by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
It’s not that the West’s central bankers are infallible – the similarity is that they cannot be held accountable. After all – who can call God to account for His decisions?
Like God, when things succeed it is They (central bankers) who deserve all the credit – when things fail it’s because we failed to properly follow Their policies.
And like God, they don’t need regulation – it is They who give the regulations, which must be accepted on faith alone and no matter how poor the results.
Central bankers are held partially accountable by only one sector – the markets of money. If markets go down based on any of their statements the bankers immediately reverse themselves, regardless of the situation. Countless times Bernake, Yellen, Trichet, Draghi and others have made statements purposely as clear as mud and then backtracked at the first lower lip quaver from the rich. Despite this exception, neoliberalism has proven to be the worship of bankers, as they rule and not markets – central bankers, of course, subvert and control the markets in many ways.
This idolatry is not new: for two centuries “capitalism with Western characteristics” has truly been “banker rule”. The most impressive victory of neoliberalism – their ability to extend their unholy domain despite provoking the Great Recession – proves this: Central bankers in the G7 nations and the Eurozone have all been given the power to set fiscal policy, to decide social policy priorities and to render domestic elections irrelevant. Western nations are no longer democracies (and they were all, every one, merely the types of democracies which pointedly refused to evolve after 1917) but bankocracies.
The Great Recession has exposed modern capitalism to be not just banker worship but also banker governance.
This is not some wild-eyed lefty nonsense – they are deciding public policy. If we called them a “Politburo” instead of a “central bank” the West would rally up a posse of Nazis and send them to invade.
This multipart series will – as many of my previous such series have also done – use an exceptionally important political book as a jumping off point, which also allows me to humbly impart my point of view gleaned from my work as a daily hack journalist in the heart of the Eurozone. This point of view is rarely heard, yet has virtues which academics, think-tankers, specialists and authors cannot possibly contain – even we hack journalists must have some virtues, after all?
The book is 2018’s 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.
Quite simply, the book’s primary virtue is chronological: Prins gives a historical 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. Prins gives us all the key happenings in these regions (only China is the one which is undoubtedly not capitalist-imperialist), and that is not something you can find all in one place elsewhere.
And because central bankers run the West, it is like reading the daily itinerary of a dictator – “this is how things were decided”.
What Prins does a good job in reminding us is that this has all been done to keep US banks solvent. Every policy of the US Fed is about defending this goal, and not at all about the health of the global economy; the idea that the US would be militarily aggressive and culturally overbearing yet financially benevolent is preposterous and unsupported by evidence.
But the book is essentially conventional journalism – it is a recounting of historical decisions, facts and consequences. The only radical, non-Western change Prins really suggests is to move away from the dollar. The world “class” is used less than a handful of times. Her mentions of the negative effect of central bankers’ decisions on the average person are clearly sincere but both sparing and brief. Few people get into Wall Street out of their love for poetry, after all. The book is a former Wall Streeter watching other Wall Streeters who have taken a brief detour into public service (except in China) – it is banker-centric. And this is quite useful in the 21st century.
Prins clearly and correctly views bankers as the problem, but her solution is essentially limited to hoping that China’s central bankers will re-balance the status quo, and that their stewardship will allow developing countries to coordinate cooperatively instead of exploitatively. She does not believe that the entire system needs re-ordering upon new moral and political foundations (or even upon the very different moral foundations upon which Red China rests, and which account for their different policies).
But merely changing Western-centrism to Sino-centrism, with its obvious shift away from the US greenback (and even combined with her correct approval of cryptocurrency) cannot be enough. China is not insisting that Western capitalist-imperialist nations follow Beijing, but that they reform themselves – Iran does this too, but where Beijing uses a whisper Iran uses a megaphone amplified by a megaphone. Prins needed far more moral condemnation and to propose far more actual changes to the prevailing Western system, but – as I wrote – this is essentially a book of typical Western capitalist “objective” journalism, where moralising is supposed to be left entirely to the reader.
This series is advocacy journalism. What I have done is to take Prins’ useful chronological, globally-oriented journalism on modern economic history and analyse it from a perspective very different from her own: a pro-socialist and anti-imperialist one.
It’s a great book, but lacks a modern political viewpoint
Prins gets the main point across, though, and it’s there in her title: G7/G20 central bankers have colluded since 2008 to (greenback) paper over the causes of the Great Recession.
Her book makes it undoubtedly clear how monetary policy has been coordinated to inflate and appease the 1%-dominated “markets” at different points around the world at different times. She doesn’t use these correct political terms, but she shows that 21st century Western financial policies are fundamentally neo-imperialist: the world has slaved for the benefit of the former unipolar imperium since 2008 – even though said imperium provoked the financial crisis in 2008 – because of collusion orchestrated by the imperium to inflict policies on the global economy which were mainly to save their biggest, busted banks.
There you have it: three major points upon which the past 11 years of Western economic history have been resting. This also explains why the West’s financial foundation is even shakier than it was in 2008.
You don’t need a PhD in economics to immediately grasp the correctness of these allegations: Nobody in their right mind would buy the securities of the top US banks… except for unaccountable central bankers. Central banks West-wide routinely bought $200 billion of such assets per month. Taxpayers were not enriched by buying bad investments, of course, but the busted banks in the US, Germany and France were.
The collusion Prins refers to in her title is the way the Fed used their influence to force other G20 banks to adopt the same policies. These policies are: massive money printing via QE, ZIRP (Zero interest rate policies) to persuade banks to take the money, and relaxing collateral standards in order to make sure banks got that money no matter how unsound everybody knew they were.
The problem comes down to a simple difference between capitalist and socialist views of finance: governments with policies dominated by the former give taxpayer money to private banks with no rules or accountability, whereas governments with policies dominated by the latter give this money with massive oversight, regulations and directives in order to ensure that it is used as efficiently as humanly possible. The irony for socialist-inspired nations is that they are the ones who are painted as corrupt!
Governments influenced by the former can rely on compliant, privately-owned Mainstream Media to repeatedly insist that these loans are for the benefit of all even though there is no such evidence for such a claim, nor any logical reason to expect such an outcome. Governments influenced by the latter really don’t care what the Western MSM says – their own people don’t need to be propagandized in favor of capitalist lies, and thus they mainly try to keep a low profile as regards international media.
(Cuba spends almost nothing on their media; Iran only recently started PressTV (and this service is more notable for its “different” viewpoint – “Voice of the voiceless” is the official slogan – rather than its scope and size); Xinhua seems to spend most of its time on soft news and certainly doesn’t trumpet its own beliefs. Indeed, much can be said about that difference between Iran and China: the former is nearly screaming up to Heaven what it is thinking and doing, whereas inscrutability in China is not just a cliché but their government policy, which aims to avoid friction. But I digress….)
The ultimate problem with Prins is that – like all “I’m a capitalist but not THIS capitalism” – she is ultimately a historical/economic nihilist:
Prins is like so many fine commentators on the Anglophone fringe: accumulating, exposing and railing against the crimes of capitalism, and garnering many clicks and views, but remaining fundamentally supportive of the capitalist system. They don’t believe in the only philosophical and economic alternative humans have designed to capitalism – socialism – nor do such analysts ever thread the camel through needle and become the one capitalist who finally proposes a capitalist system which is not based on exploitation, competition, aggression, etc.
“There are ostensibly two main types of central bankers: the ones with more legacy power, and the ones with less but rising power, as is the case in China.”
Totally false: very real alternatives exist, and denying that – which Prins essentially does – only keeps people stuck in the political nihilism of TINA (There Is No Alternative).
The very real, very working alternative: the ‘terrorist’ central bankers of Iran & China
As I alluded to, China’s central bank is predicated on totally different foundations. And then you have Iran’s central bank: Iran’s central bank chief, Valiollah Saif, was declared a “terrorist” last month by Washington. Neither of these countries with socialist-inspired revolutions have banking leaders who are quotidian, interchangeable “central bankers minus legacy power”, as Prins describes.
Why was Iran’s Central Bank declared a “global terrorist”?
More flagrantly oppositional than Iran’s foreign policy are the tenets which guide Iran’s National Bank: it is totally state-owned, whereas the Fed is a consortium of private banks and set up like private corporations (something rarely understood). Iran’s National Bank is not “independent” from the government in the slightest. Iran’s central bank cannot meddle in – much less dictate – domestic policy, because that is why Iran has elections. Iran’s Central Bank, due to its fundamental independence, anti-capitalist and revolutionary nature proves that not all central bankers are the same.
Importantly, the independence of many Western central banks came after the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979: The Bank of Japan was made independent in 1998, the same year the ECB opened its doors to let greed rush in. Of course, their independence ensures that they follow policies which are for private concerns and not public ones.
Contrarily, China and Iran have central banks owned, literally, by the People. Former ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet often talked about how the ECB was a “bank of the people”, but it was classic continental hypocrisy – the Maastricht treaty, in the neoliberal & anti-socialist model in which the EU and Eurozone were created, explicitly made the ECB independent of any government. Does anyone possibly persist in believing, 10 years into (not after) the crisis, that the ECB has chosen policies which benefit the 99% and not the 1%?
There is widespread agreement in Iran that Islam tolerates capitalism – there are plenty of private banks – but Iran has agreed with socialism that the only solution is to have the biggest banks owned by the state. That is the only way “strings” can ever be applied to taxpayer money-created-loans in order to create a virtuous – and not exploitative – monetary cycle between government and business.
Such a solution is not proposed by a capitalist like Prins. She even tries to intimate that China’s Central Bank is almost equally duplicitous (though she could never get away with implying that China’s central bank was as exploitative), which is pure political nihilism and easily disproved.
The reality is that governments must issue paper money and private bankers act as the middleman to get this money to citizens… but only in capitalist countries. In socialist-inspired countries government workers serve as the middleman, and that is why they are succeeding in the 21st century. China and Vietnam are the two biggest boomers since 1980, while Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and a handful of others would be booming if they were not so terribly sanctioned.
Conclusion: There is no god but God
(That is perhaps the theological heart of Islam there, and repeated in every Salah daily prayer. Various stone idols with multiple limbs, the Christian trinity and Western central bankers all are not God because there is only one, single God and His name is God.)
Allow me to conclude with a few more indisputable truths, many of which have been painfully learned over the past decade:
- Neoliberal central bankers are not as competent as even those much-maligned Iranian Revolutionary Shi’a mullahs. Per Prins:
“With rates already near zero, or negative in some countries, there is little-to-no room to maneuver in the event of a looming crisis. After the decade-long money-conjuring policy, one with no real end in sight, one thing has become clear: central bank craftsmanship has been ineffective, at best, and has demonstrated gross negligence for the lasting consequences at worst. The assumption that these central banking policies will anytime soon evoke real growth is as preposterous as it is wrong.”
- Once these paper props are stopped, chaos is certain to result in the Western economy. This chaos was always merely postponed via QE’s “helicopter money” (money thrown from helicopters (to the rooftops of fancy banker soirees?) in the hope that it will do good); this chaos will be even worse because 10 years of failed policies logically means that the West’s economies are far weaker than they were 10 years ago.
- Capitalism is guaranteed to go from boom to bust, but the 2008 bust was both exceptionally bad and exceptionally driven by the US. The policy response was also exceptionally bad and also exceptionally driven by the US, and is also culturally designed to make Western society’s labor and financial laws even more exceptionally like those of the US.
- If Western central bankers wanted to do everything they could to empower their enemy – socialist China – only then can they consider themselves as having been a success. The past decade has seen China soar so high they have broken the glass ceiling of a unipolar world. In slower historical processes, China has floated its yuan since January 2016, no longer pegging it to the dollar, and they have gotten the yuan added to the IMF Special Drawing Rights basket. QE could have changed the nature of Western societies in a good way, as it did in China, per Prins: “In China, conjured money went to building real things, whether they were needed or not, whereas for the rest of the G7, it tended to go into less tangible and more speculative uses.” The idea that China is building “unneeded” things and ghost towns is pro-capitalist propaganda, and is debunked here, but the result is clear: QE has only made China stronger but the West weaker.
- The West has been told that the problem is developing countries not pulling their weight – China (alleged currency manipulation, their “slowdown” from incredible growth to merely fantastic growth, their trade war, etc.), Greece and other weak economies – when both the primary cause of the Great Recession and the primary cause of the continued global slowdown has been due to following the leading ideologies of the capitalist-imperialist West.
- What the MSM has refused to shout from the rooftops is that all these trillions of QE could have gone directly into the pocket of the average person and produced comparatively spectacular economic growth on the macro level and on the micro/individual level. Half could have gone to citizens and the other half to infrastructure growth, and the money-conjuring nations would have assured their people 50 years of success and modernity. Sadly, capitalism does not believe in controlling their banks or their 1%. Instead, as everyone reading this fringe series on a fringe website written by a fringe hack journalist likely already knows, it went into the FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) and created massive bubbles worse than the ones a decade ago.
It comes down to a palpable feeling of social responsibility in government policy – there is none in hyper-competitive, “you have no right to a social safety net” Western neoliberal capitalism: contrarily, there is some of this rather holy spirit in Iranian Islamic Socialism, Socialism With Chinese Characteristics, Cuban-style socialism, etc.
It does not matter if this social responsibility comes from fear of God, or fear of incurring social shame or fear of el Norte, or whatever – results matter in social policy, because they mean life and death; because social policy always has and always will include very real judges dispensing very real (even if unfair) justice. Western distractions like “psychological motivation” are mainly overly-dwelled upon by existential Western urbanites who need to pay a psychologist to get them to finally accept that they are ragingly self-destructive, just like their economic principles and policies.
I will allow you to skip to the final page (of my series, not Prins’): At some point China will be asked to pick up the baton of QE collusion, because they are the only major economy which hasn’t done it yet… and they will not do it.
Why would they save the West? Not just because of their socialist ideals, nor their “Century of Humiliation”, but also because they have already been propping up the US monetarily (along with Japan) for quite some time.
But perhaps realizing that China won’t devalue its own economy via Western economic policies, the US has begun their fourth round of Quantitative easing. Their private media/propaganda outlets are ordering us “don’t call it QE4”, but it’s exactly the same as before: printing new money to give to private banks with no strings attached.
QE, like God, has to be permanent.
Unlike God, there will be a reckoning for QE one day and it will be worse than in 2008.
For now, the West remains righteous neoliberal believers, and heaven rain down furious destruction on any Yellow Vester who smashes the window of a Western bank!
An 10-part series may seem like a lot, but these articles are shorter than my usual output when it comes to analytical series (Part 1 is the longest, or nearly). This series is essentially a continuation, updating and expansion of a 7-part series I wrote in autumn 2017 which also covered the failed Western policy of QE. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, 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.
Thank you Ramin Mazaheri for yor great work!
I have always learn so much from your thoughtful articles!
I look forward to all your 10 parts series :)
May your God be for you and not against you. Peace.
Three questions:
1. Does Prins mention that banks are permitted to create about 90 percent of the credit it “gives”, thus the debitors debt, out of thin air, by monetizing the debtors promise to pay, i.e. the bank is not lending out money it already possesses, as most people believe?
2. Are Iranian private banks permitted to lend out money the same way, i.e. lending out money it does not possess before the creditor signs the loan?
3. How about Chinese private banks? Is all electronic money circulating in China and Iran issued by the Central Bank, or is it like in the West, where only coins and bills are full money, whereas electronic money and book money are only promise to pay governmental money, a promise that can not be kept, as there’s not enough money printed and never will?
(When you take a loan in a Western private bank, you are going to pay interest only on your own promise to pay, the money does not exist before you make the promise, thus the bank gives you nothing – in the US even the Fed is private so all money creation is private there, even coins and bills are made by private owners out of thin air in the USA.)
It’s called Fractional Reserve Banking otherwise called non-existent or ‘thin air’ money that is worth a fortune until….
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-23/fractional-reserve-banking-pure-fraud-part-i
Its created out of thin air, but todays thin air was created from yesterdays promise(s) of 30 year bonds at 15% interest, that started coming due in late 08 and set the pace for the smaller promises to pay whenever and however they would crop up.
It”s monetary inflation and leads to higher prices and cheaper made goods to off set the cost of doing business.
And its actually a public institution b/c the monies go straight to treasury which is a public institution, its private only in the way it does business, which is naturally subject to change or even be eliminated in a default environment. Its basically a dinosaur waiting to become extinct along with its congressional cousin.
All fiat monetary orders to the present have ultimately collapsed, after a few centuries on average. The frantic efforts to keep the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the US petro-dollar system going, including the destruction of Iraq and Libya and the murder of millions and madnesses like negative interest rates and derivatives ‘worth’ over one quadrillion at present, and the comprehensive rigging of all markets from LIBOR to gold, must fail, in the end, cataclysmically. Ordinarily we might possibly begin again after a nice, demand destroying, war, but thermo-nukes make that unappealing. The only way out, and a result that negative interest rates presage, in some people’s opinions, is a massive human depopulation, probably by bio-warfare.
Biological weapons have been talked about as a likely tool of depopulation. They could certainly attempt this. As someone once said ‘they can hide just about anything in those chemtrails’. I believe there has been an effort to cull the world’s population, especially in poor countries. The Gates Foundation was caught giving vaccines which caused spontaneous abortions and sterility for example. I won’t subject myself to any vaccination, and believe me when I say that here in rural Ontario, vaccines are pushed rabidly. The food we eat is slathered with poison and the big ag companies are taking over the food supply with genetically modified poison. If the monied controllers want to reduce the population more quickly such as by an aerosol campaign, how will it not also blowback on them?
wery well noted observation man, I hope Ramin knows that today 97% of money is created by private banks out of thin air, and I think that china is no exception, about iran i dont know, but i beleive it is also similiair.
Marx is having the last laugh, he predicted it all.
Including the financialisation of End-Stage capitalism. He did not, alas, predict the arrival of nuclear weapons and recombinant DNA technology.
It seems we’ll be having another excellent series by Ramin!
Your writing is uplifting as usual Herr Mazaheri, looking forward to read the next 9 parts.
The blindness of the masses to the current economic monetary system is almost too much to bear. The number of so called educated people that do not ask themselves or know where there money comes from and how it is produced is astounding.
I will keep repeating it on the Saker blog, the current economic monetary system is the most absolutely evil and criminal global phenomenon in our current age. It is the basis of and trumps all the combined wars, destruction and occupation that came out of the West in these last centuries, but is now a truly global phenomenon and embraced by the entire world.
The Saker blog is slowly gathering a good amount of material on this topic….It should be gathered into a book, where also the following articles should be included (see also my comments there):
/socialism-land-and-banking-2017-compared-to-1917/
/erratic-empire-downfalling/
There are a great many things a God cant do, it cant control the wicked except with destruction, it cant control the rich, except with destruction, it cant control time, except with destruction. It can’t create much, it cant hardly progress evolution past its current stage, it cant finance its own endevours.
There are some cans, but most of you wouldn’t understand those.
After the CEO, the highest paid executive in Chinese banks are the Chief Risk Officers but even they are outranked by the bank’s Resident Inspector, a staffer from Xi’s most memorable contribution to Chinese governance, the National Supervision Commission[1], a fourth arm of government charged with “making corruption impossible”.
As if that’s not enough, a resident Party Secretary and de facto Board Director has a hotline to the Minister of Finance and, if necessary, to the PM, who has a PhD in economics.
Where banks are concerned, China takes a belt and suspenders approach.

[1] The National Supervision Commission was formed at the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress in 2018 and absorbed the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China.
Meanwhile the organs created to police the banksters in Austfailia, like the ACCC, are so incompetent and corrupt that no bankster need ever worry. And then the apparatchiki end this pernicious ‘public service’ and go off to work-in the banks, for much more money, of course. For services rendered.
‘it went into the FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) and created massive bubbles worse than the ones a decade ago.’
The central banker Paul Warburg said it best:
“The world lives in a fools paradise based upon fictitious wealth, rash promises and mad illusions. We must beware of booms based upon false prosperity which has its roots in inflated credits and prices.”
that was back during the roaring twenties and he was horrified of the implications and all of the government incompetence.
For me now though it is the tax situation which is or must be growing problematic. There are some interesting slides here
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/careersandeducation/the-biggest-layoffs-in-history/ss-AAG4CN6#image=3
and it leaves me with the question how long before our Big Brother can no longer afford the increasing cost of the unemployed? Where’s the money going to come from to pay for all of the services that the welfare state has promised.
Yeah, is it any wonder why socialism is the cry and with it I’ m afraid a coming day where wealth redistribution is the cure really?
also if anyone is interested about the connection to the oil industry some great history about Scotland and England and what she went through to bring oil online. Without oil Britain was more or less finished and wow the money and investment that went into it? wow, just wow! Energy self -sufficiency is a missing feature to in all of this.
https://youtu.be/hP2LnW2vsdw
https://youtu.be/V_9iod_IWmw
@Yeah, is it any wonder why socialism is the cry and with it I’ m afraid a coming day where wealth redistribution is the cure really?
After the all debts are paid off, it doesn’t seem there will be much left to distribute. Derivatives are in the quadrillion(s). Defaults, debt payments, deflation, everything might be worth nothing cause no one with any money wants the stuff your selling.
@Alabama: “no one with any money wants the stuff your selling”
Depends what you’re selling. When money is worth little, goods are worth a lot.
The real question, as Ramin says, is _productive_ investment. For years there has been a tsunami of socalled “money” [EuroDollars?] sloshing round and round the globe without doing much productive investment — except, as Ramin says, in Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, China, Iran; and I would say, in Russia. Libya had very productive investment but Libya has been smashed — possibly beyond repair. I do not know if Iraq invested productively under Saddam — he chose to waste a lot of “blood, sweat and treasure” on wars against Iran and Kuwait — before Iraq too was smashed. As for the EU$A it seems to be stagnant (according to a previous article by Ramin) — possibly because the EU$A does little except going around squeezing and smashing little countries.
Its not that money is worth little, its that no one has any money to spend, and there are still a lot of “stuffs”, a lot of stuffs that now are only worth 10 cents on the dollar b/c no one can afford to buy. And from that point forward not many can afford to produce.
Production will done w/the intention of said produced item lasting a long long time so as to not need resources to continue its operations. This is what a gold std would bring to the table, along w/a lot heartache and pain from the debt hangover.
Don’t forget, milan, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Just sayin’.
When the Everything Bubble finally implodes, America’s Ponzi Scheme economy will burn like tissue paper at ground zero in a nuclear detonation.
Didn’t Henry Kissinger, Trump’s mentor, once boast about making Chile’s economy scream?
That is what America’s economy will suffer to the Nth degree when its financial bubble system goes supernova…..
But isnt this what we are currently seeing in so many smaller country’s around the globe? Growing daily it seems. Many meat products from these country’s has nearly ceased, the shelves(some cubbards) are thinning i’ll bet if walmart went away we’d have a full blown crisis of supply and demand survival at the grocery level.
It probably will arrive, but just about every other country will experience the pain first, by the time it hits here it will be like, what took ya so long.
Great article…from an exceptional writer…
I greatly appreciated his series on the Cultural Revolution [also based on a landmark book by a genuine scholar and academic who actually lived through what he was writing about…I have recommend Mr Mirzaei’s series widely every chance I get]…
Looking forward to the entire series…and this is a great start…calling out the faults of the writer, Prins, is certainly necessary…and it shows that it is important to be able to gather useful information from sources who may not have the entire picture…and even get some important things wrong…
I will refer again to the Great Thinker…
Aristotle, Politics; Book I, Part IX
We note here that even gaining wealth from ‘exchange’ or retail trade is neither necessary nor honorable…since this is about gaining at the expense of others…capitalist corporatism embodies this to its core…
As to lending at interest…this was of course a huge problem throughout history as Prof Hudson’s scholarship has detailed so illuminatingly…
At its root is simple, yet immutable mathematics…lending at interest means exponential growth of money due to the interest tacked on…at some point the real economy cannot any longer keep up with the money-making…real economies cannot grow exponentially, one need only look at a curve of exponential growth…
This was true even 3,000 years ago…even more true today where money is created at the stroke of a key on a computer…all a bank needs is someone who wants a loan…whether a household, a company, or some poor nation [including of course our own government]
And poof…the money magically appears out of thin air…even the so-called ‘reserve’ of 10 percent is meaningless because it can be fudged Six Ways to Sunday…like getting interest free interbank ‘loans’ to cover your reserve…
Was The Great Thinker the first socialist…?
Of course he was…and he breaks it all down so exactingly…
When you break it down to the absolute basics, in the end its all about Usury and what is related and derived from this method. Its not rocket science once you understand how money is literally made and how we historically got to this point.
I never write a comment before reading the article – but I’m so pleased that you’re taking on this topic, Ramin Mazaheri. I will set aside some time for this one.
And already a comment from Godfree Roberts – very good.
What a series this will be – thank you!
Thanks Ramin! I’m also looking forward to this series.
Ramin, good to see you back, with yet another thought-provoking magnum. Your opening sounds like something from Voltaire: cool revolution. I’ve clipped it into my Diary.
“It’s not that the West’s central bankers are infallible – the similarity [to The Supreme Being] is that they cannot be held accountable. After all – who can call God to account for His decisions?
Like God, when things succeed it is They (central bankers) who deserve all the credit – when things fail it’s because we failed to properly follow Their policies.
And like God, they don’t need regulation – it is They who give the regulations, which must be accepted on faith alone and no matter how poor the results.”
Capitalism is antithetical to Life on Earth, as we can see all around if only we open our eyes and minds. As the life-supporting biospheres that sustain human civilization and human existence collapse with accelerating rapidity, due to capitalism operating as designed, all we hear from politicians, economistic witch-doctors and fakestream media presstitutes is ever more hysterical demands for more growth. The capitilocancerous metastases singing from their prayer-book, ‘The world is finite, but we must grow forever, and to Hell with future generations’.
Moreover, as the psychopathic hatred directed at Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion protestors shows, the pigs do not appreciate being diverted from shoving their snouts in the trough. And, as protest grow more desperate, as the catastrophe worsens, it will surely turn violent, if only as a result of police and elite provocations, then a global civil war, between the many and the parasitic and life-destroying few, and their minions and thugs, seems to me inevitable. People will simply not tolerate being force-marched, with their children, into a global gas-chamber.
Greta is a tool of the bankers Ramin is exposing….and did you notice Mulga that Ramin is not anti-growth??
Other than the cancerous growth of their control and fictitious capital those bankers are not at all for the growth in numbers nor in prosperity ……….anywhere of the common man or woman.
And certainly not in China or Iran or Russia that could translate into non-dependence on their Empire Olympian Edicts …and Climate Change Carbon Tax Dictatorship.
And that once economic progress in China is solidified, only then has China given increasing priority to cleaning up emissions..of real pollutants…………not the plant food known as CO2.
First things first, and not being dictated to and never being humiliated again…..comes first! Not the bankers’ False Theocracy Narrative…of NATO’s Club of Rome and Forrester and Meadows and subsequent strategies to kill you and I……..and billions more in the underdeveloped sector.
Growth of WHAT? is the question.
Growth of rentier-financier capitalism is not the same as the forms of capital formation and reinvestment practiced currently in China…….Iran…and the mixed situation in Russia…which do lead to increased capacity of those societies…….to reproduce themselves….at higher levels of technical capacity, education, culture and so forth.
That in turn could make 500 milllion Russians a feasible proposition, living better and cleaner than one third that number today. But your confused, inconsistent axioms and Greta and her handlers are most definitely committed to preventing THAT from ever happening!
They are similarly horrified by the prospect of Chinese investment (OBOR) modernizing …Africa!
There are solutions to these tremendous paradoxes of our age….but other than railing against evil “capitalists” (the left-right dichotomy is MORE problematic even than the capitalist/socialist one IMHO…and is just preliminarily useful as very flawed language to get main points of justice across..because: not all “socialism”…the Fake Left version of AOC, for example with its anti-Life Transgenderism abortion in the third Trimester, etc is just NOT hunky dory…so beware these false, over-simplified dichotomies!!) , it is impossible to even remotely begin to imagine those solutions………..unless one begins to clean up the gross contradictions in one’s axioms…..allowing one to come to a realistic program of how resolve what you’re for and what you’re against …………without falling into bed with the Globalist Empire Enemy…..as you plainly are prone to doing
China and I presume Iran (???) are NOT for depopulating the planet to satisfy Greta’s psychotic pessimism nor the corruption of her criminal parents and those globalist using these dupes.
But China, Russia, Iran (i’d wager!) are FOR getting to a new, more prosperous ……and more populated stage of human development…where a human being other than a Central banker…..or his minions…and dupes ….can be valued as a vital part of the earth’s environment….and a contributor to its further, positive evolution (yes, Change!) and not charged with Rape of Mother Earth…..even before they reach puberty! LOL.
If you think that CO2 is ONLY ‘plant food’, then you are ignoring 200 years of climate science, and the Laws of physics and thermodynamics. CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, and its increase from 280ppm 200 years ago to 415 ppm today (and 490 ppm CO2 equivalent taking other gases into account)is the greatest and fastest such forcing for at least 55 million years, and when such forcings occurred in the past, they caused mass extinction events.. And it is simply impossible to continue growing economies, consumption and production on a finite planet where the life-support systems are already rapidly collapsing. And your hatred of Greta Thunberg is very unseemly, indeed.
Man is the most complex and sophisticated construction in the known universe.
Capitalism has evolved with the infinity of experience in man’s physical and conscious evolution.
In its pure form I think it is highly compatible with our own biological needs and challenges.
Nature herself demands that we compete.
She demands winners and losers.
We can’t stop it.
As much as we might like to.
Same with climate change.
Its not something to worry about. It’s something to get on with, prepare for, look forward to.
On the other hand……..the financial system is broken or should I say it’s near the end of its corrupt and outrageous history. The banks should be temporarily nationalised in each country and the ill gotten gains confiscated ie a one time wealth tax imposed.
The revenues to be donated to Mulga Mumblebrain to try and cheer him up a bit.
The issues we are seeing are inherent within the capitalistic system. I left a post on this last year. it explains the capitalistic system from its very core, and clearly shows why its a system that creates nothing but the proble.s we are seeing today. Its a comment on a previous article. I hope you guys enjoy it.
/capitalism-is-not-the-problem/#comment-515607
Capitalism is cancer, and it will kill its host, humanity, and quite soon.
I’m glad to see others have responded here. It saves me a rant :-) To rail against capitalism but not see the current climate/change/destabilization/choose-a-word-that-fits-your-politicking-today as a very specific further capitalist financial product created by the very specific capitalist forces that are not friends of humankind is of course rather silly and insisting on being in a state of being fully blind.
This thing + Extinction Rebellion + teenage angst is just another created western capitalist derivative, and a very big one at that.
Never does the word ‘peace’ pass the lips of any of these deluded climbers of trains and sticking themselves against boats with superglue. Just watch their clothing and that tells all. But they are fully organized and that means shouting out slogans and talking points, instead of a conversation with the rest of the human beings on this earth. They are fully part of the culture wars of today and cannot save their own bacon, never mind the earth. There cultural attitudes are those of dictators and one has to ask who pays them? There is an answer to that, and it is an interesting answer as it exposes the masterminds, but would be off-topic for Ramin’s blog post.
Mulga, your narrative is fraying at the edges and coming apart from the center.
Your observations are, in my opinion, completely incorrect. The reality of rapid climate destabilisation and the consequent collapse of the planet’s life-support systems is irrefutable. The people peacefully attempting to get this mass extermination event addressed and hopefully reversed, are heroes and heroines. And as I have often observed and you never bother to attempt to refute, the global parasites and capitalists have VASTLY more wealth invested in fossil fuels and ecological destruction, than they ever could have in the resistance to mass extermination. That is why they are the creators and financiers of the denialist industry.
Western bankers are strange creatures indeed. One might even imagine them to be not exactly human. These creatures presume to have the right to give us permission to borrow our own money, so that they can give us permission to build our own stuff in our own land. Everything from our own water to our own toilet paper has a price on it, that they set. This is pure nonsense. These creatures are parasites.
Thank you so much Ramin and I’m looking forward to the other parts. It is so good to see you and your excellent and enjoyable writing.
I get discouraged though, because so few people truly understand even the words capitalism, the many forms that it takes like crony capitalism, or socialism, or growth. Economics may be the one area in our social discourse that where we lack the most education. Again, thank-you.
A decent article identifying the real rulers, along with a bit of critique of Nomi Prins. Of course the International bankers are trying to rule the world.
The Bank of Canada used to be a bank owned by and used for the good of the people. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was very well aware of the danger of letting private bankers run a countries money. It all came to an end in the early 70s when a handful of these private bankers convinced Pierre Elliot Trudeau to not use our bank for loans to fund projects. It would cause inflation they said. Instead, take loans at interest from private banks. Apparently massive and crippling debt is much preferred to inflation (which would not have happened anyway). This new policy has been followed ever since which tells me the four main parties here are all part of the system. We just had an election which saw a new party appear. The Peoples Party were the only ones who seemed aware of this danger and were talking about it. As expected, they didn’t win a single seat and their leader lost his. Even worse, I suppose, but not unexpected, the young, arrogant, identity politics white shoe boy, Trudeau junior gets another 4 years to further wreck the country. He got a strong minority and with the help of the British created NDP party will be able to continue advancing dangerous and damaging laws. Freedom and all that was considered moral and normal are rapidly evaporating here.
I think the writer could have done fine without inserting a slur against my God, of what he doesn’t know or understand. There was no good reason to mention it in the context of this article.
A sure sign of the decay of Christian civilization Craig is that allows its God to be replaced as a ruling sovereignty by the new bourgeois God of Money capital and money fetishism. The Christian God has been displaced by the religion of capitalism. As such Ramin is most wise to offer criticism. All cultures need to orient themselves around a transpersonal organizing principle (God) Ramin does us a service by pointing out the contrast between the West with its phony God of bankers and the sovereign transpersonal powers of Iran and China. Iran has authentic Shia Islam and China has its great Red Dragon. It is with the integrity of theses two religious sovereignty principles that China and Iran are able to hold to a banking system that is subordinate to a higher power – as expressed in their cultures. It is the de-Christianized West that has set up its Capitalist Bankers as a supreme God. Ramin can see this. The agony of the West is that it is now trapped inside the false religion of banking capital. To free itself it must again find its “Goddess”
Hello Mr. Mouldey,
Thanks for your post. However, I did not slur your God or anyone else’s. Perhaps you are referring to this?
“(That is perhaps the theological heart of Islam there, and repeated in every Salah daily prayer. Various stone idols with multiple limbs, the Christian trinity and Western central bankers all are not God because there is only one, single God and His name is God.)”
There’s no slur there whatsoever. I was simply relating that Islam believes exactly that – absolute monotheism – and this parenthetical note was hopefully a bit informative and relates back to the title of this article.
Comparing the Christian trinity to a Hindu idol isn’t a slur in my book, so I don’t understand the offence, and hope this post clears things up. Hindus, Christians and all others who don’t exactly follow “absolute monotheism” can worship whomever they like and with all my respect.
Well, worship of central bankers is really pushing it, but nobody truly does that, I think.
This toleration is certainly ordered repeatedly in the Koran: faith cannot be forced on someone, God confounds whom He will, God leads to Islam whom He will, etc. and etc. This toleration is also rather common sense. Again, no slur intended – peace to all.
Ramin be at peace. I am somewhat surprise you would respond to that at all…
I assure you GOD is either 1) big enough to take a few slur or 2) didn’t even notice didn’t care
But an absolute monotheism god, that i cannot claim anything for him.
When is part II coming up pls?!
With the CB blowing up everywhere, your next piece is highly anticipated!
p/s if you are curious – My GOD is NOTHINGNESS.
Thank you, Ramin, but I was not offended by the statement you quote above. I just thought that, since this article is not discussing theology it seemed out of place. I am also very uncomfortable personally referring to any country in the west as ‘Christian countries’. Being majority composed of Protestants (daughters of the Roman Catholic Church) and Roman Catholics, they are not part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church founded by Christ’s Apostles. Within Protestantism are found all the heresies which the original Church fought against. Rome eventually went it’s own way and continues to morph into something it was never meant to be. The Christian Church does not worship money or the bankers and is against usury. I have a wonderful book here given to me by my priest, The Lives of the Holy Apostles. It recounts many events in their lives. It was typical that with their preaching when wealthy people believed they would give gifts to the apostles who would always refuse to accept them and instructed to distribute to the poor.
Capitalism is a cruel system of greed which enriches a few and impoverishes the rest. I live in the midst of this beast, but I don’t have to behave like it.
I much enjoyed your article, Ramin, and look forward to the Other Nine Installments of the Persian Economic Theory and Practice……Smorgasbord Feast.
I don’t think I ever clicked on any of Naomi Prins you tube videos which I noticed on the right side of my screen’s menu while viewing something else, but henceforth I will….. because of your article and particularly….this portion of it:
“But merely changing Western-centrism to Sino-centrism, with its obvious shift away from the US greenback (and even combined with her correct approval of cryptocurrency) cannot be enough.”
In the last 2 + years I’ve explored the Cryptosphere…..partly because of one of your titles that included “and Grandpa buys Bitcoin”.
There is apparently much fear and loathing when it comes to crypto…..or anything new and different from the previous, contrary experience of most people, most of the time…..however….this should be…could possibly be overcome, particularly here!
Besides the Sinful Capitalist Stigma of Potential Profit…a significant majority would never want to soil their pure socialist souls with…………and the reluctance to tackle yet another “learning curve” there are even more areas of resistance before you or I or Prins or anyone else is going to make rapid headway of engaging other minds in comprehension of even potentially what we are talking about, I have found.
One idea I have to overcome this stubborn unwillingness of the average person here or anywhere to even consider looking into something new that might help overcome the worst injustices of the “One World” Bankers..and their Macrons…Clintons, Bushes, etc is to reframe the question out of that individualist issue of personal gain (even if Granda is a good guy……many here will definitely disapprove of him exchanging any of his fiat for cryptocurrency………especially if he gains handsomely from that exchange….LOL) and into the issue of honesty…and honest versus dishonest money..
Just as I would rather discuss just or unjust economic orders…..as opposed to left vs right politics….(How about neither???) or capitalist (which variety? …there are MANY more than 1…or 3…or 4) vs socialist economic models……..as their is successful as well as failed socialist models….and much grey in between………….I am now of the opinion that Honest vs Dishonest Ledger Keeping is the key moral “entry point” to fruitfully discussing the issue of cryptocurrency in particular……………and Bitcoin (which one??? just like Christianity and many other things………”Bitcoin” has been fragmented….confused …and pretty much confounded beyond the capacity of 99% of even those who are interested………….to discern.
So far, I make no bones about the fact that Dr Craig Wright (who my nearly “one and only” crypto-interlocutor here considers “certifiably crazy” for having very different “passions” than her own……as far as I can see) makes the most sense on this subject of anyone I have yet encountered in the Cryptosphere.
And On Honest Money and Honest Banking……………I’ll stick my neck out..and say that this short presentation of his in Seoul Korea…this very month….should be very much on topic:
https://youtu.be/_EQDiJ92VaI
“We want an honest world”.
And hopefully there will be some followup, because I recently saw Red Pill 78 sincerely asking “trading expert” Bob Kudla about cryptocurrencies
https://youtu.be/5eJFd8GhCWk?t=788
and I had to wince…literally…..I mean Bob K does know quite a bit……..however he also makes ideological mistakes of judgment. (anti-China) …and anyone here can learn more than him, rapidly..if they have any desire to know what you are referring to politically..regarding blockchain and money…., but have no need for nor interest in profiting personally ….on anything.
And Red Pill 78???
I want to call him up and help him out, as he has a long, long way to go….beyond his “Coinbase App” and thinking his BTC is “around 12k”…. It wasn’t when that was recorded recently…nor today….but about 4k less than that….and asking Bob……LOL. !!!
The King Is Very Mortal, Bob.
While I admire your ambition in developing this ten-part series. It would be good to keep in mind that (mostly Western) central banks are merely a symptom, not the cause, of turbocapitalism.
What is needed now, if the human species has any hope of survival, is a new economic paradigm that acknowledges the finite nature of the Earth’s resources and that the Earth is not an infinite sink for exponentially growing waste products.
Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is that human population is 7.5 billion and growing exponentially.
Considering that we live on a small, unstable planet, in an unstable solar system and galaxy, we should consider a new economic paradigm that also accounts for the instability of our life-giving ecosystem, geology and occasional asteroid strikes.
With these limits in mind, the total amount of humans who could live on a very damaged Earth, in a sustainable manner, might be as few as 50 million.
How we get from here to there should be sufficient to challenge even the most creative minds.
Its been agreed that the most efficient way, is to starve them out. More time in the streets protesting leads to less time in the fields producing global foods.
Baldderdash!
Another pessimist, (corrupt) genocidalist.
Some “infinity”! LOL.
The weakest flank of the Multipolar World alliance of of sovereign nation states is located among those of its citizens that have swallowed the Empire Lies of NATO’s Club of Rome….and are selling a Death Wish….Little Suicide Pills like your above post.
All problems have solutions you haven’t even considered thinking about yet…because of the corruption of the oligarchical pessimism that you have apparently eagerly swallowed.
Ramin,
if you critizise modern western banking, you do not go far enough.
How powerful the central banks are us best described by a quote of one:
As long as I issue the money, I do not care who makes the nation’s laws. – Amschel Meyer Rothschild around 1800.
Furthermore, commercial and central banks create money out of nothing and ask interest for the freshly created money.
There have been attempts to lend freshly created money without interest to people but that was stopped.
Germany did that from 1932 to 1945, lybia under Ghadafi’s rule and Canada from 1938 until 1974.
It can be done but the current rulers do not like that those benefits go to the people.