ΩΩSo far, in history, there has been limited options as to how we can dare organize a civilization. Often, when we get in trouble after trying to run a civilization into infinity, people look for easy solutions. The trick of any civilization is to AVOID the trap of trying to run any system into infinity. This is a philosophical riddle which was transmitted through history via myths and fairy tales. All of these agree on one issue: humans are greedy and when they give in to greed, they die. This has been represented by thousands of ancient stories about caves where dragons or gods guard treasures. The present economic system has collapsed due to a desire to enrich the rich as much as possible while actively destroying civilization. There is no easy fix for this mess. Or any mess. I clean up messes at home and always, they happen very easily and I have to work very hard to undo them.
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ΩΩHarsh reality is hard to accept but has this way of forcing us to accept it and the harshest reality of all is, we all die. And all empires die. And all civilizations die. And often, they can spring back but only after going through the terrors of destruction and then the hard work of reconstruction. The Chinese, for example, are alive today who remember the destruction of China, the rebirth under Mao and how he went insane and made things much worse and then the second rebirth. Hard, hard work was required of every human in China during all of this, much suffering and millions and millions of deaths due to rape, starvation, warfare, and revolutionary struggles for power.
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ΩΩThe West looks at each little event in China to gloat over Chinese suffering. For example, the recent fire that was started on a bamboo platform surrounding a high rise (caused by welders who were then arrested and I presume, will be executed) led to many deaths. The West has similar fires, too. And would be very angry if anyone gloated about the deaths. Yet we can’t resist poking at the Chinese and blaming them for having poor construction techniques (which, incidentally, do plague the US, for example). We burnt down an entire major city, Detroit! And yet, shrug our own shoulders as the Chinese buy up GM which died along with Detroit.
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ΩΩEurope is burning down. The German citadel of power still reigns supreme but all around this German bulwark, things are catching on fire and the German liquidity can’t put out all of these fires anymore than the Chinese firemen could put out the fires on the bamboo scaffolding. Thinking about the EU as a high rise surrounded with bamboo scaffolding is a great metaphor, actually. Ireland’s collapse is causing all the other perimeter nations to collapse while the center of the EU confederation are still functioning fairly well.
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ΩΩEuro Dominos Will Fall Until Currency Is Split: Matthew Lynn – Bloomberg.com
- The euro has turned into a bankruptcy machine. Once the markets have finished with Ireland, they will simply move on to Portugal and Spain, and after that to Italy and France.
- There is a domino effect at work, and, with each rescue, the fault lines within the euro grow wider and wider. This process isn’t going to stop until the euro is taken apart. In each country, it will be a different trigger that causes a collapse in financial confidence. The root cause is the same, though. When the euro was launched, it was a big bet that sharing the same currency would make a group of very different economies converge, and so allow the European Central Bank to operate a single monetary policy for all of them.
- It was an interesting theory, but it turned out to be wrong. The economies are just too different to allow a single central bank to manage all of them. Interest rates are always wrong everywhere. How that expresses itself varies. In Greece, it was a fiscal crisis. In Ireland, a banking collapse. In Spain, a construction bubble that burst. In Germany, a massive trade surplus. But, like a river looking for the sea, it always comes out somewhere.
- This crisis will keep moving from country to country. The only permanent fix is splitting up the euro into more manageable currency areas. Until the euro-areas leaders recognize that simple truth, every bailout they come up with is only going to shift the attacks elsewhere.
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ΩΩIrish opposition says EU intervention under way | Reuters
- Noonan said he believed Ireland’s fiscal situation was manageable “if the government do what they are committed to doing and bring in a rigorous budget on Dec. 7 and bring forward the kind of four-year budgetary plan which the European Commission are now demanding”. But the banking crisis was putting a lot of pressure on, since nearly all the banks were now nationalised, he said.
- “The bond market isn’t distinguishing between sovereign debt and bank debt and I think the speculation that’s current is starting with the banking situation rather than the sovereign situation…The mechanism would be that there would probably be money put in to keep the banks liquid in the first instance, but it’s difficult to see Ireland still accessing the bond markets, and we could be suspended from the bond markets for three or four years,” he said.
- “Europe would provide some money then but the condition on that would be that we would dance to the European tune and budgetary decisions would be in principle decided in Europe rather than in Dublin,” he said.
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ΩΩHere is the key: since private banks made ridiculous loans which were insured by the derivative market via AIG’s ‘insurance’ that had no capital base, when the loans were not repaid but went into default, the banks had no reserves to pay for losses and thus, also went bankrupt. To save the banks, the government had to recapitalize them and to do this, the government unilaterally seized all the assets, property and future labor of the entire captive population!
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ΩΩYou cannot run any banking system without a capitalist base. Modern bankers tried to run a system where debts were the assets running the system but we see, yet again, you can’t do this. You need a solid capitalist basis to run a banking system since debts are not safe assets, they are RISKY. That is, they depend on humans paying the principal and interest on these loans and if they fail, someone has to pay since the money was put into action via lending and to return and destroy this ‘new money’ it has to be paid back with a penalty which goes to the savers who provided the capital base in the first place.
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ΩΩThis entire, older banking system depended on one major thing to run: GOLD. That is, when the capital base could be shown physically as this metal, it gave assurance to everyone investing in a bank that the bank could fund losses in capital when lending fails for some reason. Instead, due to a desire for infinite debts, the West decided to kill the gold standard and go with paper products. This, in turn, led to lying about the ability to service loans. ‘Service a loan’ means to pay for the debts if the lender ceases doing this. AIG promised to do this and then failed due to a lack of capital.
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ΩΩThis was fixed in the usual way: the US government seized all US property and used our entire nation to capitalize AIG’s business and now we take all losses and this is one reason why our budget deficit is doubling yet again in another 8 years. When we were forced to capitalize our banks and international speculative houses like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, our collective ability to borrow anything has collapsed even when interest rates are very low! The same thing happened to Ireland and England, too.
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ΩΩHere is more proof that my views are correct: Ireland Said to Weigh Pumping More Capital Into Banks – Bloomberg.com
- Concern that loan losses may increase is hampering banks’ ability to raise cash. One solution may be to “over- capitalize” Irish banks, Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan said last week. Lenders were in March ordered to have an equity Tier 1 capital ratio of at least 7 percent by the year’s end.
- “Capital is firmly back on the radar,” Eamonn Hughes, an analyst at Goodbody Stockbrokers in Dublin, said in a note to clients today. “Higher Irish bond yields and a weakening economy” are being “compounded by the market’s lack of comfort with a 7 percent core equity trough for the Irish banks.”
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ΩΩAnd pray tell, how do you ‘overcapitalize’ a bank? HAHAHA….well, you basically seize everyone’s ability to borrow! Yes, it sounds very odd, doesn’t it? But now, no one in Ireland will be able to sell their homes easily, for example. And to get a consumer loan will mean even worse usurious rates than present. We see this in the US: consumer loans are hundreds and hundreds of points higher than the loans our central bank gives to fellow bankers. The horror here is, the more the bankers do this, the more they kill the economy of the nation they kidnapped.
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ΩΩThis is why these rescues of bankers nearly universally lead to social disorders, revolutions and wars. The Irish can’t go to war since they are very weak but they have a long history of uprisings to inspire them to more and I expect more of this for sure. The US, when forced, will certainly go to war.
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ΩΩEuro under siege after Portugal hits panic button – Telegraph
- [T]he German government is expected to signal today that Ireland may have to accept a £77 billion bail-out, along with a loss of economic and political independence, as the price of preserving the euro. Mrs Merkel said the single currency was “the glue that holds Europe together”. Her words came as fellow eurozone members Portugal and Spain rounded on Ireland. They fear that international concerns over the euro will lead to so-called market contagion spreading to them….Ireland suffered the worst recession of any major economy and has amassed government debts of more than €100 billion (£84 billion). It has an unemployment rate almost twice as high as Britain at 13.2 per cent and currently has a record deficit equivalent to 32 per cent of its gross domestic product.
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ΩΩUm, the US and Japan’s government deficit is much higher than Ireland’s mess! And both the US and Japan are mired in domestic deflation spirals which the added problem of rising cost of living for basic services such as energy, medicine or food. The loss of independence is important here: we are losing our independence. We don’t control our own country as I complain about all the time, foreigners control us which is why illegal immigrants are not dealt with properly anymore and the offshoring of our jobs is accelerating, not declining. And why our media, which has been taken over by foreigners, is pushing hard for us to continue this destruction of our sovereign nation.
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ΩΩHere is an example: Israel’s Fischer Says Bernanke Correct on Easing: Tom Keene – Bloomberg.com
- Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is correct to ease policy in unconventional ways with the U.S. central bank’s target interest rate near zero… “You can’t now reduce interest rates so you have to expand monetarily some other way. Quantitative easing, and the credit easing in the type the Fed undertook, is more effective than we had thought,” Fischer said. “We have to change our views of how these things work.”
- Fischer, 67, was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as Bernanke’s adviser on his graduate thesis. The Bank of Israel official said he doesn’t doubt the Fed’s ability or resolve to exit from its stimulus when the economy is stronger. “If the economy starts growing, there will be a lot of room for them to do that,” he said. “As they raise interest rates, they will start selling some of the assets they have bought. I don’t see the problem.” While some may doubt the Fed’s resolve, “I believe this Fed would have the guts.”
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ΩΩOne of the bigger leeches on our system, a country that is draining us dry and shoving us into one war after another with Muslims is Israel. AIPAC controls Congress and destroyed Obama when he tried feebly to fix this mess by making friendly with Muslims. We have no President now, we have a foreigners, a fascist Netanyahu, running Congress and getting whatever he wants. The Zionists want Quantitative Easing since this means more free money for them.
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ΩΩWhenever the Fed raises interest rates in the past, the economy nosedives. Always. On the other hand, once the mess is cleaned up and the US taxpayers suck up all the losses, the good parts of these bonds and instruments will be very attractive to foreigners wishing to buy up all of our assets (debts are assets!!!) and so the Zionists in Israel can’t wait for this to happen. After all, much of their funding comes from the US so they can get Congress to vote more loans for Israelis who can then buy up all our businesses and property when the Fed sells this to them.
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ΩΩThis is a severe problem and even a naive reader of history who has heard the name, ‘Hitler’ knows where this ends up. A very angry US public being shorn of the last remains of social protections and wealth will be very eager to find someone to loot and of course, the #1 target has to be the richest 1% of the population. History is crystal clear about this. So looting the US to make Israel strong is a fatal choice for the Jewish community and I am a member of this community and this is why I warn everyone not to do this.
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ΩΩOur close buddy in bad banking is the UK. The same solutions we are using are being used by the UK: U.K. Inflation Unexpectedly Rises, Forcing King to Write Letter to Osborne. To fix this inflation, the bankers who now own all of England minus the immense parts owned by the royals and their rich noble buddies, are going to cut social services, education and health. That is, the Brits will have to become stupid and die. So the ‘free paper money’ ends with a bang as usual. Paper money LOVES to shoot to infinity. And will do this when there is trouble. And there is trouble so…vain attempts at preventing this paper stuff going to infinity is very difficult and this requires starving people literally to death. Why is this?
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ΩΩWell, money is actually food. The very first form of money was grain. Even in the Americas, where it was domesticated corn. Money can’t exist without it having a grain basis. In Asia, this was rice. Money in Japan all the way up to 1850 was koku, that is, a measure of rice. So it is in all civilizations since the start of this along the Nile, Euphrates, Yellow and Indus rivers. So when money collapses, even paper money, people ALWAYS starve to death. Always. Such as we saw in Zimbabwe recently or see in any of the poorer nations that are deep in debt.
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ΩΩInstead of cutting off the parasites in Israel, the U.S. offers incentives to Israelis to halt settlements for 90 days – CNN.com. We promised the fascists running Israel several billion in new jets and this: U.S. to store more weapons in Israel | JTA – Jewish & Israel News
- The United States will store an additional $400 million in emergency military equipment in Israel. The new equipment, which will arrive in Israel over the next two years, will be available to Israel in the event of an emergency. It will bring to $1.2 billion the amount of American military equipment being stockpiled in Israel by 2012.
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ΩΩThe wars grow: US Wants Bases in Yemen as Fight Escalates. Bin Laden’s elegant and horrific strategy is to poke at us periodically to lure us into one country after another. Always, his fighters use a very, very poor but very, very militant country as their base before moving on to the next candidate. The US follows in and tries to take over these dire places. When our backs are turned and our focus is on another hell hole, the revolutionaries move back into previous bases and continue onwards. We let them into Iraq (Saddam hated them) and they move in and out at will and are busy terrorizing everyone there and luring us back into open battles in Iraq.
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ΩΩThe UK has to pay many millions to silence the victims of US/UK aggression, that is, people we captured in Afghanistan and then illegally imprisoned: Ex-Guantanamo inmates win payouts
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ΩΩAnd what was this all for? While we go bankrupt fighting phantoms, Ahmadinejad Congratulates His Candidate in Iraq. Way back in 2005, I predicted that the true winner in our war in Iraq would be Iran’s religious leaders and this turned out to be true. No surprise. We didn’t even get the oil, the Chinese got the oil from both. Iran was mad at China and Russia for playing along with the Zionists in the UN but I am absolutely certain back room assurances were made to Iran and this is why Iran is so quiet right now, consolidating its power even as the US imagine Iran is weakening. The shocking news that Iran owned the President of Afghanistan still hasn’t really sunk in yet. Yikes…HAHAHA.
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ΩΩMeanwhile, a bankrupt US and a dying EU still are playing nuclear missiles with Russia: NATO: Missile Shield Doesn’t Need to Specifically Target Anyone — News from Antiwar.com
- NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen defended the program as a general concept. “More than 30 countries have or are aspiring to get missile technology,” Rasmussen insisted, adding that there was no reason for the missile defense shield to have any specific target for the program….The “lots of people want missiles” argument isn’t likely to convince Russia, however, nor will it be seen as a particularly good reason to spend billions of dollars on the iffy technology of the missile defense program. Rather it seems the excuse was aimed at avoiding the difficult task of justifying the program.
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ΩΩI know of NO ONE in Europe except for the politicians, who want any of these missiles. WWIII will utterly destroy both Europe and Japan. So both should pray very hard for disarmament of the great empires. But neither will do this so the EU and Japan hang onto the US nuclear umbrella and pray we won’t go broke. But they are also bankrupting us via free trade. At the bottom of this entire mess is our trade deficit with everyone. We are the huge skyscraper and our alliances are the scaffolding which is on fire. And we are spraying nuclear gasoline on this fire.
This is a good article but goes too much in to a doomsday scenario. It’s not as bad it predicts, but it is true that the mission of the euro is not clear now and it’s definitely not sure whether it will continue.
Jim
http://www.neocontext.com
Blog at: http://blog.neocontext.com
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@ Elaine
Re: …And often, they can spring back but only after going through the terrors of destruction and then the hard work of reconstruction….
Unfortunately, your analysis is the core truth that so many of us prefer to ignore.
The core truth causing the implosion of the US global empire is living and spending on unsustainable debt to it competitive peers, a gutted industrial base, militarized culture and economy as well as the moral rot in its political system and civic polity.
Now the US elite are trying to stop the decline by focusing on marginal issues rather than addressing the core truths and absorb the pain as the price of recovery.
Bernanke and Obama want the rest of the world to pay the price they have caused.
The core truth for the EU is a common market union without regulatory institutions to manage the disparate economies with its membership; living on debt by some members as well as the imposition of Nato because the US empire demands it.
Germany naturally wants to run and maintain a responsible economy.
Unfortunately, the rest of the EU prefer to address marginally issues and their citizens are being radicalized in to a potential mass revolution as in the 1700’s.
The tensions will tear the EU apart because its structure was created by political expediency from the top down. It is a political union analogous to the US situation prior to the civil war between the North and South.
Solid homes can not last when the foundation is imperfect.
That is why the West is floundering and cannot cure its debt cancer.
Hi Elaine,
With all your commentary on trade and protectionism, I thught you would find the clip from a financial newsletter relevant:
On the other hand with its sky-high ratio of fixed investment to GDP and its high and rising inflation the Chinese cannot cave to U.S. pressure and do a maxi revaluation of the yuan. As Premier Wen has said, it will lead to the closing of factories and social instability.
did the building collapse neatly into its own footprint after a few hours?
No, it was totally NOT built even slightly like the WTC nor was it hit by a jet.
Was it built anything like building seven, which did not get hit by a jet?
Surely you don’t think the WTC collapsed into their own footprint. They spread all over Manhattan after being blown to bits.
No, it was not like Building 7 which you guys obsess over. It was covered by a very flammable bamboo structure and the fire didn’t bring down solid walls since there was not debris dumped on the roof, etc.
At the bottom of this entire mess is our trade deficit with everyone.
And what’s at the bottom of our trade deficit? Our Happy Motoring! lifestyle, which is the root reason for even our overreach of a global Empire.