Stimulating Business and Economies with Usage Fee Money: Enabling Euro Zone Nations Like Greece to Regain Monetary Sovereignty

Abstract

The paper identifies how a usage fee parallel digital currency is more attractive than Bitcoins, either to provide liquidity in a crisis or for stimulating businesses on a sustainable basis. User fee "Stamp Scrip" successfully stimulated businesses and distressed communities during the Great Depression in Europe and the US. Unlike Bitcoins, user fee money can be gifted and redeemed at a profit by the issuer from the fees collected. Bitcoins have to be purchased at market value or mined with substantial transaction costs from computer usage and the energy they consume. Governments could issue parallel profit making money as proposed by the 1933 Bankhead-Pettengill Bill introduced into the US Congress to issue one trillion dollars of self-liquidating Stamp Scrip. This type of Quantitative Easing allows governments to directly fund the digital purses of welfare recipients, businesses, and infrastructure construction to maintain and create jobs while reducing expenditures and debt without increasing taxes. Usage fee money has been tethered to Euros in Germany and exists in competition with them. However, Euros like all other fiat money and bitcoins are not fit for purpose as a medium of exchange to sustain humanity on the planet. A hypothetical terminating but sustainable value tethered and tagged currency is described with its institutional arrangements as a reference standard for governments to: (a) regulate new types of digital money that are arising and (b) obtain support from international financial institutions to introduce as a parallel currency to sustain their economies and the global financial system.

Keywords: Bitcoin, Crisis money, Monetary sovereignty, Stamp Scrip, Sustainable money

JEL Classification: D31, D63, E42, E44, E50, G18, G20, H81, P11