Le Monde: Has Money Become Obsolete?
Posted: 03 Nov 2011, 10:37
continues...The media and official sources are preparing us: in the next few months, maybe even the next few weeks, a new worldwide financial crisis will begin, and it will be worse than in 2008. Catastrophes and disasters are being openly discussed. But what will happen after? What will our lives be like if banks and public finances fail on a vast scale? Presently, all European and North American financial systems are in danger of going down together, with no possible savior.
But at what point will the stock-market crash stop being a news story for the media, and become an event we will notice out on the street? The answer: When money can no longer fulfill its usual function, either because it becomes scarce (deflation), or because it circulates in enormous, but devalued quantities (inflation). In either case, the circulation of goods and services slows, perhaps to a complete standstill. Their possessors will no longer find anyone who can pay them in “valid” money which permits them, in turn, to buy other goods and services. So they’ll keep what they have.
The stores will be full, but without customers; the factories will be in perfect operating condition, but with nobody working there; the teachers will no longer go to the schools, because they haven’t been paid in months. Then we will be made aware of a truth which is so obvious we didn’t notice it: there is no crisis in production itself. Productivity in all sectors is continuously increasing. The amount of arable soil available can feed the entire world population. The shops and factories can produce even more than is necessary, desirable, or even sustainable. The miseries of the world are not due, as they were in the Middle Ages, to natural catastrophes, but to a kind of “enchantment” that separates men and their products.
