Prior to retirement, monetary activist and native New Yorker Mary Sue Soddy spent 31 years working for Wall Street firms in their mainframe IT departments. In 2000 she got her first job with a private commercial bank on Wall Street, which led her to an extensive investigation into issues related to money, credit, and banking.
Since 2011 Mary Sue has spoken publicly to groups from colleges, political parties, farmers, and more about our current monetary system and why it must be changed. She developed flow charts and power point presentations for many of these speaking engagements, some of which she has graciously shared with us.
If you live in or near New York and would like to attend one of Mary Sue's presentations or participate in her Skype group, you can email her at monetaryspeakersbureau1@gmail.com . You may also visit http://greensformonetaryreform.org/ which she co-authored.
Below is a sampling of her work.
First up is Mary Sue's "Financial System Flow Chart," which you can view by clicking here. Mary Sue's chart is useful because it illustrates one of the most pernicious effects of the current monetary system which allows our money supply to be expanded through debt by the banking system, this being the manner by which increasing amounts of "paper wealth" (representing claims on wealth) is created by the financial system at the expense of the real economy. The end result is a continually expanding "paper" wealth divide between the financial economy and the real (or productive) economy. Every economic downturn provides opportunities for yet more wealth to be extracted from the real economy and transferred to the financial economy via paper claims on wealth. The worst part is that these claims on wealth expand over time - this phenomenon being due to the exponential laws of increase, which is explained in part 2 of The Two Faces of Money, the closing chapters of Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy: The New Trifecta, and in our slide presentation "Money Owed and Owned" which you can view here.
The second example of Mary Sue's work is an abbreviated explanation of our current money creation system, or what Ken and I have called "Money Owed and Owned" in Part II of our book, which we compiled into our own, much longer slide presentation. Mary Sue's much shorter version of our current money creation system illustrates nicely, we think, the key reason why our current monetary system creates such instability and provides clues as to why it must eventually fail. You may view Mary Sue's abbreviated explanation by clicking here.
A third example of Mary Sue's work delves into the subject of Usury, which we opted to call "Unpayable Interest" in our book The Two Faces of Money for reasons explained in Part II of our book and which should become apparent once you finish Mary Sue's presentation. To access her presentation on usury, click here.
The last but perhaps most important example of Mary Sue's tireless work is a flow chart describing the kind of gentle, non-disruptive conversion process that can guide us away from the present unjust, unsustainable monetary system and toward the kind of monetary system only dreamed about by the Jeffersonians, but now carefully and clearly spelled out by the NEED Act HR2990. To view her HR2990 Transition Flowchart, click here.