While live-blogging the party leaders’ debates during the election I noted my suprise that Cameron was so firm on the banks, and particularly the need to split off casino banking from retail banking. I wondered if he really meant it.
Well, yesterday’s Mansion House by Geore Osborne speech showed that Cameron didn’t mean it. Knocking the bankers was just to gain votes. Proposals to split casino banking and retail banking are now to be shuffled off to a commission, kicked far into the long grass, never to be seriously heard of again.
It is the worst betrayal of election rhetoric by the Tories so far, and the biggest kick in the bollocks for we Lib Dems. Yet strangely neither media nor bloggers seem to have noticed it much, distracted succesfully by the much less important proposal to give the FSA’s powers to the Bank of England.
Here is Michael Meacher:
http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2010/06/in-merv-we-trust/
As a fellow party member, I understand your frustration. My own axe-grinding over the coalition would fill pages, but I’ll just note that Simon Hughes is now deputy leader of the parliamentary party. And thus is likely to become a lightning rod of sorts for reasoned disagreement (in varying degrees of ire!)
I also note the fund-raiser that I got from Cowley St today, complete with letter from Nick Clegg. In it he says “For the first time in 64 years there are liberals in government.” A 5th of government ministers, he says, are Liberal Democrats.
Hmm, so basically the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberal democrat’ appear to be interchangeable. Sorry, I beg to differ. Perhaps Charlie Kennedy should hold a press conference lauding the fact that for the first time in 21 years we’ve got some social democrats in government. But then I look at the Tory tranche of policies and think, well, maybe not!
I was a member of the SDP before it merged with the Liberal Party. So there’s a solution – expel the SDP again to become a proper radical reforming party again! Of course, you’ll need a proper witchhunt.
‘Take the scriptures in your right hand and read the oath aloud … Now then, are you, or have you ever been, e member of the SDP?’
‘Uh, what’s the SDP?’
‘Aha, you refuse to answer the question. Expelled for doubtful loyalty!’
Craig is a funadmentally decent man, and this is paradoxically his one true ‘weakness’. Despite his intelligence, superior education, experience… he still believes in the reformability of fundamentally and stucturally corrupt and unjust political system. That system isn’t characterised by it’s democratic qualities, but, is, on the contrary, a corporate, state-capitalist system, massively skewed in favour of the interests of tiny minority of the population.
Realistically, I think the best we can hope for, is a ‘reformed’ state-capitalism, where the democratic interests of the people are integrated into the structure of state-capitalism. A form of democratic, state-capitalism, where capitalists still exist and the economy is still ‘free’, yet the people are represented inside all of our leading corporations with full voting rights.
This seems only just, reasonable, and fair, as the people, through the state, are vital to the success of capitalism and the entire market system. Take away the people and their is no market to speak of.
In a nutshell, the system we have now, call it ‘free market capitalism’, if you’re gullable, is characterised by ‘socialism’ for the rich, and the rigours of the capitalist system for everyone else, and the rigours lash increasingly the lower down the socio-economic scale one is positioned.
It really is amazing that my brother’s bit of the City has received hundreds of millions of pounds to write off it’s gambling debts. The poor taxpayer, through the agent/politicans, really, three factions of a one-party state, have allowed his company to unload millions of worthless paper and debts onto the treasury. The treasury paid real money for worthless paper/losses. Talk about new lamps for old!
And now, having ‘robbed’ the treasury to save the financial sector, creating massive debts, the poor, hapless, people are going to be thumped and robbed again through massive cuts, a ‘just’ reward for their generosity.
Impoversih the people to save the City and my brother’s enormous bonus. He was given a bonus of over half a million pounds last time, and the ‘mugs’ aren’t even out on the streets about it. What is the matter with people?
We seem to have slipped back through a strange hole in time, to a pre-democratic, pre-enlightenment, era. Where there are rules that apply – capitalism, red in tooth and claw – for ordinary peasants; whilst the ‘aristocracy’ live by other, less bloody and harsh rules, exempt from the ravages of the market and capitalism.
It’s frankly bizarre. How on earth do the peasants fall for this rubbish? Why are people so bloody credulous? Why do they seem to believe is so much bullshit and lies?
Well, it isn’t really their fault. The people’s eyes have been pricked out and then we complain that they can’t see.
Who has blinded the people? I lay much of the blame at the door of the corporate media. The corporate media are controlled by the very people who profit so extravagantly and grotesquely from ‘inverted socialism’. The journalists are ‘priests’ in a new post-enlightenment society, which increasingly mirrors pre-enlightenment society, a return to a form of fuedalism. It’s like the French Revolution never happened!
WIKILEAKS ALERT!
Wikileaks are under attack. Julian Assange, Editor in Chief is urgently requesting donations, and that “Friends of Wikileaks” groups be established.
Wikileaks has a video of the Garani massacre in Afghanistan which still requires decryption. Over 100 people were killed, mostly children.
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=67065
Another link:
http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/whiskey-tango-foxtrot/39775-wikileaks-is-asking-for-urgent-help
Craig, could you tell us who actually now owns The Bank of England. I have tried to find out but without success. I remember that the first thing that Blair did after taking ‘control’ was to privatise it – for whose benefit??
‘Here is Michael Meacher’
‘Voted very strongly for the Iraq war.’
‘Voted moderately against an investigation into the Iraq war.’
‘Registrable shareholdings: Planet Organic (organic food retailing).’
‘Land and Property: Four residential properties in London from which rental income is received., A property in the Cotswolds from which rental income was received for two weeks’ holiday rental.’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/representatives/profiles/25453.stm
Writerman: That’s absolutely correct. Socialise the losses, privitise the gains. How else could it possibly be done? I mean, who’d want to “buy” or privitise a loss? Good grief, let’s get real here. The government – particularly a conservative one – knows that burdens fall on those who know about poverty, and understand loss.
It’s always been the same, and why should anyone think it would be done differently now. The poor can die worthless deaths in pointless wars. They can suffer environmental disasters. They can pick up the pieces when policies fail. They can rebuild economies, while the investor class moves on to new grazing areas.
The investor class is represented by Cameron, and Clegg, desperate to hang onto the coat-tails of power, will do nothing to upset the arrangement.
It’s rich indeed to hear from Cameron that this is all a Euro problem, “nothin’ to do wiv us, mate”. The fact that our filthy hedge-fund speculators gambled with our money to cause this problem – entirely deliberately, and at no risk to themselves – is waved away.
Let’s just get back to wagging fingers at the poor, and telling them how their laziness and greed is causing them to be poor. And they should stop taking so much money off the rich, if they want their country to prosper again.
I have a particular affection for Michael Meacher and those that know me understand why. His astute mind was able to expose the devious and slavish reasoning behind Blair’s foreign policy decisions.
The link between Craig and Michael seems well, organic?
‘writerman’ said it.
The system is fundamentally skewed in favour of financial oligarchs in a manner that no ‘oversight’ can fix.
I, too, have tried to find out who owns the Bank Of England. You might as well try to paint the sky. The BOE was supposedly ‘nationalised’ in 1945.
Yea, right.
Any government that wanted to act in the interests of ordinary British people would have let the Banking industry fall in 2008 (it was, and remains, fundamentally broke because of the untold trillions of pounds worth of toxic [or valueless] derivatives that exist on the banks’ [undeclared] balance sheets).
We needed the Jackson/ Lincoln/JFK solution.
Let the government create its own money, not ‘borrow’ it from banks!
Along with allowing these bankrupt institutions to be declared exactly that, the government would also have needed to develop a policy for compensating customers’ losses of monies that had disappeared in those banks.
The nature of the scam at the very heart of our culture is breathtaking. Look at what ‘quantitave easing’ really is.
The banks are skint.
We give them billions of pounds to put them back on their feet.
Where did we get this money?
Why, from the very same skint banking system.
Now, having given them billions (that they don’t seem very interested in sharing with the rest of us, by the way), we owe THIS VERY SAME MONEY TO THE PEOPLE TO WHOM WE HAVE ALREADY GIVEN IT!!
PLUS EFFING INTEREST!!! (that could and will multiply this money by whatever number they choose…..as it is the banking system, which includes the Bank of England, that sets the interest rate)
These people are wolves devouring the flock of sheep (that’s us).
Just wait and see what happens next (the cycle works the same every time round). Our currencies are heading for collapse. The derivatives reality ensures this must happen. While this is occurring the banks will probably close for a few days. After this, if the capitalist system is allowed to persist, massive financial chaos will bankrupt millions and the possessions of the broken will fall into the hands of (who else) the banks. This is what happened in Germany between the Wars. On the other hand the bankers might be waiting with a big new idea. The replacement of the global capitalist system by a managed global economy….a kind of global Soviet Union.
Whatever they offer us through ‘our’ politicians, be sure that THEIR control will be hugely enhanced by whatever new mechanisms are put in place.
This will happen one way or the other and we must resist these people with every last fibre of our beings.
These people CANNOT FIX OUR SYSTEM. They ARE the enemy……..not Muslims, not terrorists, not the BNP, nor anyone else.
Our enemies are the oligarchs at the top of our own ruling class (and their international partners, because it is well established that these people operate across national boundaries)!
Here is how you can know definitively that the banking interest controls every last corner of our society.
Surely it is true that debt, or usury, is the basis of our entire culture. It defines everything else about us.
But……the mechanism at the heart of this reality, the money creation at interest by privately owned corporations is NEVER discussed within our schools. We are not told how this system came about nor what came before it nor any of the alternative systems that have existed over the centuries. The same is true of universities. Business Schools educate their students within a sole invented (bullsh*t) economic paradigm that is the Keynsian model (i.e. THEIR model).
Likewise in the mainstream media and in parliament. Never a suggestion that realistic alternatives to our current enslavement are perfectly possible to create.
The hyper-successful author, media darling, friend of the Rothschilds and Harvard Professor of Economic history Niall Ferguson wrote a best-selling history book recently called “The Ascent Of Money”. I bought this book to see what he had to say about the titanic struggle been successive US governments and the central bankers for control of America’s money creation (and hence, control of the political system). This is the real, vital history that has defined America at every stage of its development over the last two centuries.
Eight times the banks have been kicked out by the politicians. Eight times they have rallied, bought politicians and re-established financial hegemony until their final installation of The Federal Reserve in 1913 (JFK’s Executive Order 11110 returned to the U.S. government the power to issue currency in June 1963, but this activity lasted as long as the remainder of his life, about 4 months).
The not-so-amazing discovery you can make for yourself on inspecting this ‘top-notch’ academic’s highly-praised and ‘definitive’ history is that NOT A DETAIL OF THIS FUNDAMENTAL STRUGGLE APPEARS IN HIS NARRATIVE.
Everybody in any position of influence seems to know what is good for them (and, perhaps, how to prosper).
The entire system is under the total control of the money power.
How can anybody deny this?
Watch ‘The Moneymasters’ on Google Video (3 hour 35 minute documentary) to see the real history of money…..and financial collapses…….and wars….
It is a hell of an eye-opener.
Thanks Clark
see http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/daniel-ellsberg-fears-assanges-in-danger
Let’s not be surprised, please. Any more than it was ‘surprising’ that Blair’s election didn’t spell a great new dawn of radical hopes, as the ‘Guardian’ said at the time it would.
House prices have gone up 10% in the past year! And the pundits all read their scripts to say how that’s really good for economic recovery.
Absolutely fucking mad! Economic recovery can only possibly be based on a growth in production, and banks don’t produce anything whatsoever. As for the inflation of assets that are used as collateral for loans, but which people can’t sell without buying a new one (unless they fall back into the status of tenants)!
What I’d love to see is the government nationalise the banks, exercise all the mortgage assets, i.e. take possession of millions of homes, give their occupiers secure tenancies, and rent them at socially-subsidised rents. These rents would be lower than most people’s debt repayments. So people would be a) out of debt, and b) in secure accommodation.
Both a) and b) are what people are going to be wanting very much, as the depression deepens. They sure beat being in debt up to your eyeballs and sleeping in your car.
The govt could do this voluntarily at first. Since it would cause the long-overdue and very healthy collapse in house prices, most people with mortgages would see sense, I think.
There is one reason and one reason alone that house prices are so high in Britain – because it’s allowed the banks to screw people into the ground.
Any economic commentary that doesn’t recognise that fact is worthless.
it’s been said before but the is something perverse and self-destructive about a society that is so obsessed with driving up the price of basic human need, somewhere to live, as high as it can sustainably go, and then higher
it’s also quite perverse that, once again, people who failed to do their job and let a disaster happen are rewarded with enhanced powers
anyone who’s been following the BoE comedy inflation predictions (on which interest rates are allegedly based) over the last few years will know just how useless it is
or useful, depending on whose interests you believe the BoE to be working for
Great article.
The style of the attacks might be telling. Your eyewitness said that there were three stages of militia-supervised violence:
The first group broke in to all the premises, and smashed doors, windows and fittings.
Then a second group came and removed all the stock and furniture.
An hour or so later a third group came and methodically lit fires inside each building.
During the CIA/NATO-backed Turkish Special Warfare Department’s (Turkish Deep State’s) 1955 Istanbul pogrom, Greek Consul General Vyron Theodoropoulos identified three steps of violence: first, the ‘break[ing] down’ of doors and windows; then ‘pillage’; and finally, ‘complete destruction’.
http://human-rights-archaeology.blogspot.com/2010/05/events-of-september-1955-greece-turkey.html
Of course Craig. No matter who you vote for the bankers are in control. It’s really simple – there is no business more powerful than banking. Politicians may kneel at their feet or fuck off. And I’m talking here of reserve banking and its magical money-from-thin-air. Each country’s given reserve bank is easily the most powerful institution there is.
And all of them act in concert. They tell us so! Otherwise the use of the word ‘independent’ to describe each of the reserve banks is a euphemism. A more correct word would be ‘untouchable’.
And there you were earlier complaining about the City of London. Well of course. The City of London belongs to the bankers and subsequently is a law unto itself. And you say the public transport is crap? Ha! The bankers roar with laughter.
Deficit Terrorists Strike In The UK
Is The US Next?
By Ellen Brown
6-18-10
Last week, England’s new government said it would abandon the previous government’s stimulus program and introduce the austerity measures required to pay down its estimated $1 trillion in debts. That means cutting public spending, laying off workers, reducing consumption, and increasing unemployment and bankruptcies. It also means shrinking the money supply, since virtually all “money” today originates as loans or debt. Reducing the outstanding debt will reduce the amount of money available to pay workers and buy goods, precipitating depression and further more economic pain.
The financial sector has sometimes been accused of shrinking the money supply intentionally, in order to increase the demand for its own products. Bankers are in the debt business, and if governments are allowed to create enough money to keep themselves and their constituents out of debt, lenders will be out of business. The central banks charged with maintaining the banking business therefore insist on a “stable currency” at all costs, even if it means slashing services, laying off workers, and soaring debt and interest burdens. For the financial business to continue to boom, governments must not be allowed to create money themselves, either by printing it outright or by borrowing it into existence from their own government-owned banks.
Today this financial goal has largely been achieved. In most countries, 95% or more of the money supply is created by banks as loans (or “credit”). The small portion issued by the government is usually created just to replace lost or worn out bills or coins, not to fund new government programs. Early in the twentieth century, about 30% of the British currency was issued by the government as pounds sterling or coins, versus only about 3% today. In the U.S., only coins are now issued by the government. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve Notes) are issued by the Federal Reserve, which is privately owned by a consortium of banks.
Banks advance the principal but not the interest necessary to pay off their loans; and since bank loans are now virtually the only source of new money in the economy, the interest can only come from additional debt. For the banks, that means business continues to boom; while for the rest of the economy, it means cutbacks, belt-tightening and austerity. Since more must always be paid back than was advanced as credit, however, the system is inherently unstable. When the debt bubble becomes too large to be sustained, a recession or depression is precipitated, wiping out a major portion of the debt and allowing the whole process to begin again. This is called the “business cycle,” and it causes markets to vacillate wildly, allowing the monied interests that triggered the cycle to pick up real estate and other assets very cheaply on the down-swing.
The financial sector, which controls the money supply and can easily capture the media, cajoles the populace into compliance by selling its agenda as a “balanced budget,” “fiscal responsibility,” and saving future generations from a massive debt burden by suffering austerity measures now. Bill Mitchell, Professor of Economics at the University of New Castle in Australia, calls this “deficit terrorism.” Bank-created debt becomes more important than schools, medical care or infrastructure.
RATHER THAN “PROVIDING FOR THE GENERAL WELFARE,” THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES TO MAINTAIN THE VALUE OF THE INVESTMENTS OF THE GOVERNMENT’S CREDITORS.
England Dons the Hair Shirt
England’s new coalition government has just bought into this agenda, imposing on itself the sort of fiscal austerity that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has long imposed on Third World countries, and has more recently imposed on European countries, including Latvia, Iceland, Ireland and Greece. Where those countries were forced into compliance by their creditors, however, England has tightened the screws voluntarily, having succumbed to the argument that it must pay down its debts to maintain the market for its bonds.
Deficit hawks point ominously to Greece, which has been virtually squeezed out of the private bond market because nobody wants its bonds. Greece has been forced to borrow from the IMF and the European Monetary Union (EMU), which have imposed draconian austerity measures as conditions for the loans. Like a Third World country owing money in a foreign currency, Greece cannot print Euros or borrow them from its own central bank, since those alternatives are forbidden under EMU rules. In a desperate attempt to save the Euro, the European Central Bank recently bent the rules by buying Greek bonds on the secondary market rather than lending to the Greek government directly, but the ECB has said it would “sterilize” these purchases by withdrawing an equivalent amount of liquidity from the market, making the deal a wash. (More on that below.)
Greece is stuck in the debt trap, but the UK is not a member of the EMU. Although it belongs to the European Union, it still trades in its own national currency, which it has the power to issue directly or to borrow from its own central bank. Like all central banks, the Bank of England is a “lender of last resort,” which means it can create money on its books without borrowing first. The government owns the Bank of England, so loans from the bank to the government would effectively be interest-free; and as long as the Bank of England is available to buy the bonds that don’t get sold on the private market, there need be no fear of a collapse of the value of the UK’s bonds.
The “deficit terrorists,” however, will have none of this obvious solution, ostensibly because of the fear of “hyperinflation.” A June 9 guest post by “Cameroni” on Rick Ackerman’s financial website takes this position. Titled “Britain Becomes the First to Choose Deflation,” it begins:
David Cameron’s new Government in England announced Tuesday that it will introduce austerity measures to begin paying down the estimated one trillion (U.S. value) in debts held by the British Government. . . . [T]hat being said, we have just received the signal to an end to global stimulus measures — one that puts a nail in the coffin of the debate on whether or not Britain would ‘print’ her way out of the debt crisis. . . . This is actually a celebratory moment although it will not feel like it for most. . . . Debts will have to be paid. . . . [S]tandards of living will decline . . . [but] it is a better future than what a hyperinflation would bring us all.
Hyperinflation or Deflation?
The dreaded threat of hyperinflation is invariably trotted out to defeat proposals to solve the budget crises of governments by simply issuing the necessary funds, whether as debt (bonds) or as currency. What the deficit terrorists generally fail to mention is that before an economy can be threatened with hyperinflation, it has to pass through simple inflation; and governments everywhere have failed to get to that stage today, although trying mightily. Cameroni observes:
[G]overnments all over the globe have already tried stimulating their way out of the recent credit crisis and recession to little avail. They have attempted fruitlessly to generate even mild inflation despite huge stimulus efforts and pointless spending.
In fact, the money supply has been shrinking at an alarming rate. In a May 26 article in The Financial Times titled “US Money Supply Plunges at 1930s Pace as Obama Eyes Fresh Stimulus,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:
The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of institutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.
“It’s frightening,” said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. “The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly,” he said.
Too much money can hardly have been pumped into an economy in which the money supply is shrinking. But Cameroni concludes that since the stimulus efforts have failed to put needed money back into the money supply, the stimulus program should be abandoned in favor of its diametrical opposite — belt-tightening austerity. He admits that the result will be devastating:
[I]t will mean a long, slow and deliberate winding down until solvency is within reach. It will mean cities, states and counties will go bankrupt and not be rescued. And it will be painful. Public spending will be cut. Consumption could decline precipitously. Unemployment numbers may skyrocket and bankruptcies will stun readers of daily blogs like this one. It will put the brakes on growth around the world. . . . The Dow will crash and there will be ripple effects across the European union and eventually the globe. . . . Aid programs to the Third world will be gutted, and I cannot yet imagine the consequences that will bring to the poorest people on earth.
But it will be “worth it,” says Cameroni, because it beats the inevitable hyperinflationary alternative, which “is just too distressing to consider.”
Hyperinflation, however, is a bogus threat, and before we reject the stimulus idea, we might ask why these programs have failed. Perhaps because they have been stimulating the wrong sector of the economy, the non-producing financial middlemen who precipitated the crisis in the first place. Governments have tried to “reflate” their flagging economies by throwing budget-crippling sums at the banks, but the banks have not deigned to pass those funds on to businesses and consumers as loans. Instead, they have used the cheap funds to speculate, buy up smaller banks, or buy safe government bonds, collecting a tidy interest from the very taxpayers who provided them with this cheap bailout money. Indeed, banks are required by their business models to pursue those profits over risky loans. Like all private corporations, they are there not to serve the public interest but to make money for their shareholders.
Seeking Solutions
The alternative to throwing massive amounts of money at the banks is not to further starve and punish businesses and individuals but to feed some stimulus to them directly, with public projects that provide needed services while creating jobs. There are many successful precedents for this approach, including the public works programs of England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which were funded with government-issued money either borrowed from their central banks or printed directly. The Bank of England was nationalized in 1946 by a strong Labor government that funded the National Health Service, a national railway service, and many other cost-effective public programs that served the economy well for decades afterwards.
In Australia during the current crisis, a stimulus package in which a cash handout was given directly to the people has worked temporarily, with no negative growth (recession) for two quarters, and unemployment held at around 5%. The government, however, borrowed the extra money privately rather than issuing it publicly, out of a misguided fear of hyperinflation. Better would have been to give interest-free credit through its own government-owned central bank to individuals and businesses agreeing to invest the money productively.
The Chinese have done better, expanding their economy at over 9% throughout the crisis by creating extra money that was mainly invested in public infrastructure.
The EMU countries are trapped in a deadly pyramid scheme, because they have abandoned their sovereign currencies for a Euro controlled by the ECB. Their deficits can only be funded with more debt, which is interest-bearing, so more must always be paid back than was borrowed. The ECB could provide some relief by engaging in “quantitative easing” (creating new Euros), but it has insisted it would do so only with “sterilization” — taking as much money out of the system as it puts back in. The EMU model is mathematically unsustainable and doomed to fail unless it is modified in some way, either by returning economic sovereignty to its member countries, or by consolidating them into one country with one government.
A third possibility, suggested by Professor Randall Wray and Jan Kregel, would be to assign the ECB the role of “employer of last resort,” using “quantitative easing” to hire the unemployed at a basic wage.
A fourth possibility would be for member countries to set up publicly-owned “development banks” on the Chinese model. These banks could issue credit in Euros for public projects, creating jobs and expanding the money supply in the same way that private banks do every day when they make loans. Private banks today are limited in their loan-generating potential by the capital requirement, toxic assets cluttering their books, a lack of creditworthy borrowers, and a business model that puts shareholder profit over the public interest. Publicly-owned banks would have the assets of the state to draw on for capital, a clean set of books, a mandate to serve the public, and a creditworthy borrower in the form of the nation itself, backed by the power to tax.
Unlike the EMU countries, the governments of England, the United States, and other sovereign nations can still borrow from their own central banks, funding much-needed programs essentially interest-free. They can but they probably won’t, because they have been deceived into relinquishing that sovereign power to an overreaching financial sector bent on controlling the money systems of the world privately and autocratically. Professor Carroll Quigley, an insider groomed by the international bankers, revealed this plan in 1966, writing in Tragedy and Hope:
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
Just as the EMU appeared to be on the verge of achieving that goal, however, it has started to come apart at the seams. Sovereignty may yet prevail.
Craig,
although I agree with you that the issue ‘may’ have been kicked into the long grass, any government stupid enough not to expect it to jump out and bite them in the ass in the not too distant future is off their trolly.
I have maintained for some time that Blair, Brown and Bush (mistakenly, it was in fact Clinton who deregulated the US banks) are criminally culpable for deregulating the banks in the face of clear evidence from the 1930’s that it was the wrong thing to do.
Too many MP’s and Ministers make the most appalling decisions with impunity, safe in the knowledge that Parliamentary privilege absolves them from blame. It’s not the fact that Cameron, Clegg and Osbourne have made the decision to kick this issue into the long grass, it’s what responsibility they shoulder for suppressing another financial disaster. Any commercial Chief Exec. stakes his job and reputation on the decisions he and his board make but, particularly in the case of Tony Blair, it seems past mistakes are no indication of future success.
Our parliamentary system needs some type of ‘corporate’ responsibility and I don’t mean the sleaze machine now being peddled by the Telegraph which is simply picking off high profile MP’s as, and when it suits their circulation figures.
‘(mistakenly, it was in fact Clinton who deregulated the US banks)’
Ronald Reagan
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/051410.html
It was Thatcher who got Reagan to lay the foundations of this insanity.
‘Proposals to split casino banking and retail banking are now to be shuffled off to a commission’
‘”When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men,
they create for themselves,
in the course of time,
a legal system that authorizes it,
and a moral code that glorifies it.”
-Frederic Bastiat, The Law [1850]
We have been conned again and it is said that another financial crisis and subsequent recessions/depression is almost inevitable, says the chap who predicted the last downturn and recession, everyone thought he was bonkers, now he has ascended to guru status.
The best thing to do with one’s money is to invest it in local development job creation and or tangible assets.
Such as a 6 ton block of best carrara marble, much safer and prettier sitting in your front garden, as appreciative in value than any other rare asset, than a share portfolio of strugglin’ multinationals in a fickle pseudo nationalised bank.
Only when 75% of the worlds financial systems fail will we realise that it is not just our ecology and environmental basics need to be sustainable.
Our highly strung economies cannot survive boom and bust cycles underwritten by taxpayers.
Whoever said that we are the guarantors of banks gambling habits and that they are not part of the great competition game we are all supposed to play to in this capitalist game, who said that they cannot be allowed to go bust/
Cameron has shown his mettle and Clegg is singing from the same hymnsheet.
Will we be the good choirboys they ask us to be and sing as they conduct?
Tha anonymous poster at 7:46 AM refers to the Australian economist Bill Mitchell. I would reiterate that his blog is a constant source of enlightenment:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/
I regularly google “David Cameron” to get the latest news about British politics.
Nevertheless I didn’t know about that either. Telegraph always delivers very greasy stories about Cameron. The most informative and compact news source so far turned out to be a tabloid, The Mirror.
A media conspiration perhaps?
Yachtgate, Corfu, Osborne vs Rothschild, russian donation…
Wasn’t Murdoch invited, too?
“Ronald Reagan
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/051410.html
It was Thatcher who got Reagan to lay the foundations of this insanity.”
Quite evidently you can neither read nor understand the websites you quote from:
“Even though Bill Clinton managed to win the White House for the Democrats in 1992, the anti-government dynamic that had been set in motion by Reagan continued. Clinton’s “New Democrats” worked to restore responsible government by reining in the massive federal deficits but they still rode along with the GOP’s deregulatory gang.
Most significantly, a key reform of the Great Depression ?” a provision in the Glass-Steagall Act that separated Wall Street speculators from commercial banks ?” was repealed in 1999 by a Republican-sponsored bill that President Clinton’s senior financial advisers, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, supported and that Clinton signed into law.”
Not only did Clinton not even attempt to stop deregulation he “signed it into law”………..the last 4 words of the damn paragraph!
But of course it was not only Reagan’s fault it was bizarrely, Thatchers fault despite her not even being mentioned! Why don’t you get over Thatcher and learn that nulabour have had 13 years to put right all the wrongs she’s supposed to have done yet they have done nothing but spend all the wealth we had, including our gold reserves and bankrupted the country by ‘not’ stopping’ deregulation.
osborne is a scumbag-what do you expect from that low life?
June 18, 2010 3:54 PM
It is you that cannot understand. I never said it was Reagan. I said
‘It was Thatcher who got Reagan to lay the foundations of this insanity’
Which is correct. As you have NOW admitted too (at last).
As for ‘but spend all the wealth we had, including our gold reserves and bankrupted the country by ‘not’ stopping’ deregulation.’
Oh dear, once again you try to mislead people. How much do you think the gold which was sold was worth?, it was in the scale of things VERY little, another right wing red herring, go and find out. As for ”not’ stopping’ deregulation’ it could not be stopped, even had NuLab wanted it stopped (which they did’nt). This was a runaway, out of control global led event. The city of london/UK would have been punished severely by international markets.
‘It was Thatcher who got Reagan to lay the foundations of this insanity’
Both Thatcher and Reagan were economic disciples of Milton Friedman. Thatcher being the No 1 disciple.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1185177.stm
Don’t take my word fot it, here is someone else who knew what was going to happen.
‘He responded to his sacking by Mrs Thatcher by issuing a statement declaring that she was steering “full speed ahead for the rocks”.’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7007648.stm
June 18, 2010 3:54 PM
Campaign 2010: Where to Put Blame.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/052010.html
‘Charles Geisst, Professor of Finance at Manhattan College, has recounted how Greenspan undermined the Glass-Steagall Act first as a JP Morgan director and then as Chair of the Federal Reserve: “When he [Greenspan] was a director of J.P. Morgan & Company in the 1980s, Morgan produced a pamphlet called “Rethinking Glass-Steagall,” in 1984, which he was obviously privy to and had contributed to… The pamphlet was advocating getting rid of the Glass-Steagall Act and the separation between commercial and investment banking, so that commercial bankers particularly could begin to underwrite corporate securities again, as they hadn’t done since before 1933.” [19]’
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=JPMorgan_Chase