28 Jul 2012

Which governments get ripped off the most by the banks?

I already had the figures for the level of interest charges on government debt for the 27 European Union countries (€5.6 trillion since 1995), and for the USA ($8.5 trillion since 1988). But what about all the other countries in the world? Which countries have been paying the highest proportion of their tax revenues to the banks in the form of interest charges?

Well, I have just compiled a table based on data from the World Bank which has figures for the percentage of government revenue that goes on paying interest charges for about 100 countries. Figures are missing for most of the other countries.  I've created a table with the numbers since 1990 (no numbers are available before) and again there are quite a few data points missing. There is also only partial information for 2010.

Nevertheless, the figures are impressive. I've ranked all 100 countries using the data for 2009. And Here they are.
The winner for 2009 was Jamaica who managed to pay 64.49% of all its revenue from taxes and so forth to the banks in interest charges, closely followed by the Lebanon (48.70%) and Pakistan (41.68%). Well done you three. Brazil provided a very generous 20.72% of its entire revenue to the banks, followed closely by Iceland who managed 20.65%. I note that Brazil probably holds the all-time record for generosity, since they managed to hand over 118% of all their revenue in interest charges in 1990.

Greece, with its 14.27% of government revenue going in interest charges only comes in at 15th place.

The USA, which generously gave 11.13% of all its revenue to the banks comes in 22nd position, the same value as Italy.

Germany, France and the UK are actually quite a long way down the table - they only managed to hand over between 5.31% and 5.5% of their total government revenue. I'm sure they could do better if they tried.

At the bottom line, you can see a number that the World Bank gives for the entire World. It was 5.33% for 2009 - showing the Germany, France and the UK appear to be very much at the average level.

The truly amazing thing about these numbers is that THERE IS NO GOOD REASON WHY GOVERNMENTS PAY INTEREST TO BANKS AT ALL! Virtually all the money that was lent to governments by the banks is money that was created out of thin air by the fractional reserve banking system. And when the commercial banks get to create the money, they get to charge us all interest on those loans.

This is completely unnecessary because Governments should be able to produce their own money supplies debt free. This whole system is insane. Will some politician please start to do something to fix this?

No comments:

Post a Comment