Hari Kumar

“Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“There is a danger of expecting the results of the future to be predicted from the past.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.”
― John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace: Enriched edition. Analyzing the Aftermath: Economic Treaties and Post-War Europe

“Economics is a notoriously complicated subject. To make things easier, let’s imagine a simple example.

Samuel Greedy, a shrewd financier, founds a bank in El Dorado, California.

A. A. Stone, an up-and-coming contractor in El Dorado, finishes his first big job, receiving payment in cash to the tune of $1 million. He deposits this sum in Mr Greedy’s bank. The bank now has $1 million in capital.

In the meantime, Jane McDoughnut, an experienced but impecunious El Dorado chef, thinks she sees a business opportunity – there’s no really good bakery in her part of town. But she doesn’t have enough money of her own to buy a proper facility complete with industrial ovens, sinks, knives and pots. She goes to the bank, presents her business plan to Greedy, and persuades him that it’s a worthwhile investment. He issues her a $1 million loan, by crediting her account in the bank with that sum.

McDoughnut now hires Stone, the contractor, to build and furnish her bakery. His price is $1,000,000.

When she pays him, with a cheque drawn on her account, Stone deposits it in his account in the Greedy bank.

So how much money does Stone have in his bank account? Right, $2 million.

How much money, cash, is actually located in the bank’s safe? Yes, $1 million.

It doesn’t stop there. As contractors are wont to do, two months into the job Stone informs McDoughnut that, due to unforeseen problems and expenses, the bill for constructing the bakery will actually be $2 million. Mrs McDoughnut is not pleased, but she can hardly stop the job in the middle. So she pays another visit to the bank, convinces Mr Greedy to give her an additional loan, and he puts another $1 million in her account. She transfers the money to the contractor’s account.

How much money does Stone have in his account now? He’s got $3 million.

But how much money is actually sitting in the bank? Still just $1 million. In fact, the same $1 million that’s been in the bank all along.

Current US banking law permits the bank to repeat this exercise seven more times. The contractor would eventually have $10 million in his account, even though the bank still has but $1 million in its vaults. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.2 If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all other banks in the world.

It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud. The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind