Money is not fuel. Put a gallon of gasoline in a car, start it up, drive down the road a ways and eventually you run out of gasoline. That gasoline is gone, used up. Money is not like that. You have a dollar. You want something. You give the dollar to somebody else who has what you want. You get what you want. Now they have the dollar. The dollar is not gone. To be sure, to go further in your car, you must get more gasoline. And to buy more of what you want, you must get another dollar. But that gallon of gasoline is still gone and that dollar is still there. So if the gasoline is fuel which gets used up to make the car go, what is the dollar? The dollar can't be fuel because it's still there. The dollar is a medium of exchange. If the dollar is simply a medium of exchange, then what is the fuel? What propels this transaction? Then answer to this question is given by a quote attributed to Maynard Keynes. I heard this cited once and only once. Begin quote: The economy is driven by individual human appetites that are insatiable. End quote. I view, for the purposes of this conversation, happiness as the insatiable appetite that drives the economy. Individuals engage in commerce in order to establish, maintain or further their condition of happiness. Ok, you achieve happiness today. Do you then roll over and die? No. You seek to maintain or further that condition the next day, and the next and the next . . . That's where the word "insatiable" comes into play. As commerce is practiced today, it is very difficult to achieve without money - money that is heavily affected by "monetary policy". But monetary policy has not be fashioned so as to promote the general welfare of individuals in the USA for a long time. It is fashioned to transfer wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes. The headline to this article reads "Greenspan: Monetary policy has done everything it can" This means the transfer from lower to upper classes has gone as far as it can using monetary policy alone. So how will this transfer be furthered? I don't know the answer to that, but it can't be good. DC Treybil