THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

specialised issuing corporations with strong balance sheets and
public credit ratings' and he foresees 'new private currency markets
in the 21st century'. In short, instead of competing for the familiar
national currencies backed only by government debt, corporations
could issue their own money backed by real goods and services.
Governments will, most likely, not be the only losers in such a
power shift. For instance, a Corporate Millennium has the potential
to erode further personal privacy and individual rights to the
advantage of the large corporations. Such erosion results from a
convergence of the following three trends, alluded to in the scenario:
1. The perceived need for personal identification ('positive ID') to
ensure security in electronic payments. As the cyber economy
expands, bringing with it a criminal cyber-underground, the
rationale strengthens for this possibility.
2. Electronic forms of money - whether of the old national
currencies or corporate scrip are ideally suited to become 'traceable
currency', easily used to track who purchases what. The most
valuable marketing asset in the Information Age will be the massive
consumer databases that result, and are already being built today, as
is confirmed by the demand for unprecedented large-scale data
storage devices by all major retail chains. Another sign of this trend:
the South African bank Nector gives its customers a free portable
telephone which automatically gives them each morning their bank
balance, but also monitors all other calls to build up a profile of its
customers.
3. Connecting product bar-code information to the personal
identification of the purchaser. The economic incentive for this is
almost irresistible, particularly for mass marketers, who thereby have
available to them a complete profile of millions of consumers,
including information about their preferences and lifestyles.