An Economy of Faith and Trust - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com

The Federal Reserve, as a private corporation owned by our banks, creates money and loans it to the government and its member banks (and increasingly everyone else it would seem) at interest. This is not a conspiracy; it is the result of an act of Congress in 1913. At the origin of these loans the principle is created, but the interest required to pay back the loan is not created.

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You couldn’t print more money than you had gold. Economists would likely argue that this search for the interest to pay the loans is what drives growth.

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So the irrational behavior that you describe is the only behavior that the system would tolerate as everyone attempted to create more and more wealth to pay the interest and keep the system in balance. One might conclude that the system is irrational and not the people. I would suggest that when the environment is rational and, yes, based on real trust, people are more than happy to behave accordingly. Lurching into the idea that we are all somehow wacky and can’t be trusted is not an acceptable conclusion to draw in the absence of understanding economic construct that got us here in the first place.

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