Guest lecture: The digital revolution and new monetary and financial tools

Guest speaker is Susana Martín Belmonte.

Venue: ETLA, Arkadiankatu 23 B, Helsinki. Entry from next to Café Antell; take the elevator to the 4th floor. Free admission.

Abstract: Most of the conventional neoclassical economic models assume — implicitly or explicitly — that the monetary side of the economics has little or no effect on the real economy, other than possibly causing occasional disturbances.

In this talk, we show that the financial power is rooted in the very foundations of the capitalist system. The current financification of our economic system started with a monetary event: the unilateral withdrawal of the gold standard by the USA in 1971. We will show how this trend has taken us to a dead end, to an economic system that is forced to grow and cannot grow, causing huge social inequalities.

If we want to shift from the pattern of recurrent financial bubbles and crises, we need another monetary event. We present a proposal that this event could be the creation of complementary currencies by the citizens, as a new way of allocating resources, alternative to the financial markets. We also briefly explore the different possibilities that new technologies, like the blockchains, are introducing in this arena.

Speaker: Susana Martín Belmonte is an economist (UAM), with a Bachelor in Economic Theory (1993) and a Masters in Marketing Management (1998). Early in her career she was a market analyst at the commercial office of the Spanish embassy in Mexico, in an ICEX program. However, she has spent most of her professional life on the Internet, developing digital businesses for private enterprises.  In 2003 she began her independent research on the monetary system.  In 2011, she published the book “Nada está perdido: un sistema monetario y financiero alternativo y sano”.

She is a founding member of the Instituto de la Moneda Social.  The institute is dedicated to the development of the complementary currencies and to promote monetary system reform.

She keeps a blog (in Spanish) at www.soberaniafinanciera.org