Michael Rowbotham

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Michael Rowbotham is a political and economic writer and commentator based in the UK, apparently with no formal training in either field.

He is best known for his two books, "The Grip of Death" and "Goodbye America", which both focus on what he believes to be inequities of fractional reserve banking and the economic distortions he believes to be inherent in the so-called debt-based monetary system which almost all nations utilise in the modern age.

His argument essentially is that fractional reserve banking amounts to monetary fraud, in that it creates money "out of nothing" but requires the payment of this money back to private banks at some point in the future.

Through the periodic expansion and contraction of the credit cycle, he alleges that the populace is systematically dispossessed of its real wealth, as banks increase and decrease the rate of supply of money in the economy.

Rowbotham believes that governments should "ease" the burdens on citizens that this causes by issuing their own "debt-free money" to smooth these cycles and alleviate the poverty and concentrations of wealth that he believes will inevitably arise through fractional reserve banking.

Many mainstream professional economists dismiss monetary reformers such as Rowbotham as amateur economists without formal training.[citation needed]

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