If you think you know what money is, you're probably wrong. If you think the money you put into the bank is where they get their money to do business, you're certainly wrong. If you think getting America out of debt is going to solve a lot of problems and really help the economy, then you REALLY need to watch Paul Grignon's animated movie below:
What is Money?
Very educational, raises some interesting questions and has an excellent solution to the madness we've created.
A few excerpts for those too time challenged after the fold.
Money, most of us believe, is created by the government. It's true, but only to a point...but the vast majority of money is not created by The Mint, it is created, in huge amounts everyday, by private corporations known as banks.
Most of us believe that banks lend out money that has been entrusted to them by depositors. Easy to picture, but not the truth. In fact, banks create the money they loan, not from the banks own earnings, not from the money deposited, but directly from the borrowers promise to repay...
...the bank gets to conjure into existence the amount of the loan and just write it into the borrower's account. Sounds far fetched? Surely that can't be true! Yet it is.
He then goes on to give us the history of how banking developed. This is good, but it doesn't immediately explain how Money=Debt. Then, you get to about the 28th minute of the movie and it all starts to fall together. That is IF you've listened to how banking all evolved to begin with.
Now a loan in the real world means that the lender must have something to lend. If you need a hammer, my promise to loan a hammer I don't have won't be of much help. But in the artificial world of money, a banks promise to pay money it doesn't have is allowed to be passed off as money and we accept it as such.
Mr. Grignon backs up all his assertions with quotes from credible people in the financial industry and past leaders of our government from Woodrow Wilson to Benjamin Franklin.
"Thus our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which loan,not money, but the promise to supply money it does not have." - Irving Fisher, economist and author.
I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world. No longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men. - Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States.
There is much more in this incredibly illuminating movie you Must Watch in its entirety. Show it to your children. They won't learn this in school.
The money quote IMO, comes about 22 minutes into it:
Have you ever wondered how everyone, governments, corporations, small businesses, families can all be in debt at the same time and for such astronomical amounts? Have you ever questioned how there can be so much money out there to lend? Now you know.
There isn't.
Banks do not lend money, they simply create it from debt. And as debt is potentially unlimited, so is the supply of money. And, as it turns out, the opposite situation is also true.
Isn't it astounding that despite the incredible wealth of resources, innovation and productivity that surrounds us, almost all of us from corporations to governments to individuals are heavily in debt to bankers? If only people would stop to think "How can that be? How can it be that everyone who actually produce all the real wealth in the world are in debt to those who merely lend out the money that represents the wealth?"
Even more amazing is that once we realize that money really is debt, we realize that without debt, there'd be no money.
The problem is that interest will always outrace debt. That our promise to repay a loan REQUIRES that some do not and they are foreclosed upon. The system DEPENDS on this. In the end, it will one day come crashing down. By then, the bankers will own all that is real in the world. We'll have worthless paper.
His alternative is simple: Our government needs to de-privatize the banking industry, much like we need to de-privatize healthcare.
Find time to watch this movie.
