Recently on SocialFinance.ca, Timothy Nash offered a tip for those considering shifting their money to help build a more sustainable economy. At the top of his list? “Join a credit union,” he said. We’re not going to argue with that kind of advice. Indeed, the recent economic crisis has caused a lot of people in Canada and around the world to give credit unions a second, or even a first look.
As Nash alludes to in his article, what’s attractive for those concerned about sustainability is that credit unions are co-operatives, mission-driven to improve the quality of life of their members and their local communities. That’s kinda nice to hear isn’t it? But the really good news is that credit unions are continuously improving their social, environmental and economic performance.
In The Ascent of Money, historian Niall Ferguson paints the picture of capitalism as an evolutionary beast. From the creation of stock-issuing corporations to the opaque engineering of collateralized debt obligations and other derivatives, capitalism is a story of constant innovation. More to the point, that innovation is what – in his telling – accounts for periods of dramatic economic expansion and growth. It is as if economies reach a sort of equilibrium state, and that progress requires some modification of an internal element of the system – meaning, in Ferguson’s story, the leveraging of vast new capital flows – in the underlying mechanics of the process.
At the beginning of February 
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