Do-It-Yourself Money And The New Alchemists - growing movement in France known as SEL and a recent history of local currencies

That is why the Dutch, Australian and Irish governments have all legislated to allow people to earn their equivalent of grains of salt without damaging their benefit rights.

The LETS story has become quite familiar in the British press -- though there's usually a hint of condescension about it -- swapping aromatherapy for knitted crystals and so on. But it hasn't yet managed to break through into the mainstream outside some rural pockets and the anti-poverty strategies of cities like Leicester, Liverpool and Greenwich.

SEL isn't necessarily the same -- as Bertrand points out -- because grains of salt are rigorously based on time, like the time banks in the USA and Japan that recently launched in the UK too. Unlike grains of salt, LETS currencies like bobbins in Manchester or bricks in Brixton sometimes have an equivalent value in pounds or francs to make them easier to use.

GROWTH OF AN IDEA

But the SEL story demonstrates that local currencies can mushroom as a real response to globalisation. Bertrand has even taken the idea back to Paris and made a successful leap from rural to urban.

'I didn't believe it would work there at first, because there was no food to sell. There were things like English lessons but that wasn't really enough,' he says. 'But we now have 500 in the group, and you can buy internet training, you can get office work done in local money, we have a system that brings organic food in from the countryside.'

This growth by linking up with other organisations is one of the keys to SEL's success. It has meant that you can hire building space, buy computers, food and training -- even theatre tickets -- with SEL money. Having a local currency that stays put, resisting the temptation to shoot off down the wires around the globe, means neighbourhoods can make the most of what they've already got -- whether it is wasted people, wasted space or wasted resources.

Bertrand's game-plan is to link the SEL groups together enough to provide low-cost or interest-free credit to small local business all over France -- a real competitor to the global economy.

The model is WIR in Switzerland, and to understand what that means we have to delve a little into the secret history of money.

And there is one -- though you won't find it in conventional economic text books, still less in Peter Jay's recent BBC history of the subject, which confined itself to kings, governors and banking princes.

The forgotten history of money is about how people can create their own. It reached a head during the Depression, as communities struggled with the problem that they had lots of work that needed doing, lots of people desperate to do it -- but no money to bring the two together.

Ambitious local currencies sprung up in places like Worgl in Austria, and all over the USA, inspired by the Argentinian trader Silvio Gesell, who had urged the world to discourage hoarding with 'negative interest rate' currencies.

The great Yale economist Irving Fisher threw his reputation behind the idea -- having just lost some $10 million in the Wall Street Crash -- and soon about 300 US communities were printing their own money.