Money

What Many Environmentalists Get Wrong About The Money System

July 2, 2025 Matthew Slater, Resilience. Educate! Commons, Environmental Activists, Finance and the Economy, Money

Amongst my environmentalist friends, one of their favourite novels of recent times is ‘Ministry for the Future’. In the book, the author Kim Stanley Robinson shocks us with how abruptly climate change might unfold. He also describes a policy response which seems unusually bold – the creation of a new currency that is linked to reducing carbon emissions. As an expert in alternative currencies, I was delighted that popular fiction turned some of my ecologically-minded friends on to the subject of money. I’d viewed environmentalism as failing to stem pollution and habitat destruction because the dominant ideology of growth, competition, and profit was seemingly out of their scope.

Why The ‘Local Multiplier Effect’ Always Counts

June 17, 2025 Tricia Truit, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Local Currency, Local Economies, Money, New Economy

The Local Multiplier Effect (LME) is a very valuable, hidden feature of our economies. The term refers to how many times dollars are recirculated within a local economy before leaving through the purchase of an import. Famed economist John Maynard Keynes first coined the term "Local Multiplier Effect" in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Imagine a hypothetical influx of money, say one million dollars, entering a local economy. Now imagine these dollars are spent on local goods and services. Imagine that each of the local vendors who earned those dollars then re-spends that money on more local goods and services.

Money Commons: Review Of ‘Remaking Money For A Sustainable Future’

May 17, 2025 Katja Durrani, Resilience. Create! Alternative Currency, Capitalism, Money, The Commons

“For those interested in how money works, and in how it is made to work, these are lucky times”, writes Barinaga. While it’s up for debate whether these times are lucky in other respects, her statement is certainly true as far as our understanding of money is concerned. The financial crises of the last two decades have led to many good books and articles explaining how money is created and managed, not least a 2014 communication by the Bank of England. For anybody taking a closer look, it’s quickly obvious that our current money system isn’t working for most people, nor is it compatible with a sustainable future. This book does a very good job of explaining why that is so.

Beyond Community Currencies

April 12, 2025 Alex Lopez, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperatives, Local Economy, Money, Renewable Energy Communities (REC)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Renewable Energy Communities (REC), legal entities that collectively manage energy, promoting economic, social, and environmental benefits for their community. This model of citizen management over an essential resource has been widely accepted — so could a similar principle be applied to money? Ekhilur, a nonprofit citizen cooperative, is pioneering an innovative approach to strengthening the local economy. Instead of creating a new currency, it operates its own payment system — regulated by the Bank of Spain — to maximize the circulation of the existing euro within the community for as long as possible.

To Build Just And Sustainable Cities, We Need Community Banking

February 10, 2025 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Banking, climate crisis, Community Banks, Economic crisis, Money

Hardly anyone these days talks about how banks have the power to create new money. Most bankers would say something along the lines of “We’re in the business of taking deposits and making loans.” That’s technically correct, but the precise relationship isn’t obvious. In 2023, a working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia stated: “Private money creation by banks enables lending to not be constrained by the supply of cash deposits. During the 2001–2020 period, 92 percent of bank deposits were due to funding liquidity creation, and during 2011–2020 funding liquidity creation averaged $10.7 trillion per year, or 57 percent of [gross domestic product].”

How To Escape The Federal Debt Trap

December 9, 2024 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Debt, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Money

The U.S. national debt just passed $36 trillion, only four months after it passed $35 trillion and up $2 trillion for the year. Third quarter data is not yet available, but interest payments as a percent of tax receipts rose to 37.8% in the third quarter of 2024, the highest since 1996. That means interest is eating up over one-third of our tax revenues. Total interest for the fiscal year hit $1.16 trillion, topping one trillion for the first time ever. That breaks down to $3 billion per day. For comparative purposes, an estimated $11 billion, or less than four days’ federal interest, would pay the median rent for all the homeless people in America for a year.

Creating Trust Through Money

May 15, 2023 Tiziana Penna and Anna Rispoli, Resilience. Create! Community, Community Wallet, Finance and the Economy, Money, Solidarity

In January 2018, a group of artists and cultural workers based in Brussels—including us, Tiziana Penna and Anna Rispoli—committed to living from the same bank account. All income we receive through wages, unemployment, and other benefits is wired into this shared account. From there, we don’t withdraw the same amount we wired in, but whatever amount each one of us feels we need to live our life, including money for mortgage payments, rent, utilities, childcare, monthly savings, groceries, and clothes, but also for holidays, hobbies, going out, and all the unnecessary consumerism one is drawn to.

Webinar: Making Money Work For The Common Good

February 17, 2023 Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Popular Resistance. Create! Banking, Money, Peace, Sustainability

For over three centuries, banks have been consolidating their power by extracting interest from people, businesses, governments and the planet. This power helps to explain why politicians and governments bend to their will. Mainstream economists treat money as a neutral medium of exchange and never consider its origin and purpose. Is it meant to serve the people, or to serve the interests of the monied elite alone? Exploring that question helps explain why there’s always plenty of money for military research and development and none for protecting pollinators…and always enough to finance luxury condos instead of affordable dwellings.

Only A People’s Monetary Reset Can Prevent A Feudalistic Technocracy

May 18, 2022 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Central Bank, Finance and the Economy, Money

Fortunately for the United States, our national debt is in U.S. dollars. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once observed, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.” Paying government debt by just printing the money was the innovative solution of the cash-strapped American colonial governments. The problem was that it tended to be inflationary. The paper scrip they issued was considered an advance against future taxes, but it was easier to issue the money than to tax it back, and over-issuing devalued the currency. The colony of Pennsylvania fixed that problem by forming a government-owned “land bank.”

Money Is Made Up

March 21, 2021 Caitlin Johnstone. Create! Capitalism, Money, New Economy

Have you ever noticed how online capitalism cultists who condescendingly tell socialists they "just don't understand economics" are always unable to lucidly defend their own understanding of economics? If you've never pressed such a character to clearly and concisely explain what it is you "don't understand" using their own words, I highly recommend that you try it, because it's one of the funniest things in the world. If you keep interrogating them about each aspect of their belief system, demanding that they explain exactly what it is they know and how they know it, they will invariably end up getting frustrated and telling you to listen to this or that economist if they don't rage quit on you altogether first.

In Community We Trust

May 22, 2020 the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Create! Alternative Currency, Community, Money, New Economy

Frank Tortoriello was the owner of a popular deli on Main Street in Great Barrington. He turned to SHARE when he lost his lease and the bank refused him a loan to renovate his new location. But Frank didn’t need SHARE’s circle of grandmothers; he already had a circle of his own in his customers. SHARE suggested that Frank issue Deli Dollars as a self-financing technique. The notes would be purchased during a month on sale and redeemed after the Deli had made its move. A local artist, Martha Shaw, designed the note, which showed a host of people carrying Frank and his staff, all busy cooking, to their new location. The notes were issued in 1989 and were marked “redeemable for meals up to a value of ten dollars.”

Ending The Privatization Of Money: Money For The People

September 25, 2019 Mary Mellor, Greattransition.org Strategize! Money, Privatization

Local initiatives can lead to modest gains in sustainability, but not the large-scale transformation we need. Meeting that challenge will require, among other critical factors, substantial changes in how we create and use money. As its history demonstrates, money is a social and political construct. It is the privatization of money—and not money itself—that has fueled social exploitation and environmental destruction. Money could, by contrast, help advance a Great Transition—but only if it is reclaimed for the public.

Forget Billionaires: Let’s Build Our Own System To Fund The Transformation Of Society

June 24, 2019 Michael Edwards, Opendemocracy.net Create! Capitalism, Community, Money

“Gone to the Dogs,” Paul Higgins’ canine-friendly café in Carlisle, may seem an unlikely place to look for inspiration in transforming the ways we think about funding for social change. But through ‘pay-it-forward’ fundraising and ‘creative up-cycling’ to re-use resources, Higgins has made the café a center for community in which money builds connection instead of division - a radical reversal of the inequalities that lie at the heart of big philanthropy, foreign aid and government contracting.

The Wealth Hiding In Your Neighborhood

September 13, 2018 By Chuck Collins, Otherwords.org Educate! Corruption, Money, Ruling Class, Uneven Development

You’ve probably heard about their offshore bank accounts, shell corporations, and fancy trusts. But this wealth isn’t all sitting in the Cayman Islands or Panama. Much of it’s hiding in plain view: maybe even in your town. America’s big cities are increasingly dotted with luxury skyscrapers and mansions. These multi-million dollar condos are wealth storage lockers, with the ownership often obscured by shell companies. In Boston, where I live, there’s a luxury building boom. According to a study I just co-authored, out of 1,805 luxury units — with an average price of over $3 million — more than two-thirds are owned by people who don’t live here. One-third are owned by shell companies and trusts that mask their ownership. And of these units, 40 percent are limited liability companies (LLCs) organized in Delaware.

New Currencies For A New Economy

August 1, 2018 By Juliette Legendre, Inequality.org Create! Currency, Money, New Economy

When financial crises and recessions hit, regional and local economies suffer devastating ripple effects. As activists look to shield their local economies from some of the harsh impacts of globalization, they’ve come across one potential solution to tackle the heart of the problem: create community currencies and change the money itself. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis a group of friends on the Italian island of Sardinia set up Sardex, an electronic business-to-business mutual credit system. Six years later, around 140 million euros worth of transactions have been made. Similar models exist across Europe, like Utrechtse Euro in the Netherlands and SoNantes in France. In addition to these trade networks, local currency schemes have been emerging around the world as technological innovations offer new ways to circumvent the usual issues of scale and sustainability.

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