The most absolutely stunning revelation of my life was about the very nature of money. Like the majority of us feeble mortals on this planet, my high school education failed to give me any useful knowledge about money and the economy other than the most ridiculously elementary concepts, like the law of supply and demand which, to my astonishment, some students still had a hard time to fully grasp back on the school benches. I remember being puzzled by concepts like inflation back in economy class, and the teacher could not give me a satisfying answer. To cope with this, I assumed there was some cosmic ethereal law of the market that made demand grow always higher because incomes were rising, and that would caused inflation. I somehow knew this was faulty circular reasoning, but I had to stick with this answer because I knew nothing better, and apparently neither did my teacher (unless he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me). I could not find the solution to this equation at the time because I had only been given false or insufficient data. Only years later did I fully understand.
It all started with a ludicrous number I heard on the radio. It was 2008 and they were announcing the 700 billions dollars TARP bailout. I am Canadian and I knew this amount was more than the total Canadian national debt. I was completely stunned. I made sure three times that they were indeed talking about billions and not millions. I began frenetically reading articles on the Internet in order to understand what could possibly have happened to require that such an astronomical amount of money be given to banks by taxpayers. I soon found out that many were as shocked as I was and they were writing profusely about it. However, nothing seemed to make sense to me. How could the money just disappear from the banks? Words like subprime, derivatives, MBS, CDO, insolvency and zombie banks just assaulted me and I understood none of it. I needed to have a crash course in the basics of banking. I finally discovered the root of my confusion: I didn't know about the fractional reserve lending system. Here I was for years thinking that banks lent money they had in their coffers, or that when I used my credit card, the banks were generously setting aside money for me. How blissfully ignorant I was. Banks are not in the business of saving or protecting your money. It was all made clear by Paul Grignon’s online movie “Money as Debt”, and as John Kenneth Galbralth so eloquently said in his quote featured in the movie’s opening, "The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled". My mind was repelled. Money is actually created through lending, with debt and interest attached to it. But as I watched and the initial mind-repelling faded, everything started clicking. The mechanism of inflation became crystal clear and I could then understand why governments were piling up debt and got into neverending deficits, why teenagers could get credit cards, etc.
By collecting interest on money they don’t have but lend anyway, banks are ripping us off. Almost every dollar (read 99%) we have is tied to a debt someone owes to a bank, so in essence, we’re just exchanging debt notes and everything we have is de facto property of the bankers as collateral. They can’t seize it all at once because that would expose their scam, but they can slowly erode our standards of living by recalling the loans and contracting the money supply. That’s called a recession or a depression. That’s the process in which we are right now. But since they also seized the central banks and the engine of monetary policy, they can also print as much new money as they want without any reserve requirements and dilute the value of our savings to oblivion with massive inflation if they so desire. Their buzzword for this is Quantitative Easing. Why would they do this? Well if you print the money in a depression, you get to buy everything at firesale prices and flood the system with worthless money while you own the real assets. It is absolute robbery.
How did we let that happen, you might ask? Laziness and ignorance mostly. Some people were warning about it, but the masses didn’t seem to care. They thought it wasn’t that important or that they couldn’t do much about it. We will sure paid for that mistake, though. When the politicians sold themselves to the bankers about a 100 years ago, they opened the door to blatant corruption, fraud, waste and war. Wasting resources in unproductive government policies is great for getting nations into deeper and deeper debt, and war is undoubtedly the most efficient way to waste resources ever devised. The bankers are a parasite class that suck the lifeblood of civilization. They produce nothing and feed upon the productive people like you and me. I’m not talking about your cousin who’s a bank clerk, but about the CEOs and boards of directors of these corporations. I’m talking about the top investment bankers at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase or Power Corporation. When it stopped being redeemable in gold and silver, money lost all true value. Now its value is just based on legal tender laws and the available supply there is. If you want to protect your savings and investments, buy gold and silver, because paper money could crash to a value of zero any time now. It all depends on China’s willingness to still offer us products in exchange for it, and this will come to an end sooner or later. You can't print physical gold or silver though. That's why its value compared to real assets and goods is safe.
Don’t believe me? Just watch the movies for yourself (Money as Debt, The Money Masters, The Secret of Oz) or read a book (Modern Money Mechanics by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago , The Creature from Jekyll Island by G Edward Griffin, Funny Money by Paul Hellyer, Web of Debt by Ellen Brown) or search Fractional Reserve Banking and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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