By Hazel Henderson

In Collusion, former Wall Street executive Nomi Prins follows her previous six books in a deep, exhaustive dive into how the global fraternity of central bankers continue to coordinate their monetary strategies to serve their various political and financial alliances. In shocking detail, author Prins tracks these behavior patterns and how they manifested in many countries during and after the 2007-8 financial crises. The extent of these market manipulations and what Prins calls “money-conjuring” strategies, whether on interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), negative interest rates, selection of bond purchases are described in the USA, the European Union’s ECB, Mexico, Brazil, China, Japan and detailed in Germany France and Britain (pre and post Brexit).

Prins shines a light into all the deals, handshakes, machinations and their justification in financial media relations and academic theorizing from Jackson Hole to World Bank-IMF meetings. We see the results of the US dollar hegemony and how China’s former central bank president challenged it with the help of Christine Lagarde and installed China’s RMB as part of the basket of currencies backing the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).

Monetary reformers have toiled for decades to break through the curtain of elite ideology and pseudo-scholarship of economists protecting the secretive politics of money-creation and credit-allocation (see for example Ethical Markets TV show “The Money Fix”; the Canadian journal COMER; the American Monetary Institute; lawyer Ellen Brown’s “The Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution”). Prins’ research in Collusion offers all the evidence and the smoking guns.

Today, the central bankers’ global game is now also in the crosshairs due to the rise of fintech and cryptocurrencies, as I note in “FINTECH: Good and Bad News for Sustainable Finance” (2016) and the research reports of the UN Inquiry on Sustainable Finance unepinquiry.org. While most cryptocurrencies are merely speculative strings of digital code (not the fake visuals they sport of non-existent shiny coins) they have no intrinsic value or tether. Yet they have challenged the central bankers’ fiat currencies on the very same grounds: as mere promises. Nevertheless, one can trust fiats if one trusts the issuing governments, whereas cryptos have no accountable issuer. Prior theories are swept away by all these new revelations that currencies are not wealth, cannot be a reliable store of value, but remain useful mediums of exchange if well-managed, simply tracking and scoring units like centimeters, inches, or kilograms, as I describe in Money Is Not Wealth: Cryptos v. Fiats!

In A Green Bank of England, author Rob Macquarie shows how simply the venerable UK central bank could change a few rules at the direction of Parliament. Thus it could steer Britain’s economy toward fostering (rather than continuing to block) technological evolution toward the cleaner, greener, knowledge-richer, renewable energy-based circular economy…beyond the fossilized sectors of the past Industrial Era.

This brilliant, succinct report, free and downloadable, has already been recognized with wide coverage in the financial press and media, as well as endorsed by many members of the UK Parliament. We can expect that its viable menu of reforms can hasten Britain’s chosen path toward sustainability.

All the 17 targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the 195 member countries of the United Nations in 2015 might well be achievable by 2030. That is, IF the world’s central bankers followed the reforms outlined in A Green Bank of England, and if its head, Mark Carney were to follow up with implementing these reforms. Carney has already adopted the new agenda beyond money -denominated GDP growth embodied in the SDGs, along with Michael Bloomberg in their leadership of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD). Author Macquarie points out that this disclosure mandate of fossil-related risks to assets must also apply to central banks’ assets, lending and bond-buying in QE which should also be disclosed. The private assets now invested in sustainably – managed portfolios worldwide is estimated at $23 trillion US. Our Green Transition Scoreboard 2018 finds $9.3 trillion US of private green investments worldwide in renewable energy, efficiency, green building, water, corporate R&D, as well as digital lending, finance, remittances, education and other life systems since 2007.

Time to turn central banking from part of the global problem to becoming part of the solution. Both of these books are must reads for asset managers dealing with stranded assets in fossilized sectors.