This lecture is a continuation of the series on the evolution of money and alternatives to today’s monetary system that began last year. This time, the focus is on the evolution of money into credit money. Money originated in barter; in ancient times, it emerged through the minting of coins. Today, all money is created when banks create money out of thin air to grant loans. The lecture explains how our current monetary system has evolved over centuries from the coinage system, operating in a legal grey area. Our monetary system is still undergoing change, and this change is still taking place behind the scenes.

Samirah Kenawi was born in East Berlin in 1962. She witnessed and helped shape the early days of the lesbian movement in the GDR and was active in unofficial GDR groups, such as the well-known Berlin group ‘Lesben in der Kirche’ (Lesbians in the Church). She founded the GrauZone archive, which documents the GDR women’s and lesbian movement. After 1989, she entered politics and, in 1990, headed the Berlin office of the Independent Women’s Association (UFV). Her experience of this work led her to realise that social models cannot be implemented without an economic foundation. Thus, she began to engage intensively with economics. Her search for social alternatives led to an alternative course of study in economics. This resulted in the development of a theory of money, which was published in four volumes between 2020 and 2023 under the collective title Die Quadratur des Geldes. The volumes present, for the first time, a comprehensive history of money from the emergence of coinage to the development of modern credit money, as well as a comprehensive proposal for reform.