Overflight, 51

If anyone claims that this power is exercised, according to a properly thought−out and intelligible system, to distribute the abundant wealth a modern community is empowered by scientific methods to produce in order that the members may obtain wealth for consumption, let him look around. The money is now issued primarily for usury. …
The continued coexistence of unemployment and poverty in a scientific era is its sufficient condemnation. …
To any business man a knowledge of the truth ought to be sufficient to condemn the system according to the canons of ordinary competitive business. Where else in the whole realm of human activity is it possible to create capital by an act of imagination and to derive from its supposed existence a perennial revenue, just as though it were real wealth put to productive use? … What, then, in "cultivated society" is the difference between the utterer of false coin and the banks? … But this is only a minor question in comparison with the effect it has in making the banker the real ruler of the nation.
The moratorium declared in this country in 1914, actually before a shot had been fired in the Great War, showed that banking has become so vital to the interests of the nation that the banks can call upon the national credit to save them and their depositors from ruin in the face of any great emergency. The public at that time not only shouldered the burden, but lost their right to demand gold in exchange for their money, and suffered the debasement of the currency. So both restrictions to the expansion of credit have now been removed. The banks need not fear a run on their cash reserves, nor is there any automatic regulation of the gold−value of money. That their policy at the moment is to deflate rather than inflate the currency is beside the question. It is they and not the political Government which really regulate the economic affairs of the country. They make the profits and the taxpayers and citizens shoulder the losses under the system.