Today, people are having to spend so much of their money, to acquire a house and to get an education that they don't have enough to spend on goods and services, except by running into yet more debt on their credit cards and other borrowings.

The bank's product is debt, because the banks want to make sure that they can get paid for the debt. But ultimately the only party that can pay the debt is the government, because it runs the printing presses. So the debts ultimately either are paid by the government, or they're paid by a huge transfer of property from debtors to creditors - or, the debts are written off.

When you say "bank," a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things. The bankers are the people running these banks. They're the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don't care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors.

If bankers can push the loans and make more profits for the bank, they get paid higher bonuses. They often also get stock options. If the bank goes under, they get to keep all of these salaries and options - and the government will bail out the bank. These guys will take their money and run, which is pretty much what they're doing now.

There are two definitions of deflation. Most people think of it simply as prices going down. But debt deflation is what happens when people have to spend more and more of their income to carry the debts that they've run up - to pay their mortgage debt, to pay the credit card debt, to pay student loans.

That's the problem with the financial sector. Banks and the financial sector live in the short run, not the long run. In principle the government is supposed to make regulations that help the economy over time. But once it's taken over by the financial sector, the government lives in the short run too.

The economy is being run primarily by the banks for their own interest.

When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that "real wealth." It exposes what's wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific. Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.

I think we're in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.