Steve Cobby

Yes indeed. The bond market's inflation-stoking disciplinary authority is an outcome of the general belief system. Every issue or transfer of credit is unthinkingly regarded as an interest-bearing private loan despite the irrefutable fact that governments, central banks and licensed commercial banks create money at will ex nihilo. After its beginning as a criminal operation 4400 years ago in Mesopotamia (corrupt Palace/Temple officials and merchants privately lending silver currency out of the back door for up to 30% interest), the belief system, its practices and its social relations were politically institutionalised around 3500 years ago as the moneylenders acquired land in repayment for bad debts, circumvented the debt jubilee rule and established themselves as the 'landed aristocracy'. Compounding and rolling debt was a major factor behind two civilizational collapses, and the system survived the anti-usury codes of the revealed religions - "and lead us not into temptation". It's now culturally and neuropsychologically embedded ('emotionally credible') and systemically locked in (fiscal overreach triggers automatic and predictable punishments) on a mass scale. Breaking out of it would be epochal yet, oddly, a restoration of the principles behind the Bronze Age Palace/Temple system. In the West, we just don't have institutions as strong and stable or a culture as collectively responsible as they were in that period - we have dysfunctional oligarch-captured states adminstered by bought-off, equivocating central bankers and politicians and the perverse conflation of asset accumulation with personal freedom. Technically, if we had informed populations we don't need a worldwide revolution but, realistically, we possibly do.