 Hello everyone, this is the fifth of the COVID-19 conversations in international development hosted by the Department of Development Studies here at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. This is a particularly special session for us to host because it features our esteemed colleague, Thomas Marwa, and his co-editors of what seems like a very important book that we are launching in this session, Public Banks and COVID-19 combating the pandemic with public finance. As we know, COVID-19 has been devastating in terms of the economic blow that it has landed across the world. And from what I gather about this book, we shall obviously hear far more about it. Here we have essays that are looking at the role of public banks in the fight against COVID and in the process of recovery to come. As the authors say, public banks provide supportive credit, fiscal assistance, expert advice and macroeconomic stability in ways that private financial institutions are often unable or unwilling to do. This book also has a number of case studies and we will obviously be hearing more about those case studies for the rest of the afternoon. Before I hand you over to Professor David McDonald, who will be chairing this session, let me just say a couple of words in terms of the next session, which is going to be the 8th of December. Slightly different time, you know, and they will be having Paolo Gerbaudo from King's College, who is going to be speaking on forms of protest in the time of COVID-19. So please do look out for a notice on that one. By way of a short introduction to Professor David McDonald, David is a professor at the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen's University in Kingston in Canada. He's written extensively on private and public service delivery, especially water, electricity and healthcare. And he's been interested in issues of urbanization, environment and uneven development. And on these themes, he has worked with partners in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. So I'm going to hand over to you now, David, and I will basically take on the function now of letting in people as and when they appear like they're ready to be let in from the waiting room. So please let me hand this over to you, David. Thank you, severe and welcome everybody. So I'm just wondering if you haven't already if you could make me a co host so that I'm able to share my screen with people. Yes. Yeah, the only reason I want to show you the screen when that's up and running is I want to show you as well the website that we set up for this for this project. And I'll just make a sort of general background to where this book came from and how it's come about. Tom and I, and and Diana was involved as well. And some others were in the process of talking about looking at public banks specifically as they have been playing a role in funding public water pollution. And this is part of the municipal services project. And so for me at least public banks is the most recent sort of look at yet another public utility and Tom and others have been working on these a lot longer than I have so I'm relatively new to the public bank terrain. But when COVID hit the fieldwork we had planned for this work on public banks and public water obviously came to a crashing halt. And with that, well, why don't we put out a call to see if anyone would be interested willing and able to write about the response of public banks and public water operators to COVID-19. And so much for our surprise we got a huge positive response. We've just released the book on public water and COVID-19, which you can find on the MSP website. And today we're launching this one on public banks and COVID-19. And I'll just see now if I can share my screen and take you to here we go. So this is the publication page for the for the website is brand new website we've set up, and you can download the entire book here. And then below that we have all of the individual chapters, and these are all freely available, and you can download whatever interests you. And I will say we've organized the book as an eclectic in an eclectic ordering. And that's in part because in the end, as you can imagine, in the midst of a pandemic, having the same kind of consistency across chapters was much more difficult than if we'd had months and months to plan this thing out and do all the editing etc. But in the end, I think that kind of eclecticness is part of the book strength, because it reveals a kind of certain kind of universality of public banks, but also highlights their differences. And that's also reflected I think in the eclecticness of the contributors. It's a very broad mix of people backgrounds different orientations etc. So, so if you're not familiar with public banks, I think it's a great introduction to what public banks are about. And if you have been working on public banks for a long time, it's a fascinating excursion into the variegated terrain of what public banks are. And I say that it's the sort of the good the bad and the ugly of public banking there's some really positive story there's problematic stories. But that's exactly what we wanted to do was to just try and look at how public banks are responding to COVID-19. And of course, as a kind of rapid response project, it is by definition a snapshot in time. And all the work basically took place between May and September. So things are very dynamic issue and things are changing. So this is by no means the final word in what public banks are doing in the response to COVID-19. And I think that we're going to see more of public bank engagement. But I'll just make one last point here. The landing page for the website has a whole bunch of smaller profiles of public banks and if you click on any one of these banks, you will be taken in and you can learn about for example, and there'll be a short profile on what that particular bank has been doing. You can also search by banks, and we have 60 public banks sort of randomly selected to give us a broad cross section of geographic locations sizes of banks types of banks. So if you want to learn a little bit more about public banks in general, we have a little bit of information about the background to the work, but also what are our public banks. And this will be interesting. Some people feel this so relatively new that there really isn't any consensus on even how many public banks there are. And this is drawing a lot on Tom's work and I'll just play a forthcoming book he has with Cambridge University Press in the new year, which I think will be definitive statements qualitatively and quantitatively on public banks. And as you can see here, they are major players. And again, if you're not familiar with public banks. A lot of people are kind of surprised if not shocked to learn just how significant public banks are around the world. So, yeah, that's the public banks. COVID-19.org is the website and you can get short profiles, as well as download the entire book or individual chapters. Okay, I think that's all I have to say I'm going to keep the speakers moving we've had three speakers, and they're going to speak for about eight minutes each, kind of keep it short and sweet. And then we'll open it up for questions and comments. If you want to put things in the chat. I will forward either forward those to the speakers when we're done, or it looks like we can also have people just directly ask questions. So you can either signal to me with a hand wave in the little function on there. If you want to speak and ask a question or you can put it in the chat line and, and I'll make sure that the speakers get those questions so we're going to go in the order that that it's listed. Tom Diana and Marie Jose. And so I'll just introduce Tom first briefly. We know Tom's a senior lecturer of development studies at SOAS. And as of today, I believe, as I just started as a senior research fellow in patient finance and banking at University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. He's also a research associate with the Municipal Services Project and widely published on public banks. And as I mentioned, a book coming out in the new year with Cambridge University Press on public banks as well. So Tom, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks a lot, David. Today gives me enormous amount of pleasure to speak about public banks. It's something I've been working on for quite a long time and it's great to see that now all of a sudden, you know, it's receiving the attention that it has, you know, building on the finance and common conference that was just at the beginning of middle of November run by or hosted or ran largely one of our contributing contributors, Professor Stephanie Griffith Jones, and they've done a lot of work through the French Development Agency on development banks in particular and that's, you know, raised profile of public banks, public development banks, both in the context of COVID but in green transitions. My function here today is I want to basically introduce this world of public banks. Not everybody's necessarily that familiar with what they are or even how to define it. So I sort of want to set out this larger context of how I've been thinking about it, how we sort of approach this book at a fairly general level, and then, you know, hopefully leading forward to discussion on what's to be done with public banks in the future. And so one of the things that's tricky or troubling in this this leverage of what our public banks and so we've worked around with the definition of public banks or have been in the book we discussed this is what qualifies a bank as a public bank. And that really begins to to first sort of element of that is then locating it within the public sphere bank is public it's located in there. But how do you do that. And so we've thought about that this includes by controlling defining a public bank by controlling public ownership by government or public agency or some other public oriented or authority. But it can also be located in the public sphere by illegally binding public mandates, or can be set out in public law that has specific public missions or roles. And it can also be significantly located within the public sphere simply by having some form of gunnery authority or public representation on the board. So any one of these are combination of these factors ownership law mission representation can locate a bank within the public sphere. And that's the beginning way to define it as as a public bank. Not simply ownership, but it can be a combination of factors. And then these public banks have performed some form of financial intermediation banking functions, but they do not necessarily have any innate purpose or innate function. These are really very much defined and I'm going to speak on this as I go along here. And what we also find my own research but also in this book is that public banks, both function in the public interest but they can also function in the private interest is not again no innate goal or orientation to these banks but they're, they vary. And that means the public banks are both their credible institutions and so far as they persist over time, both public and private interest, but they're contested and evolving. And so this is what I begin sort of define and argues a dynamic view of public banks that there's no essential or necessary public orientation to it or private, no essential and necessary mandate or profit driven purpose, and not even necessarily public dominant public ownership, a number of factors can combine to define a bank as public. And this, you know, it's sort of counters much of the dominant narrative out there, but it opens up a more complicated and realistic and qualitative understanding of what a public bank is. Building that sort of general notion of public bank. I just want to, there's a few things I want to emphasize. First and foremost as David sort of mentioned at the beginning and shown on the website is that they're pervasive that public banks go back centuries in some cases to 1516 century. But presently there are not at least 910 public banks. And when we're talking about public banks in this book and in our own work. We're not just talking about development banks or including development, commercial retail banks will you like your HSBC texting, but also universal banks that combine commercial retail. And when we're talking about 910 public banks is a combination of these institutions. And many of these are decades, 8090 100 150 year old type of institutions. So they've been around for a long, long time, and many of them, there's a number of new ones being created now, following the way of privatization. Public banks, not only pervasive, but they're powerful. They have combined among these 900 institutions, 910 institutions, nearly $49 trillion in combined assets. In addition to this monetary resource that they hold within the public sphere. They also have a enormous legacy of built up and acquired knowledge capacity expertise and so on, that sort of feeds into them and informs what they do for better and sometimes that means that they're capable that they've these institutions are already engaged across the economic and political and social sphere at the both national international scales, they're confronting the grand challenges like coven 19, but also the coming challenges in terms of decarbonization, definatialization and democratization, and Diane is going to speak more in their specific coven 19 functions. But public banks, and we must not forget, are always contested. They are contested political institutions. They are institutions of finance and of finance capital within capitalism. And they're pulled between contending public and private interests, they are highly contested because of the resources they control, and because of their being located within class divide society can't be otherwise. In that sense, when we're thinking about specific cases of public banks in the global north and global south, we should think of them as the resultants of actions of social forces they are the combined result and they're evolving, both at the individual and collective level. And this is why, when I talk about public banks, I talk about them as dynamic institutions, they evolve. There is no direct correlation between them, their public ownership and any necessary public orientation. They have no timeless or teleological purpose. It varies so much that we have to understand them as changing institutions. And they're dynamic because of the social forces that make and remake these public banks. So they're often contradictory. And we see this in the book in terms of their coven 19 responses. But we can see this, we can see this in terms of their, their coming rules and decarbonization and defanatialization. They're not essentially they're pulled. But what we, what's what they do do and how they function, you know, they, they're a sort of reflection of the wider social forces, and that makes them complex institutionalized social relations relationships that might on one side be funding decarbonization, but on the other side, they might well be promoting the highly carbonized form of industrialization. To wrap up then, when we're thinking about these public banks as as complex beings, we should be thinking of this as a very positive, but also hopeful orientation, because they change, they're open to change, they can be made in a better image. And as a number of CSOs are talking about, we can build forward better with them, we can make them better and we can command them better. This is something I think MJ is going to speak a little bit on me at the end. But I don't want, and I don't think I overstep when I say everybody on this panel and contributors to the book, we're all committed to ensuring pushing through our own intellectual labor, so our own advocacy for our own work. We're all committed to pushing public banks towards having a far more socially equitable pro public, green and just orientation, that this is something we would like to see evolve out of what they've been doing and reacting and responding to in the context of COVID-19. And this is an enormous opportunity for us to really capture and shape the agenda in the future of public banks, given their massive financial and sort of expertise in technical legacy. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Tom. Okay, we'll move on to our second speaker, Dana Bear cloud Diana is senior economist at the UN Commission on trade and development co author of the annual trade and development report, and leads on Ted's research on development finance and industrial policy. And Diana landed a review. Thank you. First of all, hello everyone. And thank you very much for joining us. My task in the next eight minutes is to try and give a snapshot of some of our findings. And obviously I can't possibly do justice to the full 22 chapters and the, and the 60 bank profiles, each one is incredibly rich. So I want to just to try and give a flavor of a few, a few key issues. So the first thing I wanted to start thinking about is the way that covert and the public bank responses has served to undermine and help throw away at least five myths or illusions with regard to public finance. The first is this idea that the cupboard is bare. Okay, our case studies show that the cupboard is not bear, we can fill it and in fact public banks have played a major role in filling the cupboard. It's not true that we need to save money before we can spend it. Public banks have showed that they are credit creators, as well as mediators of credit. It's not necessarily true that public debt should not be over some pre subscribed proportion of GDP. What we're seeing in these months is that people are realizing the denominator matters to and public banks are seen as a way of addressing that. The idea that central banks must only do a very narrow role of inflation targeting has been questioned in a major way in the last few months. Particularly maybe the idea that private investors can be harnessed to save the day, and that the private the public sector does not have the capacity for what is needed. I think that has really been questioned and I, in fact, forget about questioned I think we've really shown that public banks have emerged as the dynamic financial institutions that are capable of responding to what their societies need right now. And so our question as we move forward is, you know, how do we support them to be better. And this is an issue that that MJ will be addressing after me and I hope we'll be able to discuss this as the, you know, when the speakers have finished as we go through the discussion. In our introduction to the book we pick up on five key lessons that we got from our various case studies. I just want to address those very quickly. The five key lessons. I'm going to try and share my screen. Do this for you. Make it a bit more interesting. Oh, I just lost it. Here we go. So why fight why public banks matter so let's look at the bottom half of this slide the five promising lessons from that we find of all the case studies. The first is that rapid response is possible that public banks responded incredibly rapidly in country after country around the globe, and you can trace this starting in January with the People's Bank of China. From January 31 effect is the day that we start seeing a major push from the People's Bank of China followed through with Chinese policy banks. Big follow throughs with all the Asian banks, lending on a very large scale, often doubling the offer within weeks when they realize there's excessive demand for what is needed. In March, we see the central banks of the advanced countries the US Fed has pumped $4 trillion into the economy within a matter of two months after March. The interest rates rapidly within a matter of weeks, dramatic increase in lending, so rapid response is possible and we see it across all the public institutions. We see the importance of having public purpose mandates. They're absolutely key. The idea that banks are able and in fact expected to act differently from other banks in the financial system. We saw that where banks had a very clear public purpose, they could be most unambiguous in their support. So some banks were able to lend directly to local governments, for example. Others were mandated to lend to sectors we saw banks mandated to lend to SMEs or to tourism or agriculture. We also see examples where public banks have got a more difficult path where the mandate is ambiguous or unclear in countries with long histories of public banking but then change direction to a different profile. We saw that in the case studies on public banks in Turkey, India and Mexico, for example, showed that quite clearly that the history was not able to be reproduced in the banks were not able to support their government national goals. We have other examples where there's a strong link between the public mandate, for example, to support investments in climate change and the mandate to support COVID, some quite interesting parallels there. A third lesson that comes up from all the case studies is about boldness and generosity and how this is absolutely essential when facing a crisis. So historically, we had very good examples of this with the Great Depression and President Roosevelt. And again, with the Marshall Plan and post-World War II, these were bold, large scale, fast and generous responses. You don't hold back and try and do teaspoons with what is needed as buckets. And we've seen examples of this from all of the banks. And in fact, untied estimates for global growth over the next year is that we're wiping out 4% of GDP or $6 trillion worth of wealth in the global economy. And this is unprecedented. So we really see that these bold and generous responses are absolutely essential. The fourth lesson that we've got from our comparative case studies, which is very promising, is the importance of history and institutional capacity. And we saw that in the cases where public banks had been around for some time already, and they've got already lines of communication with the rest of the financial sector or with their users or indeed with their government owners. These banks were able to respond quickly and get straight to the point because they have well-honed channels already of expertise and working. So you can't build this up overnight. Having said that countries that don't have all the public banks they need, this is a good chance to get started because you'll be better prepared for the next crisis. In some of our examples with the public banks, for example, that were multilateral public banks, we see very quick responses back with national banks because they've got regular institutional arrangements for conversation and discussion and for channeling funds and expertise. The fifth lesson is the importance of solidarity and particularly public solidarity. We saw many examples of these, this benefits of a non-competitive and collaborative solidarity between public banks, between public banks and government, between financial institutions and users. We have examples where, for example, some sovereign wealth funds were using the COVID crisis as an opportunity to seed fund development banks or to lend to local governments. We see central banks lending to local governments or financing local government needs. And then we see South-South solidarity. The Latin American Reserve fund, for example, FLAR, within weeks has doubled its lending capacity by borrowing internationally to meet the needs of its member states. And this is a one country, one vote institution, so solidarity driven. In terms of the functions of the banks, we saw that public banks can face a wide variety of actions and functions. So in the 22 case studies that you see in the book, we have examples of many different capacities of public banks and how they're distinctive. And this is a question that can they be distinctive if they have the mandate. This is a question that we ask, but this is what they are trying to do is boosting liquidity through quantitative easing or massive bond purchases, lending particularly to sectors or households in great need. Grant lending, this is something really different for public banks that you can lend on extremely favorable terms that commercial banks can't do. They can literally support where central banks are changing the regulations of the financial sector to to support the commercial banks in their needs to support households and firms. There's a whole list here that I don't have time to go through, but I hope that just the flavor of this encourages you to read all the chapters in the book. And something else that we did see in the. Sorry, Diana, I'm going to just going to give you a 30 second warning there. Hey, you didn't show me the two minutes sign. Oh, I did you didn't see it. Yeah. Sorry, wrong glasses. Really, I didn't see that. Okay, so well, I'll stop with this. Just can I have a minute for this side. Yeah. But what we did see is very importantly that not all countries and not all banks have the same space to react in. And this may be at me as partly to do with mandate and it's also to do with obviously wealth and currency and many issues. But what we see is that in the advanced economies, they really were able to pull out all the stops and we have stimulus responses that are 40 to 50% of GDP. And then the next thing we have the developing countries of the world that are trying to make do with responses, you know, that are measured in single single digits, and some obviously, even less. So, I'm going to, I'm going to stop there and if we have a chance we can continue in discussion later. Thank you. Great. If you can just take your share screen function off there. Are you sure you did that. It was there. That's okay. That's okay. Yeah, before we go into the next speaker just want to, some of it some of you just joined us for we're halfway through two thirds of the way through our speaker presentations. We have one more and then we'll open it up for the questions and answers. I just wanted to underscore that point, you know that about public public solidarity and that's something we're interested in is not just sectoral publicness but you know how do public banks interact with public water operators with public health care operators. So banks tend to think because private finance areas think they're, you know, semi semi gods, that there's something unique about finance. There's nothing unique about finance, it is a public utility and can be, and should be a public utility. So I think it's important for us to see it as any other public institution. And that sort of connectedness between public banks and other public service providers is a really important part of understanding what that public mission is and what public public solidarity looks like. And that said, that's something we'll be restarting with our work on how public banks interact with public water operators. Okay, we'll move on to our third final presentation. Maria Jose Romero is importantly a PhD candidate in development economics at SOAS, the host for today's event. She's also the policy and advocacy manager in development finance at the European network on development, sorry, debt and development, Euro debt. And Maria Jose, I'll hand it over to you. And I see you're muted. There you go. Yes. Thank you very much, David. Good afternoon and good morning to everyone that is with us. I know that there are colleagues from the other side of the Atlantic including David. So it's a great pleasure to be with you all today. I will share my screen to share some slides with you. First thing to say is that your dad is a network of 49 civil society organizations, working on issues related to development finance in 20 countries around Europe. We work with partners from North and South on on these specific issues. And the issue of public development banks have been on the agenda of your dad for at least a couple of years. So it's not that your dad is new to this debate as a result of COVID. And this is what I will try to share with you today in my 10 minutes or less. So why civil society has been interested and has been working on public development banks, some of the challenges that we identify in the chapter that is included in the book. And some of the arguments that we also included in our chapter on the need to reclaim public development banks on the basis of core features that form a reform agenda that we want to promote. I will summarize here our main, our main points, because I think that quite a lot has been said by by David, Tom and Diana. I think that there is a lot of potential on public development banks. Their, their experience shows that historically, they have played a key role. And their response to the COVID-19 that Diana mentioned also shows the same, but from a civil society perspective, we have been very interested in understanding why there has been so much emphasis on the role of existing multilateral development and not so much on other institutions like national development banks that are relevant players in promoting and in providing finance to sectors and regions that private financial institutions do not serve sufficiently. While there is also the case that not enough attention has been paid to have and to develop development finance architecture able to deliver in the public interest. And in a way, these together with the needs of developing countries to get access to finance that serve their development plans and serve their needs to finance the SDGs and the Paris Agreement has been in the thought of Eurodad and many other organizations that have been engaging in this specific conversation. When it comes to the challenges that we identify in the development finance architecture and some of the institutions that have played a key role so far. What we see that as Tom said, we are in front of institutions that have been heavily contested. Because in many cases are institutions that have not performed their roles up to the standard that they should have done. Some institutions have been rightly questioned about the negative impact of the development model that they have promoted and their operations. In some cases what we see is that there has been social and environmental impact, negative impact of the supported projects and excessive focus on profit making. And also poor governance when it comes to these institutions and here we talk about lack of transparency, poor accountability, also a lack of proper civil society participation and also a problematic use of financing instruments and excessive focus on supporting private financial institutions and also a neoliberal agenda in some of their policies and the projects favored by these institutions. So as Tom also said, what we have seen is that the potential role of most public development banks has been with towards private interest over and above the public interest. And importantly in our analysis of the responses of some of these institutions, what we see is some of these challenges have not gone away with the pandemic and some might be even intensified. So there is a need there to actually analyze in what terms they are providing their response to COVID. And here we go to our main message that is that there is a need to reclaim public development banks and I will emphasize here the point on the development mandate of these institutions because as we have heard there is a wide range of institutions that can be under the label of public banks. And here, from our point of view, it's very important to emphasize that there is a need also to reclaim and to focus on public development banks. And as we have heard, public institutions have performed in such a rapid way in response to the crisis that the role of the state and the role of public institutions have been reinforced by the pandemic. There is a need to stress the important role of the state in response to the pandemic. So it is key to reclaim public banking for the public interest and it's also key to have a conversation on what would be the right type of finance and what would be the right type of institutions because it's clear that the private commensurate financial sector is unlikely on its own to provide the finance needed to support countries to get out of the crisis. The challenges that they are facing are huge. So the key question on what type of institutions and also for what development model is a question that we think that this book helps to answer. Here we go to the core features of a model public development bank that are part of a reform agenda that we that we want to promote and we have identified four key pillars for these core features and they are the mandate, the strategy, the sustainability of the institution and also the governance. And here I am trying to summarize them in terms of these core features but there are more in a dedicated table that is included in our book chapter. Here it's very important as Tom and Diana mentioned the issue of having a strong development mandate and a strong policies dedicated to serve this particular mandate. And here we are talking about the SDGs, the parties agreement, etc. High social and environmental standards, including human rights, labor, gender equality standards have to be included there. There is a role also and there is a need for a specific policies that guide the work of public development banks to provide a stable and long term counter cyclical finance. There is also a need to have an adequate business model. And by these we mean a careful choice of the funding of these institutions and the method of investing the money. And these goals hand in hand with internal systems to focus their operations to assess their operations and to monitor the development impact of their operations. Sorry MJ, I'm just going to give you the one minute warning. Yes, it's close to the end. So here I will emphasize as a final point the good governance because as we have discussed before there is a need to democratize existing institutions. Because without these governance pillar we will be lacking a critical part of how their operations are set and the ones that benefit from their operations as well. And finally the adequate articulation between the different levels, the global, the regional and the national level of these institutions. And this is a discussion that have not been emphasized enough and from our perspective is a critical discussion. So I will conclude by saying that these institutions have a key role to play, can play this role and should play this role. Not out of the crisis, but the mandate, the policies and the operations of these institutions have to be changed for them to deliver in the public interest. And here to conclude I will make a reference to the financing common summit, which was a recent gathering of over 450 institutions. And as a result of this gathering they issue a joint declaration where they mentioned that they, they set a global coalition of public development banks. And here the point to make is that there was quite a lot of good language, good good intentions, good commitments in this statement. So I think that in the coming months words have to be put into action for these institutions to actually serve the very good intentions that they put in their declaration. So the civil society organizations and academic as it is the gathering today have the opportunity to actively contribute to this debate. This is an urgent debate, and we are happy to be involved in this work. Thank you very much. Thank you, MJ. Okay, if you could just share your screen there. And just before we open it up to comments. I just want to for those of you who arrived late. Just a reminder, this is the new website we've established I've just sent a link to it. Public banks cobit 19.org, where we have a series on the landing page of small profiles of public banks from around the world this is a sort of random sampling of 60 banks. You'll notice I'm sitting here in Canada, right at the end of the Great Lakes there, we have basically no banks, public banks in North America. We do but North Dakota is the lone state owned bank in the States and we have a few very commercially private sector oriented banks. Otherwise in Canada, our most recent version is essentially trying to privatize our public services. As you can see from this map, it is a truly global phenomenon, and you can click on any of these bank profiles and search by region. And then if you go to the publications page, that's where this new book is, and you can download the entire book or individual chapters. So we encourage you to do that and help us get the word out on that front. Before we go to the questions and comments and feel free to post them in the chat or if you're wondering if I think we can go orally as well. I just wanted to make a quick point and just to emphasize that the importance of public banks in the context of COVID-19 just sort of drawing some of the comments Diana and I was saying that in the initial response, it really was about providing liquidity and providing it very, very quickly to governments, households, families, businesses and so on. And to think of this conceptually, it's important to think the banks were literally making time available for people to get through the worst of the crisis, governments, families and so on. And so they have to match that public capacity with the financial capacity at times of emergencies and be commanded to do so. And it's not a profit oriented orientation, that much of this was simply done at a loss or using returns that banks were making at other times to sort of underwrite the losses of this time. And we cannot underestimate the significance of that and link that to the importance of having this capacity on hand to face these challenges in the future, both in terms of emergencies like COVID, but also in terms of climate change, in terms of social challenges, inequality and so on. And hence why it's so important to build a very progressive and organized campaign around reclaiming and claiming public banks for the public good and the pro-public orientation. And hence the importance of those looking at those existing public-public collaborations that Diana was talking about and how you can combine resources, because if you begin to combine public financial resources, you're actually magnifying this 49 trillion closer to 90 trillion dollars in assets. And then we're talking about absolutely unfathomable amounts of money that can be commanded democratically in ways that can be managed to reduce inequality to overcome the challenges of COVID to begin building aggressively towards a decarbonized future. But, and I just wanted, this is sort of the point that we haven't gotten at, and need to emphasize when we're thinking about the discussion here, is that this is going to face a backlash, very, very soon, and a very harsh neoliberal backlash. There's going to be demands to privatize these public banks for having done exactly what they were supposed to do, which is bail us out of this, this international global crisis, and, and starts, you know, building sort of decarbonized green future economy. It's going to face a crisis very soon. So we need to have a political movement and a very organized political response, because this is coming immediately. And so I think this should be part of our discussion. So how do we, how do we progressively think for a pro public response, and how the defense ready for the, for the attack we know is going to come within months, if not within the next year or two, in terms of demands on these public banks to be privatized, because of the failures because they haven't been profitable at times of crisis. Okay, thank you, Tom. That's great. So we have, we have about 70 people participating right now. And so you can either put your questions in the chat box, and I can ask those, if, and if you're targeting towards one of the presenters, or if you want to somehow lag for me they're turning on and asking a very quick question, happy to do that as well. I don't see any hands waving at the moment. Oh, there's one. Subir, why don't you start us off. Yeah, you know, the fascinating discussion and I'm really looking forward to downloading everything and taking a quick look. My question really has to do with India and I saw that even in the slide, I think it was Diane who showed that they had a very small percentage in terms of, you know, what it is that they have been able to put forward for COVID relief. And so that sort of put me in the frame of asking the following question. How much do national histories of public banks matter in the, in the sense that over the last some years, the Indian public banks have been under tremendous stress, perhaps this have happened, mergers have happened and so forth, and also large amounts of corporate loan write offs have happened with respect to some of the large banks. So even before COVID hit the capacity of large public banks, public sector banks would have been, you know, already kind of reduced and connected to that is the question of the use the kind of institutional capture of public banks, for example, by governments with large mandates who are then kind of using it for a de facto privatization. So how much variation do you see in those two things. One of you three speakers want to respond to that first. You're muted there Diana. So a quick response but then Thomas and Maria Jose, I hope you'll also add something. So, so thanks for picking that up. So that's the chapter by our colleague Chandru, who did a very good history of India and the public banking in India. And he makes, you know, it's a very, you know, he's a wonderful economist and it's a very, very expert history of public banking in India, in fact, private banking as well in India. But he explains how after colonization, after independence, you know, there was strong movement of strong national public banks, but from the 1980s, as in so many other countries to, you know, this was overturned and and you know that the public banks had had some of the problems that you're mentioning of course like public banks in many other places. You know, the pendulum has gone so far in the other direction that their banks were simply unable to kind of carry the burden that the Indian government wanted them to take in this covert context and and Chandru's chapter does in fact end on exactly that note that you said, which is that, you know, now these the public banks are already were constrained in their ability to respond to to the public need. They've taken on board all of these private sector debt and private sector burdens of course they're struggling with that. And it's precisely the moment this is how Chandru ends the chapter it's precisely the moment at which there will be slated for privatization, and then sold off, you know, very cheaply as well as the point that he makes and and yet this is an inevitable role of public sector finances that it does step in when the private sector is is in trouble and so it's very ironic that they should be blamed for doing precisely what they're supposed to do. So I'll leave it to my colleagues please. Tom or MJ. MJ do you want to add. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you to be reported for the question I think that the question on institutional capture of public development banks is a key question. And I could say that there are different different experiences, we can see different ways in which these institutional capture plays out in the cases where it happens. At the global level, we have the experience of the World Bank as the lead public development bank, and this has been the focus of your dad's work for many years together with an analysis on development finance institution from European countries. And there what we can see is that institutional capture of these of these banks plays out at the level of the agenda that they serve. The projects that are being supported there and also as I emphasize the governance and the practice that these institutions have when it comes to to their policies, etc. So, I think that this is a risk that it's important to, to investigate and also to expose when we have evidence on that. And I want you all to, to go back to an article that was published in Al Jazeera on Saturday, last day that calls for decolonizing the World Bank and the IMF as the lead institutions in the development finance architecture. And of course here we are talking about also, you know, public development banks working at the national level national institutions dynamics, they are, are different. But with this, thinking in mind of decolonizing institutions, I think that and the practice of these institutions. I think that we have quite a lot, quite a lot to do. Thank you. Yeah, let me just add to that quickly. I don't know if there's, there's more questions coming there David or not. There's a few. Why don't you take a, there's a two more. I'll make a quick comment and I'll talk with these questions. Okay. Yeah, and the question to the national histories of other banks and I was just talking about this earlier today with some new colleagues. It's so important you can have some general visions and general ideas of banks and how they're going to work in different countries but so much depends on the culture of that country on political institutions on existing financial practices on the size of private banks for God's sakes, whether they want to crush any sort of any encouragement on their business in terms of public banking which we see in the United States right now. There's just backlash against the banking. But the, the national history is so vital. So in the case of Germany where there's very strong culture of public and savings banks, as well as public services, there's not much of a threat to the public banks there in terms of privatization and so on. But you know, in elsewhere, there's quite, you know, quite a strong backlash. And that also links to the question of institutional capture and so much has to do with the, the legacies of representation in the public banks is their representation, how is it legally mandated how binding is it. I don't think I think it is very little to do with whether or not there's government representation on public banks to be honest, some of the best, you know, quote unquote best run banks are directly run by ministers of the government. But at the same time, some of the most, you know, seemingly politically, let's say, insulated banks, one of our colleagues writes about Turkey are terribly abused banks, regardless whether they have government they don't have any government in the board necessarily. Right, so it's about the histories and the cultures in which the public banks find themselves, and what society commands and demands of those banks, and the mechanisms built into them. So that's when I talk about struggles over public banks, I'm talking about the struggles over the mechanisms by which we can command them to serve in some form of democratic public good, and the means by which we can hold them accountable. Rather than some abstract principle where you must have fully independent board members who could simply, you know, command that the banks then go fund their biggest corporate bailouts of Airbus or whatever. It's, it's, it's really about integrating means of holding banks accountable at quite a broad base, rather than abstract principles about government and ministers or not, and so on. Okay, great, we've got a next question here I liked in particular because with our municipal services project we've always tried to be sort of cutting edge academically in terms of what's going on and rigor, but then making making that information to people on the ground, labor unions, NGOs, community activists, etc. So just a question from New York City, the, the home of private predatory finance. And says we're part of an exciting movement in New York to make public banking a reality at state and municipal levels. And I think we should be doing to bring the message to legislators that public banks around the world are responding rapidly to COVID and other crises and I should say that there's a quite a dynamic pro public banking movement emerging in the United States and there's a chapter in the book by Alan Brown, public banking Institute which you might want to have a look at. Maybe MJ you can comment, you know, as a CSO, you know, how do you advise people in terms of the practicalities of push for not just any old public bank but accountable democratic progressive public banks. Thanks. The question is very interesting. And I guess that you have put quite a lot of my shoulders to respond with some tips. And so what I would say is that it's, it's important to look at public development banks and public banks in general in an holistic way. This has been the approach that we as URL have taken so far. And this is why we are talking about these four PNRs because in our reading of what a civil society can do and what could be a reform agenda for these institutions or for the ones that are going to be creative. And it's the point that it's not enough to look at the finance that they have available or the projects and the policies that they will have to provide finance and if they don't have the governance pillar right and the, and the ways of measuring that and the, and the ways of structuring their interventions to deliver in the, in the public interest. So there has been quite a lot of work conducted by civil society organizations in recent years that look at the social and environmental impact of public development banks. This is, this is a very important agenda. And this is an agenda that we should all support, because we are what we have seen. It's clearly that in some cases there have been negative social and environmental impact, but without looking at these institutions in an holistic way, we will be just solving a very small part of the problem without looking at exactly the model that these institutions promote and what interest they serve and in what particular way. So if I have to, if I have to talk to colleagues from New York that are putting together these, these work to reclaim and support the public banks, I could go for this holistic approach. And then I go for reinforcing the positive examples in response to the COVID crisis from around the world because for sure there are good things that we have to emphasize. Thank you. Thanks MJ and just add to that I think demystifying finance is such an important part of this that, you know, again, the sort of high finance people want us to believe there's a kind of rocket science to this, and which of course they use to then hide all kinds of crazy, you know, accounting and finance mechanisms which, you know, then serve to undermine public credibility. So, you know, it ain't too difficult figuring out how to loan money well and creatively and progressively. And we just need democratic control of these things so I think that, you know, as a public education project demystifying finance is going to be a really important part of making a reclaiming and and reimagining public banks. We have a question here about saying that this person is saying what is the difference between public banks public development banks and development financial institutions such as the World Bank and why these terms used interchangeably. Tom I'll ask you maybe just to give a very quick summary of this there is a discussion of this in the opening chapter of the book, but Tom maybe you just want to respond quickly to that. Yeah they've raised the hornet's nest. There's lots of different terminology at these. We have to think that they're developing banks, which typically do not accept deposits, and they tend to lend other banks or to larger institutions or to governments and they don't typically have a branch network, like a corner shop on each court on each court. So that's one type, and that would be often similarly related to development finance institutions though development finance institutions might also have different types of investment funds and so on that might just in a sense be an office in a government building or their own separate organization. The reversal public bank is something that does that development so it lends to organizations or institutions or the micro enterprises or infrastructure, but at the same time it's going to have a bank outlet on the corner street that accepts deposits you can do checking. You can do money transfers have a mortgage or something like that. So that's quite common global self you'll see quite a lot of those types of things. And then there's some that are just pure commercial retail banks not that many actually it's not that common where the public bank is simply like a deposit taking bank where it does checking and your regular day to day banking services but doesn't really engage in in investment projects so in the case of Canada for example the Alberta Treasury branch would follow along backwards your day to day banking institution where you just deposit checks and get a mortgage. So there's different types of them. Our focus has tended to be very inclusive, and I think it's important that we include all these types of banks. So we brought the case of India because in many cases, the deposit taking public banks will then support the development banks by channeling resources into them, for example, and then the development banks will help will offer programs through the commercial banks I'll have retail or like banks on the corner street that are more connected to communities. So my level of my way of thinking it's very important to think of these very holistically in terms of public public collaborations in a sort of holistic system this is very much sort of more the discussion that's going on in the US of thinking about having some retail banks are, you know, deposit taking financial access and so on, linking to more developments regional development banks that can do more investment type projects, also linked to sort of a national bank that they can access foreign or global financial capital markets at very cheap rates, and that global development bank then channeling cheap funds into the more regional and local level. So just to clarify for people, Tom, as well, I mean, I often get this question is, you know, is a co-op a public bank and I think the answer to that is no, this is a privately, you know, co-op bank. So what role for the state? Hold on. Okay, okay. It would depend. There are some cooperative publicly owned banks that are legally all on their ownership, but also thinking through more qualitative understanding that some co-op or worker control banks would have formal government representation on the board, and then we'd have some substantive like public missions, if you will, around development or loaning and things like that. So the Bank of Popularity in Costa Rica would qualify, Sparkas in Germany, the Savings Bank would qualify, and one of our guests here, Milford Bayman, sure has a whole bunch of other examples, he would be willing to share a contributor to the book as well in that regard. So it doesn't necessarily disqualify them as a public bank. Right, but there has to be some state engagement is what you're saying. In my definition of public bank, there has to be something that qualitatively situates any bank, whatever you want to call it, a bank within the public sphere, by ownership, by control, by legal mandates, something like that, that connects it to the public sphere. Right, and that can happen at the municipal level, and it can happen at the global multilateral level, they all fall under that umbrella of public, but then the character and ownership connectedness and sort of democratic accountability obviously changes quite dramatically. Yeah. Okay, we have another question here about, sorry, Subir did you. Just wanted to ask a quick, maybe typological question, how do you folks distinguish between public banks and cooperative banks or credit unions and those sorts of things, which are kind of, you know, obviously not private, they're sort of in a different zones than the private sector and do you find any need to see how they might have contributed to things like recovery from COVID, particularly in terms of providing loans to small and medium enterprises and the like. Tom, did you want to continue with that? Yeah, I mean that was sort of just what I was talking about there, Subir, that you can have these cooperative banks that are located within the public sphere, either by ownership or representation. They play a very important role in terms of there's been a lot of debt, if not forgiveness, like they don't have to repay their loans for several months, forgiveness on interest. They play a lot of roles in terms of mortgages, the one loaded or create a bunch of new services in terms of access and so, so they've had a very important place in the household, in terms of making time available to get through the crisis, much more so than the development banks, for example. But we can have a conversation about that, but they play a very important role. They're massive, trillions of dollars in resources, even within the co-op banks as well. Thanks Tom. So we had a question about sectoral lending and whether there's any particular sectors that public banks have been lending to, particularly with COVID. One of the big questions is as soon as this pandemic is over, of course, we have the next existential crisis, which hasn't gone away, which is climate change. Where are we at with public bank lending on transformation to a greener transition? And are we seeing that as part of COVID relief packages? If any of you want to respond specifically to, you know, the empirics of that, but more broadly, you know, what's the future look like for public bank funding in the green transition? And Anna, do you want to take a stab at that? Oh, you're muted there, Diana. Yeah, I'm just trying to do myself. In fact, I'm just going to show you I've got a funny picture on this. Let me go. I've got a cartoon on this, which I thought was quite funny. So, so this is, this was a joke on one of the British newspapers that, you know, so COVID-19 is the, is like the small wave, a painful wave and bringing us lots of unhappiness and destruction of the economy and death. And, but it's a small thing compared to what could be coming. So, you know, getting to your question, David, about, you know, what's the link between the lending? I think this is, I think this is a very moot point. And, and my reading of this is that it can, it can go both ways. And one side is that, you know, this could be a very positive way for much of the lending that people have been commenting on for years that we need for, you know, the transition and sustainable transformation. We've realized that actually banks do have the capacity to direct credit in ways that they used to in the past, you know, the industrial revolutions in Asia were done because there was a collaboration between public banks and commercial banks and government and it was directed through the industrial policy to particular sectors. And, you know, um, Ted has argued that we need to be doing this now this collaboration of public banking with industrial policy for climate change mitigation and adaptation. But at the same time, the kind of things that Maria Jose is talking about, we're seeing that too, that, you know, there's a kind of hijacking and, you know, everybody climbs on the bandwagon to push the sorts of policies that they wanted anyway. So this is also an excuse to use public banks to completely de-risk their private sector from, you know, their own green or sustainable investments. So, you know, it's, I think it's, it's incredibly interesting time and we need to be very alert to how funds are actually used to make sure that they use for public benefit and not to de-risk, you know, what is it? Public benefit and public cost and private benefit. That's what we don't want to happen here. So I think that's a, that's a very important point. Thank you. Okay. Sorry, Dan, if I just ask you to unshare the screen there. Yeah. MJ or Tom, did you have anything to contribute to that? Yeah, MJ. Yeah, thank you. So, I will answer on the basis of your briefing that maps the response to the COVID-19 crisis, specifically focused on Northern driven, Northern led development finance institutions, including DG from Germany, FMO from, from the Netherlands, Proparco from France, and, and the FC from, from the US. I, I have to say that quite a lot of money, well, and the IFC from the World Bank, which I will mention that, and I have to say that in response to COVID quite a lot of money, a lot of money from institutions, multilateral institutions has been channeled through the private commercial financial sector in, in developing countries, hope with the hope of reaching medium, small and micro, small and medium enterprises. Quite a lot of money have also been reached. Sorry, have also been channeled through or targeted the infrastructure sector, the manufacturing sector. We don't see in our analysis of this particular five institutions, a different pattern in the way of how these institutions work on that sector level. Maybe the most relevant point to emphasize is the great focus on the private commercial financial sector. And here we have to balance these with the points included in the book, that map the experience of national. Because they are we might be seen something different in terms of sectors with particular companies from the tourism sector, agree business or other companies heavily impacted by the COVID crisis. Okay, I would just add to that the water sector thing, the sectoral link is really important. And when you look at banks, for example, as a public bank in the Netherlands that does nothing but finance public water. And it's been operating for 60 years. And so I think this sort of reveals the, the poverty of research on public banks. And what we're trying to do with our work and growing literature on this understanding these sectoral links is really quite important. Now, John, before you go, we only have about seven minutes left. And I'm wondering if what I'll do is one last round of comments from our presenters. And, yeah, but do you want to maybe you can stop specifically to this question and then any final comments you have and then we'll go to the other two. Yeah, I'm worthy. I'm worthy of the time. So just as a final comment then in terms of the question green transition. This is a big issue for the public banks that I've been talking to. And really today, they had enormous difficulty or simply have not linked COVID responses, which is really about liquidity just about getting over the moment the current hump, any kind of green transition, maybe a narrative they have but in practice they've been unable to do but they want to and there's increasing pressure to do so so it's really an opportunity to keep more on that pressure and you know to really keep their their feet to the fire on this and think about for the next next crisis that's sort of coming. And, yeah, I mean, in terms of the sectoral lending really I think is to spoke to that but much of it has been to health. Much of it to general government sport and much of it to SMEs, followed by, you know, some other sort of spatteries and money around that's those three sectors of really where the money is going to. Okay, so maybe we'll just have some very brief closing comments from from each of our presenters and and then we'll wrap it up I haven't seen any new questions in the chat line so MJ you want to leave us with some final profound thoughts on public banks. COVID-19. Yeah, thank you. I, I want to get back to the point on the financing common summit. And the agenda that these institutions have set for themselves. I think that is a welcome step that these institutions are trying to claim for themselves the role that they have to play in the current context. And I think that the current context as I mentioned before calls for a greater role of public institutions and in their joint declaration they put quite a lot of good intentions and and I think that from this group of people where we have civil society organizations and also academics interested in this particular agenda. We should we should be paying attention to what they do with their with this work plan and actions in the coming months and years. Because if not we definitely run the risk of having a talk show each each year without the concrete action that is needed. So I could I could leave it like this I think that this conversation. It's a very relevant conversation and we should keep engaged. Thank you. Okay, Diana. Yeah, I'm unmuted. Okay, so I have two very quick related comments. The first one is that you know what we've been talking about and discovering with the public banks is that they can scale up really quickly when they need to. And private banks are not scaling up right now it's public banks that are scaling up. And then there's often this question of, is there a trade off between scaling up and also still maintaining their publicness and this is an issue that many of the public banks in our book suffer because they sometimes have slightly ambiguous mandates and ambiguous support from their governments and there's interesting research that shows when governments are fully supportive of their public banks, they can borrow more money on international capital markets and they can lend more developmentally without it impacting negatively on their abilities to borrow or to lend. So that's really important that governments have clear and strong support for their banks, you know, otherwise they're trying to run in pulling in different directions. So that was the first thing and then related to this. What we've seen is that in the covert context so just bringing this back to covert now is that nations and national banks alone can do a lot. And they have done a lot, but you can't solve global problems at the national level. And just as coronavirus is contagious. Well, so also is is economic stagnation and economic recession is contagious too. And so we need to be able to solve both economic and you know health issues with more global coordination and I think that's been the biggest lack that we've seen so far in this in this experience it's just been massively lacking. And we used examples from the Great Depression and we used examples from the Marshall plan where actually there was much more coordination than we've seen now. So, ironically, we coordinate technically but somehow not in terms of funds or cooperation when it comes to covert. Okay, thanks. And Tom. Why don't you go ahead and, because I think super superiors had to pop up so I'll do sort of final word on banks on behalf of so was you go ahead. Okay, well, I'll just remind people that the bank, sorry, the book is available at public banks covert 19.org, along with a series of smaller brief profiles. And yeah, so that's all I'll say as the chair and then Tom I'll hand it over to you to close things up. Great. Thanks, David for for chairing this session and severe. And if you've taken off thanks for hosting it and his platform and thanks to so as development studies for his opportunity to launch this book. I but also just for everyone who's joined us today. Many of you I know and many of you have influenced me in the past intellectually and but also as an academic activist so thank you for joining me. And us on this panel, and and just to emphasize to those who are new to this topic and new to our work municipal service project on Ted Europe that you know, sort of field. It's very exciting. And, and because we're looking at the level of institutions in countries, as opposed to things like the World Bank in the IMF which are really inaccessible. This is an area we can intervene. This is a struggle we can win. And it is so important to have this capacity of public banks at times of crisis but at all times. I just encourage people to sign on to this struggle in a progressive way that it can make a significant difference in terms of the future of the environment of society. Basic human relations to be able to command capacity where our public financial resources. So thank you for coming. Thanks on behalf of development studies, and yeah, we look forward to seeing you in the future. Bye everybody.