Fifi's World, A Monetary Allegory - Part II

As Fifi's father listened, the stranger told him to chuck everything he was told about his daughter's illness by the so-called experts.  It was obvious that Fifi was not suffering from a simple cold, but that she had a bad case of walking pneumonia and, therefore, no matter how much aspirin she took the illness would persist and continue to worsen. The parents should immediately renounce More Is Better  and concentrate, instead, on fewer but much more effective rememedies, such as a course of antibiotics and a healthy diet.

The stranger also insisted that a radical shift in lifestyle was very important, once Fifi was healthy again.  Exercise, outdoor activities and the like were very important, if Fifi's family wanted to get healthy and stay healthy.

Fifi's father didn't even bother to think about the stanger's propositions.  It was more than obvious that he was a quack, a mendicant - perhaps even a raving lunatic.  Everything he said was a blasphemy against the official religion, an abomination before FIAT.  He slammed down the phone without a word, More angry that a total stranger would have the temerity to approach his family with such nonsense when Fifi's life was in More danger.

What became of Fifi herself we do not know.  Moreover, we are in the dark about her family and all other families in Fifi's world  because, soon thereafter, the illness spread and wiped out everyone.
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We now shift from Fifi's world to our own.

The Earth is obviously reaching its carrying capacity under present conditions of science and technology.  We cannot expect to feed, clothe and coddle another 3-4 billion human beings - Chinese, Indians, Africans - to the level accustomed by us westerners, or even near-westerners.  Natural and environmental resources are depleting fast and, unless we immediately discover another nearly-unlimited, higly concentrated  and non-polluting energy source, we urgently need to:

1. Revamp our socio-economic system to Sustainability and just as importantly,
2. Adopt a monetary system to match.

Quite obviously, an unbounded, unlimited fiat currency monetary system is hugely at odds with a bounded economy, i.e. an economy where growth is severely constrained by the hard boundaries of resource depletion and environmental degradation.

The dollar, euro, yen, yuan... they are all based on Permagrowth, the once simple but today simplistic premise that debts incurred today will always be serviced tommorrow - and ad infinitum - by an ever-expanding global economy. 

We have, as of last Sunday, played our last global FIAT card: the EU has gone all-in in the credit bubble game when it announced it will set up a $1 trillion special purpose vehicle to issue Yet More Debt to shore up the clearly bankrupt PIIGS economies and the banks that financed them (and everyone else, the UK included).  More debt, to solve the problem of too-much-debt...

Bottom line: Bretton Woods is deader than a doornail, yet we are embarking on a last vainglorious attempt to prove it is still alive and kicking.  It will cost us dearly.

I feel like Fifi..