 So welcome everyone to a webinar with the Deep Adaptation Forum. I'm Professor Jim Bandel and joining me today is Professor Christian Arnsberger and Matthew Slater and what we're going to be doing is presenting the new paper that we wrote together which is monetary adaptation to a planetary emergency. So just for some context, Christian Arnsberger is Professor of Sustainability and Economic Anthropology within the Faculty of Geoscience and Environmental Studies at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Lausanne, Belgium and has been teaching and researching for many years on the interface between economy, society and the environment. Matthew Slater, some of you will know him from working with me in the Deep Adaptation Forum in the past before we left back in September 2020. Matthew's an open source software engineer and educator in the field of alternative exchange and complementary currencies and the free software that he's built over the last decade. It's for community exchange and complementary currencies is one of the most used around the world in in that field. He's got a passion for the history of money and debt and so he's someone I've worked with on that topic in many ways since 2009. So as a research team we comprise an economist, sociologist and monetary activist and we thought to bring all of that into this new research paper that we launched today. So as such it's quite transdisciplinary and perhaps quite unusual for a paper on monetary theory and monetary reform and in a way I think it's a paper that we should not have had to write because monetary economics is not the field that any of us have paid to engage in but we felt we really did need to engage in the topic and particularly on the monetary growth imperative due to how in recent years increasing number of activists and policy wants that we were talking to have been saying that there's no such thing as a monetary growth imperative. No such thing as the need for the economy to expand just in order to keep the economy stable. And then for a chapter in this book facing up to climate reality which is very much in the field of deep adaptation has a chapter, yeah the chapter says that explores this idea of whether there is a an imperative to expand economic activity and they cite a paper by Jackson and Victor which says challenge that idea and even debunked it with a model. So but yet we can see all around us if GDP growth is not occurring it doesn't seem that everything stabilizes people do lose their homes businesses and jobs. Things don't seem to be able to remain the same. And so we decided this topic needed much more investigation and so 18 months ago this project began and so this paper is the result of work over the past 18 months. So we're going to have a presentation now from mainly from Matthew but with contributions from Professor Ansperger as well. So over to Matthew. We're going to open with Christian. Hello everyone, thanks for being here. So as as Jim has already explained the the idea of the paper is to kind of re-actualize or revive the debate around the monetary growth imperative. That doesn't mean and we'll come back later to the meaning of the word imperative in our approach but it doesn't mean of course that we think money is the only driver or source of growth dependency. Obviously economic growth has become a source of almost collective addiction in many ways and the reason is that we're in a system in which growth has basically helped us to elude and lighten the load of many societal burdens from unemployment to raising living standards, reducing poverty, improving government finance and so on and so forth. Growth has made us dependent on itself because our system seems to need it in order to resolve the contradictions that it constantly produces. And so obviously there are many growth imperatives in our economy but we're going to focus on the monetary one. So for many years the three of us have been using this argument that is very simply stated here by Charles Eisenstein because debt is always greater than the money supply. The, sorry it's covered up, the creation of money creates a future need for even more money. This argument sounds very self-explanatory. The idea that interest cannot be paid because it's not created, only the principle is created. The first time we came across this argument the earliest that we could find was in about 1999 Richard Douthwaite put it in his book The Ecology of Money and looking at that argument closely it was quite good but it seems that the repetitions of that argument have simplified it and they've lost something. And so even in 2020 Jason Hickle said banks create the principle for all the loans they give but they don't create the interest. There's always a deficit, always a scarcity. And this is very very compelling argument and so the three of us have used it in the past and when we heard that it had been debunked we wanted to return to the subject to find out why to correct ourselves. The debunking comes from the post-Kinseyan school of economics and they have a kind of accounting called stocks and flows which is very good at representing debt and the negative balances in the economy because as I hope you all know money is created when banks create the money they issue a loan and so it's a negative balance on the bank's balance sheet and so stocks and flows accounting takes account of that negative balance. And it's very very simple if you look at the argument that the interest is never created so therefore the debt can't be paid you can debunk that in one sentence and Steve Keane does it here the argument is wrong because it confuses a stock, a debt of dollars with a flow, the interest in dollars and the picture of the bath and the water flowing into the bath and out of the bath and then the stock of water in the bath illustrates that quite well. To put it in more economic terms the argument is simply that the interest doesn't disappear when it's repaid in the same way that the stock of debt disappears when it's repaid. The interest is effectively recirculated it flows through the economy and then it becomes available for the debtors to again so that's why there is always enough money at least in principle looking at it at that level for the debts to be repaid. The problem is if debts can't be repaid then more money has to be borrowed to replace it and that's where the growth comes from. So the essence of this argument comes down to is debt payable or is it maintainable on a month-to-month basis. The models that post-Kinzians have built particularly Jackson Victor and Cahen Foer and Lavoy, they both modeled an economy that didn't have any capital accumulation and they stated this very clearly. Jackson Victor in their paper said taxation is initially set so that government debt does not accumulate and financing behavior is determined in such a way so as not to accumulate capital assets beyond those deemed necessary to satisfy its expected demand and similarly Cahen Foer and Lavoy said in our full stationary state economy there is no accumulation of private wealth. Accumulating private wealth is tantamount to capital in a broad sense and no further accumulation of capital by the private sector as a whole occurs. So they've done this kind of separation in order to make the model work in order to prove the point that issuing money as debt does not create growth. They have had to prevent or model out the capital accumulation from the model so they have effectively an economy that's 100% flow. All the money is flowing all the time in order to make the model work and this is a bit problematic for us because we understand the the functions of money are both to be a medium of exchange which is to say it should flow but also to be a store of value which is the function of money that doesn't flow so if you model out the store of value function of money in order to prove your point you really redefined money itself. Not that that's a bad idea we support in our conclusions ways of tweaking the definition of money or separating out the functions of money but we don't say that that represents anything that in modern reality in the economics as we know it. So we're going to talk about three arguments that we put forward in the paper that we think haven't been refuted and that we think deserve more attention. The first one I've touched on it already that the hoarding and accumulation of debt means that the money system becomes unsustainable if money is issued as debt. The second one that between elites they circulate money amongst themselves and so that money becomes unavailable for debtors to repay and the third one twice lent money which has been argued for many years by Paul Grignan. First of all Christian I think I've gone backwards Christian are you muted? Oh my god sorry so before before we develop these three points just a quick but very important you know a point here which is that you know of course if in a sense people like Jackson and Victor and others have set the bar very high for what an imperative is supposed to mean okay if you if you if you're gonna try to want to to demonstrate that you know credit creation or charging of interest you know must always create growth no matter what else is happening in the system and no matter the nature of money the nature of accumulation whether there is accumulation or not and so on obviously you're going to make it easier for yourself to demonstrate that there's probably not the growth the imperative linked to money. So there's a strange seeming strategy in Jackson and Victor's kind of seminal paper which is to argue that neither credit creation or the charging of interest create a growth imperative in and of themselves or in another passage of the same paper the results of this paper suggests that it is not necessary to eliminate interest bearing debt per se as if you know if you set the bar that high obviously it's relatively easy to demonstrate that you know there's no growth imperative if you're not looking at any other part of the system and as Matthew said the way that money is also used as a store value that the overall logic of our unequal and inegalitarian system of capital accumulation so what we're saying is that we need to see the very notion of an imperative as something much more systemic and complex and subtle in the sense that obviously we're not trying to say that money or you know money is the only source of a growth imperative we're just trying to show or that that it's a major driver in our system which through the mechanisms of money creation and money distribution in the system and accumulation there is a pressure a systemic pressure generated along with other factors which pushes GDP to have to grow unless the economy ends up collapsing this is you know this is the important point that we want to make clear in our approach. So there's a connection between the gross domestic product which is what we use to measure growth and the amount of debt in the system and in the paper we draw a connection between those two because you have to prove that if the money system is driving growth then there's a connection between debt and growth and so when we say the debt is always growing then that means that the economy is always growing. Now the problem is if you imagine that money is created as debt so somebody issues a debt of a thousand pounds and then it's spent into the economy and some multinational corporation earns it and puts it in a tax haven where they earn interest on it or something then the original borrower of that debt is not able to repay it back it's a very very simple dynamic. You can argue that the money in the tax haven is actually being lent back into the economy but that doesn't actually make it more available for debtors to earn because it creates another debt and so the idea of capital accumulation itself when money is debt prevents the debt from being paid and I want to ask you a question if you imagine that there was a law to prevent capital accumulation or prevent too much capital accumulation in order to ensure that the debts were payable what would the economy look like would it resemble any economy that we imagine now or worse still would it resemble anything like capitalism there seems to be an idea in capitalism and in the economy as we know it and as we conceive of it that money has to be savable it's your private property you don't have a social obligation to others to spend money that you earn in order to allow the creators of that money the borrowers to be able to spend it back so this trilemma seems to be apparent if you want to have a post-growth economy you cannot have a debt money system and unlimited monetary accumulation you can accumulate other things you can accumulate bitcoin you could accumulate ferraris they wouldn't prevent people from paying off their debts but having high cash balances in your bank account seems to us to obviously prevent people from repaying their debts or to make it more difficult it reduces the amount of money and circulation and therefore increases the pressure on debtors to earn a smaller amount of money to repay it back and creates competition and all sorts of unhealthy dynamics can i just go back to the trilemma just to just to spell it out a bit further Matthew so basically it means you can have debt money and monetary accumulation but not a post-growth economy you could have post-growth economy and debt money but not monetary accumulation you could have monetary accumulation and a post-growth economy but not with debt money so you have to two of the three take your pick that's the the idea of the trilemma thank you so one one version of what Matthew just explained when he said you you know if you buy a Ferrari it's you can accumulate ferraris that's partly true in the sense that when you buy a Ferrari there's income that's being paid back into the economy and if you buy many of them you know you kind of nourish the economy however if you only buy your very rich neighbors houses and if the money that you've accumulated never flows back to main street but it's kept in like what we call elite pools of wealth in which you know very extremely wealthy actors and people exchange goods amongst themselves and reinvest in there in each other's wealth so as to make it grow with money that was initially created as bank debt but then has become kind of congealed within these elite pools you have one instance of what kind of starves the rest of the economy the main street economy of the means to of the average most average debtors to pay back their money so inequality you know accumulation of wealth in fiscal havens and in extremely low spending propensity populations contributes massively to to the the growth imperative so this final argument comes from the animator Paul Grignan who made the series of money as debt videos he seems to be the only person making this argument but to us it seemed very very compelling and we think it deserves a proper answer so the argument builds on what I said earlier about money that goes into tax havens or really any money that goes back into an account where it is then relent because when money that's created as debt is saved and relent it results in two debts for one principle and this happens many many times you can imagine a whole chain of money being borrowed spent and saved and then lent again and it's the same money each time and each time it builds up another debt on the same principle and so you can imagine if this is true it builds up an immense pressure on debtors to repay all of those debts or to maintain all of those debts using the same small pool of actual money and we looked around and it seems that in America particularly and also since the the crash of 2008 more and more money is being lent in this way so banks are creating less of the the the loans and more of it is coming from full reserve lending institutions and so that's creating we believe a pressure on a small pool of money where more and more people are demanding it in order to be able to pay off their debt. I just want to interject to say please if you have a question I'm going to select them from the chat so please as we come towards the end of the presentation please put in your questions now into the chat back to you Matthew. So basically you know our paper is obviously and if you've read it you know it it's a big picture paper but at the same time it tries to be specific about certain mechanisms and what we think we've uncovered is basically that you know when people talk about growth and the need for growth and so on of course they're like the different you know the the the various blind men looking at an elephant from different angles and it actually is the same animal okay so obviously COVID-19 debt and climate chaos are you know contributing massively and will keep contributing in various forms to the need for growth and also causing causing problems there's a sound problem here but what we're trying to say is that talking about these problems independently of the actual factors that we're looking at which are the bank debt character of money and the the systemic dynamics of capital accumulation makes it almost impossible to actually address in a credible manner the COVID-19 debt other debts that might arise and the problems generated in the future by climate adaptation and climate chaos. I would add another leg on the elephant of growth the idea of needing to create social justice in the future so many many economies are looking to grow and also the the green revolution if we're going to change our whole energy systems a lot of investment will be needed for that so deep adaptation for those that don't know is an acceptance that maybe it's too late to prevent catastrophic climate change and so we need to put attention into extending the glide and softening the fall of what could be a civilizational collapse and so it seems to us that late stage capitalism particularly post COVID post 2008 bailouts is only going to make things worse it's going to increase the suffering of climate change if it doesn't already create a lot of suffering it's going to do this in three ways by starving the economy of money this is money that would be needed for building resilience to weather disasters and other kinds of disasters because there's no money because of austerity things like that that seems to be the way forward the capitalist story says that there isn't enough money and therefore we can't have these things and we'll have to make do without late stage capitalism is also centralizing a lot of our economic and political systems i suppose amazon is the poster child for that whereas before we would get books and other things from numerous high street outlets more and more stuff is now coming from just one company with one supply chain and that's very very efficient we we see cheaper goods usually through amazon but it's not very resilient we need to have more decentralized systems if we're anticipating various kinds of chaos through climate change and finally we're noticing in late stage capitalism people are getting unhappy they're not voting in in ways that empower them to make decisions we're seeing more and more plutocrats and demagogues in charge there's a book about the the moral value of economic growth and it says that economic growth says that societies are actually happier and more moral when economic growth is happening and when it's not happening you run into problems like intolerance and fascism and things like that and we could see that happening today whether or not that's the reason so we'd like to make a very strong case for degrowth gem you wanted to say something just that uh we don't support the views of that book in our paper i think it's an awful uh uh it's it's it's a very problematic perspective and you can see that actually those economies that grow a lot create a lot of inequality which actually causes all manner of problems as the book spirit level says so we need to look at ways of communities thriving and also becoming more resilient as disruptions hit without this dependence on the escalating amount of consumption i mentioned the the book the moral consequences of economic growth because it puts the case for what's widely believed that growth is good for so many reasons so we want to argue for degrowth which is to say that the steady state economy is not enough many economists are talking about the steady state economy they're making the case for it they're modeling it but still if we're using what three and a half planets worth of resources per year then uh any serious proposals for a steady state economy amount to omniside um we can only talk about the future in terms of degrowth as far as we could see and degrowth economics is an order of magnitude beyond steady state economics so steady state economics is a big jump when you're talking about not growing anymore but when you're talking about shrinking the economy it's different again and only the degrowth movement is actually looking into this unfortunately they don't seem to be getting a lot of traction the kinds of things that need to happen in a degrowth economy are very much a redistribution of wealth because if the economy is no longer growing and when it grows all the wealth tends to go to the the most wealthy people already then if that wealth needs to go in the absence of growth to everybody else or they will get very very poor and that will create social instability not to mention suffering and also we see degrowth as a change to the culture it's not just an economic thing but it means changing everything it's very very profound so we make some policy suggestions in the paper we're not going to go into details about them here but the general idea of the policy suggestions uh links back to what we've said before you need to help money to circulate in order to make it available for debtors to earn because if debtors can't earn the money that they borrowed and spent then they will only have to borrow more in the long run so you can do that by restricting the accumulation of money how that works in practice we don't really know you can have things like maximum bank account limits these things haven't really been done because it's it's not really in the capitalist paradigm that you would want to limit how much money somebody can earn or save another way of doing it might be to encourage people to save not money but other things non-debt assets we call them here I mean you could issue another kind of money that's purely an asset without the liability side and then there would be no problem in saving that because the the debt money could circulate while you're saving the asset money or you could have new financial tools to aid circulation and with this we mean things like credit clearing systems so that's what I've been working on for many years with a credit clearing system you're not issuing money in a limited quantity but you're allowing short-term debt to accrue between members of the supply chain which then cancels out it's it's the same in a barter system there's no money it's just accounting and so that enables always sufficient liquidity for trade to take place and of course you can reduce interest interest we didn't stress it earlier but the original formulations of the monetary growth imperative all focused on interest as something which goes out of circulation and therefore is the root of the problem our idea of the monetary growth imperative says that interest exacerbates the problem because it makes debt harder to maintain it increases the monthly burden of what debtors have to pay so if you reduce interest you therefore make debt more maintainable and all of this probably has to take second fiddle to tackling growth directly by reducing debt cancelling debt and reducing consumption and the need for consumption so helping money circulate and all of those things wouldn't really make much difference if the economy is still going as fast as it wants to go are you ending there Matthew? I'm inviting either of you to chip in thanks for listening so yeah let's have questions because it's okay just want to say I've been looking at the the the chat box and just to say that when we're talking about how it could work if people stored Ferrari's not cash that doesn't mean we're advocating that it's just to say that how for what kinds of accumulation could work in a debt money system without requiring an expansion of economic activity in order to avoid the disappearance of the money to service debts so we're just explaining the the way the mechanics works rather than saying that people should be accumulating in those kind of ways of course we don't think that so I've seen the questions that have been put in the chat and I'm going to now invite you to when I mention your name unmute yourself but hold on the first one here I see has asked not to be on video so I'll read it out for you and then our next I'll come to Kimberly but for now Matthew and Christian the question we're being asked by another Matthew who's part of the deep adaptation forum do you hold any hope for policy reform on the basis of these insights or would you push instead for local initiatives which bypass the money system all together well I'm a bottom-up guy it was from jams initiative who's been working top down for all of his career that we invested all this time in this paper so it's a personal thing I don't hang around in the corridors of power I prefer to work with ordinary people and build practical solutions so that's my answer I would just add that I kind of take the opposite view which is why we're working together I think both are necessary and but I would answer no in the you know in the short run obviously this is the kind of paper that doesn't think that its insights are going to be useful within the next week however it's essential that these insights are present in the debate that they be given as much you know airing time and debate time and room in the public sphere is as possible because in the end we are going to need systemic changes to the money system and surely the bottom-up initiatives that Matthew just mentioned are crucial in helping that along but I think without top-down changes as well propelled by popular pressure you know the successes we can have will be limited to the areas in which we've managed to do bottom-up change and so I think both are essential so this I think Kimberley your question the first one you sent in the chat relates to this then which is a bridging question over to you Kimberley thank you thank you all very much and yeah you have answered some of my questions already I posted my question too early in the webinar so it was kind of what or who are you trying to influence with this paper and I'm not an academic or an economist just a committee deep adapter wanting to respond lovingly to our predicament so what advice would you have you know in terms of what to do now with any any wealth or money I I have yeah a slightly a slightly different question yeah cool Christian you've got ideas no no I'm not a financial advisor I will not commit publicly on a youtube channel to advising somebody about their wealth management you do that Jim you'd be liable later but also it's a different question the question of what I should do with my wealth is very different to what should everybody do with their wealth because if you do something that's against what everybody else is doing you could just lose all of your wealth and so we're talking about what happens at the policy level I know I know but what can I do to further your policy aims I'm saying one so there's a number of questions in there Kimberly the one the bit that I was in I picked up on was how does any of this really relate to deep adaptation and because you know aren't we just anticipating everything to collapse anyway so why don't we just get on with that rather than trying to influence policy at this high level because you know why would the big banks listen why would politicians who are just subservient to them listen why would central banks listen these are some of the most conservative institutions and professional cultures in the world well because if we keep this current system then we it's like you know Pablo Savigne in his book he talks about you being in a car where everyone can see the wall that you're driving towards and but if we keep this system we're speeding up as we're actually slamming our foot to the floor and speeding up into the wall and it it it will make matters a lot worse so I'm not advocating these changes to suggest that we can therefore really avert the collapse of modern industrial consumer society but I'm advocating these changes to actually give us a better chance to do less damage to create more opportunities probably at local that multiple local levels for alternative ways of living to to exist but yeah my approach is I'm quite agnostic on the future I don't really know what's going to happen after a collapse of this system how bad it's going to get or continue to get depending on how bad the environment becomes as well so I think really some people think the deep adaptation agenda is mainly or mostly or only an inner journey about finding inner resilience amidst a world that's going more and more mad and but I don't believe so I think it also needs to articulate a policy agenda in order to try and reduce harm at scale because you know you can't just turn away from what's happening in a nation or in a region or on the planet with your own local transition project because if societies collapse in violence around you then that's not going to really work for your own resilient community but also how holistic is that how how universal are your values if you're just going to turn away from a world that is being oppressed by this monetary system so I think really what we're explaining today is entirely coherent with and complementary to the kind of work that for example Matthew Slater has been doing in the gift for decades on or not quite it's almost 20 years isn't it Matthew now working in providing systems for communities to de-link from the monetary system and thrive on their own so I'm I'm going to come to the oh you saw Sir Kimberly you saying the desired outcome for this paper and what to do about it well there is something called the extinction rebellion's money rebellion which launched about a month ago and it's been large by a large completely ignored by the media so do check out money rebellion and it's trying to make the connections between the ecological and climate crisis and how bad it's become with the monetary system and I would say join it somehow support it somehow I'm not I'm not fully involved in it myself I've been busy with other things but I would definitely check it out and also challenge environmental organizations what why isn't Greenpeace saying anything on this WWF friends of the earth why is it they've been silent on the nature of banking and the monetary system so I would also many of you probably are members of these things so I would I would say go for it talk to them Jerry you have a question which would slightly change focus I think Jerry if you unmute yourself and ask your question hi can you hear me okay great yeah first off thanks to the three of you for bringing this issue up and relating it to deep adaptation I can't claim to understand it too deeply but I think I intuitively grasped it when I was around 18 years old I made a t-shirt that said down with money and I'm still having that intuitive sense today that something's deeply wrong with it and I'm just wondering what any of the three of you might think about some of the work being done with cryptocurrencies and the blockchain and another one called the Holochain which really is promoted as something with power to build into its architecture decentralization greater autonomy of users means to collaborate is this in alignment with any of the things you're thinking about or is it is it just an overly high yeah Matthew do you want to come in on that one first yeah I've been looking at cryptocurrencies almost since the beginning I'm very happy that they provide an alternative in some respects to the national currencies and a technological challenge to them but monetarily speaking they fall under the Austrian School of Economics which says that money should be an asset and this is problematic for many reasons however if money was an asset if bitcoin and cryptocurrencies did take off they would fit into our policy proposals as a way of saving money that wasn't needed for circulation and for paying back generally I don't anticipate that happening very much and the cryptocurrencies look like a bit of a dead end monetarily speaking or they or they could even be socially counterproductive since they emphasize very much the value of private property and the lack of social responsibility that goes with owning assets the Holochain project I do very much support they did their initial community offering using a mutual credit paradigm so they created a a debt in an account for every token that they sold and this is because those guys have a deep understanding of the money system the previous project before Holochain was called the meta currency and they'd been looking at that for many years so they understand credit and mutual credit and they wanted to do an initial coin offering that was in the spirit of that where the tokens had some value because something was being promised for them not just because there was a hundred million billion trillion of them so yes I'm following that project very closely and I'm also excited about the technology itself which is offering when it comes out finally the ability to make distributed apps and that means apps on your phone that don't depend on a central server they all talk to each other directly and so that reduces a central point of political control so just on that many people who have heard of crypto currencies but haven't looked to them closely might hear about the the the awful energy footprint of bitcoin which is now equivalent Argentina and Austria combined so that isn't that isn't the same for all crypto currencies so bitcoin for example uses something called proof of work which is computing power done to produce new bitcoin and to secure the transactions that is a environmentally criminal system as far as I'm concerned and many people are crypto proponents like to sort of say oh compare it to a goldmine but it is an absolutely dumb innovation in terms of the environment to have proof of work currencies you can do something called proof of stake and I believe polo chain does that and and various other things so bitcoin is actually a very old and anachronistic and I would argue redundant technology but it's just popular because it's the fair first and the most famous one so yeah we we mentioned the role potentially of central bank digital currencies like as people are no longer really using much cash and we're you know therefore more and more of us are completely dependent on the private banking system for our transactions so there's it's it is it is something that central banks and treasury should naturally look at and roll out which is a digital alternative to cash when people question the role of governments then often there's some completely misinformed assumptions about who's really involved in the crypto space you know bitcoin is not decentralized it's it's completely controlled by the mining consortians who own who own the chips and have made massive investments in in that and they will therefore never want it to move off this incredibly energy intensive mode of of securing the blockchain so um yeah there's a hell of a lot of I think libertarian nonsense spoken about things like bitcoin and actually we need to look much more closely at monetary systems that are in exchange systems that are in the control of people themselves so where the there's as matthew was saying that money is issued as a as a means of exchange for people to do stuff for each other so it needs to be about real wealth creation and what real life rather than just some abstract tokens which is I think um highly problematic invites speculation and hoarding and doesn't encourage the kind of behaviors we want to create in society or support in society so um that would be my answer to the the crypto question yes crypto I think has a big future but not in the way it's being done now which is just using bad technologies in many cases and for all the wrong reasons christian do you have anything on that not on the cryptocurrency issue I was I was I was about to just want to add because time is passing that um one of the implications of what we're doing here is that we really need to be looking into I mean Matthew mentioned a mutual credit currencies and that's essential and more broadly speaking non-debt based ways of emitting money that that that might mean indeed a bigger role of central banks in emitting you know in in producing and circulating national currency from scratch you know without needing to go through this tedious and very ideologically warped banking system as a as a means of injecting money into the economy I mean I'm personally a a fan of modern money theory uh in the sense uh in in the in the in the sense that it provides a profound revision of of how governments can step in and replace and central banks can replace the private banking system in not just creating cheap inflation and throwing money around you know for all sorts of purposes which is basically what the banking system does right now I mean let's not forget that but rather in and kind of using money in a disciplined uh you know sustainability oriented way without tying it to the need to cut to to a constantly ballooning debt a massive debt and that's uh that's I think I mean it this is not a specific proposal but the logic of non-debt based money I'm aware of that the fact that you know we shouldn't fetishize government and and think that government is so much more wonderful than banks per se in principle yet the idea of democratic accountability top down you know and the the idea that money should be controlled by the political community in the citizenry and injected into the economy in many other ways than than what we have now is absolutely essential just to echo that the proposals for central bank digital currencies aren't just like cash so they are not a debt-based money they they are actually uh as you were saying so they would address some of the issues we talk about in paper Matthew to say something in between the central bank money is registered as a liability on the balance sheet but it's not clear that it ever has to be paid back and so there's been some recent work done in the UK about quantitative easing saying that politically this is framed as debt that will have to be repaid back through decades of austerity but on the balance sheet it actually isn't and so it could be that with the recent bailouts especially central banks and governments are already doing MMT but they're just not calling it that don't quote me on it because they can say it has to be repaid back at any time but at the moment they're spending as if it doesn't well in the UK these Chancellor has said that they're going to start paying it back in two years and put up taxes and there's going to be lots of that to come I think there's a lot of dreamy thinking about somehow we've post neoliberalism now we're actually the bond markets are still in charge and when they decide then governments will be having to listen at the moment I'm Cat Jenkins you have a question about learning from ancient alternatives which I think is quite a nice a nice question perhaps for us to end on I do it's really engaging to hear all the talk about potentially modernised currencies and the like but I'm wondering whether there is anything that we can learn from some of the older traditions and I'm thinking back to the the Deuteronomy exhortations in the Bible and I'm just going to find it Deuteronomy 15 where we're told that we should forgive debt every seven years we should lend freely to those who are really in need so it addresses the heart issue of smorg-like accumulating your assets and holding them to you but then says that we should reset that debt to go in a phrase periodically and gets into enough detail that it says you must avoid the evil thinking of saying to yourself well next year is a jubilee year I need to write it off so I'm not going to lend this year because I'll lose the lot and the a lot of the thinking around that is that it it's a mechanism for helping to reset rising inequalities to encourage the wealthy to hold their wealth more likely and see that wealth as a community asset rather than something that is personal to them and that it also relies on a community of abundance and trust so a feeling that if you need that grace given to you when you're not wealthy that will be repaid to you in that fashion thank you do you think there's anything we can learn from that I was thinking Matthews are theologians so maybe maybe he's got the connections there to draw upon well I wouldn't take those things from the Bible absolutely literally because the social and political context is very different but certainly the message is about forgiving debt and not getting too attached to money making money available when you can all seems like good spiritual if not political advice well and and just to add a final note maybe that it all it all seems to boil down to the crucial difference that's you know kind of lurking behind our paper as between money as a spending tool and money as an asset as long as you know money is emitted as debt and suddenly because you know it can be bought on the bond market in the form of bonds or whatever then we we're just tied into a system where this what you can't call this the evil thinking is gonna it's just gonna prevail because somebody's out there you know waiting for the debt to be repaid and the fiction of a non-repayable debt or as it were the reality of a non-repayable debt and the fiction of a debt that needs to be repaid is probably at the core of some of what we're looking at here one aspect of deep adaptation is if you realize that the society that you've grown up in that's given you your sense of place in the world your stories of self other society and nature and also the divine is falling apart has and is created a six mass extinction there's deep deep questioning about self society other nature deep questioning and in my process of deep questioning i've realized that the the origins of our omnicidal system are partly in the money system in the we because we have an illusion of pure separability of self we emphasize that sense of who we are or self that leads to more of a sense of vulnerability a more sense of fear and so we're more attracted to we're more worried about other people not giving us our basic needs so we're more attracted to anything which promises us the ability to have power to get what we want where it won't rust it won't rot and if someone doesn't like us well they'll still like our money and so therefore we'll still get fed and so what we've got is a system based on fear and that's driving everyone's desire for money of any kind other than the kinds of money that are explicitly about reconnecting us to each other in an ongoing interdependent interbeing form of relationship so that for me is why talking about money and monetary reform at local national and even the crypto field talking about in this core problem in our society which comes from this fear is important because it's one of the things we can rescue from this catastrophe of climate change caused by ourselves or at least modern humans not all of us is insight and if we don't then we risk doing all manner of crappy things as we're panicked because of everything falling apart so that's why I think it's so important to look at this stuff with this these new eyes anyway that was a little bit of a round up thing we've had an hour together thank you everyone please please please go back to the deep adaptation page that you saw this event on and find information there about the paper and about this video which will be there and please share it far and wide because there's no bank paying a PR agency to get economics journalists writing about this there's no bank paying a PR agency to get YouTubers and conspiracy theorists promoting our ideas so it's up to you thank you Matthew for an amazing amount of work over the last 18 months you're awesome and thank you and Christian thank you for bringing the you know that economists rigor to our thinking and it's been really fun to work with you both so um I'll say goodbye do you say goodbye goodbye