# Has The British Pound Always Been Worth More Than The Dollar? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 5, 2011, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-british-pound-always-been-worth-more-than-the-dollar/605162 "2011-12-05T19:36:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2011, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-british-pound-always-been-worth-more-than-the-dollar/605162/21 "2011-12-07T15:22:58Z")
> [@Candyman74](#): > > Really? But it’s not a measure of superiority. It’s just the unit chosen. The Canadians could choose to use a Gribbet instead of a dollar as their base unit (a Gribbet being the price of a small car) and say “har har, look how crap American dollars are!” > > The French used to use Francs, which were about 10p (so I guess 16 US cents). That doesn’t mean anything. Just the unit they chose. However, units of currency that come with strings of zeroes on the end of any meaningful amount do tend to be associated with economies that are (or have been) less than robust. Countries don’t tend to start off with currency units so small that you need a thousand of them to buy anything. I’m thinking of the Italian lira, which IIRC was running at about 2,500 to the pound when I first visited in the 1990s (There was a 500,000 lira note circulating by the time of the euro’s introduction). Or the old Turkish lira, of which you got about 2 million to the pound before they lopped off six zeroes. Both legacies of rampant inflation. The French franc, which you mention, was also revalued. The franc that was replaced by the euro was actually equal to 100 pre-1960 francs. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-british-pound-always-been-worth-more-than-the-dollar/605162.md?page=1)