Ellen Brown Doesn’t Understand How Banks Work: Deposit Insurance In US Different From Europe

Near-ZIRP loans for Americans to buy foreign cars

The US is seeing huge inflation in food, fuel and medical care while near-ZIRP loans are being used to induce people to buy manufactured items, especially made overseas by cheaper labor.  Ellen Brown is VERY popular with people because she alternately gets hysterical about meaningless things or demands more money be printed and handed out like candy because this will ‘fix’ the bubble mess we are in.  People dislike it when I go after popular ‘alternative’ pundits but they are hazardous to our fiscal survival just like the NRA is pushing us off a cliff over guns.  One has to show some minimum sense!  And the history of banking is crystal clear: you cannot print money to fix a burst bubble, this only makes things worse.

 

Here is the latest attempt at explaining things that goes totally wrong:  The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors by Ellen Brown.

Can They Do That?

 

Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.” The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.

 

The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.” It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.”

 

My bank is one of the oldest credit union banks in the US.  It was created when the banking system collapsed in the Great Depression in 1934 and the institution was created by the unions in New York.  In 1979, the ‘share draft certificates’ system was started.  This means the money deposited was turned into a share in the bank.  In the last six years, my bank earned the ‘Best Credit Union’ in the US.

 

Since the dawn of time, back when my Lombard ancestors in Medieval Europe introduced the concept of ‘banking’ to England, the money the bankers hold is so you can gain some PROFIT by them lending it to say, King Edward II and his son, Edward III.  Who then refused to pay back the loans and left the Familia bankrupt.

 

At NO TIME in history has savers owned their money once they give it to a banker to ‘make it grow’.  To ‘grow money’ you lend money to someone else for some venture or property and then they pay this back with interest which is the profit.  If they go bankrupt, the money goes poof.  Read any Victorian era novelist and they all talk endlessly about banks going bankrupt and the disaster this is.

 

This state of affairs continued until the Great Depression when FDR introduced the FDIC, which insures bank accounts so you don’t lose everything but it does NOT insure all wealth. The Federal Reserve tried to do this in the latest banking disaster by capitalizing, to the tune of over $12 trillion, the collapsing banks. All of whom happily resumed sucking down huge sums in the name of ‘bonuses’ and buying up more parts of the earth, buying politicians, and driving the rest of us into bankruptcy.

 

I agreed with Ellen about the evil of these Derivative Beast Bankers.  They should have all been shorn of all wealth.  Then, our government would be solvent again.  Indeed, to stop the mess in Cyprus, this is exactly what Germany demanded.  And Germany was right to demand this.

 

My bank, by the way, started the concept of the Share Draft 

A credit union functions differently than a conventional bank; in a credit union, every member is also a partial owner. Because credit unions are cooperatively owned, members do not make deposits, but rather purchase shares. Shares do not earn interest, but instead earn dividends. What’s more, share draft accounts usually carry neither monthly fees nor minimum balance requirements, unlike many bank checking accounts.

 

Ellen Brown is an ‘awfulizer’ that is, a person who sees only troubles and ill no matter what.  My bank has been secure for generations because it is owned by all of us who deposit money there and it communicates to us rather than say, hiding everything overseas like JPMorgan.  It is homegrown and domestic and doesn’t have leeches at the top sucking down all the capital in the form of ‘bonuses’ and ‘pay’.

 

And it is Federally insured.  How is this different from Cyprus?  Cyprus jumped into the EU’s euro system with both feet and then proceeded, due to the euro shooting up in value during the bubble years, to run up huge undercapitalized loans with this windfall value rise.  Like when the yen shot up against the dollar caused Japan to have a monumental housing bubble whereby a small Tokyo property might cost more than whole cities in the US, that bubble still remains popped, big time and the destruction it has caused has pretty much destroyed Japan’s economic future.

 

Cyprus had to seize all the uninsured money deposited in banks which paid very high interest rates they could ill afford.  Like with the US, the first euros to 100,000 is insured, but not the rest.  Of course, inflation makes this ridiculous and I feel inflation is a terrible burden.  Just went to the store and a $50 trip ten years ago cost me over $130 today for the same things.  Gas is very inflated.  So my savings vanish in this fog of inflation.

 

For a decade, the euro grew stronger so food, oil and vacations overseas was cheaper then for the poor US public who pays through the nose due to the weak dollar for domestic goods.  Now all the crows are coming home to pick at the dying European banking system and what killed it was lack of capital versus all the loans they handed out like candy.

 

No, our savings up to a quarter million is still fully insured.  Of course, if China dumps the dollar in world markets causing it to collapse in value, a quarter million dollars will buy a loaf of bread!  Thus, the fear of hyperinflation is a very real fear.  Any money you have in a bank will be worthless ipso facto if a government prints money like mad!  The government of Cyprus couldn’t do this.  But our government most certainly can!

 

From my old blog in 2006:  Culture of Life Financial News: Squeezed Between a Rock and a Hard Place: 80% of America’s Workers Fell Behind Inflation This Year

Flat earth labor excess crushed wages due to high oil and food inflation

 

My old cartoon is pretty clear: inflation is killed by destroying the wages of workers worldwide.  This way, money is concentrated in fewer hands who control the value of commodities, for example.  In return, to keep the workers quiet, low interest loans have been handed out while inflation rages and indeed, these very same loans are causing inflation.  ZIRP is extremely inflationary!

 

This doesn’t show up due to record FOREX accounts overseas with our trade rivals deliberately keeping the dollar strong via hoarding these at home.  BUT NOT FOREVER.  Eventually these will come home to roost while on fire and will destroy the value of the dollar and we should fear this, not some goofy threat to take people’s savings by grabbing them!!!

 

MONEY PRINTING is the horror!  And guess what Ellen Brown wants?

 

MONEY PRINTING!  That will certainly doom my savings.  And make it impossible to stay alive when my fixed income ceases to cover costs.  Ellen is goofy just like so many people are when it comes to trying to understand how money works.

sunset borger

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44 Comments

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44 responses to “Ellen Brown Doesn’t Understand How Banks Work: Deposit Insurance In US Different From Europe

  1. lucky13

    I saw local news [smdp.com] They Crow about Q3 and good times ahead.

  2. lucky13

    Zionist Thom Hartmann who now has a show on NPR is like Ellen.
    Loves the printing press.

  3. Ziff house

    Remember the original proposal was to shave the small depositors also , insurance be damned.

    ΩΩΩΩ
    ELAINE: That was in CYPRUS not the US. Here, they are shaving us with ZIRP return on capital in banks!!!!

    I hope you eventually figure this out. If they have to pay the first quarter million insurance the Fed prints more dollars. Cyprus can’t do that.

  4. Ziff house

    And the idea that small depositors were safe (by whatever means), is the glue that holds the mess together, that is now undone.

    ΩΩΩ

    ELAINE: No that is not true. Gads, what does it take to explain the obvious?

    Insured savings are still insured. Nothing has changed that. The true mess here in the US is the inflation scale for SS has been messed up so it no longer keeps up with inflation.

  5. Zionist Thom Hartmann who now has a show on NPR is like Ellen.
    Loves the printing press.
    -Lucky 13

    Yes, those of us who value food, clean water, and shelter in a massive monetized economy of 340 million people love that “printing press” as well Lucky. Repeating now: the deficit ultimately is the money supply for there is no money for us to spend or save before the US government first creates it. Thus, by definition, the US has no need to borrow or raise revenue in the currency that it creates at will before it can spend that currency.

    There is nothing available for sale in dollars that the US government cannot purchase which of course is not the same thing as saying that the US should purchase everything for sale in dollars, merely that there is no solvency risk in doing so. For example, the labor of idle American workers is available for sale and there is no credible threat of insolvency or inflation in direct fiscal spending with the goal of putting these people to useful tasks. Or… we can hide under our beds from the rampaging “printing press”.

  6. To further buttress my comments above I direct your attention to Joe Firestone’s modest proposal for Barack Obama as a way forward from here on out in addressing the Social Security “crisis”.

  7. JT

    Countries do not have pay.

    Tsingis Khan would he have paid?

  8. Just Ice

    The problem with Ellen Brown’s theory is that it assumes a zero sum game. It ignores the cheap energy and population boom over the last 150 years as well as the monetary and credit expansion that went with it, and it ignores, from an economic standpoint, what’s coming on the backside of peak oil.

    It seems to me what’s coming will be a managed bankruptcy all the way down the back side of peak oil, a bankruptcy managed by price controls so that producers do not become wealthy at the expense of western financial centers, a bankruptcy managed by selectively calling in debt from one weak nation after another to reduce demand so that those low prices seem seamless, a bankruptcy managed by tightening the belts of the strong western nations to reduce demand so that those low prices seem seamless.

    Let me suggest that everyone agrees the current system is unsustainable; the essential disagreement is the timeframe. They say that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes or something. In the past, when a sovereign started aggressively debasing currency and monetizing debt, big inflation happened in around five years, or, lets say, two to eight years or so. Perhaps we have something historically similar. But, now the rhyme is time.

    The derivatives market is ten times larger than the value of the world, owned and traded between the same handful of banks that are shareholders and influencers of central banking and the federal reserve system. ZIRP allows more than just the unlimited depression of gold and silver prices or the unlimited pumping of the stock market by the plunge protection team (PPT). ZIRP does more than buoy the housing market with low mortgage payments. ZIRP does more than allow governments to cheaply monetize debt and over-spend their tax base on domestic and military programs. ZIRP allows the derivatives beast to indefinitely HIDE LOSSES incurred if it should choose to CONTROL PRICING across the board. Let me suggest that when Blankfein says he’s doing “god’s work,” he’s referring to this giant fiction that (from his perspective) should keep the Arabs, and all other producers for that matter, from getting filthy rich on the backside of peak oil, while postponing the day of reckoning for the western financial centers (his benefactors) that chose to keep expanding credit all the way up until 2008, despite the looming production cuts of peak oil.

    If one owe’s the world, is one any more bankrupt than if one owe’s ten of them?

    Given that the derivatives beast is ten times bigger than the world, I give it fifty years instead of five years this time around, until the financial system goes kaput. Or, I guess that’s the unspoken hope of it’s creators. Anyway, fifty years would put us past the backside of peak oil, past the “50 year plan,” and back to a zero sum game like the one Ellen Brown is arguing about. . .

  9. Note that the Chinese get it. They plan to increase their deficit by 50% to boost demand and build infrastructure.

    ΩΩΩ

    ELAINE: China has the world’s biggest government wealth on earth and unlike Saudi Arabia, doesn’t spend all of it on one royal family while the rest live in great poverty. There is a spoiled rotten upper class in China today but the populace is restive and the leaders are nervous. In Saudi Arabia, the royals call on the US to suppress dissent.

  10. Just Ice

    On one hand, the chinese need to print in order to keep their currency values as low as they want, and they need to spend the money they print, so infrastructure and demand seem like a good idea if you’re going to be printing money. The silver lining of our gutted industrial base is that we have a high fidelity machine for exporting inflation, as long as we can control currency pricing.

    On the other hand, the chinese are grabbing up resources around the world, even as they keep stuffing their pockets with IOUs, bonds and FOREX reserves. In this poker game, they want our chips AND our gold watch.

    I disagree with EMS about whether they could actually affect currency pricing by dumping a few trillion dollars into the maw of an opaque quadrillion dollar derivatives beast, a beast with ZIRP staying power intent on keeping the status quo. I also suspect that all the big players are probably working together, like a cartel horse-trading at a bankruptcy auction, more than they are working apart, at least at this point. Japan shakes its fist at China for grabbing resources, so North Korea shakes its fist at us. Russians lose Syria but get thrown Cyprus on a silver platter, etc.

    But, everything up until now has been preparatory.

  11. emsnews

    They do this by dumping the dollars in the ENERGY MARKETS. We import nearly half of our oil, for example.

    And Ellen and others who want endless money printing don’t understand how food production, industrial production and energy production all CREATE more wealth. We cut down forests for more wealth. We dig up minerals or drill for energy for more wealth.

    This is NOT a zero sum game at all, this has been for the last 10,000 years, a PLUS sum game with humans multiplying and creating wealth via these methods.

    Human labor is the biggest PLUS sum game. Has been since farming began.

  12. lucky13

    ‘There is a spoiled rotten upper class in China today but the populace is restive and the leaders are nervous’
    Yes, China has 200? million very poor people, many of whom go from place to place as [homeless] workers.

  13. ziff house

    Elaine, i see your point but from Market ticker, Re Canada;

    returned to viability through the very rapid conversion of certain bank liabilities into regulatory capital. This will reduce risks for taxpayers. The Government will consult stakeholders on how best to implement a bail-in regime in Canada. Implementation timelines will allow for a smooth transition for affected institutions, investors and other market participants.

    Systemically important banks will continue to be subject to existing risk management requirements, including enhanced supervision and recovery and resolution plans.”

    But note that there is no recompense when that “enhanced supervision” fails.

    When you deposit funds into a bank the cash the bank now has is an asset. The deposit is a liability. What they are talking about is you, the depositor, being the one who is tagged for that “very rapid conversion” — that is, they’re simply going to steal your money.

  14. ziff house

    no mention of insurance, perhaps only uninsured ‘liabilites’ are at risk but its not clear.

  15. Ziff house

    Another thing , who is to say that the seized money will not vanish down the same rabbit hole the rest went. Does it not have to be a double action , throw out the bankers and resolve the debts.

  16. emsnews

    Seriously, most people’s savings are INSURED. If they have more than a quarter million, it is NOT INSURED. Most people with such funds put them in several banks to avoid losses.

    If the entire system collapses and the dollar is worthless then NO ONE will do well not even gold hoarders because…

    Governments loot whoever has the loot. If the government fails, then criminals do this to everyone they can possibly find. Such chaos is frightful and should be avoided.

    Too much greed causes these things to evolve and happen and history is clear: bubbles are VERY BAD and avoiding these is life and death and chaos is deadly and destructive and everyone suffers.

  17. Jim R

    Unnoticed by most financial analysts, the “plus sum” game that has been played over the last couple of centuries has just changed into a “minus sum” game, as noted by Just Ice above. And that trend is slated to pick up steam.

    I agree with Just Ice about the workings of the financial parasites, and that they are throwing one small country at a time into the tar pit in an attempt to maintain the “status quo”. However, I think Just Ice is wildly optimistic about the prospect of keeping this whole show going for fifty years.

    Though I have been watching in slack jawed astonishment for about eight years so far, and did not think it would last this long. And it is becoming clear that TPTB have been making contingency plans for decades. I expect the small-country-into-the-tar-pit game to accelerate over the next couple of years, and a dramatic end to the drain-circling with the derivatives implosion in less than another ten.

    In case you didn’t notice, Elaine, the TBTJ’s lobbyists had the FDIC rules changed a while back (sorry don’t have reference handy), where the depositors’ money is now SUBORDINATED to their black tarry pools of toxic derivatives.

    I think it’s entirely possible that we run into “hyperstagflation”, where the dollar gets into a “quantum uncertainty” state that is simultaneously worth a very great deal or not much at all (and every observation collapses the uncertainty for that dollar), shortly before it ceases to have any meaning at all and anyone who makes it to that point will have to employ barter or use something else for money.

  18. Just Ice

    “They do this by dumping the dollars in the ENERGY MARKETS. We import nearly half of our oil, for example.” -EMS

    I don’t think it matters where the Chinese dump their dollars if western financial interests are willing to backstop it by hiding losses with the opaque derivatives beast, carrying those hidden losses without immediate cash-flow repercussions via 0% ZIRP loan financing. The Chinese could dump ten trillion dollars of bonds and FOREX in any market whatsoever. My suggestions is that the quadrillion dollar derivatives beast could devour ten trillion dollars worth by beating their ask or bid a hundred (or at least many) times over, depending on the market, sucking up the losses secretly and carrying them forward at 0%. The Soviets learned that price controls are easy, I suggest that ours are more subtle. The difficult part of both models is reducing demand to prevent SHORTAGES, hence demand reductions via “cabon footprint” propaganda in western nations as well as precipitous serial national bankruptcies in various countries that are not part of the club. Let me suggest that PRICING is well in hand, and will be, until enough nations get off the bus or there is war.

    “Human labor is the biggest PLUS sum game. Has been since farming began.” -EMS

    Human labor was the biggest plus sum game, until oil. Now, human labor is partners with cheap energy production. In fact, cheap oil may be even more important than labor now, depending on estimates and assumptions. For the purposes of hyperbole to illustrate the point as simply as possible, here’s my highball estimate: One fifty-five gallon barrel of oil can move more earth (in a piece of giant earth moving equipment) than a man can move in year. Today, there are 6 billion more people alive than the 1.5 billion people that were alive 150 years ago. By comparison, there are 30 billion more barrels of oil produced each year than were produced 150 years ago. Roughly, oil could be counted to be as much as 80% of the gain; population the other 20%. To make matters worse, the hockey stick graph of population mirrors the hockey stick graph of the oil boom. Many alive today are alive only because of both public health AND the surplus ability of all that oil to make fertilizer, irrigate, run farm equipment, and transport agricultural produce.

    Unfortunately, even if we realistically revise assumptions to substantially reduce that 80% figure, not only is oil production increase likely to remain a serious player, alongside labor increase, but the latter seems somewhat dependent on the former, at least without sacrifices that wealthy civilizations have been unwilling to make historically.

    To highlight the absurd, it would be an interesting thought experiment to posit how decreases in cheap energy production could be countered by deliberate population increase. Might that keep the PLUS sum game from going negative?

  19. lucky13

    Notable Quote:
    Governments loot whoever has the loot!

  20. emsnews

    All we have to do is look back a mere 150 years or less to see how having many peasants and poor are used in place of oil. Rickshaws, anyone? More than horses, in high population areas like China, humans were used to transport humans. Humans were used to pump or move water, to dig the dirt, to toil on tiny plots of land,etc.

    Only for the last 150 years have we used oil to do these things. It will revert to the original form when oil runs out.

  21. emsnews

    The pyramids were built by the toil of peasants, no machines. The Roman roads and aqueducts were built by slaves, not machines. China was entirely built by humans with a few labor saving mechanical machines but the ENERGY was all humans. Think of any ancient culture and it ran on slave or peasant power and this includes the early US before machines could run on steam and even then, the slaves were needed to make plantations profitable.

  22. Jim R

    And the transtion will not be a smooth transition back to a feudal / slave economy.

  23. Just Ice

    That’s why I say the illustration is absurd. The world would be faced with the impossibility to come up with and feed as many as 30 billion more of your hypothetically squalid serfs leading miserable lives in just the next 50 years of oil decline if the transition were to be “smooth” from an economic standpoint.

  24. Just Ice

    Ellen is right, but for the wrong reason.

    They’ve gone so far now that pushing to the other side is easier than going back. The derivatives beast can depress resource prices, pump markets, and orderly bankrupt nations, all while hiding and pushing those losses into the future. The widening gyre of QE and ZIRP feed that slouching beast for as long as the center holds.

  25. emsnews

    One point here: The Derivatives Beast causes INFLATION especially in property or commodities or whatever! It creates a flood of loans! It is extraordinarily inflationary.

    Property prices collapsed due to being totally out of whack with the reality of anyone paying off their bloated loans. In commodity markets, if people can’t buy oil or gold or food, they do without and this causes the price to fall again.

    You are right about it bankrupting nations. But inflation that rages in our economic systems while the central banks do the ZIRP game is EXTREMELY destructive.

    No one seems able to stop this. We have to ride this all the way to the end of the floating fiat currency system and I fear the end will be called ‘WWIII’.

  26. Jim R

    I’m afraid the end will be catabolic collapse.
    Financial collapse is just the first step.
    Can I come live on your mountain, if I help weed the garden and stack firewood?

  27. emsnews

    We have plenty of room but remember, winters here are extremely harsh and you have to work hard to survive. Even when I had pneumonia, I had to get the firewood into the house and feed the fire day and night. Not to mention shoveling tons of snow.

  28. Just Ice

    emsnews,

    The derivatives beast might accelerate hyper-inflation ONCE IT STARTS, but perhaps it further delays the normal lag of hyper-inflation through price controls (CURRENCY, commodity, etc), hiding those losses with ZIRP loans, and thus delaying the day of reckoning, until it too goes kaput. However, the derivatives market is ten times bigger than the older, pure banking systems, and even the old systems took some time to evidence hyper-inflation. So, the question is how much longer does it give us and to what end?

    I suppose it might get us through the back-side of peak oil, to a level playing field, so we don’t have to deal with both a fiat crisis AND a loss of pricing control, that might turn the advantage of western financial centers over to resource producers in the midst of the largest decline in energy and production since the plague.

    ΩΩΩ

    ELAINE: You are correct. It is more than ten times traditional banking, it was shooting to infinity when the bubble burst. It still is huge but isn’t growing right now.

    And yes, it was created simultaneously with the sudden surge in oil prices. And yes, we are now passing the Hubbert Oil Peak. That is, POPULATION use of oil shot past it and now we are in a grinding game to see who, aside from Africans, gets to be starved of oil first. Printing trillions of US dollars to buy oil overseas means we get to do this but ONLY so long as we also have free trade which is wrecking our country. A devil’s bargain indeed.

  29. JT

    @elaine

    “Only for the last 150 years have we used oil to do these things. It will revert to the original form when oil runs out”

    No we will not.
    Electricity, hydraulics, genetic research on plants, biogas, natural gas…

    Oil depleting will bring about a a push in innovation and investment.
    It will be a fresh economic boom.
    Or at least that’s the positive take on it.

    ΩΩΩΩ

    ELAINE: Except…alas…if the US starts WWIII over oil. Then everything is nuked.

  30. Jim R

    A few years ago, when I was scouting for a place in Maine, many houses there came with an “Ell” I think they called it. The house and the barn were connected by an essentially indoor passageway. (and it’s worth noting that I visited Maine in December and January, so it wasn’t merely a summer retreat from Texas heat — I wanted to get a feel for the place)

    I decided not to move to Maine, But the decision is not final.

  31. Jim R

    And JT, oil is a key resource. It may not be the _only_ resource, but it is key. You have the whole hydrocarbon series, coal, oil, and gas, and they supply the lion’s share of the energy we use to run “civilization”. Most electricity is from coal or gas.

    Every hiccup in the oil supply has historically coincided with a contraction in the economy. A 1% dip in oil production = a 1% dip in GDP. I do not think these contractions were random coincidences, I think there is a causal connection.

    The oil industry is now looking forward to an approximately 5% decline in production rates globally. Every year going forward. Could be 8% in some years. We’ve been bumping along without the previous exponential increase for maybe a decade now. Next up is contraction, it’s just that simple.

  32. JT

    @Jim R

    “Every hiccup in the oil supply has historically coincided with a contraction in the economy. ”

    and a investment boom to energy conservation and adaptations of new technology.
    maybe oil is just too cheap?
    there is too much of it.

  33. emsnews

    No, it causes a contraction PLUS inflation. We called this ‘stagflation’ but I will note this cycle of stagflation they refused to say what it is. They claim we are in a deflation ZIRP period which is a total lie.

  34. Jim R

    Yes. We are in major stagflation and our financial wizards are in denial.

    @JT,
    Oil is too cheap at 95$ / bbl? It must have been WAY too cheap at $20/bbl. (especially in a deflationary period at $95/bbl) …

  35. JT

    @Jim R

    Yup. Too cheap as it should be on the peak.
    Expensive oil and stagflation will be the new norm.
    Smaller houses, smaller cars, living near railroad tracks and harbours.

    Not the end though.

  36. Just Ice

    It doesn’t matter whether the derivatives beast accelerates hyper-inflation ten times over if it can delay the onset of that hyper-inflation by controlling pricing, freezing money (temporarily) and pushing losses forward to maintain confidence in the system. The western monopoly on credit expansion was doomed anyway, once oil peaked. What does it matter to financial cartels if their monopoly is doomed once or ten times over, particularly if it buys them time during the backside of peak oil when the advantage would naturally shift to oil cartels.

    My suggestion is that oil and other resources are (still) cheap because the west (and others) are underpaying the producers for oil, rare earth elements, etc. Dollars, pounds and Euros, jiggered by financial markets and derivatives, are kept valuable enough to pay them for their resources but are too expensive to pay wages to fully exploit domestic resources. . . just yet.

    A financial cartel of powerful nations is drinking the rest of the world’s milkshake, underpaying them for it, backstopping the bankroll with derivatives, and keeping lots of their milkshakes for later when there are no more milkshakes and they (finally) renege on the tab. I suppose it’s economics replacing warfare in the great game of the nuclear age.

  37. emsnews

    Ultimately power is where power is. And no one runs China but the Chinese whereas the US is run by a host of international elites who don’t care if the country dies.

  38. JT

    @Just ice

    “My suggestion is that oil and other resources are (still) cheap because the west (and others) are underpaying the producers for oil, rare earth elements, etc. Dollars, pounds and Euros, jiggered by financial markets and derivatives, are kept valuable enough to pay them for their resources but are too expensive to pay wages to fully exploit domestic resources. . . just yet. ”

    That’s what I believe too.
    Inflation can still be exported and I think the general wisdom is that dollar will go up.
    And of course domestic resources can be controlled with price controls when they start going up.
    (food)

    Once oil is expensive in the US (I guess 500 dollars per barrel should do it) we can start fixing this problem and move on.

  39. Just Ice

    @Jim R

    “I agree with Just Ice about the workings of the financial parasites, and that they are throwing one small country at a time into the tar pit in an attempt to maintain the “status quo”. However, I think Just Ice is wildly optimistic about the prospect of keeping this whole show going for fifty years.”

    Yes the number is a bit arbitrary. I picked 50 years because it is ten times larger than the five years it generally takes for hyper-inflation to occur after big money printing, and the derivatives market is ten times bigger than the 100 trillion dollar value of all previous securities, bonds, and stocks. That time period is also long enough to clearly illustrate my point regarding a purpose beyond simple delay, a purpose to keep pricing stable until after the back-side of the peak oil decline has passed.

    The derivatives market is at best a fiction and at worst an unenforceable fraud.

    The true value of the derivatives market is the net present value of global nuclear blackmail. It is the quantification of armageddon. Who knows how long it will last?

  40. emsnews

    Correct.

  41. Did you read Ellen Brown or did you read the actual paper put out by the FDIC and the Bank of England? Our Deposits are insured if the Bank of England decides that they are, no matter the amount. We are at the service of the GSIFI’s. (Globally-active Systemically Important Financial Institutions.) This was agreed to by Obama at the G-20 meeting in 2009 under the guidelines of Dodd-Frank. “Financial Stability” is the criteria for who gets paid, and that is a euphemism for saving the banks that are too big to fail.

    Oil is not the answer, the answer is nuclear power. And cancelling the derivative debt through Glass-Steagall. And Instituting National Banking, (which is NOT printing money) through a Hamiltonian credit system. And starting infrastructure projects, specifically NAWAPA, to create an environment that can produce enough food for the current population. Dodd-Frank is indeed an attempt to return to feudalism, and if we allow them to get away with it, we will indeed have nuclear war. LaRouchePAC.com has details for supporting Glass-Steagall locally, in the state legislatures, and in Washington DC.

  42. Shawntoh

    To the “LaRouche Supporter” from Reno–

    Nuclear power is the answer? The answer to what?

    I suggest that you review the excellent documentation on this site that Elaine has made about the perils of nuclear power. The waste from nuclear power is deadly and we haven’t found a way yet to safely dispose of it without endangering ourselves and future generations.

  43. emsnews

    Except bankers ARE greedy as are currency speculators and stock market players.

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