Money As Debt

= about how the custom of charging interest leads to an ever-increasing supply of imaginary money

http://MoneyAsDebt.net (Full film at http://Video.Google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279 )

Paul Grignon's 47-minute animated presentation of "Money as Debt" tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it is being created.

Review

Ran Prieur:

"You might have heard the thought experiment where we're all on an island using a fixed number of coconuts for money, and if we start lending coconuts at interest, we create imaginary coconuts so it's impossible for all the debts to be repaid. To make the simplest possible example, if there's only one coconut, and I lend it to you on the condition that you pay me back two, we now have two imaginary coconuts and only one real coconut. You can't pay me back two, so instead you pay me back one and become my slave.

Multiply that by billions, and it's still not as bad as the real situation, because once we have a system where someone can make money merely by lending, we get predatory institutions that don't just lend the money they have, but money they don't have. The really big fake money is created not as interest, but as fake principal to enable the creation of more debt/slavery. Inevitably, the lending institutions grow like cancers to consume the whole economy, and the supply of real stuff cannot match the exponential growth of money/debt, and the financial system collapses. And the foundation of the whole nightmare is the rule that if you loan someone money, they have to pay you back more.

The video gets a bit foilheady at the end, with an obviously mythical quote from David Rockefeller to the Trilateral Commission, and the naively pessimistic assumption that if the bank-masters own all our stuff on paper, they own all our stuff for real. They have to enforce their claims of ownership, and I think they've already passed the limit of how much ownership they can enforce." (http://ranprieur.com/archives/021.html)

Questions/Thoughts

Patrick Anderson:

"Can centralized control, renting the right to issue, arbitrary fiat and partial reserves, be solved through peer issue?

What would back a P2P currency, and how would issuance be constrained without a central authority?

I propose such a money be backed by (issued against) any Physical Sources held under the General Public Law in proportion to the Value as assessed by Users by the Price they are willing to pay, but am not 100% certain this is correct. Any other proposals? --Ownut 12:05, 3 September 2007 (PDT)

I would like to write a simple computer program (maybe some kind of trivial game) to show how this works, but am having trouble envisioning what it would look like. Any ideas?" --Ownut 11:27, 3 September 2007 (PDT)

More Information

Transcript: http://paulgrignon.netfirms.com/MoneyasDebt/MoneyasDebt1_Transcript.doc