The following speech was delivered to the Thirty-Fifth Meeting of the New Right in Central London on October 15, 2011. It is published here verbatim with some added comment.

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THE MONEY QUESTION – The Real Issues

Preamble

My speech was introduced by Adrian Davies with the same sort of flattering remarks he used in the introduction to my last speech here, which probably means there are three rather than two people who like the sound of my voice, as per the first paragraph below.

This text is as the speech was written complete with last minute amendments, but was delivered with a bit of ad libbing and audience feedback. I mentioned for example the Digital Journal article I had published that very morning, this with especial reference to hedge funds, and the parasites who control them.

Unlike Adrian, I can’t speak impromptu for three quarters of an hour, and normally I would have a desk or some prop on which to rest my papers, but due to the last minute change of venue the speakers ended up standing in front of the audience in a fairly confined space. Because of that I lost my place a few times, and ended up omitting the text in green. I have no doubt that if I had included it, I would have received an approving cheer or two.

I tried to cover every single important aspect of the financial system in this address, and on the whole, it was well received. Afterwards, I spoke to three or four people about matters relating to it, including one guy who was very interested in Social Credit, and indeed a fellow traveller. There were though two or three people who didn’t grasp where I was coming from with regard to “protecting” British jobs. The response of one gent in particular astounded me, or would have if I hadn’t seen this sort of thing before. I asked him point blank if China (or some other country) were to give us say apples would that be bad for the economy? He seemed to think it would, although in fairness he did add that China isn’t going to keep giving us cheap goods, and pointed out (erroneously) that cheap Chinese goods are bad for British jobs.

In fact, this is not the case, and I would refer the reader in the first instance to my review of The Japanese Conspiracy and to pages 70-71 of Freedom Under Socialism?

Text

Good afternoon everyone, consulting my bibliography I see that I have spoken at these meetings no less than five times on previous occasions between May 28, 2005 and December 18 last year, so that means there are two people who like the sound of my voice, the other being the true spiritual leader of the New Right in Britain, who is most definitely not Nick Griffin, just in case any of you missed last Monday’s Panorama programme.

We live in a troubled world and in troubled times; we have lots of real problems, like over-population, global despoliation, poverty...and a fair number of contrived problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and other things which are not problems at all, such as unemployment, inequality, and most of all the ongoing so-called banking crisis.

Of all the real problems Mankind faces, the money system is by far the most serious, and the reason for this that is every other problem we face is subservient to it. In short, nothing any of us, including governments, does, is physically possible unless it is first and foremost financially possible. Now there is a big caveat to that, to which I will return in due course.

As I am addressing an enlightened audience, I needn’t go into a great deal of depth or explanation as to how the financial system actually works. I’m sure everyone in this room realises that banks do not lend the money of their depositors, that when a bank issues a loan it actually issues new money, new credit, and when this credit is deposited in another account, it can be used to issue further new credit and so on, and that when the borrower repays the original loan, this new money is cancelled out of existence, and what remains is new debt, the interest on the loan.

The figures usually given for this act of legerdemain are 90% and 97%; that is the banks are said to be able to create new money or rather new debt up to this limit, that is, for every $1,000 dollars deposited, they can issue around $9,000 in new loans. And around 3% of money in circulation is said to be actual currency, ie the note and coin issues.

Most people in this room are also probably aware of the fact that all manner of substances have been used as actual money throughout history, including perhaps most notably tobacco, in the American Colonies during the 17th and 18th Centuries, but most people are probably not aware of the fact that the value of money is purely psychological. That statement requires some qualification; while hard money – gold, silver, and of course tobacco – do have intrinsic value, money works only as long as people believe in it. The proof of this pudding is in the eating; awhile ago, the BBC screened a programme in which it was revealed that a small but by no means insignificant percentage of £1 coins in circulation in this country are fakes, but that the Royal Mint doesn’t bother to withdraw them.

You can walk into your local supermarket, local Iranian store in my case, and pay for your bread, milk or whatever with fake currency, as long as the man behind the counter accepts it. On the other hand, if you present him with a genuine £50 note, and he doesn’t like the look of it, you can’t buy anything.

The analogy I always use is that of a parachute. If you jump or are pushed out of a plane wearing a correctly packed parachute, provided you pull the ripcord, you will float to the ground regardless of your lack of confidence in the mechanism. On the other hand, if you are wearing a dummy parachute, no amount of belief will assure you of a safe landing.

Another fact that is not generally known about money is that its existence is predated by credit, or rather debt actually predates the existence of money, which means that along with slavery and prostitution, usury is indeed the oldest and most dishonourable institution in the world.

Like the rest of us, the government has bills to pay, and there are three ways the government, any government, can raise the money it needs to function. By function I mean to operate infrastructure, emergency services including fire, the courts and the criminal justice system, national defence, libraries, and so on. All these can to a greater or lesser extent be provided by private corporations, but at the end of the day, the government needs to pay for its services, and to do this, it needs money. The government can manufacture the money, ie it can print it – notes, mint it – coins, or create it as credit. It can tax it – ie steal from the public, individuals and companies, etc, alike – or it can borrow it.

While it is desirable that we the people always have access to hard currency, so printing and minting should continue, it should also be abundantly clear that of the aforementioned methods of financing a government, creating credit is by far the most effective, the most efficient, and the cheapest. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Tax and spend – the method advocated by most Libertarians in the absence of a fully privatised financial system – has two big disadvantages. One is that it reduces the purchasing power of the public, including of corporations; the other is that taxation leads to the employment of tax officers, who often have Draconian powers, legislation, lawyers, and all manner of undesirable adjuncts.

Then there is borrowing, when governments borrow money, they have to repay it at some point, and with interest.

Clearly, creating credit is by far the cheapest route for any government to go down. There is though one big caveat, if the government simply creates credit, or prints money, there comes a point when it loses all its value. Obviously, if Call Me Dave were to order the creation of a million pounds in credit and pay it into my account, that would make me a very happy man. If he were to do the same for everyone in this room, we would all be very happy, but if he were to order the creation of a similar amount and pay it into the accounts of everyone in Paddington, in London, or in Britain, we would soon see some spectacular hyper-inflation.

It is clear though that there is a continual shortage of purchasing power in the so-called advanced nations. Britain is not liberated Zimbabwe where the shops are empty because the lunatic Marxist Mugabe has confiscated all the large white-owned farms, split them up and handed them over to his supporters, who have neither the technical nous nor the economies of scale to manage them. Britain’s shops are full of goods, but the people who would dearly love to purchase them don’t have the money. The reason for that continual shortage is that the financial system is in reality nothing but a giant Ponzi scheme; most of the money in circulation exists as irredeemable debt.

Now I would like to take a short diversion. In my researches over the years I have noted several fascinating facts relating to the prices of goods and services. While it is true that we live in an age of rampant inflation, and that the value of money has fallen dramatically, certainly over the past hundred years or so, not everything has increased in price, technology certainly hasn’t.

One my favourite such snippets relates to a famous trans-Atlantic telephone call. You can read the background to this on the SongFacts website under Shepherd Of The Hills, but to cut a long story short, on February 10, 1927, a phone call was made between the London office of the music publisher Lawrence Wright and the Broadway, New York office of lyricist Edgar Leslie. This call lasted around half an hour, and cost around £150, a truly staggering sum in those days.

And a much more contemporary example, and for the young people in this room, I can assure you, this is not a joke; an advertisement from the September 1991 issue of Computer Shopper magazine: “PRICE BREAKTHROUGH”, a Tandon portable with 12 months on-site maintenance, 40Mb hard drive for one thousand one hundred and ninety-nine pounds.

A 40Mb hard drive, and no Internet!

Today, you can buy a 16Gb memory stick to carry around in your pocket, and if you pay £30 for one, you’ve been ripped off.

At the moment, there are I think two prototype hydrogen cars in Europe, not the first such vehicles by any means, but these particular cars cost around £9 million each. I am reliably informed that in four years or less, there will be ordinary motorists in Germany using these vehicles.

When it is first introduced, new technology is extremely expensive, then typically the price plummets. It is technology, the appliance of science, more than anything else that is responsible for the high standard of living most of us enjoy today, high relative to that enjoyed by even the richest and most powerful rulers of the ancient world, because although the Romans enjoyed central heating, clothes woven from fine fabrics, and figs imported from the Middle East, they couldn’t fly to Australia in a day, or watch reruns of their favourite gladiators on DVD. And if you lived in Ancient Rome and needed dialysis or a kidney transplant, forget it.

In view of the exponential leaps that have allowed us to support a population of 7 billion people, the big question has to be if technology is so cheap, why is money so expensive? The simple answer is what Major Douglas called the monopoly of credit, which is what the worldwide banking cartel has, and it issues this credit as a debt to each and every one of us, including our governments.

I said earlier that nothing the government does is physically possible unless it is financially possible, but there is one massive and striking exception to that rule: war. At the outbreak of the First World War, Britain was technically bankrupt, yet somehow it found the money not only to fight this war, but win it. After that war there was the Roaring Twenties, and then the Great Depression, when literally millions of people were living in abject poverty because of the shortage of money, then there was another war, and, surprise, surprise, there was absolutely no shortage of credit. Indeed, we saw during the Second World War what we have seen in wars ever since: capital goods are somehow materialised out of thin air, men are transported thousands of miles to bomb, maim and murder strangers, and to be maimed and murdered in turn, and this goes on until either there is a negotiated settlement, or one side is pummelled to defeat. One thing never happens though, the losing side never but never runs out of money.

The reason for this is because as Professor Quigley pointed out, wars are not run on money, but by the proper marshalling of real resources, in other words of real wealth. During times of war, the government operates a cheap money policy, of necessity. In war time there is a shortage of consumer goods – the black market excepted – and high inflation; there is also full employment, which is not a good thing in itself, but it does mean that jobs can be found for all willing hands. If we can have a war economy for war, there is no reason we can’t have a war economy for peace: cheap money, work for all willing hands, and instead of high inflation because all the war effort is going into the manufacture of capital goods which are then destroyed, we can have shops full of consumer goods, and the money in our pockets to pay for them.

Our task, first and foremost, must be to break the monopoly of credit, and restore it to its proper issuing authority, that of the democratically elected governments of sovereign nations. We must then ensure that this credit is issued in sufficient quantity to oil the wheels of industry, and to provide for all our citizens, and the developments in technology that will enable us to meet the challenges of the future, one of which will be to power vehicles and entire cities in a world without oil.

Leaving aside the monopoly of credit, there are a number of delusions to which all our leaders have fallen prey. One is that so-called unemployment is a bad thing, and that people should not be paid unless they work for their living, or at best that they should be paid a means-tested benefit. This sounds good, until one does a little research on the subject. For one thing, many people who are supposedly gainfully employed are in fact no such thing, none more so than in the financial sector, especially the people who are entrusted with the management of pension funds, unit trusts, shares portfolios and so on.

Two years ago, a competition was organised in South Korea in which eleven competitors vied to make the most money out of playing the stockmarket in a specified time. Ten of these investors were human, and one was not. The result was that picking out shares with its beak, the parrot came third. This was no anomaly, and when you consider what these so-called fund managers do all day, it is hardly surprising. Firstly, because of the sheer volume of shares traded by so-called institutional investors, they make the market, by definition, so really it is impossible for them or for all of them, to beat the market.

If on top of that you allow for their management fees, their bonuses, the fact that these funds advertise, have expensive offices in the City of London and other financial centres, and that they employ small armies of economists who are every bit as useless as the people who manage them, it is hardly surprising that a parrot should be able to outperform most of them. The secret of the parrot’s success was to trade rather infrequently. Anyone who buys a portfolio of 10 or 20 blue chip shares and simply holds onto his shares without trading them will perform better than any so-called managed fund.

Last October, the BBC broadcast a big exposé of the great pension fund rip off; to give just one example from that programme, a lady who took early retirement gave £11,000 to her bank to invest on her behalf; they turned it into 5,000 for her. And an example from elsewhere, in 2002, Hermes Real Estate Investment Managers were paid £4.7 million as the British Telecom Pension Scheme ran £6.3 billion into the red. The Chief Executive alone collected £748,247 including a £327,965 bonus. In other words, gamble with other people’s retirement funds, lose, and get paid a hefty bonus. Nice work if you can get it.

The British Government and indeed every government in the world would do us all a service by breaking up all these funds and allowing people to invest directly themselves, either by controlling their own portfolios or by paying into a central fund under government control where the money would not be actively managed but simply held in trust and paid out when due. The British Government has in fact recently set up a scheme called NEST, the aim of which is to provide a better deal for people’s pension funds, but until it gets rid of all these parasites and allows people to manage their own pensions, there will be no meaningful change.

There are many other so-called professions like this where highly paid imbeciles contribute absolutely nothing to the economy. A lot of these professions are now obsolete; to give another example, stockbrokers are now totally superfluous; people can trade their own funds on-line. There is absolutely no reason the entire stockmarket could not be replaced with something like the Betfair gaming website, the only real issue here is security, but there are ways of trading funds and processing money on-line that are totally secure, or that can be made totally secure by for example trading via a webcam or secure telephone connection.

We have in this country vast armies of social workers, or perhaps that should be social-ist workers, counsellors, therapists and the like; these people contribute nothing to the real economy. Even many of the medical trials that are conducted in Britain and throughout the world produce nothing that is of use to man nor beast. You have one study that shows wine is bad for you, and another that drinking a couple of glasses a week guards against something or other.

Then, there is the military, not a big problem for us now, considering the Sun set on the British Empire before we were born, but the Americans have troops all over the world, and because of this, they, and us, are hated by large tranches of the world’s subject races, especially the Moslems, who see the democratisation of their countries as meddling by the Imperialist powers. It would be far better for the Americans and us if they were to send most of their troops home and let the natives get on with it, and if they kill each other, at least we can’t be blamed.

Which brings me to the subject of so-called unemployment. While we have highly qualified, overpaid imbeciles in the City of London pick up massive bonuses for gambling with and often losing other people’s money, we also have the great unwashed in the inner cities who are standing around on street corners looking for a pretext to riot and burn. This applies not simply to blacks and wiggers but to increasingly large numbers of youth of all races, and indeed in some cases, even to graduates. In the first place, the jobs aren’t there, and in the second place, most of these people are unemployable in a modern, technologically advanced society. When I say unemployable, I don’t mean they can’t work at all, rather I mean that for various reasons they are incapable of earning a living wage, one being that no employer in his right mind would hire them for anything but the most menial and low paid work.

Instead of facing these facts, governments have instituted ludicrous policies like minimum wage, and have introduced all manner of arguably even more ludicrous anti-discrimination legislation which has led to unemployable minorities suing prospective employers for failing to engage them or even to interview them for positions for which they are clearly unqualified or unsuitable.

Big companies don’t mind these lunatic policies so much because although they impose a cost on them, they impose relatively larger costs on their small competitors. If for example, some semi-literate so-called asylum seeker takes Hovis to a tribunal for refusing to give her a job, well, the company would just send along someone from its legal department to fight the claim, or simply buy her off. But two or three claims of that nature could bankrupt your local bakery.

On the same subject there is direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, victimisation and harassment, and now this type of legislation has been expanded to include sexual discrimination, disability discrimination and age discrimination. This sort of lunacy has been a godsend to the loony left, it also makes a lot of work for government lawyers, and for people who consciously play the system, but of course it does nothing at all for the intellectually challenged, indigent young black males on the streets of Tottenham who at times complain with some justification of being repeatedly stopped and searched by their local plod.

The reality is that in 21st Century Britain, any young person especially who does not have either a laser printed CV or some vital, marketable skill, is to all intents and purposes unemployable, and that is before we mention such things as criminal records, ASBOs, substance abuse, disability and mental health issues. Three hundred years ago, a lot of these people either would not have survived or would have been confined to the workhouse for their short, miserable lives.

In order to lift these lumpen proletariat underclass out of the gutter, we must scrap all these lunatic anti-discrimination laws and the means-tested social security system, then institute some sort of Social Credit or Basic Income, but there is probably only a handful of politicians in Britain who can even grasp this concept.

That is about all I have to say on this subject, though if any of you have visited my FinancialReform website, which has been on-line now for nearly ten years, you’ll realise that this is nothing new for me.

I will add though that with the likely demise of the BNP, which was going nowhere anyway, we must disseminate such ideas through this forum, and to all like-minded people in Britain and abroad. I know that many of you understand the nature of the beast, and in fact after my 4th appearance here when I gave a short address called Britons Are Now Slaves, I had some correspondence with people from as far afield as New Zealand.

The current austerity measures the unelected global elite is seeking to impose on Greece, on Europe, and indeed on the rest of the world are designed not to protect us or anyone else, but to prop up their corrupt, debt-based private banking cartel. Only when we have got them off our backs will we be able make money the servant of man rather than its master, and to work towards building a better future for all of us, including generations yet unborn.

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