Who is Thomas H. Greco??
Thomas H. (Tom) Greco, Jr. is a community and monetary economist, writer, networker, and consultant, who, for almost three decades, has been working at the leading edge of transformational restructuring. A former college professor, he is currently Director of the non-profit Community Information Resource Center, a networking hub, which provides information access and administrative support for efforts in community improvement, social justice, and sustainability.
He is regarded as one of the leading experts in monetary theory and history, credit clearing systems, complementary currencies, and community economic development, He is a patron and contributor to Fourth World Review and has written for a wide range of other journals including, The Whole Earth Review, World Business Academy Perspectives, At Work, Earth Island Journal, The Catholic Worker, The Permaculture Activist, Permaculture Drylands Journal, Green Revolution, and other publications.
He has authored three books:
His latest book on complementary currencies and exchange systems, Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, was published by Chelsea Green Publishers in 2001. New Money for Healthy Communities (1994) describes voluntary alternatives to conventional money that empower communities and reward people fairly; Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis (1990) explains how conventional money malfunctions and how an ideal money would be structured.
“Real Money” features Malaysia confernce presentation
By Thomas H. Greco
Real Money: Money and Payment Systems from an Islamic Perspective is a new anthology from the IIUM Press, Malaysia. Edited by Professor Ahamed Kameel Mydin Meera of the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), this book contains contributions from several authors including yours truly. My chapter titled, The End of Money and the Liberation of Exchange, is essentially a transcript of the presentation I gave at the 2007 Gold Dinar Conference in Kuala Lumpur.
In it, I outlined the basic framework for a global credit clearing network that utilizes no national currencies as payment media and no political currency unit as a value measure. As I did in my first book, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis, I argued that the various functions that money is supposed to serve—medium of exchange, measure of value, and store of value—can and must be segregated, and described a global payment system based on direct credit clearing, using an objective, concretely defined measure of value, like the gold Dinar, silver dirham, or some composite commodity standard.
I outlined how this Shari’ah compliant approach could provide inflation-free accounting, achieve full employment, reduce the need for foreign exchange reserves, eliminate exchange rate risks, and provide more equitable trading relations among all the peoples of the world.
