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.
If they send you a piece of mail throw it in the trash; if they knock on the door call the police. Because they will steal from you; they do things will a pen and a paper what we would not allow to be done out here on the street with a gun. Bill Brennan Show, Borrower Beware: Predatory Lending & Your Rights
Commercial banks create chequebook money whenever they grant a loan simply by adding new account dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower’s IOU. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, I Bet You Thought p19
Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing. Ralph M Hawtrey
Could Britain be heading for a crash? We cannot postpone indefinitely the final acceptance that we must live within our means. Simon Heffer, The Telegraph.com headline, comment section
We are not going to educate our way out of this [debt] problem ... It’s an economy that is increasingly stacked against them. Tamara Draut
I just feel like everyone is kind of living above their means or struggling to get kind of what people could have years ago like a house and a car. Jennifer Thomforde, televised interview
4The most potent divide in British society is determined when you first bought your house. If you’re over 40 the chances are that anguished debates about insincerity, debt and the pension crisis wash over you; after a 20-year house-price boom there is enough equity in your property to see you through. Under 40 and the story is different. Your role is to envelop yourself in debt to prop up the house prices and security of your elders ... In Debt? No pension? You’re in club 18-40 ... The young have always lived for the moment, but now they face a grimmer future than their parents. Will Hutton, The Observer article 2nd April 2006
The purpose of the government is to depreciate the money. Celente & Schiff & Paul & Faber & Rogers & Woods, MeltUp: The Beginning of a US Currency Crisis, Ron Paul
Our currency is not recovering ... Our currency is currently experiencing a Melt-Up ... Wall Street paying out record bonuses ... 39.4 million Americans on food stamps ... The government will pay out more in benefits … ibid.
43% of Americans now have less than 10K saved for retirement. ibid.
Retirement will become a thing of the past ... Social security won’t be there ... Retirees will soon be forced to re-enter the workforce. ibid.
1.2 million temporary workers ... The average federal worker now earns twice as much as the private worker. ibid.
Besides the Department of Energy our country also needs to abolish the Department of Education. ibid.
Inflation is currently that last thought on American minds. ibid.
The Federal Reserve created the real estate bubble. ibid.
They build nothing other than profits. They’re junkies. They’re addicts ... They can’t get enough ... Billionaire bonuses for what? ... Bigger than the GDPs of many nations ... Here’s more money, junky. ibid.
Eventually we will have much higher inflation. ibid. Faber
Gold is the most stable asset the world has ever seen. ibid.
Morgan Stanley wasn’t physically storing their gold at all. ibid.
Real American tax receipts will decline this decade. ibid.
Wholesale food prices have risen six months in a row. ibid.
Right now there are food riots going on in India. ibid.
The last real audit of the US gold reserves took place in 1954. ibid.
The US dollar would have to be devalued 98% for our gold reserves to be worth enough to pay off our national debt. ibid.
O ye who believe! When ye contract a debt for a fixed term, record it in writing. Let a scribe record it in writing between you (in terms of) equity. No scribe should refuse to write as Allah hath taught him, so let him write, and let him who incurreth the debt dictate, and let him observe his duty to Allah his Lord, and diminish naught thereof. But if he who oweth the debt is of low understanding, or weak, or unable himself to dictate, then let the guardian of his interests dictate in (terms of) equity. And call two witness from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not at hand, then a man and two women, of such as ye approve as witnesses, so that if one erreth (though forgetfulness) the other will remember. And the witnesses must not refuse when they are summoned. Be not averse to writing down (the contract) whether it be small or great, with (record of) the term thereof. That is more equitable in the sight of Allah and more sure for testimony, and the best way of avoiding doubt between you; save only in the case when it is actual merchandise which ye transfer among yourselves from hand to hand. In that case it is no sin for you if ye write it not. And have witnesses when ye sell to one another, and let no harm be done to scribe or witness. If ye do (harm to them) lo! it is a sin in you. Observe your duty to Allah. Allah is teaching you. And Allah is knower of all things. Koran 2:282
In fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England – the first successful modern central bank – was originally founded. In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank – in effect, to circulate or ‘monetize’ the newly created royal debt. This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 per cent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest on the same money to the clients who borrowed it), but it only worked as long as the original loan remained outstanding. To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
As it turns out, we don't all have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. ibid.
I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt. P T Barnum
It’s always politically popular to impose financial burdens on somebody else. Dr Edwin Vieira
Finally, may I turn to that other slavery – our twenty-six-billion-dollar foreign debt. I have said that we shall honour it. Yet half our export earnings – two billion dollars out of four billion dollars which is all we can earn in the restrictive markets of the world – must go to pay just the interest on a debt whose benefit the Filipino people never received. President Corazon Aquino, address to US Congress 1988
Should we really let our [Tanzanian] people starve so we can pay our debts? Julius Nyerere, Guardian 21st March 1985
By the end of Babangida’s rule, the country had racketed up almost $30 billion of debt. Large-scale criminal fraud had been a persistent problem since independence, but with rising unemployment, rampant inflation and a collapse in the value of Nigeria’s currency, the naira, defrauding indigenous Nigerians was becoming every less profitable. Misha Glenny, McMafia
And now this had happened – to plunge them back into that abyss of wretchedness from which they had so recently escaped. They still owed several weeks’ rent, and were already so much in debt to the baker and the grocer that it was useless to expect any further credit. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
The United States government decides it needs some money so it calls up the Federal Reserve and requests say ten billion dollars. The Fed replies saying sure, we’ll buy ten billion in government bonds from you … In reality, this transaction would occur electronically … In other words, the money was created out of debt. Zeitgeist addendum, 2008
And through this fractional reserve system any one deposit can create nine times its original value … The application of interest … must eventually be returned to a bank with interest as well. ibid.
A system of modern slavery … How can society ever be debt free? It can’t. That’s the point. ibid.
Buy today, pay tomorrow, how much do you owe? What’s it’s like being in debt? Patrolling the front line. And can natural born spenders become savers? Tonight: Buy Today, Pay Tomorrow? ITV 2017
Households which are borrowing more than a billion pounds a month … whether Britain is heading for a new credit crunch. ibid.
So you have today about $200 trillion in debt in the world and about $80 trillion in currency. Peter Joseph, interview Abby Martin, The Empire Files: Abolishing Capitalism, 2017
4.5 million people in the UK are in insecure work. 3.3 million people are in ‘severe, problem debt’. Killed By My Debt, caption, BBC 2018
‘It’s generally speaking when you have debts owned by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation more important than anything else.’ Dave Graeber, interview Democracy Now, cited 97% Owned: Economic Truth
The [indebted] country becomes a vassal state, allowing large corporations to exploit its natural resources and workforce. ibid.