Excerpts from: "The Banking Crisis: What can Businesses do Now?"  By Bernard Lietaer           www.lietaer.com

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 gave 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.