This is a good article, that is slowly starting to delve into the theft that is fractional reserve banking: Deborah Orr Article.
From the article:
Much lip service is paid to the idea that over many years in Britain there has not been enough investment in manufacturing. What is overlooked is that one sector did a gargantuan amount of manufacturing during this period. The big international banks manufactured money, using very simple raw materials. All they needed were computers and borrowers. Every time they made a loan, the banks simply typed the amount they were lending into their computer system, transferred it to their victim's account, and charged interest for the privilege.
As for "risk" and "investment", the banks didn't have to seek out real-economy enterprises that could at some point in the future be financially successful. The more mortgages they made available, the more house prices rose, the safer investment in housing seemed, and the more willing people became to take on bigger mortgages. When the banks ran out of safe prospective home owners, they started lending to unsafe prospective home owners. And when that too had run its course, they stopped lending pretty much completely. That's it. That's all that happened. Thanks to the advent of computer technology, the banks simply found themselves able to turn a customer's desire for a loan into an actual loan. It seems plain, surely, that it is this ridiculous state of affairs, and has to stop.
This basic dynamic, with some important qualifiers, was what caused our own downturn in 2008. People need to grasp this very simple point: people who can create money will over the long run own ALL of us who do not. It does not matter how hard you work, or how creative you are: creating things and ideas will always be harder than creating money.