Ivo Mosley (Guest Author)
Bank Robbery: How would money (and the world) be different after reform?
29 June, 2017Although ‘pure’ (sovereign) money would seem pretty much the same to people using it, it would behave differently from bank-money in a number of interesting ways. First, money could no longer sit in a bank and command interest: it would have to be lent for some purpose, and at some risk before it yielded a profit. [...]
Bank Robbery: Transition to a new money system
27 June, 2017The transition would involve a one-off re-definition of money units as units of pure property, not ownership of debt from banks. The rest of this chapter addresses money not created as debt, but as circulating ‘pure’ money. This kind of money is referred to by reformers as ‘sovereign money’ or ‘pure money’. The transition, according [...]
Bank Robbery: How to change the system
22 June, 2017The nature of money Essentially, money is a form of property. Your money is your money, mine is mine, otherwise money has no meaning. Money is property in the abstract. The most interesting example of money as pure property is the stone money of Yap: some large stones sank in the sea generations ago while [...]
Bank Robbery: How the money system makes some rich, others poor
21 June, 2017Banks create new money in massive amounts – always as debt. How does this work towards making financial predators rich and productive workers poor? Here are one or two examples. First, a short-term example. Someone who has a lot of money borrows more, specially created for them by banks. The person buys a business, lowers [...]
Bank Robbery: Why are banks allowed to create money?
17 June, 2017Imagine a world where huge amounts of money are created out of nothing for private profit and destroyed again once profit is taken, so that new money can be created again (and again, and again) – for private profit. Imagine a world where governments can borrow huge amounts of money created by private corporations (for [...]
Eight people own more than half the world’s population
5 February, 2017Eight people now own more than half the world's population. This terrible statistic lurks behind many of the world’s worst troubles. How has it come to be? It might seem a great mystery, but it's not. Of all the various factors that contribute to the inequality – corporate law, tax evasion, human greed, etcetera – [...]
Secrets, Ignorance and Lies: Money, Credit and Debt
29 June, 2016“The tyranny of fraud is not less oppressive than that of force.” John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia, 1814 Chapter 7 (You can read previous chapters here) Our system of money-creation was invented and developed during a time when war was seen as glorious, when the strong robbing and managing the weak was admired as [...]
Bank robbery as part of a system
15 December, 2015‘Bank Robbery’ is not a book about how to rob a bank, it’s about how banks rob us; not primarily for their own benefit, but as part of a system that we must fix if we are to have a just and safer world. How money is created has, for several centuries, been the [...]
Bank Robbery: Economists and the Banking System (part 2: Adam Smith, some early Americans, and Friedrich List)
10 October, 2015Chapter 5 (Read the Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4) This chapter is about economics in transition. Economics means literally 'housekeeping' and most early writers on economics (roughly speaking before Adam Smith, 1723-90) treated it that way. They worried about a nation's solvency, whether fairness generally prevailed in economic dealings, and whether the vulnerable were sufficiently [...]