Don’t trust banks
Further to the letter from John R Wright (15 August), the banks have not been helping people in the North of Scotland. In September we are going to have four branches of the Bank of Scotland in Sutherland closed down for good – Lairg on 18 September, Bonar on 19 September and Dornoch on 21 September. Helmsdale also closes at the same time.
The bank gives low footfall due to internet banking as the reason, but many
areas in Sutherland cannot get a decent internet speed. They pay for 24mb and only get 0.3mb if they are lucky.
The North Coast 500 will see some seven banks closed en route from Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland and Clydesdale Bank. In addition, all attached ATMS will also go.
MICHAEL BAIRD Dornoch Road, Bonar Bridge I would like to add to John Wright’s excellent letter on the wholesale slaughter of the branch network of the high street banks. It was recognised in Athens and Sparta ten centuries BC that one of the most vital prerogatives of the State was the sole right to issue money. In 2014, the total money supply was £2.1 trillion – but 97 per cent of this had been created out of nothing by the banks as loans; only 3 per cent, £62 billion, had been issued as notes and coins by the Bank of England. It is a myth that banks lend only what they have in their vaults – they actually have a licence to create money out of nothing.
In RG Hawtrey’s article on Money in the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica we are told ‘’Banks lend by creating credit; they create the means of payment out of nothing’’. Almost without knowing it, we have transferred huge, unaccountable power to the banks. Most of the money supply is controlled by 56 unelected individuals – the directors of the five major banks.
We are now in the final stage of the total usurpation of the creation and management of money by the banks and card companies via the digitalisation of the entire financial system and the disappearance of the banks from the highstreet.
Very soon plastic cards will be the sole means of paying for all goods and services; and when that day dawns the entire financial system will be in the hands of those few private banks. More insidiously, those same banks already have the power to deny you a card and monitor your every purchase when you use one.
DOUG CLARK Muir Wood Grove Currie, Midlothian