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MONEY WHAT IS IT & WHY IS IT IMPORTANT

Before we begin our tour through the three Es (the Economy, the Environment, and Energy), we need to share a common understanding of this thing called money.

Money is something that we live with so intimately on a daily basis that it probably has escaped our close attention.

Money should possess three characteristics. The first is that it should be a store of value. Historically, gold and silver filled this role perfectly because they were rare, took a lot of human energy to mine, and did not corrode or rust. By contrast, the US dollar pretty much constantly loses value over time – a feature which punishes savers and enforces the need to speculate and/or invest. A second feature is that money needs to be accepted as a medium of exchange, meaning that it is widely accepted within a population as an intermediary within and across all economic transactions. And the third feature is that money needs to be a unit of account, meaning that the money must be divisible and each unit must be equivalent.

Money is lent into existence by banks 

There's nothing complicated going on behind the scenes. The great secret is that there isn't really much of a secret. Yet the truth about money eludes us for most of the time. 

The economist and ironist JK Galbraith once wrote that "the process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. When something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent". Offered the unadorned truth, stripped of any technocratic flim-flam, we can scarcely believe it. It seems preposterous that money should have such humble origins, as though it is beneath money's dignity that it should begin life at a banker's keystroke.