Bretanir auglýsa fund með tillögur breytinga á Bankakerfi

Sá þessa grein á Internetinu og að samtök um "nýja fjármálastefnu" þar eru að auglýsa fund um bankamál þann 29. okt.

Ég velti því fyrir mér hvort hér séu kannski að hluta til atriði sem væru fyrir okkur íslendinga að skoða?:

A few simple changes to the banking system can stop the banks from blowing up the economy again in the future, and mean that we’ll never have to bail out another toxic bank. We can also remove banks' power to create money, and use that privilege responsibly for the benefit of society and the economy as a whole.

Here are the three changes we urgently need to make:

1. Make banks ask our permission before they gamble with our money

Banks would need to offer two types of account. Firstly, a ‘bombproof’ safe account where you can keep your money. The bank won’t lend this money, so it will be available whenever you need it and can’t ever be lost or gambled away. The other type of account is an ‘Investment Account’, where you actually ask the bank to invest the money so that you can earn some interest. You’ll have to tell them how long you want to invest the money for, and you'd accept that there would be some risk taken with your money. This means that we get the choice of keeping our money 100% safe, or placing it at risk in return for interest. This is a simple change, but the knock-on consequences mean that we would never need to bail out another toxic bank, and the banks would have less money to pump into dangerous bubbles and toxic derivatives, making it less likely that they’ll blow up the economy.

2. Banks should tell us how they'll use our money

Obviously most people don’t want to know every house or business that their money has been invested in, but we should know if the bank will be using our money to invest in something socially useful, or something socially harmful. Then, those of us who don’t want to fund, for example, the arms industry, destruction of the Canadian countryside (thank you, RBS), or who don’t want their money to be used to bet on the prices of food in the third world, driving them up and causing people to starve, can ‘opt out’ of doing so. This again would limit what banks can do with our money, so that they couldn’t take your life savings and gamble them on financial markets unless you’d actually agreed to take some of that risk by putting your money into your banks’ ‘Toxic Derivatives Savings Account’.

3. We should remove the bankers’ licence to ‘print’ money and use any newly-created money for public benefit.

Bankers simply can’t be trusted to control the amount of money in the economy - they always have the incentive (bonuses, commissions, promotion) to create as much new money by lending as possible, with the consequences that we’ve seen over the last few years.

But we can’t trust politicians either, we might all end up with £1000 cheques the day before an election, but this would come at the expense of the damage it would do to our businesses in the economy through the inflation it would cause.

Instead, we need to take this power away from them, and give it to an independent, accountable and transparent body, such as the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England. This body could then create money only as long as prices were stable. If house and food prices started rocketing like they did before the crisis, then they would have to stop creating money until prices had stabilised again. This is the opposite of what happens when the banks control the money supply, and would mean that we could have an extra £30 billion to spend on schools, roads, and hospitals, never have to bail out a bank again, and have a better economy to do business in!

Check out our detailed proposals, designed by ourselves in conjunction with The New Economics Foundation and banking expert Professor Richard Werner of Southampton University.