Engineering NZ CEO pleads for Govt to release funds to restart stalled infrastructure, hospital & housing projects, saying hundreds of engineers are losing their jobs & emigrating to Australia
This is long, but I hope I will be forgiven, given how pertinent it is to your article:
Read this to see what Kiwibank should become but the foreign privately owned banks that dominate our nation are hell-bent on preventing it from becoming:
ATB Financial: Alberta's Best Kept Secret for Building an Economy of Well-being.
Mark Anielski
President and Chief Well-being Officer Anielski Management Inc.
November 7, 2016
This article was published based on the October 27, 2016 presentation by economist and author Robert McGarvey and I did as guests of the Government of Alberta's Greening Government Speakers Series. We explored the potential for building a sustainable economy of well-being for Alberta by leveraging the hidden assets yet to be fully leveraged by ATB Financial, the most important public bank in North America.
ATB Financial is Alberta’s most important financial asset. Founded in 1938 under a Social Credit government during the Great Economic Depression ATB is North America's most important public bank with over $47.673 billion in assets, 6 times larger than then the only other public bank in North America, the Bank of North Dakota and 3.6 times larger than Servus Credit Union in Alberta (with $14.2 billion in assets). What does it mean to have our own public bank?
ATB Financial’s Natural Advantage
Why is ATB Financial so different than other financial institutions? Why does it have what outside experts say is a natural advantage? First, ATB Financial is not a private bank but is a bank with full financial services that is literally owned by Albertans backed 100% of the assets of the province. In other words ATB Financial is a Public Bank.
Second, ATB Financial is governed by a special Act of legislature called the Alberta Treasury Branch Act (2000) that sets out the terms of financial services ATB Financial can provide on behalf of the needs of Albertans.
Third, ATB Financial has the legal powers to operate just like any other bank but has significant number of Albertans as its members in fact all operations are shareholders in ATB Financial should all be members. In some ways ATB Financial is like a credit union such as Servus or Vancity, with members. Yet ATB Financial effectively already has every Albertan as a member by virtue of being a resident citizen of the province. ATB Financial is so safe that the only way he can fail is that if the entire province of Alberta fails which is highly unlikely.
Fourth, ATB Financial can never go bankrupt so long as the province is solvent and remains asset rich. ATB is 100% backed by the assets of the province which likely total in the multiple $ trillions but ironically have never been measured nor placed on a proper balance sheet for the province.
Fifth, ATB Financial does not pay any federal or provincial income tax. This is because ATB Financial is an asset of the Government of Alberta and is exempt from paying income taxes. No other bank in Canada such benefits. ATB Financial is required to pay a levy in lieu of not paying taxes. For the three months ended June 30, 2016 ATB Financial paid the Government of Alberta (Minister of Finance) a mere $7,466 for payment in lieu of taxes.
Sixth, ATB Financial has one of the healthiest balance sheet of any bank in the world. Healthy bank balance sheets have strong equity to asset ratios. The assets of ATB Financial include loans to Albertans which totalled more than $40 billion in 2016. Liabilities include the deposit accounts of Albertans which totalled $30.8 billion as well as $12.4 billion in other liabilities (wholesale borrowing, collateralized borrowings and some derivatives, a mere 1.2% of ATB Financial’s assets which is very small for a bank). The difference the assets and liabilities constitutes net equity which in 2016 amounted to $3.0 billion or a equity to asset ratio of 6.4% in 2016 (7.2% in 2015). These are signs of a very healthy and vibrant bank.
Seventh ATB Financial could effectively serve as Alberta’s public financial utility creating money and credit for Alberta households, business and even governments at competitive rates.
These are natural advantages Premier Aberhart probably never imagined when his government created ATB Financial in 1938. Perhaps after more than 78 years of operations its time to come to leverage ATB Financial’s true potential.
ATB Financial is Like Having our Own Free ATM Machine
Having ATB Financial is akin to all Albertans having their own ATM or the Government of Alberta having its own central bank like the Bank of Canada. Remarkably, ATB Financial has a natural advantage over any other bank since it exists for the sole purpose of providing Albertan’s with financial services. ATB Financial does not have to generate a profit since is is owned by us, Albertans. ATB Financial pays no income taxes. Moreover, in principle it could actually issue interest-free loans to all Albertans and even governments recovering only it’s operating costs and loan risk resulting in the cost of credit that would be well below Canada’s prime lending rate.
ATB Financial has the same special power of fractional reserve banking as any other private bank. ATB Financial is governed by the Alberta Treasury Branch Act (2000) that empowers it to provide a full range of financial services to Albertans. ATB Financial is literally owned by all 4.2 million Albertans and can therefore serve to finance what I envision as a new economy of well-being by leveraging the full potential and comparative advantage of Alberta’s human, social, natural and built assets.
ATB Financial has the potential of acting like a public utility for providing the necessary credit and financing to power our economy, finance the development of Alberta’s vast suite of assets and to help achieve our individual and collective dreams for a life of happiness and well-being. In theory, ATB could operate as a non-profit bank for Albertans provide credit and loans at no cost to Albertans (that is, without charging no interest on loans) since it is an arm of the Government of Alberta and accountable to the Minister of Finance, under the Alberta Treasury Branch Act. ATB Financial, as a business entity, would only need to recover it’s annual operating costs ($1.0 billion in 2015-16 in ‘non-interest expenses, of which 51% is salaries) through possible loan fees to its members; these operating costs translate into a mere 2.5% of $40 billion in outstanding loans. In addition, a provision of $473 million was allocated in 2015-16 for loan losses which amounts to 1.2% of total loans.
In other words, ATB Financial could in principle charge an annual bank operating levy of only 2.5% on each dollar loaned to Albertans (mortgages, student loans, car loans, lines of credit, etc.), simply because it does not have to earn a profit if it recovers 100% of it’s operating costs through such a fee. This cost of ATB loans is lower than today’s Canadian average prime lending rate as of today is 2.7%. Moreover, ATB does not pay federal or provincial income taxes as a public bank; it does pay a small .
The 2.5% cost of loan operating cost is nearly the same as the world’s only interest-free cooperative bank, the JAK Members Bank in Sweden. This bank operates as a cooperative member bank which does not charge interest on any of its loans but does recover its operating costs through a business levy on each loan. (I’ll tell you more about this bank later and how it operates or see my study of JAK compared to Vancity credit union on my website).
If we considered ATB Financial as another line-item in the Government of Alberta’s annual operating budget, $1 billion in operating costs amounts to $240 per Albertan or $1,380 per ATB Member (730,000 Albertans are members). This would expenditure would compare, for example, with the $1.3 billion the Alberta Government spent on Transportation ministry operations in 2015-16 or $310 per Albertan.
Of course, the benefits of providing loans to Albertans without charging interest would be significant lowering the cost of doing business, housing costs, going to college or university, farming, and any other number of credit financing needs. At present, the average Canadian is spending about $0.35 on ever dollar of household expenditure on hidden interest charges that come from private bank-created debt money.
Ex engineer here. I graduated from uni in 1987. So many jobs. Then Share market crash in Oct 87. No jobs. Went to work in local govt and loved it as they were doing work. Unfortunately flew too close to the sun and spent most of my later years in meetings.
Fortunately Engineering degrees are portable to most other countries. People go where there are jobs. That's not here right now, as in previous cycles.
Here is another banking model that has been going for over a hundred years that I contend Kiwibank could become if we told the politicians who work for us to move the Government accounts from Westpac to Kiwibank, which would gain us the cheapest sovereign funding for infrastructure projects, without foreign borrowing or allowing toll booting foreign corporations to build it:
Wow. That was quick. Well over 100 likes now so I'm opening it up for full public reading, listening and sharing. Thanks again to our paying subscribers for your support.
In many ways the capital investment deficit is worse Bernard if you remove Defence spending. That is primarily around the “wall of steel” (as called by some in the NZDF) for the mid/late life upgrades and replacement systems. None of that investment has any major infrastructure impacts for NZ.
I seem to have thought of ideology as a head thing, something to be argued and battled out , sort of airy, but its not is it. Its about who is getting even richer even as we talk. Its very very concrete. Wealth stats please.
If ideology is a collection of ideas which may or maybe not, debated, some Ministers of our current Govt. seem to have progressed to the position where ideas have become Dogma - not negotiable, not open to introduction of contradictory evidence, or verifiable best practices.
Outwardly a bit like a cult, but as the man said “ follow the money” to discover a motivation.
Unreal....NZ Engineers needing to beg that Health capital projects, Education projects and Housing projects ve retained as previously planned.....no such begging required for Prison expansion and of course ROADS Unfortunately a land of prisons and roads (faster roads at that) is not sufficient to keep New Zealand engineers gainfully employed.
Also not totally sure who is made happy by these weird priorities.
When the Auckland Central Interceptor project is finished there will be a highly skilled and successful workforce freed up for other projects. There must be many of the Italian expert tradespeople who have established themselves in Aotearoa and would be willing to stay here. Is there any plan to make the most of this? The whole project seems to have been very well managed, with high morale and goodwill.
Boot camps, gang patch laws, foregin house buyers... this government has no new ideas.
Love hearing the crickets, very appropriate for this governments ideas.
Ha! Hadn’t thought of that.
The crickets have a point but I wish they'd hush a bit
I shall ask them tomorrow morning. They are quite friendly.
I like hearing the crickets. We need to make the most of the natural world while we still have it.
This is long, but I hope I will be forgiven, given how pertinent it is to your article:
Read this to see what Kiwibank should become but the foreign privately owned banks that dominate our nation are hell-bent on preventing it from becoming:
ATB Financial: Alberta's Best Kept Secret for Building an Economy of Well-being.
Mark Anielski
President and Chief Well-being Officer Anielski Management Inc.
November 7, 2016
This article was published based on the October 27, 2016 presentation by economist and author Robert McGarvey and I did as guests of the Government of Alberta's Greening Government Speakers Series. We explored the potential for building a sustainable economy of well-being for Alberta by leveraging the hidden assets yet to be fully leveraged by ATB Financial, the most important public bank in North America.
ATB Financial is Alberta’s most important financial asset. Founded in 1938 under a Social Credit government during the Great Economic Depression ATB is North America's most important public bank with over $47.673 billion in assets, 6 times larger than then the only other public bank in North America, the Bank of North Dakota and 3.6 times larger than Servus Credit Union in Alberta (with $14.2 billion in assets). What does it mean to have our own public bank?
ATB Financial’s Natural Advantage
Why is ATB Financial so different than other financial institutions? Why does it have what outside experts say is a natural advantage? First, ATB Financial is not a private bank but is a bank with full financial services that is literally owned by Albertans backed 100% of the assets of the province. In other words ATB Financial is a Public Bank.
Second, ATB Financial is governed by a special Act of legislature called the Alberta Treasury Branch Act (2000) that sets out the terms of financial services ATB Financial can provide on behalf of the needs of Albertans.
Third, ATB Financial has the legal powers to operate just like any other bank but has significant number of Albertans as its members in fact all operations are shareholders in ATB Financial should all be members. In some ways ATB Financial is like a credit union such as Servus or Vancity, with members. Yet ATB Financial effectively already has every Albertan as a member by virtue of being a resident citizen of the province. ATB Financial is so safe that the only way he can fail is that if the entire province of Alberta fails which is highly unlikely.
Fourth, ATB Financial can never go bankrupt so long as the province is solvent and remains asset rich. ATB is 100% backed by the assets of the province which likely total in the multiple $ trillions but ironically have never been measured nor placed on a proper balance sheet for the province.
Fifth, ATB Financial does not pay any federal or provincial income tax. This is because ATB Financial is an asset of the Government of Alberta and is exempt from paying income taxes. No other bank in Canada such benefits. ATB Financial is required to pay a levy in lieu of not paying taxes. For the three months ended June 30, 2016 ATB Financial paid the Government of Alberta (Minister of Finance) a mere $7,466 for payment in lieu of taxes.
Sixth, ATB Financial has one of the healthiest balance sheet of any bank in the world. Healthy bank balance sheets have strong equity to asset ratios. The assets of ATB Financial include loans to Albertans which totalled more than $40 billion in 2016. Liabilities include the deposit accounts of Albertans which totalled $30.8 billion as well as $12.4 billion in other liabilities (wholesale borrowing, collateralized borrowings and some derivatives, a mere 1.2% of ATB Financial’s assets which is very small for a bank). The difference the assets and liabilities constitutes net equity which in 2016 amounted to $3.0 billion or a equity to asset ratio of 6.4% in 2016 (7.2% in 2015). These are signs of a very healthy and vibrant bank.
Seventh ATB Financial could effectively serve as Alberta’s public financial utility creating money and credit for Alberta households, business and even governments at competitive rates.
These are natural advantages Premier Aberhart probably never imagined when his government created ATB Financial in 1938. Perhaps after more than 78 years of operations its time to come to leverage ATB Financial’s true potential.
ATB Financial is Like Having our Own Free ATM Machine
Having ATB Financial is akin to all Albertans having their own ATM or the Government of Alberta having its own central bank like the Bank of Canada. Remarkably, ATB Financial has a natural advantage over any other bank since it exists for the sole purpose of providing Albertan’s with financial services. ATB Financial does not have to generate a profit since is is owned by us, Albertans. ATB Financial pays no income taxes. Moreover, in principle it could actually issue interest-free loans to all Albertans and even governments recovering only it’s operating costs and loan risk resulting in the cost of credit that would be well below Canada’s prime lending rate.
ATB Financial has the same special power of fractional reserve banking as any other private bank. ATB Financial is governed by the Alberta Treasury Branch Act (2000) that empowers it to provide a full range of financial services to Albertans. ATB Financial is literally owned by all 4.2 million Albertans and can therefore serve to finance what I envision as a new economy of well-being by leveraging the full potential and comparative advantage of Alberta’s human, social, natural and built assets.
ATB Financial has the potential of acting like a public utility for providing the necessary credit and financing to power our economy, finance the development of Alberta’s vast suite of assets and to help achieve our individual and collective dreams for a life of happiness and well-being. In theory, ATB could operate as a non-profit bank for Albertans provide credit and loans at no cost to Albertans (that is, without charging no interest on loans) since it is an arm of the Government of Alberta and accountable to the Minister of Finance, under the Alberta Treasury Branch Act. ATB Financial, as a business entity, would only need to recover it’s annual operating costs ($1.0 billion in 2015-16 in ‘non-interest expenses, of which 51% is salaries) through possible loan fees to its members; these operating costs translate into a mere 2.5% of $40 billion in outstanding loans. In addition, a provision of $473 million was allocated in 2015-16 for loan losses which amounts to 1.2% of total loans.
In other words, ATB Financial could in principle charge an annual bank operating levy of only 2.5% on each dollar loaned to Albertans (mortgages, student loans, car loans, lines of credit, etc.), simply because it does not have to earn a profit if it recovers 100% of it’s operating costs through such a fee. This cost of ATB loans is lower than today’s Canadian average prime lending rate as of today is 2.7%. Moreover, ATB does not pay federal or provincial income taxes as a public bank; it does pay a small .
The 2.5% cost of loan operating cost is nearly the same as the world’s only interest-free cooperative bank, the JAK Members Bank in Sweden. This bank operates as a cooperative member bank which does not charge interest on any of its loans but does recover its operating costs through a business levy on each loan. (I’ll tell you more about this bank later and how it operates or see my study of JAK compared to Vancity credit union on my website).
If we considered ATB Financial as another line-item in the Government of Alberta’s annual operating budget, $1 billion in operating costs amounts to $240 per Albertan or $1,380 per ATB Member (730,000 Albertans are members). This would expenditure would compare, for example, with the $1.3 billion the Alberta Government spent on Transportation ministry operations in 2015-16 or $310 per Albertan.
Of course, the benefits of providing loans to Albertans without charging interest would be significant lowering the cost of doing business, housing costs, going to college or university, farming, and any other number of credit financing needs. At present, the average Canadian is spending about $0.35 on ever dollar of household expenditure on hidden interest charges that come from private bank-created debt money.
In full at this link:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/atb-financial-opportunities-building-new-flourishing-economy-mark/
Ex engineer here. I graduated from uni in 1987. So many jobs. Then Share market crash in Oct 87. No jobs. Went to work in local govt and loved it as they were doing work. Unfortunately flew too close to the sun and spent most of my later years in meetings.
Fortunately Engineering degrees are portable to most other countries. People go where there are jobs. That's not here right now, as in previous cycles.
Here is another banking model that has been going for over a hundred years that I contend Kiwibank could become if we told the politicians who work for us to move the Government accounts from Westpac to Kiwibank, which would gain us the cheapest sovereign funding for infrastructure projects, without foreign borrowing or allowing toll booting foreign corporations to build it:
https://ellenbrown.com/2025/01/15/beating-wall-street-at-its-own-game-the-bank-of-north-dakota-model/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIfDNpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfZTmpFnnEoNX06FGmHP0T_2ctPCCBQ7NmiritFC1-fMmPR6j4ATaOHFwA_aem_e6IftSY9w5JZcLZoSiYkGQ
thankyou for the link
Wow. That was quick. Well over 100 likes now so I'm opening it up for full public reading, listening and sharing. Thanks again to our paying subscribers for your support.
In many ways the capital investment deficit is worse Bernard if you remove Defence spending. That is primarily around the “wall of steel” (as called by some in the NZDF) for the mid/late life upgrades and replacement systems. None of that investment has any major infrastructure impacts for NZ.
I seem to have thought of ideology as a head thing, something to be argued and battled out , sort of airy, but its not is it. Its about who is getting even richer even as we talk. Its very very concrete. Wealth stats please.
If ideology is a collection of ideas which may or maybe not, debated, some Ministers of our current Govt. seem to have progressed to the position where ideas have become Dogma - not negotiable, not open to introduction of contradictory evidence, or verifiable best practices.
Outwardly a bit like a cult, but as the man said “ follow the money” to discover a motivation.
What you say is true.
Unreal....NZ Engineers needing to beg that Health capital projects, Education projects and Housing projects ve retained as previously planned.....no such begging required for Prison expansion and of course ROADS Unfortunately a land of prisons and roads (faster roads at that) is not sufficient to keep New Zealand engineers gainfully employed.
Also not totally sure who is made happy by these weird priorities.
Scared people in a hurry to get off the roads?
When the Auckland Central Interceptor project is finished there will be a highly skilled and successful workforce freed up for other projects. There must be many of the Italian expert tradespeople who have established themselves in Aotearoa and would be willing to stay here. Is there any plan to make the most of this? The whole project seems to have been very well managed, with high morale and goodwill.