2. A member is not credit checked (or is having unforeseen difficulties) and runs up a huge commitment and then leaves. This can be resolved through careful monitoring of all accounts and ensuring that each member has an active plan to trade out of any debt within a given time. When legal action is necessary to recover a debt any cash awarded to the exchange is often less than the total balance owing and the barter exchange almost always keeps this cash themselves when they have a real obligation to repay the debt to the exchanges marketplace in goods or services which they can acquire for the recovered cash and offer for trade dollars – thereby maintaining the balance of debits and credits across all members.

Most barter exchanges simply do not have an internal mechanism for managing bad debts or poor monetary flow within their network because they lack the detailed knowledge of the economic principles required to operate a monetary system.

3. The exchange owners make purchases using barter dollars, thereby going into debt in the exchange, and never repaying this balance.

This causes inflation as the total members obligated to accept barter (those with debit balances) is less than the total members wishing to spend (credit balances). Bartercard, for example, has openly stated in their 2006 Annual Report, issued to the Alternative Investment Market in London, that this is something they regularly do.

Ormita operates a “no deficit policy” whereby we never make a purchase on barter ourselves unless we have the barter dollars in our own account to back it up. Unlike other exchange owners who spend “barter dollars” that they may not own, Ormita makes use of its strong cash position to introduce new customers into our network with occasional direct cash purchases.