Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-05-21-Speech-2-494-000"
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"en.20130521.40.2-494-000"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, I rise again, I am afraid, to make the same old hoary speech that I have been making here for several years. That is: it is my opinion that you do not really understand the concept of banking.
All the banks are broke. Bank Santander, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland: they are all broke. And why are they broke? It is not an act of God; it is not some sort of tsunami. They are broke because we have a system called fractional reserve banking, which means that banks can lend money that they do not actually have.
It is a criminal scandal and it has been going on for too long. To add to that problem you have moral hazard – a very significant moral hazard – from the political sphere, and most of the problems start in politics and central banks, which are part of the same political system.
We have counterfeiting, sometimes called quantitative easing, but counterfeiting by any other name – the artificial printing of money for which, if any ordinary person did it, they would be sent to prison for a very long time. Yet governments and central banks do it all the time. Central banks repress the amount of interest rates so we do not have the real cost of money, and yet we blame the retail banks for manipulating the LIBOR rate.
The sheer effrontery of this is quite astonishing. It is central banks that manipulate interest rates, Commissioner. Plus, underneath all this, we talk loosely – in a rather cavalier fashion, do we not – about deposit guarantees. So when banks go broke through their own incompetence and chicanery, the taxpayer picks up the tab. It is theft from the taxpayer. Until we start sending bankers – and I include central bankers and politicians – to prison for this outrage, it will continue."@en1
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