A Miracle in Waiting
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In A Miracle in Waiting: Economics That Make Sense, Paul Hellyer pulls no punches. This book, first published in 1996 under the title Surviving the Global Financial Crisis: The Economics of Hope for Generation X, concludes that the monetarist counter-revolution has been one monumental flop. In its first two paragraphs it also prophetically forecast that the U.S. and other western economies were set on a collision course with disaster. The meltdown of 2008 was clearly predictable if anyone had been willing to listen. Now that the dreaded disaster has occurred, there is no conventional way out of the mess. U.S. and other western economies are so deeply in debt, and their current deficits are so high, that citizens are doomed to years of slow growth, higher taxes, and reduced government services. It is a dismal prospect, in the absence of radical change.
Who is to blame? The book insists that it is Wall Street and the monetary and banking system! It is a system that is both unstable and unsustainable. Stripped of all the snake oil and holy water that has been poured on it over the years, the banking system is nothing more than the perpetuation of a scam developed by the English goldsmiths more than three hundred years ago – a scam that has turned out to be the most profitable in the history of the world.
A Miracle in Waiting removes the veil from the mystery of money. It explains how nearly all money is simply virtual – computer entries by highly leveraged, privately-owned banks that create money out of thin air. Worse, the money is all created as debt. Debt on which interest has to be paid! Unfortunately no one creates the money with which to pay the interest so we have to keep on borrowing and going deeper and deeper into debt. It is a system that has been responsible for forty-five recessions and depressions over a period of 125 years and will continue to decimate the economy from time to time unless it is changed – dramatically and fundamentally.
Instead of allowing privately-owned banks to lend the same money up to twenty times, and collect interest on it each time, that ratio has to be reduced to something like three times. Even then it is a good deal. Ordinary citizens can’t lend the same money three times and collect interest on it each time, but anyone with a bank charter can.
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About the Book
In A Miracle in Waiting Paul Hellyer pulls no punches. First published in 1996 under the title Surviving the Global Financial Crisis: The Economics of Hope for Generation X Hellyer maintained that the monetarist counter-revolution has been one monumental flop and predicted in the first two paragraphs that a meltdown was inevitable. The entire book was prophetic and should be read in that context.
Hellyer argued that the federal deficit is nothing but a red herring that detracts from more fundamental issues such as the monetary system which, stripped of all the holy water that has been poured on it over the years, is nothing more than the perpetuation of a scam developed by the English goldsmiths more than three hundred years ago – a scam that has turned out to be the most profitable in history.
This book removes the veil from the mystery of money. Nearly all money is simply virtual – computer entries by highly leveraged privately-owned banks that create money out of thin air. Worse, they are allowed to lend their capital up to twenty times or more and collect interest on it each time. Still worse many of the loans are made to hedge funds and the financial industry that make huge profits without creating any new real wealth that is tangible and useful.
About the Author
Paul Hellyer was Canada’s youngest Member of Parliament when he was first elected in 1949 and the youngest cabinet minister appointed to Louis S. St. Laurent’s government eight years later. He subsequently held senior posts in the governments of Lester B. Pearson and Pierre E. Trudeau, who defeated him for the Liberal Party leadership in 1968. The following year, after achieving the rank of senior minister, later designated Deputy Prime Minister, Hellyer resigned from the Trudeau cabinet on a question of principle related to housing.
Although Hellyer is best known for the unification of the Canadian Armed Forces and his 1968 chairmanship of the Task Force on Housing and Urban Development, he has maintained a lifelong interest in macroeconomics. This led him to form Action Canada, a populist movement dedicated to the concepts of full employment and low inflation with an emphasis on quality of life issues.
A man of many interests, Hellyer’s ideas are not classroom abstractions. He was born and raised on a farm and his business experience includes manufacturing, retailing, construction, land development, tourism and publishing. He has also been active in community affairs including the arts and studied voice at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.
In his senior years Hellyer has become intrigued by the potential of new technology and the hope it brings for a smooth and rapid transition from an oil economy to one of more exotic fuels that he believes already exist. In order to finance the transition within a short time frame of, say, ten years, however, Hellyer claims it is essential to make the revolutionary changes in the banking system that he is proposing. He is devoting his entire energies in an all-out effort to help make the miracle happen.
Paul lives in Toronto with his wife, Sandra.