Honeydripper 2007 - William Lyon Mackenzie King - Robert H Hemphill - Thomas Jefferson - Paul Grignon TV - G G McGeer - The Money Fix TV - Robert Peston TV - Frontline TV - Woodrow Wilson - Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis TV - Graham Towers - Edward Mandell House - Bernie Sanders - Fergal Keane & Panorama TV - Charles H Ferguson & Inside Job TV - Will Hutton & Dispatches TV - Martin Durkin - Masters of Money TV - Anatole France - Benjamin Franklin - John Leonard - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Charles Dickens - Alexander Pope - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Ian R Crane - James Burke TV - Craig Ferguson - Mark Twain - Noam Chomsky - The Independence - Susan George - In Debt We Trust TV - Ralph Hawtrey - Bill Cooper - Arnold H Glasow - News Article - Leviticus 25:36&37 - Deuteronomy 15:1&2 - Deuteronomy 23:19-21 - Jacques Peretti TV - Misha Glenny - Robert Tressell - Tonight TV - Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve 2013 - Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders 2006 - Fraud: How They Steal Your Bank Account TV - Danny Schechter: In Debt We Trust - James Burke TV -
Everybody gets credit: it’s the American way. Honeydripper 2007 starring Danny Glover & Yaya DaCosta & Charles S Dutton & Daryl Edwards & Vondie Curtis-Hall & Lisa Gay Hamilton & Stacy Keach & Mable John et al, director John Sayles
Usury once in control will wreck the nation. William Lyon Mackenzie King, 10th prime minister of Canada
Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talks of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile. William Lyon Mackenzie King
Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation ... If the banks create ample ... money we are prosperous; if not, we starve ... It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. Robert H Hemphill, Credit Manager Federal Reserve Atlanta 1934
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution – taking from government their power of borrowing. Thomas Jefferson
Privately created bank credit is legally convertible to government issued fiat currency. Paul Grignon, Money as Debt I, 2006
The entire world economy now runs on a system of credit provided by banks. And when that credit system breaks down everyone suffers. Paul Grignon, Money as Debt II: Promises Unleashed
The account is a promise to pay, not the money itself. ibid.
The banking system functions as one bank. ibid.
Banks differ from counterfitters in that the banks are legally allowed to create new money, but only by certain rules of accounting. ibid.
Almost all the money in existence today is bank credit. ibid.
Virtually every dollar comes into existence as debt. ibid.
In our current bank credit as money system the principle amount of a bank loan is simply created from the borrower’s promise to pay back the principle plus the interest in money. Paul Grignon, Money as Debt III: Evolution Beyond Money
Almost all money is bank credit: debt money. ibid.
About 95% of all money is bank credit. ibid.
The all-inclusive self-issued credit system. ibid.
Think about taking back of money power with self-issued credit. ibid.
They were the men interested in the establishment of the gold standard money system and right of the bankers to manage the currency and credit of every nation in the world. G G McGeer
Money is simply credit ... It’s an information system. The Money Fix: A Documentary for Monetary Reform, 2011
The concept of mutual credit is not limited to the grass roots. ibid.
[Alan] Greenspan slashed rates to just 1%, and the supply of credit soared. Robert Peston, Super Rich: The Greed Game, BBC 2008
The recession had destroyed eleven trillion dollars of Americans’ net worth. A recovery seemed far off. Occupy Wall Street wanted bankers held responsible. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street I, PBS 2012
Credit Default Swaps – a kind of derivative that ensues a loan against default. ibid.
And so they began selling derivatives that were simply bets on any and all portfolios whether the bank owned them or not. These products came to be known as Synthetic Collateralised Debt Obligations – Synthetic CDOs. ibid.
A wave of lending abuses. ibid.
By the end of 2005 the total outstanding value of credit default swaps around the world was measured in trillions of dollars and was doubling every year. ibid.
AIG was on the hook for $440 billion of credit default swaps. ibid.
It was on a cold March day in 2008 that the fear of a meltdown would become a reality. After the real estate bubble burst it would only be a matter of time before investors would start to lose confident in Wall Street’s biggest banks. Bear Stearns was the first to crack. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street II
Bear was party to complicated financial deals. Geithner learned that Bear had made credit default swap deals worth trillions of dollars all over Wall Street and around the world. Geithner saw what central bankers feared most: systemic risk. ibid.
A bailout of Bear Stearns was not [Henry] Paulson’s style. But [Ben] Bernanke and Geithner believed it was too big to fail. And by that weekend options were dwindling. ibid.
One of the most basic moral tenets of the free market – Moral Hazard. ibid.
Paulson told President Bush what was needed now was to rebuild confidence in the economy ... It became known as the Summer of Assurances. ibid.
Then it hit: in the cross-hairs the world’s fourth largest investment bank – Lehman Brothers. ibid.
Paulson delivered the message: Lehman was in a death spiral and there would be no government bailout. ibid.
Geithner realised that if AIG went down the consequences would be even worse than Lehman. He argued for another bailout. ibid.
Conservative Republicans in the House were in full revolt. ibid.
The Congress finally passed Paulson’s Bill ... Paulson was about to hand out billions of dollars. ibid.
The Stock Market was down more than 6,000 points. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street III
The mega-bank Citibank was failing. ibid.
Barack Obama had made the economy a key issue. ibid.
For months there had been public anger of Wall Street. ibid.
The anger was not just confined to the streets. On Capitol Hill Congress responded to the public anger – they summoned the heads of the nation’s biggest banks. ibid.
The banks were so large and interconnected the government felt it had to bail them out. Because their failure could bring down the entire economy. They are Too Big to Fail. ibid.
The loans were part of an unprecedented intervention in the financial system. ibid.
Now the president decided to revive a central theme of his campaign – reforming Wall Street. ibid.
None of the bank CEOs had been fired or prosecuted. ibid.
This season New York banks set aside twenty billion dollars in bonuses. Since the crash of ’08 banks have paid out more than eighty billion in bonuses. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street IV
Cathy O’Neil, a mathematician, came to Wall Street in 2007 after beginning her career in academia. ibid.
For most of the last century bankers made the same salaries as lawyers, doctors and engineers. ibid.
Many American banks found London preferable to New York. ibid.
The country suddenly owed hundreds of millions of dollars of fees and penalties to its debt holders including J P Morgan. ibid.
So bankers descended on European capitals offering derivatives solutions. ibid.
Italy and J P Morgan entered into a currency swap. ibid.
Greece would also go on a massive spending spree. ibid.
Between 2001 and 2008 Greece’s debt had doubled. No-one it seemed wanted to ask any hard questions. ibid.
With the markets no longer willing to provide Greece cheap credit the country had to cut spending. People took to the streets in protest. ibid.
The five biggest banks in America have become larger ... 56% of the American economy. ibid.