Barter country: as the economy suffers, a nation turns toward cashless transactions.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

YOU MAY HAVE lost your shirt in the market, but chances are you have a few dozen more in your closet, half of which you haven't worn since the Clinton administration. If your home has never been featured on Clean Sweep, Neat, or one of the dozens of other cable shows where a team of professional organizers and designers gives your rec room an enema, you are sitting on a trove of tradable commodities. We're broke but we're loaded, and even if we've lost our jobs and cut up all our credit cards, that doesn't mean we have to stop consuming. In the midst of the Definitely Above Average Recession of 2009, cash may still be king, but barter is that guy who sometimes looks more like the king than the king himself.

When the economy tanks, it's not just dumbass comedies like Paul Blart: Mall Cop that do surprisingly well. Open your newspaper's business section, and amid gloomy tales of foreclosures, credit crunches, and government bailouts, you'll see bullish reports on the booming, almost magical world of barter. Acquaintances solidify friendships via swapped sweaters. Single moms trade housesitting for children's clothes. Refrigeration companies get paid with sandwiches. The number of listings in the barter section of Craigslist jumped 100 percent from January 2008 to January 2009. According to the International Reciprocal Trade Association, more than 250,000 U.S. businesses now conduct $16 billion in barter transactions per year. Who cares where the Dow's at when fence builders are exchanging their labor for Jet skis and barter websites are attracting new members faster than a Bernie Madoff investment fund?

Along with being the world's oldest form of commerce, barter is impeccably au courant. You want sustainability--I'll trade you my junk for your junk. You want authenticity--there's nothing more primal than getting paid for your Web design services with 50 pounds of meat. And at a time when the public has soured on impenetrably complex subprime financing instruments, barter is the ultimate antidote. You have some excess beads and trinkets you can't move, your trading partner has an island, and you swap. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

Of course, it's not always easy to find parties who have what you want and want what you have. That's where barter exchanges come in. In the U.S., these markets go back to at least 1960, when Marvin J. McConnell created a company called Business Exchange in North Hollywood, California. In a barter exchange...