Pre on Nostr: Read Lyn Alden's book "Broken Money". The problems and issues with using bank debt as ...

Read Lyn Alden's book "Broken Money".

The problems and issues with using bank debt as a global monetary system were a surprise to me when I first discovered them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

"Money" is mostly not notes and coins. Banks don't hold your money, they fractionally reserve it and create 95% of all the money that exists out of nothing. All that stuff that isn't notes and coins is interest bearing debt, and there isn't enough money in the system to pay the interest.

It must mathematically, inevitably, lead to collapse.

Alden goes through some of that problem. Describing money as a ledger, either managed by book-keeping or by physical scarcity.

She goes through some history of how money evolves in society. How the limitations of physical money (mostly that it can't be transferred quickly at the speed of communication) lead to using credit and ledgers with balances at trusted traders, and eventually banks. The collapse of Breton Woods with the ending of the Gold Standard and the problems with the current Petro Dollar system.

Some of these problems are in the media spotlight at the moment: The US printing money to trade for foreign products negatively affects their balance of payments, and is bad for the American worker. Deskills their economy and makes America dependent.

Trump says he wants to fix that, but its hard to see how it could be fixed while Dollars remain the world money standard, and America therefore has to get dollars out into that system somehow. And gets to make money for nothing to swap for real world products.

Their free money also pays for the wars that America pursues and funds all over the globe.

Another problem: Constant money printing and resulting inflation causes monetization of real estate, pushing up the price of housing and making people not even *want* there to be cheap housing. They celebrate the cost of housing going up as though it enriches them.

Likewise stocks, and equities and real estate and art and jewelry. All inflated stupidly due to the constantly devaluing worth of money.

Also the problems already mentioned that I learned about in 2008. All the money in the world is owed at interest, and to pay that interest more money must be created, at more interest. The whole system doomed to collapse and enriching the worst of us till it does.

Is the solution to return to a gold standard? Presumably not, gold is too hard to transport, and already collapsed into bank credit once in the 70s.

More controversially she wonders could it be Bitcoin? Not "crypto", which is just scams and more tokens printed out of nothing to enrich those doing the printing. But Bitcoin specifically, separate from Crypto, as a token which only real-world work can create. Nobody gets to print Bitcoin for free. It has no company or country controlling it. It has deliberately limited supply. It is a bearer asset like Gold which can be transported around the world at the speed of communication.

The last 3rd of the book looks at how Bitcoin works, how it's different to Crypto, and examines some of the obvious objections.

I remain unsure that Bitcoin could really be a new global reserve currency, but I also remain convinced that *something* has to, because continuing to use the dollar is certainly doomed and causes innumerable terrible difficulties until it does.

And what else is there?

Can we finally make Keynes' Bancor?

Until we find something, money remains broken. Like in the title. And that breaks many other things too.