Fictional Reserve

In March of 2007 the turbulence started. Many of us could feel it coming, but those ‘moneyed scientists’ didn’t want to pay attention to our poor human passions. Their unwavering faith in numbers would challenge the idea that it was all coming apart at the seems, decidedly not about to burst into a thousand fragmented pieces somewhere over the ocean of unserviceable debt.. Still the stewards of the greenest green flying machines were saying everything could continue functioning normally. We should resume buying drinks and paying for them through Visa.— a soft landing was the only probable outcome. This reassurance was all fine and good for the indebted slave who functioned throughout daily life never contemplating what his superiors would call the big picture, because nobody cared what the big picture looked like through the eyes of a family about to foreclose on their very first home. The magic of modern accounting failed to account for this family, as well as the idea that diversifying risk was a bit like killing off an unwanted ant colony. If the slow acting poison smelled sweet enough, more ants would return to feed. Delighted by this seemingly free and abundant source of magical sustenance, the ants would begin taking the poison home to feed their young, totally unaware that an hour of tragedy was looming for the entire colony. This could have been avoided, had the masses paid attention to the warnings given by the intuitive few. But they didn’t. And when the poison had been spread throughout the entire system— Alt-A mortgages, teen credit cards, equity loans, collateralized debt obligations— those who ate most of it became symptomatic first.
Money making money seemed like a sweet deal but once again relied upon people’s faith. Faith in the markets. Faith in the ignorant— those who would never come to accept the fact that not enough gold existed anywhere in the world to represent what had already been lent. It was a bust from the beginning because we’d already seen the practice of usury and its negative effects on an economy. Debt was never equal to wealth. Debt was always the equivalent of slavery— with a dictionary definition of sin. It was by no accident that every great world religion came to view lending money at interest an act against God and humanity. Why? Because the ancients new paper money was based upon a fallacy. This was also one of the reasons for the American Revolutionary war. The country’s founding fathers new that private ownership over the coining of money would usher in the return of massive federal debts. The people’s tangible assets would disappear, replaced instead by worthless paper receipts— fiat currency— proving ownership of debt backed by nothing but thin air.