This essay is part of the book Public Finance for the Future We Want, you can find the entire collection of essays here.

Do you wish to see regenerative, equitable and democratic economies, built with collective power? We believe it is not only necessary but also very possible.

Today’s economic system, fuelled by an extractivist logic and prone to crises, has reignited and enflamed old monsters of racism, misogyny and other forms of fear and hate. Economic alternatives are needed now more than ever. This book is about financial alternatives, drawn from real-world examples. It highlights the kinds of models that could become the new normal, building the basis for a democratically organized and life-sustaining future.

Before the 2008 global financial crisis, the mantra was ‘there is no alter- native’ to the extractive economic model that has fostered excessive inequality and ecological destruction. Post-crisis, big banks were rescued and the blame misdirected to public spending. This justified evermore harsh austerity measures, reinforcing the story that the public sector must rely on private finance to solve these ‘collaterals’.

More than 10 years later, we know that private finance has not only failed to address these problems, it has intensified them. Civil society needs to unite behind systemic solutions before another financial bubble bursts.

Three decades ago, in 1989, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the US Treasury agreed on 10 policy prescriptions on how countries should respond to an economic crisis. The so-called Washington Consensus required poorer countries to accept cuts in social spending, the privatization of public services and the opening of their markets to inter- national competition in exchange for financial assistance. The application of such austerity measures throughout the world resulted in increased debt, social and economic instability and growing poverty levels.¹ After 2008, European countries such as Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal faced a similar treatment. Most politicians and policymakers argued on reducing public spending and investing the remaining funds on facilitating corporate, often foreign, capital.

More recently, the assumption that private finance is the only way to realize desirable outcomes has dominated discussions on how to implement the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set forth by the United Nations. ‘Blended’ finance, for example, is presented as the silver bullet for financing the SDGs investment gap of US$2.5 trillion annually by using public funds, such as official development aid, to mobilize private investments. Research by the Overseas Development Institute points out that, between 2012 and 2016, the blended finance strategy mobilized no more than US$20 billion annually. The vast majority of this finance concentrated in middle-income countries and only US$728 million (3.6 per cent) reached the low-income countries that need it most.² Moreover, these discussions frequently ignore how private finance facilitates the extraction of wealth from the public sector to the private sector, benefiting primarily a small, rich elite.

A 2018 study that re-examined IMF data on global tax evasion by multinational corporations calculates losses by the public sector to be roughly US$650 billion annually.³ This disproportionately hits poor and post-colonial countries as they face the highest levels of natural resource extraction by multinationals. Since public spending on essential services is key to redistributing wealth, people with lower incomes, and women in particular, end up footing the bill for corporate tax evasion.

Eurodad, the European Network on Debt and Development, found that for every US$1 that flows into a low-income country, more than twice that amount is lost in interest payments, profit-taking by foreign investors, loans to rich countries and illicit financial flows.⁴ Another study suggests that from 1995 to 2005 The City, London’s financial district, cost the UK population £4.5 trillion – if not people elsewhere. These costs are meas- ured in terms of the vast wealth that evaporated and went to the wealthiest after the 2008 financial crisis, as well as the resources, skills and investments that benefited the financial sector rather than going to society’s more productive activities.⁵

The current ‘yellow vests’ protests in France are a reminder that people can and will take to the streets against an economic system they see as rigged. In this case, protestors were spurred to action by a so-called ‘eco tax’ because their government was forcing the public at large – rather than the polluters – to pay for climate change mitigation. This happened after the government transferred €14 billion from the poor to the rich by abolishing the Solidarity Wealth Tax and lowering taxation on capital. Another €41 billion was transferred to French companies, including multinational corporations, through a tax cut and exemption programme.⁶

Not only does private finance, even for seemingly productive or progressive purposes, tend to benefit the few, it often ends up being more expensive. The UK National Audit Office calculated that when public projects – for example, the building of schools – are privately financed, it is 40 per cent more expensive than using public financing.⁷ This is, again, because of the profits that the private investors and shareholders demand; the accounting rules that hide the real costs of private finance from a public balance sheet;⁸ and the interest rates for borrowing, averaging 7-8 per cent for the private finance deals and just 3-4 per cent for governments.⁹

For decades there has been a concerted effort¹⁰ to try to convince us that the public is dependent on the private sector and that there is very little public finance left to invest in public services and infrastructure. Figures produced by the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for instance, misrepresent the value of public finance by evaluating that public banks have only US$2–5 trillion in assets. Given the many trillions needed to finance climate infrastructure alone, this amount would be a drop in the ocean. However, research undertaken by Thomas Marois at the University of London shows that there are 693 public banks worldwide with assets worth US$37.72 trillion. Public finances amount to over US$73 trillion, once you include central banks and multilaterals such as the Asian Development Bank, as well as pension and sovereign wealth funds. This equals 93 per cent of global gross domestic product.¹¹

All this public money is urgently needed to directly finance the fight for renewable energy systems in order to avoid the catastrophic consequences of runaway climate change. US$6 trillion need to be raised annually, up to a total of US$90 trillion, for climate infrastructure investments, and the above figures show that public finance institutions have the resources to drive this.

Most governments, however, limit themselves and their public finance institutions to incentivizing private companies to invest in the transition to renewable energy by supporting privatization and public-private partnerships (PPPs). Irrespective of countless tax incentives, subsidies and government guarantees, the private sector has shown little interest in financing a transition away from fossil fuels. Due to over-reliance on the private sector, investments in renewables even dropped by 7 per cent in 2017, according to the International Energy Agency.¹² This trend is likely to worsen as long as we underestimate the potential of public finance and continue to depend on private finance and market mechanisms. The unfolding climate crisis, however, cannot wait for half-measures. As the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report makes clear, ‘all pathways begin now and involve rapid and unprecedented societal transformation’.¹³

By contrast, public systems and services have greater success with public investment, leading not only to lower costs but also to better social and environmental results. In Bangladesh, for example, the publicly owned Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL) provided the capital to install more than three million solar panels in rural areas between 2003 and 2014. This brought electricity to the homes of thirteen million people.¹⁴

A 2017 study by the Transnational Institute recorded 835 reclaimed public services by over 1,600 cities around the world. The report showed that privatized corporations neither guarantee better service quality nor lower prices and increased investments.¹⁵ When municipalities end privatization and re-municipalize a public service, such as water, energy or transportation, they usually prove to be better equipped to provide good services for all than a profit-making private provider.

We can draw four conclusions from the chapters in this book. First, financial resources are there but are being extracted and wasted by a very small and very privileged minority. Second, private finance is much more expensive than public finance when it comes to public services and infrastructure. Third, despite privatization, there is still a considerable volume of public finance available, in particular in the form of public banks. Fourth, as long as public finance is mobilized for private profits rather than public benefit, a just transition towards energy democracy will fail.

So, if we know what we are up against and what is needed to fight the climate crisis, how do we envisage finance and money systems that make sure we get there?

Our vision for transforming money and finance rests on two pillars. The first is a politics of finance for the 99 per cent in which public and democratically accountable finance is used to invest in water, health care and education as well as ecologically sound industries. The second is a politics of public money in which governments do not borrow from private banks, but rather use their democratic power to spend money directly in the real economy and retrieve the surplus expenditure, also known as a ‘budget deficit’, through progressive taxation. This, in combination with building international tax justice, could effectively liberate society from the shackles of debt and financialization. We value the decades of work done by the worldwide Tax Justice Network, whose members have put tax evasion and avoidance on the political agenda and with this book, we wish to complement these efforts.

With this new vision we aim to spark hope and nurture alliances, as they provide a basis for fleshing out radical and viable money, tax and finance models that can help us build the future we want. Moreover, the following real-world examples that have withstood neoliberalism reveal that economic alternatives have always been there. Now it is up to all of us to ensure that they will take root and take over, everywhere.

Other law firms specializing in international arbitration, such as Dechert, wasted no time in identifying “impending sovereign bond disputes”.

“The protections offered by international investment law may provide creditors means of recourse against a State […] following sovereign debt defaults or restructurings – even when they are necessary or unavoidable.” Dechert law firm⁴

Although Argentina has avoided these “impending” claims for the moment, the bondholders’ threat to use them is an effective intimidation tactic and presumably influenced the government to concede and make a more favourable offer.

Kerala, a state in southwest India with over 31 million inhabitants, shows how a web of more than 11,000 cooperatives, combined with high unionization, public finance and state support, can succeed in fostering strong human development. Kerala’s state-wide Kudumbashree (meaning ‘prosperity for the family’) programme, which has been running for 20 years, is impressive with 4.3 million economically marginalized women participants. Its farming sector, in which 320,000 women earn a livelihood, is especially inspiring. Working in small neighbourhood collectives, women choose a piece of land and receive low-interest loans, farm machinery, subsidized seeds, and also training and technical support. This helps them to cultivate rice, fruits and vegetables to feed their families and to sell any surplus in the village markets.

The strong driving force behind Kerala’s social solidarity economy is the organizing power of the Left Democratic Front (LDF), a coalition of various left-wing parties – in and out of power – as well as a flourishing network of people’s movements. The LDF, which is currently in government, has recently started another ambitious project to set up a state-wide Cooperative Bank in order to overcome fiscal restraints imposed by the central government and to strengthen Kerala’s existing 980 cooperative banks and its 1,647 agricultural cooperative credit societies. Together they have deposits of more than US$1 billion.¹⁶

Procurement is another source of revenue that can build resilient local economies, especially since public procurement accounts for 15 to 20 per cent of global GDP.¹⁷ The anchor institution strategy, developed in part by the US-based Democracy Collaborative, creatively expands the potential of procurement through working with large public and non-profit anchor institutions, such as hospitals and universities, in order to maximize their social contribution through spending, employing and investing locally. This strategy captures, circulates and builds community wealth. In the US city of Cleveland, it has led to the successful Evergreen Cooperatives network.

The strategy was also picked up by the city of Preston in the UK. In 2013, local spending by seven anchor institutions in the area (including a university, two colleges and the Preston City Council) was just £38 million in the city and £292 million in the county of Lancashire, where Preston is located. By 2017, after development of the Preston Model, local spending grew to £111 million for the city and £486 million for the region. The city is now advancing the model to develop cooperatives and to create a regional, cooperative bank that would target finance for smaller businesses and people on low incomes.¹⁸

In Spain, progressive municipalities, such as Madrid, Pamplona and Zaragoza, have been supporting the ‘social and solidarity economy’ with the goal to democratize the economy. Alongside public procurement, these cities have provided cooperatives and other democratic enterprises with land, buildings, low-interest loans and other services so that the economy is making society flourish, and not the other way around.

In the space of just four years, Barcelona has boldly revived public owner- ship: by setting up a municipal dentist, energy supplier and funeral company, and preparing for a participatory water model that will be implemented as soon as they oust Agbar, a subsidiary of the French multinational, Suez. The city is also experimenting with providing hundreds of residents with a citizens’ income, part of which is paid out in social currency that can be spent in 85 local businesses.¹⁹

Community wealth needs to be built on every level. Stewart Lansley of Bristol University and Duncan McCann of the New Economics Foundation developed a proposal for transforming private wealth into public wealth through the creation of citizens’ wealth funds. These permanent, citizen- owned investment funds could be financed through higher taxes for corporations and the wealthy and by gradually transferring corporate ownership shares to these funds. Citizens’ wealth funds would socialize private capital and build popular support for social spending in favour of greater equality and future generations.²⁰

Other law firms specializing in international arbitration, such as Dechert, wasted no time in identifying “impending sovereign bond disputes”.

“The protections offered by international investment law may provide creditors means of recourse against a State […] following sovereign debt defaults or restructurings – even when they are necessary or unavoidable.” Dechert law firm⁴

Although Argentina has avoided these “impending” claims for the moment, the bondholders’ threat to use them is an effective intimidation tactic and presumably influenced the government to concede and make a more favourable offer.

Top-down government control can be problematic, as states can also act very undemocratically, if not in an outright authoritarian manner. In other words, public ownership is no guarantee of democracy. In addition to citizens’ wealth funds, there is a need for a new generation of public and deeply democratic banks. Here we can learn from Costa Rica’s Banco Popular. This bank, which is owned by 1.2 million Costa Rican workers, is possibly the world’s most democratic bank, with the Assembly of Workers as its highest governing body. It lives up to its mission of serving the social and sustainable welfare of the Costa Rican people by financing cooperatives and groups who tend to face financial exclusion, such as workers, peasants and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).²¹

Its banking decisions are further guided by principles of gender equity, accessibility and environmental responsibility. Banco Popular works together with the regional energy cooperative, COOPELESCA, one of four that successfully electrified the rural parts of the country. With a low-cost loan, COOPELESCA fully converted to LED lighting and by 2015 the cooperative had offset its carbon footprint through its own renewable energy sources and additional environmental actions. The worker-owned bank also helped COOPELESCA to buy exhausted land to preserve soil, biodiversity and water resources.²²

There is also much to learn from the German saving banks, or Sparkassen. The assets of these 400 local saving banks are nobody’s property.²³ The banks are independent from local authorities, they cannot be privatized or see their profits diverted for other purposes. Each bank’s board is key to its effectiveness, as it is made up of municipal representatives and other local stakeholders whose duty is to fulfil its binding mandate to stimulate savings, promote financial inclusion and lend to SMEs. These examples of cooperative and municipal banking practices show how such principles – such as a binding mandate, the involvement of a variety of stakeholders, providing different channels for popular participation – can facilitate democratic public banking.

In Belgium, the ‘Belfius is ours’ platform is exploring these governance arrangements in its campaign to democratize Belfius, a privatized bank formerly known as Dexia, which was nationalized with its second bailout in 2011. According to the platform’s founders, Frank Vanaerschot and Aline Fares, nationalized banks need democratization, not privatization. Thus, Belfius would only viably serve society through a society-wide discussion about the bank’s new public mandate as well as its ownership and governance structures.²⁴

Creating a whole system of public and cooperative finance bodies is a powerful way to stimulate sound economic development for communities. In response to the neoliberal microcredit lending spree, where high- interest loans pushed millions of poor people further into debt and poverty, Milford Bateman, visiting professor of economics at Pula University in Croatia, shows how community-led finance can actually achieve equitable development. Vietnam, for example, rejected the microcredit approach and set up a whole range of financial institutions that combined public and cooperative models of ownership. The Vietnam Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development encompasses a network of 2,000 autonomous branches that provide affordable, low-interest credit to small and micro-enterprises, which are ideally integrated in local supply chains. It works together with the Vietnam Bank for Social Policy and the country’s central bank. The latter, for instance, has founded People’s Credit Funds. These rural credit institutions are community-based, and in combination with the support of local government, provide infrastructure services such as irrigation, as well as support for SMEs and other rural industries. As a result, family farms have become more productive and semi-commercial, setting up their own agriculture cooperatives. In 2017 Vietnam counted more than 1,100 active People’s Credit Funds, supporting 8 million households.²⁵

Other law firms specializing in international arbitration, such as Dechert, wasted no time in identifying “impending sovereign bond disputes”.

“The protections offered by international investment law may provide creditors means of recourse against a State […] following sovereign debt defaults or restructurings – even when they are necessary or unavoidable.” Dechert law firm⁴

Although Argentina has avoided these “impending” claims for the moment, the bondholders’ threat to use them is an effective intimidation tactic and presumably influenced the government to concede and make a more favourable offer.

These concrete alternatives show that the pathways towards economies of well-being are plenty. We can use transformative state funding, banking and procurement strategies to build strong human development and community wealth from the ground up. Yet, under a global, debt-driven financial system, we need to ask where the money comes from. Most new money is issued by commercial banks in the form of private and often high- interest loans, perpetuating the cycle of reckless economic growth. This type of money can be better understood as finance, as it is always based on creating debt and indebting people and entire populations. Even the IMF and the Bank of England now acknowledge that this is how new money is created.²⁶ That most of our money is based on debt is not a given: it is a political situation that people and policy-makers can change.

In the neoliberal era, as central banks in many rich countries became apparently independent of government, their primary duty was to guarantee price stability and limit inflation by setting interest rates and producing cash (notes and coins). However, governments’ continued power to issue debt-free money was shown by the €2.6 trillion²⁷ that the European Central Bank created and the US$4.5 trillion²⁸ that the Federal Reserve issued after the 2008 financial crisis, a process also known as ‘quantitative easing’. Most of the new money went to rescuing the financial system, including the big banks. The underlying approach was tied to trickle-down economics, believing that buying corporate and government bonds would in turn push up share prices resulting in short-term spending and long-term investing in which everyone would prosper. This obviously never happened, as shares are predominantly owned by the wealthy who know how to make more quick money through the financial sector than through more productive sectors.²⁹ Hence private finance and financial markets have been relying, more than ever, on governments and public money to regain temporary stability, while being largely left unregulated to maximize profits through speculative financial vehicles. This approach, according to various political analysts such as Walden Bello, will almost certainly provoke another financial crisis.³⁰

Governments still have the power to spend money rather than lending it, but the way they have used it has led to more and not less concentration of wealth. The 2008 global financial crisis showed that banks were saved through public bailouts and the financial losses were socialized through austerity measures on the backs of ordinary people. Given that the public is ultimately liable, this illustrates that even credit or debt-driven money issued by commercial banks should be considered a public good and therefore should be in public hands and democratically controlled.

It will take a ‘politics of public money’, as opposed to a politics of privatized finance, to stop the growth juggernaut. This can be done only by reasserting the powers to create new money in order to fundamentally democratize our money systems. This public money should be spent (rather than lent) to address the many great challenges of our time rather than diverted and lost in the financial markets.

With amassed counter-power, we can reclaim the state and create a new monetary model. To give an example of what such a model could look like, Mary Mellor, emeritus professor at Northumbria University, argues³¹ that a new model could allow people to democratically and collectively decide the amount of public money that should be created. Any publicly created money that turns out to be superfluous would be retrieved through taxes in order to keep inflation in check. While the trillions created by central banks after the 2008 crisis through speculation dangerously pushed up real estate prices, the fear of hyperinflation – when the prices of goods and services rise more than 50 per cent a month – seems largely unsubstantiated.³² With so many jobs, goods and services needed to restore the ecosystem, and to keep inflation in check, the new money should not be speculated with but put to societal use.³³

In order to restore ecosystems and put an end to extractivism, we need to confront the power of big business, in particular the fossil fuel oligarchy. Carla Skandier of the Next System Project argues that the United States, whose energy industry is responsible for a large share of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, could use its sovereign monetary power to buy out fossil fuel companies. A public buyout would enable society to shift control away from private, profit-driven shareholders and towards democratically decommissioning fossil fuel operations. With popular pressure, these entities could be transformed into climate-friendly public companies that prioritize the needs of displaced fossil fuel workers and communities, as well as other disenfranchised groups.³⁴

While these proposals may sound too radical to many politicians, creating new public money in the people’s interest is gaining significant momentum as it could effectively finance the Green New Deal. This plan, most recently put forward by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US, seeks to rapidly decarbonize the economy while also tackling social and economic inequalities. Public support for massive public investment, powered by publicly created money and democratically organized banks is growing, as these might be the only big guns with which we can actually fight climate change to foster collective well-being.

Building radically just money, tax and finance systems is vital to democratize our economies. If these real world examples spur us towards collective action, then, societies ensuring the well-being of the many would be within reach.

Other law firms specializing in international arbitration, such as Dechert, wasted no time in identifying “impending sovereign bond disputes”.

“The protections offered by international investment law may provide creditors means of recourse against a State […] following sovereign debt defaults or restructurings – even when they are necessary or unavoidable.” Dechert law firm⁴

Although Argentina has avoided these “impending” claims for the moment, the bondholders’ threat to use them is an effective intimidation tactic and presumably influenced the government to concede and make a more favourable offer.