Time is money. Let me show you in a completely literal way why time is money.

As explained in my post about central banking money equals a unit of trust (or many units of trust for that matter), wherein the promise is given by someone who is generally trusted. Strangers don’t trust each other therefore the trust is given to an authority they both recognize, a bank, whereby the bank is backed by somebody (or many somebodies for that matter) whom both strangers trust even more than the bank.

Today we believe that banks trust lies in the fact that the banks are protected by the governments. So, we believe in the state. Some time ago we believed in gold. We abandoned gold-backed money becuase there are just 2.500 tons of new gold dug out of goldmines, which at today’s prices of gold would equal roughly 100 billion USD of new value created each year. With the GDP of the world at around 70.000 billion USD it shows why there is a tension. Nobody was satisfied with a nominal growth of just about 0,1%. We, the people, are greedy, we want rougly 10% growth in every year. Right? I think you agree.

Now, with gold not being enough to satisfy our list for growth we turned to virtual sources. These sources are mostly words. We talk, talk and talk in a desire to convince each other that GDPs grow by at least 4 or 5% per year and when they don’t, like in recessions, we do some more talking.

And time passes.

Time passes.

Time.

So, what if time was the backing of the banks that we needed? Time seems phenomenal. There is a supply of roughly 30 million seconds of it in every year. Per person. This is added on top of time that we have productively used in the past. The more productive somebody was the less his growth can be. So really careful groups of people (or companies for that matter) may keep good productivity for a hundred years hence their natural growth could be about 1% if they stayed productive. Any company could increase their growth if they added new people. Even better, the less productive people they added the better they could fare. Or could they?

See. Time is money indeed. You just lost a couple of your precious minutes reading this. Thanks 😉