Welcome, everyone. It is so good to be here with you today. Look, all money systems enforce some

behaviors and punish others. It's just how it is. So it's vitally important to step back from

time to time and ask how your system of money. Is it operating well? Is it still serving you in

your society or not? Which is why this episode of Finance University is so vitally important.

Today, we are interviewing the exceptional world famous macroeconomist and monetary theorist

Lynn Alden, author of the highly acclaimed book, which is Broken Money, Why Our Financial system is failing us and how we can make it

better. I love the title. Lynn has been tirelessly working to help readers walk away with a deep

understanding of money and monetary history, both in terms of theoretical foundations and in terms

of practical implications. Lynn, welcome to the program.

It's such an honor to have you with us here today.

Thank you for having me.

Happy to be here and have this discussion.

Well, Lynn, let's dive right in.

What is money and why is it so important to everyone?

So money is basically what makes commerce easier to do.

It allows us to sidestep barter.

And contrary to a lot of kind of historical views on it, people often describe that first

barter existed and the money came about, but rather money developed fairly early on, you know, kind of a long

side or making it so that barter never really had to be too extensive to begin with because

it's so inefficient. And so one way to describe is that money is that which solves the double

coincidence of wants. And so if two people want to trade, the complication is that they both have to have an excess of what the other and what the other side has a deficit in.

And so there's more combinations that fail than succeed. And there are two primary ways to make the increase the success rate of trading and to avoid that kind of narrow set of coincidences.

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