You may have seen your bank; you may have seen her safe deposit box. But have you ever seen your saving or current account?
No, you haven’t. Your account is not a physical reality. It is an accounting notation. You could travel to your bank, and walk into the lobby, and you would not be one inch closer to your account than if you had stayed home.
When you receive a printed banking account statement, you receive evidence you own the dollars in your account. But, you never will see those dollars. They too, are not physical realities, but rather, accounting notations. In fact, you never will see a dollar, anywhere.
A Brunei dollar bill is not a Brunei dollar.
A Brunei dollar bill is a piece of paper telling the world the bearer owns a Brunei dollar. When you own a car, you have a document telling the world you own that car. The document is called a “blue card”. The blue card is not the car. You can’t drive a blue card. It’s just evidence of ownership. Your Brunei dollar bill is evidence you own that invisible Brunei dollar.
A Brunei dollar has no physical existence. You can’t hold a Brunei dollar. A Brunei dollar has no more substance than does a number. You can’t hold the number “one”. You can’t carry the number “ten”. When you write a cheque, from your invisible account, that cheque is a set of instructions telling your bank to debit your current account and to credit the payee’s current account.
One account is debited and another account is credited. No Brunei dollars move. They can’t. They aren’t physical. The peso, the euro, the ringgit, the pound, the yuan, the yen – none of the world’s currencies are physical. They all are accounting notations.
Most governments have been Monetarily Sovereign since they went off the gold standard in 1971. Money creation no longer is limited by the availability of gold. Monetarily Sovereign government can pay any bill of any size at any time, merely by sending instructions to banks to credit bank accounts. The world’s financial structure is based on instructions to banks.
When you hold a Brunei dollar, who owes you what? The Brunei government owes you full faith, which may not sound like much, but actually is powerful. It means:
- The government will accept Brunei currency in payment of taxes.
- It will pay it’s debts and its bills with Brunei currency.
- It will force all your domestic creditors to accept Brunei currency, if you offer it, to satisfy your debt.
- It will not require domestic creditors to accept any other money.
- It will maintain a market for Brunei currency.
- It will continue to use Brunei currency and will not change to another currency.
- All forms of Brunei currency will be reciprocal, that is five B$1 bills always will equal one B$5 bill and vice versa.
In summary, a Brunei dollar has no physical reality. Neither does a banking account or any other account, debt, deficit, inflation, recession, depression, stagflation or money. All these terms are descriptive of accounting notations. The government can change any of these simply by typing into a computer.
Brunei dollars do not physically move, because they don’t physically exist. When the government pays a debt, you may imagine dollars moving out of some government storage place into a creditor’s bank. But, there is no storage place; there is no movement. The government sends instructions to the creditor’s bank. That’s it. A Monetarily Sovereign government never can run out of instructions.
