Between 1689 and 1697, Britain was waging war against a regular enemy; France. The cause was stopping France from wanting to expand its borders into Europe. War is an expensive business and so in 1694 the Bank of England was founded; a private bank whose principle customer was the Government, which needed to borrow money to finance the conflict. Interest payable on the loan was 8%. The King and Queen of the time, William and Mary, were two of the Banks´s original stockholders; a nice earner for the royal family.

The same William and Mary, in granting its royal charter, explained that the Bank was founded to "promote the public Good and Benefit of our People". With a monopoly on English banking, within 12 days the Bank had managed to inject £1.2 million into the national economy to fund the war effort, incidentally making war now a profitable business for some.

By 2017, the majority of financial transactions worldwide were in the form of purely digital transactions; just information in a vast global computer programme. This form of currency, fiat money, has no value in relationship to anything else. Its only value is a collective agreement that it has value. That value is based on the creation of debt.

For example, if you want to make a large purchase, like a new car or a house, the chances are that you won´t have the cash in your bank account. Most likely you will need to take out a loan or mortgage and so you engage the services of a lender who will loan you the money, to be repaid at interest. Actually, that´s not strictly true. There isn´t a pot of money held by these lender institutions that they can dip into. Rather, new money is created by the Bank of England, and loaned to the lender institution at interest, who in turn loans it to you at a greater level of interest; all achieved by multiple punches of computer keyboards.

The net result is that now, more debt has been created than money exists to repay that debt. It applies both to you personally, the lenders who facilitated the loan or mortgage and also the government. For this reason, the system can only continue if linked to the need to create unending economic growth, with all the damage that that causes to nature and humanity.

For human beings, it propagates a lifestyle that has to be focussed on the accumulation of money by whatever means, rather than opening up the pursuit of individual fulfilment or activities to benefit the whole. "I´d love to be doing X, but I can´t because I need the money." In addition, the vast mountain of debt created by the system is considered a financial asset in its own right, as a global network of financiers, bankers & investors trade in this debt, with enormous sums to be made on the backs of us all. Lots more activity sitting in front of a screen!

It doesn´t have to be like this. Because money is now simply created by a keystroke on a computer terminal, the amount of money available to us all is theoretically unlimited... IF released from the burden of interest payments. The global cost of attaining net zero carbon dioxide emissions has been put at 125 trillion dollars. This is a staggering sum and probably unachievable within the present economic system. However, that sum is available if the money supply is liberated from those who have a vested financial interest in the creation & maintenance of unsustainable debt. Such a move would immediately re-invent the banking and money supply system back to its original founding purpose: to "promote the public Good and Benefit of our People".