25 signatures reached
To: Jeremy Corbyn and Mark Carney, Bank of England and Monetary Policy Committee
Ask the government to set up a Commission to Consider an Alternative Monetary System
This Commission would look at the case for Monetary Reform, in particular, asking: “What is money?”, “Where does it come from?”, “How is it created?” and “By whom is the quantity of money controlled”? These questions form the basis of the Monetary System within which economics in all its detail proceeds. A monetary system can be distinguished from the details of economic theory and practice that examines how money circulates, and what it does within the system.
According to the Bank of England, around 97% of all money in the UK economy is created in the form of bank deposits, created when banks make loans. Thus banks are afforded the extraordinary privilege of both creating and allocating money, a position that has been underwritten by taxpayers since the financial crisis. Bank profits are privatised but losses are socialised. These are inevitable effects of the current monetary system and the mindset that remains unaware of viable alternatives.
This petition asks that the monetary system and alternatives to it are considered, looking in particular at how money is created, who should be responsible for creating it, and how it should be introduced into the economy.
Why is this important?
The current monetary system, now world-wide, grew from history, the interactions of people, companies and nation states. It contains an unsustainable effect, a flaw, as money needed for circulation is created as debt to be repaid with interest. Thus there is a charge against future production, requiring continued increase in production, and somewhere bankruptcy and/or exploitation occurs, such the cycles of boom and bust and rampant inequality that have been shown to be ever more severe. This system is not only unsustainable, it is destructive. Monetary system reform seeks specifically to consider the way that money is created, who creates it and how it gets into the economy.
There are viable alternative systems* that would democratise money and enable a more optimally functioning economy, responsive to productivity and need.
Economists, and banks, including the Bank of England, recognize that “money” is not a thing in itself, it is a symbol of an agreed value for goods, services, work performed, things needed or wanted. Most economic theories are about “what money does”, how it can be used and transferred, how quickly does it circulate, what kinds of uses and modes of transfer will produce what results for investment and returns in the future, and for which sectors of society. Economists, knowing that money is a symbol, seldom address “What money is?” nor “Where does it come from?” nor “How is it created?” These unaddressed questions lie within a social and economic history that have produced the Monetary System, within which economics is applied. As these decisions are at present taken by banks, it is the banking corporations that direct significant distributional socioeconomic effects, mortgage lending being favoured over small business loans being one of the most obvious. We might say: we can’t eat bricks, but a bank loan does not make judgments of social value. It is therefore right and just that banks should be subject to democratic scrutiny, just as any corporation is subject.
Banks are private and unelected corporate entities, offering to society a money management service. When this service is seen as different from “money creation”, perception of the system as a whole can change. Banks are corporations who have been given this privilege, and part of the privilege is that over time the repayment of interest brings money out of the productive economy and into the wealth of the bank. It also ensures that debt is always greater than the money supply, and further, that debt will increase faster than the money supply.
The economy in each nation state, and indeed the world economy, affecting the lives of everyone on it and even the nature of the planet itself, can run on a reformed system. For all our goods and services, we could create a “Monetary System” that is sustainable and fit for purpose, first within our own nation, then by interactive co-operation we would affect others.
“Once a nation parts with control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation’s laws, Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.” – William Lyon Mackenzie King, prime minister of Canada, August 2, 1935 (quote courtesy of Canadian Monetary Reform News)
This petition asks that an enquiry into the monetary system and alternatives to it be set up, in order to create an Equitable Monetary System in which money creation is democratised.
A ‘wealth’ of further information from:
• http://positivemoney.org/
• http://www.neweconomics.org
• http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q101.pdf
