Is the world economy a house of cards ready to fall?

I can tell you some things about money as I informed myself about this a while ago. I watched several videos and read wikipedia, websites, among them also the video you mentioned.

Following is a list of statements that I have learned:
- Money is a good like a dishwasher, created and maintained by private companies (central banks like ecb, fed,...)
- Money does not expire (usually)
- The state has almost no influence on money, except maybe putting a person in charge of running the ecb or the fed
- You are not allowed to create your own money (by law)
- The central banks print the money and lend it to other banks at an interest rate
- The other banks lend the money to you and other banks at an interest rate
- The state says if someone owes you and offers you money to pay the dept, you have to accept it
- Money as it is nowadays does not have an equivalent in gold, it is only backed by the belief of value in it and by the number of people accepting it as payment for goods (e.g. if the saudis say they don't accept dollars for oil anymore, the value of the dollar will fall, because the saudis don't believe it's worth it anymore)
- Oil is mostly bought in dollars
- Oil is the most important good of our society
- The dollar is the most important currency in the world
- At the end you have to pay the central bank the money back that you lended + the interest
- To pay the interest you need to lend more money
- The central banks will control the amount of money going into the system and thus steer the economy, also they have to make sure that there is enough trust in the money, that there is not too much inflation and that there is no deflation
- Basically if you hold 10€ in your hand it is money that someone lended to someone sometime, so yes it's a bill of dept
- There is a tradeoff between how much money should be saved by people and how much should flow around for an economy to run well, but generally more money should flow than should be hold back
- Banks can loan 10 times more money than they have
- Banks can loan 10 times money to other banks who can loan that money 10 times to others
- Everytime someone loans money, money is created
- If all debt is paid back there would be no money

That it is _really_ just debt was only recently proved when Schwarzenegger in California issued certificates of debt instead of money to pay state employees. These certificates of debt had an interest rate. Several companies would declare that they accept these as if it was money. Basically Schwarzenegger has created an alternate dollar.

Some good points. But another point to this documentary is that it doesn't have to be this way. We could, if we wanted to, have an economy where money actually does have a value (other than debt) and that we could be loaned such money without the need of interest.

In fact, another important message I got from this documentary is that things cannot be sustained like this forever. Something will need to change, sooner or later.

Well, I think value and dept are two different things. Money has a value. There's an absolute value such that you get 1 loaf of (organic) bread for 3€ and there's a relative value like when you don't need a bread it doesn't have a high value. But dept is not the value of money, it's the base of it. Value is always a fuzzy thing and depends on what people want. If nobody wants a car, a car would have no value. If everyone wants it, it has a high value. Since everyone wants money it has a very high value, the central banks just need to make sure there is only so much money available so that people don't lose hope to get it and people don't get enough of it to not want it anymore.

We're trapped in this like Tantalus in Greek mythology and honestly I fail to see the way out.
Of course we just can throw away the interest rate, that would be a start, but that wouldn't change the base of money either. And of course we cannot just throw it away because the people that could profit the most from the current ways.

You're right that it can't go on like this forever, but we're sitting in a car that speeds against a wall and the driver isn't willing to turn.

It was a great video. I had a conversation about a lot of similar themes with some co-workers earlier this year, and it really is crazy how things work, and what we hold value towards.

Earlier this year, we also started thinking about money, who's really in control of it and its current "worth". We thought, having savings in mere electronic and paper forms wasn't a good idea. So we're trying to diversify for a rainy day.