Review

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7. Exponential fecundity of intangible wealth

“Only the exponential fecundity of intangible, bank formulated wealth can never be impeded in its capacity for growth...”
ANTONIO: Was this inserted to make interest good? Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?
SHYLOCK: I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast.

The combination of digitalised fiat currency and the numerical manipulations of fractional reserve banking means that almost the entire money supply is created by the banks out of thin air. By such methods central banks have been able to conjure up sums measured in trillions for ‘bail-outs’ and ‘quantitative easing’. This ‘invisible’ numerical wealth is geometrically multiplied beyond simple computation in the financial markets by an explosion in the nano-second algorithmic ‘trades’ of exotic and abstruse derivative securities. At the time of the international crisis of 2008 these mechanisms had ‘bred’ a ‘shadow’ economy valued at 22 times the GDP of the entire globe, a literally astronomical figure taking the measurement of wealth beyond the orbit of mere trillions into a new universe: $1.144 Quadrillion (or 1,144 Trillion) equivalent to $190,000 for every person still on planet Earth!!! Needless to say, these stupendous virtual sums are being used in the ‘real’ non-digital world to acquire very substantial properties, swathes of land, universities, corporations and whole states and, as was the case in the notorious Clearances of British history, the bankers have little use for the evicted.