For those who like their information compact and concise, here is a video that takes you from A to Z in 15 minutes. German/British economic professor Richard Werner gives us his theory of money and references the empirical support for that theory above more conventional views. He goes on to diagnose the simultaneous concentration of wealth and stagnation of productive activity, to trace it to concentration of the power to decide who gets credit, and to propose a comprehensive solution.
- Banks don't merely recycle depositors' money; they actually create new money each time they issue credit.
- The great majority of money in our American and European economies is created in this way.
- Who gets the newly-created money? When it is loaned against assets, it inflates the prices of those assets. But when it is invested in research, education, and new manufacturing capacity the result is increased productivity.
- When banks are large and decisions are centralized, the credit tends to be issued to entities that are nominally very profitable but are fundamentally unproductive: Real estate, insurance, finance, or the FIRE sector.
- Small, community-owned cooperative banks tend to lend small businesses, where new productivity comes from.
(The only thing he doesn't tell us is why the banksters aren't telling us the truth about the power they have and how they've been using it to enrich themselves at our expense. That would be a conspiracy theory.)
(And I would also add that investment in science has a long-term, large-scale value that small, local banks might not be able to appreciate. We need government funding of science, and not just the kind of science that is already close to offering technological innovation, but the very speculative science that usually fails, but succeeds spectacularly when it succeeds.)
Our problems are man-made; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable--and we believe they can do it again. -- JFK
