The illusion of money.

Essay number one of three, from the

“Through the looking glass..”

series.

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 How money became your master

...and how to make it your servant again..

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................................5
Why I am writing this book.............................................................................................................5
The Great Reset – a financial reset from a pandemic?....................................................................6
Why me, what do I know?...............................................................................................................8
Money is a trick....................................................................................................................................9
Money as debt................................................................................................................................10
The Debt/Credit system of banking...............................................................................................12
Modern Money mechanics – the creation of monopoly money.....................................................13
The cost of (monopoly) money...........................................................................................................14
The unsolvable problem of interest-bearing debt..........................................................................14
William Patterson 1694, founder Bank of England..............................................................14
Graham F. Towers - Bank of Canada...................................................................................14
Major L L B Angus 1893-1973 Australian-born British statesman, economist...................14
The National debt is money from the Bank’s point of view..........................................................16
Two financial worlds, money through the looking glass...............................................................18
Inflation and deflation as a tool of plunder....................................................................................19
Abraham Lincoln 16th US President....................................................................................20
Lord Acton , MP and Historian, 1834 – 1902.....................................................................21
How much money needs to exist? The Goldilocks amount...........................................................22
The cumulative cost of interest to the consumer............................................................................23
We pay the interest on all Government loans................................................................................24
The power to lobby........................................................................................................................26
I don’t pay any interest, I have no loans........................................................................................27
The network of global corporate control.......................................................................................28
US President Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826.......................................................................28
How money should work....................................................................................................................30
Money - unit of measure or thing of value?..................................................................................31
The real and the unreal...................................................................................................................34
Metric barter.......................................................................................................................................36
If I am my own banker, can I just go out and buy myself a Ferrari?.............................................38
How do mortgages and loans work in this system?.......................................................................38
What happens if one is unable to work?........................................................................................39
Metric Barter and the concept of “Deferred payments”................................................................40
The community factor of banking.................................................................................................40
Physical implementation................................................................................................................41
Cash in a Metric Barter system......................................................................................................41
Metric barter and monopoly money – a comparison..........................................................................43
The monopoly money mirror-effect...............................................................................................43
Divide and Conquer, a banking secret?.........................................................................................44

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Introduction
Why I am writing this book.

There exists throughout the world a power that is wholly misunderstood. It is the monopoly power
over the issue of credit enjoyed by the Banks. The power derived from a monopoly on the issuance
of credit is the power of control over all Trade worldwide. This so-called “money” is known as legal
tender. Every government in the world insists that their citizens use their country’s banking system’s
legal tender.
This creates a profit-making middle-man, the banker, between all of us individuals who just want to
trade freely amongst ourselves.
The quote attributed to Josiah Stamp on the previous page is just one of many quotes on money that
recognises this injustice. He implies that the bankers own the world and that money is a tool of
slavery. He also implies that iniquity and sin are involved, more on this later.
There are many more quotes from notable people that should arouse our suspicion that something is
amiss in our banking system. Here are a few:

Rothschild brothers, London 1863

The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so
dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the
other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous
advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and
perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.

Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company

It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary
system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

All these well-known actors are clearly aware of something that we are not. This is why I’m writing
this book. It is time we all knew what these guys know and more importantly, it’s time we fixed it.
There is a solution to the problem and the solution is relatively simple.
Unfortunately most people have no idea just how bad the problem has become and don’t see the
urgency for change. The time could not be more ripe for change.

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The Great Reset – a financial reset from a pandemic?

Today is the 27th November 2020. Here in France the whole country is in lock down because of a
flu. You will probably know this as COVID. I am not allowed to leave the house without an
authorisation or I risk a €135 fine.
How do I get this authorisation? I print it off from a Government website on the internet and sign
my name on it.
So. I have to get an authorisation, from myself, before I leave the house, or I get fined.
This strikes me as utter insanity. How many of me are there? Am I schizophrenic? Does one of me
have authority over the other?
As strange as it may seem, according to the law, there are indeed two of me. There is a trick of
“duality of identity” being played throughout the civilised world which pervades Finance, Law and
Religion. This is the mechanism that is used by the Banking industry to financially enslave us.
It is an ancient trick that has existed under many different guises over the ages. The latest rendition
of this trick is coming to an end. The so-called elites realise we are on to them. They need to
rollover the trick into a new guise so that they can start the game anew. The new game is being
marketed as “The Great Reset”.

COVID is being used to bankrupt the

entire world so that these parasites can
force us into a new one-world banking
system with a new set of laws and a new
identity, a new “world citizenship”.

An internet search on this “Great Reset”

would be instructive at this point if you
know nothing of this plan. The World
Economic Forum website details this push
to a new monopoly money system and the
chairman of the WEF has even written a
book about it:

Catherine Austin Fitts, an ex-investment

banker and Government official has also
written and made some eye-opening
videos on this subject.

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These claims sound outlandish to most. This is because most people have no idea how the
monopoly money system works and exactly how it affects us. Once you have finished this book you
will see these claims are not outlandish at all.
You will also see that the effects of the Bankers monopoly on the issue of money are more
devastatingly-destructive and far-reaching than most people realise.

Despite this doom and gloom, there is a solution. The solution is so simple it beggars belief. This is
mainly due to our erroneous understanding of money, debt and credit. We have been deliberately
misled about the subject of money.
The current worldwide monopoly money scam is intentionally occulted and sophisticated, this
quote from a Harvard professor sums it up better than I can:

John Kenneth Galbraith, former Harvard professor

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used
to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money
is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only
decent.

So John Galbraith, a Harvard professor no less, implies that “a deeper mystery seems only decent.”

Read on and discover how the illusion is done.

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Why me, what do I know?

I worked as a software developer in the financial industry for twelve years. The company I worked
for sold software to Trading banks in the city of London and the United states.

As part of my work I had to learn how Financial Instruments function, things like Commodity
Options, Commodity Futures, Interest Rate Swaps, FX (Foreign Exchange) Swaps, FX Futures and
FX Options and a whole load of other types of financial instruments.
I had to learn about exchange-traded instruments as opposed to over-the-counter trading.
I had to learn how on-exchange trades were matched and registered, what margin is, how it is
calculated. The roles of front-office, middle office and back office and a whole load of stuff.

One day I had to learn about Bonds in order to do some fixes on a bond capture application. One of
the guys explained how they work, starting with a sentence something like this:

“When the government needs money it goes to the Bank and sells it a Bond in exchange for the
required money. A Bond is a promise to pay. The government signs a promise to repay the money
issued by the Bond after a certain period, with interest payments at regular intervals over the life of
the Bond. In return the Government receives money, the bank’s “promises to pay”, in the form of
legal tender”.

What does that mean? It means that the government has to borrow money at interest from the bank
in the same way that we all do when we take out a mortgage.

This surprised me, up until that point I had assumed that it was the government that created money.
I had no knowledge of how money was created but it made no sense to me that the banks created
money.

This quote from a well-known Frenchman sums it up well:

Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France.

When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the
government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes.
Money has no motherland: financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole
object is gain.

This introduction to bonds was the start of my interest in money. I knew something was wrong but I
couldn’t figure it out.

Now, twenty or so years later, I’ve finally got something useful to say about it and I think everyone
needs to hear it.

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Money is a trick.

Money in its current form is a trick. It is a scam, it is a swindle.

The basis of the trick lies in the monopolisation of the issue of money into the hands of a small
group of people. This trick effectively monopolises the trading systems of the entire world into
the hands of the bankers. It is a system of capture, of bondage.
This trick leads to practically all the pain and suffering we currently see in the world:
Inflation, Economic booms and busts, immoral lobbying, market manipulations, Wars for
profit, foreclosures, Constant fear of being able to “live” because of money problems..
All of these problems are symptoms of the monopoly money system we were all born into. From
this point on I will refer to the money we currently use worldwide as “Monopoly money”.
The whole system is an illusion.
Magicians use illusions… Money is a trick of illusion artists.

So how is the trick done? As with all magic tricks and illusions, smoke and mirrors are used to fool
the observer.
The metaphorical use of smoke in this illusion translates to sophistications, deceptions, distractions
and downright lies that we have been taught about money.
The metaphorical use of mirrors in this illusion translates to the double-game that is being played
by the bankers based on the dual-identity trick I mentioned in the Introduction.
All will become clear with regard to this mysterious dual-identity trick. For now, to help you
understand this concept of the duality of identity, all you need to do is stand in front of the mirror.
Do it.. do you see? now there are two of you. The real you, and the image of you. Raise your right
hand, the image of you has his left hand raised. The image of you is in fact the opposite of you.
Can you imagine a world where everyone identifies as their mirror image rather than their real
selves? Everything would be back to front? That would make life very confusing wouldn’t it?
Please take the time to read on, the trick will become clear in the following pages.
If I told you that monopoly money is not real you would probably scoff, but it is not real - it is
nothing masquerading as something. It is an abstract concept masquerading as a commodity. The
monopolisation of money makes it seem real, but it is not.
If I told you that all monopoly money is counterfeit what would you think? You’d probably think I
was raving mad. It is absolutely counterfeit and completely corrupt.

In order to see and understand the swindle in your mind, you need to understand a few basics about
money. Specifically, you need to know how debt is used as money.

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Money as debt.

If you look closely at a Bank of England note you will see the words “I promise to pay the bearer on
demand the sum of Ten Pounds”.

This is a promise to pay. It is evidence of a debt. Effectively, the bank owes the holder of the note
ten pounds. A pound is a unit of measure, it represents a weight - think pounds and ounces. So
looking at the promise on this note the obvious question is “ten pounds of what?”. We are told that
in the past you could take your note to the Bank of England and redeem it for a pound of sterling
silver. You walked away from the bank with real silver, the bank then destroyed the note – the
evidence of the debt, because the debt has been paid.
Most people in the world know that money is no longer tied to Gold or Silver. Gone are the days
when you could redeem a British Pound note for a pound of sterling silver. However, the memory
of this form of money still exists today, which might explain why most people think that money is
somehow real. Nowadays there is no silver or precious metals to redeem your money into.

The nature of money has changed.

Money is now just a notional measure of value. In the same way that centimetres and metres are
notional measures of distance, and grammes and kilos are notional measures of weight, a Pound
Sterling is just a notional measure of value. Pounds sterling are simply the notional unit of measure
used in Banking and Accounting.
If you think of your bank account you think of debits and credits to your account. The movement of
money from one account to another account is recorded as debits - subtraction of value, and credits

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- addition of value. This is the debt credit system of “money” used worldwide in the monopoly
money system.
Banking is nothing more than book-keeping.

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The Debt/Credit system of banking.

Most people don’t think of money as debts and credits - a two-sided affair. They have fallen for the
illusion that money is a valuable commodity in the same way that gold and silver are commodities.
They think that either you have money or you don’t, but it is more complex than that.
Debt and Credit are reciprocal terms, for a debt to exist, there must be a corresponding credit.
Equally, for a credit to exist, there must be a corresponding debt.
So is money a debt or credit? The answer is, it is both.
If a man has a debt, that debt is owed to somebody else. That “somebody else” therefore has an
equivalent credit and that “credit” is what most people think of as money. The “money” or credit, is
simply the evidence of another man’s debt.
The “money” can be in many forms. The debts and credits you see in your bank statements are
what we call digital money. These digital numbers are evidence of movement of money. If you
transfer money from one account to another, the sending account is debited and the receiving
account is credited. This is known as posting the accounts.
Cash is slightly different, but cash also has two sides. The debt side is recorded in an account at the
Bank of England. The credit side is represented by a paper note - the cash. The paper note with its
promise to pay is evidence of a debt. To the holder of the note, this is a floating or anonymous credit
in as much as it is not recorded in any personal bank accounts.
The person holding the note, aka the bearer, has the credit. He can exchange this note for goods and
services anonymously since the person taking the note as payment has no need to know anything
about the holder’s identity or his bank account details. When the holder uses the note to pay for a
purchase, the seller then becomes the new holder of the note.
The holder of the note can choose to pay the note into his bank account. When he does this it goes
into his credit column. Physical Bank notes and digital money are interchangeable and both
represent the same value. Ten pounds cash = ten pounds of digital credit.
To put this concept of debt into even more real and simple terms, imagine this scenario: Your
neighbour grows tomatoes. You ask him for a kilo of tomatoes but you have nothing to exchange
with him, nothing to swap or barter. Your neighbour says, just write me a promise to pay for the
value of 1 kilo of tomatoes, let’s say, £2. So you write an IOU for £2 to your neighbour. This IOU,
to your neighbour is credit. For you it is a debt, you owe him goods or services to the value of £2.
The IOU is a form of money, however it is not legal tender. Only the banks are allowed to create the
money known as legal tender.
Later in the summer, your aubergines come into fruition, your neighbour asks if he can have some
aubergines to the value of £2 and you say fine. Your neighbour then uses your IOU for the tomatoes
to pay for his aubergines. He returns the evidence of your debt, your promise to pay, your IOU. The
IOU has been redeemed for Aubergines, the debt has been paid, you tear up your IOU and the
money, disappears. It is that simple.

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Modern Money mechanics – the creation of monopoly money.

In the monopoly money system, in order for there to be money in circulation – credit, there has to
be a corresponding debt to the bankers. You see this clearly when you get a mortgage or other loan
from the bank. Your current account is credited when you take out a loan, the corresponding debit
shows in your loan account. This money is known as legal tender, because it is created by the banks
and only they have the “right” to create money.
The question arises, “where does the money come from when a loan is made?”. On the surface it
looks like the money comes from nowhere, one minute there’s no money, the next minute the
money is there. Effectively, that is true, the money comes from nowhere. But the mechanism that
creates the money is where the trick lies.
When you sign the loan agreement the bank creates another account in your name – a loan account.
The credit created in your current account comes from the debit in your loan account. Both of
these accounts are your accounts. You effectively fund your own credit from your loan account.

Think about this:

If you look at your accounts from the bankers point of view, the banker has two accounts for you. If
you borrow £100,000, your loan account will have a debit of £100,000 which can also be expressed
as -100,000. Your current account has a credit of £100,000 or +100,000.
If you sum +100,000 and -100,000 the result = 0.
From the bankers point of view, “loaning” you £100,000 results in a zero sum transaction. The loan
costs the Banker nothing. It is a trick of accounting.
It is by this method that all money is created and put into circulation. It has to be “borrowed” into
existence.

The same thing happens with Government loans. The Government can raise money by selling
Bonds to the bankers. Bonds works in the same way as loans. When banks loan legal tender to
governments they receive a “Bond” from the government. The bond is merely a promise to pay, in
the same way as a mortgage is a promise-to-pay. However, it is a promise-to-pay on behalf of the
people. This puts the Government and therefore the people into “Bondage” to the banks.
The implications are enormous. All money in existence bears the cost of interest. For as long as
money circulates in the economy, someone is paying interest payments on it. A good question at this
point would be “How much is this system of accounting for trade costing us?”.

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The cost of (monopoly) money.

Leo Tolstoy, Russian Writer

Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the
fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and
slave.

As stated by Leo Tolstoy above, the the banking industry, or their monopoly on money, is a form of
slavery. It is by seeing the full extent of the robbery and realising how much this industry is
leeching from us that we can start to understand to the depth of the problem.
In this section I want to talk about the cost of money. By that, I mean how much our use of the
Monopoly money banking system costs us with regards to interest payments on debt and some other
less obvious costs.
The costs I will discuss are all costs that are specifically caused by the monopoly on banking.
These costs would not even exist in a non-monopoly system. Some of these problems you may
already be aware of, but there are many other hidden problems which may come as a shock.

The unsolvable problem of interest-bearing debt.

William Patterson 1694, founder Bank of England

The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys, which it creates out of nothing.

Graham F. Towers - Bank of Canada

Each and every time a bank makes a loan, new bank credit is created — new deposits —
brand new money.

Major L L B Angus 1893-1973 Australian-born British statesman, economist

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is, perhaps,
the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.

Given that we now know that money, or credit is created out of thin air, let’s have a look at the
problem of the interest that has to be paid on the so-called debt. I say “so-called” because in reality,
nothing is given to create the debt, more on this later.
Bankers have a Monopoly on the issue of credit, and they charge interest when they issue credit. So
while this money, the credit, is circulating through the economy, the person who borrowed this
“money” from the bank is paying interest on it.
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If the money was borrowed into existence from a house loan, the mortgage holder pays interest on
the money.
If the government borrowed the money into existence, the government uses the money it collects in
taxes to pay the interest on it. The people are the true payers of the debt and its interest on
government loans via taxation.
This gives rise to an unsolvable problem. The bankers side of the balance sheet, the debt owed,
grows constantly because of the compounded interest charged on the debt.
The people’s side does not grow at the same rate, it never stays in most people’s account long
enough to accrue interest and even if it did, the interest paid on current accounts is always much
less than the rate paid to the bank.
What does this mean? It means that at any point in time, the amount owed to the banks is
always greater than the amount borrowed into existence.
Furthermore, from the point of view of an individual who has taken out a mortgage, the
compounded interest on the loan means he repays the bank up to three times the principal amount
borrowed, depending on the interest rate charged by the bank and the term of the repayment.
This same principal applies to loans to government, local councils, county councils and so on. The
amount of money paid back is always greater than the amount of money borrowed.

Let’s review these facts.

• All money is borrowed into existence from nothing. It is created from nothing, at the stroke
of a pen or keyboard.
• The credit created from a loan is what we think of as money in our bank accounts. The
entirety of all credit created this way is known as the money supply, the money in
circulation.
• The debt created by loans is held by the bankers. The entirety of debt consisting of all loans,
mortgages and government bonds is known as the National debt.
• The money supply and the national debt are mirror images of each other.
• The credit side (what we think of as money or legal tender) circulates through the economy
in what we call “current” accounts. We use this to trade amongst ourselves.
• The Banks receive interest on the debt side, this constantly increases the national debt in
comparison to the money supply.
• Due to compounding interest being charged on the money loaned, the National Debt is
always greater than the money supply.
At any given point in time, it is mathematically impossible to pay off the national debt,
because the money supply is always less than the ever-growing national debt.
Even if we took all the money in circulation and paid it back to the banks, there would be a shortfall
of the figure represented by the interest charged on the national debt. And even if it were possible to

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pay off all the debt, doing so would leave us with no money in circulation and we wouldn’t be able
to trade!
This means that in order to maintain enough money in circulation for everyone to trade, more
money has to be constantly borrowed into circulation. The money supply has to be constantly
inflated by creating new debts on the bankers side in order to create credits on our side.
If we don’t borrow more money into existence to pay the interest on the national debt, we have to
use the existing money in circulation to pay the interest. This leads to a reduction in the amount of
money in circulation. Not enough money circulating leads to a decrease in trade, not enough money
to go round, businesses go bust, people can’t pay their loans, they lose their houses, their
businesses. This is what we call a financial depression.
If you fail to pay your mortgage, your house becomes the property of the bank. If you fail to pay
your business loan your business goes bankrupt and the bank moves in to strip your business of its
assets.
The National Debt grows exponentially, forcing new money – more debt, to be created. Eventually
it becomes impossible for the debt to ever be repaid and the whole system collapses. At this point,
the Banks become the owners of everything.
This is a monetary system with failure intentionally built-in, and the failures always work to the
Bankers advantage.

The National debt is money from the Bank’s point of view.

If you thought the previous section on the “The unsolvable problem of interest-bearing debt” was
bad, this section is going to make you sick.
We previously talked about how one man’s debt is another man’s credit or money. This holds true
for the National Debt.
Remember, the National Debt is the entirety of the Nation’s mortgages, loans, credit card debts,
Government bonds and other government loans from National to local level all summed together.
When the debts that make up the National debt are initially created, these debts, from the banker’s
point of view, are his credits, aka money. It is not money that you can take down to the local shop
and buy things with, this money is not legal tender. It has to be spent in different markets. The
markets for this money are the stock exchanges, the metals exchanges, the money markets, the bond
markets and so on - the financial markets. Debts like this are referred to as Securities by the banking
and financial industry.
So what does that mean to the average man? Imagine this scenario:
You have a great business idea, you lend £100,000 from the bank to set up your company. You
spend the money on plant and machinery and get to work. Your company is immediately a roaring
success and you decide to float your company on the stock exchange. You convert your private
company into a public company.
Now your company is listed on the stock exchange.
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The stock exchange is where the bankers can use your debt to buy shares in companies. Remember,
your debt is the bankers credit because he is holding the evidence of your debt - the loan agreement
you signed. He could use your debt, the £100,000, to buy a share into your company, why not?
So if that were to happen, you would be repaying your loan plus interest to the bank and you would
also be paying a share of your company profits, as dividends on shares to the Banker too, and of
course, the banker would now also be a part-owner of your company.
Maybe the Banker doesn’t want to invest in your company. He could take your debt - his credit, and
use it to buy shares with one of your competitors? Maybe he could use it to buy a factory in China
that makes the same product as you, who knows?

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Two financial worlds, money through the looking glass..

Aka The monopoly money mirror-effect.

Loaning money from the banks creates “money” in two different worlds. The Bankers world and
our world. In our world, money is called “currency” or legal tender. As we have discussed
previously, legal tender is the Bank’s “promise to pay”. But the Bankers are holding our promises to
pay – our loan and mortgage agreements etc, they use our promises to pay, our debt, as money.
What is happening here?
If, as most people believe, the Bank lends us their money when they grant us a loan, then surely the
Bank should have less money to spend on the Financial Markets when they loan us their money. But
this is not the case, when Banks lend us a specified amount of money as a loan, they somehow end
up with an equivalent amount of money to spend on the Financial Markets? Something seems to be
amiss? How can one loan – a debt, create credits in two different accounts, two different worlds?
It is almost impossible to get any honest information out of the banks on this subject but based on
the logic of the necessary account movements to create the credits in two financial worlds, it works
as follows:
There are two financial worlds. Our world and the Bankers world.
In our Financial world we use the Bank’s promise-to-pay as money, the famous “legal tender”
money, aka currency. This is what we spend in our world.
The Banker’s Financial world uses our promises-to-pay, our mortgage agreements, loan agreements
and Government Bonds – known as Securities, as their money. This is the “money” that they use in
the financial markets.

We are basically exchanging promises to pay with each other.

Let me say that again. We are giving our promises to pay such as mortgages, loans, Government
bonds etc, in return for the banks promise to pay. Remember, the bank’s promise to pay is known as
legal tender.
Evidently there is a huge problem:
In our world we have to work for our money. We have to produce, we have to provide
services, we have to give our real sweat-equity for money.
In the Bankers world they make vast amounts of money with no work. All of the legal tender
in the world, plus interest, is “mirrored” on the Bankers side.

You could argue that the banks do provide us with something, they host bank accounts for us. Now
while it is true that we need some kind of system to facilitate the exchange goods and services, what
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is evidently not true is that we need to become slaves to this system. But this is exactly what the
worldwide banking system does, it creates debt-slaves out of us while giving very little in return.
The monopoly money system creates unlimited resources to the Bankers and their owners. With this
money, these Securities, they can go onto the Financial markets and buy shares in any publicly
traded company in the stock exchanges, effectively they can end up owning all of the companies the
majority of us work for.
We, the people, provide the funds that allow the bankers to own the companies that we work for.

Inflation and deflation as a tool of plunder.

The banks have absolute control on the amount of money in existence at any time. Given that the
monopoly money system forces us to constantly create new debts and credits in order for us to
maintain enough money in circulation, what happens when the banks decide not to loan any more
money?
We only have to look at the Great Depression for an example. Prior to the depression there was a
period of inflation where loans were cheap and money was plentiful. In 1930 the banks of the world
all stopped “lending money” to the world. Evidently there was so much debt that the debt became
impossible to repay. Given the mechanism by which the monopoly money system works this comes
as no great surprise.
This action of stopping loans, combined with its effect of reducing the amount of money in
circulation, caused businesses the world over to fail. The money supply was deliberately deflated. It
also caused major falls in the share prices of publicly owned companies. The bankrupt companies
went into receivership to be asset-stripped by the banks and the shares of public companies were
bought up for pennies in the pound. This was no accident. It was done completely by design.
This trick of contriving economic booms and busts has lead us to a world in which the Banking elite
now own and control most of the important Corporations globally. (More on the relationship
between Banking and Global Corporations later).

The Great Depression was by no means the first time the bankers conspired to harvest the wealth of
the people of the United States. There was an earlier depression from around 1893 which lasted
several years. This following account shows how the bankers themselves were under no illusion to
the power of monopoly money.
This extract was taken from the film the The Money Masters: How International Bankers
Gained Control of America

{p. 44} In 1891, the Money Changers prepared to take the American economy down again
and their methods and motives were laid out with shocking clarity in a memo sent out by
the American Bankers Association (ABA), an organization in which most bankers were
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 members. Notice that this memo called for bankers to create a depression on a certain date
three years in the future. Here is how it read in part (note the telling reference to England,
home of the Mother Bank):
"On Sept, 1, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On Sept. 1st we
will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can
take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the
Mississippi as well, at our own price... We may as well own three-fourths of the farms of the
West and the money of the country. Then the farmers will become tenants as in
England ..." - 1891, American Bankers Association, as printed in the Congressional Record
of April 29, 1913.

In 2008 we witnessed a global financial meltdown known as the sub-prime crisis. “Sub-prime” is
the banking term used for people who may not be considered to have a “prime” credit rating. In
other words, people who might default on loans. In this case the banks created a property bubble by
making loans to anyone and everyone no matter what their financial situation. People were jumping
onto the property market to make a quick buck on the rapidly rising property market. The bankers
pulled their usual trick of inflating the money available for loans, thus creating the rising market in
property, they then let it rise to ridiculous levels and pulled the rug from under everyone’s feet by
halting any new loans, for the sub-prime bracket of people at least.
Remember, a credit for the Bank’s customers is also credit for the Banks in this corrupt mirror-
economy. All the dodgy mortgages given to people who would normally be not be approved for
loans created the same amount of money for the bankers in the form of Securities.
When the sub-prime crash happened the banks had already spent the Securities that were backed by
the sub-prime mortgages. They had exchanged them for shares in companies, Gold, FX Trades,
Options in this, Futures in that.. If there was ever a time when we should have all took an interest in
Banking, this was the time. You see, when all the sub-prime mortgage holders failed to repay their
loans and instead chose bankruptcy, the people in the financial world who were now holding the
mortgage-backed securities, the mirror-image of the mortgages themselves, their securities became
worthless, they had been defaulted on. Fortunately for the banks, the Governments of the world all
decided that the sub-prime mortgages that were defaulted on would be paid for by the tax-payer. It
will become clear why the Governments of every country seem more concerned with the welfare of
the banks than their people in later chapters.
Every single financial depression in history is a disaster for the people and a jackpot for the banks.
The solution to most of these disasters is for the government to borrow even more money into
existence to bail out the bankers.

Abraham Lincoln 16th US President

The money-power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times
of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than the aristocracy, more
selfish than the bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods
or throw light upon its crimes.

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Lord Acton , MP and Historian, 1834 – 1902.
The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or
later is the people versus the Banks.

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How much money needs to exist? The Goldilocks amount.

In the monopoly money system, at any point in time, there needs to be a certain amount of money in
circulation in order for trade to happen. I’ve called this magic number “The Goldilocks amount”.
Too much money is bad - inflation, not enough money is also bad - deflation, we need to get it just
right..
How is this figure to be calculated? How much money in circulation is “just right”? The burden of
interest on money created out of thin air can only be borne up to a certain amount, after which it
becomes impossible to reimburse the debt, leading to “harvest time” for the banks. Harvest time for
the banks happens in cycles and we roll from one economic disaster to another. Every economic
depression causes disaster for the people, but these disasters for the people equate to absolute
jackpots for the banking industry.

Suppose we manage to get this “Goldilocks” number right. We’ve got just the right amount of
money in circulation needed to keep all businesses going.
What happens when some people manage to start accumulating large amounts of this money? The
accumulation by one group leads to a deficit of money for the rest of the population. We already
know that the bankers have a system which inevitably leads to this result. But this result can only
exist in a monetary system where at any one point there is only a finite amount of money in the
system – a monopoly money system.

What am I trying to say here? “The Goldilocks amount” does not exist, it is a myth, a dream. It is an
impossibility. The study of economics somehow manages to skirt round the main problem of
economics, namely, the monopolisation of the money supply. This subject is the great elephant in
the room that nobody wants to talk about.

The belief in the idea that there has to be a “certain” amount of money in circulation to facilitate
trade is not only wrong, it is the opposite of the truth.

Having an “ideal “amount of money in circulation is exactly what is enslaving humanity. Free
enterprise is manacled by this erroneous idea. Economic growth is shackled by this idea. In order
for industry to grow, the banking empire has to profit unimaginably, this leading to more of industry
being owned by the banking Empire. If there is ever to be a free-trade system it needs to find a
solution to the idea of the “Goldilocks” amount of money in circulation. The solution needs to find
a way to remove the control of the amount of money in circulation from any small group of self-
interested people.
There is a solution to this problem and it lies in the de-monopolisation of money. More on this later.

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The cumulative cost of interest to the consumer.

If you ask most people how much the banks make from their monopoly on money they would most
likely refer to the interest rates charged by Banks on loans. “Oh it’s only 3 or 4 percent per
annum..”.
Again, the truth of the matter is more complicated than that.
The cumulative costs of interest need to be taken into account.

Imagine this scenario. Let us just take a simple item, potatoes, and look at how interest charges
affect the price paid by the consumer.
So we have a Farmer. He grows potatoes. The Farmer needs plant and machinery, tractors, trailers.
He needs somewhere to live. The Farmer may well have loans from the Bank to pay for these items.
The interest he pays on these loans are his costs of doing business. When he sells his potatoes, he
has to set a price which allows him to make a profit and importantly, to pay the costs of interest on
his loans. The Farmers cost of interest is therefore included in the price at which he sells his
potatoes.
But the Farmer doesn’t sell his potatoes directly. They need to get to market..
So we have a truck driver. He takes the potatoes to a bulk buyers market. The truck driver may well
have a loan on his house, on his car, and almost certainly on his truck. The truck driver has to pay
interest on these loans and the cost of this interest is added to the price at which he transports the
potatoes. This business cost is again added to the price of potatoes.
So we have a market trader who sells potatoes. He may well have a car loan, a house loan etc. He
too has to pay the interest on these loans and the cost of this interest is again added to the price of
the potatoes.
So we have a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper goes to the market trader to buy potatoes. The
shopkeeper will most likely have bank-loans on his shop, his house, his van etc. The shopkeeper has
to add the cost of the interest he pays onto the price of the potatoes.

And finally we have the consumer.

The consumer buys potatoes and consumes them. The price of the potatoes at this point includes the
interest costs of the Farmer, the Truck-driver, the Marker-seller and the Shopkeeper.
The consumer pays the cost of all interest of those involved from creation to consumption.
In the examples above I have only discussed interest on personal loans from those in the line of
production. There are other interest charges that I have not so-far mentioned.

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We pay the interest on all Government loans.

The government also has interest payments to pay to the Bank. They pay for this by taxing us. All
of the people in the line of production pay taxes. We have VAT, income tax, tax on petrol, Council
tax.. the list is endless.
Most people think of these taxes as being used to pay for Government services. A really important
question would be:
How much of what we pay in taxes, is used to pay interest on Government loans?
Fortunately we have some answers to this question from a German Lady named Margrit Kennedy.
From Wikipedia:
Margrit Kennedy

Margrit Kennedy was a German architect, professor, environmentalist, author and world
authority on and advocate of complementary currencies and an interest- and inflation-free
economy. In 2011, she initiated the movement Occupy Money.

Margrit Kennedy wrote an essay entitled “Interest and Inflation-free money”. This document is
freely available for download and I encourage you to read it. For the purposes of this chapter I
would like to draw your attention to the following breakdown of the costs of services provided by
Margrit’s City Council in Germany and the breakdown of the costs of each service with regard to
interest payments. (Illustration included below)

Margrit provided a rough average estimate of the cost of interest included in Council tax payments
to her City Council.
She estimated this to be around 50%.
That means that half of the money collected by the Council in taxes, was paid directly to the Banks.

As shocking as that may sound, I believe the figure to be worse than that. Earlier in this chapter I
explained how the consumer costs of goods contains the interest costs of all players in the line of
production of potatoes. This principle applies in varying degrees to all goods and services.
Margrit’s City Council is also a consumer. The cost of everything they buy also includes interest
costs incurred in the line of production. Therefore, the price of everything bought by the council is
inflated due to the monopoly on money.
Margrit’s study does not include these costs.
So what can we learn from this?
Quite simply, the monopoly on money enjoyed by the Banks adds an incredible burden to the rest of
society. What the final figure actually amounts to is anybody’s guess.
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Interest free money would reduce consumer prices enormously.
Interest free money would reduce costs for businesses, making more business ideas viable,
encouraging more production, employment and wealth.
Interest free money would massively reduce taxes, by 50% according to Margrit Kennedy’s study.
The burden of the Banking Industry’s monopoly on the issue of money is unbearable.

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The power to lobby.

The power of monopoly money is also used against the people in the form of lobbying. Lobbying is
basically a polite word for bribery. It is the use of money to influence politicians in order to pass
laws favourable to the lobbyist and his clients. It should be illegal but it is not.
What is a lobbyist? Here is a description I found after a quick internet search;

The average senator has to pull in more than $14,000 dollars every single day, just to stay in
office. One of the easiest ways to raise that kind of cash is to turn to lobbyists, who
make big donations and organize swanky fundraisers for elected officials in order to buy
influence for their clients.
“You can’t take a congressman to lunch for $25 and buy him a steak. But you can take
him to a fundraising lunch and not only buy him that steak, but give him $25,000 extra
and call it a fundraiser.” – Former lobbyist Jack Abramoff

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you’re a big bank. You want to buy influence with a senator
on the banking committee so he’ll vote your way on an upcoming bill. The easiest way
would be to just give $100,000 directly to the senator’s re-election campaign. But alas, that
would be illegal — federal law prohibits companies from making direct donations to
candidates. So instead, you hire a lobbying firm.

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 Here’s where things get corrupt. That lobbying firm can legally organize a swanky
fundraiser that brings in $100,000 for the senator’s re-election campaign. At the fundraiser,
your lobbyist just happens to have a friendly chat about your feelings on banking policy
with the senator’s staff.
At the end of the day, the senator is still up $100,000, he still knows exactly where the
money came from, and he knows which way to vote if he wants the money to keep
flowing. But this time, nobody’s broken any laws!
One recent study found that “on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the
nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government.” That’s a
76,000% return on investment. And it works on both sides of the aisle —top lobbying firms
raise big money for Republicans and Democrats at the same time.

Given that the corrupt monopoly money system creates such huge wealth for the bankers it should
come as no surprise to find that the bankers use that wealth to influence law.
Given also that “the banks and the corporations that grow up around them” are one and the same
group, it should come as no surprise that industry also lobbies governments.
The cost of lobbying for these people is nothing more than a cost of doing business. The rewards far
outweigh the costs.
The power to lobby governments at the levels we see nowadays would not exist without the power
of monopoly money.
Ronald Bernard, a former elite Dutch banker turned whistle-blower, talks extensively about how
lobbying and blackmail is used to control laws and ultimately, whole governments. He has released
a series of videos where he describes his experiences during his time as an elite banker. You can still
find these videos on YouTube. I would advise you to watch his videos, they provide important
insight into the world of banking.

I don’t pay any interest, I have no loans.

Those who believe they aren’t affected by interest on debt fail to see the cost of interest contained in
the price of all consumer goods. Everyone who spends money on consumer goods is paying the cost
of interest. The cost of interest is carried in all goods and services through the cumulative costs of
interest in the private sector, and also through the taxes we pay to governments to cover government
debts. All prices that we pay in the shops include these costs.

The consumer is the ultimate bearer of the costs of interest imposed by the banking monopoly.

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The network of global corporate control

US President Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826.

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of money, first by
inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that grow up around them will
deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent
their fathers conquered.

Clearly, Thomas Jefferson understood how the use of inflation and deflation of the money supply
could be used against the people.
He also realised how the banks could use the advantage gained in a monopoly money system to buy
publicly-listed companies for pennies in the pound after their deliberately contrived depressions.
Without this knowledge most people fail to see the relationship between big banking and big-
corporations and the absolute dominance in Corporate power that has been accumulated by the
Banking Industry over the years.
In order to illustrate just how much power and control the Monopoly money system has given to the
Banking industry we need to look at the Corporate world with regard to ownership and control.
Many years ago I came across a study by three systems theorists from the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology entitled “The network of global corporate control”.
Following is the Abstract from the report.

The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market
competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and
there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first
investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the
computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational
corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a
small tightly-knit core of financial institutions.
This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both
for researchers and policy makers.

The study states that a “super-entity” of 147 companies, or 0.3% of all Trans National Corporations,
holds control over fully 40% of the economic value of Trans National Corporations worldwide. I
have included a list of the top 30 or so entities below.
The point of this section is simply to show just how much control over our lives has been
accumulated by the banking Industry. (WIP more needed)

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29 of 44
How money should work.

By now I’m sure you are aware of my contention that it is the Monopoly on the creation of money
that is the root cause of all our problems.

If that is the case, there can only be one solution - a non-monopolised system of money. The
complete opposite of a monopoly money system. But how does a non-monopolised money system
work? None of us have ever seen or experienced a non-monopoly monetary system.
It turns out the solution is very simple. But in order for me to explain it we need to go back to basics
and look at how society works with regard to trade. Money, after all is just the mechanism by which
we exchange goods and services. It is the accounting for trade.

Look around at your society, your country, what happens every day? Well, people get out of bed and
go to work, we each go out into our society and work for each other, i.e. we “give” to society.

After work, we go out into society and enjoy the fruits of our labour. We enjoy life, we eat we drink
we buy things, i.e. we “take” from society.

We are essentially just exchanging goods and services amongst ourselves. It is a basic question of
give and take. If you give a lot to society, you can demand a lot back from society. If you give a
little to society, you can expect less back from society.

Now all that we need to do is account for it.

We need to record what we give and take so that we know what we owe society and what society
owes us.

Simple book-keeping.

Ideally, a non-monopolised banking system account would provide all the functions a monopoly
money account does and eliminate all the problems that monopoly money causes.

It turns out this is quite easy to accomplish, but it takes a change in the way we define money. Our
understanding of money has been messed with, sophisticated, occulted. We need to relearn what
money really is and rid ourselves of our illusions.

This task requires fresh thinking. In the following chapter I am going to try to shake your thinking a
little by raising some ridiculous comparisons between different units of measure.
Hopefully I can make you think out of the box and make you snap out of the collective hypnotic
trance under which we are all suffering.
Please bear with me, when one is being swindled, it pays to think out of the box.

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Money - unit of measure or thing of value?

Proverbs 11:14
A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, But a just weight is His delight. When pride
comes, then comes dishonor; But with the humble there is wisdom. The integrity of the
upright will guide them, But the perversity of the treacherous will destroy them.

In the monopoly money system money is both a measure of value and a thing of value.
This is completely illogical in a fair and just system of money.
No thing of value can ever have a constant value. It is an exercise in pointlessness to measure the
value of all things against an object whose value is constantly changing.
Consider this; in the days when the British pound note was redeemable for a pound in weight of
silver, what then happens to the value of silver when suddenly an adventurer returns from a foreign
land with tons of Silver?
The laws of supply and demand apply equally to silver as they do any other commodity. A doubling
or tripling of the amount of silver based money obviously reduces its value. If the value of silver
can rise and fall depending on its scarcity, how can you use it as a measure of value from which
everything else can be measured?
How can you possibly measure the value of a thing, using a unit of measure that is subject to
constant changes in value? It would be like fixing the length of a metre to how far a leaf falls from
the base of a tree. This would render metres useless as a measure of distance.
This same concept of supply and demand applies to monopoly money. When failing governments
resort to increasing the money supply without increasing trade and production, the value of money
is reduced.
The principle demonstrated here shows that money cannot have value of itself if we are to use it as
a meaningful measure of value.
We have to decouple, divide, separate.. the notions of the value of things, and of things themselves.
We have to disabuse ourselves of the idea that money has value and think of it only as a measure of
value and nothing else. But how do we achieve that?

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Alan Watts, an English philosopher gives us a few clues. He gave several lectures on money. In one
of his lectures he talked about the fact that Banking should be no more than the accounting for what
you owe society and what society owes you.
He argued that the idea of there “not being enough money” was a fake concept. At the time I
thought he just didn’t understand money properly. Now I realise it was me that didn’t understand
money.
At one point in his lecture he said something like this:

“Imagine going to work on a building site one day and when you get there everyone has
downed tools, nobody is working. You ask them why nobody is working and you are told
“we can’t do any more work, we’ve ran out of centimetres…””

A this point the whole audience burst out laughing, I too found the anecdote amusing in its sense of
ridiculousness but at the time I didn’t fully appreciate the point he was making.
It was only when I started to think about how to replace the monopoly money system that this story
came back to me.
We’re told that money has value.
This seems true in a monopoly money system – money appears to have value.
But in a non-monopolised money system – money has no value of itself, it is a unit of measure of
value and is used to measure the value of goods and services and nothing more. The value lies in
the goods and services, not in the thing used to measure their value!
Money should only be used to measure value in the same way as centimetres and metres measure
distance, or in the way that grammes and kilograms measure weight. Then we just need to record
the value of our exchanges in accounts.

Money should have no value, it should only be a measure of value.

It is the act of making money a monopoly that changes the nature of money. When money is
monopolised, at any point in time, there is only so much of it in existence. Due to the fact that we
all need money to trade, we are all, in effect, competing for the available money. This gives rise to
the illusion that monopoly money has value.
In a non-monopoly money system money is nothing more than a notional measure of value. Just
like centimetres is a notional measure of distance.
So what does that mean? Let us take a look at some more successful units of measure and compare
them to money.
Think of centimetres and metres, I’ve been using them for over 40 years since we switched from
using Feet and Inches when I first started school.
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The amazing thing about centimetres and metres during all that time is they haven’t suffered from
inflation. A centimetre from the year 1975 is exactly the same length as a centimetre today in 2020.
The use of centimetres and metres as a measure of distance has been an amazing success story.
The use of Monopoly money as a measure of value however, has not fared so well. In this same
time-frame the pound sterling, like all world currencies, has suffered a devastating loss in value.
Can you imagine a world where centimetres and metres are monopolised? A world in which, if you
borrow ten metres one year, you have to repay eleven metres at a later date?
Of course not, that would be madness, and yet this is the basis of monetary systems worldwide.
The principle I am trying to explain here is very subtle but its effects are devastating.

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The real and the unreal.

Most people believe that money is real, it is not real, it just seems real because there is a limited
amount of it in circulation at any given time.

In contradistinction, goods and services are real.

Our labour, our competences, our skills, our ingenuity, our sweat-labour, all these things are real,
they have real value.

Monopoly money has no real value. In reality, Monopoly money has the same value as a notional
centimetre or a notional kilogramme, i.e. None. Centimetres and Kilos are nothing more than shared
ideas. Money can be used to measure value, but it has no value of its own.

This is why monopoly money is counterfeit, in order to obtain monopoly money we have to give
real value in return for something that has no value. This means that the monopolists are receiving
real value, real property, real labour… for nothing.

This is the illusion we are all suffering from, we believe money has an equivalence with wealth,
when in fact it only reflects wealth.

At the very best, the entire banking industry is no more than an incredibly expensive accounting
service.

Here is another way to express this same idea that monopoly money is counterfeit.

If I give you a bag of apples and you give me nothing real in return, that creates a debt. A real debt.
Why is this debt a real debt? Because the apples that were given to create the debt, were real.

In the case where I give you a bag of apples, you in return would give me an IOU for the apples.
Your IOU is a promise to pay, a debt. For me, it is a credit.

As we now know debt and credit are reciprocal terms. No debt can exist without a corresponding
credit.

The credit is represented by the IOU from you for the apples. Your debt, my credit. The IOU could
quite simply be a promise to pay a bag of apples, however, to make this debt easily transferable,
instead of giving an IOU for a bag of apples, you would give an IOU for a notional value of the
apples. This IOU is your promise to pay. To pay what? The value that you both agreed on when you
exchanged the apples for a debt.

You might need to read this essay several times, this concept is difficult to grasp, it goes against
everything we have been taught about money in our limited education.

So what is the solution?

Is there a way to replace the monopoly money system in such a way that we are not constantly
transferring real wealth, real value to the bankers?

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It turns out there is such a system. In the next chapter I will discuss a system I am going to call
Metric Barter.

We all know Barter as being an old method of trading. A method of exchanging goods and services.

Metric barter combines Barter and metrics, i.e. measurements of value.

It also uses a concept of payment I heard about from Marcus at www.servantking.info called
“deferred payment”.

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Metric barter.
Metric barter is a system of exchange of goods and services that reflects reality. It is a simple
accounting system used to record the exchange of real goods and services between any two parties.

It is intended to replace the current monopoly money system of accounting for trade by completely
removing the need for banks.
It works almost exactly like most people believe the existing Banking system works, with some
small, but very important differences.

Primarily, no man or group of men have a monopoly on the creation of credit.

Credit and Debt can only be created between two parties when real goods or services are
exchanged.

Debt and credit cannot be magically created out of thin air with no corresponding movement of
goods or services.

The aim is to reduce the “cost of money” to zero. That means no monopoly on money, no booms
and busts, no depressions, no inflation, no interest, a stable currency.

Life would go on exactly as before, we would still be able to trade freely but we would use a
different “bank” to record our business transactions.

Metric barter recognises that

• Free trade is an absolute necessity of life.

• In any society, we are all interdependent on each other.
• Goods and services are the real value
• Money is just the accounting unit-of-measure-of-value used to record the giving and taking
of goods and services.
• Credit can only be created by a real debt.
• A real debt can only exist when one man gives another real goods and services.
• Money cannot be created out of thin air.
• The sum of credit and debits in your account represents your account balance.
• The account records your life with regards to your trading with everyone else in your
community.
• When a man “gives” his goods or services to another, this creates for him, a credit.
• When a man “takes” goods or services from another, this creates for him, a debit
• Only you can in-debt yourself by taking from your society.
• Only you can create your own credit – money, by giving to society.

We just need to record the debits and credits between parties and we have a free trade system...

As so eloquently stated by Alan Watts, banking is (or at least it should be..) nothing more than a
record of what we owe society and what society owes us.

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So how does it work?

In this system, your work is the money, it is the value.

When you work for someone else you first agree a price for the job. You might agree that the job of
planting a hedge is worth £500. That is its value.

So you get to work, you finish the job. The client is pleased. The client gives you a receipt, this is
your proof that you have paid value to someone else in your society. Your work is your payment.

At this point, you, the one that has done the work, have created a credit of £500 for yourself and the
client who has received the benefit of your work has incurred a corresponding debt of £500. You
make your own money, no banks involved.

Remember, money is only a measure of value in this system.

When the work is completed, the worker has made a payment of value to the one receiving the
work.

Now we just need to record it, and this is what it would look like in the accounts.

Your account receives a credit, why? Because you are the one who has given value. Your client’s
account receives a debit because they have received value.

And that is it. That is the Metric barter system. It is incredibly simple because it reflects exactly
what physically happens in life. Only the giving and receiving of something real can create money.

It is important to note a few things here that may not be immediately obvious.

In this system, there can never be a shortage of “money” in circulation, why? Because
money is only a notional measure of value. Your account simply shows a record of what you

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 have given and what you have received. Your account balance is the sum of the debits and
credits. This is an essential feature of this system. So long as there are people who want to
work and materials available, the economy will be fine. No more banking created booms
and busts.

This system has no interest payments on debt, why? Because in this system you are your
own Bank. Why would you charge yourself interest on your own debt?

Only you can in-debt yourself by taking from society without giving anything back.

Once you have given your goods or services to another member of your society and received
a receipt, your account is credited with the agreed value of the transaction and the receiver’s
account is debited with this same value. The “payments” have been made.

This system of trade also removes one of the risks in business that exists in Monopoly
Money system. I have friends who have gone bankrupt because they were not paid
Monopoly money for work that they did. In Metric Barter, this can not happen. It’s a simple
question of “were the goods delivered? Yes? Then do the paperwork. This perfectly reflects
what has happened in reality. The physical transaction happened, account for it.

In metric barter, if your balance is in debit, it is because society has given you more than
you have given society. Your debt is a debt to society as a whole. For the rest of society,
your debt is your concern, they have already been credited for anything that they gave you.

In the monopoly money world, if you have a debt, it is to the bankers, and the bankers want
interest payments on your debt, which serves only to further in-debt you.

I’ve discussed this system with friends and they asked some very pertinent questions about how
mortgages and loans would work and what happens to people who are unable to work.

If I am my own banker, can I just go out and buy myself a Ferrari?

Obviously, there have to be rules of banking in this system. One cannot simply continuously take
from society without giving anything back. Rules have to be worked into this banking system.
These rules would have to limit what you can take from society based on what you give to society.
This is how our current banking system works and one of the things it gets right.

Some of the rules which should govern this are discussed in more depth below.

How do mortgages and loans work in this system?

We only need to look at the monopoly money system to answer this question. In the monopoly
money system, to obtain a loan or mortgage, you would go to the bank-manager and ask for credit.
The banker would look at your account and see if you have a steady income. He will want to know
if you can comfortably pay off your loan given your financial situation. If it is obvious from your
account history that you can afford to comfortably reimburse the loan, the banker allows you to in-
debt yourself.

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You sign a promise to pay the banker for the amount of the loan plus interest, the banker creates a
loan account for you showing your debt to him. He then credits your current account with this same
amount.

In Metric Barter you are your bank. If you want to buy a house now and repay your debt to society
in the future over a period of time, the same rules of eligibility have to be applied. If your account
shows that you have a steady income and you can afford to reasonably pay back to society a loan
over time, the payment you need to make for the house will be allowed to be made directly from
your account. This functionality can easily be factored into banking software using simple
algorithms.
From the house-sellers point of view, once he has given you the keys to the house and the credits
and debits have been posted, the house if yours. If you fail to keep up payments your debt is to
society as a whole, not to the house-seller. Ultimately, if you fail to fulfil your promise-to-pay to
society, you will lose the house. However, given the fact that there are no interest charges in metric
barter, I would foresee a much more stable housing market and therefore less people defaulting on
their repayments.

It helps to think of a Metric Barter account as a record of what you give to society and what you
take from society. I even think it would make more sense to completely change the wording from a
bank account to a Life Account. Effectively, this is what a Metric barter account does. It records
your dealings with your society, your trading life if you will. The words credit and debit on the
accounting cross could easily be replaced by Give and Take respectively.
Imagine your life account as two simple lists, Give and Take. This puts into stark reality what is
happening and removes this erroneous idea of money as a commodity.

What happens if one is unable to work?

In the monopoly money system, the government takes money from those who work to give to those
who don’t work. Workers are effectively penalised to help those that don’t work. This burden on the
working man is further exacerbated by the costs involved in setting up and administrating such a
system, e.g. the social security system. The social security system expends enormous sums of
money before it even makes a payment to the unemployed, there are computer systems to be
developed, office space to be constructed, staff to be paid to administer the system etc.

In a metric barter system an algorithm could be applied to the unemployed person’s account to
allow him to go further into debt every month. For example, if society as a whole decided that
unemployed people deserved £100 of value a week to live on, an algorithm could be used to
calculate that person’s “available credit” at any given time allowing him to receive that value from
society.

Supporting people who are unable to work in the Metric Barter system compared to the monopoly
money system reveals an almost miraculous benefit. When the unemployed person receives value
from another member of his society it actually creates a credit for the one who gives the value.

This is obviously preferable to the way unemployed people receive benefits in the monopoly money
system.

The debt incurred stays exactly where it should be, in the account of the one who is receiving
assistance from the rest of society.

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Metric Barter and the concept of “Deferred payments”.

Inherent in any debt-credit system of banking is the concept of deferred payment. What is a
deferred payment as opposed to an actual payment?
If one man receives goods or services from another without giving equal value in return, he in-debts
himself. This means that he now has a commitment to give back to Society the value he received
some time in the future. This is the principal behind a deferred payment, the payment is deferred to
a later date. This reflects how life really works. We generally start life in debt with mortgages and
loans, then later in life when we have paid the mortgage off life becomes more comfortable. The
ability to take now and pay later is absolutely essential to any trading system.

The community factor of banking.

One of the principles that is rarely discussed with regard to banking is the benefit of being involved
in a society of people who are all financially linked by their banking system.
It is this pooling of debits and credits into one big inter-linked system that allows us to buy and sell
freely amongst ourselves.
In practice, the limits of the societies I am talking about here are defined by their currencies. For
example, all British people use the GBP or pound sterling, denoted by the £ symbol. It is the
currency that defines the boundary of the society. All of the bank accounts inside a society defined
by a currency in this way are interlinked with each other. This interlinking of all members in a given
society is one of the few things that banking gets right and is one of the least talked about reasons
why banking is so useful.

Consider the situation that often arises when lending and borrowing money amongst friends. Say I
lend £10 to John, who lends £10 to Steve, who then lends me £10.

We each owe £10 and are owed £10 but to and from different people.
As we know each other, we would all say, well I guess we are all evens so let us just call it quits.
The alternative would be for us to each pointlessly pay back £10 in order to end up in the same
financial situation.
This netting of debts and credits with different people is a natural advantage of the banking system.
It projects the principle we use amongst friends, described above, into its National equivalent where
we are netting out debts and credits with people we don’t even know. This is what gives rise to what
we call our Bank balance. When you sum the debits and the credits of all the transactions you made
with all of the different people in your society, you get your bank balance. This effect is what makes
it possible for me to take the credit I earned in one town and spend it in another. The netting effect
inherent in a society linked by its unit of payment is what creates the liquidity we need to have a
free trade system.

In Metric barter you have one simple account, not two. You have only one identity, not two. your
life account as I prefer to call it.

In a monopoly money bank account you have a credit and debit column. In a life account you would
instead have a Give and Take column. In the “Give” column you would record the value of all that
you do for other members of society. In the Take column you would record the value of all that you
receive from society.

wip..

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Physical implementation.

Most people in the world use the internet, we all have Facebook accounts, Twitter, Instagram etc
and the amazing thing about all these services is that they are free. They offer all sorts of
functionality for free. You can store photos and videos online, share them with your friends, speak
to people all over the world.

All for free.

And all these companies are worth billions..

So would it be that hard to imagine a completely free online banking system that simply hosts bank
accounts?

Not at all.

Advertising revenues could easily pay for the costs. The business models used by Facebook, Twitter
et al tell us that.

The method used to pay could be hooked up to an application on a phone, it could use cards and
card readers much like the current banking system does. Ideally it would use a dual-authentication
method to authorise payments. This means that both you and the other party in any transaction both
need to send a message to a payment matching system which matches the value reported by the
buyer and the seller of any given sale, details would have to be alleged by two parties before any
transaction is recorded.
WIP..

Cash in a Metric Barter system.

wip
So far we have only discussed digital credits and debits. Many people like to use cash. Cash is
useful for its convenience, especially for small purchases. It is also useful for purchases where there
is no internet or other connection to a banking system.
But cash has problems associated with it. Paper money and metal money can be counterfeited. The
history of empires is rife with stories of industrial counterfeiting by rival empires. The book
“Currency Wars” describes many such attacks on currencies by using the counterfeiting of notes to
reduce the value of the opposing Nation’ currency. Counterfeiting is also used in modern times by
criminals with access to high quality printing machines and the counterfeits are constantly getting
better.
The transition to any monetary system that dethrones the Banks would be instantly under attack by
the banking system and counterfeiting of cash would be the most obvious way to debauch any new
form of money.
For that reason cash needs to be decoupled from the monetary system and operate as commodity
money. In the same way that we can use Crypto-currencies to pay for purchases by exchanging
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Monopoly money for them, we could easily do the same using physical commodity money. Gold
and Silver coins denominated by weight and purity could be used to replace cash.
For instance, we could have Gold and Silver coins denominated by 1 gramme, 2 Gramme, 3
gramme etc. In order to exchange credits from your Metric Barter account with cash, you would
buy the number of grammes of cash (Gold, Silver etc) at the going rate for a gramme of Gold,
Silver etc. The cash may well go up and down in value like any other commodity, but that would
not affect the monetary system as a whole, why? Because Cash would be just a commodity like any
other commodity.
If a group of actors want to corner the cash market by making Gold or Silver more scarce, perhaps
by hoarding it, it doesn’t matter. People can continue to trade with each other using digital money.
The rise and fall of the value of Gold and Silver coins is measured by the notional unit of measure
used in the Metric Barter system. It cannot therefore affect the value of the unit of measure. This is
the complete opposite of our current Monopoly money system where the value of money can be
manipulated by supply and demand, by reducing the amount of monopoly money available .
The value of precious metals can be easily manipulated on the financial markets. This is why trying
to fix the price of Gold, Silver to £1 or £10 etc is an exercise in futility.
Imagine the situation where we have a coin made of Gold with a value of £1. What happens when
the price of Gold doubles? People would melt the coins down to sell for twice their face value.
The point I am making here is that cash would have to be separate from digital money in order to
avoid arbitration between the face value of a coin made of Gold and the actual value of Gold. Cash
in the form of precious metals should be completely separate from digital money because any cash
based on Gold is obviously a commodity.

wip

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Metric barter and monopoly money – a comparison.

In the chapter on the cost of money I detailed the many ways that the monopoly money system is
inimical to our interests. Here they are again in list form. I am going to go through each of the
subjects in the list and compare how each of the systems perform. Hopefully by the end of this
chapter you will start to see the advantages of a Metric Barter system. You will also start to realise
just how corrupt our current financial system is, it is only by seeing a fair system that you can start
to realise just how bad the current system is.

1. The unsolvable problem of interest-bearing debt.

2. Inflation and deflation as a tool of conquer.
3. The mirroring of money, the unspoken monopoly effect.
4. The Goldilocks amount.
5. The cumulative costs of interest bearing debt-money.
6. The power to lobby.
7. The network of global corporate control.

1. The unsolvable problem of interest-bearing debt.

This problem only exists in a monopoly-money system. It does not exist in Metric Barter. In
Metric Barter money is only a measure of value. What we think of as “money” in the monopoly
money system is just the credit side of the balance sheet.

The monopoly money mirror-effect.

I want to explore this idea of mirroring further, when trying to explain systems like the financial
system it helps to use analogies to help visualise certain concepts.
I’ve heard the term “mirroring” of money by the banking system by very few commentators. But it
effectively describes what is happening in the monopoly money system. Earlier I discussed the idea
of a dual-identity trick that is used to swindle us that pervades Finance, Law and Religion. This
effect can be seen in the working of the financial system.
What I am about to describe may seem a little bit esoteric but it will make sense later.
Imagine standing in front of a mirror with your arms stretched out sideways as if you are tied to a
cross. Wiggle the fingers on your left hand, the mirror-image opposite you will wriggle the fingers

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of his right hand. This the effect of mirror images, they reflect an image of the real thing, but the
image is back-to-front. It is an inversion.
In banking and accounting there is a concept of the accounting cross. On this cross we represent
debits on one side and credits on the other. Now imagine that the cross stance you are making and
the mirror image of your cross-stance represent two different accounts. An entry on your right hand
side is a credit for you, but your mirror image shows it as a debit. Conversely an entry on your left
hand side would represent a debit for you, but it would be a credit for your mirror image.
This is effectively what is happening in accounting terms when you take out a loan. The credit in
your current account is the mirror image of your debit in your loan account. Both of the accounts
are your accounts. However, the loan account is money for the banker in his world. While the
current account is money for you in your world. The amounts are mirrored, an equal amount is
created in both worlds. This is the duality of banking, more on this later.

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