Sir, – As your paper continues to report on the costs borne by local people owing to the banking system’s apparent failure, isn’t it time to re-examine the place of money and debt in the human story?

Can the history of usury teach us anything?

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,”

international banker M Rothschild allegedly said.

Perhaps this observation arose out of agreement with Dostoevsky, who proposed that “Money is coined liberty,” or with Tolstoy, “Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, that there is no human relation between master and slave.”

According to Sir Josiah Stamp, director, Bank of England 1928-1941, “The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented ... if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.”

Currently, the Government creates three per cent of the nation’s legal tender in notes and coins and the financial system the other 97 per cent as debt “created out of thin air” in loans to government (taxpayers), commerce and individuals. The debt has to be repaid with interest, compounded; mathematically impossible for the human economy based in the real world of finite resources. Hence “boom and bust”.

A possible solution was suggested by Abraham Lincoln.

“The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.”

This already works in Britain but only in Guernsey. So far ...

RICHARD AKERS Topcliffe Road, Thirsk.