What happens Under Our Present System When Governments Create Money?

Lock-down is an ideal time to consider some simple truths that we’re normally content to ignore. If we want to reclaim our world and make it fit to live in, we must wake up to a few basic facts that are having a devastating impact on our planet and our human world.

One of these facts is how money is created, rented out and destroyed again by private banks. This process is a blind spot for most professional economists – who work for the government, or finance, or in educational establishments funded by the one or the other.

Economists’ blind spots can have a devastating effect. This one creates massive inequality and puts us in the power of people who work only to get richer. Here’s how the process works.

When governments create money, they create ‘cash’, which is the same as ‘bank reserve’. Bankers use their ‘reserve’ to create – and lend – ten to twenty times the amount of cash in ‘deposit’ money, which is the money that most of us use. So, when a government creates money – for whatever reason – it is actually creating ten to twenty times more for private profiteers. With this new money, profiteers buy up our possessions and our working lives.

In the past few years, governments have been creating so much ‘cash’ – first through ‘quantitative easing’ and now for those affected by corona virus – that interest rates have been driven close to zero. This means that profiteers are borrowing, buying and exploiting the rest of us very cheaply.

This of course has enormous implications for democracy. Money is power and it influences ‘democratic’ processes just as it shapes our everyday lives. The situation could change overnight if banks were no longer allowed to create deposit-money by multiplying reserve – that is, if ‘fractional reserve banking’ ceased. Money would then be something that most of us think it is anyway: a means of exchange that circulates permanently without being covertly manipulated for the benefit of a few.

People have been campaigning for this simple piece of justice ever since laws allowing banks to create money were first passed. These campaigns have never yet been successful. But surely it’s a case of ‘now or never’ if we wish to continue living much longer on this earth.

The legal change would be simple- if a majority wanted it to happen. All this is treated in depth in my latest book, ‘Bank Robbery’: https://www.triarchypress.net/robbery.html#