Can You Relate? Paper Money Collecting Vs The Credit Crunch

Post keep churning round and round in my mind daily, but I have not done anything about it, because what I have to say the most has little to do with collecting Paper Money. All that pre-occupies me at the moment to be honest is the credit crunch, the state of the global economy and how we are going to get ourselves out of the mess we now find ourselves.

I know that some of us are still collecting and enjoying our collections, its good therapy and therefore if we are we should continue, but for now I would like to ask you my friends to indulge me a bit. Instead of starting a brand new blog I would like to continue to use this one as an avenue to express my views about what is going on around me as concerns finances, the economy and what we should do or how we should view our world.

Paper money collecting helped me to understand a lot about the history of money, banking and to some extent the economies of the West. What did I learn? In a nutshell that our economy as we know it today has been built on bankers giving out credit first that they had stored up in their vaults and then as Paper Money evolved, they started giving out credit over and above the value of gold and silver in their vaults. Obviously they had to keep an eye on devaluing the money by over extending credit. The shrewd bankers got the formula right and thus they built economies that have lasted generations supported and supporting the governments of each generation!

Unfortunately, this system has now gone bust. So what are we going to do about it? First we need to ask why it went burst. There are lots of reasons.

• Reliance on Credit or should I say Debt
• The rise of the computer
• The demise of the manufacturing economies in the west
• The rise of the Asian manufacturing economies
• The decadence of our Morals in the West

Just to mention a few.

We will explore all these in the coming weeks, after which I shall hopefully be able to get back to the art of collecting Paper Money.