A very good day at Kla.TV from our interview studio in Berlin.
I would like to welcome Mr. Bernd Udo Hack today.
Mr. Hack, hello, greetings.
Thank you for the invitation.
With pleasure.
Mr. Hack, you have been retired for around 20 years.
Nevertheless, at your advanced age of almost 84, you have tackled
such an unusual and difficult topic as the monetary system.
How did this come about?
Yes, I mean, every thinking citizen has come across the question of money at some point in their life.
You ask yourself, this is so important in life, in business, in finance.
And why do we know so little? Nobody really knows their way around.
And that made me...
That made me think about it from time to time.
But I have not found anything useful in the literature.
I got some very important food for thought from Didi Hallervorden, or Dieter Hallervorden,
who in a sketch about 40 years ago once dealt with the subject of wanting
to visit his money in the bank.
And then he goes there and at the counter and I come here and want to have a look at my money.
Where is my money?
And his sketch partner on the other side is a little confused by this naive and stupid question:
Where is it? Oh, in the account.
What is it doing on the account?
It works.
Oh, that was nice.
How many hours a day does it have to work?
So it went on and on. It was cringe-worthy, it was hilarious.
But basically, people had a good time.
But basically I realized that something was wrong, it couldn't be.
And then that made me think a bit and then I realized that we have had
this money for 6,000 years, it
has gone through a terrible development, but nobody notices.
Today we want to talk about the serious consequences of the shortcomings of the monetary
system and the three splinters of thought you have on this.
In your 2018 book, you
come to surprising conclusions and talk about errors in thinking and a centuries-old mass fraud
against real working people, including entrepreneurs, with regard to the monetary system.
How do you justify this?
I have done something that the experts, the economists who are responsible
for this, have not done for centuries: basic research.
And I also incorporated the laws of nature, which the others don't do either,
and that puts me right on the edge of spirituality.
Because the basic laws come from the Creator.
No parliament was involved in this, God gave it to us.
And we have to make do with that.
And indeed, I am of the opinion, and I justify this in detail, that
our current monetary system is an
unlawful system of exploitation.
And it is the people who are actually working who are exploited.
This also includes entrepreneurs and freelancers.
An entrepreneur probably works more than anyone else.
Think of the master carpenter who starts his own business.
He doesn't finish work at 6 p.m., but then it starts like this, bookkeeping
and new orders and so on and so forth.
And this fraud is taking place, to the
advantage of the money capitalists.
And they do what is so beautifully called, they make their money work.
But that's a joke, it's a nice catchy metaphor, a splinter of thought.
Or a beautiful formulation.
But in reality, that doesn't work at all.
No one has ever seen money work.
Me neither yet.
And then I thought about it in more detail and realized
that my fellow experts
are actually ignoring one fact that every child knows.
Namely the limited shelf life of real things.
Everything spoils.
Food goes particularly quickly, as you can see with, I know, meat in the summer,
and that means that money also suffers, has to suffer.
After all, money is in itself a voucher for an outstanding service in return.
And the consideration is available on the market.
You have self-sufficiency, you can feed yourself in a group that works together.
But it's so hard to find a swap partner.
And that means time passes and the consideration is not immediately on the table.
I can't even find the right man who
offers what I need and who wants what I can offer.
It's a two-way street. And also on simultaneity.
So, long story short, money
cannot be stable in value as the prevailing opinion demands.
The stable value is a store of value, they say.
And then, of course, it is particularly valuable, because then it is almost like gold.
Gold is one of the few materials that does not
rust or spoil.
That's why it's so popular.
Then comes the second point in the prevailing opinion.
Money can work we have already said; does not work.
And who issues the money,
usually the central bank.
Some people would like to issue this from a private bank, which
is completely wrong,
because money is a common good.
This is supposed to serve the whole group and not some banker or
rich people to maximize their profits.
It is completely wrong,
it is part of our economic order and not an object of speculation, as it is now being handled.
The largest and most powerful bank in the world is the FED, the Federal Reserve in the USA,
and that is a private bank.
Very, very bad.
And then there is another
trick
that works into the hands of these capitalists.
If the money is released, then you have to pay interest. This is because the central bank demands the so-called discount rate.
And the central bank only gives the money to the commercial banks, not to private
individuals. Not even to the government.
If they want that, then they have to pay a discount.
At the moment this is zero, for other reasons.
But because of this catastrophe that is coming our way, we don't need to be here at all for the swap.
This is because neither the seller nor the buyer are financially
distressed enough to need a loan.
You need a means of finding the right exchange partner.
That's what the money is all about.
This is an exchange aid, a medium of exchange.
We are distributing here, not producing or even using.
So much for this question.
Yes, you explained that very, very well in your book
and the Kla.TV team has summarized and illustrated your thoughts in a short film,
which we can now watch.
The current error in thinking about money
Money is indisputably a medium of exchange that is intended to facilitate and accelerate the exchange
of goods between citizens in an economy based on the division of labor.
The goods and services are already available on the market or can
be called up.
They are just waiting to find the right buyer.
The more numerous the group working together, the
more difficult it was to find a suitable exchange partner.
This is because the seller must offer the goods that the seller needs and vice versa.
This two-way relationship required reciprocity between the seller and the acquirer,
which had obviously become difficult in the
barter or in-kind economy;
and also simultaneity.
The interposition of money turned the two-way relationship into a three-way relationship,
thus abolishing the requirement of reciprocity and greatly simplifying
and accelerating the exchange process.
Instead of the desired real consideration, the seller received a voucher, which he used
a few days later to pay for the consideration that he was
able to acquire from a third party.
This also relaxed the requirement for simultaneity and made it
more flexible in this respect.
But there is more:
The interposition of money does not increase the quantity of goods available on the market.
Money is an ingenious invention in itself because it is simple.
But in its current form it has a major flaw:
It proclaims and strives for monetary stability, i.e.
it treats money as a store of value.
This is necessarily ruled out.
This is because the value of money lies in its purchasing
power, which depends on the quantity and quality of the goods available on the
market of the economy in question.
The amount of goods and money in the respective cycles should be kept as balanced as possible so that prices
remain more or less the same and make it easier for citizens to plan and do business.
However, since real goods - with the exception
of gold - gradually lose their material and utility
value over time through natural decay - some faster,
others slower - the amount of money
in circulation must also be reduced to the same extent in order to maintain
the - mobile - equilibrium.
Every child knows, for example, that food has a limited shelf life.
- So money cannot have a stable value.
The opposite assumption resembles the age-old
dream of alchemists to produce gold artificially from lead or another metal.
A very nice illustration.
Does this phenomenon also result in the creeping inflation we are experiencing?
Yes, absolutely!
Very simple to explain:
The monetary system tries to
maintain a balance between the quantity of goods on the one hand and
the money supply on the other.
And if the amount of goods decreases as a result of spoilage, the ongoing
spoilage - i.e. the amount of money decreases
- but the amount of money remains the same, then I have
too much money and too few goods on the market.
And that is called inflation.
That is clearly the
cause.
There are other causes.
They occur when the government or whoever, or even private banks recently,
increase the money supply insanely.
That's what they're doing every month now, a few million into the cycle.
Then that would also increase inflation to infinity.
But we don't notice anything of this at the moment,
because these amounts of money, formerly from Draghi
and now from Christine Lagarde -
both from the banking sector and from politics, respectively
- have also been criminal, as Ernst Wolf has proven.
Today they are people of honor, of course.
The money that is pumped into it has no effect at all
on our market, where we buy our food, i.e. the consumer goods market.
They only need this for their games, speculation and to collect
millions, billions and sometimes more.
And interest rates have no such effect as I have described with this spoilage effect.
Wasn't it actually the case that Luther demanded quite draconian
punishments for taking interest here, like wheels
or something like that, I've heard?
Yes, that's right.
I heard this from Professor Bernd Senf, who works
along the same lines as I do, the first well-known
economics professor to work in the direction
of monetary reform.
Well, interest was generally forbidden back then, ever
since Moses, and the Pope too - all in favor of banning interest.
That was only abolished by the Church, by the Pope at the beginning of 1908 or when.
He only proclaimed this as part of his program of faith.
I noticed four years ago, when the 500th
anniversary of the proclamation of the theses
by a church in Wittenberg - you know Wittenberg,
world-famous - was celebrated, a lot
was written and said about Luther, in books
and talk shows.
I had a look, followed a few.
No one has mentioned that Luther was against interest.
Ban on interest!
Of course,
this doesn't suit the bankers - our banksters,
as we should say - at all,
and even less so high finance.
Was totally hushed up.
But I wanted to say something more general about
money credit.
Cash credit presupposes that I have a surplus.
I have to have something that I don't need myself.
Yes.
If I look at it in real terms, then these are real goods.
The cattle farmer has 100 kilos of beef left over.
Then he can't say, now I have a surplus, how nice.
Rather, he has a problem.
After all, he now has to deal with the corruption.
It's starting to rot.
As I said, and that brings him a loss.
The same must apply to cash credit, hence
the discount.
Not with what I showed earlier, if
I lose goods on one side and have too much money,
I have to make deductions.
So that this comes back into a flexible balance.
This balance is not a fixed state, nothing is
stable, it is unstable, comparable
to a circus performer on the tightrope - he
has to constantly work on his balancing pole so that he
doesn't fall off.
That's all part of it.
and the corruption is completely ignored
by the prevailing opinion,
although it is as obvious as anything.
There are also other interest advantages:
If the interest requirement is abolished,
then the excessive inflow of money to the rich will also fall.
And I have to say that if you ban interest, you
also have to ban dividends, because it's
basically the same thing.
It is a legal difference in form, but
in principle it always means:
You let the others work for you
And collects without performance.
That is not possible.
Interviewer: Well, you're actually doing it the wrong way round with interest rates.
Instead of money becoming worth less,
it becomes worth more with interest.
That just ruins the whole thing, I think.
Can you explain the interest rate in more detail?
It is always said
that interest must be extracted from existing money.
That's not quite right either, in my opinion.
Because if I take out a loan without interest,
then I have to pay it back.
If I work with interest, I also have to pay it back,
so I have to earn more.
And if I generate more, then
I have to put new money back into the cycle.
After all, we don't want to have deflation, that
there is too little money.
We have to replenish the money, which
the sovereign does through his state spending -
we would say the government does that, it gets
the money from the central bank.
But without interest
These damned interest rates have no justification at all.
On the contrary, they only benefit the banks.
and they gag us with it, the rest of the citizens.
Once again, interest rates are off in every respect.
Very, very harmful.
Likewise dividends, which is almost the same thing.
This means that corporations are also prohibited.
That should be banned.
They weren't even allowed in the past.
There were times when there was a lot of doubt
- even in the USA. Some of them were idealistic.
But the moneybags, particularly influenced by London,
where Nathan Rothschild was a leading figure,
had a great influence.
Always with bribes and other things.
Very brief words on this.
If you don't have interest, then we all have more time.
Then time is no longer money.
But haste makes perfect.
Very nice, thank you.
Thank you, that is of course very valuable and informative.
Now that
you have added three splinters of thought to your comments,
can you just explain them to us?
Yes, with pleasure.
The thought fragments are the quintessence of the booklet.
The consequences of this
are that proof is provided that, according
to the laws of nature, such
a monetary system should not exist at all, which causes
constant growth and, above
all, a constant increase in income for a very
few.
With the consequence of social damage and unspeakable misery.
This would not be possible with a natural monetary system.
In the second sliver, I just explain that
the money that is too much on one side is missing
on the other: so when the
average citizen or the majority of people say: We need better
roads or we need better schools, kindergartens, etc., that
people always say:
We have no money!
That's a killer argument
and that's it - end of event!
And thirdly, I say what those
who profit from the monetary system are doing, what
nonsense they are doing with it and how they are
harassing humanity and causing it the
greatest hardship, as we are currently
seeing here.
When I say there's a lot of money,
I'm just saying, for the top earners or income earners
among the investment bankers, there's 3.5 billion
dollars a year in there.
And that means 10 million US dollars per calendar day.
It's an unimaginable amount
of money, but it shows the
incredible masses that are
hoarded together on the other side.
And if the rich now also invest their money in funds, in investment funds,
the largest of which is currently Black Rock, then trillions of US dollars will very quickly
accumulate, giving them incredible power.
Interviewer: Yes, and this power, that's the bad thing, is
then used to pay for wars and the like.
Hack: Yes, of course, you can use it to leverage all the exchanges.
And they call it a neoliberal economic
order, which is also a terrible lie.
Because these bankers are speculating and credit always plays
a major role here, which we don't need to the
extent that we do, and it is speculation that then creates even more money.
And then even more money is pumped
in and that is growth
without end, which is
impossible on a finite earth anyway.
But this also leads to them crashing at some point.
When the credit bubbles burst, they will need even more money.
And at some point this will no longer work,
the bubble will burst and that will be the end of it.
Interviewer: And then you need war. Hack:
Well, war is always good occupational therapy.
Incidentally, Charlie Chaplin also noted this 100 years ago in
the movie: The Kid - a silent movie, it's well known.
I've still seen it, many people know it too.
He sends out his foundling, the six-year-old boy,
who smashes the windows with stones.
And Charlie Chaplin arrives five minutes later as a glazier
to fix it and collect money.
So, you break it in order to repair it.
A staged war to rebuild afterwards, and the industry
and the bankers always make money.
They also finance the war.
Always both sides.
This is a recognized method.
So that's where this huge misery that
we find on earth today comes from.
And that's why we, as ordinary people, have
to be kept under constant pressure.
Always pressure, pressure, pressure, so that we don't even get to think.
Certainly not the leisure to think more deeply.
No. The monetary system must be reformed.
And now a word about the reform.
It's quite simple,
if you like, democratic:
We need a majority that says we have to change all this.
Interviewer: It is quite astonishing and significant
that no open discourse on the monetary
system is obviously permitted or desired.
And that's why your comments are so, so
valuable as a counter-voice.
Let's hope that many, many people will hear and take on board your thoughts
and that a system that was previously thought to have
no alternative will really be called into question.
Thank you very much for the interview.
And thank you for your commitment. All the best and see you soon.
I say, please. You are welcome.
Yes, thank you.