1988 Economist cover
I’m talking about the 1988 issue of the world-famous Economist magazine. The magazine predicted digital money on its cover 30 years ago. There is a Phoenix on the cover and the currencies of different countries are burning in flames under its feet. According to mythology, the Phoenix burns and is reborn from the ashes. This Phoenix rising from the ashes has a coin around its neck that we have not seen before. When you first look at the money, it brings to mind bitcoin, and when you see that it says 2018, you think that the magazine predicted bitcoin from that very moment. However, Bitcoin made its first rise at the end of 2017 and started to decline starting from 2018. So the money that emerged with the Phoenix could not be bitcoin.
When you read the article about the cover inside the magazine, you realize that this money is not Bitcoin. Because the article begins like this: 30 years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans and people in other rich and poor countries will shop with the same currency. Prices will not be in dollars, yen or marks, but in, say, phoenixes. In other words, the magazine used the Phoenix bird to represent the common currency that the whole world will use. But perhaps the most crucial point of the article is this:
It says that a new central bank, a descendant of the IMF, can produce this money, which will be the world’s common currency. What does this mean? This means that countries will no longer print their own money, a bank like the IMF will print the world’s common currency. But wait, the IMF is already working on such money. You won’t even believe it, but the IMF produced its digital money in 2018, as the magazine predicted 30 years ago.
So, did the Economist magazine predict these days 30 years in advance? Or have the owners of the magazine started to implement their 30-year plans? Or both?