Occcu: Occupy Currency – Basic-Income Global Community Currency

Alternative forms of money are designed to compete directly against global financial power, and this is a good news. Indeed, on 28 January 2012 at the gates of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, it was presented to the media a new version of community global currency, i.e. the OCCupy-CUrrency or Occcu. The project has been developed in Austria by a team of students  led by Roland Alton Scheidl at Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences with the aim to offer a Basic-Income... Read More

Freigeld: the relational ontology of money in practice

Freigeld: FreeMoney for reacting to the Great Depression According to Prof. Thomas Greco, during the years imediately after the Great Crash in 1929, “besides learning how to ‘make do, or do without’, people began to establish mutual support structures, like workers’ cooperatives, many of which would recycle and repair donated or broken items. People learned to share what they had, and to by-pass the market and financial systems” (Greco, 1994). One of the problems... Read More

Natural Savings

Natural Savings are the complementary answer to the narrowed functionality of modern bank money with regards to the micro-financial sector. By virtue of the latter, borrowers automatically face the hurdles of monetary inflation and currency devaluation, whereas micro-finance institutions operate under the constraints of banking regulation and central banking practices, which often contrast the unfolding of financial inclusion or, in other words, the decrease of the ‘financial... Read More

Cultural Credit Circuit – Cultos

C3 concept for the cultural sector In the cultural industry, a Cultural Institution behaves like a business company in the commercial sector: both belong tothe respectve industrial sectors. The difference between the two is that the former may not be designed to pursue profit whilst the latter is explicitly designed to compete for profit. In the cultural sector, a Cultural Institution (museums, libraries, etc.) deals with other cultural institutions in order to organize events... Read More

SCEC – Italy

In general complementary currencies are designed to create new wealth, both financial and social. In a nutshell, they are thought of as financial resources to increase social capital while maintaining in the best conditions the natural capital. Therefore, they foster co-operation, because they resemble some of the features a gift economy presents: horizontal and a-centered connection between peer-participants. Both complementary currencies relationships respectively with scarcity... Read More

C3 – Uruguay

The primary driving mechanism for the functioning of the conventional monetary system is fiat-money central banking. The booms and busts impelled by such systemic configuration drive economies toward full employment in booming periods, but then, during busts, they create significant unemployment. During contractive stages of the business cycle such as that one initiated with the credit crisis of 2008, the Commercial Credit Circuit – C3 – creates more liquidity in the... Read More

WIR – Switzerland

The best documented modern example to show the effectiveness of implementing a dual-currency system by means of the adoption of a complementary currency to use in mixed payments in parallel with the national one comes form Switzerland. Back in 1934, a group of Swiss entrepreneurs agreed to use a means of payment issued by a Basel-based Economic Circle in parallel to the Swiss Franc in order to lubricate the wheels of local commerce and, eventually, re-emerge from the ashes of... Read More