Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Switzerland Has Two Currencies

Well, here is something new...  Switzerland has had a complementary financial system to the franc, called the WIR, since 1934.
Several macro-economic studies have proven that – contrary to what people expect – this second currency contributes significantly to the stability of the Swiss economy because it is spontaneously countercyclical. The Swiss data is of great quality, and was the basis for three peer-reviewed articles by Professor John Stodder that proves this.2 While conventional money is procyclical and requires central banks to try to stabilize the economy, the WIR case demonstrates that having a business-to-business currency circulating in parallel with the conventional money actually helps the central bank in stabilizing the economy!
I wish they would call the franc currency, not "conventional money," but in any case, does this not sound exactly like what I have been saying USA once had but has lost, B2B credit?


First I ever heard of the WIR, need to study that. But no mention that Hong Kong has three competing (maybe 4) currencies, all issued by private companies, as was once the normal?  


Mentioning those community share-barter ideas, he says -
In contrast, for currencies designed to deal with social issues, what’s the point of accumulating thousands of hour credits, for instance? If your objective is to create social capital in a community, credit markets don’t make sense. It’s not the way human interactions operate. As was documented by Michael Hudson and David Graeber4, relationships based on debt have driven enslavement, the opposite of what social capital aims at achieving. 
That may be true about trading lawn mowing for babysitting, but the slavery part of debt comes from usury, and state enforcement of the usury contract.  Usury cannot exist outside of state enforcement.  At any rate, quite the contrary, relationships in which credit (and its concomitant aspect, debt) can be both unitive and creative.

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