Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash

Introduction In search of the new alchemists

‘Like a lot of mothers, Zabau Shepard has some charge cards, but she can’t use them. It’s not that her credit has gone to the dogs; it’s that she is a dog.’ The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1990, quoted in James Grant’s Money of the Mind.

I

Picture the scene. Millions of people gathered on a rocky island off the northern coast of Europe, and getting hungrier. They only have two fivers and a couple of crumpled dollars between them.

‘What do we do?’ Gordon Brown asks Kenneth Clarke.

‘Make them sit down,’ he says. Then he converts the money into small change and, when he has given thanks, begins to distribute it among the crowd. And by the end the whole crowd was satisfied and there was enough left over to fill twelve large unit trusts.

The cabinet, commentators and economists, needless to say, were astonished. After all, it was quite a different method of creating money from the usual one, which involves taxing the small amount at 25 per cent, carefully allocating the proceeds, together with some words of wisdom about working harder, and carrying on doing so until it all runs out.

Money just isn’t like that, is it. The one thing we learn about money is that it isn’t infinite, and it certainly doesn’t behave like the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Short of winning the Lottery, we are dependent on eking out our small incomes to fit our expanding bills.

But something peculiar is happening to money. There was a time when we knew where we were with it: good solid coins which burned a hole in the pocket just by jiggling up and down, notes which said the Chief Cashier promised ‘to pay the bearer on demand’. You’d earn it, put it in the bank, count it, spend it, then it was gone, and you’d have to earn some more. It was simple and straightforward.

The Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home was even said to balance the budget using matchsticks. It was an endearing picture of a more innocent age: you could imagine Britain’s First Lord of the Treasury wrapping hot towels round his head and putting off the dire moment when he would have to sit down and work it all out, complaining that he hadn’t been any good at sums at Eton.

Nowadays things seem very different. The number of professionals involved in different aspects of looking after money, the futures dealers, the traders and arbitragers, reads almost like a cast list from The Canterbury Tales, with all its priests, pardoners and summoners. Finance has become a strange complicated global system fuelled by inter-linked computers and burgeoning information. A large institution like Citibank collects all the money in all its branches around the world electronically overnight and invests it until the morning. Tiny slivers of percentages of transactions are bundled together in deals to pay the traders. Nothing is wasted in the financial markets.

It is a peculiar shadowy world, where rumour and mood can shift billions of pounds in a few minutes. And where Chancellor Norman Lamont, looking at the fragments of his European exchange-rate policy after Black Wednesday, could describe himself as being ‘overwhelmed by a whirlwind’. This view was echoed by former Citibank chairman John Reed, who famously described the financial markets as ‘a little like the physicist who created the bomb’.

‘We see about 400 billion dollars every day of foreign exchange transactions going through the system,’ he said, and that was a good decade ago. By the end of the 1980s, $800 billion a day in electronic payments were going from bank to bank through the Clearinghouse Interbank Payments System in the USA, known as CHIPS – in Britain, we have a similar overheating system called CHAPS – and that figure rises every year. The daily flows in the currency exchanges are now running at an estimated $1,300 billion, and the World Bank reckons that 95 per cent of them are speculative, which means that only 5 per cent is actually related to the real trade which keeps our economies moving along. The rest is froth, but froth with terrifying power over ordinary lives.

If you knock politely at your bank manager’s office door and ask actually to see your money, it’s not going to be there. It will appear on your bank statements, of course, with bizarre fractions charged in interest and service. But you know it will probably be off travelling the globe, investing in massive dam projects, or dabbling in the Tokyo Futures Markets while you’re asleep.

Actually, your money doesn’t exist at all. Money is now blips on computer screens; its value can disappear overnight, it pops up unexpectedly in the form of credit or pseudo-money like air miles or supermarket loyalty cards. Its total demise is widely reported. ‘Cash is dirty, cash is heavy, cash is quaint, cash is expensive, cash is dying,’ said the New York Times magazine recently on its front cover, hailing the advent of sophisticated computer debit cards.

While some people seem to be able to surf this new world of money easily, others don’t. When he fell off his yacht into the Atlantic, Robert Maxwell owed twice as much as Zimbabwe. The rest of us are stuck with the old idea. We believe there is a finite amount of money, which comes to us from employers and occasionally from the government, and we spend it just a little faster than we should. Why aren’t our coins and notes as flexible as they are for what Tom Wolfe called the ‘Masters of the Universe’ in the City of London or Wall Street?

For most of us, money stays irritatingly concrete. It runs out, and we all feel increasingly fearful about it. In the world of glass towers, on the other hand, it is much more flexible: if you don’t have it, you borrow it, discount it, arbitrage it, trade it, ride the market with it, knowing that money increasingly gets its changing value from the psychology of the international market: our hopes, fears, weather patterns, mood swings all effect the value of their money.

Money has become a psychological construct. So why can’t we find psychological ways of getting more of it? Maybe we can put aside the narrow world of chancellors, bank managers and balance sheets, and work out ways to tap into this infinity of wealth for ourselves – as our prehistoric ancestors did when they wandered along beaches picking up shells to use as currency. Maybe we can take Monopoly money and somehow make it real: like the economics editor of The Independent Diane Coyle, who in her book The Weightless World describes using ‘pretend money’ from an old board game to pay her neighbours in her local baby-sitting circle.

Is DIY money possible? It is an idyllic dream by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s what this book is all about. It is a journey to discover people who claim to have founds ways of conjuring money out of nothing, the so-called ‘new alchemists’ who can take the modern equivalent of base metal and turn it into gold – and with it turn all our ideas about money upside-down.

II

Why America? Partly because of Zabau Shepard.

Zabau Shepard was a dog from Virginia, who in 1990 suddenly started receiving free credit cards through the post. Her two-pronged name, in a nation where many people choose the most peculiar names, probably confused the computers. She was used as a symbol of the American financial malaise in a fascinating book by the financial journalist James Allen called Money of the Mind. If credit is endlessly available, he said, then there is nothing real about money. It means that anyone can buy almost anything.

Sometimes they do; sometimes they nearly do. The Cincinnati investment advisor Paul Herrlinger claimed to be bidding for the Minneapolis store chain Dayton-Hudson for $6.8 billion in 1987 – about $6.7 billion more than the assets of his company. In those heady days, when anyone could borrow anything, he was widely believed on Wall Street and Dayton-Hudson shares climbed $10. After his lawyer tried to head off disaster by explaining that his client was ill, Herrlinger was asked by TV interviewers on his lawn whether the bid was a hoax. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s no more a hoax than anything else.’

But then the American attitude to money is more relaxed than ours. You only have to live in the United States for a few months before you get a direct mail cheque for $5,000 made out to you, sent by an obliging credit-card company touting for business. All you have to do is pay it into your account and the card and statements start arriving, with interest at anything up to 26 per cent. The credit-card companies have calculated that they gain more in extra custom than they lose in bad debts. ‘It’s like giving lettuce to hungry rabbits,’ according to one observer. Perhaps that is why, leaving mortgages aside, the average American household is now $8,570 in personal debt, with three or four credit cards and five or six affinity cards. The figure in the UK is not as high, but since 1990 even British households have been spending more servicing their personal debt than they do on food.

All this is the culmination of a 3,000-year history of money, the origin of which is lost in the mists of time. Some experts explain the word in terms of the Latin for ‘memory’ and ‘warning’; others say it comes from the Roman goddess Juno Moneta, Jupiter’s matronly wife, who had the mint next-door to her temple in ancient Rome. Perhaps memory and warning are appropriate ways of describing the money system, because the invention of compound interest – which has solved the problem of penniless old age and driven away the workhouses – has also plunged the world into debt. Some prophets of doom will tell you that a penny invested at average interest rates at the time of Christ would now be worth in gold more than the entire mass of the earth. What they don’t tell you is that the same would be true the other way round if you had borrowed the penny.

Before money, in the Iliad, values were measured in terms of cattle: the Latin word pecunia (money) comes from pecus (cattle). Money probably emerged, not to make shopping easier, but to mark celebrations or marriages, alliances or sacrifices to the gods – to build social relationships. The human race was able to do without money for trade until the Lydians – living in what is now western Turkey – first started stamping their metal tokens with official marks, thus inventing the first coins in the West. ‘They were the first retailers,’ said the ancient historian Hero-dotus, describing a society which sounds obsessed with its new invention. ‘The customs of the Lydians differ little from those of the Grecians, except that they prostitute their females.’ It is strange to think that the inventors of money as we know it now were also the first pimps.

Before money, people who wanted to pop down to the shops had to rely on bartering – but even then they would have to be able to agree on the value of the goods they were exchanging. That was why money evolved as locally agreed counters, some of them predictable, some of them most peculiar: like bronze tools (China), gold rings (Egypt), tobacco (Virginia) or twelve-foot stones (the Caroline Islands in the Pacific). The stones must have been pretty useless, but at least they were difficult to pinch out of handbags.

These developments moved slowly at first, possibly because money innovators were not as numerous as they are these days. Some came to sticky ends, like Johan Palmstruch of Stockholm, condemned to death for causing inflation by printing too many official banknotes. Others changed money in order to achieve something completely different – like William III, who began the National Debt in 1693 to fund another war with France.

The Dutch led the way for a while, then the French. But the innovators who have succeeded since then tend to be either Scots or American. Maybe it was a national fascination for money which meant that the Scots brought the world the pioneer economist Adam Smith, and John Law, whose paper currency and limitless credit became so unpopular in France that, in 1720, he had to escape with his life from Paris.

But it is not surprising that the Americans have produced so many money innovators. From next to nothing except their threadbare clothes and a couple of chickens, the passengers on the Mayflower and their descendants had to conjure up the enormous wealth to develop a whole continent. They had to trade their way into wealth, until their children and grandchildren could set up banks which made money widely available, and by doing so they built the place we see now, with its gleaming skyscrapers, penitentiaries and McDonald’s. The cost, every generation or so, has been a tradition of regular bank crashes. The opposite of money innovation is money disaster. But without money innovators, the Wild West would never have been won, and the enormous investments they eventually attracted from Victorian England would never have been available.

Nor would the American Revolution have been paid for. It was financed by the new idea of printing more money which, as we now know, causes inflation: it loses its value. ‘The Currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine,’ said Benjamin Franklin, who printed many of the notes himself. ‘It performs in office when we issue it; it pays and clothes Troops, and provides Victuals and Ammunition; and when we are obliged to issue a Quantity excessive, it pays itself off by Depreciation.’

While we Europeans agonize about launching a single currency, suddenly everybody in the United States is issuing money. There are phone units, subway tokens, affinity cards, cyber-currencies, time dollars, hours, Valley Dollars, Frequent Flyer Miles. Americans don’t wait for the government to do it: they just get on and conjure the money for themselves. We have similar ideas on this side of the Atlantic, of course, but we also have a traditional disapproval of the elasticity and sheer availability of American money: Victorian moralists thought it led to the debauchment of youth. Our own venerable currency seemed sturdier and imperturbable somehow. ‘When I listen to the anti-European rhetoric of some politicians,’ wrote the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, ‘I get the impression that they believe that, back in the mists of time when this most noble race first set foot on this sceptred isle, God gave the British the pound for their own special use.’

Britain is not a nation of great financial innovators. We invented the Bank of England, and sat back contented for a couple of centuries, assuming that our new race of bank managers were taking over the world – only to find that they hadn’t, and the international markets were increasingly outside our control. British politicians hate this failure: they occasionally lash out, like Harold Wilson, at the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’, but usually they prefer not to think about it. No wonder the arrival of the single currency keeps British politicians awake at night.

Does our lack of power over money matter? For anyone who gets a sinking feeling from reading their credit-card statements, this probably doesn’t need spelling out, but there are wider implications. A Wall Street collapse today, says the historian Jean Gimpel, would probably mark the end of our civilization. As I write, commentators are peering at the plummeting markets of the Far East, wondering whether they will bring down our economies with them. But even if the system totters along, as it probably will, the international money system is certainly successful at some things – building motorways and superstores for example. It doesn’t work very well in other areas.

After 200 years or so of economic growth, the planet is showing distinct signs of age, many people are still just as poor, and the ones that are richer are not obviously happier. For all the accepted cures peddled by politicians and experts, the system neither works as it should, nor is under their control, and still less is it under the control of ordinary people like you and me.

The problem is that money is partially blind. It draws a circle around the financial economy, and just can’t screw its eyes up enough to see anything else – myopically peering at the instruments which register ‘success’, and failing to see beyond its own narrow interpretation of what wealth is. Economics is full of hidden costs, trading the health of communities and the environment for motorways and the promise of better times around the corner. Economic growth began by devastating the British cities in the nineteenth century, then started on the rest of the world. Forests have now disappeared, many people live with air which is barely breathable, dams have devastated thousands of square miles, chemicals have destroyed livelihoods and now many of us doubt whether the earth can sustain life for another century or so. Americans now spend over $400 million a year breaking into malfunctioning automatic car door locks: economists call this ‘growth’.

Tropical rainforest, on which we all depend, continues to disappear at the rate of over 30,000 square miles a year, because money provides incentives for its removal. As a result, the deserts grow by six million hectares a year. All this is driven by money. In the long run, a blind economic system which takes no account of raw materials or waste disposal or happiness must go head-to-head with the systems that sustain life on earth. ‘Man talks of a battle with nature,’ said the pioneering economist E. F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, ‘forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.’

The amount of money in the world is now staggering, but it is very badly distributed. Donald Trump and his casinos have far too much, while someone like me – to take a random example – doesn’t have nearly enough. And even with my letters from the bank and rickety car, I am considerably better off than the 60,000 British pensioners who die from cold-related illness every winter because they can’t afford the heating.

Peasants in 1495 had to work about fifteen weeks a year to earn the money they needed to survive. By 1564 it was forty weeks, and soon they were having to move to uncertain futures in factories just to get by. Now those of us who can find work never seem to stop working. The majority of us in the West now have luxuries unimagined by our grandparents, but despite astonishing economic growth between the year I was born, 1958, and 1980, Americans reported feeling ‘significantly less well-off’ by the end of it.

I don’t want to be dishonest about this. I want to be richer as much as anybody, but the money system is not serving us all very well at the moment, especially if you are excluded by it – or lie awake worrying that you might be. ‘It is in the brain and soul that lack of money damages you,’ wrote George Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. ‘Mental deadness, spiritual squalor – they seem to descend upon you inescapably when your income drops below a certain point. Faith, hope, money – only a saint could have the first two without having the third.’

III

I claim to be an alternative economist. As such, I am interested in searching for ways of making money more available to everyone and to help them avoid Orwell’s ‘spiritual squalor’. Alternative economists have their own institutions. One of them, TOES (The Other Economic Summit), met for the first time when the G7 leaders of the seven richest nations held their summit in London in 1984. The thought of all those conventional economists getting together in limousines to ruin the planet so annoyed the alternatives that they held their own show. TOES 1984 was an enormous success, attracting a strange mixture of futurists, greens, renegade economists, new age businessmen, hippies, social critics and complete crazies. The media took no notice at all, but some of the ideas which emerged – green taxation, new ways of measuring success – are now on every politician’s agenda, whether they like it or not.

Economists, with some notable exceptions, regard us alternatives with suspicion. Radicals get irritated because we don’t think the world’s problems are absolutely hopeless, and it spoils their pessimism. What Keynes called ‘plain men’ regard our ideas as bizarre perversions of the natural order of things. Alternative economists say the current world of money is quite bizarre enough already: the idea of fractional reserve banking, for example, means that banks create most of the money we use simply by lending it – anything up to ten times the deposits which they hold as backing. This is the real ‘funny money’. ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple,’ said John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘that the mind is repelled.’

There is a traditional critique of the money system, with a pedigree that goes back via Major C. H. Douglas – the inventor of ‘social credit’ – to Abraham Lincoln, Robert Owen and William Cobbett, and it now seems to have almost completely disappeared underground, though it pops up every so often on the right and left of politics, in US militia groups, or in strange men with carrier bags who shout ‘Fraudsters!’ from the back of the hall during political meetings.

This tradition is enraged by the way banks are allowed to create money, loading us all up with unrepayable debt. They argue that only governments should be allowed to do so, and they should do it interest-free and debt-free. Both Britain and America have experimented with ideas like this to stave off a banking crash: Lincoln by printing ‘greenbacks’ during the American Civil War and Lloyd George with ‘Bradburys’ during the First World War. Both were rapidly wound up under pressure from the banks, who were afraid they would create inflation.

But there needs to be money in circulation for the wheels of the economy to keep turning, and these arguments raged on both sides of the Atlantic until a century ago. In the USA this led to the great battle between gold and silver – between reliable money backed by gold, and available money backed by the much more plentiful silver. Now these ancestral battles are all but forgotten, ridiculed out of existence by the coruscating wit of George Bernard Shaw, and shunned because so many of the people who believed in an international bankers’ conspiracy also believed it was Jewish. The changes they called for are now extremely unlikely to take place.

The issues remain, but this book is not about them – there are other people far better qualified to write about them than I am. But I do want to write about creating money, because if its creation is so simple that banks and governments can do it, we may now be entering a world where we can all do the same thing for ourselves – which is the idea behind Local Exchange and Trading Systems.