William Bramley/The Gods of Eden/21/213

FEW TOPICS OCCUPY as many minds or stimulate as many emotions as money. This is largely because money is an overwhelming problem to a majority of people. One thing which causes modern money to be a problem is inflation, whether inflation is climbing at 3% annually or 300%. Inflation, of course, is the situation in which the costs of goods and services steadily rise due to the ever-decreasing value of money. This happens when the money supply becomes larger in proportion to the supply of valuable goods and services.

Money itself is not valuable; only the goods and services that can be bought with it are. The wealth of any individual or nation, therefore, is ultimately determined by what it produces in terms of valuable products and services, not by how much money it prints, distributes or holds. A nation could actually survive without any currency at all as long as it was otherwise productive.

The purpose of money is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. Money is therefore an extension of