"Bonus and other charges and loans to you are as high as the companies can get. Some of them ask the highest usurious rates allowed by your different legal state rates, and other charges are added—as much as they can milk out of you. Note that:
"The civic agencies conducting the Dallas, Texas loan shark fight found that interest as high as 1,131.4%, over 3% per day, was charged gullible victims. The lowest interest rate was 120% per annum, and the average 271.68%."[25]
"Money circulation and interest are the most expensive operations in your moneyism. Mr. Norman Angell in his book Story of Money calls it 'Velocity Circulation.'[26] Money travels rapidly from hand to hand, from one pocketbook to another, from bank to bank, to borrower or drawer, in constant circulation.
"Has any one of your economists calculated how many times an active one-dollar multiplies itself in a year from the time it is first issued from the Treasury? How much does it earn in interest, compound interest, commissions, bonuses, dividends, and profit gain from constantly being shifted from person to person, bank to bank, and loan to loan? Or how many times does the actively circulated dollar change hands per day, month, or year? Your World Almanac, 1950, page 716, gives the deposits for the year 1949 as one hundred and fifty-five billion dollars, and on page 715, money in circulation for 1948 of $28,224,000,000. Every one of these dollars must have earned quite a lot in interest and must have multiplied itself many times on its rapid velocity circulation.
"How about your floating currency, in safe deposit vaults, pocketbooks, pockets, or hidden away underneath mattresses and in hundreds of nooks? How much of it is in the hands of foreign holders all over the world? And in their banks going through the same interest-earning and loaning-out processes?
"For your convenience in receiving, withdrawing, and checking out your money and for other services that your bank performs for you, you are being charged in many ways. The banks do not allow your money to lie idle. It must work and earn interest and other charges over and over.
"Other powers in your moneyism are your Stock Exchanges and Boards of Trade. Security trading has developed and perfected these Stock Exchanges to the point where they are the main financial markets in your United States as well as in all other financial centers of your world. They are the mediums to help keep securities at all times in a liquid and convertible state; they are the main avenues where buyers and sellers can always transact a purchase, or sale of stocks and bonds. The Boards of Trade are the mediums or markets for transacting purchases and sales of your staple commodities like wheat, corn, cotton, eggs, butter, coffee, and other staples.
"The New York Stock Exchange with its 1,375 broker members and members of your other exchanges and Boards of Trade in New York and other cities are the agencies of purchases and sales from client to client for cash or on margin for your stocks, bonds, and future staple agricultural commodities. These brokers also do a sort of banking business with their money and profits, and with money they borrow on call from banks at 1% and 2% interest and charge their customers 6%. They trade not only for their clients, but also among themselves.
"The next power in your moneyism is rent: Payment for the use and occupancy of property owned by another party as landlord. It is another form of interest on invested money. Rent is nothing else but a gain or interest on money. The rents paid for your homes, apartments, shops, offices, business houses, farms, and equipment, must be an enormous expense for you.
"Profit, another form of interest, is an expensive process of your money system. The Romans had a saying, Caveat Emptor, 'Let the buyer beware.' History shows that your industrial, and commercial business, and services have always been based on hard bargaining. The desire for more money gain was and is so deeply impregnated in you that it has blunted and broken down your ethical standards. You have always tried to get the most gain for the least value. Some sellers take advantage by overcharging, underweighing, substitutions. Others, through their open and secret control of combinations, and cartels create price fixing pools. Some manufacturers, retailers, contractors, and producers monopolize and create a scarcity and a demand. The consumer through necessity is compelled to purchase from them, or from cut-throat grey and black markets.