Wealth & Money Quote by Frederick Soddy

Soddy is slipping a scalpel under the feel-good mythology of banking and prying it open. He’s not talking about bankers as heroic intermediaries who patiently gather savings and recycle them into productive loans. He’s pointing at the origin story: the banking sector’s foundational capital isn’t just earned through prudent service, it’s historically turbocharged by a privilege that looks almost alchemical - the power to issue money and capture the spread.

Coming from a scientist, the line has the cool, forensic bluntness of someone used to tracing inputs and outputs. Soddy is famous for treating economics like a physical system: if you can create claims (money/credit) faster than the underlying real economy creates goods and energy, you don’t get prosperity by magic, you get instability by design. That’s the subtext here. “The whole profit” implies not a marginal advantage but an engine: seigniorage and credit creation as the seed corn of modern finance. Banks don’t merely sit on top of the economy; they have been allowed to write the economy’s measuring stick and charge for the privilege.

The context is early-20th-century monetary debate, when industrial capitalism’s booms and busts made the mechanics of money impossible to ignore. Soddy is also quietly escalating the moral stakes. If the capital base of “the great banking business” is built from issuance profits, then banking’s power is less meritocratic than political: a franchise granted by law and central-bank architecture. The line works because it sounds descriptive while functioning as an indictment, making readers reconsider whether banking’s dominance is market outcome or monetary design choice.