Justaluckyfool. Read what Frederick Soddy (Author, Noble Laureate) wrote in 1926.So Unbelievable- “Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt”

Money,the role of money,wealth and how it was stolen from the people:

http://archive.org/stream/roleofmoney032861mbp/roleofmoney032861mbp_djvu.txt
THE
ROLE OF MONEY

WHAT IT SHOULD BE,
CONTRASTED WITH WHAT IT HAS BECOME

By

FREDERICK SODDY

M.A. (Oxon) ; LL.D. (Glasgow) ; F.R.S. ; Nobel Laureate
in Chemistry, 1921 ; Author of ” Science and Life ” ; ” Wealth,
Virtual Wealth , and Debt ” ; ” Money versus Man ” ; etc.

LONDON

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LTD.

BROADWAY HOUSE: 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.C.

J 934

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS, LIMITED, HERTFORD
**********EXCERPTS TO WET YOUR APPETITE********

“…
There is nothing mysterious about all this.
What has been termed ” the moral mystery of
credit “, meaning credit-money, might just as
well be termed the immoral mystery of debt.
For there is no credit without debt any more than
there is height without depth, East without
West, or heat without cold. The two are related,
and although it takes only one to own wealth
it takes two to own a debt, because for every
oVraer there is an ower. Money, of course, is an
entirely peculiar form of the credit-debt relation,
if only because whereas all other forms are entirely
optional, the creditor at any rate being a free
agent to enter into this relation or not, money is
a credit-debt relation from which none can
effectually escape.

Let us right from the start get the signs right.
The owner of money is the creditor and the issuer

26 THE ROLE OF MONEY

of it is the debtor, for the owner of money gives
up goods and services to the issuer. In an honest
money system the issuer of money who gets
for nothing goods and services would do so on
trust for the benefit of the community. In
a fraudulent money system he does so for the
benefit of himself. It makes no difference whether
he passes off the money and puts it into circulation
himself or lends it at interest for others to pass off
for him. In every case what he so gets to spend or
lend is given up by someone else. Ex nihilo nihil
fit. Nothing comes from nothing, or, in modern
phraseology, matter and energy are conserved.

Barter and Barter-Currencies. The invention
of money marks a distinct step upwards in civiliza-
tion. In barter the owner of one sort of property
gives it up to another in exchange for another
sort of equivalent worth. Money was able to
replace barter not because it enabled people to
obtain other peoples’ property without giving
anything up, but because they had in a former
and independent transaction already given it up.
All the shades of distinction which money in the
course of its evolution has passed through, from
barter to pure credit (or debt), concern not the
something initially given up for it, which is the
one essential to all its forms. They concern
merely what is received in exchange for it. This
may vary from the full value in the form of a gold
coin to an intrinsically worthless paper receipt,
and nowadays not even that. For a variety of

THE THEORY OF MONEY VIRTUAL WEALTH 27

alleged reasons, such as the necessity to make
money circulate freely, which we need not now
take very seriously, it has been held to be
necessary, at least in certain stages of the evolution
of money, to give back to the giver-up of the some-
thing the full equivalent value in gold or other
precious metal. If this equivalent were in the form
of a certain weight of gold dust, or for that matter
any other equally convenient exchangeable
merchandise, we have merely a case of barter
pure and simple, save only for the distinction
that, in all probability, the recipient of the metal
usually had no use for it himself and accepted
it merely as a recognized temporary or inter-
mediate form of payment. But when the practice
of coining money arose, and coins were issued of
definite weight and fineness stamped with some
design, such as the king’s head, indicative of
the authority under which they were legalized
as money, not only was a great step forward
taken, as, for example, in convenience of reckoning
without requiring the use of scales, but quite
definitely the material of which the coin was made
was thereby rendered useless to the owner, so
long as the coin was not melted down. Within
this limitation, that is so long as the coin remains
intact, this type of money no less than modern
credit or debt money, involved the giving up of
something really for nothing, unless a miser’s
pleasure in gloating over his hoard be considered
an economic value….

CHAPTER III
THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MONEY

r T 9 HE Origin of the Cheque. In point of time
* the invention of the cheque antedates that of
the bank-note, originally a promise to pay gold on
demand. It was customary for merchants who
had deposited gold for safe keeping at the gold-
smiths, the originators of ” banking ” as it is
still called, to write an order or instruction to them
to hand over some definite amount of their gold
to another person than themselves, named in the
order, who, on presenting it and endorsing it as
evidence that it had been carried out, was paid
this amount. It was a means of settling accounts
with creditors by instructing the keeper of the
debtors’ funds to settle them without the debtors
needing themselves to draw out the money, which
is exactly analogous to the modern cheque.

From the first, however, the bankers developed
the bank-note, for this was a powerful means of
spreading their reputation for honest dealing and
trustworthiness through the whole community.
People finding they could always if they wished
exchange bank-notes at the bank for gold, became
accustomed to accept them whoever tendered them
in payment, and not to change them for gold at

56

THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MONEY 57

the bank except for special reasons, as when going
abroad, whereas the name of the drawer of
a cheque would be known to relatively few people
and therefore had not the same degree of general
acceptability as the note as a form of money.
Honest dealing and trustworthiness then meant
ability to give the gold for the paper whenever
asked. At that time it was what mattered most,
and there is no doubt that the early banker was
a social benefactor in inventing a credit medium
of exchange when gold no longer sufficed. This
old-fashioned type of banker would be appalled
at the terrible power that he has placed in less
scrupulous hands.

It was to the banks’ direct interest to see that
counterfeit imitations of their notes were promptly
detected and removed from circulation, and that
those issuing them were tracked down and
severely punished for doing, as it now appears,
something far less socially dangerous in its ultimate
consequences than what the bankers were doing
themselves. But at that stage in the evolution of
money the physical impossibility of repaying the
debts they were so careful to create for that
purpose was not understood, and the public
were still firmly convinced that the convertibility
of the paper into its nominal worth of precious
metal constituted the note money. Whereas the
paper itself was money because the owner had
given up that value of goods and services to acquire
it, and was therefore entitled to an equivalent

58 THE ROLE OF MONEY

value in exchange for it. The whole money-
issuing interests, however, continued by every
means in their rapidly growing power sedulously
to propagate the other point of view. That is
why they and the politicians thought that there
would be an outcry when there came into force
at the outbreak of the War the scheme for recalling
all the gold and substituting a pure credit money.
But there was no outcry whatever, most people
actually preferring in use the new paper notes to
golden sovereigns. Neither has there been any
justification, from the point of view of public
prejudice, for the persistent and ruinously
unsuccessful post- War efforts to return to gold.
What the public want is a constant price-index,
so that the value of money remains stable in goods
and services. That they cannot have, as we shall
see, without destroying ” banking ” as now
understood. Here, as always, one has to
distinguish very sharply between the interests of
the public and those of their real rulers ; and so
far democracy has never had a government that
could trust itself to rule independently of the
money-power.

Government Regulation of ” Banking “. But
though the public were sedulously protected in
the banks’ interest from the counterfeiter, they
were not protected from the failures of the banks
to redeem their impossible promises, which
became so frequent and caused such widespread
ruin that the whole monetary system in this stage

THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MONEY 59

of transition was jeopardized. There were many
reasons for this. The Government having allowed
in the first instance the banks to usurp their
prerogative in creating money, instead of creating
it themselves, attempted in every possible way to
hamper and thwart them. So far, at least, as the
country and commercial banks were concerned,
they were suspicious and hostile to innovations
which seemed to go against the ordinary standard
of commercial morality and to be a new form of
counterfeiting. But as regards themselves they
acted differently. Instead of issuing sufficient
money themselves, they more and more favoured
and empowered one bank, the Bank of England, to
act for them in return for its raising revenue for
Government purposes. This bank was founded
in 1694 in the reign of William III, on the model
of earlier Italian banks, to provide the Government
with funds, and it lent money at interest first in
return for permission to issue notes of equal
amount, and was soon rewarded by a monopoly
of note issue, redeemable in gold coin on demand,
which lasted till 1709. From its genesis to this
day it has never been a bank of the English nation,
but a bank to provide the Government with
money primarily and principally for war
expenditure a weapon which the Government
can, and does, employ against the people. But
from being what is known as a bankers’ bank,
it has become now almost the Government’s
government.

60 THE ROLE OF MONEY

Outside of this object State regulation of
” banking ” has been restrictive. Speciously
directed to protecting the public from being
swindled by dishonest and unsubstantial banks,
it rendered the position of honest and then socially
minded bankers so precarious that their failure
and the consequent ruination of merchants and
commercial people became almost inevitable.
The policy culminated in the Bank Charter Act
of Sir Robert Peel of 1844, which nominally
fixed the monetary system in this country up to
the War, but through which the banks soon found
they could drive a coach-and-four. It legislated
to limit and ultimately to extinguish the issue of
bank-notes in England except by the Bank of
England, limiting the latter’s issue to fourteen
millions above the gold reserve (the so-called
fiduciary issue, because it was supposed to be
founded on the public’s confidence rather than
on their necessities). This effectively checked the
expansion of the note currency and the upshot
was that the cheque, at first secretly, took the
place of the note as a means of creating new money
and soon became the overwhelmingly pre-
ponderating form of the credit medium of
exchange.

Lending Cheque-Books. Instead of printing and
lending notes, an obvious creation of money, this
much more insidious and dangerous form of issue
grew up. The borrower without money was
allowed to draw cheques just as if he had money,

THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MONEY 6 1

and to create an overdraft at the bank. The bank’s
balance-sheet was falsified so that it still balanced.
For on the one side would be credited to the
individual the limiting sum up to which he was
authorized to overdraw and on the other side the
same sum as owing as a debt of the individual
to the bank. Naturally, as always, substantial
security or ” collateral ” had to be deposited
with the bank before the privilege was granted,
considerably more in value than the amount of
the overdraft, to provide an ample margin of
safety to the bank. If the debtor defaulted a forced
sale of the security recovered from the public
the sums he had been allowed by his overdraft
to put into circulation. Under such circumstances
the security could not be expected to fetch its
real value. As, moreover, such liquidations occur
in times of bankruptcy when money is scarce
and prices low, whereas ” loans ” are wanted in
times of boom when money is abundant and prices
high, the banks so were enabled to acquire
valuable securities at forced-sale prices. They
had only to hold the securities till ” confidence ”
returned, when they were re-issuing the money
they had called back so that it was again plentiful,
to realize much more for them than they had
fetched when sold to recover from the public
the money the overdraft had put into circulation.
It is important to realize that whichever way it
works it is a case for the bank of ” Heads I win,
tails you lose “. Moreover, the money in which

6 2 THE ROLE OF MONEY

they are repaid is, on the average, worth more in
goods than that which they create to lend.

There was essentially nothing new in this, or
different in principle from lending ” promises-
to-pay-gold ” instead of gold itself, save that the
banks avoided the necessity of giving printed
receipts for the goods and services their borrowers
obtained for nothing, and there was a secret instead
of open creation of money. Instead of lending
notes, the banks, in effect, now lend cheque-
books and the right to draw cheques up to limited
sums beyond what the borrower possesses. For
nearly a century, until the revelations of the War
made it impossible to conceal the truth from the
general public, the bankers stoutly denied that
they were creating money at all, and claimed that
they were merely lending the deposits their
clients were not using. The President of the Bank
of Montreal not a year ago continued to repeat
this, but, nearer the centre of things, all this was
known and admitted by the orthodox apologists
for this monstrous system even before the War,
usually by some such lying phrase as ” Every
loan makes a deposit “.

Genuine and Fictitious Loans. For a loan, if it
is a genuine loan, does not make a deposit, because
what the borrower gets the lender gives up, and
there is no increase in the quantity of money, but
only an alteration in the identity of the individual
owners of it. But if the lender gives up nothing
at all what the borrower receives is a new issue

THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MONEY 63

of money and the quantity is proportionately
increased. So elaborately has the real nature of
this ridiculous proceeding been surrounded with
confusion by some of the cleverest and most
skilful advocates the world has ever known, that
it still is something of a mystery to ordinary
people, who hold their heads and confess they
are ” unable to understand finance “. It is not
intended that they should. But if, instead of
trying to puzzle it out along the lines of ” what
you get for money “, these people will reverse
the procedure, as in this book, and do so on the
of ” what you give up for it “, the trick is clear
enough.

Current Account Deposits. Cheque-account
deposits at the bank represent, in monetary units
of value, what the owners have given up in the
way of goods and services in order to acquire
these claims to equivalent goods and services on
demand. In so far as one spends his money another
receives it, or in so far as one receives the goods
and services owing to him another gives them up
and is credited for them. With true ” time
deposits “, however, it is quite different, though
banking practice has been directed to slurring
over the distinction. In an honest money system
this difference would be insisted upon as essential
to accurate accountancy. However, this is too
important a matter to deal with incidentally, and
its consideration will be postponed. We will con-
fine the argument here to cheque account deposits.

64 THE ROLE OF MONEY

The aggregate of the cheque-accounts, exclusive
of genuine time-deposits, represents in units of
money value, as stated, what the owners of money
(not the borrowers of it) dealing with the banks
are owed on demand in goods and services from
the nation in which the money is legal tender.
These vast sums of money are entirely of the
bank’s creation in the first instance. When the
bank pretends to lend their money they do not
reduce the amount of the claims of the owners to
goods and services on demand by a farthing. They
do not inform them that they can no longer draw
it out as it has been lent to others ! They
create among the general body of vendors who
supply goods and services, in exchange for the
cheques the banks authorize their borrowers to
draw, new claims on the community for goods
and services. When these cheques are paid into
the vendors’ accounts they create new deposits
at the banks. When the borrowers repay their
loans and balance their accounts, they with-
draw money for the purpose from those to whom
they sell goods and services, and by cancelling
their overdrafts this money then disappears from
existence, just as unaccountably as it made its
appearance. If we can imagine the impossible,
that they ever succeeded in freeing themselves
from their indebtedness to the banks, every
penny left would be worth half-a-crown and people
earning 3 a week would get 2s. a week.

Why Cheque-money is Preferred to Tokens.

THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MONEY 65

We have only to substitute physical counters
or receipts to show the utter dishonesty of the
accounting. For if a man surrenders a physical
money token, whether to lend it to somebody else
or to buy something with it from somebody else,
there’s an end of it so far as he is concerned. He
cannot ever lend or spend it again. He has to
earn another or wait till his loan falls due before
he can get another back to lend or spend again.
But a man who deposits his money in a cheque
account can lend or spend it exactly as though he
had not deposited it at all, by using a cheque for
the amount, and yet it is this same money the
bank pretends it lends out.

The Gold- Standard. It is only necessary very
briefly to consider the now obsolete methods by
which, up to the War, the quantity of money in
existence was kept in the perpetual state of ebb
and flow known as the Trade Cycle or Credit
Cycle, by making it convertible with gold. The
details of this ” beautifully working automatic
regulation ” is the stock-in-trade of all pre-War
conventional money writers, and need not detain
us. The quantity of money was regulated by means
of the gold-standard. The latter meant that the
value of the money unit in a large number of
countries was kept equal to that of a certain
weight of gold by making the money in theory
always exchangeable with gold. In practice it
meant the growth of a number of new devilries
having for their object the frustration of every

66 THE ROLE OF MONEY

attempt to exchange it for gold, so soon as that
exchange began to occur. Since there was only
enough gold in the whole world to be had for
a miserable fraction of the claims to gold, which
the easy method of lending cheque-books had
brought into existence, in no case must the bankers
be caught out. Everyone else bore the losses.
Boom or slump, the banker throve.

It was easy to fix the money price of gold, but
what fixed the goods price of gold ? Gold being
given a fixed price, the price of every other
commodity now varied in relation to the one
arbitrarily fixed. The average price, or the price-
level, during last century varied enormously.
There were five well-marked periods of changing
value in all countries, due to innumerable causes.
Apart altogether from human and psychical
influences, some of the more obvious physical
ones were the discovery of gold mines, the
invention of new technical processes by which
gold is extracted, the number of countries having
gold currencies in comparison with those having
silver currencies, and so on. It was really much
worse than standardizing the barometer height,
calling it a ” bar “, whatever it was, and expressing
all lengths in terms of what the ” bar ” happened
to be at the moment. The variation of the price-
level in terms of gold was, however, over a range
of two or three to one. This makes the variation
of the barometer height in terms of the yard
or of the yard in terms of the barometer height,

THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN MONEY 67

whichever be taken as the ” standard “, almost
negligible by comparison.

The capacity of the banks to create money
without giving up anything for it depended on
their always having enough legal tender (conver-
tible into gold) to meet the demands of their
depositors ; that is, of those who have deposited
money on ” current account “. In practice it
was found that about fifteen per cent of their
total deposits sufficed for their safety but, as
the use of cheques continually increases, the
percentage falls. The factor of safety is now
considered to be about ten per cent, but may
not be nearly as much. Nobody but the bankers
themselves can see, in an age of potential plenty,
any sense in their always trying to make i do
the work of ^10 or more, when they have actually
created claims to nine others which the owners
have only to ask for to reduce them to panic, and
send them howling to the Government for a
moratorium.

The Correct Procedure. The proper thing to
do, of course, would be for the Government
to issue as many pounds as the citizens have
given up gratis pound’s worth of goods and
services, not one-tenth as many, and it should
require the banks to hold for ever after i of
national money for every i in the current
accounts of the banks’ depositors.

Since banking became in reality minting by
issuing cheque-books instead of notes, the banks

68 THE ROLE OF MONEY

have never been solvent, but have been liable
to have to stop payment so soon as they were
asked for more than one-tenth of the money (legal
tender) they owed to their current account
depositors. The measure proposed above would
make them solvent for the first time in the modern
phase of their history…

MUST READ:

http://archive.org/stream/roleofmoney032861mbp/roleofmoney032861mbp_djvu.txt

Then please read, “Don’t End The Fed, Amend The Fed.” by justaluckyfool