Money, Finance and Banking

Unlike the neoclassicals, green economists were expressing concern about the instability and unsustainability of the global financial system long before the crash of 2008. The reasons for this concern are explored on the Money page. This page is about work I've been involved with the try to redesign the money system.

I began by working on the practical implications of Richard Douthwaite's idea for an international trading currency backed by carbon. He called it the EBCU (pdf, 116 K), standing for environment-backed currency unit. This was published in 2009 as , (doc, 225 K) one of a series of papers in special issue of the journal Ecopolitics that linked the social and ecological crises.

I've worked on some ideas in this direction with Mary Mellor. The paper we co-wrote for the conference of the Association of Heterodox Economists in 2010 was called supplanting the Holy Trinity (pdf, 152 K) We are still working on it for publication, but the ideas are interesting.

If you are interested in the issue of money you may like to visit the pages on banking and on local currencies.