Who controls your city's money? | Trinity Tran

**Elise Hu** (0:03)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
Think about everything it takes for a community to thrive. Affordable housing, efficient transit, functioning utilities, the ability to quickly respond to emergencies and recover when things go wrong. But where does the money come from to support all of this? According to economic justice advocate, Trinity Tran, the answer shapes far more than we realize.

**Trinity Tran** (0:33)
Money ultimately decides what gets built, money decides what survives, money decides what future becomes possible. They change where money goes and who controls it, then you change what becomes possible.

**Elise Hu** (0:46)
Trinity is a 2026 TED fellow behind a growing movement to create public banks in California. A mission rooted in empowering communities to reclaim control of their own economies.
TED fellows are early stage innovators that TED finds and supports. You may have heard some of them on this very show before, because I'm a big fan of this program. It's a community of over 500 TED fellows around the globe that has an impact on more than 200 million people a year. They are not just improving broken systems, they're building a better future. In Trinity's case, she's taking on one of the most entrenched systems in the US, banking, and creating legislation to replace the idea that our money has to sit in the hands of Wall Street bankers. In this episode, she explains how banking is really about something much bigger than money. It's about power, who holds it, who it serves, and how it shapes what your community is able to become.
She wants more of that power in public hands.

**Trinity Tran** (1:50)
At the end of the day, if the government is ultimately responsible for the stability of the financial system, then why not make it public to begin with?

**Elise Hu** (2:00)
And stick around afterward for Trinity's conversation with TED Fellows Program Director Lily James Olds. She talks about how she went from meditating like an urban monk to reading banking contracts on the weekends, and tells Lily what it would take to bring public banking to a city near you. Here's a little hint. A century-old public bank in North Dakota might have the answer. It's all coming up right after a short break.
And now here's our TED story and conversation of the day.

**Trinity Tran** (2:35)
When a community wants to build like a bridge or transit system, housing, sustainable infrastructure, where does the money come from?
Money ultimately decides what gets built. Money decides what survives. Money decides what future becomes possible. They change where money goes and who controls it. Then you change what becomes possible.
I'm Trinity Tran. I lead efforts to build public banks in California and beyond. Most of the time, our cities don't have the money up front to be able to pay for a project like a bridge or housing, and so they will issue a bond, which is essentially a long-term loan provided by, structured by Wall Street banks. A loan is money that is provided up front and paid back over time with interest. Wall Street banks, private lenders end up tacking on fees to structure and sell those bonds. Then the reality is that our local governments are not only paying for the cost of the project, but decades of interest on top of that. So for every dollar that we're borrowing, we're paying another dollar in interest over time, sometimes more. And that's all money that's going out the door to private lenders. We're paying hundreds of millions of dollars in the city of Los Angeles at the state level in California. We're paying $4 billion in interest annually. That's money flowing out of our communities rather than being invested locally.
Private banks are owned by shareholders. They're investing in areas that make them a lot of money, and not necessarily what's in the best interest in our communities. Public banking asks a different question. How do we do more with the dollars that our communities generate? Without raising taxes, but by lowering the cost of financing itself. A public bank is a bank owned by the people through their local government, either city or region or state. Every time you, for instance, buy something like a cup of coffee, a portion of that tax will go to your city and your state. So we're using the money that we already generate that belongs to us. They don't have shareholders to pay, so that as loans are repaid, it comes back into a public bank. Its mission is to support the local economic development of the community it serves. That would be designed at a local level, so the law that we created, the California Public Banking Act, creating the legal framework for cities and municipalities to be able to form their own banks. And so the mission of the bank, the mandates, the lending priorities, investment priorities, the capitalization strategies, all the details of how this is going to work, is going to be defined at a local level.