The only reason it functions at all is because everyone is convinced they aren’t the anchor man on the Ponzi scheme. Finance started out in Renaissance Italy, where insurance companies guaranteed merchants that, for a reasonable premium, they would replace your ship and its cargo if it never came home. But what happens when pirates, war or storms wipe out the whole fleet? The underwriters just can’t make up the losses. And you know the insurers were loaning their own money back to the merchants to build more ships and buy more cargo.

So what happens when the insurance companies/bankers don’t have enough cash on hand to replace even a few losses because they’ve loaned it all out? What you get is Lehman Brothers.

Another line going through my head was written by Japanese Admiral Yamamoto in his diary, after the attack on Pearl Harbor: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

Hear us roar.

When you borrow money from a bank (or take out a mortgage), you sign a paper that says you promise to pay it back, plus interest. There is no reason the bank can’t loan out more than it has on hand. In moderation, this is a good thing, because we can finance today’s investments using the profits they will yield tomorrow. But soon it simply becomes just a machine for printing money, totally divorced from, and independent of, any productive use.

But wait, there’s more! The bank then uses that paper as collateral to borrow money from other banks, which they then loan out, and so on and so on. Since most transactions are done by check, or electronically, no actual currency is involved, its all “virtual money”. The system only works because when you write a check, the bank honors it. But when people lose confidence in the system, the whole inverted pyramid collapses. This is what happened in 2008—and in 1929.

THEN, the government prints money to “restore liquidity”. Actually, no currency is actually printed, they just fuck with the regulations and interest rates and such: They just pass a law and sign a paper that says the bank suddenly has more cash. Conservatives are always whining about the government’s deficit spending, but THEY do it all the time. In fact, that’s how capitalists get rich. Nobody ever gets wealthy by making something and selling it. Being a middleman is where the action is. Its always been this way, which is why the history of capitalism is an unending boom/bust cycle of panics, bubbles, depressions, recessions, inflation and other financial aberrations.

Remember, there is no such thing as “money” whether it be precious metals, currency representing precious metals, checks representing currency, contracts representing checks, or numbers in some database, whether it be cryptocurrency, ledger entries on papyrus or bits in computer memory.

Its all bullshit. The source of all wealth is the raw materials of the earth and human labor. Everything else is just bookkeeping, scorecards, IOUs. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Finance is supposed to be about a mathematical system to keep track of resources, but what it quickly becomes is an abstraction that can be manipulated by those who understand its workings, and who can suborn the authorities that allegedly administer it.