This is an incredibly important topic. Unfortunately, it is a very difficult topic to fully comprehend because a very simple subject has been effectively camouflaged by multiple layers of ideological complexity. In other words, our financial system has been intentionally made nearly incomprehensible to hide the fact that money is power, economic power in fluid form, the primary instrument of social control. Money is the central nervous system of a modern, complex society. Directing the flow of money directs what gets done and what doesn’t. The purpose of the financial system should be to direct the activities of the real economy in a socially beneficial manner as determined by a democratic political system. Placing the financial system in private hands for private profit virtually guarantees a socially dysfunctional financial system. The financial system needs to be treated as a government run utility.

Additionally, a purely debt based system of money creation is designed to benefit the bankers at the expense of society. Essentially, it means that to provide an adequate supply of money to enable the necessary transactions in the real economy, the real economy is, in effect, mortgaged to finance capital. All of those dollars, in aggregate, represent a lien on future earnings. The entire economy working to provide interest payments to capital. This, in turn, requires either a growing economy sufficient to provide the interest plus capital (which, being debt money, incurs future obligations), or a high rate of inflation to ameliorate the interest burden, or a system of progressive taxation on income and wealth to bring the compounding interest burden into equilibrium at the systemic level. None of these conditions currently exists, and a geometrically expanding economy is unsustainable in any event. The bottom line is that our current system is unsustainable and requires extensive modification. In the past, our financial system cleared out unsustainable debts via recessions and depressions, which served to further concentrate wealth and power. We appear to be headed towards a massive systemic collapse of the global financial system.

What must be kept in mind is that our financial system was created by bankers primarily to benefit bankers, which it does very well. There is nothing intrinsically “right” about our system, no infallible workings of an omniscient market obeying some mysterious universal logic of how things should be. Essentially, money is rules and regulations designed to create a system to facilitate economic and other social interactions. It is the way it is because men of ambition fought hard to create a system which benefited them at the expense of others. It can, and should, be changed. Ownership of the means of production is a distraction, it’s the money. An additional comment is that the fiscal policies of the Fed have a huge global impact because a global system of financial domination (globalization) has been implemented whereby smaller countries are held hostage to global finance. That too needs to be changed.