Customer Reviews

Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender

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Make an estimate of the amount of time you have spent on preparing yourself to earn money, on getting it, and of taking care of it when you have it. Wouldn't it be worthwile to really understand what it is you are spending all this energy on?
Tom Greco has been doing some of that work for you, with integrity, passion and enormous dedication.
The time has come to shed some light on the mysterious workings of our money. Read why it is a losing game for most people, of why it is our master instead of our servant. More important still: what you can do to change it for yourself and for your own community.

If we're producing more than ever before in world history,
with technologies creating enough to feed the world, why do we keep getting deeper in debt? It doesn't take a genius to figure there's somethng rotten in Washington,DC.

But it's not the politicians(okay, maybe indirectly), It's not political platforms, and we're not going to change it with term limits or creating new political parties. And we're not going to change it by voting.

There's one way to bring back freedom in the USA and the world, and that's by creating an economic system that eliminates the present system based on debt and greed.

I'm not talking communism. I'm not talking socialism or Marxism or any ism. I'm talking about every citizen taking control of his own economic and social values by creating alternative currencies.

I met Tom Greco several years ago when I was editor of an economics discussion group. I helped him promote his first insightful book on money and debt, and I was impressed by Tom's quiet integrity and deep grasp of the monetary system. This latest book gives the nuts and bolts of economics and lays bare the whole deception set up by our Federal Reserve System. It is written simply and clearly so that you don't need a degree in economics to understand it. I don't have any special education in economics, but after an education from
people like Tom Greco, I was able to hold my own in any economics discussion and show the whole deceitful process for what it is.

You want to know all about economics without paying for an economics degree? Get Tom's book and start changing the world.

MONEY, by Thomas Greco, is one of those books that will cast a light on the shadows of economy as we've known it. But as it happens with every time light is cast, other shadowy areas emerge. The dark side of a system which we take for granted. If anyone suffers or has concerns about money, by reading this book it'll become clear that most people suffer and are concerned about something they didn't even know what it was. What IS money? Why do we suffer under it? What's the problem with money? Most of the world uses it today, though few realize that Legal Tender has legal implications, is part of a legal contract which we agree on even though we haven't even read the large print, much less the small print. By reading MONEY, both large and small print become clear and understandable. This is a book that is both easy to read and easy to understand, and what's perhaps most interesting, a book which will make us realize that our economic problems might not be our personal fault after all, but rather the fault of a system which was never quite right. Money is a technology with side effects. Poverty is a result of money for money functions under the rule of scarcity. If it's scarce, it's more valuable but if it's too scarce, its function as a `tool of exchange' does not work properly anymore.
MONEY is the beginning of a long road we have ahead of us. A few aspects, especially at the end, might still be too close to our present paradigm about economy, but this should change as more people around the world experience different systems of Alternatives to Legal Tender and thus see their very lives changed for the better. MONEY is only one step -but perhaps the first step most of us need- in the path towards a more humane future.

The topic of this book is interesting. I read about half of the book in one day but then slogged through the remainder before I started skimming to the end. It's well-written but not completely thought out, as many of the community money examples end with summaries like "this may or may not work in your particular community." It seemed to me that those examples were rehashed several times before the end of the book. If you want to learn about money, then this book has something to offer but I think it runs out of gas. For the value, I recommend a used copy.

This is the most comprehensive book I've found on the subject of alternative or complementary currencies. It outlines what is wrong with current money systems, gives some historical examples of alternative currencies, talks a little bit about different types of alternative currencies and different properties such systems may have, and then proposes ways to improve upon existing systems and implement new systems. I think it succeeds on most points, but falls somewhat short of the quality of scholarly literature at times. I think its final advocacy falls somewhat short of its purported goals...but overall, this book is still a must-read.

The exposition of what is wrong with the current money system (Part I) is very easy to read and extremely compelling. Although it is a stance that many mainstream economists would take issue with, Greco's argument about what is wrong with society is remarkably airtight. I wish, however, that he would make more of an effort to tie his work in with the relevant economic theory, and also with work that has been done in sociology on the topic of poverty, in order to address possible objections that economists would raise. The book falls somewhat short of being scholarly research on this topic as its level of rigor and citing the literature is somewhat lacking; at times the book comes across more as a political advocacy piece than anything else. These weaknesses may explain why the book was not published in a mainstream press.

The discussion of historical complementary currencies (Part II) is by no means comprehensive, as the other reviewers pointed out, but I don't think this is a shortcoming of the book. Greco discusses some systems that were successful and compares them to a few which were not, as a pedagogical tool (in Part III), in order to highlight the effects that certain properties or certain types of management (or mis-management) have on these systems. I don't think Greco intended to make this book a comprehensive historical survey of all alternative currency systems ever used--that would be a massive undertaking.

In terms of the practical and advocacy part of the book (Part IV), which discusses how to improve on existing systems, and how to implement a complementary currency system, this book is more or less on target on most points, but I don't agree with the final conclusions. I feel like Greco recognizes all the key issues, but does not quite solve them (even though he argues that he does). The chapter on complementary currencies for impersonal markets is short and I think what is advocated there (relying on backed currencies for impersonal markets) is a cop-out. I think Greco would do well to explore a bit farther "outside the box", or, if he does not feel qualified to do this, at least end the book saying that more work is necessary. Greco's current stance seems to be that the solutions to the world's problems have already been invented and just need to be implemented--this is not entirely true, as there are a number of complementary currency systems in operation similar to the ones he advocates, and they have not grown to a large enough scale to solve any of the real deep problems that Greco highlighted in the initial part of the book.

Bottom line? Read this book; there's no better book on the subject. This one is well-written, entertaining, and has a huge amount of information that cannot be found in any other single place.

I found this book to be revelatory as to the true function of money in society.

Everybody knows, or at least has a lurking suspicion, that there is an inherent unfairness in the ways that money and the financial edifices built upon its manipulation affect the well-being of local economies. The decimation of locally owned producers and regional industries is documented daily in newspapers -- it hardly seems to be news anymore. Many books have been written about the predatory and extractive nature of a global financial system dominated by huge investor syndicates, but very few books present real, doable strategies by which communities can extricate themselves from the "race to the bottom" that global competitive pressure forces on them.

Thomas Greco goes right to the root of the dilemma -- communities suffer from a chronic, artificially enforced scarcity of cash, national currency, and that scarcity suppresses the local exchange of goods and services that is the foundation of a thriving local economy. He says, in effect, that if the existing financial system hampers your community's ability to create wealth, then you and your community must build your own financial system.

Mr. Greco draws on his thirty years of study of local economics to create a blueprint (actually, bluprints) of how this local financial system can be implemented. He explains the true nature of money in terms that anybody can understand, and once understood, how that true nature can serve to build a wealth in the community that is impervious to the financial spins and spasms of remote global masters of money.

Reading this book will give you a paradigm shift. I've read many economics books and have a reasonably good understanding of how the monetary world operates, but the first few chapters of this book took unrelated pieces of knowledge I already had and showed me the big picture. Because I read this book during the financial crisis, I saw the underlying reality stand out in sharp detail. Our fiat currency is based on debt. Thus, when trillions of dollars disappeared from the economy and people asked 'what happened to all the money?', it was obvious that in a credit crisis in which lots of bad debt must be written off, a large part of the money will also disappear. To fix the problem, the logical thing for the politicians to do was rescue the banks, so they could resume 'creating money' by making loans. Of course, this points out the inherently corrupt nature of the entire sorry system. Imagine if the stimulus package had gone to the people instead, to pay off their underwater mortgages rather than the banks. Perhaps we would not have the current situation of zombie banks paying millions of taxpayer dollars to reckless executives, while millions of Americans are moving into homeless shelters and squatting in the legions of foreclosed houses.

Greco's book is astonishing in what it conveys about the truth and reality of our financial and economic system compared to the illusions we have been consistently led to believe for years. Highly recommended for a good dose of "the truth will set you free."

This book is a fruit of the author's "warm heart and cool head." The value of this book is to demonstrate a theory and a method for democratizing the power to issue money. We can understand the necessity for local currencies in order to decrease the concentration of power in monetary and financial system.

"Debtors, as a group," says Thomas Greco, "are in an impossible situation of always owing more money than there is in existence. They are forced to compete with one another for scarce money, in a futile attempt to avoid defaulting on their debts."

How can this be? "Banks create money by making loans," but the money to pay interest is not created at the same time. This guarantees that some will always lose. Like musical chairs where there's one chair less each time around.

About ninety-five percent of existing money has been created as debt with interest due. Events today indicate an economic system on verge of collapse.

Ultimate solution to scarce money? Money was created by humans. It can be redesigned to benefit humanity. What action can you take now to ease economic stress? Create your own community exchange system to supplement official currency.

This book is empowering. Over half of it describes alternative currencies. It tells which systems have proven themselves and how to get them going. During the Great Depression, USA, "People learned to share what they had and to bypass the market and financial systems." They took matters into their own hands. They found ways to exchange goods and services. They helped put the country back on its feet.

I like Greco's compassion and integrity. "Imagine a world in which war and abuse are only dimly remembered, in which everyone has enough to live a dignified life, in which harmony among the species prevails and the rape of the earth has ceased...."

He helps us understand the basic problem: "Economics drives politics, and money is the central mechanism through which economic power is exerted in most of the world..." To change the world, we have to build "new structures that support and nurture rather than coerce and brutalize."

If you're tired of working two jobs and still not making ends meet; or you know people who've lost their jobs or old folks living in poverty; or your community needs a health clinic, READ THIS BOOK.

Re-empowering ourselves by establishing supplementary currencies is a first step to building the kind of world we want. Tom Greco can help you get started. His thirty years' expertise dealing with these questions is a treasured gift.

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