Please forgive us for quoting Karl Marx, whose writing is just a bit on the dense side, but he says it best: “This physical object, gold or silver in its crude state, becomes, immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money.”

Little did he know then that money is magical for other reasons, too.

Special powers coming to a bill near you As printing technology becomes more accurate and accessible, counterfeiting will also become easier. Taking a turn from Hogwarts, anticounterfeiting nanotechnology of the near future may make the face on your $100 bill look like it has a mind of its own. “Squeeze Ben Franklin’s face and he might smile or wink or turn purple,” predicted a recent NPR broadcast. In the next decade, other molecular powers attesting to the purity of our bucks may include the ability for a bill to feel like paper while withstanding scissor blades or to become rigid when snapped and floppy when pulled. Apparently, some industries, like (big surprise) medicine and defense, are already using nanotechnologies, but they’re too expensive at the moment to apply to money.

Making money literally makes money Apparently, only 8 percent of Americans realize that the United States Mint produces coins. That worries us. Where do the other 92 percent think coins come from? Super Mario Bros. machines? Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Mint does indeed make coins (bills come from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing) and has for, oh, the past 215 years. The Mint also holds custody of the American gold and silver supply–roughly $102 million worth–at a bullion storage facility in Fort Knox, Ky., and operates four plants nationwide, one of which is in San Francisco, overlooking the Castro.

The S.F. branch produces proofs, which are specially made collectible coins. One of these is a $5 gold coin, and technically it could buy an egg salad sandwich. But the Mint sells the coin for more than $200, directing the profits toward converting the city’s historic old building, aka the Granite Lady, into a museum. One of the U.S. Mint’s big moneymakers is the quarter, which in 2003 cost only about eight cents to make. That means that for every quarter the U.S. Mint produced that year it made roughly 17 cents. In 2005, the U.S. Mint posted a $1.77 billion revenue but, because it’s a government agency and therefore not allowed to make a profit, contributed $775 million to the U.S. Treasury.

Money can disappear (but you already knew that) Benevolent as it may seem, the U.S. Mint nonetheless has an enemy: Coinstar. Coinstar is embodied by those green kiosks at grocery stores into which people dump the contents of their piggy banks in return for the equivalent–less roughly 9 percent–in cash or gift certificates. Coinstar’s website even has a calculator estimating how much your jar of change is worth based on how many ounces the jar measures. According to the website, a 32-ounce Mason supposedly yields some $57.08.

Why does the U.S. Mint hate Coinstar so much? Because it recirculates the wealth. What the Mint and its employees count on is that about half of all change manufactured is eventually lost–under sofa cushions, in wishing wells, stashed in jelly jars, etc. In fact, about one-half of the entire U.S. Mint production is dedicated to turning out pennies, which suggests that with all the loose change out there, we especially can’t be bothered to pay for goods in pennies. Better to drop them in the tulips’ water or use one to rejoin the contacts of a broken coffeemaker. Sure, each penny costs more than one cent to make (estimates range from 1.1 to 1.4 cents), but more of the Mint staff stays employed as long as there are lost pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters to replace.

Animal, vegetable and mineral–like a sorcerer, money assumes different forms The Kyrgyz once used horses as money, making small change in the form of lamb skins. Like a demon, money has traveled through the ages, possessing various hosts: tobacco, cowrie shells, rum, indigo, salt, barley (in Babylon, the term shekel referred to a certain unit of barley), and even people, as during the slave trade.

But barter and commodity money (when the physical form of money is inherently useful–barley could be eaten and metal could be turned into tools) was inefficient. In ancient Egypt, receipts verifying that the bearer had a certain amount of grain at a warehouse could be used as “representative” money. This system was an early precursor to banking. Instead of grain, 17th-century England saw goldsmiths as bankers, issuing receipts that attested to how much gold the bearer had deposited for safekeeping at the smith’s warehouse. Eventually, the goldsmiths’ system led to the formation of banks, which each issued bank notes according to how much gold and silver filled their vaults. Betting that not everyone would come to collect at once, banks often issued notes above the amount of metal they had in stock. Most of the time, they figured right. But sometimes, they figured wrong, and eventually, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank took over the duty of issuing bank notes.

Money doesn’t really exist Even before the United States dropped the gold standard in 1971, a very small percentage of bullion backed our currency. For example, in 1880, only 16 percent of currency was backed by gold. We primarily held on to the ingots to compare ourselves to other national currencies. The Federal Reserve Notes we use now are, in themselves, valueless–fiat money. Nevertheless, we use them because the feds say they’re legal tender. Each and every one of us agrees to this mythic construct. Essentially, bills represent a moderated rate of inflation, based on supply and demand of goods and services.

Money is everything (at least according to Karl Marx) But the German philosopher and political economist was far from flush. His buddy and colleague, Friedrich Engels, modestly supported Marx and his family for years, mailing him £1 and £5 notes cut in half for security. In 1843, just a year before Engels began collaborating with him, the impoverished Marx wrote, “Money is the alienated essence of man’s labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.” So money isn’t that great. But for those who’ve been offered thousands of dollars in credit lines, it gets even worse! On credit, Marx has this to say: “Instead of money and paper, my very personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and reputation is the matter and the substance of the monetary spirit. Credit no longer reduces monetary value to money, but to human flesh and the human heart.” Ouch.

Money’s not something we ordinarily talk about here at the Bohemian, at least not without plenty of tissues nearby. Bob Woodward, Norman Mailer and Phil Bronstein notwithstanding, journalists don’t tend much to the growing of dosh. Not only do we basically not understand money and, having never seen much of it, deeply distrust the stuff, we’re generally also fantasists who prefer to live as though it will just eventually come to us in such big huge swadges as we deserve. And we deserve a lot.

So when it came time to conceptualize this first annual money issue, we decided to look at money as an abstract construct. But even within the abstract, the stock market is a different animal, one comprising packs and herds. Driven by panic as much as by research, the stock market would make terrible ship’s passengers, with traders and investors rushing from port to starboard depending on rumor, speculation and what everyone else is doing.

But lo, out of the pack, separate from the herd and as foreign to our minds as a zebra in a jumpsuit, there is a journalist who understands money, makes actual money through investing and, most particularly, breathes clearly (without panicky hiccups) within the stockyards of the stock market. Santa Rosa-based writer Brad Zigler, in fact, can even talk about the stock market without trailing off into a stupor. And talk he does, each Friday evening on KRCB 91.1-FM, detailing the triumphs and woes of a very local segment of the national trade, those publicly held companies found solely in Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties.

Speaking by phone from his office, Zigler says that he formed his own North Bay Stock Index (NBSI) to give area investors a sense of how local stocks stack up against the big boys found on the Dow Jones and S&P 500 reports.

As with so many other checkbook-involved things, location can be a key to making a profit in the stock market. And co-habitating with an area business often gives investors an advantage. “Research done at the University of Illinois showed that the average household invests nearly one-third of its portfolio in local stocks,” Zigler says. “The suggestion was that somehow these investors were able to exploit local knowledge to outdo conventional benchmarks, like the S&P 500. What that boils down to is that the locals knew something that the rest of the world didn’t. That’s not hard to see. A lot of local stocks are ‘orphans.’ Nobody’s paying attention to them, no one’s writing about them, no one’s analyzing their data.”

Zigler, who used to write regularly for the North Bay Business Journal and who now freelances full-time (often under the byline “the Curmudgeon”), is kind to orphans, singling them out for attention on his weekly radio broadcast. Stock in the ZAP electric car company, for example, grew over 205 percent last year alone. To this writer, that sounds like a sure thing. To that writer, however, emotions run more calmly.

“It’s what ZAP did in 2006,” he stresses politely. “But if you decided to buy stocks solely on the basis of how well they did previously, you’re making an assumption of a trend that may be overstretching it. There’s not a guarantee, nor necessarily even a strong probability, that ZAP is going to go up past 205 this year. When you’re looking at 205 percent, you’re looking at a stock that’s priced at about $1 now, and you had to have started at a very low level to get that gain.” Actually, ZAP stock ended its boffo year at 79 cents a share. Zigler may have a point.

Some nine companies from Sonoma County are publicly traded; five of them are banks. In Marin, the Bank of Marin is a huge player, as is the video tech firm Sonic Solutions, a few other banks and Restoration Hardware, the gadget store that revalued the sex appeal of antique veneer on door handles in the ’90s. Napa is also lousy with banks and curiously only has one wine company in the market, Andretti Wine Group, co-owned by retired race car driver Mario Andretti and his partner Joseph E. Antonini, the former CEO of Kmart.

There is little left of what Zigler terms the “tech wreck,” that giddy period of time when it looked like the North Bay would be a Silicon sister to those information-friendly folks in the South Bay. Does Zigler see the North Bay resurging in the tech industry?

“Well,” he says cheerfully, “it’s awful damn expensive to live here and work here. The decision for a business to come here is often more a lifestyle issue than an economic issue.

“But if you’re going to be broke,” he shrugs, “what better place is there?”

Our sentiments exactly.

‘Brad Zigler’s North Bay Stock Index’ is heard every Friday at 6:04pm on KRCB 91.1-FM.