A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow. - Kate Raworth

What kind of currency, then, could be aligned with the living world so that it promoted regenerative investments rather than pursuing endless accumulation? One possibility is a currency bearing demurrage, a small fee incurred for holding money, so that it tends to lose rather than gain in value the longer it is held. The fact that demurrage is an unfamiliar term shows how accustomed we are to the ever-rising financial escalator that we ride – like knowing the idea of ‘up’ but not ‘down’, ‘more’ but not ‘less’. But demurrage is a word worth knowing because it could just feature in the financial future.

availability bias — making decisions on the basis of more recent and more accessible information loss aversion — the strong preference to avoid a loss rather than to make an equivalent gain selective cognition — taking on board facts and arguments that fit with our existing frames risk bias — underestimating the likelihood of extreme events, while overestimating our ability to cope with them.

Imagine, for starters, if central banks were to take back the power to create money and then issue it to commercial banks, while simultaneously requiring them to hold 100 percent reserves for the loans that they make — meaning that every loan would be backed by someone else’s savings, or the bank’s own capital. It would certainly separate the role of providing money from the role of providing credit, so helping to prevent the build-up of debt-fuelled credit bubbles that burst with such deep social costs.