Living within your means

Have you ever asked yourself why the reporting of costs these days is always in the billions of pounds rather than millions which was common a number of years ago.
Monetary inflation, largely the result of Quantitative Easing, the Central Banks pumping money into the system, effectively devalue currencies and leads to an erosion in value across the board.

Harold Wilson famously described it as "the pound in your pocket" after his devaluation in 1967 by which he meant what you could buy much the same with your pound. Remember, in the 1960s the purchases by the man in the street were relatively simple and largely home produced, and therefore it hadn't devalued across the board and life was relatively unaffected. Of course it was a con since imports went up but for most of us, it didn't matter.
With this phenomenon of QE being practised by most economies across the globe, the trade advantages, of having a cheaper currency to exploit overseas markets is lost or evened out as devaluation is much the same across all sophisticated societies.
Billionaires become more and more common as they exploit the currency fluctuations whilst we at the other end of the economic spectrum  stay, if we are lucky, virtually static.
Coming off the pre war gold standard and falling under the fixed convertibility of $35 to the ounce agreed at Bretten Woods after the war was a currency bench mark but when Nixon stopped the convertibility and allowed the dollar to float, the gloves were off and the speculators were given free reign.
Today's currency hardly relates to anything. The debt mountain is now many multiples of the total assets in the world and so a book of accounts resemble a bankruptcy of unimaginable proportions. It's all silly money played in a casino with no one accountable for the house. 

One day it will come crashing down as it nearly did in 2004. 

The banks on whom we place our trust are in the hands of shareholders who demand growing returns. Short-termism is the only game in town and one wonders, as the banks fail and close their doors,how we the people will survive without our credit. Perhaps Barter will be the currency. Grow your crops and learn to weave as you hunker down and re-learn how to live within your means !!!

Perhaps we will rediscover ourselves, discover our true strength of character working with the little we have and not dreaming what credit can buy. 

We will join the billions of others who have no bank account, no financial gizmo to provide the "codology" which we were fed in the early 60s when the money we earned was not paid directly into our own hands, as it had been at the end of a working week, but had to be deposited into a bank account, a financial deceit if ever there was one. Your money became their money. They used your money to trade and lend on substantial rates of interest, whilst paying you nothing for the privilege. 
They issued you with credit  cards and other incentives to spend and charged you on each purchase or on the use of the card which had been thrust upon you irrespective of your wishes.

They incentivised the banking system by drawing us all into its clutches and you and I have been their fodder ever since.