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We are living in revolutionary times, with voters rejecting business as usual in favor of the wrecking ball. The surprise 2016 Brexit referendum, in which United Kingdom voters rejected European Union membership, was followed by the surprise election of Donald Trump, in which US voters rejected establishment politics.

As the European Union threatens to break apart, Asia is consolidating through its massive Belt and Road Initiative and is attempting to dethrone the dollar. It is out with the old and in with the new everywhere. The time is ripe for change.

All of which makes this an auspicious time for a revolution against an international banking oligopoly that has long held the world captive. Bankers are the gatekeepers controlling who gets credit and on what terms, extracting massive profits that they can invest for their own speculative purposes, while people and governments are crippled by debts they cannot possibly repay. Fixing the banking problem requires more than regulation that merely tweaks an obsolete system. We need a radical overhaul of the monetary system itself, and that means rethinking what money is and how it enters the economy.

We need a new economic model, one designed to elicit the abundance of which the economy is capable. Implementing that sort of systemic change is not as radical as it sounds. Over the course of three centuries, US money has evolved from government-issued scrip in the American colonies to government-minted coins when the colonies became a nation, to nearly all privately issued money today. Dissatisfaction with an extractive and outdated banking system, along with revolutionary developments in software technology, have prompted a wave of proposals for redesigning the monetary system and the currencies it uses.

This book looks at how our banking system really works, the inherent contradictions in the model, and why regulation has not worked to fix them. It then explores some new developments and proposes a model that bypasses exploitation for private profit, turning banking into a public utility that serves the people and the economy.