Episode 8: Bernard Lietaer

The Newfield Ignite Podcast

In this conversation, Bernard Lietaer reveals how our relationship with money has become unconscious. We have forgotten that we designed and created the idea of money. It seems money is managing us rather than us using it to serve our needs. “Money is an agreement,” says Bernard. “What is interesting about this definition is that one can change it once it stops working for us.”

Bernard reviews alternatives to the current system that we seem tied to, one he calls “patriarchal” because it is a single currency system, created top-down, that promotes short-term rather than long-term thinking. He also discusses places he has seen both acceptance and resistance to these alternative systems.

Bernard ends the conversation by speculating on what it will take for a money revolution. What will it take to raise global consciousness around the nature of money, our behavior patterns around it, and the existence of other possibilities?

BIO

Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money, is an international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems. He has studied and worked in the field of money for more than 30 years in an unusually broad range of capacities including as a Central Banker, a fund manager, a university professor, and a consultant to governments in numerous countries, multinational corporations, and community organizations. He co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro) and served as president of the Electronic Payment System at the National Bank of Belgium (the Belgian Central Bank). He co-founded and managed GaiaCorp, a top performing currency fund whose profits funded investments in environmental projects. A former professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain, he has also taught at Sonoma State University and Naropa University.

He is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, the World Business Academy, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Bernard Lietaer has written numerous books and articles about money systems, including Of Human Wealth (2011), Monnaies Régionales (2008), and The Mystery of Money (2000).