Who Benefits from Debt?

Not you! Follow the money.

There are two recent articles on debt by Peter Duke at The Duke Report, outlining the history of how the rich banking class came to control world finances, capturing sovereignty of money from governments and putting the entire world into debt servitude without end. Debt is not well understood - once created, it does not go away unless paid back with interest or defaulted on. Even worse, due to interest, it increases with time exponentially while the overall economy does not. And when the rentier class tires of one debt asset, they roll those up into a new bundle and sell that yet again. Thus mortgages are collected into bundles of collateralized obligations and corporate bonds are merged into collateralized bond obligations. Same debt “assets,” new name, new buyers and the world’s debt bubble has expanded again, now a collective debt obligation of over US$700T, many times the world’s GDP. This financialization system is the primary driver of income inequality since all interest on debt accrues to these banking system elites. Here’s the two Duke Reports:

Caesar’s Monetary Revolution - 12 Centuries of Relative Stability Ended in the Fourth “Crusade” - THE DUKE REPORT - NOV 06, 2025

The Money Masters Explainer - 1996 Video Recap - THE DUKE REPORT - NOV 07, 2025

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The whole world is deliberately trapped in debt. This, from “Money Masters Explainer,” which is a review of The Money Masters, directed by William T. Still and produced by Patrick S.J. Carmack, which traces the complete lineage of monetary power from ancient systems of debt to the Federal Reserve’s command of twentieth-century finance:

“King Henry I of England established the tally-stick system in 1100 AD, transforming wooden notches into official money accepted for taxes. His design created a stable, debt-free medium that sustained England for seven centuries. Private financiers later overturned that stability, promoting credit backed by gold and converting money into debt. By the late seventeenth century, the Bank of England formalized this transformation. In 1694, a royal charter granted private bankers authority to lend money created from nothing to the Crown at interest, institutionalizing permanent public debt. England became the model for a global system of monetary control anchored in credit and taxation.”

Throughout The Money Masters Explainer is an outline of how governments struggled, and ultimately lost, to the financier class. A frequent tool of control was assassination, from Julius Caesar through Lincoln and JFK.

“Julius Caesar broke the dominance of private money changers by issuing debt-free currency directly from the Roman treasury. His coinage circulated without interest and revived prosperity across the empire. Farmers regained land, commerce expanded, and the economy stabilized. Caesar’s monetary reform transformed Rome from a society ruled by creditors into one supported by productive labor.”

But his assassination ended that reform, the money supply restricted and the Empire was driven back into debt. Whomever controls the money supply is the actual author of sovereignty.

From “Caesar’s Monetary Revolution”:

“Caesar treated money as an act of lawmaking. He saw that the paralysis of the Republic came from private control of circulation and from the belief that gold defined value. He reduced state debt by a quarter, transferred the mint from patrician usurers to the government, and issued abundant base-metal coins to restore exchange. He outlawed compound interest, capped rates at one percent per month, and forbade lenders from collecting more interest than the loaned capital. He abolished debt slavery and ordered the wealthy to invest their holdings in productive work rather than hoard them. These actions rebalanced the Republic toward labor and away from rent. The oligarchs killed him because he broke their monopoly on debt. His assassination restored private control over credit.”

The American colonies were successful because they issued their own currency, “script” until the Bank of England put an end to that, forcing the colonies back into debt, which was the primary cause of the Revolution. Afterwards there was a constant battle between private lenders and supporters of national currency sovereignty. In the Civil War (The Rebellion) Lincoln issued “greenbacks” as a national currency, along the lines of Caesar’s reforms, but money sovereignty was handed back to the banking establishment with his assassination. In 1963, JFK issued Executive Order 11110 authorizing the treasury to print silver-backed certificates, restoring partial monetary sovereignty. This scheme ended shortly thereafter with his assassination. In 1971, Nixon closed the “gold window” so foreign governments could no longer convert dollars into gold - the dollar then became purely fiat currency and the global economy operated on entirely debt-based money. Nobody was allowed to issue money without a corresponding issuance of debt, entirely at the behest of the international banking elites, providing them with a percentage of every dollar created. What a life!

The Federal Reserve System is outlined in The Money Masters Explainer:

“The Panic of 1907, coordinated by J. P. Morgan and allied bankers, collapsed credit markets and persuaded Congress that only a central bank could stabilize the economy. In 1910, leading financiers met secretly on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to design the Federal Reserve System. Paul Warburg, Nelson Aldrich, and representatives of Morgan and Rockefeller interests drafted legislation that concealed private ownership beneath a federal title.”

“President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The law transferred the power to issue money from Congress to the Federal Reserve, a private corporation composed of regional banks owned by member institutions. The system created money as debt, lent it to the government, and charged interest on it. Wilson later admitted that he had delivered the nation’s liberty to the control of financiers. The Federal Reserve became the dominant force in American life, determining interest rates, credit supply, and the value of money.”

“Between 1929 and 1933, the Reserve reduced the money supply by one-third. The contraction produced mass unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcies. Congressman Louis McFadden accused the Federal Reserve of orchestrating the Great Depression to consolidate ownership.”

See also The Creature From Jekyll Island (PDF).

I’m trying to show, from all these texts above, that issuance of money does not need to be tied to suffering under debt. The very richest families in years past gained vast fortunes often by devious means, such as when the Rothschild’s network brought false news of the Battle of Waterloo to England, trashing the value of the government debt, which they bought up for pennies, only to become impossibly wealthy the next day when the real news came in. In various such schemes, the uber-rich came to hold more monetary value than entire governments, and set about to buy influence to get laws made that required governments to borrow from them to fund government operations, with interest owning to the already wealthy! A defined-benefits scheme to defy gravity - so that money always flows upwards!

Any government with a spine could kick the oligarchs to the gutter and issue their own currency. Money is information, a particular form of information, a part of law-making, as noted in the section about Caesar, above. The law-making part gives it validity and value as an exchange-medium in trade. Money is also a reflection of sovereignty, because who controls the currency controls the nation. Should that be a (real) government, or should that be the oligarchs, running the government like a puppet on strings? It obviously can’t be one of the pretend “democracy” elected governments, or you have the situation like Benjamin Franklin said: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”

The entire system must be set up to run properly, devoid of ideological influence, as I wrote in Imagine an Economy Devoid of Debt.

I get a lot of pushback on this issue, from people calling it “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT) (they likely being metalists, believing in an innate value of gold, coins, bitcoin, etc.). They try to explain to me how the “system” operates, as if there are no other options. But we all know something is wrong with the present system and often blame it on “capitalism” while accepting the deluge of debt as normal.

But in that debt post, I’m talking opposite of MMT - MMT says that government is the monopoly issuer of its currency and must spend that into existence before taxpayers can use it to pay their obligations to the state. But the way things are, the banking establishment controls the central banks, thus they are the issuer of the currency, not “the state.” And they say nations that borrow in their own currency need not worry about deficits because they are money sovereigns so can create more money to pay their debt. If they can create their own money, WHY DID THEY BORROW? People say that normal household finance problems do not apply to governments - governments don’t have to balance their books like your household does. But, if they BORROW the money, from the oligarch banks, then they DO have to balance their books, because they have (needlessly) incurred a debt obligation, with interest, and that MUST be repaid or defaulted on. So yes, a BORROWING government CAN default, since it is NOT printing its own currency, it has handed that POWER to a private banking system. It was a legislated requirement, in the case of the U.S. Federal Reserve, that the Fed must buy Treasury bills (government bonds) on the open market, thus retiring that debt from circulation and entering the balance on the seller’s account. The Treasury is not allowed to print money although it may issue coins, and sells bonds to cover expenses beyond what tax revenue can cover. Thus, they continually rely on debt.

Debt is the problem! In ancient times people were smart enough to establish debt jubilees, which accomplished two things - it gives debtors some relief AND informs lenders to not be too greedy, since their loan portfolio can be wiped out. In earlier times, the buildup of debt and hoarding by the wealthiest families was not too disruptive since the overall debt bubble was not so large and was often defaulted on or captured during frequent wars. But now, overall debt has mushroomed into a bigger cloud over the world than all the Space junk. Every little lender, such as a mortgage issuer, wishes to package up their debt portfolio and sell that as a new debt bundle to a bigger fish. This clears their balance sheet so that they can write more loans (this is where most money is created). And the bigger fish get together and bundle up their collective debt and sell that to the next-level shark. And on it goes, leveraging debt upwards to try to eke out a smidgen of liquidity from someone else. Somewhere, and coming soon, in these derivatives trading schemes, somebody is not going to be able to find the liquidity pay up on a contract, and the whole house of cards begins to fall. Unless the Fed again bails out hedge funds like they did a few months ago. And why are these speculators being bailed out, from their own deceitful trading schemes? Because the oligarchs call the shots on where public money is directed.

The Trump tariffs regime is making matters worse, and when you look at a chart of govt revenue, it is about the same as last year, so the economy has TANKED and his tariff gravy is barely making up for that. To operate the world-reserve currency, you have to keep massive amounts of $$$ out there in the world, that REQUIRES running a trade deficit and doing foreign aid, but orange moron is cutting BOTH, even when before this crap, there wasn’t enough $$$ in circulation world-wide to adequately facilitate trade. That’s TWO more reasons for other countries to join BRICS. De-dollarization is the only effective remedy to his tariff crap - all countries should demand to be paid in their own currency for their shipments to US.

The big banks are preparing for “bail in” since this time there will be no bail-out of the banks, and bail-in means that your deposits are converted into bank shares. Enjoy! Runs on banks will be prevented by daily maximum withdrawals at ATMs. Don’t bother buying gold, bitcoin, stablecoin, etc. - those embody metalist notions of money and are hedges, not currency substitutes.

We CAN run an economy on direct forward funding, avoiding borrowing, but it must be managed for improving productivity and social advancement, not for greed and expanding profit or corporate welfare. The central bank is then not “independent,” it is the integral beating heart of the entire human project. Or, we can just continue on as we are, heading straight into further inequality and chaos.

To finish off this look at the debt-based financial system, have a look at this video, and follow along with the notes below:

How bankers Triggered WW-II to collect WW-I debts

The textbooks tell a simple story about World War II — Hitler was evil, he invaded Poland, the Allies stopped him. But the records reveal something they don’t teach in school: American banks funded Hitler’s rise, profited from Nazi Germany’s rearmament, and treated World War II as a debt collection operation to recover unpaid World War I loans. From the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that created unpayable German debts, to American corporate investment in the Third Reich, to the Bretton Woods system that emerged from the war, this wasn’t a conflict about ideology — it was the world’s largest financial consolidation disguised as military combat.

From 1919 when Germany was burdened with 132 billion gold marks in reparations, to 1944 when American banks formalized global financial dominance at Bretton Woods, World War II followed the exact pattern of World War I: create debt crisis → fund both sides → collect through conquest → emerge more powerful. This video uses banking records, corporate documents, and government archives to reveal how World War II served the same function as World War I — transferring wealth from taxpayers to international creditors:

1) 1919: Versailles Treaty creates unpayable German reparations (132 billion gold marks)

2) 1924: Dawes Plan — JP Morgan loans Germany money to pay reparations (circular debt)

3) 1929: Young Plan — More American loans, creates Bank for International Settlements (BIS)

4) 1929: Stock market crash cuts off loans from U.S., German economy collapses

5) 1930-1933: German industrialists fund Hitler (using American loan money)

6) 1933-1939: American corporations invest heavily in Nazi Germany (IBM, Ford, GM, Standard Oil)

7) Prescott Bush’s bank finances Nazi industrialists (assets seized 1942 under Trading with Enemy Act)

8) 1939-1945: War allows Germany to loot Eastern Europe (debt collection through conquest)

9) 1944: Bretton Woods establishes permanent U.S. financial dominance over postwar world

10) Result: Same banks that funded Hitler emerge controlling global finance through IMF/World Bank

This video blends World War II history, international banking records, and financial analysis to explain how the most devastating war in human history was actually a debt restructuring operation where 50 million people died to reset financial relationships established in World War I.

By the end, you’ll see that World War II wasn’t caused by Hitler’s ideology alone — it was engineered by unpaid World War I debts that American banks restructured to give them control over German finances. When loans from U.S. banks stopped in 1929, Hitler rose to power funded by German industrialists receiving American money. American corporations (IBM, Ford, GM, Standard Oil) rebuilt Nazi military capacity while maintaining profitable relationships. Prescott Bush’s bank financed Nazi industrialists. The Bank for International Settlements facilitated financial flows between Allied and Axis nations throughout the war. And the outcome was Bretton Woods — permanent American financial dominance where the dollar became the world’s reserve currency and Europe became permanently indebted to U.S. banks. The pattern from WW-I repeated exactly: create debt crisis, fund both sides, consolidate through war, emerge more powerful. And it’s still operating today.

Wars aren’t primarily fought over ideology, territory, or political disputes. They’re fought to establish and maintain the debt-based financial system that benefits creditors regardless of which side wins the military conflict. They create the financial conditions that make war more profitable than peace.

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