MONEY OR YOUR LIFE
Chapter Nine
INTEREST. SNAG NUMBER ONE.
If you were given a licence by the Government to create money out of thin air and spend it, you might be tempted to plurge on the privilege to such an extent that money became worthless. You might have a yearning to buy the worlds oil resources, or the worlds drug companies, or the worlds press or all three and if you did this without circumspection, so much new money would appear in circulation so fast that you would become a joke and locked up for being crazy.
But if you were a bit cunning and issued the new money you created out of thin air as credit, charged interest for its use and obtained legal authority to foreclose on whatever property you earmarked as collateral for your credit, and you decided to preserve the privilege for doing all this in perpetuity, you would get it all wrapped up so that your family would inherit the privilege for at least another 10 or 20 generations.
You would ensure that enough people were beneficiaries of your privilege to establish a power structure that would embrace the whole globe. You would have your head hunters bring under your patronage every appropriately unethical person for every key function.
You would then institute a system of rigid control of the rate at which new money is issued so that it could never get out of hand.
A difficult task but easy if you know how. Instead of spending the money, you issue it as credit and charge interest to regulate the speed with which the peoples of Earth can be seduced into debt.
Very soon the people of Earth come to believe that debt is ordained by God and that the world could not exist without it.
It is essential for the banks to charge interest on credit for three very good reasons.
In the first place if too much credit were issued too fast the whole monetary system now based on credit would disintegrate.
Money would turn to confetti.
The privilege held by the banks of being allowed to create money out of thin air would become useless. You and I have to earn our money, the banks don't have to earn money, they make it. You and I are not allowed to do that. And thus we have a system of issuing new money into circulation at a rate which is controlled by interest rates.
The rate at which new money is issued into circulation is determined by the rate at which people can be seduced into borrowing money whilst paying a toll for its use.
If the toll is too high they will not borrow.
If the toll is too low they will borrow too much.
As a result the health of the economy is measured in terms of how much confidence people have in borrowing money.
This is the feel good factor.
That is a crazy system if you think about it, because we have already agreed that wealth is created by trade, and trade is the exchange of goods and services in the market place.
Therefore the only accurate method of measuring the health of the economy is in terms of the value of what is created or produced and exchanged in the market place.
Unfortunately you cannot measure that value in terms of debt. It doesn't work.
Second, the banks are greedy. The right to create money out of thin air gives the banks unlimited access to the wealth created by others. And they take that wealth almost ad lib.
But, as we have seen, they must not take it too fast or they will lose the privilege.
Charging interest, which is charging a toll for the use of this fictitious money, gives them an additional source of revenue.
The Government pays them over £33 billion per annum of our money each year as a toll for the money already borrowed by the Government. The banks do very nicely don't they.
And thirdly there is another rich harvest to be gathered in by the banks. By law they are permitted to foreclose on the assets assigned to them by he who borrows their "money".
When the borrower has to pay a heavy toll for the use of credit, the odds are stacked against him when it comes to making his business viable and the banks then foreclose.
The higher the interest rates the richer the harvest on foreclosures.
This is not a pretty picture and we turn a blind eye at our peril.
Read the next chapter for the second snag in the system.