How Iceland Escaped From The One Bank
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How Iceland Escaped From The One Bank
Written by Jeff Nielson (CLICK FOR ORIGINAL)
What have the governments of the corrupt Western bloc spent most of their time doing since the Crash of ’08? We can answer this question in three parts:
1) Creating increasingly falsified “statistics” to fabricate the illusion that their economies were not on the verge of all-out economic collapse;
2) Hacking and slashing every social program in sight in order to generate the false savings known as Austerity; and
3) Creating new funny-money and taking on new debt at an exponentially increasing rate in order to delay collapse, since all that Austerity accomplished was an acceleration of these death spirals.
Making these points apparent to newer readers will require additional elaboration. The starting point is the Crash of ’08 itself. What caused these nations to go from being merely heavily indebted to hopelessly insolvent overnight? That can be summed up in a single euphemism of fraud and crime: “too big to fail.”
At the end of 2008, the West’s puppet governments succumbed to History’s ultimate act of blackmail at the hands of History’s largest and most rapacious crime syndicate: the One Bank . “Give us all your money, or we’ll blow up your entire financial system.” That is the real meaning of “too big to fail”: institutionalized extortion, in perpetuity.
What was the real price tag for this massive extortion operation? Forget the phony numbers published by our corrupt governments and their mouthpieces in the corporate media. The total quantum for these extortion payments was in the tens of TRILLIONS . Obviously the Deadbeat Debtors of the West couldn’t raise more than a tiny fraction of that amount of blackmail money up front. Thus, most of this shakedown of (supposedly) sovereign governments came in the form of future tax breaks and “loss guarantees.”
In the Shakedown of ’08, our governments did not merely clean out every penny they could scrounge from our public treasuries and borrow every penny that they could. In addition, they mortgaged the future of our children and grandchildren by pledging infinite corporate welfare for the One Bank.
Western governments had no money left to spend on their own people after committing tens of trillions in extortion payments to this banking crime syndicate while also having to deal with rapidly rising interest payments (to the same crime syndicate) on all their new debts. So Western governments then pulled out their chainsaws and attacked our social programs.
Infinite dollars in “interest payments” go to the crime syndicate; no pennies are left for the people. That is Austerity. However, so-called Austerity represents more than simply another act of economic treason against Western populations; it is also the self-inflicted, fatal wound for these economies.
Austerity treason took economies that were already in a slow-motion descent toward collapse and rapidly sped up that suicide cycle. The evidence here is overwhelming, but it can be summed up most easily in one word: Greece.
Greece has had far greater and more punitive amounts of Austerity treason heaped upon its victim population than any other regime in the Corrupt West. It was demanded by the economic sadists known as “the Troika”: the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. The result? This nation was bankrupted twice within a span of five years.
Which nations are closest behind Greece in Europe’s Bankruptcy Derby? Spain and Portugal. These are the #2 and #3 nations in terms of inflicting the greatest amounts of this suicidal Austerity on their own populations. Austerity kills. More Austerity kills faster.
Here, people need to understand that it was always totally predictable that Austerity would fail. It was always totally predictable that Austerity would harm these economies more than help them. And this was predicted (repeatedly) in previous commentaries.
How do you make any economy stronger? The key lies within one of the most fundamental principles of economics: the Marginal Propensity to Consume. This law of economics is universally accepted because it is ½ simple arithmetic and ½ common sense.
In elementary terms, the fastest and easiest way to make any economy stronger is to place a dollar into the hands of a member of the Poor or Middle Class. Why? Because these people will spend most of that dollar (the Middle Class) or all of that dollar (the Poor) immediately. This extra dollar of consumption then gets divided up into wages, payments to suppliers, tax revenues for the government, etc.
Then additional portions of that dollar are spent and re-spent. This is known as “the multiplier effect,” and it explains why the Marginal Propensity to Consume is a universally accepted principle.
But what happens if we put a dollar into the hands of the Rich, rather than the Poor or Middle Class? By definition, the Rich person will hoard the vast majority of that dollar. As a matter of the simplest logic and arithmetic, no person can become “rich” unless/until they have spent years hoarding wealth, or they win a lottery.
Thus every time a Rich person receives a dollar, most of that dollar is hoarded and disappears from the economy. Only a few pennies of that dollar are ever circulated, and as a result the multiplier effect is virtually nil. This is known by the economic euphemism of “trickle-down economics.” Put all the new dollars into the hands of the wealthy, and only a few pennies will ever “trickle down” to the economy.
“Trickle-down economics” has been the official policy of nearly all of the traitorous governments of the Corrupt West since the start of the new millennium, and, in the case of the U.S., it goes back at least a full generation. This policy of everything-for-the-Fat-Cats and nothing for the Little People is one of the primary reasons for the relentless decay in our standard of living and the relentless collapse of our economies.
How do you then make these sick economies even sicker? Start taking extra dollars out of the hands of the Poor and Middle Class – Austerity. Every dollar of Austerity treason creates a Reverse Multiplier Effect: removing more and more dollars from the system and thus starving the economy of the fuel which allows our consumer economies to survive: consumer spending.
Austerity causes the economy to get even sicker, leading to larger deficits, more borrowing, and thus even higher interest payments to the parasitic One Bank. Debt slavery. The response from these puppet governments to this vicious circle? Even more Austerity. If something fails, do much more of it.
However, one Western nation that was caught up in the original Crash of ’08 did not climb aboard this treadmill of economic suicide and blackmail: Iceland. As a result, alone among the nations of Europe, Iceland enjoys real robust economic growth. The standard of living of its population is once again risingrather than falling as it is throughout the rest of the Corrupt West.
How? How did one, small island nation succeed while every other Western government failed miserably and completely? As with the economic suicide now practiced throughout the Corrupt West, Iceland’s success also traces back to the same four words: “too big to fail.”
What happened when Iceland’s Big Banks (more tentacles of the One Bank) arrogantly demanded that the government rubber-stamp the principle of crime of “too big to fail” – sacrificing the System in order to save the Big Banks? Iceland’s government responded that it had a different, radical idea: it would sacrifice the Big Banks, and save the System.
Iceland’s Big Banks folded. As with all blackmailers, the One Bank responded to Iceland’s refusal to be blackmailed by immediately lashing out in revenge. Among other things, it attacked Iceland’s currency (i.e. manipulated it lower), yet another criminal conspiracy for which the Big Banks have now been convicted.
However, Iceland’s government stood firm and did not cave in to the attempted extortion by this crime syndicate. It weathered the financial/economic reprisals. It proved that “too big to fail” was always nothing more than a lie and a myth created by the banking crime syndicate. No entity within any system could ever be more important than the system itself. This was always elementary logic. Iceland has validated that logic.
Iceland refused to be blackmailed. Iceland refused to take on the extra debt (and debt slavery) that came with the blackmail. Iceland refused to touch its social programs. Iceland has the strongest economy in the Western world.
Game, set, and match.
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How Iceland Escaped From The One Bank
Written by Jeff Nielson (CLICK FOR ORIGINAL)
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There are two fundamental types of austerity.
1. Cut the size of government including their support for crony capitalists and reduce taxes. Additionally socialist programs can be phased out and soft landed over time to further reduce taxes and create a greater productive and self reliant population.
2. Increase taxes to fund government but cut government social support programs while increasing government and crony programs.
The two types need to be differentiated and then each type further broken down into the degree to which it is to be implemented. E.g. type 1 degree 1 is small govt only to protect private propery rights with no crony capitalist component vs type 1 degree 10 is a smallish govt with social programs and minimal crony support.
In any event the acid test of where government intrusion lies is known by the percentage of the private sector GDP they confiscate. Real GDP cannot include government transactions because govt. produces nothing. In my opiinion any govt. that confiscates more than 5% of private sector GDP is tyrannical and I am quite sure practically all governments confiscate north of 60% of private GDP via myriad forms of taxation including the "hidden" tax of monetay inflation.
?
Why do bankers always demand cuts to money given to their victims by all member governments? First they destroy the economy, next they demand none of their fake money be given to those they dispossess. But the idea of righteous "austerity" does not sell.
What does it tell you about someone's plans when they want to starve people to death?
The biggest problem for US is the government, judicial system and the politicians.
The government has the properties of growing and demanding better pay than private sector for the same or less amount of work.
the Land of the free? Only in the western movies.
"Marginal Propensity To Consume" is junk. Rich people don't bury their excess money in the back yard or hide it under the mattress. It goes into stocks and/or bonds, bank accounts, or businesses or real estate or collectibles like art or jewelry. In all these cases, there is a benefit to the man on the street through real job creation or liquidity in the banks that allow them to lend more money to Joe Sixpack if he needs it. Even the money spent at auctions on Van Goghs or diamonds trickles down to the common man when the seller goes shopping.
My own mother grew up poor and had a hatred of the wealthy. She was envious especially of those who live in million dollar houses (back in the Eighties). I drove her around a wealthy mountainside area and we looked at different mansions. I tried to point out to her that these home owners no longer had the million dollars it cost for the house. The money was now in the pockets of the blue collar guys who built them. It was of no use. She died hating the rich and successful. "Marginal Prospensity To Consume" is propaganda invented for her crowd.
In one of my Business classes at Penn State the prof made us watch some film on how horrible Iceland was and featured all our friends (Soros,GS,JPM et al.) and how they tried to save them. I was the only one to walk out of the class after 10 mins.
Iceland had a relatively coherent culture, which made it difficult for the banksters' CIA types to use their usual bag of dirty tricks. (I understand that those were tried, but failed, due to the people in Iceland being able to perceive those attempting those kinds of dirty tricks sticking out like sore thumbs.)
Everywhere else, the divide and conquer strategies are way too advanced for anything like what was possible in Iceland to be actually replicated. While Iceland was, at least so far, able to resist the standard techniques of organized crime by the One Bank, that have worked almost everywhere else, there is nowhere else that I am aware of where a sufficiently coherent community culture exists than in Iceland. (Hungary may be the closest, but still, already too far gone.)
The other Scandinavian countries, due to their integration into the European Union, and the degree to which they have accepted cultural and genetic suicide via massive immigration, are already too far gone to be able to save themselves now ... Meanwhile, the degree to which divide and conquer strategies would continue to work in the USA, and other NATO countries, are way too overwhelming!
The writer left out one thing in this excellent essay concerning where money and liquidity should always flow to energize an economy.
According to the SBA and WSJ, about 80% of all new jobs are created by a $15,000 to $20,000 start-up with 4 to 6 employees. That's a working class bank account. That's a dry cleaner...a food truck...an insurance office...a real estate brokerage...a flower shop...a computer repair shop...etc...
Next time some creep tells you, that you never got a job from a poor man...tell them to shove their right-wing talking points up their mother's bunghole.
It's those with fire in their belly wanting to live a better life that creates the jobs in America. Even Napoleon understood the power of small business and not big business. "Britain (who runs the British empire) is a nation of shop-keepers".
So if small business creates 80% of most new jobs and Federal, local and state governments create another 10%...that leaves the last 10% to the rich...who most often use public stock for capital formation (your 401K)...who lay-off workers when demand is slow...who get golden parachutes when they drive the company into the ground.
So, not only do the rich not create most jobs...they barely take any risk when they do. The right-wing Republican "principles" of conservatism all came out of think tanks designed to bamboozle the most uninformed voter base on earth.
Below is the only economic platform I've seen that both progressives and "conservatives" like when it is explained. It's called, the "Single Tax".
"Progress and Poverty"
http://www.henrygeorge.org/pdfs/PandP_Drake.pdf
I disagree. Austerity is good as long as it targets the overinflated government. The real cancer in our society is the government : it keeps growing, it keeps "regulating" and "controlling" nothing and everything apart from itself. Todays western governments are pure communism. All for the apparatchiks ( the government ) and the oligarchs ( the Politbureau, aka. the multinationals ), and fuck you and me. Small problem : you and me start to know this, and that's a problem.
That's fine, but you are wrong and part of the problem.
Krugman's explaination was easier to follow, and said about the same!
USA Austerity ... Not so much (Welfare rolls, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare have expanded greatly), but unimaginable leves of fraud and BS
Bullshit! Budgets at the state land local levels have been cut severely. That's were USA austerity can be found.
And what's up with the Obamacare garbage. For Christ's sake, it's a for profit market approach to deliver healthcare.
FIAT is a GLORIOUS MONOPOLY to own. People are bitching only because they didn't come up with it themselves.
It's particularly funny to read the ZH comments, because traders are the chum following the tuna boats...eating on the entrails thown overboard by the fishermen doing the REAL work.
Scheme away...you can't beat a system when they are the only game in town...and you aren't smart enough to make your own game.
Your moniker sounds Japanese but your opinion sounds Jewish. But I bet you're just being sarcastic, no good Jew would ever say that out in the open.
Correct. The problem is not the bankers, the problem is the idea that the government has the right to initiate force and fraud.
Austerity...what a puke. By what right do the unproductive hold guns to heads of the productive and demand they support them with their own lifeblood. Austerity is the word for "being less of a thieving cunt"
And besides, "austerity" in the political world means "reducing the amount we were going to increase our spending by"
Janet?
Spoken like a real effendi. Looking forward to plucking those feathers.
One Bank to rule them all, One Bank to sign them, One Bank to lend them all and through indebtness bind them
Do not idealize Iceland.
It is all pretty easy. Iceland did not pay the depositors from Netherlands and UK in Icelandic banks. In the end, the savers paid the excesses: capital controls and a 40% devaluation against the euro. That's all.
A privately owned bank called Landsbanki had a branch in UK and the Netherlands that opened up so called Icesave accounts when it started running into liquidity problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icesave_dispute This Wikipedia doc is not entirely correct, there are a few errors.
When that problem escalated in October 2008 the Landsbanki bank was put into administration.
There were bitter cries from all kinds of assh*les for socializing the debts, by issuing a state guarantee for the whole shit show, Of course that was not done.
Because of emergency laws issued at the beginning of the crisis, depositors were put in front of all other creditors and when the assets of the failed bank were sold, they were paid in full.
Iceland never had anything to do with any of this.
If I remember correctly Visa and Master card shut down services to Iceland, soon they discovered that the Icelandic people didn't give a $hit and they quickly turned them back on after the fear that they wouldn't be aloud to be turned back on in retribution for them turning them off sank in.
I agree Steve in Greensboro. I stopped skimming at Marginal Propensity to Consume. This is pure Keynsian drivel and as far as the author goes. Certainly a hungry man given money will spend that money on food, and will likely spend the whole of the gift quickly. This means nothing, for, if the economy is structured on commodity money, the money given was earned by another, and in a counterfeit money system, the money printed into existence robs all other holders of fiat money. It is born of one of Keynes more insipid ideas: Burrying money by government in secret so that others would dig it up and spend it.
What matters in any economy is the production of goods and services and the trading of these products of men's labors. Money facilitates the range at which trades can occur, and the speed with which they occur. It arose out of a need for efficient exchange. This trading creates and facilitates economic specialization which provides a greater pool of goods and services to be produced by any polity. It also allows producers to produce more than they consume, thus giving a polity a pool of savings to produce tools and clear land for greater productive yeilds(in simplest desert island terms, a few saved fish to allow Robbinson Curusoe to spend a day making a net rather than spearing fish). Anyone in the polity consuming more than he produces must necessarily be either "eating the seed corn" or taking food out of another's mouth. This is true weather said resources are given charitably to the over consumer, or extracted by force or fraud from the rest of the polity. It can be no other way. Goods and services do not spring forth from nature to the table of their own good will. However, since charity is itself a psychic good, and good Keynsians are all about violently or fraudulently robbing their neighbors for their particular ideal of "the greater good", I will focus further only on force or fraud.
In order to provide said money for the poor and less well off to consume above their marginal propensity to PRODUCE, the polity's gang of official criminals (gov't) must either rob other or defraud them. Keynsians are not above robbery, and pine for it, but said robbery must only come from the Keysian's source of envy. They far prefer fraud, where the medium of exchange is counterfeited. However, giving freshly minted fiat money to these folks merely reduces others marginal propensity to consume as prices become distorted and rise in response to the influx of money into the ghettos and modest neighborhoods. If capital goods and labor were instantly and costlessly fungible, as most Keynsians imagine, then rather quickly, the capital and labor structure would realign to the these price increases, only to find that such arraingments were faulty as these consumers, having exhausted their windfall, drop their consumption to their old level.
This of course is not the case. In the real world, a one off transfer of such funds would merely precipitate some mild price dislocations (mostly upward), that would settle back down once the monetary polution was absorbed by the polity. No reasonable entrepneur would view the price signals coming from such neighborhoods as organic and continuous. Therefor the capital structure would remain more or less intact, while current warehouse inventories would be diverted from more prosperous neighborhood Targets and Walmarts and delivered to the chains stores in less afluent areas and prices of the redistributed goods would rise in response to the single wave of fiat. Thus the affluent would have goods "taken" from them so others could consume above their means. If, however, the fiat stream APPEARED to be permanent, countless entrepeneurs would be fooled into investing in structures and labor to feed this groups increased consumption. However, capital and labor is neither instantly nor easily fungible. Thus actual capital, in the form of higher levels of goods and services must be used to allign the production structure to this new demand. This takes time, and the initial price rises seem to justify this investment. The resultant activity building stores and increasing the production of flat screen tv's and cars, seems to look for all the world like growth. But it isn't. It is the party one has when one eats his seed corn. It consumes scarce capital for a momentary distortion caused by the money illusion. After the initial spurt of activity, the steady flow of ever more fiat into these poorer neighborhoods cuases inflation throughout the polity, and while there will be occasional winners in these poorer areas, their will be unnoticed losers in other areas. However, eventually, the false investments will be outed, and the number of poorer people will grow as employment and wages fall below the level occuring before the experiment. This is so because the capital base will have been devalued or consumed completely. Thus savings (consuming less than you produce) must increase in order for the errors to be corrected.
Since this falacy is integral to the article posted, as well as one of the KEY elements of the ONE BANK's ability to continue operation, I stopped reading the article.
I roundly applauded Icelands moves back in the day, but this post sheds little light on the situation.
In Iceland most of the top bankers from all 3 top banks, other financial entities and many connected people have been sent to prison.
The latest case.
http://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/10/08/iceland_jails_bankers_...
The last CEO that has not been sent to prison is Larus Welding from Glitnir bank. He was sentenced by district court to 5 years for market manipulation in the Stim case. There were 2 other bankers sentenced in the same case.
Larus has appealed to the Supreme Court. http://ruv.is/frett/larus-welding-i-fimm-ara-fangelsi
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/iceland-does-what-the-us-wont-26-top-ban...
What a complete load of garbage.
i like it
Iceland isn't free from the one bank, don't kid yourself.
If you are reading this you may be, like I am, heartily sick of banks and their shenanigans disguised as business practices.
It is time for the little people to hurt the banks any way we can. They are pretty hard to rob, but not so hard to damage.
Points of weakness.
1. They need to be able to open their doors on a monday morning.
Creative use of modern adhesives and cements can prevent this and incur great expense in overcoming your cheap to implement actions. "Asymmetric warfare, Bitchez!"
2. They need their computers to work. When the manager steps out of the interview room in a bank where you are asking questions, maybe talking about taking one of their "services", that keyboard or mouse cable could easily get damaged or pulled on very hard. (Just rember to keep a straight face when he starts wondering why his mouse pointer won't move!) The absolutely LAST thing that will occur to the operator is that the potential new victim just "did for" their mouse when he weren't looking! Extra points can be gained by learning what a network cable looks like, simply unplugging one of those will likely cause expensive chaos, especially if you kill the mouse at the same time. (Simply jamming a tiny sliver of matchstick under the left click button might be enough to stop the average bank employee computing, and that isn't even damaging property, neither is unplugging a cable). IF you find someone else's bank card in the street, it's a gift! make sure you dip it in impact adhesive before returning it to your favourite bank, via one of it's ATM's...
3. They need your money, in the form of loans and bank charges, and want to save their own. Pay neither, whilst operating as many different accounts as possible all legally. You just need to make sure that your activities generate the maxium of work and provide the minium of reward, that is totally legal and I've been doing it for years, but we have "free banking" here, you may not be able to opertae multiple bank accounts, but use as many free services as you can. Always take a "free" pen and some paying in slips. ALWAYS. Always take as much cashier time as you can spare by asking questions, talking about the weather etc. if there isn't a large queue in the bank. (The bank is your enemy not it's customers) If the teller is busy serving you, and answering your questions, they ain't serving the bank..
4. Educate other people. Learn and use phrases like; "A bank will give you an umbrella to carry about when it's sunny, but snatch it back as soon as the rain comes." or "Why pay 16 percent or more extra on the price when you buy things for yourself and your family with your hard earned cash, to a banker who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire?". Or my favourite: "Did you know that every single individual human being in the our country (that is every single member of YOUR family) was made liable for 5,500 punts/dollaz/euroze of banking debt at the 2008 rate of exchange? That's what austerity is paying for.."
SO to recap, they are vulnerable to physical, social and financial attacks. All of which unlike robbery, are dead easy to pull off without getting caught or in many cases you can be blatant and still not be punished. And don't forget if a bank employee catches you taking too many pens or paying in slips, or they catch you slipping a bit of matchstick underneath the left hand mouse button, and they have you "bang to rights", then tell them as clearly as you can WHY you hate the usurious, controlling, evil banking system.
Or you could sit back and enjoy your banks shafting you like you always did, because you think they are the powerful ones. But for those powerless souls like me who daily prick 'em and draw off a tiny bit of their energy, remember that you are not alone and every day, more join our numbers. In the city where I live, the banks are starting to realise what is happening, and as they try to control teh leakages of pens, and relalise that they cannot leave customers unattended near computers they have to implement controls and measures that reduce their ability to appear customer friendly, and that helps enormously to pierce the lie that they are the customers friend. It all helps no matter how small.
We just have to get the ticks off our necks, it has gone too far to be tolerated now.
Push back. Any way you can.
And get your friends to join in as soon as they realise, the banker is not your friend, he is a parasite..
Take up painting. Yourself.
http://www.laweekly.com/news/banks-on-fire-paintings-by-artist-alex-scha...
Agree with you, Sprott Money.
Do you remember how that played out? A long time ago, Iceland was pretty shaky. The Central Bank had cranked up the interest rates to double-digit figures. That caused a lot of hedge funds to pile into the banks in Iceland and start lapping up the gains from the interest rates.
Way back then ... on Roubini's blog (remember that blog ... back in the old days???) I warned that Iceland was going to go down the toilet. And sure enough - it did, The predators from the global financial system sucked the small island dry.
However - as you point out now ... Iceland had the cajones to tell the banking system where to go. It was a tough move for them, but a very good one. In the long term, Iceland will be a lot better off in the next 20 years. It's going to be a rough ride for the whole world, but at least Iceland has got fish and hot water (thermal springs).
Well, the Greeks have voted continuously for the continuation of the 'economic sadists' policies, so they are either happy , or masochists (and happy).
Ireland had their chance to 'Go Galt' like Iceland, but the Irish voted for EU/bank serfdom instead... I cannot understand that choice by a nation that struggled against colonial oppression for so long...
For centuries, Ireland has looked toward the Continent for its salvation; IMHO the Irish felt that if they didn't play the euro game, they'd just be London's bitch. Again. Still. Whatever.
Ireland is Catholic, and therefore votes for the Judeocatholics, in hopes that They will given them a nice government job as a policeman or clerk or something. Irish don't want to be ruled by "outsider" Protestants, because Protestants don't give them those nice policeman or clerk jobs. Judeocatholic rulers do give them those jobs. Freedom? Irish don't want freedom. Irish want jobs.
Who counted the votes?
Hard to imagine how they went from patriots to socialist serfs in a generation. the lure of th free sh&^t army I guess
they got shit on but it was hardly free.
bad leadership. iceland was blessed with better.
where necessary (most of the world) the people have to reject bad leaders, however possible.