World of Unreal Finance Hitting the Real Economy
Politics / Credit Crisis Bailouts Sep 28, 2008 - 03:48 PM GMTBy: David_Chu
“It's not the economy, stupid!” - Bill Clinton's campaign slogan was: “It's the economy, stupid!”
Actually that was James Carville's maxim and battle cry for the 1992 presidential election. Mr. “Ragin' Cajun” Carville, as you probably don't remember, was the commander-in-chief of Bill Clinton's first campaign for the White House. He was and is married to Mary Joe Matalin who happened to be working on George H.W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign! Ms. Matalin was also an assistant to President George W. Bush and a special counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney until 2003.
Talk about sleeping with the enemy! If their marriage of political convenience and ”political operativeness” does not wake you up like a freezing morning shower, then you should go back to sleep in the Matrix (i.e., how they can be involved in both the Republican and Democrat presidential campaigns in 1992 at the highest levels and sleep in the same bed literally, and still be able to get away with it is a testimony to the blatant and absolute corruptness in U.S. politics):
Every four years the powers-that-be (PTB) that control Washington, D.C. and Wall Street trod out candidates from two sides of the same coin that they own. The little people, programmed by the corporate mass media and separated into two self-feeding troughs called the “left” and the “right” as in donkeys and elephants, cheer as though their candidate is the one who is finally going to lead them to their promised land. And every four years, the disappointment on both sides grows and grows.
Were not the Democrats elected to Congress during the 2006 election to stop the Iraq war? What happened? All that the madam speaker of the House, the Democrat congresswoman from San Francisco, has to do to stop the illegal and inhuman Iraq war is to withdraw military funding for the war by not considering the spending amendments and bills that come up which is the fiduciary prerogative of the U.S. Congress. It's pretty simple, but she doesn't want to do that for many reasons that will not be discussed here.
Mr. Obama, under the tutelage and supervision of “neolib” Zbigniew Brzezinski, has openly stated, but not widely reported in the corporate mass media, that he wants to move many U.S. troops out of Iraq into Afghanistan for more fighting there. Why?
Mr. Brzezinski is the Democrat soulmate of Dick Cheney: both want wars without end for their masters in the U.S. corporate military industrial complex, but they differ in their approach and who their proclaimed public enemy is. For Mr. Cheney and the neocons, the enemies are the so-called “Islamofacists” who were created by the neolibs, specifically by Mr. Brzezinski, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan when he was the national security advisor to the peanut farmer from Georgia. Neolib's new enemy during a possible Obama administration will be an old enemy: the Russians. And that is why Mr. Obama wants those troops moved.
According to Patrick Briley who writes for Newswithviews.com, this man may be Obama's “Rasputin” (google his article titled “Brzezinski: Obama's Globalist ‘Rasputin'”). Mr. Brzezinski is a geopolitical chameleon and opportunist, but, even more significantly, a presidential “handler” who needs to be watched very carefully as you would with Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger:
Zbigniew Brzezinski is Barack Obama's foreign policy advisor. Brzezinski was the national security advisor for President Carter from 1977 to 1981. In 1988 he endorsed HW Bush for President and was Co-Chair of the HW Bush national security advisory task force. From 1987 to 1989 he also served on the HW Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright was a student of Brzezinski. GW Bush Secretary of State, Condi Rice (also a former national security advisor), who studied under Albright's father, shares many of the same world government views with Brzezinski and Albright.
Were not the Republicans elected every four years to cut government spending as they keep promising a smaller federal government that only grows exponentially? In case you haven't noticed, the total U.S. public debt has exploded from just under $6 trillion at the beginning of 2000 to approximately $14.5 trillion now (this latest tally includes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage liabilities that the U.S. Treasury unilaterally assumed for the U.S. a couple of weeks ago without any input from the American people or their so-called representatives in Washington, D.C.)
From a historical perspective and for comparison sake, it took the U.S. from 1776 to 2000 to reach a total public debt of just under $6 trillion. The current resident of the White House has more than doubled the taxpayers' debt! What took 224 years to accomplish if you can call it that, the current president did it in less than 8 years! How is that for the legacy of a “conservative,” “free market,” “small government,” “we are not into nation building,” Republican president?
What about Mr. McCain? What about him? Is he not the one who has publicly stated that he wants a war for one hundred years in Iraq alone? In response to a question from the audience (at a New Hampshire town hall meeting) concerning the possibility that the U.S. military might be staying in Iraq for the next 50 years, Mr. McCain dryly replied, “Make it a hundred.”
Didn't he also recently confess to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “I don't really understand economics”? He then pointed to former Senator Gramm whom he had brought to this meeting and told everyone in the room that Mr. Gramm is the expert he turns to for expertise on the subject of economics (the former Senator, for those who don't know, is one of two people most responsible for the financial crisis at hand, the other being Alan Greenspan!).
And Mr. McCain is going to take over the captaincy of the U.S.S. Titanic just as it careens towards the derivatives “debt berg” straight ahead in plain sight? Enough said.
Politics is just a game.
To the PTB and their public servants like Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, politics is just a means to swindle the little people every four years by lying and promising anything and everything to get elected. This 2008 election will be the “crossing the Rubicon” moment for the U.S. The little people are the ones who do the real work and create the real wealth by producing tangible goods and services that are needed in the arena of human commerce. This brings us back to the topic of this article.
The Real and the Unreal
What is confusing about what's going on with the financial markets crashing on Wall Street and the mega bailouts raining down like manna from Washington, D.C. is because most Americans don't understand the difference between two concepts: the “ real economy ” of goods and services versus the world of “ unreal finances ” (my present day term for what has been called the “money trust”* in the past) where money is created out of nothing and money is made on top of money. This mental confusion or brain fog over the real economy and unreal finances is purposefully maintained by the corporate mass media and the public education system through their deafening silence on the difference between the two.
The definition of the word “economy” is “the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.” And the definition of the word “finances” is “the monetary resources and affairs of a country, organization or person.”
To differentiate the word “finances” that you and I understand and use in our everyday lives, i.e., paying bills and earning a daily wage, versus the world of high-powered money used on Wall Street, I am calling theirs “unreal finances.”
And to illuminate these rather dry but crucial and even life-and-death concepts, I am going to quote at length from a very important newsletter written by Joel Skousen from the World Affairs Brief on March 14, 2008. Mr. Skousen provides penetrating analysis, commentary and insight into the reasons and causes behind the news in politics, economics and finances. An annual subscription to his weekly online newsletter is only $48 and is highly recommended ( www.worldaffairsbrief.com ). My comments are in brackets below.
In reality, there are two separate economic worlds now, not one--even though they are interconnected [just to be clear: there is one “economic” world where real goods and services are produced, and there is one “financial” world where money is created from nothing]. One is real and public [the “real economy” where the little people live and breathe] ; the other is a world of secret monetary creation and financial flows between speculators and insiders with first or second access to new money (and they hoard gold in central banks, incidentally, as the ultimate value) [the world of “unreal finances” of Wall Street and Washington, D.C.] . Yes, eventually the new money flows down into the real markets of goods and services, but there is a huge financial world out there that operates solely on the trillions of dollars that have been created out of nothing. It's a world that does nothing but play on the rise and fall of trends within paper markets.
The real economy of business, industry and actual production of goods is relatively slow to change and grow. It takes time to transform entrepreneurial ideas into concrete products and services. Real productive enterprises create jobs and increase productivity and overall efficiency by providing goods and services that do something better than what existed previously. Economic growth and progress in the real world only comes through making a profit and investing those savings in new enterprises [this is the general theory of the ”free enterprise system” which doesn´t really exist at the upper echelons of the market place] . This takes time. Even in the old world of finance, things took more time. Savings were invested in banks that loaned out funds to other endeavors, and were paid back with interest. Banks could only loan funds as new money came in or as old loans were repaid.
All of that changed with the invention of fiat money, created out of nothing and spent into the economy by government [and by the banks through the creation of loans: approximately 95% of the U.S. money supply is created by the banking system, while the rest is created by the U.S. government through the Federal Reserve] . This monetary and credit creation did not need to wait on tax revenues or savings to be generated and thus it altered the speed of monetary circulation within the economy. The only reason it wasn't highly inflationary is that foreign trade kept absorbing large amounts of our inflated currency, shielding the US from hyperinflation [one of the only reasons why the U.S. has not yet experienced the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany from the 1920's is because the U.S. exports the billions of dollars it creates from nothing to other nations in exchange for their real goods and services--this is the greatest economic and financial scam or pyramid scheme in the world and probably in history] .
A large portion of this government induced inflation surged into the economy through the military industrial complex, leading to huge profits and exaggerated compensation for top executives. Over several decades this habit of paying millions in salary and bonus to executives worked its way through civilian companies. This excess compensation, including fat pension funds, coupled with inflated stock options fed the spectacular rise of mutual funds and investment banking that ultimately funded the dot com boom of the 90's. Yes, the high tech boom would have happened at some time, but not as fast were it not for excessive monetary inflation flooding the markets.
Injection of fiat money alters the natural risk factors of the economy by vastly increasing the number of insider wealthy people who can afford to take high risks--because they are tapped into the bottomless pit of government contracts, or are downstream of those contracts. People who have first access to the free money become high rollers like government itself. That's why government makes such bad investment decisions full of waste and fraud. If it's lost, there is little personal liability. They just create more money next year.
In the presence of government inflation of the monetary supply (especially when it exceeds the true growth of economic output) an increasing number of people (with first, second and third use of the new money) have a lot of excess money looking for a place to earn a profit. Normal, solid business opportunities don't interest them. These take time to provide a return and it is usually less than 8% unless you are the business owner himself--which few nouveau riche want to become. Thus, speculative markets begin to grow exponentially as places to park money and make high profits without having to wait years for a business to succeed and mature.
There have always been markets for paper assets, but they have grown much larger in recent decades as a percentage of the entire economy compared to what I call the real economy of production. These paper asset markets are essential to the function of business and industry [only to a certain and limited degree] , but they now have a life of their own and feed off speculative market moves alone. This is not a rant against speculation per se, because you technically can't distinguish between good and bad speculation until the results are in [I submit to you that all derivatives speculations are bad and non-productive as they pertain to the real economy and the little people] . But, I can recognize when people and institutions are simply gambling on the markets with no thought of producing anything of benefit, except huge profits. . . .
And their even bigger losses are now typically bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers, care of the U.S. Treasury and the Fed.
The End Run
What is taking place with the financial collapse of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Washington Mutual, et al. is taking place in the world of unreal finances , not in the real economy. Very key difference. However, let's be totally clear: what happens in the world of unreal finances will eventually spill over and affect the real economy sooner or later.
This is because real businesses, as one example, require loans to expand production and growth in many cases. The collapse of the investment banks in the world of unreal finances is resulting in the collapse of perhaps the entire banking system including commercial banks that do business in the real economy. This is adversely affecting the ability of businesses to borrow money from commercial banks, or to repay existing loans as their banks suddenly collapse and/or are swallowed up by the key insiders corporations like JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp, Bank of America, etc.
What the PTB are attempting to do is to delay the inevitable collapse in unreal finances buy adding more gasoline (what I have called “financial heroin” in my last article) to the financial fires on Wall Street. This will cause the temporary financial euphorias on Wall Street that we are witnessing with increasing frequency. But that is not all that the PTB are attempting to accomplish.
There are at least three crucial objectives that the PTB are trying to push and rush through the U.S. Congress under the guise and rare opportunity of the current financial crisis:
• Bail out their servant class and their insider corporations on Wall Street with hundreds of billions and even trillions of U.S. taxpayer's money.
• Usurp more unconstitutional control by creating an executive position, a new U.S. Treasury Secretary, that borders on financial dictatorship.
• Kill the intent and purpose of the Glass-Steagall Act once and for all by combining so-called investment banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley with commercial banks such as Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and Bank of America as is being done right now by these investment banks.**
It's the Unreal Finances, Stupid!
The $700 billion dollars [a number admittedly pulling out of the thin air as a U.S. Treasury spokeswoman reportedly told Forbes.com last Tuesday: “It's not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number.”] bailout scheme proposed by the U.S. Treasury Secretary and probably the Fed Chairman is solely for the rescue the world of unreal finances: those who have played one too many financial crapshoot games with trillions of dollars of bets on such toxic financial instruments or so-called investments as “credit default swaps,” “interest rate derivatives,” and “mortgage backed securities,” just to name a few.
They are crying out to Uncle Sam to bail them out after they have made and lost trillions of dollars on their atrocious gambles. As Catherine Austin Fitts (former Assistant Housing Secretary under George H.W. Bush) said on the Jeff Rense Radio Program (rense.com) last Wednesday, and I am really paraphrasing here: “It would be akin to you and I picking the wrong Super Lotto numbers and then having Uncle Sam come and bail us out by rewarding us the jackpot even though we didn't pick the winning numbers!”
That is what Wall Street is attempting to do with the crucial assistance and blatant insistence of one of their very own who now controls the U.S. Treasury and who wants unlimited power to do whatever he pleases to become the financial dictator of the United States. Henry Merritt “Hank” Paulson Jr. was the chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs. Now he is the 74th U.S. Treasury Secretary. And he wants to be the financial dictator of the United States!
The Paulson Act and Financial Dictatorship
To wit: the $700 billion bailout scheme proposed by Paulson, Bernanke and Bush will institute the following unconstitutional powers (italicized and bolded emphasis is mine):
• "The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time ."
• “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion , and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
I would list more egregious usurpation of power proposed by this mother-of-all bailout scheme but these are the only two statements that I could find on the Internet on this bill, which should be truthfully called the “Paulson Act.” But these two statements are quite enough.
What the former Goldman Sachs CEO wants to do is to consolidate total unlimited financial powers of the United States in the hands of one person, in himself as the Treasury Secretary, untouchable by any judicial courts--even the U.S. Supreme Court.
All the political arguments about (1) why this bailout scheme must be passed immediately or the financial markets are going to hell in a hand basket, (2) limits on executives pay and compensation, (3) protecting the middle class, and (4) enacting new rules and regulations are just smoke screen or diversionary tactics promulgated by the crocks on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and on Wall Street, and gladly assisted and facilitated by the corporate mass media.***
They must push this financial coup d'état through the U.S. Congress as quickly as possible before the little people wake up! Like they did with the midnight passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 on Christmas eve when most representatives of Congress who opposed this Act were away for Christmas, the PTB must get this Paulson Act passed before the election of 2008 takes place!
As columnist Jason Linkins so aptly stated in his Huffpost.com blog from September 22, this is the “mother of all bailouts”:
In short, the so-called "mother of all bailouts," which will transfer $700 billion taxpayer dollars to purchase the distressed assets of several failed financial institutions, will be conducted in a manner unchallengeable by courts and ungovernable by the People's duly sworn representatives. All decision-making power will be consolidated into the Executive Branch - who, we remind you, will have the incentive to act upon this privilege as quickly as possible, before they leave office. The measure will run up the budget deficit by a significant amount, with no guarantee of recouping the outlay, and no fundamental means of holding those who fail to do so accountable.
Think of the Paulson Act as the last-minute financial pardons of President Bush before he leaves office, the equivalent to the last-minute presidential pardons of President Clinton for his crook friends like his half-brother and fugitive financier Marc Rich.
As Robert Kuttner warns in his American Prospect article from September 22, the Paulson Act is unlike any of the other mega bailouts in recent history (my comments are in brackets):
The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street's dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson [so they proclaim publicly, but that won't prevent either of them from voting against the Paulson Act] -- a provision that evokes the Bush administration's suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security. . . .
The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder, and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the S&L collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review.
People: if the Paulson Act passes by your representatives in the U.S Congress as it is now or in any shape and form that even remotely resembles its current embodiment, it will be the beginning of a dictatorship in the United States in one fell swoop!****
It is time for the people of the United States of America to get off your collective easy chairs and stop watching the senseless and stupid unreality and sports programs, and start faxing and calling (emailing and snail mail will not work) your elected representatives in Washington, D.C. before it is too late and tell them this:
“If you vote for the Paulson Act, I will make sure to defeat you in your upcoming re-election!”
Your children's future and the future of your children's children are on the line!
You have no more time to procrastinate!
You will have no person to blame except yourself (and the American people) if the Paulson Act passes!
It's not the economy, stupid!
It's the unreal finances!
______________
• Back in the early 1900s, the U.S. Congress and people in general called them the “money trust”: a cabal of financial and economic monopolists such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and many others who abused the public trust by consolidating absolute financial control over many industries including the banking system.
** The following is taken from a footnote in my ebook, NO Foreclosures!:
• The term “Investment Bank” is an oxymoron. The Glass-Steagall Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in [1933] after the rampant bank speculations that led to the Great Crash and the subsequent Great Depression. The purpose of this Act was to prevent commercial banks (whose primary task is the safe keeping of the depositors' money and the preservation of their savings) from selling investments (engaging in speculation and other forms of financial gambling) which are clearly two opposite and contradictory fiduciary responsibilities. It was the massive bank speculations that precipitated the Great Crash in 1929 that finally forced Congress to pass this Act. However in 1999, the U.S. Congress led by former Senator Phil Gramm (now a vice chairman of the Swiss financial conglomerate UBS and chief financial advisor to Republican presidential nominee John McCain) enacted the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. So began the mega-mergers between formerly separate investment firms and commercial banks, and, more importantly, the merging and meshing of their separate and distinct fiduciary responsibilities. And so too began the current financial problems with investment banks trading in trillions of dollars of unregulated derivatives.
*** Here are my financial and political solutions, some borrowed from many fine and knowledgeable individuals, to begin the process of saving the U.S.S. Titanic from going down:
• The financial markets or unreal finances need wholesale market corrections, and many of these financial corporations must be allowed to fail and go bankrupt without any government interventions or bailouts.
• Some of the executives from these financially bankrupt and morally corrupt corporations must go to jail. Do not pass ‘go' or collect on your golden parachutes and millions of dollars of bonuses, but go directly to prison!
• If the U.S Congress is serious about protecting the financial health of the middle class as they proclaim, they must pass a law to outlaw all family home foreclosures for a period of at least 2 years starting immediately, and let the banks and money lenders take the serious financial hits which they rightfully deserve as they are the ones who created this financial mess in the first place.
• Congress must enforce the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 immediately and nullify the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 by outlawing investment banks from combining and merging with commercial banks, and from performing the fiduciary responsibilities of commercial banks (i.e., collecting and safeguarding the depositors' savings), and vice versa.
• The U.S. president must issue an executive order (1) making all derivatives that originate in the U.S. null and void, and (2) outlawing all trading activities involving derivatives.
• If the U.S. government is going to spend hundreds of billions of new taxpayer's money, they must only be allowed to use this newly created money to build real infrastructures such as replacing old and failing bridges, repairing dilapidated freeways and highways, building new mass transit systems in large cities, etc. Once these public works projects are completed, the government needs to extinguish the formerly created money supply either through taxation or by official retirement of the debt instruments used to create the new money.
• The U.S. must get rid of the privately owned Federal Reserve System once and for all. Or nationalize it under the full and direct control of the U.S. Congress. This way when the nationalized Federal Reserve is again instrumental in creating recessions or depressions as is the case in its sordid history since its inception in 1913, it will be the people's representatives who will face the music and the full accountability of the Feds actions or non-actions.
• The U.S. military must come home! No more spending almost $1 trillion of the taxpayer's non-existent money each year on the illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere, and on maintaining the greatest empire in the history of this planet with at least 761 military and covert bases in more than 130 countries throughout the world (there are only approximately 194 countries on the entire planet!). That is exactly what the United States truly is when you understand that even the Roman and British empires had only approximately 37 and 36 major military bases worldwide at the zenith of their global empires, respectively.
**** If you need help in directing your anger and frustration at your elected representatives, check out the following websites:
by David Chu (9-28-08)
Author of NO Foreclosures! www.noforeclosures.info
With over 20 years of business and engineering experience under his belt, David Chu, who is also a professional engineer, is writing his first book: NO Foreclosures! is about delaying and stopping foreclosures for Middle Class American families--the only group that is not getting any real help from the Fed or the U.S. government. This timely subject is dear to his heart as his personal experiences in California and Colorado taught him how to successfully escape the Housing Bubble in 2006 and 2007.
Now, he is ready to show you how you can do the same, and much, much more!
If you have any comments, suggestions, testimonials, or recommendations for NO Foreclosures! , please contact the Author by using the email form on the " Questions? " webpage.
© 2008 Copyright David Chu - All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.
David Chu Archive |
© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.
