Money is weird when you start looking at it closely

Having recently started work at the Addington Timebank I've been having lots of conversations about trading and money amongst other things, and I've concluded that money is not the straightforward means of exchange that we take it to be.    

Looking at what has been going on in Greece, I can see there are huge problems when a financial system collapses.  But, like Charles Eisenstein, in Sacred Economics,  I wonder, why do things grind to a halt when there is a financial crash and banks close?  

Banks don’t do any real work - they simply shuffle money around and, make money out of nothing (more about this another time!).    At the same time, farmers and gardeners are still growing food. We still have people who can cook, care, cure, build, clean, organise, entertain and all the other things that people need.  Surely it is a little odd that we need the blessing of a bank to make this continue.  

To take the odd nature of it even further most "money" as it is used today is a bunch of 0s and 1s recorded on computers, and doesn’t actually exist in any other form. When you take time to stand back and look at all this, it is clear that our real assets are our own skills, connections and communities, along with the ecological systems that provide us with the things we need to survive and thrive. 

This is one of the premises of the Timebanking idea that was first developed by Edgar Cahn.  Joining a timebank such as the Addington Timebank in Christchurch is one way  to learn about the many skills and abilities that people around us  have.  It introduces us to the idea of a local currency (time credits) and helps use imagine how we might survive in a world without money.

Timebanks also provides us with a way to imagine a world without banks and financiers, who simply make money out of money and who at present are creaming it because we've forgotten how to imagine a world that does not rely on them.