Blog 35

Some may say that it's just basic human nature, that it's all to do with our basic instinct to survive. Others would argue that as the most intelligent being on this planet we have risen above our basic instincts. Our natural tendency to group into social units that started as small self sufficient communities has through advances in transportation and communications created what is now effectively a global village.

Obviously, less than desirable human survival mechanisms are no longer required and most are undesirable in a civilized society, for this reason remedies in law have been developed over Millennia for the authorities to deal with social disagreements and disputes.

However, the instincts that served us well in uncivilized times still exist within us all. Our greater knowledge and fear of retribution under the law if we overreact to situations instinctively are occasionally not enough to control our immediate reactions.

In this article I want to highlight two less than desirable instincts, impatience and greed, for it is these two seemingly unimportant elements of human nature that have brought the world's financial system to its knees, yet again.

First let's consider impatience. There was a time when people saved a proportion of their income to acquire the things they desired. In time the amount required was acquired and the item bought. It is of course true to say that some purchases are so large that it's reasonable to arrange to pay over a period of time, though I am not altogether happy with this for reasons I have commented on elsewhere.

At some point in time financial mechanisms were put in place that allowed people to attain things immediately without having to 'save up'. It was this single act that started us all down a road that should never have been constructed.

The very basic instinct of impatience is the factor that made the installation of the banks pernicious mechanism of credit so successful.

Now we come to necessity, some will say this is not a basic human instinct and perhaps it's not, nonetheless it is the single most important factor that prompted those people in the banking sector to set up the credit system. There is an element of any society that has no skill to create anything [other than misery], they are incapable of growing crops, making things or creating anything that we all judge our wealth by. By necessity these people can only survive by acquiring by whatever means, wealth created by those people in society that do have the practical ability to produce.

Not content with acting as a depository for surplus wealth and as an intermediary in financial transactions between the wealth creators, the banking sector wanted more. And this is where greed, perhaps the most heinous of all human primal instincts (well perhaps a close second to revenge killing), rears its ugly head.

Not content with the not unreasonable 'creaming off' of interest from lending back to the public the money they borrowed from the public in the first place and everyday banking services, the people in the banking sector wanted more.

But how to do it? Try to imagine it, a group of avaricious bankers sitting around a table racking their brains for ways to maximize the extraction of wealth from the wealth creation classes without it being too obvious. One thing they all agreed upon at the outset was that the only way to make any such mechanism work was for them to be united. There would be no room for independent banks in the system, and to be really effective the system would have to be global. First, each country would have to create a central bank to which all other banks within each nation would be affiliated.

Then they had it, with such an insidious union they would have the power not only to control Governments but to instigate the next phase of their plan, the control of the money supply in every civilized country in the world.

The 'money supply', normally the province of Government, the bankers realized that in order to maximize their wealth extraction mechanisms it was necessary for it to be under their control. But how? Short of commandeering the Governments money printing presses how could it be done?

Well, it's quite simple really. Since probably well over 90% of all buying/selling transactions these days are done without actually using real money it was easy for the banks to inject almost unlimited amounts of money into the system simply by saying 'it exists'. It's as simple as that, all that was necessary was for all the central banks to concur and say 'yes, it does exist'. The control of the money supply in any civilized country is now firmly in the hands of the banks. Just how the Governments of the world now determine how much money to actually print is a complete mystery to me.

Of course, the ramifications of such a contrived system where if very tight control is not maintained is loaded with potential for dramatic failure.

And of course fail is what it did, dramatically, but that's not the purpose of this article.

I simply want to place on record that in my opinion it was the lack of civilized control over two basic human instincts that allowed the banks to install a system of uncontrolled credit that not only by necessity ensured their continued survival but also satisfied their insatiable greed for more wealth by preying on another basic human instinct, the impatience of a gullible public.