Understanding the Financial System:
Social Credit Rediscovered 
Frances Hutchinson
Jon Carpenter 2010



Very few people can say with any certainty what money is, exactly how the financial system operates, or why finance dominates social policy formation throughout the social order. This has not always been the case. During the inter-war years of the 1920s and 1930s countless ordinary men and women conducted an informal debate on the flawed economic thinking which led simultaneously to war, waste and poverty on an unprecedented scale. The worldwide Social Credit movement of this period gave rise to a practical political venture in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Clifford Hugh Douglas' institutional analysis of the role of banking and finance in the social order continues to provide the missing link necessary for the comprehensive development of economic thought beyond the rational choice theories of neoclassical economics. In order to make some sense of the political economy of the early twenty-first century it is necessary to understand how economic, political and cultural policies have come to be determined primarily by finance.

Drawing upon the writings of key twentieth century social thinkers, including Clifford Hugh Douglas and Thorstein Veblen, Frances Hutchinson moves beyond negative critiques of global corporatism to suggest a transformation in our understanding of the relationship between finance and the three spheres of society, the cultural, the political and the economic.