Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

Without throwing away the positive contributions of the existing system, we can add new possibilities. It is often said that all crises contain hidden opportunities. The Chinese ideogram for 'crisis' even contains explicitly the root 'opportunity'. The opportunity that will be described in the pages following may seem as extraordinary as the crisis itself. You will discover how it is possible to turn the TimeCompacting Machine into a Sustainable Abundance Machine. This can be accomplished by revisiting the prevailing interpretation of money, by understanding how money actually operates, and by acting upon that knowledge.

The core thesis of this book can now be restated more pointedly as follows: proven money innovations can solve the four 'money questions' summarized in Fig 1.3 and engender Sustainable Abundance within one generation. The key is to introduce in parallel with the existing money system complemo2faty currencies that have already proved that they can contribute to solving these uncompromisingly tough questions.

A complementary currency refers to an agreement among a group of people and/or corporations to accept a non-traditional currency as a medium of exchange. They are called complementary because their intent is not to replace the conventional national currency but to perform social functions that the official currency was not designed to fulfil.

Together, the exchanges facilitated by the conventional national currency economies and the complementary currencies form what I will define as the Integral Economy. The Integral Economy includes the processes studied by traditional economic theory, and goes beyond it. For instance, it includes transactions in the 2,500 complementary currency systems already operational today in local communities in a dozen countries around the world.