Meet The Mayor Who Printed His Own Currency To Fight The Virus

Tracy Alloway (0:11)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

So Joe, we like to talk about money on this podcast, don't we?

Joe Weisenthal (0:23)

We love to talk about money. Of course, talking about market, talking about economics is always inherently or to some extent a discussion about money. But we also like to discuss money itself as in the stuff, what it is, where it comes from, what gives it its value, how it evolves over time. Those are, of course, some of my favorite episodes that we do.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

Yeah, I know they are. And that's why I think you're going to enjoy this one because we are going to dive into a sort of, I want to say brand new currency, but it actually kind of has its roots in something very, very old, which is during the Great Depression, we saw a bunch of different towns and areas in the United States issue their own local currencies. We also saw sort of unions, work unions, issue their own script.

This is something harking back to that era.

Joe Weisenthal (1:20)

Yeah, absolutely right. Like, you know, we have this crisis in this country and it affects every layer of government and every kind of business, but we have this sort of weird issue where a lot of the entities that are on the front lines of fighting the crisis, so to speak, are the cities, towns and states that deliver services to the people, but they can't create their own money for the most part, unlike the federal government.

And this is all coming at a time when, because of the collapse in the economy and the collapse in service activity, like restaurants and stores, tax revenue has really dried up. So a lot of public entities at the state and local level, while they sort of wait, hopefully perhaps, for more relief from the federal government, are in a severe crunch.

Tracy Alloway (2:06)

Right, you have this tension between the federal level and the local level. But like I said, there have been instances in time where the local level, the local entities, towns, villages, you name it, take matters into their own hands and decide that they're not gonna wait necessarily for federal money. So this is going to be one of those instances. And I'm happy to say that today we're going to speak with Wayne Fournier. He's the mayor of Tenino, Washington, population just shy of 2000 people.

And over there in Tenino, they've invented their own currency as part of their response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Joe Weisenthal (2:45)

Can't wait, I love this.

Tracy Alloway (2:47)

All right. Well, without further ado, let's bring on our guest, Mayor Fournier, thank you so much for being with us.

Wayne Fournier (2:54)

Thank you for having me, Tracy.

Tracy Alloway (2:55)

Maybe just to begin with, you could sort of lay the scene for us. I mentioned, Tenino is a relatively small town.

What's it like and what's been the impact of the coronavirus crisis?

Wayne Fournier (3:06)

Like you said, we're a smaller city of just under 2000 people. We lie just about smack dab in between Portland and Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, and we're relatively isolated.

So when the lockdown occurs and the shutdown happens, most of our businesses, our service industry, and there's no like manufacturer or anything like that. So when the lockdown happens, all the restaurants, the stores, the retail, they just roll up, they roll up the carpets and they lock the doors. For about three months, there was no traffic. There was no cars parked downtown on the traditional main street, as you would kind of picture it in kind of an old way of thinking of a city, and no people walking around. There was little to no economic activity outside of our supermarket, where you couldn't buy toilet paper or anything like that.

And so, seeing this lack of activity and knowing that there would be some financial fallout from it, we decided to dust off an old idea that popped up in Tonino in 1931, where we were the first city, I believe, in the US to develop our own wooden dollar, our own currency. And so we fired up the same printing press that was built in the 1870s. Yeah, yeah, this, we've celebrated our history and the fact that we were on the cutting edge in the 30s during the Great Depression.

And we've kept this printing press in our museum since then. And so when it came time to fire it up again and use it to print money, it worked. We've got a guy that knows how to operate it without losing an arm. Because when you fire this thing up, all these gears start turning and steam's popping up out of places. And it looks like something out of, you know, the Wizard of Oz or Willy Wonka or something. And, you know, this person was in there for two days straight printing off these two-sided bills. And he'd have to print every single one individually, flip it, and it was quite a process, but we fired it up again, and we're going for it.