LOAN SHARKS – TAPEWORMS – PARASITES – LEECHES –
USURERS – GOVERNORS - JUDGES - BULLIES - MAGGOTS
UPDATE: Covid-19
3rd April 2020
HM GOV is attempting to con the small business community to shoulder the entire bill for the Coronavirus national shutdown.
They are pushing "loans" to small businesses whose incomes have ceased. Most have no income or sales at all; but HM Gov wants them to continue paying wages and salaries and all their overheads. They employ 60% of the workforce. 800,000 firms are forecast to go bust this month.
With no end in sight - incomes and sales frozen for months or years - the owners are expected to borrow heavily and guarantee - YES GUARANTEE - repayment of the loans. Some banks are charging 30% - Yes thirty-bloody-percent on the loans. Loan-Sharking. THINK HOW THEY ARE LOAN-SHARKING THE STUDENT-LOANS.
The owners are not however as daft as they look. Many might have stupidly voted for Brexit which will alone bankrupt the UK, but the firms have only applied for 0.04% of the supposedly available Loan Guarantee Funds. Nobody knows when business will re-start. DO NOT sign any guarantees.
In 1979, I guaranteed and put our home behind a large business overdraft (for 50 employees) just before Thatcher went to war against the Unions - hiking the Base Rate up to 16%, bankrupting 60,000 small business, soaking up all liquidity - and stopping trade completely. It took me 15 years of penury to pay-off, harried daily by bailiff's, debt-collectors, receivers, and assorted thugs employed by the banks.
I was particularly resilient. Most don't have such stubborn stamina. Suicide is preferable to deep, grinding, inescapable debt. Don't sign. Let the business go bust - and walk away. Start again.
BBC 3rd April 2020 "The government has pledged to guarantee £330bn of loans but only £145m (0.04%) has been lent so far.
Small firms say they have struggled with onerous eligibility criteria for the government-backed loans, which are being issued by High Street banks and other lenders.
They have also complained of facing interest rates of up to 30% and being asked to make unreasonable personal guarantees."
For Christmas 2013, George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer for the UK Tory Party (the nasty party) is mumbling about capping UK pay-day loan sharks, sometime – perhaps - maybe - never.
As the super-rich of the UK have sold-off (monetized) all our industries and much of our property and infrastructure and gouged out all the cash and capital to tax-havens, which are now desperate to anonymously lend it (safely invest it) back at usurious rates, this country has only a single “commercial” activity left – money-lending.
To protect and
maximize this lone last gasp “industry” of a nation that was once the world’s industrial
and trading power house, UK
government, courts, police, bailiffs, bully-boys, prisons, enforcers and
Ministers of The Crown, vigorously support all money lenders in charging the
world’s highest official rates to impoverished citizens. Great
Britain has escalated and inflated the price
of money; accompanied by an astonishing example of Double-Speak and Double-Think. It
is the most brass-necked example of being “economical with the truth” or in
plain language, lying and deception.
While the Bank of
England Base Rate sticks at the historic low 0.5% (half of one percent) for
loans to banks and financial institutions, recognizing the rivers of tax-evading
cash offshore – the banks in turn charge customers from 4.5% (nine times) to
5,000% (ten thousand times). The UK rule is that the richest and
strongest can borrow at 3% to 5%; the poorest and weakest pay from 16% to 36%
on credit cards and from 800% to 5,000% on pay-day loans. We pay the poor less
than the official, Scrooge like “Living Wage”; so they HAVE to borrow monthly from
our loan-sharking pals (as seen on TV). Let’s all enjoy permanently bullying
the poor and weak!
Since Thatcher’s Big Bang in the mid 1980’s –
based on Milton Freidman’s crazy sociopathic theories of Monetarism and the
allegedly “Free Markets”, which are in fact all global cartels ripping off
captive customers – the price of money has soared. This is a prime example of a
vast surplus ($32 trillion offshore) being rationed to push up world prices. Money
is not subject to market forces. Pre-Thatcher and Freidman, all UK loan rates above
30% were treated by British courts as usury – “contracts illegal as formed” and
the loan-sharks (journeymen, back-street lenders) were imprisoned.
IF – IF – the price
of money was capped at, say, 5% (ten times base, 90% profit) it would not only
free hundreds of thousands of families from being oppressed by debt, it would
eliminate most bad-debts and save hundreds of millions in enforcement costs. And
it would reduce the cost of each stage of the production /service chain – typically
10 stages from farms and mines to consumption – and reduce most prices by 25%.
It would beat inflation. The very worst, most damaging inflation is that driven
by unearned income; such as interest charges.
Will Osborne and his
nasty party deliver low interest to customers? Can the UK wean itself off loan-sharking,
tax-evasion and bullying the weak – and invest its vast tax-haven hoards into
manufacturing, infrastructure, science, industry, training and justice? Almost
certainly not.
Wait for the
Double-Speak, speaking with forked tongue, and the continuing elevation of the
loan-sharks.
If you are among the world’s
2.1 billion Christians, or 1.5 billion Mohammedans, or 900 million Hindus, 376
million Buddhists, 23 million Sikhs, 14 million Jews; 5 million Freemasons or belong
to other religious and ethical communities; you will know that your organisation
outlaws sinful usury. Now is the time to stand up and be counted. A 5% cap is a
good target.
**********
NB – Australia and other nations have
capped interest rates. In theory Australia has a 48% per year cap on
unsecured loans; the reality for borrowers often breaches the laws. America has caps in some States - and New Zealand is resisting any cap; they love their loan-sharks.
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