Emma Dawnay graduated from Cambridge University in the UK with a degree in natural sciences. After being a stagiaire at the European Commission she did a PhD on optical materials and worked in R&D. By the time of the dot-com boom and bust at the end of the 1990s she was working at managerial levels at Bookham Technology. Her personal experience of this boom-bust gave Emma her passion for economics, which lead her to do an MBA specialising in finance and economics at the London Business School. She later joined the New Economics Foundation (nef), a think tank in London, where she wrote an influential report on behavioural economics*. Whilst at the nef she came across the idea of Sovereign Money, which has been a major interest of hers ever since. Emma’s husband is Swiss, and she dividesher time with her family between Switzerland and the UK. In 2014 she became amember of the board of Monetäre Modernisierung (MoMo), the NGO which brought aboutthe referendum on Sovereign Money in Switzerland, where she has the role of internationalspokesperson. In the UK she is an active member of the Green Party – the only Britishpolitical party to have adopted Sovereign Money as policy – where she has twicestood as a parliamentary candidate in general elections.

Dawnay and Degiacomi are both part of the board of the NGO Monetäre Modernisierung which ran the Swiss Vollgeld Initiative in June 2018. The Referendum has created a lot of publicity all over the world and brought the structure and the problems of the current money system into mainstream media. The Referendum was rejected with ca. 25% voting for the introduction of a Vollgeld / Sovereign Money system. However, it can be conceived as a major step for the discussion about the (mis)functioning of the current fractional reserve money system.