Here we are again, at the beginning of another banking crisis, and again we dimly wonder why it happens. Or we accept banking crises as an inevitability, like the weather, because we accept banks as an inevitability. But should we? From an early age we’re taught to get our money in a banking account as quickly as possible, set up direct deposit, download our bank’s app, et cetera. We partner with this institution for our entire lives, a business which knows and tracks every purchase we make. They know everything about us, so why do we use them at all? Naturally, because a checking account is free, or at least it seems so to us, and also, our entire modern world revolves around them. Banks make it very convenient to navigate a world which revolves around banking, and very inconvenient to forgo their “services”. It seems we’ve allowed ourselves to be painted into a corner with this institution. In the battle against banking, we’ve lost our Queen, our King, our Rooks, and now we’re stuck in a corner with only a solitary pawn, and so we feel that the game is over, and so we accept our fate. We’ve built civilization around banking, but no one stops to ponder whether it’s a good thing or not. Very few people stop to think whether we need banks or not. Do we? What do they really do for us? Investment, but that could be handled by other financial institutions. The “free” service is what should raise eyebrows. In what situation would any business offer anything free to its customers? In almost all instances, because YOU are the product. Or, your money is. You deposit $10, giving the bank the power to lend out $90, just like magic. This is new money, magic money, money that simultaneously doesn’t exist and yet does. But this incorporeal sum funds real economic activity, leading to a real rate of return for the investment. You think your money is safe in your account. You log in to your account. You see that it’s there. Surely it is? It’s not. It’s being used in what amounts to financial witchcraft. Some money is in the bank, some of the time, and enough is there at all times to make depositors believe that it’s there. But instead, an inverted pyramid of debt is being built upon it, money that the bank doesn’t have is being lent out to fund real business decisions. This is a deeply unnatural state of affairs, one that guarantees never-ending bank crises, until the mother of all panics spreads through all banks, all at once, and the depositors en masse lose faith in their bank, and withdraw their money. The real money is what is taken out, causing the vaporous bank-created debt-money to disappear into thin air. This would cause the mother of fall economic crashes, the end of modern civilization. Which is built upon the inexistent debt-money pyramid scheme that banks have been practicing for over a century now. Those “free” checking deposits we all love so much come with the highest of prices. Ironic that we’d gamble the world for something so small. But hey, “free”! Is there anything that modern America wouldn’t sacrifice at its altar?
