money moves the world and banking moves money welcome to the public bank solution conversations about an emerging new american institution a publicly owned partnership banks able to rebalance the scales of monetary control in service of the public interest and our common wealth brought to you by the public banking institute and its national association of partners and  hello and welcome i'm won't be creek chair emeritus of public bank an institute and your host on the public bank solution welcoming you back to a discussion about our money and our city and some of the systems that we use to manage it and some of the aspects of our money that you made out of thought about before or knew about our conversation about public banks has ranged pretty broadly in the last in our programs here because part of it's technical part of it's political and part of its financial but and part of it is relational meaning that money is very much the vestige of a relationship that we have between each other today we're going to be delving into that a little bit deeper with an author professor an international consultant to businesses and governments who has done a couple of books one called the economics of happiness and economy of well being he is one of those rare economists who combines the spheres of money and economy into the notion of human community and into the aspects of human human community how does money how to do it how do the econom a professor a living in edmonton alberta it's of some note that the in alberta the alberta or treasury branches is really the home for the world for the north america's largest publicly owned bank a fifty billion dollars affair which is about seven times larger than the public bank in north dakota which is the only one we have in the united states marc has been centrally involved with that organization and ed raised a subject that seemed to be seemed to be a dissonant when he talked about creating an economy of worthy of our affection those two sentiments those are those two elements one the very hard facts of economy the other the sentimental aspect of how we feel seem to be disconnected somehow and you have gone further in that field and written books about happiness and well being tell us about your work so my work at it and both accounting and in omics i'm also orser by profession so the notion that well actually one properly defined the old english word means the conditions of well being that's what the word actually met with thirteenth century and whether adams understood that maybe with scottish that explains why eight nort the original english definition of the word well in his wealth of nations my whole argument is that from a macro it and enterprise level accounting if we if we mean the conditions of well being that it gives new meaning to how we look at balance sheets we look at assets i would look at liability and if the game now is actually an optimized well being rather than simply more g d p more profit then it changes the whole nature in which you look at everything whole economy the way i look at enterprise we look at by net so if wellbeing and be measured which we believe it can be and a qualitative and quantitative way and we have an accounting fracture that gives better information we hope to say that well where money talks money moves the world as we say at the center of this program you're suggesting that that should be the denominator as it were for the you really the reason for our economy's base yeah i money is not created in parallel with assets it's created as a debt instrument which expects more and more interest on a growing amount of debt my argument is if money was tied directly to assets of an  quality so that's basically m's i'm not i'm not blowing ending up i'm just going back to the original ideas five hundred years ago so are we short changing ourselves by only took counting our shuttles instead of  incorporating the true wealth of of our assets not only that we were violating basic outing by ignoring liabilities like else liabilities or environmental liabilities which right now don't even get treated even as unfunded liabilities on the nation or state balance sheet that we have a fundamental flaws in public sector accounting which goes against even enterprise level accounting so we need better asset accounting better accounting of  people has there been in your view a historical shift or when did the historical shift go from the from the more common well sort of an assessment into this preoccupation w rated basically a private bank you could say blame the medi cheese too i think never actually went away they're probably sitting right inside the vatican right now so you have these private rothchild i'm not blaming i'm not saying it's a conspiracy that all  smart bankers who who you know bailed out you know and barons and kings and they began to get addicted to easy money private traded money and bankers in england and even the queen don't remember the tally stick except that it grated the great fire in the parlor in a thirty four that they had to burn them all so again it's like well what are the lessons from history that we can probably adopt a day right now well certainly one of the lessons is the power retains its control through thick and thin and then we have a empire of monitor of financial financial lists who control the issuance and the exchange of money and the outcomes in the products are so that's not their concern so much as long as they're controlling it and get in benefiting from it monetarily how yeah yeah so i i've studied you know i study the story of the raw child and all these these banking dynasties and you say we look at that in a way they're just it's just good business we're just we know this business we've been we've monopolized this we're not good why would we ever want anybody to know how easy it is to create this money at and certainly we're not as henry ford said if people simply knew our banks great money there'd be a revolution tomorrow well there's no revolution there's no conversation in your mid term elections about it at all and so it's but it's not like i'm angry at the guys that run the show because i'm like they're just they're just smart they've kept us in ignorance and as as you and alan and others have said it's time for us to mature and grow up we have blotching we have all this technology today where we could free ourselves from the burden of unnecessary interest charges restore the prosy of money to founding fathers and mothers and visions i think and we have the operating model to do it and there's no excuse not to do it why would we go to sleep one more night and pretend that somehow that there's justice coming when there's actually no conversation a vote will things do would it matter if there was less inequality if the monitor if the monetary policy i was shared more equally so that people were not struggling so much for survival of fifty percent of our people were not on the edge of poverty here in the  us would that change should the quality of the happiness level of our society were something else involved but here is a simple image if i told america i was running for president i don't know if i'd live a day but i would promise that going to give you a two and a half day work week how do i do it i simply erase the debts that are held and we're all just getting it all complicit because we have pension plans and right investments if you have a million dollars in the bank you're actually benefiting off the backs of we're down the has a mortgage right so it's not going to be easy but i think i think we can read and do the counting to say all this is an injustice right now the fact that nothing is made up out of nothing how would we get away from a system you're suggesting that that scarcity doesn't have to be the model that abundance is actually a possibility yes so so i'm a forest as a background and so nature becomes the operating model i think i had talks about this too right so if you start with the premises ben franklin said he started with what is it that gives rise to our well being watershed land to generate was two by fours weeks and oranges and whatever it is now we're talking about a balance sheet approach to launch or all in which the money that's created is bedded in suspicion supply for what sustain a good life sufficient amount of goods and services no taxes necessary by the way in any of this model what about better health better you generate a living wage for every household in harrisburg easy to figure out what the living wage in harrisburg what one of the assets land where they capable of producing how much do we and we produce for our own stuff and then getting into a point in our own history where the pursuit of monetary profit is dominating our technical limit or technical development fossil fuels for example you're living in alberta there's a tremendous amount of fossil fuel the dependency there but we're actually destroying these assets you're talking about in the process are we at a point where in the if we are expecting a financial collapse a monetary contraction built around amount of money model how will banks and how could perhaps public banks address a new day in which we realize that we have these enormous restricted unlimited sort of assets and we would but for our monetization and our mission we can realize this how do you see a public accounts don't treatment of natural assets i would be the first step to get better decisions coming out of the public yeah there are very very interesting no so your book economics of happiness give us a couple of words about that we're running a little bit low on time but like to frame that little bit force about how people can what people will see in that which are well the economics of happiness was basically about eleven years ago as my whole premise that we measure the conditions wellbeing as witness at earlier the word happiness means the wellbeing of your soul or spirit so i'm working on now generation of analytics for all thing individuals and organizations measure the qualitative wellbeing of individuals inside a company is or in relationship with us to murders so this is a very practical working again which become the basis i hope of a new financial order where you know our well being the well being of your soul is the highest aspiration and will be worthy of our affection who will actually have a properly functioning affection economy where you or your well being storing your soul index will actually go up a it's a it's a very deep subject for a lot of people to put their heads around it's a whole new realm and it is so fundamental to our survival and to our well being and to our happiness mark thanks very much for joining us today on the local book so seller and just to point out or to illustrate one of the his aspects about the wealth vailable wealth i just wanted to mention stat that every year the g d p of the united states generates about two hundred thirty six thousand dollars for every family of four and of course we have many people who are living on barely a tenth of that in the economy so that upset or that inequity is something that public banks are in a position to address in some very specific ways and we'll talk about some of those ways in a subsequent program is coming up thank you very much for joining us today here on the public bank solution and i just want to say if you want to find out more about public