The Burden of Debt Based Money: The Core Issue

In our monetary system, money is made from debt. The more debt that is out there, the more money that is out there. The government makes money by going into debt to private banks and other entities, like people who buy U.S. bonds. Most of the money out there in the economy is made by private banking through loans; it doesn’t exist as paper or coins. The Federal Reserve buys U.S. bonds on the open market with invented, fictional money, and those purchases then become the reserve base for the banking system to invent money. Fed money is multiplied by the banks 9 times, so $1,000 in Fed money becomes $9,000 in bank money. It is a little different though when you put money in the bank. When you put say $1000 in the bank, the bank is able to then lend out $900 of that $1000 in the form of a loan and earn interest off your money. But it doesn’t end there, because the person who took out the $900 loan inevitably feeds that money back into the banking system where it is lent out again. This goes on and on until an extremely large amount of money has been invented and added to the system from minimal reserves. The bank thus invents all this money and is allowed to charge interest on it. When the bank charges 10% interest, it is actually making about ten times that amount and so more like 100% interest due to this fractional reserve lending. The money needed to pay that interest doesn’t exist in the system though and so more debt is required through more loans to pay the interest off. This leads to an exponential increase in debt, which in turn requires perpetual economic growth to service the debt.

Our debt based monetary system is a far cry from a sustainable system. To keep the cycle of debt insanity alive requires exponential growth, exponential increases in the money supply, exponential production, and exponential consumption. The result is constant inflationary pressure, and constant consumption of resources. Plus, in our debt monetary system, people don’t have the time or money to sit back and relax when technology increases productivity. Increases in productivity usually just means redistributing work to new areas in order to constantly grow the economy. In a sustainable economy, people would really capitalize off of technological increases in productivity by gaining free time as goods become cheaper. But in a perpetual growth economy, there is no time to rest and reap rewards; it is always on to the next thing–regardless of how worthless and wasteful that thing is, just so long as it can keep the economy growing.

This debt based monetary system is a detrimental parasite to everyone except those who are making money off money–namely the people in the upper echelons of the banking industry. However, most regular Americans make plenty of money off money too–at least relative to the people in poorer countries who also work for the debt system, yet on a lower echelon. Our debt based monetary system is a system so insidious that most people know nothing about it, even though they work for it.

Step one in facilitating a better future is implementing a sustainable, debt-free monetary system. To stop inflation, environmental damage, resource scarcity, war (which is big debt maker), income disparity, and so on, all first requires changing the money system. But there is a steep road ahead in educating people about how our monetary system really works. Most people in attributing our many societal problems to the wrong sources end up shooting their own causes in the foot. Until people learn how our monetary system really works and realize that we don’t live in a fair, free-market capitalist system, but instead live in an unfair corporatist system, where the money makers call most of the shots, will there ever be real hope for change. The only other hope for change is the inevitable self-destruction of our monetary system, but that will be painful, and it holds no guarantee that we won’t just replace the old system with a new debt monster system.

Here is a little litmus test for you to use on people who claim to have the answers to society’s problems (like pollution, war, poverty). If a person doesn’t know enough about our debt based monetary system to see that it is the core problem in things involving money (which is most things) then everything else they say should be treated as suspect. It all starts with the money folks. You ignore that and you are just pissing in the wind.

(Note: there are two ways of describing how fractional reserve banking works. Both explanations are correct. One explanation says the banks loan out 10x the money they have in reserve. So a $1000 dollar deposit becomes $10,000 in loans. That is true only with FED money (actually 9x not 10x). Yet, in the big picture, it is also true with individual money deposits, but it would only really become true if there were ever a major run on the banks requiring FDIC bailout—since that money doesn’t really exist until people try to withdraw it. The other explanation, the one used in this article, deals with the normal everyday practice of normal people depositing normal money, with no runs on the banks. If there were ever a run on the banks we’d see the huge amount of inflation hidden in the system come to the surface overnight. Yet, it is unlikely there will ever be such a bank run, because who really wants all that hidden inflation to boil to the surface like that?)

Check out this video for more info on this subject.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cy-fD78zyvI

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