PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson, author of numerous books on future trends, is a political scientist and co-founder of Meridian Institute. In the wake of the recent wave of currency crises that shook economies in Southeast Asia, Russia and Brazil, there has been much talk of how money systems are changing, and might change even more dramatically in the coming century.
Some economists envision a single global currency.
In recent decades, they often emerged as responses to some kind of economic crisis. For example, in Germany after World War I, inflation grew so badly that postage stamps cost billions of marks. A coal mine owner came up with the idea of paying his workers in coal instead of money, and that evolved quickly into a form of scrip, tied to the value of coal, that became the stable local currency of the town of Schwanenkirchen and then in adjoining areas until the German central bank put a stop to it. Many other such local currency experiments have appeared all around the world with varying degrees of success and acceptance by government authorities. Over its 60-plus years the WIR system has at times been heavily criticized as radical and unrealistic, but it now enjoys a certain sturdy Swiss respectability, with official government recognition, six regional offices, and some 80,000 members.