Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

will have enough money to run an election campaign and who will not.'

The root cause While these concerns are relevant and poignant, I have come to the conclusion that they are attacking symptoms rather than causes. In modern Western history, power and influence have traditionally been shared and/or balanced between Four ‘estates’ the government, business, academia, and the media. Today, more blatantly and directly than ever before, money is controlling all four of these estates. Even CEOs of the most powerful corporations are obliged to do what the financial market wants, or they are fired and replaced by someone who will. Giving priority to long-term thinking over next quarter's profits is brutally punished under the present money system. At some level, we are all prisoners of the same money game.

In short, the money system is what creates the structural conflict experienced by so many CEOs between stockholders' interests, their own personal ethics, and their concerns for their grandchildren's future. My contribution to addressing this dilemma is to propose a money system that will harness corporate power and direct it towards the goal of long-term sustain8bility (Chapter 8: The Global Reference Currency Making Capitalism Sustainable).

Even though it may seem that the Corporate Millennium is looming betbre us, this scenario is only one of the ways in which the power shift away from the nation-states could manifest itself. The next scenario - Careful Communities - reveals another very different set of dynamics.

Careful communities The other night I woke up from a strange dream.