Monetarism is Dead. Bring On The Brand New Renaissance.

The fatal flaw of our current dominant economic paradigm is a mistake about the fundamental nature of money. It’s not a medium: it’s a message.

I’ve had an insight that I think explains our current economics as well as why it has been difficult to get economic traditionalists to see what is wrong with the economy.

Last week, I shared a piece about how researchers at the Canadian Library of Parliament explained, in a brief paper, how the Bank of Canada creates money for the Government of Canada to spend and invest, as well as how Canadian Banks extend credit. It’s one of many documents issued in the last few years that describe the process for money actually comes into being, in ways that completely contradict both conventional wisdom as well as most orthodox economic thinking.

I’ll start with two of the most basic ideas, both of which are supported by official documents describing central bank and commercial banks in multiple G-7 countries, including Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway, to name a few.

I am going to introduce the ideas first without going into detail explaining them. Instead, I will try to explain why the actual system is so hard to believe. It is an entirely different worldview, where the whole system works differently.

At the heart of understanding the difference is this: all money is information. It is not physical. This is all-important, because the difference is transformative.

These papers describe how the process of money creation is happening, right now.

• Government spends money into existence. Not just for deficits, the whole budget. In Canada, the Government issues bonds, some of which are reserved by the Bank of Canada. The Bank of Canada electronically creates Canadian dollars, by typing a given number of dollars being created into a field on a computer, which shows up in the Government of Canada’s bank account. The Government then communicates the money to everyone who gets it - governments, individuals, etc., either via electronic means, or by cheque - which is also informational. However - and this is very important - this is not the only source of money in the economy, and it is not much of it.

• Second, when banks make a loan, they create money in the act of lending. They are not taking someone else’s dollars and cents: they are extending credit, usually against an asset. This private credit-money is by far the largest source of money in the economy - over 90%, almost all of it mortgages.

What all these reports show is that money is a form of record keeping, not a physical item or object that has value of its own. When we consider the way everyone does business today it seems hardly radical to say that money is a kind of information, when we can transfer money one to another over digital communications systems like phone or e-mail.

A paper by Stephanie Bell at the Levy Institute provides historical context - the idea that money is information is not new, and the debate over whether it is information or is something physical or information dates back centuries - as a debate between the “Chartalists” who saw money as a political and legal creation, and the Metallists.” Keynes was sympathetic to the Chartalist view. Minsky treated the creation of money as “a two-sided balanced sheet operation.”

Bell sets out the history of the Metallist position (Aristotle was one) before drawing a link to monetarism:

“The early Metallists and modern Metallists (or Monetarists) bear important similarities. Both treat money as irrelevant to ‘real’ analysis. In fact, “‘real’ monetary analysis derives from ‘metallist’ or ‘commodity’ theory” (Ingham, 1996). In its modern form (Monetarist), exchange can be analyzed as if it occurred in a simple barter economy where money is neutral, serving only as a lubricant to the exchange mechanism; all that matters are ‘real’ exchange values derived from highly abstract exchange relations based on rational maximizing behavior. In addition to this a social treatment, the methodology of each is plainly ahistorical.”

When I read that monetarists are metallists I thought “of course, that explains everything.”

It’s absolutely clear that things started to turn in the U.S., Canada, UK and other countries around the world in the 1970s because all of those countries switched their economies to Monetarism, to fight stagflation.

There was an intellectual coup in economics where Keynes was rejected and replaced with a whole suite of economic theories and policies that were designed to dismantle all of the New Deal. They were not seen as “political” they were sold as science. While people associate the economic shift to the right with the elections and policies of the UK’s Thatcher post 1979, Reagan in the US after 1980, and Mulroney in Canada after 1984, it’s absolutely clear across multiple countries that incomes between labour and owners started to diverge between 1976 and 1978. Monetarist anti-inflation models and policies were already being implemented under “left” parties - Labour in the UK, Carter Democrats in the US, and the Pierre Trudeau Liberals in Canada.

These ideas have also been called neoliberal, supply-side, trickle-down, neoconservative, libertarian, and fiscal conservative.

While I have been reading and writing for years about economists, politician scientists and other experts showing, using empirical data and impartial history that those ideas continually fail to do what they promise.

It was not until I re-read that sentence that linked metallists and monetarists that I finally understood the simple reason why it is so hard to change their (and everyone’s) minds.

What I am going to do now is

• Explain my background

• Why monetarists being “metallists” is the crux of the matter

• How money works as a kind of information

When it comes to my background, I will admit straight up that it sounds ludicrous: I first heard about and took interest in monetarism in my teens. The reason for this, thankfully, is both stupid and edifying.

I heard about monetarism in 1985, because of the song “All Gone Away” by the Style Council. Paul Weller of the Jam had started Style Council to create “dance music for socialists”. I heard about this song because a friend of my sister’s interpretation of one of the lyrics, which she believed to be:

“Come take a walk upon these hills
And see how Mother Theresa kills -
Whole communities -
Even families -
There’s nothing left so - They’ve all gone away.”

In fact, the lyric was not about line was not about Mother Theresa killing, but “Monetarism.” When you are a teenager in the 80s, the natural question when you hear a story about a misheard lyric like that, is “well, if it’s not Mother Theresa doing the killing here, what the hell is monetarism?” The lyric was even more memorable because of the clumsy way it was mispronounced to be shoehorned into the song.

To add to this absurd situation, I was able to find out exactly what monetarism was, because my father, Frank Lamont, was a financial executive who had been described by Macleans’ magazine as Canada’s foremost private sector expert in monetary policy. He could, and did, explain to me exactly what monetarism was.

He was born in the worst month of the Depression, here in Western Canada, which was harder hit by the Depression than anywhere else in the world. He and his university-educated parents and brothers and sisters lived in a converted grain shed at a time when the money system had collapsed. My grandfather was sometimes paid for legal services in livestock. My father earned a Rhodes Scholarship and a law degree. We talked about his job, about interest rates, stocks, bonds, stock options, bond options. When Black Tuesday happened in 1987, he explained exactly what had happened, as it happened. Throughout my undergraduate degree and beyond, he was explaining how Canada and the world worked as an active participant, where real-world feedback made him aware of the shortcomings of theories.

During one of our discussions, he explained, “To really understand something, you need to look at it from the top down and the bottom up, and most economists do neither.”

It was an offhand comment on his part, but it never stopped rattling around my brain. By “top down and bottom up,” my father was referring to social structures.

It is a good general guide to approaching problems:

• Be skeptical and do your due diligence.

• Don’t make up your mind until you’ve considered a problem from more than one point of view

• When others are presenting their arguments, check to see that they’ve done the same.

• Making a mistake and not perceiving things a certain way is not a moral or intellectual failing.

Whether you study philosophy, literature or the history of science, what you learn is that schools of thought are based in a particular worldview. You can think of it as a filter: you have information coming in, and the filter, like a decoder, or a receiver, interprets the information and translates it to different values. It can be based in ideas around science, philosophy, politics, religion and spirituality, and morality.

There’s a link here between what I am calling a paradigm and what Thomas Kuhn called “paradigms” in his excellent book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he tried to understand the process by which scientists could shift from one paradigm to another. One paradigm shift was the Copernican revolution: moving from a model where it was thought that the sun, moon and universe revolved around the earth, to the revelation that the earth goes around the sun, and so do the planets. Galileo argued the Copernican case, Kepler determined that orbits were elliptical, and Newton determined that the force that pulled apples to the earth was the same force that tethered the moon to the earth, and the earth and planets to the Sun. Newton’s mechanistic ideas gave way to Einstein’s theories of relativity.

The same is true with literature, where in order to understand the text, it helps to understand the cultural and social context in which it was written, and if the author was writing from a particular worldview. Romanticism, nihilism, dadaism, surrealism, modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, as well as different philosophical frameworks like empiricism and rationalism.

What is really startling, including on a personal level, is that different paradigms interpret the same information in ways that are internally consistent, but may be completely incompatible with one another. They are incommensurable.

The experience of switching between one paradigm and another is similar to seeing the different aspects of an optical illusion. You can see one or the other, but not both. This makes for a “dialogue of the deaf” where disputants are all the more baffled because, while they are pointing to the same elements with the same names, (like planets and the sun) they have a fundamental disagreement about the nature and forces that govern those elements.

Monetarism & Metallism

The fact that 1970s monetarism changed the entire way that everyone looked at the economy is hardly a secret. It is important to note, however that the global economy worked on a different basis and understanding prior to that. What closed the circuit for me was being reminded of the monetarist / metallist connection just after I had attended a lecture by Dr. Steve Keen where he demonstrated how the math of the money multiplier does not work, unless it’s cash.

Monetarist ideas work based on the metallist idea of money as a physical object. It is regularly taught that there are certain essential qualities of money, as in this example from a sample test for students from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. It says:

“In order for something to function well as money, it must possess six characteristics. Explain each of the characteristics of money as follows:

• Divisible — Money must be easily divided into small parts so that people can purchase goods and services at any price.

• Portable — Money must be easy to carry.

• Acceptable — Money must be widely accepted as a medium of exchange.

• Scarce - Money must be relatively scarce and hard for people to obtain.

• Durable - Money must be able to withstand the wear and tear of many people using it.

• Stable — Money’s value must remain relatively constant over long periods of time.”

The entire “metallist” idea of money is that each unit of value is an actual object - which is a reasonable interpretation, given the experience everyone has as a user of money. It’s tied to the idea that money must be “backed” by something of value. The idea is that a precious metal like gold has “real value”, and that money is representing that value.

Imagine that instead of coins and bills, we used steel ball bearings as money, so that all the money in the economy - personal, banks, business, government - is represented physically. Nothing is represented symbolically, and every piece of money is in a specific physical location, and all of the money is perfectly interchangeable.

If you’re getting paid, your company arranges to physically move ball-bearing money from their bank, to be placed in safe keeping at your bank. The bank will take some of the ball bearings that people are saving and lend them out for other people to use. The same number of ball bearings are in the economy - it’s just that some are being borrowed, and will be returned.

To pay your taxes, you send ball bearings to be placed in the government’s coffers. The Government then spends those ball bearings back into the economy.

No matter what happens, it’s assumed that there is a total amount of money in the economy. So if the government creates more ball bearings and adds to the money supply, it will devalue the currency, but if there’s a financial or economic crash, the money and capital is still there.

This is a perfectly reasonable way to interpret our experience of the economy. The idea of the gold standard, or the silver standard, or the idea that paper notes or non-precious coins must be “backed” by a precious metal are all based in this idea.

Their idea of money is that if you can’t have actual gold coins circulating, you melt the gold coins into ingots and put it in a vault. It’s the idea that there is a fixed amount of value in the economy that can be stored physically in a lump of gold, and that all the fiat money in circulation represents a claim on this finite quantity.

From this conception of money, all of the other conclusions of monetarism flow.

I will rephrase: from this false conception of money, all the mistaken conclusions of monetarism flow.

The evidence is that money is not a medium, it is a message. It is information, and it always has been, since a stylus was first pressed into clay thousands of years ago.

Instead of money being a physical object; it is a symbol of legal obligation. Yes, it is information: commands and orders are a form of information as well.

Even when the gold standard was in place, governments chose how to price it in their currency. Money doesn’t have value because gold does: gold has value because of money, and the entire value of money is in getting other people to do what we want or need.

Central bank after central bank is describing exactly how money is created in the economy, and it describes a completely different concept of money. What central banks are reporting is that money is pure accounting.

I believe that the stumbling block to understanding, is that when monetarist/metallists hear about how money is created out of thin air, they are always already thinking of money as an object.

It is because the metallist / monetarist conception of money is wrong, and the Chartalist account is correct, and always has been.

The reason this is shocking is not because things have changed. This is the way money has always worked. The record and the writing defines and creates the meaning.

Notably, all of crypto and the benefits of the blockchain is based on this fallacy. In a world where everything that can be digitized has been, it is extraordinary that the consensus on the internet, and with tech billionaires, is that money is an object, when it is information.

One reason for the strangeness of money creation is that these actual practices are based on legal frameworks that are centuries old, incorporating ideas that reach back millennia.

The Government of Canada creates bonds to sell, the Bank of Canada creates money to buy them. That money is spent into the economy. The Government and the economy are based on an ancient annual agricultural cycle. The new year starts with the new seeding, the crop grows, is harvested and consumed, and the next planting season.

Every year, with every budget, the national government starts a new year, from scratch, at zero. This is not quantitative easing.

The entire federal budget is all newly created money - and only the federal governments. Provincial and municipal governments are “users” of money, just like business and everyone else.

There’s very little question about where all the newly created money is going, because it is all spelled out in detail in the budget. It’s not just creating money and spraying it all over the economy. It’s highly specific. All of that money is going to address very specific obligations that are passed by elected officials as a law - to other governments and individuals. People’s personal income supplements, health care, education, to build a particular road, bridge, or buy particular equipment.

When people hear “money creation” or “money printing” there’s a notion that, because the money supply is fixed, it must be adding to it. In fact, the entire process of money creation is pure accounting, and money is also continually being destroyed as well as created in the process of extending and cancelling credit.

The monetarist-metallists are making the mistake of thinking that the value of money is derived from an object, when all of the value is derived from other human beings. The entire value of money is that human beings use it to get other human beings to do what they want or need: sell a good or service, sell the title to real property.

It is not “on top” of last year’s taxes, because last year’s taxes were used to cancel out the money that was created that in that fiscal year. The Government collects the taxes, transfers them to the Bank of Canada, deleting the debt. Incredibly, there is no redistribution, because the money paid in taxes are destroyed.

The fact that money is destroyed as it is repaid can be even harder to understand than the idea that it is being created out of nothing.

Why tax? That’s the other side of ensuring that money has stable value: on a very practical level, taxation is important for inflation control, preventing the excess concentration of wealth, income and power, in order to keep the economy stable and to maintain freedoms for individuals. Establishing that individuals have rights, and the defining feature of rights is that they exist outside the money system, serves to guard against incursions from both the public and private actors.

The belief that government money creation alone creates inflation, as Friedman asserts, is based on the notion that money is an object and there is already a fixed amount of it. The perception is that you are adding to a fixed quantity, when across the economy, money is being created and deleted by the private sector through loans, as well as by the national government.

The government’s contribution to money creation in the economy is dwarfed by the private sector

While governments create money in the act of spending, banks are creating money in the act of lending. Banks aren’t taking cash from people’s savings deposits and lend it to other customers. Your deposits stay as deposits.

Banks are extending private credit. The amount they are willing to extend is based on the value of certain holdings, and reserve requirements set by government and regulators.

Metallist/monetarists describe banks holding on to 5% and lending out the other 95%. What is actually happening is that they are keeping the money in the bank, and use that as the basis for how much credit they can extend. If the ratio is 5%, banks could create an amount of new private credit 19 times over and above the value of the reserve.

Just like governments, banks are creating money by filling in both sides of the double entry accounting. Also like governments, the private credit is being created for a very specific purpose, which almost always to purchase an existing asset - property. This is debt-driven speculation.

Banks take the risk of extending private credit to individuals who agree to spend a certain number of years coming up with the money. The value of the debt contract is derived from a person’s legal commitment to keep up with payments.

During the pandemic, the Federal Reserve dropped the reserve ratio to zero, which effectively meant that private commercial banks could, in principle create infinite amounts of credit money.

Just as this credit money is created by banks in the act of lending, it is destroyed as the borrower pays it back. Banks make money from the interest, which is usually more than double the initial amount created by the loan.

In 2014, the Bank of England described how money is created in the modern economy.

Several other central banks describe the same process in their economies:

• The Bank of Canada and the Library of Parliament

• The German Bundesbank issued two papers - here and here - describing the money creation process.

• Jon Nicolaisen, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Norway

• The Central Bank of New Zealand

• The Bank of Australia

Monetarist / Metallists think of this private debt as one person lending their cash to another, so they don’t think a change in the money supply is happening.

You can’t tell the difference between money created by government and money created by private credit. They both look the same in your bank account, but they have extremely different conditions attached. The private debt has interest and conditions attached so that the amount of the obligation to repay is continually growing. Each debt contract has value so long as it’s being paid. If there’s a default, that changes things.

The government is the Mother Bank for the entire economy, and has the power to create official currency, as needed. The private sector, on the other hand, has extended far more credit than it has, because it is expecting to be paid back double over a period of years or decades.

One of the major challenges that people face in understanding that money is “mere” information. Everything - everything - that has meaning to us as human beings is information. Everything that matters is information, from the most to the least important.

In the early 90s I read a book called “Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life” by Jeremy Campbell.

It was about information theory and cybernetics, and it described in plain language how a mathematical theory of communication had led to the entire information and digital revolution, with a theory of information with a truly universal applications, at every level of human existence and experience.

Information theory was developed by Claude Shannon and cybernetics, which was developed by Norbert Weiner recognized the role of information as control and feedback in all systems, whether they were artificial or natural which you can read about his book “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society.”

I appreciated a politically neutral scientific and engineering approach to understanding how value is assigned to information. At the time, post-structuralism was particularly in vogue. I was skeptical because I felt that some of the theories about language and psychology just weren’t sound. My Master’s thesis involved integrating ideas from information theory and cybernetics for a theory of interpretation that was grounded in hard science.

As a consequence, having spent many months trying to articulate my argument, I was already in the habit of thinking of everything as being a form of information.

All human senses deal with a different kind of information: our eyes interpret light, our hearing interprets sound, our taste and smell interpret chemicals, our skin and bodies interpret pressure, and our nerves communicate through electrical and chemical signals that are processed in our brains. Our DNA itself is information. Biological reproduction is literally a reproduction of information.

From understanding the behaviour of subatomic particles, to analyzing DNA, understanding signals and senses in living creatures, to language, behaviour, cybernetics, and all of computing have the Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication as their foundation.

This is especially the case with all modern digital information technology. Information is not just about communication: it is also about commands.

That’s why it makes sense to think of money as information. Metallists are assuming that for money to have enduring meaning, anchoring it to a specific object in the real world is what provides stable value.

What provides meaning is the statement itself. We live in societies that define what money is, and when you say something’s money, that has real social and legal consequences.

The basis of the monetarist/metallist idea is that money represents and stores all the value in the economy, based on a fixed amount of money. If the economy has $1-trillion dollars, then people think that the value of one dollar is 1/trillionth of the whole economy.

This appears to make so much sense it is hard to see where it is wrong, but when we look at what is actually happening with money creation and deletion, it becomes more clear. In fact, none of the “essential qualities” of money apply. Saying that money must be “divisible, portable, accepted as a medium of exchange, scarce, durable and stable” is an illusion created by the way we think of cash.

The assumption of a fixed amount of money is also related to the idea of a fixed population. A fixed population is an explicitly stated assumption in Friedman’s idea that government money creation is adding to an existing, fixed supply of physical money. If value is represented by a fixed, physical amount of money, then adding to the population will also mean less for everyone. So immigration can be blamed.

What the actual processes of central banks and banking shows is the reverse of what metallists and monetarists see. Money is not a virtual representation of cash: cash is a physical object that has information printed on it that makes it part of the money system.

To recap. What is actually happening is that the federal government creates money every year and spends it into existence, and then collects taxes, uses those taxes to cancel out the money that was created; and commercial banks are creating money by extending credit and lending it into existence, and borrowers have to go and collect the money to pay it off.

This was all understood by the bank of Canada in 1936, when they rejected the quantity theory of money:

“…in stimulating business activity the vital matter is not the amount of money in existence, it is the size of people’s income, in other words, the size of the national income. This can grow, and does grow, without any definite connection between such growth and a growth in bank deposits or note circulation.”

The reason these purely informational processes work, and do not fall apart, is because the money being created in every instance is for a specific purpose that is spelled out in legal contracts.

The federal government creates money, and elected officials set out in the budget exactly how much, where it is going, what it is to be used for, all of which is subject to public accounting and audit.

The same is true of banks creating money through the extension of private credit, usually for the purpose of purchasing a specific, named asset - a house, a business, a vehicle.

The question is bound to arise, is how you can possibly have a stable value for money or an economy, when the money is being created out of thin air and erased again by governments and banks.

There’s a thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus, “Mentioned by Plutarch and later modified by Thomas Hobbes.”

Plutarch asked, “If, over a period of time, Theseus replaces every part of his ship, is it still the same ship?” Hobbes then asked, “If you took all the parts from the old ship, and reassembled them, which would be the real ship?”

The reason this is confusing is because on the one hand you have the design of the ship, which is information, and the material substance of it.

If you had a Book of Theseus, where you erased words, and wrote them back in, there is no question: it’s still the same story.

When it comes to money, this is a feature, not a bug. Money is not made more certain by being tethered to a precious metal. It is more certain because even when money is destroyed, it is always possible to create some to replace it, and because everyone who uses that money has an interest in it maintaining its effectiveness.

This is not the way the economy is “supposed to” work based on political goals. This is a purely descriptive explanation of the actions that human beings take in in order to create money.

The federal government creates money every year, which is allocated for specific purposes under federal jurisdiction. Taxes paid back to the federal government cancel the money that was created. Banks also create money by extending private credit to customers - much more money than the government does - mostly for mortgages. Other levels of government are users of currency, not creators, as are businesses, workers, households.

Without making specific policy recommendations, it should be clear that recognizing that money, at its core, is a record of obligations being created through agreement and cancelled through fulfillment, is the nature of money.

In addition to the difference between government-created fiat money and bank-created credit money, there is also an important distinction between the “real economy”, and the financial economy.

In the real economy, the exchange is defined by one buyer with money and a seller with a good or services - something that’s not money. Such transactions are mutually beneficial, because each side gets something they didn’t have before.

With the financial economy, instead of money for goods or services, it’s money for money. These transactions are not mutually beneficial; they are zero sum. One person loses and the other gains. For the FIRE Sector - Finance, Insurance and Real Estate - this means they will tend to think of other people’s money as a commodity to buy and sell, like an object.

As less and less of the money is in the “real economy” and more and more of the money in the economy is related to finance, it means that zero-sum economic transactions are growing and replacing a mutually beneficial ones. This has real social and economic impacts, because the world is currently in an insolvency crisis. People are unable to service the debt on the colossal amounts of private credit that was extended to them by banks. This was possible because central banks dropped interest rates to zero and created money for Quantitative Easing that was provided to banks so they could extend much, much more new credit that has now fuelled one of the largest asset bubbles in history. As we speak, money is already being destroyed, default by default.

There’s a saying: “Put your money where your mouth is.” Money is a statement that you really mean something, because money has meaning in our society, the same way words and numbers and statements do in all societies.

The action of creating money is a statement of value, which is what meaning is.

When we talk about interpreting meaning, people may puzzle over how it is that one symbol can stand in for another. They focus on the “sign” part of the word significance, when meaning and value is about importance. What is important to us, and why? There are times when some things matter more.

Understanding that all money is actually a document that represents a legal obligation, not a symbol for a precious object, has implications for every aspect of the economy: from fiscal and monetary policy, to regulation, taxation. The nature of privately created credit money and debt, and the role of ultra-low interest rates in fuelling credit expansion should be seen for the systemic risks to the economy that they pose.

However, the fact that money is information means that it is incredibly malleable. It can be created and undone, in code, with a fountain pen, a clay stylus.

What this means in practical terms, it means that it is entirely possible and feasible to provide emergency financial supports to every Canadian citizen and business. The Bank of Canada would offer accounts to everyone, and they would create money in the bank account. It would not have to be a loan. It could be digital cash, which is certified as being genuine because it was created by the Bank of Canada, which as part of the Government of Canada, has a constitutionally granted monopoly on the creation of Canadian dollars.

It does not mean all things are possible, but it does mean that people should reconsider just how government spending and, taxation should look, as well as making a plan to deal with the insolvency crisis. Because this private debt is denominated in national currencies, central banks could work with banks to restructure the credit arrangements.

We are all in the worst crisis of our lifetimes, and our inability to escape or come up with a solution has been hampered by an understandable misapprehension about the nature of money. It is the single greatest force in all of our lives.

Money defines the shape of our lives, families, our societies. It can define who we marry, whether we have shelter, whether we can eat, whether we have children, or health care. It affects how long we live. It affects the land we live on from which we draw sustenance.

Money defines the power relationships in our society. It defines your freedom, your power, and degree to which you can have any control over the outcomes in your life. Individuals, institutions and ideologies all have identities based around money. When people say “we have record inequality” what they actually mean is that the concentration of property in the hands of a few has never been higher, and we are all living in societies that are becoming more and more stratified.

And it is all supposed to be regulated by the Federal Government, which is supposed to represent the people, because the very nature of democratic government is that it exists in part to restore social and economic order, address disputes and work to ensure that legal obligations are being met.

Monetarism and metallism are dead. Money is not a physical object, it’s a statement of human value. The sooner we acknowledge this reality, and come to terms with its implications, the better we can address the crises caused by our failure to grasp this reality.

It might just be the new Geist this Zeit has been looking for.

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