Currency

In the global gaming hall, this is the equivalent of the all-night card game. Down on the 24-hour trading floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, it takes about $45,000 just to ante up, and plenty of stamina to stay in. Dozens of traders and brokers keep playing their hands right through the evening until early morning, when financiers in Tokyo close their business day and head to the karaoke bars. The Philadelphians keep playing their hands on toward daybreak, long after checkbooks have started rustling in London and Paris.

Say what you may about common markets, single currencies and the dawn of a unified Europe: Anyone with a laptop computer here knows just how far Europeans have to go before they are truly one. On the eve of my arrival, I was issued a survival kit - a drawstring bag containing a dozen telephone converter plugs, each designed to translate the standard American phone jack into the local technological idiom. Europe has nearly as many plug-socket combinations as it does languages. Germany alone has five jacks; Greece's look like R2D2; Belgium's is a husky, five-pronged job; Italy's trident is the biggest.

Money, money everywhere, but for Jose Boveda Fernandez, gazing around at the one-ton mounds of Irish coins, all there is is copper. "For us, coins are metal," said Boveda Fernandez, director of Elmet S.L., owner of the two factories in Spain charged with giving the now-useless coins a new lease on life. "As copper producers, we are very interested in their copper content. " The two factories are among several around Europe where Europe's coins went to die when a common currency was introduced this year.

Today's French vote on whether to join a European economic union may have seemed a distant tempest - until last week. But after the week's turmoil on the international currency markets, one wonders: Is the creation of a single European currency more than a lot of economic mumbo jumbo? Does it really mean something for all of us, here, in the United States? Clearly, say economists, a "yes" vote in France to the so-called Maastrict Treaty, assuming it leads to European economic unity, would leave some Americans winners and others losers.

Vince Cignarella says his teenage daughter isn't impressed by the high-stakes currency trades he makes from Sovereign Bank's subterranean trading room. "She says we just instant-message people all day. And, you know, we do," Cignarella said Wednesday, tapping his computer keyboard and swiveling among three monitors flashing multiple data screens from Bloomberg and Reuters, and zipping price gossip to traders in New York, Toronto and other cities. But it's not idle chat. There's a lot riding on the questions and answers that securities and currency traders like Cignarella and his colleagues send around the globe every weekday and weeknight.

This week's European currency turmoil is bad news for a united Europe. And it could be bad news for some American firms that do business on the continent. But it has been an absolute windfall for the currency traders on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. The exchange, at 19th and Market Streets, is the only place in the country where foreign currency options are traded. Long before Monday, when the European currency pact began to disintegrate, anxiety had mounted that it was in danger - and that its demise would produce wild swings in exchange rates that could jeopardize profits in all manner of business deals.

In Argentina, when you buy a home, a car, a taxi ride - virtually anything - you typically pay not with pesos, but with U.S. greenback dollars. The same is true in Panama, in Liberia, increasingly in Russia, and in many other countries from the Caribbean to the South China Sea. In fact, about two-thirds of the 500 billion U.S. dollars in existence are now held outside U.S. borders, according to the Federal Reserve. Argentina is even thinking about scrapping its peso entirely and making the U.S. dollar its official currency.

Stock prices recovered most of Tuesday's losses amid rumors that Japan was preparing to defend the yen. The currency gained against the dollar. Wall Street analysts also said traders were looking for stock bargains.

The man who persuaded the Treasury to put the motto "In God We Trust" on currency has left his papers - documenting his campaign - to the American Numismatic Association's archives. Matthew H. Rothert, an Arkansas currency collector, died in 1989. In 1953, he conceived the idea of having the motto printed on currency, and began a campaign of lobbying congressmen, senators and Treasury Department officials. He spoke to clubs and church groups all over the country, and within two years, he had won congressional support.

Reports of the dollar's death have been greatly exaggerated. It is true that the value of the U.S. currency has recently fallen against the Japanese yen and Deutsche mark. It is also true that some measures of the dollar's use as an international currency show a decline. But these are long- running trends. Contrary to widespread belief, the dollar's standing as a reserve currency has actually increased in the 1990s. And there is little likelihood that some other currency will supplant the dollar as the world's premier reserve currency by 2020.