[quote]And there is a vast sense that the professional money managers took advantage of people’s ignorance on the mortgage thing (and yes, the people should have known better) and then took huge risks that backfired, causing the 2008 crash.
In sum:
Wall Street caused the 2008 crash by selling irresponsible amounts of leveraged debt. Main Street and the entire world is suffering from that now, big time.
They got bailed out, “we” didn’t.
That’s why people are pissed.[/quote]
Right on brother. People are slowly waking out of their apathy.
But the actual cause of the recession and the financialisation of the economy prior to the recession along with the consumer boom were also side-shows of free market fundamentalism. The debate was won, jobs and manufacturing were offshored, taxes were lowered. Wars were fought to make sure the status quo remained in America’s favour or to keep the folks at home happy. This WAS the result of that.
Wall Street caused the 2008 crash by selling irresponsible amounts of leveraged debt, [color=#FF0000](demanded by the government)[/color]. Main Street and the entire world is suffering from that now, big time.
They got bailed out, “we” didn’t.
That’s why people are pissed.[/quote]
There. I’ve fixed it for you.
People are pissed BTW, because they are stupid. One can only be angry at oneself in a so called “free” country for being suckered into giving up one’s money in the first place. People are reactionary. People didn’t care when their country’s currency printing rights were handed over to a group of private financiers. People only started caring after they had been hijacked. Well in my opinion, if you’re going to buy a gun, load it up and then offer it to a known criminal, then you shouldn’t really be complaining that much when he shoots you with it. :loco:
MM: You’re missing the bigger picture. All of this was inevitable. It was/is part of a great structural/cultural decline that has been occurring in many Western nations, including America, for the past thirty years or so. The U.S. has become less and less competitive in manufacturing, but has not reformed its education system and other aspects of its culture to stay ahead of the pack. Likewise, at the same time, people have expected ever more services whilst they have simultaneously expected to pay increasingly less tax. It’s all part of a greater issue to do with a gross sense of entitlement, as though merely being born in the U.S. (or the West generally), people deserved everything handed to them on a silver platter. All of this should/could have been dealt with much less painfully ten or twenty years ago. However, it was allowed to drag on, and was temporarily masked by cheap, easy credit. It was inevitable that that would have to come to a head at some point.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that your inability to get a decent job in '96 was the result of your own country’s/countrymen’s financial mismanagement at the time, coupled with whatever you got your degree in. I’m guessing it wasn’t in something like chemical engineering. I say this as someone who studied philosophy, only I don’t blame the government or Wall Street for not giving me a six figure cushy number with stock options and a golden parachute just because I could write an essay on David Hume. That’s also not to say that I regret studying philosophy, but I do have to take the good with the bad.
[quote=“sulavaca”]Let me help you out with that one. First of all, the government don’t print money. They gave that privilege away to the Federal reserve and its owners…whoever they are nowadays.
Secondly, printing money has nothing to do with allowing the public to buy stuff they can’t afford. Not specifically anyway. The printing of money has everything to do with putting everyone into a state of perpetual debt, thus putting the Fed and its banks into a position where they own or have “rights” to everything of value. This is the only reason that the Fed operates its services for FREE! How kind of them!.[/quote]
You’re splitting hairs about the government printing or not printing money. The government could change the situation at any stage.
Printing money has everything to do with allowing the public to buy stuff they can’t afford. If the government is not paying for itself with tax money then that effectively frees that tax money up for the taxpayers to spend on other stuff. Except in both cases – the government and taxpayers – they went overboard and ended up borrowing money. When you can print money, and the world will lend it to you very cheaply, it’s easy to see it as not really meaning anything and that it doesn’t have to be paid back one day, and therefore, regular shopping binges are one’s right.
Wall Street caused the 2008 crash by selling irresponsible amounts of leveraged debt, [color=#FF0000](demanded by the government)[/color]. Main Street and the entire world is suffering from that now, big time.
[/quote]
There. I’ve fixed it for you.[/quote]
Really? I wasn’t aware that the government had coerced the big investment banks to engage in selling leveraged debt as a financial instrument on a massive scale. Do you have a source for that please?
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]You’re splitting hairs about the government printing or not printing money. The government could change the situation at any stage.
Printing money has everything to do with allowing the public to buy stuff they can’t afford. …[/quote]
Separated into first and second points; The government will not chance the situation at “any stage” several U.S. presidents in the past have spoken outwardly about this and they have been shot. Call it a coincidence if you like. Anyway, why would a politician want to put their sponsors out of business? That doesn’t make sense at all. No, they are going to keep on supporting their bosses, so that their bosses can keep on with business as usual. Selling out their country for the benefit of securing cheap labour and free property rights.
The point of printing fiat currency free of charge is not to offer the public a means of buying stuff they can’t afford. That’s a side effect, yes. The main reason though is to put the public into perpetual debt and then be forced into effectively ‘slave labour’. Slave labour is a form of labour where the slave makes little to no income from their labour. In the fiat currency-central bank system then the bank offers money indirectly to the slave through a company. The slave is then taxed on that wage by the government, by the exponentially expanding fiat currency system, and in the form of debts issued directly from the banks. If a slave is lucky enough then their ever dwindling savings will keep them under a roof and fed for the remainder of their years until they die, at which point any savings meant for passover are once again taxed by the government and fed back to the central bank, plus interest.
Personally I prefer gold. It’s damn hard to tax, can be passed on forever and pretty much maintains a guaranteed exchange rate in the form of valued goods. The government have to issue boots and guns to their goons to take your gold away and even then you can still have a good chance at hiding it
Wall Street caused the 2008 crash by selling irresponsible amounts of leveraged debt, [color=#FF0000](demanded by the government)[/color]. Main Street and the entire world is suffering from that now, big time.
[/quote]
There. I’ve fixed it for you.[/quote]
Really? I wasn’t aware that the government had coerced the big investment banks to engage in selling leveraged debt as a financial instrument on a massive scale. Do you have a source for that please?[/quote]
Those are just a few of google’s results. Many people still believe that Bill did a great job of “balancing the budget”. In fact all Bill did was to produce more debt based “value” to make the economy look good and then tax some of the newly produced “money”. Its easy when you know how, but a sound economy with no debt, money printing does not make.
[quote=“Wiki”]MB: is referred to as the monetary base or total currency.[8] This is the base from which other forms of money (like checking deposits, listed below) are created and is traditionally the most liquid measure of the money supply.[12]
M1: Bank reserves are not included in M1.
M2: Represents money and “close substitutes” for money.[13] M2 is a broader classification of money than M1. Economists use M2 when looking to quantify the amount of money in circulation and trying to explain different economic monetary conditions. M2 is a key economic indicator used to forecast inflation.[14]
M3: M2 plus large and long-term deposits. Since 2006,[color=#FF0000] M3 is no longer tracked by the US central bank.[/color][15] However, there are still estimates produced by various private institutions.[/quote]
[color=#FF0000]Not even tracked folks![/color] A halt in practice which came under the last Bush administration. Funnily enough there was another counting practice which also changed under Bush. He didn’t have much regard for numbers it seems.
Sorry, but once again fiat currency is the main reason for economic slowdown and fiat currency is the greatest reason America can’t get on its feet. Please see the constitution section 10. We knew about fiat currencies a long, long time ago.
The U.S. as a country may be in a decline in manufacturing, but not U.S. companies. Many of them are improving and becoming ever more efficient, albeit overseas.
The U.S. has some of the best education in the world as long as you can afford it. It also has some of the smartest in the world. The issues are mainly to do with public education which is for dumbing down the masses whilst the well to do can invent new ways to take advantage of the stupid people. Being stupid is also ingrained within the culture of the U.S. You can hear it anytime you tune into MTV or listen to people on the street there. They talk in tongues. “I aint got none of that shit!” " I gotta get me some of that!" and so and and so forth. It has been cool to be dumb and purposely sound that way for quite some time now and the more anyone dumbs something down, the “cooler” they seem to their dumb arse viewers or friends. I think that psychologically it might be like finding security amongst the popular masses. In this case, the dumbed down popular masses.
I think that the dumbed masses have been good as obedient workers who have no great job prospects out there. They have also been excellent at pushing vote buttons for popular sound bite, fascist politicians. They have also done just as they have been told regarding giving up more of their personal privileges covered in the constitution. Best of all though, poor, dumb people make excellent soldiers and can be rounded up and sent off to kill people who they have no qualms with. They even believe they’re doing it to protect their “freedom”.
I was watching a Vietnam war movie tonight and there was a great line in it from an American soldier. In justification for the war he said something like “We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.”
I truly believe that many Westerners and especially many Americans who don’t leave their own country believe this.
So the economy is on the decline, the dollar is sinking and a good portion of the world’s people hate the American government. It’s almost poetic, truly sad, but mostly pitiful that Americans let their government do all of this to them. It’s now an embarrassing country. It’s a long, slippery climb out from here as far as I can tell, and the politicians and corporations haven’t yet stopped digging deeper.
Hang on a second. As far as I know, the only U.S. president who has been shot since the creation of the Fed is JFK. You’re saying he was shot because he spoke out against fiat currency? I don’t know enough about the conspiracy theories regarding his assassination, but I wasn’t aware that was one of them.
This is complete hyperbole. No one is forced into slave labour. No one is forced into consumption of things they don’t really need. The definition of a slave requires compulsion and there is no compulsion in people getting themselves into debt. It’s a self-inflicted misery. Those who avoid it and handle their money sensibly become wealthy, as my parents have in Australia (which has fiat currency). Of course, (just about everyone) has to go out and get a job and pay the bills, and that’s often a hard slog, but that was also the case before the creation of fiat currency. You’re making out like the world/America was all peachy prior to 1913, when the reality is that on pretty much any reasonable index, from life expectancy to literacy to home ownership (and size of dwelling) to ability to travel, people live much better lives than they did one hundred years ago. I live a life my great, great grandparents could never have imagined, and I will live considerably longer than them also. This is even more obvious for Taiwanese people or people from most other developing nations.
Hang on a second. As far as I know, the only U.S. president who has been shot since the creation of the Fed is JFK. You’re saying he was shot because he spoke out against fiat currency? I don’t know enough about the conspiracy theories regarding his assassination, but I wasn’t aware that was one of them.[/quote]
To be clearer, there is an interesting relationship/correlation with murder attempts and successful assassinations of U.S. presidents over the years who have been opposed to a private central bank and the issuance of fiat currency. Lincoln-production of government greenbacks, JFK-the breakup of the Fed, Executive order 11110, Andrew Jackson: “If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency… the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” I don’t know how accurate that quotation is, but in 1834 Jackson stated that all national debt would be paid off. One month later there was a failed assassination attempt on his life.
Here’s another one for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxEq2LWUPzc
National debt as well as Fed debt is to be paid by EVERYONE! There’s your compulsion and there is no choice in the matter. You can’t opt out of it as an American…Well unless you change your nationality or kill yourself. Death and taxes my friend
To be honest, I really don’t know enough about the assassination (attempts) on American presidents. I thought the assassination of Lincoln was to do with a disgruntled Southerner. Can anyone more learned jump in here? It sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Yes, everyone has to pay for the national debt through taxes, but this has been true all through history, including before there was fiat currency. You make it sound like the citizenry have only had to pay for the irresponsibility of their governments since 1913. The lack of a gold standard has nothing to do with people having to pay The Man. Also, as has been pointed out before (I believe by Gao Bohan, but I could be wrong), the U.S. suffered all sorts of financial woes previously when it was on a gold standard. You make it sound like the 19th century was some sort of economic paradise.
Yes it was paradise slavery, serfdom, colonialism, legal racism, capital punishment, religious persecution, vote to men and landowners only, child labour, genocide, dying young, ah the good old days.
Some of the graphs are interesting but the forward projections are poor, especially the one showing future debt and interest payments where it becomes a nightmare by 2070 or so, he is just using compound interest to generate that. Compound interest of almost anything is scary after that long!
The other part he reaches are in claims of inflation, just like we experienced in Taiwan for 10 years until recently deflation is likely there especially as dollar has bottomed out and rising again. Oil prices are also likely to moderate in a recession thus reducing inflation.
I mean, people who over extended and took out loans are suffering the consequences, they lost their houses. But no one in government or wall street is facing the consequence of terrible policies and predatory loans or selling toxic mortgage assets and betting against them at the same time, that’s being passed on to the public.
So, I don’t see how anyone could think this is acceptable, corporations who do very well in the good times and receive big bonuses, which I wouldn’t have a problem with, except they take no responsibility for the bad times passing on the bill to general public who pay through taxes, or cuts in other spending, education, healthcare, pensions. Its not just the US of course, but the system is broken and am seriously giving thought to taking as much cash out of the bank as possible, buy a bag of gold and storing it in the bank of under my mattress.
