Crime Against Humanity: the Holy GAAP, 26

Scriptural, commercial bank money does have a deliberately ambiguous nature: when it is convenient to bankers, it is money; when it is convenient to bankers, it is not money but a promise of money. When it has to be money to produce purchasing power for the banker, it is; when it does not have to be money to avoid being booked by the banker as an asset, it is not. All its existence is characterised by this ambiguity: from its inception to the end of time, it is a promise of money that circulates and is accepted as money, and thus has purchasing power as money, as long as no one ever asks that that promise is honoured. And as to this, it has been observed that all the bankers of the world are in a state of permanent insolvency, and it can be observed how they are in a state of permanent war against cash – I mean, physical cash, that not directly under their control.

As you have seen, the length and breadth of the bankers’ legalised privilege, the depth of the pockets of their old trousers, are considerable. They border on the infinite. But, even though well on track towards it, do you think the speed is enough for their greed? What if those old trousers got too tight on them? What if the financial statement itself got too tight on them?
They obviously thought about that too… Just get rid of them!

“And now for something completely different”, the flying circus “It’s Man” says, “It’s…”
The off−balance sheet activities.
“Shadow banking”, to their friends.

In view of the following, we find ourselves in need of labelling “conventional”, “traditional” banking what until now we simply called “banking”, which is characterized by a model called “Originate−to−Hold”. That is all the bankers do, we thought: they originate loans, and hold the related credits while the borrowers pay them back. Leaving aside for a moment the negligible detail that that origination is out of thin air, since that whom loans is the banker, the loan is booked as a liability, and the corresponding receivable as an asset, in the banker’s balance sheet, and that’s all there is to it: the banker originates the loan, the banker holds it; and his balance sheet holds it, too.

Crime Against Humanity: the Holy GAAP