Positive Money

Overview

Positive Money is a not-for-profit research and campaigning organisation founded in London in 2010 by Ben Dyson, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, to advocate reform of how money and credit are created.[1] Its central argument is that commercial banks — not central banks — create the great majority of the money supply each time they issue a loan, and that this system channels credit disproportionately into real estate and existing assets rather than productive investment.[1] Fran Boait became executive director in 2013, broadening the group's work beyond its original "sovereign money" reform proposal to include ideas such as "green quantitative easing" and public digital-currency alternatives.[1] That original proposal descends from Joseph Huber and James Robertson's Creating New Money (New Economics Foundation, 2000): transferring the power to create money from commercial banks to a public authority so that seigniorage — the profit from money issuance — accrues to the public rather than to banks.

Positive Money's research on the composition of bank lending has been cited by Georgist writers as independent, non-Georgist corroboration that modern banking has become substantially a land-lending system. Lars Doucet's Land is a Big Deal cites Positive Money, alongside Jordà, Schularick & Taylor's data, for the estimate that real estate makes up roughly 45–60% of bank lending in advanced economies, in a chapter that also notes Michael Hudson's related argument that much of the rent paid on land ultimately flows to banks as mortgage interest.[2]

See Also

• Land is a Big Deal (book) — cites Positive Money's bank-lending composition research
• Finance's growth is largely mortgage credit against land — the broader empirical case this data feeds into
• Michael Hudson — makes a related argument about land rent flowing to banks as interest
• Objection: cycles are driven by credit, not land — the debate over whether credit or land is the more fundamental driver
• Seigniorage — the rent-theoretic case behind Positive Money's "sovereign money" reform proposal

Sources

1. "Positive Money," Wikipedia — used for the founding (Ben Dyson, London, 2010), the organisation's core argument about bank-created money and its allocation, and Fran Boait's 2013 leadership transition and expanded policy agenda. Wikipedia
2. Lars A. Doucet (2022), Land is a Big Deal, Ch. 16 — used for the citation of Positive Money (with Jordà et al. 2014) on real estate as 45–60% of bank lending, alongside the related Michael Hudson argument on land rent and bank interest. wiki summary