Author: Joe Ricketts

I just had the pleasure of watching a fascinating online lecture about how the most important currency of the 21st Century is likely to be not liquidity or credit-worthiness, but reputation. The lecturer was a brilliant young author and business consultant named Rachel Botsman; she was giving a TED Talk entitled “The Currency of the New Economy is Trust?” I can’t recommend it highly enough.

In the late 1990s, I had an idea for a new business called OnMoney. It was going to be a single online destination where people could maintain all their financial information in one place. In other words, a terrifically convenient service that would empower consumers. I thought it was a great idea, but I was wrong. It didn’t work, and Ms. Botsman’s TED Talk gets at the heart of why. Back in the 1990s, no one was going to trust a single financial firm to host all their most sensitive information. But as Ms. Botsman points out, it’s a different story today. Sharing this kind of sensitive financial information online is now commonplace – think of websites like Mint.com. Even more interesting is that through web-based businesses like Airbnb, WhipCar, Spinlister, and DogVacay, we’re sharing possessions that are just as (if not even more) personal: a room in our house, our car or bike, even our pets.

And more than simply creating marketplaces (and markets) where none existed before, the Internet is creating a currency of reputations. As someone who loves free markets, I can tell you that this currency was not created or regulated by a government. Rather, it sprang organically from the free market. In fact, the government’s only role in any of this was to help launch the Internet – that is, to establish the infrastructure that has permitted free enterprise to flourish and, to borrow a phrase Ms. Botsman uses, to create “micro-entrepreneurs.”

As part of my effort to promote informed discussion of the critically important economic challenges facing our country, Ending Spending, the non-partisan advocacy group I founded and lead, recently published a book called “The Fiscal Cliff.” Carefully researched and written by Ayse and Selahattin Imrohoroglu (two well-regarded economists who teach at the University of Southern California), “The Fiscal Cliff” is a readable, fact-based analysis of how our economic future is threatened by out-of-control government spending and the ballooning federal debt it produces. The purpose of the book is to identify and explain the facts and some of the key challenges that brought us to this financial precipice. After laying out these facts, the Imrohoroglus concluded that our nation’s debt trajectory is unsustainable and decisive action is required to prevent an economic disaster.

A few weeks ago, Ending Spending sent copies of the book to every member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and this week we sent out fifty more – one to each governor of every state in the union. You can download your own free e-book here: www.thefiscalcliff.com. I can’t say “The Fiscal Cliff” is a fun read, but especially in an election year, it is certainly an important one.