Home
登录
注册
听力练习
听力练习
/
Video
/
TED Talk
/
Who Controls Your City’s Money? | Trinity Tran | TED
Who Controls Your City’s Money? | Trinity Tran | TED
选择学习模式:
查看字幕
选词
重写单词
Highlight:
3000 Oxford Words
4000 IELTS Words
5000 Oxford Words
3000 Common Words
1000 TOEIC Words
5000 TOEFL Words
字幕 (98)
0:03
When a community wants to build
0:06
a bridge or transit system, housing,
0:10
sustainable infrastructure --
0:11
where does the money come from?
0:14
Money ultimately decides what gets built.
0:16
Money decides what survives.
0:18
Money decides what future becomes possible.
0:21
So change where money goes and who controls it --
0:24
then you change what becomes possible.
0:27
I'm Trinity Tran,
0:28
I lead efforts to build public banks in California and beyond.
0:32
Most of the time, our cities don’t have the money upfront
0:35
to be able to pay for a project like a bridge or housing.
0:40
And so they will issue a bond,
0:44
which is essentially a long-term loan,
0:47
provided [and] structured by Wall Street banks.
0:50
A loan is money that is provided upfront and paid back over time with interest.
0:55
Wall Street banks -- private lenders -- end up tacking on fees
0:59
to structure and sell those bonds.
1:00
Then the reality is that our local governments are not only paying
1:04
for the cost of the project,
1:05
but decades of interest on top of that.
1:08
So for every dollar that we're borrowing,
1:11
we're paying another dollar in interest over time, sometimes more.
1:16
And that's all money that's going out the door to private lenders.
1:19
We're paying hundreds of millions of dollars
1:22
in the city of Los Angeles.
1:23
At the state level, in California, we’re paying $4 billion
1:28
in interest annually.
1:30
That's money flowing out of our communities
1:33
rather than being invested locally.
1:36
Private banks are owned by shareholders.
1:39
They're investing in areas that make them a lot of money,
1:42
and not necessarily what’s in the best interest of our communities.
1:46
Public banking asks a different question:
1:49
how do we do more with the dollars that our communities generate
1:53
without raising taxes,
1:55
but by lowering the cost of financing itself?
1:58
A public bank is a bank owned by the people
2:01
through their local government, either city or region or state.
2:05
Every time you buy something, like a cup of coffee,
2:09
a portion of that tax will go to your city and your state.
2:13
So we're using the money that we already generate that belongs to us.
2:17
They don't have shareholders to pay.
2:21
So as loans are repaid, it comes back into a public bank.
2:24
Its mission is to support the local economic development
2:28
of the community it serves.
2:29
That would be designed at a local level.
2:32
So the law that we created -- the California Public Banking Act --
2:36
created the legal framework for cities and municipalities
2:39
to be able to form their own banks.
2:40
And so the mission of the bank, the mandates, the lending priorities,
2:45
the investment priorities, the capitalization strategies,
2:48
all the details of how this is going to work
2:50
is going to be defined at a local level.
2:53
There are 900 public banks globally
2:58
with nearly $50 trillion in assets.
3:01
In Germany, a network of 400 municipal banks
3:04
was able to support the country's renewable energy transition.
3:08
In the United States, we have a successful model to emulate.
3:12
The Bank of North Dakota
3:13
is a 100-year-old public bank founded in 1919.
3:18
It was started by socialist farmers
3:21
who were being gouged by out-of-state New York bankers.
3:26
During the Great Depression,
3:27
nearly 200,000 farms were being foreclosed on.
3:31
Because the state of North Dakota had a public bank,
3:34
it was able to step in and buy the farms
3:37
and lend it back to the families for a dollar.
3:41
Once the families were able to stabilize,
3:44
they sold it back at a price they could afford.
3:48
For the last century,
3:49
it has supported local economic development,
3:52
supported small businesses, infrastructure
3:55
while still returning very healthy return on equity, 15 to 18 percent.
4:00
That means it's returning hundreds of millions of dollars
4:03
back into the general fund year after year.
4:06
So that's an example of how a public bank is able to step in and support
4:10
and strengthen the community
4:13
without focusing on just purely profit.
4:16
Los Angeles just dealt with a devastating wildfire.
4:20
So if we had a public bank,
4:21
it would have been able to step in to offer immediate, low-cost loans.
4:26
It's able to be immediately responsive to the needs of the community
4:30
without having to wait for federal aid,
4:33
which can be unstable.
4:36
We're moving towards building a system
4:39
that mobilizes public revenue to support our public priorities.
4:44
We've seen such an incredible amount of progress
4:48
in such a short time,
4:49
because even without a complex understanding of finance and banking,
4:54
when you start explaining public banking,
4:56
it makes sense on a logical, intuitive level.
5:01
Multiple cities and states are working towards it.
5:04
We have the ability to create a new system.
5:07
This isn't a pie-in-the-sky idea.
5:11
This is a model that works for the people,
5:14
our communities and our environment.
