Is Money Credit?

["Gunnar Tomasson" <gunnar.tomasson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following exchange of today's date between a fellow Gang8 member and myself may be of interest.

 

Gunnar

 

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Briefly re. the following:

 

Money in its most advanced form can never be a promise to pay
something else - the "something else" would be the money. The money is
an entity in itself, and mixing it with the concept of credit will only
confuse it. While credit may improperly be made into money, money in
itself, is never credit; it is money.

 

Comment:

 

"Credit" is a generic concept akin to that of "mass" in physics, which appears in innumerable manifestations, including "energy".

 

As such, "credit" is not something that one discovers by rummaging through empirical data - it is a product of the imagination.

 

In that respect, "credit" is akin to the universal action-reaction principle in mechanics - it permits one to conceptualize a set or 'universe' of creditary phenomena.

 

How so?

 

It is a foundational concept whereby the 'universe' of creditary phenomena assumes the attributes of a logical structure.

 

What does that mean?

 

It means, inter alia, that no matter how or where one begins to reproduce a mental image of that structure, the end result is identical - as in the case of Geoffrey, Chris, and myself working independently of each other along wholly different paths in the 1980s.

 

For, unlike the concept of "mass", that of "credit" - as in "creditary relations" - is subject to precise definition.

 

Gunnar