One cornerstone of understanding money is this: The structure of the monetary system existed long before our modern governments. There was never a 'Constitutional Convention' by brilliant minds for a reasoned discussion on how to set up money to best facilitate the trade of goods and to have money work towards the benefit of nations and people. Instead, the monetary system was set up by an aristocracy many centuries ago, designed to siphon the wealth from nations and people, and has kept its structure for governments to build around, rather than vice versa.

A more important cornerstone is the concept of attaching interest to money. I want to borrow an analogy from Michael Rivero from his website whatreallyhappened.com. He calls it 'The Eleventh Marble'. Consider this: You have a tin can and ten marbles. If you put ten marbles into the tin, you can only ever take ten out. Its tied to reality, logic, science, math; it is obvious that no matter how much you want an eleventh marble to appear from the tin, it cannot and will not unless you put an eleventh marble in.

The banking system is the protagonist of the marble scenario: It puts ten marbles into the tin, in other words, it produces the worlds money supply through the process of money creation. Yet, against the laws of reality, logic, science, math, they demand an eleventh marble in return. This is analogous to the interest that is inherent to money.

To simplify: The Federal Reserve creates money through loans to commercial banks, or by the buying of bonds or financial assets. A significant majority of the time, the money that enters the economy through these processes has interest attached. And there is our eleventh marble. How can the institution responsible for the available money in the economy, demand more money in return than it originally created?

It cannot, although it does. Debt based money is the basis of the banking deception. Everything else, the rampant corruption, the 'business cycle' of booms and busts that conveniently centralize wealth, the fractional reserve process that expands the banks profits from interest tremendously, the private ownership of central banks, are all icing on the cake. And unlike the marble scenario, where the inability to produce an eleventh when prompted causes nothing more than dissatisfaction, in real life when the people are unable to produce the eleventh marble of money, our jobs are lost, homes and assets are repossessed, sometimes we are thrown in jail. And it is all based on the deception of money with interest.

It is with this understanding that any serious inquiry into the economy and banking must be built upon.

Our money supply is constantly growing because of the very nature of interest. New loans have to be taken out to repay old ones. This is why inflation is so constant, why the US dollar has lost 95% of its value since the Federal Reserve was implemented. So each year our money is worth less and less. 40% of American workers now make less than minimum wage workers in 1968, adjusted for inflation.

And the structural modes of wealth centralization are not enough for these global elite. As the LIBOR scandal, other rate fixing scandals, foreclosure lies and other forms of fraud show, the 'free market' is rigged in every sense of the word.

The truth is that the whole structure of money is 'absurd', and the market is entirely 'unfree'.

The absurdity lies in just how easy it is for the massive consolidation of wealth and assets by banks, and how much influence they have over both politics and our daily lives. The Federal Reserve is pumping hundreds of billions (trillions after fractional reserve math) into the balance sheets of the major commercial banks, through quantitative easing. The idea is to stimulate loans, which are desperately needed to pay off the previous loans, which were needed to pay off previous loans, and so forth. The banks also take this money and spend it on financial gambling. Instead of giving stimulus to the people, which the Federal Reserve has every legal right to do, in which the money would immediately be spent on goods and services in the economy, the banks buy things like derivatives, to the tune of trillions. The truth is that the process of financial gambling on intangible assets has completely spiraled out of control. There is no reasoning that can defend the $700 trillion dollar derivative market, other than as a tool of hegemony and market manipulation.

And the power that these institutions exert is a part of the absurdity. In Money, Part I I discussed the web of corporate elite: A super-entity of 147 transnational corporations exert massive influence over 80% of global revenue. And at the very top of this pyramid is the central banks, who are owned by private, profit-driven interests, and have the ability to create money out of nothing and expand and contract the money supply. The potential for financial and political manipulation is astounding.

I used this quote in Money, Part II, from a New York Times article on derivatives:

“On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan. The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential. Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge risk. In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks. The banks in this group... have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available.”

I failed to elaborate this point then: The cabal of bankers discussed here are the member banks, the owners, of the Federal Reserve, and they operate in the secret manner described by the New York Times on more issues than just derivatives.

This cabal creates money from the Federal Reserve for the major banks when they need it. They expand the money supply when it is convenient, then they shrink it, by refusing to issue loans and raising the Federal Funds rate. When the latter happens, they collect the assets of those who cannot pay back their loans, because there were not enough new loans created to do so. Already we have the structural base for a permanent class of wealthy elite with the ability to increasingly consolidate their power. But that is not enough, this cabal needs to manipulate rates and commit fraud in secret to make even more profits. They profit off of retiree's pensions by manipulating derivatives, evidenced by the ISDAfix, and they knowingly lie to mortgage customers to repossess their homes.

And they are reckless, as we saw with the 2008 financial collapse, with their financial gambling. It is objectively absurd that such worldwide suffering could be caused by chain reaction initiated with bad bets on mortgage securities. I don't know how phrase this any simpler: The banks are creating money out of nothing, to gamble on financial assets that don't actually exist, and when their bad bets go sour, they illegally repossess our homes and then lobby the government for a trillion dollars in bailout money, funded by taxpayers.

And this cabal is not concerned with another collapse, because they are behind the Federal Reserve and by extension own all of the debt. Every person, corporation, bank that goes under in such a scenario, their assets are transferred back to those who own debt, the people behind the Fed.

It is absurd and surreal.

(Continued, too big for one post)