MONEY What It Is How It Works

For several thousand years, money has been viewed as tokens with intrinsic value, like gold or silver coins. Substitutes like paper currencies were often used, but they were only accepted on the promise they could be converted into "hard money" on demand. The era of hard money is now history. Today every major industrial nation creates its own monetary base of intrinsically worthless and inconvertible tokens known as fiat money. Most other forms of money are viable only to the extent they are convertible on demand into the government's fiat money. Many books deal with money in relation to financial institutions and markets, but say little or nothing about the imperatives in a fiat money system. This book should help fill the void. It consists of a collection of fifty-one short essays selected from those I wrote over a period of several years for my website at http: //wfhummel.cnchost.com. Thanks Google and other search engines, the website has been discovered by many thousands around the world and is now visited by several hundred a day.