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Currency becoming worthelss
Feb 7, 2007

I wanted to share this article which gives a good description of the creation of money and it's greatesy faults.

The End of Money

by Dr. Chris Martenson - January 10, 2007

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

- Dr. Albert Bartlett
While it was operating well, our monetary system was a great system, one that fostered incredible technological innovation and advances in standards of living. But every system has its pros and its cons and our monetary system has a doozy of a flaw.

It is run by humans.

Oh, wait, that’s a valid complaint but not the one I was looking for.

Here it is: Our monetary system must continually expand, forever.

Which means it has a math problem in the same way that a beached whale has a breathing problem. In each case we have a massive organism that was optimized for a very different set of conditions than those in which it currently finds itself.

Our monetary system was conceived at a time when the earth seemed limitless and so nobody gave it much thought when we designed it such that every single dollar in circulation would be loaned into existence by a bank, with interest. In fact most thought it a terribly modern concept and most probably still do.

Since some people might begin grumbling about whether the earth is limitless or not, for the moment let’s remove any debates about natural constraints and simply talk about the mathematical evidence that our monetary system is now entering a stage of explosive, exponential growth.

Consider these data:

1) Money supply growth has gone parabolic. It took us from 1620 until 1974 to create the first $1 trillion of US money stock. Every road, factory, bridge, school, factory, and house built, every unit of economic transaction that ever took place over those first 350 years required the creation of $1 trillion in money stock. But it only took 10 months to create the most recent $1 trillion and I don’t recall seeing an entire continent’s worth of factories, schools or bridges built during that time.

2) Household debt has doubled in only 6 years. Think about that for a minute.

3) Total credit market debt (that’s everything) was about $5 trillion in 1975, has increased by $5 trillion in just 2 years, and now stands at over $51 trillion.

4) The wealth gap between the super-wealthy and everybody else is widening at a furious pace.

What’s going on here? Could it be that the US economy is so robust that it requires monetary & credit growth to double every 6-7 years? Are US households expecting a huge surge in wages to be able to pay off all that debt? Are wealthy people really that much more productive than the rest of us? If not, then what’s going on?

The key to understanding this situation was snuck in a few paragraphs ago; every single dollar in circulation is loaned into existence by a bank, with interest.

That little statement contains the entire mystery. If all money in circulation is loaned into existence it means that if every loan were paid back, all our money would disappear. As improbable as that may sound to you, it is precisely correct although some of you are going to consider this proof that I could have saved a lot in tuition costs if I had simply drunk all that beer at home.

But with a little investigation you would readily discover that literally every single dollar in every single bank account can be traced back to a bank loan somewhere. For one person to have money in a bank account requires someone else to owe a similar sized debt to a bank somewhere else.

But if all money is loaned into existence, with interest, how does the interest get paid? Where does the money for that come from?

If you guessed “from additional loans” you are a winner! Said another way, for interest to be paid, the money supply must expand. Which means that next year there’s going to be more money in circulation requiring a larger set of loans to pay off a larger set of interest charges and so on, etc., etc., etc. With every passing year the money supply must expand by an amount at least equal to the interest charges due on all the past money that was borrowed (into existence) or else severe stress will show up within our banking system. In other words, our monetary system is a textbook example of a compounding (or exponential) function.

Yeast in a vat of sugar water, lemming populations, and algal blooms are natural examples of exponential functions. Plotted on graph paper they start out slowly, begin to rise more quickly and then, suddenly, the line on the paper goes almost straight up threatening to shoot off the paper and ruin your new desk surface. Fortunately, before this happens, the line always reverses somewhat violently back to the downside. Unfortunately this means that our monetary system has no natural analog upon which we can model a happy ending.



http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=812
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Posted: Wednesday February 7, 2007, 8:17 pm
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Marc Gartmann (142) 		Sunday February 11, 2007, 9:07 am
Great article, I attended a lecture on that in Germany a few months ago.

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