“And on top of it all NOTHING has been fixed financially, at all. There is more debt, more leverage, more and more liquidity achieving less and less, interest rates are negative, pensions are going nowhere, insurers are grasping for risk even as they fear what it will do to them when the next crisis hits. And governments are all, every one of them, preparing their armed forces for widespread civil unrest.”
Golem XIV, Note On Deutsche Bank
What I mean is that every political and financial system, every bureaucracy, public or private is originally set up to do a necessary job. And the duty of those who work in it is to make sure the system doe that job. But when the challenges facing the system change so that the system begins to no longer be able to do its job, those in it have two choices: they can work for the greater good and help change the old system into a new one better fit to the new challenges, or they can ignore the problems, and forget the reason they and the system were created in the first place and instead seek merely to get as much as they can from the failing system before it implodes.
It seems obvious to me that is where we are today, both politically and financially. We are living in the End Times not because some angry supernatural being is coming to punish us, but because we are living in a system, a machine, which we built and therfore can change, but we have forgotten this. Some time in the recent past we crawled inside our machine, closed the last hatch to the outside behind us, and then forget there was an outside. Our leaders are the worst of us. They are the lords of the machine and they are sure outside there is only chaos. We must all save the machine. Their power and wealth demands it.
And yet they do not know how.
I think Friday saw a power-shift from the central banks to the global private banks. I think the global banks served notice that the Central bank plan of 1) reining in the risk-taking of the TBTF banks and 2) stimulating growth in the real economy is now dead in the water. There is a new plan. (Let me apologise now for this video being too long. I really did try half a dozen times to make it shorter. I failed. )
Couple of things I forgot to mention in the video.
Lobbying in the US by the financial/Insurance and Real Estate sector in 2014 stands at $249,342,399. Its been above $450 million every year since 2008.
According to the Sunlight Foundation, Mr Melvin L. Watt, head of the FHFA, had received some 45 percent of his total campaign funds in 2009 from donors in the finance and real estate sector.
Waiting for Something Bad to Happen
Beneath are the links I used in the video roughly in the order I used them.
Blackstone quote and their $70 billion
Junk Bond market and Derivatives market
The FHFA and the new sub-prime housing push
Changes to Buy-backs and mortgage laws
UK housing – new mortgage rates
Frank Keating – Frank Dodd hurting the recovery Look up Frank Keating and Bloomberg to see how often he is on lobbying against regulations.
C. Boyden Grey – Regulatory overreach
Leveraged buy-outs – ignoring the regulators
What are Synthetic CDOs and how they work/don’t work. A really good but technical piece by the always good Janet Tavakoli
Guest Post by Jesse
What is even more clever than lining your pockets by ballooning the financial system into a great bubble by fraud and bad governance?
Getting the victims and bystanders to pay the price of your perfidy, and shifting the anger of the people to some unfortunates, while ‘reforming’ the system to make it even more efficient at looting so that you can do it all over again.
No wonder that any movement that threatens the status quo in the least bit gets these white collared reivers and their pampered princes in such a lather. It is important to make people think that no one else cares, and that they are alone.
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.
“The sudden explosion of European sovereign debt is the direct and indisputable result of all our political parties deciding they would safeguard their mates’ and their own personal wealth (it is the top 10% who hold the bulk of their wealth in the financial products which would be destroyed in a bank collapse. NOT the rest of us!) by bailing out the private banks and piling their unpaid debts on to the public purse.
So whatever the trigger of the next crisis may be, they know any solution which saves the wealth and power of the over-class will have to involve piling new, private-bank bad-debts on to already indebted sovereigns and that, our leaders must be keenly aware, will not be easy to force on an already angry public. They know a whole range of the assurances they might like to give us about what must be done when the next crisis hits and how those things will undoubtably save us, will not be so easy to shove down people’s throats…
I think one of the cleverest things the 1% have done over the last few years is the way they have created a relentless public discourse, via their paid political front-men and women and their media empires, to insist on the need to ‘fix’ and protect the system, and the extreme danger to us all should the system not be ‘saved’. This has served as a perfect cover for making sure that not enough people have noticed that the system is, in fact, being gutted and replaced by something that better serves the interests of the 1%. We have not been fixing the banks, we have been feeding them.”
Golem XIV, The Next Crisis Part One
“Why do you think we have a winner?,” President Snow asks while cutting a white rose.
“What do you mean?,” Seneca asks.
“I mean, why do we have a winner?,” Snow repeats, before pausing. “Hope.”
“Hope?,” Seneca replies slightly bewildered.
“Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous,” Snow declares. “A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained. So, contain it.”
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
