What is the issue?
Among economists, politicians, central bankers, the finance sector, businesses, academia, think tanks, and civil society organisations:
- There is little understanding of how the current monetary system works.
- There is little understanding of the problems that this monetary system causes.
- Few people have considered proposals for how to change the current system.
Positive Money was set up in the aftermath of the financial crisis to raise a public debate around what we perceived to be a public question: “Should banks be allowed to create and allocate the money that the rest of our economy uses?”
What will the project try to achieve?
The 3-year programme will work towards four long-term outcomes:
- A shift in attitudes and perceptions of policy makers and central bank regulators, i.e. increased attention is given to the problems with the current money system, most urgently, the contradiction of using rising personal debt as a ‘solution’ to a crisis caused by excessive indebtedness.
- Many more civil society organisations understand how the monetary system acts as a barrier to them achieving their goals, and are engaged in ways to change monetary policy.
- Many more economists and opinion formers see the need to challenge and transform the current monetary system.
- A public movement significantly raises the profile of the alternatives to the current money system, through all the channels available; including media, civil society organisations and Positive Money’s grassroots network.
Who might be interested in this project?
A wide variety of groups may be interested in this project including the Transforming Finance Network and Rethinking Economics who are also grantees of Friends Provident and who we are working with. Other groups include academics, economics students, economists, policy makers, politicians, representatives from the finance sector, regulatory bodies, the Bank of England, civil society organisations working in economic justice including NGOs, unions, think tanks, and faith groups. General themes that we connect to include housing, inequality, debt, economics instability, the environment, and democracy. Therefore people working in these areas way be interested in the project. Finally a lot of our support comes from the general public, and there is likely to be many more people in the general public that we haven’t reached yet.