About the Discussion
Fractional reserve banking is widely misunderstood, with one dimension usually overlooked: how it disrupts the social contract between citizens and their government. Through fractional reserve banking, commercial banks empowered by a central bank use accounting entries to conjure purchasing power from nothing, rather than productive work. Practiced without the discipline of the classical gold standard, this system severs the most fundamental constraint on government power — the natural limit on the resources it can spend. Drawing on decades of monetary research and the Austrian School tradition, James Turk will explain how this mechanism — institutionalised in Britain by the 1694 Bank of England Act and in America by the 1913 Federal Reserve Act — systematically debases the savings and earnings of ordinary citizens while financing government ambitions that honest money could never sustain. The result is not merely economic instability. It is the slow erosion of liberty itself.
About the Speaker
James Turk founded goldmoney.com in 2001 and is Lead Director of Goldmoney Inc. (Toronto Stock Exchange: XAU), a gold-based financial services company that administers and safeguards $2 billion of precious metals owned by its clients. James has specialised in international banking, finance, and investments throughout his business career, which began in 1969 at The Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase Bank). In 1983 he was appointed Manager of the Commodity Department of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, that country’s sovereign wealth fund. He is the author of several monographs and numerous articles on gold, money, and banking. His latest book is "Money and Liberty: In the Pursuit of Happiness and The Theory of Natural Money".
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