Occupy Money : Creating an Economy Where Everybody Wins

We can reclaim it as the sacred thing it is meant to be —. a means to facilitate the flow of gifts among human beings, a way to bridge the gift of one with the need of another. [...] The key interest components that give rise to the structural defect in our current monetary system are the liquidity premium and the inflation adjustment, which are rewards for the saver who gives his money to the bank to use. [...] The growth of the “real” economy,14 depending as it does on the availability of natural resources, diverges from monetary growth at the point where the demands of the financial economy can no longer be fulfilled. [...] The following figures refer to research results from Germany, which have been confirmed by the research done for the Norwegian translation.17 Take garbage col- lection fees: the interest portion of the price in Germany was 12% already in the 1980s. [...] In Germany alone in 2007, the sum redistributed as interest from the large majority to this small minority was in excess of 600 million euros every day.20 The mon- etary system all over the world is thus one of the main factors responsible for the growing divide between rich and poor and the growing polarization of our society — not just nationally, but globally.