more (or less) on money
posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by Kevin in [Consuming, News & Media, Politics]that video about where money comes from has got me spooked – money really is just made up, by banks, because they can.
So we are currently here:
- in the UK there is only about £20bn of cash in circulation, that’s actual notes and coins.
- the bank of England only has 400 tonnes of gold – in today’s market that’s £6.6bn – selling that much gold would be done by auction and probably sell for less.
- UK National (i.e government) debt is currently £650bn
- personal debt in the UK is £1,448bn (1.4trillion) – £232bn of that is unsecured debt [credit action]
- in the UK we pay £259m in interest each day.
- The housing stock in the UK is currently worth around £4trillion
It really is a massive house of cards – It’s all a bit scarry.
You can join a LETS or Timebank scheme which are time exchange schemes. To be honest I’m a bit put of by the “everyone’s time is equal” i know it sounds egocentric – but i don’t see how this encourages people to learn/research/innovate which is a key part of society.
Maybe traditional bartering is the way togo. How many pints of milk do you think a website is worth?
