Tag Archives: Ikon
No to Vollgeld, Yes to Ikon!
There was a basic flaw in the Vollgeld “sovereign money” proposal rejected by the Swiss in a referendum last Sunday. An arrangement that gives the state or its agencies exclusive power to create money, oversee bank accounts and direct lending to the economy is hostile to capitalism. It cannot produce the assurance needed to allow the…
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1. The case for a global monetary standard
Introduction To be in the trap means two things: The international monetary anti-system: Governments are in the trap when they act in the belief that if they get monetary, regulatory and fiscal policy “just right” for their own economies, they can achieve their aims – full employment, growth, stability – without paying attention to the…
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The bare bones of a new policy regime
As argued in the post “Regime Uncertainty Undermines Confidence”, only a new policy regime, not changes to individual policy areas (such as regulatory policy) will reduce the existential angst that is crippling business and over-shadowing the recovery. New money….. It should establish a global currency standard. The standard should be sufficiently attractive that countries…
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The Ikon – towards a new currency unit
The global monetary unit woud be defined by international treaty. The value of the unit is defined by a basket of diversified global equity shares, represented by an index (see W Engels, 1981). An international currency board would be tasked to hold the value of the monetary unit constant against the basket (index). I…
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The reforms in a nutshell
We need two, inter-related, big reforms – first to the official international monetary system and secondly to banking/financial markets. The international monetary system The first class of reforms needs to start at the beginning – with new reflection on the true nature of money. This is the most fundamental, and yet unavoidable, question raised by…
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Man is born free and everywhere he is in debt
Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Graeber is fascinated by the past. Indeed, Graeber might have started his book (“Debt: the first 5,000 years”) with an echo of the famous opening of The Social Contract: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”. But perhaps he thought that would be presumptuous. Graeber starts off…
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