Thomas Bass caught up with Wriston to get his ideas on smart cards, stateless capital, and the future of money. During the Neolithic revolution, marked by the rise of agriculture and cities, wealth lay in land. During the Industrial Revolution, it resided in machines. And today, in the information age, wealth is generated by intellectual capital.
Money is information, and information makes money.
Money today flows in waves of bits and bytes that wash over the globe in 24-hour cycles. As markets in Osaka and Singapore pass the book to London and on from there to New York and Chicago, great pools of speculative capital churn on rumors, political events, and feedback mechanisms endemic to the markets themselves. The rules for understanding this flow of money seem to come more from the study of turbulence and fluid dynamics than from dry economic theory. Short of laws for predicting the motion of money, what we have to work with are approximations - and for that, you need good information. Thomas A. Bass is author of The Eudaemonic Pie.