[xwolfi]

> Being a tech worker is not like banking, where you know you’re not doing good for society

I... I work in banking and I think I'm doing good for society :D It's weird how deep this belief banks are an artificial parasite that built itself on top of normal people became. If people don't like banks and think they're really bad, they could really try removing them... it's not like I'd disobey a law or anything that says we can't work in banks anymore...

[missedthecue]

I've long wished for a short film that would depict a world without big banks.

[cryptica]

Do you know how banking works?

Banks keep injecting new fiat money into the economy via loans and thus dilute everyone's salaries (buying power) by inflating asset prices artificially and thus make them increasingly out of reach for salary earners.

Loans are also used to facilitate thousands of different financial schemes to inflate stock prices, distort the markets and drive honest people into corporate servitude and ensure that they will never be able to afford a house or any passive-income asset.

At a global scale, it converts salary earners into slaves and asset owners to into masters. Intelligence and skill are entirely factored out of the equation, success is all a socially-oriented scheme of who is who and who knows who; not much different from Stalin's USSR.

The banking sector is the main reason why there is growing wealth inequality and why jobs are getting increasingly useless. It atrophies people's useful skills and replaces them with useless bureaucratic skills as they are forced into the highly inefficient, monopolistic corporate sector and are shielded from essential competitive pressure.

For many smart, ambitious, passionate, hard-working people, it has turned their lives into an absolute Kafkaesque hell.

Once you can see what the monetary system is doing, you cannot enjoy any work. You cannot enjoy well paid intellectual office work because you know that your job is useless and you're making your money on the back of financial exploitation. You also cannot enjoy real useful, meaningful work because you get paid less and you know you're being taken advantage of by those who do the useless work. You can either be a crooked winner or an honest loser.

The only meaningful job I could find was in blockchain space, but because financing is all driven by fiat monetary policy (driven by banks and governments who have no idea what the problems are), the industry is a complete centralized brainfuck.

The reality for many people is beyond what even Franz Kafka could have imagined.

[McScroogy]

I think you are confusing different types of banks. As for loans, think about your housing example: say it takes 30 years to earn enough money to buy a house. So without banks, people could only move into their own house after 30 years of work. Thanks to loans, they can move in now and pay it off within 30 years.

An even more extreme example, if you want to start a business. If you have to save for 30 years to get your starting capital, you might already be too old to start.

[cryptica]

This is incorrect because in the 1950s, the average price of a house was much cheaper relative to average salaries. This information can be found all over the net.

For example this article https://archive.curbed.com/2018/4/10/17219786/buying-a-house... states that:

> the average teacher’s salary in 1959 in the Pacific region was more than $5,200 annually (just shy of the national average of $5,306). At that time, the average home in California cost $12,788

A house back then only cost 2.5x a teacher's salary.

According to Google, the average teacher's salary in California today is $83K (and this seems extremely optimistic, some other sources claim it's $65K max), the average cost of a house in California is $440K.

That is 5.3x in the best possible case. Meaning that people today have to work more than twice as long to be able to earn the amount of money it takes to pay for a home... And that's not even counting the interest they need to pay on top which roughly doubles that amount yet again!

This asset inflation was caused by banks. By allowing people who could otherwise not afford to buy a house to buy one (thanks to loans), they artificially increased the demand for housing (which is somewhat limited in supply in urban centers where work is available); and in accordance with the law of supply and demand, this drove up the price of properties.

Loans allowed reckless people to participate as buyers in the marketplace and this punished savers and cautious individuals. Many of these reckless people, eyeballs-deep in debt which they couldn't afford, then turned to criminal or unethical activity to make money. Studies have shown that financial stress leads to increased levels of criminal activity. Debt causes financial stress.

Banks harm not only the people who are taking loans but also the people who are not taking loans because it turns assets which savers could have easily have been able to afford within a few years into assets which they can never afford by saving their salaries.

[McScroogy]

Banks don't fabricate a need for houses. You really have a much too simplistic view of things. Banks also can not create arbitrary amounts of money, it is regulated (and somebody has to trust their loans, too). Housing costs in California went up because it become a more attractive place to live (nice weather, good job opportunities, network effects of more people creating more culture). (Edit: in 1950, the population of California was 10 Million People, Now it is 40 Million people https://www.macrotrends.net/states/california/population )

Even without money, a house would cost something - you would have to get the building materials, the ground to build on, and the time and work to build it. This has nothing to do with banks. The banks just help you to pay the cost upfront.

There are other ways to do it, like the Amish coming together and building a house in a day. They still use a lot of work hours, distributed over many people. And it only works out if you are also Amish and "pay it forward": for now, you give other Amish "credit" by helping build their houses. When your turn comes to move into a house, you'll get that credit back because they help you build your house. That sounds great, but it doesn't provide the freedom banks do. If for some reason you don't want a house in an Amish community, you won't get your credit back. Islamic solutions have similar issues (credit is illegal, so they either borrow from non-muslims, or they also have a "pay it forward system" where every member of the community chips in when somebody wants to marry and build a home).

[cryptica]

>> Banks don't fabricate a need for houses

In many developed countries like Australia, there are many people who own 10+ houses which they bought using debt and rent out. These people are monopolizing ownership of real estate and forcing people who don't have preferential access to credit to rent from them instead of buying.

The injustice of the scheme comes from the fact that not everyone has equal access to credit from banks. It's an unjust qualitative social process which some people are locked out of.