Lucky Jerry

Amidst my other travel memories, a few moments stand out. One was in Afghanistan, when I visited the central bank to learn what I could about the country’s exchange-rate policy. In those days Kabul had a floating exchange rate that managed to remain reasonably stable despite the economy’s grinding poverty. Conventional wisdom among economists at the time was that a stable floating rate was not possible without an efficient and well developed currency market. So where is your currency market, I asked. My host took me to a window and pointed down the street to an open-air market. “There,” he said. “Down there we have a couple dozen Sikhs and Jews. That is our currency market.”

Another moment was at the start of an academic conference in Germany, when I took my seat at a large circle of tables with the scheduled speakers positioned to my right. Suddenly an elderly gentleman moved from the other side of the room to occupy an empty seat next to mine. It took me only a moment to realize that my new neighbor was none other than the celebrated Friedrich Hayek, leader of the arch-conservative Austrian school of economics. Leaning over, he whispered to me that he had moved over to my side of the room in order to hear the speakers better. “I’m deaf in my left ear,” he explained. And then after a beat, with a twinkle in his eye, he added: “My friends tell me it is no accident.”

And a third moment was during my first visit to China, in 1986, when I was invited to give some lectures in Beijing and Shanghai. The Middle Kingdom was just beginning to open up to foreigners and did not yet have many qualified simultaneous translators. So when the time came for my first lecture, I discovered that translation would be sequential, not simultaneous, and would depend on the services of a graduate student with, at best, rudimentary language skills. I was expected to offer two or three sentences, and then wait for the student to translate into Chinese before I could go on to another two or three sentences. I quickly learned from the questions being asked from the audience that my meaning was often mangled; I would have to speak in the most elementary way possible. But most disturbing were the moments, all too frequent, when the translator would suddenly turn back to me and ask: “Could you repeat that, please?” By that time I was already mentally framing my next few sentences and had put my previous remarks out of my head. There were some awkward moments as I tried to quickly resurrect my thoughts. This pattern went on for the entire two weeks I was in China.

Finally, there was the time when I was invited to Bogota, capital of Colombia, by the country’s national banking association to conduct a week-long seminar for mid-career bank officials on the subject of international debt. This was in 1989, at the height of anxiety in the United States over the activities of Colombia’s notorious drug cartels. On the last day of the seminar, my host suggested it was time to pay me the honorarium that had been promised, together with reimbursement of my travel expenses. Normally this would be done by check or perhaps a wire transfer. But in this case payment came in the form of a brown manila envelope full of used US twenty-dollar bills. I knew enough to be aware that twenty-dollar bills were the currency of choice for drug sales in the United States. In effect, I was being used to launder a small fraction of the massive flow of cartel earnings. But I decided to let discretion be the better part of valor and silently pocketed the envelope. I’m just glad that there were no cocaine-sniffing dogs at the Miami airport when I arrived back home.