Aristotle, wrote, "When the inhabitants of one country became more dependent on those of another and they imported what they needed, and exported what they had too much of, money necessarily came into use." This view, that once trade became so complex that barter would no longer cut it, was resurrected two millennia later by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Smith described the New World communities of Peru and elsewhere as burdened by barter until the genius of European coinage was introduced. Smith's view was critical to the conventional wisdom that we've sequenced from barter to money to debt. He argued that as human beings divided labor according to their talents, they produced surplus goods to trade but were trapped by the failure to meet what economists call a "coincidence of wants." In other words, there was no guarantee that the next guy wanted to swap his sheep for all the arrowheads you needed to off-load. So, an easily exchangeable, clearly distinguished commodity was chosen to function as the agreed-upon standard to facilitate exchange. This commodity became money, and by this thinking it was a thing in its own right, carrying an intrinsic value. Once we thrust it into this role, money opened the doors to all other tools for exchanging value, including the creation of debt. Saudi stands at a crossroads to its future. It has geographic advantages unmet by any other nation. The new free zones and ports and logistics can be world changing. I respectfully suggest that to merely join the crowd as another very wealthy investor ( sovereign fund ) without taking advantages of the fact that Saudi is a unique powerful nation, not merely an investor is short sighted. Its focus should be clear, Saudi to increase its power in the business world, needs liquidity, not necessarily dollars, euros or yen. As I said on the phone , just as in a war, HE Mohammed would immediately understand that conventional weapons „ are less useful today, th