In most countries, about 3% of our money originates from government-owned mints that make notes and coins. The rest is digital and created by private banks, out of nothing, when they issue loans, according to the Guardian, 12th March 2013.

The article also mentions Positive Money campaign.

 

Here is a short extract:

While more politicians promote new measures of progress, they remain fixated on increasing economic growth. Why this obsession? Do they simply prefer it to other measures of progress? Clearly that can’t be the reason. The answer lies in our current monetary system, which requires economic growth, as otherwise our money supply disappears and we experience recession.

In most countries, about 3% of our money originates from government-owned mints that make notes and coins. The rest is digital and created by private banks, out of nothing, when they issue loans. When we go to a bank to take out a loan, the bank does not lend its own money or that of its depositors. As a deputy governor at the Bank of England put it: “Banks extend credit by simply increasing the borrowing customer’s current account … That is, banks extend credit by creating money.”

[T]here must be an increasing amount of lending to pay off debts plus interest while maintaining the amount of money in circulation, which means economic activity must continually increase. Otherwise, as debts are paid off, so our money supply shrinks, which leads to defaults, foreclosures, bankruptcies, unemployment, depression, and, history shows us, then crime and extremism.*

This monetary system also means that although individually we might pay off our debts, collectively we are in debt forever, paying interest to the banks. So this money system makes increasing inequality a mathematical certainty. Is it any wonder that 2% of the world’s population controls about half the world’s wealth? This monetary system means governments do not issue the money they spend, but go into debt to private banks that “lend” money they simply create. It’s a sleight of hand that becomes a strangling hold, as people assume the government cannot afford to help their citizens by spending their own currency, due to the deficit. Yet the real deficit is in our thinking.

You can read the whole article here

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*Watch our new video ‘How money gets destroyed’  (3 mins)