Who Controls Your City’s Money? | Trinity Tran | TED

00:03When a community wants to build a bridge or transit system, housing, sustainable infrastructure -- where does the money come from? Money ultimately decides what gets built. Money decides what survives. Money decides what future becomes possible.

00:21So change where money goes and who controls it -- then you change what becomes possible. I'm Trinity Tran, I lead efforts to build public banks in California and beyond. Most of the time, our cities don’t have the money upfront to be able to pay for a project like a bridge or housing.

00:40And so they will issue a bond, which is essentially a long-term loan, provided structured by Wall Street banks. A loan is money that is provided upfront and paid back over time with interest. Wall Street banks -- private lenders -- end up tacking on fees to structure and sell those bonds.

01:00Then the reality is that our local governments are not only paying for the cost of the project, but decades of interest on top of that. So for every dollar that we're borrowing, we're paying another dollar in interest over time, sometimes more.

01:16And that's all money that's going out the door to private lenders. We're paying hundreds of millions of dollars in the city of Los Angeles. At the state level, in California, we’re paying $4 billion in interest annually. That's money flowing out of our communities rather than being invested locally.

01:36Private banks are owned by shareholders. They're investing in areas that make them a lot of money, and not necessarily what’s in the best interest of our communities. Public banking asks a different question: how do we do more with the dollars that our communities generate without raising taxes, but by lowering the cost of financing itself?

01:58A public bank is a bank owned by the people through their local government, either city or region or state. Every time you buy something, like a cup of coffee, a portion of that tax will go to your city and your state. So we're using the money that we already generate that belongs to us.

02:17They don't have shareholders to pay. So as loans are repaid, it comes back into a public bank. Its mission is to support the local economic development of the community it serves. That would be designed at a local level. So the law that we created -- the California Public Banking Act -- created the legal framework for cities and municipalities to be able to form their own banks.

02:40And so the mission of the bank, the mandates, the lending priorities, the investment priorities, the capitalization strategies, all the details of how this is going to work is going to be defined at a local level. There are 900 public banks globally with nearly $50 trillion in assets.

03:01In Germany, a network of 400 municipal banks was able to support the country's renewable energy transition. In the United States, we have a successful model to emulate. The Bank of North Dakota is a 100-year-old public bank founded in 1919.

03:18It was started by socialist farmers who were being gouged by out-of-state New York bankers. During the Great Depression, nearly 200,000 farms were being foreclosed on. Because the state of North Dakota had a public bank, it was able to step in and buy the farms and lend it back to the families for a dollar.

03:41Once the families were able to stabilize, they sold it back at a price they could afford. For the last century, it has supported local economic development, supported small businesses, infrastructure while still returning very healthy return on equity, 15 to 18 percent.

04:00That means it's returning hundreds of millions of dollars back into the general fund year after year. So that's an example of how a public bank is able to step in and support and strengthen the community without focusing on just purely profit.

04:16Los Angeles just dealt with a devastating wildfire. So if we had a public bank, it would have been able to step in to offer immediate, low-cost loans. It's able to be immediately responsive to the needs of the community without having to wait for federal aid, which can be unstable.

04:36We're moving towards building a system that mobilizes public revenue to support our public priorities. We've seen such an incredible amount of progress in such a short time, because even without a complex understanding of finance and banking, when you start explaining public banking, it makes sense on a logical, intuitive level.

05:01Multiple cities and states are working towards it. We have the ability to create a new system. This isn't a pie-in-the-sky idea. This is a model that works for the people, our communities and our environment.