by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
Because they are so ensconsed in their little bubble and because they profit so much from maintaining the status quo, Western mainstream media pundits don’t – or perhaps can’t – admit how Quantitative Easing policies have so quickly and so radically changed the financial system of the West and their satellites.
I imagine that most everyone reading this is already aware of what has transpired economically across the West over the last decade:
- Elite-class asset (stuff rich people own – stocks, real estate, financial derivatives, luxury goods, etc.) prices have ballooned to pre-2008 levels.
- Debt (which is, of course, another elite-owned asset), mainly to pay for banker bailouts and their usurious interest levels, has ballooned national accounts to incredible levels.
- The “real” economy has only weakened, as proven by endemic low economic growth across the West and Japan.
As a pro-socialist who has no faith that capitalism seeks anything but inequality, I believe that creating and compounding these issues has been the unstated goal of Western policy over the last decade. But that’s not the main point: what cannot be denied is that those ARE the economic results of the West’s “easy money” policies – i.e., QE and ZIRP (Zero percent interest rate policy) for the 1%, and austerity for the 99% (all coins have two sides).
Similarly, I imagine that everyone reading this is generally aware of what will happen should the West stop easy money: obviously, once artificial demand is no longer being fabricated then these assets will plummet in value, with huge ripple effects in the “real” economy. The West will be right back to dealing with most of the same toxic assets they had back in 2007, but now compounded by a decade of more debt, more interest payments, and a “real” economy which was made weaker via austerity.
None of that is really “news” to a smart reader… but it is “news” to many dumb journalists.
This 10-part series uses as its jumping-off point the 2018 book Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World by Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive who saw the light and is now informing on the crimes of Western imperialism-capitalism. Prins gives a thorough and chronological account of central banker doings in key areas – Mexico, China, Brazil, Japan and Europe – ever since US banker crimes set off the Great Recession in 2007. The essence of her thesis is that the US orchestrated collusion among the central bankers of many of the G20 economies and the Eurozone primarily in order to save busted US banks, and then also to maintain the 1%-enriching neoliberal policies of QE, ZIRP and no-strings attached bailouts.
What Prins keenly demonstrates is that since 2007 Western nations have continuously handed off the baton of QE and ZIRP between each other.
By coordinating on that policy, central bankers have effectively kept the 1% so awash in easy money and inflating assets that the 1% no longer cares that central bankers in a foreign country are manipulating the government where they live. This is what “globalisation” truly means in capitalism; it is very different from the socialist concept of internationalism.
It’s very simple for Prins to prove the G20 central banker collusion via the one thing the Japanese didn’t think of first (they created both QE and ZIRP) – temporary bilateral liquidity swap lines. It sounds complicated but it is easy to explain, and easy to understand their impact:
At the start of the crisis the US pushed the G7 banks, Switzerland and Scandinavia, and then other G20 banks, to create lines of credit with each other which allow them to move money to any place/nation where there is the mere potential of a volatile event which could create a negative impact on the stock or currency markets. This represents hundreds of billions of (taxpayer) dollars which essentially ensures that stock & currency markets never have to feel pain again: whether it is bad concrete economic data, or Fukushima, or Brexit – any major dip is now met with artificially created money which will fortify the position of the 1%.
These can be thought of as the junior versions of QE, and are no longer “temporary” – bilateral liquidity swaps are now a permanent feature of the Western banking system. Therefore, it doesn’t matter where new money is printed, only that it IS printed – it will go to prop up the 1%’s markets anywhere the West has its tentacles.
Thus, there is no real “market force” anymore – “just central banker force”. Their only goal is to perpetuate the status quo, not to improve the status quo, which is of course the essence of right-wing/anti-socialist/conservative ideologies.
There are no debt swaps for when you or I lose our job, but the 1% are “too big to fail”. However, what is even bigger than debt swaps are governments.
It’s not the inflated numbers but the source of the credit which is scary: the bond market
Prins quotes Bank of England leader Mark Carney in 2015 to illustrate this point: “As I wrote to G20 Leaders, the structure of (the) financial system has changed significantly since the crisis. Virtually all of the net credit since the crisis has been from the bond markets and the size of assets under management has increased by 60% to $74 trillion.”
Those numbers are staggering. The 2017 estimate for worldwide total GDP was around $75 trillion. Global QE had reached $12 trillion in 2016.
These numbers are so significant that basically every single human should grasp what QE means, and yet how very little media ink is spilled explaining the scope, reach and everyday impact of easy money policies?
Carney pointed out that the West’s financial system has been dramatically deformed, and that the most urgent issue is the bond markets, and for obvious reasons:
The biggest actor in any system is not the “invisible hand”, nor the most talented CEO, nor the richest family – it is the government.
Just as the Pentagon is the world’s largest employer, just as the government employees’ union is always any nation’s largest union, just as the Chinese Communist Party (which is inextricable from their government) is running their economy, just as the Iranian government controls a greater percentage of their economy than even Cuba’s government – I could point to any nation and show that the government is the primary economic actor (with the exception of tiny tax haven nations). This is based on the answer to the questions: what is done by the government with money received by taxation and produced via printing?
This acknowledgment that – as long as there are taxes and printed money – the government must always, inescapably be the biggest actor is actually the very foundation of socialism, which posits that these two government powers can be used as tool of liberation for the average person and not as a tool used by the 1% to oppress. That is what makes socialist systems inherently different from aristocratic (or bourgeois/liberal/West European) and other oligarchical systems.
Far-right neoliberalism is a modern ideology – give credit where it is due – and thus they acknowledge this hugely positive role government can play… which is expressly why their dogma also insists on gutting government powers in order to prevent interference with the whims and happiness of the 1%.
However, QE does not represent anyone’s “government policy” – it represents the apex of “anti-government policy”. Nobody voted for QE, and it would never survive a popular and free vote. Western central banks are all independent from their government (in socialist dogma, there is a big fat “LOL” to that notion), and many governments rail against the policy of their own central banks!
Clearly, QE is a policy which has been undertaken via entities which are not at all subject to (Western, bourgeois, liberal, already-quite limited) governmental oversight. QE in Europe, for example, has the ECB ostensibly acting as the banker of the Eurozone’s citizens yet its client has not at all been national governments or the national taxpayer – it’s only client is multinational private banks. Thus, the ECB has not been working to protect national governments, but instead clearly subverts those interests to those of the 1%.
Nice system y’all got in the West….
No central banker will ever be tried for collusion, much less blamed in the Western press no matter how bad their results are, just as no incoming US Fed chief has ever lost their rubber stamp legislative vote. The penultimate paragraph of Prins’ book gives the key reality: “Yet in the inevitable financial crash – these conjurers (of so much newly-printed money) will not be blamed. Or monitored. They are simply doing their jobs, even if those jobs have shifting definitions and nebulous goals.”
Back to the key point: We cannot forget that over the past decade these suddenly-arriving monies have been instrumental in propping up the government bond market, especially in the Eurozone. Governments cannot operate without paying salaries, and to do that they need to borrow money or print it. Insanely, QE has taken printed money and given it to banks so that banks could give it back to central banks in the form of buying national bonds: no value was created, yet so much was lost for the People.
Socialist or capitalist, we cannot argue what ARE the results: QE thus represents the ultimate economic victory of the “rentier” – he or she who adds no value, but only parasitically extracts value. Western economic-political ideology truly means giving private, self-interested bankers the ability to extract an endless flow of parasitic interest payments, and all because Western neoliberalism refuses to allow the government to play their logically dominant role in directly shepherding the economy.
Everybody should have known that European Central Bank QE was a fraud at least by 2015, when Greek banks were excluded from the bond buying party.
That was incredibly comic-tragic, because it showed how there was absolutely no solidarity in the Eurozone and the pan-European project, nor any common sense, nor any desire to really improve things – only the desire to make the rich even richer.
The simple math is: Central bankers resorted to QE because private banks had lost faith in each other, thus they roped in central banks to accept all the risk and losses. But the question which no one can answer is: So what happens when private banks lose faith in central banks?
The answer is: necessarily even more chaos than 2008, because even if Western central banks are “independent” from the government in neoliberal practice, they still have the full credit and powers apportioned to the government.
Thus, we no longer just have a “subprime bank” or a “subprime loan” crisis – the West has added a “subprime central bank” crisis for themselves as well, which is essentially the same as saying a “subprime government” crisis.
That’s why I wrote a 7-part series on QE back in September 2017, when I was sure they could not extend it more than one time. Little did I guess that QE could become permanent policy. The thesis of that series remains valid and the same in 2019:
Capitalism assures us that profit will be found at any cost by the 1% class – there is no sense of morality, only greed, backstabbing, bloodsucking, treason, laziness, covetousness, etc. National governments and the local banks and industries they support, and even partially own, are all risky bets which have only gotten riskier – do you think bond investors want to lose their money on them? When the government intervention of QE and ZIRP stop (i.e., free profit for banks) then banks will have to risk their own money to buy national bonds. This means no more playing nice: they will go back to doing what they began doing in 2011 – squeezing their profit out of the national bond markets, because globalised capital means no nation matters anymore.
Prins’ book gives us the chronological doings and details in Western countries which further supports this thesis.
Thus, the paradoxical non-conflict between government and bank in neoliberalism will eventually come to an even greater head than it did in 2012, when the Eurozone was about to split up and the true seed of Brexit was clearly set (which is recounted in Part 9). The West’s refusal to cut out the middleman, the rentier, the parasite – which is what socialism does – means they will get bloodsucked to death.
The death of a corporation or a bank is not fatal to a nation, but the death of a government – a government which cannot borrow or print money, as in the Eurozone – will be fatal. Or maybe you believe QE really can be permanent?
When did QE go wrong?
“The FED didn’t just ‘save’ the US financial system, it altered the flow of capital everywhere,” writes Prins.
The problem – or rather the failure – of QE became evident with the internationally-condemned 3rd round of QE by the US.
In the US QE 1 was money to buy bad mortgage assets in November 2008. What I call “QE 1.5” came 4 months later, to buy debt securities in the credit markets. QE 2 was in November 2009 – $600 billion of longer-term US Treasury securities. QE 4 only arrived this month – the delay is explained by Prins’ title: collusion in easy money policies among many G20 nations.
QE was obviously misdirected to the wrong classes from the very start, but in 2012 QE 3 generated a lot of international anger from developing countries. I will explain their reasons shortly, but the primary reason is one which gets at the heart of the fact that capitalism can never evolve positively – the emperor has no clothes… (probably because “emperor-ship” is unmodern and immoral, and whoever heard of a “socialist emperor?”):
“None of the core central bankers knew what else to do. They believed or wanted to believe in their own hype and power – that they could save economies through the right combination of QE, intervention, and lending money cheaply to big banks and corporations, and that somehow this would trickle down into the real economy people live in day to day. They could not admit that their economies had been crippled by the US financial crisis and that the collusion of the Fed with allied central banks perpetuated risk in a grand conjured-money scheme.”
It is no coincidence that 2012 was the year of the European Sovereign Debt crisis. That was when it became clear to money managers that problems: were huge and getting huger; were already proven to dramatically exist, but were now additionally being proven that the decisions of 2007-12 had not fixed them; that these problems could not be resolved in a neoliberal system of economics; were merely being money-papered over; and that governments were going to go bust from all the debt, printing and interest charges.
Prins is correct, but she also lets the 1%ers off the hook – QE 3 is when the 1% fully usurped governments (and their inherent duty to serve the People) in order to keep funding their lifestyle and to indebt others. This is a failure inherent in capitalism – and not just the neoliberal variant – simply writ on a 21st century, multinational, digital scale.
Again, neoliberalism is a modern ideology – hats off to them for not living in the past. German Nazism was also a modern creation – clearly, “modernity” is not the highest virtue….
But Prins is correct that – because they reject socialist regulations, planning and ideals – the central bankers simply would not, could not, do anything else.
With QE 3 in 2012 the savvy observers in the developing world saw what QE and ZIRP also served as: a way to create easy money for Western bankers to buy up foreign assets and to entrap developing countries with unsustainable loans. That is something I imagine you have never read even a single time in a Western media – anti-Western accusations of “collusion” is merely called “business sense” in the West, after all. The unexplored, negative consequences which QE has wreaked on the non-QE world are detailed in Parts 3 and 4.
QE3 was when QE showed its true colors: several years of it had not fixed anyone’s economy. And because the QE system cannot be stopped without revealing that fact, the US decided it will get their allies to print as much as they can while they can in order to enrich their 1% chums and to ensnare foreigners via the free capital flows required in globalisation.
In 2012 (and at other times, as well) we assumed that a government’s bankruptcy – Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. – would end the QE game. However, QE has gone on so long that many predict that Germany’s private Deutsche Bank will be the bankruptcy which restarts economic chaos. And why not? Major private banks are still just as rotted out with un-shed-able assets as they were 10 years ago. Non-austerity policies likely could have saved some of these failed investments and improved the state of these stupid loans, but….
What is certain is that when government bond rates go back to floating on market rates instead of on the air of QE, that’s when chaos is sure to hit… and that’s why governments cannot end QE. 2019 is no different from 2017.
Conclusion: QE can’t end, and it could have been so much better
The amazing thing is not the idea of QE, but how stupid the West has been about it: if they had been smarter, then they could have purchased a golden future for their societies – instead they bought fancy paintings you can find images of for free online.
QE could have been a chance to smash neoliberalism forever by proving what we all know: the government must have a major role in the economy – why empower the parasitical middleman? That is a question asked by every hard-working farmer for quite some time…
The good news is: not everyone takes part of the West’s financial system. Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and even – though many are loath to admit it – China. All these nations may trade with foreign nations, but that doesn’t mean their own domestic economies are based upon the exact same neoliberal capitalist principles as the US and Eurozone.
It is the goal of neoliberal/globalisation propaganda to deny that reality.
In many ways Part 2 in this 10-part series is the least revealing, but only to the very well-initiated.
QE has changed the Western economic system because their central banks have become the toxic asset-owner which has become “too big to fail”:
“Even if fabricated money wasn’t achieving its stated purpose of real economic growth, taking it away would invoke chaos on the financial system. That was a possibility that central bank leaders did not want to risk, not on their watch.”
The reason we have had QE Infinity is because no central banker will be the one to end to QE. To do so would be to say: “I have been a fool – a capitalist banker. Let’s switch to socialism.”
What about journalists? Asking them to successfully campaign against 1%-er easy money/99%er austerity seems very difficult in the West, where the vast majority of the media has been foolishly privatised. I have never seen any honest series in The New York Times or any other top media regarding the obvious failure of QE and far-right economics. The best they can do is to blame an individual politician for cutting this government service or raising that single tax on the 99% – mostly they prefer to blame people who rail against capitalist globalisation, like the Yellow Vests. Of course, the monthlong tactic has been to ignore the Yellow Vests entirely….
That leaves us with only citizens: “Citizens were caught in a vortex between unpopular and ineffective policies. Governments seemed to forget they existed, while central bankers did not even pretend to be concerned.”
Perhaps Western citizens are, in their own mind, truly painfully living in a vortex created by right-wing forces? I feel certain that the source of this would not be primarily caused by their culture, history or religion, but in their current West European/liberal/bourgeois political systems.
I don’t have anything more to try and help the West’s citizens about what ARE the simple economic facts of the past decade. I have to move on to Part 3 – QE paid for a foreign buying spree: developing countries hurt the most.
***********************************
Here is the list of articles slated to be published soon, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!
Part 1 – Western central bankers: they’re God, they trust – a 10-part series on the QE economy
Part 2 – How QE has radically changed the nature of the West’s financial system
Part 3 – QE paid for a foreign buying spree: developing countries hurt the most
Part 4 – Iran vs Mexico: ‘economic inflows’ versus ‘economic independence’
Part 5 – Understanding the West’s obsession with inflation
Part 6 – The new ‘beggar thy neighbor’: wars to devalue labor, not
currencies
Part 7 – Blaming China for the Great Recession… to avoid emulating China’s (socialist-inspired) success
Part 8 – 1941, 1981, 2017 or today – Europe’s mess is still Germany’s fault
Part 9 – Don’t forget the real root of Brexit: fear of Eurozone economic contagion
Part 10 – Bankocracies: the real Western governance model
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China and the upcoming Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.
The summary title of this article understates greatly the real effect of QE in the major societies. QE has changed not only the west’s financial system — it has totally undermined the western social fabric. The basic equation that hard work leads to better future has been tossed out in favour of mindless and endless shenanigans of greedy people. Hence the anxiety everywhere, with open unrest here and there. There is no end in sight.
The ‘forty glorious years’ of economic advance for Western populaces, after WW2, was granted solely out of fear of socialism and communism. After the 1971 Powell Memorandum, which declared revitalised and energised class war by US elites on society, and in particular, the disappearance in 1989-91 of the Soviet thanks to Gorbachev, capitalism simply got back to capitalising. Hence the continual fall in public welfare, the growth of inequality, elite wealth and poverty, social sadism and viciousness, one-sided class warfare, and foreign aggression ever since. That process has finally drawn a response from brutalised populations, hence the current upsurge in truly demented anti-communist agit-prop in the West, ostensibly to ‘celebrate’ thirty years since the Fall of the Iron Curtain. And hence the frenetic and hysterical hatred of China, a country that puts utilitarian concern for its people front and centre. While China is near to ending poverty throughout the country, penury and destitution are growing throughout the West, and the USA and UK in particular, and the Chinese good example must be destroyed, or the ruling parasites in the West will have nightmares of tumbrils rumbling nigh.
Thank you. That is an excellent summary of the broad background to the current phase of algos, TARP, QE, ZIRP, sanctions … et cetera.
There is an end in sight, Naresh. The End, that is, brought about by capitalist neoplasia destroying the life-supporting systems of the planet. Some freaks, like Pence, Bolsonaro, Morrison etc, are actually looking forward to it, as a symbol of their perverted ‘religious’ faith.
The goal for ‘the rest of humankind’ must then be to save the planet from the freaks :) Truth is far stranger than any fiction can ever be. And now the freaks are mistaking fictional prophecies for truth — and missing out on reality!
It is Federal reserve style Central Banks that are owned by private banks that can print up and control the money supply that is the problem. They control the MSM and are gatekeepers for economic textbooks.The libertarians have a good critique of these. Most Americans are unaware of how the monetary system works, so no discussion in the political world, I belonged to facebook group, EndtheFed and it never shows up in my feed, I have to visit them directly.
Michael Hudson’s books are good on this subject. There are solutions like the Treasury department printing and controlling the money supply, but the bankers are too addicted to the easy money.
Thank you, sir. This article is a keeper! As much as I like Ron Paul as a statesman and man of peace and non-intervention, I can’t agree with him on his view of economics and free-market capitalism. It’s my understanding that the early settlers to America had something called ‘poor houses’. Hence, where the expression comes from, ‘this will put me in the poor house’. it was brutal. If someone was poor, regardless of the reason, they were looked down upon with utter contempt and treated like criminals.
It certainly looks to me that Donald Trump is in on this scam too. That is why he gave huge tax breaks to corporations. This is why he works to bump the stock market as high as he can, and then claims it is proof of a great economy. And why he is screaming for zero or minus interest rates and a weaker dollar. How does any of this benefit or help the common citizen? It doesn’t. It steals the little they have left to the benefit of the financial elite. They always follow the same pattern: cheap money to the rick guys. Punishing austerity for the poor. A parasite is a fitting term.
Before the so called poor houses, the small houses were built around the church which most everyone participated in building, their were no so called poor then b/c everyone had to pitch in or not make it through the grueling winter, this is what the settlers were dealing with, not until full blown capitalism was in effect and the borrowing costs of independence started being paid off did the country enter into a more rich or poor arena. Even education(the ability to read) tended to produce those effects you speak of, and they probably not only didnt ever go away, but got worse once the Federal Reserve system of grading and preferencial treatment was introduced. This treatment remains privately intact to some degree today and may never get the chance to go away.
It’s not just quantitative easing that sets the proverbial seal of parasitism upon what passes for our ”Western fabric of society”.
To wit: The Banksters’ stranglehold rests upon a global lending market which thrives on the deliberate starvation of tax revenues for the State — courtesy of neoliberal governments and all the cursed tax havens — along with unrestrained consumer credits to all and sundry. Moreover, the banks create money by lending; they don’t have the sums involved in cash or otherwise. Still, they can charge interest on these loans.
The banks’ parasitism is truly staggering.
This is what traders are all about, keeping the massive amount of money sloshing around to where ever, or what ever asset class is deflating. As long as they all dont crash at once the jugglers (traders) keep the money ball moving to where it is needed most.
B/c they dont see a mechanism to prevent this operation, the confidence indicator always is used as a fail safe buffer or circut breaker before the full blown linear crisis has a chance to materalize. There is one out there but weather it is used or not has yet to be determined, the to date fairness equation would suggest that the odds are higher than lower that it will be forced to be used. Even as much as everyone wishes it would not have to be, not everyone has been treated fairly and some of us have a hard time forgetting things of this nature.
a small correction: the so called “Capitalists” are caught and MUST do QE, which will eventually crash and destroy their so called “Capitalism”.
In no way shape or form it was their goal to destroy the very system which makes them rich, but they had no other choice.
Yes, but the world has simply moved far beyond the socialist vs capitalist worldview. You have opposition to QE much more on the “far right” then in those that claim to be left (you know the types I’m talking about)
It’s a communitarian vs cosmopolitan world
But anyways, I don’t see how this is going to end. The center cannot hold. I am guessing that the end result is very grim – not even the 1% will escape this fate: the total and utter wiping of all their property and then blatant enslavement to a hostile, predatory communitarian government that is yet to appear
Well said.
Economic solidarity and heavy social burden could only work moraly and technically on small communitarian scale.
That is why there is an intrinsic moral contradiction between universality of human beings and moral means to insure human solidarity.
As there is an intrinsic technical contradiction between necessity of growing population in order to sustain the elders and earth finite capacity to insure western standard for world population.
Current contradiction will lead to disappearance and dissolution of advanced civilization through migrations with associated misery.
Or the end of universalism way back to traditional solidarity (family, clan/tribe, ethnicity, country…)
France us only at the forefront of those contradictions. And France will be first to either disappear or explode.
Capitalism could actually work effectively if market power, ie money power, was distributed in as egalitarian a fashion as possible. But then it wouldn’t be capitalism anymore.
Ramin
I like your articles.
But like the capitalists who are presenting reality with their own glasses you do exactly the same with your socialist glasses.
The point is.
The only moral economics could only be based on solidarity. But aging population make it impossible.
Actually the OEDC proportion of elderly people is too important for younger working people to sustain the old ones with only a fair share of the youngers work.
The corrolary is simple.
Either you enslave the younger generation with debts to the benefit of the olders.
Or you let the olders die as beggars.
Alternately you can do both !
Guess what ?
The OEDC country with highest debt is also the one with oldest population and lowest immigration (immigration being a solution to aging population but bringing other problems)
Namely Japan.
A country where there are more elders diaper sold than ones for babies !
The issue is that you have a ideological view of the situation.
There is no good solution or miracle.
And your so called socialist utopia would work no better as the elerly burden would not disappear.
As for Iran. It is still a young population. But going down the same road. time will tell once the population profile is the same as in Japan if the socialist utopia helps….
Automation, computerisation and robotisation makes the demographic crunch quite containable. But you’ll also need an end to the capitalist logic of infinite growth, and a circular economy and strict limits on individual wealth and greed, as well.
“strict limits on individual wealth and greed”
Sure Mulga. That is called solidarity.
But it can only implemented morally on small scale only. (Family, tribe or arguably very small countries).
If implemented on systemic and larger scale that is called communism and orwellian society with associated crimes and atrocities.
I do not know or believe alternate way exist.
Defeatist cobblers.
I love your articles, but here’s the BIG BUTT.
QE is just another name for free money to the ‘elite’ to cover their bets, you can lower interest rates, but only to zero to prime, so that game is up, after that QE ( by any name ) is the only way to perpetuate the fraud known as Modern Western Lifestyle.
Let’s put this into proper perspective, the owners of Corporate-USA, say Ray Dalio has written a series of book for free called “Principals”, in these books, he lays out all debt crises in the history of mankind, how they’re fixed, and how they fester, and the outcomes.
Now Dalio is biased being the one of the richest men in the world, and owning the largest hedge fund on earth, he has a vested interest in this ‘system’, or machine as he calls it.
Now that zero-interest has been played, QE is the only tool left in the bag, free money to all.
So what? Call it socialism, or nazism, or capitalism, or USA-ism, being a world life traveler I see it all, and now I see ASIA fat, dumb&happy, and I see in Seattle people covered in shit and drooling, so I know that the USA is on its death bed.
These people are trying to the best they can do to keep a failed system alive, whether it was going off the gold-standard to petro, then pedo ( sorry put the USA really does send children to saudi ), the devil CIA will do whatever it can to keep the world excepting these US dollars to infinity. Given the USA has the most evil/powerful killing machine on earth, what’s a mother to do? Not much.
China, Iran, India, Russia ( sounds like BRICS ) just wait and watch, not unlike vultures, waiting for the USA/West to die, and then be fed on. The BEAST however only has this one game left “QE”, but seriously they can take it to INFINITY, cuz the brilliance of the system is “EVERYONE GETS A CUT”.
Dalio works with the richest men in CHINA, all the ELITE the real owners of EAST&WEST capitalism are working together on keeps this beast alive. I think we can all agree that long ago MAO was brought to power by same forces that own OSS/CIA. Even most of Russia is on the same meal-ticket.
So problem some 90% of the earth feeds at the same death-bowl, and its kept alive by QE.
This will all end not unlike ROME, once the money was ‘worthless’ the farmers quit sending grain, there was no bread and everybody moved on. But this took 500+ years, now with CIA lying, and computers & DALIO MMT, the sky is the limit, this could be a 5k year ROME, …
So what INTL debt obligation say $1,000 TRILLION+, why not Quadrillion, Sextrillion, or Sepatrillion?? Why not, its all as real as a UNICORN.
The entire world is not unlike the “Emperors New Clothes”, and everybody is on the dole, just like Nazi Germany, everybody fears speaking the truth, cuz their meal ticket depends on the big lie.
I’ll just mention the fact that Dr. Michael Hudson’s been writing and railing about the entire neoliberal project for decades. Here’s an interview given by both Prins and Hudson in 2008 just as the crisis began. I also suggest reading Hudson’s latest paper as he continues to dissect and analyze the financial Black Plague known as Neoliberalism.
“As a pro-socialist who has no faith that capitalism seeks anything but inequality,”
Nonsense.
Socialism reduces inequality only in political speeches; in reality, it produces the exact opposite.
Capitalism reduces inequalities. More capitalism, less inequality; less capitalism, more inequality.
2-step proof:
1 – The value of productive capital stems from the added productivity it brings: A machine that increases production costs is scraped and worth zero.
2 – Productivity is what drives purchasing power
There is not conflict between capitalists and workers but “economic harmony” as Bastiat put it 2 centuries ago.
That superstition of conflicting interests is used by politicians to acquire power and commit massive injustice and ruin, then lie and exploit them to acquire more power and so on until complete destruction.
A “fun” place to see how blatantly corrupt the US system is over at TESLAcharts and Plainsite @ twitter, the level of crime tesla and its playboy owner and his family get away with IS STAGGERING.
The legal documents from one of the latest lawsuits made my jaw hit the floor quite literally.