Global financial system implosion begins

[Dr Jon]

The bit i selected from that guardian quote is the most alarming, and tragic, statement i have read in a long time. It's saying the stock market is betting on us actually destroying ourselves and rendering the planet uninhabitable

Crapitalism has always been destroying the environment, taking out resources, contributing only toxic wastes and environmental destruction.
These vermin want to maximise their profits, up to the point where the ecosystem crashes, taking them and us with it.

 

[Dr Jon]

Just seen heard this clip posted by Bill Still:



Like Bill Black, Max Keiser and others, Prof. Sachs is calling this scam for what it is and is talking about ending fictional reserve banking.

... what has been revealed is prima-facie criminal behaviour ... it's financial fraud on a very large scale ... there's also a tremendous amount of insider trading...
...
The final point of course, is separating the politicians from the crooks ... but maybe they're so close together, they can't actually be separated. It's the same community...

 

[laptop]

Prof. Sachs is... talking about ending fictional reserve banking.

Not quite, he isn't:

But the second point then is Larry’s point, and this is whether fractional reserve banking itself has value enough to keep it in its current form. I’m not convinced, I have to say, one way or another. I kind of, you know, grew up in a fractional reserve banking system. I do believe that it provides liquidity in normal times if regulation is good. I tend to believe that there is value in reserve banking, but it’s also highly volatile, as theorists have recognized at least for 150 years, and as Milt Friedman agreed, as Diamond said, as Larry has pointed out, and I think we have the choice, could we really have liquidity without fractional reserve banking? If we could, we might be able to address, you know, another, another degree of this problem.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013...treet-criminality-and-pathological-greed.html

 

[Dr Jon]

Good link. I like this comment:

Every single idea Sachs has promoted in the past twenty odd years has produced unimaginable disaster, and now he wakes up to notice greed is a problem? Has he told the Russians?


James Madison understood checks and balances. He may be the last important person who did. We have spent thirty five years listening to fools and charlatans chanting black is white, spouting gibberish and calling it economics. Sachs should be required to wear a dunce cap in public. Greenspan, Rogart and Reinhoff too.

Economics has long been a pseudo-science with almost as much credibility as Astrology or Homeopathy.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Noticed this elsewhere, not really sure if it's worth it's own thread

Just so people aren't surprised by tonight's probable news of riots in Madrid:

A protest called #AsediaAlCongreso , unseat parliament is called for 5 PM in three different spots in Madrid by the PlataformaEnPie.

The police expect "no more than 8000 people". The stated goal is nothing short of revolution. Parliament has suspended activity for this day. 1400 riot police will be deployed, 40% of them not wearing ID numbers because they "ran out of supply".
This is what previous "encircle the congress" protests looked like on the 25th and 29th of September.

Todays demo has been declared illegal by the government. 15-M (Indidignados) and PAH (anti-eviction platform) have witheld support, as organizations. A TV interview with one of the organizers is here. He makes the case that the demo is intended to be peaceful, but that the 1400 will be armed to the teeht, and they will defend themselves.

A livestream will be here.

 

[Dr Jon]

On the subject of large-scale financial fraud and money-laundering:

Money laundering is the life blood of organized crime. Without it crime would simply not pay. But who does the laundering? The easy and obvious answer is criminals. But that is completely wrong and is at the root of our inability to stop it.

Criminals are the people who need money laundering. They are the clients. But they do not, themselves, know how to launder money. The only people who do know, and who are in positions to do it, are those whose day jobs are the many professional services which make up laundering: the accountants, lawyers, company registration and management agents, account managers in banks and company directors in companies that have no reason to be, other than to pass hot money through an endless spin cycle. In organized crime, criminals provide the crime but professionals provide the organization.

From:
Making the Truth Illegal – revisited

... and on a similar theme
After Laundering $800 Million in Drug Money, How Did HSBC Executives Avoid Jail?

Either we have a big clean-out in politics and finance or we support the economy by buying more drugs...

ETA
Just spotted this
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it's only just coming into view.

 

[Dr Jon]

Another corking post from Rowan Bosworth-Davies, on the legacy of Thatcher, Reagan and the (oil-fuelled) financial free-for-all that they unleashed.
link

 

[Dr Jon]

Blast from the past:

 

[yield]

Heading to G7 meeting, U.S. tells Japan to stick to currency rules
Reuters. Fri May 10, 2013

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said that Japan had "growth issues" that needed to be dealt with but that its attempts to stimulate its economy needed to stay within the bounds of international agreements to avoid competitive devaluations.

Japan insisted that its tumbling yen would not be a hot topic at the meeting of finance chiefs, despite concerns in other camps about a looming currency war.

"The Bank of Japan isn't targeting currency rates, which are determined by the markets," the bank's governor, Haruhiko Kuroda.

There has been concern among policymakers that Japan is engineering an export-led recovery that could hinder other regions' ability to grow.

Other central banks have also ramped up their stimulus efforts in the face of weak growth. The European Central Bank cut interest rates last week and may boost small business lending while the U.S. Federal Reserve is continuing its sizeable bond purchase programme.

The Bank of England has recently expanded a credit scheme and Chancellor George Osborne has tasked the next central bank governor, Mark Carney, with finding new ways to boost growth when he succeeds Mervyn King in July.

The USA saying "do what I say, not what I do"?

 

[gosub]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/financ...lvent-get-your-money-out-while-you-still-can/

 

[Dr Jon]

After seeing what happened in Cyprus, I'm surprised this hasn't happened everywhere already.
I read about the difficulty getting delivery of physical gold these days, so I'm wondering whether maybe it has, but the banks just aren't letting on?

 

[gosub]

After seeing what happened in Cyprus, I'm surprised this hasn't happened everywhere already.
I read about the difficulty getting delivery of physical gold these days, so I'm wondering whether maybe it has, but the banks just aren't letting on?

If buying gold DON@T BUY COINS -only people who buy back are the places you brought them from (Krugerrand may be different)

 

[littlebabyjesus]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/financ...lvent-get-your-money-out-while-you-still-can/

It's telling that that article focuses on the deficit, with 25% unemployment mentioned only in passing - and even then only in terms of getting the deficit down. The human crisis here is with the lack of work. Getting people back to work is the challenge, not getting the deficit down.

 

[free spirit]

It's telling that that article focuses on the deficit, with 25% unemployment mentioned only in passing - and even then only in terms of getting the deficit down. The human crisis here is with the lack of work. Getting people back to work is the challenge, not getting the deficit down.

innit - and only by getting people back into work and the economy growing can they possibly hope to ever get to a position where either the deficit is at a sustainable long term level, or they're actually able to repay some of that debt.

cuts cuts and more cuts in the middle of a deep depression can only ever make minor temporary inroads into the deficit before the deficit worsens again as the direct and indirect economic impacts of those cuts feeds back through the economy into reduced taxes and increased social spending on unemployment benefits and assiciated costs (prisons, health care etc etc)

 

[gosub]

It's telling that that article focuses on the deficit, with 25% unemployment mentioned only in passing - and even then only in terms of getting the deficit down. The human crisis here is with the lack of work. Getting people back to work is the challenge, not getting the deficit down.

not really, its from the finance section

 

[littlebabyjesus]

not really, its from the finance section

It goes to the heart of Spain's economic crisis. Getting people back to work is the way to save it from meltdown.

Here, for instance.

So what happens when you carry on borrowing at that sort of rate, year in, year out? Your overall indebtedness rockets, of course, and that's what's going to happen to Spain, where general government gross debt is forecast to rise from 84.1 per cent of GDP last year to 110.6 per cent in 2018. No other advanced economy has such a dramatically worsening outlook. And the tragedy of it all is that Spain is actually making relatively good progress in addressing the "primary balance", that's the deficit before debt servicing costs.

Not a word about getting people back to work in order to slow the growth in public debt - or indeed, purposely increasing public debt in order to get people back to work where the private sector is not investing. Also not a word about the private-sector debt that caused the crisis in the first place - it is meaningless to talk about public-sector debt without mentioning private-sector debt. And there is the usual scare-mongering about figures. Japan has 200% public debt - Spain's nowhere near that - and the average length of maturity on the debt is also utterly crucial to assessing how sustainable a debt is, and utterly absent from that piece. I don't know what the average time on Spain's debt is - the article writer should be telling it to us in order to make their figures meaningful.

The recent crisis was caused by a crisis of private debt. You'd never guess that from this article.

 

[gosub]

cos its from the finance section, the food section doesn't bang on about the history of pepper or rarely do they mention the living standards of those picking tea, and that's not 'telling' , even if it is the telegraph.

 

[free spirit]

cos its from the finance section, the food section doesn't bang on about the history of pepper or rarely do they mention the living standards of those picking tea, and that's not 'telling' , even if it is the telegraph.

it's very telling.

it tells a lot about why we're in this mess, as the financial sector have got this completely wrong by focussing on the deficit as being just a function of too much government spending so we must cut that, rather than considering the other side of the equation in terms of actually the best way to increase government tax receipts at the same time as decreasing long term spending... ie economic growth and job creation.

No country could ever balance the books with ~25% unemployment, it's just farcical to even contemplate writing an article about the situation without pointing that out.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Spain's average debt maturity is 6.3 years. That's low. For comparison, in the UK, it is about 14 years.

So why isn't Spain issuing 20- and 30-year bonds - they didn't issue any last year? Part of the answer is that they are issuing debt in order to firefight in a situation where unemployment is sky-high and tax receipts are down. That debt is short-term as that's easier to finance.

There are other ways. Not all debt is equal. There could be plans in place for 20- or 30-year bonds issued specifically to fund projects designed to get people working. These would need to be issued on top of the short-term bonds they're issuing to firefight - and so the headlines in simplistic articles like the one above would be scaremongering - but they would stand a chance of being productive debt, debt that creates jobs and wealth - increasing tax receipts while reducing social security payments, which is a double-win.

But this article isn't even asking these kinds of questions.

 

[Dr Jon]

I see that Merv is asking us not to demonise bankers.


No Merv, we don't need to do that. The evidence is clear to see:-

• Libor Exposure Of Banker Corruption, Bank Of England And U.S. Fed Both Implicated
• How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it
• Banks have become the enemy of the State and should be treated in the same way as Organised Crime or Financial Terrorists!
• Banking on Criminality
• etc.

 

[gosub]

They do a lot of work for charity, but they don't like to talk about it.

 

[love detective]

I see that Merv is asking us not to demonise bankers.


No Merv, we don't need to do that. The evidence is clear to see:-

• Libor Exposure Of Banker Corruption, Bank Of England And U.S. Fed Both Implicated
• How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it
• Banks have become the enemy of the State and should be treated in the same way as Organised Crime or Financial Terrorists!
• Banking on Criminality
• etc.

He's absolutely right though in what he says, which is:-

I would say to people though, don't demonise individuals here. This wasn't a problem of individuals, this was a problem of failure of a system

In as far as someone like him can, he points towards the structural problems of the system itself as being the root of the problem, not the individuals who are produced by, and are merely manifestations of, that system

This is a far better way of looking at things than putting it down to a few bad/rotten apples within an otherwise functioning, equitable and acceptable system (not that I think his solutions to the structural problems of the system will make any difference though as they are grounded in the idea that more/better regulation can prevent crisis within capitalism)

 

[phildwyer]

Objectıfıed lıfe stands ın logıcal contradıctıon to lıvıng lıfe.

The problem ıs money, not people.

 

[Dr Jon]

...
In as far as someone like him can, he points towards the structural problems of the system itself as being the root of the problem, not the individuals who are produced by, and are merely manifestations of, that system

That'll be the system that puppet politicians liberalised and de-regulated, to the point where the thieving vermin could gamble away people's savings, whilst snorting cocaine and pocketing obscene bonuses.

Fictional reserve banking based on usury is both immoral and inherently unstable and needs to be replaced. The financial system should be a public utility, not a profiteering racket! Especially not one that we are expected to bail out when these thieving twats' Ponzi schemes (inevitably) implode.

Also see

 

[love detective]

great analysis Jon

 

[Dr Jon]

Do The Math

 

[Crispy]

Do The Math

s

 

[ibilly99]

Do The Math

A long haul looks like a Gold bug shilling physical gold , inflation on the way , central banks have rigged the game oh and Germany is screwed.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Spain - Firefighters vs Police

 

[Dr Jon]

Bill Black: Our System is So Flawed That Fraud is Mathematically Guaranteed

A warning: There's much revealed in this interview that will make your blood boil. For example, the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcement actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.

Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70 times greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. So how many criminal referrals did the same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, make?

Zero.