![Avatar](/_next/image?url=%2Flemmy-icon-96x96.webp&w=3840&q=75)
blue@diagonlemmy
Coder, Artist, Blogger (https://fungiverse.wordpress.com/, https://philpapers.org/archive/BINAKR.pdf), Admin of https://diagonlemmy.social
Dark reading but fair point. I mean yeah, the fact that the goblins hold a money monolopy in the first place is really weird.
Apparantly in the books, wizards shy away from banking because of the bad image and so no one except goblins wants to do it, so a bad societal dynamic is hinted there. But then again, goblins ARE depicted as greedy and evil.
I read it only in parts. Apparantly, there actually is a dollar-galleons-exchange rate carried out by Gringots.
“Consider first the Galleon–Dollar exchange rate (i.e. the exchange rate between the muggles’ money and the wizards’ money), which is not mentioned explicitly in the original 7-volume Harry Potter books, but we know from the books that the Gringotts handles such exchanges (Rowling, 1999a, p. 50). Based on information from three sources, we estimate that the Galleon–Dollar exchange rate is about $7.30/Galleon.”
The best of these sources is Rowling herself I think: “Third, in an interview on March 12, 2001, when asked by Rebecca Boswell, ‘What is the approximate value of a galleon?’ J.K. Rowling’s reply was ‘About five pounds, though the exchange rate varies!’ (Source: https://www.hp-lexicon.org/2007/02/04/wizard-money/, accessed June 6, 2022.) We conclude therefore that the Galleon–Dollar exchange rate is about $7.30/Galleon.”
Arthur Wesley after all also bought a muggle car and bewitched it.
No no, there is actually a whole economic going on and someone analyzed it: https://academic.oup.com/ooec/article/doi/10.1093/ooec/odac004/6646895
And its not so different and similary flawed than that in our world ;)