Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

What happened instead was a slow and gradual evolution of payment and banking habits. This was accompanied by dramatic changes in personal insights and collective crises such as the need to finance wars, or the political reactions to the South Sea Bubble of the 1720s. Such a combination of more or less conscious choices by the many and the few shaped a money system remarkably in tune with the pre-Victorian English Zeitgeist, the priorities and mindset of an island country poised to carve out its empire in the world.

Many aspects of the modern money system can be traced back to the customs of medieval goldsmith money lending, or to Renaissance banks from Tuscany and Lombardy. But several of these hallowed traditions were dropped and replaced with brand new ones whenever they did not fit with the Zeitgeisof pre-Victorian England.

For instance, charging interest on money -- which had been prohibited on both moral and legal grounds for more than 20 centuries suddenly, became a normal and accepted practice.

While payment and banking- technologies (i.e., how we do things) have continued to dramatically change and improve, the fundamental objectives pursued by the system (i.e., why we do them) seem not to have been seriously revisited since Victorian England.

From the perspective of the objectives pursued by the money system, we are still living with what propelled us so effectively into and through the Industrial Revolution.

Four key features still characterize our 'normal' money systems and remain basically unquestioned: Money is typically geographically attached to a (1) nation-state. It is (2) 'fiat' money, i.e. created out of nothing, by (3) bank debt, against payment of (4) interest.

Perhaps this sounds obvious, even trivial, but the full implications of each one of these features are much less clear. When we question