US
commercial bank loans and leases flat since Lehman, and yet US GDP
higher by $2 trillion since the biggest bankruptcy in history. How does
one reconcile this monetary and growth quandary? Simple.
When it comes to the real measure of a nation’s economic output, one
can rely on “flexible”, constantly changing definitions of what
constitutes the creation of “goods and services” as well as transactions
thereof, goalseeked to meet the propaganda of
”
(just ask the anti-Austerians for whom debt and growth are
interchangeable) which is and has always been a reflection of the
increase (or decrease) in broad and narrow liquidity or money supply,
which in turn means how much money is created through loans, either via
commercial banks or the central monetary authority, also known as the
Federal Reserve.
by Monty Guild, Financial Sense:
There are More Tools in the Kit—We Expect to See them Used in the U.S. and Europe Before the Current Economic Malaise has Ended
So far, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s aggressive monetary
easing is following pretty closely the prescription laid out in 1999 by a
Princeton economics professor named Ben S.
Bernanke.
Back then, before the dotcom decline of 2000 and the 2008 crisis, Mr.
Bernanke wrote the following in his appraisal how to help Japan regain
its economic footing after 10 years of stagnation:
“Despite the apparent liquidity trap, monetary
policymakers retain the power to increase nominal aggregate demand and
the price level… [and] increased nominal spending and rising prices will
lead to increases in real economic activity.”
…
In a Market Society, everything is for sale
For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion
live on less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding
to 10 billion by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling
revolutions, wars, adding more billionaires and more folks surviving on
two bucks a day.
…
Why should you worry? Capitalism breeds corruption and inequality
But the 2008 crash challenged our faith in free-market
capitalism: “The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the
ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a
widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals.”
Then comes the big
question: So what? “Why worry that we are moving toward a society in
which everything is up for sale?” Two big reasons concern Sandel:
First, inequality: “Where
everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means.” If
wealth just bought things, yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations,
inequalities wouldn’t matter much. “But as money comes to buy more and
more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.”
Second, corruption: “Putting a price on the good things
in life can corrupt them … markets don’t only allocate goods, they
express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.”
Also “corrupt the meaning of citizenship. Economists often assume that
markets … do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue.
Markets leave their mark.”
…
Dysfunctional politicians pushing Americans past point of no return
Can we change? “The appeal of using markets to put a price on
public values, is that there’s no judgment on the preferences they
satisfy.” Debate is unnecessary. Markets don’t “ask whether some ways of
valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is
willing to pay for sex, or a kidney … the only question the economist
asks is ‘How much?’ Markets … don’t discriminate between worthy
preferences and unworthy ones.” Markets may never draw the line, but do
politicians, in secret?
What is certain:
Capitalism is eliminating moral values, as Nobel economist Milton
Friedman and capitalism’s philosopher Ayn Rand had been preaching to the
generation. As Sandel puts it: “Each party to a deal decides for him-
or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged. This
nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market
reasoning, and explains much of its appeal.”
But unfortunately, market capitalism “has exacted a heavy price … drained public discourse of moral and civic energy.”
The good professor is a great teacher, with only one
glaring flaw in his logic: he’s too idealistic, too quixotic. You don’t
have to be a fatalist to know that without a total economic collapse,
market capitalists — including 1,426 billionaires, Wall Street bankers,
hedgers, lobbyists and every other special interest getting rich off the
new market society — will never voluntarily surrender their control
over the American political system.
Rather, they will blindly continue down their self-destructive
path with an absolute conviction they are divinely guided by the
Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, and perhaps even God.
Meanwhile, we have no choice but wait patiently till the
collapse, anxiously aware that our bizarre political system will just
keep degrading America’s moral values, pricing, buying, selling, trading
morals like commodities, because in the final analysis everything has a
price and everyone has a price in our hot new exciting Market Society.
The world economy is starting to disintegrate. What we are
entering now is the culmination of a Ponzi scheme of printed money and
credit that started with the creation of the Fed in 1913….
The world is heading into a horrific economic nightmare, and an
inordinate amount of the suffering is going to fall on innocent
children. If you want to get an idea of what America is going to look
like in the not too distant future, just check out what is happening in
Greece. At this point, Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic
depression. As I have written about
previously,
the unemployment rate in Greece has now risen to 27 percent, which is
much higher than the peak unemployment rate that the U.S. economy
experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And as you will
read about below, child hunger is absolutely exploding in Greece right
now. Some families are literally trying to survive on pasta and
ketchup. But don’t think for a moment that it can’t happen here.
Sadly, the truth is that child hunger is already rising very rapidly in
our
poverty-stricken cities.
Never before have we had so many Americans unable to take care of
themselves. Food stamp enrollment and child homelessness have soared to
brand new all-time records, and there are actually thousands of
Americans that are so poor that they
live in tunnels underneath
our cities. But for millions of other Americans, the suffering is not
quite so dramatic. Instead, they just watch their hopes and their
dreams slowly slip away as they struggle to find a way to make it from
month to month. There are millions of parents that lead lives that are
filled with constant
stress and anxietyas
they try to figure out how to provide the basics for their children.
How do you tell a child that you can’t give them any dinner even though
you have been trying as hard as you can? What many families go through
on a regular basis is absolutely heartbreaking. Unfortunately, more
poor families slip through the cracks with each passing day, and these
are supposedly times in which we are experiencing an “economic
recovery”. So what are things going to look like when the next major
economic downturn strikes?
A recent
New York Times article detailed
the horrifying child hunger that we are witnessing in Greece right
now. At some schools there are reports of children actually begging for
food from their classmates…
As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used
to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently
he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was
impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for
food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an
11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.
“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his
cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb
of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground.
He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but
admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their
savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.
Could you imagine that happening to your children or your grandchildren?
Don’t think that it can’t happen. Just a few years ago the Greek middle class was vibrant and thriving.
And we are starting to see hunger explode in other European countries
as well. For example, in the UK the number of people receiving
emergency food rations has increased
by 170 percent over the past year.
This is one of the reasons why I get upset when people say that
“things are getting better”. Yes, the stock market has been setting
record highs lately, but things are
most definitely not getting better.
Even during this false bubble of debt-fueled economic stability that
we are enjoying right now, we continue to see hunger and poverty rise
dramatically in America.
Since Barack Obama has been president, the number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 32 million to more than 47 million.
Will we all be on food stamps eventually?
Will we all become dependent on the government for our survival at some point?
According to
the Boston Herald, even Tamerlan Tsarnaev was receiving government welfare benefits…
Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living
on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep
into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has
learned.
State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging
gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with
his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The
state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those
benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income
eligibility limits.
Isn’t that crazy?
And yes, there are some people out there that are abusing the
system. In fact, the cost of food stamp fraud has risen sharply to
approximately $750 million in recent years.
But most of the people on these programs really need the help. Thanks to our
incredibly foolish economic policies,
there are not enough good jobs for everyone and there never will be
again. The percentage of Americans that are unable to take care of
themselves is going to continue to rise, and the suffering that we are
witnessing right now is going to get much, much worse.
Not that things aren’t really, really bad already. Here are some
signs that child hunger in America has already started to explode…
#1 Today, approximately
17 million children in
the United States are facing food insecurity. In other words, that
means that “one in four children in the country is living without
consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life.”
#2 We are told that we live in the “wealthiest nation” on the planet, and yet more than
one out of every four children in the United States is enrolled in the food stamp program.
#3 The average food stamp benefit breaks down to approximately
$4 per person per day.
#4 It is being projected that
approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps before they reach the age of 18.
#5 It may be hard to believe, but approximately
57 percent of
all children in the United States are currently living in homes that
are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.
#6 The number of children living on $2.00 a day or less in the United States has grown to
2.8 million. That number has increased by 130 percent since 1996.
#7 According to
Feeding America,
“households with children reported food insecurity at a significantly
higher rate than those without children, 20.6 percent compared to 12.2
percent”.
#8 According to a Feeding America hunger study,
more than 37 million Americans are now being served by food pantries and soup kitchens.
#9 For the first time ever,
more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by
57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
…
Fed Debate Moves From Tapering to Extending Bond Buying – 11.7 million Americans remain jobless.
Debate about the Fed ending its bond buying was premature. The US
economy would collapse if it wasn’t on Fed life-support and the Fed
knows it.
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden
hands of the Rothschild’s & the Masons & the Illuminati, we
skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little
different, but your basic premise is correct: The …
This is why we are facing a MAJOR economic upheaval. This is a
GENERATIONAL shift. The youth are coming of age. They have no future
under this economic system. This will explode in everyone’s face.
BBC
US
commercial bank loans and leases flat since Lehman, and yet US GDP
higher by $2 trillion since the biggest bankruptcy in history. How does
one reconcile this monetary and growth quandary? Simple. Enter the Fed.
See
the surge in central bank holdings, the printing of new money,
beginning in the spring of 2008 with the bank bailouts and the
acquistion of long-term securities to keep interest rates down. (International Monetary Fund)
