david32856757 (@david32856757)

https://x.com/Handre/status/2097227431253868869?s=20 The Bank of England was born in 1694 to fund a war. William III needed £1.2 million to fight Louis XIV, Parliament wouldn't raise the taxes, and a group of London merchants solved the problem by creating money from nothing. That arrangement has never really ended. The mechanics were straightforward. The merchants lent the Crown £1.2 million. In exchange, they received a royal charter permitting them to issue banknotes far in excess of their actual gold reserves. They created credit, lent it to the government, and charged 8% annual interest plus management fees. The government got its war. The bankers got a legally protected monopoly over English money. Naturally, inflation followed. Murray Rothbard traced this exact model across three centuries of central banking history. The pattern never changes: crisis, emergency, currency expansion, wealth transfer from savers to the politically connected. By 1720 the South Sea Company's collapse wiped out ordinary English investors who had trusted a financial system the Bank quietly backstopped and promoted. The Bank's founders, by contrast, had already cashed out. 1694 is not ancient history; the template is still running today. Every quantitative easing program, every emergency lending facility, every "temporary" credit expansion traces its intellectual and institutional lineage directly to Threadneedle Street in the reign of William III. The wars changed. The monarchs changed. The creditors collecting interest on government debt kept their seats.