&quot;Money from the future&quot; is a way of describing using future GDP to pay for current goods. Its a bet that what ever you are using the money for will result in a way to pay it back in the future while still benefiting from the investment.<p>Simple example: I borrow $50,000 from a bank to open a restaurant.<p>Lets split that into two bets:<p>First, I bet that from my <i>future</i> revenue, I&#x27;ll be able to pay back the bank <i>and</i> keep operating my restaurant. So in my own time line if you will I am taking money I&#x27;ll be earning from paying customers in the <i>future</i> and using it in the <i>present</i> to actually build my restaurant. The way I do this is with a bank.<p>Second, the bank kind of believes and kind of doesn&#x27;t believe that I can pay it back. So it says &quot;we&#x27;ll take some money we have laying about and give it to you to open a restaurant, but you have to pay it all back to us in 10 years and every year we want an additional 7.2% from you. What that means is that after 10 years you will have paid them back <i>double</i> the amount of money you borrowed.<p>So I&#x27;ve taken $50,000 of my future revenue, and turned it into a monthly obligation to the bank of $834. So if I sell my pies for $8.34, the first 100 pies of every month end up having all that money going to the bank which loaned me the money. So in my &quot;present&quot; money is going to pay off my &quot;past&quot; borrowing. Had I not taken the loan that $834 would go right into my pocket.<p>In a Macro Economic sense, if you take on debt, and invest the capital represented by that debt to grow the economy, then in the future the larger economy, some of the GDP is going to servicing (or paying off) that debt rather than additional growth. If your economy cannot sustain that drag (debt service) then it tends to contract, which makes it even less able to support that drag. If you read George Soros he will tell you that any day now the entire world is going to implode in just that fashion :-).<p>The careful thing you have to watch out for is talking about &quot;money&quot; which everyone thinks of as bills and coins or balances in a bank account, and &quot;GDP&quot; which is essentially the &quot;value&quot; created by all of the economic activity in an economy. Governments try to manage their economy to grow its GDP, and because transactions in the economy are often (but not always!) transacted using the national currency, economic figures are often reported in terms of dollars or yuan or yen or what have you. But you have to remember that you can have an economy that doubles in size, the the size of the monetary denominational transactions might be the same, more (inflation), or less (deflation).<p>China is in the situation of trying to show the world a growing GDP (their economy). They have a spotty track record when it comes to how accurately they compute that :-) but fundamentally if they cannot actually grow it, then the debt they hold which they created in order to grow, will not  be serviceable without shrinking the size of their economy. The traditional &quot;fix&quot; for that is that the exchange rate between economic value and currency changes so that the numbers match. China allows the Yuan to &quot;inflate&quot; to 10x its current value, and then services the debt with this inflated value.<p>But what that really means is you aren&#x27;t selling enough pizzas so you start charging $834 per pizza and just by selling one a month you can meet your monthly debt payment. And the citizen says &quot;Gee, remember when you could get a nice pizza for less than $10? I miss those days.&quot;