ABSTRACT
In September 1992, Britain was famously expelled from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism when George Soros, amongst others, successfully bet that Sterling would not be able to continue to track the then hegemonic German Mark. One solution to the coexistence of unmet need and unwanted skills was an attempt to reassign the status of money from a prerequisite of economic activity to a lubricant, or tool for measurement. Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS) was introduced to the United Kingdom at a meeting of The Other Economic Summit in 1985 before being popularised in a book written in 1988 called Beyond the Crash: the emerging rainbow economy. The innovation that led to the large scale use of alternative money networks, which made them different, perhaps more modern than the utopian socialist or hippie experiments of the past came in Comox Valley, Vancouver Island, Canada in 1983. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
