I often compare the evolution of exchange alternatives to the development of aviation. Just as many early attempts to fly were clumsy and poorly informed by good science, so too have been many early attempts to create private and community currencies. But much has been learned over the past three decades, and conditions are ripe for major advances in our ability to rise above antiquated and dysfunctional means of  payment. My role is to guide the design and implementation of community based currencies and trade exchanges that enable general prosperity and a stable and sustainable economy.

During my upcoming tour of Europe I will be speaking about the power of community currencies and mutual credit, and consulting with communities on doing good things where they are.

With still two weeks to go, our Crowdfunding campaign is now more than halfway toward our goal. Thanks for your support, and please help spread the word. Our campaign site is http://igg.me/at/tomstour/x/31801.

It’s high time for us to reclaim the credit commons and I need your help.

I will be traveling to Europe this summer to push forward the movement toward complementary currencies and moneyless exchange, and to preach the “gospel” of decentralized credit-clearing networks.

So far, I’m slated for speaking engagements, workshops, and consultations in the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and Greece. There may be room to add other stops to the tour so if you want to organize an event, contact me and we’ll see what fits!

Right now however, I need YOUR help to cover the lodging and travel costs. Please help spread the word about my Crowdfunding campaign to your networks! Share this image meme and the campaign link: http://igg.me/at/tomstour/.

We have thus far received $1207 from 21 very generous donors. My sincerest thanks to everyone who’s pitched in already and to those who help me achieve this goal by pledging and sharing!

Thomas

P.S. In case you missed my Spring, 2013 Newsletter, you can find it here.

Are you eager to learn about the future of currencies? Or are you keener to know how complementary currencies can support the local economy and build communities? Are you intrigued by digital currencies like Bitcoin, Freicoin and Ripple?

Then join the 2nd International Conference on Complementary Currency Systems on Friday 21st of June. It will bring a fresh perspective on local currencies like the Brixton Pound, Bristol Pound, Chiemgauer, Berkshares and the Calgary Dollars! It will explore several amazing time banks and time credits systems like Spice, Fureai Kippu and De Makkie!

The conference will be held in The Hague, The Netherlands and will bring together world-leading experts including Bernard Lietaer, Thomas Greco, Jem Bendell, Bart Jan Krouwel, Shann Turnbull and Tony Greenham.
Step into the world of complementary currencies, join the conference!

Join today at http://www.iss.nl/forms/ccs_conference_governement/
Or learn more at qoin.org/conference_english/
Twitter @CcsConference13, #CCSconf13
Prezi http://bit.ly/12qzePu

In this issue:

Crowdfunding my 2013 Summer tour

Articles and Projects

• New chapter with Prof. Jem Bendell is now published and online.
• My new article in IJCCR.

Recent events & Presentations

• Money & Life.
• DEBTx prsentation

Crowdfunding my 2013 Summer tour

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been invited to the EU and UK for a multi-stop tour on the power of currency for people and communities. My itinerary is still evolving but so far I am slated for presentations, workshops and consultations in the Netherlands, Sweden, England, and Greece. I will be hosted for a few days by STRO (Social Trade Organization, then attend the 2nd International Conference on Complementary Currency Systems in the Hague, where I will make a presentation titled Reinventing Money: How Complementary Currencies and Mutual Credit Clearing Can Create a Sustainable, Regenerative Economy, and sit on two panels: The Future of Currencies, and another which will consider the legal and regulatory aspects of complementary currencies.

As you’ve probably noticed, travel is becoming increasingly expensive. The CCS organizers will be providing a travel allowance, but it will not be enough to cover even my trans-Atlantic flight, much less living expenses and travel to other stops on my tour. That is why I have launched a Crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to help cover the costs of this tour. I need $4,000 to make it to all the places on the tour and cover the costs of food and lodging. I hope you’ll help me make that goal by going here: http://igg.me/at/tomstour/x/31801 and chipping in whatever you can. Please also help me get the word out and share the link with your networks! Thank you!

This is an investment in a sustainable future and, as Swami Beyondananda says:  “It’s time to shift our karma out of reverse and get our assets in gear.”

As a quick reminder, on my previous tour last October I gave a total of 15 presentations and workshops to various groups in three different countries. If you’d like a review, you can read my brief report of that tour on this site, here.  Your help with this Indiegogo campaign will make all the difference in building on that success and extending this good work to other communities in need! Here’s that link again: http://igg.me/at/tomstour/x/31801. Thanks in advance for your support in getting me to all these exciting engagements and spreading the word about the campaign!

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Articles and Projects

Following our participation last October in the International Sustainability Summit at the European Sustainability Academy in Crete, Prof. Jem Bendell and I decided to collaborate on certain projects. One of these was to co-author a chapter for a new book, The Necessary Transition: The Journey towards the Sustainable Enterprise Economy, edited by Malcolm McIntosh. Our chapter titled, Currencies of transition: Transforming money to unleash sustainability, is now online and can be downloaded here. This chapter elaborates on topics I covered in the anthology, The Wealth of the Commons, which I announced previously. You can find that chapter on this site, here.

My newest article, Taking Moneyless Exchange to Scale: Measuring and Maintaining the Health of a Credit Clearing System, has just been published in the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Go here to download it. This article provides some very important guidance for operators and organizers of credit clearing systems like LETS and commercial trade exchanges. Please take the time to give it your attention.

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Recent events & Presentations

In March, Katie Teague’s documentary film, Money & Life, in which I make an appearance, premiered in Tucson at the historic Fox Theater. That event also included short presentations by myself and Bernard Lietaer (with Jacqui Dunne). The mayor of Tucson, Jonathan Rothschild, was on hand to introduce us.

In April, I gave a presentation at the DEBTx conference that was held at the University of Michigan Law School. My presentation titled, Debt, Interest, and the Growth Imperative, was delivered remotely from Tucson via Skype, which worked very well. I’m told that the presentations were recorded and will soon be posted to the web, but I don’t yet have the link. It may appear at http://www.law.umich.edu/multimedia/Pages/default.aspx.

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Finally, I’d like to remind you that if you sign up to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll be notified every time I add a post to this site (which isn’t that often, so you won’t be overwhelmed). And please check out our campaign on Indiegogo. Your support will be greatly appreciated and all donations are tax-deductible through NEST, Inc.

Wishing you a pleasant Springtime,

Thomas

I read the abstract, the conclusions, and part of the body text, but could not bring myself to make a detailed read. “The history of an idea” is not relevant to my interests nor to the debt crisis that plagues civilization. Verbose and tedious, it seems to be an academic exercise that I doubt  will be of interest even to historians.

On the positive side, it did prompt me to write a few words of clarification on the question, words that I think are both pertinent and helpful to those who truly wish to understand the nature of money and the role of banks in today’s world.

The accusation that banks create money out of nothing has, according to King, been made by many famous economists, including Schumpeter, von Mises, and Keynes. I too must admit to having once or twice used that statement as a sort of shorthand criticism of the global money and banking system.

It is surely true that saying that banks make “money out of nothing” is an exaggeration that can be misleading to the uninitiated.

Bank actually create money out of something. The question is, what is that something, and what is wrong with it?

The short answer is that banks create money on the basis of the promises of their borrowers to repay.

Mr. King would have us believe that banks simply take in money from savers and lend it out to borrowers. That is clearly wrong. Even the Federal Reserve, in its own publications, says that,

The actual process of money creation takes place primarily in banks.(1) As noted earlier, checkable liabilities of banks are money. These liabilities are customers’ accounts. They increase when customers deposit currency and checks and when the proceeds of loans made by the banks are credited to borrowers’ accounts.

In the absence of legal reserve requirements, banks can build up deposits by increasing loans and investments so long as they keep enough currency on hand to redeem whatever amounts the holders of deposits want to convert into currency. This unique attribute of the banking business was discovered many centuries ago.-Modern Money Mechanics

As I’ve pointed out in all of my books, banks serve two primary functions. They act as both depositories, reallocating funds from savers to borrowers, and banks of issue that monetize the promises of their borrowers. I’ve explained that in detail in Chapter 1 of my book, Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, and in Chapter 9 of my latest book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.

But not all promises provide a proper basis for creating money. As Edward Popp, describes it, banks create both bona-fide and non-bona-fide money. (See Money, Bona Fide or Non-Bona Fide at http://www.reinventingmoney.com/documents/bonafidePopp.pdf).

The vast majority of the non-bona-fide money that banks create, is created on the basis of loans made to national governments (when banks buy government bonds). Further large amounts of non-bona-fide money are created when banks make loans to finance purchases of consumer goods and real estate (see my books for details).

The bottom line remains: the present global, interest-based, debt-money system, is dysfunctional and destructive.

The creation of money on the basis of interest-bearing loans is the cause of the growth imperative, and the creation of non-bona-fide money is the cause of inflation.

If we are to achieve a sustainable society and assure the survival of civilization, we must transcend the present money and banking paradigm and reinvent the exchange process.  – t.h.g.

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My good friend and scholar, Rajni Bakshi, has recently articulated that possibility and those ideas in her article, Civilizational Gandhi. You can download the full article here, or read an excellent précis of it at http://www.gatewayhouse.in/publication/gateway-house/features/replacing-keynes-gandhi.

Ms. Bakshi is the Gandhi Peace Fellow at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations based in Mumbai, India.

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Here is a summary of the Six Ways:

1. Find Money

2. Convert to a Co-op

3. Hook Up With Big Partners

4. Be Co-op Curious

5. Shop Co-op

6. Make Co-op Friendly Laws

The details can be read here.

Riegel’s call for monetary freedom must no longer be ignored. –t.h.g.   

LET FREEDOM RING THE CASH REGISTER

[by E. C. Riegel, written circa 1940s]

Old Liberty Bell rang out the political freedom that we cherish. But unless we learn how to make freedom ring the cash register, bureaucracy will ring down the curtain on our liberties.

What is the strange power that makes the government at Washington grow stronger and our state and local governments grow weaker while the people suffer the torment of war and the travail of insecurity and the shadow of dictatorship falls across the land? It is the same power that oppresses the people of all the world — the political money power.

The political money power is the power of national governments to buy the people’s sweat and blood with scraps of paper – paper that falls like a blotter upon our production and our freedom. Each day our

wealth diminishes and more of our liberties vanish. Inflation that threatens to bring chaos is just around the corner. As our sons bleed and our mothers weep, the same grinding power throws its pall over other lands.  Yet our chains are paper – paper money that, through our ignorance, binds us to the treadmill of our own destruction.

We can be masters of our destiny; we are all powerful, if we but realize it. In each of us resides the power to assure liberty, prosperity, security and peace. In each of us lies the money power, which, when springing from us, is democratic and virtuous; when springing from government is authoritarian and vicious. As we liberate our inherent money power we curb the political money power, for the more we use our self-created money, the less we need political money. Thus we defeat dictatorship. Thus we reconstruct the shattered world on a free democratic basis. Thus we save civilization.

Parchment freedoms are but taunts and mockeries without money freedom. A people dependent upon their government for money is a subject people regardless of the form of their government. No people can declare their independence and govern their government unless they assert their money freedom. A government that is not dependent upon its people for money supply is a tyranny regardless of its professions. Government must be made to beg the people for money; the people cannot be sovereign while petitioning government for money. The citizen must command both government and business through his money power. Political democracy is a delusion without economic democracy and economic democracy can function only through the power to issue money – the power to ring the cash register – the power to support and the power to withhold support. To prevent political dictatorship the citizen must himself be a dictator. To prevent centralization of power, power must be reserved by the people. Money power is sovereignty; without it democracy is impossible.

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From Money Freedom, organ of The Private Enterprise Money Movement.

More monetary wisdom from E. C. Riegel, including his book, Private Enterprise Money, can be found at http://www.newapproachtofreedom.info/, and via my website http://beyondmoney.net/.

– Thomas H. Greco, Jr.