Bernard Leitaer has been a student of monetary systems and a recognized authority in the area for many years. He was one of the creators of the Euro. The information below was obtained from: http://www.transaction.net/money/book

Bernard Leitaer is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book on the Future of Money, about which a free online conference has coalesced, was published in January 2001 and is now available online. (For a German version, see http://www.futuremoney.de.) His professional background afforded him access to five different (and usually mutually exclusive) hands-on experiences with money systems, listed here in chronological order:

1. For multinational corporations, he developed the first models of global currency management
2. He has consulted with developing countries on four different continents about improving hard currency earnings
3. His academic history includes a Professorship of International Finance at the University of Louvain in Belgium
4. For five years he was head of the Organization and Planning Department at the Central Bank of Belgium, where he was President of the Electronic Payment System
5. Finally, in the speculative domain, he served as general manager and currency trader of the most successful offshore currency fund.

Leitaer is the author of The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World. The following bullets are reality-checks extracted from The Future of Money (published in January 2001, also available in German from http://www.futuremoney.de), illustrating the dramatic changes we face in the near future.

• Your money's value is determined by a global casino of unprecedented proportions: $2 trillion are traded per day in foreign exchange markets, 100 times more than the trading volume of all the stockmarkets of the world combined. Only 2% of these foreign exchange transactions relate to the "real" economy reflecting movements of real goods and services in the world, and 98% are purely speculative. This global casino is triggering the foreign exchange crises which shook Mexico in 1994-5, Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998. These emergencies are the dislocation symptoms of the old Industrial Age money system. Unless some precautions are taken soon, there is at least a 50-50 chance that the next five to ten years will see a global money meltdown, the only plausible way for a global depression
• The Information Age has already spawned new kinds of currencies: frequent flyer miles are evolving toward a "corporate scrip" (a private currency issued by a corporation) for the traveling elite; a giant corporation you never heard of is issuing its own "Netmarket Cash" for Internet commerce; even Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, foresees "new private currency markets in the 21st century."
• Exorbitant compensations are paid to the very few at the top: it started with movie stars and sports heroes, and has now spread to top lawyers, traders, doctors, and business leaders. In the 1960’s CEO’s salaries were only thirty times greater than those of the average worker, compared with two hundred times today. Is this the dawn of a society where "Winner-takes-all" or a short-term last gasp of the transition out of the Industrial Age?
• 1,900 local communities in the world, including over a hundred in the US, are now issuing their own currency, independently from the national money system. Some communities, like in Ithaca, New York, issue paper currency; others in Canada, Australia, the UK or France issue complementary electronic money.
• The value of barter transactions — exchanges which do not use any money as medium of exchange - totaled almost $6.5 billion in 1994 in the US and Canada, and is increasing three times faster than normal exchanges. The magazine "Barter News" covers the industry’s development and now has 30,000 subscribers. It estimates the total barter worldwide at $650 billion in 1997, and growing at an annual rate of 15%.

All of the above is part of an irreversible process of change in our money system and our societies. We are now in a transition period, an interval of great risk but also of great opportunity. The risks are not only financial; some of the emerging money technologies could create a society more repressive than anyone of us thought possible. More importantly major opportunities are also becoming available: now more than ever it has become possible to address some of the most critical issues of our times, such as enabling more meaningful work, fostering cooperation and community, even realigning long-term sustainability with financial interests. None of this is theory--real-life implementations have pragmatically demonstrated such results. Combining these innovations can make available a world of Sustainable Abundance within one generation.