Over the next generation or two, there will be increasingly visible turf wars between money-suppliers with four very different motivations. It’s not really a fair fight, but it isn’t as one-sided as it used to be.
The spoils
The general term for the benefit associated with the issuance of a currency is seigniorage. Historically, the term has been associated with the profit made by a government from issuing currency, especially the difference between the face value of coins and their production costs. At the risk of outraging pedants we can use the term more broadly to include a wide range of benefits accruing to the issuer.
The spoils may be in the form of direct financial benefit (like the interest charged on credit-money created ex-nihilo). Or they may be indirect, in the form of influence that can in due course be traded or cashed-in (for example preferentially allocating credit to favoured partners).
There is, however, a further dimension. Money congeals as wealth. The location of wealth signals the ‘revealed preferences’ of the underlying money-system. Sure, there’s luck, inheritance and sometimes energy, enterprise and hard work. But mainly there’s the money system.
The motivations
a) OneWorld. The cherished belief of a certain section of the international elites that governance is best left to those who know best (i.e. them), and that societal and economic diversity is somewhat of a nuisance, entailing the never-ending energy-sapping suppression of a series of hare-brained ‘alternatives’. If this seems like a conspiracy-too-far for you, feel free to skip this section but remember that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you aren’t being persecuted.
This direction of travel can be portrayed as a natural extension of monetary scope – if money is ideally a universal lubricant of exchange, then the more universal the better. Focal points for monitoring progress of this ideation are: Bilderberg, the future of the euro, and (most importantly) the evolution of the SDR (Special Drawing Rights) [1,2], the IMF’s ‘international reserve asset‘.
b) National Sovereignty. The nation state is the traditional home of the fiat currency, and indeed gives those currencies their primary raison d’etre – the compulsory requirement to pay your taxes in them. Unfortunately national governments have had a well-documented history of abusing their money-issuance privilege – usually via the simple expedient of issuing tons of it before elections to create a feel-good effect; occasionally in more subtle ways.
The current arrangement of outsourcing money-as-credit creation to the banks is at the subtle end of the spectrum (see The Bank-State Bargain [3]). It obviates the need for governments to have to bother much with real national strategies (typically characterised as ‘picking winners’ rather than ‘sustaining the planet for future generations’). They can concentrate on tinkering.
It’s not quite as attractive as printing money and putting it straight into your own account, but the revolving doors arrrangement ensures that political apprenticeships can often be traded for corporate gravy. Put it into your mates’ accounts and wait for payback. The arrangement is underpinned by a sense of inmpotence as national governments race to the bottom (regulation, tax) in response to corporate threats of absenting themselves. TINA.
But this gradual diminution of sovereign influence does beg the question – can’t corporations do the money thing themselves and cut out the sovereign middle man.
c) Private Money. As is often said, anyone can create money – the problem is getting it accepted as payment. Private entities cannot coerce quite like a government, but they increasingly have huge market power that can be brought to bear if they think they can profit from operating a currency. They can use this power to construct unique value propositions. And are likely to do so.
The potential for the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google to operate their own currencies has been given a boost by the cryptocurrency phenomenon. All are already actively looking at payment systems and it seems likely that the next generation competition for commercial banks will come primarily from out of sector. The crypto-angle has opened up the possibility of currencies that cannot easily be closed down by the state, as many of the successful alternative currrencies of the 1930s eventually were. Of course private for profit currencies are unlikely to make use of the fully distributed consensus model of Bitcoin, being more interested in permissioned blockchains with the gatekeepers being – yes Google, Facebook, Apple or Amazon. But the possibilities of the blockchain are encouraging disruptive thinking.
One starting point for initiatives in this area is Hayek’s writing on the denationalisation of money [4]. Hayek generally thought that competition was the answer to everything, and he saw money as no exception. He thought monetary policy to be ‘neither desirable nor possible’, and identified government as the major source of economic instability. And while his writing predates our current over-financialised economy, he certainly anticipated the ‘parasitic’ secondary activities that could attach themselves to a monetary monopoly and saw competing currencies as a solution to that.
So while Hayek’s for-profit currencies generally come from a very different political place than value-based Intentional Currencies [5] and today’s complementary currencies, they share the core belief that ‘A money deliberately controlled in supply by an agency whose self-interest forced it to satisfy the wishes of the users might be best.’
d) Peer-controlled money. It is difficult to title this section. The vision is similar to Hayek’s but the ‘wishes of the users’ are determined in a co-operative way and the money is controlled not by a for-profit ‘agency’ but by the users themselves through various forms of co-operative institutions and governance mechanisms (including platform co-ops). I have previously expressed dissatisfaction with the adjectives ‘alternative’, ‘complementary’ and ‘community’; and ‘intentional’ can include a for-profit motive if objectives are explicitly set out, as can ‘value-based’. It can be argued that this form of money is the purest because it is directly controlled by its users; by the people who give the currency value by accepting it in exchange.
The Battleground
We can indulge the late Mr Hayek a bit further by exploring the competitive landscape, both between and within currency models . If we plot on a matrix the reaction of an *established* money-type to an *emerging* (or re-emerging) money-type we can surface a wide range of conflictual issues, including the regulation of private currencies (b/c),acceptable units of account for national taxation (c/b), national debt slavery as political influence (a/b) and the use of currencies as weapons in financial wars (b/b). Interesting stuff but far too much for a short article.
What follows therefore is a summary of two key battleground issues affecting peer-controlled money, (which is a category of special interest to Feasta).
The Ultimate Potential of Shared Value (c/d)
The core idea behind Intentional Currencies [5] is that the value-set shared by the relevant user community should be made explicit and will act as a cohesive force as a currency and its governance institutions develop side by side. However experience with intentional communities in general leads us to be a little cautious not to overstate the power of this idea. All too often communities that on the face of it have strong shared values can fracture and fragment because of personality clashes and power trips. Against this background the ‘honest profit’ metric has its attractions, (as has hierarchical decision-making). Profit is a hard verifiable metric, reassuringly value-free. From this perspective old money provides a service for us – it enables economic interaction with people we dont want to break bread with. It absolves us from social interactions.
Thus if this group of money-systems is to scale and replicate sufficiently to become a central progressive economic and societal force, the evolution of thinking around shared value is a critical success factor. Somehow it has to translate integral fellow-feeling into pragmatic mechanisms for exchange and do so authoritatively but in a co-operative fashion.
Selectivity vs Universality (b/d)
A related issue is that the restricted scope of a value-led currency – the potential preferencing of certain transactions – prejudices the variety of the portfolio of goods and services that are available. The concepts of the Preferenced Domain [6] and the Deprecated Domain [7] are attempts to flesh out this line of thinking. It is possible there will need to be an Intermediate Domain where we are relatively neutral about some goods and services and want to find ways to include them to enrich the offering, but may not want to extend full community benefit to their providers.
Conclusions
Activists in the Peer-Controlled currency space will generally welcome an increasing diversity in the developing monetary ecosystem. Thus the exchange of ideas about how value-led currencies can develop should in itself be a key factor in their progress.
There is certainly a window of opportunity. Decision makers in the higher reaches of international financial institutions will be more concerned with the power relationship with national currencies, so peer-controlled money will be somewhat off radar for while. An ‘offgrid money’ mindset may be helpful. But the same window is open for private for-profit moneys, and multinationals are already fluent in international finance.
One factor working to close the window is the increasing appreciation of the significance of digital/ crypto currency which is already sensitising established international institutions to potentially disruptive developments. Whether more democratic user-controlled currencies can establish a secure foothold before they are re-challenged by a new breed of national/ international digital moneys remains to be seen. No doubt many of the ICOs [8] coming to market now will turn out to be Ponzi schemes, but some are already seeking to differentiate themselves via value-statements (as opposed to get-rich-quick statements) and there may well be one or two that show us the shape of the peer-controlled currencies of the future.
References
[1]: IMF Factsheet: Special Drawing Rights (SDR)
http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/sdr.htm
[2]: One World, One Bank, One Currency : Jim Rickards on the SDR
https://dailyreckoning.com/one-world-one-bank-one-currency/
[3]: The Bank-State Bargain : Graham Barnes. How commercial banks facilitate deniability, debt-peonage-management and financial warmongering in return for massive anti-capitalist subsidies.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-05/bank-state-bargain-breaking-basic-rules-capitalism
[4]: Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined. An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies. F.A Hayek published by IEA in 1990 and reissued by The Mises Institute 2009
[5] Intentional Currencies : Graham Barnes
http://www.resilience.org/tag/intentionalcurrencies/
& Designing an Intentional Currency : Graham Barnes
https://www.feasta.org/2016/07/13/designing-an-intentional-currency/
[6] Designer Currencies and the Preferenced Domain : Graham Barnes
https://www.feasta.org/2013/11/19/designer-currencies-and-the-preferenced-domain/
[7] The Deprecated Domain: the pros and cons of designed exclusion : Graham Barnes
https://www.feasta.org/2014/07/10/the-deprecated-domain-the-pros-and-cons-of-designed-exclusion/
[8] Initial Coin Offerings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering
Graham Barnes is a Director of Feasta and co-organiser of the Feasta Currency Group. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and worked at a senior level in IT and online marketing in a previous life. His past projects have included the design and delivery of currencies to be sponsored by a local authority; by a social entrepreneur to complement and enhance a well established sustainability methodology; and by a ‘local-aware’ restaurant chain. His focus is on the systemic dysfunction of mainstream money and finance, the inequity it accelerates and promising developments for its democratisation and detox #fairgreenmoney
