Monday, December 12, 2011

Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West

which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

DBK.ETR chart
Deutsche Bank, Compensation and Benefits 2010: EUR 12'671'000'000

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Financial Corruption

Ron Hera shows some trends in the US (which of course are of great global influence) from the past 10+ years and, unfortunately, ongoing.

By Ron Hera: How The U.S. Will Become a 3rd World Country (Part 2)
Under ordinary circumstances, monetary inflation has the effect of redistributing wealth in favor of those who receive newly created money first.  The value of money is reduced as a function of the number of currency units in the economy but recipients of newly created money can spend it before it loses value.  In a declining economy, however, the wealth redistribution effects of inflation are magnified.

...

Among other things, U.S. tax policies will erode capital formation within the remnants of the middle class, which is the engine of small business creation and the source of most American jobs.  The eventual result will be a three-tier socioeconomic structure consisting of a super rich wealthy class, a much poorer working class and a massive, politically and financially disenfranchised underclass, similar to that of a 3rd world country.