> So what's the difference between 'money' and 'currency'?
Uh-oh don't get us started on that one, that's a can of worms!
Used to be, way back in the past, "money" was "coin or bullion in your bank's vaults" and banks' receipts for "money" starting circulating -- hence, we have the separate word currency.
Nowadays, I suppose the distinction is largely lost, other than "currency" now implicating different jurisdictions -- EUR and USD are considered different "currencies" but both are considered "money" by and large.
Money is spent or lent or hoarded, currency circulates. One necessitates the other.
Whether "hard" or "soft", in all history and today both are certainly always "credit" -- a (rightly or wrongly) trusted claim to some future consumption of some future production. Whether the "money" is paper or metal or digital. If we swap a banana for an apple, a trade is completed and settled, no money was needed. But since most of apple sellers are not also banana buyers "right here and now", this purely mental value-association, regardless the medium it's recorded on, is needed and used and traded in-place with ease and the world mostly works! Money hence is always a debt for future trade settlement -- completion of exchange.. (Whether banks should create new money for all their lending is another question, whether all savings of people should be in ambiguous claims on future production is another question. Doesn't change this most fundamental nature of "money".)
Uh-oh don't get us started on that one, that's a can of worms!
Used to be, way back in the past, "money" was "coin or bullion in your bank's vaults" and banks' receipts for "money" starting circulating -- hence, we have the separate word currency.
Nowadays, I suppose the distinction is largely lost, other than "currency" now implicating different jurisdictions -- EUR and USD are considered different "currencies" but both are considered "money" by and large.
Money is spent or lent or hoarded, currency circulates. One necessitates the other.
Whether "hard" or "soft", in all history and today both are certainly always "credit" -- a (rightly or wrongly) trusted claim to some future consumption of some future production. Whether the "money" is paper or metal or digital. If we swap a banana for an apple, a trade is completed and settled, no money was needed. But since most of apple sellers are not also banana buyers "right here and now", this purely mental value-association, regardless the medium it's recorded on, is needed and used and traded in-place with ease and the world mostly works! Money hence is always a debt for future trade settlement -- completion of exchange.. (Whether banks should create new money for all their lending is another question, whether all savings of people should be in ambiguous claims on future production is another question. Doesn't change this most fundamental nature of "money".)