Positive Money’s Chief Economist leaves as Bank of England now knows where money comes from

Shortly after launching the Positive Money campaign in mid-2010, we got a call from the producer of a television documentary, asking for an explanation of how money was created by the banking system. We explained the whole process as we understood it. But this producer wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so she called the Bank of England directly and asked:

 “Do you have a simple document that explains how money is created?”

“Ah, no, I’m afraid we don’t.”

“OK, could you possibly send me the training manual that you provide to your staff?”

“Er, we don’t really have something like that.”

The problem was that the information was spread throughout hundreds of documents; a paragraph here, a rule change there. We realised it would be difficult for any journalist to give accurate reporting on this while the information was so hard to find.

In March 2011, Andrew Jackson joined our team to help with research. We teamed up with the New Economics Foundation to hunt through these documents and find definitive answers to how the monetary system works today.

The result was the book “Where Does Money Come From?”, which is already being used as a core text in some universities.

Andrew has worked on our research ever since, written several Positive Money publications and also co-authored another book: Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System is Broken, and How We Fix It

Andrew is now starting a full-time PhD with the highly regarded Professor Tim Jackson (author of Prosperity without Growth) and will be stepping back from work with Positive Money.

In a strange coincidence, on Andrew’s last day in the office, the Bank of England published a new paper explaining exactly how money is created in the modern banking system. Their paper actually references Where Does Money Come From?, the first book that Andrew worked on. That’s a great finish to 3 years of hard work to educate people about the reality of money!

Here’s Andrew last night with his Positive Money-branded leaving cake: