THE
WATERWORKS
OF MONEY
Charting the influence of big money on our society
A production of cartographer Carlijn Kingma in collaboration with investigative journalist Thomas Bollen and researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden
NEW RELEASE:
Private profits, public costs
In the video The Waterworks of Money: private profits, public costs, we’ll show that the design flaws causing instability in our financial system have not been fundamentally addressed after the financial crisis of 2008. Some of the measures taken by our governments and central banks have actually created new incentives for excessive risk-taking and exacerbated inequality within society.
The response to the crisis has also boosted a new kind of ‘asset manager capitalism’. Asset management firms like BlackRock and Vanguard have grown into major power players. They are responsible for investing our pension savings, and they control trillions of dollars in assets. Just like the banks before them, they are now ‘too big to fail’. Who actually benefits from this system?
In our journey, we also explore new monetary channels and policy options that haven’t been used in the past decade, but could be deployed in the future to make major improvements to the system as a whole. Could the introduction of a digital euro or dollar – also called Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) – improve financial stability and make the monetary system more equitable?
MONEY IS POWER
Although money plays a key role in our lives, the workings of our monetary system are a mystery to most of us. Anyone who does not speak the complex financial language of economists and bankers is excluded from the public debate on how our monetary system should work. Power over our money is in the hands of a small group of financial literates.
In an attempt to change this, Carlijn Kingma, Thomas Bollen and Martijn van der Linden have made the world of money accessible through metaphors and architectural drawings. They have depicted the workings of our current monetary system and outlined various possibilities for reform, based on two years of research.
Growing inequality, the slow progress with making our economy sustainable, and recurrent financial crises cannot be seen in isolation from the way our monetary system works. If we want to properly tackle these problems, we will have to address the flaws of our current money system. The future of our money is a public matter which is too important to be left to unelected bankers.
MONEY AS WATER
If you think of money as water, then our financial system is like an irrigation system, watering the economy. And just as irrigation helps crops grow, money allows the economy to flourish. As long as the money keeps flowing, society will thrive—or at least that’s the idea. In reality, large swaths of society remain parched, while a small group of people is swimming in money. Today, a handful of billionaires controls more wealth than half the world’s population combined.
Who creates and allocates our money? Where all does it go? And why doesn’t the financial system work for everyone? These questions are at the heart of The Waterworks of Money, the latest work by cartographer Carlijn Kingma, in collaboration with financial economists Thomas Bollen and Martijn van der Linden. They lead you through a watery world where money is in motion, its hidden forces made manifest.