The Euro and Its Rivals: Currency and the Construction of a Transnational City

3. Receipts and Deceits: Currency Regulation, Black Markets, and Borders

THREE Receipts and Deceits Currency Regulation, Black Markets, and Borders The diversion of commodities from their customary paths always carries a risky and morally ambiguous aura. —Appadurai 1986 In Malmö, Sweden, I lived around the corner from an o≈ce furniture store. Though I was in desperate need of a more comfortable desk chair, I could never a√ord the prices. One week, I noticed that it was having a close-out sale. Yet the prices were still, in my opinion, too high. After the sale ended, I spotted the men whose task it was to move the remaining chairs out of the showroom. As a dutifully bargain-hunting American, I asked how much a chair would cost right now, since they were getting rid of them. He told me to look around and see if I liked anything that was left. Without knowing it, I had set the stage for a black market transaction, a sort of transaction that is amazingly common in Sweden, but requires a good deal of insider knowledge to execute. Still not aware that I was engaged in shady dealings, I picked out one that I liked, which had a price tag of 500 kronor (about $60 back then). The man o√ered me the chair for 300 kronor. He then asked if I needed a kvitto (receipt), to which I initially replied no. Then I recalled how hard it is to resell goods in Sweden if one cannot provide the receipt, so I said, ‘‘Actually, I should take one since I might sell it when I return to the United States.’’ π≠ THE EURO AND ITS RIVALS He gently chuckled and clarified everything for me in a sarcastic tone: ‘‘You can’t get a chair like that for 300 kronor [he used the slang term spänn] if you need a receipt.’’∞ Having already noted the seeming love a√air that many Swedes have with receipts, I awkwardly tried to inject some ethnographic questions into this economic interchange, asking why I could not get a receipt. He refused to talk to me about it, simply shaking his head and saying softly, ‘‘Don’t worry about it [Det är lungt]’’ several times. I walked away with my chair and no receipt, and immediately started asking other people about the situation. Everyone I spoke with about this interaction knew immediately what had occurred; there was no debate over the nuances of the transaction. I was told that the movers would just tell their employers that a certain chair was never even there to begin with (if its absence was even noticed, which it probably was not), and suddenly they have 300 kronor for a nice lunch and a few beers that night. Furthermore, without a receipt, the money was made without any need to pay the standard value-added tax (VAT) that applied to the vast majority of goods and services traded in Sweden. In short, receiptless transactions denied money to the state and put more money in one’s own pocket. These sorts of transactions were quite standard, and the accepted delineation between legitimate and illegitimate transactions hinged on the use of the receipt.≤ The receipt (or its absent presence) is a vital aspect of currency exchange , though it is largely unstudied by anthropologists. Receipts help to constitute legal tender per se (at least in highly regulated economies). Currency is part of a legal fabric, and when a receipt is not present, the currency is not being used in a ‘‘proper’’ manner; the transaction is missing a legitimizing component. Thus, a receipt indexes faith in a specific regulatory regime, whereas receiptless transactions announce a desire to evade that regulatory regime. As such, receiptless transactions become questionable and potentially illegitimate. An exchange partner can even deny in a court of law that the transaction ever took place, thereby calling into question the e√ectiveness of currency itself. In other words, receipts are the legal residue of our famously anonymous cash, the way in which we desperately try to trace its untraceable movements. More specifically, within the bounds of Sweden, all transactions involving kronor theoretically required a receipt; transactions across the sound in Denmark or in the local currencies either required a di√erent kind of Receipts and Deceits π∞ receipt or could occur without a receipt at all and there was nothing openly immoral about them. Agreeing to a receipted transaction usually cost...