Saving the Euro: A Plan for the Liquidation of Central Government Debt and the Financial Rehabilitation of the Eurozone

The key elements of the plan are: to (1) monetize the central governments' debts held by commercial banks; (2) raise commercial banks' minimum reserve requirements on deposits sufficient to prevent banks from increasing the money supply (up to 100% giving all deposits a 100% federal funds backing); (3) divide banks in deposit taking and into lending institutions; (4) disband deposit insurance corporations because deposit-taking banks cannot fail anymore from illiquidity. Austerity programs, crippling the economy, are both unnecessary and misconceived to rectify an anomaly, namely the government's inability (in fact ‘stupidity’) to fund itself by way of its constitutional money power, which lies idle and unused because it was given to private commercial banks for nothing in return. The book discusses the principles of money-creation, a rather mundane, banal and arbitrary way of conceiving and coining claims on resources. The worlds’ currencies including the US dollar, British pound and Euros are created by way of Luca Pacioli's (1494) double-entry bookkeeping by entities holding a banking license but nothing else, not even assets – namely € 11 trillion for the Eurozone. Only central bank money is legal tender, but it, too, is created by the ECB and the Eurozone's central banks in the same way: a "process so simple that the mind is repelled" (J.K. Galbraith, 1975. "Money. Whence It Came. Where It Went.").