Public Credit

= as advocated by Brown: a non-debt money supply created as a public service, operated by and for the benefit of the people

Citations

1.

"My main focus is the need for monetary reform, which can achieve these important goals, among others –

– shift the money power from the creation of a national “debt supply” through parasitic bank loans – a power now held chiefly by Wall Street — to a non-debt money supply created as a public service, operated by and for the benefit of the people.

– provide public benefits including the elimination of the national debt and its interest payment of ~$400 billion/year.

– make the government the employer of last resort, creating full employment and falling prices due to wise investment of this labor (infrastructure, education, etc.).

– create credit at cost as a funding mechanism for public services/goods, with state-level credit creation an important option.

– provide total benefits of at least a trillion dollars a year that we can quickly calculate, and probably more." (http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north/)

2.

"How are you going to wrest Congress from the grip of Wall Street? Here’s my plan: (1) break up the “too big to fail” banks by freezing foreclosures – ForeclosureGate – something that is happening right now; and (2) eliminate the “too big to fail” mystique by setting up an alternative banking system, one run by the people for the people, involving a partnership of publicly-owned banks and local community banks." (http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north/)

Examples

Cases:

1. Commonwealth of Australia Bank
2. Guernsey's Monetary Experiment

Discussion

Ellen Brown:

"I now turn to less controversial examples of countries that pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps simply by drawing on the credit power of the nation. My favorite one right at the moment is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, but another was featured on NPR just this week. The clip, called “How Fake Money Saved Brazil,” describes how Brazil transformed a collapsed economy and money supply into the nation’s present state of vibrant health, just by issuing a new currency.

On Hitler’s remarkable popular following, I was simply reporting. He DID have a remarkable following in the early thirties, and they were not marching in lockstep for no reason. It was because he had turned an utterly destitute economy around; and he did it basically by putting people back to work, paid for with a new currency backed by nothing but the credit of the government and the people. Your argument that this necessarily leads to fascism is belied by history. It did not lead to fascism when employed in Australia in the first half of the 20th century, or in New Zealand or Canada during that period, or in Guernsey for the past 200 years, or in the American colonies, or in this recent case of Brazil." (http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/response-to-gary-north/)