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Anonymous Coward writes:
"http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/ 18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerity
Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, 'there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'
Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 25 2014, @05:11AM
It is power. Which is also based largely on faith.
Oh, you think the Iraq war disproves it? Well, there's the old quote from Carl Sandburg, "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come." OK, the soldiers did go there. But why? Because they had faith. Either faith in that it was the right thing to do, or faith in that the military system would have the power to punish them if they didn't go. And yes, the second thing, while true, is also based on faith: Namely the faith of those who do the punishing that they may, or even must, punish it.
All power is based on faith. If nobody believed Obama would have any power, Obama would not have any power, regardless of the results of the last elections, or of what the constitution says. People would just ignore him, and there would be little he could do about it.
And since money is ultimately a form of power, it is not really a surprise that money is also based on faith.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.