Henry Ford; one of the 20th Century’s great industrialists: ‘It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be revolution before tomorrow morning.’

You’re going to understand now: Ellen Brown, one of America’s most informed economic experts says, ‘Now we are beginning to understand that our money is created, not by the government, but by banks. The only money government creates are coins, which compose less than one ten-thousandth of the money supply.’

Most money in circulation isn’t real money; it is high interest digital credit. Most people are shocked to learn that bank interest now makes up 40 per cent of the cost of everything they buy.

This was revealed by Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher. Bank interest is extracted at every stage of production of whatever we purchase. Like indirect taxation you don’t see it but it hurts the family budget. We would all be better off by 40 per cent if it were not for bank interest built into everything from building schools to visiting the hairdresser.

Before you purchase anything, it goes from producer to distributor to retailer. The process throughout is dependent on a score of support mechanisms; transport, labour, materials, factory, storage, marketing etc. Each of these support services borrows to finance their operation; bank interest is loaded. By the time you take it home 40 percent of what you pay goes to the banks in interest repayments through that chain.

For government funded projects, Kennedy estimates the average cost of bank interest to be 50 percent. Nationalise the banks, as did Adolf Hitler, and your $50 million public building costs just $25 million.

When government owned banks are interest free, such as in the booming economic powerhouse that China and India have become, all government projects cost 50 percent less. This happened in Kaddafi’s Libya but Western banking interests will not tolerate rebel states if they can rid themselves of them. They send the enforcers, NATO in to deal with them.

Each country’s citizens could enjoy twice the infrastructure essentials and goods they buy if their system was government and not private bank owned.