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Related: About this forum12-year old Victoria Grant explains why her homeland, Canada & most of the world is in debt. + more
Last edited Thu May 10, 2012, 02:44 PM - Edit history (1)
12-year old Victoria Grant explains why her homeland, Canada, and most of the world, is in debt. April 27, 2012 at the Public Banking in America Conference, Philadelphia, PA. For more information see http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org
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Money As Debt - Parts 1, 2, and 3 (animated films by Canadian Paul Grignon about the banking system)
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http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
Where does Money Come From?
The simple answer to the title question is DEBT. Whether paper cash or numbers on a computer screen, all money (except coins) is evidence of debt.What is "cash and where does it come from? Cash can be the familiar paper stuff, or it can be credit at the national central bank which banks use to settle accounts between banks. Credit cash at the central bank is always convertible to paper cash upon demand. So, where does cash come from? Is it just printed by the government as we are shown on TV? NO. Cash is created out of thin air by the central bank of the country (which is often privately owned). The central bank can just have it printed for the cost of printing, by the government or privately. The central bank then uses this cash it creates out of thin air to buy interest-bearing public debt in the form of government bonds.
Government debt is perpetual and thus interest paid on it is perpetual. Therefore a good definition of cash might be: evidence of public debt on which taxpayers will be paying interest forever. So what is credit? Everything else that isnt cash. Take for example your bank account. Your bank account tells you how much cash the bank OWES you if you demand it. It isnt cash itself. All those numbers in bank accounts are just promises to pay cash, nothing more than IOUs created by banks. However, we typically think of these bank IOUs, or checkbook money as money. Little wonder. This checkbook money, especially in electronic form, is much more convenient and secure than paper money. Therefore we can transact all of our business with these promises to pay cash instead of cash itself.
So are there more promises to pay cash than there is cash to fulfill them? You bet. That is because banks usually make what they call LOANS by promising, rather than providing, cash. With a base of cash usually much less than 8% of the total they will loan, banks create their so-called "loans" as promises. How? It is astonishingly simple. You, the so-called borrower, sign a document that promises to pay the bank X amount of money over time plus interest on the outstanding balance. Your promise is backed by the collateral you agree to forfeit and the effort you will expend to earn the money. Your promise to the bank is an ASSET to the bank. To balance its books, the bank creates a matching LIABILITY. The bank promises the borrower X amount of cash on demand.
The loan money that the bank puts in the borrowers account is not cash. It is an IOU. It need never be cash unless the borrower demands cash. And, because we accept these IOUs as money itself, and do almost all of our business trading these convenient and secure IOUs instead of inconvenient and risky cash, banks can safely issue many more IOUs than there is cash to back them up. Perhaps the simplest and most "magical" feature of this system is "net" transactions. Only the net differences of transactions between banks need to be paid in cash. In theory, if all the banks are getting as much bank credit coming in as is being withdrawn, all the IOUs balance each other out at the end of the day leaving a net difference of zero. No cash required at all, from anyone! In practice, banks are competing. Winners can demand losers pay in cash. But that amount is still only a small proportion of the whole amount of credit issued.
The exception to all this is coins. They don't begin as debt. The government Mint stamps them and the government sells them at face value to the banks, no returns. But coins are an insignificantly small part of today's money supply. The significant thing about coins is that most peoples understanding of money has not yet developed much beyond the idea of coins, simple POSITIVE tokens of value. They fail to see how we have been ensnared by a money system based on NEGATIVE shackles of debt. The current system pretends to be money but is, in truth, a financial black hole sucking us all in to seemingly inescapable control by our so-called creditors. The truth we need to see is that WE are the real creditors, because it is WE who produce the real value in the world, not the banks.
snip
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Debunking Money Creation
Damon Vrabel ran a short-term blog for around 9 months, and appeared on many televison networks and shows (including Current TV, CNBC, Press TV and Max Keiser), before becoming frustrated and shutting it down.
his blog:
Council on Renewal
http://csper.wordpress.com /
his website
http://www.csper.org /
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Debunking Money Series - Parts 1 to 5
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
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Renaissance 2.0 Series
http://csper.org/renaissance-20.html
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Lesson 1
Revisiting American History
Documents the conversion of the US into a monolithic financial empire as the Federal Reserve Act created a monopolized cartel of private interests, "Wall Street," that controls all money in the system.
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Lesson 2
Revisiting Economics 101 - Debt
Discusses the power of debt-based money, embodied in the bond market, and its ability to exert total top-down power and control over the empire. Our system is not a free market.
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Lesson 3
Revisiting Civics 101 - Ownership
Describes how the media projects a false picture in terms of who controls the US. This lesson illustrates the real power structure, which is modeled after the corporate governance system.
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Lesson 4.1
Part 1 - The Culture of Empire
Addresses our wealth illusion, freedom illusion, exponential growth, inflation/deflation, and bankruptcies.
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Lesson 4.2
Part 2 - The Culture of Empire
Focuses on the issue of scale. As the debt-based empire grows, the scale of our system grows causing all sorts of problems related to the loss of meaning, community, freedom, and agency.
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Lesson 4.3
Part 3 - The Culture of Empire
The velocity of money is a standard economic concept, but economists ignore the issue of human velocity caused by the system, which results in the loss of rest, joy, delight, and deeper issues
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Lesson 4.4
Part 4 - The Culture of Empire
Focuses on the rise of narcissism, increasing pathology and oppression, and how the financial empire eventually replaces government
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Lesson 5.1
Part 1 - The Emerging Global Empire
Explains the strategic global transition we're in as the financial institutions take us through a global restructuring, similar to how the individual states were restructured into the financial empire in lesson 1.
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Lesson 5.2
Part 2 - The Emerging Global Empire
More on the restructuring process and the single, integrated, corporate government the elite is trying to create.
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Lesson 6.1
Brightening the Future
Discusses the powerful monetary vortex that governs our lives day to day; explains the truth about inflation, leverage, and derivatives; and introduces the solution to the vortex.
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Lesson 6.2
Part 2 - Brightening the Future
Discusses how the left vs. right political framework is not the place to find solutions to the vortex because it only fuels the vortex further. Explains what fascism really is.
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Lesson 6.3
Part 3 - Brightening the Future
Discusses how to fix the problem and help launch the next Enlightenment to ensure humanity moves into Renaissance 2.0 vs. the next Dark Ages.
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12-year old Victoria Grant explains why her homeland, Canada & most of the world is in debt. + more (Original Post)
stockholmer
May 2012
OP
yesphan
(1,588 posts)1. Excellent job Victoria !
tnlurker
(1,020 posts)2. I'll watch this later
N/T
DocMac
(1,628 posts)3. Thanks for this post.
It's gonna take a while to watch these.
provis99
(13,062 posts)4. New Age woo.
alp227
(32,025 posts)5. Could you please de-clutter this page of everything else and just provide links?
Thank you, not everyone has broadband or lots of RAM. Meanwhile, I first learned about Grant's speech from CBC News article "Ontario girl's online banking speech goes viral".
stockholmer
(3,751 posts)6. all I posted was simple text and YouTube links
alp227
(32,025 posts)7. Too much of that content at once can crash some computers.