In 2024, total global debt crossed the threshold of $315 trillion. Three hundred and fifteen trillion dollars. A figure so staggering it defies any meaningful human representation. And yet this mountain of debt is not the symptom of reckless management that a bit more fiscal discipline could fix. It is the logical, mechanical, and inevitable consequence of a system designed to grow or die.
What we politely call "the global financial system" is in reality an extraction machine. It does not function despite ecosystem destruction — it functions because of it. Understanding this mechanism means understanding why all incremental climate policies are doomed to fail as long as the underlying monetary architecture persists. It also means understanding why monetary reform is not a technical question reserved for economists — it is the central political question of our century.
I. Money is born from a loan. And dies with repayment.
Let us begin with a truth that mainstream economics textbooks still struggle to state clearly: virtually all money in circulation was not created by a state, a central bank, or any sovereign authority. It was created by private commercial banks, at the precise moment someone signed a loan contract.
This process has a name: ex nihilo monetary creation — from nothing. When a bank grants you a €200,000 mortgage, it does not open a vault and withdraw a pre-existing bundle of notes. It records a claim on its asset side and an equivalent deposit on the liability side of your account. Money has just been created, through a simple accounting entry.
This reality, long contested, is now acknowledged by central banks themselves. The Bank of England stated it without ambiguity in a 2014 research note: "Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money."
This observation has a fundamental consequence: money is inherently ephemeral. Money is created by the banker's pen and destroyed by their eraser. It is born with the loan and disappears when the principal is repaid. For the money supply not to contract — which would trigger catastrophic deflation — the flow of new credit must permanently exceed the flow of repayments. Growth is not a choice in this system. It is a condition of survival.
II. The three curses: when mechanics become destiny
This monetary architecture is not neutral. It secretes three systemic pathologies that I call the monetary curses — three mechanisms that transform a simple accounting convention into a machine for destroying life.
The first curse: mechanical extraction
Since money is born from debt, its very existence demands market production. Repaying the loan plus interest requires transforming natural resources into monetary revenue — and quickly. Not in twenty years. Now, according to the creditor's schedule.
Every newly created euro of debt is a promise of future extraction. A bill drawn on the biosphere. This is not a metaphor: to honour $315 trillion in global debt, nations, businesses, and households are structurally compelled to maximise their extraction of natural resources. The Earth is the first-resort payer.
The other face of this mechanism is its selectivity. By advancing the means of payment before real wealth is produced, banks and investors exercise a function of ex ante social validation: they decide, concretely, which projects have the right to exist. The criteria for this validation are unambiguous: short-term financial profitability. In this framework, restoring a forest is a cost. Depolluting a river is a burden. Regenerating depleted soils is a dead loss. Conversely, extracting oil, clearing land for intensive agriculture, or opening a mine generates rapid, predictable, bankable cash flows. Banks do not finance the future we want. They finance the future for which they can calculate a return.
The second curse: bank money and the impossible decoupling
Green growth is an oxymoron. This is not an opinion — it is a direct consequence of thermodynamics. Every production activity, whatever it may be, inevitably generates environmental impacts. Entropy does not negotiate.
The chain is relentless: debt → obligation of profitability → extraction. And this chain traps every one of our acts, even the most virtuous. A few examples suffice to measure the absurdity.
To pay an environmental fine, I must earn euros — a currency whose primary allocation by banks is only possible under conditions of profitability. I must therefore produce more ecological damage with my activity to pay for an ecological offence. To cover an insurance surcharge linked to climate-induced flooding, I must earn a currency earned by causing that same climate disruption. I must cause rising waters to protect myself from rising waters. To buy organic products that cost more, I must work in generally degenerative activities. The ecological added value of the label is neutralised by the way I earned the money to buy it.
Financing the ecological transition through debt? That creates growth to repay it — growth assumed to be green, when green growth is impossible. Through taxation? Tax is a levy on produced value: more tax means more production, hence more extraction. We are compelled to destroy through production to earn the means to repair through taxation.
There is no economically neutral act in the current system. Not even this noble act of seeking to understand it. As the epigraph opening L'Économie de l'Équilibre states: "And Gaia said to humankind: it is futile to heal me with a currency you draw from the depths of my wounds."
Decoupling is not merely difficult to achieve. It is contradictory with the very foundations of the system. As long as the creation and use of money remain subject to extractive logic, decoupling ambitions will remain chimeras.
The third curse: the Gordian knot
The third curse is the most vertiginous, because it closes the trap on itself. There are two types of debt governing our era: financial debt — what we owe creditors — and planetary debt — what we owe Gaia for destroyed ecosystems, depleted soils, and disrupted climate. These two debts form a Gordian knot: paying off one only worsens the other.
To reduce its financial debt, a state must produce more, extract more, export more — thereby deepening its debt to ecosystems. To begin repaying its planetary debt, it must finance regeneration, transition, and the protection of life — incurring financial debt in the process, which reignites the obligation of extractive growth. The knot tightens with every attempt to loosen it.
This is not a political impasse that willpower could overcome. It is a structural impossibility inscribed in the very architecture of money. As long as the money that finances the world's repair is the same money that demands its destruction, we will be condemned to destroy with one hand while attempting to repair with the other. Only a monetary system whose creation is not backed by debt can cut this knot — not untie it, but render it obsolete.
III. The geometry of powerlessness: compound interest and planetary limits
To fully grasp the absurdity of the system, one must confront two radically incompatible temporal logics.
On one side, the exponential logic of debt. Compound interest describes a geometric growth without ceiling. Capital invested at 5% doubles in 14 years, multiplies by 11 in 50 years, by 131 in 100 years. The rule is simple: for debt to remain "sound," the real economy must follow exactly this same trajectory.
On the other, the sigmoidal logic of living systems. A forest does not grow exponentially. Soil fertility does not double at regular intervals. Fish stocks do not obey the curves of financial discounting. Natural systems grow, reach a plateau, and collapse if pushed beyond it. These are saturation curves, not power curves.
The collision between these two logics is the engine of the ecological crisis. Since 1979 and the Volcker shock that restored positive real interest rates in Western economies, this pressure has intensified continuously. The market discipline imposed by sovereign debt has systematically overridden ecological objectives. Not because rulers are malevolent, but because the system leaves them little other choice.
The most fitting image to describe this mechanism seems to me that of Sisyphus digging holes. Each new hole dug (each new debt contracted) serves to fill the previous one. But with each shovelful, a handful of earth is taken: that is the interest. For the ground to remain flat — for the system not to collapse — ever wider holes must be dug. And the earth taken each time is the biosphere.
"We compel ourselves to dig ever deeper holes in nature to fill ever larger holes in our accounting ledgers."
IV. Fossil pre-validation: an accounting crime
Nowhere is the perversity of the system more visible than in its relationship with the fossil fuel industry. Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the sixty largest global banks have injected more than $3.8 trillion into coal, oil, and gas sectors. These financings are not anomalies. They are the rational response of financial actors to an architecture whose rules reward rapid extraction.
What economists call stranded assets — the stranded reserves of fossil fuels that must remain in the ground if we are to respect climate agreements — represent today an existential threat to the global banking system. The balance sheets of many major banks rest in part on the valuation of hydrocarbon reserves that physically cannot be exploited without condemning the planet.
We thus find ourselves in a situation of tragic absurdity: if climate policies truly work, they trigger a financial crisis. If they fail, they trigger a climate crisis. The current system has been designed so that both outcomes are unacceptable.
The geopolitics of debt reproduces this violence at the international scale. Nations of the global South, indebted in currencies they do not control, are compelled to remain in an extractive paradigm to generate the currencies needed to repay creditors in the North. Sovereign debt becomes an instrument of soft colonialism, a wealth transfer mechanism hidden behind the vocabulary of international cooperation.
V. Escaping the labyrinth: systemic reform
Faced with this diagnosis, dominant responses oscillate between two inadequacies. On one side, inaction disguised as prudence: we will reform the system from within, gradually, without questioning the monetary architecture. On the other, flight into technique: green bonds, European taxonomy, carbon markets — instruments that play by the rules of the game without ever questioning them.
Neither path can suffice. As long as money remains a promise of extraction, every transition financing tool will be structurally biased towards actors capable of generating the returns the system demands. The greening of finance will not resolve the fundamental contradiction between exponential growth and planetary limits.
What is needed is a reform of the monetary architecture itself.
This is precisely the object of the NEMO IMS project — Negentropic Money International Monetary System — that I have been developing for several years. NEMO IMS rests on a radical conceptual reversal: rather than anchoring monetary creation in debt and the obligation of repayment, it anchors it in ecosystem regeneration.
The founding principle is simple: money is created without debt counterpart to directly finance activities certified as regenerative — reforestation, depollution, soil restoration, energy transition, healthcare, education. It is not a stock to be accumulated indefinitely, but a flow whose life cycle is governed by its ecological impact. It is created to the extent of what it regenerates. It is progressively destroyed (monetary melt) as market transactions consume common resources.
This system replaces the logic of extraction with the logic of regeneration as the engine of value creation. It is no longer GDP that validates the issuance of money, but the restoration of natural capital.
NEMO IMS also proposes a new international exchange standard, based no longer on the balance of power between currencies — the dollar's dominance and its corollary of economic wars — but on the measurable ecological impact of economies. This new standard ends the race to destructive comparative advantages and reorients international competition towards systemic resilience rather than accelerated extraction.
VI. Money as political language
There is no serious ecological reform that is not, at its core, a monetary reform. For money is not a neutral tool. It is the invisible language of power — the device that determines what has the right to exist and what is condemned to accounting invisibility.
In the current debt-money regime, healing an ecosystem is a negative externality. Destroying a forest for timber is a GDP gain. This inversion of value is not natural. It is constructed, politically and institutionally, by the monetary architecture we inherited from the 19th century and keep reproducing.
Saying that monetary reform is too technical a question for political debate is precisely what those who benefit from the status quo want to hear. The apparent complexity of the subject is a defensive wall, not an intellectual reality. The mechanism of ex nihilo monetary creation is no harder to understand than any other mechanism of political power — it is simply less taught, less discussed, less contested.
What is at stake is the question of who has the right to validate the future. Today, this validation belongs to private creditors. It could belong to the collective, oriented by imperatives of ecological regeneration and social justice.
Conclusion: equilibrium is not a utopia
I am not arguing here for a return to an archaic economy or for the abolition of finance. I am arguing for a realisation of what finance claims to be: a mechanism for allocating resources in the service of the common good.
The current system fails this mission not through lack of goodwill from its actors, but through architecture. It is designed to valorise short-term extraction and externalise long-term destruction. As long as this does not change, all green pacts, all COPs and all sustainable development goals will continue to erode against the same reality: just as it is futile to repair porcelain with a hammer, you cannot finance regeneration with tools designed for extraction.
The true transition will be monetary, or it will not be. Not as the sole prerequisite for all change, but as the condition of coherence for all other reforms. Changing money means changing the language in which we calculate value. It means collectively deciding that the future of the biosphere matters as much — and even more — than next quarter's return.
Planetary equilibrium is not a utopia. It is the only viable trajectory. And it begins by recognising that the first problem to solve is not technological, nor behavioural. It is institutional. It is monetary. It is, at its core, eminently political.
Jean-Christophe Duval