Tackling Peak Oil, Climate Change and Economic Breakdown

Positive Money - Campaign for Monetary Reform

So the money in your bank account was created by private companies?

The numbers in your own bank account were all created, essentially out of nothing, not by the Bank of England or the Royal Mint, but by commercial banks.

The banks are able to create this ‘number money’ through the accounting process that they use to make loans. Rather than taking money from a saver and lending it to a borrower (as per the common
understanding of banking), they simply write new numbers into the bank
account of a borrower - effectively creating new money.

All the money in your bank account represents someone else's debt

Since all the number money in your account was created by banks making loans, this means that for every pound in your bank account, someone
else is in debt by an equal amount.In other words, we now have a debt-based money supply issued entirely by private, profit-seeking companies. Our money supply has been effectively privatised.

Who do we blame then?

Many people are angry at the banks, or individual bankers. But the truth is
that it is the government who sets that 'rules of play', and successive
governments have failed to reform the banking system at the right time.

Instead, after every crisis, the government and authorities focus on getting back to business as usual. They focus on 'getting banks lending again' without questioning why we are all so dependent on bank debt to keep the economy functioning.

So we should blame all those successive governments who have repeatedly failed to fix the banking system, but the pressing concern is to do something about it.

But we also need to make sure that they don't make the same mistake again. We need to make sure everyone understands how the banking system really works, how money is created, and how we can fix the system.