As Feder states throughout his manifesto, currency (or credit) is simply intended as a means of exchange, not as a profit-making commodity via usury. During the Medieval era usurers were executed; now they are regarded as the epitome of respectable business practice.

Finally, the ideals of liberating all of mankind from the slavery of usury is one that can capture the imagination of multitudes of people of goodwill, as it once did during the 1920s and 1930s. It is an alternative that leaves Marxism for dead and demands the utmost idealism, based on the closing words by Feder: “Give me your hands, workers of all lands, unite!” (Manifesto, p. 57).

Feder: “Closing of the nation externally with all freedom and diversity internally. This is the correct idea of a German state.”

I think Grillo have read it as he asks revisions of free trade agreement, referendum on Euro etc.

A popular view of the crisis in the eurozone is that it is a balance of payments crisis caused by the growing gap in competitiveness between core and periphery countries. This view is equally used to validate austerity-based national policies repressing domestic consumption, as well as pleas for leaving the euro to regain competitiveness through currency depreciation.

This view is based on two (unwarranted) concerns. The first is that a rise in net exports is the best strategy for getting out of recession. This is obviously not true, as fiscal policy is an alternative (and more effective) solution. Yet, the attempt to use exports to drive demand is functional to the refusal to use fiscal expansion.

The second is that trade deficit countries face an unsustainable growing foreign debt. The reality is that all a trade deficit entails is an increased stock of currency-denominated savings held abroad. When this stock happens to be greater than desired, the currency will depreciate. Unless the country specifically negotiates a loan (like Britain in the 1940s), no increase in foreign debt is needed to match the trade deficit.

Rather, trade surpluses (not deficits) need to be funded. In Euroland, for example, the trade surpluses of core countries have been funded by bank loans, and ultimately government deficits of peripheral countries.

Dr. Terzi is a Professor of Economics and coordinator of the Mecpoc Project at Franklin College Switzerland.
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2013/02/mercantalism-exports-lower-living-standards.html

Bring us public banks, interest free money, decentralization and cooperative structure of public affairs. Democracy instead fascism. Looking at national figures, some countries have a very high proportion of cooperative membership, for example: Ireland (approximately 70% of the population), Finland (60%), Austria (58%), Singapore (50%), Switzerland (46%), Sweden (45%), Norway (44%), and Canada (40%).

Book to read: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.