Oakland Holds Community Forum on Public Banking
The idea of creating a public bank in Oakland is under serious consideration. While the chief motivation is to keep local money in Oakland, a public bank could also give the city’s cannabis industry expanded access to banking services. Additionally, the proposed institution could provide low-interest loans to students and home buyers, support small businesses, and invest in local infrastructure.
Dark Pools: The Path to the Next Financial Crisis?
The biggest banks on Wall Street, both foreign and domestic, have been repeatedly charged with rigging and colluding in markets from New York to London to Japan. Thus, it is natural to ask, have the big banks formed a cartel to rig the prices of their own stocks? And, are these dark pools behind the run-up in bank stock prices?
How to Cut Infrastructure Costs In Half
Money is not fixed and scarce. It is “elastic”: it is created when loans are made and extinguished when they are paid off. Private banks now create nearly 97 percent of the money supply in this way. To get much-needed new money into local economies, governments should borrow from banks, which create money in the form of deposits when they make loans. And to get that money interest-free, a government should borrow from its own bank, which returns the interest to the government.
It’s Our Money: Can History Please Not Repeat Itself?
The pattern of private capital determining government policy is centuries old – but so is the sort of public interest banking emerging in the US now. Ellen’s guest Jim Hogue, an author, broadcaster and historian, recounts how the struggle for control of finance rocked the early American colonies and precipitated a permanent war footing enabled by big finance. Cohost Walt McRee talks with Dr. Maurie Cohen about his latest book on creating a sustainable post-consumerist economy.
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