In editing an article recently, that touched on the design of the US monetary system, I was forcefully reminded of 1) how complex (some would say purposefully so) our monetary system is, and 2) how rarely anyone tries to talk about it in an easily digestable way. There was a time in this country's history when knowledge of the fundamentals of the monetary system was wide spread among the common citizens, not just Wall Street financiers and academic economists. Nowadays, however, even a lot of financiers and economists fail to understand either the design or the problems of our money system.
