Friday, August 13, 2010

Superb older video on money and banking

Since Nixon's evaporation of the gold standard, the US currency has been backed by little more than confidence. Confidence in the people's lack of understanding of the monetary system that is. The federal reserve is not federal, it is privately owned. They can lend multiples of what exists in reserves, under fractional reserve banking. They control the amount of money in circulation, which comes in to existance through loans made to banks and governments. Since the money comes into existance through debt it has to be repaid, but with interest. Therefore the debt is larger than the money supply and inflation, along with defaults and bankruptcy, become permanent problems




Hat tip Justin!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a 9-minute clip from the Zeitgeist Addendum video.

http://www.google.com/search?q=zeitgeist+addendum&tbo=p&tbs=vid%3A1&source=vgc&aq=f

Lorne Marr said...

I'm sure you've heard of this, but I thought I'd re-post anyway, just in case :)

Modern Money Mechanics (on Wikipedia)

The concept is very well explained in there, and it's straight from the source!

Anonymous said...

Modern Money Mechanics is covered in the Zeitgeist Addendum video as well.

Anonymous said...

You've probably already seen this, but in case you haven't ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-11/u-s-is-bankrupt-and-we-don-t-even-know-commentary-by-laurence-kotlikoff.html