FINANCE TALK - Part 1.

I am an accountant. I am not a financial advisor so I cannot advise you on where to invest your money, what to do with your pension or which mortgage is best suited to you. My knowledge of the stock exchange is as close to zero as you can get without being zero. What I can do is talk to you about the current financial system, how it came to be and why the experts say the collapse must happen. What happens after the collapse is speculative and dependent on whether light or dark is in power. It also depends on what strategies have been put in place to take over when, or even before, the collapse happens. I will not be able to cover everything in detail. My aim with this talk is to give you an overview of the current financial system, my thoughts on how to prepare for what’s around the corner, and to get you thinking outside the box. So, what is money and what constitutes its value? According to the 1973 Oxford dictionary money is the "current coin, banknotes or other documents representing it". In this same version of the dictionary currency did not refer to money. However, by the 1989 reprint currency had become an alternative name for money. In reality, money is whatever a society or country considers valuable enough to exchange for its products and services. Sharks’ teeth, beads and seeds have all been used as money at some point in the past. The first recorded coins go back as far as 650BC, and the first coins were not embellished with the king or queen’s head; that came at a later date when royalty realised the benefit to them of stamping the coins. We have been programmed all our lives to believe that money is coins, bank notes, cheques and bankers drafts. We have also been programmed to believe that these are the only legal forms of money and that they are worth what is written on them. In fact, they are not worth a lot, if anything. In 2020 the Bank of England updated an article on ‘What is legal tender?’ Though coins and bank notes are legal tender businesses do not have to accept them. The article also states that 1p & 2p coins only count for legal tender up to the amount of 20p.

How a coin can become illegal once it reaches a certain value is beyond me. It makes no sense. The Bank of England also states that if you offer to pay off a debt to someone in legal tender, they cannot sue you for failing to repay. This means that if you go into a cashless shop or cafe and give the cashier cash for an item, they cannot sue you for not paying, as you have used legal tender: just don’t give them coppers above the value of 20p, or expect change.

Comments & Questions Welcome. To be continued ... "Over the centuries money has changed its format many times"

Alison Gale

POSTED ABOVE 19 MAY 2023