new forms of money: the dutch way

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http://www.gelre-handelsnetwerken.nl/index.shtml

http://www.henrymakow.com/dutch_barter_system_angers_ban.html

Dutch Barter System Challenges Bankers

November 3, 2009

"Believe it or not, but De Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch central bank,) run by Nout Wellink who is on the board of BIS and a member of the Trilaterals) shut down my on-line telebank service. A clear sign I was on the right track :-). "

By Anthony Migchels

My name is Anthony Migchels and I am the initiator of the "Gelre," the first Regional Currency in the Netherlands.
My organization is a foundation, not for profit, not a company, because I believe credit should be a public facility, serving the people that actually OWN the credit, instead of milking them dry with what is rightfully theirs. The Gelre foundation is run by a board of three.

We now have almost a hundred companies participating and the break even point should come at about 300, after that we can get an income out of it. But the real goal is, to hook up 66% of all companies in Gelderland, a province in the Netherlands with 1.2 million inhabitants and 60k companies. A GDP of about 40 billion Euro.

It is clear that interest bearing debt to a bank as money is a vicious hoax, but strangely enough, few have been developing a viable alternative.

Ellen Brown and the Money Master people, whom I both regard very highly, have reasonable
propositions, but they are still considering reform at the state-level and that is simply not going to happen. Not here in Europe and not before having survived WW3, anyway.

State Level real money implies the end of the New World Order Central Banking Vampires.
There is Bernard Lietaer, but his biggest point seems to be that 'complementary currencies' complement the 'national' (banking, really) currencies. He has correctly analyzed the negative aspects of interest, but is completely oblivious (or pretends to be) to the nefarious nature of the powers behind the printing press. It is clear that real alternative currencies have only one goal: to destroy the credibility of humanities greatest plague and its metal based successors. The goal is clearly NOT to play second fiddle.

I like Thomas Greco, who is very knowledgeable. He suggests mutual credit, facilitated by Market Players as a solution, but even he has not pinpointed what is to my mind the most crucial challenge for anybody wanting to create a viable currency, able to truly compete with Dollar or Euro

That challenge is as follows:

Barter units allow for interest free credit, but are not convertible to major currencies and convertible units don't allow for non interest bearing credit.
Combining these two features, convertibility and interest free credit, is essential for non state/non bank monies to have a real impact.

It is the way of the not so distant future :-)

Most barter schemes have prohibitive transactions costs. Also, and even more importantly, they are not convertible to Euro/Dollar. They usually are OK for swapping excess inventory or goods and services with low marginal cost, but not for high powered capital intensive industry.
The Euro/Dollar/Pound based Berkshares (http://berkshares.org/) , Lewes Pound
(http://www.thelewesPound.org/) and German Regional Currencies (www.regiogeldverein.de) are stronger, because they are based on national currencies: you give up a Dollar and in return you get a Berkshare, that can be spent within the network. In effect the Dollar remains in the network. Because there is a Dollar in the bank, companies can convert excess local currencies (units that they cannot usefully spend in the network) to Dollar/Euro The problem is, there can never be more of the local currency in circulation, than the supplying organization has Dollars/Euro in the bank. Therefore they cannot supply any credit.

This is also the basic architecture of the current Gelre. Another conceptual problem with this approach is that you are basing real, loving money on the most toxic commodity known to man: interest bearing bank debt as money.

There is also a legal problem here, in Europe, anyway:

Believe it or not, but De Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch central bank,) run by Nout Wellink who is on the board of BIS and a member of the Trilaterals) shut down my on-line telebank service. A clear sign I was on the right track :-). They did so because of a prohibition on collecting 'reclaimable money' (a direct translation of judicial lingo, I'm not sure an English speaking lawyer will know what this means).

You can, however, manage reclaimable money if you give a paper voucher in return. This is a loophole designed for book vouchers and the like.

Now we have only paper money in circulation. Of course, this law is to 'protect consumers' (wink wink). You have to realize this was going on last year, 2008. The people from the Dutch Central Bank are telling me they are very worried about the couple of thousand Euro that we manage as deposits for circulating Gelres. The same people that have been supervising and in effect organizing the credit crunch that has cost taxpayers in the west trillions
of Dollars.

Now, being confronted by men and women (kind and intelligent people!) in expensive suits destroying and enslaving the people I love, including myself, who are telling you they are protecting consumers by putting me out of business, kind of pisses me off BIG TIME.
Brainwashed or not, you start to dislike them even more than you already did.
Its probably not the same with everybody, but if somebody starts playing with my family jewels,
smiling all the time and speaking very correctly gets me thinking. To be honest, it was an experience that inspired.

By creating a unit that combines both strengths, cheap credit AND convertibility, we believe it is possible to actually compete with Euro Creating money out of thin air that will buy Euro and eventually gold, it sure gets me excited :-)

We'll buy the world back :-))). we won't, but the people using the Gelre will!
The only problem is: how to do it and inspiration makes answering this elusive question easy: you create convertibility not by reclaimable deposits, but by creating an open marketplace where your unit can be traded!

In this way, you create convertibility not by having Euro or Dollars deposited, but by more classical means: foreign exchange markets have been around for quite some time, but only for bank money Speculation is out of the question, because in the network 1 Gelre=1 Euro always.

My foundation simply always sells Gelre for 95 cents, so it is no use offering your Gelres for more.

And because 1 Gelre has a purchasing power of 1 Euro in the network, there is always a natural demand for Gelre because its buyer gets a de facto discount of at least 5%.
Of course you want a stable rate for the Gelre, close to its target of 0,95 cents. This is achieved by correctly managing the amount of Gelre you issue. If you issue to many, people will dump it on the market and your unit goes down the drain: nobody will accept it if its rate goes down too much.

But you can, and we have, create a stabilization fund. Because we sell Gelre for 0,95 cents, we have Euro. We could simply pocket them, but then we would be ripping off the system. It would be a goldmine. Nobody would even notice, people are gullible, but the idea is to help, not to steal. No, the Euro we get in this way go into the stabilization fund and we use them to buy back Gelres if the rate goes down to much.

In effect this means we can almost guarantee a stable exchange rate. Almost, because every adult has to awaken to the fact that there is only one guarantee in life: you die.
It is childish to look for guarantees from institutions. That is part of what is called 'arrested
development'.

At this moment we are programming the on-line exchange. Its not complicated at all, thankfully.

Naturally all this needs to be managed correctly. And of course the idea is very simple. But also revolutionary. A breakthrough that has the potential to create very powerful currencies that can compete globally and locally in many diverse networks against the far to expensive (because of interest) '(supra)national' currencies.

We have chosen a regional scope, because one of our main goals is to stop centralization of power. Since most local economic area's are 80% self sufficient, it is natural that they are monetarily as well.

And because 'The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it' and also because 'the process of money creation is so simple, it repels the mind' transparency is essential in any real money system.

Therefore we have created the Gelre monitor, which reports real-time to all parties involved, on-line, all the key indicators of the Gelre. Turnover, amount in circulation, percentage that is taken by the issuing organization for costs, number of participants, etc, etc. All this information will be available with just a few mouse clicks.

End of this year, maybe early next, our new system will be on-line, hopefully. And it is going to work. Despite the many unknowns to the public. You know why?
Because we are going to print some money and GIVE IT AWAY!

We are going to give away millions of Gelre (1 Gelre = 1 Euro). Why not? We print it for nothing! We don't use that money to stuff these piggybanksters, but we hand it over to the people!! And they can spend it at the businesses that join. These businesses can actually convert their Gelre income to Euro (at a small cost).

We are going to play Santa Clause and all that money is going to circulate forever, continuing to create business. A skyrocketing Gelre Economy in the depths of a very severe depression.
Nobody can get a Eurodime, but we give away millions of Gelre!!

Of course most of the Gelres we put into circulation will be lent out (without interest, but of course with some (very cheap) price, we have bills to pay) in a mutual credit kind of scheme, or sold for Euro (for the benefit of the stabilization fund), but a reasonably small percentage can be simply given away.

You know, the Dutch have a reputation, well deserved, for being the Jews of the Gentiles. If GIVING THEM MONEY FOR NOTHING is not going to convince them, I'm just gonna give up and let the wolves do their thing.

As a final note: one of the most painful delusions many well informed and well intentioned people suffer from, is that the problem is paper money. And that gold is the solution. It is not. Gold is controlled by the same scoundrels that control the current printing presses.
The problem is inflating and deflating an interest bearing money supply. By fraudulent criminals. This is the same for gold as it is for paper. Where do people think all the depressions before 1913 came from?

Of course, gold DOES have a function as the great, eternal tell tale of paper manipulation. That is why it has been manipulated at an unimaginable scale. If it had not been, gold would probably already be at 5k Dollars per ounce. Real inflation (as opposed to the FED figures) has been that bad, the last few decades.

But as a means of exchange it is worthless. Impractical and with an unstable, non-transparent supply. Stable, transparent supply is a core indicator of high quality money.

To be honest, the bankers couldn't care less about the paper, if they can replace it by gold.
Money is one of the few commodities that we can produce infinitely at virtually no cost. The art of the trade is to create plentiful money, without overdoing it. Even a limited amount of inflation is OK, as long as people are aware of it, are compensated for it and don't save the money.

Saving money is always a bad idea anyway, because it withholds money from circulation, but that is another story.

The point is, that if you have a reasonable entity issuing the money, its supply will be stable and cheap.

The Gelre will also prove that gold is as big a hoax as is interest bearing debt.
You can tell I'm excited about it, I can hardly believe we are actually going to do this, and sometimes I am afraid, not only of success, but also of the banksters.
We are going to do it, though.......

us s/m businesses:+500 barter exchanges operative

http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/23/smallbusiness/fair_trade.fsb/

Make purchases without cash

In a tough economy, more business owners are conserving cash by bartering for the stuff they need.

By Justin Martin

June 29, 2009: 1:10 PM ET

(FSB Magazine) -- Tina Ames owns the Craftsmen Cafe, a Clarence, N.Y. eatery that specializes in organic comfort fare such as chicken soup and apple pie. Recently she needed to replace her restaurant's roof, a $7,000 job. Ames was loath to part with that much cash and didn't want to take out a loan.

Her solution? She cut a deal with a local contractor who handled the roofing job in exchange for a Ford F-150 pickup that Ames no longer needed. "I grew up on a farm," she says. "If you had eggs and someone else had corn, you traded. It's an old way of doing things, and it makes a lot of sense."

Even in modern times, bartering remains a practical choice for small businesses. It's a cash preservation tool, something that's especially useful in a tough economy. It can also help move unsold inventory or put idled staff to work. Done right, bartering can even drive new cash business.

Many trades get executed informally, as when a dentist cleans her accountant's teeth in exchange for tax preparation services. But increasing numbers of small businesses are joining barter exchanges that make it possible to arrange trades within a large online network. U.S. exchanges now boast about 250,000 small business members, up from 200,000 five years ago, according to the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA), based in Rochester, N.Y.

Because so many swaps are informal, the size of the small business barter economy is hard to gauge. But Bob Meyer, publisher of Barter News in Mission Viejo, Calif., was willing to take a crack at it. Meyer estimates that 1 million small businesses are involved in barter, either informally or through exchanges, with a volume of transactions approaching $20 billion annually. This figure combines the $10 billion that IRTA attributes to exchange trades with Meyer's conservative estimate that informal barter accounts for another $10 billion.

Typically, bartering activity spikes during economic downturns. Meyer expects the total volume of U.S. barter transactions to grow 10% this year (historically the annual growth rate has hovered around 5%). "Right now many small businesses are starved for customers," he says. "If you're a savvy owner, barter is just another doorway that brings customers into your establishment."

Drew McLellan runs the McLellan Marketing Group, a firm with 10 employees and $5 million in 2008 revenues. A resident of Des Moines, he's a devotee of informal barter and sees a real advantage in doing deals within a tight-knit community of trusted owners. "These are my neighbors," he says. "I know I'll bump into them at a Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500), so they can't afford to mess up and neither can I."

Even so, McLellan is careful to draw up a contract whenever he barters. As in any business deal, the contract is a crucial formality that entrepreneurs neglect at their peril. At the very least, experts say, the parties should exchange e-mails that establish a written record of their intentions. In the event that one party reneges on the deal, a properly drafted barter contract would stand up in small claims court. More important, a contract sets terms so that both parties know exactly what's expected.

McLellan recently cut a barter deal with a local Internet provider: His firm created a print ad for the Web business, and McLellan received a high-speed connection and two years of service. McLellan values each party's contribution at $10,000 -- the amount he would have billed for the ad, and also the cost of getting a much-needed Internet connectivity upgrade for his firm.

Like so many small business owners, McLellan is spooked by the economy's free-fall. Lately some of his clients have delayed payments because of cash flow problems. Bartering for Internet service allows McLellan to preserve his precious cash for rent, utilities and salaries. "I'm in ultraconservative mode," he says. "Barter is a great way to nip and tuck operating expenses."

McLellan also cut a deal with Des Moines consulting firm Kick in the Pants, which is drawing up a strategic road map to help his firm grow. In return, McLellan developed a cardboard point-of-purchase display for a card game called Do You Q? that Kick in the Pants is shopping for sale in bookstores and other retail outlets. The deal values each party's work at $7,500, McLellan says.

Because of the soft economy, McLellan's firm hasn't been working at full capacity. The barter arrangement gave McLellan's employees, who typically create advertising posters and direct-mail pieces, the chance to try something new. "It allowed them to stretch their skills, particularly the junior staffers," he says. "And now my firm has a new offering -- retail point-of-purchase displays -- that we can suggest to other prospective clients."

McLellan says he diligently reports his barter income to the IRS. So does Ames of the Craftsmen Cafe. That not only keeps them on the right side of the law, it also allows them to claim tax deductions when they barter for items categorized as business expenses. For example, a caterer who barters $250 in services to a printer in exchange for $250 worth of business cards can claim a tax deduction for that amount.

For better or worse, many business owners gravitate to informal barter because the deals tend to stay off the books. It's hard for the IRS to uncover an instance of bartering if neither party reports it, says Tom Ochsenschlager, vice president of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in Washington, D.C. But informal barter has drawbacks. Would-be traders must locate a counterpart for each transaction. And some swaps simply don't make sense. It might be impractical to cut a $10,000 barter deal with a restaurant, for example. Would you really want all those chicken dinners? And what if the restaurant went out of business before you'd claimed your grub? By contrast, joining an online barter exchange can expand your network of trading partners and provide access to a much larger selection of goods and services.

Christian Kar is the founder of Silver Cup Coffee, a company with 16 employees and $3 million in 2008 revenues that's based in the Seattle suburb of Lynnwood. The firm distributes high-end espresso machines and also creates custom coffee blends. Its customers include indie coffeehouses, hotels and restaurants.

In recent months Kar has bartered for Web site design, a walk-in freezer, a phone system, vehicle maintenance, plumbing, catering for a company holiday party and a parking lot paint job. Kar estimates that 5% of his company's expenses are covered through barter: "Especially in such a dicey economy, I always think, 'Do I pay in cash, or should I get on the barter exchange?' "

Thanks mostly to the Internet, the U.S. currently boasts some 500 barter exchanges, up from about 40 in 1980. Kar trades through an outfit called BizXchange that's headquartered in Seattle. Here's how it works: Say a printing company uses the exchange to buy $1,000 worth of Kar's coffee. Kar will receive $1,000 worth of trade dollars that he can use to pay for any good or service offered on the exchange. He doesn't have to barter directly with the printer. In fact, if the printer goes belly-up, Kar keeps his 1,000 trade dollars. He could split up his barter purchases, buying 500 trade dollars' worth of lightbulbs and 500 in window cleaning. "An exchange is like a small closed economy with its own currency," explains David Wallach, executive director of IRTA.

Most barter exchanges charge a onetime membership fee (typically around $250) plus a monthly fee ($30 is standard). You also pay the exchange a commission of 5% to 8% on each barter transaction. The fees buy access to a broader range of barter transactions than you could structure for yourself. You also get to join an online community consisting mostly of small business owners.

Exchanges provide useful record-keeping services. All transactions are reported to the IRS, and the exchange usually furnishes members with monthly and year-end statements of their trading activity. Although most exchanges focus on particular regions, they sometimes have reciprocal arrangements with others around the country. This can be useful if you're trying to locate an obscure item, or even for business travel. Recently Kar booked trips to Toronto, Chicago and Miami through exchanges with which BizXchange has a relationship.

Whether done informally or through an exchange, bartering allows business owners to connect with customers whom they might not otherwise find. Joe Gallenberger is a case in point. Gallenberger owns Cream City Music, a store in the Milwaukee suburbs that sells new and vintage guitars. He employs eight and posted $3.5 million in revenues last year. Gallenberger often trades guitars for advertising. Last year he closed enough barter deals to purchase $50,000 worth of spots, nearly half his annual ad budget. He also cut deals for space in a Milwaukee Pennysaver and in the local edition of the Onion, a national humor publication.

Gallenberger also trades guitars for other business necessities, such as printing and plumbing. All the while, he's careful to treat barter customers with the same courtesy he extends to his cash customers. "You never know who's going to talk you up to others," he says. "Word of mouth from barter customers is just as valuable as it is from any other kind of customer."

According to Gallenberger, barter helped increase customer traffic at his store by 20% in 2008. He says about half the business came from returning barter clients and the rest from ads. He wouldn't trade that for anything.

bartering exchange to open in moscow

The Moscow Times

» Issue 4072 »

VMillionaire's Crisis Plan: Return to Bartering

27 January 2009

By Nadia Popova / Staff Writer

To help pull the world out of economic crisis, German Sterligov, one of Russia's first multimillionaires, has swapped his valenki for polished office boots.

After spending four years in a wooden hut in a forest outside Moscow, Sterligov has leased out almost an entire floor atop a skyscraper in the Moskva-City business district to launch a global barter system.

Sterligov, who doesn't watch television and rarely uses the Internet because of his Orthodox religious principles, plans to start facilitating the barter of debt and goods with his company, the Anti-Crisis Settlement and Accounting Center, by early March.

While the global economic crisis didn't sweep into Russia until September, Sterligov said he sensed that trouble was looming in August and got to work.

"I decided that barter trade would be the right choice for the world in times of liquidity problems and payment delays," he said in a recent interview.

So from August to November, computer programmers hired by Sterligov created an interactive database allowing the barter of debt and goods worldwide.

Sterligov illustrated a possible barter deal with a real-life example: Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works' estimated debt of 1 billion rubles ($30.4 million) to Mechel for coal supplies.

"Mechel could put information about MMK's nonpayment in our system and then add which products it needs itself," Sterligov said.

MMK, in turn, would put 1 billion rubles of steel into the system, he said. At some point, a company would surface that wanted steel and had a product needed by Mechel, and the deal would be completed.

"For this to work, you have to have thousands of bids in the system," Sterligov said, adding that debt would probably become the most popular item for barter.

Mechel and MMK declined to comment about their possible participation in such a system.

Barter trade was widespread in Russia in the 1990s, when economic turmoil following the Soviet collapse prompted companies to pay employees and creditors with the products they produced — anything from bricks to vegetable oil.

Sterligov built his fortune through one of Russia's first mercantile exchanges, which he launched in 1990, and subsequently got involved in businesses, "ranging from fish processing to metals trade," he said.

Sterligov said he had invested "several million euros" into the Anti-Crisis Settlement and Accounting Center. "I have no business plan — it's my money — and I spend as much as I want and is reasonable," he said.

Sterligov said he has opened offices through joint ventures in New York, London, Brussels, Hong Kong, Paris and Sydney and plans to open three more soon — in Istanbul, Berlin and Milan. He said his company owns 51 percent in each joint venture.

He declined to disclose the firms' names before an official presentation of his company in late February.

The company currently has 13 regional offices across Russia and plans to boost the number to 1,000 — mostly small offices in towns and villages — by March, when the whole system is to be launched.

Sterligov plans to hire around 15,000 people in Russia, mainly workers who have been laid off in recent months as companies scaled back production and axed investment plans.

Sitting in his office on the 26th floor of the Moskva-City skyscraper, Sterligov said it takes him two hours to get to work from his hut in a forest of the Mozhaisky district of the Moscow region, 100 kilometers northwest of Moscow, where he lives with his wife and five children.

"I still have sheep, chickens, goats and cows, but now they are mainly my wife and children's responsibility," said Sterligov, 42.

He said he would return to the woods as soon as the world gets out of the economic crisis.

Sterligov moved to the forest in 2004 after selling all of his holdings, including "several luxurious houses" in the prestigious neighborhood along the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Shosse and some property abroad. "I had to pay back huge debts from my election campaigns," Sterligov said.

Sterligov unsuccessfully ran for Krasnoyarsk governor and Moscow mayor before then-President Vladimir Putin ended popular elections for the positions. He also tried to run for president in 2004 but was denied registration because of his failure to get notary certification for the signatures of support that he had submitted. Sterligov says he followed all the proper legal procedures.

He refused to say how he had earned the money for the Anti-Crisis Settlement and Accounting Center.

Several companies contacted by The Moscow Times expressed an interest in using barter trade during the crisis. "We could use barter trade to pay our contractors with the square meters that we build," said Yevgeny Plaksenkov, chief executive of Miel, a leading real estate company. "We know how it all works through our experience in the 1990s."

The crisis of liquidity logically leads to barter trade, he said. "However, barter is like a drug for the economy," he said. "It may give a temporary effect, but if you continue playing with barter it throws the economy backward."

Sergei Ryabov, head of regional and strategy development at Titan-Agro, an agro-business holding, said Sterligov's plans had potential. "In times of crisis, all means are good," he said.

Economists and legal experts, however, were highly skeptical about Sterligov's initiative. "The price of money is not high enough yet to return to the underdeveloped economy of the 1990s," said Natalya Orlova, chief economist at Alfa Bank. "The state was weak then, and taxes were barely paid. It is all different now."

Sergei Voitishkin, a corporate partner at Baker & McKenzie, said barter would not work because of hassles involving taxes and property rights. "The crisis is an opportunity to make economies more efficient, whereas barter schemes throw us back into the Dark Ages, which is definitely not what modern economy needs," he said.

barter or starve

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3e5c633c-ebdc-11dd-8838-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Nations turn to barter deals to secure food

By Javier Blas in London

January 26 2009 23:32

Countries struggling to secure credit have resorted to barter and secretive government-to-government deals to buy food, with some contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a striking example of how the global financial crisis and high food prices have strained the finances of poor and middle-income nations, countries including Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Morocco say they have signed or are discussing inter-government and barter deals to import commodities from rice to vegetable oil.

The revival of these trade practices, used rarely in the last 20 years and usually by nations subject to international embargoes and the old communist bloc, is a result of the countries’ failure to secure trade financing as bank lending has dried up.

The countries have not disclosed the value of any deals, and some have refused even to confirm their existence. Officials estimated that they ranged from $5m for smaller contracts to more than $500m for the biggest.

Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations’ World Food Programme, said senior government officials, including heads of state, had told the WFP they were facing “difficulties” obtaining credit to purchase food. “This could be a big problem,” she told the Financial Times.

While food prices have fallen from their record high last year, this fall is only temporary, a study by Chatham House, the London-based think-tank, suggests
Last week, Malaysia’s commodities minister, Datuk Peter Chin Fah Kui, said Kuala Lumpur had already signed a barter deal swapping palm oil for fertilizer and machinery with North Korea, Cuba and Russia. He said Malaysia was talking to Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Iran about other barter deals.

“[Bartering] could be used for contracts with other countries that do not have the cash,” Mr Chin told the local press. “We can set the conditions for them to supply us with the raw materials that we need.”

Thailand, the world’s largest exporter of rice, is discussing barter deals with Middle Eastern countries, including Iran. The Philippines, the world’s largest importer of rice, has secured rice needs for this year through a diplomatic agreement with Hanoi.

The countries’ struggle to obtain credit to import food is boosting the price of domestic crops. Ms Sheeran said that prices of crops in some African countries were rising sharply even as international food commodities prices had fallen from last summer.

The move to barter shows the global food crisis that started last year is far from over.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009