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In the beginning...
and then...
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
- Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
Good ideas are not impervious to the madness of crowds.--WB7
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I am not ready to accept the money murder connection, but there are some people that are so rotten that the only reason that they are alive is it is against the law to kill them.
*Thanks for posting this. It was quite unexpectedly profound and I am sure I will come back to read it again many times.
In order to get a banking license in England (To establish a bank) there's still a little known archaic rule that states, a banker must be a "Fit and proper person". Usually used to describe a person with the right education and social background with personal investments in the success of his community and nation. Over the years, it has been corrupted and adapted to describe a person in the old boys' club, then ultimately to describe anyone with a ton of cash from anywhere with schemes and false promises to enrich depositors. Multinational banking, with no ties to the hosting nation, with no conscience in how it makes money, and no regard for the societies it destroys have become the templates of modern finance. Hiding fraud, theft, absurd schemes and dishonest fantasy gambling behind their defence that they are only answerable to their shareholders.
Many argue that banking has always been a dirty trade. Perhaps they are right. But I worked for a merchant bank in my youth as a junior member and by and large it was an honest trade with many decent people within it. I got to travel far and learned many valuable lessons. Risks, policies, and procedures were often tempered with compassion for our clients, and there was dignity in being honest. Then I saw first hand the rapid changes in the 80's and 90's when profit, & only profit became the motivating factor, and the whole system changed from managing trade/trust between companies that actually made and sold things, to gambling schemes on the exchanges. I doubt my old job would even exist now. These days, it all seems to be about celebrating predatory behaviour, greed, and squeezing the life out of everything as quickly as possible to leave before anyone notices the lies and that their lives are built on sand. Quick sand for those they have touched with their vile influence.
The big gang bang.
Well put RM. So provided they keep teaching the masses that housing prices will never go down, and to buy and hold their equities, there should be many more ever larger rounds of fleecing available.
Perhaps bubblenomics can become a national pastime, well revered by all. All the money will be made in larger and larger boom cycles, with ever longer and more depressed vacation/vulture sessions in between. Homebuyers will need to adjust, and rather than just considering current market conditions, their needs and location, they will need to anticipate and prepare for ever larger busts where those well prepared swoop in and pick off the assets of the latest crop of debt zombies/american idol fanatics at better and better prices. This will be fantastic until such time as their domiciles sovereign' keynesian spending regime blows up their respective bond market. But even this period will provide greater opportunity as assets can then also be taken by brute force. Obviously preparation will again be key.
This is a fantastic new era we are venturing into, and all by having turned SFR into a financial asset class. I suspect the outcome will be nothing short of fantastic. Certainly an exciting time for all participants.
You are correct again. Thank you.
The ancient Egyptians had it that the order of life equates to the process of digestion; wash and rinse; continue the same.
Our "govrenment" systems are feudal systems where we employ those, that would normally murder us anyway, to govern us; simply really, and it's all downhill from there. All the systems within our circular preferences of governing ideology are controlled by murder, imposition and stealth and where "leadership" is franchised through a two tiered system of control that mandates them the right to recursively scam the public purse in return for maintaining and improving the banker system of global asset and productivity ownership. And, its been going on for more than ~3,000 years.
In fact any type of insanity of governance is desireable by the overlords, war, genocide, insanity, incarceration, torture, theft, debt, etc., as long as the long arms and sweating hands of control and grabbing, reaches into the home and every single soul, on a daily basis and until well after death and the body has decomposed; longer is prefereable. Sacrifice, your sacrifice, is the preference of the bankers from before birth to after death. Soon, we can expect thought sacrifices will be introduced; sacrifice and death before life.
And, they give you religion. Religion is a manipulated human belief and cultural system institutionalized, manipulated, plagiarized, falsified and rammned into our tiny minds from the time of being in the womb until after death. Everything is religiousized; science, technologies, consumer goods, pets, pissing, sex, relationships while trees are made illegal, truth is banned by the fear of death and torture, thinking for yourself is ostracised. all for the control of the matrix. The blood and life must be squeezed out of all living men for and on behalf of the banker system, a priori.
A simple fact: the USA was founded in a milieu of freedom and absence of governing tyrants and foaming at the mouth priests, rabid rabbis, and mad mullahs, such as then existed in the UK and Europe and which are still there today in greater numbers, all in the process of getting their hands into your chest cavity, soul and bank account. And in the USA today? well, its just an improved version of the European system that is now feeding off the rest of the World by destroying it. You can call it Corzining the World, or fracking the World, the result is the same; as the giant python crushes the bones of its prey before digesting the destructive mass in its hold, it is really just about "digestion"; destructive destruction through stealth and deceipt; and squeezing the life out of life itself; the food of the bankers, where "leadership" or "government" are merely the banker's gatekeepers; lackeys.
Ho hum
Hey ZHers,
As a former risk manager for a certain large financial entity, I am going to be writing a book about savers and takers. Please don’t be shocked if I say it will be critical of certain aspects of our current financial system.
The general outline of the book will be that an upcoming struggle is emerging in civil society. It will be between those who have money but lack the political and financial power to defend it, and those who have the political clout to take it.
The savers and the takers.
This will happen because the capitalist system has been turned into a financialist system. The economy is no longer served by the banks and financial institutions. We are now at a point where the banks force the economy to serve them. Those who benefit are the financial class, their servants in the political class and the large international organizations such as the EU, the IMF and the World Bank. Those who suffer are the rest who are trapped in the system and cannot find the means to escape it – but they do have small amounts of saved money or equity.
Who are the savers? In short, it is those people who look to their own future and have taken decisions to set aside “value” from today and hold it for use tomorrow. This includes those with savings deposits, pension funds (401K, RRSP, ISA etc) and those who have equity in their homes. It also includes those who hold small physical amounts of precious commodities such as silver, gold and palladium.
The takers are those governments with unsustainably high debt levels and high levels of unfunded future liabilities. In cooperation with them are the major international banks that have over leveraged themselves as well as supra-international institutions such as the EU.
This meme – savers and takers – will shape much of the political and economic discourse over the next few years. The existing examples of where this has occurred have been Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. How this all plays out is not clear, but there are lessons to be learned about the limits of the individual and potential social unrest.
You can see the rest of an article which describes the outline of the book at: http://tinyurl.com/dxsqjbe
or at
http://economicsfortherestofus1.blogspot.ca/2013/04/savers-and-takers-new-fault-lines-and.html
If you have any comments, ideas or whatever, feel free to leave comments and I will try and answer them. Send the URL to friends if you think this is a worthy project.
The Honest Ex-Banker
HB- I commend you on your future project. Just a note- I'm self employed and work with a 30 yr old who has a wife and several kids. He works very hard for me and works his ass off on other jobs he goes to. His wife also works as a sub teacher/tutor as she has her masters in Ed when she can find the work. They are both living on the line. I know they don't do drugs or drink in excess, but have food stamps allocation. The state just canceled his DL because he was late on CS payments, so his wife as to drive him around. He can't afford to go before the judge and plop down a G and beg for his license back.
Fuck, I"M living on the line, but compared to them I'm kicking ass. They have two cars both over 100k, one broke down today and I had to drop him off near his home so he could catch a bus. Their other car needs inspection and insurance. If you want to know where the limits of social breakdown will be I guarantee it will be within this age group;married with kids facing a huge financial set back they didn't plan for and finding they are stuck in a quicksand they can't possibly get out of.
"This will happen because the capitalist system has been turned into a financialist system."
While this statement is certainly true, there is more to it because the rule of law is increasingly disregarded:
This will happen because the capitalist system has been turned into a financialist "criminopoly" system.
....I suggest you better get on this quickly....the savers are disappearing fast, as in, disposable income is being disposed of.
JMO, but it seems to me that the distinction of being a "saver" or a "taker" is a consequence of all of us existing within a distorted system, and you run the risk of focusing your book on topic made possible by a great fraud, without actually dealing with that greater fraud itself. The are so many evils that we live with today that either stem from, or are supported by, a false (fiat) currency. The egregious over-the-top behavior of political and economic elites is made possible by their holding the keys to the horn of plenty; they are both powerful and capable because of their access to unending money, coupled with the (willful? cultured?) ignorance of the masses. Likewise, the masses choosing to vote themselves manna (being "takers") is only really an option when the elites they vote for can effectively steal from everyone at will; again fiat currency is the ultimate enabler.
In an alternate reality, if currency were constrained by nature, and personal property something other than a lip service concept, those same elites would have to resort to brutal thuggery, theft, or pillage to fund their dreams of dominion. And the masses, having no option of voting themselves free lunches would never have success at being "takers". They can vote for the promises, but delivery of their payment requires in-your-face seizure from someone; likely to not be tolerated for very long at all. So in a Darwinian fashion, the behavior of "taking" dies out as a not very successful approach to living when it is attempted in a system that is not set up to reward it.
Fix the money, and while you may not fix all ills, you make it much much harder to indulge in most. The entire concept of masses being "takers" becomes improbable. Your proposed book, as an in-depth study of such a paradigm, seems to assume we're going to stick with our dysfunctional currency approach even though it is fundamentally flawed and prone to abuse. Why not focus on fixing the fundamental issue and let the behaviors live or die out as a consequence?
SWCroaker: one chapter indeed will focus on how banking elites have been able to invert the system. Previously and throughout all of history, the political elites were on top and the financial class under them with us, the peasants, on the bottom.
For the first time in history, we are in a situation where the financial elites have been able to get on top and now the political elites work for them. Peasants still on the bottom.
This is a form of inverted totalitarianism and methinks it will not end well. Capitalism 2.0 or something else will emerge from all of this.
Sound currency is the champion of the individual. It restrains his government, rewards his prudence, and pushes for the most effective allocation of savings (true capitalism). But this also means that sound currency is the enemy of those that would rule with impunity, as well as those that would opt to be coddled. I fear the numbers are and will remain with the coddled; the elites will never put sound currency and all of it's constraints in place voluntarily. So unless a critical mass of individuals push (hard) for a system that protects individuals, we are doomed to world of serfdom.
Widespread education of the truth, of the real costs in liberty and self-fulfillment that the nanny State and its false currency robs from each of us, is the only path I can see ever having a chance of getting from here to there. Along those lines, Ron Paul's Curriculum (http://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/) is probably the most hopeful endeavor out there, being pushed by one of the sharpest humans we've known.
Edit to add: Mototard, please don't get me wrong. It's great that you are looking into doing a book; we need lots of discussion out there on many many topics. I'm just somewhat selfishly trying to nudge you to perhaps think about maybe shifting the focus a bit more towards how we might throw down the system that enslaves, rather than analyze the mess it has produced. Either way, my best to you.
Well, Mototard, I guess you are already familiar with how Max Keiser beats that issue to death in almost every episode of his show. Keiser stresses the ways and means that the speculators have to steal from the savers!
My typical response would be to criticize any false fundamental dichotomy between "savers and takers." I would look for unitary mechanisms, of more and less, rather than qualitative differences. Therefore, I would assert that EVERYONE IS A TAKER. The "savers" are those who took in the past.
My philosophy is based on the concept of SUBTRACTION, from which follows the concept of ROBBERY. That philosophy leads to recommendations that we all need to become better wolves, rather than better sheep, i.e., better takers, rather than better savers. Clearly, what is happening now is that the savers are being destroyed by the takers. The sheep have been routinely fleeced, and have been set up to slaughtered.
As long as the savers continue to fail to understand the mechanisms of taking, within which they were always operating, but without understanding, then they are doomed to be robbed worse. However, I would emphasize that the subtraction is never absolute, and thus, the processes of robbery are never finished.
According to basic English definition, "taking" is robbery. The ulimate form of robbery is to take a life, which is killing. All money is backed by murder. The best organized criminals have been able to use the methods of organized crime to take control of governments, which has resulted in the kind of things that you wrote about the meme of the struggle between the takers and the savers, and seeing the takers now destroying the savers.
There is no way back out of that problem, other than through the heart of it, which is that money is backed by murder. Everyone has some power to rob and to kill, and that power is always distributed. However, those powers can be assembled and channelled. That is what the War Kings did, as the developed sovereign states, and that is what covertly enable the Fraud Kings, the central banksters and their buddies, to take control of those sovereign powers to rob, and to back that robbery up with murder.
The "savers" are going to continue being screwed worse and worse, if they continue to bleat the morality of sheep. The "savers" are going to continue being annihilated if they continue to listen to their black sheep attempting to lead them to become better sheep. The only genuine ways that the "savers" can save themselves is IF they rediscover their inner wolf, and take back their power.
Of course, that seems like it would require a prodigious series of political miracles. At the present time, I would not hold my breath waiting for the majority of the "savers" in the past to wake up before it is already too late for them. Moreover, all these political economy problems are still within their overall human ecology context, which again means that the death controls must be central to any future resoluton of the real human ecology problems. (Furthermore, those principles continue to be necessary for the possible emegence of more industrial ecologies in the future!
Radical Marijuana: thanks for taking the time and the inputs.
My own guess, based on time spent in Bosnia and Greece is that a breaking point will come - not necessarily tomorrow or this year. Ponzi shemes and the like go on far longer than we can conceive of. Think of Bernie Madoff who should have been busted 8 or 10 years before he was, but when it happened, it was fast. Same goes for collapse of former USSR etc.
HB
check out "Predator Nation" by Charles Ferguson, how this book is structured <historical overview> <context> is what you need to use as a template
Nice quote WB.
Gold, Banzai, Gold!
I liked everything about Bitcoins other than you could trade fiat for them.
Bubbles are blown when people believe they can trade dollars, euros, yen, etc for something and get back many more dollars, euros, yen, etc later on.
What would you have liked to trade for them?
Almost word for word that is the essential critique of Marx's Capital.
Capitalism = Bubbles
"Capitalism = Bubbles"
Its that damn compounding curve...
Could it be that Moses had it right? Bubbles are for Goyim?
NO!!
Fiat Fraud = Bubbles
Fractional Reserve Fraud = Bubbles
WB7 - I too think bitcoin is a "good idea". Nice to know I'm in such fantastic company.
Yep.
"I will be sorry to see such a good idea go. But btc only proves the old adage that you can give heaven on earth to man, and man will always find a way to fuck it up"
Posted yesterday.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Oscar Wilde
Be that as it may...
Banzai , please return to the scene of the crime, the 106th Congress and do an expose' on those who turned Regulatory Arbitrage into a death sentence for America. There is a reason Chris Dodd has escape bunkers in Ireland, Hank Paulson to Terra Del Fuego and Bush to four corners Uraguay and the rest of them , especially in NYC & Wilton , Ct. want us disarmed.
the 'four satchel charges" that blew up the American economy::
Number one: The Community Reinvestment Act, the expansion of Fannie Mae's balance sheet which began between 1993 and 2001.
Number two: was the hearing in the Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on July 30, 1998, in which CFTC's (Commodity
Futures Trading Commission) Chair Brooksley Born begged for the Commission to regulate credit default swaps, the instrument that exploded the American economy. Rubin, Greenspan ,Summers, SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt & Chairman Richard G Lugar, Indiana Republican, attempted to extract a public promise from Born to cease her campaign for regulation on the OTC derivative market in exchange for warding off a move in
Congress for a Treasury-backed bill to slap a moratorium on further CFTC action.
Number three: was the Securities Modernization Act repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which ultimately created, turned our banks into securitization millls .
Number four: was the Commodity Modernization Act.
The 106th Congress, FNMA Chair Johnson , Bill Clinton & Hank Paulson are walking off scott free
Guillotines can be made easily in any of those countries. Blades may be a little dull, but then that might be a good thing. hujel
Chris Dude is deluding himself if he thinks Ireland is a safe haven for his kind.
I'll make you a deal William: grant my request and I'll make it go viral beyond your wildest expectations. Every media outlet in America+
You know all the culprits are in Banzai7's Periodic Table of Wall Street Criminal Elements
Which I can now do on archive quality glossy poster stock if anyone is interested in getting one signed.
Contact: banzai7institute@gmail.com
Derangium. hypocritium, blabber, commodium, moron.....i cannot choose!
Banzai you fucking rock!
You need to change your name to Da Vinci.
oops
Awsome table! I noticed you stuck Krugman in at number 40, which is Zirconium in the scientific table. It is used as a refractory and opacifier. Opacifier certainly seems to fit as nothing that comes out of his mouth makes any sense and is meant to prevent the sheeple from seeing the truth.
Look as I might, I could not find unobtainium on the chart, it is a scarce element, almost as rare as WS honesty....
I was looking for Barney Frank, Dimon and Blankfein. The scientific table has more than 100 elements, so there is room for exapnsion on criminal elements table.
All three are in there.
That's what I get from looking at it on my phone. Again, excellent chart!
Belive it or not, Barney Frank spent his farewell address to congress channeling Ron Paul with attributation.
Jamie Dimon is something I don't know about. And Blankeinfiend is the technoviking. Study WB7s works and it does make sense what makes it on what pallet.
That's the most intelligent thing I ve ever heard coming out of a CA girl. I think I love you.
Despite being in California, I somehow managed to avoid bleaching my brain.
Which is precisly why I want to have drinks with you. Say Friday around 8 at a nice club in La Jolla?
:-) 400 miles is a bit too far.
Biutcoins, Euros, US dollars - all the same fake crap, all the same crash and burn at the end of the product ponzi push for participants.
May all bankers burn in the paper hell they created.
RIP
Shaun the Sheep
New scheme:
1. DDoS the BitCoin exchanges
2. Buy The Fine Dip
3. Bit Bubble re-inflates
4. PROFIT!!!!
5. Repeat.
Black Wednesday for some, opportunity for others.
BTW if U want pls check Your last post "A LeVeL PLaYiNG FieLD..."
http://www.secretsofthefed.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/stock-market-crash-baby-black-african-didnt-loose-anything.gif