City of London addresses barter

Happily my suit and I are in the same city, and together we slipped in to the launch of The Corporation of the City of London's £200,000 report on the 'capacity trade' industry. This was my first brush with the politicised side of commercial mutual credit systems. Daniel from Ormita who had contributed to the report warned me that many people in the industry don't actually understand mutual credit, and were putting the collapse of some exchanges in several countries down to other causes than the massive deficits being run up by the franchisee. So while Ormita and IRTA argued for accountability and transparency, such matters were not actually addressed by the panel, except incidentally. Details can be found in the report (I trust) but today's discussion went right to the core of the matter.

"What's in it for me"

Why indeed would the City of London concern itself with capacity trade which doesn't involve money per se? Well a new expertise would bring prestige to the city, which is elbowing places like Hamburg to be the first offshore Renminbi centre. Also some people are saying that there is a liquidity crisis, and these schemes address just that, mitigating the waste of idle factories. This is important because it promotes 'sustainable growth'. This phrase was mentioned a couple of times without irony. Excuse me but we already need several planet earths just to maintain ourselves, and haven't we passed peak oil? The best thing I heard was that perhaps taxes might be paid in trade credits, since governments consume stuff also - they don't spend all their income servicing debt.

The most sense was spoken at question time, by practitioners asking about tax and transparency. All in all I'm not at all confident that the City's involvement in barter will improve things, especially if they don't understand the rules. We should be on our guard against TBTF banks coopting and crashing the industry, in order to drive us back to commercially produced credit money. I found it interesting that while no attempt is being made to regulate the enormously damaging behaviour of banks, 2 out of 5 of the reports recommendations are about regulating barter.

I don't see why the barter industry needs anything from the City of London, which cares only for money, profit and extracting unearned value from the marketplace. Instead bodies like the IRTA should be much more proactive in regulating and introducing standards.