Letter: Curb on the bankers would go long way to ease our suffering
There is much suffering around Europe today. People are losing their jobs and homes. For a number of years, wages have been frozen or cut. The value of pensions and savings has fallen.
Unemployment among the younger generation is at record highs, and their future prospects look very bleak indeed. Instead of easing the burdens of its citizens, Governments are imposing ever more austerity. Why is all this austerity, with its subsequent suffering being imposed upon people? Most of it is because people, businesses and nations are struggling to repay bank loans.
How unnecessary all this suffering is when one considers that the money everyone is struggling to pay back was created out of thin air in the first place.
To quote IMF economist Michael Kumhof: "Banks create money out of thin air". Every time a bank makes a loan, new money is created. It is typed into existence. No money is removed from any saver's account when a loan is made. The bankers and economists bamboozle us with a lot of talk about bonds, hedge-funds and derivatives. They deliberately make it sound complicated so that we leave it to the 'experts'.
The late John Kenneth Galbraith, former professor of economics at Harvard once said: "The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled."
The bankers benefit from the existing money system and don't want it replaced, even though the rest of society is weighed down under a great burden of debt.
As a believer in Jesus Christ I am praying that our Government and other sovereign governments will pluck up the courage to retake the power to create and control their money supplies from the private bankers.
After this is done, work can start towards implementing a money system that prospers society instead of the current one which impoverishes it. I agree with the Positive Money Movement when it says: "Newly created money should be used to benefit society, not enslave it".
J Clift, Shrewsbury
