Dear Supporter of the Swiss Sovereign Money Initiative,
In this newsletter:
When is the referendum on the Swiss Sovereign Money Initiative going to take place?
We're going on tour: can you help us?
How Lord Adair Turner became a supporter
Swiss National Bank has updated it's information on how money is created
A Japanese video on the Initiative
When is the referendum on the Swiss Sovereign Money Initiative going to take place?
In short: probably at the end of 2017 or 2018.
After an initiative has collected the requisite number of signatures, it has to be discussed first by the Federal Council and then by both houses of parliament before coming to a referendum.
The Swiss Sovereign Money Initiative handed in over 110,000 valid signatures in December 2015, and was discussed by the Federal Council in February 2016. It is now waiting for discussions in parliament before proceeding. The referendum is likely to take about 10 months after these discussions (so long as the parliament does not put forward an alternative suggestion to go on the ballot paper; in which case the process is longer).
We're going on tour: can you help us?
The Swiss Sovereign Money Initiative aims to make the electronic money on our bank accounts just as secure as the coins and bank notes in our wallets: "Genuine real money which is legal tender for all!". Only our independent and democratically legitimate Swiss National Bank will be able to create our money. Banks won't be able to create money themselves any more, which will solve the "too big to fail" problem and prevent financial crises. In about a year, Swiss citizens will vote on this in a binding national referendum - however, a large majority of the voters still don't know about the problems with our money system and how they can be solved.
We are working on changing this: we have just finished the preparations for our next campaign in Switzerland. In 2017 we will make the Swiss Sovereign Money Initiative known to as many voters as possible. Our plan is to draw attention to the initiative with a huge 6m high pink piggybank. We'll take this together with an information stand to around 30 towns and cities across Switzerland.
We need your help to proceed with this project: We've set up a crowdfunder to fund the campaign "Vollgeld on Tour". Please contribute what you can to help us get the message out!
If you think any of your friends or family would like to contribute, please forward them the link too!
How Lord Adair Turner became a supporter
CEP, the Council on Economic Policies (in Zurich), had organised a conference together with the IMF, to which they had invited Lord Turner. He had been the chairman of the Financial Services Authority in the UK at the time of the financial crisis, and he has gone on to write a book "Between Debt and the Devil". Through our good contacts at Positive Money, we could arrange to meet up.
We found out that in many respects Lord Turner has a similar view of the problems in the financial system as we do. In particular, he also sees the global build up of debt due to banks creating too much credit being a major cause of instability in financial markets. Although his solution would not be to completely forbid the banks from creating money, he acknowledges the importance of our approach to the critical debate of how to reform our damaged financial system. Click here to see Lord Turner's statement supporting us (right at the bottom, in English).
Photo: Lord Turner deep in discussion with Maurizio Degiacomi and Dr Reinhold Harringer from MoMo
Swiss National Bank has updated it's information on how money is created
For a long time the Swiss National Bank had the discredited "money multiplier" model of how money is created on it's website, despite us writing to ask for this to be changed. We are very happy to see that they now correctly explain how money comes into existence.
Today, the majority of Swiss francs (almost 90%) exist in the form of book money, a large proportion of which is created by the banks when they grant loans to companies and households.
A Japanese video on the initiative
See our colleague Dr Kaoru Yamaguchi being interviewed about a public money (or sovereign money) system in Japan here.
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