The Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy Has Destabilized the World’s Markets and Created Financial Chaos

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Ever wonder why today's corporate leaders can't seem to plan for the long term? Why government can't control inflation? Why the stock market is more volatile than ever? Why interest rates rise and fall like the tides? Why economic forecasts never seem to be right? In The Death of Money, Joel Kurtzman, an economist and business columnist for The New York Times, brilliantly and convincingly argues that economic stability and a rapid rate of growth, once America's hallmarks, have been lost because the fundamental nature of money has changed. Money - in the traditional sense - died two decades ago with a single stroke of Richard Nixon's presidential pen. What followed was twenty years of a new economic disorder that began with soaring oil, gold, and real estate prices and continued with an unprecedented consumption binge by government agencies and the citizenry alike. In the twenty years of chaos, we've seen the savings and loan industry collapse, the banking system become weaker, eclipsed by the economy of finance, and an entirely new global medium of exchange created that Kurtzman calls "megabyte money." Most economists, Kurtzman argues, still don't know what - or how - it all happened. Megabyte money is different from anything that has preceded it - and from the money jingling in your pocket or purse. It is part of an intricate and fragile electronic system of truly global dimensions and of amazing complexity. It is a nonstop, seven-day-a-week, 24-hour network that links tens of thousands of computers in places as lofty as the Federal Reserve and the Tokyo Stock Exchange and as lowly as the automated gasoline pump that accepts credit cards. Megabyte money has created an entirely new global economy, one which, Kurtzman warns, is still largely unregulated, where government agencies, including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, have ceded much power to the world's bankers, speculators, corporate treasurers, financiers, and computer programmers. In The Death of M ISBN:9780671687991