well i'm john are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture during the past four decades every single year there are a bit around ten countries experiencing some kind of financial or monetary crisis turning to alternative currencies help relieve some of the burden that nations are facing today and improve the global economic outlook alaska where our lives are and jackie done in tonight's conversations with great minds also in her first senate banking committee meeting yesterday elizabeth warren was kicking butt and taking names as she hammered home the point that wall street banks need to be held accountable for their role in devastating our economy so why haven't the big banks been put to trial and punished for their role in america's financial collapse that and more into night's big picture rubble and nobody should have to wait in line for

hours to vote because of the republican voter fraud which that's become a reality in america the talking heads of fox news that that's why i explain in tonight's guilty take. for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by bernard leo tara and jackie done for art is an international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems and a research fellow at the center for sustainable resources at the university of california berkeley and jackie is an award winning journalist from ireland founder and c.e.o. of. the new resource and emerging global leader in helping entrepreneurs develop technologies and initiatives that restore the earth's equilibrium bernard reac your authors of the book remake the money new currencies turn scarcity into prosperity and. rethinking money and they join me now in the studio welcome to you both thank

you snow and great book rethinking it's fact. it's somebody i know put put a globe on the bag. and i set this up by pointing out that over the last forty years we've seen one hundred forty five major monetary or fiscal crises around the world . what's that what's at the core of this stuff with our well he was lee one looks at each crisis on its own and what's different about. what we're doing is but look what's common. and actually the commonality is that we are officially trying to maintain the mop we hope of a culture of one type of currency created privately by the banking system and that system is not stable is systemic unstable we've been able to prove scientifically in five peer reviewed articles in major journals bouts of course we've been

thrilled so much in our branding that we need to do everything with a single currency thinking of another currency has to be crazy and what type of currency to yaz enough currency issued by central bank well actually from a central bank if you should privately by the banking system i mean under the supervision of a central bank there is money brought into being by debt but it's sickly. and jacki we just to start out with kind of the origin of money you know the story we're one story we're told about the origin of money is that it was it was devised as a medium of exchange to reduce the what economists call the shoe leather cost of barter. and that a tie various times it's had intrinsic value or not had a transit value basically been accounting system another model of money is that it came out of society needing to figure out a way to extract some little piece out of all the activity that was going on in society to maintain. what what is the source of money and why why should it matter

what what what does what does money mean really. it's interesting question you bring up tom because money really lives in the space of an agreement it's new greenman to something as a media big strange so like in a war situation cigarettes may become a medium exchange women's my hands may become an immediate exchange did here they did absolutely so it is whatever somebody agrees to accept as a medium of exchange and why we have a monoculture has been our pointed out of money is that governments accepted exclusively in the exchange in the payment of taxes so that gives the bank the money that you alluded to such prominence and that's that's the arguably society preceded money and society needed to figure out a way to extract some small piece from all the people all the all the portions of

society that were that were engaging in commerce or any kind of practical joke but we must remember that the current system we have was quite brilliant because when it was introduced and actually you know it's a mental construct it's something that streamed up doesn't it as your mom probably said you know money does not grow in trees it's not a thing of nature it is a human construct it is an agreement and it was during the industrial revolution that the common money that we used today as a dollar or a euro that all the same type of money was the first time that it was possible to make money from money before then you either had to get as a spoiler war you had twin heritage you had to marry into it it was now possible to make money out of money and this fuel to the industrial revolution which was something fantastic making money out of money are you talking about just capitalism on a wander around capitalism as we know it today. and it was very efficient and its efficiency

as you were pointing out you know it made the possibility of exchanges much more efficient but the unfortunate thing and this is what bernard has been alluded to at the opening of our conversation is that it has become brittle the system has so become so in totally brittle because it's come hyper efficient among other other aspects to its design so we're saying you know we need another the other types of money to give us a monetary tool kit. and bernard to what extent does. i mean there's lots of currencies around the world but they're all the same type but they're all the same to they're all feel our currency is the same going to governments or not with a pine forest and you say well they're all different bombings however we know that when there is a match they can go over the same time that's what happened in two thousand said to that make for example while at a crisis well they always looked and they all are making their own mechanisms that

are motivate the providing the same motivation at the same time so you know it's kind of like self-feeding right and that's why it's a lack of diversity of media of exchange doesn't give the flexibility that either businesses or societies or comp corporations or communities would prefer. to deal with their issues and we have a one size fits all and that size fits for certain things but there are lots of things and then happen in our society because they're not encouraged to example no environmental issues. social issues elderly care learning these things are not very good water there are in our society can. we say that the most important thing about in our society for selves are children but the people who take care of educating our children are paid fractional. so an investment

bankers were right you know well that what's important that's a reflection of skewed values is not more than a monetary system interestingly no it's not actually it's where we're actually saying in the in our book together is that the money system actually informs the behavior and this is something we don't think about the analogy is like we are like fish swimming in water we live and we die in this stuff so it's very very difficult for a fish to actually define what water is same with this money system that we're in we have no way of really understanding the actual impact it has because we have no other real experience of another type of money well there are and you mention you know chocolates or you know the things during during world war two. when i lived in montclair vermont we had the green mountain dollars where i could you could buy them there but they were a part basically you know ten dollars for ten dollars but you knew i knew that if i

used a cream dollar in a local store that that local store would have to redeem that with another local vendor that was it was going to keep their currency in the local circulation and that's social and about me talking exactly socially desirable thing so so we can't have an economy based on dialogues. but so tell me about some of the alternatives among the of turnit if this is what you just mentioned but there are at least fifty different types of currency design school outside of the conventional. national money so-called quote unquote because there are national they're privately issued but the. longest system learning currencies. we have here currencies in japan five hundred of them just what does that i mean how does that ok. people system is now sort of the ninety five forty or forty. people

because it literally translates from japanese as a caring relationship take it. ok and if i do something for one of my neighbors. one point eight million people in japan that need daily care it's a fast aging society the fastest in the world and they have know a lot of people that need daily care of the medical type of thing that are going shopping hell or you know. little things that make life possible at home. if i do that i get a credit and if we keep a currency one hour is one for keeping and i can use that currency when i need to myself i'm sick to have someone pick up my children the reliable. we can have i can send in two credits to my mother who live in another part of the country and someone is thinking of her there so we create a whole support system were actually doesn't cost any yet as you pointed out a way i mean japan's culture historically is what's referred to as an obligation

culture it's a it's a society sort of potlatch societies isn't this a kind of a codification of that because in the old days before colonel perry busted in people would actually there would be obligation books where you kept track of what gifts people had given you and your ads are still there. which is the key if the object object to change which is the whole thing a very so but that's that's not you you know it's not one of arnie's i said ok you may be right that it has been one of the reason that it has sprouted there first now the first city in europe that is doing this formally is some column in switzerland that in some column they don't have this thing mentioning ok so and it's working ok so so so jackie even you mentioned earlier the. society you know that that money as a society is a cultural. agreement and obviously what bernard was just talking about is. and yet

also that governments bring money into being so that they can tax how do they tax if you're operating within the national currency. interesting question that the most ubiquitous complementary currency here in the united states is time dollars and it's like what an artist just described in japan it's backed by an hour of service and you can do a bunch of different things and time dollar time banking has actually received three notations from the i.r.s. three rulings from the i.r.s. that they are actually tack to exempt the fish officially tax exempt because of the social nature of what they're doing so so you could. see you going to have. a barter economy with. no closer to let's say dollars have drilled into that it was time and we have to take a quick break more conversations with great minds with bernard. and jackie done right after the break. let me let

me i want to know what all the let me ask you a question. here. is what we're going to debate we have i know you say. the truth is this is really just about staying there to get here in this situation we're being i didn't mean to talk about surveillance we. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out. of that thing that we americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot of what you. are you know what that is my theory self but i don't want to give us a feature the reason we are liberal chris jones. you're totally out of the. you know the corporate media distracts us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industry that's facials that garbage you call that breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that let's.

go back to conversations of the great minds with bernard leotard and jackie are artisan international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems jackie is the founder and c.e.o. of dano resource or jacki or authors of the book rethinking money on you currencies turn scarcity into prosperity both join me now in the studio welcome back as we as we went to the last break we were talking about how these alternative is the right word all the films are being compromised you think of. these complimentary currencies that can operate within the within the world of a national currency is it without at all with its. how they could arguably be used as a replacement for a barter system of some sort and they could be were actually i was. by suggestion

and you will get this very point very interesting a very simple way to explain the concept most people are very very familiar with frequent flyer miles sure this started off as a p.r. game make an order to get people to fly a certain american airlines of forty years ago what forty years later ninety six airlines have frequent flyer programs it's not just about getting a seat on the next plane to tahiti nowadays you can actually use your frequent flyer miles to do a variety of things for example a hotel night you can rent a car and some airlines actually have full brochures of goods and services you can actually buy with frequent flyer miles now take that concept and bring it back into the community where community comes together community could be a geographical community it could be a community online it could be a business community could get together and say what are underused resources and what are unmet needs and i tell you both of those are going to be very very long

and what they can do is link these unused resources and these unmet needs with the currency and that can be backed by hours it can be act by service it could be having all different types of different functionality and if you could explain in the book how you unfurled the d.n.a. of conventional money and realize how we have such a competitive society and by tweaking it and we show how that can be done in the book you can have a currency within a community that has a bunch of very very different outcomes for example designing a currency to be spent in that locale to incentivize people to shop locally we can devise currencies that are not to be saved or to be hoarded but designed purely as a means of exchange to get the economy going. and you know what similar question was back in the seventy's. i guess with the. reason i ordered the ad agency in

atlanta and we were. this was the barter clubs were becoming hot there was this business of barter clothes it was kind of a fad from the mid eighty's to the mid ninety's and our company had a newsletter factory involved itself with one and we traded out i remember we traded out advertising for furniture and we got some really nice furniture and we gave some really good advertising you know design to this company and. the i.r.s. came in and you know we got we didn't get was like an auditor so we had to present all this information to them and the guy who ran the barter club end up going to jail for tax evasion i mean they they basically said this was a scheme to avoid paying taxes which was not our intent our intent was you know we've got a bunch of people working for us you know in the ad agency doing things and sometimes we're all just flat out screaming busy and then sometimes you know we could go by and there's not that much to do and so if we could put

a little extra business in here and get some furniture for that seems great but they're arrested and take the same view of it so that is the beginning of the movie introduced a rule that you have to file a special fire a special form one you can gauge in commercial part and now it's perfectly legal and nobody's going to prison for doing it they just a question that they caught up with that new development i see and this is so that's taken care of i mean of course you can do the good things with that right and maybe the guy who was running this particular part of it was i don't know. it's an old specific case but i'm saying there has been legislation to believe it's in one thousand two that the whole suppressive became formally organized and i was reporting requirements were introduced in the works but let's turn that around tom we're looking at all these municipalities all these towns that are not being able to make their budgets they're slashing programs i mean slashing you know huge. austerity programs are coming in. coming into play if

a municipality for example were to accept heart payment of local taxes for example say like property tax whatever in the local currency of that particular region you can get people to work long hours they have for example whatever it might be and then in turn they are getting this revenue in which they can perhaps get partial payment to their employees in this currency or they can buy goods and services using this i mean we've got to start thinking out of the box we're in a new age in a new era with a whole new set of problems and sensibilities and wisdoms that we didn't have four hundred years ago when this national bank money was created we need new types of money. that the greenland hours were exposed that we created to make keep money local yes that's one model that's one model and it's one benefit one of the other models and other benefits of alternative complimentary currencies that leak out that way yes what will be we are for example is

a very interesting idea is gregory with all. this started on this if we in switzerland reality are nowhere near where the german word meets us in germany and it's also the radiation from which a crash in germany which means a circle like nomic circle this was developed by seventeen business people back in one thousand thirty four in the middle of the depression it's the only system from the thirty's that actually has survived and a quarter of all businesses in switzerland are now members and they are this is one of the most powerful ways to stabilize employment because employment equals the same is the same thing as a small or medium sized business eighty ninety percent of all private jobs are in small business and the problem of small business is cash flow well this creates a cash flow process when i sell you something i get a credit and we get a debit and we hear neither one of us has to get money. from the banking system in

order to make the change and what happens is this stabilizes the economy because it is council cyclical that does the opposite of what the official business cycle does why well if you're a normal suze guy business guy and i offer you thousands first frank sort of thousand with which is thousand swiss francs i can go to two occasions in cancun i can buy stuff in china right with three i have to buy something for sixty eight thousand business interests so i prefer the swiss francs right now that's assuming a boom period. i'm fully busy and come up and say i offer you thousand swiss francs two thousand me to put purchase something i see come back a month later you know i'm too busy on the other hand if this is in a recession and i have fifty percent of face paper past the i'm going to accept it you know that's why that's why my desire is so what happens is when there is a recession automatically the volume of the number of participants increases which is what the comp of the current account the cyclical is with the norm economy and

that is the secret for the swiss economy and why would it be that when you take a bunch of germans and a bunch of french and sprinkling of italians and put them together and suddenly that the economy is more stable than either one of the three. you know what's the secret is so so jackie how do we go about star in the you know somebody watching this and some municipalities or some area region whatever. the water the carbon or occurrences in the united states how how does you know other than reading your book of course as a story out of. it one of the great reasons why all these currencies are now bubbling up to the up to the surface because they're saying like two really major ones in one thousand nine hundred four and we now have about four thousand of the ritual ones around the world all different types of designs is there's been a confluence of cheaper computing access to the internet and social media so anybody can go. to the computer and type in complementary currency or local

currencies and they will be amazed at the amount of information there is that's all these few too busy videos and how to they'll find out all the different styles and types of currencies that they are time banking is the most ubiquitous one here in the united states there's about four hundred time banking programs here in america and i think it's growing by one to two new programs every single week and people are understanding we have the power to take control of our destiny by creating our own local community currency given the dollars are brought into being by banks creating either they're based on and our age or you are based currencies are not they're brought into being by somebody working or being available to your difficulty here. is there. is there

does that remove an inherent inflationary nature from these kinds of currencies or alter any of the currency the nature of the currency that actually does that when you have a mutual created system where we create the money like i got a credit i'm selling you something you have a credit you have a debit by doing that. the problem of inflation arises when you have more money in circulation than goods or services or in this case the currency is created at the moment of the exchange the good of the service is a billable at the moment of the creation of currency you cannot have run away you know trillions of dollars so that's sort of there is the the volume of currency always reflects the the amount of goods and services in the economy actually already exchanged so the change has happened at that moment and the net amount of currency records is europe you have to credit is the arbiter of how do you how do you keep these systems are a study. because of the qatar fifty well. the dual system tend to be more

transparent i can see your account before i can make it through it with you so we want you so policing because you know if it's one of those cheats it affects means you write in own capacity for example you know if you're treating trading on e bay you've got little stars you know and if you get a bad rap for not honoring your obligations you know your name is mud and i'm not going to trade with you even though we're doing dollars really there's a secondary currency and it's the stormers more transparent people what we're talking about complicated we're talking about complementary terms you know people may be aware of e-bay where they use dollar is that you have a reputation to maintain which is almost a complimentary currency i don't know what i'm saying it is but it's the basis of exactly exactly you have your money is as good as your word that's what keeps them solid and that's what keeps them going absolutely and the whole of the two to

counterfeit it makes perfect sense jacki thank you so much for being with us it's been a delight to spank you think you're going to see this in other conversations in the great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com. coming up earlier today on media rights land into the year old mountains region of russia injuring around a thousand people in causing a widespread structural damage is this a sign from above that we shouldn't be cutting the nasa budget agency task of keeping us safe from space debris like meteorites.