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American Trade Cooperative (ATC)

 

AMERICAN TRADE CO-OP

    Mutual Credit System

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SECTORS SERVED

    Real Estate

    Construction

    Manufacturing

    Hospitality

    Media/Advertising

    Professional Services

    Retail

  

IREEX International Real Estate

 Equity Xchange

 

WIR COOPERATIVE

    WIR Videos

 

U. S. BANK

  

RESEARCH PAPERS

    B. Lietaer - UC Berkeley

    M. Pingle - Univ. NV Reno

    J. Stodder - Rensselear

    T. Studer - Bern University

    H. Defila - WIR Bank

    W. Wuthrich - Switzerland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                  

The American Trade Cooperative (ATC) enables:

 

  • Real estate principals and practitioners to increase transactions by providing a new and innovative credit and financing source.

 

  • Businesses to increase sales, cash flow, profits and conserve cash while maintaining a stable customer base.

 

Real Estate

 

The International Real Estate Equity Xchange (IREEX) and the American Trade Cooperative (ATC) are bringing to the American real estate marketplace an innovation, consisting of using Trade Credits, together with cash, in buying and selling transactions.

 

Property Owners who can take advantage of this method are:

 

  • Sellers of land with limited marketability
  • Buyers of property wanting to reduce their cash and credit requirements to make acquisitions
  • Sellers of property wishing to offer better terms to potential buyers without discounting
  • Owners of property wishing to monetize and put to use dormant equity  

PRIMARY BENEFIT: The system allows owners of non-productive assets, such as vacant land, to monetize the assets and convert them to Trade Credits, a form of money that can be used to transact business. 

 

HOW ARE TRADE CREDITS ACQUIRED? A property is pledged, as security, for a line of credit in Trade Credits. Title to the property pledged does not transfer, but a Notice of Interest is used to record the encumbrance at the time the line of credit is activated. If the principal is not able to use the Trade Credits to make a desired purchase he/she can terminate the arrangement at any time and retrieve the pledged asset.    

 

HOW DOES IT WORK? The ATC Trade Credit system operates similarly to a REIT. In a REIT assets go into a Trust which issues stock certificates; in our case pledged assets go into a Trust which, in turn, issues a Dollar-denominated Trade Credit that is used, as part of the consideration, in real estate transactions.  The portion of the consideration paid using Trade Credits ranges between 20% and 45%. 

  

WHO WE ARE: The parent company has operated since 1974 and the current management team has over 125 years of collective experience in real estate. The CEO of the Companies owns an enviable record as a broker, investor, developer, syndicator, lender and a sales and marketing specialist.

 

ATC System

 

The American Trade Cooperative uses a Mutual Credit System to provide a unique source of credit and financing for real estate and several other sectors of the economy.

 

Although new to the U.S. the System has a very important working model that has provided the same services in Switzerland for many years. 

                                    MORE >> 

  

Excerpts from:

        "The Banking Crisis: What can Businesses do Now?"  

                                             By Bernard Lietaer  

 

Whatever governments do for the banks, credit will be a lot harder to obtain for businesses, for many years to come. In 1934, sixteen business people gathered in Zurich to create a mutual credit system among themselves, with a currency unit called the WIR, equivalent in value to the Swiss Franc. Instead of borrowing money from the banks, businesses give credit directly to each other. We propose that businesses take the initiative of creating such B2B systems at whatever scale makes sense to them. A remarkable quantitative study proves that this system is actually the secret for the proverbial robustness of the Swiss economy. The big advantage, compared to what happened in Switzerland in 1934, is today’s availability of very cost-effective information technologies that make it possible to implement this approach much more rapidly than in the 1930s.

 

Bernard Lietaer is an international expert on economic, banking and monetary matters, best known as the co-architect of the convergence mechanism to the Euro. www.lietaer.com