 Fy nid o'r ddechrau'r pryd o ddechrau'r ddatgani'r paradol ar gyfer gyda'r Paradol Cresifol. Felly, yn ei feddwl am ddod o'r cyfnod a'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod i'n meddwl i'r gael. Felly, mae angen i'r storio'r panlwysau am y cyfnod o'r ddod o'r llefydd, ddim yn ddiddordeb ac rydyn ni'n wybodd yn wneud o'r cwestiwn. Rydyn ni'n ffrifiad o'r ffordd oes unrhyw o'r gwahanol ar y ddweud o'r cymryd a'r ideaio ar y dyfodol. Roeddwn ni'n gweld plent o gwahodd ac mae'r barfod rydyn ni'n rwy'n rydyn ni'n bwysig i'r gwahodd i'r ysgustafol. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r hynny'n bwysig i'r hashtag CPC16. Rydyn ni'n gweithio chi'n gweithio'r ysgustafol. Mae gennym ni fydd ac wedi cael ei ddweud ac yn ddweud.." ...�이f am gweithio'r chyfion gan ein frywio... ..eb i'w bwysig y cefnchofffyrdd yr cyllidolion, rydym yn... ..eithio'r llwyso gennym nhw ar yr eithaf y ffarchydd sy'n gydweithio'n fawr. Mae'n gwneud, hyd wedi'u ziwethaf, at ddych chi'n amlwbio'r sefydliad... ..lyny'n byw'u cyngorol mewn credu'r ymlogion... ystod gwaith ynglynig yn y bwysig, mae eich Comerwyr ynglynig. Felly mae'r bwysig yw'r rhannog yn ystod gwaith yn ystod yn ei gallu ymwybwysig ac mae'r cyfraith eich cyfraith yn ystod yn cael ei hunain, on iddyn nhw'n ddweud iddyn nhw'n ddwy fyddydd. Yn ystod y bwysig yra gael y bwysig, rydyn nhw'n ddweud i gydag ychydig ac mae'n ddweud i gydag ychydig yn ydylliannogi, A in recently it's ... we've seen the massive growth in money and money and credit flowing into property and financial markets resulting in an economy that is skewed towards housing bubbles and oversized financial sector and most people end up under a mountain of debt. So where are we now? Well, post, Brexit and the economic and political uncertainty that followed The bank stepped in with a significant response. It announced £70 billion of new quantitative easing programme, so it's creating £70 billion and £60 billion of that will be used by government bonds from financial institutions and a further £10 billion will be used by corporate bonds. Many economists are pointing to the fact that QE increases inequality. This has actually even been pointed out by Theresa May and George Osborne and the Bank of England's own research has confirmed it. It's clear that monetary policy has significant political consequences, yet it's not really being scrutinised by Parliament. That was seen when there was a debate in the House of Commons on 15 September on the effectiveness of quantitative easing, and only eight MPs spoke. Steve, of course, was one of them, but our aim at Pustamoney is to change that. We've also seen in the last couple of weeks, Mark, the announcement of the Bank of England on which private companies are going to consider buying bonds from. Mark Carney said that they have to be companies that make a material contribution to the UK economy. So it was pretty shocking when the list was revealed, and it includes companies such as the technology giant AT&T, which are headquartered in Dallas. It includes Apple, which have recently been fined £11 billion for illegal tax activities by the EU, and other corporations who you could question whether they make a material contribution to the UK economy. Many people have said, questioned whether the bank should be picking and choosing companies like this at all, and former MPC monetary policy committee member David Blanchflower has called it unmandated fiscal policy. Up until now, there's been pretty much a cross-party consensus on monetary policy, which is leave it to Bank of England. But I think we can see that that consensus is breaking. As I said, many economists are pointing out that QE increases in equality, which isn't a good thing. And leading economic commentators such as Martin Wolff have actually said that QE should be abandoned and even pointed to other monetary policy tools that could be more effective and maybe more politically defensible. Some have even suggested a form of monetary financing where the bank would still create money, but that would enter the economy through government spending. But either way, I think we can all agree that a discussion about the role of the Bank of England and the Treasury is well overdue and how monetary and fiscal policy can work together. So, I'm going to introduce our fantastic panellists, so Steve Baker MP for Wickham, who's really delighted he can join us because he's one of a handful of MPs who's been working tirelessly to hold Bank of England and banks to account. And he also led the Money Creation and Society debate in November 2014, which was the first debate that Parliament's had on this topic for around 170 years. We're also really pleased to be joined by Peter Lilley, MP for Hitchin and Harfindon. Peter has held a handful of different Cabinet posts, including being a former Treasury Minister. And Peter also spoke at the Money Creation and Society debate, where he mentioned the money. Isabella Kaminska is a writer, blogger and commentator at the FT Financial Times and the blog FT Alfavel. Having spoken to her, I know that she has an enormous amount of knowledge about monetary policy and the theory of money, so we're really pleased she's here. Eric Lonergan is a fund manager from MNG Investments and he's also written a book on money and is a writer and blogger on monetary policy. He has criticised negative interest rates and promoted the idea of a helicopter money. So, first of all, I'd like to hand over to Steve, if you want to kick off. Although over the last year my career has been defined by the European Union and it's what triggered me to get into politics, actually I'm much more concerned about monetary policy, so thank you for coming. The question is, is monetary policy in its current form compatible with creating an economy that works for everyone? And I would say categorically no. No, it is not compatible with an economy that works for everybody. I should just say as an aside, I don't really think this subject's got very much to do with Brexit except for a reason which I'll touch on in a moment. I really want to make three points, very briefly say something about the effects, then say why we tolerate the current system of money and then ask a couple of questions about what follows. Well, it's now turned out to be quite easy to get the Monetary Policy Committee members to talk about the distribution effects of monetary policy. It was actually very difficult. They'd admitted it in a policy paper but then you couldn't draw them back to it. I suspect the reason why is that they know it's of course a political question, how to redistribute a wealth and so they didn't really want to talk about it. But Dr Vlega came along and very kindly directly answered a question that I asked him about distribution effects at which point we are now able to get much more feedback on it. And indeed at the last MPC hearing several colleagues held them to account on this issue of distribution. What happens? Asset prices get pumped up by QE, by easy money generally and of course that benefits the holders. Not only does it benefit the holders at the time but also I would suggest puts people at risk. So Andy Haldane told the Treasury Committee some years ago after QE had first started that they'd deliberately created the biggest bond market bubble in history. Well what do bubbles do? They burst. Well what if we've got a bubble in property, in bonds and in equities? Well I'll leave that there for the moment. Geographical issues. We talk a lot about the Northern powerhouse. Well I think one of the great strengths of positive money for me is we agree on a lot of the diagnosis although I think we basically disagree about what to do about it. But there's something called the counterlon effect. The idea that money is not in fact neutral. You're not pouring water into a tank. You're pouring black treacle in and therefore it piles up before it spreads out. That's a sure answer to what goes on. It takes time for money to change hands. So imagine you've got a great fountain of new money coming up in London and the South East in the financial sector where banks are lending money into existence where QE takes place. Is it any wonder that London and the South East is wealthier than the North and in fact there's some charts here which you're welcome to collect from the front but I've put together some charts on spending and what debt and so forth. But on the back is regional house prices and what you find is that the data on regional house prices seems to support the hypothesis that there's a counterlon effect in new money and housing. So I think the geographical distribution of wealth is also a function of monetary policy. And a further point on this productivity. It's great that we want to talk about productivity puzzle but again is it any wonder if you're in London and the South East working in the financial system that you have to do less effort to make the same amount of money. Productivity I suspect looks far better in London than our next cities and that the gap is larger than it is anywhere else because we have this enormously expansionary monetary system. By the way when I say extraordinarily expansionary I'm not just talking about QE. In 1997 the UK money supply was £700 billion, £700 billion by 2010 it had reached £2.2 trillion. And if you simply plot the quantity of M4 outstanding which again you'll find on this sheet it's an accelerating rush into that crisis as a great deal could be said about that but I've been asked to just stick to five minutes. So why do we tolerate this chronically expansionary monetary system which we've had since 1971 when finally money was separated from the G word gold? Well I think really there's two reasons. The first is that ultimately currency to basement has always been the last resource of rulers of politicians of kings. Back in the days when kings couldn't persuade their subjects to pay the taxes that they wished to raise they would bring the coins back in, clip them, dilute them and send them back out but these days what we do we operate a chronically expansionary monetary system which hardly anyone understands. Which brings me on to economists because although I'm not an economist I've worked so often with regulators, economists and with banks often enough to know that most economists don't give very much thought to money itself. They just don't and I've learned by studying monetary theory that actually monetary theory is very poorly understood generally. I also think that there's a profound problem in economics in that economists think that the methods of the natural sciences, the methods of physics and so on can be applied to the social sciences. Again there's a long conversation to be had about that. If Her Majesty the Queen had asked me why did no one see it coming I would have said well some people did see it coming but there were the economists who focus on a different epistemology, a different theory of knowledge. So again there's a long conversation there. So what follows? A great advantage of positive money is they've thought about what follows. I would describe such a system as constitutional fiat money I think you'd probably let me get away with that. A system of money where the government entirely controls how money is created. That's possibly a system better than the one we currently have because at least its shortcomings would be manifest before the public instead of money creation being hidden. But personally I agree with Alan Greenspan and Walter Badger, Friedrich Hayek and others that actually what we need is a free banking system. One which does not consist of a central planning committee making grand decisions which steer of all of our society. Because one of the great absurdities of the predicament we are in is that people claim we live in a market economy and yet we all pay huge attention to a massive big player in our economy and our society. One which is currently I believe not only sowing injustice by their actions but undermining the fundamental basis of trust in the market economy and that is the Bank of England. Now they mean well but I think that it is absolutely wonderful that so many people want to be here to ask these fundamental questions about the nature of money and how it should be reformed. Well Steve has packed an awful lot of profundity into his five minutes, I should be more mundane. I in the early days of my political career was much involved in monetary issues which then monetarism was the big thing and as a result I was known as a monetarist and as a result I get assailed by everybody including my wife on the issue of quantitative easing. They say you're a monetarist, you're against printing money, quantitative easing is printing money therefore you should be against it and I have to explain that it's not quite as simple as that. I'm against too much money but I'm also against too little money. I would also be against too much discretionary control of money but that's an issue I'm not going to perfect. Normally money is created printed if you wish by banks lending more than they take back in repayment of loans and if they do that there's a net increase in the money supply and that normally provides enough money for the economies. Sometimes it seems to be getting out of hand, too much money is created, the banks are creating too much money and the government or the monetary authorities are trying to limit it by saying well you must only have a certain ratio of loans to your fundamental assets and other techniques or just raising the interest rate and limiting the supply base. Recently however, since the great financial crisis of 2008, we've had a tendency to produce too little money. Banks have been intending to take back in repayments more than they're issuing out in loans. In that case money is cancelled as a reduction of money. QE is just a system of making sure that the money supply expands. Now, maybe that we are having too much QE. You can have too much of a good thing, so you can have too little of a good thing. But I don't think we should get too hung up on QE as such. There will always have to be a system of creating money, whether it be the banks doing it spontaneously by lending more than they're taking back in loans or in the absence of that government creating additional money through to do it easily. So, I don't think we should get too head up on that. Steve is right that the point at which money is injected to the economy will create a sort of, as Hyatt would say, if you put honey or crinkle into the economy. There's a mound for a while before it will settle down to an even level. But ultimately it does settle down to an even level. And the reason we have high house prices is not because of the money supply. It's because of the shortage of houses. In the long run it's because of the shortage of houses. You can have a temporary boom in house prices and you know that it's going to collapse. Ultimately, if you've got more people, you've got 25 million households trying to live in 24 million houses, the price of housing has to go up until a million people share homes. It's as simple as that. Whatever system you try to do to reap the price, if you've got fewer houses than households, you will have to have households sharing homes. People have to stay at home with their parents longer or share with friends or live in homes of multiple occupation or whatever. And that's the underlying problem. The worst problem we have in this country more than all our monetary problems we have, we just haven't built enough houses for the extra people coming to this country over the last 20 years. And even if we get a grip of our borders, which I hope we will post Brexit, we will still have to build lots and lots of houses to cope with the ongoing natural growth of the population, the increasingly rich population wanting more housing and the backlog of it. So we should separate to some degree the housing problem for the monetary problem. Finally, a monetary policy to some extent influences the exchange rate. As a market economist I sort of like to think the exchange rate ought to find its own natural level, but it's quite clear that we've been running a huge deficit on the balance of payments. That's normally a symptom that the exchange rate's overvalued. How has the exchange rate remained overvalued? Because we've been selling assets to make up the difference. Those assets include IOUs of the government and they include physical assets. People have been buying up British companies, as we see all the time. We call it a foreign direct investment, because it's just simply buying up the ownership of companies. And that can go on for a while, but eventually you run out of assets. If you sell goods you can make more goods next year, but you've got a limited number of assets. So we were on a deadline that someday or other the exchange rate was going to collapse. It's fallen happily as a result of Brexit and I hope it will stay on. To the extent that one has any discretion in monetary policy, I hope we would keep in future to a policy that didn't encourage us to balance our payments by selling assets, but had a reasonably competitive exchange rate. Now I think all those things are slightly off message for the group I'm talking to and on behalf of, so I'll shut up there. It is quite a few seats here, so if you want people that are standing on to grab a chair you can take it to wherever you want to sit down. Can you hear us at the back? Isabella? Hi everyone, I'll try and speak gladly. I'm very glad that you raised the sort of Friedmanite perspective on this, because I think one of the most misquoted quotes in all time is the Friedman quote that goes, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, because what's always overlooked is the second part of that quotation which says, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. So my point there really is that we always forget about the output fact, which sort of alludes to the point that you were making, which is that if there's a shortage of housing there will always be an inflationary problem. Now, how this fits into the post-Brexit monetary policy world? Well, I work for a blog called Deputy Alpha and we spend a lot of time sort of looking into the really geeky parts of monetary policy and how central banks work etc etc. And one thing that we continuously sort of come up about or come up against is the fact that there's a lot of misunderstanding about the very basic concept out there, such as QE. So QE is not actually money printing, it's more akin to an asset swap. So every time the government, the Bank of England is creating money here, they're also taking in an opposite equal asset, which in this case is US government bills or will shortly also be corporate debt. Now, this is really important because to really understand what's going on and how things went wrong, we have to look, we have to kind of rewind to what I would say is the 80s and the 90s, which is when the digital banking system went live. And really, this is the moment when money started to turn into something completely different in so much as we started to think that with information tech we could have instant settlement almost everywhere. So whereas we used to have a system that focused on something called NETSA, I'm using a lot of jargon so excuse me, but essentially we created this notion that we can have instant settlement everywhere. And this was a bit of a fallacy, because in reality what we discovered in 2008 is that instant settlement wasn't really working. There was a massive mismatch in terms of the liabilities and assets that we thought the system had. So we had to collateralize the network, which is where QE came in, which was essentially a recollateralization of the central bank balance sheet. And this is largely because central bankers have for a very long time idealized this notion that zero balances is the idealized form of central banking. So you don't actually need to have a central bank with gold or any sort of assets on its books because the optimum is a zero balance world where everything squares. So as we proceed throughout the day, everybody is never owing anyone because everything is instantly set. Of course the real world doesn't operate that way. If I order shoes on eBay, my transaction might be settled immediately, but if my shoes don't turn up on time, well somebody somewhere is bearing that risk. So what looks like on paper an instant settlement turns out to be a non-settlement in reality. And this is where the mismatches come about. So one of my views is that because of the way we've structured the central banking system, we don't count the other side of the balance sheet. We don't count the instances of fraud of all these different liabilities that kind of pop up through the years because we assume they go away. And when they come to a sort of crossing point in the road, there is only one way you can resolve that and that is with the government to step in and match the discrepancies that have built up. This is what we saw in 2008 and we now have this system where we are continuously collateralising and collateralising and we're running out of collateral. So my key point really is that we're now at a stage where bank reserves are effectively meaningless. Nobody in the international community or in global trade really appreciates them as much as they appreciate the collateral that backs those reserves. And we're running out of that collateral. This is a phenomenon that is now leading to things like negative interest rates and all sorts of other absurd situations where a sort of crowding out effect from collateral is having all sorts of distortions. I'm probably running out of time but I would just point out that generally speaking nobody agrees on what money is. It is really hard to define. But I'm predisposed to the idea that money is effectively a sort of a hierarchical system. There is a hierarchy of money everywhere. You often hear that so and so has a specific currency or they've created their specific talent has been turned into a currency. Kim Kardashian's currency is the fact that if she wears anything immediately it makes money for the people who are advertising on her platform or platforms, whatever. So we all have the potential to create currency. It's just that not all of us have currency potential that is in common use between all of us. And really the only common denominator is something like the government, which is why in the hierarchy of money government kind of sits at the top. So we do kind of live in a free banking world already because Tesco club card points are a type of money. So opera shareways miles. Every single bank that operates out there issues its own money. I mean positives money, positive money's big point here is that all these different liabilities interact with each other which effectively creates this sort of complex environment. Well firstly, so my name is Eric Lonergan. I'm a fund manager at M&G Investments and I'm responsible for money for running global funds. I work in the city. I first of all would like to thank positive money for inviting me here today. And I'd like to thank all of you for attending. I'm very impressed with the turnout for such an arcane issue as the reform of monetary policy. But what I would firstly like to do though is actually stress why this meeting is extremely important. So no one should have any doubt that central banks are in a kind of intellectual crisis currently. There is absolutely no doubt about that. So however confident they sound, however good they are at doing press conferences, however poor their forecasting is around Brexit, all of those factors are absolutely secondary to this fundamental point which is if this economy in the near future experience anything approximating a recession for whatever reason, there is with current tools absolutely nothing that the central bank can do. Now what's important is this is the first time in 30 years that you could make that statement. Now that may sound daunting, that may sound complicated. There's a very very simple reason for that. Everybody in this room or many many of you will even remember but we'll all be able to identify that we started 30 years ago with interest rates close to double digit levels. Now what that effectively meant is any time this economy experienced some kind of a shock, so whether it was an oil price shock, a recession in Europe, the banking crisis, ERM, in any of those situations or just standard cyclical recessions, any of those situations the bank of England's starting point was a high level of interest rates which it could then very aggressively cut interest rates which provided an immediate stimulus to the economy. Particularly in the UK where the mortgage system based on variable interest rates meant it was almost an automatic transfer to household cash flows from the bank of England immediately induced by a reduction in interest rates. Now the truth of the matter is whatever anybody says and I'll talk very briefly about what the bank of England's done post Brexit is it makes it crystal clear they simply do not have tools now to respond in an equivalent fashion. Now that is an incredibly dangerous state of affairs because over the last 30 years we've delegated all authority for dealing with recessions to the central bank and they're currently out of tools and they're not actually coming up with any good ideas as to how to solve that problem. In fact by and large they're ruling out all the good ideas. So this is something that is of grave importance to all of us and I also think there is an opportunity for the UK to show global leadership and to do some genuine innovation. Now if I can briefly I'm just going to clarify how I come to some of those conclusions. Let's look at what the bank of England has done since Brexit. There's been a reduction in interest rates that nobody in the country has even noticed. There may be some marginal impact on somebody's mortgage somewhere. It's not even clear that mortgage rates have moved. The net effect has actually been a major decline in government bond yields in guilt yields. Now we may not many of us don't pay any attention to what's happening to the guilt market. The guilt market is extremely important to everybody's pension because it's the discount rate. It's essentially the benchmark that the pension industry invests in for people to generate income in the future. So the net effect of what they've done since Brexit is actually to increase people's desired savings. That's a negative for demand in the economy. If you look at what's happening with corporate pensions people thinking about retirement. So the net effect of monetary policy has actually been to make people more cautious about the future. That's the reality of what's happened. So we've reached a point where interest rates are near zero. Making interest rates negative is an absurd idea. Further attempts to cut interest to ban currency. These are crazy ideas. The private sector is telling the authorities we have enough debt. Thank you very much. We don't want anymore. That's part of it. We're much more concerned about saving for the future. OK. So what are we going to do about this? What's fascinating when you look at central banks is the two fundamental tools of central banks have actually not changed since the first central bank was set up several centuries ago. It was the Swedish Reaks Bank. It had two tools. It bought government debt. That's actually QE. So QE is nothing new. It started 200 years ago with the first central banks and they provided liquidity and a financial panic to the banking sector. We've dedicated banks' authorities for managing the whole economy with two tools that are unchanged in 200 years. So what I would at least like us to do is start an intelligent discussion about how we are going to reform the Bank of England and give it tools that are effective. Now the objective of that discussion has to be preserve the central banks independence. We do not want to revert to the old policies where you get a big spoon bust associated with the political business cycle. So whether or not we like the politicians we don't really want to give the politicians cyclical control over monetary policy. Preserve the Bank of England. We want to maintain the inflation target because that price stability is undoubtedly a very, very good thing for an economy in a society. And we want the policies to be effective and as fair as possible. And one of the suggestions out there which I think is worthy of consideration, don't believe me as a fund manager based in the city. We have people as something that Keynes, Freedman, Ben Bernanke agree on, which is actually in a recession and I thought Peter put it beautifully. You can have too much money. You've got inflation. It's not difficult to know whether there's too much money. If you've got inflation there's too much. If you have the threat of deflation there's too little. So there's an awful lot to be said for a very simple policy solution if there's the threat of deflation. Were this economy to slow very, very seriously, which is allow the Bank of England to make transfers to households. So instead of forcing individuals to do things that they don't want to do, i.e. to borrow more, why not use the money that the government can effectively generate to counter recessions to make an equal distribution to households? Now obviously that is no small challenge. It would require legislation. But really what I'm saying is I really want to stress one point which is currently we don't have the policies. The policies that are being pursued are outright dangerous and extremely risky. This requires some new thinking. We need to start that thinking right now. Questions for the panel that I will open it up to the floor to start with and take three. So the person with the T3 T-shirt? Yeah, I'd like to point out that in 1925 C.H. Douglas produced for monetary prices workers are producing goods and services and the prices for those goods and services are always going to be higher. And there were incomes that they received so there's always going to be a discrepancy in monetary policy even at that level. So as the gentleman was saying, his solution was national dividend payments in order to counter out the difference between the prices and the income. So that's an interesting point of view that you raised there as a possible means of reform. Is there a question or just a statement? I just want to use that highlight. Okay. So please raise your voices and keep your questions concise. They check share. So it was very interesting. Thank you to all the speakers. I have a question to the lady from the press. I read a lot of economics. I read papers even from central banks. But I didn't understand the word of what you said. So I was wondering if you could maybe try and explain your thesis to normal people language. That would be thankful. Thank you. We heard that central banks use monetary policy to A, keep out the hands of politicians and out of the boom the electoral cycle. And B, to maintain price stability. But the price stability that they've done to maintain deliberately ignored housing prices. They were told CPI and RPI. Does the panel think that A, damaged what they were trying to do. And B, led to politicians being able to ignore what the housing market should have looked like and that not in the tax. So the major Douglas thing, there are so many ideas in monetary policy. Sometimes he's denounced as a crank and sometimes he's admired. And I don't know, I just use it as an opportunity to make the point. But there's a very wide range of views around monetary theory. It's one of the things that makes it difficult to determine what we should do next. I thought I understood most of what was said and found it very interesting. But I hope you'll be able to give me the disagree. Can you project your voice? Sorry. It's actually quite difficult to talk this loud, but we'll try. On the other point about deliberately ignoring the price of houses. Yes, you're absolutely right. Peter made the point about supply and demand. I'm not denying supply and demand, but I think both supply and demand and the way that money injections happen are both relevant. But I won't say any more about that. But I tried, during the last parliament, I tried to get the government to talk about this issue of ignoring house prices. They decided to introduce what they called CPI brackets H. But it only looks at your mortgage costs or your rental costs. It doesn't look at actually the asset price. So, there's all sorts of things going on here which obscure, for me, the fundamental issues. Thank you. I will try. I think that speaks more about my presentation skills than anything else. So, it's a really complex situation because there are so many moving parts. But if there's one point I'm trying to make is that money is something endogenous. It is an ethereal concept and a lot of us think we know what it is. But in reality, nobody can really agree on it and there is no such thing as money. I know you think of a £5 note being the definition of money. But when you look at the big picture and you unpick everything, you realise that money is this hierarchical situation of all sorts of different liabilities. I owe this person this and I owe that person that. Banks have liabilities. We have personal liabilities. Then there's other types of money. There's commodity money. There's coupons that are issued by supermarkets. There's all these different things that float around in the world that qualify as money. So, when you take policy and you address only that top little sector of money, there will be distortions because you're not necessarily addressing the rest of the monetary universe. And just because this is positive money, I think their big revelation was that banks create money without any sort of governmental supervision. It's up to them how much they issue. Nobody tells them you can issue a million or two million or two. They do it and what determines whether they do it is the potential productivity of the loans they are making. If the universe of money works, then everything should balance to zero plus create some profit. But somewhere in the system we went wrong. They stopped balancing and so we ended up with a big deficit. Now, was it because the banks were over issuing money to the point where banks stop being... If you really think about it, what is a bank? It is in the job of creating barriers to entry. It's a well-frashering system. It is in the job of ensuring money is always scarce because if money was literally falling from the trees, there would be no point to money. So, as soon as banks end up, I don't want to call them a mafia, but say they're internally corrupt and they start issuing money as if it comes from trees, you create a problem. And this can happen all over the place. It can happen to supermarkets which are over-issue units. I don't want to mention specific supermarkets, but hypothetically, if you over-issue club card points, you have a run on your supply. So it can happen to anyone. This happened in Weimar, et cetera, et cetera. So the solutions have to understand that the system of money is complex. And if you address just one specific type of money, you're probably going to create unintended consequences somewhere else in the chain. Does that make more sense? It's a complicated subject, but if you'd like to comment on either of those questions, housing price, social theory... I'd just make a very brief comment on the long history of ideas along these lines. I think the housing point is a very important one. I would make a very simple observation, which is excessive reliance on interest rates. So parts of the economy that are more sensitive to interest rates are going to react an awful lot more. So what we're discovering is that interest rates are very blunt, and their effects are ambiguous and can't be destructive. And it's entirely valid if you look at places like Scandinavia where they're now using negative interest rates, for example in Sweden. It's causing huge problems, as you would absolutely expect in the housing market with a huge housing bubble and financial stability. So we really do need to think about alternative ways of creating money and stabilising demand in the economy. Great. OK, let's take three more. So, blue tie. I'm just wondering how has China affected things? Great question. Tetscher. Tetscher, Dick Rogers, a fan of positive money, but I might not completely have understood what positive money is saying. But in the book, in one of your books, you quote early American President Thomas Jefferson, who I think I've got it right, said that the power, the sovereign authority to create money should be taken from the banks and returned to the people to who they are. To whom it properly belongs. And it seems to me that the essential deficit is that the money stock of our country is almost entirely, apart from the 3% that's cash, is the property not of the nation of the society, but a debt by society to its creators and lenders, the commercial banks who are not part of our society really. And they should actually be banned from creating money, and an agent of society, namely the Bank of England as a public servant, should be given that job and should do it. Have I got it right? I might rephrase it, but I'll take one more question and then I'll do that. You said, Eric, that the Bank of England's monetary policy on industries is favourable, which clearly has because we haven't had a monetary demand. But actually, isn't it more of a failure because interest rates for small businesses is still at a probable 14% to 20% and consumer credit is probably at a probable 30% and most mortgages is still at a probable 40%, so actually they say that the policy bit hasn't gone through at all. They keep saying it's going to go forward, so before you look at everything else, shouldn't you see out their ways that they should of course be through? Great, so the question is, what about China? And then Dick very eloquently outlines positive money's proposal, which is around stopping banks having the power to create money and returning it to the state. But I'm feeling like that's quite controversial amongst our panelists. I'm also going to throw in our campaign, which we're doing at the moment, which is the fact that QE is money created by Bank of England. I kind of disagree with Isabella, but it's not creation of money because it is the creation of central bank reserves, which are then swapped for assets. If we're going to create money in the public interest, how do we get that into the real economy so that it benefits people and households? But I very much welcome comments on our main proposal, which is the more radical stop, stop money being a debt by society to commercial banks. And then the final question was about how these low interest rates just haven't gone through to SMEs, even mortgages. So who wants to pick up? Big questions. Actually, I meant to say previously, I'll start answering the last set of questions again. One thing I would say about if you didn't understand what Isabella says, you should read her work because it's very clear and very interesting. So I would strongly recommend that. With respect to interest rates not being fed through, I mean that's absolutely true. I still would suggest that what we're realizing about central banking is that interest rates as a tool has reached the end of the road. And my own personal view would be that we should let competition and efficiencies and technology in the private sector, which I think is happening, reduce the cost of credit where it's appropriate for it to be done. But I still think the essential point is there's an over-reliance really on interest rates. I mean with respect to China, all I would say about China is a fascinating subject. I don't think it's too directly relevant to this conversation. Except for perhaps this, that China similarly has a problem of too much debt. So this is a global phenomena that the private sector pretty much globally perceives itself to be overburdened by leverage. So we should watch China because the one good thing about the Chinese is they think very independently and they're not shy of the unconventional. So even if it isn't the UK that can lead the way on this globally, and as I say there is a real opportunity here, it may well be that it comes from somewhere that we don't anticipate and they are going to innovate in a way that we can learn from. So we should certainly watch the Chinese situation very closely. Can I come in on China? Interest rates normally have to do two things. They have to produce a balance between people's desire to hold money rather than their desire to hold interest bearing assets. And they have to balance the desire to save against the desire to invest. So they have to simultaneously do both things which is quite difficult. But it normally sort of happens and works its way out. It's more difficult when interest rates can't go down below a certain level. China, however, has a chronic propensity to save. It's very odd to me that a poor country, where it's relative to ours, or our standard of living, people want to save so much. And even though they invest a lot, their propensity to save even more. So there's a sort of glut of savings in the world from China also, some example from Japan and Germany. And that ideally, therefore, should be borrowed and result in extra investment elsewhere. But the interest rate ought to help bring that about. It isn't bringing that about automatically. These things are identical, but it's tending not to happen as smoothly as it should. And if anything is happening by reducing the level of activity rather than increasing the level of investment. So somehow we want to overcome that. We had calls for new thinking. I thought at the end of the session we'll have got that. We were thinking, we worked out how to do it. I don't know how to do it. But that's the problem that China saves too much. Even though they thought they got plenty of things to spend the money on and consume the goods. Just to add on the China point, I would recommend a book called Paper Promises, Money, Debt and the New World Order. Which, despite its provocative title, is written by the Economist's Capital Markets editor, Philip Cogan. And he discusses China in quite some detail. So I would recommend that one. I think China's probably got the same problem as everywhere else. If there's something wrong with the fundamental way that the institutions of money are set up, then it's the same institutional problems of Flick China as well. On this point about money as an obligation to the banks, there's always a risk going off on a tangent. There's basically two things you could do in a reform about it. You could do what basically Irving Fisher said, have paper money 100% backed, the banks don't create any money as debt. And your ultimate settlement is basically paper money. That would be a way of doing it. The other way, which historically has been the way of doing it, is gold. And gold has the great advantage of you're able to take possession of that physical asset and it's nobody else's liability. And so gold is the other way. If you look at a great reading on this, is Alan Greenspan's essay, Gold and Economic Freedom. To me it's the absolutely definitive short essay on a system of free banking based on redemption in gold. He wrote it back in the 60s, Ron Paul asked him if he repudiated it, he said he never had. I hoped to meet him last year, the year before, and ask him again. But unfortunately he was frightened off from attending that particular conference. That's another story for today. But that is the book to read. Personally I think the thing to do these days is to let the market work. What you do is I would remove all restraints on producing money in the private sector. Bitcoin would be one example. Other ways you could do it would be to use fintech to have claims on gold and silver. But I would take the state out of the way of the innovators, entrepreneurs creating new forms of money that would not claim liabilities to the banks. Very quickly, I just add that the hard thing isn't issuing money. Anyone can issue money. The hard thing is getting other people to accept your money, right? And so all this sort of innovation that sounds very promising on the surface of things. But I will also remind people that necessity is the mother of invention. And there's sometimes no more desperate people out there than criminals and the sort of black economy. They are very good at innovating on all this stuff. Again, I mentioned the mafia, but they've been innovating creating new sorts of money for many generations. So the art market is a good example of a sort of parallel money system that's been operating sort of alongside the legitimate one all this time. So with respect to China, the same applies. China has just joined something called the special drawing right basket. I don't know how many of you are familiar with that, but it's essentially the IMF basket for valuing their special drawing rights. And this was a really big deal because it sort of means China is now one of the big boys. It's issuing so-called hard currency and hard currency is supposed to be something that is internationally accepted and qualifies as something everybody wants to keep in their reserves. But the truth is when you speak to the market, it's not clear at all whether just being in the club means that the market will accept these liabilities because there's more to what an acceptable liability is than just being part of a basket. It's whether or not your system of law is trustworthy, whether you're likely to default on promises, whether your business practices are solid, whether your property right law is acceptable. And people are not yet convinced that China necessarily has the same standards as the West. So it will be a very interesting time to see whether or not the market goes for it. If they do, then there is potentially a big transfer of power coming up and then really we won't be worrying about whether the Bank of England is producing money or not. We will be worried, or not even the BOE, that hasn't been the case since before the war, more like the Federal Reserve. Then we will be worrying about the PBOC, but for now it doesn't look like that's going to happen because we still don't necessarily trust China the same way that we do trust the U.S. Just the interest rates. You can come back to that maybe. Let's take off another round of questions. Nigel Martin is my name. I was fascinated that when Iceland beat England, 10% of the population had travelled from Iceland to Nice where it was. And I thought, how could such a large portion of the population afford to go to Iceland or to France where they suffered a worse financial crisis than we did in 2008? What did they do that we haven't done? Is there something missing from this in terms of you outlining positive news position a bit more explicitly? And would you see a role for credit unions in the facilitation of moving that money around the country? I'm going to go on a slight counter to the history card. Lot of course, with reference to pointers, the share price of the Deutsche Bank has fallen yet again. So my question is how big a problem is this and how worried should we be? Maybe I'll take one more because they're quite short questions. Why do you think it is that when there's a House Billers debate about funds to visa only a dozen MPs tell us? OK, we'll do one more. This is going to be a big round of questions. I think we'll just come back. We've got plenty of time. So I'll just take these four and you'll be in the next round. OK? Don't panic. So Iceland, why can everyone still afford to go to Nice? What do we think about credit unions as part of the solution? Deutsche Banks just had a massive share price crash. How is this feeding to the broken monetary policy system? Why do only a handful of MPs turn up to any debate on monetary policy? Is this a problem? Who wants to kick up? I don't know the complete detail about what happened in Nice, but we can make this a very complicated discussion. You can keep the question of money actually extremely simple as well. The great Scottish philosopher and political economist David Hew said that there were three spontaneous institutions of social organisations, of three institutions that all societies have, which is language, law, the rule of law and money. And in many ways, those are three amazing free gifts that a civilised society has. Language, which is the most valuable thing that we have, is free. The rule of law isn't quite free. These may well be hard-fought, wonderful things, but essentially the benefits of the rule of law are available to all. That is an amazing fact of the society. The ability to print money used wisely is in large part the basis of an advanced economy. And it is free. Money is created out of nothing, and as people have suggested, it just depends on trust. I do believe that also because it tends towards being a monopoly, what really all of that means is if loads of people set up their own monies, we will end up after a certain amount of time with one. That's why it ends up in the state's hands. So even if you think ideologically Milton Friedman of the legal states should produce money, and he was obviously an advocate of free markets, but there's an inevitability which is you end up with one money because of the economies of scale, because it's most convenient if we have one. In the sense that policies of issuer will dominate. But the Iceland point is important. No society should be brought to its knees by a financial crisis. If you are, it's a failure of your monetary authorities. In the same way as Peter said, no civilised society should have deflation because it can create money for nothing. The challenge is to make sure that people get the money and that it's being created responsibly. It's as simple as that. So when people talk about hyperinflation, et cetera, those are institutional failures. A corrupt dictator can destroy a society. It can destroy the rule of law. But that is not a reason for us to distribute money in an intelligent way. And I'm actually suggesting a very simple solution here. For a fraction of the amount of money that would be used with quantitative easing, three or four per cent of GDP just give the bank of England the ability to credit people's households directly with money. You don't need any spectacular innovations. There's no political vested interest that should be opposed to that. And a fire point, why does nobody show up for a quantitative easing debate? Because people are absolutely baffled and embarrassed to confess that they have no understanding of how the entire thing is operating nor what its effects are. Now, to the gentleman in the back, I think these issues can be explained very clearly. The problem is if you explain quantitative easing very clearly, you realise very quickly it has virtually no effect. And leading back to the issue of helicopter money or the Bank of England crediting everybody. I am the recipient of helicopter money. The government pays me my MP's salary of £70,000 a year. I pay tax of perhaps half that amount. The government is somehow getting the money to give me that extra from somewhere. So it's getting it from other people. But over the economy as a whole, the government is spending roughly £100 billion more than it's raising in taxation. So it is injecting into people's pockets £100 billion a year. What it does is says, well, that's creating an extra £100 billion of money. That's too much. So we'll scoop some back by selling bonds to get back from the banks the money that they have created and put into circulation. So I don't really see any difference between a so-called helicopter money and what we have at present. Am I missing something? There's one very obvious difference. The system as it is, it's doomed from the start because of the interest. And because the bank down to keeps all the interest they make on the money. The system with sovereign money, money is created with no interest. So it all fits in a nice system. Do you want to very, very quickly come up on that? Yeah, I would just make the very simple point. I think to some extent Peter is correct. So effectively fiscal policies could do the same thing. I just have a very practical observation. Let's say there's a nuclear accident, there's a financial crisis or Deutsche Bank collapse. Something happens externally that caused this economy to go into recession. What is the Bank of England going to do next week? The reality is absolutely nothing. So we're entirely in the hands of fiscal authorities. And all I'm saying is let's just give them a simple effective tool that is not particularly dramatic, is not really that dramatic in innovation but means if this economy does at any point in the next five years go into recession, they have the ability to end that recession quickly. Steve, do you want to comment on why no MPs turn out for debates? Yeah, well it's a bit like what Eric said. Well put it another way round. Why do MPs go to debates? There's basically three reasons. Constituency pressure is entirely proper. Their electors want them to go and attend a debate on an issue. Secondly, because they personally appreciate that the issue is relevant in the common good to their electors, but they're not under pressure, but they care about it, which would be why I go. And the third reason would be because the whips tell them to go in the interest of supporting the Prime Minister or whatever. And on this issue I think the bottom line is basically to put what Eric said maybe just a tiny bit, more kindly, they just don't know about the issue and there before they've got nothing to say. Because that Goldsmith wouldn't mind me saying that though he spoke in the Monetary and Society today, he confessed he didn't know very much about it, but he sort of sensed it really matters. And this is a lot of this is going on. Maybe we're all crazy and everything is going to be fine and they'll just do a bit more QE and half percent interest rates. The economy will restart and there's no problem. I don't think that's right. But if we are in one, in so far as there is an intersection amongst our views, we all seem to think that there's something quite wrong with the monetary system. Well, OK, if we're right, we better start getting all of our brains on this and try and work out what we're going to do. But I'm afraid because it hasn't been an issue, Minister of Parliament, I'll be quick. If I may, I just on this point of Deutsche Bank and then I ought to say something about positive money. I think with both Deutsche Bank and the Italian banks, there's a whole set of institutional failures. Just set aside the money things. The limited liability corporate form, as opposed to unlimited liability, strict liability partnerships, means that the people operating the banks don't stand to lose massively when it all goes wrong. That's something I raised in another bill. And the other thing, the IFRS accounting system causes you to prosyclicly overvalue assets and under account for loan losses. And I think that's also made all of the banks much more vulnerable. I personally do expect a massive banking crisis because I believe that monetary policy is overinflated the numeric value of assets. On positive money, you know, the bottom line is I don't support these ideas about helipops and money and money creation in these ways. But to give a refutation of it now, I feel would be trespassing too much on all of your time. But I think in the end money has to be something which is not created and handed out by government. I think one way or another, you simply cannot trust politicians, ultimately politicians, with the power to create money. And I know Eric said that Bank of England needs to be independent. Of course I respect what you said. But I think that once one were to start down this and it would become very clear that this redistributional effect was political, I think that resisting calls for much more democratic control of the currency creation process would be impossible to resist. So I would just say very quickly that I totally agree with Eric that money tends towards monopoly. And this is one of the issues when you face something like a free banking model is that you will inevitably end up with a cartel because it's like OPEC. You have to control the supply if you're going to retain the value. This is why Bitcoin has a very hardwired sort of scarce de-factor in built in it. From full reserve money, I would just say this too has problems because you don't want to end up in the sort of gas bank world, which is the Soviet system where the central bank was in charge of the entire money supply in terms of how the transfers were being done. Who got allocated the money and how much and was kind of veering towards that world already with this new Mark Carney idea to kind of buy corporate bonds because he's already making decisions about what sorts of corporations will be given this sort of advantage whereas which versus those that won't. These are market-based decisions I would argue so it is a bit unnerving to see an institution like Bank of England making these qualitative choices. But I'd also argue that the best way to think of banking and money is as the original sharing economy. We hear a lot about the sharing economy these days and we hear about how it's network-based. Well before you had Uber or before you had Airbnb you had money and money was literally a network system and if you all had the Uber of money aka the pound you had certain frictionless sort of ease of access situations. And this is what created what people called, well there are two types of money, information sensitive and information insensitive money. So the sort of stuff that we all know and we can all trust because we know the brand, we know the person, we don't have to do much due diligence on it. We just know who it is if there's a problem we can go collectively and get our money back so to speak. But all the private money has enormous information, asymmetry associated with it and the cost of doing the due diligence defies the network effects that you get from it. And that's the problem which is why I advocate balance so you don't have entirely full reserve and you don't have entirely private but you have a nice balance and the two keep each other in check. OK, we're going to take a question about credit unions. Can we pick up credit unions very quickly? I just would make the observation that credit unions are like peer-to-peer lending generally don't have this credit expansion phenomenon. It is quite interesting with the growth of peer-to-peer and interesting credit unions that actually the nature of money creation would change naturally as a result of those things growing. Can I just say that with peer-to-peer one thing we have to be very mindful of is that it doesn't scale very well because of these information challenges that I've talked about. So we're coming into the point where peer-to-peer networks where frauds are coming up, people are lying, all the same old stuff that happened with banking is happening with peer-to-peer because to accelerate their business model they're having to make the same sort of qualitative judgments and take the same sort of balance sheet risk that the banks did. Right, I'm going to take the last round of questions so yellow tie. I'd like to just refute some of the points about this cartel and this monopolisation of money because if you look at the 19th century, prior to the Peerless Banking Acts we actually had competition and currency in Scotland, banks were issuing them and so on. It was actually the government stepping in and stopping that. There was no central bank in Scotland, it was in England and in England they were failing, the banks were largely outside the bank. The Scottish system was connected to the British system then? No, no, no, no, no. We've only got time for short questions, concise. We will be hanging around afterwards so we can get into some more discussions then. I'm just going to take two more and then we're going to go to StripeShare. Just to bring this home to everybody, you've all talked about the asset price bubble that were probably in. Could you quantify say in footsie and house price terms just where you think we might be heading if we don't do something about this fairly soon? Professor Richard Werner of Southampton University coined the term quantitative easing and he says in a nutshell his argument is that everybody has implemented it wrongly and that quantitative easing, the creation of money should go towards productive investments rather than speculation which is what's happened. What's your comment on that? Bitcoin, does that make all this relevant? I'm an ICAW accountant whose office is just down the end of the canal. It's very interesting what Isabella said because outside this bubble within a two minute walk is one of the most socially deprived estates in not the UK but the whole of what was still called in Europe. It's very interesting what Isabella said. Most of that estate survives on credit unions, food vouchers, local food banks and trading within charity gifts of vouchers given to using local. This is the third one of these I've been to being an accountant. No one has ever bought the people who live in Ladywood, Claire Shorto constituents within one of these debates. Very shortly, final question, can you keep it concise? I have a slightly old question to you that the government optimist has to balance the books. I don't really get confused by this concept that you've been appealing optimally and give everybody a check for say £1,000. That's very different. That doesn't count against the PSPR but if the government gives a tax cut of £1,000 to everybody that does count against the PSPR. So please explain. So the questions were and I'm going to ask the panellists to keep their answers possibly to like under a minute because we want to finish dead on 5.30 so people are going to use this day. Asset price bubbles for the dangers, Bitcoin, what do we think, something about quantitative using, not going into productive sectors, what about people using vouchers down the road having their discussion. Helicopter money, tax cut versus actual, like what's the difference between helicopter money and tax cut. And I'm going to add a final question which is what is the role of fiscal policy and monetary policy working together because if we're actually going to innovate in monetary policy who's going to lead it? So who wants to kick off when I'm going to be really strict and keep you to under a minute. Thank you. Okay we don't have to balance the books because the pattern notes that are in your wallet have been created out of nothing. That is a benefit the whole society can have. In my view the Bank of England should be distributing that benefit equally to everybody. So eating people on, it shouldn't favour people who own stocks and shares, it shouldn't own people with bonds, it shouldn't favour banks, it should favour all adult citizens. So all citizens should get an equal distribution of the money that we create for free which we need to keep the economy going. In terms of asset prices, Bitcoin, don't worry about Bitcoin, don't worry about asset prices. The role of monetary policy is to stabilise spending. That's its function and we can do that through the distribution of the money that we create. And there was a final point about having private monies in what the Scottish did etc. Absolutely not. Private languages don't work, think about it. If I invent a language that only I speak, it's of no use to anybody. Apart from myself I can have a lot of my own, that's fine. That's where my jokes are funny. However language tends to one and you would never give that power to another country. So you do not want to start using dollars or start using euros and Scotland should be very aware of this. You don't want to start using euros similarly. So there's immense advantage in having your own currency precisely because it is a gift to its own society. I agree with all that and I'm sorry but I've got to go. So on this point about the poor for one of a better term, I do believe in the old idea of the ladder and the safety net, but the problem we've got at the moment I believe is that our monetary institutions mean that the ladder is broken and there are enormous holes in the safety net. I am outraged that there are still homeless people. I'm outraged, there's a report I read over the summer. I'm outraged that we're in a position where if benefits were paid within three days, two-thirds of food bank use had disappeared. I mean outrageous that we pay so much money to operate a welfare state. That does that. I could give you a catalogue of in callous indifference to the suffering of the poor, which I've seen by amongst people operating the welfare state. I don't doubt that there are lovely people in all other regards, but somehow when we put this within this system of rules-based provision of welfare within the state, somehow it doesn't work in a way that I suspect that friendly societies would never tolerate. To Barry's point about abolishing legal tender laws, well I actually agree and there's just a fundamental intellectual difference here basically because I'm a libertarian and I want them to be free of the state as far as that's possible. But when Nigel Lawson was Chancellor, he basically adopted high-ex proposal for competing monies, and by saying instead of adopting the euro we should allow Europe's fiat monies to compete across the territories. So Barry, I agree with you. If I could say how big the bubble was, I'd probably also be able to say when it would burst and then I'd be remortgaging my home and short selling and I just don't know. And on this point about speculation versus investment, I'm afraid in a society with uncertainty all entrepreneurship necessary to production is itself speculative. So I think it's a bit of a false choice. Bitcoin, the problem with Bitcoin is because it is monetising, its value fluctuates too wildly to be a good unit of account and therefore at the moment it is not a good money. That said, I own some Bitcoin and I used it to find accessories for my camera and it turned up just like it does for Amazon. So I think it's an exciting time to be alive in this space and we should definitely not spoil the emerge. For God's sake, whatever the government does, do not spoil Bitcoin and other fintechs capable of delivering a means of exchange which might be adequate should people choose to use it. I do think the books have to square. I think there's a fallacy to suggest they can't. But with respect to the free bankings, the QE point about productive investments, I couldn't agree more. I think this is where we are going wrong and we should see QE targets, say renewable projects or something like that. Green QE is something I think is a good idea. On the free banking stuff, the Scottish example can be refuted with the simple point that it was entirely a guilt backed system and if it wasn't for the guilt that was supporting the Scottish free banking system, you wouldn't have had the productive stability that you had back then. There are a lot of counter, there is a lot of counter literature is what I'm going to say. And on Bitcoin, I will simply say that we're seeing this experiment provide us with a fantastic example of competing currencies. There's loads of them. There isn't just Bitcoin, there's Litecoin, there's Madera, there's like a million, billion different types of currency. And what we are discovering through this process is that there's a lot of fraud in this world and almost all these different currencies of Ponzi schemes or scams to the degree that nobody can really trust them. And this is the kind of problem you have in a free banking world is that you would have to do so much research before you accepted anybody's particular liability that before you knew it, your market opportunity would have disappeared because the guy who was selling you, I don't know, some jars would have moved on by now. So it's about due diligence and in Bitcoin we're actually seeing the system mutate back into the current system. So who has the power in the Bitcoin economy? It's all the intermediaries, it's the coin bases and the sort of third parties who are essentially guaranteeing that your values, your balances are kept apart, which is very ironic because that's exactly how banks came about because they too had different fluctuating equity prices and they realised that people wanted a common currency, common acceptable currency between all institutions and they effectively ended up cross ensuring each other so your liabilities would be backed by my assets so and so for the sake of the greater good. And this is how we created the Bank of England as it happens. Thank you, wow. Well I think if we can all agree on anything it's that it's complicated but thank you very much for being here and especially our panellist. We've heard from Steve about how asset bubbles are being generated by monetary policy and that monetary policy category is not working for society. Peter mentioned that since financial crisis banks have just not been creating enough money which is why monetary policies had to become unconventional. Isabella talked about no one caring about but none of the financial markets wanting central bank reserves, they want the collateral that backs them and she got in at the end that she promotes the idea of a green quantitative easing and Eric talked about the fact that central banks are in an intellectual crisis right now, they're out of tools so I just want to make a couple of announcements. If you are interested in positive money ideas and our campaign on stopping QE and getting money created for people not financial markets please come and see Danny and you can sign up to our email list. There's a bunch more food so please stay around and have some food and a drink with us and carry on discussing this very complicated topic. I think two people particularly panell generally ought to be honoured but particularly I think Steve Baker for raising or organising a part of the first parliamentary debate about this issue since 1844, two years ago. I think that's right isn't it? I agree with you about everything but that was really great and Fran for organising it so I think you've done a really...