Jay-Z's Euro-punk Future Cost Him At Least $1.15 Million

Four years ago this week, the value of the euro reached an all-time high against the U.S. dollar: $1.594 to €1. (It again hit, and briefly surpassed, this level two months later, closing at $1.599 on July 15, 2008.) Jay-Z — then as now a businessman as well as a business, man — must have seemed to all observers something rarer still. Namely, a successful currency speculator.

After all, it was his video for "Blue Magic," which premiered October 11, 2007 (when the euro stood at $1.4199), that truly ushered in the half-year apotheosis of the common currency. Try to remember that cultural moment, more or less unthinkable today. Cut from the American Gangster soundtrack and keyed to its plot, "Blue Magic" has Jay moodily cruising nocturnal New York. This is the city in unmistakable '80s vintage: drugs are cooking in an Erlenmeyer flask; the lyrics "blame Reagan for making me a monster / blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra." Yet the video's only legal tender is fat wads of €500 bills, a banknote that wasn't even in circulation until 2002.

Hot on the heels of Gisele Bundchen refusing pay in greenbacks, everyone (BBC, CBS, Bloomberg, Ron Paul fans) knew Jay-Z's embrace of the euro as prestige (if not yet reserve) currency would go down as a watershed. The Wall Street Journal titled its blog post "Jay-Z, the New Alan Greenspan." The Independent mused:

The attraction of, say, a steampunk retro future for the modern iPad user is not a matter of outré implausibility or even alien uncanniness. Quite the opposite, actually: Faced with a world of dirigible airlines and mechanical computers, it's not the fantasy tech — the counterfactual history — so much as the actual path taken to A380s and silicon wafers that seems impossible, or at least somewhat inexplicable.

Indeed, the human-history teleology of Jules Verne or H.G.Wells was pretty much on target, and is pretty much our own. More machines, more complexity! Ever faster travel! Ever faster communications! Ever faster calculations! Human flight, fast! That these prerogatives were ultimately met, but not through the continued progressive development of familiar steam and gears and springs, is puzzling. That electronics and jet engines and integrated circuits might be discovered and revolutionize the making and working of things, but not alter those late Victorian prerogatives, is perhaps more puzzling still.

And so it is with "Blue Magic." The smart, geisty truths Mr. Carter was trying to tell us about our future haven't really changed in four and a half years. The anxiety and pathos of American decline, tipped in what was then still quaintly known as the "housing credit crunch," continued apace; within a calendar year, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG would be gone. His high-sheen, high-priced New York — a hermetically sealed pastiche of itself in grittier times, with decor by Damian Hirst and Takashi Murakami — likewise remains fundamentally prescient. And we know his favorite color hasn't changed.

Jay-Z's only failure was in assuming the whole works would be run on euros. Call it €punk: Whatever else the 42-year-old (!) accomplishes in life, his fate will be that of the futurist in 1889 who got things 90% right, but triple-downed on airships.

As it happened, the coming age of the euro went down faster, and more spectacularly, than the Hindenberg. Ours is a future where the second-most lucrative award in economics (after the Nobel) challenges entrants to break up the eurozone in a way that won't blow up the world. The prize? £250,000 — denominated in pounds sterling, just like Phileas Fogg's!

What of personal costs? As of April 23, 2012, one euro is worth $1.3131 — which is still much too high for non-Teutonic members to be competitive. A regulation bank strap contains a hundred bills. So a strap of €500 bills is €50,000 total. In "Blue Magic," a close-up shot shows five such straps laying across the interior of a hard case. Each is clearly sitting upon at least one other strap (5 × 2 = 10), and we see partial evidence of another row of the same in the back of the case (10 × 2 = 20). Let's say, then, that the case shown in close-up contains €1 million (€50k x 20).

Later, "Blue Magic" flashes to a set of four patent-leather cases, shown from their exterior. Unfortunately, there's no sense of scale. Assuming their average interior volume corresponds with what was shown in close-up — which would make these boxes more the size of poker-chip cases than the vintage Louis Vuitton luggage set they otherwise resemble — we reach the extremely conservative estimate that the Jay-Z of "Blue Magic" possesses €4 million in cash.

If he held on to those bills until April 2008, they would have been worth $6.376 million (4M x 1.594). Today, it's just over $5.252 million. In other words, if he'd kept it in dollars, that $1.3 million maternity-ward rental would have just about paid for itself.