Canada has a public central bank

[KinAlberta]

Interesting...

 

 

THE EXCHANGE WITH AMANDA LANG | May 7, 2015 | 18:40

 

The case against Bank of Canada

Rocco Galati is one of the country's leading lawyers with a taste for quixotic cases

 

http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Business/ID/2666703865/

[KinAlberta]

Seems to be a biased article butprovides some interesting history...

 

 

 

Liberate the Bank of Canada, Intrepid Think Tank Urges | The Tyee

Canadians have been fleeced for billions, but no traction in media for complex banking case.

By Murray Dobbin, 17 Apr 2015, TheTyee.ca

 

"The Bank of Canada was established as a private bank in 1935 under private ownership but in 1938, recognizing that money should be created in the public interest, the government amended the Bank Act and turned the Bank into a public institution. The Bank was almost immediately harnessed to finance not only Canada's war effort (we ranked fourth in production of allied war materiel) but a long list of infrastructure projects including the Trans-Canada highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and over the decades, hospitals and universities across the country.

 

It was mandated to lend not only to the federal government, but to provinces and municipalities as well with a limit of one-third of federal budget and one-quarter of a province's.

 

...

 

"But after nearly 40 years of this incredibly productive use of publicly created credit, unprecedented economic growth and increasing income equality, international finance got its chance to launch the free market ..."

 

"Freidman argued that stagflation was the direct result of irresponsible governments issuing too much money or borrowing recklessly from their central banks and ..."

 

"Canada -- that is, the Pierre Trudeau Liberals -- joined in the deliberations. The committee's solution was to encourage governments to borrow from private lenders and end the practice of borrowing interest-free from their own central banks. The rationale was thin from the start:  Central bank borrowing was and is no more inflationary than borrowing through the private banks. The only difference was ...

 

Soaring interest

 

In 1974, Canada immediately stopped borrowing from the Bank of Canada, launching the country on a deficit accumulation path that in 2012 saw interest payments to private lenders top $1 trillion. ..."

 

 

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/04/17/Liberate-Bank-of-Canada/