Money - what is it?
Wow - ten trillion dollars !. If I owned this note, would I be a trillionare? Yes. Would I be rich? Unfortunately, no. What exactly is money - a big question - you might answer 'who cares, as long as I have enough'. A very loose definition might be 'the numbers in your bank account that allow you to buy stuff' (economists have more detailed definitions - see later.). You don't even need bits of coloured paper or plastic or little discs of stamped metal to buy stuff, you can just use a debit card and touch it to a machine and money is 'transferred' from your bank account to the coffee vendors' bank account so you can walk away with a latte. However, you might be surprised that nothing was actually 'transferred'. The debit card allowed your bank to reduce your bank account by one coffee price, and the vendors bank was allowed to increase the vendors account by the same amount. Numbers were decreased in one computer, and increased in anoth...