What is the Bank Job?
Our Bank Job is a feature film and art project pushing for a national debt writeoff as part of a reset for a fairer economic system.
Throughout 2018/19 we operated out of a former Bank on a High Street in Walthamstow, North East London as HSCB (Hoe Street Central Bank). The Guardian called us “The Rebel Bank” - as we first printed our own banknotes/artwork and sold £40,000 worth of them. We used 50% of the proceeds to fund local projects picking up the pieces of our broken financial system - local food bank Eat or Heat, homeless kitchen Pl84U-Al Suffa, youth project The Soul Project and Barn Croft Primary School.
We used the other £20,000 to buy up and abolish £1.2m of local high interest debt. Debt gets sold for a fraction of its face value when debtors fail to make repayments. Debts get sold on and on - but debtors get chased for the full amount.