It is common knowledge that the entire western world is as near as dammit to total bankruptcy, with only two other political entities still operating with their own central banks (and in the black) the US State of North Dakota and South Africa.

It’s also common knowledge that “only a war” can get us out of the current global debt trap…

An internal, publicly-owned central bank issues the nation’s currency, sets the repo and interest rates and monitors the money supply needed to drive the economy, which is the ease of access of product from manufacturers to consumers using ‘money’ as a medium of exchange.

The nation’s businesses and government borrow from the central bank, and any interest incurred is returned to the national fiscus and spent on service delivery and the business of government, which is the well being of its citizens.

A central bank can also issue asset-backed scrip to raise emergency funds or sell long-term investment funds as Treasury Bonds, again, backed by hard and recoverable assets.

One of the largest financial ‘trading assets’ is the mortgage bond debt.

A mortgage is a long-term financial commitment and the 20 or 30 year debt incurred can be sold at a discount to investors willing to wait that time for their money to yield returns as mortgages are paid off.

Meantime, the mortgage lender has new cash in hand (although much less that the total 20 or 30 year mortgage yield) for further lending into or investing in the economy.

If on the other hand, a nation’s money supply is ‘fiat’ or paper currency borrowed at interest from a foreign bank and further, that paper is not backed by gold or other ‘hard’ assets, a part of the nation’s GDP is spent ‘servicing’ the debt incurred over the interest and not on service delivery or infrastructure maintenance.

What has happened in the world is a repetition of several other debt-based economic collapses over the centuries, all the result of many fraudulent financial practises like securitizing ‘troubled assets’ by pooling them with Triple-A Mortgage securities, but particularly by interest rates called usury.

Once anyone, including a nation, has fallen into the ‘debt trap’ a ‘modern’ false economy kicks in – borrowing more money to pay off the interest – called Keynesian economics, which only ‘works’ up to the point where the consumer base stops growing.

You can’t get more money from for the same products from the same number of people unless you raise your prices, in which case the consumer will turn to his employer for higher wages and the ‘push-pull’ inflationary cycle starts.

There are many other factors involved if an economy strays from the basic rule of income “more must come in than goes out”, but the most common is fraud that government turns a blind eye to like the sub-prime fraud that the Bush Administration actively supported to the point of ‘politically assassinating’ the governor of New York, Elliott Spitzer, for attempting to rally the nation’s other governors to legislate against the practice.

Once that ‘borrowing to pay interest’ mistake is made, the “Debt-to-GDP Ratio” must increase until all GDP revenue is being used to service debt and basic infrastructure collapses…

Or we have a war.

This is literally the deadliest economic flaw of all – to deliberately waste huge mineral and human ‘assets’ only to destroy them as quickly as possible in order to build or hire more of them, employing more people and thus generating a ‘recovery’ – because the money to fight a war has to be borrowed and a nation drops further into debt.

By the end of a major war and for a few decades after, the populations on both sides have been stripped of their savings and property and are offered credit with which to ‘rebuild’… startng the ‘Boom-Bust-cycle’ all over again along with the new debt incurred by the war – America is still paying war debts from the beginning of the last century.

The only respite in the current situation is that the world is now aware of the system’s total inadequacies and will hopefully write a true history of these events, pass it to the next generaton and thus prevent another wave of robbery, depression, destrucion and ‘recovery’ only to repeat it again.

Tom Dennen