to75ne wrote:where have they stashed it?
how did they manage to "aquire" it in the first place.
i dont know what the figure is, but it seems to a vast number. why dont governments just refuse to pay up.
scrap the current euro, go back to to individual currencies, or have a euro mark 2, and start again. its all monoploy money anyway ie fiat currency, just worthless paper and/or binary digits in computers. none of it real.
this is the way i see it...
- we had the mother of all credit booms (fueled by low interest rates) which fed an asset price boom (everything from property and shares to art and fine wine).
- the asset price boom fed back into more credit and bank lending got more and more reckless in the hope that the asset price boom could continue forever.
- the bankers secretly knew it would all end in tears but they didn't care as they knew that by then they'd have made their billions and wouldn't be liable for the bust).
- credit expansion hit it's limit eventually and thus we had the credit crunch.
- what normally happens at this point in the cycle is that asset prices fall as the phoney wealth created by the excess credit is destroyed (most of the wealth was not created by anything real, like productivity increases, but mainly by asset price inflation). governments then step in and spend their surpluses (built up during the good times when tax receipts were very healthy) to tide things over (Keynes).
- but this time, because the credit boom was so enormous, the powers that be decided that if asset prices fell it could cause a depression (and because the powers that be - ultimately bankers and the asset rich - didn't want their wealth to be destroyed).
- so governments, already very indebted because they'd overspent during the 'boom', stepped in and propped it all up by borrowing huge sums and bailing out all and sundry, eventually resorting to printing money and debauching their currencies (causing inflation because imports become more expensive) in a race to the bottom (UK/US especially because they had the biggest booms).
- now we're stuck because the debt hasn't gone away, it's just got bigger and bigger, and we're still pretty much at the limits of credit expansion (hence there is not much demand for credit and increased inflation means that people have less to spend).
to75ne wrote:Well frank that short video as only confrmed a long held belief of mine that the world of finance is nothing more than the biggest con job ever.
How can there be any justification to having no limit to how much monopoly money is printed/created.
Why the hell is currency not based on something that as real value and hence limiting how much can be created.
This financial system to me is the most disreputable /disgusting/ low class/misery creating thing in human history. Its illogical. Its like the bastard son of Alice In Wonderland, and One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. Totally insane. Mad.
Agreed! It's really just a fancy a Ponzi scheme - even Mervyn King admitted that you couldn't do much worse than the present banking system.
