The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

Review by Brian Blackburn

Most if not all of us can not ignore the mega trends that are impacting on all of our lives. You only have to watch the news on any day to get an update; the author Bernard Lietaer of my book review this month has condensed these trends into four key areas:

Pensions Crisis: The rising imbalance in our population age demographics resulting in more people not working versus those in work. This author refers to this as the “Age Wave”, hard to imagine that there just might not be anyone to look after you when you need a Zimmer frame or a wheel chair?

Climate Change: Is it simply better reporting from global communications , or indeed are we experiencing more frequent natural disasters brought about by our population explosion across the planet and our rampant consumerism? Eighty five percent of all insurance claims are paid out as a result of natural disasters. The endangered species list is growing by the month including Polar Bears that may disappear as the Polar Regions shrink.

Monetary Instability: In the last decade we have experienced the South East Asian crisis with deflation a real part of their lives ever since, The Mexican crash, the Russian Crash of 1998 and the well publicised crash in Brazil in 1999.

Information Revolution: The last twenty years have been the “the new industrial revolution” with the same live changing impacts on all of our every day lives. Information has never been so prolific if only we had the time to read it?

What connects all of these trends?

Money!

The author Bernard Lietaer has spent 25 years working in different areas of the money system. He worked on the creation of the single European currency and was named the world’s top currency trader by Business Week in 1989. He was Professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and a Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. So fair to say, he might just know what he is talking about? Indeed he appears to be one of the world’s foremost financial visionaries.

Having outlined these mega trends the author goes onto suggest the potential outcomes of these trends, many of which we are already experiencing in our daily lives. Big Brother controls go on the increase, this is evidenced in our every day lives, taxation is pervasive from cradle to grave with all activities even our personal lives being watched at every corner. Britain is the most watched nation in the world. We have the most CCTV’s per head of population. Who said the North Koreans had it bad? Caring Communities, spread rapidly: small communities isolating themselves from the global tide of lowering values and institutional intrusion, to maintain basic cultures of caring and sharing. Gated communities around the globe are becoming ever more popular, religious groups already practice this across the globe and are seeking better and better ways to isolate themselves from the rest of us. Hell on Earth, a general systematic decline in law and order and an increasing gulf between rich and poor. And lastly Sustainable Abundance, in which he envisages the world in which we take better care of the environment, re-arrange the poor and the unemployed in mainstream society and give back time and fulfillment to the over-worked, while providing the elderly with a high level of personal care. The cynic or perhaps the realist in me thinks that this last outcome is way outside of our abilities as a race to achieve due to the nature and future of money. A thoroughly “heads up” read for all of us in business, and as it was written in 2001, even more so unsettling, maybe I need to save a little less in my pension?

Available from all good retailers and retailers from £9.99 or less. (Do your bit for the planet and get a used one from Amazon)