Who Needs Money, Anyway?

Certainly not Lily Gold, a Brooklyn artist who says she is, "constantly looking for ways to eliminate hard currency from my life." She recently created a bartering event at a Park Slope art gallery. According to the internets, she is not alone in preferring to trade.
An e-commerce expert interviewed by am NY says that, "as the economy has nose-dived, the "free-trade" movement has skyrocketed." And he doesn't mean the kind of "free trade" that allows you to buy bargain blouses at Wal-Mart made in Pakistan or Bangladesh. He means swapping goods and services instead of paying for them

Due to a timely combination in the of generalized brokeness and increasing access to the internet, lately US consumers are returning to the good ol' days of bartering. For many, this means access to products or services that would be out of reach otherwise, because bartering opens up opportunities that don't exist in a classical economic system, where pricing is marked to the market.

A bartering system instead can give the economic edge in any given deal to unlikely and unexpected parties, as it simply benefits those who happen to have a particular item or service that is in demand at that particular time by a peer.

Can you feel the thrill???

For a while, Craigs List (with its "barter" section) had the corner on this market, but among the bartering websites that have cropped up lately are:
HomeExchange.com, where you can trade houses for a vacation (ooh, think anyone will want to trade a noisy, cramped apartment in Brooklyn for a thatch-roof beach house on an island??); MakeupAlley.com, a "beauty social network" which offers product reviews as well as the possibility to make trades;FrugalReader and PaperBackSwap, both book trading websites; TextSwap, which is for textbooks in particular, BarterBee.com, for movies, music, and games; and, finally, SwapThing and TargetBarter which are forums for trading and bartering all categories of things.