Andrew Hilton (Letters, FT Weekend, June 19) refers to Edward de Bono’s “IBM dollar” paper published in 1994 “presaging, 25 years ahead of time, private currencies”. De Bono proposed that large manufacturers create their own currencies, exchangeable for their products at a future date. Friedrich Hayek, having received a Nobel Prize in 1974, wrote a paper in 1976 entitled “The Denationalisation of Money”. Hayek was truly ahead of his time in arguing that the public should be able to select, from a number of competing private currencies, a better form of money than governments have provided over millennia. He cites Diogenes as early as the fourth century BC in calling money the politicians’ game of dice.
Chris Russell
Guernsey
