Money makes the world go round but we didn’t always have it. Before money, we used what’s called a barter system, this is where you simply trade what you have for what you want or need.
It might seem simple but in reality it was quite complicated as the person who has what you need doesn’t necessarily want what you have.
The solution to this problem was to use a medium of exchange in order to mediate trades, otherwise known as money. In order to qualify as money an object needs to be capable of fulfilling three tasks. It needs to be a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value.
Not everything can fulfill these requirements and some things have proven far better at it than others. Gold and silver, for instance, are excellent but it’s been cowrie shells, gold, clay tablets and nothing more than numbers on a screen.
However, whenever the object used as money isn’t limited by nature we tend to make far too much of it. This is called monetary inflation and I plan to make a video about it eventually.
A book I read, also a documentary, called The Ascent of Money by Niall Fergusson inspired this video. In it, he details the humble beginnings of currency it evolved over the years. He also discusses key developments in history from the Medici bank, to the worlds first ever joint-stock company, the Dutch East-India company.
The history or money spans the course of civilization. Starting in Ancient Mesopotamia, where the people used clay tablets, all the way to the modern day where we essentially just used numbers on a screen.
Australia gets a mention because after all, we have a hell of a lot of gold here and Australia is just awesome, of course. You can also lookout for a very famous banking family, the Rothschild's.
It rules our lives and rules the human economy, it dominates our lives.
This is A Brief History of Money by Matty’s Modern Life.
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