We can end the threats to our environment, and aid dramatically in its restoration. We can help provide meaningful work for all, with opportunities that enhance and replenish the world around us. We can effectively address fundamental urban and rural concerns and the many diverse and often divergent needs of developing and developed nations alike. We can create a better world where life and all living systems flourish. This is not and idealistic dream, but is rather a pragmatic attainment, achievable within our very own lifetime.

So write Bernard Lietaer and Stephen Belgin, authors of the much anticipated book New Money for a New World. Mr. Lietaer is a principal architect of the euro and author of the acclaimed international best seller The future of Money, which has been translated into sixteen languages. Mr. Belgin is the founder and president of Qiterra Press and author of the upcoming City of Light Chronicles.

New Money for a New World examines a previously unexamined culprit for the many issues we face today—the monopoly of our centuries old monetary system. This book also provides many ways and means that are now readily available to stop the current juggernaut towards global self destruction. Many of the solutions offered within this book are more than theory. Communities from around the world have successfully addressed a myriad of issues without the need to raise taxes, redistribute wealth, or depend upon enlightened self interest from corporate entities. Rather the improvements were realized simply and effectively by rethinking money. With such a shift everything is possible.

Watch “New Money for a New World” video clips on Youtube and get an insight on the book!

Order the book here!

Download video: MP4 format

Access the archive for videos from 2011 debt conference.

Businesses have tended to leave the question of how the monetary system works to the government, central banks, and the banking system. Yet in doing so they miss the opportunity to solve key monetary and financial problems that cause real heartburn in times of economic downturn—leading to layoffs, bankruptcies, and cascading economic crises.

Small and medium-sized businesses provide between 65 and 95 percent of private jobs worldwide. Their main challenge is access to working capital, which is crucial for job maintenance and creation. When credit lines get prohibitively expensive or are pulled back, as is the case today, the jobs evaporate.

A financial innovation — the Commercial Credit Circuit (C3) — provides critical working capital for small- and medium-sized businesses and already operates in several countries. It represents a substantial improvement on commercial barter by making its business-to-business (B2B) currency convertible into official national currency.

This article also discusses how inventory receipts and storage costs for commodities and services could form the basis of a new international planning and trading currency, called the Terra. Multinational companies that produce or use commodities and international services could establish the value of the Terra by creating a standardized basket of the most important commodities and services in global trade (e.g., oil, wheat, copper, carbon credits, or container shipping services). Among the benefits of such a system would be that it could make it profitable for multinational businesses to think long-term, and also would contribute to stabilizing the world’s business cycle.

Article published in the Solutions Journal, Volume 2, Issue 5, Sept-Oct 2011.

French and Spanish translations of this summary can be found next:

Ignore the financial elements for a moment, if you will, and instead examine the politics, the human relations, the power plays and the general disarray involved here. None of it is looking good. The EU is facing a major test and it is failing it miserably.

The union’s leaders appear to be rolling up in Brussels for top-level meetings every second week. Summit after summit is called where we are promised a major breakthrough.

In the immediate aftermath there is major spin about how decisions of great significance have been taken.

But the markets, with their usual brutal swiftness, recognise this for the pile of crock that it is, and act accordingly.

It’s usually the market pressures that have forced the summit to take place in the first place, and since these are never satisfied the next emergency summit is never far away.

You don’t have to be a market analyst to realise what is happening here: too much is going on, with far too many players and too many egos, and too many competing national interests. The markets are often accused of being irrational and impossible to satisfy. They are all that and more.

But in the case of how Brussels has been handling matters, they are on the ball in their assessments.

We have the biggest financial crisis ever, and no one is in charge.

The EU is led by politicians who, whether originally supporters of the European project or not, find their backs right up against the wall and are responding by mostly playing to their domestic agenda.

It’s an understandable reaction, but even they must see that it is not working and won’t work when there is a union of countries involved.

This shouldn’t be all that surprising given the circumstances, and the nature of the collective that is the EU. After all, the United States of America is a proper political and financial union but even their politicians ended up staring down the barrel of a gun when it came to the budget deal negotiated earlier this month.

But this week a new level of farce was reached with the EU’s latest “response” — the meeting of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.

In essence, the pair of them took the startling decision to remove themselves from the beach in August (actually Merkel was hiking in northern Italy). This fact alone — European political leaders abandoning their summer holidays — was intended to impress and show seriousness.

What happened in the markets since that meeting shows that they, and we, might have been better off if they had remained working on their tans.

Their proposals for a closer fiscal union, and stronger rules governing spending and borrowing, make sense. After all, we have the second largest currency in the world but we have nobody really in charge of it, or speaking in one voice concerning it.

If the euro is to survive, there will have to be major changes. No one could argue with that. But the two big players “going off on one” themselves, as it were, was no help to the immediate situation that all euro countries are facing.

Try explaining the need to give more power to Brussels to a public whose scepticism regarding the EU project has reached new lows. The cart and the horse must move together here, and for that to happen we need real political leadership.

What, for example, is the average Irish punter meant to think of the French and Germans reintroducing the whole corporation tax idea. It’s less than a month since our triumphant Taoiseach Enda Kenny declared our conflict with the French concerning the issue was over.

“It’s over, c’est fini,” said Enda on the same night that we got the interest rate cut on our bailout loans. Now we hear those two countries are getting together on it.

This is exactly the sort of move guaranteed to erode EU credibility even further. The big two are calling for a closer union, involving proposals, if extended, that would no doubt necessitate at least one referendum to be held in Ireland.

Declan Ganley et al must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect.

This is all the more depressing at a time when we are trying to get our own act together and looking like we are having a measure of success with that.

The EU has played a very large part in rescuing us with their loans.

But being a member of that union at present is like being attached to a runaway train driven by people who don’t know what they are doing or where they even hope to end up.

We have no choice at the moment but to watch and wait, and continue our policy of appearing to be the best in a class of supposedly reformed financial delinquents. We are too small a country to do otherwise.

In September 2009 a friend returned from a conference in Amsterdam quoting one of the speakers, Bernard Lietaer, a man who knows a huge amount about money systems.

Almost two years ago he spoke to his audience of how the global economy was then in the eye of the storm — the calmest part.

Companies failed on the way in, he said, countries would fail on the way out. Wasn’t he spot on.

Perhaps the most to hope for now is that the crisis gets worse, and quickly, and gets so bad that a proper Europe-wide solution has to be found.

- Alison O’Connor

Irish Independent, Saturday August 20 2011.

Link to original page: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/hard-decisions-needed-to-stop-this-runaway-train-2853321.html

In this episode of the Evolutionary Provocateur, Dawna Jones talks to Bernard Lietaer, author of “The Future of Money” and the forthcoming “New Currencies for a New World”, about the root causes of financial uncertainty and what practical steps businesses can take to insure against it.

So just how can small and medium size business reclaim control over financial instability? At their heart, economic downturns and financial instability are symptoms of a financial and monetary system that is unsustainable. Yet nature shows us how to create a structurally stable monetary system and the same principles can help business survive the current turmoil.

In this special half hour interview, we’ll also how local innovations in currency serve to stabilize cash flow, local and regional economies.

Apart from his books, Bernard Lietaer has been active in the domain of money systems for a period of 25 years in an unusual variety of functions including a Central Banker, a fund manager, a university professor, and a consultant to governments, corporations, and community organizations.

The original post can be found here.

• What are the questions you would most want to explore with fellow movers and shakers in the complementary currency movement?

• What recent developments in the field do you find most exciting?

• What do you see as key challenges, obstacles or blind spots which hinder the movement’s success?

• Where do you see untapped resources and unmet needs within the field of complementary currencies? And do you have any suggestions about how to bridge them?

• Besides financial support, what would help the acceleration of the monetary shifts that are needed?

• What could bring about a tipping point in the shift from a monopoly of bank debt money toward a monetary ecology? And is the idea of a “tipping point” the best way of thinking about that change?

• People in the sustainability movement seem to be divided between those who feel we need to organize ourselves more efficiently (the way the right has done in the united states), and those who suggest we need to trust that our diversity is organizing us (or rather leading us to self-organize) in more resilient ways. Where do you stand on this question?

• A lot of valuable community-building initiatives in this movement (including the publication of this magazine) are done by dedicated people, as a labor of love, but would often highly benefit from actual financial support. if you were given $10,000 to $50,000 to invest in strengthening the currency movement, how would you invest these funds?

If you would like to read my answers to these questions, please read the online interview on the Community Currency website.   I welcome your comments, and your own answers.