People don't often realize the Civil War was a fight between big city industrialists, and the southern gentleman farmers. It was a fight for thedirection our country would take going forward. Slavery was on its way out regardless. Maybe this is our chance to take the power back from big cities.
(media.patriots.win)
🚁 FREE CHOPPER RIDES 🚁
Again, this doesn't make much sense.
Banks are constrained in modern lending by liquidity and capital. These constraints existed in gold-backed currency times as well.
If everyone tomorrow went and demanded gold that's a problem for a gold-backed bank, the same as if you demanded cash for modern banking or even if you demanded to remove your digital currency from the bank's account into your own account.
Even when banking was gold-backed banking, the bankers would still play with "imaginary numbers". For example: if a business borrowed 100 bars of gold from the bank but that business has a current account with the bank, the bank would just do an accounting record of 100 gold bars into the business's account without any gold bars changing hands. This same transaction happens today. If the bank lend money to a business who had a current account at another bank, still no gold bars may change hands because the banks will eliminate their cancelling debits/credits and choose to trust the bank to make up the difference by lending between each other at the overnight rate. This still happens exactly the same in gold-backed lending.
You're right, that gold is limited so they can't make more of it but because of that, the more banks "make up" more of it by lending, the more demand is placed on gold itself which raises the value of gold, thus banks don't even need to increase the total quantity of gold because are their demand for gold increases by "printing money", now the 1 bar of gold they had is worth 2 bars of gold so they still only need to have 1 bar of gold on hand.
Gold is effectively and completely valueless outside of the demand banks place on it with gold-backed currency. The only reason it retains value today is the idea that if the banking system collapses or in transactions where one doesn't want to use the banking system, gold still has value as a currency. If it weren't for that the only value gold would truly have is in its industrial use which is minimal and its value would be trivial.
Gold-backed or not, the banking system stays mostly the same in the regard that you mentioned. Under gold-backed they still could create money at will with 0 effort. What has been a major factor in that is the technology more so than the currency.
Without banking, you'd have a lower standard of living and quality of life not greater. Banking allows people to reallocate future earnings toward the present in a lump-sum, thus allowing people to purchase things they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. This increases productivity for people. For example, pretend you had the skills of a dentist, well without banking and the concept of it, you'd be forced to work as a waiter for 10 years until you saved enough money to buy a dental clinic after which you income increases 5x. With banking you can purchase the dental clinic right away and increase your income 5x-3x (interest + principal) = 2x immediately. You pay off the loan in 10 years and you've increased your overall net worth significantly. Society as a whole benefits as well since your work is allocated toward its most productive area.
I can tell you're quite new at this and have several crucial misconceptions about how things actually work. Please look up the Mises Institute and start reading. By the time the war's over, you'll know exactly what's really going on with these banks you believe are so helpful.
See, that's what I dislike about the banking conspiracy theories. It's always "you don't get it" or read something else.
No one can explain it well-enough. Point me to something specific that counters what I said.
I'm not new to this. I work in banking, in risk and treasury and know how it works for the most part. It seems to me more or less that the conspiracy theory guys on banking are the ones who don't truly know how it works.
The only issues I'm aware of with banking that exist are the following:
International Capital Allocation: In essence banks match savers to borrowers and this in theory creates values but given how international banks are now, a saver in Country A might be matched with a borrower in Country B. That means, the benefits of banking aren't actually felt in the country or state or city in which it should be. In fact, it's actually taking value out of the communities and reallocating them into other communities. At a national level that might be fine but at a global level, that's a big issue. It might not even be fine at a national level either.
Government debt. Most government debt is a waste of money, period. Banks have incentive to encourage government debt and are the only people who truly benefit from government debt except maybe the corrupt politicians and whomever they distribute the funds toward. This happens far too much.
Too big to fail. Banks that get bailed out by governments crowd out new entrants with superior processes from gaining market share. It also creates a skewed incentive structure where banks can take on more risk than they should at higher than justified prices to consumers given the risk because of the fail safe. It also gives people a false sense of security regarding banks such that people begin to trust banks too much and this gives unfounded value to banks at the expense of consumers. Only banks truly benefit from bailouts in the long-run not society.
Bank regulation. Too much bank regulation prevents new entrants from entering the market to compete with banks which reduces value for society and is a bonus to existing banks.
But Banks start wars and got rid of gold-backed currency to rule the world... I'm not seeing it.
Sorry for this way late reply. If you have the time watch a video on YouTube called the zeitgeist addendum, explains everything way better then I ever could. But the gist is it's all in the fractional reserve lending policies, the way the banks can lend money that they don't actually possess thereby creating money (more accurately creating debt, since we have a debt based currency), and charging interest in that money that they created. If all the banks called in all their loans, there's simply not enough money on the planet to pay it. Also that debt is in itself a form of power, since they never even had the money to begin with and they have large institutions and governments that can't pay their debts they effectively own said government, or have access to all the collateral of the borrower. That's the reason there's new banks popping up all over the place, because they now have assets everywhere due to foreclosed loans that never truly existed. The banks literally own the whole world, all the people in it, and all the property of it. Too term too big to fail doesn't even begin to explain it. That's why they can gamble their loans, lose, and have all those debts absorbed by the federal government. They either win in their investments, or we lose on their investments, but there is never a loss to the banks.