Ever wondered why there's so much debt?

 

Watch 10 year old Holly explain where debt and money come from - and what it means for you...

 

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Positive Money is a movement to democratise money and banking so that it works for society and not against it.

Our current financial system has left us with the highest personal debt in history, unaffordable housing, worsening inequality, high unemployment and banks that are subsidised and underwritten with taxpayers’ money. We believe that these problems have a common root: money.

 

 

Many of the big social and economic problems that we're facing today are connected to money. If we want to solve these problems, we have to change the way that money is created. Most of us learn that only the government can create money, but in reality more than 97% of money is created by private banks - the same banks you see on the high-street every day.

The money banks create isn't the paper money you keep in your wallet. It's the electronic money that flashes up when you check your balance at an ATM. Find out How Banks Create Money...

Debt

Banks create this electronic money whenever they make a loan. That means for every pound in your bank account, someone else must have a pound of debt. The authorities find it very difficult to limit how much money - and debt - that banks can create. As a result personal debt is now higher than ever before.
MORE: Why is there so much debt?

 

      

Inequality

Since almost all of our money is 'on loan' from banks, someone must pay interest on nearly every pound in the UK. This interest redistributes money from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10%. The money banks create also pushes up house prices, and blows up bubbles in financial markets - making the very rich even richer.       MORE: Why are the rich getting richer?

 

      

High House Prices

House prices have been pushed up and out of reach by the hundreds of billions of pounds of new money that banks created in the years before the financial crisis. It's not just that there's too many people and not enough houses..


MORE: Why are house prices so high?