Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

How is money made? Well, in conventional terms we work for it. But where does it come from? We know that the economy needs a sufficient “money supply” so we can exchange “goods and services” every day. Of course, it’s not that simple. After the “Great Recession” of 2008, the Federal Reserve injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the Big Banks. The purpose was to keep them from going under as a result of their gambling with depositors’ money. So, where is all that money now?

The conventional wisdom is that the “the government prints our money.” Technically but only partially true, this image of overworked treasury printing presses is increasingly irrelevant. Most money today is created electronically when banks lend up to some multiple of the money held in their accounts. A bank’s solvency depends on the money it holds “in reserve” – does not lend – in accordance with banking rules. If the ratio of loans to reserves is too high, the bank risks not being able to cover losses if loans go bad.

Reserve requirements were reduced significantly in the years before the 2008 crash. But the “too big to fail” banks took it a step further. They packaged many risky mortgages into highly leveraged “derivatives,” re-sold them to investment clients and each other, and took exorbitant “fees” at each step. It all blew up when mortgages failed and the Big Banks couldn’t cover their losses. So, the Fed stepped in and kept them solvent by “lending” them billions upon billions of dollars.

With the lowering of reserve requirements and the elimination of the firewall between commercial and speculative investment banking, all hell broke loose. Lending practices and the bundling of debt took on the logic of gambling in a casino, but with more hubris. Reliance on complex mathematical models of “risk management” to justify reckless behavior became the biggest illusion of all.

Most critics of the federal “fractional reserve” banking system worry that our “paper money” or “fiat currency” is not “backed” by gold. They consider gold to be “real money,” not arbitrarily “created” money. Gold is an effective standard of value because it is scarce, not reproducible or easily faked, and is universally valued by humans. That’s great, as long as everyone believes in gold’s value.  After all, value is what we make it.  But any economy needs its money to circulate. If paper money had to be backed by gold, there would not be enough to circulate and the economy would stagnate. Yet, if too much paper (or electronic) money is put into circulation, borrowed and invested, then inflation can get out of hand.

There is some validity to the concern of producing an oversupply of money leading to inflation, as has happened in several historical cases. But the biggest problem of money creation lies in our debt-based banking system, created under the influence of the big bankers in 1913. That was when the Big Banks convinced the government to create the Federal Reserve banking system. The Fed is essentially a private banking cartel that “lends” money to the federal government – the nation. Where does the Fed get the money it lends to the government? It simply creates it out of nothing – other than the government’s authorization for it to do so! That sounds crazy because it is, unless you own the Big Banks. But if national banks were owned by the nation, then money creation would not produce national debt.

So, you can see that fundamentally the “national debt” is an illusion created when the government gave up its sovereignty over our currency. Without the privatization of currency creation, indebting the government, there would be little need for an income tax.

A debt-based monetary system is inherently unstable and succeeds only as long as economic growth continues. But as long as conservative reserve requirements held sway and investment banking was separated from commercial banking after the Great Depression, another crash was averted. The Glass–Steagall Banking Act of 1933 kept commercial banking separate from investment (speculative) banking after the Great Depression. And relatively strict reserve requirements limited the Big Banks tendency to engage in excessive speculation – until deregulation beginning in 1999 unleashed the Hounds of Wall Street.

For a hundred years, the government has become increasingly indebted to the Federal Reserve and buyers of treasury notes and bonds.  These instruments are the means by which  the Fed sells our government’s debt worldwide. Despite the increasing debt and interest payments, the economy could be managed as long as it kept growing – adding new money from new debt to pay old debt and interest. The Federal Reserve – the private central bank owned by its member big private banks – partially controlled inflation by controlling interest rates, some of the time.

But the illusion of endless growth and the phantom money it creates are rapidly coming to an end on our finite planet. The debt-based monetary system will be unsustainable in a steady-state economy aligned with real-world limitations – it must be replaced. We must move to a stable ecologically grounded economy.  We can no longer support an ever-growing debt-based money system. In an ecological economy, money will simply circulate as the means for exchanging real value – that is, actual goods and services.