Important article but you're succumbing to mass-market economic thinking--which confuses your points, I believe. Money or banking has little to do with the problem you're addressing. The key issue is the relationship of money to labor/resources. As long as farming become more efficient (needs less labor and resources) farmers can keep borrowing.

Borrowing money is one way of looking at it. Cashing in their efficiency as monetary wealth is another way.

No one knows for sure what happens to the Egyptians but I buy into a theory that a climate event severely reduced yields. Egyptians could NOT eat gold or money. There is only so much food they could store. Have we fixed that problem?

I don't believe we have. Your story touches on that. I don't see that money has much to do with it except that it has been consolidating wealth and making it easier to ignore how the "masses" are vulnerable to climate shifts--the same which happened to the Egyptians, I believe.

Anyway, I look forward to your future pieces. But I feel analogies to banking or money are misleading because, again, the real question is what will we have to eat in the following decades? It won't be money.