Michael Sauvante

Executive Director, National Commonwealth Group, Inc. msauvante@commonwealthgroup.net

Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the economic backbone of economies everywhere. My research efforts over the past decade consistently brought me back to the question of how to put more money in the hands of SMEs and communities, and the mechanisms to facilitate them. Ultimately that led to an examination of money itself and exploring how it is injected into local economies. Ask anyone where they think money comes from and most will guess the government. But most national governments create only about 3% of all their money in circulation. The other ~97% is created by private commercial banks when they make loans. The Bank of England revealed that secret in 2014. A deeper exploration of the existing money paradigm revealed that bank-created money puts in motion the forces that inevitably will lead to income and wealth disparities in society. That led to the conclusion that to truly break free from the constraints of the current monetary system, money must be injected into the economy via alternative means.

Pursuing that concept, I discovered certain times and places in history where money was issued by the people rather than the government or banks and yielded unparalleled prosperity for those communities. These particular "complementary" currencies drove periods of abundance, while most did not.

Understanding why they succeeded established a new framework for how regions can achieve economic sovereignty. In doing so, many, if not all, of the world's current financial limitations can be eliminated.

KEYWORDS: Small and medium-sized enterprises, economies,