Financial Crises on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

The foundation of the value of computer money proceeds, as with paper money, by means of the institutionally regulated scarcity of money. But this is not sufficient, as new regulations to ensure technical and economic security must be developed by the central bank so that computer money cannot be privately reproduced - which in principle is technically possible within a split second - infinitely quickly and in infinite amounts. It severs itself from the rules to which money as 'public property' is subject. Money becomes, and this is the arch-liberal utopia of von Hayek, privatised. A look at the financial innovations which have taken place in recent decades does in fact show the scale which the privatising bifurcation of money from real economic relations and from ties to political regulation on the globalised markets has attained. However, the privatisation of monetary assets has a flip side, namely a tendency towards the socialisation of debts. So money, in the historical conditions of the late 20th century, emancipates itself from the substance which gives it a material and local character. Money emancipates itself from work; the monetary and the real economy part company. Money becomes the referent of real relations, which, however, functions like a draconian tablet of laws: money requires social actors to observe the rules. It transforms society into a money society, into a divided society, as owners of monetary assets draw income from their monetary assets and debtors must bear the costs of their debt service through real production. Money and work thus become opposites.