What is money? The question sounds banal. Everyone knows what money is — you have it in your pocket, in your account, or you don't have it. Yet precisely this apparent self-evidence should make us pause. For hardly any other phenomenon that shapes all our lives so fundamentally is our thinking so underdeveloped. At school we learn how photosynthesis works — but not how money comes into being, who creates it, and why it is the way it is.
This gap in knowledge is no accident. It is functional. It is a system function of the Megamachine.
I. The myth of barter
The standard story: in the beginning was barter. The farmer exchanged wheat for shoes. That was cumbersome — so money was invented as a neutral medium of exchange. This story is elegant, plausible — and historically wrong.
Anthropologists and economic historians have searched in vain for societies that actually worked like this. Barter as the economics textbooks describe it never existed as a predominant economic form. What existed instead: giving and taking, obligations, debts. The farmer gave his neighbour wheat — not in return for immediate payment, but because they knew each other, because they stood in a relationship. These obligations were recorded. On clay tablets in Mesopotamia, on tally sticks in Europe. Money did not arise as a coin but as bookkeeping. Not as a thing — as a relationship.
The coin came later — and it came not from trade but from war. Kings minted coins to pay soldiers. Soldiers spent the coins. The population needed the coins to pay taxes. A cycle of power, not of exchange.
II. How money comes into being today
When a bank grants a loan, it does not lend out existing money. It creates new money — through an act of bookkeeping. The bank credits an amount to the borrower's account and at the same time books a claim against him. Money comes into being — out of a promise, out of the borrower's obligation to repay. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the official position of the Bundesbank, of the Bank of England, of every central bank that has ever commented on the matter.
Every euro in existence was born as a debt. This connects directly with the "richest poor country": Germany's €3.5 trillion in net foreign assets are not wealth — they are promises. Claims. Other people's debts. Printed paper in another form.
III. The paradox of interest and the compulsion to grow
If all money comes into being as credit — where does the interest come from? If a bank creates €100 and demands €105 back: the additional €5 was never created. It does not exist — unless someone else takes out a new loan. Here lies the structural compulsion to grow built into the system. It is not the greed of individual actors that drives expansion, but the arithmetic of the monetary system itself. To service yesterday's interest, today's loans are needed. The economy must grow — not because that would be good, but because otherwise it collapses.
This is the cruise control in the financial sector: a built-in acceleration mechanism without negative feedback. Deregulation did not build it in — it lies in the mathematics of the credit system. Deregulation merely removed the last brakes.
IV. From tool to god
At some point something tipped over. Money was invented as a means to an end — as an aid to memory for obligations, as a tool to make exchange easier. Today the relationship is reversed: the economy no longer serves to satisfy human needs while using money as an aid. The economy serves to multiply money — and in doing so treats human needs as a means to an end. This is no exaggeration. It is the logic of every listed company.
Economists speak of "the market" the way theologians speak of God. The market knows. The market decides. The market punishes and rewards. One must not disturb it, or it reacts without mercy. Money bears all the attributes of a deity: omnipotence — it can bring about anything. Omnipresence — it pervades every area of life. Transcendence — the numbers in the account merely represent it. The demand for sacrifice — sacrifices are made to it: time, health, relationships, ecosystems, human lives. The stock exchange is the temple. The bankers are the priests. The economists are the theologians who interpret the unfathomable will of the market. ALTERNATIVLOS ("there is no alternative") is the amen of this theology.
V. The double debt
It is no accident that German uses the same word for "debts" and "guilt" (Schulden, Schuld). Whoever has debts is guilty. The moralisation of economic relationships is built into the language. The indebted state is treated like a sinner — that was the logic of the euro crisis, of the Troika, of austerity policy. That someone can have credit balances only because someone else has debts — that in bookkeeping terms assets and debts are two sides of the same coin — disappears in the moral narrative.
The biblical Jubilee year provided for the cancellation of all debts every 50 years. This tradition has been forgotten. The debts have remained. The forgiveness has not. And the Megamachine reliably produces new ones.