Category: Business as usual

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Yvette! Yvette! You Stupid Woman!

I saw Yvette Cooper on tv last night stoutly declaring Labour had saved thousands of Britons from losing their life savings by bailing out the banks – this as if it were a good thing! The British people, all people in fact, should clearly understand that lodging their money with a bank is a gamble and that sometimes, if you gamble, you lose.  This is a matter of simple education and the job of education is in the hands of government, in particular a government who got elected on a mantra of “Education, education, education”. The banks that should have gone bankrupt were that way because they were incompetent, dishonest or both. If they’d been bankrupted as they should have been (and no doubt still should be) then they’d be gone and the system would be purged and could rebuild itself cleanly. Now, they’re still there! Permanently too if the polticians have anything to do with it! All Yvette and her pals, all of them no doubt with their eyes on a cosy seat in a boardroom somewhere when they retire, have done is to lumber the Britih people, all of them, with an entire banking system that’s both corrupt and incompetent and glories in the sure knowledge that whatever scrapes it gets into the politicians will use taxpayer money to bail them out so they can all of them collectively, bankers and politicians both, carry on with the serious business of getting their snouts back in the trough. I mean, the budget: who cares? Was there anything in the budget to address this situation – or did it, in fact, by refusing to address any of the issues at the heart of the problems, merely preserve and extend the circumstances that have given rise to those problems in the first place? It’s the election coming up very soon, and we’re all supposed to trot along and vote like good little sheeple. Who is there to vote for with a policy of letting bankrupt banks fail when they need to and damn the cost to their political careers? Who is there, in fact, that there’s any point in voting for at all?

BB

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The Budget At The End Of The Universe

Budget day but I’m not at all excited. We don’t need a budget to do this or to do that, we need something now that’s utterly beyond the scope of any budget. The environment in which any kind of budget would make a perceivable difference is gone now. No-one seems to be addressing this, probably because they’ve got no idea what to do – witness both main parties accusing the other of lack of detail in their policies on how to deal with the deficit. The pretence is that it’s business as usual, but it isn’t, and I doubt it ever will be again. Buy your tickets now for the end of the world… as we’ve known it…

BB

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Force Majeures, Argues Myners

Hilarious watching Myners on tv this morning declaring that Labour won’t be doing anything to upset the process of recovery from recession, which, he remembered to mention, was a global problem in the first place.

Well! If the problem’s global, the inference being there wasn’t anything they could do about it, why are we paying them to do nothing? If they’re going to get elected and do nothing, why do we need them at all? I mean, what exactly IS the business of government? 

BB

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Fun You Can Have With Gold Bullion

Fractional reserve banking, where in theory the banks don’t actually have to have the money they lend you and in practice means they don’t actually have to have any at all, doesn’t just apply to money. They can do it with gold too;

http://www.gata.org/node/8388

Proof once again that while it might make the mattress lumpy keeping gold where you can get your fist on it in an emergency is the only way to buy gold.

This is how it all began with the original goldsmiths, so we seem to have come full circle.

BB

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Springtime For The Mafia

I’m reading in the papers that in the absence of available finance from the banks businesses are getting funding from the Mafia, who are thriving as a consequence. It’s perhaps ironic to note that if you borrow money from the Mafia, they actually have the money to lend you. They practice what amounts to full reserve banking, whereas the legal banking system will have to counterfeit it, practicing as they do fractional reserve banking. It’s further interesting to note that again, the Mafia here can actually lay proper claim to interest, being genuinely deprived of the use of any monies they genuinely lend and so therefore entitled fairly enough to compensation. The legal banks, who make up the money they ‘loan’ out of thin air, obviously aren’t entitled to any ‘interest’ of any kind.
In this instance, then the Mafia woud seem to be more honest, if you will, than the banks are.
This reminds us that just because a procedure’s legal doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily in any way socially beneficial or morally superior even though such procedures often like to masquerade as such. One bunch of malevolents is much the same as another, whether they have a a sign hanging around their necks saying legal or not. Antisocial people are antisocial people, (banks/mafia) whether they have signs on them saying Legal/Illegal or not. Are their interests social, ie, coincident with that of the broader community, or antisocial? If you want your community to survive and prosper, you need to note distinctions.

BB

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Bonus Balls

Here’s a report from the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100131-703419.html suggesting bankers are now using financial instruments of the unregulated variety to turn their commission-based share options into cold hard cash. Commission payments are now made in chares as opposed to cash. This is in an effort to stop bankers selling any old rubbish under the guise of grade A material and then retiring from the game, their enormous cash commission bonuses safely stashed away somewhere no-one save themselves can get at it. If the bonuses are paid in shares, goes the reasoning, then bankers will have to behave responsibly inorder to preserve their own commission-paying companies. The bankers though, as I predicted at the time this scheme was thought of, are far cleverer than those who oppose them (whether this opposition or not is purely cosmertic for political purtposes is, of course, a different argument) and will simply invent new ways of cashing in faster than they can be understood and outlawed. Heads, the banks win. Tails, the banks win. Plus ca change.

BB

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Obama Declares War On My Arse

President Obama Declares War On The Banks, bawls one headline, presumably missing the days when it could stand urchin-like on street corners exhorting passers by to “Readallaboutdit” inbetween sniffs. President Obama, it seems, proposes to reinstate key elements of the Glass Steagall Act to restrain the banks, causing many to think that – at last! – he’s turned against them. The effect of Glass-Steagal (and the new legislation too, to an extent) is drawing a clear line between what we in Britain refer to as casino banking and high street, deposit banking. The point of this is that when the casino bank bets too far and goes broke, it isn’t any longer able to count your and my money, safely deposited with a separate company, as assets it can lose. We don’t all lose our money when the casino banks lose theirs, so the economy as a whole survives, in a much-abreviated nutshell. Glass Steagall was introduced after the Great Depression as a way of ensuring that another Great Depression never happened. Lobbying by the banks saw it repealed in 2004. Lo and behold, as we’ve seen another series of bank crashes followed, again imperilling the broader economy. Good old Obama for bringing back Glass-Steagall, then, eh? Phew!
Not really. It doesn’t address the heart of the problem at all, that the banks simply shouldn’t have the place in society that they do. Banks don’t lend money, they create it. A banking license isn’t a license to lend money, it’s an extension of the sovereign power formerly of the monarch, eventually surrendered to parliament, to create money out of thin air. We pay the banks a fee for this we call interest. When we have a government elected by the electorate to further and safeguard the interests of that electorate that can create money itself for free, it’s an absurd situation to even suggest that when we need money for funding a sound business proposal we have to go cap in hand to a third-party privately-owned bank and ask them to create money for us, incurring fees in the process. It’s nonsense, and the banks simply shouldn’t be in this entirely parasitic position. They give the community nothing, and in charging recurring fees for effectively doing nothing they endlessly cream off money that should be being spent towards the betterment of the community as a whole. They grow fat for doing nothing while the community suffers for no good reason.
Obama’s proposed legislation won’t do anything to change this. What it will mean is that the banks will once again have brought the greater economy to its knees, profited handsomely from the experience, and survived essentially intact to repeat the process in the future. A repeat of the earlier Great Depression scenario, in fact, as they were bailed out back then too. Obama’s proposed legislation leaves them free to repeat the experience again next century, sooner if they wish, if the economy has revived enough to make it worth their while. It’s not a punishment for the banks, it’s a gift, a lifeline – through this they’ll survive in place as they are to cripple us all financially another day.
I’ve said before that Obama is the bank’s puppet, a reader of press-releases, nothing more. His recent proposals do nothing to change that view. When he campaigned on the basis of change, he seems to have neglected he meant the kind of change that usually has plus ca attached to it.

BB

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New Banks For Old! Oh Wait; They ARE The Old…

New banks are being created to buy the old ‘Good Bank’ formed form the ashes of Northern Rock. A good thing? Not in my view, simply more of the same. We don’t need more private banks operating for private profits, we need genuine competition to the existing cartel not additions to it. We need banks that work on favour of the public, effectively distribution outlets for government-created money to the little guy. I note no-one seems to be interested on making loans/creating money (using fractional reserve principles) for the smaller business. They’re onlyinterested in the big fish. Where are the big fish going to be coming from if the small fish areen’t ever allowed to develop? All the proposals seem to suggest is more business as usual and frankly, that’s no good for anybody.

I notice too that Mr. Chen’s bank formerly tried operating under the moniker of ‘The Bank of Britain’ until the Bank of England reportedly objected. Hey, at least we knew who was behind the Bank of Britain!

BB

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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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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