The Economy

The economy is the exchange of IOUs.

Here's how it works:

One person makes a IOU because some other person did them a favor.

The person with that IOU trades the IOU with someone else, so then it becomes an IOHim or IOHer.

Then that person trades that IOHim/IOHer, with another person...and so on and so on.

Pretty soon the government gets involved to keep track of these IOUs, and starts printing official looking IOUs for everyone to trade. The government starts takings some of these IOUs for themselves, because they need some favors so they can do things like making official IOUs, roads, bombs etc. etc. things that they get done by giving people IOUs.

Well, soon enough bankers, the government, financiers, and other people too smart for their britches start figuring out ways to make up fake IOUs without anyone noticing. The ways they do this are varied and complicated, but all methods essentially start by taking an I and a U, and inserting something that looks like an O but is really more like a zero. One day everyone realizes that these I0Us don't mean much, because it's likely nobody actually did anything for it, and therefore nobody actually O's anything. So these I0Us now lack any O, and the zero isn't worth anything, so we are left with I and U.

The upside is now that the O is gone we get a chance to decide what we want between I and U.