Please let me share an email message, dated on 23 December 2013, from the Positive Money:
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It's been an exciting and slightly exhausting 12 months for Positive Money, and we're winding down for week off over christmas, but I just wanted to review some of things that have happened over the last year and say thank you to everyone who has been involved in one way or another.
We started the year rushing to finish the book Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System is Broken and how we fix it. The book is now the most detailed book ever written on taking the power to create money away from banks and returning it to democratic control. We've sold around 2,000 copies to date and given another couple of hundred to influential people who are thinking about the problems with our economic system.
On Saturday 26th January, more than 280 people joined us in London for the Positive Money 2013 conference- the biggest event on monetary reform that had been held to date. Between the various workshops and updates on the campaign, one highlight was this talk by former Reuters journalists on why the media don't understand money.
I opened that conference by talking about the growing discussion of the issue of money creation in the press and policy debates. Less than three weeks later, the former chairman of the UK's Financial Services Authority, gave a landmark speech where he proposed the idea that fuelling the economic recovery through debt-based money created by banks might not be a good idea - especially after a crisis caused by exactly that! Lord Adair Turner suggested that rather than relying on more bank-created money, or using QE to flood financial markets (benefiting the wealthiest more but doing little for the real economy), it would be better for the Bank of England to create money, grant it to the government, and for the government to spend this money into the economy.
This idea - that the state should be allowed to spend money into the real economy rather than relying on banks to put it into the financial markets and property bubbles - is considered fairly radical amongst mainstream economists. But having someone who was at the centre of the financial system presenting these ideas has opened up the discussion and made these ideas much less of a 'taboo'.
The door for the creation of money in the public interest is open...
In March 2013 the UK government released a review of the "Monetary Policy Framework"that governs the Bank of England's remit and targets. The exciting detail about this was that the review recognised that the old mechanisms of managing money creation (e.g. lowering interest rates to encourage people to go further into debt) were no longer working effectively, and that something else was needed. The review permitted the Bank of England to use "unconventional monetary policy instruments" - meaning that the door is open for the creation of money in the public interest, so long as it can be shown to be an effective way of meeting the Bank of England's remit.
The proposal in Modernising Money suggests that banks should be prevented from creating money, and that power returned exclusively to the state. But we realised that no government of an economy the size of the UK is going to make such a change overnight. So we developed the ideas put forward by Lord Turner, along with some of the research we'd done for Modernising Money, to put forward a new proposal under the title Sovereign Money: Paving the Way for a Sustainable Recovery. This paper, which we released in early November, explains that the UK's current economic recovery is fuelled by money creation by banks and by rising personal debt. We explained that this will ultimately lead to crisis. And we proposed an alternative way of fuelling the economy that doesn't rely on rising debt, which is to have the state create and spend money into the real economy. This proposal allows the government to take a first step towards reclaiming the power to create money, in the public interest, and can be done without requiring the massive lobbying battle that will be required to fully stop banks creating money.
In August my talk for BBC Radio 4's Four Thought programme was re-broadcast as part of their "Best of Four Thought" episode, going out on the second most popular radio station in the UK.
Online we released this video on "What is Money", this one on why the monetary system means the gap between the very rich and the rest of us is getting bigger, and this one of 10 year old Holly explaining where money really comes from! And the 6 videos in our Banking 101 series (which offers one of the few accurate explanations of money creation available, in 50 minutes) have collectively been watched over 120,000 times.
It's also been a very busy year around the country, with over 90 events held by the 18 local groups around the UK, some of them with a remarkable attendance, e.g. event organized by the Newcastle group, entitled “Where Does Money Come From?”, with over 100 attendees.
The work of our local groups is very important for Positive Money campaign. Thanks to the efforts of the group in Wales, we have delivered talks to the Welsh Assembly, where a Cross Party Group on Monetary Reform was set up. Thanks to some of our active supporters Positive Money campaign has been mentioned in some local newspapers.
We've also seen the establishment and growth of 16 international campaigns for monetary reform around the world, and launched a simple website to link them all together.
After much debate the Green Party adopted a motion that is consistent with Positive Money's proposal to return the power to create money to a democratic body, in the public interest. (Don't hold your breath for the bigger parties to do the same just yet).
This week we saw the 17,000th person join us on Facebook, and over 6,500 on Twitter. A few weeks ago this image was shared over 1,000 times.
It's been a busy and productive year and we're grateful to everyone who has come to the conference, attended a local event, shared or talked about our videos and website, or helped to fund the work we're doing to change the monetary system. If you'd like to get more involved in the coming year, check out our upcoming conference, join a local group or become a regular donor to help us keep going.
Have a great christmas and we'll be in touch again in the new year.
Ben, Mira, Fran and Andrew
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