The Enigma of the Lari

I have used almost every more or less well-known foreign currency throughout my lifetime in almost every part of the world, but none of them has seemed to me as strange and enigmatic as our national currency, called Lari.

It truly is a very amusing one, but much more amusing are the comments of our government members and polit-economic experts on its permanently changing value, as shaky as it looks today. Nobody will call me an economist, but I still dare go ahead and describe my thoughts and feelings concerning the unit of local money which has lately been the talk of the town if not the entire country.

I grew up with Rubles in my pocket – the USSR currency, still persisting in Russia (à propos, our unfriendly comrades the Russians are terribly good at preserving the old soviet names and symbols, like hymns and newspaper titles). Even that miserable Ruble gave us, the unfortunate users of it, a feeling of more stability and security than the Lari, which monetarily represents our free and democratic Georgia. The Ruble was not a convertible currency of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but it rarely changed its value. It bought all you wanted within the soviet family of nations, spreading its purchase power over one-sixth of our planet, comprising almost 300 million people. There was not one bank or currency exchange booth anywhere in the world where you could not convert the Ruble into a currency that worked in the international market.

The Lari, however, is convertible but not internationally – you can convert it back and forth only locally in Georgia. At least this! You can buy any convenient currency with Lari on any street corner of any city in the country, and, yes, it makes you feel free in the financial market. The only bad news is that with the shaky Lari, you always have misgivings about the optimal time for making the exchange: you convert it today and next morning you see on the flashing currency boards that it has gone down a couple of more notches which makes you a loser; or it goes up, and the transaction of the previous day makes you feel good. With Lari, you are never calm and stable.

There is one more regrettable thing that you become the victim of because the Lari has the proclivity to change: when Lari goes down, prices go up, and when Lari is stable, the prices stay the same. This is a pain-in-the-neckish fiscal paradox, isn’t it?

I have no intention to throw in here the many-times-heard rationale provided by our pecuniary experts who try to explain the shakiness of the national currency. I am just sharing with you the popular sentiments that prevail in society concerning the Lari. The interpretations are in most cases fuzzy and unintelligible. The government keeps mum on the subject but rumor has it that the selfsame government is going to come up with some grandiose plan which should presumably keep the Lari from further shakes. The hope is not yet totally defunct and expectations are high enough to keep in fiscally high spirits, and even those who are in constant mulligrubs concerning the Lari buying power are not totally pessimistic.

The overall feeling is that the government will never let the national currency fly into inflation because that might really be the beginning of the end. No sane administration will allow that much of a drawback. Well, blessed are the believers, aren’t they? Actually, I am one of those believers that our darling Lari, no matter how light its virtue has become, will soon recover and let its scared users gain their wallets back.

Meanwhile, the markets and restaurants are full of patrons, malls are infested with eager consumers, movie and drama theaters are sold out, car tanks are never empty of fuel and the classrooms of private schools with skyrocketing scholarships are bursting with academic presence, saying nothing of the ubiquitous private tutorship of kids throughout the country. How come? Never ask that question in Georgia! It just happens that way. The Lari fluctuations are so far ignored by this society as minor tides and ebbs, no thought of the tsunami that might be brewing somewhere out there ahead.

Nugzar B. Ruhadze