Paul Grignon produced a 47 minutes animated documentary film about the creation of money and the modern banking system. It is a must-see video if you wonder where the money comes from (certainly not from gold or silver). A few elemental phrases I picked to warm you up:
The vast majority of money is not created by the Government, it is created by private corporations known as banks. Banks create money out of nothing. In the past, money represented value, today money represents debt. New money is created whenever anyone takes a loan from a bank.
In the artificial world of money, a bank’s promise to pay money it doesn’t have is allowed to be passed off as money and we accept it as such. Even more amazing is that once we realize that money really is DEBT, we realize that if there was no debt there would be no money!!!
Loan fees, interests and taxes should be paid too. This money isn’t created so everywhere, there are other borrowers frantically trying to obtain the money they need to pay back Principal, Interest and fees from a total money pool which contains only Principal. It’s clearly impossible for everyone to pay back the Principal plus the Interest. And so, more and more new debt money has to be created to satisfy today’s demands for money to service the previous debt. But, of course, this just makes the total debt bigger. In other words, debt is perpetual and unpayable.
How can it be that the people who actually produce all the real wealth in the world are in debt to those who merely lend out the money? We are completely dependent on Commercial Banks, that is, a small elite is controlling the world.
As Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) said:
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal—that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
There’s also available a video in Spanish and an english transcript can be found here.
Alexander van der Kolk 