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

usiness editor of The New York Times, is even more damning. He
titles his latest book The Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy
has destabilised the World’s Markets.
A master of understatement like Paul Volcker, ex-governor of the
Federal Reserve, goes on record to express his concern about the
growth of 'a constituency in favour of instability', i.e. financial
interests whose profits depend on increased volatility. Just to
illustrate this last point, a typical comment by a foreign exchange
trader quoted in the Washington Post reveals how a period of relative
stability is perceived: 'You can't make any money like this. The dollar
... movement is too narrow. Anyone speculating or trading in the
dollar or any other currency can't make any money or lose money.
You can't do anything. It's been a horror.'
The net effect of the actions of these 'constituencies for instability'
are the monetary crises that regularly make front-page headlines (see
an extract from The New York Times in sidebar, where all the key
actors to which you have now been introduced play out a real-life
drama). The question nobody dares to ask is: Who is next? Latin
America? Western Europe? China? When will the US, the largest
debtor country in the world, become a target? What would that
mean?
This is not the only challenge that the money system is facing. We
will see later that banks and financial services are just starting to
change again, this time under the pressures of the cyber economy.
We will discover that market innovations, such as Open Finance, will
make it harder than ever for regulators to define what a bank is, or
what money is theirs to manage.
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