I saw this article on the New Economics Foundation Website and thought it made some real sense. The banks seem to think they are not only above the law but also above control. The idea that their function should be split 3 ways , personal customers, business banking and securities dealing, makes such common sense and give control back to the people that use their services. That a bank should be for profit for me runs against the grain – there is something just not quite right. That brings me onto the whole subject on money – is it real or is it a myth.

If we all went to the Bank of England and asked to exchange a £10 note for £10 in cash – we’d get a big surprise. The statement on bank notes ” I promise to pay the bearer on demand…” – has gone. So what is the currency of money – does it even exist? If you like philosophy just google the phrase ‘does money exist’ and see what comes up.

I’m very interested in the concept of micro finance as practised by several organisations in Africa – I wonder if that could be a model for the western countries so devastated by the banking system collapse.

Break up the banks to restore lending and revive the economy from the bottom up, says think tank

Economic rescue efforts – including quantitative easing – will not work until the fundamental problem that Britain’s banks have become “unfit for purpose” is addressed, says nef (the new economics foundation).

In a report published today, Tuesday 10 March 2009, – the day the British Bankers Association chief is to answer to a parliamentary investigation of banking supervision and regulation¹ – nef argues that the shift in the shape and business model of banks over the last generation helped both cause and perpetuate the present financial crisis.

It calls for a radical rethink of Government strategy, to rebuild a financial sector that is fit for purpose.

Instead of throwing good money after bad, Government should:

• de-merge the big banks
• separate retail banking from corporate finance and securities dealing
• support community finance initiatives and small businesses, who will be the drivers of the recovery. Small businesses provided 59% of private sector jobs in the UK in 2007.²

IOUK: banking failure and how to build a fit financial sector, analyses the behaviour of the UK banking sector. Banks have withdrawn from the heart of communities, sidelined their basic business, lost touch with the real needs of their customers and become structurally unable to serve them, it says.  While flooding the economy with inappropriate credit they contributed to a financial drought in disadvantaged areas and starved small businesses of the credit they needed to survive.

And the Government’s rescue attempts have so far failed. Despite virtual nationalisation and a £37bn bailout of the biggest banks, the Government seems powerless to force banks to lend appropriately. The Enterprise Finance Guarantee scheme which replaced the Small Firms Guarantee Scheme has failed to kickstart lending (despite Lord Mandelson’s claims in an announcement slipped out quietly on 20 February in response to media criticism³) and is weighted in favour of larger firms.

Yet a “sleeping architecture” of a more robust local financial infrastructure exists in the credit unions, community finance and local enterprise schemes that are working on the frontline of financial exclusion. The paper includes case studies of viable businesses failed by the banks but supported by this parallel infrastructure.⁴ This sector should be supported and a UK Community Reinvestment Act be brought in to force banks to partner with them.

“The Bank of England has reached a dead end with interest rate cuts and the decision to flood the economy with £75 billion of new money through “quantative easing”; is just another form of bail out. The Government is in denial if it thinks we can go back to business as usual; that’s what caused the crisis. If banks became too big to let fail, how can the answer be to make even fewer banks even bigger and keep channelling all the funds through them? We need to bring banks back to their original function, break them up and return them to a scale where they are in touch with the communities, people and businesses they should have been serving all along.” said Sargon Nissan, Business and Finance Researcher at nef and co-author of the report.

I use twitter to follow many people and today I was checking a couple of tweets and saw one that made me want to look further. The site is all about people’s experiences of getting laid off or made redundant and is well worth a look. It recently was featured in the Wall Street Journal and I sadly note that in many states in the USA unemployment is running at 10% or more and that’s only the beginning in my opinion.

We have to become more supportive of the people we know who have or are struggling with being laid off and offer them hope. That’s what this site and the community behind it are all about – offering hope, support and the belief that there is a better way.

Don’t forget you can always contribute and join the community and in doing so we may well be able to offer to give you or people you know the lift up in life they need to get back on their feet – Don’t forget our Free Web Hosting offer for those who deserve it.

www.pabarton.com – doing business a better way

Ok – its been a long time coming but what started out as a simple monday morning call with some freinds who shared a common goal (health in this case) has become something much more. Start Something Today is a beginning that might just lead anywhere – It depends on what we want to do and what we want to start – hence the name.

In todays economic climate we have recognised that we need to be proactive and actively create what matters to us. If we don’t do that we run the risk of getting stuck in a passive state where we watch the hurting world pass by and do nothing about it.

The key categories we have put in place ( we can add more later on) are the things we talk about most often. So here we are at the beginning of what I hope and Trust will be a wild ride where a few people get together to make a real difference and have a lot of fun in the process.

We will have some editorial guidelines to put in place but we have to start some where.

Paul Barton – excitedly

WE have today lived up to the title of the site START SOMETHING TODAY