Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Oh Canada! Imposing Economic Austerity on the World’s Most Resource-rich Country

Economics / Canada Apr 02, 2012 - 01:19 PM GMT

By: Ellen_Brown

Economics

Best Financial Markets Analysis ArticleEven the world’s most resource-rich country has now been caught in the debt trap.  Its once-proud government programs are being subjected to radical budget cuts—cuts that could have been avoided if the government had not quit borrowing from its own central bank in the 1970s. 


On March 29 in Ottawa, the Canadian House of Commons passed the federal government’s latest round of budget cuts and austerity measures.  Highlights included chopping 19,200 public sector jobs, cutting federal programs by $5.2 billion per year, and raising the retirement age for millions of Canadians from 65 to 67.  The justification for the cuts was a massive federal debt that is now over C$ 581 billion, or 84% of GDP.   

An online budget game furnished by the local newspaper the Globe and Mail gave readers a chance to try to balance the budget themselves.  Possibilities included slashing transfer payments for elderly benefits, retirement programs, health benefits, and education; cutting funding for transportation, national defense, economic development and foreign aid; and raising taxes.  An article on the same page said, “The government, in reality, doesn’t have that many tools at its disposal to close a large budgetary deficit. It can either raise taxes or cut departmental program spending.”

It seems that no gamer, lawmaker or otherwise, was offered the opportunity to toy with the number one line item in the budget: interest to creditors.  A chart on the website of the Department of Finance Canada titled “Where Your Tax Dollar Goes” showed interest payments to be 15% of the budget—more than health care, social security, and other transfer payments combined.  The page was dated 2006 and was last updated in 2008, but the percentages are presumably little different today.

Penny wise, Pound Foolish

Among other cuts in the 2012 budget, the government announced that it would be discontinuing the minting of Canadian pennies, which now cost more than a penny to make.  The government is focusing on the pennies and ignoring the pounds—the massive share of the debt that might be saved by borrowing from the government’s own Bank of Canada. 

Between 1939 and 1974, the government actually did borrow from its own central bank.  That made its debt effectively interest-free, since the government owned the bank and got the benefit of the interest.  According to figures supplied by Jack Biddell, a former government accountant, the federal debt remained very low, relatively flat, and quite sustainable during those years.  (See his chart below.)  The government successfully funded major public projects simply on the credit of the nation, including the production of aircraft during and after World War II, education benefits for returning soldiers, family allowances, old age pensions, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway project, and universal health care for all Canadians.    

The debt shot up only after 1974.  That was when the Basel Committee was established by the central-bank Governors of the Group of Ten countries of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which included Canada.   A key objective of the Committee was to maintain “monetary and financial stability.”  To achieve that goal, the Committee discouraged borrowing from a nation’s own central bank interest-free, and encouraged borrowing instead from private creditors, all in the name of “maintaining the stability of the currency.” 

The presumption was that borrowing from a central bank with the power to create money on its books would inflate the money supply and prices.  Borrowing from private creditors, on the other hand, was considered not to be inflationary, since it involved the recycling of pre-existing money.  What the bankers did not reveal, although they had long known it themselves, was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do.  The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be re-invested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy.      

The debt curve that began its exponential rise in 1974 tilted toward the vertical in 1981, when interest rates were raised by the U.S. Federal Reserve to 20%.  At 20% compounded annually, debt doubles in under four years.  Canadian rates went as high as 22% during that period.  Canada has now paid over a trillion Canadian dollars in interest on its federal debt—nearly twice the debt itself.  If it had been borrowing from its own bank all along, it could be not only debt-free but sporting a hefty budget surplus today.  That is true for other countries as well.

The Bankers’ Silent Coup

Why are governments paying private financiers to generate credit they could be issuing themselves, interest-free?   According to Professor Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University, it was all part of a concerted plan by a clique of international financiers.  He wrote in Tragedy and Hope in 1964:

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations.

Each central bank . . . sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.

In December 2011, this charge was echoed in a lawsuit filed in Canadian federal court by two Canadians and a Canadian economic think tank.  Constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati filed an action on behalf of William Krehm, Ann Emmett, and COMER (the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform) to restore the use of the Bank of Canada to its original purpose, including making interest free loans to municipal, provincial and federal governments for “human capital” expenditures (education, health, and other social services) and for infrastructure.  The plaintiffs state that since 1974, the Bank of Canada and Canada’s monetary and financial policy have been dictated by private foreign banks and financial interests led by the BIS, the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), bypassing the sovereign rule of Canada through its Parliament.

Today this silent coup has been so well obscured that governments and gamers alike are convinced that the only alternatives for addressing the debt crisis are to raise taxes, slash services, or sell off public assets.  We have forgotten that there is another option: cut the debt by borrowing from the government’s own bank, which returns its profits to public coffers.  Cutting out interest has been shown to reduce the average cost of public projects by about 40%. 

Game over: we win.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.  In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back.  Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com and http://EllenBrown.com.

Ellen Brown is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Ellen Brown

© Copyright Ellen Brown , Global Research, 2012

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.


© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Comments

Andre
02 Apr 12, 23:03
Canada and the bankers

Very true article. This is how we ended up in the current absurd situation, where Central Banks around the world are lending money to private banks at 0%, and then those banks lend back the same funds to their governments at whatever the "market" rate for gov bonds is. Not to mention that they are also the market-makers for those government bonds.

The banking sector in general has become a leech on the global economy. Through the interest on public debt, all citizens are now practically paying a bank tax, which goes directly into the bankers pockets. And the best part is, most people are not even aware of this.


hyperbole
03 Apr 12, 05:38
evolution of government

The construct of government evolved significantly with the separation of church and state by enabling one to criticize the government without being accused of heresy.

The next evolution requires the separation of bank and state to enable criticism of the government without being labelled an libertarian/right wing anarchist, socialist/left wing communist, or economic activist/terrorist.


ernie messerschmidt
03 Apr 12, 08:08
leeches and worse

I agree with Andre and Ellen Brown. 0% money for the wealthy people who own the banks while everyone else pays much more for their mortgages, business loans, student loans, etc., is blatant unfair discrimination in favor of the rich people who own the banks. It's worse than discrimination in favor of rich worthless welfare bums tho: they are guilty of economic crimes on a huge scale -- they've destroyed and ripped off our economies, and enslaved us with debt. We need to unyoke ourselves from their rule and Ellen Brown shows us the way.


ASHOKSINGHANIA
05 Apr 12, 08:14
Gold Standard

GOOD COMMENT LA ROUCHE HAS COMMENTED ON THE SAME AS INTERALPA GROUP OF BANKERS WHERE ASMICHEAL HUDSON HAS BUT THE SAME AS FINALLIZATION OF ECONOMY. BUT ILIKE ANTAL FEKETEWHO HAS BUT SOME WHAT CORRECT WHY CENTRAL BANK WAS ELABLISH. AND REAL REASON WHY GOLD STANDARD FAIL AND HAW GOLD IS ULTIMATE EXTINGUISHER OF DEBT.BUT THERE NEED TO BE UNDERSTANDING THAT FOR SOCIETY TO FLOURISH HEALTHCARE SYSTEM ALSO NEED TO BE RIGHT . PPLESE LEARN AYURVEDA HAVE FAITH.


jeremy
07 Apr 12, 02:39
Immigration

Another example of blatant unfair discrimination that can be found in the new budget concerns our immigration policies. I understand that our economy needs a boost but why do they discriminate against people who applied for immigration several years ago? What I’m talking about is the government’s controversial move designed to enable immigrants whose skills are in greater current demand to enter the country faster. I don’t subscribe to this theory since it will definitely lower the chances of acceptance for those people who have been in the backlog for a longer period of time and their qualification may not be sufficient after several years of waiting. If we want the successful immigration system to remain among the measures in this particular area shouldn’t discriminate against any of the groups of people coming to live in the country.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in