Receipts: our method and our red lines
A site that says "banks create money out of nothing" had better show its working. Here is exactly how every page on this site gets made, what we will publish, what we will not, and why the difference is the whole point. Read it once and you will know how to hold us to it.
Every claim traces to a document you can open yourself: the Bank of England's own publications, peer-reviewed research, official statistics, or a company's own published prices. Every current figure carries its source and the date we checked it. No receipts, no claim.
How a page gets made
Sources come in tiers, and only the top tier carries weight. The load-bearing claims, the ones the site stands on, come from primary documents: the Bank of England's 2014 bulletin on money creation, Professor Richard Werner's peer-reviewed 2014 paper, ONS statistics, lenders' own published rates and fees. Named people's arguments, an economist's interview, an ex-banker's testimony, are always presented as their view, attributed, never stated as fact in our voice.
Every current number is checked on the day its page is written, and the date is printed next to it. Rates change: the deposit protection limit changed in December 2025, Experian rescaled its scores in January 2026, and pages written from memory go stale without telling anyone. Ours carry their dates so you can see the freshness yourself, and every page says "Last checked" at the bottom.
The maths is always shown. When we say £25 a month never clears £1,000 at 34.9%, the receipts box gives the formula so you can reproduce it in any spreadsheet. If you cannot check it, we should not say it.
Why you can trust a site that says banks create money
Because we do not need you to trust us. Our biggest, strangest-sounding claim is the one with the strongest paper trail: the Bank of England's own bulletin, in plain English, says banks do not simply lend out savers' deposits and that most money is created by banks making loans. When someone tells you this site is nonsense, do not argue. Hand them the Bank's document and watch.
There is a second thing worth knowing. Search for "what is APR" or "store cards" and almost every page that appears was written by a lender or a comparison site paid by lenders. They are not lying, but there are sentences they can never publish. Nobody at a bank writes "minimum payments are engineered so the debt survives". We can, because nobody pays us to soften it. That is the gap this site lives in.
Our red lines: what this site will not publish
The moment a sourced page sits next to an unsourceable one, critics stop arguing with the Bank of England and point at the weak page instead, and rightly so. So these lines are hard, and you are invited to hold us to them:
No claims we cannot source to a document you can open. No accusations against named living people. No theories about ethnic or religious groups: money's history is the history of institutions and incentives, and anyone explaining it through a group of people is selling you something old and ugly. No saviour products: we never tell you what to buy, hold or invest in, not gold, not crypto, not anything. We explain; we never point. No financial advice: facts and questions only. What you do is yours.
Some of the topics near this site's subject are argued about in books and documentaries of very mixed quality. Where a claim is documented, history is history and we publish it with its source. Where it is not, it stays off, no matter how good the story is.
The one line test
Before any page ships, it faces one question: would a head of economics at a secondary school be comfortable putting this in front of a class? Sourced, fair, shown-working, no shame, no preaching, no pointing. If not, it does not ship. That test is why parents and teachers can send this site to a 15 year old without reading ahead.
When we get something wrong
We will. Rates move, sources update, and sometimes we will simply make a mistake. The deal is: tell us, with the document, via the contact details on the privacy page, and we fix the page and update its "last checked" date. A site about receipts had better take correction as a compliment.
Questions people ask
What are your main sources?
The spine: the Bank of England's Money creation in the modern economy (Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1) and Richard Werner's peer-reviewed 2014 paper in the International Review of Financial Analysis. Around them: ONS statistics, the Bank of England's data and history pages, the Federal Reserve's history pages, and lenders' own published rates. Every page's receipts box links its own.
Do you give financial advice?
No, and we never will. Nothing on this site is a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, borrow or invest in anything. We show how the machinery works, with sources, and ask questions worth asking. Decisions, and where needed regulated advice, are yours to seek.
How is the site funded?
Ordinary advertising from Google, and nothing else. Never bank sponsorships, never paid product placement, never affiliate links to credit products. Ad personalisation is switched off site-wide because the readers are teenagers, and the blocked categories are published on the privacy page. The footer promise, no bank sponsors, no pushed products, no jargon, is the constitution.
Why do you link YouTube videos in some receipts?
Interviews and lectures are where economists and ex-bankers explain things in their own words, and hearing a source directly beats our paraphrase. Videos are always the colour, never the foundation: the load-bearing claim next to any video link also carries a document.
Read next
- Rabbit holeHow do banks create money? (Yes, out of nothing.)
- The siteAbout: why this site exists
- The siteStart here: the whole site in 5 minutes
Last checked 25 August 2026.