El opaco poder de los bancos

It’s the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World
By Ellen Brown
Global Research, November 08, 2012
Url of this article:http://www.globalresearch.ca/its-the-interest-stupid-why-bankers-rule-the-world/5311030

Muchas veces nos preguntamos cómo las entidades financieras rigen nuestro destino. Las respuestas de Brown, autora del artículo que he escogido, pueden dar una idea más o menos aceptable. El punto crítico del asunto son los intereses que se pagan de una u otra manera. Los bancos son negocios y no se puede esperar que funcionen sin obtener beneficios. Pero los consumidores deberían contar con garantías legales para no quedar desvalidos (o desvalijados) por procedimientos de genuina usura. Si os interesa saber algo más, consulten la URL señalada.
In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released last week, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of “Wall Street greed” but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.

This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and don’t take out loans, they aren’t paying interest. This, says Dr. Kennedy, is not true. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging from 12% for garbage collection, to 38% for drinking water to, 77% for rent in public housing in her native Germany.

Her figures are drawn from the research of economist Helmut Creutz, writing in German and interpreting Bundesbank publications.  They apply to the expenditures of German households for everyday goods and services in 2006; but similar figures are seen in financial sector profits in the United States, where they composed a whopping 40% of U.S. business profits in 2006.  That was five times the 7% made by the banking sector in 1980.  Bank assets, financial profits, interest, and debt have all been growing exponentially.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept12/cui-bono-Fed9-12.html.

Exponential growth in financial sector profits has occurred at the expense of the non-financial sectors, where incomes have at best grown linearly.