This text explains why money has different effects according to its origins and purposes. Was it created to make profits for a commercial bank or issued by a government as a form of taxation? Or created by its users themselves purely to facilitate their trade? And was it made in the place where it is used, or did local people have to provide goods and services to outsiders to get enough of it to trade among themselves? The book shows that to build a just and sustainable world, money creation must be democratized and the payment of interest on money in circulation scrapped.

About the Author

Richard Douthwaite studied economics at the University of Essex and the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. He set up and managed a boatyard in Jamaica on behalf of the island's fishing co-operatives before spending two years as Government Economist in the British colony of Montserrat. He has lived in Ireland since 1974. His book, The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet, was published by Green Books in 1992 and an extended and updated second edition appeared in 1999. His other major book, Short Circuit (Green Books, 1996), gives dozens of examples of currency, banking, energy and food production systems which communities can use to make themselves less dependent on an increasingly unstable world economy. In 1998-9 he was a consultant to an EU-funded project to establish experimental community currencies in Scotland, Ireland, Amsterdam and Madrid.