The malice of interest-burdened debt

Peter Lock

The following extract is from one of Peter’s very recent publications, which may be obtained in its entirety by contacting Peter directly (email: [email protected])

Banks do not create the minuscule amount of circulating legal tender hard cash currency. They do initiate, with the stroke of a pen or the touch of a computer key, the existentially related credit and debit entries by which today’s business accounting operates and to which the purchasing power of the community is now mortgaged and enslaved. What many minds, past and present, would deem as counterfeit and treason is now understood legally as privatized purchasing power (ppp) or debt. Costlessly invented, this debt is subsequently conjured into circulation. Once a client’s loan application has been approved, a bank opens an account in that name and calls the invented debt-money deposits.

Banks invent and lend their clients new ppp debt-money which becomes complementary credit and debit deposits. Such deposits have no physical tangible reality. They are constructs of negative wealth called debt (F. Soddy). Today, in the marketplaces of western economies almost all purchasing power money is debt-money. Contractual debt-money is understood to have a species of undefined legal existence. It is not physically owned and possessed by anyone. It is a psychical fictional negative quantity, having no physical factual positive reality. It only has an agreed contractually signed existence in the minds of creditors and debtors.

Debt-money is an “I-thou” self-other existential relation, existing only as a reciprocal promise-to-pay in the mindsets of creditors and debtors. The ppp owed to creditors is termed financial assets, while the ppp owed to debtors is termed financial liabilities. In the debt-financed world of modern western economies, self-functioning creditors are dependent on other self-functioning debtors. They are mutually self ↔ other sustaining.

There are complications arising from the use and abuse of debt-money. Banks and other lending institutions, as well as public companies, invite private persons or other corporate bodies to purchase shares in their business enterprises. These investors use some of their own ppp financial assets to do this and receive appropriate amounts of dividend debt-money from the public company’s income earned from trading. The reduction in the amount of ppp in the investor’s assets-deposit account is compensated by the acquisition of shareholders’ script and the ppp dividend the latter earns. The same logic applies to the purchase of Treasury bonds. The agreed exchange of ppp from the financial assets account of one investor to that of the financial assets account of the public company who issues the shares is done almost instantaneously by electronic transfer.