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New Money for a New World

Page 33

by Bernard Lietaer


  AN INVITATION

  Our journey in pursuit of monetary innovations and societal transformation continues online at our companion websites:

  www. newmoneyforanewworld.com

  and

  www.lietaer.com

  CHAPTER THIRTY - The Dynamics of Transformation and Money

  This chapter, regarding the changes now taking place to our economies and society at large, and the vital role of monetary enhnacements, will be posted online on our companion websites:

  www.newmoneyforanewworld.com

  and

  www.lietaer.com

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Bernard Lietaer has studied and worked in the field of money for more than 30 years in an unusually broad range of capacities including as a central banker, a fund manager, a university professor, and a consultant to governments in numerous countries, multinational corporations, and community organizations. He co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the euro) and served as president of the Electronic Payment System at the National Bank of Belgium (the Belgian Central Bank).

  He co-founded and managed Gaia Corp, a top performing currency fund whose profits funded investments in environmental projects. A former professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain, he has also taught at Sonoma State University and Naropa University. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, the World Business Academy, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Bernard Lietaer has written numerous books and articles about money systems, including The Future of Money (translated into 18 languages), and New Money for a New World (2011, Qiterra Press).

  Stephen Belgin is the founder and President of Qiterra Press. He is a self-described passionate student of systems thinking and what is truly possible. A near-death experience in the 1970′s began a journey that spanned much of the globe and a wide variety of disciplines, including medical research and communications. Most recently, he spent a decade working with Bernard Lietaer to create New Money For A New World, one of a number of upcoming books from Qiterra Press that speaks to societal transformation and the solutions that are within our grasp.

  COPYRIGHT

  New Money for a New World

  A Qiterra Press hardcover original

  6” x 9” / 392 pages

  Category: Non-fiction

  ISBN 978-0-9832274-0-3

  © 2005 and 2011

  Bernard Lietaer

  and Stephen Belgin

  All rights reserved.

  This edition is published by Qiterra Press, LLC

  1905 15th Street

  Box 565

  Boulder, CO, 80302-9998

  United States of America

  Design and Cover Design: Stephen Belgin and Chad Morgan

  Currencies featured on cover: U.S. dollar, Croatian dinar, Greenback

  (Telluride, Colorado), LETS (Australia), and Rubi (Brazil).

  The illustrations in this book are, unless otherwise stated, original drawings by Moreno Tomasetig and Brian Hutchinson. The publishers are making all reasonable efforts to contact copyright and license holders for permissions for both pictures and cartoons, and apologize for any omissions or errors in the credits given.

  ISBN #

  978-0-9832274-0-3

  ENDNOTES

  CHAPTER ONE - A Tale of Two Cities

  1 Information regarding Curitiba results from a field trip to the area in the late 1990s by Bernard Lietaer and by a follow-up interview in June 2007.

  2 The Hammerville metaphor for our society’s limiting use of money as a tool

  CHAPTER TWO - Welcome to Moneyville

  3 John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money (London, 1930), p. 13.

  4 Richard Wagner, interview by the authors (22 June 2004).

  5 Jacques Rueff, The Age of Inflation, translation by A. H. Meeus and F.G. Clarke (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1964).

  6 See: Peter Sloterdijk, Aus Herbstschrift I (Steierischer Herbst, 1990).

  CHAPTER THREE - Megatrends and Money

  7 Ken Dychtwald, from a speech addressing the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Meeting (San Francisco, 3 April 1999).

  8 Ken Dychtwald, from a speech addressing the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Meeting (San Francisco, 3 April 1999).

  9 Ken Dychtwald, from a speech addressing the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Meeting (San Francisco, 3 April 1999).

  10 Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), p. 106. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), based in Paris, is an association of the most developed countries in the world

  11 Peter G. Peterson, “Gray Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis,” Foreign Affairs (January-February 1999).

  12 Peter G. Peterson, “Gray Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis,” Foreign Affairs (January-February 1999).

  13 Source:

  14 Source: See also: Fidelity Investments, Press Release (6 March 2006).

  15 Paul Eccleston, “Ecological credit crunch potentially more damaging than financial crisis, says WWF” The Daily Telegraph (London, 29 October 2008), quoting WWF’s International Director, James Leape, and the WWF Living Planet Report.

  16 Paul Eccleston, “Ecological credit crunch potentially more damaging than financial crisis, says WWF” The Daily Telegraph (London, 29 October 2008), quoting WWF’s International Director, James Leape, and the WWF Living Planet Report.

  17 Sigmar Garbriel, “Biodiversity ‘fundamental' to Economics,” German Federal Environment Minister (9 March 2007).

  18 “Deforestation continues at an alarming rate,” Press Release, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), (Rome, 14 November 2005).

  19 As announced at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (December 2007).

  20 ASA GISS Surface Temperature (GISTEMP) Analysis, which “provides a measure of the changing global surface temperature with monthly resolution for the period since 1880,” as reported by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC).

  21 Remarks by Sigmar Gabriel, German Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, based on “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” report by The European Union and German environment ministry-led research, and presented at the UN Convention of Biological Diversity (Bonn, 19 May 2008).

  22 “Economic Sector and Climate Change” report by Munich Re (21 May 2008).

  23 Munich Re, press release (29 December 2005).

  24 Jim Coleman, “Cap and Trade - The Booster Shot Our Economy Needs,” Terra Rossa (20 February 2008).

  25 “Summary for Policymakers,” Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007).

  26 The 2001 joint statement was signed by the scientific academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Sweden, and the U.K. The 2005 statement added Japan, Russia, and the United States. The 2007 statement added Mexico and South Africa. Professional societies include: American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Astronomical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, Geological Society of Am
erica, American Chemical Society, and Engineers Australia. “The Science Of Climate Change” (Royal Society, May 2001); “Joint science academies' statement: Global response to climate change” (Royal Society, June 2005). ; “Joint science academies' statement on growth and responsibility: sustainability, energy efficiency and climate protection.” ;

  Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, (May 2007)

 

  27 John Thornhill, “Income Inequality seen as the Great Divide,” The Financial Times (London, 19 May 2008).

  28 Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 107.

  29 Edward N. Wolff, “Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership,” a paper for the conference: Benefits and Mechanisms for Spreading Asset Ownership in the United States (New York University, 10-12 December 1998).

  30 “Executive Pay Special Report,” Business Week (9 April 2001).

  31 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute (April 2008).

  32 David Boyle, “The New Alchemists,” Resurgence Magazine (January 1999).

  33 Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 107.

  34 Stijn Claessens, Larry H.P. Lang, and Simeon Djankov, “Who Controls East Asian Corporations,” Policy Research Working Papers, no. 2054 (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank 1999).

  35 Stijn Claessens, Larry H.P. Lang, and Simeon Djankov, “Who Controls East Asian Corporations,” Policy Research Working Papers, no. 2054 (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank 1999).

  36 “State of the World Population 2002: Useful Facts,” Planetwire.

  37 Anup Shah, “Causes of Hunger are Related to Poverty” (19 November 2005).

  38 Department of Labor Commissioner's Statement on the Employment Situation News Release: unemployment rose by 1.8 million in the last four months of 2008.

  39 Tomoko A. Hosaka, “Japan's exports tumble on global spending freeze,” The Associated Press, as reported by MSNBC (25 March 2009).

  40 Sharon LaFraniere, “20 million migrant workers in China can't find jobs,” The International Herald Tribune (2 February 2009).

  41 “World economy may lose 51 million jobs,” International Labour Organization (ILO), as reported by United Nations Radio (28 January 2009).

  42 Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan addressing UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) annual session (3 July 2006).

  43 Paul Craig Roberts, “Forget Iran, Americans Should be Hysterical About This: Nuking the Economy,” Counterpunch (11-12 February 2006). Paul Craig Roberts presents his argument as follows: “The U.S. economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. U.S. manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17 percent of the manufacturing work force. The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized “new economy” never appeared. The information sector lost 17 percent of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25 percent. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.”

  44 Floyd Norris, “Off The Charts,” New York Times (8 August 2009). For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.

  45 The U.S. Labor Department reported in February 2008 that average hourly earnings increased 3.7 percent in 2007. As prices increased even more during that time, the real earnings in terms of purchasing power actually decreased 0.8 percent. Average earnings were $596, or $30,992 per year. (Note: This is the total earnings of all private sector, non-farm, non-supervisory employees, full and part-time, divided by total number of hours worked.) Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Real Earnings Report.

  46 Employees Put In More Hours, CNN.com (31 August 2001).

  47 Barbara Killinger, Workaholics: The Respectable Addict (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1991), p. 7.

  48 Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  49 James Surowiecki, “The Financial Page: Lifers,” The New Yorker (16 January 2006), p. 29: “The percentage of companies that offer health benefits has dropped thirteen percent over the past five years, and even employees that are covered now generally pay more of their own costs. With pensions the shift has been fundamental: defined-benefit plans, in which companies guarantee a set payout to employees, have been gradually replaced with defined-contributions plans like 401(k)s. With a defined-benefit plan, the company assumes the risk of investing assets, absorbing the impact of market downturns, but with a 401(k) it is entirely up to the employee to prosper or plummet…Meanwhile, the risk of exposure of anybody unfortunate enough to lose a job has soared. People who are unemployed stay unemployed, on average, about fifty percent longer than they did so in the seventies, and only about half as many receive unemployment insurance as did in 1947. Furthermore the explosion of health-care costs means that the consequences of forfeiting company health insurance are graver than ever…So, economists estimate that income volatility is about twice what it was in the early seventies.”

  50 United Nations Population Division, “World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision Population Database.”

  51 William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

  52 Wassily Leontieff as quoted in Jeremy Rifkin, “After Work,” Utne Reader (May-June 1995), p. 54.

  53 These numbers of monetary and banking crises are extracted from Gerard Caprio, Jr. and Daniela Klingelbiel, “Bank Insolvencies: Cross Country Experience,” Policy Research Working Papers, no.1620 (Washington D.C.: World Bank, Policy and Research Department, 1996). Since then, an additional series of crises should be added, including the Asian crisis in the late 1990s, and more recently, the Russian and the Argentinian crises. See also: Jeffrey Frankel and Andrew Rose, “Currency Crashes in Emerging Markets: an Empirical Treatment,” Journal of International Economics 4 (1996), p. 351-66; Graciela Kaminsk and Carmen Reinhart, “The Twin Crisis: the Causes of Banking and Balance of Payment Problems,” American Economic Review 89, no. 3 (1999), p. 473-500; Carl-Johan Lindgren, Gillian Garcia, and Matthew Saal, Bank Soundness and Macro-economic Policy (Washington D.C.: IMF, 1996).

  54 Joseph Stiglitz, “How to Reform the Global Financial System,” Harvard Relations Council International Review 25, no. 1 (Spring 2003), p. 54-9.

  55 Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity in 2010 – Final results (December 2010).

  56 This number originates from the survey performed every three years by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS)—the “central bank of the central banks” located in Basel, Switzerland—during a normal day of trading. In addition to these “traditional” foreign exchange transactions, the BIS counted in April 2004 “a daily volume of $2.4 trillion in monetary derivatives in foreign exchange and interest rate related products, including outright forwards and foreign exchange swaps…Gross market values more than doubled, from $3.0 trillion to $6.4 trillion, in the three years to end-June 2004.” Bank of International Settlements (BIS), Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Market Activity 2004—Final Results (Basel, Switzerland, 17 March 2005), p. 1.

  57 These statistics are derived from the total daily foreign exchange transactions as reported every three years by the BIS, and compared to Global Annual Trade divided by the number of days.

  58 “Russia blames U.S. for Global Financial Crisis,” Reuters (7 June 2008).
  620080607?sp=true>

  59 Catherine Clifford, “Household net worth sinks $
11.2 trillion,” CNNMoney (12 March 2009).

  60 Tami Luhby, “Americans $1.7 trillion poorer,” CNNMoney (5 June 2008).

  CHAPTER FOUR - A Money Primer

  61 Geoffrey K. Ingham, Concepts Of Money: Interdisciplinary Perspectives From Economics, Sociology. p. xi.

  62 The Forum on Magic, held in Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton University (May 30, 2008).

  63 William Greider, The Secrets of the Temple (New York: Touchstone Books, 1987), p. 240.

 

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