#1497 1934 · WIR Bank (Wirtschaftsring) · banking
Swiss Small Firms Built Their Own Recession-Proof Money
问题
In downturns small firms face a cruel paradox: sales fall and banks cut credit exactly when they need it most.
背景
Switzerland, 1934, four years into the Depression. Small businesses watched customers pay late while banks tightened franc credit, in an era when local scrip currencies were spreading in the United States. A group of Swiss businesspeople stopped waiting for the banking system and founded the Wirtschaftsring, an 'economic circle' whose member firms extend credit to one another.
The circle kept its own unit of account, the WIR franc, and its own bank to keep the ledger. Firms that joined could buy from and sell to other members in WIR. By 2003 the network counted more than 77,000 small-firm and household members, trading what economist James Stodder calls 'residual spending power'.
换别人会怎么做
Beg banks for bigger credit lines, discount for cash, and wait out the recession.
他们看到了什么
Firms that distrust each other's cash in a recession will still accept one another's IOUs if a neutral ledger clears them, and credit that cannot leak out of the circle expands exactly when bank money contracts.
那一手
A member short of Swiss francs can draw a credit line in WIR from the WIR Bank: purchasing power created with a ledger entry, not franc reserves. Because WIR can only be spent inside the network, the credit cannot leak away; it circulates back to other members as sales. The bank manages the system through members' credit limits rather than cash repayment, and persistent defaulters lose access. In time-series analysis (error-correction models over decades of WIR turnover), Stodder finds WIR turnover strongly counter-cyclical and negatively correlated with Swiss M2 in the short run: when franc credit tightens in recessions, members lean on WIR instead.
为什么管用
WIR credit is confined to the network, so extending it creates demand for other members; the bank allocates credit by limits, not reserves; members short of francs but rich in capacity fill the gap with WIR, hence turnover rises when GDP falls.
值了多少
More than 77,000 members by 2003; WIR turnover strongly counter-cyclical, rising when franc credit tightens (error-correction analysis).
什么时候会失灵
It fails where membership is thin in the inputs a firm actually needs (nowhere to spend the scrip); if the bank loosens average credit limits, over-issue erodes trust; and in booms WIR idles, a shock absorber rather than a growth engine.
后来呢
The longest-lived large complementary currency, and the standing demonstration that a mutual-credit ledger can work as a private macroeconomic stabilizer for small firms.
资料来源
- [1]Complementary Credit Networks and Macro-Economic Stability: Switzerland's Wirtschaftsring (author manuscript)Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2009jimstodder.com
- [2]WIR Bank (Switzerland) — complementary currency profileMonneta (monetary research institute), 2020monneta.org