O P I N I O N / A N T I S E M I T I S M
by Ivo Mosley (London)
To Vita Rose Mosley, born 21 October 2014
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A good deal of today’s nationalist and right-wing antisemitism rests upon the fantasy that “the Jews” control the world through finance and banking. Nor is the same fantasy entirely absent from left-wing antisemitism, which currently tends to concentrate itself on criticism of Israel.
The fact that some Jews are very good at banking is, apparently, enough to justify race-hate in the antisemite’s mind. Of course, a number of Jews are also prominent as scientists, civil rights activists, generals, hairdressers, actors, musicians, historians, etcetera, without anyone blaming science, civil rights, theatre, hairdressing, war, music, history, etcetera on “the Jews.” This highlights one of the traditional functions of antisemitism: if something is obviously bad, “the Jews” can be reached for as a scapegoat.
The object of this article is twofold: first, to analyze what is rotten in the world of capitalism and finance; second, to show that while it has nothing to do with “the Jews” as a people or as a tradition, it has everything to do with a tradition that for centuries excluded “the Jews.”
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Capitalism and Predatory Capitalism
There are two stories about how capitalism is financed. One is commonly believed and accepted, but not true. The other is true, but hidden under veils of obscurity.
The familiar story is that citizens save up bits of money: banks gather up those bits of money and lend them to capitalists, who put them to good use for the benefit of all. This, however, is not what banks do – nor is it necessarily what capitalists do.
The unfamiliar, but true, story is that banks create money out of nothing when they lend to capitalists, who use the new money to purchase assets and/or labor, from which they expect to make a profit.
The first story needs no elaboration: as well as being untrue, it is simple and widely understood. The second needs to be explained, however, because though it is not so very complicated, it is unfamiliar to most people.
Economists generally avoid mentioning the fact that banks create money, but central bankers are happy to state it and even on occasion to try to explain it. The Bank of England website states simply: “Most money in the modern economy is in the form of bank deposits, which are created by commercial banks themselves.” And again: “The majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans.” The same article explains that this fact is not recognized by most economists: “rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits — the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks.” (Quotes from the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014/1.)
The way bankers create money today requires two things: a “magic trick” by which a small quantity of money held by the banker becomes a great deal of money in circulation; and laws which make the “’magic trick” not just legal, but binding on all citizens.
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The “Magic Trick” of Banking
“A banker may accommodate his friends without the payment of money merely by writing a brief entry of credit; and can satisfy his own desires for fine furniture and jewels by merely writing two lines in his books,” wrote Tommaso Contarini, Venetian Banker and Senator in 1584.
The Encyclopedia Britannica of 1950 states firmly and definitively, “A bank does not lend money.” So just what does it do, when we think it is lending money? The answer is: it writes two numbers into a ledger, just as Tommaso Contarini did in 1584. Those numbers represent two equal-and-opposite claims, with a time lapse in between. The borrower gets a claim on cash belonging to the bank, which it can exercise immediately. The bank gets a delayed claim against the borrower, which it may exercise when the loan is due for repayment. In the meantime, the bank charges the borrower interest. When both claims have been exercised, the bank’s creation – the loan – disappears.
The claim which the bank creates for the borrower is called “credit.” “Credit” means “believes,” meaning whoever owns the claim believes they can get cash from the bank when they want it. This is where the “magic trick of banking”’ begins. If people believe they can get cash from a claim, they are happy to receive a claim in payment, so long as they too can use the claim to get cash from the bank. Joseph Schumpeter observes: “There is no other case in which a claim to a thing can, within limits to be sure, serve the same purpose as the thing itself: you cannot ride a claim to a horse, but you can pay with a claim to money.”
The second bit of the magic trick is for the banker to create many claims on the same bit of money – or, to put it another way, to create claims on money that isn’t there. Banks, naturally enough, want to maximize their profits, so they create as many claims as they think they can get away with, bearing in mind the regulators and people’s demand for cash. By creating fictitious claims a bank turns a billion, say, of cash into sixty billion, say, of credit.
The magic trick may seem somewhat technical in nature, but it has enabled bankers, with the active connivance of governments and capitalists, to replace money we can own with money we must rent off governments and banks. The effects of this substitution are immense, incalculable, far-reaching, all-pervasive (more on this later).
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The Legal Underpinnings and Authority for Bank-Money
For a claim to pass from hand to hand as money, completing the “magic trick of banking,” one more thing is needed: the law must recognize it as a valid claim.
Normally, people are not allowed to create claims on property they don’t have. You can’t, for instance, create a claim on Buckingham Palace – unless you happen to own it. Nor can you mortgage your house sixty times over, and spend the money. Banks alone may do this kind of thing. Only banks (and “other depository institutions”) are authorized in law to create claims on property they do not have.
For centuries, banks operated in a legal grey area. Their activities were restricted to merchants, who understood the risks involved, and to what might be called the “higher criminal class” of rulers and potentates. Lending to princes often carried an interest rate of 100% — but still, most bank-crashes occurred when monarchs defaulted on their debts.
The watershed in banking history came during the decades on either side of 1700, when the English House of Commons, newly-all-powerful and consisting of rich men voted in by other rich men, wanted to exploit the fruits of bank-credit for their own devices of war and profit.
The Lord Chief Justice of the time, Sir John Holt, was supporting the traditional legal position that a claim on property was valid only if the claim was on a specific piece of property. Parliament passed an Act of Parliament (the Promissory Notes Act of 1704) to overrule him. Over the next three centuries, other countries followed the English example and “credit-creation” — creating claims on assets that don’t exist — is now authorized for bankers all across the world.
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The Two Traditions: Money-Lending and Banking
Within the European tradition, Jews were long known as money-lenders. The relatively straightforward nature of money-lending, as a freely-negotiated contract between lender and borrower, was complicated by moral and social issues.
Usury (lending money at interest) was deplored in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but Jews were allowed (by their own religious laws and by self-interested Christian monarchs) to lend to non-Jews. A pattern was established: monarchs licensed Jewish money-lenders to lend to their subjects; agents of the monarch helped them collect their debts, then the monarch would rob the money-lenders of much of their profits. Throughout much of Europe, discriminatory laws forbade Jews to earn a living any other way. Although money-lending was a despised and hated occupation, it could make people very rich.
Meanwhile, banking — the creation of credit — was developing in an entirely separate tradition via the activities of merchants, exchange-dealers and civic banks. The tradition was Christian, protective of its own, and often openly antisemitic. When these early bankers “lent” money they were not lending hard cash, they were lending claims written into ledgers.
Failure to distinguish between banking and money-lending, and the superior social status of bankers (who being in close collusion with the State are liable to pick up honors as well as great wealth) have led many writers to claim that Jewish money-lenders were bankers, i.e. creators of credit. This in turn has fed the delusions of antisemitic pseudo-historians. In reaction to this false history, most serious historians of banking have found themselves making statements similar to this from Raymond de Roover: “Unlike the Christian moralists, the rabbis paid little attention to exchange dealings or cambium, because, as Yehiel da Pisa explains, this business was not practiced by Jews. This is further evidence that the latter confined their activities to money-lending on a small scale and that the leading international bankers, such as the Medici or the Fuggers, were all Christians. There is, therefore, nothing to support Sombart’s thesis according to which the Jews were the originators of international finance and the founders of modern capitalism.”
All this, of course, was a long time ago, and nowadays bankers are Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, African, Indian, Jewish, Christian, Islamic or whatever: assorted individuals who have no more consuming interest than to make lots of money.
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What is Wrong With Creating Money as Fictitious Credit?
Bank-credit — money created as credit on assets that don’t exist — has many features that may be viewed as negative. It replaces money owned outright with money rented out, and is therefore (in the words of John Taylor of Virginia, 1753-1824) a “machine for transferring property from the people to capitalists.” Along the same lines, it allocates new money to borrowers on the mere promise of profit: as a result, much of it goes to inflating asset prices, again increasing inequality. It enables governments to borrow with little accountability, and to charge interest and repayment to “the people”: these charges make domestic labor more expensive, and therefore less competitive. It is created in large quantities during booms, and disappears during busts as loans are retired or “go bad,” thereby exacerbating business cycles. It encourages the production of arms and war by providing unaccountable finance to both governments and arms manufacturers, at the expense of their peoples. It encourages large concentrations of power in government, corporations, and individual “oligarchs,” reducing independence among citizens. It has an endogenous (inbuilt) insatiability: money drifts to the ownership of capitalists and only economic growth, state hand-outs and war (when governments create new money for working people rather than for banks) can supply consumer-money to the poor. The effects of this insatiability on the environment are literally devastating. It gives vast wealth to an elite who care only for making more money: the tastes of this elite have corrupted human culture. Lastly, because the process is not widely understood and is conducted largely in secret, it makes Western claims to political “democracy” dubious at best.
Given all this, it might be a good idea to contemplate reform, which would have to include (i) the replacement of credit money with digital money owned outright and (ii) withdrawal of the license allowed banks, to create claims on assets they don’t have.
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Conclusion
Most people familiar with the reality of bank-credit also profit from it. Reason gives way to self-interest in human affairs, so enlightenment and reform are hardly to be expected from among the powers-that-be. As for antisemitism, mental disease is also resistant to reason, so the targets of criticism in this essay are unlikely to be affected by the contents of this article. However, the majority of humanity have strong reasons to desire both financial reform and less racial hate and I hope this essay has made a small contribution to those ends by shedding light on a topic that is not at present widely understood.
Ivo Mosley’s book Robbery By Banks will be published in 2015.