Sunday, April 17, 2016

The crux of financial capitalism

Yesterday, on a sunny day of Spring, I made a nice walk through a river landscape near Zutphen and had the following conversation with my co-walkers.

- What is the crux of financial capitalism?
- The pushing of buttons on a computer and property law that guarantees ownership of money.
- How is money created?
- By debts.

- Do we need to reduce the debts of states, companies or individals?
- It depends...
- Depends on what?
- On whether the creditors want the debt to be repaid.

- Do creditors need debtors?
- Yes.

- Can there be money without debtors?
- No.

- But if money did not have the function of storage of value, but would just function as a means of payment?
- Then we would live in a different world.

- Is such world possible?
- Any world is possible... It is the result of what people living on this earth do.

- Does history predict or help understand the future?
- Yes, but we should not despair. There is always hope that certain things, like world wars, will not happen again.
- And global debt problems?
- We have seen recurrent global debt crises, but the word 'crisis' is misleading...
- Why?

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