Tuesday 3 May 2011

The Flaw: learning economic citizenship and how the world works


The Flaw is a remarkable documentary film about the origins of the financial crisis. It is named after Alan Greenspan’s pained remark to the US Congress that “I have found a flaw in the model that defines how the world works and I was shocked.” As Chairman of the US Federal Reserve bank for 19 years, Greenspan was the most powerful man in the world. His neoliberal free-market model set the rules for the rest of us. The film shows participants at all levels of the financial crisis, from its sub-prime victims to mortgage brokers and bankers. The Flaw presents compelling detailed evidence for how that model redistributes money from poor to rich and created the financial crisis. The film does not cover every aspect of the crisis, such as the role of ratings agencies like Standard & Poor. It may be a bit too long and sometimes repetitive. But it is well worth seeing if you get a chance. The Flaw is set to screen at The Curzon Soho in London on the 7th June - time TBC, and the makers are keen for it others to show it.
This film could be a powerful stimulus for discussion and further reading about the current economic model and alternatives to it. Without informed citizens the causes of the fiancial crisis are likely to continue and create yet aother crash in future. My previous blog suggested further reading on the financial crisis. For a wider analysis, read Ha-Joon Chang’s book 23 Things They Didn’t Tell You about Capitalism for another eye-opening and entertaining look at how the economy really works. Chang shows why the so-called free market is bad for people and bad for the economy, and what to do about it. John Kay’s 2004 book, The Truth About Markets,  is another accessible expose of the flaws in the American business model.

The challenge is to make information and ideas about how the economy really works accessible to citizens and inform our participation in politics.

Tuesday 1 February 2011

Lessons from the financial crisis: Understanding Money (1)

Perhaps the biggest task in practical political education is to understand how the financial system works and help bring it under democratic control. Two opportunities to make the case for democratic reform of banking are the Independent Commission on Banking and the UK budget on 23 March: both urgently need to hear from victims of the financial crash and the millions excluded from the banking system whose services and opportunities have been shrunk as a result. Educators have a responsibility to help people understand the system and take part in making it work better.

The 2008 financial crash has already cost vast amounts in lost output, jobs, wealth, public services and personal misery. In the US “Nearly $11tn in household wealth has vanished ... The collateral damage of this crisis has been real people and real communities. The impacts of this crisis are likely to be felt for a generation" according to the official US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commissions (FCIC). Western governments pledged a mind-boggling $11 trillion of public funds to support the banks in their hour of need according to the IMF. Although only some of this was spent, everyone will pay for the bankers' failures. The Governor of the Bank of England said on 25 Jan that living standards will be cut as “the inevitable price to pay for the financial crisis and subsequent rebalancing of the world and UK economies.” Inevitably, the poorest and least powerful are hardest hit, while bankers reap staggering bonuses.
The crisis was entirely avoidable, and yet economic crises will happen again and again until society learns how to manage the financial system better.
Big cities like London suffered repeatedly from cholera and other epidemics in which thousands died until the city authorities understood the source of disease and designed systems for water and sewerage that worked for all citizens. Diseases are part of nature, but epidemics are the result of human actions and therefore preventable by designing healthy systems.
Make no mistake, “this crisis was the result of actions, decisions, and arguments by those in the financial sector. The system that failed so miserably didn’t just happen. It was created. ... Those who played a role in creating the system and in managing it ... must be held accountable.” (Joseph Stglitz, in Freefall, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy,  Penguin 2010) See Stiglitz speak on Fora TV.  In Fool’s Gold (Abacus, 2010), Financial Times journalists Gillian Tett tells the dramatic story of “how an entire financial system went wrong, as a result of flawed incentives within banks and investment funds, as well as the ratings agencies; warped regulatory structures; and a lack of oversight.”
Oversight and regulation are public duties which dramatically failed the public. Citizens cannot assume that politicians, officials or regulators can repair the system while bankers invest millions in lobbying to protect their interests. Western politicians are hypnotised by the “chunky tax tax revenues” which banks extract from the public (£61bn in 2008-09) without questioning how the money was obtained.
The central problem is not technical but ethical. Gillian Tett concludes that “the financial world’s lack of interest in wider social matters cuts to the very heart of what has gone wrong.” (p298) Without an ethical compass or social conscience, financial regulation alone cannot work. Regulations put in place after the 1929 financial crash and great depression were bypassed and stripped away to make 2008 possible. The world is awash with ‘dark money’, shadow markets, tax havens and the spoils of corruption, contraband and counterfeiting. Some of the world’s largest industries (eg drugs) flourish despite being utterly illegal and hounded across the world by governments with massive enforcement budgets.
Democratic rules and oversight are necessary, but we must start by inculcating moral principles and practices in every banker, financial institution and regulator. At very least, everyone who works in finance should swear a Hippocratic oath, an oath with the moral force of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the enforcement powers of the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary Fund and Bank of International Settlements combined.
Finance has an essential and useful role in the economy, but if the system is not brought under effective democratic oversight it could be swept away, like regimes in Egypt, Tunisia or Eastern Europe.
To hold these powerful institutions to account, we need to understand how the system works. Over the coming weeks I will explore key questions for democratic accountability of money and suggest some reading. The challenge for educators is to distil complex material into questions and information in a form that enables more people to discuss, understand and influence public policy on finance: please let me know if you can recommend any courses, books, videos, websites or other materials. 

A short course in money: (1) where it comes from
Money is a simple but powerful tool for economic self-management. It can give people information about the relative economic value of different activities, goods and services, which makes decisions easier and can reward activities which increase value. Value in this case simply means anything that people are willing to pay for, whether it is church services, food, football, heroin or slaves. Money that is not needed right away can be pooled to pay for bigger things like cathedrals, homes, factories, schools and spaceships.
Somehow society has to decide how this powerful mechanism should be used – what can people legitimately buy (alcohol but not cannabis, servants but not slaves), what public goods people value (monuments, roads, sewers, wars), how to pay for them (subscription, fees, insurance, taxes, conscription etc), how to look after people with no money or earning power (infants, the infirm) and how much power should different groups and individuals be allowed to exercise. All societies make these decisions, whether consciously or not. In a democracy, the people should decide these things, and to a certain extent they do.
But money and the financial system seem so mysterious that most essential decisions about money have been delegated to financiers. These “masters of the universe” have probably waged the most successful campaign in human history. They organised globally to persuade elected governments to give them responsibility for the world economy and then, when they screwed up, got governments to bail them out. Tax payers, consumers, workers and public service users will pay the price of their mistakes for decades, in loss of output, opportunities, public services and wealth.
Money has magical powers. When there is enough to go round and more for experiment, risk and frivolity people can act. But when money’s tight, people go slow or even stop. People lose their jobs, companies collapse and spending is cut. Although there is work to be done and people to do it, without the magic of money resources are wasted. People who control money cast a spell over individuals, governments and entire economies, so that an individual like George Soros could turn British government policy on its head, wreck the Conservative Party’s reputation, earn over $1 billion and cost the taxpayer £3.3bn over a few day in September 1992. Then for two decades the City cast a spell on the Labour Party and government. And when the banks failed in 2008, governments pledged trillions of Euros, pounds, dollars, Yuan and other currencies to stop banks from collapsing, then cut public spending to appease the money markets. No other industry enjoys such powers or privileges as finance.


How money works its magic
To understand how money magic works, I will use the example of a babysitting circle of 100 families which uses beans as tokens. Each family gets 10 beans when they join. One bean pays for an hour of babysitting and when they run out people can get more beans by babysitting for others. The system works pretty well. Many families enjoy going out a lot, but some families do more babysitting than others and pile up more beans than they need. The babysitting circle agrees that beans can be used to pay for home improvements and other odd jobs, so people are happy to save beans. One enterprising family, the Banks, offer to pay anyone with spare beans one bean for 20 a year (5%). At the same time, the Banks offer to lend beans to anyone who wants them, at a cost of two beans a year for 20 (10%). The Banks earn a fee from the difference in rates between lending and borrowing, but everyone benefits.


Now a remarkable thing happens. Out of 1,000 beans held by 100 families, 900 are deposited with the Banks family. They lend these to other families for home improvements and babysitting, so more people have fun going out and doing up their homes. But no sooner have they lent out the beans than people give them back to the Banks for safe keeping, who lend them out again. Soon the Banks have turned 900 beans into 9,000 beans and lots more people are doing up each other’s homes, babysitting and going out. The baby economy is booming.
This is known as fractional reserve banking and is one way money is put into circulation. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “the process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved a deeper mystery seems only decent”. (Money: Whence it came, where it went, Houghton Muffin 1975)
This multiplication of money through credit is the first trick in the money-makers magic box. It works well so long as people repay their beans on time, so the Banks family have to be good judges of characters as well as friends of their neighbours. They need to know who is reliable and will replay. They keep good relationships, inquiring after borrowers’ well-being and the progress of their projects. When someone falls ill or has an accident and can’t repay on time, they encourage people to support each other so that no one fails to replay.
The BBC’s Business Editor Robert Peston describes how these “great conjurors” work in short film about banks.
Banks make billions from their ability to create money through credit, a right that traditionally belonged to the crown and is known as ‘seignorage’, which in a democracy should belong to the people. If as a democracy we decide that banks are best placed to create and manage money on our behalf, then at very least the power create money should be open and accountable to Parliament.


Read more
For other mainstream books on the financial crisis, see
Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance Penguin 2010
Anatole Kaletsky, Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy, Bloomsbury 2010

Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, Princeton UP, 2010
and the roundup in Moneyweek


For some good alternative analysis of the financial system, see:
David Boyle, The Little Money Book, Alistair Sawday, 2003, an excellent overview which warned  that "Derivatives need serious regulation before it’s too late."
David Boyle (Ed.) The Money Changers: currency reform from Aristotle to e-cash, Earthscan, 2002
Bernard Lietaer, a former top executive in the Belgian central bank, The Future of Money, Century 2001
Francis Hutchinson, Mary Mellor and Wendy Olsen on the history and thinking of social credit, The Politics of Money: Towards Sustainability and Economic Democracy, Pluto 2002
Michael Rowbotham, The Grip of Death (1998) and Goodbye America (2000), Jon Carpenter publishing
James Robertson & Joseph Huber, Creating New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age, New Economics Foundation, 2000


Practical Politics is a personal view from Titus Alexander and does not represent the views of Novas Scarman, Democracy Matters or any of its members.

Sunday 16 January 2011

Charities and the AV referendum

I hadn’t given much thought to the Alternative Vote referendum until a member of Democracy Matters got a threatening letter  from William Norton of the No to AV campaign. The letter alleged that Democracy Matters supported the Yes campaign and that as an unincorporated association this implied endorsement by all its members and that charities are not permitted to take sides in the referendum and it should therefore provide the No to AV campaign with a “denial of support for the Yes Campaign, for general circulation” and also ask Democracy Matters to disaffiliate from the Yes Campaign. Similar letters had been sent to 42 charities, along with a four page letter to the Charities Commission saying that if this matter is not resolved he will “consider making formal complaints about the charitable status of these organisations.”

My first thought was that the No Campaign must be running scared if it has to frighten organisations from supporting the campaign. Then perhaps this was a cunning wheeze by a young Mr Norton, fresh from law school, to get a clutch of letters “denying support for the Yes Campaign” to promote the No Campaign. Or perhaps he simply was a retired solicitor with time on his hands and a genuine desire to ensure “that the referendum is fought on a fair and legitimate basis with a level playing field for both sides” as stated in his letter.

Mr Norton must have spent a lot of time on these letters, because he researched the aims of each charity as well as Democracy Matters. But at no point did he ask me what our position was. He had jumped to conclusions without double checking his facts. I would have told him that we did not take sides on the referendum question.

The more serious problem is that Mr Norton is wasting the time and money of many charities, which have been forced to discuss the issue, consult lawyers or the Charity Commission, and correspond with me and others to clarify the matter.

Even more serious is the way in which this kind of legalistic threat attempts to close down active involvement in campaigns about the nature of our democracy. The Charity Commission’s guidance on political activities by charities  is reasonably clear and deserves careful reading. In plain English (as opposed to legalise, in which meaning is mangled), this allows a charity to take a position for or against a referendum question where 1), after careful consideration, it believes a yes or no vote furthers their objectives as a charity (but not where the aims of the charity are narrower than the potential impact of the referendum), and 2), and there is not a significant party political dimension to the referendum. Although the Liberal Democrat position on AV could make this seem a party-political issue, the major parties are divided and the democratic process should not be the property of parties but of citizens. Parliament sets the rules for all organisations including charities, so they should be concerned about how Parliament is constituted. Citizens should also be able to exercise their voice through their organisations, many of which are charities. More citizens are involved in charities than in political parties and for many charities reflect their concerns better than any political party. Charities should always give careful thought before taking a position on any issue, because it may compromise their reputation, their ability to deal even-handedly with politicians or breach their charitable objectives. But the risk of losing support as a result of taking a stand is a more important and democratic sanction on charities’ actions than a narrow interpretation of the law and threats of court action. Democracy Matters may have to take up this point of principle with the Charity Commission.

Most serious of all, however, is Mr Norton’s allegation that the views of unincorporated associations are binding on all its members. This would make it almost impossible to form informal alliances of any kind. But in plain English, the Charity Commission’s guidance on coalitions states that “It is open to charities to form coalitions, alliances and consortia for the purpose of lobbying MPs and government for changes to the law. It is not realistic to expect that everything that a campaigning alliance does, particularly if it has a large membership, will fit with every one of its members’ charitable purposes and there are, therefore, some important considerations.”

Mr Nortion is neither a naive young lawyer nor a pedant with a passion for legalese, but a seasoned political activist who led the highly successful NO campaign against the referendum for an elected regional assembly in the North East in 2004. His five part series on How to Win a Referendum offers reflections on practical politics which are relevant to any side in the campaign and makes useful distinctions between party political campaigning and the kind of broad strategy needed to win a referendum.

In this instance, however, Mr Norton’s 42 letters has at least raised awareness of the referendum among these charities and more widely through an artcile in Third Sector magazine, althiough his heavy-handed tactics may be counter-productive and encourage sympathy for the Yes to AV campaign.

That is, if there is a referendum at all this May. The Government’s decision to lump the AV vote with the cut in parliamentary seats has also confused the issue, which perhaps it was designed to do.

Personally I am not wholly convinced by AV. It is not proportional and it can exaggerate representation of one party when there are strong swings. But then AV forces candidates to seek majority support and not just a plurality. So there are merits on both sides and I intend to look at the arguments in more detail later.

This blog contains personal reflections and does not represent the views of Unlock Democracy or any of its members.