What do counterfeiting and the way money enters the world have in common?

Banks create new money when they make loans. Before the loan, this money did not exist. 97% of the money in today’s economy exists as bank deposits, while only 3% is physical cash. The money that banks create is not the paper money that bears the logo of the European Central Bank. It is the electronic deposit money that lights up on the screen when you check your balance at an ATM. Currently, this money accounts for over 97% of all money in the economy. Only 3% of the money is still in this old-fashioned form of cash that you can touch.

This is confirmed by the Central Bank of: Great Britain, Germany and many other European central banks!

Do you think it is right for the commercial banks to do this? Because there is no law that authorises them to do so!

What is one of the negative side effects for the environment of this illicit activity? The failure of a bank is not due to new circumstances, but, like every banking crisis, has the same cause over and over again! Banks lend much more than they have deposits. These loans, in turn, go most often for non-productive and also very profitable purposes, such as oil pipelines, chemical factories for pesticides, technologies for genetically modified plants or simply speculation with food. As soon as one of the deals goes wrong, it becomes public sooner or later. Customers start withdrawing their (real) money. Liquidity deteriorates. The crash accelerates as more and more people find out about it. The bank run is inevitable….

Even worse, the banks pay themselves bonuses from the newly created money, buy real estate and other expensive objects (e.g. yachts). And what else is bad about it? The banks have no costs at all in “printing money” because everything is electronic. There is an enormous overreaching in favour of the banks, and within the banks in favour of the top management or the shareholders. A concentration of capital in the hands of a few people promotes social inequality in an extreme way.

What can you call this practice of making money? Is it counterfeiting? The law is currently limited to physical money, probably knowing that other forms of money exist that are explicitly excluded here. But in the broader sense, this is very much counterfeiting! When creating book money, the banks use the term “euro”. Here there is an acute danger of confusion between the banks’ book money on the one hand and the ECB’s euro on the other. In an extended sense, this is very much a counterfeit and product piracy!