Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

In America, the banking system since the days of Thomas Jefferson has shown a remarkable capacity to inspire paranoid fantasies: whether centering on Freemasons, or Elders of Zion, or the Secret Order of the Illuminati, or the Queen of England’s drug-money-laundering operations, or any of a thousand other secret conspiracies and cabals. It’s the main reason why it took so long for an American central bank to be established to begin with. In a way there’s nothing surprising here. The United States has always been dominated by a certain market populism, and the ability of banks to “create money out of nothing”—and even more, to prevent anyone else from doing so—has always been the bugaboo of market populists, since it directly contradicts the idea that markets are a simple expression of democratic equality.