Dishonest money: What the financial crisis tells us about ourselves

Credit is the lifeblood of the modern economy. It saturates our lives — from the personal credit we each use to purchase household items or to buy our homes, to the shadier, more mysterious world of credit default swaps (CDSs) and other derivatives that commercial banks now trade like a currency.

But it’s the very ubiquity of credit that prevents us from seeing its true nature, kind of like not being able to see the wood for the trees.

In essence Credit is the promise of limitless, indefinite, unfathomable wealth. And the reason that we need credit is because of the kind of lives that we have become accustomed to living, or the size of the profit margins investors demand.

Like most facets of our economy Credit is an invention; a form of technology ... More