Bernard Lietaer - The Future of Money - Full Book

familiar money system, and we are even less likely to re-examine them in search of solutions.

Part One brings our hidden assumptions about money to the surface. In doing so, it also brings to light new potentials for our interactions with money. It is not about how to make, invest or spend money. There are already plenty of books about all of that. It is about the concept of money, and how different money systems shape different societies.

You will learn why fundamental changes in our money system have become inevitable. While these changes may seem frightening in their scale, they also hold the promise of unprecedented opportunity.

The Information Age promises to change fundamentally within decades our entire economy and payment habits. Whether gradual or cataclysmic, significant world-wide changes are under way in the realm of money. The well-known contemporary management expert Peter Drucker claims: 'Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions rearranges itself and the people born then cannot even imagine a world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently living through such a transformation.

When no safety net has been prepared, experiencing such an unparalleled shift can be very frightening. Just ask any one of the one billion Latin Americans, Asians or Eastern Europeans who are still reeling from their own personal encounter with the cataclysmic monetary changes that occurred as a direct consequence of a radical shift in power from their governments to international financial markets. James Canrille, who directed Bill Clinton's campaign in