Prof. Dr. Margrit Kennedy
FINANCIAL STABILITY: A CASE FOR COMPLEMENTARY CURRENCIES
Prepared for the China-Europa Forum,
Tasks and Responsibilities of Institutions of the Financial Sector
Paris and Brussels 4th – 7th of October 2007
Reasons for my look at Monetary Sustainability
In the late seventies, environmentalists – among which I count myself - were among the first to question, why economic reasoning demanded exponential growth returns that the planet could never sustain. We discovered
that there was severe lack of understanding of the most basic facts about money amongst laymen as well as professional economists. Remarkably little research by economists had been devoted to the questions of
money creation and functioning. Up to this day, it remains almost taboo to discuss it, both, for economists and governments, as if the global monetary system was a fundamental given. However, nothing could be further from
the truth.
In this paper, I will summarize my learning process, which started in 1982, when
I first asked the questions:
Why the ecological renewal measures for Berlin we were planning would not be considered “economical”? As most people wanted to move towards a sustainable life style in the city, I felt that there had to be something
wrong with the economic system, if it was the cause for preventing us from implementing them. Looking into this issue somewhat deeper, I found that there is a basic antinomy between ecology and economy due to a well-hidden problem in our money system.
Link to the .pdf of margrit's paper here: [http://www.margritkennedy.de/pdf/PRE_finStab.pdf ]
