Attendee: Andrew FC Turpin

We all now know that internet, telephone & email can transform a country as much as roads, harbours and rail did 100 years ago. I firmly believe that re-thinking financial services infrastructure can have just as significant an effect; that cooperative ground swell initiatives, people’s balance sheets, and mutual investments can help the middle-class recreate a whole new range of financial services infrastructure that will be resistant to the veracious greed which triggered this most recent global financial crisis. The middle-class still have the financial means to bring about this change for themselves, whereas the rich won’t ever want to and the poor may never be able to. One way to slow the growing gap between the mega-rich and everybody-else is for everybody-else to take control of their own money and stop giving it to the mega-rich to invest and manage. The current financial turmoil is the perfect time to start making fundamental changes to how we think about our money and to take control of it for ourselves. I believe that the middle-class should be investing together, saving together and lending to each other, even building and leasing out jointly owned assets in cooperation with each other, rather than meekly accepting what the established financial service providers are proffering. Time to own our own money!