Every government on Earth is a billionaire or trillionaire bond debtor, not a rich as Midas money printer. Everybody knows that. In the Fifty Years Ago Today section of daily newspapers, headlines warn of alarming and increasing levels of government deficits and debts. Government-issued debt is front page news, everywhere, and has been for a very long time. Yet most people continue to believe the government issues the money.

Private commercial banks - not governments; not central banks - issue the money supply of nations by lending it into existence. Commercial banks create the money supply in the form of the deposit account money supply - spendable bank deposit account balances, in borrowers' bank deposit accounts. People, businesses and governments who borrow and spend money that is created by banks are "debtors" who owe the borrowed money back to their creditor banks.

Debtors pay the new deposit account balances to payees - by check, direct deposit, online banking, debit card, etc - within the central-commercial bank-operated payments system of debiting payer accounts and crediting payee accounts.

The new balances are debited out of the debtors' accounts and credited into the payees' accounts.

Debtors owe all the deposit account money balances back to their banks as payment of the debtors' loan account and bond debt balances.

But debtors can't pay their loan account and bond debts because payees have all the deposit account money; which we are using as our spendable, investible, savable "money supply".

The commercial banks' debt-based "repayable bank loan and bond purchase" money supply creation monopoly systematically creates unpayable debts.

Everybody needs money.

By offering to pay enough money, you can motivate people to build, produce, make, think, do, say, pretty much everything that is within human power to do. Money commands human action.

By offering to pay enough money, you can buy ownership of everything in the world that can be bought-sold for money. Pretty much everything - including the water you drink, the food you eat, and the ground you are standing on - has been converted to property that is bought-sold for money. Money buys ownership of the Earth.

The power to issue money is the power to decide who gets how much of the new money, for what purposes. In the present monetary system it is private banks serving private interests - not governments serving public interests - who exercise financial government by issuing the money supply of nations.

The result: private splendor and fabulous wealth for a few; public squalor, debt bondage, and immiserating austerity for everybody else.

This book describes how commercial banks create the spendable money supply; how central banks create the base money supply; and how the money-using people, businesses and governments of the world sink into ever-deeper pits of unpayable debt bondage.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Seeing how the banks' debt-based money monopoly works, exposes why it fails, and illuminates the technically simple way to fix it: add debt-free government-issued "helicopter money" into the banks' debt-based money supply.

Ben Franklin's colonial government did it. Abraham Lincoln's Civil War government did it. We can do it too.