An early solo broadcast in which Pinchbeck responds to "Print Less but Transfer More," the Foreign Affairs article by Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan arguing that central banks should hand cash directly to households, targeted at the bottom 80 percent of earners, instead of relying on asset purchases and interest rate adjustments. Pinchbeck treats the proposal as a sign that the monetary system is a design artifact open to redesign rather than a natural fact, and reviews alternatives he has worked on as an editor and filmmaker: Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics, the Evolver anthology What Comes After Money?, Bernard Lietaer's The Future of Money, Japan's fureai kippu eldercare credits, Thomas Greco's mutual credit and local exchange systems, and John Boik's community currency modeling. He ends on Bitcoin and distributed autonomous organizations.
In brief
- Pinchbeck reads the Foreign Affairs proposal for direct cash transfers to households as a notable radical turn for an establishment publication, while doubting it will be adopted.
- He argues that the current currency is debt-based and interest-bearing by design, and that this design, not any natural law, produces its competitive and extractive behavior.
- Citing Bernard Lietaer, he contrasts the dominant competitive currency with historical community currencies, and points to Lietaer's proposed global trade currency carrying a demurrage charge that penalizes hoarding.
- He argues that accounting has to be brought back into alignment with the Earth's ecosystems, and that nobody currently knows how to do this, which would require a global redesign effort.
- He cites Thomas Greco's model of local businesses issuing their own credit and John Boik's modeling of community-issued currencies that level out household income over one to three decades.
- Pinchbeck describes Bitcoin as arguably the first fully distributed autonomous organization, with no CEO or hierarchy, and a base layer on which new cooperative structures can be built.
Full text
folks uh welcome to my second You Tube stream inspired by Russell Brand the TRS uh I'm curious I'd love to come up with a name for this uh so if you have any ideas for names let me know uh today I wanted to talk a little bit about uh money uh inspired by a really extraordinary new article in foreign affairs uh in the September October 2014 issue called print less but transfer more by Mark blly and lonan essentially what this uh what this article kind of suggests is that the Central Bank um should essentially print money and give it out to Consumers to people uh across the economic spectrum uh as a way to address the sort of global stagnation in the economy uh they write rather than trying to Spur private sector spending through asset purchases or inst interest rate changes central banks such as the FED should hand consumers cash directly in practice this policy could take the form of giving central banks the ability to hand their countries taxpaying households a certain amount of money the government could distribute cash equally to all households or even better aim for the bottom 80% of households in terms of income targeting those who earn the lease would have two primary benefits for one thing lower income households are more prone to consumes they would provide a greater boost to spending for another the policy would offset Rising income inequality such an approach would represent the first significant innovation in monetary policy since the Inception of Central Banking it would not be a radical departure from the status quo most citizens already trust their central banks to manipulate interest rates and rate changes are just as redistributive as cash transfers when interest rates go down for example those borrowing at adjustable rates end up benefiting whereas those who save and thus depend more an interest income lose out so I mean Foreign Affairs you know was generally considered one of the organs of the you know kind of establishment relatively conservative uh I think it's quite extraordinary that at this point in time they're proposing such a radical solution and I mean it doesn't seem one that's likely to be uh adapted uh in my work over the last years I've done a lot of uh thinking around um kind of the money system uh I edited an extraordinary book uh sacred economics by Charles eisenstein which is uh free online uh we also uh through evolver editions put out an anthology what comes after money which was looking at alternatives to the present monetary system uh recently I've been inspired by John bo uh his work with um uh the Local Economic uh direct democracy uh Association model uh and I'm a big fan of Bernard leotar who wrote a book called the future of money and Tom Greco's book the end of money and the future of civilization I think that we have have to recognize that the current monetary system is a major problem and this is a very interesting uh kind of proposal by from foreign affairs to address it in such a direct way uh but um you know really the problem is that we have to bring our accounting back in alignment with the Earth's ecosystems and I don't think anybody really knows how to do this at this point I think it would actually require some type of uh Global conference that that that you know would have to begin with the realization that um the monetary system is is a design artifact you know and and requires a redesign uh that's what really fascinated me about for for instance Bernard lear's uh work in the future of money he analyzed the whole history of currencies and noted that AR that that our currency was designed because it was um you know debt-based and interest ACR it's a currency that has only a kind of masculine competitive values inscribed in it he described it as a Yang currency but he noted that throughout history you also found y currencies Community currencies that you find in places like Bali and so on in my uh documentary 2012 time for change we talked about um a Japanese currency called the fuo kipo a caring relationship ticket which is particularly used that you do you take care of an old person in your neighborhood and you get you get a credit for that and then maybe one of your family members or children gets taken care of and that's been uh a very powerful tool in Japan uh so yeah so you know essentially we need to see a bunch of Innovations in terms of uh currencies local currencies um and even Global currencies I one of Bernard lear's idea is to have a currency called the Tera which would be a global uh trading currency with a negative interest charge what he calls a demarrage charge and the advantage of that is that you would have no uh interest in hoarding such a currency if you happen to have a surplus of it you would want to share it as quickly as possible uh Tom Greco and the end of money in the future of civilization suggests that businesses manufacturers service providers ERS in various localities could come together and create their own form of credit uh through what he talks about as uh local uh economic exchange trading uh systems uh local something like that uh lets uh and um yeah and they could interest zero interest loans to local businesses um John Bo and the participatory democracy kind of project he's doing is looking at uh Community currencies where you create Community Association who issue their own currencies and that these um these local currencies have more and more positive impacts over time and they tend to level out income over 10 or 20 years he's he's they've been doing a sophisticated modeling around this would lead to a situation where every household had roughly 100,000 income in 20 or 30 years so there are a lot of interesting uh proposals out there uh you know the question is what would it take to actually make them scale up and um obviously another you know major kind of development has been Bitcoin uh and I think uh you know Mark Andre who's relatively conservative uh investor you know U internet Pioneer uh noted that um Bitcoin could potentially be as important a kind of um development ultimately as the internet itself in that Bitcoin allows for a secure uh transparent peer-to-peer exchanges um that don't require mediation of central banks and now on top of Bitcoin there are a number of companies that are that are seeking organizations that are seeking to innovate and develop ways that you can use the blockchain architecture of Bitcoin to build new forms of cooperatives um new forms of companies uh that would be uh distributed and autonomous so in a way you could look at Bitcoin itself as the first uh fully distributed and autonomous Corporation there's no hierarchy there's no CEO everybody who has a Bitcoin uh you know owns a share in in in Bitcoin itself as a distributed autonomous uh organization so anyway that's that's pretty much all I wanted to talk about today that um you know we can see that uh you know as this Foreign Affairs uh article lays be and as Thomas P's recent book has discussed economic inequality has gone haywire and it's leading to all sorts of negative uh social impacts now the problem is that you know giving out money is an interesting idea but we don't really want to encourage uh scaling up of consumption and production of more consumer goods uh change in the monetary system you know considering the ecological crisis and the resource depletion crisis and species Extinction and so on a change in the monetary system has to be somehow devised or designed so that it leads more to kind of a a sharing Cooperative uh infrastructure where uh communities are working together to actually uh produce more locally reduce the burden on the environment protect Wilderness corridors protect watersheds and so on uh so hopefully we'll see uh a model like this emerge in the next few years thank you so much for uh listening to me today on my second You Tube uh broadcast inspired by Russells the TRS uh look forward to talking to you soon
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.