Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

concentration keeps occurring on all levels. The assets of the tiny group of the top 500 families in the US rose from $2.5 to 85 trillion between 1983 and 1989.

Globally, the world's 447 billionaires have agglomerated financial assets greater than the combined annual income of over half of the world's population."' The top three billionaires own now more wealth than the combined GDPs of 48 poorest countries in the World.

Was it a concern for social justice and stability that previously motivated all three major religions -Judaism, Christianity, and Islam unanimously to prohibit the practice of charging interest? It is intriguing that after interest became officially legal, almost all countries have felt the need to create income redistribution schemes to counteract at least part of this process. Some of them, such as the welfare system and progressive taxation, are increasingly being criticized for their ineffectiveness. Is this the fault of the overly efficient money system, or of the inefficient redistribution schemes?

Or both?

What next?

The three side effects of interest growth and wealth concentration are the hidden engines that have propelled us into and through the industrial Revolution. Both the best and the worst of what the Modern Age has achieved can, therefore, be indirectly attributed to these hidden effects of interest - the apparently banal feature of our officially prevailing money system.

There is a growing consensus that the Industrial Age is dying. We have begun navigating the uncharted waters of the Information Age. Curiously, unnoticed by mainstream media and academia, new monetary experiments have already started to thrive in a dozen countries around the world. My view is that these innovations offer