The Sins of Economics & The Death Of Money

Kurtzman may be a bit simplistic as shown in his optimism that the electronic financial system can just reset itself and life will go on as usual.

Not quite, if Japan's seminal experiment with money in the 1980s has anything to learn - not for Malaysia and other Asian economies in the 1990s anyway, nor even the source of all troubles, the US in recent years for that matter.

I do not think that it is the electronisation of money that the cause of all the trouble in the world today. ICT is also a tool, and it will be akin to arguing that the telephone is a major source of problem in the world in the last half century - although we will not deny that it has no appreciable impact on the way the world functions.

It is the people behind the money policy who has not mastered their economics to see beyond the old theories and to realise how the old ideas are impacting reality and how the new reality is now behaving differently from the old. It is not rational expectations, but an increasing order of expectations - how we expect to react to what people will react when something they expect is expected to happen.

The sins of economics is that we know too much, that we have dissected the matrix we have created for ourselves - markets, money, specialisation and economies of scale, and trade - and are fully exploiting them until they have lost their value.

This debasement is the death of money and the economy as we know it.