Honest Money: A Challenge to Banking

After a series of boom years the Western economies, including Japan, have begun to show signs of serious weakness. "Recession" now appears on everyone's lips. There is a growing awareness that something has gone significantly wrong in the world economy and, in contrast to former periods of economic downturn, there is little belief in an ability to recover quickly. Many have become aware of one special phenomenon in this recessionary crisis which raises questions about our former naive trust in the monetary system: while production and service companies are declining and failing, and while more and more people are faced with long-term unemployment, there is one branch of the economy which seems to recover through special privilege and which appears now to get wealthier and more powerful year on year - banking. How can banks boom and grow while almost all others are ailing? Could the reasons lie in the very structure of the monetary system? Is it possibly inherent in banking itself? Most thinkers in the monetary and economic field, including "classical" economists, seem merely to have accepted the money-lending role of banks as a "given". "Honest Money" is the necessary critical examination of this money-lending mechanism. The book's contribution to the debate about the world-wide economic recession is substantial and deserving of serious consideration by any who are genuinely interested in resolving our monetary and banking difficulties.