Gonzalo is back. I personally think ZIRP is an evil policy that destroys the lives of senior citizens while further enriching criminal bankers. And that’s all I have to say about that.
The Perniciousness of ZIRP
Suppose that I promised to give you free chocolate for the next three years: How much chocolate would you eat today?
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| Mmm . . . money . . . —er, I mean: Mmm, chocolate . . . |
A pound? Half a pound? A few ounces? Or would you not eat any chocolate at all, once I made the announcement? After all, you’re going to have free chocolate for the next three years—seems silly to gorge on chocolate today, when you can have as much as you’d like tomorrow, or next week, or whenever you want over the next three years.
So free chocolate for the next three years? Great! . . . uh, only not right now, thanks very much: I’m kinda full.
But then what if I said to you, “Chocolate is free now—but I’m definitely going to raise the price in the near term. In a month, chocolate might be free—or then again, it might cost $1,000 an ounce. So get some while you can, because tomorrow, you never know!”
Well, obviously, to such an uncertain outlook, you’d go out and buy some chocolate now—because tomorrow, it might well be unaffordable.
In fact, it seems quite obvious that if you don’t know when I’m going to raise the price of chocolate, you’ll probably wind up buying—and eating—more chocolate than if it was free. A paradox? Sure—but true.
In point of fact, if the chocolate is free, you might not eat any chocolate at all. Every time you make the decision as to what to eat, you might well find yourself repeating the same mantra: “Chocolate is free—I can have it any time I want. So I won’t have any now.”
This is the problem Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve currently have—and it’s their own stupid fault: They have promised to maintain interest rates at effectively 0% until at least the end of 2014—they have in fact announced this zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP) as the hallmark of their strategy to reignite the economy—
—but then they’re surprised when businesses aren’t borrowing more. They’re surprised when lending is in fact contracting. They’re surprised when the American economy doesn’t start borrowing—and thus growing—like crazy.
So the American economy obviously doesn’t benefit from ZIRP. In fact, it stagnates because of ZIRP.
Stucky says:
GLES
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1st February 2012 at 10:06 am
Muck About says:
He may eat shit but you can’t disagree with his logic.
MA
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1st February 2012 at 10:37 am
Stucky says:
Oh, yeah? Well, maybe GLES means, Gonzo Lira Eees Stupendous.
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1st February 2012 at 10:41 am
AKAnon says:
GLEC (chocolate)
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1st February 2012 at 10:45 am
Stucky says:
I’m sticking this article here because;
1) GLES
2) To draw out SSS
====================================
Drug war hypocrisy: drug trafficking’s big money benefits Big Brother and corrupt banksters
February 1, 2012
By PF Louis
Natural News
The hypocrisy of the war on drugs is outrageous when compared to the amount of drug trafficking that benefits the CIA and international banking system. The son of a convicted notorious mobster, John Gotti Jr, when asked in court if the family still dealt drugs cracked, “No, we can’t compete with the government.”
Today in Afghanistan, American troops have been seen guarding poppy fields used to make heroin. Those fields were all but wiped out by 2001 when the Taliban destroyed them and forbade that agricultural pursuit. Now they’re flourishing again after the American occupation.
This doesn’t make sense despite all the mainstream reports that American troops are protecting the poppy farmers from the bad guys. Internet sites such as Prison Planet, Info Wars, The Political Coffeehouse and others report otherwise. They connect the CIA and US military to restarting the poppy fields in Afghanistan in 2002, increasing poppy growth by over 650 percent. Who’s telling it like it is?
One way the CIA keeps their drug trafficking hidden from public view
The CIA’s secret operations to influence journalism started in the 1950s by infiltrating the media and bribing journalists to be operatives and assets for the CIA. By 1976, then CIA director William Colby reportedly bragged that the CIA owned the press. Supposedly, this too secret to name operation was coined “Operation Mockingbird” by Deborah Davis in her bookKatherine the Great.
Operation Mockingbird worked well against prize winning journalist Gary Webb when his newspaper, theSan Jose Mercury News, ran his in depth series on CIA drug trafficking that flooded the USA to help finance the CIA backed Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s.
Journalists all over the USA jumped on the series, claiming Webb’s journalism was shoddy. The newspaper had to recant and fire him, and Gary Webb was black listed from mainstream journalism completely.
Webb retaliated by having his bookDark Alliancepublished and making theNY Timesbest seller list, forcing some of his critics to privately eat crow after the fact.
Despite the CIA’s control of the press, a few Mexico and Central America cocaine busts of plane cargoes and discoveries of large cocaine stashes on crashed planes with CIA hired pilots flying them for front companies did hit the mainstream news,albeit briefly.
Remember the movie “Air America?” It was based on an actual CIA owned front company transporting tons of heroin from Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle” poppy fields during and after the Vietnam conflicts. Now Afghanistan and the “Golden Crescent” are the featured opium/heroin conduit sources.
Government and big business using drug traffic profits is nothing new
When the U.S. government made deals with the Cosa Nostra mafia to help police ports and harbors during WW II, they breathed life into the heroin trade. Eventually, Marseilles, France was set up by the Corsican mafia to become the “French Connection” for heroin traffic.
But opium trade history goes back further, to colonial times and early America. That’s when American shipping magnates used their fast Clipper Ships to compete with England’s monarch sanctioned dope running East India Company for transporting opium to China.
A few key players created family fortunes from the China opium trade that exist today within some northeast America’s “old money” families.
Among the familiar family names, according toWikipedia(source below) is Forbes. Another source mentions Astor, a prominently wealthy philanthropic family around New York today (Wiki source below). In those days, trafficking dope was a legitimate business endeavor, immoral but not illegal.
Now it is illegal as well. Ironically, this allows the biggest illicit drug providers to financially benefit the CIA and international banking.
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1st February 2012 at 10:58 am
Administrator says:
Stuck
SSS is still curled up in the fetal position after another epic smackdown by the Admin on the Guatemala thread. He’s questioning his entire life’s work.
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1st February 2012 at 10:59 am
Colma Rising says:
Modest insight…. nothing to write home about.
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1st February 2012 at 11:01 am
Kill Bill says:
Suppose that I promised to give you free chocolate for the next three years: How much chocolate would you eat today?
Id eat only a little and sell the rest. I should be a banker, no?
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1st February 2012 at 11:10 am
Kill Bill says:
“—but then they’re surprised when businesses aren’t borrowing more. They’re surprised when lending is in fact contracting”
People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. -Michael Hudson
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1st February 2012 at 11:14 am
Administrator says:
KB
To be a banker, you’d have one piece of chocolate, but sell it 40 times.
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1st February 2012 at 11:17 am
Kill Bill says:
KB To be a banker, you’d have one piece of chocolate, but sell it 40 times. -Admin
Easy. I will just invent synthetic chocolate, keep it in my vault, and sell pieces of paper that have the word real chocolate imprinted on them.
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1st February 2012 at 11:25 am
AWD says:
Gonzo writes another epic piece of shit, and using chocolate as an analogy?
Even a second-grader could see the latent homosexual undertones. Gonzo is craving a ride up the “Hershey highway”, is dying to eat liquid “chocolate” off a huge black schlong, and be a backseat driver to a hunky homo.
His writing amazes with it’s stupidity and banality. I wonder if his mom is still his only subscriber, after he stole her credit card.
He still hasn’t figured out he’s queer yet, but he was born that way…
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1st February 2012 at 12:06 pm
ragman says:
Without savings the capital is gone from capitalism…..theBernank has destroyed our economy with this foolishness.
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1st February 2012 at 12:42 pm
Petey says:
TBP’s tagline should be “ZIRP 4 EVA, BITCHEZ”
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1st February 2012 at 2:31 pm
SSS says:
Stucky
More drivel about the CIA and illegal drugs. Sort of like the Truthers who claim that the WTC buildings collapsed because of internal explosives planted in the buildings or that the Pentagon was hit by a missile instead of an airplane, while a fucking photo of an aircraft engine lay on the ground right next to where the Pentagon was hit. So where’s the beef to these claims?
This CIA/drug trafficking accusation shit has been going on for decades. And in all that time, not one fucking arrest of any CIA employee. Not one. Maybe someone can come up with a credible example (flash will certainly try) during the Vietnam War or whenever, but I guarantee it will be some rogue acting on his own to make some money on the side, and not an Agency network.
It would take hundreds of Agency employees or co-optees to run an international drug trafficking network, yet NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE OR EYEWITNESS HAS EVER BEEN PRESENTED THAT THE CIA IS INVOLVED IN DRUG TRAFFICKING. NONE. And this from an Agency that critics claim is filled with a bunch of bumbling fools.
That cunt from California, Maxine Waters, even held hearings on the subject in the House of Representatives, and came up completely empty. Nothing but blanks. She made a goddamn fool of herself, but her constituents keep reelecting her with 90% of the vote.
The defense rests. Case dismissed.
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1st February 2012 at 6:39 pm