Glimpses of a new ecology of money

With reform of the financial system moving at a glacial pace, what better place to be for some late winter cheer than the International Conference on Community and Complementary Currencies (ICCC) in Lyon, France, held over a 3 day period last week. 

Here was living proof of communities, NGOs, small businesses and even some governments getting on with the job of reforming our dysfunctional monetary system.  Admittedly the scale remains small but, as some of the academic papers attested, the implications of these money experiments are profound for our understanding of economics and finance.  And with the emergence of a variety of new forms of payment, in particular driven by mobile phone and the internet, the potential for rapid up-scaling of these social currencies is growing. 

With 250 attendees from over 67 countries and 64 academic and practitioner presentations, the tri-lingual (Spanish, French, English) conference was one of the largest of its kind ever to be held.   The number and diversity of global CC systems is astounding and it was particularly sobering to discover how much is happening outside the English-speaking world.  My particular highlights included:

• the Banco Palmas in Brazil, which distributes micro-credit loans in poor communities in a social currency which is limited to local businesses, a living embodiment of nef’s local multiplier concept.  There are currently over 50 community banks in Brazil operating the system which has received financial and legal support from the left-leaning Brazilian Federal Government.
• The Talente Tauschring in Austria, which combine LETS, voucher schemes and timebanking models and are increasingly being accepted as tax by local authorities
• The Uruguayan C3 (Commercial credit Circuit), a new means of payment for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), is guaranteed by the Uruguayan Central Bank and will be accepted as tax by the government and the nationalized utilities.
• The RES in Belgium, a commercial mutual credit scheme for SMEs that had a turnover of 35 million Euros last year with 5000 businesses and is now expanding to France.

Academic highlights included papers demonstrating the counter-cyclical properties of commercial barter schemes, a project in the emergence of a powerful ‘solidarity economy’ in Latin America driving forward monetary innovations and attempts to classify the many different currency systems worldwide. Most of the 58 academic papers can be downloaded from the conference website.

With many of the CC systems being presented now being integrated in to cooperative banking and micro-finance infrastructures or gaining the support of local and regional governments, it appears that complementary currencies have the potential to move beyond small grassroots experiments. 

Here at nef in the Business and Finance team we are part of this movement, driving forward the development of an ICT mobile phone enabled payments platform for the Transition complementary currencies: Transition Currency 2.0  which I presented at the conference. Watch this space for more.