Reader: Creating Money and Blowing Big Bubbles

On March 29, AEOO hosted a Zoom of Our Own conversation on how women are working now to more clearly explain our current money world, including the Federal Reserve, and working to change our money’s intent — not to enrich just a few winners at the cost of mostly losers, but to grant all of us a livable future.

Led in conversation by AEOO founder and Screwnomics author Rickey Gard Diamond, our panel of incredible women broke down what’s wrong with our fiscal policies and our cultural understanding of money. We also dug into the Robinhood / GameStop “scandal” and how we can make change moving forward by democratizing and redefining money.

Ebony L. Perkins is Director of Investor Relations at Self-Help Credit Union in Durham, NC,, and manages a seven-person team that helps groups and individuals invest funds in communities underserved by conventional lenders. Ebony participates in the US Forum for Sustainable & Responsible Investing, Women In Philanthropy, and the Financial Planning Association, and was recognized by the Socially Responsible Investment Conference in their 30 Leaders Under 30 List.

Ellen Hodgson Brown founded the Public Banking Institute in 2010 and is currently its chair. She is an attorney and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program, “It’s Our Money” on PRN.FM. Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

Mary Sanderson has worked as a Wisconsin farmer, explorer, postal worker, peace & justice advocate, and mom. Three years ago, three new jobs fell into her lap at once; grandma, ad hoc nurse and Citizen Scholar on Money. Her energy got a big boost from learning the backstory on bank-credit, and advocating for permanent public money to begin healing the messes we are in. Mary serves on WILPF’s Women, Money & Democracy Committee, the Green Party, and the board of Alliance for Just Money (AFJM).

Adrienne Massanari (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include new media, gaming, digital cultures, design, platform politics, gender, and ethics. Her book, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit (Peter Lang, 2015), considers the culture of Reddit.com; she was a source for a recent Washington Post article on the Robinhood scandal, Roaring Kitty and a dangerous online culture.

Below is the video and the curriculum from the event for further reading, exploring, and sharing! Don’t forget to check out our Resource Library for even more feminist economic goodness.

(PS: The conversation/webinar series will continue. Check out our events here!)

DEFINITIONS + BASICS

• Money: A medium of exchange: cash, loot, bread, coin, moolah, wampum. When it is a recognized national currency used as legal tender, like the dollar, this can be a fiat currency based in trust; or a commodity currency based on something like gold or silver.
• Financial Corporations: Nine major categories of banks include central banks, retail and commercial banks, credit unions, savings and loan associations, investment banks, investment companies, brokerage firms, insurance companies, mortgage companies, and the newest type, internet banks. Only credit unions are incorporated as nonprofits.
• Interest: a monetary charge for borrowing money, often described as an annual percentage rate (APR). Interest is the money fee a lender or financial institution receives for lending out borrowed money. Over time, it will double costs. Excessively high interest charges are called usury.
• Investor: Those with surplus money to lend via investment in bonds or other contracts, or investment via stocks. Risky investments pay a higher return on investment (ROI).
• Socially Responsible Investing (SRI): Investments made into publicly traded companies with good social values, or through a socially conscious mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF). Similarly, ESG (Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance) investing focuses on corporations actively avoiding negative impact and/or promoting social good.
• Bubbles: Prices normally rise and fall in any market, but over time they trend toward the real value of the traded goods or assets. A bubble occurs when the price of an asset (stocks, bonds, real estate, or commodities) rises quickly from new money in the market, inflating prices far beyond its value, like the #GameStop scandal. When asset bubbles pop, their economic pain can lead to recessions. This happened with real estate in 2008.
• Gender Differences: Men save or invest up to three times as much money as women, even though women tend to save a greater percentage of their income for emergencies or retirement. A gender pay gap and time-off for babies both result in fewer female dollars; social security adjusts for neither.

WHAT MONEY IS AND HOW IT WORKS

Ebony Perkins’ article in Green Money Journal (Dec. 7, 2020), “How Investing in Women Helps Everyone During the Pandemic.”

AEOO advisory board member Crystal Arnold (Money Wise Women podcast) talks with Ebony Perkins, who says if you care about racial justice, you can become a financial activist.

Adrienne Massanari’s book, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit (Peter Lang, 2015), considers the internet culture of Reddit.com.

Adrienne Massanari was also a source for a recent Washington Post article on the Robinhood scandal, Roaring Kitty and a dangerous online culture that equates investing with gaming, “Women are Missing from the GameStop News: Experts Blame This Fratty SubReddit.”

AEOO advisory board member Ellen Brown views the Gamers uprising against Wall Street as a populist movement in this article. She quotes the fiery 1890 speech of Kansas farmer and activist, Mary Elizabeth Lease: “Wall Street owns the country! It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

Ellen Brown’s book Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About our Money System and How We Can Break Free provides a clear and readable history of US monetary policy and controversy, including the game-changing establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Her more recent books, The Public Banking Solution: From Austerity to Prosperity and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age provide authoritative and well researched insights into banks owned by publicly accountable governments, and operated as financial utilities, not as sources for private profit. The US now has one such bank in North Dakota.

Mary Sanderson sits on the board of The Alliance for Just Money, an organization that seeks to move US money-creation away from the Federal Reserve System to the US Treasury. Money created by the government needn’t be borrowed, wouldn’t add interest costs, and could be directly invested in public needs. Read more about AFJM’s reasons to “change the money” here.

The Bank of England was the first to issue a national fiat currency from debt, but now the people of the United Kingdom are organizing to change the nature of their money too. The organization called Positive Money explains why growing inequality is inevitable with BoE money creation.

Our US central bank is not a single bank but a network of privately owned banks, The Federal Reserve System, operating independently of the government. The New York Fed on Wall Street dominates and is notoriously secret. A FOIA request from Institutional Investor yielded some insights in 2020 into who really owns the NYFed (Citibank, JP Morgan and foreign banks) and why they’re sharing. More people are raising questions. Should you?

A law to move money-creation to the US Treasury with government oversight was introduced in 2012. The NEED Act didn’t pass, but it is far from dead, and thanks to this guide at AFJM, is easy to read and understand.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) argues that governments with a fiat currency system under their control can and should print (or digitally create) as much money as they need to spend because they cannot go broke. The only limit to government spending is the availability of real resources, like workers or supplies, MMT says. Governments needn’t sell bonds, therefore, but do need to tax to remove money and protect against inflation.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are on the rise, but Jon Danielsson, London School of Economics, argues that most of us wouldn’t like a society where bitcoin succeeds

Wall Street journalists Pam and Russ Martens called a Senate Banking Hearing on March 10, 2021, “brutal,” but we just found it honest. The US Senate Banking Committee, now headed by US Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), clarified the difference between the Covid-relief bill that puts $1.9 trillion in Federal Reserve money in the hands of the poor and middle class and the $29 trillion its secret money spigot gushed into Wall Street from 2007–2010. The Martens report that the bottom half of Americans own just one percent of wealth on Wall Street.

If you’re curious about internet banking and investment apps like Robinhood, Professor and economist Vicki L. Bogan of Cornell University testified at a Senate Banking Hearing on March 17, 2021: “Game Stopped: Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide.” Find a pdf of her testimony here: Testimony to Senate Banking Hearing of Prof. Vicki L. Bogan, Cornell University:

Wall Street banking expert Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage, All the Presidents’ Bankers, and Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, says GameStop demonstrated what she’s long written about: the way Wall Street works is fundamentally unfair.

Cities and states across the nation are organizing to create more public banks, thanks to the Public Banking Institute’s research and informational resources. Learn more about local efforts and organizing here. California has now passed the first public banking law in a hundred years.

The Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF-US) has adopted public banking as one of its organizing projects. To help with this, WILPF’s issue committee, Women, Money & Democracy, has created a Public Banking Handbook, available online. It’s a treasure trove of information.