How Big Banks Run the World – at Your Expense

Gar Alperovitz
Truthout
June 9, 2012

The recent Public Banking conference held in Philadelphia offered a message that is at once so simple – but also so bold – it is hard for most Americans to pause long enough to understand how profoundly their thinking had been corralled by the masters of finance – in ways far, far, far more insidious and powerful than even the latest financial crisis suggests.

To understand what has happened, however, you first have to take a minute to shake a few cobwebs out of your brain about “money” – and how it is created and by whom and for whose benefit.

Money is “created”? Yes, obviously so – or did you imagine there is some fixed pile of “money” some place that exists once and for all and for all times?

Think about it: If that were true, it would be impossible for the economy ever to change and grow. If the “money supply” were not increased over time, the original economy of, say, 1776 – which served about 2.5 million Americans – would still define the amount of “money” we would have to work with today.

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 9, 2012 at 1:27 pm

Tags: economics, foreign affairs, money

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