What does the term “currency” mean?
Money is nothing more than a governmentally issued medium of exchange, and its soundness is no greater than the issuer’s monetary responsibility.
The semantic burden of the term “currency” is passage in time. Anything “current” belongs only to the time actually passing. Thus, the weather is current. A passing fad is current. A river’s flow is a current. And an electric charge’s rate of flow is a current.
The English world “currency” stems from the Latin word “currere”, which means “to run”. Money probably came in English to be termed “currency” because it flows from one person to another.
The rate at which money flows (and, thus, the purchasing energy it possesses) is a factor of monetary inflation–something which all Governments have practiced since the beginning of every monetary means of exchange.
The current Zimbabwean rate of monetary inflation is, for example, 100,000 percent per year (and it’s increasing). If our money inflated at the current Zimbabwean rate, a loaf of bread which costs us $2.50 now would cost us $1,985,30 twelve months from now. Actually, a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe today costs 3.2 million Zimbabwean dollars. A year from today, the same loaf of Zimbabwean bread will cost 3,200 million Zimbabwean dollars (i.e., 3.2 billion Zimbabwean dollars). In a year from now, there will, in other words, be a thousand times less “energy” in 3.2 million Zimbabwean dollars than there is today.
Your own Federal Reserve System is presently playing the same game with the Federal Reserve Notes in your pocket. The System has doubled the U.S. monetary supply in less than the last decade–thus, inevitably, decreasing proportionally the “energy” of the Federal Reserve Notes in your pocket at the the beginning of the decade.
If you had been alive in 1913 when the Federal Reserve System was created and had then stuffed $1 million in your mattress, it would today have the purchasing power of only $10,000. That’s quite a flow of energy.
