La Bourse  /  Volume III

Volume III of VII

Money, Energy, Information

You have handled money every day of your adult life and you have almost certainly never been told what it is.

A woman in a linen robe standing by a window beside a vase of dried grasses, light on her shoulder.
Volume III11 chapters, each with its whole teaching unit, and 3 extensions: one for the practitioner, one for the corporation, one for the translation between them.

The chapters

A man marking a chart of bar graphs while a colleague beside him holds a tablet, daylight from the windows.
Plate III.01The Column of Figures.Money has never been a substance. It is the agreement that these two columns must always match, held by enough people, for long enough, that the agreement can be spent.

Nº III.01

What a Currency Is Made Of

You have handled money every day of your adult life and you have almost certainly never been told what it is.

A woman seated cross-legged on cushions with a cup of tea and a wooden tray, sun striping the wall behind her.
Plate III.02The Meter and the Kettle.The meter counts joules. Her hand is checking something the meter has no column for — whether this particular heat, in this particular hour, is the heat she actually needed.

Nº III.02

Energy as the Denominator

Every proposal to remake money eventually arrives at the same suspicion: that a dollar is an opinion and a joule is a fact.

A man writing at a desk on a balcony above a mountain valley, books stacked beside him, cloud over the peaks.
Plate III.03The Stamp, at the End of the Month.A currency is not a thing. It is an agreement with a running cost, and somebody is always paying it. The only question a design settles is who.

Nº III.03

Complementary and Local Currencies

You have almost certainly been told that Wörgl worked and that the bankers stopped it, that the Swiss have run a parallel currency since 1934 and it keeps them steady in recessions, and that a town in England printed its own pound and it was wonderful until it wasn't.

Four colleagues around a table raising their cups to each other, laughing, warm light under the pendant lamps.
Plate III.04The Slate Behind the Bar.Every credit system in history began as this slate. The interesting question is never who is owed. It is what the village does when the slate fills up.

Nº III.04

Credit as a Commons

You have been taught that credit is a product — something a bank manufactures, prices, sells and regrets.

A watercolour of people working at a long wooden table inside a glasshouse full of autumn trees.
Plate III.05The Long Table.The table is the same width at both ends. It is the light that falls away. A discount rate is a claim about how fast it falls, and almost nobody who uses one has ever said out loud what theirs is made of.

Nº III.05

Interest, Time, and the Discount Rate

There is one number in your organisation that decides more than any other, and it is usually the only one nobody can source.

A watercolour of a tree drawn whole, its roots spreading under the soil as wide as its crown.
Plate III.06The Trade at the Root Collar.Everything here is trading with everything else and none of it is generous. That is not a disappointment. It is the reason the arrangement has lasted four hundred million years.

Nº III.06

Mycelial Finance

There is a version of this chapter that would be very easy to write and would be worthless.

A woman reading a book by a curtained window, her face turned down to the page, soft morning light.
Plate III.07The Core on the Open Page.One of these two objects is audited and one of them is true, and the work of this chapter is to stop that being two different sentences.

Nº III.07

The Regenerative Balance Sheet

This chapter builds an instrument.

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Plate III.08The Third Round.One of those notes came in this morning from the flour merchant's daughter, went out at noon to the greengrocer, and will be back on this street before Thursday. Nobody has ever measured that at the level of a country. It is measured here every evening, by hand, in a book.

Nº III.08

Velocity, Circulation, and Health

You have almost certainly seen the chart.

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Plate III.09The Counter at Closing.Every payment you have ever received arrived through somebody's pipe, and somebody set the price of the pipe. The question is only whether you have ever seen the number.

Nº III.09

Digital Settlement Without Extraction

There is a number on your merchant statement that you have probably never argued with, because it arrived looking like weather.

A watercolour of a broad tree with its roots reaching down into orange earth beneath a green canopy.
Plate III.10The Deep Pantry.A reserve is not what you have. It is what you have already decided not to use.

Nº III.10

Reserves and Resilience

Every organisation you have ever worked in holds a reserve, and almost none of them can tell you what it is for.

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Plate III.11The Standpipe at Six.She pays four times per litre what the household with the meter pays. There is no tariff on this water. That is precisely why it costs her so much.

Nº III.11

What Money Cannot Do

This is the last chapter of a volume that has spent ten chapters taking money seriously — what it is made of, what it denominates, how it circulates, how it settles, how it is held in reserve.

The extensions

Three chapters that make the volume usable by practitioners of Luminous Economics and by people inside corporations alike — because they are not different economies, only different vocabularies.

A woman and a man seated in a loft office, turned toward each other, tall windows and plants around them.
Plate III.E1The Ledger Between Two Trades.The cash box holds what the day settled. The exercise book holds what the day cleared, which is the larger number and the one nobody taught her to write down.

Nº III.E1 · extension

For the Practitioner of Luminous Economics

The eleven chapters you have just read take money seriously at a scale you may not have.

Hands resting on an open book on a lap of white linen, a dried grass stem beside it, warm light.
Plate III.E2The Second Page.The decision was taken on page one. The money is on page nine, in a column that has been the same for eleven years because nobody has ever had a reason to open it.

Nº III.E2 · extension

For the Corporation

A corporate treasury cannot execute eleven instruments, and the eleven chapters you have just read end in eleven.

A woman in a cream silk dress writing in a leather journal on a sofa, a candle and a cup of tea beside her.
Plate III.E3The Two Ledgers, One Object.Neither ledger is a translation of the other. They are two readings of one object, taken from opposite ends, and the whole craft is knowing which readings have to agree and which have no counterpart at all.

Nº III.E3 · extension

The Translation — One Economy, Two Vocabularies

There is a version of this chapter that would be easy to write and would do harm.