It's Time to Ban Interest (Again)
It's Time to Ban Interest (Again)
The ancients were right - usury only leads to disaster and ruin
Author’s note:
You need to understand this, so please stick with me on this one.
— J.B.
Picture yourself on a deserted island with nine strangers.
A murderous gangster pulls up on a hyper-yacht and throws you each $10 in one-dollar bills.
“It’s a loan. Do business amongst yourselves. I’ll be back in a year, and you all owe me 10% interest. If you can’t pay, I will re-possess some of the assets you pour your hard-earned time into this year... or worse. Get to work, peasants.”
He takes off. Everyone stares at the horizon.
You say what everyone’s thinking. “If there are only $100 dollars to go around, and at the end of the year we will collectively owe $100 plus 10%, that’s $110. We’re going to be ten dollars short…”
Because the ten of you have been forced into a rigged game, you spend the next year competing against one another instead of cooperating, collaborating, and working together.
You get up earlier, so they get up even earlier.
You work later, and they work even later still.
You all spend a huge amount of time constructing houses and canoes and gardens, building your assets sure, but mostly trying to just seize that extra 10% you owe.
The year ends. You have all lost a huge amount of time and have suffered and sacrificed and competed because of the extractive gangster. You have compromised your values, taken advantage of others, cut quality, marketed dishonestly.
Person #1 steps up and pays her $10+1.
Person #2 does the same.
$10+1.
$10+1.
$10+1.
Everyone steps forward and pays.
Now it’s your turn.
You step forward… and you have zero dollars, because everyone was better at playing the rigged money game.
Or maybe not.
Maybe you’re awesome at the rigged money game.
In that case, you get to watch someone else suffer and die.
Congratulations, I guess?
This is exactly what bankers have done to the world economy.
Land of the fee, home of the slave
Picture America as that island.
No, the murderous extraction gangster isn’t the big bad US Government — it’s the billionaire elites who own said US Government.
Specifically, it’s the people who control the private banks that own the Federal ReserveTM.
You see, America’s central bank, called the Federal Reserve, is actually owned by 12 regional reserve banks.
Each of these regional banks are owned by private commercial banks.
Let’s look at the most important of those 12 reserve banks, the New York Fed. A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the biggest shareholders of the NY Fed are… wait for it… Citibank at 42.8% and JPMorgan Chase at 29.5%. Other shareholders include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and even foreign banks like HSBC and Deutsche Bank.
The banks say they don’t control monetary policy, but let’s be honest — the Fed is absolutely packed with former Goldman Sachs employees, and they never do anything that doesn’t enrich the big banks.
Take, for instance, the massive heist they just pulled during the pandemic. They made the Fed print $6 trillion and use it to buy bonds from the private banks. Receiving the cash virtually interest-free, the banks then turned around and lent it to their favorite multinational corporations for slightly higher interest rates so they could further monopolize the economy. Far more insidiously, banks also started out-bidding human buyers for residential homes in order to force millions of families into rent slavery.
And it gets far worse.
The Midas touch of death
Not only did the (real human) John Pierpont Morgan and his cronies covertly seize behind-the-scenes control of the Federal Reserve, but they gave themselves the Midas-like right to create private credit.
Forget the measly $6 trillion they got the Fed to create — printing private credit is where the real money is at.
Let’s say you want to get a mortgage. Right now, there’s a good chance the bank will just turn you down (even though rent is costing you more than your mortgage payment would) because they want to own the house so you can work for them. #ConflictOfInterest. But let’s magically pretend you qualify.
A banker types on a computer and creates credit in your account. Now you have to pay it back with real cash plus interest. That’s it. New money has been created.
If someone deposits $10 in a bank, the bank can loan out $9, then another bank can book that loan as an asset, which allows them to loan out eight more dollars, which allows another bank to book that loan as an asset, loan out $7, $6, $5, etc. It’s called the Money-Multiplier Effect, and it’s the reason debt levels will never stop rising until we get a new system.
(Obviously, this is a slightly simplified version of what happens — banks are subject to a purposefully complex matrix of capital requirements, leverage ratios, and liquidity requirements that they created. But considering global debt levels keep metastasizing, it’s extremely obvious that putting former Wall Street foxes in charge of the hen house isn’t working. Welcome to the insane fractional-reserve banking system.)
The end result? Almost all new money is created as debt.
That’s why it’s called fiat currency. In the Latin Bible, God’s first words were “Fiat lux” — Let there be light. Banks now say, “Let there be money.”
Yes, it still gets far worse.
It’s only a matter of time before it hits you, too
“The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave.”
— Proverbs 22:7
Do you see the con here? You and I legally have to pay back fake private credit loans with real public cash plus interest.
But on this island, there’s never enough money to cover all the loans + interest.
They’ve pitted us against each other in a dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest competition for a limited supply of money.
That’s why America’s 614 billionaires added $5.5 trillion to their net worth while 659,881 families when bankrupt last year.
That’s why the gap between the rich and poor keeps growing wider and wider.
It’s just math.
Right now, banksters are profiting from nearly $300 trillion in global debt.
$300,000,000,000,000.00
If you include derivatives — casino-style bets made by banks using colossal amounts of leverage — it’s well over $1 quadrillion dollars.
And friends, there is literally no end in sight.
As the global economic system balloons larger and larger with debt, prices rise higher and higher, and each of your hard-earn dollars tanks in value because of inflation. So you have to keep chasing, chasing, chasing. At some point, the whole thing becomes impossible to pay back, and a crash wipes out millions of families
But banks don’t care. They get a taxpayer bailout from their Federal Reserve, shunt the losses off the books, pay out their bonuses, and start inflating the credit bubble all over again.
I honestly don’t know why we haven’t seen a full-scale revolution already.
It’s time to ban interest (again)
All the major world religions were right:
Charging interest is a straight-up sin.
In Judaism, Moses gives his people this command in Deuteronomy 23:19 —
“You shall not charge interest on loans to a fellow Israelite, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest.”
(Fun fact: The Hebrew word for interest literally means “bite.”)
In Christianity, Jesus not only upholds the Old Testament injunction against charging interest to fellow Israelites, and just as he does with adultery and divorce, he actually raises the expectation, telling his disciples in Luke 6:34–35 to loan without interest to Jews and Gentiles alike:
“If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.”
(If you meet a Christian who tries to convince you that God blesses interest-taking, you can rest assured they are either willfully ignorant of their faith’s historical stance on interest-taking or they are simply not a true Christian.)
In Islam, the Quran is vehemently against interest in Surah 2 Al-Baqarah, Ayat 275–278:
“As for those who devour interest, they behave as the one whom Satan has confounded with his touch. Allah has made interest unlawful… those who revert to it, they are the people of the Fire, and in it shall they abide. Allah deprives interest of all blessing, but blesses charity with growth.”
Isn’t it telling that three major world religions, covering nearly half the planet, originally agreed on banning interest?
It makes logical sense to anyone with a working brain:
Interest enriches the rich.
Interest impoverishes the poor.
Interest progressively increases debt forever.
Interest forces humanity to work harder but keep less.
Interest forces competition instead of cooperation.
Interest rewards extraction and punishes contribution.
Oh, and then there’s this little gem from G.E.M de Ste. Croix:
“A propertied class is freed from the labor of production through its ability to maintain itself out of a surplus extracted from the primary producers.”
In other words, interest is the ultimate inefficiency.
Calls to action
There is much we can do on this crucially important front:
Stop charging interest.
Interest is a vile and evil form of theft. If you own bonds, sell them. If you own stock in banks via your retirement funds, divest. If you are a person of virtue and character, do the right thing and free yourself of passive profits derived from the moral crime of interest.Defund the banksters.
Switch your bank accounts, credit cards, lines of credit, car payments, mortgage payments, and all other interest-bearing accounts to local banks, co-operatives, credit unions, or not-for-profits. We must stop enriching banksters. (There’s also a huge opportunity here for entrepreneurs to build boring banks that don’t create credit and don’t charge interest, while simultaneously protecting depositors and enriching communities.)Ditch bank debt.
By taking a loan or mortgage from a credit+interest-creating bank, we perpetuate the debt cycle. So either pay it off, switch to a not-for-profit credit union/co-op, consider a private loan or crowdsource, or move to DeFi. (Better to enrich your friends and community than anti-democratic global elites.) But far more ideally, ask friends or family for an interest-free loan and pay it off quickly. My wife and I have loaned multiple five figures interest-free to a huge amount of people, including total strangers. The world is better for it.Confront.
If you know anyone who works in banking, strongly encourage them to radically reform from within, whistleblow, or quit and use their skills to build up society instead of enslaving it in debt.Stop voting for corporate-captured political parties.
No more voting for Democrats and Republicans. The reality is that bioeconomic sustainability isn’t negotiable. We need to fix this immediately, or the poor and the planet will do it for us. So fund new parties, support moral candidates, and real leaders of character.Demand banking and currency reform.
We need a new money system where banks no longer have the right to create credit or charge interest. We need municipal, state, federal, and international currencies that are asset-backed, inflation-proof, cooperative instead of competitive, long-term instead of short-term. Above all, we need to ban interest. There is no reason why federal, state, and municipal governments couldn’t create interest-free money and have it be loaned interest-free to everyday people via local not-for-profit banks. There are plenty of other ways to grow a productive economy and we need to get far more creative. But no matter what, we need to ban interest.
Otherwise, we’re mathematically doomed.
A closing thought
A world without interest is possible. Without interest, we wouldn’t need money-printing, and inflation would evaporate. Without interest, banksters could no longer subvert democracy, play casino with the markets, crash our economy, debt-trap homeowners for 30+ years, and rent-slave tenants for life. Without interest, rich people would actually have to work for a living, and the contributor class would get to keep far more of their hard-earned wealth.
But it’s not going to happen unless we wake up the sleeping masses.
For all its crimes, it’s ironic that JP Morgan Chase is named so honestly.
Because of interest, we’re all just chasing bankster dollars now.
Like rats on a wheel…
spinning, spinning, spinning…
increasing the wealth of billionaire elites…
until the day we fall off and die.