Month: December 2009

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Greed Is Good

The point of encouraging greed is, as the Roman invaders here knew and understood,
if you create an aspirational society and you control the money
supply by monopoly, you bring into being a machine that makes you
wealthy. If you have a society where everyone wants to “get on” and
you define what “getting on” means, and they need money to do it and
they have to come to you to get it, you rule. Every time they trade,
which they need to do to “get on”, they need money and they can only
get it from you. You let them have it cheap (as we’ve had here in
recent years) the money supply grows and everyone prospers. You make
it expensive or, as currently is the case, largely unavailable, and
people starve, as we’re seeing. When you see people using expression
like greed is good, it’s banker thinking, the bankers having the
effective monopoly today of the money supply. It’s not pointless or
ridiculous, the point is it make money for the people who run the
economy, not the people who have to live in it. We live under an
imposed cultural model, one which has been imposed upon us to further
the interests of the imposers, not we who live under it. It was never
intended to be benign and you shouldn’t think it’s silly or irrational
because it isn’t, you just mistake it’s intentions.

BB

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Throwing Moodys

Why are we bothered one way or the other that rating agency Moodys are suggesting Britain might lose its credit AAA rating?
Moodys has been thoroughly discredited in recent times as it repeatedly gave AAA ratings to what turned out to be sub-prime rubbish. I understand it only exists courtesy of the big banks, who fund it.
Why then would we (or anyone at all) take any notice of its assessments?
And, while we’re on the subject, where are all the court cases? Why aren’t we reading in the press of furious pension fund managers and the like suing the backside off the credit rating agencies (like Moodys) and the banks themselves for knowlingly recommending and selling them investments marked as gold-plated when they were anything but and the sellers were well aware of this? It has occurred to me that here is another reason for the banks to be sitting on the output of QE, as they may well be needing all the readies they can lay their hands on to pay the rather large fines that ought to be coming their way. Something rather odd is happening though, or rather not happening; I’m not hearing about banks and credit rating agencies being sued?

BB

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BBC News – Banks Criticise Plans For Windfall Tax On Bonuses

 

She added that one million jobs in the UK were supported by the banking industry

BBC News – Banks criticise plans for windfall tax on bonuses

No doubt true enough but how many businesses and so jobs are not being supported by the banks by their refusal to lend to small businesses? It’s true the banks have a duty not to lend into a financially precarious environment but it is they themselves who have bought about this fragility. It can fairly be argued that a business model is out of date when it means that a small group of shareholders have their interests catered for against the broader interest of the entire country.

The banks may well be supporting their own employees but in so doing they are creating and maintaining the unemployment of an increasing number, one certainly far in excess of a paltry one million.

 

BB

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Global Warming

Recent research indicates that artifacts found underwater off Japan and India are from 7500 BC. The environments they were found in, deep underwater and obviously man-made, indicate flourishing civilisations existed on land-masses now underwater around 12000 BC. When I say flourishing civilisation, I hasten to point out there’s no evidence these guys polluted the skies with air travel or the seas with shipping the way we do. No suggestion of man-made pollution back then. They got swallowed up by the advancing waters just the same however. This suggests to me warming and cooling is a natural and ongoing consequence of the world turning, commonplace in the scheme of things, rather than directly created by the scheming hands of man.

It gets turned into something else by the politicians as an excuse to exercise further authority over the rest of us. Plus of course it serves as a distraction from their endless economic incompetence.

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Bad Banks!

Banks or their equivalent can’t be allowed to make a profit at the expense of the rest of the community. This has been recognised for thousands of years. Old-time religions are recorded as being against it. I suspect there was wisdom behind this thinking, it was better understood then that within a community you cannot have one small section effectively running the rest because then you have two societies, the morlocks and the elois, effectively. We’ve grown up in a culture where that awareness has not so much been lost sight of but comprehensively buried. We’re taught nothing of this in our so-called education but it influences every facet of our lives. Everything we buy is loaded with a huge premium that consists of nothing but profits for the banks, profits on loans consisting of money not garnered by prudence and thrift but made up out of thin air. We’ve been had, and we continue to be had.

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Unfair Bank Charges

Much in the news lately about unfair bank charges. Plenty about overdraft charges – but what about interest?
Let’s examine why we have interest on loans. If you borrow 500K from your mate, while you have it, he doesn’t have use of it. He can’t use it to further his own interest and so it isn’t in his interest to loan it to you. In order to make it in his interest, you have to offer him compensation. You not only agree to return his money after a set time, then, but with extra money on top as compensation. That extra money is, quite literally, his interest in doing the deal.
All fair enough.
When you get money from a commercial bank, though, none of this applies as you aren’t loaned anything. Instead the banks create new money in your account. This isn’t the same thing as lending you what’s theirs and so being deprived of the use of it. They aren’t deprived of this money in any way; they never had it in the first place. Why should they have any compensation then? They didn’t lose out in any way. There is no actual or potential loss.
I’m aware that it is recorded in their accounts as a debit, (or whatever), but that’s just the way banks choose to do their accounting. They can just as easily decide not to. That’s the way things developed because it suited the banks, not because it was fair or appropriate.
So where’s all the complaining about that?

BB