Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Funny money

Would you carry and spend "money" that was printed by your local government or businesses in your city? Not counterfeit U.S. dollars, but local currency that you could only spend at certain businesses where you live?

Right now that's happening in Detroit, Massachusetts, a small North Carolina town and who knows how many other places. A story in USA Today says that some places where the economy is particularly bad have started printing their own currency to help people get by.

So if you had no real money to spend, would you spend local currency? And what do you think that would do to the value of real money once it was available again?

1 comment:

Butterrfly said...

Seems like the reincarnation of the paper foodstamp -expanded beyond just food. True sign of how desperate and dire things have become... the economy is really a mess. This practice might be a good short term solution on the micro level, but not sure how it can possibly be healthy for the greater economy however.