The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.

That threat may now be materializing. On June 18, Facebook unveiled a white paper outlining ambitious plans to create a new global cryptocurrency called Libra, to be launched in 2020. Facebook reportedly has high hopes that Libra will become the foundation for a new financial system free of control by Wall Street power brokers and central banks.

But apparently Libra will not be competing with Visa or Mastercard. In fact, the Libra Association lists those two giants among its 28 soon-to-be founding members. Others include Paypal, Stripe, Uber, Lyft and eBay. Facebook has reportedly courted dozens of financial institutions and other tech companies to join the Libra Association, an independent foundation that will contribute capital and help govern the digital currency. Entry barriers are high, with each founding member paying a minimum of $10 million to join. This gives them one vote  (or 1% of the total vote, whichever is larger)  in the Libra Association council. Members are also entitled to a share proportionate to their investment of the dividends earned from interest on the Libra reserve—the money that users will pay to acquire the Libra currency.

Needless to say, all of this has raised some eyebrows, among both financial analysts and crypto-activists. A Zero Hedge commentator calls Libra “Facebook’s Crypto Trojan Rabbit.” An article in The Financial Times’ Alphaville calls it “Blockchain, but Without the Blocks or Chain.” Economist Nouriel Roubini concurs, tweeting:

Another Zero Hedge writer calls Libra “The Dollar’s Killer App,” which threatens “not only the power of central banks but also the government’s money monopoly itself.”

From Frying Pan to Fire?

To the crypto-anarchist community, usurping the power of central banks and governments may sound like a good thing. But handing global power to the corporate-controlled Libra Association could be a greater nightmare. So argues Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who writes in The Financial Times:

This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests — profits and influence — ahead of public ones. …

The Libra Association’s goals specifically say that [they] will encourage “decentralised forms of governance.” In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. …

What Libra backers are calling ‘decentralisation’ is in truth a shift of power from developing world central banks toward multinational corporations and the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.

Power will shift to the Fed and ECB because the dollar and the euro will squeeze out weaker currencies in developing countries. As seen recently in Greece, the result will be to cause their governments to lose control of their currencies and their economies.

Pros and Cons

Caitlin Long, co-founder of the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, recently agreed that Libra was a Trojan horse but predicted it would have some beneficial effects. For one, she thought it would impose discipline on the U.S. banking system by leading to populist calls to repeal its corporate subsidies. The Fed is now paying its member banks 2.35% in risk-free interest on their excess reserves, which this year is projected to total $36 billion of corporate welfare to U.S. banks—about half the sum spent on the U.S. food stamp program. If Facebook parks its entire U.S. dollar balance at the Federal Reserve through one of its bank partners, it could earn the same rate. But Long predicted that Facebook would have to pay interest to Libra users to avoid a chorus of critics, who would loudly publicize how much money Facebook and its partners were pocketing from the interest on the money users traded for their Libra currency.

But that was before the Libra white paper came out. It reveals the profits will indeed be divvied among Facebook’s Libra partners rather than shared with users. At one time, we earned interest on our deposits in government-insured banks. With Libra, we will get no interest on our money, which will be entrusted to uninsured crypto exchanges, which are coming under increasing regulatory pressure due to lack of transparency and operational irregularities.

United Kingdom economics professor Alistair Milne points to another problem with the Libra cryptocurrency: Unlike Bitcoin, it will be a “stablecoin,” whose value will be tied to a basket of fiat currencies and short-term government securities. That means it will need the backing of real money to maintain its fixed price. If reserves do not cover withdrawals, who will be responsible for compensating Libra holders? Ideally, Milne writes, reserves would be held with the central bank; but central banks will be reluctant to support a private currency.

Long also predicts that Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a huge honeypot of data for government officials, since every transaction will be traceable. But other reviewers see this as Libra’s most fatal flaw. Facebook has been called Big Brother, the ultimate government surveillance tool. Conspiracy theorists link it to the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Facebook has already demonstrated that it is an untrustworthy manager of personal data. How then can we trust it with our money?

Why Use a Cryptocurrency at All?

Why has Facebook chosen to use a cryptocurrency rather than following WeChat and AliPay in doing a global payments network in the traditional way? Yan Meng, vice president of the Chinese Software Developer Network, says Facebook’s fragmented user base across the world leaves it with no better choice than to borrow ideas from blockchain and cryptocurrency.

“Facebook just can’t do a global payments network via traditional methods, which require applying for a license and preparing foreign exchange reserves with local banking, one market after another,” Meng said. “The advantage of WeChat and AliPay is they have already gained a significant number of users from just one giant economy that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s population.” They have no need to establish their own digital currencies, which they still regard as too risky.

Meng suspects that Facebook’s long-term ambition is to become a stateless central bank that uses Libra as a base currency. He writes, “With sufficient incentives, nodes of Facebook’s Libra network would represent Facebook to push for utility in various countries for its 2.7 billion users in business, investment, trade and financial services,” which “would help complete a full digital economy empire.”

The question is whether regulators will allow that sort of competition with the central banking system. Immediately after Facebook released its Libra cryptocurrency plan, financial regulators in Europe voiced concerns over the potential danger of Facebook running a “shadow bank.” Maxine Waters, who heads the Financial Services Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives, asked Facebook to halt its development of Libra until hearings could be held. She said:

This is like starting a bank without having to go through any steps to do it. …  We can’t allow Facebook to go to Switzerland and begin to compete with the dollar without having any regulatory regime that’s dealing with them.

A Stateless Private Central Bank or a Publicly Accountable One?

Facebook may be competing with more than the dollar. Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, writes:

[It] seems that the company is not seeking to compete with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Rather, Facebook is looking to replace the existing global financial system with an all-new setup, with Libra at its center.

At least at the moment, the Libra is being designed as a form of electronic money linked to many national currencies.That has raised fears that Libra might someday be recognized as a sovereign currency, with Facebook acting as a “shadow bank” that could compete with the central banks of countries around the world.

Long thinks Bitcoin, rather than Libra, will come out the winner in all this; but Bitcoin’s blockchain model is too slow, expensive and energy intensive to replace fiat currency as a medium of exchange on a national scale. As Josh Constine writes on TechCrunch:

[E]xisting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum weren’t properly engineered to scale to be a medium of exchange. Their unanchored price was susceptible to huge and unpredictable swings, making it tough for merchants to accept as payment. And cryptocurrencies miss out on much of their potential beyond speculation unless there are enough places that will take them instead of dollars. … But with Facebook’s relationship with 7 million advertisers and 90 million small businesses plus its user experience prowess, it was well-poised to tackle this juggernaut of a problem.

For Libra to scale as a national medium of exchange, its governance had to be centralized rather than “distributed.” But Libra’s governing body is not the sort of global controller we want. Jennifer Grygiel writes:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg . . . is declaring that he wants Facebook to become a virtual nation, populated by users, powered by a self-contained economy, and headed by a CEO–Zuckerberg himself– who is not even accountable to his shareholders. . . .

In many ways the company that Mark Zuckerberg is building is beginning to look more like a Roman Empire, now with its own central bank and currency, than a corporation. The only problem is that this new nation-like platform is a controlled company and is run more like a dictatorship than a sovereign country with democratically elected leaders.

A currency intended for trade on a national—let alone international—scale needs to be not only centralized but democratized, responding to the will of the people and their elected leaders. Rather than bypassing the existing central banking structure as Facebook plans to do, several groups of economists are proposing a more egalitarian solution: nationalizing and democratizing the central bank by opening its deposit window to everyone. As explored in my latest book, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age,” these proposals could allow us all to get 2.35% on our deposits, while eliminating bank runs and banking crises, since the central bank cannot run out of funds. Profits from the public medium of exchange need to return to the public rather than enriching an unaccountable, corporate-controlled Facebook Trojan horse.

Reposted from Truthdig. Header image: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Mike Deeroski / Flickr)(CC BY 2.0)

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This article is excerpted from my new book Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, available in paperback June 1.

The U.S. federal debt has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the interest on it, and interest rates are rising.

In 2018, the Fed announced plans to raise rates by 2020 to “normal” levels — a fed funds target of 3.375 percent — and to sell about $1.5 trillion in federal securities at the rate of $50 billion monthly, further growing the mountain of federal debt on the market. When the Fed holds government securities, it returns the interest to the government after deducting its costs; but the private buyers of these securities will be pocketing the interest, adding to the taxpayers’ bill.

In fact it is the interest, not the debt itself, that is the problem with a burgeoning federal debt. The principal just gets rolled over from year to year. But the interest must be paid to private bondholders annually by the taxpayers and constitutes one of the biggest items in the federal budget. Currently the Fed’s plans for “quantitative tightening” are on hold; but assuming it follows through with them, projections are that by 2027 U.S. taxpayers will owe $1 trillion annually just in interest on the federal debt. That is enough to fund President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan every year, and it is a direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy investors holding most of the bonds.

Where will this money come from? Crippling taxes, wholesale privatization of public assets, and elimination of social services will not be sufficient to cover the bill.

Bondholder Debt Is Unnecessary

The irony is that the United States does not need to carry a debt to bondholders at all. It has been financially sovereign ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard domestically in 1933. This was recognized by Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a 1945 presentation before the American Bar Association titled “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete.”

“The necessity for government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments,” he said, “but it is not true for a national government.” The government was now at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget, drawing on credit issued by its own central bank. It could do this until price inflation indicated a weakened purchasing power of the currency.

Then, and only then, would the government need to levy taxes — not to fund the budget but to counteract inflation by contracting the money supply. The principal purpose of taxes, said Ruml, was “the maintenance of a dollar which has stable purchasing power over the years. Sometimes this purpose is stated as ‘the avoidance of inflation.’”

The government could be funded without taxes by drawing on credit from its own central bank; and since there was no longer a need for gold to cover the loan, the central bank would not have to borrow. It could just create the money on its books. This insight is a basic tenet of Modern Monetary Theory: the government does not need to borrow or tax, at least until prices are driven up. It can just create the money it needs. The government could create money by issuing it directly; or by borrowing it directly from the central bank, which would create the money on its books; or by taking a perpetual overdraft on the Treasury’s account at the central bank, which would have the same effect.

The “Power Revolution” — Transferring the “Money Power” to the Banks

The Treasury could do that in theory, but some laws would need to be changed. Currently the federal government is not allowed to borrow directly from the Fed and is required to have the money in its account before spending it. After the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, Congress could have had the Fed just print money and lend it to the government, cutting the banks out. But Wall Street lobbied for an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, forbidding the Fed to buy bonds directly from the Treasury as it had done in the past.

The Treasury can borrow from itself by transferring money from “intragovernmental accounts” — Social Security and other trust funds that are under the auspices of the Treasury and have a surplus – but these funds do not include the Federal Reserve, which can lend to the government only by buying federal securities from bond dealers. The Fed is considered independent of the government. Its website states, “The Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities are categorized as ‘held by the public,’ because they are not in government accounts.”

According to Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, the prohibition against allowing the government to borrow directly from its own central bank was written into the Banking Act of 1935 at the behest of those bond dealers that have an exclusive right to purchase directly from the Fed. A historical review on the website of the New York Federal Reserve quotes Eccles as stating, “I think the real reasons for writing the prohibition into the [Banking Act] … can be traced to certain Government bond dealers who quite naturally had their eyes on business that might be lost to them if direct purchasing were permitted.”

The government was required to sell bonds through Wall Street middlemen, which the Fed could buy only through “open market operations” – purchases on the private bond market. Open market operations are conducted by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which meets behind closed doors and is dominated by private banker interests. The FOMC has no obligation to buy the government’s debt and generally does so only when it serves the purposes of the Fed and the banks.

Rep. Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1963 to 1975, called the official sanctioning of the Federal Open Market Committee in the banking laws of 1933 and 1935 “the power revolution” — the transfer of the “money power” to the banks. Patman said, “The ‘open market’ is in reality a tightly closed market.” Only a selected few bond dealers were entitled to bid on the bonds the Treasury made available for auction each week. The practical effect, he said, was to take money from the taxpayer and give it to these dealers.

Feeding Off the Real Economy

That massive Wall Street subsidy was the subject of testimony by Eccles to the House Committee on Banking and Currency on March 3-5, 1947. Patman asked Eccles, “Now, since 1935, in order for the Federal Reserve banks to buy Government bonds, they had to go through a middleman, is that correct?” Eccles replied in the affirmative. Patman then launched into a prophetic warning, stating, “I am opposed to the United States Government, which possesses the sovereign and exclusive privilege of creating money, paying private bankers for the use of its own money. … I insist it is absolutely wrong for this committee to permit this condition to continue and saddle the taxpayers of this Nation with a burden of debt that they will not be able to liquidate in a hundred years or two hundred years.”

The truth of that statement is painfully evident today, when we have a $22 trillion debt that cannot possibly be repaid. The government just keeps rolling it over and paying the interest to banks and bondholders, feeding the “financialized” economy in which money makes money without producing new goods and services. The financialized economy has become a parasite feeding off the real economy, driving producers and workers further and further into debt.

In the 1960s, Patman attempted to have the Fed nationalized. The effort failed, but his committee did succeed in forcing the central bank to return its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs. The prohibition against direct lending by the central bank to the government, however, remains in force. The money power is still with the FOMC and the banks.

A Model We Can No Longer Afford

Today, the debt-growth model has reached its limits, as even the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ bank” in Switzerland, acknowledges. In its June 2016 annual report, the BIS said that debt levels were too high, productivity growth was too low, and the room for policy maneuver was too narrow. “The global economy cannot afford to rely any longer on the debt-fueled growth model that has brought it to the current juncture,” the BIS warned.

But the solutions it proposed would continue the austerity policies long imposed on countries that cannot pay their debts. It prescribed “prudential, fiscal and, above all, structural policies” — “structural readjustment.” That means privatizing public assets, slashing services, and raising taxes, choking off the very productivity needed to pay the nations’ debts. That approach has repeatedly been tried and has failed, as witnessed for example in the devastated economy of Greece.

Meanwhile, according to Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari, financial regulation since 2008 has reduced the chances of another government bailout only modestly, from 84 percent to 67 percent. That means there is still a 67 percent chance of another major systemwide crisis, and this one could be worse than the last. The biggest banks are bigger, local banks are fewer, and global debt levels are higher. The economy has farther to fall. The regulators’ models are obsolete, aimed at a form of “old-fashioned banking” that has long since been abandoned.

We need a new model, one designed to serve the needs of the public and the economy rather than to maximize shareholder profits at public expense.

_____________________

An earlier version of this article was published in Truthout.org. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. Her latest book is Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, published by the Democracy Collaborative. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

The post The Bankers’ “Power Revolution”: How the Government Got Shackled by Debt appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As our democracy hangs in the balance, I hope this book allows many more people to understand why having control over the money supply is central to the idea of democracy, and what we can do to wrest that control from big private banks and put it squarely in the hands of the people.

From the back cover:

Today most of our money is created, not by governments, but by banks when they make loans. This book takes the reader step by step through the sausage factory of modern money creation, explores improvements made possible by advances in digital technology, and proposes upgrades that could transform our outmoded nineteenth century system into one that is democratic, sustainable, and serves the needs of the twenty-first century.

“Banking on the People is a compelling and fast-moving primer on the new monetary revolution by the godmother of the public banking movement now emerging throughout the country. Brown shows how our new understanding of money and its creation, long concealed by bankers and others capturing the benefits for their own purposes, can be turned to support the public in powerful new ways.”

— Gar Alperovitz, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, Co-Founder of The Democracy Collaborative and author of America Beyond Capitalism and other books

“More lucidly that any other expert I know, Ellen Brown shows in Banking on the People how we can break the grip of predatory financialization now extracting value from real peoples’ productive activities all over the world. This book is a must read for those who see the promising future as we seek to widen democracies and transform to a cleaner, greener, shared prosperity.”

— Hazel Henderson, CEO of Ethical Markets Media and author of Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age and other books

“Ellen Brown shows that there is a much better alternative to Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Public banks can safeguard public funds while avoiding the payday loans, redlining, predatory junk-mortgage loans and add-on small-print extras for which the large commercial banks are becoming notorious.”

— Michael Hudson, Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and author of Killing the Host and other books

“Banking on the People offers a tour de force for those activists, NGOs, and academics wanting to understand the forces at play when we talk about the democratization of finance. A must read!”

— Thomas Marois, Senior Lecturer, SOAS University of London, author of States, Banks and Crisis and other publications

EllenBrown.com
PublicBankingInstitute.org

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As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the US and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage.

The 14 page proposal for a Green New Deal submitted to the US House of Representatives by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez does not actually mention Modern Monetary Theory, but that is th it’s e approach currently capturing the attention of the media – and taking most of the heat. The concept is good: abundance can be ours without worrying about taxes or debt, at least until we hit full productive capacity. But the devil is in the details….

MMT advocates say the government does not need to collect taxes before it spends. It actually creates new money in the process of spending it; and there is plenty of room in the economy for public spending before demand outstrips supply, driving up prices.

Critics, however, say this is not true. The government is not allowed to spend before it has the money in its account, and the money must come from tax revenues or bond sales.

In a 2013 treatise called “Modern Monetary Theory 101: A Reply to Critics,” MMT academics actually concede this point. But they write that “these constraints do not change the end result,” and here the argument gets a bit technical. Their reasoning is that “The Fed is the monopoly supplier of CB currency [central bank reserves], Treasury spends by using CB currency, and since the Treasury obtained CB currency by taxing and issuing treasuries, CB currency must be injected before taxes and bond offerings can occur.”

The counterargument, made by American Monetary Institute researchers among others, is that the central bank is not the monopoly supplier of dollars. The vast majority of the dollars circulating in the United States are created, not by the government, but by private banks when they make loans. The Fed accommodates this process by supplying central bank currency (bank reserves) as needed; and this bank-created money can be taxed or borrowed by the Treasury before a single dollar is spent by Congress. The AMI researchers contend, “All bank reserves are originally created by the Fed for banks. Government expenditure merely transfers (previous) bank reserves back to banks.” As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, “federal deficits do not require that the Federal Reserve purchase more government securities; therefore, federal deficits, per se, need not lead to increases in bank reserves or the money supply.”

What federal deficits do increase is the federal debt;  and while the debt itself can be rolled over from year to year (as it virtually always is), the exponentially growing interest tab is one of those mandatory budget items that taxpayers must pay. Predictions are that in the next decade, interest alone could add $1 trillion to the annual bill, an unsustainable tax burden.

To fund a project as massive as the Green New Deal, we need a mechanism that involves neither raising taxes nor adding to the federal debt; and such a mechanism is actually proposed in the US Green New Deal – a network of public banks. While little discussed in the US media, that alternative is being debated in Europe, where Green New Deal proposals have been on the table since 2008. European economists have had more time to think these initiatives through, and they are less hampered by labels like “socialist” and “capitalist,” which have long been integrated into their multiparty systems.

A Decade of Gestation in Europe

The first Green New Deal proposal was published in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation on behalf of the Green New Deal Group in the UK. The latest debate is between proponents of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), led by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, and French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling Capital in the 21^st Century. Piketty recommends funding a European Green New Deal by raising taxes, while Varoufakis favors a system of public green banks.

Varoufakis explains that Europe needs a new source of investment money that does not involve higher taxes or government deficits. DiEM25 proposes for this purpose “an investment-led recovery, or New Deal, program … to be financed via public bonds issued by Europe’s public investment banks (e.g. the new investment vehicle foreshadowed in countries like Britain, the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund in the European Union, etc.).” To ensure that these bonds do not lose their value, the central banks would stand ready to buy them above a certain yield. “In summary, DiEM25 is proposing a re-calibrated real-green investment version of Quantitative Easing that utilises the central bank.

Public development banks already have a successful track record in Europe, and their debts are not considered debts of the government. They are financed not through taxes but by the borrowers when they repay the loans. Like other banks, development banks are moneymaking institutions that not only don’t cost the government money but actually generate a profit for it. DiEM25 collaborator Stuart Holland observes:

While Piketty is concerned to highlight differences between his proposals and those for a Green New Deal, the real difference between them is that his—however well-intentioned—are a wish list for a new treaty, a new institution and taxation of wealth and income. A Green New Deal needs neither treaty revisions nor new institutions and would generate both income and direct and indirect taxation from a recovery of employment. It is grounded in the precedent of the success of the bond-funded, Roosevelt New Deal which, from 1933 to 1941, reduced unemployment from over a fifth to less than a tenth, with an average annual fiscal deficit of only 3 per cent.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was largely funded through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a public financial institution set up earlier by President Hoover. Its funding source was the sale of bonds, but proceeds from the loans repaid the bonds, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms, and much more; and it funded all this while generating income for the government.

A System of Public Banks and “Green QE”

The US Green New Deal envisions funding with “a combination of the Federal Reserve [and] a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks,” which could include banks owned locally by cities and states. As Sylvia Chi, chair of the legislative committee of the California Public Banking Alliance, explains on Medium.com:

The Green New Deal relies on a network of public banks — like a decentralized version of the RFC — as part of the plan to help finance the contemplated public investments. This approach has worked in Germany, where public banks have been integral in financing renewable energy installations and energy efficiency retrofits.

Local or regional public banks, says Chi, could help pay for the Green New Deal by making “low-interest loans for building and upgrading infrastructure, deploying clean energy resources, transforming our food and transportation systems to be more sustainable and accessible, and other projects. The federal government can help by, for example, capitalizing public banks, setting environmental or social responsibility standards for loan programs, or tying tax incentives to participating in public bank loans.”

UK professor Richard Murphy adds another role for the central bank – as the issuer of new money in the form of  “Green Infrastructure Quantitative Easing.” Murphy, who was a member of the original 2008 UK Green New Deal Group, explains:

All QE works by the [central bank] buying debt issued by the government or other bodies using money that it, quite literally, creates out of thin air. … [T]his money creation process is … what happens every time a bank makes a loan. All that is unusual is that we are suggesting that the funds created by the [central bank] using this process be used to buy back debt that is due by the government in one of its many forms, meaning that it is effectively canceled.

The invariable objection to that solution is that it would act as an inflationary force driving up prices, but as argued in my earlier article here, this need not be the case. There is a chronic gap between debt and the money available to repay it that actually needs to be filled with new money every year to avoid a “balance sheet recession.” As UK Prof. Mary Mellor formulates the problem in Debt or Democracy (2016), page 42:

A major contradiction of tying money supply to debt is that the creators of the money always want more money back than they have issued. Debt-based money must be continually repaid with interest. As money is continually being repaid, new debt must be being generated if the money supply is to be maintained.… This builds a growth dynamic into the money supply that would frustrate the aims of those who seek to achieve a more socially and ecologically sustainable economy.

In addition to interest, says Mellor, there is the problem that bankers and other rich people generally do not return their profits to local economies. Unlike public banks, which must use their profits for local needs, the wealthy hoard their money, invest it in the speculative markets, hide it in offshore tax havens, or send it abroad.

To avoid the cyclical booms and busts that have routinely devastated the US economy, this missing money needs to be replaced; and if the new money is used to pay down debt, it will be extinguished along with the debt, leaving the overall money supply and the inflation rate unchanged. If too much money is added to the economy, it can always be taxed back; but as MMTers note, we are a long way from the full productive capacity that would “overheat” the economy today.

Murphy writes of his Green QE proposal:

The QE program that was put in place between 2009 and 2012 had just one central purpose, which was to refinance the City of London and its banks.… What we are suggesting is a smaller programme … to kickstart the UK economy by investing in all those things that we would wish our children to inherit whilst creating the opportunities for everyone in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK to undertake meaningful and appropriately paid work.

A network of public banks including a central bank operated as a public utility could similarly fund a US Green New Deal – without raising taxes, driving up the federal debt, or inflating prices.

­­­­­­­­­­_______

This article was first published under a different title on Truthdig.com. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. A 13^th book titled Banking on the People: Democratizing Finance in the Digital Age is due out soon. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

The post Monetary Policy Takes Center Stage: MMT, QE or Public Banks? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is getting significant media attention these days, after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview that it should “be a larger part of our conversation” when it comes to funding the Green New Deal. According to MMT, the government can spend what it needs without worrying about deficits. MMT expert and Bernie Sanders advisor Prof. Stephanie Kelton says the government actually creates money when it spends. The real limit on spending is not an artificially imposed debt ceiling but a lack of labor and materials to do the work, leading to generalized price inflation. Only when that real ceiling is hit does the money need to be taxed back, and then not to fund government spending but to shrink the money supply in an economy that has run out of resources to put the extra money to work.

Predictably, critics have been quick to rebut, calling the trend to endorse MMT “disturbing” and “a joke that’s not funny.” In a February 1^st post on The Daily Reckoning, Brian Maher darkly envisioned Bernie Sanders getting elected in 2020 and implementing “Quantitative Easing for the People” based on MMT theories. To debunk the notion that governments can just “print the money” to solve their economic problems, he raise the specter of Venezuela, where “money” is everywhere but bare essentials are out of reach for many, the storefronts are empty, unemployment is at 33%, and inflation is predicted to hit 1,000,000% by the end of the year.

Blogger Arnold Kling also pointed to the Venezuelan hyperinflation. He described MMT as “the doctrine that because the government prints money, it can spend whatever it wants . . . until it can’t.” He said:

To me, the hyperinflation in Venezuela exemplifies what happens when a country reaches the “it can’t” point. The country is not at full employment. But the government can’t seem to spend its way out of difficulty. Somebody should ask these MMT rock stars about the Venezuela example.

I’m not an MMT rock star and won’t try to expound on its subtleties. (I would submit that under existing regulations, the government cannot actually create money when it spends, but that it should be able to. In fact MMTers have acknowledged that problem; but it’s a subject for another article.) What I want to address here is the hyperinflation issue, and why Venezuelan hyperinflation and “QE for the People” are completely different animals.

What Is Different About Venezuela

Venezuela’s problems are not the result of the government issuing money and using it to hire people to build infrastructure, provide essential services and expand economic development. If it were, unemployment would not be at 33 percent and climbing. Venezuela has a problem that the US does not have and will never have: it owes massive debts in a currency it cannot print itself, namely US dollars. When oil (its principal resource) was booming, Venezuela was able to meet its repayment schedule. But when oil plummeted, the government was reduced to printing Venezuelan Bolivars and selling them for US dollars on international currency exchanges. As speculators drove up the price of dollars, more and more printing was required by the government, massively deflating the national currency.

It was the same problem suffered by Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe, the two classic examples of hyperinflation typically raised to silence proponents of government expansion of the money supply before Venezuela suffered the same fate. Prof. Michael Hudson, an economic rock star who supports MMT principles, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He confirms that those disasters were not due to governments issuing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, he writes, “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.”

Venezuela and other countries that are carrying massive debts in currencies that are not their own are not sovereign. Governments that are sovereign can and have engaged in issuing their own currencies for infrastructure and development quite successfully. A number of contemporary and historical examples were discussed in my earlier articles, including in Japan, China, Australia, and Canada.

Although Venezuela is not technically at war, it is suffering from foreign currency strains triggered by aggressive attacks by a foreign power. US economic sanctions have been going on for years, causing at least $20 billion in losses to the country. About $7 billion of its assets are now being held hostage by the US, which has waged an undeclared war against Venezuela ever since George W. Bush’s failed military coup against President Hugo Chavez in 2002. Chavez boldly announced the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a series of economic and social reforms that dramatically reduced poverty and illiteracy and improved health and living conditions for millions of Venezuelans. The reforms, which included nationalizing key components of the nation’s economy, made Chavez a hero to millions of people and the enemy of Venezuela’s oligarchs.

Nicolas Maduro was elected president following Chavez’s death in 2013 and vowed to continue the Bolivarian Revolution. Like Saddam Hussein and Omar Qaddafi before him, he defiantly announced that Venezuela would not be trading oil in US dollars, following sanctions imposed by President Trump.

The notorious Elliott Abrams has now been appointed as special envoy to Venezuela. Considered a criminal by many for covering up massacres committed by US-backed death squads in Central America, Abrams was among the prominent neocons closely linked to Bush’s failed Venezuelan coup in 2002. National Security Advisor John Bolton is another key neocon architect advocating regime change in Venezuela. At a January 28 press conference, he held a yellow legal pad prominently displaying the words “5,000 troops to Colombia,” a country that shares a border with Venezuela. Apparently the neocon contingent feels they have unfinished business there.

Bolton does not even pretend that it’s all about restoring “democracy.” He said on Fox News, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.” As President Nixon said of US tactics against Allende’s government in Chile, the point of sanctions and military threats is to squeeze the country economically.

Killing the Public Banking Revolution in Venezuela

It may be about more than oil, which recently hit record lows in the market. The US hardly needs to invade a country to replenish its supplies. As with Libya and Iraq, another motive may be to suppress the banking revolution initiated by Venezuela’s upstart leaders.

The banking crisis of 2009-10 exposed the corruption and systemic weakness of Venezuelan banks. Some banks were engaged in questionable business practices.  Others were seriously undercapitalized.  Others were apparently lending top executives large sums of money.  At least one financier could not prove where he got the money to buy the banks he owned.

Rather than bailing out the culprits, as was done in the US, in 2009 the government nationalized seven Venezuelan banks, accounting for around 12% of the nation’s bank deposits.  In 2010, more were taken over.  The government arrested at least 16 bankers and issued more than 40 corruption-related arrest warrants for others who had fled the country. By the end of March 2011, only 37 banks were left, down from 59 at the end of November 2009.  State-owned institutions took a larger role, holding 35% of assets as of March 2011, while foreign institutions held just 13.2% of assets.

Over the howls of the media, in 2010 Chavez took the bold step of passing legislation defining the banking industry as one of “public service.”  The legislation specified that 5% of the banks’ net profits must go towards funding community council projects, designed and implemented by communities for the benefit of communities. The Venezuelan government directed the allocation of bank credit to preferred sectors of the economy, and it increasingly became involved in the operations of private financial institutions.  By law, nearly half the lending portfolios of Venezuelan banks had to be directed to particular mandated sectors of the economy, including small business and agriculture.

In an April 2012 article called “Venezuela Increases Banks’ Obligatory Social Contributions, U.S. and Europe Do Not,” Rachael Boothroyd said that the Venezuelan government was requiring the banks to give back. Housing was declared a constitutional right, and Venezuelan banks were obliged to contribute 15% of their yearly earnings to securing it. The government’s Great Housing Mission aimed to build 2.7 million free houses for low-income families before 2019. The goal was to create a social banking system that contributed to the development of society rather than simply siphoning off its wealth.  Boothroyd wrote:

. . . Venezuelans are in the fortunate position of having a national government which prioritizes their life quality, wellbeing and development over the health of bankers’ and lobbyists’ pay checks.  If the 2009 financial crisis demonstrated anything, it was that capitalism is quite simply incapable of regulating itself, and that is precisely where progressive governments and progressive government legislation needs to step in.

That is also where the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is stepping in in the US – and why AOC’s proposals evoke howls in the media of the sort seen in Venezuela.

Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to create the nation’s money supply. Congress needs to exercise that power. Key to restoring our economic sovereignty is to reclaim the power to issue money from a commercial banking system that acknowledges no public responsibility beyond maximizing profits for its shareholders. Bank-created money is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, including federal deposit insurance, access to the Fed’s lending window, and government bailouts when things go wrong. If we the people are backing the currency, it should be issued by the people through their representative government. Today, however, our government does not adequately represent the people. We first need to take our government back, and that is what AOC and her congressional allies are attempting to do.

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This article was first published on Truthdig.com. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. A 13^th book titled Banking on the People: Democratizing Finance in the Digital Age is due out soon. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

Photo by ®Dave

The post The Venezuela Myth Keeping Us From Transforming Our Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Since the 2008 global financial meltdown and bailouts, trust is disappearing: in banks, stock markets, corporations, governments, religious institutions, experts, academia, political parties’ rhetoric and even the Internet and social media. This mistrust has fueled global populists across the political spectrum, with ubiquitous signs at their rallies, “Where’s MY Bailout?”  We see the rise of cryptocurrencies becoming bubbles, as many seek alternative stores of value and mediums of exchange they hope will prove more trustworthy than central banks’ fiat currencies: dollars, yen, euros, pounds, pesos backed only by their governments’ promises.

Trust is a precious commodity which undergirds all humanity’s markets, trading and exchange. Trust does not scale easily, abiding in face-to-face, handshake interactions in humanly-scaled communities, based on common agreements, shared infrastructure, resources and culture. Trust does not reside in packages of software, apps, AI, big data or social media platforms, as we learned in 2016. So trust was sought in the blockchain platforms first developed by the mysterious computer expert, Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 for his bitcoin. Now, over 1000 blockchain-based start-up companies and blockchains underlie the over 1,500 cryptocurrencies traded on electronic exchanges including Coinbase. These computer-based distributed ledger blockchains are designed to engender trust by allowing person-to-person ability to verify each transaction or contract with a permanent record open to all.

Crypto promoters aspire to create global-level trust in the value of cryptocurrencies due to this transparency and their protocols limiting finite amounts to be issued, to create artificial scarcity. This vision is sullied by the many cases of criminality, hacking, stealing, frauds and other shenanigans. Nevertheless, faith and trust in these cryptos remains strong, since proponents say central banks also manipulate their fiats — which is true!  We see fiat money being printed on TV shows! Yet fake visuals of cryptos, such as the shiny golden colored coins are also shown with news about bitcoin. This is a “bit-con” since bitcoin is a digital algorithm, a string of computer code which is unlikely to become a ubiquitous medium of exchange or a store of value.

Still, the allure to libertarians, hackers and speculators is that cryptos exist with no middleman, for peer-to-peer global private use with no governments, no banks or financial intermediaries and few outside rules except those imposed by issuers. Millions of hackers worldwide soon began solving the ever more complex mathematical puzzles needed to claim their next block of newly minted bitcoin. These “miners” now use some 30 terawatts annually of fossil-generated electricity, equivalent to the consumption of a country the size of Ireland, plus gobs of computer power. They are now affecting the Earth’s climate as I described in “Hey COP23: Bitcoin Miners Exploding CO2 Emissions!”

The loss of trust in fiat dollars, pounds, yen, euros, pesos we always use to pay each other cannot be replaced by cryptos—in spite of the current hype, as traditional financial markets now trade bitcoin futures and ETFs concocted by eager Wall Street players.  Nations including Russia, North Korea and Venezuela under international sanctions for violating norms, are now issuing their own cryptos to escape financial controls set by governments for fiat currency transactions. How will this war between governments and libertarian hackers’ cryptos versus fiats work out?

Clearly, trust in all forms of money is fading. Today, people barter more goods and services on electronic platforms, swap and match, often directly without any use of currencies on platforms like Freecycle, and for everything from baby-sitting, sharing garden tools, spare rooms, vacation homes to finding their true love matches! The familiar fiat currencies we still spend our lives earning, investing and saving for our retirement are losing their dominance in our lives and with that their role as a promised store of value. For example, few fiat currencies remain stable, as we see on FOREX trading screens daily. Even our US dollar has lost about 80% of its value over the past 30 years— due to inflation, budget deficits, interest payments to bond-holders on our national debt, which recent tax cuts may increase by another $1.5 trillion.

Most US and European citizens register disbelief when they learn that all their national money in circulation is created out of thin air by private banks when they create loans and is therefore only backed by other peoples’ debts, not gold or any other commodity of value! Governments in Britain, the USA and most countries gave their sovereign power to coin their own national money away to their private banks and allowed them to charge interest on their loans as well, as Ellen Brown explains in “Web of Debt”, (2010). Our TV Special “The Money Fix” details on how this happened in the USA with founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and the rise of local currencies, barter and credit circles.

Governments’ policies became ever more erratic, swinging between obsolete textbook policy prescriptions: either “stimulation “(quantitative easing QE, i.e. money-printing, tax cuts, lowering interest rates, buying dud mortgage-backed securities) or “austerity “(cutting safety nets, education, healthcare, public services, selling off public assets) while continuing to bail out too-big-to-fail firms without prosecuting their reckless executives. Ethical Markets dissects such obsolete economic policies and offers more realistic alternatives (www.ethicalmarkets.com).

Today, failing policy levers are being bypassed by the rise of cryptos, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, electronic barter, information-based direct trading I describe in “FINTECH: Good and Bad News for Sustainable Finance”.  They reveal the stunning truth: Money Is Not Wealth and worse, it is no longer a reliable store of value!  All those dollars we pinched to save for our retirement are losing their value until we use them to buy something useful, and shift our investing from obsolete, polluting, unsustainable corporations into trustworthy, sustainable, well-managed and transparent enterprises so we can monitor their performance and social impacts ourselves.

As the shock of this reality sets in, it reveals how most financial market players try to make money out of money, trading stocks with each other which are tradeable contracts issued by big companies as explained by law professor Lynn Stout in “The Shareholder Value Myth”, (2012). The latest Wall Street bubbles are index-based stocks and ETFs, reaching additional levels of abstraction. I first unraveled these truths in “Creating Alternative Futures” (1978,1996) and “The Politics of the Solar Age” (1981,1986). I described the essential unpaid tasks underpinning the cash-based sectors measured in GDP and incomes of mostly male “breadwinners”. Textbooks designated their wives to perform all the work of maintaining households, raising the next generation, caring for elders, volunteering in community service —all unpaid, as in this diagram (Cake). Economic textbooks described all this vital productive work I called the Love Economy as “non-economic”!

Feminists emerged worldwide to insist this work be recorded and paid, as in Marilyn Waring’s “If Women Counted” (1990); lawyer Riane Eisler’s Caring Economy campaign and Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics” (2017). I documented how thousands of communities around the world starved by their central governments of fiat currencies by austerity programs, simply created their own local currencies, like the famous “Berkshares” issued by the Schumacher Society and circulated, even by local banks in Great Barrington, MA. These townsfolk realized that using their own local currencies and credit could clear their local markets and employ their people meeting local needs. Photographs of thousands of such local currencies issued all over North America and Mexico are catalogued in, “Depression Scrip of the United States 1930” (1961). They taught a key lesson: money cannot be a store of value –it must circulate in the community in order to meet needs and create jobs and prosperity. To assure these currencies were not saved, but spent, they all carried expiration dates and require stamps to re-validate them regularly affixed until they finally expired.

So this myth of money as a store of value is now threadbare. Electronic platforms open up new possibilities for direct barter, with all the fintech exchanges now disrupting traditional finance and banking. These innovations offer hope that both cryptos and fiats may eventually be properly managed and regulated in the service of decentralized prosperity and focus on the new model; the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) now ratified by 195 governments. Accountants are renovating their models for information-based economies  where services account for some 80% of production: from unpaid voluntary work to intellectual property, R &D, design, brands, networks, “infostructure” (broadband, internet) and institutions, described in “Capitalism Without Capital” (2018). The International Integrated Reporting System (IIRC) models six forms of capital: finance, built facilities, intellectual, social, human and natural capitals, which then measure the extent to which companies and governments enhance or degrade all six forms. This accounting revolution also from the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB); the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants www.cimaglobal.com, (ICAEW) finally discloses and internalizes all those “externalities” into companies’ balance sheets and provides full spectrum accounting— beyond money as the single metric. Honest money: currencies fully backed 100% for example, by kilowatt hours of renewable electricity, productive assets and services can continue to be useful as mediums of exchange. Expert Shann Turnbull in “Is A Stable Financial System Possible”, shows why currencies cannot be a predictable store of value, i.e. money is not wealth.

Cross-posted with permission from Ethical Markets.

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