DEMOCRATISING FINANCE

  • by Hazel Henderson
  • Inter Press Service

The financial meltdown generated by Wall Street and the "too big to fail" culture of global money-centre banks and financiers is generating local initiatives and demands to decentralise and democratise finance, writes Hazel Henderson, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006), president of Ethical Markets Media, an independent social enterprise covering local economies, new currencies, and the growing green sectors.

In this article Henderson writes that with national safety-nets unravelling, local leadership is rising, offering many creative alternatives for communities to nurture healthier home-grown economies, from local barter-clubs, to people-to-people lending and microfinance projects.

Thanks to all the communications tools now widely available, people-to-people finance can go a long way in bypassing big, greedy banks and ethically-challenged Wall Street financiers and their political allies. Using the new information-sharing tools is helping people realise again what money is: just one form of information.

In a very real sense, we humans don't have a financial crisis but a crisis of perception. We are beginning to see our world differently from the way the mainstream media portrays it. We see our choices with new eyes. As we watch central bankers printing money on TV, we learn that money is not real wealth. Real wealth is generated by productive people using the Earth's resources wisely.

(*) Hazel Henderson, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006), is president of Ethical Markets Media ( www.ethicalmarkets.com). She co-created the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, updated regularly at www.calvert-henderson.com.

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© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service