Sovereignty & Seignorage

A Structural Framework for Democratising Monetary Control

Sovereignty & Seignorage is a framework within which to redress the imbalance between corporate private and democratic public control of the money supply, nationally and internationally.

The natural sovereignty to issue currency has been removed from European countries such as Italy, Germany and France without a democratic referendum. Instead, the European Central Bank Corporation, whose shareholders are the national Central Banks, controls the money supply unaccountable to anybody.

As the ECB threatens to extend its scope into the UK, it is important to maintain the sovereignty of the Bank of England to issue
Sterling.

Seignorage is the revenue that a government makes from the difference between the cost of producing notes and coins and their face value.

This income stream for the State has gone down as its share of creating cash has gone down from nearly 30% in 1969 to about 3% currently.

In accountancy terms, the debts and credits between nations are treated differently than between banks and companies or individuals. But they all boil down to + or – and sums or differences over short and long time spans.

Likewise, credit created by banks does not appear as ‘assets’ but as ‘expenditure’ and the accounts of bank would look very different if they were kept according to the same conventions as other companies.

Redressing imbalances between ‘state-created money’ (interest-free notes and coins) and ‘bank-created money’ (interest-bearing credit) thus means taking back the democratic control over the money supply and the creation of money for a Nation

• Through the sovereignty to issue money by a public democratic rather than private corporate institution
• By ensuring seignorage as an income stream for the State and a measure for controlling the money supply besides varying interest rates.

Our network of monetary reformers is preparing to take simultaneous legal actions in the major Eurozone countries demanding the relevant courts to rule that the European Central Bank and the Eurosystem are unlawful under the respective constitutions. This is because they dispossess the involved states of their natural monetary sovereignty in favour of an independent unaccountable politically uncontrolled institution, namely the European Central Bank Corporation (see Articles 104, 105 and 107 of the Maastricht treaty). The shares of the ECB are mostly owned either directly or indirectly by private banks, bankers and financiers, most of which are not European citizens.

We will lay the emphasis particularly on the difference existing between the continental Eurosystem and Britain, whose monetary sovereignty is retained by the nation and its government thanks to the nationalization of the Bank of England. This was achieved in 1946 and constitutes a bulwark of democracy. Were Britain ever to enter the European Central Bank system, she would lose her monetary independence and sovereignty to an unaccountable foreign and privately owned financial organisation, thus becoming a sort of financial colony of not completely identified potentates.

The more you help us, the better our chances to disrupt the legitimacy and credibility of the EURO. For further details, please contact Sabine McNeill, Organiser, Forum for Stable Currencies, www.monies.cc Tel: 020 7328 3701.

The initiator of this idea is Italian lawyer Marco della Luna whose book EuroSlaves has given rise to the formation of the Committee for Monetary Liberation.