Martijn van der Linden on inequality and the need for a fairer monetary system

In this episode, Robert Snijder van Wissenkerke talks to Martijn van der Linden, lecturer in New Finance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Together with cartographer Carlijn Kingma and investigative journalist Thomas Bollen, Martijn set up the project 'The waterworks of our money', in which they mapped out the structure of our money system.

Martijn explains how the current structure of the money system contributes to inequality in society. Banks play an important role in this. About 90 percent of the new money is created in the form of debt by the private banks, they control the money supply and thus determine where the money goes. Furthermore, the current digital money system consists mainly of bank money. This has created a system where people are dependent on bank money. And governments must bail out banks when things threaten to go wrong so as not to jeopardize the stability of the monetary system. According to Martijn, the dependency on the banks can be reduced by introducing a new form of digital public money. According to him, this can be done in several ways, which he explains in the video. He argues that politics has given too little direction to the development of the monetary system in recent decades.