Are we headed towards a barter economy?

[ambitious_wench]

NPR reports that Craig's list has added a new category: Permanent House Swaps: My grandmother told me of how, during the Great Depression, people resorted to bartering to survive. With no money available, people still gave value to goods and services by bartering with neighbors for what they needed.

Now we have something in place that may indeed be one incredible tool to assist in bartering from coast to coast--the internet.

Credit is non-existant, and selling a house, even at record market lows, is dam near impossible unless you have a mattress stuffed with cash. It makes sense to swap houses instead of trying to buy and sell.

Now if companies would accept barter!

Comments

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

Entire nations are resorting to barter (http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE49Q1JA20081027) for survival needs. While I still don't think the average American clearly understands just how colossal the scale of the disaster we walked ourselves into is, the leaders at the top -- especially in nations with truly ruthless, Darwinian politics -- *do*.

While in America you can have spoiled, know-nothing, silver-spoon incompetents fail upwards to positions of power, in other countries politics is played for keeps. Places where the losers often find themselves suffering mysterious plane crashes -- or where goverment changes often involve mobs storming presidential palace gates -- the leaders are sharp as hell (else they would have never survived to take power) and know just what the true stakes are. Other national leaders know -- from their own experience -- what happens when the lights go out or the masses go hungry. They're making frank assessments of things like the likely future strength of the dollar. And they're voting with their actions.

Gonna be an interesting winter. Gonna be an interesting year. Gonna be an interesting decade.

Gonna be an interesting rest of our lives.

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

What is that old curse? "May you live in interesting times".