 Dwi'n fyddiw i ddweud, Andrew. Felly, ddweud i'n mynd i'n ffordd ti'n wneud, i'r cyffredinol a'r cwmaint i'n ffasg ffordd. Dyma, ar hyn sy'n meddwl i'r ffrindig o'r ffrindig ac yn cyfriffeilio'r cyfriffeilio. Mae'n gwneud yn 2008, yna i gyd, ac mae'n amgylchedd yma o'r ffrindig yma. a oedd yw'r cyflawni a'r cyflawni wedi'i gweithio bod eich cyflawni a'r energi awdur, a'r cyflawni a'r cyflawni yn y UK. Mae ganddo yw'r cyflawni, mae'n cyflawni, a'r cyflawni a'r cyffordd, a'r cyfrifio ar gyfer y ffraenig yw'r 2014, a ddim yn ymgyrch yn ei wneud hyn yn ymdysgfaen nhw, oherwydd mae'n gweld yn ymddangos. Ond oherwydd ddifen nhw'n ddwylo'r ffinolynig ymddangos ddweud yn cael ei ddweud, ac mae'r ffordd byddaeth yn defnyddio'r wyf yn ddiwedd ar hynny o'r ddweud ymddangos. A ddweud yw'n ddim yn oes i ddechrau ac yn 2011 oedd gwiswch a'i amser am ymddangos. Mae'r ddweud yn ddim yn ddim ymddangos a'r ddweud yn oed yn ddweud y ffinolynig. A dyna wedi bod y ddweud ymddangos rwy'n meddwl, mae'n meddwl i'w hyd yn teimlo'r energio cerddwyddoch chi ac ydych chi'n meddwl i'r bobl i wneud ar gyfer fforddau US Bank, Ben Bernanke i'r ymddorol i'r cwmpewter. A dyna'r meddwl i'r meddwl i wneud ar gyfer os ddim yn ymddangos, ond rydyn ni wedi bod yn fydig gwybod yn eistedd o'r hyn sy'n gwybod mewn gwirioneddol, That led me on a path to look into economics. It was actually my dad who sent me the link to positive money. I was really excited to join as the campaign manager. Just to say a bit more, we're kind of a research and campaigning organisation set up by Ben in 2010. We spent the first few years really researching the monetary system. I'm just trying to tell people how money's created without being told that you're mad... ...and now we're kind of moving into a more campaigning section of our organisation... ...as the debate is kind of expanding. So we ask questions like inequality. Why is the gap between rich and poor getting bigger? Housing. Why are prices too high for people to afford? . sandy environment. what's stopping us tackling climate change when we try and link the big issues to how the monetary system works. For all those problems, there's an issue like money can solve them fusionally, but how does the money system actually work? Who creates it? Quite often, when I think of money, you think of it as circulating, is banks and background in the economy.. only kind of leaving when the banknotes get too old. But actually there are kind of two types of money. So there is money that circulate in the economy but there's also a kind of spendable IOU which is created when someone takes out a loan and then when they repay the IOU is ripped up, and disappears. And the everlasting money is cash and coins ac mae'n gweithio gyda'r Bank of England i'r UK, ac mae'r Cash and Coins i'r Scotland i'n gweithio gyda'r Bank of England i'n gweithio gyda'r UK. Ac mae'n gweithio gyda'r 3% o gweithio gyda'r unrhyw o'r unrhyw o'r UK o'r Pound Stirling. Ac mae'n gweithio gyda'r 97% o gweithio gyda'r IOU sy'n gweithio gyda'r Lones ac yn ddigon ni'n rhoi'r IOU gwladu. A mae'n gweithio'r 97% o gweithio gyda'r IOU gyda'r Bank of England i chi odyn yn gweithio gyda'r bach gyda'r Lones. Ac mae'n gweithio'r IOU, gyda'r branch gyda'r 5 bach gyda'r bank o gyda'r IOU. The money they create is in the form of electronic deposits in bank accounts. The numbers you see flashing up on the ATM. Most of that money is created when banks make a loan and it's held electronically on the bank's balance sheet. So we don't have a kind of money system from households to businesses to banks. to banks. We do not have this model that is actually still taught in textbooks. Save as deposit money in banks and banks lend to borrowers. That model does not work. Money is created at the point in which somebody goes into a bank and takes out a loan. I like to think of that money, the spendable IOUs, as an easy way to think of the electronic money the women of fire uses as the bath water in the bath and when the loins are made it's like the water coming in through the taps and when the loan's are repaid then it's like the water coming out the plug hole. Obviously it's quite tricky to get those two in balance, so usually what's happening is either the money's flooding out of the taps or as we saw after the financial crisis actually banks panic and stop lending it's like the taps being switched off. Ond mae'r bwysig y gallwn yn cael ei wneud i'r byw yn gwneud i'r llon ac mae'n fwyaf i'r bwysig i'r system ac mae'r wath yn ymwyfydd yn ymdweithio y plwg. Ac mae'n oed yn ymdweithio'r cyd- oedd o'r ddefnyddio. Yn y US, yma yw'r grwp sydd yn y L-20, mae'r ddwyf yn gweithio'r ddwyf yn ymdweithio'r ddwyf, ac mae'n gweithio'r ddwyf yn ddwyf yn ymdweithio'r ddwyf yn gweithio'r ddwyf. Felly, ydych chi'n gweld, a byddwn i'n ffordd'r dweud, byddwn i Professor Galbraith, byddwn i'n gwybod y bydd y banc gwirionedd ymlaen, yn fwy gwybod y byddwn i'n gweld. OK, mae hi'n gwybod y byddai'n gweld? Well, yn 1970 ydy'r ffordd 30 bilion pwn yn ddwy'r cofnol i'r cofnol. By 1980, y gweinline yw cash, ac y blwline yw'r elektronicaeth yw'r loneg yw'r banc yw'r cyfnod, ac mae'n dweud 100 bilion. Yn ymwneud yw'r gweinline yw by 1990? Not quite there yet, half a trillion, about 500 billion. Anyone to guess by 2000? It's till about 850 or 900 billion. And then before the financial crisis, that's when we went past a trillion. So then it was about 2.2 trillion pounds. Bank issued money and then you can see the fraction of cash obviously getting smaller and smaller until it's about 3% as it is now. So quite a substantial amount of money in the economy. Obviously because it's all being issued when people take out a loan, then it all is backed by debt. So the amount of debt in the economy increases at the same amount. So we have a situation where basically we rent our currency from private banks because we take out loans from the banks and we have to repay them with interest. So that interest is really the rents that we pay the banking sector for having the privilege to create our national currency. And actually that breaks down to quite a significant amount of money. So it's about 100 to 200 billion pounds that we pay them per year in rent. And that breaks down to about 2.4 to 4.8 thousand pounds per person, which is quite a significant amount of money. And obviously one of the reasons they are so profitable as an industry. Okay, so they get to create all of the money but what happens to that money? Surely they do something useful. Who decides how to use it? Well, it's the same banks that create it that get to allocate it. And as I said, because we've got a really undiverse banking sector, there's actually just five big banks which get to create and allocate most of the money in the economy. And it's not the bank person that you see when you go into your local branch that's really deciding whether to lend to you or not. It's some kind of complicated algorithms or profit maximising algorithms that say that. So it's quite a concentrated amount of people that decide where it gets allocated. And quite a vast sum of money. So in the five years going up to the crisis, 2002, 2007, they allocated 2.9 trillion pounds into the UK economy. Okay, so where did it go? Well, it didn't go into particularly useful things for society or us as individuals. 40% went into mortgage lending which inflated a housing bubble which I'll talk about a bit more later. 37% went into financial markets. So that's kind of almost 80% going into things that aren't really useful for most normal people. And only 13% went into business lending. What most people think is the whole job of banks to do is to lend to business. It's actually only about 10% of what they do. And another 10% went into credit cards, high cost credit, personal loans. So they have a choice where to put the money and obviously they're always going to choose where is most profitable. So they don't lend to productive parts of the economy anywhere near the way people kind of think they do. And it's around 10% of lending is directed towards useful things. And the majority of it is towards what we'd call non-productive. So financial markets and speculation and mortgage lending. And so what happens is you kind of have consequences which aren't necessarily useful. House prices increase quite rapidly. You just have a situation where the banks get to decide what they do with your money. And in terms of speculating in markets, food speculation has caused some attention because some campaigning groups such as World Development Movement has been highlighted. They shouldn't be speculating on food prices which can have really bad consequences for some of the poorest parts of the world. And you can end up in a situation where you're depositing your money with Barclays and they're investing or using part of that money to invest in things like the tar sands in Canada, which is obviously undesirable. But actually they have the legal control over the money when you deposit with the bank. And obviously all the time that they're creating this money it's causing households and businesses to go further into debt. And so this is just a graph to show the kind of between 1990 and 2008 household savings as a percentage of personal debt going up. Personal debt as a percentage of GDP going up between 1990 and 2008 from about 60 to 100%. And at the same time savings as a percentage of disposable income falling from about 10% to zero. So you can see that kind of on the whole we've been getting more and more indebted in this boom. And eventually the debt becomes too much and a financial crisis is kind of precipitated. And this is a debt earner who was the chairman of the FSA in 2012 saying the financial crisis occurred because we failed to constrain the private financial systems creation of private credit money. So we have the system where if the banks aren't lending like the financial crisis then there's no money. And worse than that money's actually disappearing as I showed in the bathtub situation earlier. People are still paying down their debts, banks aren't lending so the kind of money in circulation is shrinking in the economy. So you get headlines like this where politicians are desperate to get banks lending again because it's the only way to get new money into the economy. And as I said, yep, the taps turn off and people are still paying the debt so the amount of money shrinks. And quite quickly after a financial crisis you get a lot of people unemployed. So you can just see the year along the bottom and around 2008 to 2009 a jump of a million people became unemployed. And obviously we live in a country where if you're unemployed you have social security and so obviously that's when the national debt jumped a lot as well. That's the situation that we're in. So we have a system where if we want more money in the economy then we have to take on more debt. Obviously we want less debt and so we have less money and really we'd like a system where you can have less debt with more money but that's not possible. So I could stop there and say that's basically what positive money are advocating that we just want a system where you can have less debt and more money. But I'll talk for a little bit more about some of the kind of negative consequences of this system. So why is the gap between Rich and Poor getting bigger? So we kind of have this myth that it's fine for lots of people at the top to have lots of money because it trickles down to the rest of us but in reality through systems like the monetary system it's sucked up from all of us to the people with lots of wealth and that's done through the money system with the kind of interest that we pay to the banks. So this kind of just shows income groups into desiles, into tens and the poorest 10% of people pay a disproportionately high amount so 9.4% of their income, all of the red, is paid to banks in interest whereas the wealthiest 10% have a disproportionately low amount so only 1.4% of their income is paid to banks in the form of interest payments. So another way is that obviously businesses and households need the money to kind of keep the economy going and so they all have to pay interest on that in the form of loans when they take out loans to banks so that transfers money from the real economy to the banking sector. Geographically, as I said, we've got a concentrated banking sector in the city of London so from everywhere else in the country money's kind of sucked in to that again in the form of interest payments and also what you do with your money so when we're all taking out lots of debt wealthy people tend to take out debt to leverage their assets and speculate on things like mortgages and buying more properties whereas if you're on a lower income you tend to buy consumables which will actually depreciate through time so that's another factor to increase this inequality that we've already got. So I've talked a bit about housing already but just to show a graph because everyone likes graphs so the purple line is house prices between 1991 and 2010 and that's showing the index relative to that so you can see they increased by 300% up until the crisis in 2007 and the other three lines are population growth, housing stock and mortgage lending so you have to guess which is which so which is the green line, I think that's next yep, very good, population growth anyone guess the red line? yeah, housing stock so the myth that you know it's a supply and demand issue we just don't have enough houses it might be true on a geographical level but on a national level we have enough houses for the people and so one of the big drivers is the blue line which is obviously mortgage lending which increased over 500% up to the financial crisis it's really driving that bubble it's money being pumped into mortgages through that period of time but interestingly it wasn't the own occuporship increase it's not like more people got to own their own houses actually that went down throughout that time it was mostly mortgages going to people who already owned homes buying more homes, buying to let getting on the buy to let scheme and all of that money being pumped into mortgages had one big effect for people who were renting or had one mortgage, the house that they lived in which was just to pump up house prices so in 96 the average house price was £51,000 it increased to £78,000 in 2004 increased to £140,000 in 2004 and increased to in 2008 to £179,000 so a huge increase over that period of 12 years ok, so just moving on to democracy so you have a situation where you know as we saw the financial crisis made a lot of people unemployed which increased the national debt because of their social security and welfare and you have a situation where a debt based money system after a financial crisis and nations become heavily indebted weakens the democracy as that kind of dwarfs the discourse and there's not too many options for politicians to take but also in terms of the actual money going into the economy so in the five years leading up to the crisis the government spent £2.1 trillion and commercial banks lent £2.9 trillion so a significant amount more which suggests their power to really shape the economy and what kind of industries we have in the economy and what we don't and obviously whilst the 650 MPs who decide where that £2.1 trillion goes and most of it's already allocated to various departments it's a very small amount of people deciding where that £2.1 trillion goes and where it enters the economy and whether it just gets stuck in mortgages and financial markets before it hits anyone in the kind of real economy doing real work so, could it be different? well, we definitely think so and we're not the only organisation we want to see a money system where businesses and households and people that do real work in the economy to keep things going don't have to take on more and more debt it's going to further debt we want to see a situation where you don't have to have a money a money system that has to continuously grow because if it doesn't grow it will collapse into a recession and a lot of businesses will go bankrupt out of no fault of their own and we want a money system where money gets to the places we need whether that's affordable housing or flood defences that's in Dundee, I think I'm not sure where it is but somewhere in Scotland and energy, we need renewable energy so we want to see a money system where we can get new money to the places we actually need for a healthy economy so what does positive money do? well, as I said, the first few years was really taken up with research so we did one book with the New Economics Foundation called Where Does Money Come From and then this was the book that we did on our own so Andrew Daxon and Ben Dyson wrote it and it's called Modernising Money and it's also how the money system works now but also half of it is how we propose things could be different I won't lie, isn't the most exciting of reads quite a few balance sheets in there but it's quite a thorough thought through proposal of how things could be different that isn't totally out there it could be done basically what we propose are that we could have a situation where instead of going to a bank and depositing it and it being legally theirs and they can do what they like with it you have a situation where you basically you have two types of accounts you have a current account which will sit with a bank but it will, within that bank it will sit at the Bank of England and they won't be able to do anything with it it will be safe, it will be money that they can't and speculate anywhere and so if there's any financial crisis that money won't have moved and you'll be able to extract it as and when and then there'll be investment accounts where if you do want to take a little bit of risk but get some interest on your money you can invest it but you kind of realign risk and reward so our proposal also suggests that banks won't be able to create money anymore actually all new money will be sustainable everlasting money that doesn't get destroyed when loans are repaid and the way that will work well kind of with our bathtub analogy it will be like putting the plug in and shifting who is in control of the taps so it will no longer be the banks that are creating money they are going back to being kind of intermediaries between savers and borrowers and the decision of how much and what for gets a split because we're not if you have both under the same control mechanism then it's a conflict of interest and in a similar way to the current monetary policy committee sets interest rates you could have a money creation committee that looks at how much new money if any we need in the economy each month and the government looks how to spend it and so that money will be created free from debt and spent in the public interest so is this a radical idea well maybe some people think but it has happened before in the UK one of the only kind of historical documented places but in the 1800s or before then all over the UK banks could create their own banknotes and that led to quite an unstable money system where lots of financial crises happened and the government of the day decided that actually the Bank of England should take on the sole responsibility for issuing banknotes so they passed a bill, the Peel Act in 1844 it's never been updated to account for obviously the kind of evolution of money and actually there's been a never been a debate on Parliament really since then about money creation and who should create a national currency so I mean Scotland cannot mention the fact that you're going to have a referendum on Scottish independence and you know it's kind of doesn't really change things we're advocating for money reform on a UK wide scale if Scotland went independent then we'd hope that people would advocate for money reform on a national scale in Scotland and we've done a small report just to kind of lay out the five design floors of the Pound Sterling and how it could be done differently if Scotland did go independent and you could set up your own central bank and issue your own national currency and tomorrow we're launching a petition positive money to basically say that we want to have a national debate now about money creation so we're launching that through our subscribers we've got about 25,000 people now who are supporting us online and we're hoping that they're all going to sign it and share it and get a lot more people interested in this debate because we think it's a really important one and to kind of follow that up we are pushing for a backbench debate so MPs who are on the backbenches can put forward their own debates we've got a handful, we're now up to 11 that are committed to going to a backbench debate and talking about this issue of money creation and who should create our nation's currency and so we'd love for you if you're interested try and get them interested I think come and talk to Andrew or Richard or Scott about maybe going as a team and see what MPs, see if you can get them interested we're not asking them to have an opinion to say what the right proposal is or to agree with positive money but we're saying we should have a national debate about who gets to create it because the same banks that caused the financial crisis it's still the same system, nothing's changed we've still got an affordable housing we've still got the highest personal household debt in history and they're getting to blow up another housing bubble so we need a national debate so we're trying to get things going across the UK so we've had about 150 meetups over the last year in 30 different cities we're getting local groups to meet up more regularly lots of quite a few meet up monthly it's going to be great if a local group formed here in Edinburgh and also we are kind of spreading internationally so we've now got about up to 20 sister organisations so all volunteers they're not as big as or they haven't grown as many supporters as we've got in the UK but they're starting, they've got websites they've got social media accounts and they're raising the debate in all these countries across Europe and even further afield so that's quite exciting especially when smaller countries which don't have such vast bank lobbies can actually get to their politicians quite easily and get a debate going so we're quite excited about places like Iceland where there's even interest to do a feasibility study potentially into money reform so we want to support them because although we want to grow the campaign in the UK we are well aware that we have one of the two biggest banking lobbies in the world so if we can see some other countries move first as well that would be great so that's about all from me just to kind of leave it at that it's not a law of nature that we have to have a debt based money system thanks for coming so I have two questions the first question is say what is the amount of money that banks lend in four different categories and the two first were non-productive and the two last were productive, right? Do you understand right now? Yeah, I mean so it was the third almost for business loans in the UK so the question is if that's the middle of the money they lend is from productive stuff right when they chop the top why do they not chop just the first part and not the second part or put in another words what's the benefit of not lending to business at any crisis time and the second question is why is it possible to change the currency system in one country without changing it in all the others to make it possible because I don't know Iceland decides to start changing it but then how do they do it to for example buy foreign currency in that country with that they appreciate their money to have certain values or something Should I answer that one before we go? So first question on business I mean it's so it's just really not in the bank's business model anymore to make small loans to businesses because they're so ginormous basically you know if you've got a thing about so there are kind of two things first the amount of the loan and then the kind of back up so if you lend to a house the average house price in London is now hitting half a million pounds if the person then defaults on their loan you've still got the house obviously you don't that often make that big of business loans of half a million pounds so you make lots of small loans it's lots more paperwork to do to make that many loans but also with their limited liability if a business goes bust then there's not much for the if they default on their loan there's not much for the bank to take so there might be some assets like some computers or something but there's not much to back that up so it's just more risky and in many different ways it's more risky so that's why they're incentivised both in that way and also in the kind of international banking standards way to lend to mortgages and then with the international one yeah it's a really good question I mean obviously if say a small country like Iceland did the money reform thing there would obviously be a big reaction in the markets and bankers panic and say oh not going to invest in that I signed a company anymore but it kind of depends I guess how dependent how the country is on flows of money coming in and out of their country in terms of the real economy but there's no practical reason why it can't happen and why the market shocks wouldn't calm down after a period of time but also there's the potential that it might be seen as once they got over the initial shock they might actually realise it's quite a safe investment then because it's not going to have booms and busts as easily so it might even become an attractive country to invest in One of the things that I feel to me aboutquisitive money was democratisation and the idea about the or the idea about using a committee to decide how much money should be that I'm a wee bit uneasy about that on two grounds one is that it sort of implies it's a technical matter about really it's a political one isn't it and the other thing is how would they be accountable to the public because what's to stop it just being captured by the kind of interest that we've seen capture the finance industry I mean it's not a straightforward matter and I don't say that we've not necessarily got it right I think the issue is that you could say a lot of politicians are already a bit captured so then giving them both the kind of power to create money and allocate it could be a conflict of interest and because the public are so distrustful of politicians at the moment part of the way that we've made the reforms to make them as politically acceptable in the current situation not saying that we can necessarily really bound to these specific reforms and we've kind of put bit more democracy in place so at the moment the MPC is really undemocratic and it's just appointed by the governor and obviously the governor of the bank union is just appointed by the chancellor and we kind of say that there should be some kind of election where the MPs elect a bit like they currently elect like the select committees so at the moment MPs elect who's on the committees based on who is knows more about the environment or knows more about housing or knows more about the treasury like economics so we kind of say that MCC should be elected economists but I think it is kind of a technical you have to have economists on there because if the stability thing you don't want to be creating excess amounts of money or too little money that might make you go into inflation or deflation so you do kind of have to have some people that are able to do the modelling and the kind of complicated stuff I think Okay, point taken but I trust economists even less than I trust Yeah, I think I have two questions but that's okay so the first question we have one of the two banking lobbies Banking lobbies in the world I'm just wondering what does a banking lobby look like So it's just because our banking sector is so big and has so much money they just have vast amounts of resources to put into like stopping any legislation going through so like a good example is at the moment or with the banking reform bill we're trying to get like transparency so basically data release that shows what sectors banks are lending to on a postcode scale across the UK so whether they're lending to businesses or mortgages or whatever and that's just transparency and they were really fought hard against it and what they have is just resource to pour into paying lawyers and paying advisers how to stop any reform going through and yeah so whereas civil society generally don't have any resources so if they want to kind of push something through then getting MPs time getting legal advice about a bill is just a lot more difficult so it's that just unequal unequal kind of distribution of resources to go into kind of making laws happen Is the second one would that be Wall Street who gets it? Yeah exactly I mean I don't I mean Brussels is pretty big as well in terms of like stopping any kind of EU reform on banks getting through as well so I don't know what the sizes are but I'm pretty sure London and Wall Street are the biggest ones kind of So my second question I don't I'm not even sure I know I asked a question but I just you know you have in this country we have the city of London which is an independent jurisdiction which is not under Westminster it's locked when most of the bags are I know so it's a huge question I don't even know the question I'm asking I'm just trying how do you manage effectively an independent state or have most of the money has been created inside our country and then it's done to democratise the money inside about it Yeah I don't even know So yeah the city of London is a corporation in itself which is really weird and I don't know enough about it but I mean it's kind of two things it's like political parties if they had if they weren't you know they do still think the banking sector is like our best industry and are still under that kind of dream so they're really scared of doing things basically anything I don't feel like yet the city of London corporation is even scared of them making decisions against the banking sector but obviously if they were that could come up and they could I don't know what powers they have but one of the powers is this thing called a rememberancer or and it's a man that stand or could be a woman I guess that stands behind the speaker of the house and the House of Commons and can like whisper things to him behind her it's really weird there was a film called UK Gold that was about tax avoidance mostly but it kind of uncovered this idea and there's been a few petitions going around about let's get rid of this person that has special powers in the House of Commons so these things are surfacing but I think at the moment we're still at the stage where we need politicians to wake up and realise they need to have some political will before the kind of power of these of what the banks do have is really kind of shown for what it is. The city of London is so powerful it's like the Vatican in Rome. Yeah, yeah. A different thing but it's very similar. You can't go against it because of the community they deny it. I mean I stood as a paper candidate in the recent council elections and we I mean I was not going to be elected I was just there to be on the sheet and so you know we got all got brochures sent to us from the city of London Corporation you know already before you even got no chance of being elected as a counciller in London but they're kind of already trying to sweeten you or something. It's very scary. Some people say that the reason that politicians focus so much on economic growth is also a consequence of the way money works what is your view on that? So not necessarily so yeah so I mean the situation we have is we've got a debt based money system so if we stop creating money then the amount of money shrinks and so you kind of either growing or collapsing so they are desperate to have growth but then you know GDP is only increasing at 2% a year which you could look as being quite stable but then looking at money being pumped into housing it's much bigger than that so there's an argument to say that if all new money went into something that would create new goods and services which would increase GDP then it wouldn't then we'd kind of have alarm bells ringing a lot earlier than we did if that makes sense but I feel like you know we can't get away from growth when we've got a debt based currency because if you stop creating it you just stop in a way On your map of housing businesses and so on that you showed how the debt loan created money is allocated it didn't really talk very much about the funds which are then gambled on the stock exchanges and on commodities and so on so I understood that one thing that's changed in the last few decades is money you've focused a lot on housing I totally understand that and there's the leaflet on how the mortgage side of things is very significant but can you talk a little bit more about the role of these secondary and tertiary things in the financial system where there's gambling basically and where does that lie because I thought that was what a lot of the created money was being used for I mean it's like I put it up as almost as big as the amount going into mortgage lending 37% into financial into the financial markets but I mean they're kind of a black hole to me in a way they're you know trading these weird mathematical algorithms that some poor PhD students have come up with but it it's a black hole but I think the key is money gets created by banks lending into some kind of less dodgy financial instrument and then it just goes into a kind of the markets the stock markets and gets stuck there and it doesn't trickle down into the the real economy as we're told but it is a horrendously complicated system and completely un productive I mean there's a really good argument to scrap the whole thing scrap the stock markets I think but yeah I mean I don't it's not something that we at positive money have spent a lot of time looking into exactly the pathways of money that's created as loans going in and where it ends up and that kind of thing and then I suppose I slightly take issue with the the image of the house and the I'm just saying and asserting that shelter is unproductive because it's quite an awkward thing in the human psyche shelter is a nearly human right and that but what isn't is the is the value added the artificial value added so it's the bubble which is unproductive it's not the actual so have you ever had comments like that before about how it's not it's not housing say it's not the construction of houses and building buildings is the problem it's the fact that because there isn't because the way the money is used with mortgages too much money was into mortgages the price of the houses just was up and up and up and you don't build more houses that's the problem so it's the asset it's disinflating it as an asset and it's not like it's getting more that's why I took to add that own occupy thing because it's not like it's getting more people to own their houses it's actually just increasing the people that own the multiple homes if you look at the statistics from the ONS it's own occupy ship went down in the period up to the boom it was people buying multiple homes and obviously they're controlling rent there's like rent controls is another area which is pretty outrageous so yeah it's mortgages it's not house building that we're trying to kind of highlight we're in an unproductive part just relates to the fact that you're not putting money into new housing but into existing housing yes yes I appreciate that I think it's new money it's 40% of newly created money so it's all it's where it starts off that's right the next question was I just wanted to refresh you with the what's the debate in the House of Commons what's the debate it's not been tabled yet but it's a back bench debate that we're trying to make happen and it's going to be on money creation something along the lines of who should create our nation's currency or should our nation's currency be created in the public interest and it's we've got kind of three Michael Meach from the Labour Party Steve Baker from the Conservatives and Caroline Lucas from the Greens who have kind of agreed to lead it to try and get cross party support and we've got 11 so far so if we can get any more MPs signed up then it's more likely to get tabled sooner and have a longer time to debate just a quick one have you contacted all the MPs about about your philosophy just generally did you get any kind of response from not all of them because you've contacted the ones that have had some kind of contact with with what we're doing either through signing an early day motion on money creation or being on the Treasury Select Committee I think you know at first so in March the Bank of England came out with a paper about money creation and they kind of you know backed what we were saying which is that money creation isn't constrained in a way it is all created by banks on their land and that's really helped to kind of move the debate forward and now we've got we've had the chief economist of the Financial Times say basically advocating a similar proposal to us and those two things in short space of time has meant that actually it's becoming a bit more mainstream so now we're going back to the politicians and they're actually listening to us a bit more because they can see the debates not going away it's just gathering steam which is really exciting because if we you know contacting them a year ago they just were kind of very dismissive and so basically we're trying to mobilise supporters to talk to their MP because an MP's first priority is his or her constituents so it's much better coming from the constituents than coming from us because we're quite small and yeah exactly I come from I guess a pretty similar background for yours I just did a Masters in Ecological Economics in University of Edinburgh and so that's also how I came into this the topic I was mostly concerned with growth actually solving climate crisis solving pollution solving all these things although there is a section on the website on the environment it's not exactly a big part of your promotion material I can imagine that right now we're now together together a lot of interest focus on the acute crisis right now even though you could really argue that the environmental crisis is pretty acute as well with the news coming about the Antarctic ice sheets the western half is completely lost basically is that it felt to me when I I came across positive money roughly two years ago when I was back in the Netherlands but a lot of my friends here in the environmental movements I work in international development because obviously just south of Edinburgh they're all doing environmental management none of them have heard of this issue and it's I feel like there's so much we could gain if you could get environmentalists behind this as well definitely I mean something I'm really passionate about doing sorry who do you finish there and I've thought about it a lot and I guess like the main reason is is the kind of way we've positive money has already started always started from is the kind of research based advocacy stuff so the kind of how the monetary system works and how we've performed this based on a lot of research and basically it's a lot simpler to exactly correlate or have kind of cause and effect relationship between things like the housing bubbles and this monetary system and the environmental stuff's just much harder and the growth stuff so Tim Jackson who wrote Prosperity Without Growth he's been really exciting that he read modernising money and he was like oh this really helped me fit this piece in and now he's doing research a bit more on that connection between the monetary system and environmental stuff and Andrew Jackson our main research has gone to a PhD with him and kind of on this stuff but you know a few other friends that are also from environmental backgrounds and interested in this have gone I know someone that went to a PhD and was like yeah I'm going to just totally come up with the link between the environment and the monetary system that's really clear and she's like switched her topic to housing after like and the mortgage bubble after like six months because it's just really complicated so I think yeah I don't think we've got clear arguments that are succinct that we can kind of put out there without knowing that we could probably be shut down of it so it's kind of figuring out how to talk to people without basically we need better arguments that sound like a topic to develop at the top for our next the next round of research you could probably argue go along with performing money however you've looked at things like land value taxation or if you have personally I think of when the works of positive money is quite we're all like supporters of land value tax and kind of citizens income basic income but kind of and we know people that are in the land value tax campaign but you know it's already quite complicated to talk about money so we're not going to go veer off but we're very supportive on a personal level and the kind of organisational level of land value tax because it's rent seeking stuff again yeah we're getting less clear in my mind but that's alright I mean my question I've identified a country that has an economy as close as what your philosophy is I've identified a country in the world that is pretty close or the closeness of what you wish to promote or what you promote yeah I don't haven't done enough research into other countries but Iceland seems pretty I mean it's quite small so it's only half a million people it's like half of Hackney but they could do it and I don't know what would work five million we think would be a good sized country so Denmark, Scotland New Zealand New Zealand big enough to be taken seriously but it's also so yeah, New Zealand and Denmark are our hopes the question was was it the the closed sorry, no or something the closest would be the close at least would be like Iceland or potentially Iceland but no, not very close we're all in lots of debt we don't have a home historical examples yeah it was just two points from what Ben was talking about and how you used to marry the money thing into the environment we heard of Nate Higgins he's a very good guy and he did a really good YouTube presentations all the time forward to you it was an hour and a half but he talks about if you create infinite money for your currency if you have 100,000 if you create 100,000 pounds and ask in the ecosystem to match that 100,000 pounds the ecosystem isn't finite so I guess that was his way of looking at it the other thing I was going to say is obviously the flip side of a recession is that all your green policies go out the window so they're the first things that get kept in touch as soon as you have a recession now people will house you no more there's more important things in the environment and these are the plus what you came for wasn't in front of me yeah absolutely and actually that's the one thing that we advocate that we're quite sure on is that the one reason environmentalists shouldn't want the system is because it creates boom and busts and recessions that make governments kick out environmental safe guards another issue with money and the environment I guess is that a mathematician has calculated that because there is interest on money it's actually most efficient to fish all the way out of the sea to extinction as quickly as possible then have your money in the bank and let it grow with interest rather than fish the whales sustainably in the end if you do cost benefit analysis it will be better to just fish the whales to extinction and that's because of interest on the money so that's something that would not be addressed in this system or maybe to some extent part of that is the whole modern economics doesn't factor in externalities does it so it's the cost of actually depleting your system that you profit from to extinction isn't that a good idea if you factor that into your economics right I think we'll take just a couple of last questions so nope there are lots of last questions ok people who haven't spoken before then please just behind you Sarah and then you at the bank ok three last ones ok so touching on that point isn't that the profit aspect of it doesn't this idea threaten the basis of the profit motive itself because that's the thing that drives by increasing financialisation and everything else the justification for doing all of this is the pursuit of profit so I work in a third sector so I'm clean it's that desire for profit that justifies all of this our current system I mean not what you're proposing so to start chipping away at that means a fundamental rethink of our entire value system which is quite frightening for a lot of people isn't it because if you're not doing it in pursuit of profit then where's your motive I definitely agree but I think just kind of on every day every day perspective it's like you don't really begrudge the person that's like working really hard making socks to earn a profit but you do begrudge people that are just kind of rent seeking profit which is the kind of finance sector profit is when you make money without working right when you give money to some people they work for you something you say we could define profit online ok but I'm not sure that the positive money proposal changes that make such a fundamental change no but it's the kind of the post growth kind of mindset isn't it of just kind of the profit motive is what compels us to do more in most business is that what I'm saying if you're there's the profit is the good side and there's the avoidance of debt so you have a pool but there's also debt coming up behind you but if debt is the profit centre itself if the issuance of debt is the profit centre so do you have a question that has disturbed me for a long time it's too big a question to expect an answer here and I don't expect a right to leave it and regarding the difference between America and the UK America has now 17 trillion of debt and the only way they know to get back on the real is to increase and increase and increase and then you have the UK the only way they can get back on the real is on the Bank of England and have a chance of cut, cut, cut, cut, cut now the question as I said is but later is either system right or one of them right whether they go through all together back on the reals and student deals but the good answer now is that is the real one right I fundamentally disagree there both the American and the UK approach to debt government debt as you guys have said the government debt to the UK will unfortunately effect by 2015 although there has been nearer of austerity in Britain this present government have doubled the national debt and it's exactly the same approach really as the Americans and that's the futility of the system and the things that are being cut here are the essential things and jobs and everything else that's a political stance that is a political stance provided there is no positive money system if the Americans have a better idea austerity is really hurtful and that's what actually caused the Great Depression I mean the key thing is if you cut jobs then they go on social security and take out benefits so then you increase your deficit anyway so it's a bit of a non-productive thing to do I think this might be the last question It was wonderful comment to be interesting I'm not 100% sure I'm talking about potential gains from ally in your cause to environmentalists but I would actually put that the other way and say well if you look at people in the country for example when you pull a majority of people will either say that they don't believe in man-made climate change or they don't know and so might you actually do better by emphasising the other benefits I mean I like the fact that this has environmental benefits and I think that's great and you might get a lot of really keen activists by American environmental cause who don't believe in climate change and all people who hate windmills on board as well for other perfectly good reasons to do with that it's going to make their life better I don't know about that it's just a thought I'm not I think everyone's different and we're not going to not try and get on board different types of people I think at the moment we tend to appeal to people who think more holistically about society and big issues and they are more likely to kind of get active and so they are quite often tuned into the climate change very vital to the debate and I talk to different people friends or family I don't try and talk about different things like house prices is obviously the main one in to people, especially people living in London young people who have no hope of owning a house but often they aren't necessarily the people that are kind of ready to that kind of take it on fully and then want to act on it because actually they haven't been thinking oh god the economy is really broken and it's like looking at the bigger picture and I think if you've been looking at the bigger picture for a while then you're more likely to get motivated when you hear about this so that's it This is so fundamental and this is going to be hard enough this is going to be hard enough to change let's just do this and on that note I think I'd like to join me and thank you for having me Thank you