Bernard Lietaer - The Future of Money - Full Book

complementary currency systems as 'typical', while in reality it was an exception.

However, notwithstanding such mishaps, the majority of the applications in the US were correctly designed and successful. There even exists a remarkable catalogue which illustrates several thousand examples of local scrip from every state in the Union.

This sets the scene for some key conversations between Professor Irving Fisher and Dean Acheson, then Under-secretary of the Treasury. Fisher was convinced that stamp scrip was the way out of the Depression, and brought his considerable knowledge to bear to prove this. He went on record with the statement that 'The correct application of stamp scrip would solve the Depression crisis m the US in three weeks!’ Dean Acheson, a prudent man, decided to refer the whole concept to one of his own economics professors at Harvard, the well-respected Professor Russell Sprague. The answer came back that in his opinion this approach would indeed succeed in bringing America back to work out of the Depression. But it also had some political implications about decentralisation that he might want to check with the President...

We know what President Roosevelt's final reaction was from a speech he made a few weeks later. This is probably his most famous address, the one including the phrase 'The only thing we need to fear is fear itself. In it, he announced a series of impressive centralised new initiatives to counter the crisis: the expansion of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and a series of large-scale Federal government-managed work-creation projects - basically, what became known as the New Deal, completed in 1934 by the first US Export-Import Bank. He also announced that by executive decree he would henceforth prohibit 'emergency currencies'. This was the code name for all the complementary currencies already in existence, and all those in preparation around the country.