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Tarek El Diwary (Original Summer 2000; updated June 2003)Promise to purchase the goods
It gets worse. Because the banks create money by agreeing new loans, society must be in constant debt to the banks by an amount approximately equivalent to the total of a nation's money supply. But when the banks create money, they do not create the money needed to repay the loan plus the interest charge. The loans that the banks make are therefore unrepayable. The unrepayable debt in turn forces society to compete instead of co-operate since the borrowers in aggregate experience a constant shortage of money. Only one thing can save current borrowers, and that is the creation of more money, either by the state or by the banks. This provides sufficient new money with which current borrowers can repay old debts. When the banks and the state don't create enough new money, we have a recession. If they create too much, then we have inflation. And always we have more debt.
Wherever you live in the 'developed' world, look at your country's monetary statistics. You will see a steady expansion of total debt (private plus public) accompanied by expansion of money supply to a similar degree. More telling is the fact that total debt is in almost all cases showing substantial growth as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product. So despite decades of hard work, using ever more productive technology, the people are more in debt than they have ever been. Net, they own less of the wealth in their possession than they have ever done. Does this make any sense to you? Only when we understand that modern money is manufactured mostly by the banks for the sake of profit, can we understand the modern economy. Then it will all make sense.
Islamic finance is not a product to be offered to a niche market. It is a system. It must be promoted and implemented as a system. Where the monetary system is concerned, I am beginning to feel that this is something that cannot be achieved by the private sector alone, Islamic or otherwise. A lead is required from the State since we must redefine the meaning of the words 'legal tender'. We must somehow overturn the monetary system as it is. And that will require us to defeat the monster that faces us.
Some of our scholars have yet to recognise the monster for what it is. They think of the banking system as a necessary part of economic activity. They do not connect the deaths of millions of children in Africa every year with the burden of debt repayments to the banks (the United Nations Development Programme's annual Human Development Reports 1997 - 1999 do show this connection). We need a payment transmission system, a safekeeping service, and investment advisory services. To all these things, yes. To money creation for the sake of profit, no.
Which politician will be brave enough to challenge the wealthy bankers and their friends in the leveraged corporate boardroom? The prize awaiting a successful challenge will be huge. Such a nation will be a light for the world to follow. Imagine no more debt. Imagine all those bankers being released from their unproductive industry (the largest by value on the London Stock exchange) to do something useful instead. Imagine a world free of dominance by a few huge firms, huge and dominant because they have been leveraged with the bankers created money. Imagine what we once had before all of this. A world of small businesses, a world of variety, of individual responsibilities and co-operating communities.
Failure to defeat the monster means a never ending necessity for growth. A world awash in the dust of riba, ruled by the 'Money Power', paying perpetual interest on an unrepayable debt. Oh, I know they'll say I'm being extreme, it's just that these other fellows have all been saying it too ...'The Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing'. Statement of William Paterson, first Director of the Bank of England, upon receiving the Charter of the Bank in 1694: quoted in Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley, MacMillan New York (1966)
The unlimited emission of bank paper has banished all specie .... private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us.
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Wayles Eppes on June 1813, Jefferson, Writings (1984) New York: Literary Classics of the United States
And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Taylor 28 May 1816, Writings (1984) New York: Literary Classics of the United States
The distress and alarm which pervaded and agitated the whole country when the Bank of the United States waged war upon the people in order to compel them to submit to its demands cannot yet be forgotten. The ruthless and unsparing temper with which whole cities and communities were oppressed, individuals impoverished and ruined, and a scene of cheerful prosperity suddenly changed into one of gloom and despondency ought to be indelibly impressed on the memory of the people of the United States. If such was its power in time of peace, what would it have been in a season of war, with an enemy at your doors? No nation but the free men of the United States could have come out victorious from such a contest; yet, if you had not conquered, the government would have passed from the hands of the many to the few, and this organised money power, from its secret conclave, would have dictated the choice of your highest officials and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their own wishes.
President Andrew Jackson, Address to the American people, 4 March 1837, recorded in Richardson's Messages, volume 4, p. 1532
The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of the consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges ... money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.
President Abraham Lincoln, Senate Document 23 1865
I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks or the Bank of England can create and destroy money.
Post-war Banking Policy, p. 93 (1928) William Heinemann, by Reginald McKenna,
Chancellor of the Exchequer of Great Britain, later Chairman of Midland Bank
In the abstract it is absurd and monstrous for society to pay the commercial banking system interest for multiplying severalfold the quantity of the medium of exchange when a) a public agency could do it all at negligible cost, b) there is no sense in having it done at all, since the effect is merely to raise the price level, and c) important evils result, notably the frightful instability of the whole economic system.
Saturday Review of Literature, p. 732 (1927), Frank Knight
By allowing private mints to spring up, Parliament has fundamentally and perhaps irretrievably betrayed democracy. Before the War it was customary even in the works of apparently respectable economists to find absolutely dishonest hair-splitting distinctions between the invisible money so created and paper notes. The latter were really money and the former was not! In fact the reader can always tell in such standard works on the subject when he is approaching the fishy part of the business. The essential fact, the creation of new money, becomes obscured in a cloud of anticipatory justification and special pleading.
The Role of Money (1933), Frederick Soddy, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Despite the accusations of neo-imperialism leveled at the IMF and the World Bank, in the same way that a country's domestic banking system is carried out with apparently scrupulous honesty, the financial conduct of the IMF and World Bank appears above reproach. If a nation borrows, it must repay. Naturally! What other conclusion can there be? The true injustice of the IMF and World Bank only become apparent when the fraudulent nature of these 'loans' is understood, and how they relate to the debt-based banking system ... It is an injustice amounting to international slavery and extortion; it is an aggressive injustice, involving the subjugation of whole nations and their sovereign peoples, operated on a scale that exceeds the total of all the more obvious efforts at dominance by individual nations indulging in warfare over the centuries. The Grip of Death (1998), Michael Rowbotham
Reference: http://www.islamic-finance.com/item100_f.htm
An abridged version of this article was published in Banker Middle East during November 2002
