François de Siebenthal

Here are excerpts from a text written in 1995 by Mr. François de Siebenthal, from Lausanne, Switzerland, in charge of the Institute of Monetary Studies, economist, consul general of the Philippines, secretary general of the consular corps, and great friend of the “Michael” Journal. Moreover, Mr. de Siebenthal holds two other titles that distinguish him even more: he is a Catholic and the father of eight children:

Hunger in the world, population growth, wars, bad distribution of wealth, and the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, call for a neutral and objective reflexion. We admit that there will always be disparities, but the present situation calls for urgent solutions, and most of the problems are yet to receive any beginning of efficient realization, except for a few rare exceptions.

After years spent studying the recent demographic phenomena, and because of their relationship with the present banking crisis, I can affirm that the following facts are of the utmost importance, their seriousness having been anticipated by only a few civilizations in the past. The non-respect of natural laws inscribed in nature will cost a high price, and the more we wait, the higher the bill will be for us, our children, and our grandchildren.

The main facts

The present demographic crisis in Europe is the most serious in history. One of the worst situations is that of Italy, with an average fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman, even 0.8 in Northern Italy. Soon Spain will beat Italy in this demographic pit. In the near future, Europe will have to consecrate more than half of its Gross National Product to the elderly. The European States will be ruined because of the lack of young people. The European economy is already declining. In an absurd reaction against this, some voices are raised in the mass media to promote the active euthanasia of the elderly and disabled. (Laws along this line have already been voted in in Zurich and the Netherlands.)

Most of the Western Nations can no longer manage to pay the interest on their debts nor control them, to the detriment of primary tasks. For example, Italy is socially bankrupt because of its taxes. There is widespread corruption, a decline of the GNP, the failure of the school system, young people on drugs, and the ever-increasing cost of health care (more than 50 billion Swiss francs in Switzerland alone): all of these facts carry a heavier burden on society. National pensions plans are going bankrupt.

The productivity due to robots and computers could save us, but it will have to be redistributed in a just way.

The role of credit and its demographic consequences

Today's economy is based on loans. The public does not know that banks take huge liberties with the loans they make. If, for example, there are 100 dollars in deposits, the U.S. banking system lends a hundred times this 100 dollars, which makes $10,000, or a creation of $9,900 out of nothing. This creation of money is possible thanks to the trust in the banks and the law of large numbers, which says that it is never all of the depositors who will withdraw their savings at the same time. The globalization of the world economy aggravates this situation of the “miraculous” creation of money by the banks, which creates skyrocketting debts.

Since human nature has its limits, many people have begun to realize the limit of this system of the creation of money out of thin air, and its human cost, especially regarding unborn babies. There is a shortage of babies in every western nation, and the present crisis is due to this shortage. If all the depositors in the world wanted to withdraw their savings all at once, there would be a huge financial crisis. This is going to happen in developed nations because of the ageing of the population. We should be smart enough to prevent this fall, and prepare alternative solutions, by favoring families.

The role of interest rates

Through sudden raises of the interest rates and money creation, banks become gradually the owners of the real wealth of the nations, since all the fictitious money they lend has to return to them, plus the interest.

Families or small businesses borrow when the interest rates are low, and most often, are forced to pay back these loans when the rates are high. The consequence is the absence of children and the collapse of the economy.

In some nations, the real rate of interest is 7% per month, which amounts to 125% per year (shylocking), whereas the inflation rate is 9%. These rates are usurious, and are the plain representation of greed. And there are even worse systems.

The interest plays an even more pernicious role, when money is lent to developing nations. In this case, these loans are granted with advantageous rates, provided the creditor nations apply birth control policies (like China's one child policy, which brings about forced abortions and the massacres of girls). This is the beginning of a vicious circle, with debts causing the sacrifice of human persons to the modern Moloch. Human rights and freedoms are crushed by the economic system.

Taxes and the social budget

Nations have borrowed from private banks huge sums of money which, for the most part, is scriptural money created out of nothing. This money is based on the wealth of the whole nation. This creation of money out of thin air is legalized, but immoral, just like abortion which, even legalized, remains a crime in the sight of God. These huge sums of borrowed money bring about ever-increasing debt payments, which take an increasing part of government budgets, leaving less money for health, education and other services, creating unemployment, cuts, stress, quarrels, divorces, downsizing, restructuration plans, etc.

The solution is obvious: the State must create its own money, interest free. Savage capitalism eats up its own children, but so slowly that some people actually get used to it.

Interest and usury condemned

Cardinal Ratzinger recently said that there are over 40 million (declared) abortions per year in the world. This means that if one counts the abortions through coils and abortive pills (undeclared), for the last ten years, there have been one billion human beings killed, not to mention those who were not conceived because of the prevailing contraception mentality. This slaughter is the worst of history. What are the causes?

In the Old Testament, God and the Church have always condemned any interest on the loan of money as usury, and not just high rates of interest, especially through the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. (See also Josue 3:15 and 4:18, Chronicles 12:15, Isaias 8:7 and 24:2, Daniel 8:16, Exodus 22;25, Nehemias 5:5, Leviticus 25:36, Psalms 15:5, Jeremias 15:10, Ezechiel 18:8, Proverbs, and in the New Testament, Matthew 25:27 and Luke 19:23.) In the Lord's Prayer (the “Our Father”), which Christians recite every day, the Latin version uses the words “debita nostra” (reported in Matthew 6:12: “forgive us our debts”), which has also to be understood in the literal sense, as taught by the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

There is no difference between interest and usury, for it is the very principle of charging interest on time that is pernicious. Besides, it is obvious that the higher the interest, the more harmful it is. The condemnations of greed by Pope Pius II are very harsh: “heretical theories that are appaling and abominable.”

The penalty for this type of crime is the same as for all those who take part in an abortion: excommunication. Popes Paul II, Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum also strongly condemned interest.

The encyclical Vix Pervenit

On November 1, 1745, Pope Benedict XIV issued the encyclical letter <M>Vix Pervenit, addressed to the Bishops of Italy, about contracts, and in which usury, or money-lending at interest, is clearly condemned. On July 29, 1836, Pope Gregory XVI extended this encyclical to the whole Church. It says:

“The kind of sin called usury, which lies in the loan, consists in the fact that someone, using as an excuse the loan itself — which by nature requires one to give back only as much as one has received — demands to receive more than is due to him, and consequently maintains that, besides the capital, a profit is due to him, because of the loan itself. It is for this reason that any profit of this kind that exceeds the capital is illicit and usurious.

“And in order not to bring upon oneself this infamous note, it would be useless to say that this profit is not excessive but moderate; that it is not large, but small... For the object of the law of lending is necessarily the equality between what is lent and what is given back... Consequently, if someone receives more than he lent, he is bound in commutative justice to restitution...”

The interest in one of the factors that triggers inflation, and not the opposite. Pope John Paul II's encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor reminds us that there are intrinsic evils and absolute sins. To ignore them may suppress personal sin (according to St. Thomas Aquinas, the borrower commits no sin), but society pays for this misdeed, even at the cost of its own disappearance, and those who favor the ignorance of the sin of usury are responsible for endangering the survival of the population.

What comforts us, however, is that this condemnation of usury is repeated in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, at the end of the comments on the Seventh Commandment.

Impossible contracts are null

It is impossible to pay back interest-bearing loans, either they are compound or not. Take the following example: Croesus borrows a principal of 100 at the birth of Christ. If one applies an interest rate of 10%, the sum to be paid back in the year 2000 is (100 x 1,12000), or six times ten to the power of eighty-four, or a number with 84 zeros, which simply blows the mind... It would represent 10 to the power of 68 houses for every person on earth. It is obvious that it is impossible to respect such a contract.

A French mathematician, M. Levy, showed that, after a while, all the wealth in the world will be owned by the banks, through the simple application of mathematical rules.

Money is a human creation which, if the interest is admitted, begets more money. This money is not only a sign; it really causes deaths and injuries, in every area. It is more prudent to forbid any new organism that is self-reproducing (like viruses, the development of new species in vitro, etc.), including abstract concepts like money that have consequences in real life. The common good called “money” is in the hands of people without scruples. It is a duty for society to take back control over the issuance of money.

It is said that everything has a cost, and so the interest would be the cost of money. However, money is not a thing, a commodity, but a sign, a common good that belongs to all, just like water or air. It is precisely the dream of the greedy to make people pay for the air and water they consume. Money is a universal, and to leave its creation into the hands of the supporters of death is a crime.

Today, money is more and more invested in labor-saving technology rather than in creating jobs. The interest causes the repayment of loans to the banks to go before the wages of workers, and to prefer to lay off these workers instead of paying them. This is how human rights work today: money, a sign or abstraction, comes before the human person, a reality. Where is the dignity of the fathers of families, who are not bankers? Besides, bankers do not have large families, for money comes even before their own children.

Abortion: a sacrifice to Moloch

This swindle of the “creation” of money by the banks, and the widespread use of interest on the loan of money, favor economic crises and abortion when loans have to be paid back. In Switzerland, the first reason given by women who had an abortion is the repayment of loans, contracted by themselves or their families. We know that there are other reasons (hedonism, selfishness, fashions, social pressure, frivolity, ignorance, etc.), but to shut up our eyes and do nothing against one of the causes is neither scientific nor Christian. To let the people who earn money without working (by collecting the interest on their loans) crush the poor who are defenseless, is ridiculous. However, to defend the poor is far from being ridiculous.

History of ancient Egypt shows the close link between mortgage rates and the decline, even disappearance, of the population. (See the analysis of Belgian historian Pirenne on the 20% rates that caused the deadly exposition of children to the sun.)

The new Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains the condemnation of interest and its harmful role at the end of the comments on the 7th Commandment, which forbids to steal. As lay people, we must make this condemnation understood by all, for it is a liberation for the poor; moreover, an economy based on investment in real developments and improvements (and not simply hoarding money through the gimmick of the interest rates), is much more dynamic, and favors a reduction of prices, while rewarding those who take risks in investing in new developments.

Justice is necessary to achieve holiness. It is too easy to wash one's hands of the matter by saying that one understands nothing in economics. Economics is not so complicated, especially when one takes the trouble to humbly study solutions that are finally more practical than those who manipulate public opinion want to make you believe.

For many centuries, the Church has been suffering, because her sons are prisoners of a huge disinformation campaign. Maurice Allais, 1988 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, wrote that the present international financial system is the biggest disinformation system in human history. The sons of darkness control this disinformation and crush the weak, often with the help of the ignorant of good faith. Let us unmask them, to give some fresh air amidst this general atmosphere of corruption.

What to do?

Why not react now? The human race has survived for centuries without this so-called creation of money at interest by banks, and even with no banks at all. So, why not abandon these inhuman and outrageous interest rates that know no limits and steal time from us as educators of our children? The interest is time stolen from fathers and mothers.

Nations spend billions for research in physics. Let us spend a few million to study more carefully the social doctrine of the Church and the practical solutions it entails in favor of a sound economy. Let us create a center of studies and formation for social action.

Let us make the promise made to Abraham possible. The earth is huge and generous, as well as the seas. All the serious experts, after long studies (cf. Julius Simon), admit that our planet can feed all the population to come in the future. In fact, those who believe that the earth is overpopulated neither believe in God nor in His promise. Let us learn again to utter this greeting of the sons of Abraham: pax, peace, shalom, salam... This peace, as Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, will come on earth only if abortions are stopped, and if we accept those who are different, the disabled.

A salary for housewives

Housewives, mothers who stay at home, work just as hard as those who are hired in the workforce. They deserve a real salary, which will create more job opportunities, boost consumption and the economy, and allow the Gross National Product to double. It was possible to finance two world wars, so there is no reason why it would not be possible to finance this wage to housewives. In Canada, it is estimated that the work of housewives represents 46% of the GNP. So it is simple justice, as Pope John Paul II said, to reward them with a salary.

Is is true that:

The less the children in a family, the less vocations to sharing and generosity?

The best school to teach the principle of subsidiarity is a large family?

The main flaw in world politics is this generosity in the existence of intermediary bodies?

The contraception mentality is directly aimed against large families?

The system of interest directly attacks the family?

The interest is a theft of time and children?

The creation of money through interest is a lie and a swindle, a theft to the detriment of future generations (unborn children)?

Can any person of good will take part in this slaughter, by action or omission? Can we stand up and stop this mechanism?

Is the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on usury still valid today? Can the time that belongs to God be stolen? This is a good explanation for stress.

Any human invention that has no limits is monstrous; the system of interest rates has no limits. Moreover, a means of exchange, or unit of measurement, cannot multiply by itself. If money breeds more money today, it is at the expense of our own children. This is criminal!

It is easy to show that the present crisis is in large part due to this search for zero population growth, based on flawed facts and analysis. What a mistake it is to think that the earth cannot support all of the present population, whereas Europe alone could feed many times the world's population, not to mention the resources of the oceans that are barely developed.

For those who say: “We will have to change the way our deposits are managed in banks,” I reply: “This is true, and you will be rewarded a hundredfold, for a dynamic economy will benefit all, unless your selfishness make you sad to see others happy. How sad it would be it you were in such a situation, especially since you risk eternal damnation.

All this work is done with the hope that a few simple economic concepts can be explained for the good of the poor, the unborn, especially in Third-World countries. Don't believe those who complicate everything to keep their control over the economy, for billions of human beings will never be born because of this control. True love cannot accept interest, but it can accept just profit. Let us entrust the future of mankind to the family, with mothers having for their model, Mary.

This article was published in the March-April, 2004 issue of “Michael”.