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Posts Tagged ‘Corruption’

Financialization and centrally planned speculative credit bubbles have undermined the real economy: that’s why things are falling apart.

There is no pleasure in “I told you so” when things fall apart. Many of us recognized the artifice and folly of the credit-housing bubble “Bull market” as early as 2004, but few cared to listen because they were deeply complicit in the Status Quo’s legerdemaine: their home was rising in value, their pension fund was being fattened, their sales were rising on the onrushing tide of abundant, cheap credit, their tax revenues were soaring, and their benefits/perquisites were notching higher with every tick up of the stock and housing markets.

Faith in a centrally planned economy operating under the flimsy guise of cartel-State “capitalism” was supreme, as were greed, self-absorption and an overweening sense of entitlement to consumerist “prosperity.”

Both corrupt political parties enthusiastically embraced the bubble-culture of fraud and speculative excess, for they too benefited from the illusory glow of “permanent economic growth” and the ever-richer contributions from the fiefdoms, cartels and Financial Elites who gained the most from the credit-based frenzy.

The “prosperity,” “growth” and “wealth” were all illusory, but the pain is real. Hardworking, dedicated, smart, experienced people are being laid off into an economy with few prospects. Young people are graduating from university into the same bleak atmosphere of a paper-thin facade of magical thinking and propaganda finally crumbling.

Things are falling apart because the economy has been undermined by financialization and the extreme concentrations of capital and State power. I think these charts tell the story rather well:

Here we see the Federal Reserve-engineered credit-based speculative financialization bubbles and busts reflected in the stock market. All that cheap credit sloshing around created asset bubbles which sucked in capital and borrowed funds seeking extraordinary returns. Then when the bubble inevitably popped, the players were left with the debt, which remained real, while their illusory wealth vanished.

Here is the dynamic: cheap abundant credit fuels malinvestments and speculation, the acme of financialization. Real production can’t match the enormous profits generated by financial leverage and legerdemaine, so real production atrophies as capital and talent migrate to financialization.

Financialization rewards concentrations of capital that can off-load speculative risks onto the Central State while keeping profits private. Thus financial capital comes to dominate the entire economy and mechanisms of governance.

Empoyees no longer share in the gains from rising productivity: those gains flow to capital/global corporations who influence or control the political machinery.

Corporate profits have skyrocketed as Cartel/Monopoly Capital captures an ever larger share of thenational income and buys political power with that cash flow that enables Capital to offload risk on the State and insure a steady supply of cheap/free credit from the central bank (the Fed) to fund its speculations.

This concentration of wealth leads to extremes of income inequality. The gini coefficient for the U.S. is .47; researchers have identified .4 as the triggering threshold for social unrest. (0 is perfect equality, 1 is total inequality.)

The substitution of money-printing/credit creation for actual wealth creation has led to an explosion of debt across private and public sectors. This debt will soon require crushing interest payments; once again, Capital that owns the debt will profit at the expense of real production.

The cost structure of the real economy has exploded higher as the tide of cheap abundant credit has created vast imbalances. As long as the Sovereign State can borrow trillions of dollars every year to paper over inefficiencies and fraud that could not otherwise endure, then costs can rise forever. Sickcare (operated by cartel-State partnerships) is a prime example:

With tax revenues climbing along with the speculative gains, government costs also lack any limiting factors. Now that the speculative cycle of ever-greater imbalances and financialization is reaching the endgame, tax revenues are plummeting even as costs (“we were promised,” etc.) continue rising.

I have often addressed the theme of things falling apart:

The Unique Benefits of When Things Fall Apart (March 15, 2010)

Things Fall Apart: But Not Just Yet (July 26, 2010)

China’s Towers and U.S. McMansions: When Things Fall Apart (Literally) (April 14, 2010)

It is a phrase drawn from THE SECOND COMING by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Though the poem was penned in 1919, just after the Great War destroyed all the illusions that trade and interdependent prosperity spelled the end of war, it speaks presciently to our era. The falconer circling ever farther away from the voice of its master could be interpreted as a spiritual metaphor for a culture lost in self-absorption, complicity, Empire, greed and resentful entitlement, or politically as a metaphor for a populace slipping away from the Founding Fathers’ principles of liberty and limited government and their distrust of central banks’ potential for financial destruction.

In a nation increasingly diverging into hackneyed, hardened ideological camps whose sole goal behind their soaring rhetoric is defense of their own preferred cartel-State fiefdoms, clearly the center (common ground, common sense) is not holding.

Things are falling apart because artifice, fraud and facsimiles have purchased complicity, and engineered concentrations of financial power that inevitably over-reach and implode.

Of Two Minds

Rob McNealy interviews Karl Denninger, the editor of www.Market-Ticker.org and founder of the original TEA Party movement [and co-founder of FedUpUSA] on the coming economic collapse.

Listen Now

Karl Denninger’s Bio

Mr. Denninger is the former CEO of MCSNet, a regional Chicago area networking and Internet company that operated from 1987 to 1998. MCSNet was proud to offer several “firsts” in the Internet Service space, including integral customer-specified spam filtering for all customers and the first virtual web server available to the general public. Mr. Denninger’s other accomplishments include the design and construction of regional and national IP-based networks and development of electronic conferencing software reaching back to the 1980s.

He has been a full-time trader since 1998, author of The Market Ticker (www.Market-Ticker.org), a daily market commentary, and operator of TickerForum, an online trading community, both since 2007.

Mr. Denninger received the 2008 Reed Irvine Accuracy In Media Award for Grassroots Journalism for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown.

Rob McNealy

Most policy makers still don’t understand the urgent need to restore trust in our financial system, or the need to prosecute Wall Street executives for fraud and other criminal wrongdoing.

But top economists have been saying for well over a decade that trust is necessary for a stable economy, and that prosecuting the criminals Is necessary to restore trust.

Trust is Necessary for a Stable Economy

In his influential 1993 book Making Democracy Work, Robert Putnam showed how civic attitudes and trust could account for differences in the economic and government performance between northern and southern Italy.

Political economist Francis Fukiyama wrote a book called Trust in 1995, arguing that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation’s prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. He stated that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years.

In 1998, Paul Zak (Professor of Economics and Department Chair, as well as the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and a senior researcher at UCLA) and Stephen Knack (a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Research Department and Public Sector Governance Department) wrote a paper called Trust and Growth, arguing:

Adam Smith … observed notable differences across nations in the ‘probity’ and ‘punctuality’ of their populations. For example, the Dutch ‘are the most faithful to their word.’John Stuart Mill wrote: ‘There are countries in Europe . . . where the most serious impediment to conducting business concerns on a large scale, is the rarity of persons who are supposed fit to be trusted with the receipt and expenditure of large sums of money’ (Mill, 1848, p. 132).

Enormous differences across countries in the propensity to trust others survive
today.

***

Trust is higher in ‘fair’ societies.

***

High trust societies produce more output than low trust societies. A fortiori, a sufficient amount of trust may be crucial to successful development. Douglass North (1990, p. 54) writes,

The inability of societies to develop effective, lowcost enforcement of contracts is the most important source of both historical stagnation and contemporary underdevelopment in the Third World.

***

If trust is too low in a society, savings will be insufficient to sustain
positive output growth. Such a poverty trap is more likely when institutions -
both formal and informal – which punish cheaters are weak.

Heap, Tan and Zizzo and others have come to similar conclusions.

In 2001, Zak and Knack showed that “strengthening the rule of law, reducing inequality, and by facilitating interpersonal understanding” all increase trust. They conclude:

Our analysis shows that trust can be raised directly by increasing communication and education, and indirectly by strengthening formal institutions that enforce contracts and by reducing income inequality. Among the policies that impact these factors, only education, … and freedom satisfy the efficiency criterion which compares the cost of policies with the benefits citizens receive in terms of higher living standards. Further, our analysis suggests that good policy initiates a virtuous circle: policies that raise trust efficiently, improve living standards, raise civil liberties, enhance institutions, and reduce corruption, further raising trust. Trust, democracy, and the rule of law are thus the foundation of abiding prosperity.

A 2005 letter in premier scientific journal Nature reviewed the research on trust and economics:

Trust … plays a key role in economic exchange and politics. In the absence of trust among trading partners, market transactions break down. In the absence of trust in a country’s institutions and leaders, political legitimacy breaks down. Much recent evidence indicates that trust contributes to economic, political and social success.

Forbes wrote an article in 2006 entitled “The Economics of Trust”. The article summarizes the importance of trust in creating a healthy economy:

Imagine going to the corner store to buy a carton of milk, only to find that the refrigerator is locked. When you’ve persuaded the shopkeeper to retrieve the milk, you then end up arguing over whether you’re going to hand the money over first, or whether he is going to hand over the milk. Finally you manage to arrange an elaborate simultaneous exchange. A little taste of life in a world without trust–now imagine trying to arrange a mortgage.

Being able to trust people might seem like a pleasant luxury, but economists are starting to believe that it’s rather more important than that. Trust is about more than whether you can leave your house unlocked; it is responsible for the difference between the richest countries and the poorest.

“If you take a broad enough definition of trust, then it would explain basically all the difference between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia,” ventures Steve Knack, a senior economist at the World Bank who has been studying the economics of trust for over a decade. That suggests that trust is worth $12.4 trillion dollars a year to the U.S., which, in case you are wondering, is 99.5% of this country’s income.

***

Above all, trust enables people to do business with each other. Doing business is what creates wealth.

***

Economists distinguish between the personal, informal trust that comes from being friendly with your neighbors and the impersonal, institutionalized trust that lets you give your credit card number out over the Internet.

In 2007, Yann Algan (Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics and University Paris East) and Pierre Cahuc (Professor of Economics at the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris)) reported:

We find a significant impact of trust on income per capita for 30 countries over the period 1949-2003.

Similarly, market psychologists Richard L. Peterson M.D. and Frank Murtha, PhD noted in 2008

Trust is the oil in the engine of capitalism, without it, the engine seizes up.

Confidence is like the gasoline, without it the machine won’t move.

Trust is gone: there is no longer trust between counterparties in the financial system. Furthermore, confidence is at a low. Investors have lost their confidence in the ability of shares to provide decent returns (since they haven’t).

In 2009, Paola Sapienza (associate professor of finance and the Zell Center Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University) and Luigi Zingales (Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business) pointed out:

The drop in trust, we believe, is a major factor behind the deteriorating economic conditions. To demonstrate its importance, we launched the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index. Our first set of data—based on interviews conducted at the end of December 2008—shows that between September and December, 52 percent of Americans lost trust in the banks. Similarly, 65 percent lost trust in the stock market. A BBB/Gallup poll that surveyed a similar sample of Americans last April confirms this dramatic drop. At that time, 42 percent of Americans trusted financial institutions, versus 34 percent in our survey today, while 53 percent said they trusted U.S. companies, versus just 12 percent today.

As trust declines, so does Americans’ willingness to invest their money in the financial system. Our data show that trust in the stock market affects people’s intention to buy stocks, even after accounting for expectations of future stock-market performance. Similarly, a person’s trust in banks predicts the likelihood that he will make a run on his bank in a moment of crisis: 25 percent of those who don’t trust banks withdrew their deposits and stored them as cash last fall, compared with only 3 percent of those who said they still trusted the banks. Thus, trust in financial institutions is a key factor for the smooth functioning of capital markets and, by extension, the economy. Changes in trust matter.

They quote a Nobel laureate economist on the subject:

“Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,” writes economist Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel laureate. When we deposit money in a bank, we trust that it’s safe. When a company orders goods, it trusts its counterpart to deliver them in good faith. Trust facilitates transactions because it saves the costs of monitoring and screening; it is an essential lubricant that greases the wheels of the economic system.

In 2009, Time Magazine pointed out:

Traditionally, gold has been a store of value when citizens do not trust their government politically or economically.

In other words, the government’s political actions affect investments, such as gold, and thus the broader economy.

In 2010, a distinguished international group of economists (Giancarlo Corsetti, Michael P. Devereux, Luigi Guiso, John Hassler, Gilles Saint-Paul, Hans-Werner Sinn, Jan-Egbert Sturm and Xavier Vives) wrote:

Public distrust of bankers and financial markets has risen dramatically with the financial crisis. This column argues that this loss of trust in the financial system played a critical role in the collapse of economic activity that followed. To undo the damage, financial regulation needs to focus on restoring that trust.

They noted:

Trust is crucial in many transactions and certainly in those involving financial exchanges. The massive drop in trust associated with this crisis will therefore have important implications for the future of financial markets. Data show that in the late 1970s, the percentage of people who reported having full trust in banks, brokers, mutual funds or the stock market was around 40%; it had sunk to around 30% just before the crisis hit, and collapsed to barely 5% afterwards. It is now even lower than the trust people have in other people (randomly selected of course).

Prosecuting the Criminals Is Necessary to Restore Trust

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t recover:

The legal system is supposed to be the codification of our norms and beliefs, things that we need to make our system work. If the legal system is seen as exploitative, then confidence in our whole system starts eroding. And that’s really the problem that’s going on.

***

I think we ought to go do what we did in the S&L [crisis] and actually put many of these guys in prison. Absolutely. These are not just white-collar crimes or little accidents. There were victims. That’s the point. There were victims all over the world.

***

Economists focus on the whole notion of incentives. People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.

Robert Shiller said recently that failing to address the legal issues will cause Americans to lose faith in business and the government:

Shiller said the danger of foreclosuregate — the scandal in which it has come to light that the biggest banks have routinely mishandled homeownership documents, putting the legality of foreclosures and related sales in doubt — is a replay of the 1930s, when Americans lost faith that institutions such as business and government were dealing fairly.

Economists such as William Black and James Galbraith agree. Galbraith says:

There will have to be full-scale investigation and cleaning up of the residue of that, before you can have, I think, a return of confidence in the financial sector. And that’s a process which needs to get underway.

Galbraith also says that economists should move into the background, and “criminologists to the forefront”.

Government regulators know this – or at least pay lip service to it – as well. For example, as the Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division told Congress:

Recovery from the fallout of the financial crisis requires important efforts on various fronts, and vigorous enforcement is an essential component, as aggressive and even-handed enforcement will meet the public’s fair expectation that those whose violations of the law caused severe loss and hardship will be held accountable. And vigorous law enforcement efforts will help vindicate the principles that are fundamental to the fair and proper functioning of our markets: that no one should have an unjust advantage in our markets; that investors have a right to disclosure that complies with the federal securities laws; and that there is a level playing field for all investors.

Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future. Indeed, William Black notes that we’ve known of this dynamic for “hundreds of years”. And see this, this, this and this.

And when Zak and Knack – quoted above – discuss “enforcing contracts”, “raising civil liberties”, and “reducing corruption”, they are talking about enforcing the rule of law, which means prosecuting violations of the law. Likewise, when they refer to “enhancing institutions”, they mean regulatory and justice systems which enforce contracts and prosecute cheaters.

And when Zak and Knack promote reduction of inequality, that means prosecuting fraud as well. Specifically, as I recently pointed out, prosecuting fraud is the best way to reduce inequality:

Robert Shiller [one of the top housing economists in the United States] said in 2009:

And it’s not like we want to level income. I’m not saying spread the wealth around, which got Obama in trouble. But I think, I would hope that this would be a time for a national consideration about policies that would focus on restraining any possible further increases in inequality.

***

If we stop bailing out the fraudsters and financial gamblers, the big banks would focus more on traditional lending and less on speculative plays which only make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and which guarantee future economic crises (which hurt the poor more than the rich).

***

Moreover, both conservatives and liberals agree that we need to prosecute financial fraud. As I’ve previously noted, fraud disproportionally benefits the big players, makes boom-bust cycles more severe, and otherwise harms the economy – all of which increase inequality and warp the market.

Of course, it’s not just economists saying this.

One of the leading business schools in America – the Wharton School of Business – published an essay by a psychologist on the causes and solutions to the economic crisis. Wharton points out that restoring trust is the key to recovery, and that trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable:

According to David M. Sachs, a training and supervision analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, the crisis today is not one of confidence, but one of trust. “Abusive financial practices were unchecked by personal moral controls that prohibit individual criminal behavior, as in the case of [Bernard] Madoff, and by complex financial manipulations, as in the case of AIG.” The public, expecting to be protected from such abuse, has suffered a trauma of loss similar to that after 9/11. “Normal expectations of what is safe and dependable were abruptly shattered,” Sachs noted. “As is typical of post-traumatic states, planning for the future could not be based on old assumptions about what is safe and what is dangerous. A radical reversal of how to be gratified occurred.”

People now feel more gratified saving money than spending it, Sachs suggested. They have trouble trusting promises from the government because they feel the government has let them down.

He framed his argument with a fictional patient named Betty Q. Public, a librarian with two teenage children and a husband, John, who had recently lost his job. “She felt betrayed because she and her husband had invested conservatively and were double-crossed by dishonest, greedy businessmen, and now she distrusted the government that had failed to protect them from corporate dishonesty. Not only that, but she had little trust in things turning around soon enough to enable her and her husband to accomplish their previous goals.

“By no means a sophisticated economist, she knew … that some people had become fantastically wealthy by misusing other people’s money — hers included,” Sachs said. “In short, John and Betty had done everything right and were being punished, while the dishonest people were going unpunished.”

Helping an individual recover from a traumatic experience provides a useful analogy for understanding how to help the economy recover from its own traumatic experience, Sachs pointed out. The public will need to “hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again.” In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again, he argued.

Note that Sachs urges “hold[ing] the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible.” In other words, just “looking forward” and promising to do things differently isn’t enough.

As Wall Street insider and New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin writes:

“They will pick on minor misdemeanors by individual market participants,” said David Einhorn, the hedge fund manager who was among the Cassandras before the financial crisis. To Mr. Einhorn, the government is “not willing to take on significant misbehavior by sizable” firms. “But since there have been almost no big prosecutions, there’s very little evidence that it has stopped bad actors from behaving badly.”***

Fraud at big corporations surely dwarfs by orders of magnitude the shareholders’ losses of $8 billion that Mr. Holder highlighted. If the government spent half the time trying to ferret out fraud at major companies that it does tracking pump-and-dump schemes, we might have been able to stop the financial crisis, or at least we’d have a fighting chance at stopping the next one.

And as a former congressional aide recently said in some of the most colorful language to date:

“You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,” says a former congressional aide. “That’s all it would take. Just once.”

Washington’s Blog

Today I find this little gem in American Banker:

Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., is circulating a letter among top GOP members of the House Financial Services Committee that argues the state attorneys general and other federal agencies involved have gone too far in their attempt to punish the banks for problems with the foreclosure process.

WHAT?  ‘Too far?’  As I posted on this topic yesterday, and Karl Denninger wrote in State Attorneys General Sell Out Americans To The Banks, this settlement is a joke.  There is absolutely nothing substantive in this tentative agreement; there’s nothing that isn’t already stated and covered in currently existing law.  This is some sort of restatement of existing law, dressed up and being trotted out as if a new revelation. 

So, what is Rep. Garrett trying to do here by attacking this toothless settlement as ‘going too far’?  I would say that the obvious answer is that he cares far more about who or what funds his campaigns than he does for those he is supposed to represent.  This settlement does nothing negative to banks and does nothing positive for homeowners.  To even suggest that this ‘punishes’ the banks is a bad joke.  These banks have committed massive fraud.  This is not just conjecture. 

There have been a myriad of rulings from state courts as well as appellate level courts that have found evidence of massive fraud perpetrated by banks against homeowners, much of which has been documented right here on FedUpUSA and also documented over at 4closureFraud. Just spend 20 minutes going through their library of court cases involving illegalities and criminal activity of banks and you’ll get an education of a lifetime.  This is not to even mention the revelations of people like William K. Black and Elizabeth Warren, who have testified as to the fraud in front of Congress itself! Yet, Rep. Garrett says this settlement goes too far?! 

I would say that anything short of jail time for all of the banks’ CEOs and Board Members doesn’t go far enough.  As for you, Mr. Garrett, your constituents should immediately initiate a recall effort, since you sir, don’t even bother to give them the courtesy of pretending you aren’t owned by special interests.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

CRIME SHOULDN’T PAY

I guess this from Bloomberg should come as no shock, really….

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators is drafting legislation to delay debit-card “swipe” fee rules that banks say would cost them billions of dollars, according to two Senate aides with knowledge of the plan.

Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Tom Carper of Delaware, both Democrats, are working on the bill’s language with Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, according to the two aides who requested anonymity because the talks aren’t public.

The Federal Reserve proposed capping debit-card interchange fees charged to merchants at 12 cents per transaction under a Dodd-Frank Act requirement to align them more closely with the processing costs. A bill to delay the measure, which may come this week, would be the first legislative attack on a rule that could cost lenders including Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) as much as $12 billion in annual revenue.

“There’s no question legislation is being looked at,” Corker said in an interview. “The question we’re dealing with now is, what’s the best way of approaching this issue?” The lawmakers discussed the shape of a bill on the Senate floor last night, Corker said.

Opponents of the rule have found supporters in Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair, who questioned a provision exempting banks and credit unions with less than $10 billion in assets, saying it may have the unintended consequence of harming smaller lenders.

So, yet again, those who can pay for legislation, get legislation.

I’m going to post this chart until everyone gets it through their heads. 

This is now a fully-closed system.  You are not a part of it.  I don’t care if you are left or right or Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal or red-white-and-blue striped - YOU ARE NOT PART OF THE SYSTEM ANYMORE.  Government of The People, by The People and for The People is history.  Kaput.  Gone.  Fini.  

What, it’s been all of two months since the Republicans were supposed to rescue us all?   Yet, just like the Democrats before them they are doing the work of those who put them into office – but I do not refer to the voters – I mean those that paid for their campaigns.  Republican = Democrat = Members of the Oligarchy, funded by those with very deep pockets, especially the banks.  You remember?  Those entities that we are continuing to fund with our taxpayer dollars, lest everyone find out that they are really insolvent.  Yes.  Those banks.

There is no rule of law; no equal protection.  Laws apply only to the ‘little people’ while the people who can fund legislation (lobbyists, big corporations, banks on Wall Street), get exemptions.  They write laws that allow them to commit criminal acts – legally.  They get to elminate usury laws.  They can charge exhorbitant fees.  They can force you to purchase things against your will.  They can skirt taxes.  They can somehow dodge criminal prosecution for direct (on tape) perjury before Congress itself.  They can foreclose on homes they do not have legal rights to.  They can even frighten Congress so badly that they will pass legislation to fund a revolving line of credit with no limits upon the heads of every American Taxpayer (TARP). 

However, perhaps most grievous of all, they can ‘print’ money by purchasing our own debt, thereby devaluing our dollars, and resulting in the massive price inflation in commodities (you know, goods you NEED to buy), at the same time depressing our wages, while simultaneously collapsing our asset values (homes, fixed income pensions) AND the margins of the small, businesses that provide for our production and our employment (but which are not wealthy or big enough to fund legislation).   And why all the money printing?  Refer to aforementioned ’insolvent banking institutions’ that…..pay for legislation favorable to them, and catastrophic to you.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’ll say it again:  YOU ARE NOT PART OF THE SYSTEM ANY LONGER.