Commodity Money+
Samirah Kenawi's Full-Reserve Approach from the „Money of the future" Project

🟢 Samirah Kenawi is a monetary researcher and author. She contributed to the documentary Oeconomia; the fourth and final volume of her main work „Die Quadratur des Geldes" ("The Squaring of Money") was published in 2023 and lays out a comprehensive plan for solving monetary problems, building on the analysis of the origin and workings of today's money set out in volumes 2 and 3. An updated and expanded complete edition of all 4 volumes was published in 2026 under the title „Die Quadratur des Geldes" by oekom-Verlag (link to the book click here).

🟢 The Commodity Money concept is one of eight solutions in the curated project „Geld der Zukunft" – democratic, sustainable, fair. This page documents Kenawi's contribution fairly and closely follows her own word-for-word presentation, not as a refutation but as an independent voice in the spectrum of monetary reform concepts.

🔵 Money creation: still through democratic, decentralised, state-supervised private banks – as credit money created at the click of a mouse, but strictly coupled to goods-value creation.

🔵 Credit & interest: money remains credit money. In periods where the real economy's credit demand exceeds society's total savings volume, positive savings interest is paid. But because private money holding stays permanently coupled to private consumption spending, no compound interest can arise – balances cannot grow without limit given the finite nature of real consumption needs.

🔵 Financial markets: capital, currency and stock markets are wound down entirely in an orderly way, since they serve no necessary function. Capital raising for companies happens fully through banks, or savings banks, risk cover fully through insurance. An international clearing bank in the spirit of Keynes' clearing union also makes currency trading unnecessary – money for international trade arises through the settlement of trade transactions.

🔵 Capital accumulation: apart from occasional savings interest, there are neither dividends nor capital gains – no capital income from money holdings at all. Modifying property rights is meant to make capital income from real assets impossible too. Equity capital then brings no market advantage and no longer needs to be accumulated.

🔵 Central bank: becomes a clearing house. Today's two-tier banking system becomes a single-tier one: the clearing house supervises money creation by goods-money banks and lending by savings banks, manages every institution's risk reserves, and oversees the coupling of money supply to goods value.

🔵 Democratic control on the ground: decentralised, democratically controlled goods-money banks give local communities direct say over credit decisions – allowing social and ecological criteria to be agreed and enforced locally.

🔵 Property: is reduced to its original dimension – possession. By merging possession and property rights again, every claim to a return on capital ownership (ownership without an accompanying duty of possession) disappears – explicitly including real assets such as land and real estate, not only financial assets. According to Kenawi's own clarification, possession-based property – for example owner-occupied housing – remains fully protected; what is to be prevented is any kind of capital income as unearned income, in order to implement the performance principle consistently.
🟣 This page's assessment: for capital property that is not owner-occupied, this is structurally a conversion of property into a possession right, coming close to an expropriation logic – unlike HME/RICH, which leaves the existing property right legally untouched (though that concept concedes that revaluing assets without real-economy backing can in effect act as an indirect expropriation).

🔵 Reference theories: feminist economics, Keynesianism and the Keynes Plan, Henry George's single tax, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's people's/exchange bank, John Maynard Keynes' clearing currency, and Silvio Gesell's demurrage money. Target picture: steady-state economy / post-growth society, full employment, no land or real-estate speculation, balanced current accounts.

🔵 Investment financing: means of production and infrastructure are meant to be financed exclusively through the lending out of savings – unlike today, not through money creation.

🔵 Performance incentives: as unearned capital income disappears, the model logic expects a larger share of value creation to become available for labour incomes, so that everyone can live in a self-determined and dignified way from their labour income. Entrepreneurs' consumption is not meant to be restricted in any way – market competition alone (free of monopolies) limits profit margins and thus incomes. For money as a medium of exchange not to turn into an instrument of power, however, private money holding must be kept from decoupling from actual consumption needs.

🟣 Value stability (derived from the backing mechanism itself): because the money supply is strictly coupled to goods-value creation – money is created and destroyed in lockstep with real production, full commodity backing rather than backing by financial assets – the money supply is meant, by the model's logic, not to grow faster than the real supply of goods. The risk of purely monetary consumer-price inflation is thereby strongly limited according to the model logic. Whether the mechanism actually ensures stable prices is an open empirical question: prices can also rise through demand shifts, velocity of circulation, sectoral bottlenecks, import and energy prices, wage and cost changes, or valuation problems of goods-value creation. For asset-price inflation, two further mechanisms apply: since private money holding stays permanently coupled to finite real consumption needs, no compound interest can arise – financial wealth cannot grow without limit. And since capital markets are wound down and capital income from real assets (land, real estate) also disappears through property-law reform, the economic incentive for speculative asset-price bubbles is largely absent. Deflation risk, however, remains to be examined: if goods production falls (e.g. in a recession), the money supply shrinks by the same logic – whether the system provides sufficient stabilising mechanisms of its own is not conclusively answered by the sources cited so far.

🟣 Backing mechanism: Kenawi relies on 100% goods-coverage – money is created and extinguished in lockstep with goods-value creation. HME/RICH relies on Silvio Gesell's circulation-securing money (demurrage / negative holding costs) as its value-storage mechanism. Both prevent compound interest – by different routes.

🟣 Property – two very different paths: Kenawi reforms property rights directly: ownership is reduced to possession, capital income from real assets (land, real estate) is made impossible by changing the law itself.

HME/RICH deliberately takes a different route without a new law of land ownership: wealth is regulated through value-storage certificates, which must always carry real-economy backing – not through balance mechanics. In addition, high taxes on unearned income are levied: on rents, leases, the sale of real assets, real estate and land, and on inheritance. The goal – no unlimited capital income from mere possession – is similar in both concepts; the route there differs fundamentally: Kenawi changes property law itself, HME/RICH steers through mandatory backing and taxation.

🟣 Financial markets: Kenawi winds down capital, currency and stock markets entirely. Under HME/RICH, shares generally remain – the lever there sits more with heavy taxation of unearned gains (60–70%) than with abolishing the market itself.