Any genuine scientific analysis of the trajectory of global capital is hard to find. Economic history is rife with ideological stories of “wealth creation,” “capital formation,” and the mythical “invisible hand.” What is capital? What is wealth? What is money? Well, they are all pretty much taken for granted in most economic thinking – conveniently so for the financial elite. On top of that, economics itself has been dominated by the ideology of the power elites that dominate society. Little room is left for science. International finance and the ‘wealth of nations’ are managed in very strange ways – I describe them below in a highly condensed sketch.
Global Capital and Central Banks
Put as succinctly as I can, during the industrial age finance (the management of capital) has gradually become globalized. But it was not international trade that spurred the emergence of a global financial network of banks. It was more a matter of the most powerful banks forging a network of control over the monetary systems of nations. In fact, industrial development and the human misery that has accompanied unprecedented wealth have always involved a struggle between public and private control of money and banking.
Each historical example of public banking and sovereign control of national currencies has been accompanies by prosperity and stable prices, then followed by an assault on public authority by private banking. Usually, this has led to the “privatization” of what is in its essence a public utility: money and banking. Benjamin Franklin explained to the British parliament how the Pennsylvania and other colonies were funding their economies by issuing credit in the form of paper script not “backed” by gold or silver to stimulate commerce, leading to unexpected colonial prosperity. Soon King George banned colonial script, and Parliament passed a Currency Act, requiring all taxes to be paid in gold or silver, forcing them to borrow from the Bank of England at usurious rates. That put an end to colonial prosperity based on public credit and gave a strong impetus to revolution.
Numerous other examples, from Canada to New Zealand, Lincoln’s “Greenbacks,” etc., eventually let to a cartel composed of the central banks of each nation, each privately owned and coordinated by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Geneva, itself owned by the central banks. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) impose financial requirements and lend to ‘developing countries’ in support of the interests of global capital in dominating national economies.
So, the currencies and banking requirements of nations are controlled by the private international banking cartel. The control of national economies in the interests of central banks, causes booms and busts in their pursuit of bank profits and control of national economies. Today, each central bank is largely controlled by its relationships to the cartel. Governments take a back seat to the whole of global finance, and their economic and monitary policies are subordinate to the global capital markets controlled by the BIS, the IMF, and the WB, all operated in the interests of the banks, not nations.
Illusions of Wealth
Most of the ‘highest values’ of modern economic ideology are buzzwords for the mechanisms by which the Big Banks control national economies and extract vast amounts of “wealth” from them.
“Free Trade,” for example, is actually the freedom of giant corporations and the giant banks that finance them to exploit labor internationally and avoid any responsibility for environmental damage they do in the nations in which they operate. “Financial innovation” is actually the various schemes of the Big Banks to extract phantom wealth out of the banking system by ‘packaging’ debt into complex derivative instruments from which additional fees and profits are squeezed, and risk externalized.
It is all built on a system of debt-based money, that is, money created out of debt through double-entry electronic bookkeeping when a bank makes a loan. Banks are allowed to lend much more money than they have ‘on reserve.’ The money they lend is thereby created “out of thin air.” They can borrow even more from the central bank – the Federal Reserve in the U.S. – at very low rates and lend it to their customers at much higher rates. Remember, the Fed is owned by its member banks.
It’s a great big illusion. Why? Because the creation of money is not related to actual economic activity in the real world. Of course, lending does occur for actual production of goods and services for the economy, but the money and banking system I am describing here operates independently and in addition to the real world of investment in the economy itself. In the past couple of decades the phantom-wealth ‘economy’ has expanded to the point where it accounts for a much larger share of the GDP than before. Yet, it contributes nothing to the real economy. Despite massive “quantitative easing,” little of the vast funds released to the Big Banks have reached down into the real economy. Contrary to the dominant ideology, you could do away with these “too big to fail” banks and nothing much in the real world would be missed.
The Walking Dead
The unbridled global capitalist system has no natural constraints, except the finite supply of energy and other resources. It is in the early but rapidly accelerating stage of near-death. Unless it is radically transformed, quickly, the extinction of the human species from which it emanates, will be its final constraint. That will depends upon whether or not the illusions of global finance capital continue beyond the tipping point of ecological and societal collapse. In either case, it is already the walking dead.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 