MERIT Master Distinguished Lecture Series: What is money and where does it come from?

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MERIT Master Distinguished Lecture Series

What is money and where does it come from?

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Prof. Marcel Coderch

May 22, 2013 at 11.30

Aula Merit D5-010

Abstract

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks… will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of USA

“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”

Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Founder of the House of Rothschild

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

Henry Ford, Founder Ford Motor Company

If you want to continue to be slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own enslavement, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit … However, as long as governments will legalize such things, a man is foolish not to be a banker.”

Sir Josiah Stamp, President Bank of England

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, economist

There is a widespread misunderstanding about what constitutes money and of how new money is created. Many people would be surprised to learn that even among bankers, economists and policy makers, there is no common understanding of how money is created. This is a problem for two main reasons. First, in the absence of this misunderstanding, attempts at banking reform are more likely to fail. Second, the creation of new money and the corresponding allocation of purchasing power are vital and very profitable economic functions. It is therefore a matter of significant public interest and not an obscure technocratic debate. Greater clarity and transparency on this matter is a prerequisite for the democratic legitimacy of the banking system and for our economic prospects. We need to reform our financial system, but we need first to understand how it really works.

Dr. Marcel Coderch is Vice-President of The Telecommunications Market Commission (CMT) and Honorary Professor of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC).

Prof. Coderch holds a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), and a Master’s Degree and Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was a Fellow of the MIT Science, Technology and Society program.

He worked in the Telecommunications Area of the Technological Institute for Postgraduates in Madrid and occupied several management posts in the Anaya Group as Director of the Anaya Research Centre, Director of New Technologies and Director of Information and Communication Systems. He took part in launching Gestevisión/Tele 5 and the newspaper El Sol and was a member of the Board of Directors of Anaya Multimedia and the Internet portal Telepolis. He was Internet Director of Retevisión-Auna, director of Servicom, Redes TB, Cinet, Iddeo and a director of the portal EresMas and also a founder Partner and Vice-President of Strategy and Business Development in Tech Foundries and a director of InOut TV, Eneo Labs, PowerOffice and Mediaxpress. He is a member of GAPTEL and an analyst in Real Instituto Elcano.

Lecture documentation

What is money and where does it come from?

Banking and Democracy

The lecture, that has been attended by MERIT Master students, PhD researchers and academic staff, has finished after a lively debate on the topic.