That is just as much printing money as what the government does, and it invariably leads to economic catastrophes. Oh sure, you can argue that printing money so people can invest in real future productive capacity is a good thing, but when you start using IOUs as collateral for more borrowing, so you can lend it to other banks, so THEY can use it as collateral, and so on, the system is obviously out of control.

I'm starting to wonder if the whole concept of "money" is a fraud. Everybody is in debt, countries, companies, consumers, banks, everybody. And everybody is cashing in on the party. People have mortgages, car payments and credit card debt. I've never heard of any government anywhere ever being in the black. (We have had an occasional budget surplus, but we've always had a national debt.) No company, even highly profitable ones, uses its cash reserves to finance expansion, they always borrow money. And the financial experts tell us we should not pay off our mortgages, but take advantage of the low interest rate and invest our spare cash instead. "You can always re-finance." Sure, they collect their vigorish off the top, and promptly lend that out to someone else. Of course that's what they are going to counsel you to do. And like the greedy chumps we are, we fall for it.

Gold, currency, checks, bank ledger entries, digital data transfers in remote computers...none of this is real. Its all symbolic. I'm not saying we should deliberately go into debt. But haven't you noticed that everybody who is "rich" owes more money than they've got. I've never declared bankruptcy, I'm totally out of debt, and I've got money in the bank: Donald Trump can't say that, but I'm better looking than he is and his wife is better looking than mine.

And who is all this inflated debt OWED to, anyway? What can they possibly do with all that phony money, besides loan it to someone else? By definition, it exceeds the total value of everything in the world; its all been "printed", it's not "real". So what do we do, go onto the gold standard? Gold is a metal with only limited industrial uses. It's intrinsically worth a great deal less than copper. It is no different from a banknote, its just harder to carry around in your pocket.

The only things of real value are earth resources which can be potentially converted to real goods and services that can satisfy real human needs and desires, and the human labor that makes that conversion possible. Matter and energy. Everything else is just bookkeeping. Little marks on paper that don't mean shit.