Echoing David Bollier’s theme that large centralized financial systems are failing us, as evidenced by the meltdown, Bernard Lietaer proposes we turn to mutual credit systems as a peer to peer inspired solution, and he has a number of key documents on his website explaining the topic.

You can find there:

* White Paper on all the “Options for Managing Systemic Banking Crises”, and their economic consequences. It also provides the theoretical justification for the recommended strategy

* 6 page summary of the Business-to-Business (B2B) currency proposal

* One pager on the Business-to-Business (B2B) Currency solution

Here’s just his introduction which refers to a number of extra documents by other authors, and in particular to the WIR system in Switzerland as an example to follow.

Of all the authors and experts on monetary reform and transformation, Bernard Lietaer is my favourite, because his ideas relate to all the different systemic levels of our economic infrastructure, from the local to the global.

Bernard Lietaer:

“Whatever governments do for the banks, credit will be a lot harder to obtain for businesses, for many years to come. The trickiest aspect of the current situation is the simultaneous, global nature, of the banking crisis. Please, get ready now for an unprecedented rough ride for as long as one decade. What all this means in practice is that we have now entered the period of an unprecedented convergence of the four planetary issues – financial instability, climate change, unemployment and the financial consequences of an aging society – that was described in the 2001 book, The Future of Money.

To avoid a domino effect of massive layoffs and bankruptcies, the most urgent action for businesses to take is the initiative of creating a Business-to-Business (B2B) mutual credit system at whatever scale makes sense to them. The WIR system (see six page synthesis paper for details) is a successful precedent of this strategy implemented in Switzerland since 1934.

The various downloadable documents available on this page describe the practical steps to achieve this; as well as the theoretical backing why this is a systemic solution to today’s sitiation. This includes a one pager and a six pager on the B2B currency solution; and a White Paper on the Financial Crisis describing all the options on how to deal with the current crisis. If you desire the theoretical backing for the claims made in the White Paper, the documents below are the relevant original academic sources available for download. It includes the quantitative study on the stabilization effect of the WIR on the Swiss economy; the peer reviewed paper on the sustainability of complex systems; and an explanation for the collective psychology of financial crashes, extracted from my “Mystery of Money” (unpublished in English).”