THE GREATEST ECON-THEFT IS HAPPENING NOW
It's time to get painfully honest about this
By Adam Taggart. Friday, March 17, 2017
While the banks spent much of the past century consolidating
their power, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 emboldened them to accelerate
their efforts. Since
then, the key trends in the financial industry have been to dismantle
regulation and defang those responsible for enforcing it,
to manipulate market prices (an ambition tremendously
helped by the rise of high-frequency trading algorithms), and to push downside risk onto "muppets" and taxpayers.
Oh, and of course, this
hasn't hurt either: having the ability to print up trillions in thin-air money
and then get first-at-the-trough access to it. Don't forget, the Federal Reserve is made up of and run by -- drum roll, please -- the banks.
How much 'thin air'
money are we talking about? The Fed and the rest of the world's central banking
cartel has printed over $12 Trillion since the Great Recession. Between
the ECB and the DOJ, nearly $200 Billion of additional liquidity has been -- and
continues to be -- injected into world markets each month(!) since the beginning
of 2016:
Banks have enriched themselves and their cronies
spectacularly. They have made themselves too big to fail, and too big to jail. Remember
that their reckless greed caused the 2008 financial crisis, and yet, in 2009, not only did
bankers avoid criminal prosecutions, not
only did the banks receive hundreds of billions in government bailouts, but they paid
themselves record bonuses?
And the bonanza continues unabated today. By being
able to borrow capital for essentially free today from the Fed, the banks
simply lever that money up and buy Treasurys. Voila! Risk-free profits. That giveaway has
been going on for years.
Couple that with the banks' ability to push market prices
around using their wide arsenal of unfair tactics
-- frontrunning, HFT spoofing and quote stuffing,
stop-running, insider knowledge, collusion, etc -- the list is long. James Howard Kunstler said: we don't have a
free market anymore. Instead, we have rackets, run by
racketeers. The rest of us are simply suckers to be fleeced.
Nobel Prize-winning
economist Angus Deaton recently agreed:
Income
inequality is not killing capitalism in the United States, but rent-seekers
like the banking and the health-care sectors just might, said
Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton on Monday.
If an entrepreneur invents
something on the order of another Facebook, Deaton said he has no problem with
that person becoming wealthy.
“What
is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich,” Deaton said in a luncheon speech to the National
Association for Business Economics.
Rent seekers lobby and persuade
governments to give them special favors.
Bankers during the financial
crisis, and much of the health-care system, are two prime examples, Deaton
said.
Rent-seeking
not only does not generate new product, it actually slows down economic growth,
Deaton said.
“All
that talent is devoted to stealing things, instead of making things,” he
said.
As further proof, let's look at this data recently obtained
by Zero Hedge. In the past 4 years, JP Morgan's in-house
trading group has had exactly 2 days of losses:
That's not trading.
Trading involves uncertainty and risk. This situation has none. It's an
extraction process -- siphoning value from the market day after day with
ironclad dependability.
And it's not just a few dollars here and there. In 2016, JP Morgan's daily
average trading revenues were $80 million. Per day! That's nearly $20
billion for the year.
So if not "trading", what
should we call it when a bank can
extract tens of billions of dollars a year from the markets, with no downside
risk? "Sanctioned
theft" sounds about right.
Because for every
trade there is a buyer and a seller. If JP Morgan is the winner every day, who is losing? Turns out, it's the big pools of "dumb money" that don't
have the cheat codes for the system the way the banks do. These are the pension funds,
the index funds, the retirement accounts -- the aggregated money of all the 'little people' out there. Little
people who don't have visibility into how they're being constantly fleeced; nor
do they have agency to do anything about it even if they did.
SO YEAH, "THEFT" FEELS LIKE A
PRETTY ACCURATE TERM.
WEALTH INEQUALITY
Are you struggling
to get out of poverty? Are you finding it hard to remain in the middle class? Whatever
your income, are you having to work harder and harder to just stay in the same
place? See here
how the Fed's
money printing, and the banks' first-position access to it, has created the
most concentrated imbalance of wealth in our country's history:
Check this video https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
Further reading
Our best choice as
individuals is to position ourselves where we can be least subjected to the
game the banks want to force us to play. To help you in taking a
choice we suggest you to read the 3-part
series we've just concluded: The Mother Of All Financial Bubbles, The Coming Great Wealth Transfer, and When
This All Blows Up , they offers
our best guidance for preserving wealth from the predation of the bankers. If
you haven't read them yet, make that your weekend reading assignment.
…
...
COMMENT:
The Central State and
the Banks are One
"worship
of the central state as the "solution" is the problem itself.
Charles, thank you very much for making this point.
I suggest that we define "globalist" as one who
"worship(s) the central state as the "solution."
This is an important distinction because such "globalist" is now the number one enemy of human progress.
This is an important distinction because such "globalist" is now the number one enemy of human progress.
Human civilization is fitfully evolving towards small resilient
communities that organize and trade between themselves. Even up
until now, the most successful civilizations were organized this way: The Greek
city states, Venetian cities in N. Italy in the Renaissance, Holland in its
golden age, and America before it became a global power, come to mind. This
advance contradicts the very notion of worship of a global government run by
superior sociopaths (Chinese emperor, Saudi King, Rich Guys at Davos, unelected
Euro-dictators etc.) that know better than us. The two sides (real
progress vs globalism) have entered a life and death struggle. Much of
the strife going forward can be understood based on this realization.
The resilient community based from-the-ground-up organization
will eventually win for many reasons, (not enough time to detail those
reasons in this short keyboarding). However, I fear that a new
Renaissance will only emerge after a prolonged dark ages, during which local
communities refine their adaptations to their local environments and advantages
and cannot be displaced by the globalist marauders who do not produce but only
rely on banking/law to control, steal and plunder. Any inter-community
organization that may extend over large geographic distances will emerge from
and be used by those small communities, and NOT by one or more sociopaths, or
sociopath cliques as is the case now.
I conclude that how we deal with "worship of the central state as the
solution" (i,e, globalism) will determine
our fate. It is very helpful to keep your idea in mind when trying
to understand and survive the antics of these new age barbarians.
lol
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