Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
BANK JOB
A film by Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell
Available for educational use: bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/bjob.html
Debt is an integral component of our current system of inequality. Almost all money is conjured into reality at the moment when banks make loans. This means our money supply is effectively on lease from private banks, giving them inordinate power determine the course of our economic, social and common good. Yet we, the public, do not yet fully understand the way money comes into existence – and while we remain in the dark, there will be no way to change course.
Artist/filmmaker team Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell live in an area plagued by debt – mortgage debt, credit card debt, public debt – which impoverishes families, communities and public services. So they recruit their neighbors to set up a bank in their High Street to print their own currency which they then sell as art works. The plan is to raise money to support the local school and community projects and, more daringly, to buy up over $1 million of the debts of local people. These debts are being sold on the market for a small fraction of their face value. BANK JOB follows Dan and Hilary as they succeed in their aim, eventually (and spectacularly) blowing up the debt in the shadow of London’s financial district. Along the way, they meet with economists, politicians and anti-debt campaigners in America to discover how debt is created in our economy and ask important questions about how the system of money creation might be altered in society’s favor…not just to the banking system’s benefit.
With wit, insight, and gunpowder, BANK JOB argues that these debts are a result of a monetary system which is impoverishing multitudes by design, and which could be changed.
Featuring interviews with: Professor Andrew Ross, founder of Strike Debt; economist Ann Pettifor, co-founder of Jubilee 2000; late anthropologist and activist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory; and Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf.
BANK JOB
A film by Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell
Available for educational use: bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/bjob.html
Debt is an integral component of our current system of inequality. Almost all money is conjured into reality at the moment when banks make loans. This means our money supply is effectively on lease from private banks, giving them inordinate power determine the course of our economic, social and common good. Yet we, the public, do not yet fully understand the way money comes into existence – and while we remain in the dark, there will be no way to change course.
Artist/filmmaker team Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell live in an area plagued by debt – mortgage debt, credit card debt, public debt – which impoverishes families, communities and public services. So they recruit their neighbors to set up a bank in their High Street to print their own currency which they then sell as art works. The plan is to raise money to support the local school and community projects and, more daringly, to buy up over $1 million of the debts of local people. These debts are being sold on the market for a small fraction of their face value. BANK JOB follows Dan and Hilary as they succeed in their aim, eventually (and spectacularly) blowing up the debt in the shadow of London’s financial district. Along the way, they meet with economists, politicians and anti-debt campaigners in America to discover how debt is created in our economy and ask important questions about how the system of money creation might be altered in society’s favor…not just to the banking system’s benefit.
With wit, insight, and gunpowder, BANK JOB argues that these debts are a result of a monetary system which is impoverishing multitudes by design, and which could be changed.
Featuring interviews with: Professor Andrew Ross, founder of Strike Debt; economist Ann Pettifor, co-founder of Jubilee 2000; late anthropologist and activist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory; and Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf.
