Bankers

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England wants to split banks into "casino" investment arms and retail businesses. He is surprised the British public isn't angrier about the way the banks are "squashing ordinary British Citizens".

We keep hearing how we must retain our "banking talent", etc, and this justifies printing more money to give to the banks to pay off their - and this is all they are - gambling debts. One commentator in the Daily Telegraph opined that if the banks left our shores, we'd have to "fill the yawning gap in employment and wealth they'll leave behind".

This is an absurd rationalisation. Banks don't create anything except money, which is worthless in itself - it is only useful for buying (useful) things and it is a rule of the monetary system that everything (so far as is possible) must be only obtainable with money. Having made this rule, we then build a complex financial system on top of it and argue that it must exist because it does exist - the argument reduces to this.

It doesn't make any difference how much money we've got in total. It only matters what actual life giving / conserving resources we have in total, and we can't make any more of them, only conserve them and use them as efficiently as possible when we do. The amount of money is constantly increasing (never mind the deficit, feel the debt) and because it is only lent at interest, those who have money to spare get proportionately more of it because they are paid interest, whilst those who don't get proportionately less of it, because they pay interest.

The financial system creates jobs? Absolutely - it creates its own need to support itself. It is the ultimate example of jobs for jobs sake. It creates precisely nothing other than stuff to do to keep it going and empty tokens that represent nothing.