The Infinite Debt Trap

Suppose now that pebble beach does not contain 1,000 pebbles only, but an unlimited amount of pebbles, and, yes: those 99 people are going to scrape together those additional 99 pebbles by borrowing them from that very pebble beach owner. Who will be more than happy to loan them. At interest: 10%.

So the 99 people have borrowed 990 pebbles, then have returned 1,089 pebbles, and still owe 9.9 pebbles that, again, do not exist: even if they exist in pebble beach, they do not exist in their hands. How are they going to scrape them together in order to return them?

Welcome to the trap of the infinite debt mechanism. But this is just its first and most primitive form. The best is definitely yet to come.

Suppose the pebble beach owner is not going to ask his 990 pebbles back: he will content himself with the interest, for now. How kind of him: those 990 pebbles remain into the hands of the 99 people so they can go on using them for their deals; they only have to return him 99 pebbles every unit of time that goes by. Sort of rent.

This means that after ten units of time they find themselves in the following situation: they have returned him 990 pebbles of interest/rent, they are left without any more pebbles, but they still owe him 990 pebbles.

But they need those pebbles to deal with one another, so let’s see… they borrow 990 pebbles, after the first unit of time they have to return 99 pebbles of interest, and they want to keep on having 990 pebbles in their hands… they have to borrow those additional 99 pebbles to return, at 10% interest. So after the second unit of time this is the situation: they still have 990 pebbles in their hands but they have borrowed 1,089 pebbles, and now they owe a 10% interest on 1,089 pebbles: 108.9 pebbles. So to pay that interest while keeping the 990 pebbles now they borrow 108.9 more pebbles at 10% interest. So after the third unit of time this is the situation: they still have 990 pebbles in their hands but they have borrowed 1,197.9 pebbles, and now they owe a 10% interest on 1,197.9 pebbles: 119.79 pebbles. I know these are stark figures but… do I need to say more?

The Infinite Debt Trap, 2

Oh well, they have a choice left though: return all the pebbles originally borrowed and still owe additional pebbles, or keep all the pebbles originally borrowed and keep on owing more and more, or any middle way. But it’s just a matter of time, whatever: sooner or later the 99 people become the property of the pebble beach owner.

This is the most important thing to underline here: if anyone is allowed to set up an infinite debt trap, sooner or later that one is going to own and destroy everything and everyone. Because while anyone else has to incur in work and costs to produce the products, the purchasing power to exchange with others, the owner of the infinite debt trap can produce that purchasing power directly out of thin air – I mean, out of nothing! –, thoroughly effortlessly and at no cost at all. A fictitious, non−existent purchasing power, that will be nonetheless accepted by others as real. This fraud enables unfair competition, to say the least, which enables to buy everything and everyone for free. Just a matter of time. And in the process, the unstopped and growing unbalance between the bigger and faster growth of the fictitious purchasing power produced by the criminal and the smaller and slower growth of the real purchasing power produced by others will inevitably produce an increasing degree of browbeating and oppression. And, at the end of the line, a global death, by either explosion or asphyxiation. After all is said and done, once we allowed suppressives to seize all the gold in the world, there's not much to be dumb with amazement at the consequences, isn’t it? Infinite debt trap, then: qualifies as the mother of all Frauds and as the Mother of all Suppressions, isn’t it?

We could try to give a definition here and say that the infinite debt trap consists of allowing or granting someone the monopoly of a vital flow, such as media of payment, and the ensuing faculty to profit from loaning it at interest; this suppressive privilege enables that someone to end up sooner or later seizing everything and everyone. At its basis there is the same reason why there is ethics and justice, that is, why a society cannot afford dishonesty: any thieves of any kind rob honest people of the purchasing power−survival potential they earned, and then they can exploit this stolen purchasing power to seize further purchasing power from honest people; this opens a leak in the hull, through which society is prone to being dispossessed and enslaved by thieves. But where other robbing mechanisms are subject to failure, and consequently the society has a chance to survive, because society can still produce more than thieves rob, the infinite debt trap is a deadly weapon due to its combination of monopoly and interest, making the future total dispossession and enslavement of society an absolute certainty. And to increase the speed of the fall into the trap, there is even the additional factor of the difference between the face value of money and its intrinsic value or production cost – a profit called “Seigniorage” and discussed ahead – when profited by the owner of the trap: while the amount of purchasing power stolen with the interest is progressively siphoned from the society, an additional amount of purchasing power is siphoned off with Seigniorage, thus increasing the speed of the “transfer”.