Industry sign banking iowa presentation now
ok ladies and gents sorry for the delay but I guess I'm ready my name is Robin cash I live in Cedar Rapids and Paul was kind enough to invite me to come and make this presentation today and I appreciate you all coming and my intention is to try to inform us about public banking how many of you will know about public banking I've heard of it okay well that's a head start then I want to this is kind of the outline of what I want to do I want to tell you how I got interested in it and I want to talk about what a bank is and about banks and banking and money and then what's a public bank and some examples of public banking what I think a next step there ought to be so see if work if this is going to work there we go and over the years I've lived in Cedar Rapids now since 2005 2006 and I got interested in our City Council and so over the years I've gone to many many meetings of the City Council into several of their committee meetings and I started noticing that every year they would sell millions of dollars worth of bonds usually in May or June of each year and I noticed when I looked more closely that they were paying about as much interest on the bonds as they were for the principal so I found this just sort of doubled the debt that we had and then I got to looking at their budget and I saw that for one year they were spending 16 million dollars in interest which to me is a lot of money so I was even more concerned when at a certain point our mayor and the council started pressing for for a for a sales tax to pay for street improvements and they were going to generate from that sales tax about eighteen million dollars a year so I thought to myself you know that goal that 16 million would go a long way toward helping our street repairs would obviate the need for a for a sales tax which I think all of us realize is a regressive tax and hits low-income people and poor people hardest of all I guess we don't need that cleaner alert up there do we and then just in the course of doing some reading I discovered there D might be an alternative to bonding and to sales taxes so I confess I'm not a banker nor am I the son of a banker and I didn't major in finance or banking I majored in sociology and English and then eventually in theology and I was not educated in Iowa so a very short comings in the presentation that may go a long way to accounting for it I was taught to read and to cypher a little bit in southern schools mostly southern schools and I was inspired to start this study of public banking by the debacle of 2008 which I think probably all of us remember so I started reading a lot of books on economics things that I could that I could lay my hands on that made sense to me and one of the books I picked up was a book by a guy named Michael Hudson killing the host it's about the financialization of our economy and I was fairly far along in the book when he mentioned that a way to escape financialization for at least four states and municipalities was through a public bank this was in a footnote so I was curious and so I started thought well I'll explore that a little bit so I looked up the public banking Institute which was in see if I can get that to come up here I don't know whether we know we don't I don't have an internet connection so never mind the rate I commend the that website to you if you just you know Google public banking Institute you're going to come up on it and I started reading books by Ellen Brown whose woman that founded this Institute in the web of debt she depicts how debt traps not only individuals but also states and municipalities and and governments and then in the public bank solution she discusses how public banking can go a long way toward delivering us from that so what I hope to do is to broadcast my interest enough maybe others will be interested and maybe even some city or county officials will be interested enough to conduct a study of public banking and its suitability and appropriateness for for their community I'll get to a little later the city of Los Angeles has already their City Council has approved a study that they authorized and they have on the ballot this November to amend their city charters so as to authorize them to to establish a public bank for Los Angeles the City of Seattle has undertaken a similar study so so you'll probably all how many of y'all have bank accounts somewhere all right everybody has most everybody has has a bank account we'll get into the people that don't so it's a it's an institution that can make Larisa get deposits and make loans and they can also provide other financial services and really there are two kinds of banks there's a commercial bank and then there's an investment bank and you know it was the investment banks when glass-steagall was demolished during the Clinton administration we kind of got mixed up between what commercial and investment were and that created a lot of problems for us most countries the banks are regulated by by a government of some sort ours are regulated both by the Federal by federal authorities the Fed as we call it and then we have a banking commission here in Iowa that regulates banks as well so you can go read more the investopedia kind of has a lot of stuff on finance and banking and stuff and so I commend that website to you okay so how do you get a bank started well you have to get a charter and to get a charter you have to have a business plan what do you want to do with that Bank as you may recognize for a city most of the bonding that is done is for infrastructure and no commercial bank is going to finance your infrastructure your streets or your bridges or your public buildings so you have to so most communities go out and sell bonds to finance those and then to get your bank started you have to gather some investors all of us could invest you know a million dollars apiece and we probably have enough to to get a bank started in Iowa different states have different requirements for what you're for what your investors have to put up and then you start receiving deposits and you may close you all realize that you get less interest on your deposits and you do for the loans that you have with your bank and that's the way they make money that margin that margin in there so so that's here's where you go to charter a bank that Department regulates all banks state chartered banks and Iowa as well as other agencies that deal with with money here's what a commercial bank does you formed the you and I would form the basic capital for our bank and then we have we can either keep our reserves we need to have a certain amount of reserves to cover and the deposits that we may fall short on if we can keep that in our owns vault or we can make a deposit with the Federal Reserve and then the bank starts getting deposits from you and me and once we put on money in the bank it's the bank's money and what we get is an IOU and and so they do keep track of our accounts and and we always get a little receipt when I make a deposit so that's kind of what stands for an IOU and then the reserves are there to cover demands by depositors that may exceed the amount of money that the bank has on hand in deposits at the time so you all have heard of bank runs where people get uneasy about the banking situation and they go withdrawal their deposits and it throws throws a bank into turmoil until they can correct the situation mainly they do that by borrowing from other banks but if there's a huge run all over the country then you can see that we'd be in a real predicament so the amount of reserves is is set by the Federal Reserve on on that if you're a federally chartered bank a bank then as I've said gets deposits and makes loans and but one of the main things that I learned in the course of my reading that I had not realized is that makes create money so that interested me so I wondered what is what is money then if they can create it the money than I'm accustomed to is the of course the dollar bills and the change that I carry around and so I learned that you know money has three as those three functions that we have different kinds of money we used to be on the gold standard all our money was backed by gold but is you could take your dollar bills and you could go to the Treasury and say give me you know $25 worth of gold or $35 worth of gold and you'd get nowt so I think that was that used to be the standard so what happened during the Vietnam War when we were spending so much money in Vietnam we just poured money into Vietnam the French who used to occupy and own Vietnam called in to French Indochina I believe at one time we're collecting all those dollars and they were bringing them to our treasury and say give us your gold and so President Nixon said you know enough of that we're going to run out of gold and pretty soon we won't be able to honor our obligations so I'm going to go off the gold standard he did that in 1971 so now the money that we have is is called fiat money it's money that's created by the government the Fed will will actually create the instruments and then the month oddly enough the government borrows from the Fed and pays them interest I'm still working on that and the reason that that the money is good the fiat money is good is that the government will accept that as taxes or fees or or anything else so so there's a big element of trust involved in any money transaction if I give you know Paul a check for $500 he he trusts that I've got money in the bank and that that check will be covered or if I make a credit card transaction the merchants trust that that will be honored if it's not we get a reading back all of a sudden you know not accepted so so there is a big element of fundamentally money involves trust maybe y'all are acquainted with the biblical notion of you can't serve God and Mammon so to the that Mammon involves money then you prioritize your trust in God over your trust and money and that's a puzzle in itself so right now as it stands about three dollars are walking around money's about three percent of what we what we have fiat money is ninety seven percent of the money that we have and most of that is created by the same instrument I'm using to show you this PowerPoint on a computer and you strike a few computer Keys and and the money is is made and the way you could the reason you can do that is by the magic of double-entry bookkeeping how many people took accounting in college and all right so you know about double-entry bookkeeping and how you know that you when when when you make a loan you also make a mortgage and they balance out so that's what happens when we make a home mortgage the loan officer approves your loan makes a few little clicks on his computer keyboard and there shows up in your account you know half a million dollars so you can afford your McMansion and also he hands you a mortgage with a payment schedule for you to to retire that debt so on the bank's books the amount deposited in your account is a debit I believe and and then the mortgage shows up as a credit it's an asset of the bank so and they all balance out well they start out that way they start out that way and we've heard about foreclosures when people and that was a big part of the deal in 2008 was that we had a lot of foreclosures because banks issued liar's loans and which are loans that weren't really checked out before they were made they pull yen off the street and say here will give you a hundred and five percent on your house and you can use that other five percent however you want to but you're gonna owe us for the whole 105 percent well they would do that with people that had had had no no jobs or no income and no prospects of income so it integrated a public bank is one that is owned usually by a taxing jurisdiction though I'm told that say a college or university could establish its own bank if it chose to do so but for our purposes we want to just think about a public bank being one that's established by a taxing jurisdiction Iowa City Johnson County Cedar Rapids Linn County the state of Iowa so the one the one public bank that's been in existence longest is the Bank of North Dakota and it got started in 1919 the the farmers there got got tired of the banks and many of Minneapolis stiffing them on loans charging them interest that was way too high it was killing the agricultural economy because people couldn't afford the loans so they got together formed this Bank at first it didn't work out too well they the people in North Dakota had these socialistic ideas and and a lot of the powerful people in the state didn't like that so they in 1925 or 26 they reconstituted the bank and and people who people who were better informed let's say about banking took it over and and have made it work but it's worked very well for them the the state and all of its agencies put their with their income into this state bank they make it as deposits so the bank never has any problems getting deposits they have a steady stream from tax revenue and the bank does it is signed up with a Federal Reserve but they do not have FDIC they they rely on the Full Faith and Credit of the state of North Dakota - back there - back there to back their money so that's one of the hang-ups about getting a public bank in Iowa the law requires a bank to to have sign up with FDIC and I think that pardon it's a bank local banking law I will banking law Iowa banking does that and that would make sense to me if we had a lot of depositors and you and I were depositors but if if Iowa City owns the bank and is the only depositor then you know they're gonna have more money in there than FDIC would would require would be able to cover or would be willing to cover so you to get a bank started in the public banks started now we have to get that provision waived for now they belong to a separate thing credit union has its own its own depositor protection I think both of them are up what two hundred and fifty thousand dollars now and service we're live yeah and so there you may have noticed in the newspaper here this last year there was a lot of contention between the commercial banks and especially the state banks and and credit unions because credit unions don't pay the same kind of taxes that commercial banks do and they have maybe some other advantages as well okay so here are some things that I pulled off the website of the public banking Institute that are that are good things about a public bank keep their money keep your city counties money for you they are their main focus you know commercial banks main focus is making money they may say they're here to serve the public and in a way they do but that's a secondary consideration there aren't going to serve the public unless they can make money so that a public banks main aim is is to serve serve the public of the group that owns the bank which would be in Iowa City would be the citizens of Iowa City in Johnson County would be the citizens of Johnson County making they do need to make money public bank does need to make money and we'll get into that a little bit they can a public bank and save Iowa City Cedar Rapids Johnson County a lot of money on interest and and so on and also you're not paying a high salary to to your executive to your bank president you not don't have shareholders that you have to honor anything like that that you have to pay dividends to on a regular basis and then one of the big things is that you can the money that that is used and any interest that you make on it can be reinvested in the community that 16 million dollars I told you about that Cedar Rapids was paying annually if they were to buy you know go ahead and close out those bonds by them up then they could finance what they were doing through a public bank and use most of that 16 million to invest in in public enterprises infrastructure economic development and so on we'll get into a little bit of that as well so usually you get somebody who is who know something about banking although one group said we don't go out and look for bankers we go out and look for people who have some public spiritedness about them figuring that they can learn how to run a bank but you the main thing is you want some people who have a public interest focus that there is you kno
because of open meeting and open records laws then the banks would be transparent and you would know what kind of public decisions were being made and you know it's the speculators on Wall Street that it got us in so much trouble in 2008 and that was one of my concerns why should we be shipping off 16 million dollars a year to people on Wall Street when we could be using that here we can be recirculating that and recycling that right here in Iowa in in Cedar Rapids for useful purposes can create new jobs and and help your economy by helping small businesses get the get the loans they need at a lower rate than they're gonna pay in in the market you can the bank of North Dakota partners with its with its state banks that is the state banks kind of act as a front office for the Bank of North Dakota and they get to charge their fees and so on for let's say making student loans but the Bank of North Dakota under writes those loans and does so in an intro straight that's much more favorable than say the federal rate or certainly one that you would get from a commercial bank so the bankers will oppose will oppose a public bank I don't want to being persuasive about being a front office for a public bank will not help them because they're going to miss out on some interest and then when you when you run into hard times a public bank will be able to withstand that and continue to make loans because they still have the same text they have a stream of tax revenue that they can rely on and that's even in hard times that didn't go away I don't know of any city that has exempted me from paying property taxes just because we were in a recession so some examples there public banks are widely used and have been for years they were even used in the in colonial times that's the way the the colonists financed their war against against Great Britain created their own money Continentals after the war was over they became worthless but they even before the war they were financing agriculture and business and so on with with public banks so Germany has lots of large regional banks and and several and several hundred even thousands of the city owned banks India has had public banking since the late 50s Brazil two of the largest banks in Brazil our public of the ten largest banks in Brazil are publicly owned and one of the banks in southern Brazil has hundreds of branches that that cover cover that part of the world form and as I mentioned earlier Los Angeles voters will be voting on whether to change their charter for a public bank on November 6 Auckland as their City Council has received a study and approved it for a public bank San Francisco in the state of California are all undertaking studies the city of Seattle is undertaking a study in California it was prompted because the pot growers didn't have any place to go with all of the money that they were they were drawing in because of the federal restrictions on being able to handle what is considered a illicit money although there's another story about the way United States has has dealt with with drug money to help finance finance its own concerns so so yes that's right that's right so too it's explicitly to authorize public banks if you wanted to form legislation do that the Legislature would have to would have to do it although in my discussions with the Iowa banking people the only drawback that they could tell me about was the FDIC requirement and as I said I think you could appeal that and have that waived if if a city went forward with a proposal to establish you're shaking your head on you're skeptical well regulation you can get it changed and the reason for the wealth of not change it is that people that are getting beautifully scratched well in all my presentations to the city right up in Cedar Council about exploring public banking has met with no interest at all the one council person said well we were told it wouldn't save us any money which is a misunderstanding of banking for one thing of what banking is about and so then I was yeah I think that's probably true so with any rate to get a public banks started you need to go through the state of Iowa the the city would have to use some of its unrestricted funds for basic capital and reserves and then the deposits would come from city revenues for from property taxes fees fines other things franchise taxes and so on the City Council would have would appoint a board of directors who would form the policies for the bank and then would employ one or more persons for for a very simple kind of city infrastructure bank probably one person could do it yes ma'am Dakotah I mean ordinary citizens there yes they do and but now they by the citizens possibly that would be the basis for it that would be the sustaining basis the the policies of the Board of Directors could be all right let's let our residents of Iowa City or Cedar Rapids be able to make deposits here and have checking accounts and saving accounts just the way they do at commercial banks and then then that's going to increase the number of employees you'd have to have but the other thing is that you don't have you don't have branch banks or anything like that so at least the Bank of North Dakota doesn't they collaborate with commercial banks yes ma'am are you yeah and with the oil boom and all those people moving into the state it you know so they had they had to make some changes in order to protect their protect their interests as a public bank okay so then you have various banking programs and we'll I want to give some examples of that I think that's what's up next one would be it's an alternative for bonding and you have basically two kinds of general obligation bonds that are paid off with your taxes and and revenue bonds that are paid off by your say your water department you know from the fees that you pay for water and so on here's an example that I drew from Iowa City you know each city is responsible for us publishing a certified annual financial report and so these figures came from Iowa City's 2017 report right now they have general obligation bonds totaling about fifty one and a half a million dollars the interest they're paid they paid in 2017 was that much the interest rate about that and let's say if you had a public bank you could cut that interest about in half and you would save over half a million dollars on those bonds and surely someone could find some other use for that happen million dollars and sending it off to New York because you would pay the interest to the bank but then the bank will return part of that interest to the to the city government just the the Bank of North Dakota for example has returned thirty million dollars a year for the last ten years to the state of North Dakota so so that so they support the ongoing operations as well as the banking interests of the state banks are intended to make money you would not get a business plan approved if if it didn't foresee making money in some way and I think they do that by being more efficient reducing overhead no high I paid executives or no need to pay stockholders and you know saving money is one thing but making it is another one but your you have to keep in view that public service is the main thing your about the bank has to make enough to stay in business has you have to pay your employee and other other things that would go along with the banking some examples of programs that a public bank could run include affordable financing affordable housing helping with student loans with check cashing payday lending affordable housing I don't know what situation here is here in Iowa City although The Gazette keeps telling me that that there's a real struggle about affordable housing here we have one in Cedar Rapids as well and one of the reasons is there's not enough profit in it for developers to undertake it they they want to make more money than that so then that's going to let them so the usual way of financing affordable housing is with bonding and tax credits and I think there's been a lot of controversy about tax increment finance in Iowa City and Coralville I think especially has had a lot of controversy about it Cedar Rapids certainly makes liberal use of tax increment financing and and also tax relief for tax abatements for developers public bank will make make loans at less the bonding rate you know interest rates on bonds going up right now when I looked at bond rating in Cedar Rapids is double-a right now it used to be triple-a but it's double-a right now when I looked at Fidelity's bond interest ratings they said about four point seven percent on bonds now well if you if you are financing as we are in in Cedar Rapids two hundred million dollars worth of the flood financing flood protection financing then that turns out to be a lot a lot of money a lot more than two point three two percent that were able to get on when the Fed had interest rates so low so public bank could make could make bonding rates that would be lower to underwrite construction for infrastructure of affordable housing so on and then there's a lengthy article on Seattle's exploration of public banking at that website anybody wants this PowerPoint I can send it whether you're really okay alright I can do that okay then you all know about students here student loans when I looked it up Oh earlier this week if you took out a student loan between July 1st and June 30th of next year then that's interest you're going to be paying depending on where you are in school you know those loans have they keep the same interest rate for the life of the loan you cannot default on the loan you cannot declare bankruptcy you are saddled with that loan until it is paid off no no two ways about it okay so if the city of Iowa City were to make student loans let's say you were to limit them just to graduates of Iowa City high schools who went to the University and not to all how many students you have there now 25 30,000 at the University so you don't want to take on the whole thing but you know to to honor your graduates of high school here you could give them at lower rates and I think you could do it in a way that would adjust the rate so that when the Fed lowers its rate then you lower your interest rate maybe by keeping it at a percent lower then whatever the feds rates are and if they go up then then you go up just like an adjustable rate mortgage but yeah yeah you would then you would have to you would have to say you'd have to say a minimum interest rate and then a maximum interest rate we have an adjustable rate mortgage on the house that we own and their maximum rate on that is 10 percent so you'd have to have a minimum and a maximum but you could adjust them so and then you could have your local banks be your front office's on making those loans and the banks would get their fees and and and so on and maybe be able to collect a customer or two okay so the other issue that I think public banking could help with is banking for people that are financially marginalized that is working poor and people who are just outright poor have don't have any jobs or have erratic employment and I've been reading an interesting book on that called how the other half banks and the book covers in there a kind of a history of the way people tried to approach banking for the poor poor people don't have any banking services and if you go to my high B you'll see that people walk in there to get money orders they walk in to send money through Western Union they have do it they will cash a check for you if it's on if it's a check from your employer but not and it will give you a certain amount on your personal checks like 20 maybe maybe it's $50 limit on cash on your personal check beyond your purchase yes ma'am Oh like a like a gift card or something like that or a credit card they're starting their own and you know payday lenders that we know about and Cedar Rapids will charge up to four hundred percent on your loan u.s. bank is getting into the business there they're going to charge forty eight percent a year and I think public bank could do better than that you'd have to set your interest rates to take into account defaults and all the risks that are involved in in in payday lending but it would certainly help alleviate a lot of the poverty health care and and lack of Bank services are two of the main things that hold people down who are poor and and keep them that way because these cards that you're talking about some sometimes they will charge you a charge to use the card they'll you know it's not just like it's a free service you have to you pay part of whatever they deposited in your account to pay for the use of that card a payday lender is let's say that I get paid every two weeks and I get paid on Friday of the second week well let's say that at the first of the month I have my rent my utilities my car payment I run out of money and I I don't have enough money to get there's too much month at the end of the money so I have I have maybe on Wednesday I have a half till get some medicine for my for my wife or my husband or my kid and I don't have the money for it and I don't have a credit card because nobody's gonna issue me a credit card so I go to a payday lender and I get a loan for whatever whatever I need and so the idea is that I will pay so much interest for that if I pay it back in 30 days but let's say I can't pay it back in 30 days or I can't pay back all of it then I have to refinance the the balance that I haven't been able to pay off and so the interest just keeps piling up and piling up and piling up until I get that till I get that paid off well you have [Music] and if you're renting that money for three days you might borrow $50 back fifty five doesn't sound like much but five dollars in it is some form of loan sharking now and they only break your leg and I read that a lot of the payday lenders are financed by the big banks and that so I I'm a little puzzled about why US bank must think it's going to make more money by by going directly into the market rather than financing maybe with interest rates going up and everything US bank is saying oh we can make a lot more money because we don't we won't have to give this front office a cut and they guarantee you that the substantially more relaxed than they are with the statement alone that I might take out from the University why I wear that Union and with that laxity they can make a lot more money and they can even up to make them with that laxity they can still make a substantial profit even if they die right so the other thing that I wanted to call attention to is protecting public funds from the next next crash that we're going to have you know in Cedar Rapids we say it's not whether we're going to get flooded it's when we're going to get flooded and although floods are becoming more predictable they're not entirely predictable but crashes seem to be fairly predictable about every ten years or so our former capitalism has a has a big blowup like we did in 2008 and people are starting to see signs of another one coming along here so the next time around you know last time we bailed out the banks trillions of dollars and they did not lend it out to anybody they used it for speculation they were supposed to lend it and that was supposed to get the economy back on its feet and so they got it they got trillions of dollars for almost no no interest at all there was zero interest to them so it was like a giveaway so any rate next time there's not going to be a bailout there's going to be a bail em and and that means that Cedar Rapids for example which has oh I think little over two hundred million dollars invested with with the US bank we'll have its have its money declared as equity by US bank and so that money that they have with us Bank supports the self insurance health policies that city employees have they pay into it the city pays into it but when the bailed in comes the people that were expecting to have insurance will have an equity share in a failed bank so that means that they will have bought stock with that Bank and the money that that was that was in that account in the city contracts with US bank the US Bank put in the best bid for managing that money local banks it's too much money for them to handle
anyway so I think the biggest bank in Cedar Rapids has deposits of about eleven million dollars so handling two hundred two hundred and fifty million dollars would be way beyond the capabilities of a local bank yes ma'am now it would apply to the most likely to the big banks the the local the small banks are probably not going to get hurt as bad because they're not involved in the kind of speculative enterprise that the that the big five or ten banks are I think US bank is the fifth largest bank if you don't count goldman sachs and another another big financial out that no other a big investment outfit so about the first five or ten biggest banks will be the ones that would that would have that did benefit from a bailout your money that becomes the bank's money yes they give you an IOU but the bank now has that much more money and when the bank defaults that money belongs to the bank's creditors not to deposit this has already happened in Cyprus it's at risk for happening in several countries in Europe and it is now legally allowable in the United States and you directly point out that funds that are deposited in time being we haven't seen your evidence that's goes as the either the health care insurance for the retirement insurance I'll see the rapids employees may claim help like the people of that time that outfit in Houston that went campaign Ron and Ron had many io u--'s of worthless paper is either rather than to get nothing no they won't they they will have their probably their deposits from the smaller state banks that they have money in but the bigger the bigger banks are likely to - yes ma'am well the calling services are all over the place and you know I'll get you know if I call in about my computer I'm apt to talk to somebody in India so you know so the these calling services marketing services are all over the place and they just contract with these big companies to do their marketing for them well you know we had a housing bubble and the and the purpose there is a the fire sector is what one of the things I've this acronym finance insurance and real estate are the agencies of the financialization of our economy and for example my the house I live in I live in an older neighborhood in Cedar Rapids the house I live in the last valuation of it by Zillow which is one of these big real estate marketing and assessment outfits said your house is now worth a hundred and forty six thousand dollars well not not a year ago it was worth a hundred and twenty thousand dollars so over the course of a year it's gone up that much so house is worth what a bank will loan you on it and banks have an interest in increasing the loan amount that you take out on the house because they make more money they don't keep the loan themselves they sell it to to Fannie Mae or somebody like that for example I financed my house originally with my credit union but they sold it to Wells Fargo and so which is a whole nother story but in any rate then if as the house value goes up then my insurance premium goes up and then eventually the houses in my neighborhood will start appreciating as well and as they sell then the Assessor says oh we we do comparative values here and so everybody's house going up so my taxes go up you know so so the business about the inflating housing prices and is you know is kind of merciless and relentless the banks drive that and the real estate people do - you know they say - they say to Paul when he's looking for a house you know oh this hey this is a bargain that a quarter of a million dollars you you know so although Paul knows he could probably get it for 200 if if he just has long enough so so they the real estate people the bank people all push to inflate inflate prices the real estate agents going to get a bigger Commission if you know she sells it so so at any rate about I've used up my time and then some so I appreciate it so those are some of the thoughts I have about what economic points out that virtually all of the increase in gross domestic product in the United States over the last decade has been and would you rightly call a higher sector which is massively overinflated and meet your original economists like Adam Smith when they talk about free trade they're talking about trade that is independent of the fire sector the fire sector produces artificial inflation the insurance is an artificial rent is is popular and income we hit come from monopoly investment is basically on there because it if I make a drug that cost me five dollars to reduce and I charge five hundred or four hundred ninety five is basically unheard income and it is basically uh near indeed from that in a German of America's gross domestic product were reasonably a decade I would the sky Michael Hudson is associated with University of Missouri Kansas City and that that Economics Department there is OPA lightly called heterodox but they they are very critical of the Freedmen's Chicago School of Economics and so I commend Michael Hudson and and stephanie kelton and and they were hold there a whole bunch of of these folks that that I've benefited from reading and so I would I would commend commend them to you so and I'm also working on a project to how we can have public ownership of monopolies and and benefit cities are our utilities our cable television internet so all of these sayings should be publicly owned and so thank you very much for coming and for your attention and grateful to you for listening thank you
