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Thank you Buckwheat, for you clear understanding of the system. Rather than get sidetracked by the waste of time of debating minute details with Todd, I would rather just remind everyone that it's the system itself that is the problem, not the individual statistics.

Despite apologists to the contrary, the system is, in and of itself, unjust as it gives unfair advandtage to the banking business over any other enterprise. There is no "expert", versed in the structure of the global financial system, who would deny that central banks work in concert with privately owned banks to make the process of money creation a profitable business. Rather than being a neutral measure of economic activity, currency yeilds profits to banking institutions through the process which creates it. That profit opportunity stems from the debt based nature of money.

While banks enjoy a virtual monopoly on money creation, allowing them to exponentially increase the over-all supply, government also enjoys a blank check as it's reward for giving that power to banks.

Here is an interesting perspective, from a book called "The Grip of Death, by Michael Rowbotham:

" For example, every country in the world suffers from a massive and constantly increasing national debt. Britain has a national debt that is fast approaching £400 billion. Canada's debt has reached $560 billion and Germany's now exceeds 500 billion deutschmarks. So are these poor countries? No more so than Japan with a debt equivalent to two trillion dollars or America with a national debt now in excess of five trillion dollars. Since the poorer nations are crippled by their indebtedness to international lending institutions and foreign banks, the overall picture is of a world suffering acute and ever worsening insolvency.

But this is really quite illogical and absurd... The question almost asks itself. If all the nations of the world are in debt, who are they in debt to? Rationally, where there is a debtor, there should be someone else who is a creditor. If every nation is in debt, who, precisely, owes whom? In addition to the logical absurdity of all nations being simultaneously insolvent, such escalating national debts are a complete contradiction of the real and obvious wealth of these nations. This is underlined by the fact that the nations which run the largest national debts are those with the most advanced economies. What can we say to the developing nations struggling under the burden of their debt, nations who have copied our economic institutions and aspire to a life free from poverty? 'Work hard, and one day your debt will be as small as America's - a mere five trillion dollars!"

Or this from Stephen Zarlenga, of the American Monetary Institute:

Monetary realities usually affect the citizen’s daily life far more than the Congress, President, or Supreme Court. AMI’s research shows that a main arena of human struggle has been over the monetary control of societies. This control is exercised through monetary theory - in obscure doctrines about the nature of money. If it had to be summarized in one sentence it is that by mis-defining the nature of money, special interests have often been able to control a society’s monetary system, and in turn, the society itself. Describing how this has been done historically, makes these concepts clear and vital and sweeps aside the mystification in which money has been purposely shrouded.

Despite apologists to the contrary, the system is, in and of itself, unjust as it gives unfair advandtage to the banking business over any other enterprise.

If that's the case then the banking sector should outperform all others year after year. Is that the case?

I would say that the largest beneficiary of the existing monetary system is government, because it is able to print money at almost no cost for which it can pay for goods and services from the very people whose wealth the money exists to be a medium of exchange for. Fiat money is counterfeit private wealth.

Secondly, government gets to issue sovereign debt, and force citizens to guarantee it by (unstated) future taxes and assets that can be acquired because of the last way that fiat money insults liberty: government defines income as the nominal increase in dollars. It levies a capital “gains” tax on assets that may have only increased in nominal dollars to track inflation and caps the insult by various rules to make the tax “progressive” without adjusting the limits, adjustments, brackets, exclusions, etc. for the very inflation that only government can control.

(All this of course is reduced or even eliminated with a the Fair Tax, but that is another thread.)

The end result is that government issues debt that it uses to spend and for which it never intends to really repay. It rolls expiring old debt into new debt. In the end it may only be left with repudiation as a way out. Since they “knew or should have known” (a common legal standard in torts) that this was the easily foreseen outcome of their policies, it is a grand theft on the greatest scale in human history.

Rather than get sidetracked by the waste of time of debating minute details with Todd,

It's true, feelings are easier than facts.

There is no "expert", versed in the structure of the global financial system, who would deny that central banks work in concert with privately owned banks to make the process of money creation a profitable business.

Who makes the profit?