Launch of the Sovereign Money Initiative in Switzerland

Press Release: Launch of the Vollgeld Initiative, Media Center Bern, Switzerland, Tuesday, 03/06/2014

by Hans Ruedi Weber, president of the NGO Monetary Modernization ( MoMo )

Just over six years ago, at the height of the crisis in 2007 / 08, the booklet “Creating New Money” by Joseph Huber and James Robertson was translated into German. At that time we decided to start a sovereign money (Vollgeld) initiative in Switzerland.  As a citizen of a country with its own currency and the democratic means[1] to implement such a reform, we saw ourselves in the privileged position to take on this essential project. In the following years, we sought contact with Swiss experts, put together an advisory board, founded the organization “Monetary modernization” ( MoMo ) and began to organize professional conferences to alert the media and the Public to the problems of our existing monetary and banking system carefully. Initially we had only moderate success with a few articles in major newspapers and contributions in radio and television. However, help came from an unexpected quarter: first by the International Monetary Fund ( IMF) with the study “The Chicago Plan Revisited ,” recently by the Bank of England (BoE ) in their bulletin for creation of money by banks and finally even by Martin Wolf, the chief economists in the Financial Times (FT).

Meanwhile, Thomas Mayer, a very energetic campaign manager joined us, which is why we’ve come as far as being able to start collecting the signatures today. I would also like to sincerely thank everyone, both inside and outside of our organisation, who have given their selfless commitment.

An initiative that targets the root causes

The Vollgeld Initiative is an initiative that not only treats symptoms, but causes. This is explained in detail in other documents. That’s why I’m limiting myself to five simple questions that are important to me, but have unfortunately been ignored by the media, politicians and scientists.

These are:

(1) Simplicity: Why should money not be easy to understand? Why shouldn’t it be money that all of us use, made available by the National Bank and mediated by the banks. The complicated current fractional Reserve system is unnecessary and nonsensical because it necessarily produces risks and instability.

( 2) Constitutionally : Why has the federal government allowed the commercial banks to take the money-issuing privilege away from the state, and then tolerate them generating virtually unlimited money supplies? When the consequences – as everyone reads daily in the newspapers – are harmful, even for the banks.

( 3) Power : Why do we – people, economies, states – allow ourselves to be dominated, unchallenged, by the financial markets? I wish we had the legal means to free ourselves from this domination.

( 4) Inequality: Why should the money-producers in the economy be privileged and subsidized at the expense of all other economic operators? When it generates mountains of debt and financial bubbles, when it could easily be otherwise.

(5 ) Democracy: Why have these questions never been made ​​public, let alone answered? Do we want an uncontrollable system, or do we want one that we can control democratically ?

The Vollgeld Initiative would like to bring these questions to the attention of the public and enable people to answer them.

[1] Switzerland has a direct democracy, which means anyone can bring about a national referendum on changes to the Constitution by collecting 100,000 signatures within an 18 month period. This is known as an “Initiative”.