Hazel Henderson, coauthor of the Cosimo book The Power of Yin and a longtime advocate for global financial reform, has some advice for the world leaders who will join President George W. Bush in Washington D.C. on November 15 in a summit to discuss economic issues. Among her suggestions:

Imposing globally-harmonized currency exchange taxes is an obvious step.  Promoted for decades by economists from James Tobin, Bank of Sweden’s Nobel Memorial prizewinner, to former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, this below 1% tax on the $2 trillion daily currency trading would reduce some of its 90% speculative activity.  Recent levels of turbulence in currency markets are not sustainable, and Bernanke’s ideas about selling US dollars to buy other currencies are unprecedented.  Only global regulation of currency markets can address the problem of weaker currencies leading countries to default.

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Reform of ill-designed monetary systems based on debt (see www.ethicalmarkets.tv “Money as Debt” and the American Monetary Reform Act of 2008 at www.monetary.org); in the UK, monetary reforms proposed by banking expert James Robertson at www.jamesrobertson.com and those of the New Economics Foundation at www.neweconomics.org).  This includes raising capital reserve requirements for banks and reducing leverage used by all financial players.

Read the whole article at Henderson’s site Ethical Markets. (See also Henderson’s recent article “And We All Thought That Banks Had Money!”.)

The Power of Yin is avaiable from Amazon and other online booksellers.