 I'm Shirley Wardell. I live in Ffarncom, near Guildford, and my job is training leadership in mostly in higher education, but wherever they will pay me money, I like everybody else have a mortgage which needs paying. In my leadership development work, the main thing I focus on is helping people to create the conditions in which people can think. When we look at the current economic system and crisis with every country virtually in the world in huge debt, unemployment on the one hand, unsold goods and services on the other hand and a debt crisis that's to be solved by further debt, nothing seems to make sense. So it's clear to me that the thinking behind the system at the moment is not good enough. The system is not fit for purpose. So I started to think, what can I do about it? And the first thing I did was try to spend my money ethically. And I rallied my family round and we don't buy from Nestlé and we do buy from our corner baker, her hand made by Jane, and these things made me feel better. I changed my mortgage to the Britannia Building Society and I've also changed our savings to the Treados Bank. So there's a few things we could do but it's not enough. I wanted to think more deeply about how to make an impact on the economic system. And that's where I'm very grateful to the thinking that's gone on by positive money because I as a layperson did not understand how it all worked. And now I understand a little bit and I hope to share that with the audiences I'm going to speak to. So what I'd like to tell them is the strange way money is created with a swift sleight of hand by the banks. A couple of taps here and a couple of taps there which create money when we want to borrow and for which we pay interest. How do we get to be the ones that do the diddly-diddly-diddly with the buttons on the sleight of hand? My friend John Colridge said, let's all be bankers who wouldn't want to be in the current system. So that's one thing we're all paying incredible amounts of interest including all our governments which we have to pay back in tax. So there is a huge negative impact on a debt based system. And the other thing I'm going to tell you about which has made me so happy is that there is an alternative. There is a positive money solution and being positive about money is not just moaning about the current situation. It's doing something about it, an offering alternative. My name's David Faraday. I'm a business owner, director, lead trainer of a small training company based down in Godlaming in Surrey. Mostly we do leadership and personal development training predominantly in academia but in other aspects in corporate life as well. Now, I regard myself as a reasonably intelligent person. I've got a PhD or was an academic for 12 years. I've published many research papers, albeit in engineering, not in the subjects I'm here to talk about today. And also I regard myself as being fairly interested in what's going on in the economy and what's going on in the world, particularly with the financial crisis that's recently happened. So it was with some interest about my month and a half ago I suppose. I sat down to watch a YouTube video entitled 97% owned. And I got about 30 minutes into this video and I had to stop it. I had to stop it for a couple of reasons. One, I decided pretty straightforwardly I had to get my wife involved in this and she was away training, she's over there now. She was away training and I wanted to watch it with her because I knew she'd be interested in it. But mostly it was because I was both shocked and a bit sickened by what I was hearing in this video. I was shocked because I did actually think I had some idea of how the financial system worked. And it was becoming increasingly apparent that actually I had many misconceptions about how it did work. And somewhat sickened because it also became apparent that there were probably a small number of people in the system, possibly benignly and not altogether aware themselves, but they were making a tremendous amount of money out of this particular system at the expense of most other people. So as a result of that I watched the rest of the video when my wife came back. I decided that it was very important that I educate, that I find out more about this myself. Potentially educate other people and that's what I'm here to do today to hopefully transfer some of this knowledge. So before I get into the talk in more detail I'll tell you a little bit about myself and how I got into these ideas. It was in a Quaker context, I was at a conference, it was on sustainability and justice or something like that. We were in home groups and we were putting the world to rights when my neighbour said to me or said to all of us, you realise that the basis of the problems we're talking about is the fact that 97% of all the money in circulation is based on debt. I looked at him and thought, what are you on about? How can it be? He said, yes it's debt money. Most of the money is debt money and I said it can't be true. I was really truly disturbed or I like the man, I trusted the man from what I knew about him and he said, well if you want to know more, go and read this book, Michael wrote the Bodhams Grip of Death, that was intriguing in itself. I went away, the first chapter is on the net, I read it and had to go and buy the book, read it from cover to cover. That was it. Since then it's become a total passion of mine. I'm not an economist, I don't feel confident about facts and figures and economic terms, but in the simple way of trying to raise awareness I'm on a mission now to help to educate people into the basic ideas.