Keynesian Economics: Wolves Among Sheep

Stand in any modern city, and you can feel it: overbuilt, underloved, engineered for the quarter, not for the century. Tower cranes, boxy apartments, disposable retail, and endless traffic litter the landscape. Why is it like this? Why can’t young people afford houses anymore, and why does inflation devour wages faster than paychecks can grow? It’s not just bad tastes or bad incentives — it’s bad worship.

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We have built altars to mammon and sacrificed our children upon them through fractional reserve banking, monetary expansion, and economic policies that favour the wealthy while impoverishing the young.

The Keynesian money regime that rewards optics now and hands the bill to the young later isn’t merely failed policy — it’s a principality — a demonic intelligence operating through economic structures, disguised as technical expertise. When Scripture warns that “the desire of money is the root of all evils” (1 Timothy 6:10), it’s not moralising about greed. It’s identifying a spiritual power that enslaves nations, devours generations, and masquerades as prosperity.

This essay names the game: how policy punishes savers, rewards speculators, and hollows out the middle class. But more than that, it exposes the spiritual architecture beneath the spreadsheets — how the principality of mammon operates through fractional-reserve fraud, perverts divine justice through usury, and demands the perpetual sacrifice of the young to sustain the illusion of wealth.

Cheap money builds quickly. It rarely builds beautifully. And it never builds without taking blood.

The Keynesian Promise — and Its Politics

Across the West, the default creed is Keynesian: macro ‘management’ by stimulus in bad times, restraint in the good. In practice, restraint never arrives. Politicians addicted to applause and central bankers fearful of downturns deliver permanent stimulus and artificially cheap credit. Paper wealth inflates while productive work and patient saving are devalued. Starter homes? A relic. Rent and grocery bills chew through paychecks while the ladder toward ownership is pulled up one rung at a time. The best many can afford is sharing a poorly constructed flat with six other people. This isn’t policy failure — it’s the principality’s strategy: keep the young dispersed, unstable, and unable to form households of resistance.

How New Money Moves: The Cantillon Effect

Fresh liquidity doesn’t rain equally on everyone. It hits financial balance sheets first — dealers, large lenders, asset managers — then trickles downward. Early recipients buy assets at yesterday’s prices, late recipients pay today’s. That asymmetry — observed since the 18th century — lit up in 2020-2021. Broad money (M2) spiked while the real economy was throttled. Asset prices surged ahead of the goods supply. You can see the kink in the M2 with your own eyes.

The fiscal channel told the same story: three rounds of Economic Impact Payments ($1,200, $600, and $1,400 per eligible adult, with add-ons for children) pushed cash into household accounts even as output sagged. The public sees a government providing essential support services to keep asset prices and the Gross Domestic Product High. Yet, the adverse effects came later in the form of inflation and unprecedented price pressure on basic goods and services.

This isn’t just economic inefficiency — it’s liturgical inversion. In God’s economy, the last are first (Matthew 20:16). In mammon’s economy, those closest to the money printer feast while those furthest from it starve. The Cantillon Effect is the principality’s communion: first, the priests of finance receive the body (new credit), then the congregation receives the diluted blood (inflation). The early recipients are mammon’s priesthood — investment banks, hedge funds, private equity — officiating over a eucharist of extraction.

Why Inflation Hurts Young People More

Anyone who works a regular job and has paid rent or groceries over the past fifteen years knows that their salaries are not keeping up with the price increases in housing, food, and transportation. Many are finding it harder to make ends meet, and their fixed costs and necessities are devouring most of their paycheck.

Keynesian policy architecture systematically favours those already holding assets — those who design such policies rarely bear the downstream costs of monetary expansion that fall hardest on renters, young families, and wage earners. Therefore, they promote fiscal policies that favour property speculation and the stock market over affordable housing. As a result, there is a growing mismatch between wage growth and increasing fixed costs. The younger generations are hit hardest by this effect and are poorer than their parents and grandparents as a result.

The money our youth is missing has been given away to the wealthiest sector of society through low-interest loans. In turn, they gambled and wasted these funds on consumption and extravagant short-term projects that failed or resulted in the appalling modern architecture that plagues modern cities. Everything has been devalued except housing and stocks, which prey on youth because they cannot afford the high costs of entering the market.

Inflation is theft by debasement — a violation of the Eighth Commandment dressed as monetary policy.

Why Young People Can’t Afford Houses

Housing costs dominate household budgets. The Consumer Price Index’s (CPI) shelter component is rent plus “owners’ equivalent rent” (OER). OER is a survey-based estimate of what homeowners would pay to rent their own homes, which lags behind market pricing and understates the immediate pain. That’s by design, not conspiracy, and it explains the disconnect many feel at the grocery store and at the lease office.

The housing math stopped working for first-time buyers. U.S. home prices ran far ahead of wages for most of the post-pandemic period. This pattern repeats globally with local variations. In my home country of Malta, the housing bubble has been exacerbated by foreign investment and EU monetary policy, creating a microstate version of the same principality: local wages suppressed, housing prices inflated, the young priced out of their own ancestral land. This is how you end up with an entire generation of twenty-year-olds priced into forever-rent or pushed into leveraged bets to keep up.

Affordable starter homes are now a relic of the past.

The Ritual Sacrifice of our Children

The extinction of affordable housing isn’t market failure — it’s ritual sacrifice. Molech demanded children cast into fire; mammon demands children cast into perpetual debt. The young are systematically prevented from building equity, forming families, and planting roots. They are kept nomadic, precarious, renting — because a generation that owns nothing has nothing to defend, nothing to pass down, and nothing worth fighting for.

This serves the principality perfectly. Rootless people are compliant people. Debt slaves are obedient slaves. When you’re underwater on student loans and can’t afford a down payment, you don’t resist the system — you beg it for another loan.

Give us this day our daily rent, and forgive us our debts (which we cannot pay), and lead us not into homeownership, but deliver us unto the landlord. For thine is the property, and the equity, and the capital gains, forever and ever. Amen.

This is the anti-gospel preached from every mortgage denial, every rent increase, every “you need 20% down”. The young are taught helplessness: you’ll never own, so don’t even try. And a generation that stops trying to build stops believing in the future.

2020-2023: checks, chains, and the asset pump

Keynesians are only concerned with making things look good on paper and in statistical reports. The pandemic lockdowns throttled supply — whether justified or not, the economic response revealed the regime’s true priorities: protect asset prices at all costs, even if it meant destroying the productive economy. Ultra-easy money makes overspending feel risk-free. As a result, asset prices soared while real output declined. Then, as the supply chain failed to meet excess demand, broad inflation arrived with teeth.

The hangover was inevitable. The bill landed on renters, new families, and small savers.

The Culture Fiat Money Builds; Disposable By Design

Western economies are junkies — easy money is to the economy what booze is to an alcoholic. Everyone knows the problem, but we can’t stop. The pain of withdrawal is too great to bear, and no politician or central banker is going to sacrifice their careers to do the right thing. Moreover, they are all Keynesian, so they all run the same playbook — postpone the inevitable collapse by inflating an even bigger bubble. The West has debased its own currency for decades, and it will continue to do so to maintain the ‘high’ of easy money until total financial collapse.

With cheap capital and protected cycles being the order of the day, time preference shrinks to the horizon of the next quarter. The result is value-engineered buildings, fast-money projects, and cities that feel temporary — built for mammon’s liturgical calendar (quarterly earnings), not for the Kingdom’s (eternity). The geometry of easy money is ugly; it optimises for yield this quarter, not dignity in fifty years. We live inside spreadsheets, then wonder why they don’t feel like homes.

Wolves and the Flock

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly are ravening wolves. (Matthew 7:15)

The Keynesian priesthood comes dressed in academic robes, speaking the language of “stimulus,” “liquidity,” and “optimal monetary policy.” But strip away the jargon, and you find the same ancient pattern: the strong devouring the weak, the old consuming the young, and the creditor bleeding the debtor.

This isn’t a market. It’s a hierarchy of predation blessed by central banks and enforced by the state. The wolves aren’t just greedy individuals — they’re operating within a system specifically designed to funnel wealth upward while dispersing costs downward. Privatise the gains on the way up (asset inflation and cheap leverage for those with collateral); socialise the losses on the way down (bailouts, inflation, and austerity for the young).

And who sits at the apex of this predatory pyramid? Not human wolves alone, but the principality of mammon itself — the devouring spirit that animates the whole system, whispering the same lie that echoed in Eden: Surely you shall not die. Surely the bill will never come due. Surely you can borrow from tomorrow forever.

The young pay twice — first in rent and deposits, then in taxes and inflation for yesterday’s rescues. The moral math doesn’t balance out by design. The system cannibalises the future to sustain the present. It feeds our children to the wolf-god of perpetual growth.

Jesus warned: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). He wasn’t offering lifestyle advice. He was distinguishing between two mutually exclusive liturgies, two kingdoms, and two lords. One demands you love your neighbour, forgive debts, and build for eternity. The other demands you extract from your neighbour, compound debts, and optimise for quarterly earnings.

The Keynesian regime has chosen its master. And mammon is a jealous god.

How Fractional Reserve Banking Works: Theft by Design

The young have been systematically impoverished through mechanisms like Fractional Reserve Banking and monetary expansion — a system that concentrates benefits upward while dispersing costs downward. Banks create ‘money’ when they issue loans as credit. Physical currency accounts for less than 5% of the broad money supply (M2), with the vast majority held as bank deposits and credit. This machinery enables rapid monetary expansion and its distribution.

Banks loan money they do not have at interest by creating it out of thin air — usury masquerading as good business practice. Banks make money by gambling with other people’s money, stealing a portion of it through inflation. A monetary system built on gold and silver — tangible assets — would deny the possibility of this level of exploitation.

Fractional Reserve Banks inject more money into the economy every year without an equivalent increase in goods and services. The corresponding rise in prices is inflation — a hidden tax that allows the rich and powerful to pillage the wealth of the middle class by destroying their purchasing power. Both the Fed and the European Central Bank agree that 2% inflation is good for the economy. That’s 2% of your wealth every year, gone forever.

It’s like trying to boil frogs alive in slow degrees — 2% a year, compounding quietly, until purchasing power evaporates and whole generations drown in debt. But God is not mocked. Whatever a nation sows in monetary debasement, it will reap in social collapse. The only question is whether we’ll repent before the pot boils over, or after.

Biblical and Economic Arguments Against Usury

From different starting points, the Christian tradition and sound economic analysis converge on the same truth: fractional reserve banking is theft dressed in technical language.

The Scholastic Witness: Interest as Injustice

Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle and Scripture, taught that money is a medium of exchange, not a productive asset (Summa Theologica II-II, Q. 78). To charge interest on a loan is to sell time, which belongs to God alone, or to charge twice for the same thing. You cannot rent what is consumed in use. When a bank “loans” money that it created ex nihilo, charging interest on nothing, the injustice compounds. The borrower pays real labour for phantom principal.

The Scholastics distinguished between a loan (mutuum) and a partnership (societas). In a loan, you transfer ownership; in a partnership, you share risk. Modern fractional reserve banking claims to do both simultaneously: the depositor supposedly “owns” his money (available on demand), while the bank loans it out at interest. This violates the basic logic of property. The bank cannot lend what it does not have, yet this is precisely what it does — creating deposits when it issues loans, expanding the money supply with every signature.

Deuteronomy 23:19 forbids charging interest to your brother. Exodus 22:25 commands:

If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor, that dwelleth with thee, thou shalt not be hard upon them as an extortioner, nor oppress them with usuries.

Leviticus 25:36-37 repeats the prohibition. The prophets thunder against those who practice usury (Ezekiel 18:13, 22:12). This isn’t arbitrary religious law — it’s protection of the vulnerable from financial predation.

The Austrian Witness: Inflation as Fraud

The Austrian School — Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt — exposed fractional reserve banking from a different angle: it’s systemic fraud that debases currency and distorts economic calculation. When banks create money through lending, they don’t increase wealth; they dilute existing wealth. Every dollar conjured into existence through credit expansion is a claim on real goods and services that don’t yet exist. The result is malinvestment, boom-bust cycles, and the Cantillon Effect you’ve witnessed firsthand.

Murray Rothbard called fractional reserve banking “legalised counterfeiting.” The bank promises to redeem deposits on demand while simultaneously lending them. It’s a confidence game that works — until it doesn’t. When depositors lose confidence (a “bank run”), the fiction collapses. The bank never had the money. It was creating credit from nothing, charging interest on air, and calling it banking.

The moral mathematics are clear: If I print fake currency in my basement, I go to prison. If a bank creates digital money with a keystroke, it’s called “liquidity provision” and praised by central bankers. The mechanism differs; the fraud is identical.

Where They Converge

Both traditions — theological and economic — condemn the same practice for complementary reasons:

• Scholastic: You cannot charge for what you haven’t given. Creating money from nothing and charging interest violates justice.
• Austrian: You cannot expand the money supply without diluting everyone else’s holdings. It’s theft through inflation.

Together they form an ironclad case: Fractional reserve banking is usury (unjust profit from lending what doesn’t exist) compounded by fraud (simultaneous claims on the same deposits) resulting in theft (inflation that transfers wealth from savers to borrowers and banks).

The system isn’t broken. It was designed this way — to enrich the financial class while impoverishing the productive class, to reward speculation over labour, to make homeownership a leveraged gamble instead of patient saving.

The Serpent’s Arithmetic

Notice the pattern: The system creates something from nothing, then demands more in return.

The serpent in Eden offered Eve knowledge “without cost” — just eat. But the bill came due: exile, death, curse upon the ground. Fractional reserve banking operates by the same dark magic. The bank creates credit ex nihilo — a mere ledger entry — then demands principal plus interest in real labour, real assets, and real blood. You borrow phantom money; you repay with your life.

This is why interest on fiat credit isn’t just economically extractive — it’s spiritually parasitic. The bank doesn’t risk anything because it created the loan from nothing. The borrower risks everything: his labour, his home, and his future. The asymmetry is demonic: one party plays god, creating money by fiat; the other party plays Adam, toiling by the sweat of his brow to repay what never existed.

Usury, in this context, is more than charging interest; it’s claiming divine prerogative — the power to create value, to determine wealth, and to make something from nothing. Only God creates ex nihilo. When central and commercial banks arrogate that power to themselves, they commit the original sin: “You shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). And like all demonic promises, it produces death.

The inflation that follows isn’t an unfortunate side effect. It’s the curse.

Cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat. (Genesis 3:17)

The ground of the economy is cursed by monetary expansion. You work harder for less. The thorns and thistles are rising rents, grocery bills, and insurance premiums — choking out productive labour, making life precarious, ensuring you never rest.

When the Pot Boils Over

“Whatever one sows, that he also reap” (Galatians 6:8). God is not mocked. A nation that debases its currency debases its people. A nation that steals from the future will have no future. The question is not whether judgment comes but when — and whether there will be a remnant who built on rock instead of sand.

The principality of mammon promises prosperity through debt, wealth through inflation, security through leverage. But “the borrower is the servant of the lender” (Proverbs 22:7), and a nation of borrowers is a nation of slaves. When the system finally collapses under the weight of its own contradictions — and it will — the architects of easy money will have already escaped. They always do. The young will be left holding the bag, surveying the ruins, and wondering how it came to this.

But you don’t have to participate in the lie.

Christian Alternatives to Fractional Reserve Banking

Systemic reform is necessary: End the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Restore commodity-backed currency. Prosecute fractional reserve fraud for what it is — counterfeiting. Break up “too big to fail” banks. Enforce honest weights and measures (Leviticus 19:35-36, Proverbs 11:1). These aren’t radical proposals; they’re basic justice.

Refusing the Lie, Building the Alternative

But reform requires political will that doesn’t exist yet. In the meantime, Christians must resist both spiritually and structurally:

Spiritually: Name mammon as a principality and refuse its liturgy. Fast from debt. Practice Sabbath economics. Give generously, forgive debts when possible, and build community resilience. Pray for the collapse of unjust systems and the rise of just ones. Spiritual warfare is real — bind the strong man before plundering his house (Matthew 12:29).

Structurally: Opt out where possible. Buy hard assets (gold, silver, land, and tools). Reduce your exposure to fiat-denominated debt. Build local exchange networks. Support sound money alternatives, primarily commodity-backed currencies. Teach your children to measure in decades, not quarters. Build for durability, not disposal. Plant trees whose shade you’ll never sit under.

Communally: Form covenant communities that practice mutual aid, debt forgiveness, and economic solidarity. The early church shared possessions and ensured no one was in need (Acts 4:32-35). We need modern expressions of the same Spirit — communities that refuse to sacrifice the young on mammon’s altar, that build housing cooperatively, that practice Jubilee when the system won’t.

This isn’t utopian dreaming. It’s obedience to a different King.

Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you. (Matthew 6:33)

The economy of heaven operates by different mathematics: the first are last, the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, and a grain of wheat dies to produce a harvest.

Mammon’s economy operates by extraction and death. God’s economy operates by gift and life.

Choose which kingdom you’ll serve. Build accordingly. And when the pot boils over, you’ll be standing on the ground that cannot be shaken.

Therefore receiving an immovable kingdom, we have grace; whereby let us serve, pleasing God, with fear and reverence. For our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:28-29)