Does New Money Need to Be Born from New Debt? - Brazil 2026 Presidential Election

Banks, credit, interest, concentration, media, and a BrainLatam proposal: what if a limited share of new money began in the Body-Territory?

Imagine one thousand people arriving on an island.

There is no bank.

No government.

No Brazilian real.

No stock exchange.

To survive, they begin organizing themselves.

One group plants crops.

Another fishes.

Another builds houses.

Others care for children, make tools, clothes, and medicines.

After some time, a simple problem appears: directly exchanging a chair for fish does not always work.

So the society creates a currency.

A small group receives authorization to produce pieces of paper that everyone accepts as a means of exchange.

Now the farmer sells food, receives paper, and can buy a tool tomorrow.

Money brought dynamism.

But something else also happened:

one group began controlling one of the gates through which money enters society.

Twenty generations later

Now imagine someone wants to build a boat.

They do not have enough paper.

The monetary group responds:

“We can create ten thousand new units for you. Later, you will return twelve thousand.”

Two things were born at the same time:

new money

and

new debt.

If the boat increases the island’s productive capacity, this can be excellent.

Credit itself is not the problem.

But observe what may happen over generations.

Someone who owns one house can offer collateral.

Someone who owns ten houses can offer more collateral.

They receive more credit.

They buy another business.

Now they own more assets.

Those new assets make it possible to obtain even more financing.

None of this necessarily requires fraud.

It can happen while fully respecting the rules.

And then a political question appears:

Can those who receive new money first also acquire more easily the assets that will generate wealth tomorrow?

In contemporary financial systems, banks do in fact create new deposits when they grant credit. This does not mean unlimited freedom: capital, liquidity, risk, supervision, and Basel rules constrain expansion. Even so, credit creation remains one of the main channels through which new monetary capacity enters the economy. (imf.org)

The problem is not that banks can create credit

We need to be clear.

Credit can finance:

a factory;

a harvest;

a home;

research;

a small business;

new technology.

A society without credit would probably produce much less future.

The BrainLatam question is different:

Who receives that capacity first, and what happens afterward?

In Brazil, recent research shows how income associated with ownership of financial assets can channel a significant share of aggregate income toward asset owners. This does not mean that all financial income is illegitimate, but it reveals that income distribution does not occur only between wages and productive profits: important rentier flows also exist. (academic.oup.com)

The ownership networks of large Brazilian corporations also reveal structures in which financial institutions, families, multinational corporations, and the State occupy central positions. (scielo.br)

Perhaps the right question is not only:

How much money exists?

But:

Where is it born, where does it travel, and in which Body-Territories does it ultimately become concentrated?

And why do we almost never ask who is at the end of the chain?

When we hear:

“public debt costs too much,”

we usually think about the State that pays.

But every debt has two sides.

The payer.

And the receiver.

So we could ask:

Who are the ultimate beneficiaries of interest payments?

That does not mean publishing the tax ID of every person who owns government bonds.

There are pension funds, banks, investment funds, foreign investors, companies, and millions of individual savers.

Moreover, custody systems and intermediary structures make it impossible to automatically reduce every public bond to a publicly visible individual beneficiary.

But society could understand the final economic concentration much better.

The same applies to land.

It is not enough to know how many companies appear as owners if several of those companies belong to the same ultimate beneficiary.

And the same reasoning can be applied to funds, concessions, mining rights, and corporate ownership.

The BrainLatam question is not about publishing every citizen’s financial life.

It is about allowing democracy to see:

How much economic power ultimately concentrates in the same final beneficiaries?

But there is an even quieter concentration: the concentration of questions

This is where economics meets 5D Consciousness.

Imagine that on our island, after twenty generations, some of the wealthiest groups also begin controlling newspapers, radio stations, and the places where people communicate.

They do not need to ban the question:

“Who receives the interest?”

They may simply talk about other things every day.

In 5D Consciousness, what appears repeatedly tends to remain pre-activated within the Informational Territory.

“The government spent too much.”

“The market lost confidence.”

“Interest rates need to rise.”

These may all be legitimate questions.

But others are equally legitimate:

Who receives those interest payments?

Who controls the funds?

Who concentrates land ownership?

Who controls the channels through which we learn to think about economics?

If these questions appear rarely, perhaps they never acquire enough Qualia to capture collective attention.

The most powerful opacity, therefore, may not be hiding an answer.

It may be preventing a certain question from reaching the internal space where it could be thought about at all.

Brazilian research published in 2026 describes the digital public sphere as a dispute over visibility and shows that, despite the multiplication of digital sources, traditional media organizations continue to occupy symbolically central positions in the Brazilian informational ecosystem. The study also highlights the country’s historical concentration of media ownership. (scielo.br)

The Digital News Report 2024 similarly described media ownership in Brazil as concentrated among a small number of major private conglomerates. (reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk)

This does not mean media owners call journalists every day telling them what to say.

The problem can be much more structural:

business models,

advertising,

privileged sources,

algorithms,

editorial routines,

and competition for attention also determine which questions remain visible.

The Dawn of Everything: the rules are not natural

David Graeber and David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, challenge the idea that human societies necessarily follow one single institutional sequence.

Human beings have experimented with different forms of property, authority, social organization, and markets.

This matters because banks, funds, currencies, and credit mechanisms appear so natural today that we often forget:

They were created by human societies.

They can be redesigned.

We do not need to eliminate markets or property in order to imagine another monetary architecture.

Varoufakis adds another question

In Technofeudalism, published in 2023, Yanis Varoufakis argues that large digital platforms have acquired a kind of power different from that of the traditional capitalist firm.

They do not merely compete within markets.

In some cases, they control the space through which the market itself must pass.

Those who sell depend on the platform.

Those who advertise depend on the platform.

Those who search depend on the platform.

This creates the capacity to extract rent from access.

Even if we do not fully accept his thesis that capitalism has died, the question remains powerful:

What happens when a company stops competing only inside the market and begins owning part of the infrastructure through which the market itself operates?

BrainLatam adds another question:

What happens when similar structures simultaneously influence money, property, and attention?

What do the candidates propose?

In the Brazil 2026 Presidential Election, we find very different economic architectures.

Lula maintains a mixed economy with public banks, productive credit, income policies, and significant State participation.

Flávio Bolsonaro emphasizes fiscal discipline, spending reduction, entrepreneurship, and private credit.

Romeu Zema places markets, privatization, and fiscal discipline at the center of his model.

Ronaldo Caiado, Renan Santos, Augusto Cury, and Clariana Barão, with important differences among them, defend strong fiscal responsibility or adjustment.

Edmilson Costa, Hertz Dias, Rui Costa Pimenta, and Samara Martins propose different degrees of bank nationalization, debt auditing, or debt-payment suspension.

Wilson Grassi proposes replacing several taxes with a Single Federal Tax applied to financial transactions.

The official documents are available in the TSE repository. For Pablo Marçal, we did not identify an equivalent official plan there that would allow us to attribute a monetary architecture without inference. (tse.jus.br)

These are enormous differences.

But perhaps we can ask all of them an earlier question:

Why must almost all new money enter society first through a decision about who will receive credit?

Citizen Drex: a second gate

Here enters an explicitly BrainLatam proposal, belonging to none of the candidates.

We would preserve:

banks;

credit;

investment;

property;

profit;

risk;

markets.

But we would add a second gate.

Today we have:

credit → debt → new bank deposit.

We propose also discussing:

Body-Territory → limited sovereign issuance → National Income.

Imagine that technical studies identify macroeconomic room for a certain monetary expansion without excessively pressuring inflation, the exchange rate, or productive capacity.

Instead of all that new capacity entering initially only through new debts, a small part could be distributed equally among citizens.

R$100.

R$200.

R$300.

The exact figure is not the point yet.

The architecture is.

The money would begin circulating through millions of Body-Territories.

In 2025, the IMF published a study exploring retail CBDCs as infrastructure for social policies. The paper does not recommend the BrainLatam model and notes that systems such as Pix already solve many payment functions, but it recognizes possibilities involving government transfers through digital wallets, automation, and public administration of benefits. It also emphasizes that CBDCs require strong privacy safeguards. (imf.org)

But could this become inflationary or populist?

Yes.

That is why the proposal only makes sense with limits.

Issuance could not be freely decided by the president.

It would need to respond to rules involving:

inflation;

productive capacity;

employment;

food supply;

energy;

productivity;

exchange-rate pressure;

and industrial utilization.

If there is no economic room, issuance falls to zero.

And citizens would need to retain financial privacy.

Buying bread cannot create a government dossier.

Traceability of large financial structures is not the same thing as surveillance of everyday life.

Why is this also a Decolonial Neuroscience question?

Because material insecurity does not exist only on balance sheets.

It reaches the Body-Territory.

Latin American researchers led by Agustín Ibáñez, Sebastián Moguilner, Sandra Báez, and collaborators have shown that socioeconomic and environmental inequalities are associated with differences in brain health across the Americas, with particularly strong associations in Latin American populations.

These findings do not mean that poverty determines a brain or that income transfers automatically generate creativity.

They show something more fundamental:

macrosocial conditions can also become biologically embodied. (nature.com)

Reducing economic anxiety may not automatically produce inventors.

But it may restore something that comes before invention:

time to think;

the possibility of studying;

freedom to experiment;

the capacity to refuse;

internal space to imagine.

And then our monetary question changes.

It is no longer only:

How much money exists?

It becomes:

In which Body-Territories does that money begin its journey?

In the 2026 Presidential Election, perhaps economic critical thinking begins when we are able to ask:

Who writes the rules of money, who receives new money first, and who owns the channels through which we learn to think about those same rules?

Because perhaps there are many possible forms of capitalism.

And perhaps economic freedom is not only the freedom to choose within existing rules.

Perhaps it is also the democratic capacity to ask who wrote those rules — and whether we still want money to keep entering society through the same gates.

References

LEGAZ, Agustina; ALTSCHULER, Florencia; GONZALEZ-GOMEZ, Raul; BÁEZ, Sandra; MOGUILNER, Sebastián; IBÁÑEZ, Agustín et al. Structural inequality linked to brain volume and network dynamics in aging and dementia across the Americas. Nature Aging, 2025. DOI 10.1038/s43587-024-00781-2. (nature.com)

MOGUILNER, Sebastián et al. Brain clocks capture diversity and disparities in aging and dementia across geographically diverse populations. Nature Medicine, 2024. (nature.com)

IBÁÑEZ, Agustín et al. Healthy aging meta-analyses and scoping review of risk factors across Latin America reveal large heterogeneity and weak predictive models. Nature Aging, 2024. (nature.com)

Rentiers and distributive conflict in Brazil (2000–2019). Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 48, 2024. Analysis of rentier income and its role in the functional distribution of income in Brazil. (academic.oup.com)

The dynamics of the Brazilian digital public space on Twitter. Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política, 2026. Analysis of Brazil’s informational space, media centrality, visibility, and concentration. (scielo.br)

NIKITIN, Denis; SCHMALHOLZ, Johan; BLOCH, Carolina. Can Retail Central Bank Digital Currencies Improve the Delivery of Social Safety Nets? IMF Working Paper WP/25/211, 2025. (imf.org)

GRAEBER, David; WENGROW, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. 2021. Conceptual reference on the historical plurality of social organization.

VAROUFAKIS, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. 2023. Conceptual reference on cloud capital, platforms, and rent extraction.

SUPERIOR ELECTORAL COURT — TSE. Government Proposals — 2026 Elections. Official candidate documents used in this comparison. (tse.jus.br)