A Beginner Guide to Monetary Reform

From mutual credit systems to time banking to private currencies and social currencies, there are no shortage of ideas for how to transition off of the current system in a gradual manner while increasing and facilitating local trade.

by James Corbett
The International Forecaster

As events in Cyprus, Greece, Brazil, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere in recent years have taught us, the euros or real or dollars or yuan in your bank account are only as secure as the bank that holds them.

[…] In fact, the lesson is deeper than that: That the money in your bank account is not cash at all, not pieces of paper sitting in a bank vault waiting for you to withdraw them, but mere digital ones and zeros in the bank’s database, capable of being subtracted from your account at a moment’s notice, or even less. Cash that is not in your hand, it turns out, is not cash at all.

This should be reason to give pause for thought about some of the deeper issues behind our current international financial order: what is money, after all, if it is not physical pieces of paper that we keep in our wallet? And if we don’t control it, who does?

As opposed to this system of financial control by a few bankers, heading as it is toward a seemingly inevitable financial collapse that threatens to crash the entire world economy, there are many alternate ideas for facilitating transactions. Some advocate for a gold-backed system, or some other hard asset backed currency that protects against rampant government printing and the possibility of hyperinflation.

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