Chapter XIX Money in the Atomic Age

buyer to seller; it is too dangerous to expose gold to thieves. Even its quantity dwarfs, into a puny supply, when you take into consideration the world's needed supply of money; so long ago man during the horse-and-buggy days, began to print paper bills that he might have 25 or 50 times more "money" than he could get hold of in gold. And this failed, because the few billions of paper money could not shuttle back and forth between buyer and seller. Then came the personal cheque. The bills and coins now could sleep snugly in bank vaults, while the buyer mailed the seller in a distant city his cheque to cover the costs of goods which he had bought. The cheque might be for $5.00 or any amount, $5,000 or more, if he had that amount to his credit in the bank. Three cents would take the cheque to the seller, his bank gave him credit for it, the bank sent it to its Reserve Bank, the Reserve Bank credited the seller's bank with say $5,000 in its reserve fund, then it went to the Reserve Bank of the buyer's bank, and this Reserve Bank debited the buyer's bank reserve account $5,000, and the Reserve Bank sent the cheque to the buyer's bank, and his account was debited $5,000. And the only material thing that made the rounds was a small piece of paper, a personal cheque. Other than the cost of bookkeeping, the debiting and crediting of the $5,000 on four different books, the entire cost was the postage, which amounted to 12 cents. Under our proposed plan, both the Reserve Banks would be eliminated, and the seller's bank would credit the seller's account $5,000, and the buyer's bank would debit his account $5,000. Could you desire a more fluid money? Could you devise a simpler way of keeping track of the money of the nation as it shuttled back and forth between buyer and seller? Could you wish for a safer method of keeping your money, the country's money? But I have gone a bit ahead of my story. We have shown that money is intangible. We have shown that it is an evidence that man had produced a surplus of goods. That it is an evidence kept on the books of banks. That it can be transferred from one depositor's account to another's account in remote cities, simply on a written order from the buyer to the seller, made through a personal cheque, mailed to