don't work to let us say what we want to say. Those accounting definitions rule our thought in ways they shouldn't. Must do a post on this sometime, just finding the words and accounting definitions so you can say what you want to say clearly and consistently. (Which I basically agree with, BTW). Lorenzo and K: It's all right for you young trendy people with your smart phones and Starbucks coffee and crap. But whenever people talk about abolishing currency it sends Brave New World/1984 shivers up my spine. I think about me, and all the homeless alcoholics. How will we cope? In Margaret Atwood's Handmaids Tale, the first thing they did was abolish currency. Steve: thanks! But I think it's the monetary system that causes recessions, not the financial system. The only reason that financial failures cause recessions is that the monetary and financial system are linked in a disfunctional way, so one spills over into the other. Greg: I disagree with you there. Stuff will always go wrong on the real side of the economy, whether due to human stupidity, ignorance, good bets that just didn't come off, or asteroid strikes. And there's always going to be structural unemployment, which we can ameliorate or not through various measures. But none of these ought to cause aggregate demand failures, which are a purely monetary phenomenon. It's the medium of exchange what dunnit. I'm much closer to K's sort of proposal. Set up a monetary system so a demand to