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

There are several significant reasons to claim that the New
Zealanders are on the right track. Several of these reasons are new:
they reflect a changed political and technological environment.
The issue of geographic scale for monetary policy
Let us assume for a moment that Governor Greenspan of the
Federal Reserve becomes responsible for the economic well-being of
the poorest depressed area in Washington DC, instead of the country
as a whole. Would he follow a different monetary policy from the one
he does today?
He certainly would, and justifiably so.
One of the main problems when a central bank has to make
decisions about the money supply is that it needs to look at the
economic situation over the entire country. From this perspective,
complementary currencies make it possible to fine-tune the medium
of exchange to the local needs. This is why the New Zealand and
Australian governments are involved in creating complementary
currencies in the wont unemployment areas of the country. This is
also why the introduction of the euro provides an additional
incentive to promote local currencies.
Information age unemployment
Monetary policy has been one of the main tools used to counteract
the effects of the well-known short-term business cycle over the past
half-century.
But if today's unemployment issues are the result of a structural
adjustment to the new production technologies of the Information
Age, this puts us in a very different ball game. Central banks have an
interest in experimenting with new ways to solve this problem. It is
clearly what New Zealand has decided to do, and it chose the right