NEMO IMS doctrine · Based on The Economy of Equilibrium

NEMO IMS

NEgentropic MOney — International Monetary System

An international monetary architecture designed to turn money into an instrument for regenerating the living world, rather than merely an accelerator of debt, growth and extraction.

Full reading time: about 14 minutes · 10 blocks inspired by the chapters of the book

NEMO IMS on one page

The monetary architecture of the economy of equilibrium.

The ten blocks below follow the path of the ten chapters of The Economy of Equilibrium. They summarize the NEMO IMS doctrine in direct language: why the current monetary system makes degradation profitable, why regeneration remains insolvent, and how another monetary architecture could change the rules of the game.

Create money in proportion to what it regenerates. Withdraw it in proportion to what it degrades.
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Doctrinal pathway

Ten entry points to understand NEMO IMS.

01

Why change the economy?

Understanding why the problem is not only ecological or social, but monetary.

Read → 02

The dilemmas of our time

Debt, inflation, unemployment, climate and global trade form one interlocking system.

Read → 03

Histories and futures of money

Money is a historical convention; it can therefore be rethought.

Read → 04

A new ethics of value

Distinguishing price, profitability, real usefulness and the robustness of life.

Read → 05

The monetary curses

Debt, impossible decoupling and planetary debt reinforce one another.

Read → 06

What if the planet had its own bank?

Create debt-free money to finance what regenerates the commons.

Read → 07

The GAÏA Economic Symposium

Imagining a global governance of regenerative activities.

Read → 08

International trade

Moving beyond key currencies and extractive competition between nations.

Read → 09

NEMO IMS prudential rules

Create, circulate, withdraw and regulate money through a logic of dynamic stability.

Read → 10

Rethinking the economy, remaking the world

Making ecological and social robustness the new economic compass.

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01 · Changing the engine

Why is the problem first and foremost monetary?

Supposedly neutral, money makes some activities solvent, desirable and profitable, while condemning vital activities to economic invisibility.

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The problem is not only economic. It is monetary.

Supposedly neutral, money is the great absentee in discussions about social and environmental crises. We speak of taxation, public debt, innovation, green growth, energy transition or individual responsibility; but we rarely question the monetary architecture that makes certain activities solvent, desirable and profitable, while condemning other activities — though vital — to economic invisibility.

Our age is therefore facing a major contradiction: humanity has never produced so much wealth, and yet it has never destroyed so much of what keeps it alive.

This paradox is not an accident. It reveals a deep anomaly in the way we define value. Activities that extract, accelerate, artificialize, consume and degrade remain widely solvent because they rapidly generate turnover, margins, yields and growth. Conversely, activities that repair, protect, regenerate and preserve the conditions of life are too often treated as costs. This is the tragedy of short horizons.

Restoring soils, cleaning oceans, preserving forests, protecting biodiversity, strengthening public services or funding fundamental research are essential long-term activities. Yet in the current system they struggle to find their place, because they lack immediate profitability.

Today, degenerative activities can be extremely lucrative, while regenerative activities remain insolvent in the short term. NEMO IMS proposes to reverse this monetary polarity: to make what regenerates remunerative, and to penalize what degrades through mechanisms of monetary subtraction — monetary demurrage on transactions.

This is why the problem is not only economic. It is monetary. As long as money is born mainly from debt, short-term profitability and the future exploitation of reality, it will continue to orient the economy toward quantitative growth, extraction and the degradation of the living world.

This contradiction is all the deeper because debt, from an accounting standpoint, can grow without theoretical limit, whereas planetary resources are finite. We have built a system in which potentially infinite financial promises exert permanent pressure on a limited material world.

NEMO IMS therefore proposes to change this invisible dynamic: to turn money creation into a tool for regeneration, rather than merely an accelerator of debt, production and destruction.

02 · The systemic puzzle

Why do contemporary crises call for a systemic response?

Unemployment, public debt, inflation, ecological crisis, loss of meaning and trade competition appear separate. But that separation is misleading: these crises are intertwined.

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Like a vast puzzle in which each dilemma is a key that locks all the others.

Unemployment, public debt, inflation, recession, ecological crisis, resource depletion, loss of meaning, geopolitical tensions, deindustrialization, trade competition: our time appears to be facing a multitude of separate problems. But this separation is misleading. These crises are not merely juxtaposed; they are intertwined.

We want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but our social models remain dependent on growth. We want to preserve the commons, but we finance them through taxes levied on an often extractive economy. We want to reduce debt, but debt reduction generally requires more market activity. We want to protect employment, but financialization pushes firms to replace workers with machines whenever this increases margins. We want to produce more cleanly, but international competition too often rewards those who produce at the lowest cost, even when that lower cost rests on social or ecological degradation.

We sacrifice the future to the glory of the present. The central dilemma lies here: in our current economic software, collective well-being still depends too heavily on mechanisms that degrade the future conditions of well-being. Public services, ecological transition, social protection, research, health, education and ecosystem regeneration are financed through tax revenues or debt. Yet these revenues come from a productive system that must keep growing, selling, extracting, artificializing and consuming in order to remain solvent.

This is the curse of Sisyphus applied to the modern economy: we keep pushing the boulder of growth in order to obtain the means to repair the damage produced by that very growth.

To this must be added the trap of the external constraint. A nation that decided alone to produce with greater ecological and social precaution would often see its costs rise. In a world of generalized competition, it would risk losing market share to less demanding competitors. The global system therefore rewards ecological and social undercutting. The most harmful player sets the pace, and the others are forced to follow if they want to remain in the race.

NEMO IMS starts from this observation: contemporary crises cannot be solved one by one through isolated adjustments. They form a system. And if the lock is systemic, the response must be systemic too.

The monetary and economic theories we know seem unable to offer a relevant answer to this entire set of crises. Clearly, we must attempt something radically new.

It is not merely a matter of taxing better, regulating better, subsidizing better or raising awareness more effectively. These tools can be useful, but they remain insufficient as long as they do not touch the core of the problem: the way money is created, oriented, converted, used and withdrawn.

NEMO IMS proposes to break this circle by directly financing regenerative activities without making them dependent on prior destructive growth. In other words: no longer having to destroy in order to obtain the means to repair.

03 · Monetary narratives

What kind of humanity does money produce?

Money is not merely a medium of exchange: it is a collective narrative that shapes our institutions, our behavior and our way of inhabiting the world.

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What kind of humanity does money produce? And what kind of humanity could be born from a new monetary narrative?

Money is not merely a medium of exchange. It is a political institution, a social convention, an architecture of power and a collective narrative. It decrees what counts and what does not. It distinguishes what deserves to be financed from what can wait. It makes certain activities visible, solvent and desirable, while condemning others to invisibility.

This is why the history of money is not a secondary history reserved for specialists. It is one of humanity’s great histories. Through money, societies have organized trust, debt, sovereignty, exchange, obedience, scarcity, wealth and sometimes domination.

For centuries, humans have sought to give money the appearance of solidity by tying it to precious metals, reserves, promises of repayment, states or dominant currencies. Gold, silver, the gold standard, Bretton Woods, the dollar, foreign exchange reserves and floating exchange rates have all been historical answers to the same question: how can trust be organized between peoples, states and trading economies?

But every monetary system carries its own vision of the world. A scarce, metallic and accumulable money does not produce the same humanity as bank money created through credit. A money dominated by a key currency does not produce the same relations between nations as a system of monetary cooperation. A money that primarily values extraction, immediate profitability and accumulation shapes behaviors, institutions and imaginaries adapted to that logic.

Our current system therefore produces not only prices, loans, debts or interest rates. It also produces an implicit anthropology: the human being as an economic agent in competition, the firm as a machine for profitability, the nation as an export power, nature as a stock of resources, the future as a deposit of income to be exploited.

This monetary anthropology is rarely named. Yet it acts everywhere. It influences our relationship to work, merit, success, responsibility, time, the living world and other peoples. It teaches us to regard as rational what generates income, even when it degrades; and as secondary what protects, when it does not pay off immediately.

The historical question therefore becomes a civilizational question: do we want to continue living under a monetary narrative that produces human beings forced to compete, accumulate, extract and grow without end? Or can we imagine another narrative, capable of producing other behaviors, other institutions and other forms of cooperation?

NEMO IMS belongs within this interrogation. Before being a technical architecture, it is an attempt to shift the monetary narrative. It asks not only how money circulates, but what it tells; not only who creates it, but what kind of society it makes possible; not only what it measures, but what kind of humanity it shapes.

The future of money will not be decided only in central banks, financial markets or international treaties. It will also be decided in the collective imagination: in our ability to understand that money is not neutral, that it produces a world, and that another world probably requires another monetary narrative.

04 · Value, price, profitability

Why must we refound our idea of value?

Our time confuses value, price and profitability: what maintains the conditions of life remains invisible, while what destroys them becomes accountable.

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Not everything profitable is essential. Not everything essential is profitable.

Our time suffers from a deep confusion between value, price and profitability. We call “wealth” what increases gross domestic product, even when that production destroys soils, depletes resources, weakens societies or manufactures useless objects. We call “cost” what protects, repairs, preserves or slows the degradation of the world. This accounting inversion is one of the most powerful symptoms of our economic disorientation.

The preservation of a primary forest is wealth from the standpoint of ecosystemic robustness. But for the market, this wealth is too often measured only in planks, exploitable surfaces or industrial plantations. In other words, what maintains the conditions of life often remains invisible as long as it stays intact; what destroys them becomes accountable as soon as it enters market exchange.

In our current way of doing economics, what is not counted seems not to count.

In the accounts of the market economy, a clean river remains almost invisible; it becomes visible when an industry exploits it, when it is degraded, and then when public budgets must finance its cleanup. A living, fertile and preserved soil appears as an available land reserve, whereas an artificialized soil becomes an economic operation. Dominant accounting does not first see what maintains life; it sees what enters the circuit of transactions.

This is why growth can no longer be considered a sufficient compass. Producing more does not necessarily mean living better. Some productions respond to real needs; others merely keep the economic machine running, create artificial desires, accelerate obsolescence, multiply waste and turn uselessness into statistical performance.

The problem is therefore not only how to produce more cleanly. It is to know what still deserves to be produced, what must be transformed, what must be slowed down and what must disappear. A mature economy should be able to distinguish the indispensable from the superfluous, the necessary from the ostentatious, real use from mere market stimulation.

This distinction lies at the heart of a new ethics of value. Essential market activities — feeding oneself, housing oneself, caring for oneself, moving around, communicating, producing energy, transmitting knowledge — must obviously continue to exist. But they must be organized so as to minimize their ecological and social footprint. Conversely, superfluous, highly polluting, extractive activities, or those based on the permanent creation of false needs, must be progressively discouraged.

It is also necessary to recognize a third category, one mistreated by our current economic frameworks: non-market or weakly market-based regenerative activities. Restoring an ecosystem, preserving an aquifer, protecting a species, strengthening a community, caring for the most vulnerable, producing fundamental knowledge or maintaining robust public services does not always generate immediate profitability. Yet these activities condition the very possibility of a sustainable society.

The question of value therefore becomes political, ecological and civilizational. A worthy economy should not merely ask: “How much does it yield?” It should also ask: “What does it preserve? What does it destroy? What needs does it meet? What society does it produce? What planet does it leave behind?”

NEMO IMS belongs to this new ethics. It is not about denying the existence of the market, nor claiming that all market activity is bad. It is about putting finance back in its proper place: that of a useful tool for certain functions, but one incapable, by itself, of defining the real value of things — especially when that value concerns the long term, the commons, the living world and future generations.

An economy of equilibrium does not seek growth for its own sake. It seeks an adjustment between real human needs and planetary boundaries. It accepts that some activities must degrow because they degrade too much, while others must finally grow because they protect, repair and regenerate.

05 · Debt, extraction, decoupling

Why does debt push us toward extraction?

Debt is not merely an accounting entry: it is a promise of future income, and too often a promise of future extraction.

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What we almost never think about when we think about money.

We often speak of public debt, deficits, inflation, purchasing power or the cost of transition. But we much more rarely question the monetary mechanisms that make these problems almost insoluble. Money seems self-evident. It circulates, it is missing, it costs, it is borrowed, it is repaid. Yet behind this apparent banality, our monetary system locks our societies into several structural curses.

The first curse lies in money creation through debt. In the current system, a large share of money is born when a bank grants credit. This money therefore does not appear as free income, but as a debt to be repaid. It carries within it a requirement of return, yield and future solvency. It forces economic actors to produce tomorrow more income than exists today.

Deposits do not precede loans; loans create deposits.

This logic is not morally scandalous in itself: bank credit has made it possible to finance homes, firms, infrastructure, useful projects and many innovations. The problem is that it is an incomplete engine. It finances very well what promises future income. It finances far less well what protects the general conditions of life when those benefits are collective, diffuse, non-market or too distant in time.

We should see this logic as a great monetary chain reaction: the indebtedness of some often enables the deleveraging of others. In this mechanism, the incomes needed to repay previous debts partly come from new loans, new spending, new investments and therefore new financial commitments. The indebtedness of the “following” thus contributes to the deleveraging of the “preceding”.

Add to this compound interest, the cost of credit and the permanent need to sustain economic activity, and we understand why aggregate debt tends structurally to increase. The system is not merely crossed by debt: it needs new flows of indebtedness to maintain its own solvency.

Here the link between finance and the extractive economy becomes clear. A debt is never just an accounting entry: it is a promise of future income. Yet in our current system, the fastest and highest incomes often come from the most degenerative activities: resource extraction, land artificialization, intensive production, speculation, organized obsolescence and accelerated consumption.

Debt thus becomes, indirectly, a promise of future extraction. To fill the holes written on our balance sheets, we are pushed to dig ever deeper holes in nature. Financial statements demand repayment flows; the material world provides those flows in the form of energy, matter, land, human labor and mobilized ecosystems.

This is how finance, when it is not framed by ecological and social purpose, tends to turn the future into a deposit of income to be exploited. It does not merely finance the economy: it imposes a pace, a demand for yield and a permanent pressure on reality.

The second curse is that of impossible decoupling. We still too often hope that economic growth can continue indefinitely while reducing the global pressure exerted on the living world. But in a finite material world, all economic activity rests on flows of energy, matter, extraction, transport, transformation and waste. Efficiency gains exist, but they are too often absorbed by the increase in the volumes produced and consumed.

In other words, an economy structured for growth almost always ends up recreating new externalities, even when it becomes locally more efficient. Pollution can change country, emissions can be displaced through supply chains, technological gains can be canceled by rebound effects. Decoupling then becomes less a solution than a reassuring narrative, unable to respond to the global scale of degradation.

The third curse is the knot between financial debts and planetary debts. Our societies accumulate accounting debts toward creditors, markets, banks and future generations. But they also accumulate material debts toward soils, oceans, forests, climate, biodiversity and the very conditions of life. These two debts come into contradiction.

To repay financial debts, we often have to produce more, sell more, extract more, export more. But this additional growth aggravates planetary debts. And to repair planetary debts, we again resort to taxation or public debt, which in turn require more economic activity. The circle closes: repair depends on the degradation that made it necessary.

This is what we might call the fiscal Jevons paradox: the more we need to repair negative externalities, the more we fiscally depend on an economy that continues to produce them.

Our curse is this: the less we destroy, the less we earn the means to repair.

The money intended to repair the world still too often comes from the mechanisms that damage it. If we assume that taxation is the only way to finance regenerative activities, then we remain trapped in a logic where the repair of negative externalities remains financially dependent on the processes that generate them.

This logic is not marginal: it has long been embedded in the DNA of our economy. Public services, social protection, infrastructure, education, health and ecological transition still depend heavily on revenues generated by a productivist, extractive and market-based economy.

These curses do not mean that bank money, credit, taxation or debt are useless. They mean that the current monetary, banking and financial architecture has become insufficient — and in some respects archaic — to confront the systemic crises of our time.

A system designed to finance future profitability cannot, by itself, finance the long-term robustness of the living world.

NEMO IMS therefore starts from a simple intuition: the existing monetary architecture must be complemented by a mechanism capable of directly financing what debt, markets and taxation do not know how to finance properly. As long as regenerative activities remain dependent on revenues taken from the degenerative economy, we will remain trapped in the same mechanism.

Escaping the monetary curses does not mean abolishing all existing money. It means recognizing that money born mainly from debt and oriented toward profitability cannot be the only economic language of a civilization confronted with planetary boundaries.

06 · Gaia’s money

What if the planet had its own bank?

NEMO IMS proposes that regenerative activities become the counterpart of debt-free money creation through NEMO Green SDRs.

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And Gaia said to humankind: “It is vain to heal me with a currency drawn from the deepest parts of my wounds.”

The question may seem strange, almost naïve: what if the planet had its own bank? Not a private bank seeking yield, nor a national central bank defending only a currency, nor an international financial institution reproducing existing power relations; but an institution capable of recognizing, financing and remunerating what protects the very conditions of life.

For this is precisely the blind spot of our system. We know how to create money to buy housing, finance firms, support markets, save banks or relaunch activity. We know how to monetize assets, organize credit, securitize claims, refinance institutions and support liquidity. But we still do not know how, at the necessary scale, to create incomes for those who restore soils, clean oceans, protect forests, preserve freshwater, repair ecosystems, strengthen food security or care for the commons.

In today’s world, these activities too often appear as costs. They require long time horizons, labor, skills, coordination, equipment, research and infrastructure. Their curse, in our current system, is that they do not produce immediate market income. They are therefore pushed back toward taxation, public debt, philanthropy, uncertain subsidies or political goodwill.

NEMO IMS proposes to break this dependency. If an activity is recognized as regenerative, if it truly contributes to ecological and social robustness, then it must be able to become the counterpart of debt-free money creation. Money would no longer be born only from a promise of future repayment, but also from a present act of repair, preservation or regeneration.

This is the role of NEMO Green SDRs — Gaia’s money: to serve as an international unit of account for recognizing and remunerating activities that strengthen planetary commons. These green SDRs are not designed as a single world currency intended to replace national currencies. They are rather an instrument of accounting, coordination and issuance, enabling central banks to convert an internationally recognized regenerative value into national money usable in the real economy.

The principle is simple: a regenerative activity is identified, evaluated and validated; it gives rise to the issuance of NEMO Green SDRs; these units are then converted by central banks into national currency; this money becomes income to finance labor, projects, territories and institutions engaged in regeneration.

The money thus created is not additional debt. It does not burden public balance sheets, nor impose on future generations a repayment obligation. It recognizes a form of wealth that our current accounting does not know how to see: the restoration of the conditions of life.

Such an architecture could give nations new revenues, not derived from extraction or productivist growth, but from their measurable contribution to planetary robustness. It could allow countries now trapped in debt, external dependency or forced resource exploitation to find another path: earning monetary means by protecting their forests, soils, biodiversity, water, populations and vital infrastructure.

It is not about replacing the entire existing economy with an administered economy of regeneration. It is about creating the missing pillar: a monetary circuit capable of financing what the market does not finance, because the return on investment is not private, immediate or market-based, but collective, delayed and vital.

The question is therefore not: “Do we have the means to finance regeneration?” The real question is: “Why do we accept money creation to feed debt and extraction, but not to preserve the conditions of life?”

NEMO IMS answers by proposing a new convention: the regeneration of the living world can become a legitimate counterpart of money creation.

07 · Governance of the commons

Who decides what deserves money creation?

If regeneration becomes a counterpart of money creation, there must be a governance capable of defining, certifying and controlling what deserves to be financed.

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A global governance of planetary commons.

If the regeneration of the living world becomes a legitimate counterpart of money creation, a decisive question immediately arises: who decides? Who defines regenerative activities? Who measures their impact? Who prevents fraud, windfall effects, greenwashing or capture by vested interests? Who ensures that this new monetary power is not confiscated by a handful of states, corporations or dominant institutions?

NEMO IMS therefore cannot be limited to a monetary idea. It requires governance. This is the role of the GAÏA Economic Symposium: to become the international institution responsible for organizing, certifying, supervising and guiding major programs for the regeneration of planetary commons.

It would not be a world government, nor a planetary ministry of the economy. The GAÏA Economic Symposium would rather be an institution of coordination, deliberation and certification, bringing together states, central banks, scientists, representatives of peoples, international institutions, field actors and guardians of the commons. Its role would be to turn a currently scattered question — how can the preservation of the living world be financed? — into a global economic architecture.

The central mission of the GAÏA Economic Symposium would be to answer a simple yet dizzying question: which activities deserve to be remunerated through money creation because they truly strengthen the ecological and social robustness of the world?

This implies defining criteria, thresholds, evaluation methods, control procedures and collective priorities. It is not enough to declare an activity “green” for it to be regenerative. We must measure what it restores, what it prevents, what it protects, what it transmits, but also what it risks displacing or degrading elsewhere.

The GAÏA Economic Symposium would therefore have an economic, scientific, legal, accounting and democratic function. Economic, because it would orient the creation of NEMO Green SDRs toward missions of planetary interest. Scientific, because it would have to rely on the best available knowledge on climate, biodiversity, soils, water, energy, public health and social resilience. Legal, because it would participate in recognizing and sanctuarizing the commons. Accounting, because it would require new ways of measuring wealth, degradation, repair and contributions to the living world. Democratic, finally, because such an architecture can be legitimate only if it remains open, controllable and pluralistic.

This governance would also have to avoid two pitfalls. The first would be technocratic: believing that a few experts could decide alone what deserves to be financed in the name of the living world. The second would be purely political: allowing the usual power relations to turn NEMO IMS into yet another instrument of domination. Robustness requires science, institutions, law, deliberation and counter-powers.

The GAÏA Economic Symposium would thus be the place where humanity learns to discuss its priorities from the standpoint of planetary boundaries and real social needs. It would no longer be merely a matter of allocating budgets after the fact, but of collectively defining what money should make possible in the first place.

In this perspective, planetary commons would no longer be mere objects of discourse, advocacy or compensation. They would become monetary and accounting priorities. Freshwater, living soils, forests, oceans, biodiversity, vital infrastructure, public health, food security and fundamental research would no longer be treated as secondary variables dependent on growth surpluses. They would enter the heart of economic architecture.

The GAÏA Economic Symposium therefore represents the institutional dimension of NEMO IMS. Where NEMO Green SDRs give regeneration a monetary form, GAÏA gives their legitimacy a political, scientific and legal form.

Without this governance, regenerative money could become another vague promise. With it, it can become a global infrastructure serving the commons.

08 · Monetary spiderweb

How can we move beyond key currencies and extractive competition?

The monetary spiderweb links each currency to the NEMO Exchange Standard in order to reduce key currencies, foreign exchange reserves and monetary hegemony.

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Moving beyond key currencies and extractive competition between nations.

International trade is not merely a system of exchanges between countries. It is also a monetary architecture. Behind every import, every export, every trade deficit, every foreign exchange reserve and every balance-of-payments crisis lies a way of organizing currencies among themselves.

Today this organization remains profoundly asymmetric. Some currencies play the role of key currencies, especially the dollar. They serve as benchmark, reserve, invoicing unit, safe asset and necessary gateway in a large share of international exchanges. This situation grants considerable privilege to the countries issuing these currencies, while placing other nations in a position of dependency.

Countries that do not issue a key currency must earn, borrow or accumulate these currencies in order to import, repay, stabilize their exchange rate or reassure markets. They are then pushed to export more, attract capital, reduce costs, exploit resources and remain competitive in a global game where ecological and social undercutting often becomes a condition of economic survival.

The current world trade system thus produces a permanent external constraint. Even when a country wants to produce with greater precaution, pay workers better, protect its soils, preserve its forests or reduce its emissions, it remains exposed to competition from nations able to produce more cheaply because they bear fewer social or environmental constraints. In this race, the planet and peoples become the adjustment variables.

NEMO IMS proposes to move beyond this logic by introducing a common reference: the NEMO Exchange Standard, or NES.

The NES is not a world currency intended to replace national currencies. Nor is it a new hegemonic currency meant to take the dollar’s place. It would be an international unit of account, a central reference allowing conversions between currencies without passing through a key currency.

This is where the metaphor of the monetary spiderweb comes in. In the current system, currencies are often hierarchized around a few centers of power. In NEMO IMS, each national currency would be linked to a common reference: the NES. As in a spiderweb, currencies would no longer be forced to pass through a dominant currency to communicate with one another; they would all be connected to the center through a declared, stable, transparent and revisable parity.

In the diagram, the center represents 1 NES. Around it, each currency has a correspondence: dollar, euro, yen, yuan, pound sterling, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar and so on. The figures should not be read as definitive parities, but as an illustration of a principle: each national currency is attached to the same accounting standard, allowing currencies to be compared and converted through a common reference.

Monetary spiderweb diagram: 1 NES at the center, connected to the main national currencies.
The monetary spiderweb: each national currency is linked to the NEMO Exchange Standard, without passing through a dominant key currency.

Concretely, a conversion between two currencies could pass through the NES as an intermediate accounting unit. An exchange between the Canadian dollar and the yen, for example, would not necessarily depend on mediation through the US dollar. It would pass through double-entry accounting: national currency to NES, then NES to national currency. The NES would play the role of a common language, not that of an imperial currency.

International trade would then be organized in an essentially scriptural way, through a simple rule of three enabling transparent conversion. When a country imports, the importer’s currency is destroyed in its monetary space; symmetrically, the exporter’s currency is created in its own monetary space, according to the common parity expressed in NES. The point is therefore not to circulate a key currency physically or financially between the two countries, but to organize an accounting destruction-creation between sovereign currencies connected to the same reference.

This architecture would reduce dependence on key currencies, massive foreign exchange reserve needs and the geopolitical privileges tied to issuing a dominant currency. It would also allow trade imbalances to be addressed otherwise than through austerity, devaluation, wage compression or an export-driven flight forward.

The NES would thus respond to several historical dilemmas of the international monetary system. It would bypass the Triffin dilemma, since international liquidity would no longer depend on the indebtedness or deficits of the country issuing a key currency. It would also help overcome part of the Mundell-Fleming trilemma, because exchange-rate stability would no longer rest on a dominant currency nor on a total loss of monetary sovereignty, but on a shared conversion reference. It would reduce currency wars, competitive devaluations and domination strategies through exchange rates, since currencies would be linked to a shared accounting center rather than locked into permanent rivalry.

Geopolitically, such an architecture would limit the monetary imperialism associated with key currencies. The dollar, for instance, would no longer be the compulsory gateway of globalization, the indispensable support of reserves, nor the indirect instrument through which a national power imposes on the rest of the world its constraints, sanctions, financial cycles or internal imbalances. NEMO IMS would not seek to replace one hegemony with another; it would seek to make monetary hegemony itself unnecessary.

Under NEMO IMS, international trade would no longer be only a matter of prices, volumes and competitiveness. It would also become a matter of impact. Exchanges could be adjusted according to the ecological and social quality of production, in order to prevent the least demanding countries from imposing their standards on others through price pressure alone.

The monetary spiderweb therefore does not aim to centralize the world around a new single currency. On the contrary, it aims to decentralize monetary power. Each currency retains its existence, each central bank retains a role, each nation retains its monetary sovereignty; but international exchanges are organized around a common reference that limits the domination of one currency over all the others.

The objective is to escape the old dilemma: either accept the hegemony of a key currency, or endure exchange-rate instability and generalized monetary competition. NEMO IMS proposes a third path: structured monetary cooperation, where national currencies remain distinct but connected by a common international standard.

World trade cannot become sustainable as long as nations are forced to fight for currencies, surpluses, market shares and reserves. The monetary spiderweb offers another image of globalization: no longer a pyramid dominated by a central currency, but a network of sovereign currencies linked by a shared reference.

09 · Create, withdraw, regulate

How can money be created without causing inflation?

NEMO IMS is not an unlimited monetary injection, but a complete cycle: regenerative issuance, circulation, demurrage, prudential adjustment and central-bank steering.

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Create, circulate, withdraw and regulate money as a dynamic flow.

“Inflation is creating money that does not exist to finance things that are not profitable.” This formula, attributed to Jacques Rueff, goes straight to the heart of the objection that could be addressed to NEMO IMS.

At first glance, NEMO IMS seems to fall directly under this criticism: it does indeed propose to create money to finance activities that the market judges non-profitable in the short term. But this is precisely where the reasoning must be shifted. Regenerative activities are not “unprofitable” because they are useless; they are so because our accounting and financial system does not know how to remunerate their collective, delayed and vital benefits.

It must also be understood that inaction is inflationary in the long term. Failing to finance the regeneration of soils, water, forests, climate, biodiversity or vital infrastructure means allowing the real capacities of production to deteriorate. Yet an economy that loses its harvests, resources, supply chains, sanitary conditions or energy stability does not become more stable: it becomes more vulnerable to shortages, supply shocks and price surges that will follow from them.

Ecological inaction therefore prepares future inflations that may be far more violent than those we claim to avoid by refusing to finance regeneration.

The inflation objection must therefore be taken seriously. Creating debt-free money can be acceptable only if that creation is framed, measured, backed by a real counterpart and accompanied by a reflux mechanism. Without rules, limits and monetary withdrawal, new money could feed inflation, speculative bubbles, external imbalances or a loss of confidence.

NEMO IMS answers precisely this difficulty by refusing to think of money creation as a definitive injection. Regenerative money must be understood as a dynamic flow: it is born when it finances activities that strengthen ecological and social robustness; it then circulates through the real economy; and it can be partially withdrawn when it accompanies market transactions, according to the ecological and social impact of the activities concerned.

The question is therefore not to create money without limit, but to organize a complete monetary cycle: regenerative issuance, economic circulation, monetary subtraction, prudential adjustment and central-bank steering. NEMO IMS never envisages creation without its symmetrical movement: targeted withdrawal.

In this architecture, debt-free money remunerates work, services, projects or institutions that contribute to the regeneration of the living world. But it is not meant to accumulate indefinitely. When it enters the market economy, part of it can be withdrawn from the system through demurrage on transactions. Money must therefore be able to be born, circulate, be oriented, be monitored and disappear.

Monetary demurrage is not a classical tax. It is not a levy collected and then redistributed through a public budget. It is a partial monetary withdrawal applied at the moment of certain transactions, according to the ecological and social impact of the activity concerned. The more degenerative an activity is, the higher the demurrage can be. The more essential, sober or low-impact an activity is, the more it can be preserved.

This mechanism profoundly changes economic logic. In the current system, a highly polluting activity can remain profitable if it externalizes its costs onto society, ecosystems or future generations. Under NEMO IMS, money itself would be affected by the quality of what it finances. What degrades would gradually lose part of its monetary yield; what regenerates would be better recognized, better financed and better protected.

The prudential question therefore becomes central. Demurrage rates, the sectors concerned, impact thresholds, necessary exemptions, circumvention risks, effects on prices, incomes, investment, foreign trade and banking stability must all be determined. These rules cannot be improvised. They require strong central banks, supervisory institutions, reliable data, transparent criteria and regular adjustments.

NEMO IMS therefore gives central banks a fundamental role. Their mission would no longer be limited to monitoring inflation in the narrow sense, nor to steering interest rates in the hope of indirectly influencing the economy. They would become guardians of a broader equilibrium: price stability, financial stability, sustainability of monetary flows, ecological robustness, consistency of reserve requirements and quality of credit circuits.

Reserve requirements would play an important role here. Money stemming from regenerative activities could feed the reserves of the banking system, but central banks would have to finely adjust reserve ratios in order to avoid excessive market credit. If new money too rapidly increases the lending capacity of commercial banks, reserve requirements could be raised. Conversely, in a phase of contraction or fragility, they could be adapted to avoid suffocating the real economy.

In other words, regenerative money creation does not abolish monetary policy; it makes it more demanding. It forces us to move from a static quantitative vision to a qualitative and dynamic one: where does money come from? What is it used for? Which sectors does it feed? What impacts does it produce? At what pace should it be withdrawn? Which behaviors does it encourage or discourage?

This is where another decisive dimension of NEMO IMS appears: debt-free money can become a massive deleveraging instrument. By remunerating regenerative activities through new monetary revenues, nations would have additional resources that do not come from new borrowing, nor from higher taxation on the existing economy. These new kinds of national revenues could irrigate the real economy, support employment, finance the commons, then flow back toward public and private balance sheets in the form of revenues, repayments, reduced borrowing needs and progressive easing of financial burdens.

The mechanism thus creates a double movement: a flow toward activities that regenerate the living world, and then a reflux toward accumulated debts. Ecological debts and financial debts would no longer be treated as two separate problems. A single monetary architecture could mitigate both simultaneously: repairing the material conditions of life while giving nations new means to reduce their dependency on indebtedness.

NEMO IMS is therefore not a green printing press. It is a complete monetary architecture in which issuance is conditional, circulation is observed, withdrawal is organized and stability is steered. Debt-free money creation is acceptable only because it comes with a mechanism of reflux, control and responsibility.

This approach could be described as monetary thermodynamics. In nature, no living system operates through infinite accumulation. There are inputs, transformations, losses, recycling and regulations. NEMO IMS applies this intuition to money: a sustainable monetary system must have a metabolism. It must know how to create where the living world regenerates, and how to withdraw where the economy degrades it.

NEMO IMS prudential rules are therefore not a technical detail added at the end of the project. They are the condition of its credibility. Without them, regenerative money creation could be confused with inflationary stimulus. With them, it becomes a steered, measurable and reversible instrument, capable of financing robustness without abandoning the requirement of stability.

10 · Civilizational horizon

How can we adapt our economy to the planet?

NEMO IMS is not merely a monetary reform: it is an invitation to rethink the economy from the material, social and ecological conditions that make it possible.

Read the full analysis

Change or disappear?

NEMO IMS is not merely a monetary reform. It is an invitation to rethink the economy from its foundations: no longer from growth alone, profitability, debt and competition, but from the material, social and ecological conditions that make any economy possible.

For too long, we have reasoned as if the economy were an autonomous world, separate from the living world. We have spoken of markets, budgets, debts, productivity, competitiveness and yields as if soils, water, climate, forests, oceans, human bodies, social bonds and political stability were merely secondary variables. But the economy is not above the biosphere. It is included within it. It depends on it at every moment.

Rethinking the economy therefore means reversing the implicit hierarchy of our time. It is not the living world that must endlessly adapt to the demands of finance, debt and global trade. It is money, finance, banks, markets and institutions that must reorganize themselves to respect the limits of the living world.

This transformation cannot come merely from individual behavior change. Personal gestures matter, of course. But they will never be enough to correct a global architecture designed to make extraction profitable and regeneration marginal. A systemic problem cannot be solved by an accumulation of micro-virtues. The rules of the game must be changed.

NEMO IMS proposes precisely to shift those rules. It is not about adding one more ecological tax to an unchanged system, nor about repainting growth green, nor about promising that technological innovation will mechanically resolve all dilemmas. It is about recognizing that money is a civilizational lever, and that the orientation of money creation profoundly determines what a society makes possible.

Such a proposal may seem utopian. But utopia is not always the opposite of realism. In certain periods of history, it becomes the name given to solutions that the present still refuses to understand. What is unrealistic today is not to imagine another monetary architecture. It is to believe that the same mechanisms that produced ecological, social and financial crises will miraculously solve them without deep transformation.

NEMO IMS does not call for abolishing states, banks, national currencies or the market economy. It calls for complementing them, redirecting them and framing them through a regenerative pillar. The market can continue to produce useful goods and services. Banks can continue to finance market projects. States can continue to organize public policies. But none of these actors should still be allowed to operate as if planetary boundaries were external to the economy.

The strategic question then becomes: through what paths could NEMO IMS come into being?

It could first emerge as doctrine — a new language for thinking through the dead ends of the current system. Before an institution exists, ideas must become speakable. We must name degenerative money, insolvent regeneration, planetary debt, monetary demurrage, Yin and Yang finance, the monetary spiderweb, the NES, NEMO Green SDRs and ecosystemic robustness. A transformation often begins with a vocabulary capable of making visible what the old language concealed.

It could then become a research program. Economists, jurists, ecologists, central-bank specialists, accountants, climatologists, sociologists, engineers, public institutions and citizens should be able to discuss, criticize, model, correct and improve this architecture. NEMO IMS must not be a closed dogma, but an open and perfectible proposal, tested against serious objections.

It could also advance through partial experiments. Territories, coalitions of states, international institutions or public banks could test certain mechanisms: accounting for regenerative activities, robustness indicators, ecological contribution currencies, debt-free regeneration funds, targeted demurrage mechanisms, new reserve requirement frameworks, or trade compensation systems inspired by the NES.

Finally, NEMO IMS could become a diplomatic horizon. Nations face the same dilemmas: debt, climate, biodiversity, energy, trade, migration, financial instability. None can solve these problems alone. An international conference on ecological monetary refoundation could open a path: not to impose a single model, but to recognize that the current international monetary system is no longer adapted to the age of planetary boundaries.

Rethinking the economy also means remaking the world culturally. We must leave behind the cult of performance to recover the cult of relevance. We must also imagine forms of merit detached from production alone, measurable performance and market utilitarianism: a merit that is reduced neither to salary, nor yield, nor financial success, but recognizes invisible contributions to care, transmission, repair and preservation.

For from the standpoint of finance, not all the sweat that runs from our brows has the same value. Some activities exhaust bodies to feed balance sheets; others silently preserve the conditions of life without ever being fully recognized.

We must also move beyond a freedom reduced to the mere ability to consume, and rethink it as a collective capacity to inhabit the world sustainably.

NEMO IMS does not claim that money will be enough to save the planet. No monetary system, by itself, can replace political courage, the transformation of lifestyles, international cooperation, science, law, democracy or collective responsibility. But the reverse is equally true: no great ecological and social transformation can succeed sustainably if money continues to orient the economy toward debt, immediate profitability and extraction.

Changing money will not automatically change the world. But trying to change the world without changing money is like trying to build a new house on old foundations, cracked and no longer fit for purpose.

The economy of equilibrium therefore proposes a horizon: to make money no longer the language of domination over the living world, but one of the instruments of its regeneration. To make finance no longer a machine demanding ever more from the world, but a collective capacity to preserve what allows us to exist. To make economics no longer the art of accumulating in a finite world, but the art of inhabiting the Earth without destroying it.

This may be, in the end, what remaking the world means: no longer asking how to adapt the planet to our economy, but how to adapt our economy to the planet.

Go further

Read the founding interview of NEMO IMS.

To complement this ten-block journey, a founding interview presents NEMO IMS in a question-and-answer format: origins of the project, objections, mechanisms, international scope and civilizational ambition.

Read the founding interview → Read the NEMO IMS FAQ Explore the glossary

NEMO IMS doctrine

We invented a money capable of extracting the world.
Now we must invent a money capable of regenerating it.

This page synthesizes the ten chapters of The Economy of Equilibrium. The newsletter and the founding interview follow the development of the doctrine, its objections, its updates and its international diffusion.

Follow NEMO IMS on Substack → Discover the book → Read the founding interview →