 Dwi'n dechrau i'r ysgwrdd sy'n meddwl i gael gyllidol o'r bod ddiddorol Wallach yn unig o fawr. A bydd hynny'n ei sylwedd ar gyfer yau Yn Ymgylcheddau Ymgylcheddal, yn ymgylchedd i'r ddweud a rawr o'r ysgwrdd i'r ffwrdd yn ei wneud. Naj algorithmwyd wedi ei cwmplo'r politithoseau ar y dyfodol gyda rhoi chi'n rhaid o'i Stark hopecadol o'r bwysig a Llyfrgell Gwyrddol, ond mae'n unrhyw bwysig a'r bwysig ond yw. Gallwch am gweithio'n cymhwyno, sefydlu'r cyfwyr yn dweud yn gweithio newydd o'r 18 miliwn pwnnig yn cofio'r cyfan sy'n cyfwyr cyfan ymgylchedd Cwrthwynt Cymru. Felly mae gennym ein cyfifloedd o gwych iawn sy'n cyfwyr cyffredig cyfwyr yn cyfwyr, sy'n meddwl i'r cyfwyr ymdweithio'n gweithio ymdweithio'r cyfwyr yn gweithio'r cyfwyr for everyone else. So let's imagine what we could do instead. Our economic recovery from COVID-19 gives us a rare chance to change everything. A Green New Deal, a four-day week, a real living age, universal basic income, a stronger NHS. Today we're going to discuss how we really could build back better by unleashing some of the money and policies that are available to the Government. So a quick introduction on the structure of the next hour. So we've got three fantastic speakers here today. They're each going to give a presentation for about seven minutes each before we then move into an audience Q&A for the second half of the hour. So please do submit questions via the Q&A function you should see at the bottom of your screen. We'll also be monitoring questions on the Facebook live commentsion because we're also live streaming on Facebook right now. So now I'm going to introduce our three speakers. Mae Cohen is co-author of the recent report Towards a Feminist Green New Deal for the UK, which was done for the Women's Environmental Network at Women's Budget Group. She also co-founded the Post Crush Economic Society and is the former director of Rethinking Economics, the international student-led campaign to reform economics education. She is currently campaign manager at Discover Economics, a campaign to diversify economics. Chaitanya Kumar is head of environment and green transition at the New Economics Foundation. He was previously head of climate and energy policy at Green Alliance in the UK and prior to that he was based in New Delhi as the South Asia campaigns leader for 50.org. He holds an MSc in energy policy for the science policy research unit at Sussex University. Finally, Dinesha Khazi is positive money's senior economist, economist. Prior to this she worked as a senior teaching fellow at SOAS lecturing in heterodox economics. She has an MA in development economics and PhD in economics for SOAS university. Welcome to all of our speakers and welcome to everybody who is joining us on this call today. We're really excited to be having this conversation. I'm now going to invite our first speaker Mae to share your presentation. Thank you so much. Yes, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. I'm basically just going to talk about the report that Rachel referred to on her feminist Green New Deal. We were asked to write this before COVID, but it's only become more and more relevant as COVID has unfolded. We were asked to write this paper to contribute to the Women's Budgets Group's commission on a feminist economy. During the general election, as I'm sure you can all remember, and generally since AOC in the US started talking about the Green New Deal, again, there'd been a lot of noise around the Green New Deal. I'm sure that most of you attending know what it is, but just to recap, the Green New Deal was a project with the twin aims of decarbonising the economy and reducing social inequality. It's based around large-scale state and private investment targeted at taking us down to net zero carbon, primarily through the decarbonisation of the large polluting industries of transport, construction and energy. This decarbonisation was to go hand in hand with the reduction of social inequality based primarily around job creation in these new green industries. When writing our paper, Cherylyn, my co-author and I were asking ourselves, great, that all sounds good, but what does this new green economy mean for women? To answer that, we wanted to look at what got us into this mess in the first place. I think environmentalists and ecological economists over the past decades have done a really great job of bringing awareness to the fact that the reason we're in this situation is because our economic system and the economic models that we use don't accurately consider the environment, so the environment is external to the market, it's an externality, the jargon, which means that it's able to treat it as a free resource, as this inexhaustible free resource, and in doing that, we've completely depleted the environment, and that's why we're in this ecological crisis. A sort of less well-known analysis and a less well widely acknowledged truth is that the work done by eco-feminists and feminist economists that another externality is the caring labour done primarily by women, but also primarily by BAME people, by people in the global south, and by people from a lower socioeconomic background. So, this caring labour is also treated as an externality, it's outside of the market, it's treated as this free resource that we can just inexhaustibly use up, and that has meant that we don't only have an ecological crisis, we also have a crisis in care. So, back to the Green New Deal, we wanted to examine whether the Green New Deal plans that had been put forward in the UK reached this goal of social justice when being viewed in this context, and spoiler alert, we found that they didn't. So, care was noticeably absent from each of the plans that we looked at, and each of the industries that they did look at, that they focused on transport, construction and energy, in which this job creation would happen that would get rid of this social inequality, all of these industries are heavily male dominated, so jobs created in these sectors would disproportionately benefit men and could actually contribute to the worsening of gender inequality, and this is the exact opposite of the stated aims of the Green New Deal. So, to remedy this, we recommended that as well as decarbonising these hyperluting sectors, which is obviously super, super important, is absolutely essential that we boost the already low carbon caring and service industries in which female people and their people and low income people are disproportionately represented in the UK. To do this, we need to fundamentally rethink what the economy is for, and to do that it's not enough just to go green. We need to think about who bears the cost of greening the economy. So, if we're all going to go to locally produced organic food, which is totally essential, the food industry emits an insane amount of carbon, I think it's something like 26% of global carbon is from the food, the agriculture industry, but if we're all going to move to organic locally grown food, who is going to prepare that food? It's a lot harder to prepare a meal from scratch, it costs a lot more labour to prepare a meal from scratch than to just bang it in the microwave. Where is that extra labour going to fall? If we move, if we ban single use plastics, that means banning disposable nappies. That means that caring for children is going to have massively more labour. Who is going to do that labour? It's not enough to just go green, we need to think about how we are going to redistribute labour after we have gone green or during the process of going green. So, we need to completely rethink how we do our economics. The new deal, which the Green New Deal was based on at the start of the last century, was all based around the social contract. If you go to the work, you go into the factories and as a result, you will get all of these lovely consumption goods. Go to work and you can have a washing machine, you can have a car, you can have cheap holidays. We can't do this in a green economy. We need to completely rethink the social contract and what we are putting forward in our paper is that that new social contract should be around care. You're not going to go to work and get more stuff. You're actually going to work less, but you are going to be supported. Your loved ones are going to be supported and cared for. You're going to have green spaces that you can enjoy a fuller and richer quality of life. Back to the initial question about the magic money tree and building back there, the magic money tree part of this is that we need the state to release funds. We need the state to invest in the caring industries. We need the state to invest heavily in decarbonisation. The build back better part of it is that we need to recognise that care is a fundamental part of human existence. Every single one of us at some point in our life is dependent on care and we need to be organising our economy around that and that is that. That's all I have to say. Thank you so much Maeve. That was fantastically clear and insightful. We're going to move straight on to Taitanya. Excellent. Thank you so much Rachel. I'm going to try and speak by firstly laying out the context. I want to start off with the PM's speech yesterday. If you saw the PM's speech yesterday, you'd be forgiven for thinking it may have been given 15 years ago. I think the same old stale rhetoric around state versus private sector unleashing the power of markets downplaying the role of the state. Same old sort of labour versus story tropes. If I can be slightly cheeky and the invocation of white men from 200 years ago that nobody knows about, it seems quite typical of the speeches. If I'm trying to be hopeful and I was listening to some of that speech, I'd like to think that he and the Chancellor are just playing to the gallery of the Conservative hardline members and fiscal hawks that are actually, but they're interested quite keen on boring more investing across the economy. But I might be too hopeful there, but nonetheless that option still exists. But if I wasn't trying to read between the lines, one thing was fairly clear in all the speeches we've seen so far coming out of the party conference is the narrative around build back better is pretty much there. We've seen it in speeches, we've seen it in the branding. It's very clear that build back better is a piece of my rhetorical point of view. Very clearly something that this government is quite keen on. Neff and a lot of other groups have started a programme and a campaign back in June under the same headline build back better. And I want to sort of briefly speak to that and sort of key pillars that sit underneath that campaign. It currently has about 350 odd signatories, some of you on this call perhaps already part of that. And the goal is to sort of secure commitments from the government on three things, protecting livelihoods, creating jobs and retraining or reskilling workers. Now the government so far has focused on the protection piece of the last few months but is unwinding the programme which we think will have disastrous consequences. The focus on creation, it does exist but the scale is incredibly poor and what I think it basically amounts to building back better but very slowly. The retraining, reskilling aspect is also there but it doesn't seem to be any sort of cogent plan around it. We've seen the kickstart scheme, we've seen things like the hiring of hundreds of tons of coaches across the country. These are sort of good initiatives but they're quite limiting in the scale that we need really. Central to build back better we also think is the investment agenda. I think that's the sort of crux of the conversation we're trying to have here and one thing that needs to change if you need to achieve that as Neff would like to think about this is the fiscal rules have to change, they have to be modernised for the 21st century. Things like limits to net public spending of 3% of GDP is rather arbitrary especially under current economic conditions. We've seen a lot of countries including the UK, suspend these rules but we're now clawing ourselves back out of that and using language again of like balancing the books and seeing that as a sacred duty and I think that is again quite dangerous. Now you may have seen the headlines on the IMF coming out saying public investment by which nations have to increase. They stated you know sorry my internet is a bit unstable I'll continue hopefully you can still hear me. You get a bigger bank for buck from public investment because investment by private firms is extremely low. We've heard similar statements by the Federal Reserve saying now it's time to invest and a weak recovery can create a necessary hardship for businesses and households across the country. So I think that's where we're at there are sort of three things Neff and partners are trying to focus on again under the agenda of protect, create and reskill. Under protect we're quite keen on talking about the minimum income guarantee something we published early in the year where we're looking at a weekly payment worth 221 pounds per week for any adult who's sort of not in any of the schemes that the government has at this point. We have calculated how much it might cost all of these reports that up on our websites that is something we're quite keen to push. On the create aspect may have already spoke to this point there's a rewritten report basically calling for an investment of about 28 billion pounds or the next sort of 18 months or so that we think could create roughly half a million jobs. Now this isn't energy efficiency, energy networks, broadband things of that nature but of course it can't just be in those sectors and we need to think much more broadly around social infrastructure that can create another report coming out soon that can create we believe an equal number of jobs in the public sector and the final thing around retraining, re-skilling, the way we see it is the job support scheme that was announced a couple of weeks ago needs to have a strong element of retraining and upskilling. If COVID has set in more traditional structural changes to the economy and activity at the firm level then the government has a clear responsibility for a just transition and helping people through it. Now as with most things we've seen the rhetoric around it but the scale of the response again is rather lacking and the final thing to say is we've again produced a piece of analysis just a couple of weeks ago looking at lost working hours in the economy and it tells a very interesting story. What you've seen is places like the east of England has lost a lot more working hours up to about 29% while London saw a drop of only 12% essentially suggesting London saw a smaller scale economic slowdown than the rest of the country so there are massive distributive variations across the country and how not just how COVID is impacting but also the government policy in response to that and how it's actually rolling out there are massive disparities across the country and any approach that's protect, create, reskill approach that we're talking about needs to also look at the distributive aspects of it. So I'll conclude just by saying I think the need for public investment is higher than ever before but the government rhetoric is starting to turn the other way and I think now is the time to really up the ante just when the politics is turning against us and I think the window is sort of closing and the next two months where perhaps people on the stall and others who've been working in this space really need to step up and then push against that closing door and see what we can get otherwise we may go back to sort of boring old approaches to fiscal and monetary policy that clearly got us into the mess in the first place but clearly not get us out of this. That's it, back to you Rachel. Thank you Chetania and that was just bang on seven minutes so brilliant timing and again super interesting and insightful presentation thank you and so now we're going to move to our final speaker Denisha. Hi thanks Rachel and so hello to everyone and and really great contributions by Maeve and Chetania and hopefully mine will sort of complement what they've been saying so I'm going to really talk about what the magic money tree is and how we can use it it's essentially the fact that the state can finance public spending and investment through money creation with a little bit of background I'll be in just sort of setting the scene a bit in the context so after the global financial crisis of 2008 we were told there was no magic money tree and austerity was imposed this basically crippled the recovery placed the burden of the recession on those least able to bear it and also weaken the economy in the event of future crises so that's what we've seen now the dismantling of the social safety net and heavily under resourcing key public services like the NHS and social care so in sharp contrast to that this time what we've seen is unprecedented action by governments and central banks across the world and this has involved creation of large amounts of money to prop up many economies and what I'm going to do is talk about two key points which is how the government can finance spending investment through direct monetary financing which is really what we're talking about and why the government's current response is failing to achieve better social conditions and ensure the burden is shared fairly and this is basically because the current response is centred around pushing the private sector that's firms and households to take on more debt as a way to weather the storm and direct monetary financing can overcome that negative aspect so um we generally accept that government spending is financed by combination of taxes and borrowing but there is a third option direct monetary financing and this can be done in two ways um what this means is the bank of england creates new money and it gives it to the government to spend and and this can be done by the bank of england purchasing government bonds directly from the treasury or by extending the government's overdraft facility at the bank which is the ways and means facility and interestingly the bank of england did do this back in april recognising that it was going to be important and the scale of the crisis it's also useful to view direct monetary financing in comparison to quantitative easing which has been the standard approach since the global financial crisis this is a more indirect form of monetary financing and what happens here is the bank of england creates new money but it buys government bonds in the secondary market from non-bank into financial firms so things like pension funds and insurance companies and it's giving them the money so that's why it's indirect this year the bank created 300 billion of new money through quantitative easing programmes in response to the crisis and so this is pumped into financial markets and the purpose of this was a little bit different this time so in the aftermath of the global financial crisis the purpose was to try and stimulate the economy to put the money into those markets so they can lend it out and we saw that that didn't really happen and this time it's been the real main purpose of it has been to keep demand for government bonds high therefore keeping yields down and that makes it easier for the government to borrow so they can finance their fiscal programmes that we need right now things like the furlough scheme so i'm going to talk about some of the advantages of direct monetary financing firstly avoids all the negative effects that we know come out of quantitative easing that's um pump because pumping money into financial markets has led to increasing inequality asset price inflation that Rachel had mentioned at the beginning and it diverts importantly it diverts money away from the real productive economy where people um they're living and have you know their income from um and so yeah that's why we're seeing even now house prices have hit um have been going up even now in this recession um secondly the government wouldn't be dependent on financial markets to finance its spending which i think um it speaks a lot for itself um thirdly the government will have no excuse for failing to to meet the needs of people their well-being and future crises such as climate change unemployment social care prices um and then finally the government is actually responsible under these conditions to make sure we have better social outcomes and um it won't be relying on what it's doing now which is leaving firms and households to rely on more debt to weather the storm and to meet their basic needs um which is an unsustainable approach despite all these clear benefits um the government and the bank of England are still not willing to take full advantage of the direct monetary financing um so this moves me on to my last point a second point which looks at the problem with the government's current approach um the biggest problem with the current approach is it's more of the same the government's response is basically to protect the interests of the asset rich and capital rich while expecting households and small businesses to take on more private debt um private debt is worrying because um increasing amounts of private debt is a basically a main source of financial instability and this is what we saw with the global financial crisis it was triggered by unsustainable private debt not public debt so direct monetary financing can circumvent this problem and looking at a key snapshot of what the government's been doing recently we're seeing key measures such as the furlough furlough scheme and payment protection holidays on mortgages and other kinds of forms of debt which have been important to protect jobs and incomes they're going to be withdrawn now and as unemployment rises people are going to see their incomes collapse and dent and renteries um skyrocket now that means the vast majority of people are not benefiting from the government's current approach another example is the treasury's business loan schemes things like the bounce back loan schemes and the business interruption loan schemes now this is told to doled about 58 billion now that's been lent out essentially these provide state back loans to businesses they guarantee repayment by the government of 80 to 100 percent of the loan so effectively this is an implicit subsidy to banks not only are they guaranteed the loans will be repaid by the government they get interest in these paid by the government for the first year um importantly um the downside to this is that small businesses are taking on more debt and at higher interest rates sometimes up to six or eight percent as well as the risk of default on their livelihoods um and this could be an unsustainable problem in terms of recovery a final example which Rachel also mentioned at the beginning is the the covid the corporate covid financing facility there was a scheme joint scheme by the bank of England and the treasury to extend on very favorable terms large bailouts to large corporations that were seen important in the economy um they didn't attach any meaningful conditions on these loans um either environmental or social conditions problematically what we've seen is vast amounts of money extended to them newly created money um that at while at the same time companies are making large-scale job cuts what's been estimated recently is something like over 50 000 redundancies across these companies that have taken loans and they continue to pay dividends so what we're seeing is that some people are doing quite well out of this crisis it's inflating house prices and stock market and the owners of capital and assets and large businesses while others are being forced to take on more debt and this is unsustainable so just to end here um I'd say the state has the capacity to create money to directly finance the challenges we're facing and improve social outcomes make sure the burden of these crises and these challenges are shared fairly amongst us the government has to start taking advantage of all the tools it has and that includes direct monetary financing um and the risks for direct monetary financing are minimal but the risks of an action are very high so yeah that's me thank you thank you so much Denisha um again so much um useful and insightful information in that presentation thank you to all of our speakers for for all of that we've got a rich discussion ahead of us and so I can I'm now just going to segue us into the the Q&A section and I guess just summarise some of the key things we've heard there so we may talked about the need to fundamentally rethink what the economy is for and what the social contract is and within that we need the state to release funds heavily in order to decarbonise and boost the care industry recognising that care is a fundamental part or basis of our whole existence from Chaitanya we heard about what the the core of what building back better means in terms of re-skilling creating jobs and protecting livelihoods and that the need for public investment is higher than ever right now but the government and the government rhetoric is going the other way so it now could be an important time for us to to push against that and Denisha outlined how austerity crippled the recovery in our public services off the back of the financial crash but there is a tool on offer to the government and Bank of England in the form of direct monetary financing um but currently the government's response is to expect households to take on more debt whilst it protects the asset rich and what you said right at the end there Denisha was so kind of I guess chilling in some ways that some people are really benefiting from the government's response to COVID whilst a lot of people are losing out substantially and so thank you all again for those presentations and now we're going to move into the Q&A we've got about 250 people out there listening to this call on watching and and some fantastic questions coming in coming in and so Peter Khan says I often think the phrase bouncing the books equates a state economy with a household budget as David Cameron so famously did after the financial crash and it can put pressure on politicians to appear financially responsible so what does the panel think is the best way to educate politicians and also the general public um that a government debt isn't necessarily a reason to panic um and reject much needed state fund finance investment so that's the first question I'm going to bundle three together and then we'll go back to the panel that's all right Julian's got a related question which says Chaitanya why is it dangerous to balance the books and Ronald Mendel says Maeve I found your presentation very provocative and novel can you elaborate on what you mean by the caring industry does it encompass not only child and social care for health and education as well so perhaps you could go to you Mae first on that question and then and then perhaps the Chaitanya and then Denisha for this first round of questions yes thank you um yeah the caring industries and also it's the caring and service industries right so these are all of the industries that we've found to be incredibly important during this COVID crisis okay so yes there's the the industries which is like the the paid version of this so that includes everything that you're talking about like elderly care child's care health care education um the rest of it but then there's also the service industries so we've seen obviously we became incredibly well supermarket staff as a huge one delivery drivers is a huge one these are already relatively low carbon industries that we that we are we fundamentally all rely on and we saw that very clearly during the crisis these were the key workers these were the people that we realised that society couldn't function without I mean which they shouldn't have needed a global pandemic to realise that these are the people that we've fundamentally rely on and yeah so in answer to your question yes it includes that but it's also not just the caring industries an incredible amount of this work is done and is unpaid within the household and we've seen lots of horrific statistics about how badly lockdown has protected um affected particularly women so you've got people working from home and disproportionately women have been having to work from home and also care for for children or obviously we know there's a gender pay gap um and if somebody's going to have to stay home and look after the kids because the childcare um service is gone then it's going to be the person who has the lowest wages so women have come out of work and pulled out of work to provide the childcare so I did say caring industries and I do mean those those caring industries that are in that are monetised but I also mean care provision which is disproportionately done by women and that is unpaid for as well and and then just I just wanted to say something on the on the first question as well so um how can we move away from um the well same to the public that we need to to um balance the books I think we need to stop talking about balancing the books in general I think there's just more there's just more important things that the economy needs to do and I think sort of rather than meeting people where they're at and saying this is why we don't need to balance the books so this is why we need to change the language around this I think just just we don't we obviously it's it's something that we need to consider people should be talking about in policy circles but this is something that the economy is not for if we need to be thinking about what we want our economy economy to be working towards and providing us for and I personally think that's yeah a healthy environment and a healthy society chat on your feet come in sure um yeah just to pick up from where may have left uh sort of saying last thing which is right I mean if you're if we've been measuring the wrong things then they don't want to balance in the budget seems a bit silly but but the that's where we're at the politics of the day means every time a politician goes on LBC or whatever news outlet they will be asked this question like how are you going to deal with the fiscal deficit I'm going to deal with a massive debt of 350 billion pounds that don't think they have a cogent response and just saying we can borrow more interest rates low which some have I don't think some some reason doesn't feel like a satisfactory response because it's an easy thing to sort of beat politicians with uh constantly and I don't think we've figured out a way of responding to that I genuinely do not think the the civil servants in the treasury um don't get this concept I think they do it's not rocket science I mean I'm not an economist you know but I get some of this um so I think it's more on the media spin and the the the language around needing to balance the books is is is quite critical so I do not know I don't know the clear answer to it but a lot of it is emerging from just the media pressure I'd say just to respond to or clarify rather what I said earlier around dangerous or balancing the books being dangerous just to clarify I didn't mean balancing the book per se is dangerous I meant balancing the books at the expense of public investment is is dangerous and I think we've seen that in the past 10-12 years ago and we can't risk seeing that again now the narrative of austerity is behind us I don't think we go down that path but um under investment is as bad as just cutting public spending right so it can have dire consequences given we just sort of in some semblance of coming out of austerity last year some signs of that but and you know we can't just go back to that so it's less about balance the books being dangerous per se it's more about I'm more worried about the investment and and the risk of losing that which is dangerous. Go Richard. Sorry yeah um I think it's a really important question um it's um disappointing to see it appearing so early on in our um in the pandemic that we're still dealing with that second wave is sort of coming or is already here um it's um very misplaced um to be it's misguided to be talking about this at the moment so I agree with Maeve that we should try and change that conversation um one thing I would say is to take the focus away from it is to to really point out that private debt is more of an issue and it's it is what the root of financial instability is so we really need to be instead of worrying about that we need to be worrying much more about what's causing private debt to become unsustainable and the sort the sort of roots of that um another thing I need I quite like to say quite often is that we've actually sustained much higher levels historically of um public debt than than we are now so after the world war after world war two public debt hit 250 percent so um debt as a share of GDP um 250 percent and we also set up the welfare state at that time which has had immeasurable immeasurable benefits to society so we can do these things and this shouldn't be holding us back um so yeah thank you so much so the view um just loads of different questions coming in coming in here we've got people as far as Edinburgh from islands off of Scotland from Chester um all around the UK it's very exciting um and I'm going to just ask three questions now that that are are quite specifically about this idea of direct monetary financing um because there's a few different questions coming in on that so um so Rosanna in Edinburgh says um she's wondering if universal basic income is part of this idea of direct monetary financing secondly Caroline White in Ireland says are there existing examples of direct monetary financing in other countries and if so what lessons can be drawn from them and finally um a question from Jenny what reasons do the Bank of England and the Government give against direct monetary financing do do we know that and what can we come be done to overcome these barriers um so three connected questions there and I'm going to put them back to um to the panel and um I can see Denisha and Titania writing away there so um either of you please feel free to to come in and and comment on those questions and maybe of course as well um I leave the questions around direct monetary financing to you Denisha you've spoken to that and I'm sure you'll have answers to that um just on just on UBI I suppose universal basic services is is how we've we've been thinking about it and I've been writing at Neff uh more should be clear my colleagues have been writing about it um I've in my initial remarks I've spoken to the point around a minimum income guarantee the reason why we want to focus on that is we are going to enter a an income crisis over the next few months uh leading up to Christmas and beyond people finding it difficult to pay their energy bills or rents or transport things of that nature so um income is is going to be quite quite critical and ought to be the front and centre of of any of our campaigns I I'd argue and therefore the point around minimum income guarantee that we've uh written about and advocated for in the past it is something that Neff would push for we've done some numbers around it um as I've said in my sort of initial remarks around 221 pounds per week is is is the sort of amount that we are advocating for um and we've done some calculation like I said in terms of how much it might cost I think about 20 billion pounds over three months if you had to do if you had to sort of do that and that figure isn't outrageous given like I said how how much we've been spending lately but again we fully understand it's a tough sell with this government but yeah just answer that question uh minimum income guarantees is what we've been pushing for um yeah I um in terms of the um first point about universal basic income it's not um sort of part it's not exactly part of direct monetary financing although some peoples might call for um direct monetary financing to fund universal basic income um essentially um it's one of many different options that have been put out there things like jobs guarantee the great new deal um and um funding social care and health services so um that's a question for what priorities um as a society we choose to focus on uh direct monetary financing on um in terms of um what reasons does the government and bank of England give for not um pursuing direct monetary financing um one of the main reasons that's given is that it's this kind of mis kind of misguided view that it would leave to lead to uncontrollable inflation that's generally what's said um and often a few kind of um kind of extreme examples are given things like Zimbabwe as a as an example for what it would lead to but actually um we don't we know that conditions right now are not in line with that um inflation being an issue inflation right now is not 0.2% which is well below the government's target of 2% and in fact um most economies are facing deflationary pressures as well as um the fact that recently the Fed had actually changed its inflation targeting so that it was a range value rather than targeting a specific value which is recognition that actually we probably need to have a little modest inflation um so um sort of moving away from that um another reason is um there's this been this tendency in the recent past to separate the bank monetary policy and fiscal policy so the bank is in control the central bank is in control of monetary policy and the treasury is in control of fiscal policy and this idea of independence is seeing politically as important and that they shouldn't be um shouldn't blur the lines so that's another reason it's seen as um not appropriate to kind of blur those lines but um one thing we do at Positive Money is say that we are sort of campaigning and advocating for actually better coordination between the treasury and the bank of England um and this will actually be beneficial for the economy because they can actually make sure that the government has enough fiscal space to um directly spend on the economy. Similarly I just want to come in on the on the UBI point um just from from the sort of well actually there's obviously there's lots of feminists that advocate at UBI but from my perspective on this on this rethinking the economy around care I think one of I would I would agree with Titania and advocate for universal basic services and rather than a universal basic income based on the fact that one of the problems is this privatisation of of what we call socially reproductive work which is in like in short care work and that's individuals paying for their own care right so if that works within a for for profit model of caring provision so care is quite unique um as an industry if you want to increase productivity in an industry you have to increase um the output for the amount of inputs you put in but with um with caring with caring labour there's only the the the care is the labour right so if you you can't increase productivity without um sorry I've not explained this very well and I had it in my head when I was gonna say it and now I've not done very well but basically right you need to to increase productivity you need to increase the amount of outputs for the same amount of time right in care the the measure of output is time right that is the that the output is the amount of time you're caring for someone so you can't increase that there's a limit right you can only increase that by saying instead of caring with one person in an hour I'm going to care for five person within an hour and that that necessarily decreases the um the quality of the care or increase it um or you can decrease the cost of that labour which is obviously decreasing wages so care is quite unique in an industry in the sense that you can't increase productivity very easily without decreasing um the quality of the care or decreasing the amount that you're paying people so I think we can't be working with care in a for-profit system we need to think of better ways to provide care and universal basic income sort of speaks to that individualisation of care privatising care we all pay for our own care it can't work to some extent but it needs to go hand in hand with the provision of universal basic services and that's the socialisation of care and and sharing sharing that and distributing that more fairly apologies that wasn't explained very well but I hope I got there in the end it absolutely was made um that was that was really clear thank you so much um and thank you for all our panellists for for answering these questions that are coming in thick and fast and such a rich range of questions as well so if um if we've all got the energy I'm going to take a deep breath and ask us three more um so Jonathan says if the government had spent its 180 billion or is it 18 billion perhaps by giving money directly to people what would the effect have been on the macro economy Rachel says as a mum of three who uses cloth nappies and tries to shop locally and organically I'm super interested in the idea of a feminist green new deal and a care-based economy to change our economic setup slash my sets to achieve this do we need to move away from the idea of perpetual growth how would it work basically she says um and Alistair says um given that the pound and almost every other currency in the world is a debt-based currency lent into existence by bankers and bearing debt is the idea that we can transform to a green new deal possible is it necessarily is it necessary to completely reimagine the financial system with non-debt based currencies so three chunky and different questions there um Maebe are we able to go to you first um and feel free to to speak to any of the three questions there um yeah I'll speak to the one that was um directed at me I think um yeah I think that um all of these things that are going to so when I was talking in my presentation about the increased labour in these areas um yeah changing nappies preparing food these are all like burgeoning industries right you can create jobs around these things sustainable and and and decently paid jobs right so instead of people having to like dig the turnips out of their own backyard and chop them up and boil them make them into I was going to say a turnip paste nobody eats that um we can we can have small businesses local businesses and they can be built around different ownership models so we could have local cooperatives that grow food and prepare food and then local delivery companies that come and deliver them to your door and green and sustainable vehicles right and and there's no reason why these industries need to be gendered these can be we can encourage all different people to get involved in these industries so if you're boiling nappies on the hob don't you've got your dirty nappies put them in a bin that can be a whole industry we give that to a sustainable local cooperative they can take those nappies away and boil them for you and bring them back and we can we can turn these jobs that seem well jobs that are pretty pretty they're not very glamorous boiling nappies on the hob is not very glamorous but we can turn that into industry and into into successful and and sustainable employment for people um speaking to the the um decreasing growth does this mean degrowth um i think that the focus on growth is not not the focus that we need again this is talking about what is our economy for our economy certainly isn't for growth at the sake of growth i think this is a bit of a i don't know this this argument's been going on and on and on for ages right i think what's important is that we are living within our planetary boundaries that we are supporting um good well paid fulfilling work and that we are ensuring a decent quality of life for for for citizens right so um that may well mean that we need to drastically reduce consumption but i don't think it's it's it's helpful to talk about to focus on growth is the main important thing i think the most important thing is focus on the health of our environment and the health of our society thank you may denisha would you like to come in next um yeah sure um so i think um one of the questions was what would the effect of putting 18 billion i think that relates to the covid um the ccff um scheme into the economy what effect it would have on the macro economy um this um i mean the way to look at this i think is that we're in a deep procession and um direct spending into the economy is going to support jobs is going to um depending on what schemes we whichever scheme you want to look out the furlough whatever it's going to protect jobs it can go towards protecting people who are um piling up debts because they're becoming unsustainable um protecting um industries that are critical to the wider society um helping us shift to new patterns of demand because that is actually going to be happening we're going to be working all from home potentially um some industries are going to be closing down some new industries are going to be taking their place and we want to be able to um sort of strategically plan that transition process so that it is in industries that are sustainable that provide um good quality jobs that are well paid um at least you know living wage paid um and um six issues like the under resourcing of the nhs and the social care system um and so um it could the question was it would probably have been very beneficial for the macroeconomy in terms of the fact that we're in a very unusual recession and that's going to really reshape the way our economies are running would help us strategically and um transformatively shape that change and that recession so and the recovery so i think um you know the other side of this is that we have a lot of spare capacity because we're in a recession aggregate demand is extremely low it's collapsing as is um people's incomes and um you know it's going to be a sort of downward spiral unless we we do something about that um i think the other question might have been about reimagining the financial system i think that's a really important um point um something else that we um haven't been talking as much about because of the sort of immediate concerns around COVID and the response to COVID is the fact that um decos of deregulation in the financial sector has made it kind of such a dominant industry that determines a lot of what politics we follow it it determines policy decisions and um also how we live our lives effectively because we take on more debt through the financial sector um and um it's often used against us of why we can't regulate the sector because it's too valuable to us so we need to take away our dependence on that financial sector and make sure that it serves people rather than we're serving the financial sector so i think yes there does need to be a reimagining on a bit um of it and we need to make sure that we sort of start focusing on greening the financial sector but also um regulating it better thank you denisha tatana do you want to speak to any of those um questions um i think both panelists have covered most of it the only thing to say i suppose from my end is um the concerns often the concerns around direct monetary financing of deficits uh is to do with inflation um but from what i've gathered so far that concern isn't here or it's going to be here anytime soon um i can't explain why i do not know why perhaps like my other co-panelists might know better but uh from what i read and what i understand from my colleagues at a nef um concerns around inflation as we speak today are blown out of proportion in fact there's a bigger concern potential deflationary spiral compared to uh anything around inflation so i think that's the question that comes up at least in my understanding of general public discourse around direct monetary financing of of public debt um the question of inflation i don't think we ought to be worried about it at this stage thank you everyone um there are so many questions flowing in here i'm doing my very best to get a grip on them all but we've got time for just two more i think so um a cheery one from blaze which says is it is it likely our country will go bankrupt in the next 12 months and normal people i not the corporates will lose their own money and then a second question from adrian which is how likely can direct monetary financing be achieved as advocated in today's talk without any change to the central bankers mandate um so final couple of questions there before we'll move into um the conclusion um so danisha um can i go to you first on those questions um yeah so um we're going to come bankrupt in the next year i think um no i think this question normally um or variations on this question normally is because people fear we're going to end up like Greece um and the truth is we we can't end up like Greece because um Greece didn't doesn't have its own currency um it depends on the um european the eurozone and the european central bank and we don't have that problem so no we're not going to go bankrupt but i do think private debt again is a problem lots of people and businesses are going to default or go bankrupt and we'll be struggling um which is going to draw out the recovery for a very long time so that is something we need to keep an eye on um and in terms of the central bank's mandate um yes i think it's something positive money has been trying to push for and advocate for much more but the better coordination more transparent and accountable coordination between the central bank and the treasury would allow us to um you know ensure the direct monetary financing could be a tool in the box that we can use but actually um even though mixed messages have been coming out from the bank of england over this past sort of several months the truth is they have said that a lot of things are on the table for them that never were before so things like negative interest rates they're looking into it um they've opened up the expanded and extended the government's overdraft facility which is a form of monitor um direct monetary financing so it's there but i think mixed messages coming out of the bank of england um need to um need to change they need to be more transparent and accountable to people in that respect um so yeah hopefully that answers it again i think dynish has covered covered the the response quite well um i suppose implicit in the point around the fact that we cannot go bankrupt is is another case for greater public investment i suppose um and for the borrowing there so that never is is a worry uh as far as i understand and dynish's example in the past around how much deficit we accrued post world war two is another example so yeah just repeating the fact that that's not a possibility which means that we can actually do more in terms of public investment again i don't really have much to say that it's relevant but before it ends i just want to give you a quick shout out to the local i want to just we've talked a lot about the central bank about government and i think that there's a lot to be said about what we can be doing locally and how we can be generating and building wealth locally and as dynish says we've got lots of small businesses that are going to be going out of business and this is this is this is not good um but it is an opportunity to build workers cooperatives to take over some of these firms that might have gone bust and build and generate wealth locally using um look at using the support of local authorities using the support of local institutions that are embedded in the area um and yeah i think that the national and the international is obviously super important but i think in these times of covid where i don't know final nail in the coffin of globalisation we need to be looking locally and looking at how we can um yeah build things on a local scale a really important point to end on and bring in thank you for bringing that in me um and that brings us to the conclusion of um of this webinar so um i just want to say a really huge thank you again to our speakers for all of the expertise and energy that you've brought to today's webinar this is a really important and fundamental conversation um it's become clear that we really need to reframe what our economy is for is it for the health and environment um as opposed to the importance of balancing the book that just doesn't really important um and that we need to change this narrative around how governments can spend money so private debt is problematic and high we're in a deep recession but public debt is quite low in historic levels and we need to recognise that under investment government is is not good for our economy we've also heard um about the technicalities of how some of this how some how the state can fund um what it needs to and then at the end there we heard about the importance of community wealth building and different ownership models at the local level and drawing on local institutions and perhaps different forms of banking models um so the full video of this webinar will be on our youtube channel probably by the end of today but at the tomorrow morning at the latest and it's already on facebook as well this was the third and final of our webinars in our autumn series the first was how racism built our money and banking system the second was debt inequality and COVID-19 the perfect storm and obviously today has been building back better with the magic monetary you can see all of them on the positive monies youtube channel we're hopeful to do another series of webinars um early in the net in the new year um but for now I just want to say a big big thank you again to our speakers and to everybody who joined and submitted questions today thank you all so much