Bankocracy (from the English word

bank A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets. Because ...

and

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

κράτος - ''kratos'', "power, rule") or trapezocracy (from Greek τράπεζα - ''trapeza'', "bank") is a polemic term referring to the excessive power or influence of

s on

public policy Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. Public p ...

-making. It can also refer to a form of government where

financial institution Financial institutions, sometimes called banking institutions, are business entities that provide services as intermediaries for different types of financial monetary transactions. Broadly speaking, there are three major types of financial inst ...

s rule society.

Usage

One of the first uses of the term was by British Member of Parliament

William Fullarton Colonel William Fullarton of Fullarton (12 January 1754 – 13 February 1808) was a Scottish soldier, statesman, agriculturalist and author. He sat in the House of Commons between 1779 and 1803. Early life He was born on 12 January 1754 the on ...

(1754–1808), who in a parliamentary debate on April 10, 1797 characterized the monopoly of the Bank of England as being a more important issue to solve than the peace attempts to end the war against France: United States Senator Robert J. Walker (1801–1869), a staunch opponent of the Bank of the United States, delivered a speech in the Senate on January 21, 1840, where he warned that the acceptance of

paper money A banknote—also called a bill (North American English), paper money, or simply a note—is a type of negotiable promissory note, made by a bank or other licensed authority, payable to the bearer on demand. Banknotes were originally issued ...

as legal tender would "overthrow the

Constitution A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed. When these princ ...

, subvert the liberties of the country, and the rights of the people, and establish the reign of a bankocracy, more sordid, ruinous, and despotic, than that of any monarch, however absolute."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, , ; 15 January 1809, Besançon – 19 January 1865, Paris) was a French socialist,Landauer, Carl; Landauer, Hilde Stein; Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl (1979) 959 "The Three Anticapitalistic Movements". ''European Socia ...

used the term in his work ''Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire'' (1849), in reference to the

July Monarchy The July Monarchy (french: Monarchie de Juillet), officially the Kingdom of France (french: Royaume de France), was a liberal constitutional monarchy in France under , starting on 26 July 1830, with the July Revolution of 1830, and ending 23 F ...

Mikhail Bakunin Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (; 1814–1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, socialist and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major founder of the revolutionary s ...

, an anarchist like

, used the term in his work

Statism and Anarchy ''Statism and Anarchy'' (russian: Государственность и анархия, ''Gosudarstvennost' i anarkhiia'', literally "Statehood and Anarchy") was the last work by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Written in the summer of 1 ...

while talking about the reaction from the German State headed by Otto von Bismarck. He uses the russian term for Yid in the original script, a derogatory for the word "Jew", showing his historically noted anti-semitism. The term was also used by

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

in his work '' Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie'' (1867). He theorizes the birth of national debt as the catalyst for the

primitive accumulation of capital In Marxian economics and preceding theories,Perelman, p. 25 (ch. 2) the problem of primitive accumulation (also called previous accumulation, original accumulation) of capital concerns the origin of capital, and therefore of how class distinctio ...

: In Marxian economics, the term cognates with

finance capitalism Finance capitalism or financial capitalism is the subordination of processes of production to the accumulation of money profits in a financial system. Financial capitalism is thus a form of capitalism where the intermediation of saving to inves ...

in general. Numerous political observers and journalists have used the term when describing or commenting on the

2007–2012 global financial crisis 7 (seven) is the natural number following 6 and preceding 8. It is the only prime number preceding a cube. As an early prime number in the series of positive integers, the number seven has greatly symbolic associations in religion, mythology, ...

References

{{Reflist + Oligarchy Political terminology Political corruption Pejorative terms for forms of government

Usage

See also

References