Complementary and Local Currencies

Volume III — Money, Energy, Information

THE PLATE

A man writing at a desk on a balcony above a mountain valley, books stacked beside him, cloud over the peaks. — Plate III.03The Stamp, at the End of the Month.A currency is not a thing. It is an agreement with a running cost, and somebody is always paying it. The only question a design settles is who.

THE LETTER

You have almost certainly been told that Wörgl worked and that the bankers stopped it, that the Swiss have run a parallel currency since 1934 and it keeps them steady in recessions, and that a town in England printed its own pound and it was wonderful until it wasn't. All three of those are true. None of them is useful yet, because in every telling the interesting number is missing.

The missing number is what the scheme cost to run, per unit of money it moved.

It is missing for a reason that is not conspiracy. Currency schemes publish their circulation, their membership and their turnover, because those figures grow and growing figures raise money. Almost none of them publish annual operating cost against annual turnover, because that ratio is the one that decides whether the scheme exists in ten years, and for most of them it is not a number you would put on a poster.

This chapter puts it on the poster. For six of the best-documented schemes in the world we compute the same two figures — how fast the money turns over, and what it costs per unit turned over — and then we let them rank each other. The answer is unusually clean, which is why the chapter is worth your evening: a retail town pound in Britain has a half-life of nine years, a business credit circuit does not have a measurable half-life at all, and the difference between them is a single ratio that anyone can compute in an afternoon from figures the schemes already disclose.

You are not here to be told local money is good. You already suspect it is. You are here to find out what makes one live to ninety-two and another to nine, and then to build the one that lives.

— The Editors

DISCOVERY

What is already working

Switzerland has been running one since 1934 and it is a real bank. The Wirtschaftsring — the Economic Circle, now Bank WIR — was founded in Zurich in the trough of the Depression by businesses that could not get francs. It issues a unit, the WIR franc, not backed by Swiss francs, and settles a closed multilateral circuit among small and medium enterprises. In 2005, the last year for which the bank released full panel data, 60,703 client enterprises were in it, out of 372,546 Swiss firms in the six sectors it serves — 16.3 percent of them. In construction the figure is 37.0 percent. Turnover that year was CHF 1.614 billion against balances of CHF 624 million.

James Stodder's work is the part that matters to an economist. Using data back to 1948, he showed that WIR turnover is countercyclical: firms use it more in a recession, and more reliably so than the official Swiss money supply. Stodder and Lietaer later separated the mechanism: large non-registered firms provide the countercyclical swing through their balances, small registered firms through their velocity. The circuit does not merely survive a downturn. It fills in behind the retreating bank credit, for exactly the firms the banks retreat from first.

A Tyrolean town proved the mechanism in thirteen and a half months. From 31 July 1932, Wörgl issued 32,000 schillings of labour certificates carrying a stamp of 1 percent per month — a carrying charge on holding, not on spending. The council financed roughly 100,000 schillings of public works with it: a bridge, a reservoir, streets, a ski jump. Unemployment in Wörgl fell 16 percent while Austria's rose 19 percent — a spread of 35 points. The first project, completed that October, cost 31,222.42 schillings, of which 12,197.13 — 39.1 percent — went out as coupons.

It did not fail. The Oesterreichische Nationalbank asserted its note monopoly, the scheme was withdrawn on 15 September 1933, and the courts confirmed the ban on 18 November. Wörgl is the one case in this chapter that was killed rather than starved, and it is the reason the rest of the chapter is about money rather than about law.

Sardinia built the modern version and it grew like software. Sardex, founded in 2010 by four people in Serramanna, is a business-to-business mutual credit circuit: one sardex is denominated at one euro, is not convertible, pays and charges no interest, and every member gets a credit line of roughly one hundredth of their annual turnover and agrees to accept up to one tenth of it in credits. It went from 237 members and €304,366 of turnover in 2010 to almost 3,000 members and €51 million in 2015 — 167.6× in five years, a compound rate of 178.5 percent a year. Credits in circulation at the end of 2015 were €4 million, against €80 million of goods and services standing behind them: 20× backing, and a velocity of 12.75.

Japan has been banking care hours since 1995. Fureai kippu — caring relationship tickets — let a person earn time credits by helping an older neighbour, hold them, and transfer them to a relative in another prefecture. The Sawayaka Welfare Foundation counted 374 non-profit organisations running it; a 2012 survey found 391 branches.

Fortaleza built a bank out of a favela. Banco Palmas opened in Conjunto Palmeira in 1998 and issued the palma from 2002. The founding survey found 80 percent of residents' purchases were made outside the district; by 2011, 93 percent were made inside it — the local share going from 20 to 93 percent, a swing of 73 points and a 4.65× multiple. 42,000 palmas were circulating in 2010. By 2011 the model had become a national network of 66 community banks.

And Bavaria has run the largest regional currency in Europe for twenty-three years. The Chiemgauer, launched 2003, moves about €7 million a year on over €1 million in circulation, with 3,914 consumers and about 400 businesses. Its published terms are the clearest in the field: paper loses 3 percent every six months, the electronic form 0.02 percent a day after thirty; converting back to euro costs 5 percent, of which 2 points run the system and 3 points go to a local association the member chose when they joined.

Six schemes, six continents' worth of conditions, and every one of them still standing or stopped by something other than its own economics. Seyfang and Longhurst's global mapping, still the best census we have, found 3,418 local projects in 39 national groupings across 23 countries and six continents — 1,715 of them service credits, 2,333 of them in Europe. 52.6 percent of the national types were growing when counted. This is not a fringe. It is an industry that nobody has yet taught to do its own accounts.

THE ARITHMETIC

What works, what does not, and where the line sits

One identity governs the whole field, and it fits on a line.

        c  =  C / T  =  C / (M · V)

  C   annual operating cost of running the scheme
  M   stock of the unit outstanding
  V   velocity — turnover per unit of stock, per year
  T   annual turnover, which is M · V
  c   operating cost per unit of turnover

c is the fee a member would have to pay on every transaction for the scheme to break even. That is the whole test of viability, and it is computable from two figures every scheme already publishes plus one it usually does not.

There is a second form, and it is the one that makes demurrage legible:

        d*  =  c · V  =  C / M

d* is the carrying charge on the stock that raises the same revenue. So a transaction fee and a demurrage are not rival philosophies. They are the same instrument priced off different bases, and velocity is the exchange rate between them. Gesell's stamp and Visa's interchange are the same line in different clothes.

Now run six schemes through it.

  scheme                     V         c     d* = c·V
  ----------------------------------------------------
  Wörgl 1932-33           2.78     4.32 %       12.0 %
  Chiemgauer              7.00     1.54 %       10.8 %
  Sardex 2015 (est.)     12.75     4.41 %       56.2 %
  Bristol Pound           1.36    15.75 %       21.4 %
  WIR 2005 (bound)        2.58     4.03 %       10.4 %

Read the middle column first. The Bristol Pound cost 15.75 percent of everything it moved. That is not an estimate assembled from hostile sources; it is the scheme's own figures. Petz and Finch — Diana Finch was its managing director — record £1.2 million of funding over eight years, which is £150,000 a year, and £5 million spent in the currency by late 2017, which over 5.25 years is £952,381 a year. No surplus was ever generated. Thirteen percent of the funding came from Bristol City Council, five from central government, twenty-four from the EU and fifty-eight from trusts.

Now read the first column, because that is where the cause is. Bristol's currency turned over 1.36 times a year. Sardex's turned over 12.75 times — 9.4× faster. A pound that moves once a year is not a circuit; it is a deposit with a picture on it. And c = C/(M·V) says that if you hold cost and stock fixed, every unit of velocity you fail to get multiplies your cost ratio directly.

The second route to the same answer, which is why it can be believed. Finch states the scheme would have had to grow fifty to a hundred times to fund itself from the currency. Divide 15.75 percent by fifty and by a hundred: 0.315 percent and 0.158 percent. That is card-network interchange. The managing director's growth multiple and our cost ratio are the same sentence computed from opposite ends, and they meet. They were not derived from each other.

So here is the honest negative, and it is the load-bearing one.

Take the eight sterling local currencies of the transition wave, 2007 to 2018 — the full enumerated set, not a sample: Totnes, Lewes, Brixton, Stroud, Bristol, Kingston, Exeter, Lake District. Six have closed. Two are running. Compute the survivor function properly, with Kaplan and Meier's 1958 estimator so that the two survivors are censored rather than discarded:

   t     at risk   closures    S(t)
   2         8          1     0.8750
   3         7          1     0.7500
   7         6          1     0.6250
   9         5          1     0.5000   <- median
  12         4          1     0.3750
  17         2          1     0.1875

The half-life of a British retail town pound is nine years. The implied annual hazard, if it were flat, is ln2/9 = 7.70 percent — about one closure in every thirteen scheme-years. Note that taking the median of the six closures alone gives 8.0 years, and that figure is biased downward, because it throws away precisely the schemes that contradict it. Say which you did.

And then — this is the part that changes the conclusion — run the same estimator over sixteen schemes including Wörgl, WIR, Sardex, Chiemgauer, BerkShares, Banco Palmas, Fureai Kippu and the Findhorn Eko. Seven closed, nine running. The survivor function bottoms out at 0.5469 and never reaches one half. The median is not reached. That is an answer, not a missing value.

The nine-year half-life is a property of the retail town pound, not of complementary currency. And the identity says why: the town pound is the one design in which V is low and C is fixed by staffing. Bristol spent 22 hours a week — 0.55 of a person — moving paper between cashpoints, and over £10,000 per issue on counterfeit-resistant printing, before anyone did anything economic at all.

The Balenciaga cut, and it is uncomfortable. The world's most successful complementary currency does not pay for itself as a currency. Bank WIR's 2023 operating expense of CHF 65.013 million against 2005 WIR turnover of CHF 1.614 billion puts an upper bound of 4.03 percent on its cost ratio — a ceiling, not a measurement, because that expense also runs a CHF 6.2 billion Swiss-franc bank with 238 staff, and the two figures are eighteen years apart. But look at the composition. Net interest income in 2022 was CHF 67.8 million. Commission and service income in 2023 was CHF 19.202 million. The interest business is 3.53× the fee business. The ninety-two year-old proof that complementary currency works is a mortgage bank that runs a currency on the side.

Which reframes the entire design question. It was never what should the currency be? It is what balance sheet is the currency bolted to, and does that balance sheet earn somewhere else? WIR is attached to a mortgage book. Banco Palmas is attached to a correspondent-banking agency — 52 percent of Instituto Palmas's revenue is services to government and Banco do Brasil, plus 10 percent credit operations and 10 percent product sales: 72 percent earned, 28 percent grant. Sardex is attached to a membership subscription. Chiemgauer is attached to a redemption fee and a stamp. Bristol was attached to a grant application, and grant applications have a hazard rate.

A third honest negative, and it cuts the other way. Fureai kippu solves the cost problem by refusing to be a currency. NALC's 2010 returns, in Hayashi's study, show 12,367 volunteers serving 3,126 dependents, earning 198,091 credits and redeeming 10,548 — a redemption rate of 5.32 percent. 94.68 percent of the credits were never spent. Only 9 percent of volunteers say saving credits for their own old age is their main motive. The scheme is thirty-one years old and costs almost nothing to run, because volunteers broker it and nobody redeems. At V = 0.053, c = C/(M·V) explodes unless C goes to zero too — and it does. A currency that is never spent is cheap and does no monetary work. That is a legitimate design. It is not a monetary one, and calling it one has misled a generation of Western writing.

Check the arithmetic on the one estimate that carries weight. Sardex's cost is inferred: about 50 employees at a fully loaded €45,000 is €2.25 million, giving c = 4.41 percent and an implied fee per member of €750. Sardex's published annual membership band is €350 to €2,500. At €35,000 per head the implied fee is €583; at €55,000, €917. Every case lands inside the published band. Two independent routes agreeing is the only reason to believe either.

One caution on the table, caught on re-reading: for Wörgl, C is the demurrage, so d* returns 12 percent by construction, not by discovery. The informative figure there is c = 4.32 percent.

DREAM

What becomes ordinary

In the economy where this is normal, a trade association does not lobby for credit. It clears.

A regional builders' federation of four hundred firms runs a closed credit circuit as a member service, the way it already runs an insurance panel and a training scheme. Members hold a credit line of about one percent of their turnover and accept up to a tenth in credits. The federation charges an annual fee that pays six people, and those six people spend their time doing the one thing that decides everything: introducing members who could trade and do not yet. Velocity is a staff objective with a number on it.

A firm's monthly management accounts carry two columns of receivables — one in national currency, one in circuit credits — and the second is understood to be less risky, because a credit can only be spent inside a circuit whose members have all been credit-assessed and all want to sell. The finance director describes it without apology as trade credit that nets.

A municipality holds a small stock of the regional unit in its treasury and accepts a capped share of local charges in it, not as a subsidy but because it clears its own suppliers faster. Nobody calls it alternative. The treasurer calls it a settlement asset with an unusual acceptance boundary, which is what it is.

A care network banks hours and is honest that it is banking hours. The credits are recorded because recording is respectful, not because anyone expects a market in them, and the scheme is funded as care is funded — because it is care.

And the schemes that are launched are launched with a viability line on the front page: here is our target velocity, here is our cost, here is the fee that implies, here is the date by which one covers the other. Founders who cannot write those four numbers do not launch, and nobody thinks that harsh. They think it is the same discipline you would apply to a bakery.

None of this requires legislation, a central bank, a platform or a movement. It requires an existing organisation with a member list, a balance sheet that already earns, and somebody willing to count.

DESIGN

The structure that gets there

Choose the scope before the technology. Every durable scheme in the record is closed to a defined population that already trades: Swiss SMEs, Sardinian businesses, Bavarian consumers with a chosen charity, a favela's shopkeepers. The boundary is not a limitation on the currency; the boundary is the product, because it is what makes acceptance predictable. Open schemes have to buy acceptance with marketing, and marketing is C.

Issue by lending, not by selling. This is the fork. A voucher currency issued against national money — buy ten pounds, get ten local pounds — has stock equal to what people happened to buy and velocity equal to how often they happened to spend. A mutual credit circuit issues the unit at the moment of a trade and destroys it at the moment of the matching trade, so stock is endogenous and velocity is structural. Bristol was the first kind. Sardex and WIR are the second, and their velocities are 2 to 9× higher.

Price the two constraints, both of them, on day one.

  credit line     ≈  1/100 of the member's annual turnover
  maximum credit  ≈  1/10  of the member's annual turnover

The first bounds what a member can owe the circuit; the second bounds what they must be willing to receive. Together they are the leverage rule: Sardex's €4 million of circulating credit stood against €80 million of goods — 20× backing, which is why a closed circuit with no reserves does not break.

Staff to velocity, not to membership. The single largest error in the record is hiring people to sign up members and then wondering why turnover is flat. The operator's job is brokerage — knowing that member A buys what member B sells and making the introduction. Sardex calls them community trade advisors. Pay them on circuit velocity, not on member count.

Finance the scheme from a second surface. Four proven attachments, in descending order of how much they have been tested:

A balance sheet that earns interest — WIR, and it is the strongest.
A payments agency — Banco Palmas, paid by Banco do Brasil per service.
A subscription — Sardex, at €350 to €2,500 a member a year.
A redemption fee plus a stamp — Chiemgauer, 2 points to the system on conversion, 3 points to a cause, plus roughly 6 percent a year on the stock.

Grant funding is not on this list. It is on it for a while, and then it is not.

Publish the ratio. Annual operating cost, annual turnover, and their quotient, on the front page of the annual report. Three numbers. The field's single biggest information failure is that almost nobody does this, which means no founder can benchmark, which means every founder re-learns the same lesson from the inside at a cost of about eight years.

DESTINY

How it holds when nobody is pushing

It holds when c is below the fee members already pay for something they value less. That is the entire condition, and every other sustaining mechanism is a way of getting there.

Velocity has to be somebody's objective with a number against it. Turnover divided by outstanding stock, monthly, on the standing pack. If nobody owns it, it drifts to one, and at a velocity of one the scheme is a grant-funded loyalty card.

The attachment has to earn independently. A currency financed by the enthusiasm of its founders has the half-life of that enthusiasm. A currency financed by a mortgage book has the half-life of a mortgage book.

Now the failure modes, plainly. It fails when the scheme is a voucher and velocity never exceeds two. It fails when the operating cost is set by the number of staff rather than by the size of the circuit, so growth does not improve the ratio. It fails when redemption to national currency is free, which converts the circuit into a slow, expensive payment processor. It fails when the membership is consumers rather than businesses, because consumers spend on a short list of shops and the credits pile up at the retail end with nowhere to go — that is Bristol's 1.36 in one sentence. It fails when nobody ever computed c, which is most of the time. And it is stopped, rather than failing, when a central bank asserts its monopoly — which happened once, in Tyrol, in 1933, and which every founder since has cited as though it were the usual cause of death. It is not. The usual cause of death is the ratio.

DELIGHT

What it feels like

There is a particular pleasure in watching a circuit close for the first time. A printer pays a joiner, the joiner pays a caterer, the caterer pays the printer, and the balances net to nothing — and every one of those three did work they would otherwise have turned down for want of francs. Nothing was created and nothing was lent. A constraint simply stopped applying.

The people who run these circuits talk about it the way matchmakers talk. They keep the list in their heads. They know that the man with the kiln has a daughter starting a café and that the woman with the surplus oak has been looking for a kiln. The job is not financial engineering; it is remembering who needs whom, which is one of the oldest pleasures there is and one of the few that improves with age.

And there is the specific, physical satisfaction of the Chiemgauer stamp — the small deliberate act of keeping money current, which turns a passive holding into something you tend. People report liking it. That is not sentiment; it is V, and V is the number the whole chapter turns on. The pleasure and the arithmetic are the same fact, which is the best thing that can be said about any design.

OPERATIONALIZE THIS

At the level of finance

The instrument: a bolt-on mutual credit facility inside an existing member organisation.

Not a new currency and not a new company. A clearing facility operated by a body that already has a member list, a subscription, and a balance sheet: a trade association, a chamber, a cooperative federation, a supply-chain group, a franchisor.

The structure.

Legal form. A closed multilateral clearing arrangement among members, documented as a set of bilateral trade-credit terms with a central netting agent. In most jurisdictions this is trade credit, not deposit-taking and not e-money, precisely because no member may convert credits into national money. Non-convertibility is the regulatory design, not an inconvenience.
Unit. Denominated one-for-one in the national currency. No float, no exchange rate, no speculation, no reserve to manage.
Credit line. One percent of the member's audited annual turnover.
Acceptance undertaking. Ten percent of annual turnover, as a maximum positive balance the member agrees to hold.
Interest. None, either way. Balances must be worked off in trade within twelve months or settled in national currency.
Tax and VAT. Full transparency: a sale in credits is a sale, invoiced and taxed exactly as a cash sale, with tax paid in national currency. Sardex has operated this way since inception and it is why it was never a grey market.

The balance-sheet treatment. Credits receivable sit as trade receivables, credits payable as trade payables. They net within the circuit at the reporting date. The member's disclosure is one line in the accounting policies naming the circuit and the settlement basis. Auditors treat this as trade credit with a restricted settlement medium, which is a conversation they already know how to have — take it to them in month one, not month ten.

The counterparty. The association itself is the netting agent and the only counterparty any member faces. Its obligation is limited to operating the ledger correctly; it guarantees nothing, and the documents say so in the first paragraph.

Sizing it, with the numbers. Four hundred founding members at a median annual turnover of 900,000:

  credit line        1/100  ->     9,000 each   ->  M =  3,600,000
  acceptance cap     1/10   ->    90,000 each   ->      36,000,000 backing
  annual fee                          900 each  ->  revenue  360,000
  operators funded          360,000 / 60,000    ->  6.0 people
  turnover at V = 8         3,600,000 x 8       ->      28,800,000
  cost ratio at target      360,000 / 28,800,000        1.25 %

The number that decides it: velocity in month twelve.

  V =  2.0   turnover   7,200,000   c = 5.00 %   fails a 3 % fee test
  V =  4.0   turnover  14,400,000   c = 2.50 %   clears
  V =  8.0   turnover  28,800,000   c = 1.25 %   clears
  V = 12.0   turnover  43,200,000   c = 0.83 %   clears

  break-even velocity, at a 3 % fee test:  V* = 3.33 per year

Below 3.33 turns a year, close it. Above it, you have a business. Put that sentence in the board paper. It is the only sentence in the paper that will still matter in year three, and having written it down in advance is what makes closing it a decision rather than a defeat.

The first ninety days.

Day	Action	Artifact
1–15	Map the existing trade graph: who already invoices whom	The graph, from members' own ledgers
16–30	Recruit the twenty members with the densest existing links	Twenty signed undertakings
31–45	Agree credit lines and acceptance caps against audited turnover	The signed schedule
46–60	Auditor and tax conversation; publish the accounting policy line	One-page policy note
61–75	Open the ledger. Two brokers, full time, doing introductions	Weekly velocity log
76–90	First monthly report: M, T, V, C and c, on one page	The five numbers

The one figure on the front page.

            annual operating cost
   c  =  ---------------------------   <   the fee a member already pays
             annual circuit turnover        for something they value less

If c is below a member's existing card-acquiring cost, you are not asking them to support a cause. You are offering them cheaper settlement and a book of new customers, and that is a conversation that does not need a single word about localism.

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS

Twelve, for a room

Discovery — what is already working

Where in our own supply chain do two members already trade regularly without ever having been introduced by us — and how did that relationship start?
Think of a time this organisation extended credit or forbearance to a member and it came back to us. What made that judgement good?
Which of our existing member services pays for itself, and what does it have that the ones that do not are missing?

Dream — what becomes possible

If a quarter of our members' trade with each other settled without cash, what would that free up, and for whom first?
Imagine our annual report carrying one ratio we would be proud of on the front page. What is that ratio?
If we paid two people purely to introduce members to each other, what would they need to know on their first morning?

Design — what we build

What is the smallest closed group among us where everyone already buys from at least one other — and could we start with just them?
What does this organisation already earn that could carry a clearing facility in its first two years?
Which existing cost would a member happily stop paying if we could clear their trade instead?

Destiny — how it holds

Who will own the velocity number, and what will it take for them to want to?
What would have to be true for this to still be running when everyone in this room has moved on?
What is the honest number below which we would close it — and are we willing to write that number down today?

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Note on figures. Every number above is computed in lib/verify/III_03.py and printed there with its inputs, its units and its source. The Sardex operating cost is an estimate, labelled as such, with its sensitivity printed; the Bristol velocity combines a 2015 stock snapshot with a 5.25-year mean turnover and is labelled as an estimate for that reason. The WIR cost ratio is an upper bound and its denominator is stated. Where two routes to a figure disagree, both are printed and the difference is named.