Money is the ultimate in stuff. With it, you can buy almost anything, and in that lies a tale. Economists generally don’t spend that much time writing or talking about money. It is, for them, simply a tool we use to facilitate exchange—the buying and selling of stuff. But, as we will try to show in this book, the manner in which we create money and what we are (or are not) able to get and do with it matters a great deal. It determines how we live our life and the nature and quality of the world in which we live it. It is our goal to show why this is so.

金钱是物质的终极。有了它，你几乎可以买到任何东西，这里面就有一个故事。经济学家通常不会花那么多时间来写或谈论金钱。对他们来说，它只是我们用来促进交易的工具——商品的买卖。但是，正如我们将在本书中试图展示的那样，我们创造金钱的方式，以及我们能够(或不能)得到什么和用它做什么，都非常重要。它决定了我们如何生活，以及我们生活的世界的自然和质量。我们的目标是展示为什么会这样。

Most of us have known only one type of money, and most don’t even understand that money well. This money, for the most part, is not created by governments, as most people seem to think; it is created by private corporations, that is, banks, by lending it out as interest-bearing debt. Furthermore, in historical perspective, our monetary system is a relatively recent invention. It was preceded by thousands of years of attempts to develop an effective way to promote economic exchange, store wealth, and place a value on things. The monetary system we use emerged from the needs of a 17th-century English king. It may no longer meet present needs; that is another subject that we will explore.

我们大多数人只知道一种类型的钱，而且大多数人甚至都不了解这种钱。这些钱，在很大程度上，并不是像大多数人认为的那样，由政府创造的;它是由私人公司，也就是银行，以有息债务的形式借贷而产生的。此外，从历史的角度来看，我们的货币制度是一个相对较新的发明。在此之前的几千年里，人们试图发展一种有效的方式来促进经济交流，储存财富，并为事物赋予价值。我们现在使用的货币制度是在17世纪英国国王的需要下产生的。它可能不再满足目前的需要;这是我们要探讨的另一个主题。