the last four years the state bank i think the proper name now as you'll hear is the public infrastructure bank that bill will call it the washington investment trust actually s learned about the idea in december of two thousand and eight by reading yes magazine anyway there was an article there about public banking its history in the colonies and during the civil war and  more recently with north dakota anyway so then i met with bob fosse ago in december of two thousand and nine and he had heard about the bank as well and he wanted to put it in a bill that he didn't have one and so he asked me to write one well i've never written a bill didn't quite know what to do actually i was panicked i even googled how to write a bill and got some answers then i asked cindy to help me and we decided to e mail the bank of north dakota and ask them to send us the legislation that established their bank in one thousand nine hundred and they did so and that's what we used as the template for that first bill and idea and we wrote this in the legislation was that this would be a way to finance a transfer of transformation of our farming system in our energy system so that it would be more sustainable and resilient that was the original idea so the bank as you've heard that we have modeled out first bill after was the bank of north dakota and a c only state in the union that has a public bank and it was founded in  nineteen after world war one there was a really depressed economy and the nonpartisan league came into power in north dakota at that particular time and election in one nine hundred eighteen i believe they also they swept in the power they took the governorship the legislature and were able to get enough people on the on the state supreme court also and i'm going to show we're going to show a small clip from the bank of north dakota because it really explains i think of in a very good way even though the washington investment trust now is is different from it the difference between a public bank and a private bank the bank of north dakota is different from private bank in a very simple way a private bank takes your deposits and it pays you an interest on your deposit and then it takes your money and leasure money to someone else and charges someone else more money than it's paying you and it makes a difference in the spread of a state owned bank has a different mission its mission is not to make a profit its mission is to serve the people of the state it's able to take a really long term view about what's the right thing to do for the people of the state at this moment in time right now it's a four billion dollar bank it's capitalized with the state earning it is paying interest on that money to the state treasurer and it's using that money to create different lending opportunities for north dakota family farms for farmers who wanted to versified for students who want to go to college when the bank of north dakota was being set up it had been a state for thirty years ninety five percent of the people were engaged in farming it was being in the grossest terms ripped off by the interests out of minneapolis and st paul and austria interest and it was packed the impossible to make a living at anything if you would go to borrow one hundred dollars from the bank you would come back with sixty dollars because they charge you twelve percent interest and a twenty dollar origination fee and the farmers would really mad the opponents of the state on bank did everything they could possibly do to stop it from being a stablished they took two challenges to the united states supreme court and the united states supreme court said the citizens of the state want to do this they should be able to do it drought in the one nine hundred twenty s and these farmers just had to see that dream turned sour when they couldn't pay not only the principle but the interest on the loan that they had with the bank and people would write notes to the bank on a torn sheet of paper i would send it to you but i don't have any we don't have a crop i haven't had a crop this year i didn't have a car last year they didn't have money to even feed themselves much must pay a bank called the bank tried to collect the money bank of north dakota representative would just say i  can't take money from these people they don't have any and it became very clear in the early thirty's and this is when when bill lann or was governor and bill langer created a moratorium on debt so the bank stopped doing any kind of for closure and then allow them to stay on the farm when the economy turned around in the early one nine hundred forty s the banks sold those farms back to the original farmer at the price the bank had in the the bank of america code at is doing amazingly well giving their worldwide economic crisis that we're in it's as strong as ever been and the fact that it isn't suffering any of the fallout from the financial crisis that the other banks are i think attests to really the strength of the bank and actually the banks mission and they didn't invest in risky derivatives they didn't buy any subprime home loans they didn't fit less of the way that they did business during the last twenty years the bank has returned a half a billion dollars to the states general fund what that means in the state has been able to develop programs half a billion dollars worth of programs without taxing the people of the state to do those programs it really in my mind it doesn't matter if it's socialism or capitalism what matters is what works best for the people what provides the most services at the least cost the people of north dakota love their bank it's really helped the state there have been no bank failures in north dakota here in washington state we've had i think the last count was fifteen bank failures  and you know those have been eaten up by by larger banks call banks from oregon is come in and take over and over several banks so anyway this just shows from february nine zero nine through february zero ten the percentage change in economic activity and as you know that was when the big crash happened and here's north dakota up here and they were the only state that continued to prosper during that particular downturn washington's here washington's there john and i have heard of course quite a number of arguments over the years and one of those is as well there's only one you know public bank in in the whole of united states that must mean it's you know some kind of deal that just doesn't work very well but we really think it's really that reason is because there's been a real hostility over really since that  our nation was first founded hostility toward government involvement in banking there was actually a huge fight between hamilton and jefferson and when they were establishing the first national bank of the united states and then also the other argument that we've heard is well the reason that north dakota is doing so well is because they have all and that is true right now there's an oil boom in north dakota but the center for state innovation which is a nonpartisan actually study group did an investigation of the differences between montana north dakota south dakota and wyoming all four of those states are agrarian they have small populations and they all have  oil natural gas and coal actually and in that particular study what they saw again which this diagram actually demonstrates is that north dakota taking all things kind of equal still had an economy which did not go into the red in a state government that did not go and into the red during the crash now as i've kind of mentioned the washington investment trust which is the bill that has been introduced into the our state washington state legislature is different  than the north dakota bank and john will explain a little bit more why that why that so as we go along but it will be able to loan to governmental entities like school districts  water districts cities towns counties for infrastructure projects and now it's kind of how we're starting now and we'll go into that more as as we continue  understand our state a little bit more is how we handle our money now and you know you don't think about it very much i never really thought about ok when all our taxes and fees are collected where do they go they don't go to a big vault down in olympia and where they go is into a consolidation account at bank of america and if you just heard the latest news about bank of america the united states government is suing them for brazen fraud finally so anyway what the treasurer then does the office of the state treasurer does is they have a contract with bank of america to do this to collect all the taxes and fees and then the office of the state treasurer then from that consolidation account will pay the state's bills and anything that is does not need to be used immediately any funds that came come in because you know it fluctuates how taxes come in except for a they are invested by the office of the state treasurer but they're invested in short term usually  treasury book bonds and because those are very liquid and you can get them out quite quickly there are also some other long longer term investments but it's all done in paper all of the investments are done in paper and the washington investment trust than if we have a bank that will loan to counties and cities it will be loaning to infrastructure projects right it will stay local  washington state and also benefit the people and it's real there will be real projects come out of it not just paper so the reason we're starting this is because there's a big debate in the state that the states credit cannot be loaned to private businesses so that's a constitutional question it's debatable but it's because you need two thirds in the legislature and a public vote we're not going to go that way we're going to start with a bank that will loan money to other government jurisdictions and that can include state agencies as well as cities counties water districts sewer districts again the deposit base will be the taxes and fees and the loan portfolio will be short term construction loans for these jurisdictions to build their projects there is actually a huge backlog of infrastructure projects that we need to do to start funding in the next few years now currently a local government or state agency if they want to build an infrastructure project they have to go to the private bond market and they have to pay large upfront fees large front fees and at a lower interest rate and yet would still make money for the state so that's the idea and as you can see it will circulate the money in our state the circulation flow now is how to the federal government and the wall street banks and as we know it's circulating everywhere in the world but here this just gives you a little idea of the bill that we're looking at right now it's still in draft it's still in process there's a committee working on it we hope to have it done by probably the end of this month or so but basically these items will be in the bill and the mission again would be to benefit the people benefit the citizens of washington state and to circulate tax dollars here locally within the state for economic development and for jobs and that would be its mission it would not be to make money for private stockholders and in it there will be five approximately five there's a little debate whether we should have five or three or seven but probably it will come out five statewide elected officials on the board and this is so that there's accountability to the voters the elected positions most likely it would be the governor the treasurer the attorney general perhaps secretary of state goes to those cops types of folks there's also a citizen's advisory board i think this is a citizen an advisory board of between nine and fifteen people and that's from all different areas of citizens but bankers will run the day to day process the day to day happenings within the bank we don't want this bank to be something that politicians can go to to fund their pet projects we don't want this bank to be something that the economic development folks although they might have a good plan can just come and get some it's not a lender of last resort we want you know loans that give us a return so that we can build the bank so we're starting out with bankers running the bank and these bankers will be public employees they will not you know state employees they won't you won't have a president that gets huge bonuses we've been trying to keep into the legislation that the the person like the president would not make any more money than ten ten times more than the lowest paid person i don't know if that's going to stay in but that was something that john and i really wanted in the bill we'll see if it stays in there so that is basically what the mission is the others actually john will bring this up but we want the loans to be the type of loans that the private banking system would like because then they know that they will get a payoff public entities usually pay off their loans so the question of liquidity and this is been an argument the treasurer has made and our answer basically is that this will function like a bank and  what a bank has a privilege of doing is when they loan money out they add money to their asset column that's because the money will come back with interest so it becomes part of their capital unlike you and i if we want to loan money our bank account goes down so banks have a different accounting system than most families and this will basically allow them  to have liquidity while they are also loaning out the money basically there's a relationship between the deposit side and the loan portfolio side of a bank it's mathematical it's not physical in other words there's not money being transferred back and forth so this this quote is from robert b enderson who was known for his candor he was the secretary of treasury under eisenhower and he basically let the cat out of the bag and said that when a loan is made it's not taken from someone's deposit it's actually new money loaned out and it's in effect is creating money so this shows how the system works as a whole so there's cash we'll say cash going in the first bank as a deposit and then the next day if there's a ten percent return reserve they can loan out ninety dollars of that ninety dollars and if it's loaned out to someone who has an account in that bank it'll stay in that bank but it could go into another bank and in any case comes becomes a deposit then it's added so the way this works is with ten dollars theoretically it can become a thousand dollars as it's fanned all way through the economy it never does that because not all monies in the banks it's in transfer between people and businesses but that's what can happen in the in the banking system so basically loans new loans can become deposits it's kind of like i don't know it depends on your financial situation but most people their total net worth is not dollar bills in their mattress it's in the bank and it's not all cash so the government prints the cash but the money is created by the banking system so again this bank will be loaning to government entities to build roads bridges schools but this is what i'm trying to say is that our private banking system creates  ok money is created by debt and there's a positive thing about this it allows our economy to expand but but there's a negative thing about it and that is that particularly now the big wall street banks and there's i think five or six banks control more than half deposits in the whole country they are low and hedge funds in wall street are loaning money to each other so you can see with this that and then there's on top of that they're speculating with it their own trading desks are speculating on the world market and the last thirty years there's been hundreds of opportunities because capital c around at the click of a mouse hundreds of opportunities for investments all over the world and that's what they're doing they're more interested than that than they are loaning money here or that's that's their moneymaker now and that's pulling money out of our economy and that's one of the problems we have and so that's what the state bank or the public infrastructure bank is designed to do is to take that amount of money in our state you know five six percent and circulate it in this in this state now these this is this is in essence this istomin has been around for at least four hundred years the private fractional reserve system and if you know history there's crashes about every generation sometimes more often and there were four big ones in the nineteenth century in the united states ever and and course the big one in nineteen  eight and then one nine hundred twenty nine and course that crashes all over europe in their four hundred years so this system would allows the money to grow fast also it can contract as fast and that's a credit crunch is and that's kind of where we are so it's architecture of the system now some people would like to change the architecture but we know from history that very very strong regulations which were put in place after the last depression allowed the system to function without as much trouble basically they separated speculation from ordinary banking  so we're not trying to get rid of the basic system we're just trying to take some of the money and get it circulating in this in this state and we think the private banks have abused the privilege that they've been given by the states in the federal government and that it's time to try another model the public bank so to other concerns are the safety and return so will this this idea return more money to the state or less money well right now interest rates on short term construction loans are higher than interest rates on t bills or c d s so the return would be higher the t would earn more money for the state also the local jurisdictions or state agencies that would be borrowing money from the washington vestment trust would could borrow it at a lower interest and they would on the private market and so they would save and the large upfront fees which are significant would be a savings to them and we think the return as part of the return we have to count the jobs that will be created by the infrastructure projects the new schools and and bridges as far as safety against and he said it would be run by bankers and they would be subject to annual examinations by the department of federal financial institutions and the state auditor the same system that would control the that does control the private banks another aspect of safety is that at least in the last thirty years there were no losses on state infrastructure loan programs in the united states so it is a valid question about how we're going to capitalize the bank and at last year's task force and a graph was given to the task force and what it showed is on the top there's like a liquidity portfolio that the treasurer uses and that you can see it goes in a like this over the year where funds come in they're spent right away right away then there is a core investment portfolio and it's in the in a larger band underneath and what that shows what that particular core portfolio is is that those are longer term investments they're not those short government security investments they're longer and usually there are three four five year investments that the office of the state treasurer has been able to  do and hold right he hasn't had to liquidate those sometimes it does but over the last is it ten years over the last ten years that has not gone below two point one billion dollars that particular core portfolio so what the washington investment trust taskforce is looking at is to look at at that particular core portfolio and if we could just have a small portion of that you know even like a hundred million or something then that could be leveraged like john was saying holding back a certain amount because of the power of having a bank could be leveraged you know in into loans  hundred million times nine or whatever that's helmut how much you could loan into the economy with an infrastructure there's also a small one that is money markets and c d s that a very very liquid that could be that the treasure uses on that particular diagram another possible way to capitalize on the washington investment trust and we're looking into this is the called yeah the local government investment pool and this is a an investment portfolio that has about eight billion dollars in it and municipalities cities counties small towns they often don't want to invest their own cash especially if they're smaller they give it to the office of this state treasure to invest for them and that is what is in this local government investment pool that is invested also in quite short term investments but what we're kind of asking and i've actually put out the question to the city of seattle and king county because i have a couple of contacts their county king county doesn't vest in the local investment pool government pool but only if it's getting a better return than what they can do on their own so that gives a possibility to say to king county hey why don't you do some of your investment in the washington investment trust  give us some capital yeah see i was in wells fargo i think yeah right so yes yes wells fargo yeah if they could have a place to put their money so anyway that's also being explored a way which would process possibly be able to capitalize the bank would be to sell bonds now that means that you are going out on the on the market to do that but we feel that we might be able to do that maybe you guys have noticed in your on your ballot there's a initiative or you know there's a recommendation from the legislature that we lower the debt ceiling if the washington investment trust could float their own bonds because we would have a revenue stream from the interest from the loans and therefore the washington investment trust would pay back the of the bonds rather than having the state have to keep it under its debt limit as general obligation bonds are right now and then that comes out of tax money we can probably you know use those but if we had our own revenue stream we could we could do it so that's again another possibility just something that we're looking at we're looking at and you know trying to do it would be much better if we could actually get something like an investment because then we could grow the bank faster than if we had to pay off beyond course the public banking movement is nationwide and this is just to let you know where it's all happening the public banking institute john and i are the state quarters for the public banking institute which is a national nonprofit organization they're all volunteers just like john and i are ball into that are trying to introduce this in various states and the blue are actually states that have initiated or put legislation to establish a public bank and the read or study bills that have been introduced the green as you can see this there's north dakota and this one's actually really kind of interested in oklahoma and indian nation has their own bank so essentially is their public bank for their indian nation and that's in oklahoma and then colorado has an initiative on the ballot they've gone and gotten signatures and they're putting it directly to the people they couldn't get any legislators interested so they're trying that so that is what's happening on the national scene just want to talk a little bit about the history and public banking is not new to the united states we've already mentioned north dakota but the colonies had their own banks the governments of the colonies had their own banks massachusetts virginia pennsylvania north dakota excuse me north carolina and the best one of these was actually the one that worked the best was the quaker colony of pennsylvania and they were able to because they were able to loan money in and they did it very prudently into the economy and then also spend money into the economy the government just spent money but they did it very well and didn't cause inflation the interest that the loans that they that they put out into the economy that interests paid for the paid for the government they didn't have to tax the people for about twenty twenty five years they did have a tax  it's just it actually worked the best and in fact benjamin franklin went to england to talk and kind of plead with king george that you know let the colonies how this is really you know helping our prosperity and king george said you're not supposed to be prosperous you're supposed to be you know a colony and you have to buy all your goods from us and you have to pay all your taxes and gold and of course the colonies didn't have gold it helped start the revolution when they would now no  longer allow a colonial script as as it was called and then also just recently in the past couple years the state of massachusetts was trying to have you know stablish a bank and the federal reserve of boston wrote a paper critical of it and what you have to remember is the federal reserve is not really federal it is a consortium of private banks and the governors are appointed by the federal government but the owners are actually private banks and so the federal reserve of boston wrote this critical letter and john and i are you know madly reading it when we when we got it over the internet and one of the things that they said  in it as a reading was that banking should remain in private hands unless there is a market failure and both john and i kind of went we didn't we just have a market failure right and obviously to the big banks wasn't a market failure they came out as you know quite well whereas so many of our our our citizens lost their jobs lost their homes etc and so again we're kind of emphasizing this but the larger context is to take some of our public money away from those big wall street banks and keep it locally here in washington state  so we found this interesting we actually got these slides from representing hasa gowell but two years ago he went back to north dakota to talk to the bank there and while he was there he went to their historical museum and he found this newspaper clipping from just before nine hundred nineteen and this is when the nonpartisan league was agitating the citizens of north dakota for a public bank and a public grain elevator and they also eventually build the public railroad because the banks the grain elevators and the railroads were the three into teas that were ripping these farmers off and so they pointed to seattle and said look elevators work public pork and seattle has a green old leader and this is what we want to do so they got their inspiration from us anyway you just you can recognize our elevator it still says them but we just want to also say that we do realize that the washington investment trust is not the silver bullet it's not going to take us out of the present recession but it is a beginning something and we hope that it brings a brighter future for our children and i grandchildren our purpose here tonight and i think this fits in with your common cafe common good cafe is that we want citizens to educate them themselves about this no banking is going to esoteric thing and quite frankly i don't know what goes on in the inside the banks and i don't think they want us to know anyway but we want people to become confident in in these matters and so they can talk to their friends and their legislators because we've noticed over the last three sessions a lot of legislators were listening to their constituents they were they would talk to economists or bankers to get their information about how banks should be run and how bad you know what do we need so again they weren't listening their constituents and that's sad and i bring up the lesson of history that the idea of deposit insurance was rejected by bankers economists and f d r himself when it was first floated it just didn't seem like something that the federal government would do but the people demanded it and congress passed a law the banking act of june one thousand thirty three that's the same law that's also called glass steagall that separated investment banks from commercial banks so that sometimes the people know don't think i'll understand banks unless they take special courses anyway so we want people to educate themselves and feet feel as comfortable as possible about this so they can talk about it and the main thing is that this is going to be a public bank and we're going to put our public money in the public bank for public good and it will be create thousands of jobs across our state oh yeah any questions richard well that we expect in a couple weeks to have the bill bob promised that hopefully that's the case it will be introduced in january and then they'll be some committee hearings i think it's going to go through the capital budgets committee in the house and that's zack no that's  the last several years there were hearings and we were able to get a lot of people down there we just passed the word and they wanted to go it so the rooms were for all of supporters there were only two people that spoke against it one was the state treasurer and he has a lot of and they didn't do a public vote because they knew it wasn't going to pass and they they didn't want to bear as the ones who were going to say no because there were democrats who are going to say no republicans so far have not touched this bob says that several of them are interested in kind of like the idea by the way north dakota is a republican state and they love their bank so it shouldn't be a partisan issue but in this  so it was last year representative house of yahweh got forty four co sponsors and that was the highest single number of co sponsors for any of the legislation that was in the house so i don't know if that answers your question but probably in february they'll be a couple of hearings one on the house and one in the senate and then they'll take a vote of it will go into the full house and full sen well that's that's the hurdle right it hasn't so far we don't know well we hope we're hoping public pressure and the composition of the committees will be a bit different because the elections listening to power so that's why we need to try to educate as many citizens as possible and get them active and have a talk to the legislators particularly from just their home districts whichever legislators are standing in the way of it i think most of the sierra legislators are pretty good yet jamie jamie's tough however however we where we're going to try and not have it go through his committee the committee that he's on we want to put it to the capital budget committee which is headed by hans dunshee we have a much better chance of getting it through that it's probably going to be harder in the house me in the senate but we will have a mean bob can be there to try to assure it through but if we can get it through the house that would be you know one more step in this drive there are other questions you we have we have a distribution list that i keep that has about three hundred people on it there's two sign up sheets there in the back if you want to be on that you mail list you can and as things come up will be send in you know information out information out we also have some cheat sheet speak guys question and answers that i can pass to you so that you've got some background because this is kind of a quick thing we especially when it was first introduced i know that spoke with several bankers john and i met with a banker who didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole he's a small banker usually what the small bankers do is that they go along with the big banks even though you can make a real strong argument that the big banks actually aren't you know are on the same page as they are and actually are in great competition with them now the first couple of years that the legislation was introduced the banking what is it called its association of bankers did speak against it but this last year only the treasurer did and and one other fella which i don't know where i don't know where he was from he was but the treasurer actually holds a lot of clout and we also think he was speaking for the banks the banks could remain silent right they didn't have to you know be against it but i think that's you know they'll they'll do under under you know they'll they'll do their lobbying you know in the background and you know and that's what we have to fight against until it comes out to a big fight and then you know then you might see the more i don't know exactly how to counteract that john and i are actually going to go down to oregon oregon had a big huge fight couple years ago and they were able to through the working families party hire an organizer who went around to small banks and talk with them and he's very good i mean you know how some people can just really they just know their stuff and they know how to talk with you they're really charismatic they can do it and he works for an entire year and he was able to get four community bankers to go along with that and say yes i will publicly come out in favor of this so that was after a year of work so i think that the m momentum just has to build and even with the legislators that are kind of residents you know to get out there in front there has to be you know enough momentum that's why actually when john and i started this we knew it wasn't going to be one legislative session you know it often will take you know three four five years you know for stuff to  go the treasure was asked last year if this was a turf issue and he denied it but i really think it is because right now his office invests all the money that we don't immediately spend and they're good at it but this is a different way of investing the money this is a way of ensuring that the money that is invested his working in th state there was a treasure in oregon that was starting to come around to the idea of public drinking and we were told by this organizer this and he talked about that when this treasure went to the national meeting of state treasurers he was told by all the other treasures that he shouldn't do this so they're hanging together to hear right i think the banks didn't speak against it last year because they know in popular they are would have just made it more more popular if they spoke against ruth well eventually it would because the deposit base of the bank are the fees and taxes that all go into bank of america and go are managed by the state treasurer the department of treasury or whatever the office the state treasurer in north dakota about six people very small office they don't need to i think they might might just pay the bills but the the bank of in north dakota is about one hundred sixty people so it's  would be a shift of who does the investing in this state oh for a constitutional amendment the well the reason that we have gone to the idea of an infrastructure bank that will loan only to public entities is that there is a constitutional provisions in the washington state constitution in several places actually that says that the credit of washington state will not be extended to private entities so right now it's extended in certain ways to private entities but what was decided by the taskforce year of year and a half ago was that we didn't want to fight that because you need two thirds of the legislature to vote for that constitutional amendment and then you need a just a majority vote by the people so that's like a long process we could we could we could establish the bank have that then you would be in the courts probably for years trying to trying to work it out yeah yeah well you see he would still have to go out on the bond market they would still have to entities which well right i still i believe in order to get the money he would have to go out on the bond market because  that the office of the straight treasurer does not have banking privileges the state can only at this particular time do revolving fun loans which means that you can't leverage right you can't hold back ten percent and and leverage if you have a hundred bucks you can't hold back ten dollars and leverage ninety so that's where the real power of a bank you know comes in you have a very limited capacity and what we want to do is you know make the capacity bigger and then and then hopefully like the bank of north dakota grow over time so that we can you know the more we have and the more we can invest in the state yeah yes oh  the constitutional thing we live in west seattle and we used to have as our state senator phil tell me to and went to the supreme court and he told me that he doesn't think this is unconstitutional and then we heard from lloyd haro that the main lawyer at the university of washington the most senior lawyer in washington state law thinks it is unconstitutional but he has a job as a bond lawyer so he's got a dog in the fight so a lot of people said he's not objective but over why my opinion of some of the the legal staff in olympia and the reps and the representatives and senators is that this is would be unconstitutional and some of our allies think it would be unconstitutional so we don't want to fight that there's enough backlog of infrastructure projects that they'll be plenty of places to invest this money the this state bank the state the state bank on the model of north dakota and that model is they they can loan money to private businesses but they they work through the banking system there so they're like a banker's bank so they are a local bank will loan to somebody they know that the client they check out the client but  that bank can go to the bank of north dakota to back you know to back up their loan and then they can go back out again so it's like a banker's bank and that's all the other  most of the other states don't have as robust a community banking system is as north dakota in fact they have the most robust and it's because this bank has stood behind those community banks whereas in the other  well we've we've heard the transaction number in fact the treasurer tells us that they're getting a really good deal from bank of america i mean it's like a few cents per transaction and the normally it's ten cents or something so he says this is a really good deal but then it accumulates but then they don't they are in the business of giving good deals there they must get something out of it well i think it's because the money passes through there and then it's while it's in there it's money that they can leverage again on the other side of the equation you may also be talking about bonds and how much you know debt service we have as far as you know bonds that have been floated that we have to go to the big banks and we don't have that number i don't know what it is but i'm sure that we can find out yeah ninety nine percent so that's what the issue on the ballot is they want to take it down to eight percent so the debt service just washington state i don't think that's of all the local governments is about nine percent of the state budget so nine percent of our tax money goes right back into the banks to pay for the bonds that we floated in the past and again that's that's the state debt north dakota has no state so if this this bank would eventually get up and running and be you know it's capital would go back into it then we could get rid of our debt to well we we too were involved somewhat in those kind of campaigns and course when the crash happened people wanted to pull their money out of local branches of the wall street banks and you know people want to credit unions or community banks smaller banks and we're connected and for a while we framed our talk well if it's good for us as citizens to take our money out of wall street banks why doesn't the state of washington take its money out of wall street banks and basically that's we're still saying that as one and say something about public banks in other areas we had a chance in march to go back to a convention that the public banking institute put on it was a great convention and i ran into a fellow there who teaches a kent state and he said that the banking system in germany was almost completely public right after germany unified in the eight hundred seventy s and the reason for that was they needed capital to industrialize the german general staff could see that warfare was going industrial and germany was behind france and in england so they needed capital so what did they do they put tariff barriers around their country their new country and they gots the public banks to finance the building of it of industry where we know germany we came a strong industrial power and they did they did exactly the opposite of what the americans have been telling these countries around the world which is take down your barriers and let our banks come in and finance you well that's is it any wonder they're not developing but i think china is developing i think they have a big a bank brazil's developing they have a bank so again it's a concept that's proven another thing i we when we were back in philadelphia we saw  independence hall and everything and one of the themes of the conference of course is that people like thomas jefferson thought the big mistake they made in the writing the constitution was was not having control of the money supply and giving that over to the private banks twenty years after the founding jefferson said that's the that's the flaw we made and you think about it them per always issued the money or the kings in old europe but here we created this democracy and who has control of the money the private bankers and now after two hundred years we we see what happens and thank you all very much