Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

1
2 The Financial Symptoms
And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat; and no man gave unto
him.
– Luke 15: 16–17
In Chapter 1 I looked at how our unhealthy money creation system operates and
discussed the consequences of this system in broad terms. In this chapter I go on to focus
in more detail on these consequences as they relate to the world situation and to New
Zealand – namely the widening gap between rich and poor, and the instability of
economies. In addition, I will look at the growing debt spiral in New Zealand, the flow of
New Zealand dollars overseas, and why we, as a nation, seem to have been kept in the
dark by banks, economists and even politicians.
Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor
The transfer of money from net borrowers to net lenders can be viewed both in terms of
individuals and of countries. The state of our system is such that those countries and
individuals that fall into debt end up having to borrow more and more to service their
debt, and the money they do manage to pay flows into the hands of the rich. To put this
into context, US$40 billion a year flows from developing countries to the developed
countries, and the developing world now spends US$13 on debt repayment for every
US$1 it receives in grants. 1 By 1998, the heavily indebted poor countries had international
debts of US$214 billion – a huge sum for them, but equal to only 41/2 months of western
military spending. 2 As a result of the debt crisis, 7 million children die each year. 3