The Bottomline: Poverty doesn’t exist because money is scarce—it exists because powerful systems make it so. Prof. Jiang Xueqin argues that money is infinite, created out of nothing by banks and central banking systems, yet poverty persists because it serves a purpose: to maintain the illusion that money is valuable and to keep people working.
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Summary: If Money is Infinite, Why Do We Still Have Poverty?
In this lecture, Prof. Jiang Xueqin breaks down the history of money and why poverty continues to exist despite banks having the power to create money infinitely.
He begins with the origins of finance: merchants trading gold and using banks to store it safely. Receipts (contracts) replaced gold as a more convenient way to trade across borders. Eventually, banks realized they could lend more receipts than the gold they actually held, effectively creating money “out of nothing.” This laid the foundation for modern finance.
But this system carried risks—bank runs (when too many people demand gold at once), lending to kings who refused to repay, and wars that destroyed wealth. To protect themselves, banks formed cartels, creating what we now call central banking. These systems gave banks immense power: the ability to turn paper (or contracts) into money, and money into power.
So why does poverty exist if money is infinite? According to Jiang, it’s deliberate. Poverty maintains the illusion of scarcity. Without poverty, people would lose the incentive to work hard. Crises, recessions, and even wars serve to destroy wealth and reinforce the belief that money is valuable and scarce. In reality, money is infinite—it’s only our labor and productivity that hold real value.
The world, Jiang argues, is structured like a giant game—much like World of Warcraft. Players (workers) only grind because they believe resources are scarce. In truth, scarcity is manufactured to keep society running on the terms of the powerful.
