It is very sickening to see Cameron, Osborne and Johnson dressing up their opposition to a financial transaction tax as a defence of the UK against Europeans. Reducing the attraction of multiple financial speculative transactions is an obvious step in reforming the crazed world of fantasy finance. If it did reduce the concentration of speculative centres in the City of London that would in the long term be good thing – our economy is over-dependent on servicing a system which cannot last anyway.
The Tories see Britain as the world capital of spivs, with unlimited free amounts of cash raining down on their friends and family in the city who devise ever more elaborate financial speculations on every one of which they take a margin. Free lolly forever. Hooray!
But it is probably too late anyway. The establishment seems oblivious to the extent to which the system is unravelling. Almost all European governments face increasing demands for real interest on the money they borrow from banks and financial institutions – increased bond yields – but that only increases debt, which countries largely service by new borrowing in this never-never land. Banks demand higher interest because they fear the risk of not being repaid, and the higher interest makes it more and more certain they won’t be repaid. It is only one of a number of ways the logic of the system has collapsed.
So the Tories posture while the system sinks deeper and deeper, and meantime people around the world have noticed that the elite are screwing them. These really are the most interesting times of my lifetime.
“We live in interesting times” a chinese curse, and we sure do. Its getting very hard to predict what is coming next. Revolution, Evolution or Apoclaypse..
Hopefully people are not going to put up with this nonsense much longer and why should they. Financial terrorist banksters have got us here, the best thing we could do is arrest them all.
If I was a racing tipster, unlikely if, you could observe that I predicted the catastrophe of Mrs Thatcher’s banking reform at the outset, but was ignored. I am also ahead of the game by 30 years in predicting that all of our futures lie within Islam.
There is no other system that discredits the me- first Thatcher doctrine which has spawned a breed of me-first financiers who really don’t care if they pull the whole system down.
That’s why they continually oppress Islam, scooping up our resources and violating our human rights. Purely because we tell them that their system is wrong. ‘Oh no, no no, market forces will always self-balance’, they say. Forgetting that this theory only worked at a time when an Englishman’s word was his bond.
Now that there is no punishment for financial wrongdoing, they are going to dismantle the entire world. And God will dismantle them.
If I break the rules as an engineer, I get prosecuted. Why is it so different for so-called financial engineers? Because Mrs Thatcher started the process of de-regulating financial engineering, while at the same time real engineering is now so over-regulated that nobody can make anything.
Craig, may I suggest the following as a read
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385529961/counterpunchmaga
and
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/24/totally-corrupt-america/
regards
TFS
Craig’s is as neat a summary as you can get of the root of the economic problems of the whole world and 100% accurate. By “the whole world I mean China, Saudi Arabia etc. as well. “Anno” is right to blame the Thatcher/Lawson deregulations, but at least they acted in ignorance, as Lawson now admits; but Gordon Brown went much further, knew it was idiotic, made a fanfare of how clever it was, and just got the timing wrong. Has anyone considered the possibility that the Bond Market, which should be the most perfect market imaginable, an auction of dated sovereign debt, might actually be run by a Ring?
anno
i call your islam and raise you a zoroastrianism
The tragedy of the 2008 crash was that the government missed a golden opportunity to reform the entire money system, by taking the issuance of the nations money and placing it in the hands of – where it rightly should be- the treasury. Thus instead of the obscenity of seeing the government borrow its own money from the markets, it could issue the money, debt free, into the economy, by spending it into the economy, via infrastructure projects. The BOE could continue as lender of last resort and if it needs more money then it can borrow the money from us! One other bonus, the people would no longer have to guarantee government borrowings, in other words no more direct tax upon earnings.
The system is bust and we have all been screwed. But arresting everyone responsible isn’t going to help. Vengeance just makes things worse. The Tsarist government in russia and the ancien regime government in France were corrupt and deserved to go. But the revolutions that overthrew them just made things worse. Can’t we try to get rid of the corruption without becoming intolerant and vengeful?
Anno is right but Islam does not have a monopoly on righteousness. There are righteous Jews, righteous Christians, and bad Moslems just as the Thatcher, Cameron, Blair governments were bad. Bad people get themselves in positions of power. Islam alone is not going to save us. If you love money, you are doomed from day one. That’s why when the Wall Street crash came so many money-loving speculators threw themselves off skyscrapers. When the next crash comes it will be a new opportunity for Moslems, Jews, Christians, Seikhs, Buddhists and other faiths to take a good look at what caused all the evil wars, take a good look at the greed for money, and oil, and criticise it, like the Germans were justly criticised for the persecution of the Jews, like the Italians were justly criticised fort heir excursions into Africa, and Japan for its excurions into China. This time the guilty parties are the UK, US, Israel and their allies. I am in favour of similar measures being imposed on the UK, US and Israel as were imposed on Germany and Japan after the Second World War, that is the prohibition of weapons’ production and defence expenditure. Then watch our economies flourish!
Why do we insisit on calling these pirates “the elite”?
There must surely be a more appropriate term for them?
Hamish. Looks like you’ve been reading Keynes or John Kenneth Galbraith. But frankly I think 2008 was already too late. By then the world had been exposed to the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman for far too long. The crash is coming. If there had been a real run on the banks it would have come then. Only by carrying this worthless scrip in barrowloads and dumping it can we begin to start again. And this time the bankers must play by the rules. I’m old enough to remember nationalised industries. They provided jobs, kept energy bills affordable, gave us a health service to be proud of in a mixed economy to be proud of. Who can claim to be proud today?
The real “dirty little secret” that is never discussed (by UK politicians) is the real level of indebtedness of the UK, in reality far worse than Italy, Greece etc. Please see the graph at http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov11/drowning-in-debt11-11.html as best as I have been able to fact check it, it’s accurate.
The fact of the matter is that in the UK there has been this complete delusion on housing “wealth” and the bubble has yet to burst, however as soon as “real” interest rates rise (when there is an absence of deluded fools to buy our “debt”) the edifice comes tumbling down, along with our banks.
It will be horrid, however for the gilded few, courtesy of the public purse mainly (through cosy deals like the spivs getting to run a bankrupt NHS hospital, despite being manifestly unable to run their own at a profit, they will be on-track for a bailout pretty quickly, guaranteed they have accepted zero risk) through myriad tax breaks & tax inequality favouring (non) risk takers…. they will have no mortgage, money stashed in the BVI (like the majority of the cabinet), and will be ready to ride out the storm, or so they think, but the order is changing, they just haven’t realised it yet, their day will come, sooner than they think.
Illuminating, ALM.
just when you thought the financial crisis couldnt get any worse
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/entire-system-has-been-utterly-destroyed-mf-global-collapse-presenting-first-mf-global-casualty
I keep asking, in various quarters, “Why do governments borrow money in the first place?”
But I never get an answer.
I’m an atheist and dont need religion to know this is all wrong. And I certainly don’t believe that religion will do anything other than complicate matters and create division.
It is indeed perplexing why our banking system operates in a way that has the Government borrowing money from the banks to finance expenditure, and for the banks to create the money they lend to the government out of thin air. Why not have the Bank of England create the money instead?
The videos at http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/ are useful to understand how the banking system works.
SAY MY FCUKING NAME
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Powerful words that predict crash – are they true?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp_-pdqigXo
One of the biggest problems for me is the much used line “in the public interest…” In a democracy where the people are voting on information they are given- surely the whole democracy thing can’t work if information is held back? So- it would be in the public interest to have transparency?
Why don’t we get the chance to vote on laws? Who makes them? Why can’t you defend yourself in your own home as a member of the public? Why should someone decide you can’t? This Democracy thing is clearly bullshit to keep people in their place with the illusion that we all have a voice. More so now that they have removed some of the corner stones- the right to a fair trial etc.
As for religion saving us all – give me a fucking break- you’ve had thousands of years- and more infidels, none believers, gays, women, children and the rest of the innocents that have been killed in the “name of god” than for any earthly reason. God- the same entity that has allegedly only spoken to humanity a couple of times- the rest of the speculation on what he/she/it meant was written by man.
(Sunni and Shiite Muslims disagree that Mohammed died on the toilet, so have been killing each other ever since!!!)
If anyone is going to get punished by a higher power it’s you people- claiming you’re spreading the word of god!
The sooner we remove the power from the banks, the Vatican and the religious freaks the better!
Thanks Johnathan, ALM and others, very enlightening. Some 20 years ago I changed my mind on our economic system, sitting in a small working manetary group of the Gren party, we were figuring out the advantages of bartering vs. the usuary system.
Unless our financial system mirrors the real values and assets that exist and unless these values have a sustainable and equitable base, our financial systems were bound to fail, Bretton woods unsustainable basis has led us into never never land. But change will not come easy, war, leviathanly measures of fascist proportions and elite campaings, deluded by the idea of global power and control will make it necessarry for 75% of finance institutions/systems to fail, before anything would drastically change.
Such change will costs lives and the have’s will be under prerssure like never before, whilst the chaos that reigns in the transition can not be stemmed by a law that has been arbitrary and selective in the past. The rule of law should now focus on the crass casmn between those who exploit the system and the exploited and used, it is their last chance of honour before they get swept aside just as those they fettered for too long.
The economics of diminished resources will reign in future, as long as we can stave of rising sea levels and accomodate the increasing chaotic weatherpatterns into the equation.
The news of a 5% increase in comuter cycling here in East Anglia is merely a sweet’ner to this down beat message, but the sooner we get our chops around these basic ideas, the better.
Demeter said: “I’m an atheist and dont need religion to know this is all wrong. And I certainly don’t believe that religion will do anything other than complicate matters and create division.”
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Wot he says.
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Religion has nothing to do with the current crises, and none of the so-called Great World Religions has anything to offer on solving them. They are all complicit in the current world order.
Marcus, I wish I’d said that (You will, John, you will…)
Derek, The Bank of England is in private hands and part of the BIS:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6NcAzqAd6M
@domino, I call your Zoroastrianism and raise you a humanism.
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I’ve met personally enlightened Muslims and personally enlightened Buddhists, and it cheers me to see someone so excited and boundlessly happy about their spiritual discovery. But they often forget how personal these discoveries are, whilst they set about their enthusiastic converting of anyone and everyone they meet.
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I’ve never met an enthusiastic Christian, however. Perhaps it’s something to do with the pervasive Puritanical ideology that suffering and misery is godly?
What I`d like to know is this – who owns the UK government debt, and is it the same institutions (or some of them) which were bailed out after 2008? And who are the major players in the various markets – cash, commodity, futures – who are determining the trend of interest rates etc? It seems starkly obvious that many of these institutions will have to cancel or drastically cut down their debt claims otherwise the euro (and thus global) economy will go smash again. Comments?
Some serious air manouvres being flown directly over my head, it looks like a practise for a targetted bombing raid of sorts for the last half an hour or so, definatly not low level flying.
Where are you, Ingo?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8530150.stm
The BBC looked at who owned government debt a few years back (although post Hutton the BBC has lost all credibility in my opinion, poodles led by noodles) in this piece. But there’s been a lot of printing (both lies & money) since then, by the kleptocracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy on all sides of the house…..and in the BOE, arise Sir Kleptocrat of mediocrity.
There is one man who dares to speak truth to power in Brussels:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdob6QRLRJU
@Jon
“I’ve never met an enthusiastic Christian”
I have – give me the miserable ones any day.
Protesters have occupied an empty building in Hackney that is owned by UBS (originally Union Bank of Switzerland until they combined with Swiss Bank Corp.)
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We just had some brief drama here – noon
Posted by MikeD on November 18, 2011, 12:19 pm, in reply to “The Occupy London protesters occupy empty USB building”
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We just had some brief drama here. More or less as soon as I was escorted out of the building so the occupiers could hold a meeting, several heavily armed police arrived – they had a machine guns as well as handguns – followed by a few more vans.
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The police looked very jumpy, ready for action. Protesters started leaning from the windows, worried.
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Overhearing a chat between an officer and two activists, it transpired that police had received calls about a supposed disturbance at the UBS building across the road. The protesters assured police this wasn’t the case.
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Things feel more calm now, but there’s still plenty of police around, and a police helicopter hovering over the building.
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http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1321614374.html