As the summit of the Group of Seven nations approaches next month, the Europeans are irritated with America’s handling of the dollar. That’s the report on the Dow Jones Newswires yesterday evening. It quoted what it characterized as a “person close to the French government.” It quoted its French source as voicing frustration because American authorities, as Dow Jones’s reporter put it, “don’t seem keen to even ‘talk up’ their currency.'”

Which leads us to the thought that in this season when even the taxi drivers are worried about the world economy, it’s particularly important to keep in mind a clear understanding of money. And a friend sent us just yesterday a dispatch by Bret Swanson, in the March 26 number of the Far Eastern Economic Review. “Money is not a product or commodity,” he pointed out. “Money is an abstract concept — a measuring rod, a standard of value, a unit of account that must remain constant over time.”

“Only then,” wrote Mr. Swanson, “can workers and businesses, entrepreneurs and investors engage in meaningful trade, risk new money in forward-looking ventures, and lend and borrow money on reasonable terms. Movement in the value of money is not a helpful ‘adjustment’ but harmful noise that impairs the transmission of all-important information. How can one determine the price of a house, or a complex mortgage security, for example, when the value of money itself is under suspicion?”

We are not economists here, simply newspapermen and newspaperwomen. But if there are but a few principles of political economy that stand out in our combined years of foreign corresponding and domestic reporting, that simple point about money would be right up there. As Mr. Swanson put it: “To achieve a dynamic and growing economy, you need an utterly undynamic, stone-cold unit of money. … ” We predict that when the smoke clears from the current turmoil in the markets, that simple principle will reassert itself with a clarity that has been lacking in recent years.