Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

The truth is that the world economy poses more dangers than we had imagined. Problems we thought we knew how to cure have once again become intractable, like temporarily suppressed bacteria that eventually evolve a resistance to antibiotics. ... There is, in short, a definite whiff of the 1930s in the air.

In the Primer you will learn why these repeated crashes are not random accidents, but signs of systemic dislocations of the official monetary system. This implies that no country should consider itself immune from such problems: not China, not the UK, not even all of Europe, nor the US. a The last money question is straightforward: How can we prepare for the possibility of a monetary crisis?

Money at the core of the Time-Compacting Machine The extraordinary convergence of these four megatrends over the next two decades shows why Peter Russell was right in predicting that 'over the next 20 years, as much change will happen in the world as has occurred over the past 200 years'.'* I would add that, in order to deal with the challenges just described, we are going to have to change as much in our consciousness about money over the next 20 years as we have over the past 5,000 years.

Figure 1.3 summarizes the four money questions of the TimeCompacting Machine. Whether we like it or not, there will be some kind of answer for each one of these questions. Together, they indicate that something fundamental will have to change in our current way of dealing with money.

Today's interpretation of money needs to be questioned if we are to address these issues. Remaining locked within the prevailing money paradigm amounts to collectively doing what the cartoonist Cardon depicts so soberly.