An interesting and complex article.

Twenty years ago agreement on a new monetary system would have been easier because Europe (eg. Eurozone and IMF (usually headed by a European)) and the US (World Bank (usually headed by an American) and Federal Reserve Bank) worked together relatively smoothly.

But now we have fragmentation: Brexit, Trumpist isolation from international agencies AND the rise of China as a financial powerhouse that may surpass the US in nominal GDP in 15 years.

All this means major economies are in disagreement and therefore less likely to agree on major monetary reform, be it universal or regional. The US dollar is less trusted as the international trading currency.

Today Trump would ask "What's in it for America?" and President Xi would ask "What's in it for China?" to benefit MOST from reform.

More see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency

Pete

Money as a unit value is intended to represent so many units of energy. And did so when pegged to the gold standard. Therefore, self-liquidating money is a nonsense given energy can neither be created or destroyed or liquidated!.

That said, we could create a few trillions worth of government-guaranteed, self-terminating thirty-year infrastructure bonds. And sure to be fully subscribed right now!

Cannot be used to support recurrent spending but any project that eventually, when complete earns revenue.

Top of that list has to be a very fast train down the eastern seaboard

Followed by multitudinous, nuclear energy, renewable energy and water projects, co-ops and family firms, export industries.

We simply have to stop exporting our best ideas and our smartest people.

But rather, commercialise their ideas, innovation and inventions, then manufacture them here to export via a national freight forwarding shipping line/national airline, to the world.

Key to this and a critical requirement, is truly affordable energy and unavailable as long as conflicted tin-eared, recalcitrants are welded to this or that straight jacket, idiotic ideological imperative?

Or are the puppets of the rich and powerful with their own agendas? Agendas that tell the national interest? GFY!

A very fast train, a VLT, Could require the temporary migration of this or that skill tha simply doesn't exist here! But will need to be imported and with it, the transfer of those skills to our own along with the transfer of technologies.

Temporary migration has to mean that along with a period of mandatory quarantine on Rottnest or somewhere similar!

Assisted by half or two-thirds of their salaries/production bonuses, withheld and only paid to them, upon their completely issue-free repatriation!

In conclusion, let me say, the very best kind of money is money that stays here working in our economy and earned from exported goods, and commodities!
Alan B.
.

A stupid and misleading article - despite his credentials, it's clear the author doesn't understand what he's writing about!

Official money is not too complicated at all. It fulfils its three different functions far better than it could if those functions were separated out.

> The value of all major currencies has become self-referential and so inherently unstable.
On the contrary, that's what makes it inherently STABLE! The market corrects imbalances in real time, preventing major crises from occurring.

>A crisis in one major currency immediately affects the others.
...AS IT SHOULD! That helps mitigate the effect on trade. Back in the managed currency value era, the effects wouldn't be immediate, so would ultimately be more severe.

>Leading economists recognise this self-referential feedback problem by describing it as a “Doom Loop”.
THAT'S NOT WHAT A DOOM LOOP IS!
As Shann would have seen if he'd followed the link he supplied, a doom loop (which stands for Deep Out Of Money as well as its literal meaning) is where businesses that are short of money take on more risk. If things go well, it solves the problem; if things go badly, it greatly exacerbates the problem by increasing the financial commitments that are unable to be honoured.

It's not Money reform that's needed, it's the disproportional salary/wage imbalance that needs reforming !

Hello Pete aka “Plantagenet”
I appreciate your concern that reforming the nature of money is a daunting task. For political parties of conservative persuasions around the world to print unthinkable quantities of money this year, that some may view as stupid, illustrates that radical decisions can become both possible and widely adopted. It becomes simply a matter of running out of options of any more attractive actions.

Global pollution, inequality and migration are creating not only inconvenient problems but ones that introduce existential problems for the majority of the world’s citizens living near coastlines subjected to rising sea levels. This provides grounds for unthinkable actions might well also become accepted and widely adopted even in the lifetime of our grandchildren

Printing money has been tried already, in Zimbabwe, And the axis countries. Can't say that any one of those examples was entirely successful!

And because most of that new paper, was spent on recurrent spending and added no value or economic expansion?

Social credit on the other hand as a way to create new money has been proven to work if there are two things. A large economic resource that hasn't been privatised and a modest to small population.

The resource is corporatised and the entire population become shareholders.

And the revenue pumped into government coffers.

Another example is, the government, creates an entirely internal debt and writes cheques to fund income-earning infrastructure

And as the money rolls out, entered in the debit ledger.

However, once the project is complete and functional it acquires endlessly improving value which from the get-go is entered into the same leger as a credit.

The snowy, a good template to create jobs, jobs, jobs, and via the usual flow on factors, many more service industry jobs and wealth creation opportunities.

A very fast train would do all that and more as would the electrification of our economy as well as decarbing it!

If the pandemic has one silver lining? It's the must-do rebuild and the myriad opportunities it gives us to reset/remake our economy and self-reliant independence as an economic superpower, exporting, clean, green, carbon-free, energy to the world!

And for just pennies, a day per individual customer, be they living in hovels in China's N.W., or some slum in Calcutta? All doable with clean, green affordable nuclear energy! And as the world's cheapest and so cheap not even hydro-power could undercut it!

But we need decision-makers that are open to new ideas, new technologies and a new saner political mantra!

The choices are that stark and separate!

We just do not have a leader or a party or post-pandemic politicians able to put the nation and the national interest ahead of other conflicting considerations?

A Darwin port anyone, going cheap, get one now, before they're all gone! Catch my drift
Alan B.