The Ecology of Money: Debt, Growth, and Sustainability

Modern economies must "grow" because money borrowed for investment can be repaid only by expanding production and consumption to meet the burden of usurious rates of interest.

The roots of this dynamic between debt and growth lay in the financial revolution of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Britain which established a new usurious monetary system.

For the first time in history credit was made widely available, but only on condition of an exponentially increasing debt ...