Everything we understand about how money works - including finance and the economy, plus everything else touched by money - it's all changing. Money is going digital and becoming 'new money'. Money is turning into code and becoming 'smart money'. And everything is turning into money - the financialisation of everything.

This 20-minute introduction to "Post-Classical Finance" opens with the basics of digital currencies - from Bitcoin all the way through China's 'digital yuan' and currencies from the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of England, Facebook's Diem, and others; continues with an easy-to-understand explanation of 'smart contracts' - computer programs that turn money into code, or code into money; and concludes with NFTs - 'non-fungible tokens' - transforming into a new asset class that is rapidly enabling the financialisation of everything.

"TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE is upending finance. Bitcoin has gone from being an obsession of anarchists to a $1trn asset class that many fund managers insist belongs in any balanced portfolio. Swarms of digital day-traders have become a force on Wall Street. PayPal has 392m users, a sign that America is catching up with China’s digital-payments giants. Yet, as our special report explains, the least noticed disruption on the frontier between technology and finance may end up as the most revolutionary: the creation of government digital currencies, which typically aim to let people deposit funds directly with a central bank, bypassing conventional lenders.

These “govcoins” are a new incarnation of money..."

A simple test shows whether a digital currency improves upon its classical analog. Read it here.