Neither of those analogies were very good. Look up some Peter Schiff analogies if your gonna use them at all, ie. “Digging the grand canyon then standing on a phone book to get out.”
When the Fed and US congress bailsout the banks because of bad debt and then they buy physical assets they are taking over the world. Look at how large the derivativews market is…some say 600 Trillion others say 1.2 Quadrillion. If all of that debt is to be “bailed out” then it is in fact a “conspiracy” to dominate the resources and physical properties (to which all fabricated debt instrumnets are valued against) of the world.
I don’t even know what you are tryring to argue Dave.
Pretty sure Daniel and I were contemplating the effects of bailing out bad debt in the name of supranational banks from one country to another.
If i could fabricate paper assets from nothing, let them default, get a proportional amount of money from the government and buy physical things, it is not a “market” situation. It is blatant outright fascism. A hostile “color of law” takeover in the name of corporate fundamentalism.
We can put aside the obama analogy. just meant that someone doing A is taken as a conspiracy to do not A.
What say do the Germans have in greek politics from all this? The greeks are spitting in the face of the whole EU, including the Germans, and losing nothing.
It would be much cheaper to to just bribe a few politicians if all they want is a say in greek politics. As if what happens in sleepy greece matters to anyone.
As for regulatory powers over american banks, my understanding is that all regulations are intended to help big banks [the ones big enough to get a bailout in the first place] by keeping out any possible competition. not my theory; it’s well know austrian theory.
If i could fabricate paper assets from nothing, let them default, get a proportional amount of money from the government and buy physical things, it is not a “market” situation. It is blatant outright fascism. A hostile “color of law” takeover in the name of corporate fundamentalism.
we differ too greatly to profit from further discussion
Ha! If I had a penny every time I heard someone claim this… Seriously, I’ve been hearing this for 15 years, from grizzled old Communist-leaning pensioners, to drunks desperate to keep on their feet at a local bar. Surprised it made it into a paper.
I think a huge part of the reason why official Germany is willing to bail out the Euro countries is indeed maintaining the prestige associated with being the leading EU nation. They (the politicians) love the idea they are the force behind the EU and can wiggle the whole union, but I really wouldn’t go beyond that. Accomplishing economically what it wasn’t able to accomplish militarily is a huge overstatement. It is stil much more a EU hegemony than a German one, and besides US has huge influence in Europe and over the EU countries so it isn’t really accurate to speak of an EU hegemony either.
My guess is that we do not. You don’t think that there isn’t anything sinsister going on, other than the Greeks getting something from nothing at the expense of the Germans. Which i happen to see as small fries. I think that the world banks are trying to break the back of every nation state that they can. Too much ‘coincience’ in the world of debt instruments to think that the banks have not leveraged everything on earth in the hopes that they might be able to function as the sole owner of all property on the planet.
We both know the banks sshould have gone bankrupt and the debt liquidated. However, that has never been the plan. The plan is to bankrupt the nation states and suck all of the assets out of the “socialized” countries so that the banks ourtright own them.
Look at Iceland, the banks levereged their assets there ten times past the GDP of the nation. So, if they were to bailout that bad debt they would need to sell assets in the order of ten times their GDP to come up with the cash to do so. Goldman Sachs et al are doing it on purpose. Who cares if the EU people want socialism, we all know it cannot work, let them fail as a nation, but don’t suck the blood from their bodies as they are on life support.
Besides, the only reason any country can have an extravagant welfare system is because of the banks debt financing schemes. Not huge deficit, no welfare (especially the ones in EU)
You know, that’s really not a good example as Hitler did invade France…the Banks can bribe the countries, but other countries bribing other countries is a little harder to pull off.
Shortly before he died my maternal grandfather used to say one of the most dangerous men in Europe was French President Valery Giscard d’Estaign. When he asked why he said he was the most prominent figure of the French takeover, a takeover which heralded the coming of the European version of the USSR. Before you ask, my grandfather’s positions were somewhere between Anarcho-socialism and Anarcho-syndacalism. He had followed the Teologia de la Liberaciòn movement enthusiastically. As an Anarchist he had little sympathy for “Unions”, be them of Soviet Republics or European States.
Philipp Bagus, in his masterly book, pretty much says the same things from an Austrian/Libertarian point of view.
At the moment the leading force of European centralization is France. Germany is an economic powerhouse but a political dwarf: her industries may have benefited from the euro (due to their ability to be more competive on such markets as Italy and Spain) but it has been forced to foot most of the bills for little return. Her weak political class is the offspring of WWII, especially of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s idiotic decision to allow defeated France to sit at the winners’ table and dictate terms. This political class will always put the “winners” interests ahead of their own nations’. The decisions to send troops to Afghanistan and to back the Lybian civil war are just two examples. Backing the US and Israel to impose sanctions on Iran (a prelude to the inevitable) was even more symptomatic: Germany has (had) good commercial ties with Iran. Sure, the Iranians are a bit “weird” but have proven themselves reliable business partners.
Due to the aforementioned quirks of the political system, German voters are left without a true alternative. Voting left or right changes nothing. That’s why the Bundesbank was so widely respected: it was felt to be much closer to Germany’s interests than the political class. This respect only increased at the end of the '70s when the Bundesbank sternly refuse to increase money creation to match Federal Reserve, the Bank of England etc. French newspapers (no doubt acting as mouthpieces for the political class) started to describe the Bundesbank as a “tool for German supremacy” around this period. Thankfully the accompanying images of Nazi troops marching through Paris were nixed at the last minute. You can see this as a classic case of competing currencies: investors were rewarding the relatively sane German monetary politics and punishing the recklessness of France, Italy, the United Kingdom etc. This didn’t sit well with the big exporters (Volkswagen, Siemens, BASF, Bayer etc) which wanted a more “flexible” currency to be more competitive on European markets and in the US. The problem was the Bundesbank was an independent creature, much more independent than other European central banks, so there was little the German government could do. Sure, like any other fiat currency the Deutsche mark experienced inflation but it was small fries compared to what the US or France were experiencing.
There’s no doubt one of the main reasons behind the creation of the euro was the will to cripple the hated Deutsche mark once and for all. Control was shifted from the conservative Bundesbank to the European Central Bank, an organization strictly controlled by inflation happy French and Italian bureaucrats. The aforementioned exporters gave a big thumbs up and the hapless political class simply went along with the flow. Of course with the EMU came the problem of big government deficits. The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) was introduced to give a semblance of order but was nothing more than a huge scam: of all the EMU contries only Luxembourg was within SGP parameters. Germany used the same accounting tricks as Italy and Ireland to get aboard and then their own Constitutional Court declared the SGP “non-binding”.
Of course there was also the small problem of bailouts. They are technically forbidden under the terms of the SGP but it has always been “common knowledge” that a country in need (like Greece or Ireland) would have gotten help in one way or the other. French politicians always made very clear the EU/EMU is here to stay and they would have spared no expense to make it possible. After all these are the chaps who sent a whole generation to be slaughtered at Verdun (the war memorials in even the smallest French village are a chilling proof of this) and who stubbornly refused to evacuate Dien Bien Phu when they had the chance.
