This week, the Maryland House of Delegates' Economic Matters Committee will hold hearings on HB0794, which amends section 1-212 of Maryland's Code to authorize political entities in the state to establish public banks, and calls for the study and evaluation of a Maryland State Bank. Read more

While cities around the country are going broke--a result of their reliance on big private Wall Street banks, high-interest and risky financing schemes, and overreliance on unpopular (and often regressive) taxation, Grand Forks, North Dakota, is smiling today. Read more

In 2013, at a Climate workshop in Istanbul sponsored by Al Gore, a civil engineer named Delton Chen conceived of a new global currency that would drive greenhouse gas mitigation. The idea would become the foundation of the group Global4C, which wants to use public banks as an agent for this monetary conduit to climate justice. Read more

While activists and citizens in several countries prepare to protest Saturday's signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of its chief negotiators, the economic minister from Japan, has been forced to resign from the ruling cabinet because of bribery allegations.  Read more

For Immediate Release Contact: Walt McRee, walt@publicbankinginstitute.org / Matt Stannard, matt@publicbankinginstitute.org Interviews available with those quoted or mentioned in the release    Significant savings of taxpayer dollars and sizable predicted profits were just two of the positive results of a 10 month study undertaken by the City of Santa Fe, NM, moving the city one step closer toward creating America’s first new publicly-owned bank in almost 100 years.   Read more

The following story is from the Santa Fe New Mexican, January 13, 2015.  To read the Santa Fe Public Banking Feasibility Study report, click here.  Read more

"People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change,” says Desmond Tutu, demonstrating consciousness of the bottom line that has delayed action on clean energy and the much larger task of providing security to those who will be displaced by climate disasters and the way humanity rapidly, in a panic, responds to them. Tutu is right to call it "the injustice of climate change" too, because climate is an economic justice issue as much as it is an objective question of environmental impacts. Read more

I apologize for "de-democratizes" in the title. I wrestled with "un-democratizes," "hurts every good cause," and "cuts a swath down the sail of American democracy like Errol Flynn," and none of them seemed to work. I decided to go with a word that represents curtailment, undermining, moving away from. American political and economic life certainly isn't democratic enough, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership makes it all less so, because it undermines an entire category of democratic policymaking. As we'll see straight away, the TPP is not the only trade agreement that does this, but as others have noted, it's wider and deeper than its predecessors.  Read more

We have received so many inquiries about the status of the Public Bank for Santa Fe. The news is good! Read more

Two or more years ago, only a few libertarians and some innovative left thinkers were talking about guaranteed income. Last year, more proposals and opinions began to trickle in. Now, governments are experimenting with it, political parties and think tanks are endorsing it, and opposition is surprisingly mild.  In a way, it's not hard to see why. For countries with a strong tradition of social democracy and regulated markets, dividend income is another (more efficient) arrow in the quiver. And in the U.S., where half of all Americans are economically insecure and battles over minimum wage take place against a backdrop of a wholesale abandonment of supportable wage work, it's increasingly apparent that our capacity to create full-time livable work income for even most Americans is melting down.  Of course, part of the case for basic income is that the value of money itself is fluid, and can be democratized. That's what groups like Positive Money and PBI bring to the table. As for the rest of the story, here are several important reads from merely the last 30 days on the ideological convergence and current widespread embrace of basic income.  Read more