“Where will the government find the money?” is no longer a valid objection to providing an economic safety net for the people. The government can find the money in the same place it just found more than $5 trillion for Wall Street and Corporate America: the central bank can print it. In an April 9 post commenting on the $1.77 trillion handed to Wall Street under the CARES Act, Wolf Richter observed, “If the Fed had sent that $1.77 Trillion to the 130 million households in the US, each household would have received $13,600. But no, this was helicopter money exclusively for Wall Street and for asset holders.”

“Helicopter money” – money simply issued by the central bank and injected into the economy – could be used in many ways, including building infrastructure, capitalizing a national infrastructure and development bank, providing free state university tuition, or funding Medicare, social security, or a universal basic income. In the current crisis, in which a government-mandated shutdown has left households more vulnerable than at any time since the Great Depression, a UBI seems the most direct and efficient way to get money to everyone who needs it. But critics argue that it will just trigger inflation and collapse the dollar. As gold proponent Mike Maloney complained on an April 16 podcast:

Typing extra digits into computers does not make us wealthy. If this insane theory of printing money for almost everyone on a permanent basis takes hold, the value of the dollars in your purse or pocketbook will … just continue to erode …. I just want someone to explain to me how this is going to work.

Having done quite a bit of study on that, I thought I would take on the challenge. Here is how and why a central bank-financed UBI can work without eroding the dollar.

In a Debt-Based System, the Consumer Economy Is Chronically Short of Money

First, some basics of modern money. We do not have a fixed and stable money system. We have a credit system, in which money is created and destroyed by banks every day. Money is created as a deposit when the bank makes a loan and is extinguished when the loan is repaid, as explained in detail by the Bank of England here. When fewer loans are being created than are being repaid, the money supply shrinks, a phenomenon called “debt deflation.” Deflation then triggers recession and depression. The term “helicopter money” was coined to describe the cure for that much-feared syndrome. Economist Milton Friedman said it was easy to cure a deflation: just print money and rain it down from helicopters on the people.

Our money supply is in a chronic state of deflation, due to the way money comes into existence. Banks create the principal but not the interest needed to repay their loans, so more money is always owed back than was created in the original loans. Thus debt always grows faster than the money supply, as can be seen in this chart from WorkableEconomics.com:

When the debt burden grow so large that borrowers cannot take on more, they pay down old loans without taking out new ones and the money supply shrinks or deflates.

Critics of this “debt virus” theory say the gap between debt and the money available to repay can be filled through the “velocity of money.” Debts are repaid over time, and if the payments received collectively by the lenders are spent back into the economy, they are collectively available to the debtors to pay their next monthly balances. (See a fuller explanation here.) The flaw in this argument is that money created as a loan is extinguished on repayment and is not available to be spent back into the economy. Repayment zeros out the debit by which it was created, and the money just disappears.

Another problem with the “velocity of money” argument is that lenders don’t typically spend their profits back into the consumer economy. In fact, we have two economies – the consumer/producer economy where goods and services are produced and traded, and the financialized economy where money chases “yields” without producing new goods and services. The financialized economy is essentially a parasite on the real economy, and it now contains most of the money in the system. In an unwritten policy called the “Fed put”, the central bank routinely manipulates the money supply to prop up financial markets. That means corporate owners and investors can make more and faster money in the financialized economy than by investing in workers and equipment. Bankers, investors and other “savers” put their money in stocks and bonds, hide it in offshore tax havens, send it abroad, or just keep it in cash. At the end of 2018, US corporations were sitting on $1.7 trillion in cash, and 70% of $100 bills were held overseas.

Meanwhile the producer/consumer economy is left with insufficient investment and insufficient demand. According to a July 2017 paper from the Roosevelt Institute called “What Recovery? The Case for Continued Expansionary Policy at the Fed”:

GDP remains well below both the long-run trend and the level predicted by forecasters a decade ago. In 2016, real per capita GDP was 10% below the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) 2006 forecast, and shows no signs of returning to the predicted level.

The report showed that the most likely explanation for this lackluster growth was inadequate demand. Wages were stagnant; and before producers would produce, they needed customers knocking on their doors.

In ancient Mesopotamia, the gap between debt and the money available to repay it was corrected with periodic debt “jubilees” – forgiveness of loans that wiped the slate clean. But today the lenders are not kings and temples. They are private bankers who don’t engage in debt forgiveness because their mandate is to maximize shareholder profits, and because by doing so they would risk insolvency themselves. But there is another way to avoid the debt gap, and that is by filling it with regular injections of new debt-free money.

How Much Money Needs to Be Injected to Stabilize the Money Supply?

The mandated shutdown from the coronavirus has exacerbated the debt crisis, but the economy was suffering from an unprecedented buildup of debt well before that. A UBI would address the gap between consumer debt and the money available to repay it; but there are equivalent gaps for business debt, federal debt, and state and municipal debt, leaving room for quite a bit of helicopter money before debt deflation would turn into inflation.

Looking just at the consumer debt gap, in 2019 80% of US households had to borrow to meet expenses. See this chart provided by Lance Roberts in an April 2019 article on Seeking Alpha:

After the 2008 financial crisis, income and debt combined were not sufficient to fill the gap. By April 2019, about one-third of student loans and car loans were defaulting or had already defaulted. The predictable result was a growing wave of personal bankruptcies, bank bankruptcies, and debt deflation.

Roberts showed in a second chart that by 2019, the gap between annual real disposable income and the cost of living was over $15,000 per person, and the annual deficit that could not be filled even by borrowing was over $3,200:

Assume, then, a national dividend dropped directly into people’s bank accounts of $1,200 per month or $14,200 per year. This would come close to the average $15,000 needed to fill the gap between real disposable income and the cost of living. If the 80% of recipients needing to borrow to meet expenses used the money to repay their consumer debts (credit cards, student debt, medical bills, etc.), that money would void out debt and disappear. These loan repayments (or some of them) could be made mandatory and automatic. The other 20% of recipients, who don’t need to borrow to meet expenses, would not need their national dividends for that purpose either. Most would save it or invest it in non-consumer markets. And the money that was actually spent on consumer goods and services would help fill the 10% gap between real and potential GDP, allowing supply to rise with demand, keeping prices stable. The end result would be no net increase in the consumer price index.

The current economic shutdown will necessarily result in shortages, and the prices of those commodities can be expected to inflate; but it won’t be the result of “demand/pull” inflation triggered by helicopter money. It will be “cost/push” inflation from factory closures, supply disruptions, and increased business costs.

International Precedents

Critics of central bank money injections point to the notorious hyperinflations of history – in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, etc. These disasters, however, were not caused by government money-printing to stimulate the economy. According to Prof. Michael Hudson, who has studied the question extensively, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

For contemporary examples of governments injecting new money to fund domestic growth, we can look to China and Japan. In the last two decades, China’s M2 money supply grew from 11 trillion yuan to 194 trillion yuan, a nearly 1,800% increase. Yet the average inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index hovered between 2% and 3% during that period. The flood of money injected into the economy did not trigger an inflationary crisis because China’s GDP grew at the same fast clip, allowing supply and demand to rise together. Another factor was the Chinese propensity to save. As incomes went up, the percent of income spent on goods and services went down.

In Japan, the massive stimulus programs called “Abenomics” have been funded through bond purchases by the Japanese central bank. The Bank of Japan has now “monetized” nearly half the government’s debt, injecting new money into the economy by purchasing government bonds with yen created on the bank’s books. If the US Fed did that, it would own $12 trillion in US government bonds, over three times the $3.6 trillion in Treasury debt it holds now. Yet Japan’s inflation rate remains stubbornly below the BOJ’s 2% target. Deflation continues to be a greater concern in Japan than inflation, despite unprecedented debt monetization by its central bank.

UBI and Fears of the “Nanny State”

Wary critics warn that a UBI is the road to totalitarianism, the “cashless society,” dependence on the “nanny state,” and mandatory digital IDs. But none of those outcomes need accompany a UBI. It does not make people dependent on the government, so long as they can work. It is just supplementary income, similar to the dividends investors get from their stocks. A UBI does not make people lazy, as numerous studies have shown. To the contrary, they become more productive than without it. And a UBI does not mean cash would be eliminated. Over 90% of the money supply is already digital. UBI payments can be distributed digitally without changing the system we have.

A UBI can serve the goals both of fiscal policy, providing a vital safety net for citizens in desperate times, and of monetary policy, by stabilizing the money supply. The consumer/producer economy actually needs regular injections of helicopter money to remain sustainable, stimulate economic productivity, and avoid deflationary recessions.

Republished from EllenBrown.com

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The Federal Reserve alone could do the job. It could buy “Green” federal bonds with money created on its balance sheet, just as the Fed funded the purchase of $3.7 trillion in bonds in its “quantitative easing” program to save the banks. The Treasury could also do it. The Treasury has the constitutional power to issue coins in any denomination, even trillion dollar coins. What prevents legislators from pursuing those options is the fear of hyperinflation from excess “demand” (spendable income) driving prices up. But in fact the consumer economy is chronically short of spendable income, due to the way money enters the consumer economy. We actually need regular injections of money to avoid a “balance sheet recession” and allow for growth, and a UBI is one way to do it.

The pros and cons of a UBI are hotly debated and have been discussed elsewhere. The point here is to show that it could actually be funded year after year without driving up taxes or prices. New money is continually being added to the money supply, but it is added as debt created privately by banks. (How banks rather than the government create most of the money supply today is explained on the Bank of England website here.) – while leaving the money supply for the most part unchanged; and to the extent that new money was added, it could help create the demand needed to fill the gap between actual and potential productivity.

The Debt Overhang Crippling Economies

The “bank money” composing most of the money in circulation is created only when someone borrows, and today businesses and consumers are burdened with debts that are higher than ever before. In 2018, credit card debt alone exceeded $1 trillion, student debt exceeded $1.5 trillion, auto loan debt exceeded $1.1 trillion, and non-financial corporate debt hit $5.7 trillion. When businesses and individuals pay down old loans rather than taking out new loans, the money supply shrinks, causing a “balance sheet recession.” In that situation, the central bank, rather than removing money from the economy (as the Fed is doing now), needs to add money to fill the gap between debt and the spendable income available to repay it.

Debt always grows faster than the money available to repay it. One problem is the interest, which is not created along with the principal, so more money is always owed back than was created in the original loan. Beyond that, some of the money created as debt is held off the consumer market by “savers” and investors who place it elsewhere, making it unavailable to companies selling their wares and the wage-earners they employ. The result is a debt bubble that continues to grow until it is not sustainable and the system collapses, in the familiar death spiral euphemistically called the “business cycle.” As economist Michael Hudson shows in his 2018 book And Forgive Them Their Debts, this inevitable debt overhang was corrected historically with periodic “debt jubilees” – debt forgiveness – something he argues we need to do again today.

For governments, a debt jubilee could be effected by allowing the central bank to buy government securities and hold them on its books. For individuals, one way to do it fairly across the board would be with a UBI.

Why a UBI Need Not Be Inflationary

In a 2018 book called The Road to Debt Bondage: How Banks Create Unpayable Debt, political economist Derryl Hermanutz proposes a central-bank-issued UBI of one thousand dollars per month, credited directly to people’s bank accounts. Assuming this payment went to all US residents over 18, or about 241 million people, the outlay would be close to $3 trillion annually. For people with overdue debt, Hermanutz proposes that it automatically go to pay down those debts. Since money is created as loans and extinguished when they are repaid, that portion of a UBI disbursement would be extinguished along with the debt.

People who were current on their debts could choose whether or not to pay them down, but many would also no doubt go for that option. Hermanutz estimates that roughly half of a UBI payout could be extinguished in this way through mandatory and voluntary loan repayments. That money would not increase the money supply or demand. It would just allow debtors to spend on necessities with debt-free money rather than hocking their futures with unrepayable debt.

He estimates that another third of a UBI disbursement would go to “savers” who did not need the money for expenditures. This money, too, would not be likely to drive up consumer prices, since it would go into investment and savings vehicles rather than circulating in the consumer economy. That leaves only about one-sixth of payouts, or $500 billion, that would actually be competing for goods and services; and that sum could easily be absorbed by the “output gap” between actual and forecasted productivity.

According to a July 2017 paper from the Roosevelt Institute called “What Recovery? The Case for Continued Expansionary Policy at the Fed”:

GDP remains well below both the long-run trend and the level predicted by forecasters a decade ago. In 2016, real per capita GDP was 10% below the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) 2006 forecast, and shows no signs of returning to the predicted level.

The report showed that the most likely explanation for this lackluster growth was inadequate demand. Wages have remained stagnant; and before producers will produce, they need customers knocking on their doors.

In 2017, the US Gross Domestic Product was $19.4 trillion. If the economy is running at 10% below full capacity, $2 trillion could be injected into the economy every year without creating price inflation. It would just generate the demand needed to stimulate an additional $2 trillion in GDP. In fact a UBI might pay for itself, just as the G.I. Bill produced a sevenfold return from increased productivity after World War II.

The Evidence of China

That new money can be injected year after year without triggering price inflation is evident from a look at China. In the last 20 years, its M2 money supply has grown from just over 10 trillion yuan to 80 trillion yuan ($11.6T), a nearly 800% increase. Yet the inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index (CPI) remains a modest 2.2%.

Why has all that excess money not driven prices up? The answer is that China’s Gross Domestic Product has grown at the same fast clip as its money supply. When supply (GDP) and demand (money) increase together, prices remain stable.

Whether or not the Chinese government would approve of a UBI, it does recognize that to stimulate productivity, the money must get out there first; and since the government owns 80% of China’s banks, it is in a position to borrow money into existence as needed. For “self-funding” loans – those that generate income (fees for rail travel and electricity, rents for real estate) – repayment extinguishes the debt along with the money it created, leaving the net money supply unchanged. When loans are not repaid, the money they created is not extinguished; but if it goes to consumers and businesses that then buy goods and services with it, demand will still stimulate the production of supply, so that supply and demand rise together and prices remain stable.

Without demand, producers will not produce and workers will not get hired, leaving them without the funds to generate supply, in a vicious cycle that leads to recession and depression. And that cycle is what our own central bank is triggering now.

The Fed Tightens the Screws

Rather than stimulating the economy with new demand, the Fed has been engaging in “quantitative tightening.” On December 19, 2018, it raised the fed funds rate for the ninth time in 3 years, despite a “brutal” stock market in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average had already lost 3,000 points in 2-½ months. The Fed is still struggling to reach even its modest 2% inflation target, and GDP growth is trending down, with estimates at only 2-2.7% for 2019. So why did it again raise rates, over the protests of commentators including the president himself?

For its barometer, the Fed looks at whether the economy has hit “full employment,” which it considers to be 4.7% unemployment, taking into account the “natural rate of unemployment” of people between jobs or voluntarily out of work. At full employment, workers are expected to demand more wages, causing prices to rise. But unemployment is now officially at 3.7% – beyond technical full employment – and neither wages nor consumer prices have shot up. There is obviously something wrong with the theory, as is evident from a look at Japan, where prices have long refused to rise despite a serious lack of workers.

The official unemployment figures are actually misleading. Including short-term discouraged workers, the rate of US unemployed or underemployed workers as of May 2018 was 7.6%, double the widely reported rate. When long-term discouraged workers are included, the real unemployment figure was 21.5%. Beyond that large untapped pool of workers, there is the seemingly endless supply of cheap labor from abroad and the expanding labor potential of robots, computers and machines. In fact the economy’s ability to generate supply in response to demand is far from reaching full capacity today.

Our central bank is driving us into another recession based on bad economic theory. Adding money to the economy for productive, non-speculative purposes will not drive up prices so long as materials and workers (human or mechanical) are available to create the supply necessary to meet demand; and they are available now. There will always be price increases in particular markets when there are shortages, bottlenecks, monopolies or patents limiting competition, but these increases are not due to an economy awash with money. Housing, healthcare, education and gas have all gone up, but it is not because people have too much money to spend. In fact it is those necessary expenses that are driving people into unrepayable debt, and it is this massive debt overhang that is preventing economic growth.

Without some form of debt jubilee, the debt bubble will continue to grow until it can again no longer be sustained. A UBI can help correct that problem without fear of “overheating” the economy, so long as the new money is limited to filling the gap between real and potential productivity and goes into generating jobs, building infrastructure and providing for the needs of the people, rather than being diverted into the speculative, parasitic economy that feeds off them.

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This article was first published on Truthdig.com. 

The post Universal Basic Income Is Easier Than It Looks appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We talk to Brett Scott the alternative financial activist about the opportunities and challenges of transforming the economy.

Your work can be described as economic anthropology, an attempt to explore the historical origins and current approaches to economics. How cultural is our economic system?

I come from an anthropology background and one of the main ways anthropologists try to understand systems is by immersing themselves in them to understand the perspective of those involved. Sometimes that is called participant observation – participating in something while observing it. You can blend those elements in different ways: Hardcore anthropology can be weighted towards extreme participation with less structured observation, really immersing yourself. Some old-school anthropology is more weighted towards observation than participation, making it more prone to a ‘judging’ outlook.

The discipline of Economics has traditionally tried to fit economic activity into universal theories. The attempt to fit all societies over time into a single theory requires a level of abstraction that is often quite disconnected from actual practice, or how people experience themselves in economies. Anthropology, on the other hand, is more attuned to describing the differences between people – the specificities and variations – and more interested in showing the ways people have provisioned themselves over time, rather than just asserting that people have always traded as ‘self-interested agents’ on markets. In essence, Economics takes one form of economic activity, forged in a particular historical and political context, and implies that this is the only form of economic activity.

Also, economics as a discipline tends to make a strange distinction between economics and politics, as if the political sphere and economic sphere can be meaningfully separated from each other. Holistic forms of anthropology, though, would explore how different economic systems are formed in or imply different political or cultural systems – how they are all interlinked.

One of the insights that came out of anthropology and historical studies is that states cannot be meaningfully separated from our modern concept of markets. That is to say, market-based thinking was enabled by, or expanded by, modern states. Within traditional Economics, self-interest is presented as natural, timeless, and inevitable. If you look at the economist Adam Smith, he makes this assumption that people have always traded with each other since the beginning of time. Whereas, history and anthropology point out many instances of societies that do not rely on trade, or do not even have private property regimes, and that have completely alternative ways to provision themselves.

It is only in the context of modern state formations that you see the emergence of the modern conception of ‘markets’. In the time of Adam Smith, modern states had already formed and he was blind to the fact that many features of economies he was observing couldn’t really exist outside of that context. So economic anthropology and history will try to situate the economy within specific political and cultural epochs.

Modern academia has attempted to create discrete disciplines to describe and understand reality, such as politics, economics, psychology, and so on. But in your everyday life no-one experiences these things as separate from each other. You don’t experience your psychology as distinct from a decision to participate in a particular form of economic activity. They are all fused into one experience. So all economic activity is intensely cultural and political. It is concerned with the distribution of resources, your ability to act in a society. The idea that there is some realm of economic activity that is separate from culture is, frankly, bullshit.

If we change our culture, can we then transform the economy?

If you come from a strict Marxist background, you’d probably tend to say the material world conditions culture, or that the underlying relations of production support a ‘superstructure’ of beliefs and institutions. So the tendency – more or less – is to see cultural systems as being a reflection of the underlying economic situation. The question then is, “Can you change your underlying economic situation by altering your culture?” And yes, it probably is possible. But it is a complex process and I’m not sure I have a coherent answer. Within economic reform movements you have some people who say things like ‘all we need to do is make people think differently to effect change’, but that jars against the reality that every single day people need to enter an economy that has a particular structure, regardless of what they think. It’s not obvious what the link between changing people’s worldviews and changing economic structure is.

Take a look at small credit unions or local currencies. People are trying to think and behave differently – act out a different culture – but in reality they remain stuck within the vortex of a much more powerful economy. Sure, if everyone, at once, changed the way they behaved, you could probably change an economic system, but there is a huge coordination problem there. It seems more likely that change is a messy and contradictory process, driven by some things we consciously choose – like small changes in behaviour – and others that we do not, such as technological changes. It’s unpredictable. The Internet, for instance, has opened up new possibilities, but also created opportunities for new monopolies of power.

To shift the question slightly, we could ask, “How do you shift culture within a large financial institution, such as Goldman Sachs?” These institutions are huge, with like 35,000 employees. They have to go into work every day and keep doing the same thing. Even if individuals within the institution want to change their own personal behaviour, the day to day pressures and requirements won’t allow it. So if you wanted to change the culture you would have to press pause on the organisation for, say, three weeks, and then go around and convince everyone in it to behave differently. But there’s no way in hell that they can press pause, so any attempt to change culture has to happen on the fly, incrementally. But these cultures get locked into these institutions, and when it gets toxic they find it very hard to change it. Here’s an analogy: imagine you have a computer that has a load of viruses, but to get rid of them  will require a complete time-consuming reformatting. Now imagine you need to use it every day, and it’s not an option to be without it for a week, so you just keep using it. Likewise, we need to reformat financial institutions, but often we’re just superficially patching them up.

Access to capital is probably the most powerful dimension of our financial system. How can communities have more control over the circulation of capital at this stage?

The financial system as it stands, in most countries, operates at a large scale. It has centralising tendencies that give financial institutions lots of market power, and these large banks are also closely connected to government. In general, these banks find it easier and more profitable to deal with other large-scale players, directing capital to large corporations or large infrastructure projects, for example. Or else they invest in large numbers of standardised financial products that can be sold at scale, such as mortgages. They don’t have much ability, or desire, to sensitively respond to the niche needs of small-scale communities.

So how do you change that? Short of restructuring the entire system so such power does not exist, there are interim approaches such as banking regulation and reform. For example, you might lobby for quotas on banks to get them to support the real economy and smaller businesses.

Then there are attempts to bypass or augment the mainstream banks. This includes, for example, building community banking systems or municipal banks. Local banking advocates will insist that if you have a small financial institution rooted in an area, it is far more likely to serve local interests. In this debate, countries like Germany are often mentioned, as they have an older and more established system of local and regional banking. Co-operative banks are another approach. The idea is to change the ownership structure of banks to produce better outcomes, bearing in mind that co-operative banks often work at large scales and need not be local in orientation.

Then there are the local currency movements. This approach is not necessarily about accessing or raising capital, but creating economic exchange between people. This is different to raising money for a business. That said, mutual credit systems are currency systems, but they also provide access to short-term small-scale credit. They don’t solve the problem of accessing large-scale investment, but they can be very effective at allowing small businesses to trade on credit. Sardex in Sardinia is a good example.

A mutual credit system is when a network of people create an economic network and then set up a system to record when members give energy, labour or goods to another member of the network. The member who receives the labour goes negative, and the person who gave it goes positive. It’s essentially a ledger system for recording obligations between people. Members go in and out of credit and debt with each other. Over time, this is basically what a monetary system is: I contribute things, but I also needs things. When I contribute to the system I get positive credit, when I need things I am using up my credits or going into debt. This creates a cycle between members.You can create these networks with, say, 150 people, and I think they are one of the most undervalued approaches within local currency movements.

So there is local banking, local currencies, mutual credit, but there are also systems like community shares, which allow you to raise equity finance by offering shares to your local community. These have been relatively successful on a small scale.

You also have to bear in mind that is has been quite a while since there have been coherent communities in the UK. We often talk about ‘community’, but in London people often don’t know each other in their own neighbourhoods. There is a whole raft of work around community cohesion that is required before we even start to develop ways for communities to finance themselves.

I think with all of these things you have to have serious commitment. There are a lot of people trying to design local economic strategies that are volunteer-led or part-time. I’m not against small timebanks or other volunteer-led schemes, but they are not a serious challenges to the economic system. In the case of Sardex, it is a serious attempt to build a parallel currency system, and one that also integrates into the normal system. Recently I’ve become interested in the Greater London Mutual, and the network of new regional banks supported by the Community Savings Bank Association, which look like serious attempts to build local and co-operative banking.

If you can combine these alternatives with banking reform and policy changes, putting pressure on the existing banking system, you can then start to make a difference.

More recently you’ve been exploring what you call the ‘dash to a cashless society’. Could you explain how this offers new surveillance opportunities to private companies and governments, and how you understand the social consequences?

The term cashless society is a euphemistic way of saying the ‘bank payment society’. Within this system you need a bank account and you have to ask banks to facilitate payments. In a cashless society you always have to go through a financial institution.

Think about the traditional story given in any Economics course. A market is made up by two basic players – a buyer and a seller. The buyer gives money tokens to the seller who hands over tangible goods or services. In a cashless society, however, there is the introduction of a third player between every transaction – the money-passer, who moves money between the buyer and the seller in exchange for a fee. These payments intermediaries include the card companies and banks, who run the underlying infrastructure to allow this. So the ‘cashless society’ is an economic system that is predicated on every transaction passing through the banking system and groups like Visa and Mastercard.

There are a lot of institutions lobbying for this system – the banks themselves and digital payment companies who facilitate the movement of money between bank accounts. Then there is the state that can see many advantages to this. In particular it allows them to monitor all transactions. If you’re forced to use digital payment systems, all of your transactions are recorded and leave a data trail. This data can then be analysed. They are interested in this for anti-terrorism and crime detection, but also to monitor tax. There are also monetary policy interests, in particular the ability to introduce negative interest rates.

So the implications are far more than data about transactions, and it’s not just states that find this useful, but corporations, too. Large technology companies, like Google and Amazon, are trying to build payment infrastructure to expand their data monopolies and gain ever deeper insights into people’s economic behaviour. For example, big web platforms often are in the advertising business, but struggle to prove whether adverts convert into sales. So one endgame for some of these large technology companies is to discover the correlation between the adverts you see and how much you spend. So they have an obvious interest in receiving and analysing that data, and if they can track what you spend, they can also develop more efficient advertising.

Another endgame is machine learning and predictive analytics that try to predict, and ultimately steer, people’s behaviours. Banks themselves are interested in this approach, using data to influence behaviour.

There is no cashless society at present, but there is a big political push for it. In this context, it is interesting to explore crypto-currencies that create some form of counter power.

Blockchain technology has been offered up as one of the most recent transformative technologies, with use in supply chains, payment exchange, and its ability to decentralise the control of data. How do you see the political implications of this technology?

Blockchain is multi-layered. At its base, the original version, blockchain technology is essentially a means for a network of strangers to keep track of their positions relative to each other, without a central intermediary. In the case of Bitcoin, it is about keeping track of money tokens. The concept can be applied more broadly though.

Why is blockchain seen as a profound shift in technology? If you walk out in the street, right now, wherever you are, you are going to see a group of people you do not know – strangers. You don’t necessarily distrust them, but there is no easy way to extend your trust. Traditionally, the way we would deal with this is through state law – such as consumer protection laws – and big third-party institutions and corporations who mediate between these interactions. I can walk into a shop and buy something without needing to know the seller personally.

Then blockchain emerged as a technology that could facilitate transactions between people without requiring intermediary institutions. People have historically been able to do that in small-scale situations, but blockchain tech enables this at large scale. The first version of this was Bitcoin, which is a system that enables people to move tokens between each other without relying upon banks. Unlike the banking system, where transactions are recorded on private ledgers controlled by an oligopoly of banks, whose permission you require to move money around, Bitcoin is based on a public ledger that is updated by special players in a peer to peer network.

The second wave of blockchain – such as the Ethereum system – took the same concept, but moved towards developing more complex interactions between people beyond the exchange of money tokens. In particular they added the ability to deploy automated agents onto the network, which they – somewhat misleadingly – refer to as ‘smart contracts’. In Bitcoin you assume all players on the network are humans who make their own decisions about whether to send tokens. The automated ‘smart contract’ agents of Ethereum though, are like robots, forced to do certain things when members of the network interact with them. For example, if you want to raise money for a company, you can programme a smart contract to automatically send a share to someone who sends it money. To understand this, imagine a vending machine. It is an automated agent. You give it money and it gives you a drink. It has no choice. Now imagine this kind of thing in digital form. If you start to link these ‘smart contract’ entities together you can automate all sorts of interactions.

The third wave of blockchain tech – which is being hyped right now – is the corporate use of the technology. The first two waves were open systems in which anyone could join and, theoretically, everyone had the same rights. In wave three, which is known as private, closed or ‘permissioned’ blockchains, institutions or groups of institutions control who is able to join the system, and can give users different rights and powers within the system. This fundamentally changes the entire ethos. They’re just trying to make more efficient versions of business as usual. Banks, for example, already collectively run certain shared systems for things like payments, and they currently see private blockchain systems – or ‘distributed ledger technology’ – as just a more efficient way to do the same thing. So if American Express says it’s ‘using blockchain’, they’re going to be building a closed system, and this makes it confusing for the public, who often don’t know there is a difference between the open systems and closed systems.

So, to give an example, when I was working within the derivatives market, two traders would agree a deal – let’s say a trader at Goldman Sachs would do a deal with a trader at Barclays – but once they’d done that they report it to their separate back office staff, who would do all the dirty work of having to make the transfers and make sure both traders had recorded the same details about the deal. This takes time, and each bank has different systems that don’t necessarily jive with each other. So the interest for large banks is in finding ways to automate the coordination between themselves, so that they can fire all their back office staff who do the reconciliation work.

What is important here is the distinction between open public and closed private blockchain systems. That said, you could also use closed systems to launch co-operatives. If you were trying to create a co-operative version of Uber, a closed blockchain system could be very useful. So drivers could get together to coordinate themselves. So there is interesting potential.

With the Paradise Papers we are reminded again how tax policy and legislation is often written by the legal teams of large companies who are offshoring their assets and profits. This is a clear example of big finance’s political power. What are the opportunities for us to transform the policy and legal environment?

We are used to this tacky distinction between ‘states vs markets’, but I start from the assumption that there has always been a symbiosis between states and markets. The state creates the underlying structures that enable large-scale markets to operate. If you accept that, you can then think about which market players the state prioritises. Do they favour the large corporate players or the small players and ordinary citizens? This is kind of the historical battle between conservatives and labour: is the state there to facilitate the owners of capital, the CEOs, the elite entrepreneurs, or is it there to protect those with less market power, the employees and marginalised? The state is always going to be captured – the question really is who has captured it? Is it a corporate state, or a citizen’s state? This is a dynamic that goes back and forth.

I do think there are opportunities to transform the policy and legal landscape, and it has happened over the years. It is a fickle system, though. A positive policy change can be reversed by a new government, like a law to separate safe banking to risky banking that then gets repealed. In the long-term the ideal is to try build systems that do not rely on external regulation, but that have positive principles built into their DNA. I’d not give up on financial reform, but it’s difficult. I’ve just come back from spending time with Finance Watch in Brussels: they lobby for the public interest in finance, but they are outnumbered by highly paid private lobbyists that the financial industry deploys. They have to fight day to day against the odds.

In terms of the Paradise Papers, I feel there has been a political turn in the tax avoidance debate. I think there have been gains for tax justice groups. At the same time, there has also been a fatigue among the general public. We hear about new scandals frequently, but there is only so much outrage people can express. This is a long-term fight, not something you can win in quickly. So stick in there and enjoy the ride.

Alternative financial activists, such as the Robin Hood Co-operative and Debt Jubilee, use ‘traditional’ financial tools to challenge the system. How do you understand the strategic relationship between financial protest, financial reform, and the creation of new financial institutions, tools, and services?

Finance activism, financial reform, and alternative financial should, like you say, align with each other. I think they do, but those within these groups do not often attempt to overtly work together. Partially because of funding structures. If you are a critical artist exploring finance, like Paolo Cirio, his funding stream will come from arts funding bodies. And then if you’re FinanceWatch, your funding comes from NGOs and EU sources. This means they’re often having to play into different institutional spheres that don’t allow much overlap.

Also the energy required to work towards different campaigns means focusing obsessively on certain priorities. If your whole world is lobbying in Brussels or Westminster, you may become dismissive or intolerant of the direct action strategies of activists scaling the Houses of Parliament. There are cultural differences within financial reform and they don’t always recognise each other’s value. Sometimes because they are competing for media attention, funding and legitimacy.

But when I zoom out and think about how we will create financial change, I see all of these approaches playing a role. Financial activism and protest is very effective at getting media attention – Occupy Movement, Move your Money campaign, UK Uncut were very good at getting headlines and asking for extreme changes. This then creates space for more centrist organisations to draw up more technical proposals for financial reform. They come through with more palatable demands, which can create change.

The same with climate change movements. Earth First or Greenpeace open space for less overtly activist sustainable finance groups – like CarbonTracker – to come and make technical proposals. You have to zoom out to see the politics – take alternative finance platforms like peer-to-peer lending. Mainstream policymakers struggle to directly attack big banks, and may find it easier to support the alternative finance sector as a way to indirectly weaken banks. The alternative finance sector in the UK has actually been quite good at ‘playing the state’, presenting themselves as a useful alternative to address the shortcomings of the traditional finance giants.

On the extreme end of financial activism, there is little crossover with more ‘respectable’ alternative finance entrepreneurs. If you take Enric Duran, or the Robin Hood Co-op, they have no interest in reforming finance. They are trying to create parallel systems that do not rely on the current system. It’s not like the divestment campaigns, or ethical banking system, which are trying to reform the current system, and that’s an important distinction.

The divestment campaigns are an interesting case study. These campaigners are often criticised by those within more mainstream sustainable finance circles as lacking nuance or being counterproductive. But the divestment organisations have been great at driving the debate on unsustainable investment in a more public way. They actually indirectly support the work done by the technical sustainable finance community. The student activists are creating a space for more technical changes to be introduced.

Since I specialise in not specialising, it makes it easier for me to to see the points of intersection. There needs to be more people who hop between different approaches, overtly spending more time in different communities. The technology community, the localist community, the policy community, the artistic community, and so on. Hybrid approaches are often the most interesting.

Brett Scott is a journalist, campaigner and the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto, 2013). He writes for publications such as the Guardian, New Scientist, Wired Magazine and CNN. He is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab, and helps facilitate a course on power and design at the University of the Arts London.

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Published in STIR magazine no.20, Winter 2018

Illustration by Nick Taylor

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Japan has found a way to write off nearly half its national debt without creating inflation. We could do that too.

Let’s face it. There is no way the US government is ever going to pay back a $20 trillion federal debt. The taxpayers will just continue to pay interest on it, year after year.

A lot of interest.

If the Federal Reserve raises the fed funds rate to 3.5% and sells its federal securities into the market, as it is proposing to do, by 2026 the projected tab will be $830 billion annually. That’s nearly $1 trillion owed by the taxpayers every year, just for interest.

Personal income taxes are at record highs, ringing in at $550 billion in the first four months of fiscal year 2017, or $1.6 trillion annually. But even at those high levels, handing over $830 billion to bondholders will wipe out over half the annual personal income tax take. Yet what is the alternative?

Japan seems to have found one. While the US government is busy driving up its “sovereign” debt and the interest owed on it, Japan has been canceling its debt at the rate of $720 billion (¥80tn) per year. How? By selling the debt to its own central bank, which returns the interest to the government. While most central banks have ended their quantitative easing programs and are planning to sell their federal securities, the Bank of Japan continues to aggressively buy its government’s debt. An interest-free debt owed to oneself that is rolled over from year to year is effectively void – a debt “jubilee.” As noted by fund manager Eric Lonergan in a February 2017 article:

The Bank of Japan is in the process of owning most of the outstanding government debt of Japan (it currently owns around 40%). BoJ holdings are part of the consolidated government balance sheet. So its holdings are in fact the accounting equivalent of a debt cancellation. If I buy back my own mortgage, I don’t have a mortgage.

If the Federal Reserve followed the same policy and bought 40% of the US national debt, the Fed would be holding $8 trillion in federal securities, three times its current holdings from its quantitative easing programs.

Eight trillion dollars in money created on a computer screen! Monetarists would be aghast. Surely that would trigger runaway hyperinflation!

But if Japan’s experience is any indication, it wouldn’t. Japan has a record low inflation rate of .02 percent. That’s not 2 percent, the Fed’s target inflation rate, but 1/100^th of 2 percent – almost zero. Japan also has an unemployment rate that is at a 22-year low of 2.8%, and the yen was up nearly 6% for the year against the dollar as of April 2017.

Selling the government’s debt to its own central bank has not succeeded in driving up Japanese prices, even though that was the BoJ’s expressed intent. Meanwhile, the economy is doing well. In a February 2017 article in Mother Jones titled “The Enduring Mystery of Japan’s Economy,” Kevin Drum notes that over the past two decades, Japan’s gross domestic product per capita has grown steadily and is up by 20 percent. He writes:

It’s true that Japan has suffered through two decades of low growth . . . . [But] despite its persistently low inflation, Japan’s economy is doing fine. Their GDP per working-age adult is actually higher than ours. So why are they growing so much more slowly than we are? It’s just simple demographics . . . Japan is aging fast. Its working-age population peaked in 1997 and has been declining ever since. Fewer workers means a lower GDP even if those workers are as productive as anyone in the world.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank, concurs. In a June 2013 article titled “Japan Is a Model, Not a Cautionary Tale,” he wrote:

Along many dimensions — greater income equality, longer life expectancy, lower unemployment, greater investments in children’s education and health, and even greater productivity relative to the size of the labor force — Japan has done better than the United States.

That is not to say that all is idyllic in Japan. Forty percent of Japanese workers lack secure full-time employment, adequate pensions and health insurance. But the point underscored here is that large-scale digital money-printing by the central bank used to buy back the government’s debt has not inflated prices, the alleged concern preventing other countries from doing it. Quantitative easing simply does not inflate the circulating money supply. In Japan, as in the US, QE is just an asset swap that occurs in the reserve accounts of banks. Government securities are swapped for reserves, which cannot be spent or lent into the consumer economy but can only be lent to other banks or used to buy more government securities.

The Bank of Japan is under heavy pressure to join the other central banks and start tightening the money supply, reversing the “accommodations” made after the 2008 banking crisis. But it is holding firm and is forging ahead with its bond-buying program. Reporting on the Bank of Japan’s policy meeting on June 15, 2017, The Financial Times stated that BoJ Governor Kuroda “refused to be drawn on an exit strategy from easy monetary policy, despite growing pressure from politicians, markets and the local media to set one out. He said the BoJ was still far from its 2 per cent inflation goal and the circumstances of a future exit were too uncertain.”

Rather than unwinding their securities purchases, the other central banks might do well to take a lesson from Japan and cancel their own governments’ debts. We have entered a new century and a new millennium. Ancient civilizations celebrated a changing of the guard with widespread debt cancellation. It is time for a twenty-first century jubilee from the crippling debts of governments, which could then work on generating some debt relief for their citizens.

Photo by portable_soul

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