Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
By understanding that money is simply credit, we unleash it as a powerful tool for our communities. The reason our financial system has routinely gotten into trouble, with periodic waves of depression like the one we’re battling now, may be due to a flawed perception not just of the roles of banking and credit but of the nature of money itself.
Want to encourage the local economy? Try printing your own regional money.
– The Money Fix – documentary now online
– Tim Jackson’s Economic Reality Check
– Currency wars are necessary if all else fails
A new book by longtime bioregionalist Stephanie Mills tells the story of one of our forerunners in relocalization’s long history. Bob Swann may be the most important pioneer for a just world whom you’ve never heard of. He worked tirelessly over a long life to bring together practical structures for economic justice, land reform, rural investment and credit, complementary currencies, and education.
The sort of conundrums which the barter market produced helped us unmask some of the hidden dynamics of markets, in particular how we measure value.
While North gives a good overview of the most sophisticated portions of the local-finance spectrum, he is writing about local money, not community finances in general. The scope of his book does not include the low-hanging-fruit — the easy to set up, free to establish vehicles which hold enormous community-building potential. Group purchasing, garden sharing, carpooling, tool libraries, seed swaps, barter fairs and more – these fill in the most intimate, colorful portion of the spectrum in the vision of a multifaceted local financial infrastructure.
My suggestion is that we combine the ID concept with the concept of a local currency. You could title this either a “merchant credit system” or a local, virtual, Alternative Currency for Oakland Residents and Neighbors (ACORN). The United States has a rich history of local currencies. There are local currencies in Ithaca (N.Y.), Berkshire (Mass.), Humboldt (CA.), Lawrence (Kansas), Floyd (Virginia), Calgary (Canada), and many more places in this country and around the world.
The “big boys” use currency trading not only to hedge against inflation and trade fluctuations but also to amass assets; a local currency would make some of those options available to the City of Oakland and the “little guy.” An additional important benefit is to keep more resources within the micro-economy of the City.
Peter North’s book is a clear and deeply researched practical guide for you to get started, laying out of some of the tools that increased economic localisation will need. He brings to this project many years of insight and observation of local currencies around the world.
– The Pentagon also expects an imminent oil shock
– Peak oil man [Colin Campbell] shifts focus to peak price, demand
– DECC start to ‘get’ peak oil… or maybe not
– Saudi Arabia’s crucial role in the crude price outlook
I was invited earlier this month to speak on the future of payments at the Digital Money Forum in London, now in its thirteenth year and as provocative as ever. Of course, it’s a future that’s increasingly bound up with technology. My version is based on the work that’s been done by the historian of economics and technology, Carlota Perez (which I’ve blogged about elsewhere, at length) on long technology cycles.
“as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold”
Randy Udall, Dr. Robert Costanza, Albert Bates, Richard Douthwaite, Stephanie Mills, Michael Brownlee, Megan Quinn Bachman, and Thomas Greco tackle peak oil, climate change, and monetary collapse at the Conference on Michigan’s Future: Energy, Economy and Environment 2009.
