Occupy Money

Spain now boats a variety of alternate currencies, The Washington Post reports. From scrip -- parallel paper money -- to online exchanges, to 'time banks' where expenditures and credits are accounted for in hours, the number of Spaniards who are augmenting their world with non-Euro currencies is increasing.

These schemes is tiny, compared to the population of Spain. But acceptance is growing significantly, according to The Post. Like the conceptions of both Bernard Mandeville and Silvio Gesell, the goal of these currencies is to block hoarding and to keep the local money circulating for the benefit of the community. So, for instance, the Catalonian currency called Turutas does not grow with interest if you hold it for a time. As Ton Dalmau, one of the founders of the effort, told the paper, "We are returning money to its origins and making it purely a system of exchange.”

Money quote, from Peter North, a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool who has written two books about local currencies: “Instead of just being a desperate way for people to survive a horrible economic crisis, this is part of the cooperatives, credit unions, community banks, organic farms and recovering factories — the alternate economy — that the Occupy movement is groping towards.”