Must've Been Quite a Thursday Night

Waiting for a train in the subway the other day, I noticed this rather odd-looking ad. It's from a large Stockholm daily, Dagens Nyheter (Daily News), and advertises their "World Money Report" section, which runs on Fridays. Roughly translated, the text at the bottom says, "The Swedish Krona hits back. Read about the world's economies, every Friday."

My first question is, does the krona really need to fight back? This seems like a rather strange thing to discuss, because the exchange (at least relative to the US Dollar) is pretty insane at the moment, historically speaking. In fact, my best guess at the correct perceived exchange* is about 20% higher than what it is right now.

Second, why does this woman look like she's been in a bar fight? And what happened to the other guy?!?

It turns out woman in the portrait is Selma Lagerlöf, one of Sweden's most well-known authors and the first female winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. The Prize was given partly in recognition of her very first book, Gösta Berlings Saga, which she published in 1891, at the age of thirty-three. (Interestingly, the 1924 film version of this book was the big break for another famous Swede, Södermalm's very own Greta Garbo.) The portrait (in its pre-brawl form, of course) appears on the front of the ubiquitous 20 krona note.

I still don't know what happened to the other guy, though I bet it wasn't pretty. I guess you just don't mess with a Nobel Laureate.

* Having been here for a few months, I have come up with this idea of perceived exchange, which is the exchange rate that would have to be in effect for most things to cost the same in Sweden as they do in the US. It's also a handy way to gauge perceived value: it helps to understand, for example, when a particular purchase might be considered an extravagance by colleagues, and so on. My best guess for the perceived exchange is about 10 SEK to 1 USD. And since the exchange currently hovers a bit below 8:1, that means most things here are about 20% more expensive in Dollar equivalents.