{"id":10589,"date":"2012-04-03T10:50:54","date_gmt":"2012-04-03T15:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=10589"},"modified":"2012-04-03T10:57:36","modified_gmt":"2012-04-03T15:57:36","slug":"oh-canada-imposing-austerity-on-the-worlds-most-resource-rich-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/04\/03\/oh-canada-imposing-austerity-on-the-worlds-most-resource-rich-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Canada! Imposing Austerity on the World\u2019s Most Resource-Rich Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ellen Brown has written a very revealing article Oh Canada! Imposing Austerity on the World\u2019s Most Resource-Rich Country<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 The summary of the article is:<\/p>\n

Even the world’s most resource-rich country has now been caught in the debt trap. Its once-proud government programs are being subjected to radical budget cuts\u2014cuts that could have been avoided if the government had not quit<\/strong> borrowing from its own central bank in the 1970s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me see if I can capture the most damaging part of the story in the following quoted paragraphs:<\/p>\n

The debt shot up only after 1974. That was when the Basel Committee was established by the central-bank Governors of the Group of Ten countries of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which included Canada. A key objective of the Committee was to maintain “monetary and financial stability.” To achieve that goal, the Committee discouraged borrowing from a nation’s own central bank interest-free, and encouraged borrowing instead from private creditors, all in the name of “maintaining the stability of the currency.”<\/p>\n

The presumption was that borrowing from a central bank with the power to create money on its books would inflate the money supply and prices. Borrowing from private creditors, on the other hand, was considered not to be inflationary, since it involved the recycling of pre-existing money. What the bankers did not reveal, although they had long known it themselves, was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do. The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be re-invested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, I have failed.\u00a0 There is even worse stuff in the article, but I can hardly quote the whole thing here.\u00a0 You’ll just have to follow the link to the article, and read it yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ellen Brown has written a very revealing article Oh Canada! Imposing Austerity on the World\u2019s Most Resource-Rich Country.\u00a0 The summary of the article is: Even the world’s most resource-rich country has now been caught in the debt trap. Its once-proud government programs are being subjected to radical budget cuts\u2014cuts that could have been avoided if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10589"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10591,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10589\/revisions\/10591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}