What do you mean banks print money?

 When you go to a bank and get a loan on a mortgage the bank is not lending money which someone has actually deposited with them. They just record your debt and create electronic money by recording a credit in someone else’s account. You pay interest on the money they just created. Why do you pay interest on something which cost nothing to create?  - because banks decide you should and there is nothing we can do about it.

Interest rate movements, besides just transferring money from the poor to the rich (a monopoly rent on debt and money creation for the banks shareholders) are the way the government tries to stop people and corporations from asking the bank to lend them money. The amount of money circulating depends on whether you and the bank think you can afford to pay the money back, not on government monetary/economic policy.

 Printing money! Doesn't that create inflation?

Yes. Printing or creating money be it paper or electronic does create inflation. So the more banks lend, the higher the inflation rate. What does the government do about it? All they can do is raise interest rates. But interest rates just raise the banks profits.

It doesn’t matter what happens, the banks make more money and we all get deeper and deeper in debt and the banks make record profits in the billions of dollars, a large slice of which, about 25%, goes offshore and other countries get our coal and other minerals for free.

The money supply is increasing around 7-8% a year (This figure is called M3 in the technical literature).  The Government does not control the money supply and therefore cannot control inflation which it benefits from in any case by way of increased taxation revenues and the like with bracket creep, capital gains tax etc.

What this also means is that the real inflation rate is by definition around 7-8%. The CPI (Consumer price index) is basically a hoax to slowly whittle away at the real value of low wages, pensions and unemployment benefits. Inessential items get cheaper while healthy food, housing and utilities get more expensive. Healthy food gets more expensive and poor people get obese from eating all the cheap crap that we get sold. Studies demonstrate this.   

If the real inflation rate is at 7-8% this makes apparent economic growth an apparition and is merely an unadjusted inflation measure. Because unadjusted inflation represents the transferal of wealth from the poor to the rich invertors look kindly upon countries with a high apparent growth rates like Australia.  High corporate profit likewise is merely an indicator of the distribution of goods and services between workers and employers within an economy and not indicative of economic prosperity. Corporate profit is just rent on a workers salary.

There is no economic justification for interest rates on housing loans and constantly printing more money just makes it almost impossible to make sensible and wise investment decisions  by distorting market feedback mechanisms, that is, prices - if that is, you have a few bucks left over after paying the mortgage to invest in anything  but basic survival.  The big lie.