Chan's Personal Blog

With the banks imploding all around us, and talks of an $850 billion bailout of the banks, many people have suddenly become interested in the banking system, and why are these awful things happening around us.

There's a short film that's circulating on the internet entitled "Money As Debt" which helps explain some of these things. This film answers questions such as:

• What is the role of the central bank?
• Where does money come from?
• What is a "run on the bank"
• etc.

The documentary is pretty accessible to even people with basic understandings of economics and such. It's also completely animated and not too complicated.

To the Ron Paul fans, you've probably heard the congressmen lament how bad our monetary system is currently. One of his solutions is the return to using the gold standard for our money, but this documentary highlights the problems with the gold system.


The first half of the documentary I enjoyed as it gave the history of how banking was created. However, I can't vouch for the second half of the documentary. It suddenly becomes very conspiracy theorist like. An example of this is when they quote from two American presidents who opposed the money system, and they imply that they were assassinated because of their opposition. In addition, I find the documentary's proposed solution of solving the money system's problem to be a bit naive or impractical. Some of the solutions, they wave their hands and say, oh alternative energy could save us money problems without explaining why.

Some of the solutions are very naive. For example, they suggest that if government had complete control over the money system, that would solve all our problems of evil bankers manipulating the system. However, giving absolute power to government is just replacing one problem with another in my opinion. Do we not remember that government has corruption and scandals as well?

I was debating whether to post this or not due to the duality of my opinion of this film. However, there are some nuggets to be sifted out of this. I'll let you decide which parts of this film is true, and which parts are conspiracy theories.

One interesting tidbit of information, apparently this film was created in Cowichan, British Columbia.