I wanted the CEOs and directors of those slime pits hung from gibbets along Wall Street as an object lesson of what the ‘invisible hand’ really means. Their frauds killed people. It was immediate for some with weak hearts, but a slower process for others who saw their futures flushed by high-flying con men in executive suites.
They didn’t affect me personally, because I was in law enforcement long enough to recognize a Ponzi scheme, but a lot of people I know have been affected. It makes me very angry that they weren’t punished.
]]>That isn’t fair, it isn’t just, and it damn sure isn’t capitalism.
We need commercial banks, but they need to be separate and distinct from the gambling that is still going on, so the gamblers can crash and burn without taking Main Street with them.
One of my great uncles lost his farm because of the lack of cash. The farm was very productive but people didn’t have any cash to buy what he produced, so he didn’t have any cash to pay his mortgage.
]]>The housing crash in 2008 could have had the same effect on the country if the banks had been allowed to crash like they were allowed to crash in 1930 and 1931. Instead the banks were propped up — despite the fact that, like in 1929, it was their own damn fault for shoddy lending standards. My own opinion: we need banks, but not *those* banks. Like GM and Chrysler, they should have been taken over by the government and either put under new management or sold off to another entity.
Iceland really didn’t have much choice in what they did. The deposits in question were Euro accounts, not krona accounts. They could print krona to guarantee the krona deposits, much like the Federal Reserve can print dollars to guarantee dollar deposits, but all their exports for the next 50 years would not have brought in enough euros to pay off the euro accounts. The Eurozone proposed that Iceland submit to the modern equivalent of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration which sold the Ottoman Empire into debt slavery to the European banks for the remainder of the Empire’s life. But unlike the Ottoman debt, the Iceland bank deposits were debts owed by private parties (the banks), so there was no rational reason why Iceland should have submitted to such a draconian regimen. If the Eurozone wanted to guarantee those Euro accounts they could print their own damned euros and do so, it had nothing to do with Iceland. But of course the Krauts weren’t going to do any such thing, the ECB is basically the Bundesbank and has that Teutonic rigidity to it that forbids it from doing anything sane and rational.
]]>Many years ago, when I started investing very small amounts of money I could afford to lose, I did so with great trepidation, and a clear understanding that that money was at risk, and I could lose it all. Or so I thought… apparently, if I had only invested a hundred times that amount, I could have stopped worrying, assured that I would profit no matter what happened to the firms I invested in. If only I’d known…
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