Wealth & Money Quote by Charles A. Jaffe

A throwaway bit of market trivia becomes, in Jaffe's hands, a quiet indictment of how finance dresses itself up as inevitability. He reminds us that for two centuries Americans watched stock prices tick in fractions not because fractions are naturally superior, but because a pirate-era coin and a cutting practice got fossilized into "the way things are done". The intent is practical on the surface: explain why old quotations looked weird, why eighths and sixteenths showed up on ticker tape. The subtext is sharper: markets are full of conventions that masquerade as laws.

The Spanish pieces of eight detail does more than add color. It drags Wall Street's supposedly hyper-modern machinery back to an improvised, tactile origin story: money literally chopped into bits. That image undercuts the aura of precision that pricing is meant to project. If a "bit" is just 12.5 cents because a coin happened to be sliced that way, then a lot of the sophistication in price discovery starts to look like theater built on inheritance.

Context matters here: Jaffe is speaking from inside the business world, the kind of person whose authority comes from knowing the plumbing. His point lands in an era when U.S. markets moved from fractions to decimals (and spreads tightened), and when the public was primed to suspect the game was rigged. By framing an outdated quoting system as historical residue, he implies reform is possible - and that the market's sacred traditions might be less sacred than they pretend.