Friday, July 22, 2011

The Debt Crisis and the War Cycle

Excerpt from Clif Droke's interview of Richard Hoskins for Green Faucet:

Q: In your book you talk about the intricate relationship between war and the economy.  Do you see the U.S. returning to war anytime soon?
 
Hoskins: When we run into a big problem with money, what do we always do in a usury system?  We go to war.  And what’s the reason for that?  We go to war to borrow money into existence, to force people to borrow money into existence.  And then they’ll have money to spend on ice cream cones and cars and boats and everything else after all the killing is done.  This time they built something we never heard of before – usury notes or IOUs that resulted from building houses.  Everybody had to have a house and everybody had to borrow money for the house and the banks were issuing bonds all over the place.  Well it just so happened that it all came to an end.  And when it came to an end all the money that it been borrowed into existence carried interest that must be paid, because if you don’t pay interest on an IOU what do they call it?  They call it default, bankruptcy, call it anything you want, but it came in a hurry and all these banks were up to their necks in IOUs that had no collateral worth speaking of. 
 
Now all of a sudden we had to have money and going to war is too slow. We’ve been fighting these brushfire wars ever since World War II and that keeps the money rolling and keeps a certain amount of money being borrowed into existence all the time.  It helps a lot but we had to do something and do it fast, so they did something that had never been done before.  They went up to Washington and voted a great big war debt overnight.  They called it a stimulus bill.  It was more than what World War I and World War II cost and they did it in one day!  And there they were with money all over the place. But it didn’t even wet the surface of the problem because so much money had been borrowed and there were so many bonds had been issued that it did little to pay for the IOUs that were coming due.  It still doesn’t. 

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