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| He borrowed money! |
The Debt Business: Tonight, pundits, commentators, journalists and other wise persons, will lecture the dumb UK public via the
BBC, on the evils and perils of DEBT. The trailers for this correcting-errant-public-behavior broadcast tell us that private debts among the 63,000,000 Britons has reached the staggering, terrifying, death defying, End-of-the-World, annihilating, crushing total of £1.4 trillion, £66,000 per household.
The trailers have further explained that WHEN INTEREST RATES RETURN TO NORMAL, all the wicked borrowers will be justly bankrupted - and be "cast into the exterior darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth". And it'll jolly well serve all those paupers right, for having the temerity to attempt to join the money-economy - without first having an Eton & Oxbridge PPE, Ivy League education and an inherited family trust fund.
What the people who rule this great nation overlook, and that their tame "Economists" somehow fail to mention at all, is that returning from 0.5% to NORMAL interest rates, by which they mean 5% or more, would gouge £70 billion a year, every year, from the (poor) borrowers - and give it the (rich) lenders. This vast cornucopia of unearned, risk free, effortless income would flow through The City - washing, refreshing and cleansing the dusty gutters and sewers, clogged with bitterness, failure and gall, after the City's immense £1.2 trillion losses in 2008/09. What a blessed relief for "Hardworking Bankers Everywhere". Is it a strange coincidence that "Hardworking Families" are saddled with the same amount the bankers lost? Where have our past 500 years of hard-earned profits gone?
Meanwhile - in the rest of the world, panic has gripped the other 7 billion hapless souls as, we are told by City and Wall Street money market experts, ...as China, the sleeping dragon that has awoken to greet the 21st century, slows its growth programs. China, they say, will grow by ONLY 7% next year. Seven percent is an immense, unprecedented growth rate for a modern economy - and China is paying for the new investment from its own hard earned, saved-up wealth (Corrupt governors will of course export all the cash to tax-havens and then borrow it back - and blame the poor for high borrowing; as do all the western countries). However, the crazed, half-witted, incontinent- gambling, get-rich-kwik, brokers, bankers, hedge-fund managers and individual speculators - egged on by the media who haven't enjoyed a TOTAL WORLD BREAKDOWN CRISIS for 8 years - having gambled like fools with their own and our and everybody else's money; having bet the house (their & our houses) on China growing at ludicrously impossible rates for eternity - are now panicking.
China has been buying raw materials (commodities), fuel and western expertise for several years, to intelligently invest mainly in Chinese infrastructure. This has created jobs and cash-flow and optimism across the land and cheered up the 1.3 billion citizens - who have become consumers - of Chinese and western goodies. Chinese citizens are traditionally also compulsive gamblers. They have been taking a punt on stock market shares in China - and the more sophisticated have been gambling on the world's major exchanges. Seeing 150% growth in Chinese share prices - these gamblers have also bet the house, the wife, the kids and the venerable grandmother - and rushed out, panicked out to borrow even more to back the miraculous "Free Markets".
It is these shortsighted hysterics who are now selling everything they have bought - and crashing the markets - to pay off their ill judged bank loans. And it is the month of August, when the major professional investors, the pension fund managers, who have to invest billions every day of the year, are away, cruising on their, or a friend's, private yacht. So when schoolteacher John Doe, South Bronx, sells 50 shares - there are no buyers - and he crashes the New York Stock Exchange. In August, the investment rule is - do nothing.
What the finger wagging, matured trust-fund media and political babes will, I anticipate, be telling and warning UK citizens tonight is "neither a borrower or lender be". If followed, this advice would of course freeze the global economy forever. What our exalted economists seem incapable of doing is accounting for the rapid growth in world populations, the rapid growth in world communications and thus education of possibilities, and the immense growth in the real-economy-transactions across the world. These blinkered economists have not yet learned that the money-economy is a bookkeeping system for, and servant of, the real-economy.
In post-war Britain, families never borrowed. We saved up for as many years as necessary to buy a washing machine - or a high-tech black & white 12 inch TV. Our greatest horror was indulging in Hire Purchase, Credit-Cards, American Express, empowering the peasants, the lower orders, the working class to borrow and buy their washing machine now, today - instead of saving thru-pence a week for 40 years; and continuing to plunge blistered hands into bowls of washing suds and bleach. We didn't want the Hoi-Polloi, the Plebeians, the undeserving, unwashed poor to get above themselves - and start demanding indoor lavatories, baths and cookers. So we restricted and crippled the money supply for two decades. We made DEBT a mortal sin. We tortured our people (except of course the already rich) with grinding poverty, from 1938 to 1958.
Today's governing economists really must learn to count; and to lubricate the real real-economy. Today's youth won't wait 40 years for their next I-phone or first home.
Gambling on the world's stock and commodity markets - markets on which we all depend - ought to be curbed. This can be done with mandatory time lapses, of weeks or months, between buying and selling, and vice versa. We need to inject reality into the real-economy and banish the speculating idiots and spivs - onto the B-Ark. (Douglas Adams - philosopher and innovative economist).
What next?
BIRTHRIGHT - so we all become Trust Fund Babes.
