Modern Fractional Reserve Banking - A Ponzi Scheme | Murray N. Rothbard

The banker issues fake warehouse receipts and lends them out as if they were real warehouse receipts represented by cash. At the same time, the original depositor thinks that his warehouse receipts are represented by money available at any time he wishes to cash them in. Here we have the system of fractional reserve banking, in which more than one warehouse receipt is backed by the same amount of gold or other cash in the bank’s vaults.

 

It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts.

Quoted from:
Murray N. Rothbard (1983) - The Mystery of Banking.

 

See also:

Anthony C. Sutton (1974) - The Bankster's Paradise Conspiracy Theory.

 Nikolai Starikov (2013) - The Conspiracy of the Counterfeiters.

The Global Financial Ponzi Scheme

$1,280,000,000,000 = There is only 1.28 trillion dollars worth of U.S. currency floating around out there.
$17,555,165,805,212.27 = 17.5 trillion dollars is the size of the U.S. national debt. It has grown by more than 10 trillion dollars over the past ten years.
$32,000,000,000,000 = 32 trillion dollars  is the total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).
$48,611,684,000,000 = 48 trillion dollars is the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts.
$59,398,590,000,000 = 59.4 trillion dollars is the total amount of debt (government, 

corporate, consumer, etc.) in the U.S. financial system.  40 years ago, this number was just a little bit above 2 trillion dollars.
$70,088,625,000,000 = 70 trillion dollars is the total exposure that JPMorgan Chase has to derivatives contracts.
$71,830,000,000,000 = 71.8 trillion dollars is the approximate size of the GDP of the entire world.
$75,000,000,000,000 = 75 trillion dollars is approximately the total exposure that German banking giant Deutsche Bank has to derivatives contracts.
$100,000,000,000,000 = 100 trillion dollars is the total amount of government debt in the entire world.  This amount has grown by $30 trillion just since mid-2007.
$223,300,000,000,000 = 223.3 trillion dollars is the approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world.
$236,637,271,000,000 = 223.3 trillion dollars is - according to the U.S. government - the total exposure that the top 25 banks in the United States have to derivatives contracts.  But those banks only have total assets of about 9.4 trillion dollars combined.  In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 25 to 1.
$710,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 = 710 to 1,500 trillion dollars are the estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives contracts.  At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives exposure to global GDP is about 21 to 1. Credits: Michael Snyder