 I was researching carbon dioxide capture and storage which is a technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from sources like power stations and store it in rock about a kilometre under the seabed. The idea being that you could reduce carbon dioxide emissions while growing our renewable energy industry. So how did I get from that to working for positive money? Well when I started researching it, it was 2008 and it was actually quite an exciting area to be in. The government had announced a competition and we were going to have our very own project in the UK. And I kind of imagined myself finishing my research degree and going and working on that big project in the UK. But of course as the financial crisis of 2008 set in and the recession, I realised that the renewable energy agenda and the environmental agenda at large was getting shelved by the government. And this kind of frustrated me quite a lot. So in autumn 2011 I found myself at a sustainability conference and Ann Pettiford was one of the speakers. She's a fellow at the New Economics Foundation and a member of the Green New Deal. And she said two things which really stuck with me. She said we can't afford renewable energy. And the second thing she said was that when Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, bailed out the banks, he just typed numbers into a computer. And that talk was really my wake up call. Those messages really deeply unsettled me but at the same time they kind of made sense. There was kind of a direction I could point my frustration. You know if you've got a situation where we can't afford the things we need but banks can get bailed out by typing numbers into a computer then the system must be pretty broken. And so I had the feeling a bit like when you're a child at school and you see your teacher in a supermarket and you realise that they're just a normal person. It's quite an unsettling feeling. And I kind of realised then that policy makers probably really didn't have a clue why the financial crisis happened. And they probably didn't really have a clue how to fix it. And since working for Positive Money I found that to be kind of confirmed and felt like it'd be truer, truer. So needless to say when I finished my research degree the money for the big project in the UK had been scrapped because we couldn't afford it anymore. So today I'd like to welcome you here. Who came to the Positive Money conference last year? Excellent. OK, so I'm going to talk about what's happened to Positive Money since then. And then I'm going to talk about how that has shaped our strategy and then talk about building a movement and how we want you to get involved. So last year we launched Modernising Money, a book written by Andrew Jackson and Ben Dyson of Positive Money. And since then we've sold over 2,000 copies which has been very exciting and fantastic. And they are on the left, Lorda Dair Turner, who was the chairman of the Financial Services Authority. Now he's a fellow at the Institute of New Economic Thinking. In the middle is Martin Wolff, who's the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. And on the right is Professor Tim Jackson, who's the author of Prosperity Without Growth. And what's quite exciting is that Andrew Jackson is going to start a full-time PhD with him to kind of further this research. So that's quite exciting. So at the last year's conference we also heard from Professor Victoria Chick who talked to us about why academics don't get this. And she laid out really clearly how money creation has basically disappeared from economics departments and syllabuses across universities in the UK and worldwide. And it's quite exciting that one person in the audience last year was Joe Earl, who is one of the founders of the Post-Crash Economic Society. And they're a student society based in Manchester studying economics, kind of challenging their department about the economics they're being taught. And they've achieved quite a lot of media coverage in the last year and this is one article about them. But they've also been joined by many other societies and universities across the UK. So rethinking economics came out of LSE and there's been other societies set up in universities such as UCL. And so they're starting to feel a swell of economic students unhappy with what they're being taught. Last year we also heard from Patrick Chalmers, who's a former Reuters journalist, and he talked about why the mainstream media don't get this. And since last year, we've thought a lot about how we can get into the mainstream media. And whilst we've had some success this year, you might have seen Ben's article in The Guardian, he spoke on the world service. It's been pretty slow and that's kind of been kind of frustrating, but we're kind of realising that maybe it's too early, we can't actually get into the mainstream press. One thing we've learnt a lot from is writing about Scotland. So Ben wrote a report trying to open the debate around the Scottish currency. We thought we could lay out an alternative. But what we found was that by the time we tried to get that into the media, already the discussion had shrunk to being a politics debate between the Scottish National Party and Westminster. And no one was really interested in having a kind of open discussion about real alternatives. So it's been pretty disappointing, but perhaps not that surprising. So last year we also decided to do some more research. So Andrew Jackson wrote this paper which was released last year on sovereign money and Ben's going to talk about that this afternoon. Ben and Andrew have been doing a hell of a lot of thinking about critiquing the current system and proposing alternatives. And we have this poster up in our office says change will happen when expert opinion and public opinion coincide. And when I joined Positive Money in 2012 I was kind of like, well that's quite simple, I don't think it's really going to be like that. But as I've worked there and kind of become very frustrated with the state of our political system, with the media, I kind of feel like it's truer and truer. And it definitely feels like the right place where we have to start. And if you're wondering which person this is a quote from, it's from our very own Andrew. He came up with it. So we feel the expert opinion is actually shifting. You know Martin Wolff at the FT has written a couple of articles on this. Adair Turner has made several high profile speeches over the last year on the topic of debt, money and credit. And this is Michael Cymhoff from the IMF who wrote the paper The Chicago Plan Revisited. And he's definitely attracted a lot more attention around the subject. Both Martin Wolff and Adair Turner have books coming out later this year which will feature the topic. So we feel like this is a serious topic, the money system, and it's going to attract more and more serious thinkers with time. And so we feel more confident than ever that our research proposals are gaining momentum and that there's a possibility of expert opinion shifting and that it already is. But can these individuals shift public opinion on their own? We think probably not. So that's where positive money comes in. Cos positive money really is its supporters. You know, from day one it's been the people who've been interested in the subject that's allowed the organisation to establish its foundations and to grow. Now we feel confident in what we are proposing. We want to build a national and international movement for change. So what is a movement? It's kind of an ambiguous word. So that was the positive money supporters, that's all you. So what is a movement? Well, obviously there are hundreds of definitions about what a movement is. One simple one is that it's a large group of people who are focusing on one issue to change, one either political or social issue that they want to change. So we know that economic system is really broken and we know that at the heart of that sits the money system. And that's what the positive money movement is about. It's about changing money. So systemic change, however, doesn't happen that often. It doesn't usually happen when governments suddenly realise that the way that they're running the system isn't particularly fair or useful for most people. And it's also kind of unlikely to happen when central bankers kind of get their own wake-up call and realise that the way they're running the money system isn't actually very useful and it could be changed to better serve society's needs. And so big-scale change generally happens when people on a mass scale demand it and when governments generally become fearful and they're worried about risking their losing their position. So they actually change things in a big way. But politicians aren't actually, I think we know politicians aren't rational decision makers, to say the least. How many people here have talked to their MP about the money system? And how many people here have managed to have a calm rational discussion about the money system? Okay, I'm really glad it's not just me. So they're humans, you know, we're complicated, we're not these rational consumers that economics would have us believe. When I met my MP in the summer of 2012, I went into the meeting thinking I was going to have a really calm rational discussion. I thought I'd focus on house prices, talk about the fact that it wasn't just a supply and demand issue that mortgage lending had something to do with it. But I left the meeting feeling utterly deflated and really frustrated. He'd really aggressively challenged every point that I'd made, tried to close down all of my arguments with his superior debating skills and not wanted to have an open discussion at all in the slightest. So we don't want to waste time, really, and energy banging on closed doors to media and politicians. Positive money has always had its most success when we've tried to bring new people into the conversation who are open to the discussion. And that's why we've now got over 22,000 followers on Facebook. We've got 15,000 subscribers on our newsletter, and we've got over 7,000 followers on Twitter. And we get about 30,000 new visits to the website each month, which is about double the amount from last year. So that's really exciting. Yeah! No, no, back. So positive money is not simply Ben or Mira or Andrew or me, but it's everyone. It's everyone that shares a Facebook post, it's everyone that tweets, it's everyone that donates to us. It's everyone that talks to their friend about the money system, anyone that organises a film screening, anyone that books a room for the reading group, anyone that writes to their MP. And we're much stronger working together than working separately. You know, we can bring lots of things to the table, we can help each other better to communicate, to influence politicians, if that's what we want to do, to bring in our friends and family to the conversation. Who here has tried to explain the money system and the issues to one of their friends or family? Who here has had unsuccessful results or has been quite unsure about how to even start the conversation? Surely more. And so that's why we need a movement, because we need to help each other figure out how to best communicate to each other. And if we agree that we need to shift public opinion, then we do need to bring new people in to the conversation about how we've got a broken economic system, but also how it can be changed and how it can be fixed to have a better society. And I get the feeling that quite a few people do realise that there's something seriously wrong. You know, when they see in the local area more and more people going to food banks and at the same time on the news can see stock markets hitting all-time highs, they can tell that the system is seriously broken. But obviously we all have different barriers to wanting to get more involved or wanting to learn about the problems and what positive money is proposing. Some people will be put off because they think that they need to understand all of this technical jargon and to be intimidated by it. Other people might just simply not have the headspace or time to even think about money creation. So we need to work together to help remove barriers for people to get more and more people involved. So we now have 18 local groups across the country, which is very exciting and they meet regularly from up in Newcastle to down in Dorset to show up positive money. And we have 19 national groups across the world, which is really exciting. I think we've got about nine of them represented here today. So I think we've got people from Denmark, yeah, from Sweden, from Switzerland, from Germany. From Germany, yeah, from France, Iceland, here by myth. From the US? No, okay, yeah, from the US. So this is really exciting because it is an international movement and it might be more likely that we can change the money system in a country that's not the UK and a country that has a smaller bank lobby. So we need to support all national groups growing. And with the technology we've got, there's absolutely no reason why we can't work together on an international movement. How many people knew that Mira, who does every single one of our Facebook posts, does it from her home country of Slovakia? So we're already an international movement and we can work together across the globe. You know, even though it was the UK that designed the first wind turbine, it was Denmark that turned it into an industry. So we want to support each other working together. So what does a money reform movement look like? Well, it looks like this room to start with, but it also looks like people getting together in groups and regions across the UK to talk to each other, to support and motivate each other to take action. You know, we can reach a whole lot more people online, but we can't actually build a movement online, because a movement is about relationships and it's about people. And that's why we're here today. OK. How many people have been to positive money events that's not today? Yeah. And how many people felt that by going to that event they felt, and meeting other people that were interested in similar issues, they felt more connected and more committed to that cause? Cool. I think that's about the same number. I'm definitely one of them. So that's why we want to build a movement, and there's already been hundreds of fantastic events that have happened from street stalls in Cardiff to film screenings in Sweden, and we want many more of those to happen and to come out of today. And we've got an opportunity in the UK with the 2015 elections to get more... It's more likely that your MP will turn up at an event if you can organise a successful one in your area. We all have different resources to bring to the table. So some of us might... So this is building movement. Sorry. So some of us might understand the system in really great detail and absolutely get how the current system works and the proposals that positive money has. Other us might be great at communicating the ideas and understand how to bring in different kinds of people and make it real for people with different interests. And some of us might be good at organising and know what it takes to organise an event. And all of those kinds of people are really valuable to positive money, but they're even more effective when they're working in teams rather than in isolation. So what do we want positive money local groups to do? Well, we kind of feel they should have the same goal that positive money does, which is to grow. And so that's a really overarching target and we're not going to define how that should be, whether it's grow the number of people attending your monthly meetings or grow the number of people attending your events or grow the number of signatures you pick up on the street to send to positive money. But we all have a common goal, which is to grow, and you can measure that really easily. We measure the number of people signing up to our newsletter, the number of people looking at our website, the number of people looking at Facebook. And if we're growing the movement, then that's got to be a good thing. So we're asking quite a lot of you today to give up your Saturday to come here and join the positive money movement. So we don't want you to feel like it's all about us telling you to do things. You need to tell us what you need from us, whether that's resources for your group, whether it's support or training, if it's technical knowledge about how to become a speaker or social media, how to facilitate a group. Those are things that we can help you with and we want to. I got more involved with positive money when I attended their speakers training in 2012, but we found that speakers haven't really been able to find audiences to then go and talk to. And that's why we wanted to set up groups so that we can support each other, reach many more people.