The Age of Money
We live in the Age of Money. At no time has finance been more complex, nor the methods of banking more arbitrary, nor the nature of money itself more obscure. The practice of banking dates at least as far back as the Bronze Age, with temples serving as the first great clearing houses and depositories of wealth. The very words “money” and “mint” come originally from the famous Roman goddess Juno Moneta, protectress of wealth, whose image appeared on early Roman coinage and whose temple served as both a bank and a mint for centuries. So likening central banks such as the Federal Reserve to temples and international banking elites to a priesthood (as William Greider did in his bestselling book on the Fed) is not mere metaphor.
The most conspicuous trait of our modern economy is financialization, that is, the unnatural complete domination of our economy by financial activity. Innovation in areas such as derivatives is unceasing and extremely profitable, as inventive financial minds seek ever-more-imaginative ways to reconfigure debt and dilute counterparty risk while staying ahead of government regulators. Exotic new forms of money itself, particularly the cryptocurrencies described in articles here by Paul Rosenberg ("Making the Case for Bitcoin") and Catherine Austin Fitts ("Bitcoin Bailout"), furnish a novel way of protecting wealth and financial information from the grasping hand of the state — even as the technology used to sustain them is being harnessed by governments as a potent new tool of control. All of this, and much more besides, is symptomatic of the hyper-financialized castles on air that pass as economic growth in our illusory age.
There was a time — no longer within living memory, unfortunately — when economic growth was predicated on actually inventing, building, extracting, and manufacturing tangible things — commodities, machinery, buildings, agriculture, and the like. Banking and other financial services, such as law and accounting, were primarily appendages of the truly productive sectors.
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