Ecuador Gives Banks One Week to Stop Their Usury -- Or Face Jail

May 9 (EIRNS)--Ecuador's private banks have one week to lower their "intolerable interest rates" to consumers, or the government will file criminal suits against them--for usury-- President Rafael Correa announced in a speech before 2,000 people today.

Out of proportion bank interest rates--one bank was just caught charging over 55% interest to consumers-- while the bankers make super-high salaries, is a big factor in the inequality in the country, which has to change, the President charged.

Even before this ultimatum, the Association of Private Banks were hysterical, because the government had announced the day before that it would be sending a bill to Congress, within days, to reform the banking law so as to give the State authority to regulate the market and set interest rates.

The bankers protested that any such law would intervene against private interests, but as Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly pointed out, government control over the credit system is a central instrument of the American System of Economics developed by the United States of America since its founding, and was used with great success by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to begin to pull the U.S. out of the depression in 1933.

In announcing the bill to regulate the banks on May 8, Luis Maldonado, President Correa's representative on the nation's Banking Board, denounced the market as "something absolutely empty, brainless and heartless. The market should be regulated. We are perfectly clear on the issue that the market should foster mutual benefit... The financial system must align itself with our great national goals."