Wealth & Money Quote by Josiah Stamp

“Slaves of the banks” is doing deliberate rhetorical violence here: it yanks a technical system - credit creation, debt service, monetary policy - into the register of bodily captivity. Stamp isn’t merely complaining about high interest rates. He’s framing finance as a political relationship where consent is manufactured and the bill arrives as “the cost of your own slavery.” The sting is in that last phrase: the public isn’t just exploited; it’s recruited into paying for the machinery that exploits it.

The line’s specific intent is coercive clarity. It splits the world into two choices: either you accept a banking system where private institutions “create money” (through lending) and therefore steer “control credit,” or you reject it as a form of rule. That binary is polemical, but effective, because it translates an opaque privilege - the ability to expand the money supply via loans - into a moral outrage.

The subtext is class discipline. “Let bankers continue” reads like a dare aimed at legislators and voters who treat finance as neutral infrastructure rather than power. Coming from a businessman, it’s also a revealing pivot: not an outsider’s conspiracy talk, but an insider’s warning that credit is governance by other means.

Context matters. Stamp lived through the interwar years, when Britain wrestled with debt, deflation, and the gold standard’s chokehold. Trust in institutions was brittle, and banking looked less like prudent stewardship than a privatized lever over national life. The quote works because it weaponizes that anxiety and makes monetary design feel like a democratic choice, not a natural law.