Money
The problem with money is it’s insufficiency. Yes,
we all have some money, but how many of us use only cash? For most of the transactions in the world, particularly
commercial, “notional” money is used. Unfortunately the use of “notional” money
has dramatically increased in the last quarter century and this has lead to the
disastrous state of the economy in this country and the rest of the world.
Most people are aware that banks are greedy
organisations that would rob a blind beggar of his begging bowl, if they could
get away with it, but they are unaware of the way in which the banks have been
robbing rich and poor for generations, and have been getting fatter, richer and
greedier all the while. Their “success”
in this respect will ultimately be their undoing, but before that happens there
will be much hardship and suffering, because, like all power seekers, they will
look after themselves at the expense of those they claim to be “helping”.
It is a very clever trick they are using and
although there are people (politicians) who could and should do something to
stop it a) it has gone on so long that has entered the psyche, of those who
know of it, as “normal” and b) even if they could, just for a moment, get a
glimpse of “real reality”, they are too much in the pockets of the financiers
to be able to do anything about it and retain the financier’s support needed to retain power.
The trick is simply this. For every pound they have
on deposit they lend ten. This is known in banking parlance as “gearing”. If they only have one pound how can they
possibly lend ten??? This is where we meet “notional” money. It is a cute
trick. They will claim, if asked, that they are lending you money deposited, to
gain interest, by a customer, and they have to charge you interest so that they
can pay the other customer his interest and make a little money from the
transaction to cover their costs and profit. So here you are with a ten pounds
loan and you are expected to pay back ten pounds and say fifty pence interest.
They have lent you one real pound and nine “notional” pounds that they
did not have. Now this seems to me to be a criminal offence. “Obtaining
money by false pretences.”
At this point we need to look back in time to when
the currency was minted for the King to
pay his expenses. Some would go to pay his extravagant living expenses, some to
pay his army but most of it would go to buy support from the nobles. These
nobles would similarly dissipate their share of the kitty and ultimately some
of it would fall into the hands of the peasants, who, by and large, were
managing quite well with barter and exchange for things in which they were not
self sufficient. The gold and silver needed by the king, for making currency,
was generally spoils of war and extortion. When the coffers, and/or the spoils
of war, had run out, which was not unusual, he would “raise a tax” on anything
he could think of, and thus reclaim some of his handouts to his nobles (who
would in turn make the lives of the peasants a little less pleasurable.
In due course some of the more “astute” members of
society realised that, by some tricky footwork, they could amass a little money
and lend it out at a profit. This they did with so much success that ultimately
it was not unknown for the king himself to go borrowing. As time went by the
banking business grew, but the state remained responsible for minting currency.
With the advent of overseas trading, the
East India Company, Colonialism and Empire, the amount of gold and silver
available for currency was immense, due to “suitable” taxation. By this time
however the peasants had become factory workers or farmers, some had worked
themselves up the ladder and become employers, and Banking had arrived with a
capital B.
This was because by now the banking folk had worked
out that they could lend out more than they had on deposit because so little of
what was on deposit was needed at any one time, and thus far more than they had
on deposit could be lent. They had also realised that they could charge the
borrowers interest on ten times the money they had on deposit and only pay the
depositors one tenth of this income as interest.
The easy way to understand the next step is to look
upon “The Banks” as “The Bank”. They
are all the same, the same motives, the same methods, the same greed, the same
codes of malpractice, all governed by a “self
regulated” code of practice, and so we can think of them as The Bank.
Let us return to your bank loan of ten pounds. We already know that what they are lending
us is only one pound of the other customers money and nine pounds of notional
money, that they have conjured up out of thin air. In the days of hard golden currency this operation was a
lot more tricky to obfuscate, but in those days there was much less of it done
than there is today. In those days it
was widely believed that banks had to have a stock of gold buried safely in
their vaults in order to carry out “safe” lending, and this was
“normality”.
The confusion in this matter is down to not
realising that currency has no intrinsic
value of its own. You can not eat it, drink it, wrap up warm in it. You
can not use it for anything other than exchanging it for goods and services. In
fact the only thing about currency with any usefulness is the “number”
stamped/printed/embossed upon it (plus the units/denomination to which that
number refers, of course). It is, in fact, a bartering token. You exchange a
leg of lamb for an agreed number of tokens so that you can go and exchange some
or all of those tokens for something you need that the man who wanted the leg
of lamb did not have. You are given previously agreed tokens for your days work
(instead of say two chicken legs and half a turnip) which you are then able to
exchange for something that you find more interesting than what you would other
wise have received. (Just what you would have got for two chicken legs and half
a turnip must remain an enigma). So in fact,
because service was paid for with goods, we can say goods = tokens =
currency.
Gold and
silver were the metals of choice for tokens because they were relatively free
from corrosion, were scarce and already
had a “high worth” as decorative metals for the leaders and power seeker.
In the “barbarian” days gold and silver
were looted, but as time progressed it was bought from mining concerns.
Here is a very strange affair. With what does one
buy token making material? Well one
turns the matter around and one pays with goods and services (and possibly a
knighthood or two). The important fact,
of which we must not lose sight, is that the only things of value are goods and services.
Currency = tokens, and these tokens must represent
goods and services to be of any value. If the tokens are not backed up with
goods in the community then the outcome is, as was found out by Germany in the
nineteen twenties, galloping and uncontrollable inflation. In part this was due
to belief in what was called “the gold
standard”. Which in its own way was part of
“hypnosis”.
So, with regard to your loan of ten pounds, you have
been lent one pound token backed up by one pounds worth of existing goods, and nine
pound tokens backed up by nothing. Granted the tokens look identical and no
one, other than the man at the bank, knows that one pound token has value and
the other nine are worthless, but, had you been borrowing goods (chicken legs
or turnips with which to barter) and not just tokens, then it would have been
plainly obvious. Not only when you got them (or more correctly did not get)
them from the bank, bur also when you tried to exchange them for what ever it
was that you wanted to borrow them for, and which got us into this mess in the
first place. The whole thing is criminality masked by hypnosis. This, however,
is only the beginning.
