News

September 2018 Release of our petition to have the Reserve Bank issue our money along with an opinion piece.

June Press release on the swiss referendum. Despite the campaign of confusion and fear run by opponents, 25% voted for the Sovereign Money Initiative.

April The AustralianRoyal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry is coming up with some serious wrongdoing by the banks and financial institutions

May 2017 Positive Money New Zealand issued a press release seeking clarity from the Reserve Bank on how our money is created. They still refer to intermediation by the banks, which is not how our banking system works.

5th November 2016 An article in The Guardian newspaper in England argued that abolishing debt-based currency holds the secret to getting our system off its addiction to growth.

5th September 2016 KPMG released a report, commissioned by the Prime Minister of Iceland, titled "Money Issuance" The report looked at money created by the Government.

28 March 2016 Bryan Gould agreed to be our Patron. Bryan is a respected commentator on economic matters, an author, academic and Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

14 October 2015 The Finance Commission of the Dutch parliament discussed monetary reform.

22 November. The British parliament debated money creation last week, for the first time in 170 years. There was cross-party support for a proposal to set up a monetary commission

23 September. A new generation of young people, dubbed ''property orphans'' may be destined to be renters for life.

17 September. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the bank used by central banks, confirmed New Zealand houses are among the most "unaffordable" in the world compared to people's incomes.

25th April 2014 "Strip private banks of their power to create money": says the Financial Times' chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, who endorses Positive Money's proposals for reform

15th March 2014 - In a historic move The Bank of England quarterly bulletin explains how money is created. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it creates a deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money. The bank says that this differs from the story found in some economics textbooks.

16th August 2013. The retiring head of the Financial Markets Authority apologised for the mistakes made saying "You were let down".

 

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“The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn’t realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create it.”

H W White, Chairman of the Associated Banks of New Zealand, to the New Zealand Monetary Commission, 1955.

A better deal for bank customers

  • Despite the removal of deposit insurance, citizens who wished to keep their money safe and have absolutely no risk of losing their savings would have the ability to do so.
  • Post-reform, banks will have a strong commercial incentive to encourage people to save as much as possible and to look for good-quality borrowers. This is in direct contrast to the current situation, where the bank benefits most if everyone is in debt and the level of savings is not important.
  • The new system will require banks to share more of their profits with their customers. At the moment they can use funds on which they pay 0.1% interest to make risky deals where they earn 5-10% returns. They then keep the bulk of the profit for themselves, but pass on the risks to taxpayers. However, post-reform, to attract the funds for these risky deals, the banks will need to pay more interest to their customers, meaning that when a bank takes risks successfully a fair portion of the resulting profits are returned back to the bank’s customers who provided the funds in the first place.
  • The modernised system would restore the free market in banking and give power back to the consumers, rather than providing state support for failed investments, an effective privatised monopoly on the issuance of the nation's money supply, and an almost guaranteed, risk-free ‘super-normal’ (ie. excessive) profit each year.

Inflation

Inflation would be far less likely when the state takes control of issuing new money into the economy than when the money supply is effectively controlled by an army of loan- and mortgage-officers whose main consideration is not the needs of the economy, but their own potential to earn commissions.

Pensions

The looming pensions crisis could be avoided. Not only are huge holes appearing in the pension funds of major corporations, we are facing demographic change that could see the stock market enter long-term declines and wipe out the value of pensions. Under the existing system, there is simply no money to deal with this issue.

The welfare state and benefits

The demand for welfare payments and 'dole' can be reduced by creating a healthier and more stable business environment, and therefore creating more jobs and making existing jobs more secure. If major recessions are no longer inevitable (as they are under the current banking system), then businesses will be more willing to hire, without the fear of needing to make redundancies in the next few years. This should lead to an overall higher level of job creation.

International trade and currency

By making the money supply stable, creating a stable economy and an excellent environment for business, we can restore the New Zealand dollar as a stable currency.

Summary

All these benefits are there for the taking, simply by implementing this simple reform. Our current financial poverty is an illusion created by the flawed design of the banking system. The current banking system is economically and socially destructive and must be modernised.

 

 

 

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