English banking terms are designed to deceive people.
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—No rubber words here
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| [1] | ^ “How strangely will the tools of a tyrant pervert the plain meaning of words.”- Samuel Adams, January 1776 |
| [2] | ^ “There never has been a time in our history when we have needed so sorely to hear good sense, to learn to define terms exactly, [and hence] to draw reasonable conclusions…. We are on the brink. It is possible to have another Dark Ages.” - Agnes George de Mille, 1979 |
| [3] | ^ “I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination….knowledge will always rule ignorance. You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.”– Julian Assange (Hastings, 2012) |
| [4] | ^ A couple years ago at research.pasteur.fr, someone posted: “Zinkernagel's theory about publishing papers: Old method, old results, no way; Old method, new results, OK; new method, old results, OK; New method, new results, no way.” |
| [5] | ^ Are the lunatics running the asylum? “In American universities from 1985 to 2005… the number of full-fledged administrative positions [increased] by 85%- and the number of administrative staff by 240%”, even though student enrollments and faculty only increased by 50% (Graeber, 2018b). In the mid-20th century, “when people spoke of ‘the university’, it was assumed they were referring to the faculty. Nowadays it’s assumed they are referring to the administration” (Ibid). See also “Bullshit jobs”, “Usury”. |
| [6] | ^ Prof. Graeber himself, hardly an aca-bureaucratic careerist, confesses: “I can’t remember the last time I read a book. I mean, like, a whole book, cover to cover. It basically never happens” anymore (Graeber, 2018b). |
| [7] | ^ This is not hyperbole. In the UK “in 2017, none of the senior partners of the big 4 firms had built their careers in what should be the firms’ core business of auditing. Worldwide, 2 of the big 4 were led by men who were not even qualified accountants” (Brooks, 2018).. |
| [8] | ^ “We discovered...a pattern that only made sense if it was fraud, and it was fraud that involved using accounting” (Black, 2016c, mn.5). |
| [9] | ^ “‘Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things’. The game as Eisman saw it was ‘crack the whip’. He assumed [that] Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain’” (Lewis, 2011, ‘175’). |
| [10] | ^ “The controls on pay and other internal incentives, they [executives] are always gonna get their way around” (Wolf, 2017, mn.22). |
| [11] | ^ According to Brooks Adams, (1896). |
| [12] | ^ “Banks create [TAB-bank] money by double-entry bookkeeping. That’s all there is to it” (Keen, 2016m, mn.38). |
| [13] | ^ The PCCC is now “charged with producing US GAAP accounting rules for private companies… not publicly listed… Previously, private companies used the same accounting rules as public companies” (Ramanna, 2015, 15-16). |
| [14] | ^ “In the early 2000’s, fair-value [accounting] rules were implicated in some of the accounting misdeeds at Enron that led to the firm’s collapse” (Ramanna, 2015, 13). See also “Accounting, ‘Fair Value’”. |
| [15] | ^ The “zero” here connotes pretty much “zero rights” for the non-armed, non-elite (perhaps because such an abstract concept [as rights for non-elites] was not deemed necessary. 3rd Estate/non-elites had the traditional ‘right’, so to speak, to lounge around for most of the day, unless it was harvest or sowing time. |
| [16] | ^ ...not to mention also varying degrees of availability and honesty/accuracy in “the” historical records that we future generations of researchers have to work with. |
| [17] | ^ The next 3 most imperialist nations- Britain, France and Russia- have “about 30 foreign bases combined” (Vine, 2015). |
| [18] | ^ Life imitating art? (Scutti, 2015) http://www.medicaldaily.com/autism-rates-increase-2025-glyphosate-herbicide-may-be-responsible-future-half-316388 |
| [19] | ^ The School’s initial founder (in the 1870’s), Carl Menger, ”was not quite as mathematical as [Neoclassical founder] Walras, but [he] also spoke about the beauty of Capitalism being that the market lets you decide with limited information. And that’s what the Austrians picked up on… that Capitalism’s real strength is how it handles a disequilibrium…. I think the Austrians are wrong on many other points, but their fundamental vision of Capitalism as a disequilibrium, evolutionary system- that’s valid” (Keen, 2017d, mn.16). |
| [20] | ^ $306 billion was about “2% of US domestic product, and roughly the combined budgets of the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing & Urban Development, and Transportation, and was presented undisguised as a gift” (Lewis, 2011, 261). |
| [21] | ^ The world’s original globalist-private central bank “was half-heartedly nationalized” in 1946, and for most of the 20th century, the BoE’s “approach reflected its social and cultural affinities with the community it supervised, and, at key moments, it was difficult to determine whether the Bank operated as the government’s enforcer within the City, or the City’s representative in government. Certainly, the bank encouraged informal… self-regulation on the part of a coherent group of bankers…. Critically, this regulatory form was strongly spatially constituted: banks were all headquartered within a…[square mile] in the City [as] proscribed by the Bank of England [owners]. The City...today is a very different environment from its…[imperialist era] predecessor… [with] a more codified, rules-based system ” (Tickell, 2003, 123), perhaps due to the post-war influence of the (more stipulatory) Americans. |
| [22] | ^ Nonetheless, much of the UK’s bureaucratic post-war regulatory regime lost favor with the rise of the European Economic Community (EEC), and American bank-corps’ need for a relatively “free” (de-regulated) platform [some would say ‘Trojan Horse’] from which to operate in the new European environment… after Britain joined the EEC, on its own monetary terms, in 1973 (confirmed by referendum, ‘75), and elected the de-regulationist Margaret Thatcher as PM in 1979. |
| [23] | ^ Where there are no glitches in the matrix. |
| [24] | ^ For an approximation of ‘Their’ mindset and methodologies, one may consider seeing also “Smith, Adam (1723-90)”. |
| [25] | ^ Bank “credits” [TAB] or (d.b.t.) ‘deposits’ are not the same thing as “bankmoney” [TAB, + RAB backing] in accounts. |
| [26] | ^ And according to Richard Werner’s empirical investigation of contemporary money-creation practices (in Germany), the Reserve/RAB backing is- in actual practice- not always necessary: “In fact” the central bank “didn’t care about their [loan-issuing bank’s] Reserves. They didn’t even look at how much they had. The Reserves were not affected” (Werner, 2018b, mn.17-18). |
| [27] | ^ With a “fractional reserve system...any actual money...deposited in a checking account, the bank has the right to lend...out as belonging to the bank, and not to the depositor. The legal title to the money rests, indeed, in the bank” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 20-21). |
| [28] | ^ Credit Unions differ from (the post-1999 blurred category of) commercial-investment banks, in that they are: 1) owned by their members/depositors, 2) have different regulations and lower capital adequacy requirements, and 3) are usually locally based, as opposed to (the deregulated) US commercial-investment banks. |
| [29] | ^ “Engine”- as in the primary engine(s) feuling warfare and state capture games in (the famously ununitable) Europe of the mid and late 2nd millennium. |
| [30] | ^ Commercial/deposit banks, however, “are basically limited to holding diversified portfolios of credit assets- [just] loans and investment-grade bonds… [and] may not buy equity securities [stocks] or junk bonds” (Ricks, 2016, 7). |
| [31] | ^ Household debt “is about 80% mortgage debt, and 20% credit card [debt] and short-term loans and stuff like that” (Keen 2018c, mn.21). |
| [32] | ^ Richard Werner and City of London veteran David Buik (Werner, 2017, mn.10). On both sides of the Atlantic, however, most bankers today, or at least “many people working in banks [still] tend to think of banks as pure intermediaries (middlemen between savers and borrowers), and are generally unaware that bank loans create new deposits” (Dyson, Hodgson & van Lerven, 2016, 9). This is because of Economics and CB’s traditional (20th century) domination of the monetary economics sub-field in particular (Still, 2013, mn.5-6). |
| [33] | ^ All chart data, unless indicated otherwise, is from (Congressional Research Service, 2017). |
| [34] | ^ According to a co-founder of US Marine Corps. Intelligence, “It doesn’t matter what the money buys, as long as Congress gets a 5% kickback. That’s the standard kickback [tip] on the Hill” (Steele, 2012, mn.6). |
| [35] | ^ I.e. everyone within the clan-tribe or polity “simply keeps track of who owes what to whom” (Graeber, 36). |
| [36] | ^ Actually, “there is good reason to believe that barter is not…. ancient… at all, but has only really become wide-spread in modern times… most recently Russia [and other fmr. Soviet states] in the ‘90s, and in Argentina around 2002”; although even in such odd cases (of sudden currency disappearance) “one can even find some kind of currency beginning to develop: for instance, in POW camps and many prisons, inmates have indeed been known to use cigarettes as a kind of currency…. The more frequent solution [however] is to adopt some sort of credit system” (Graeber, 37). |
| [37] | ^ Central bank reserves is sometimes misused as an overly inclusive term for RAB money in general (like ‘England’ is not ‘Britain’). |
| [38] | ^ Richard Werner goes further in his suspicion of unlimited [as opposed to, say, more specific ‘food’ or ‘housing’ credits] basic income schemes (at least under the current/banks’ regime), calling “universal basic income… the bribe for microchipping” (Werner, 2017b). |
| [39] | ^ Bernays once defined propaganda as “the executive arm [branch] of the invisible [(or after WW2) “secret”] government (Bernays, 1928, 20). |
| [40] | ^ It is said [S.R.1917b] that, just like rat poison, effective propaganda needs to be at least 70-90% ‘inert’ (more-or-less truthful), or the folks won’t swallow it. Anything not up to that standard should be questioned for perhaps other crooked motives. See also “Attitude Inoculation”. |
| [41] | ^ Similarly, the post-war CIA seems tasked with taking the blame for the UK-USA Empire’s larger military-financial-complex. |
| [42] | ^ Deloitte, in addition to being the world’s largest and most-established accounting firm, is also the world’s top global consultant and management consultant in terms of revenue. |
| [43] | ^ More specifically, the Big 4 now audit “97% of US public companies and all [of] the UK’s top 100 corporations” (Brooks, 2018). |
| [44] | ^ Sometimes pretty much “all the local police forces have gotten addicted to Homeland Security money” (Steele, 2012, mn.146). |
| [45] | ^ Publicly-owned RBS, “a very interesting case”, was responsible for “most” of UK banks’ colossal losses on US mortgages during the Financial Crisis.... (Wolf, 2017, mn.12). |
| [46] | ^ A couple years later, Werner revised this to the Big 5 UK banks accounting for “90% of deposits, which is [still] one of the most consolidated banking systems in the world. In Germany…[by contrast], 70% of deposits are accounted for by 1,500 local, not-for-profit community banks” (Werner, 2017, mn.2). See also “German (industrial) banking.” |
| [47] | ^ “They don’t want to deal with their customers. Actually, they just want to focus on their large-scale customers. They focus on unproductive financial lending, because you can get the big numbers” there (Werner, 2016b, mn.46-47). |
| [48] | ^ https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201213/jtselect/jtpcbs/writev/misselling/sj015.htm |
| [49] | ^ Many “large corporations with a strong incentive to influence public policy give [their] executives bonuses and other incentive pay if they take jobs within the government… Citigroup even… awards additional retirement pay upon leaving to take ‘a full-time high level position with the US government or regulatory body’” (Lofgren, 2014, mn.22-23). |
| [50] | ^ Whereas in the UK the term “Big 5 banks” goes back to at least the early 20th century, in the US it was not something that made sense until the 1990’s-millennial era, as the USA in general was not set up to be a banking corp. See also “Glorious Revolution”. |
| [51] | ^ Prof. Yamaguchi concurs that bitcoin today is being used “as Digital Ingot” (Yamaguchi & Yamaguchi, 2017, 6); and that the “[f]ixed maximum amount of bitcoin sooner or later imposes [a] deflationary trend of its quantity, pushing up bitcoin prices as [the] gold price used to be” (2017, 23). |
| [52] | ^ The main problem with Bitcoin is epistemological, in “that it wants to have a non-trusted system- that you don’t need a trusted party. Well that’s [like] saying ‘We don’t need money to do what money does’. And [so] what has happened instead has been this enormous cost…[in the] verification process, to get proof of…. Stake, which is actually modelling ‘money’, and proof of ‘Work’ is modelling [the absurd concept of] ‘barter’.” (Keen, 2017l, mn.31-32). |
| [53] | ^ According to Danezis & Meiklejohn (2016), there are some “airlines and railway companies, as well as today's telecom and tech giants…[that] have comparable, or even bigger and faster, processing capacities” than do credit cards (Huber, 2018). |
| [54] | ^ US Code 50, 403a, “part of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949”, currently defines a US “Government agency” as: “any executive department, commission, council, independent establishment, [or] corporation [that is] wholly or **partly owned by the United States which is an instrumentality of the United States, board, bureau, division, service, office, officer, authority, administration, or other establishment, in the executive branch of the Government” (United States Code, 2012). **- “Partly” was, and still is, left up to (apparently Deep State) bureaucrats to decide/define, thus enabling the DoD’s ‘national security cult’ or ‘cult of secrecy’ shield to be applied to any privately-owned corporation in which the US government has any share of the ownership, however minor or residual. See also “Mind Control”. |
| [55] | ^ Fitts subsequently revised this, to: “since 1998, $40 trillion has disappeared…and even more [than that] in Quantitative Easing… [It could be] up to $100 trillion dollars” (McKinney, 2017b, mn.5). |
| [56] | ^ That amount “is more than all the taxes that individual Americans paid that year…. It’s like you losing 100% of your budget for the year” (Fitts, 2014, mn.24-25). |
| [57] | ^ “They don’t have the legal authority [or] the legal power… They could get themselves is a situation- and I’ve seen civil servants in a situation- where… they and their families could get hurt” (Fitts, 2018j, mn.21) for going outside and beyond their contractual duties. See also “Deep State”, Shipp, 2017b. |
| [58] | ^ According to Fitts, modern America’s (financial-political) “leadership has always been in a Prisoner’s Dilemma [game, wherein] if they’re the ones who don’t do the organized crime, then the guys who do it are the ones that win- because that’s who the (“modern”) general population will support” (Fitts, 2018, mn.24). “The swamp that exists in Washington exists from sea to shining sea. It’s not just in Washington. It’s in every county, every statehouse in the country. And if we’re gonna change and cleanse ourself of enormous financial dependency on criminal activities, you know we’re talking about a very big change, and it’s not just in Washington. And it’s certainly not something that the executive branch or the Congress can do alone” (Fitts, 2017r, mn.12). Why? “The American people have made it very clear. They want their check…. At the end of World War 2, the United States had 6% of the...[world’s population] and 60% of the world’s resources. So George Kennan at the State department said ‘To keep this going we’re gonna have to drop a lot of bombs’ because that’s a big, you know, unfairness. And so Barry Goldwater ran for president and said ‘We’re going to have to drop a lot of bombs’. And the American people said ‘Oh, no. We’re good Christians. We don’t like that’. So Jimmy Carter came along… and he sat in front of the fireplace and he said ‘Ok, we’re going to have to cut back, because we can’t hog the resources, if we’re going to drop a lot of bombs’. And the American people said ‘Oh, no. We don’t like that. That’s not a plan’. So the Bushes came along and said ‘You know something? Ya’ll are good Christians. Here’s your check. Don’t ask questions’; [and] we said ‘Okay’... The folks at the CIA have been trained that the American people want their check, and then they want their story. I call it the story of ‘I Am Good’” (Fitts, 2018c, mn.24-25). |
| [59] | ^ Sberbank’s current vice-president, Andrey Sharov, ventures even further, predicting that: “‘In 10 years, there will be no banks…. [The] Bank of England has established a consortium of 50 English banks rebuilding their banking models completely… I’ll have no place to work at’. Sharov seems to have confused the Bank of England with [the] R3 blockchain consortium which now has over 40 member banks… [Although the BoE] has been increasingly showing interest in blockchain technologies” (Econotimes, 2016b). Olga Skorobogatova, current deputy chairman of the Central Bank of Russia, has chimed in that blockchain technology “‘is the future, and we need to prepare for it’”; with even Putin’s Bitcoin-phobic “Internet Advisor” adding that, with blockchains, “‘We cannot even imagine how different it will be. When every ruble has a recorded owner, it will become a truly different world’” (Econotimes, 2016). |
| [60] | ^ In other words, If one considers “just the capabilities of blockchains without smart contract functionality, a full implementation [in terms of peer-to-peer accounting] could lead to [the] disintermediation of a large part of the financial system. Private blockchains between groups that often transact with one another could replace central authorities [and middlemen] such as banks, clearing-houses and lawyers. With the ability to directly interact, and with only 1 ledger that never requires reconciliation, businesses could save on both the costs of paying the ledger owner, as well as efforts spent reconcilingwith their counterparties…. The permanent [and unalterable] record of a blockchain reduces the chances for financial crime, thus making records more trustworthy” (ICAEW, 2017, 3). |
| [61] | ^ E-security design is an ongoing concern: “Fundamentally, any kind of asset ledger will have to be designed around the limitations of privacy that a [particular] blockchain creates. While the data in each transaction can be encrypted, if [however] the provenance or ownership of assets is at stake, then [the] prior transactions must [all] be public to verify this. Finding a way to balance the competing [design] priorities of 1] decentralisation, 2] privacy, and 3] security is a current area of research among blockchain specialists” (ICAEW, 2017). |
| [62] | ^ All figures are for 2017 (from The SIFMA Fact Book 2018, p.29). |
| [63] | ^ According to the B.I.S., the aggregate US bond market accounts for nearly 40% of the $100 trillion “global bond market”, with the “EU28” a distant second at $28.2 tn., Japan third at $12.7 tn., and then China at $11.8 tn. (SIFMA, 2018, 51). |
| [64] | ^ See also “Big Government, (growth of)”, “Burien, Walter”. |
| [65] | ^ Like the conventional money supply (M1) is also now dwarfed by ‘near monies’ |
| [66] | ^ But they don’t lead GDP growth. “[A]fter the sharp growth acceleration in 1983 it took over a year for bond yields to rise. For decades...US interest rates [bond markets] have not moved ahead of growth, but instead they followed it” (Werner, 2016c). |
| [67] | ^ More commonly known as N.I.N.J.a or “Liar’s” loans. |
| [68] | ^ The New York Times, December 6, 1921. Edison sounds like he may have read Henry George, who wrote: “What can be clearer than that a note directly issued by the government is at least as good as a note based on a government bond? Yet special interests have sufficed with us to institute and maintain a hybrid [semi-public/semi-private] currency for which no valid reason can be assigned [other] than private profit” (1886, 12). |
| [69] | ^ “20 years ago… the top tech companies chartered the future of humanity…. Saying they’re gonna transcend humanity with government-financed DARPA programs… building their Breakaway Civilization that is designed to make people poor and stupid, so that they can basically be phased out- ‘saving the Earth’ from an infestation of humans. That’s all this is! It’s like an alien force came and did it, but it’s our own species…. It’s like robber-baron meets mad scientist”- Alex Jones (Fitts, 2017p, mn.31). |
| [70] | ^ The Bretton Woods regime was in many ways like a residual or “Half Gold Standard”, since the tighter version of a gold standard had crashed and burned in the 1930’s. The 1943-44 Agreement “was a compromise between the strict discipline of the old gold standard, and the new freedom demanded for national economic policies. When the [(American) Dexter] White Plan and the [(British) J.M.] Keynes Plan were published…[a commentator at the time] suggested that they were [both] ‘essentially gold standard plans’, while Keynes declared that the new proposals were ‘the exact opposite of the gold standard’” (Halm, 1977, 2). |
| [71] | ^ The Borough of Manhattan was the first state or local government to issue a “combined financial statement”, in 1951 (mn.). |
| [72] | ^ “In 1981, because of Bush’s CIA experience- and...also because of… James A. Baker III, who had managed…[Bush’s] 1980 nomination campaign- President Reagan issued National Security Directive 3, naming the vice president to head a special Situation Group to identify national security crises and plan for them. A new era of clandestine arms sales, massive armaments buildups, secret diplomacy, and covert actions, perhaps as much Bush’s doing as Reagan’s, was about to unfold in the Middle East generally and in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan specifically. With it, the seeds of two Persian Gulf wars and hundreds of terrorists strikes would be fertilized and watered” (Phillips, 2004, 207-08). |
| [73] | ^ Bush, unique among U.S. presidents, was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, from 1976-77, in addition to being an agent thereof in the early 1960’s (Phillips, 2004, p.205). America’s 41st president is also in a class of only 5 others [Adams, Adams, Van Buren, Taft, Hoover, Carter] to have been resoundingly rejected for a second term (Phillips, 75). |
| [74] | ^ In the quarter-century from 1992-2016, arguably the only DNCs that weren’t Clinton-centric were 2004 and 2008. |
| [75] | ^ “Risk-weighting…basically...is [when] we decide how much equity we need in a bank, by deciding how risky its assets are.” Banks flagrantly abused this tool in the (2004-07) runup to the Financial Crisis (Wolf, 2017, mn.20-21).ankrup |
| [76] | ^ According to Richard Werner “the whole Basel capital [adequacy] approach doesn’t work...because it’s premised on the idea that banks are just financial intermediaries. But they’re not. They’re money creators. We need bank regulation that recognizes [the] reality of how the banks actually operate” (Werner, 2017, mn.11). |
| [77] | ^ Today “absentee-owned real estate and natural resource extraction are practically free of income taxation” (Hudson, 2017p). See also “Provocation operation (Po).” |
| [78] | ^ ”[T]he government/state never distributes cash into the economy [directly] by paying suppliers or employees with newly minted cash. The only route for physical cash to get into the economy is through withdrawals from ATMs and bank branches” (Ibid, 8, n6). |
| [79] | ^ “[A]ny digital or electronic data processing leaves a trace” (Huber, 2018). |
| [80] | ^ “So they are even willing to adopt this nonsensical negative interest rate, just so that they can have a reason to argue [that] ‘we need to abolish cash’” (Werner, 2016b, mn.117). Keen agrees, that “a large part of that [‘cashless economy’] is conventional economists thinking they can stimulate demand by putting negative interest rates on bank accounts. And they can only do that if we can’t take cash out…. I don’t want to hand over the monetary system to a bunch of people who don’t understand money in the first place” (Keen, 2017h, mn.27-28). |
| [81] | ^ “That would then lead to central banks completely in control. ‘Digital cash’ [oxymoron], centrally controlled by the central bank. We are talking about a totalitarian regime here… the culmination of the 20th century agenda to centralize power... ever-more power in the hands of fewer and fewer...” (Werner, 2016b, mn.117-118). |
| [82] | ^ China’s digital payments market (2016) is 50 times larger than America’s. “...in Shanghai, you’d be amazed…[If] you pull out cash, you’re a dinosaur. Nobody has change. Everybody uses digital payments. It’s all on your phone…. You hit one button you get a taxi. You hit another you got food delivery coming… You hit another one, you’re in wealth management. You hit another one, you get to send digital gold packets...” (Collins, 2017, mn.16). |
| [83] | ^ While a few federal statutory laws, such as Privacy Act of 1974, do “provide some basic privacy coverage for financial records, Congress has chosen over time to strike a balance between privacy concerns and other priorities, especially crime prevention and national security” (Ricks, et al., 2018, 9). See also “National Security Agency”. |
| [84] | ^ See “Greece”. |
| [85] | ^ Actually the US Secretary of Treasury (with assistance from the Comptroller) at least nominally presided over Washington Federal Reserve Board meetings (which were also housed in the Treasury building), prior to the Banking Act of 1935 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2008). |
| [86] | ^ “A central bank has control just over its own [Reserve/RAB] money, not, however, over [TAB] bankmoney” (Huber, 2018d). |
| [87] | ^ Mohammed El-Erian adds that the political “power and influence of central banks have grown by leaps and bounds…. over time”; into a “much more complex management and regulation of the banking system” (2016, xviii). Werner agrees, adding that “What we’ve got is central banks getting ever-more powerful, but not using these powers to give us good results…. In the last 40 years, central banks have been made independent from governments, globally. The idea was...‘We give them more powers, we get better results’. And that...has been absolutely not true. We’ve had more & more banking crises, booms & busts cycles, and [TAB] credit creation not being used for productive purposes” (Werner, 2018b, mn.40-41). “But we do have some very good central banks out there…. It is possible. There are some examples” (Werner, mn.42). |
| [88] | ^ Steve Keen agrees that, globally, central banks have been “...pushing private debt beyond anything it ever reached in the 19th century” (Keen, 2016f, mn.25). |
| [89] | ^ Richard Werner takes a different position from Zarlenga (above), or from Keen (i.e. that they are all just insufficiently intelligent), favoring something of a (central banks-only) conspiracy theory of purposeful obfuscation (as opposed to everyday groupthink/ineptitude). “Obfuscation has served central banks particularly well since they have become...all-powerful: the danger for them in this era of unprecedented powers is that the general public may simply (and rightly) link bad economic outcomes to bad economic policies adopted by central banks, not to the– now far less powerful– governments…. A [conscious] desire by central banks to misinform would explain why they have spent vast resources on ‘economic research’- pseudo-scientific writings that are often far removed from reality, but are designed to place any blame for the terrible economic performance that they [CB’s] have been responsible for on other actors– preferably the government, [government] fiscal policy, or ‘irrational’ and ‘uneducated’ ordinary people...looking for ‘easy answers’ or seeking ‘populist explanations’” (Werner, 2016c). |
| [90] | ^ Half a century earlier, historian Carroll Quigley also concluded that the “public” boards of mostly privately-owned & staffed central banks were mostly just the modern manifestation of age-old corporate shell games: “It must not be felt that the [public] heads of the world's chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather they were [just] the technicians and agents of the dominant [private] investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up, and who were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers who remained largely behind the scenes in their own private banks…. The result of this was that larger and larger aggregates of wealth fell into the control of smaller and smaller groups of men" (Quigley, 1966, Ch.20). Debt-money is and always has been a tool, or leverage, for extraction. And (supposedly) “public” central banks are just another layer of disguise or obfuscation: “In most countries the central bank was surrounded closely by the almost invisible private investment banking firms. These, like the planet Mercury, could hardly be seen in the dazzle emitted by the central bank which they, in fact, often dominated. Yet a close observer could hardly fail to notice...” (Quigley, 1966, Ch.5). |
| [91] | ^ Since “”UK, etc. |
| [92] | ^ Huber just uses the term “central bank money” (CB money) to encompass both interbank reserves (RAB) and intergovernmental federal funds (FF): “No matter in which function– as a fractional [Reserve] base [RAB] for transferring bankmoney, or as [sovereign] digital currency [FF] in public circulation– either way it [CB/Treasury money] is about the same kind of central bank money-on-account. The terms 'reserves' and 'digital currency'...[merely] express different functions and owners… [of] non-cash central bank money” (Huber, 2018d). |
| [93] | ^ TITF implies that such institutions’ “failure would have such a negative impact on the financial system and the economy as a whole that the government would do whatever it takes to prevent such a failure, including...transfers from taxpayers” (Wendt, 3). |
| [94] | ^ The TIA term was coined at a 1999 DARPA conference, prior to the US Information Awareness Office opening in January 2002. Several months later, at the same time that The Minority Report was screening in theaters nationwide, the Office initiated its “Total Information Awareness” program, based on (“pre-crime”) predictive policing and algorithims. After Congress balked at its outrageousness (with the Senate actually voting unanimously for its defunding), the Pentagon successfully eluded their ire by simply renaming it “Terrorism Information Awareness”, or even “Basketball”, assuring Congress that (what would later simply be known as “the NSA database”) would only be used for military-intelligence purposes [i.e. non-commercial and non-personal] against “non-US citizens”. See also “National Security Agency (NSA)”. |
| [95] | ^ Catherine Austin Fitts agrees that the “CIA Act of 1949… endowed it with the statutory authority that became one of the chief components of financing the ‘black’ budget- the power to claw monies from other agencies for the benefit of secretly funding the intelligence communities and their corporate contractors. This was to turn out to be a devastating development for the forces of [governmental] transparency, without which there can be no rule of law, free markets or ‘democracy’” (Fitts, 2006). Steele also concurs that “CIA is basically leveraging the rest of the government [via the CIA Act of 1949] to do…evil everywhere” (Steele, 2017i, mn.56)...as does Reagan cabinet official Paul Craig Roberts. After WW2, “[t]hey began hyping the Military-Security-Complex.… President Truman said [that] he made the mistake of incorporating inside the CIA- which was supposed to just be intelligence analysts. He let them have this Black Ops and this covert operations section, that nobody…[had] any control over. And that is the part which has grown completely uncontrollable. No one knows what it is… [or] what is their budget…. It’s off the books. It’s hidden. They can block any [sic] kind of inquiry on the grounds of ‘national security, and nobody in Congress would dare challenge this crap about ‘national security’. What it means is...security for the security agency that’s committing the crimes…. A President is a mere nothing compared to this kind of power, as Kennedy found out, and as Nixon found out” (Roberts, 2018b, mn.37-39). |
| [96] | ^ In addition to the ‘de jure’ (though unconstitutional) financial privileges mentioned in the note above, there is also purportedly a de facto “CIA get-out-of-jail-free card”, whereby if somebody working for or “helping the CIA and they get caught, the CIA can come in and say ‘Don’t prosecute this person. He’s working with us.’ And that happened on a number of occasions in the S&L crisis, where you have a savings & loan looter… getting caught by the FBI & the Justice Department, and the CIA trying to get them off the hook” (Brewton, 1992, mn.19-20). In maintaining the CIA’s unofficial motto of plausible deniability, “there can be 4 or 5 levels of cutouts and frontmen- layers that the CIA money would flow through, so that it couldn’t be tracked back to the CIA” (Brewton, mn.23). |
| [97] | ^ Or, in other words, “...a secret lily pad within the US government, from which to run the US government” (Steele, 2017d, mn.57).”[P]eople need to understand that the CIA was actually created by Wall Street to be its secret cabal inside of the US government to be the Wall Street mechanism by which it could leverage military aircraft and [permanent standing] military bases overseas to smuggle guns, gold, cash, drugs, and small children… from its inception…. [of, by, and for] The 5% at the top…” (Steele, 2017h, mn.20). |
| [98] | ^ Fitts concurs again, that there “is no such thing as ‘the CIA’. because you’re talking about scores of thousands of people, as well as scores of thousands of contractors. The biggest problem in all this…. is that you have created a legal and financial infrastructure that allows private companies to receive government money on a non-accountable basis...literally trillions of dollars [for] doing [supposedly] highly classified functions…. The fox is in the henhouse” (Fitts, 2017, mn.18-20). “Jon Rappoport calls it [CIA] ‘The Fractured Kingdom’ [laughing].... Imagine having 65,000+ people, plus contractors, and everything has to be secret. Can you imagine what a mess you could get yourself into?” (Fitts, 2012, mn.31). |
| [99] | ^ According to the most famous CIA whistleblower of the 20th century, the CIA is characterized by” a kind of mafia attitude, and it has been that way since Eisenhower” (Agee, 1995, mn.17). CIA “sidekick” organizations include the National Endowment for Democracy, “which is nothing but a major conduit” for bribery (Agee, mn.31), and the Drug Enforcement Agency (Valentine, 2017, mn.). “An old[er] technique of the CIA is to establish a kind of ‘Civic’ organization which will be involved in monitoring elections and things like that“ (Agee, mn.33). |
| [100] | ^ Steele adds that Google CEO Eric Schmidt “is leading the campaign to bury [last year’s] Pizzagate [controversy]. Pizzagate scared the crap out of the elite” (Steele, 2017d, mn.55-56).”Peodophilia has been for generations… the way you create control files on people… [which] is the way you maintain a political structure that operates outside the official law… So if you’re a Shadow Government, if you’re the intelligence agencies, if you’re the secret societies, peodophilia is key to creating those control files…. It was always out of hand, but now it’s been wildly out of hand” (Fitts, 2017, mn.10-11). “Clearly state and local [law] enforcement feel now free to do this…. And I think a lot of the very Orwellian behavior we’re watching in Washington is [that] we have, on both sides of the aisle… a significant number of people in Congress who are compromised by these” operations (Fitts, mn.12). Politicians acting “beyond crazy… [is presumably] because they are terrified about something in their control file…. They’re scared to death” (Fitts, mn.21). |
| [101] | ^ Living in lies? ”Every person that’s reporting to CIA is either a double agent, or under observation…I testified to Senator Patrick Moynihan on this… [that] basically secrets and sources and methods are [primarily] used by CIA to lie to Congress; not to actually ‘protect operations’” (Steele, 2017, mn.10). |
| [102] | ^ According to Robert David Steele, “NSA does not provide signals intelligence support to the clandestine service… [nor to] the counter-intelligence people…. When I was overseas, ” a bottle of Scotch bought me NSA signals in my country, on my terrorism target, for one day” (2018, mn.19). |
| [103] | ^ Feinstein was preceded in that oversight post (a legacy of the 1970’s Church Committee) by Sen. Rockefeller, 2007-09. |
| [104] | ^ It wasn’t necessarily always like that. For example, in “the 1970s and ‘60’s they created the McCone center [for International Relations] at MIT to study political psychology, propaganda, [and] national character… And when you learn those things, you never forget it. And in turn that was the essence of the CIA then. It eventually transmuted into other [contracting] organizations… They offered me endless kinds of jobs. And I said: ‘Guys, I’m not interested. I don’t want to be in the business of being controlled’” (Pieczenik, 2017j, mn.16). |
| [105] | ^ A quick gathering of notable/inside quotes on this subject, in chronological order: 1) “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized…. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government”- Edward “the father of propaganda” Bernays, 1928. 2) The popular internet fake quote that: “The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media”, attributed to fmr. CIA Director William Colby, is in fact based on similar (though less pithy) statements made during the mid-1970’s and the 1976 Church Committee hearings. As related by Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone at the time: “In all, about 25 news organizations... provided cover for the [Central Intelligence] Agency… [Former Director] Dulles initiated a ‘debriefing’ procedure under which American correspondents returning from abroad routinely emptied their notebooks and offered their impressions to Agency personnel. Such arrangements, continued by Dulles’ successors, to the present day, were made with literally dozens of news organizations. In the 1950s, it was not uncommon for returning reporters to be met at the ship by CIA officers” (Bernstein, 1977). Moreover in 1973, CIA Director Colby “told reporters and editors from the New York Times and the Washington Star that the Agency had ‘some three dozen’ American newsmen ‘on the CIA payroll’... [and] in 1976, according to high‑level CIA sources, the CIA continued to maintain ties with 75 to 90 journalists of every description- executives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews. More than half of these had been moved off CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound by other secret agreements with the Agency. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence… at least 15 news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976” (Bernstein, 1977). 3) “” 1981; 4) “There’s been a coup, have you heard? It’s the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They’re the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries…. And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve…. think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They’re in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators... We need to take out the CIA”- Congressman Ron Paul, 2010. |
| [106] | ^ “The equivalent to the CIA in Germany is the BND… which is… [in literal translation]‘The Federal News Service’. Similarly, in the CIA under Obama, about 6 years ago, the CIA introduced a change into how it writes its internal reports- to use the same style that journalists use in writing articles, called the inverted pyramid style, where…[inductively] you put the conclusion [first] up top, and then you justify how you got to the conclusion” (Assange, 2017, mn.5). |
| [107] | ^ Julian Assange adds that the CIA “has a lot to be concerned about…. [as] a very incompetent organization… that gave us Iraq, Al Queada, the destruction of ‘democracy’ in Iran [1953], [the General] Pinochet [dictatorship in Chile; 1974-90], the destruction of Libya [2011-present], the...rise of ISIS [https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/58c7eb00270000ee64749d45.jpeg?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale], and the Syrian civil war [2011-present]. So this is an organization that… [is] either deeply incompetent, or which- even from the perspective of American power- [operates] counter to its purposes” (Assange, 2017, mn.19-20). |
| [108] | ^ More specifically, On Dec. 16, 2015, the FOMC (as implemented by “The Desk” at the NYFRB) “decided to increase [a.k.a. “liftoff”] the target range for the federal funds rate from 0-0.25% to 0.25-0.50%, with the discount rate [ceiling] at 1.0%, the IOER [bobber/float] at 0.50% and the ON-RRP rate [floor] set at 0.25%” (Williamson, 2016). |
| [109] | ^ Although the original 1933 ‘Chicago Plans’ were confidential, Irving Fisher actively promoted his 1939 revision (https://www.scribd.com/document/53641496/A-Program-for-Monetary-Reform-1939) in very broad sectors of the academic community, eventually writing to Roosevelt in late 1944 that “’[f]our hundred other economists have endorsed the idea’” (Phillips, 1995). |
| [110] | ^ “The Government ought, as soon as possible, to retire from the banking and money-lending [i.e. allocating] business, into which the recent emergency has driven it. While depending on our banks to mint [i.e. create] our [new] money, we have come more and more to depend upon Uncle Sam to be our banker and source of [allocating] loanable funds. The appropriate functions of each have thus been perverted to the other…. take the banks out of the money-creating business and put them back squarely into the money-lending business where they belong, and...put the Government in the money-creating business, where it belongs, and take it out of the lending [allocating] business, where it does not” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 21-22). |
| [111] | ^ Adding to the past heritage of confusion over this matter is also the fact that Austrian founding father “Ludwig von Mises (1912) was [like Ricardo in the 1820’s] an advocate of 100% reserves in gold” (Phillips, 1995; passim Laina, 2015). Von Mises, unlike the Chicago Plan or Ricardo, also supported the patently false myth of ‘exogenous money creation’. |
| [112] | ^ “Instead of [supposedly] ‘backing’ deposits with Reserves [which relies on heavy regulation], we [simply] give people access to the state created means of payment itself. Thus, unlike in the current system where 2 types of money circulate separately– central bank created Reserves [RAB]… and commercial bank created deposit [TAB] money... in the…[public money] system there is no longer a split circulation of money, just 1 integrated quantity of money circulating among banks and non-banks alike” (Jackson, 2012). |
| [113] | ^ Friedman’s apparent duplicitousness in supporting both (and thereby also conflating) his new Chicago School [which denied nearly any positive role for government in a peacetime economy] and the Chicago Plan [for government money] in the 1950’s and ‘60s is perhaps best explained by the CP’s original non-s |
| [114] | ^ Such assertions are typically predicated upon land-of-barter mythology [see Graeber, 2012]. For example, Chicago School monetarism “treats the whole economy as if it’s barter. If you look at any Economics textbook, all the way through the PhD, they treat the economy as being barter...” (Hudson, 2016p, mn.6). |
| [115] | ^ Speaking of what historian Niv Horesh has called China’s ‘monobank’ era (1950’s-’70’s), in reaction to Petro-dollar developments, in August 1974 “the effective rate of the yuan was pegged to a trade-weighted basket of 15 currencies, the composition of which was undisclosed to the market” (Liu, 2004). The basket-peg didn’t give way to a de facto US dollar peg until the mid-1980’s, after the mono-bank system was broken up with Deng Xiao Peng’s monetary reforms of the early 1980’s. A de jure peg was set at 8.28 per US dollar in 1995, and lasted until the 2005 limited de-peg and band-limited float. Completing the cycle, in Dec. 2015 the People’s Bank of China announced that it was shifting the yuan’s peg to a basket of 13 [undisclosed] currencies (Wei, 2015). |
| [116] | ^ After two decades often bereft of leadership, China and its current premier “...will eventually face a choice between saving the Communist Party or saving China”, according to Long March scion-dissident Luo Yu. “China today is beset by “environmental crisis, a crisis of faith, a crisis of morality, financial crisis…. There are crises everywhere…. You can’t have both … I’m telling him [Xi], there’s only one way- it’s not like you can do it anyway you like- and the only way is democracy” (Ong, 2016); or more democratic values. See also “Design”, “Parties, political”. |
| [117] | ^ In China the PRC government owns all land, commercial, agricultural, or residential. Home “owners” typically sign a 70-year lease with the government, which either party has the right not to renew. |
| [118] | ^ “China was the largest economy in the world, and then they ran into the Opium Wars and the Brits [in the 1840’s], and basically the ‘West’ used violence [and other forms of dirty pool] to re-assert dominance and then use the Industrial Revolution to...become the lead economy. So China’s experience with the ‘western’ world is that we win by war, and that we win by violence, because that is in fact what has happened” (Fitts, 2018h, mn.36-37), actually through all the millennia of Chinese history (not just something that the ‘barbarian’ culture of the City of London & Economist started). |
| [119] | ^ In the 21st century, it has become increasingly evident that “you’re having, really, the creditor cartel...running world politics…[under ‘economic’ guise. So]...what we’re talking about is not simply a monetary theory. It’s a political theory that’s… driving Russia, China, India…[and pretty much most] of Eurasia out of the globalization orbit [nest], because ‘globalization’ basically means permanent depression for labor, financialization, and if you don’t want want to be part of this, you have to withdraw from the [bankmoney] globalized Order” (Hudson, 2018d,mn.103). |
| [120] | ^ See White & White 2008. |
| [121] | ^ This Chinese bankmoney, however, has been mostly (and in the 20th century nearly completely) issued by the PBOC’s ‘Big 4’ state-owned banks- Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). |
| [122] | ^ “China has a high debt to GDP ratio because most Chinese businesses are funded through [bank] loans rather than through the stock market [and near monies], as in the US; and China's banks are able to engage in massive lending because the Chinese chiefly save their money in banks” (Brown, 2018b) most of which are state-owned anyway. |
| [123] | ^ Keen calls it “People’s Q.E.”, whereby “like a tax refund… electronically. The CB would credit your account... In Australia’s case, this was done, as part of the attempt to soften the blow of the financial crisis… in 2008”; roughly $1000 per every person who “paid their taxes that year” (Keen, 2016o, mn.28). |
| [124] | ^Apparent in this official video from 1954: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/londons-city-welcomes-queen . The City of London, as one might suspect of the place that spawned, in the 1960’s, the offshoring trend in (what were initially) US-UK corporations, “is an offshore center in its own right” (Shaxson, 2011b, mn.1). |
| [125] | ^ The City’s “present role and importance was already taking shape by the late 1950s, when it began to provide an offshore market for unregulated borrowing and lending….[and it has been globally] preeminent in 1] currencies, 2] interest rate derivatives and 3] global banking” (Tooze, 2018), not to mention 4] accounting & auditing, since the 1970’s or 80’s. See also “Three Romes”, “Debt cycles”. |
| [126] | ^ “The common denominator among all the Classical Economists was the distinction between earned income and unearned income.…. [until] John Bates Clark came along and said:’There’s no such thing as unearned income. The landlord actually earns the money by taking all this effort to provide a house and land to renters. And the banks provide credit… Everybody earns their income. So anybody who accumulates wealth- by definition, according to his formulas- get[s] rich by adding to what is now called GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT” (Hudson, 2016d); as was necessitated by two world wars directed at German “socialists.” See “German (industrial) banking.” |
| [127] | ^ “[I]f you had a History of Economic Thought, you’d know that Adam Smith and the adversaries of Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, [that] their idea of a free market was a market free from rent, free from the banks, free from monopoly. But now when you have the Austrian School and Hayek’s talk about the free market, they mean free for the parasite, free for the predatory” (Hudson, 2016s). |
| [128] | ^ Commercial paper maturities can be as short as 1 day (the average is approx. 5 months), and usually mature within 270 days. |
| [129] | ^ Any business negotiates with its suppliers (often about delayed payment or float terms). |
| [130] | ^ When Irving Fisher examined Worgl and other scrip currency experiments, “he concluded that ‘the correct application of stamp scrip would solve the depression crisis in the US in three weeks!’. [However] Roosevelt’s government, aware that such [money-creating] currencies could invoke a massive loss of federal power, promptly banned it”, as Germany and Austria had already done (Monbiot, 20015). See also “Chicago Plan, the”. |
| [131] | ^ Say, for example, from c.1820 (Congress of Vienna), to c.1970 (Petro-dollar ‘free-float’). |
| [132] | ^ John Gregory calls conservatorship “a sort of short-term nationalization” (2015, 6). |
| [133] | ^ And whatever you do, don’t see Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, or Janet Yellin (for they do not know). |
| [134] | ^ ...a.k.a. ‘We The People’. Most of the Unitaries are (de facto) run by the Binaries (via monetary-economic and other forms of indirect imperialism) these days [and particularly since World War Two], so the Binaries have been rather full of themselves of late, and hence in a crisis brought about by hubris. |
| [135] | ^ The Holy Roman Empire-like status the European Union this decade was exemplified, rather extremely, by the sudden replacement of elected prime ministers in both Greece and Italy with unelected bank bureaucrats in November, 2011 (Still, 2011, mn.10-15 ; see also “Lisbon Treaty [E.U. ‘Constitution’]”, “European Monetary Union”). |
| [136] | ^ ...as demonstrated during this BBC pannell (Wolf, 2017, from mn. 110), by The City’s cognitive-linguistic dominance of the Parliament, represented by Martin Wolf and Ed Balls, respectively. |
| [137] | ^ “...even though it was dead, the head still had the potential to turn someone [who was overly ethnicist or otherwise weak-minded] into stone.” |
| [138] | ^ Bad acting (or incredulous script), of course, awakens one from the trance, as surely as Brando-Streep-Cronkite acting (or Kubrick directing) puts one under. |
| [139] | ^ Both Rappoport and Meadors are southern Californians. Outsiders sometimes have a less charitable, and more hierarchical, view of 21st century ‘talent industry’ management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_574Rxxez2c (Moore, 2015). |
| [140] | ^ “If you’re not creating your own reality, then you then you are accepting the reality that’s being invented for you… I mean, that’s the way it is” (Rappoport, 2015, mn.129). |
| [141] | ^ It is common knowledge that even house intellectuals of the latter 20th century such as- most famously- Noam Chomsky were shadow-banned (semi-muzzled) by most of the ‘blue-chips’ of the CMC. For example, New York Times executive editor “Abe Rosenthal had...a sort of unwritten rule that...Chomsky- certainly one of the most important intellectuals in the country- his name was just not gonna appear in the New York Times at all” (Hedges, 2018, mn.16). America’s most renown activist for the era adds that: “In my experience, A.M. Rosenthal[’s]... Washington bureau reporters would tell me [that after] ...he took over the helm of the…[paper, in 1969] that they would send up stories about our exposes- about our testimony…[and] litigation, and [that] he basically took them off the table… And then you know when the Times doesn’t cover the consumer-environmental movement, with the advent of A.M. Rosenthal, then...the network televisions don’t cover it, and the Washington Post doesn’t cover it, because they all look at the Times for, you know, what’s hot- what’s news...” (Nader, 2018, mn.16-17). See also “Debt cycles”, “Mockingbird”. According to Chris Hedges, who worked for the The New York Times for more than a decade, “the space for reporting on issues that corporate advertisers didn’t want reported on” during the A.M. Rosenthal era “was shut down, and remains pretty much shut down” (Hedges, 2018, mn.17). |
| [142] | ^ Independent journalist Greg Hunter, a veteran CMC trooper, adds to this his own personal experience that “The inmates do not run the asylum. I did nothing on ABC and CNN without management [executive] approval” (Fitts, 2017, mn.5). |
| [143] | ^ According to Paul Craig Roberts, it was initially during “the Clinton Administration that 6 firms were allowed to take over ownership of 90% of the… print & broadcast media… [Even though] the American tradition had always been a diverse and independent media, with thousands of media organizations…. This was not something the government decided it wanted to do. It’s something they did to serve the people who pull the [government’s] strings” (Roberts, 2017d, mn.104-105). |
| [144] | ^ “Say everything is a CIA plot: you’re a ‘dipshit crazy conspiracy theorist’. Say everything is a Kremlin plot: you’ll get a newspaper column!”- Neil Clark, Twitter, Nov. 5, 2017 |
| [145] | ^ ...which typically “…writes as if production and business [industrial] conditions take the lead, not finance. It is as if stock & bond prices, and interest rates, reflect the economy rather than influencing it. There is no hint that financial interests may intrude into the ‘real’ [industrial] economy in ways that are systematically antithetical to nationwide prosperity” (Hudson, 2011d). |
| [146] | ^ For an incisive summary on the ownership of the CMC in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, and France, see http://msm.rt.com/. |
| [147] | ^ A 2014 study by Media Dynamics, Inc. also found that the “typical” American’s “adult’s daily media consumption has grown from 5.2 hours in 1945 to 9.8 hours” in 2014 (Papazian, 2014), which is significantly more than any other developed nation. |
| [148] | ^ “My experience with the Washington Post is that the Washington Post is a criminal enterprise…. Reality is in the [FHA] budget, and this is just ‘ya ya ya ya ya ya ya’.... a distraction...a movie” (Fitts, 2017e, mn.43-44). |
| [149] | ^ “People need to understand that the Pulitzer Prize is named after the guy that invented Yellow Journalism… on a foundation of lies” (Steele, 2017l, mn.43), in order to start the Spanish-American War. |
| [150] | ^ Official ‘business voting’ in parliament was only abolished in 1948, and likewise for the rest of the UK (except for the City) in 1969. |
| [151] | ^ What is today known as corporate personhood indeed originated, in the US at least, as “…a mistake in the [clerk’s] recording… and then [from the 1970’s], Justice Powell spent 20 years building up toward [the] Citizen’s United” ruling [in 2010] (Steele, 2012, mn.44) that codified corporate money as 1st Amendment-protected ‘free speech’. |
| [152] | ^ Think tanks have their relative ups and downs in influence. According to former C.F.R. member and sometimes Intelligence Community spokesman Steve Pieczenik, the C.F.R. in recent decades has transformed “into an fossilized dyspeptic version of themselves. What was once a collective body of individuals with innovative ideas became, through time (inertia and just the normal process of aging), a gargoyle of physical and intellectual vulgarity that at one and the same time…[is now] both repulsive and fascinating…. The C.F.R. is not a place for statesmanship and new ideas, but rather a laundry for scrubbing up bunglers who want to belong to something that used to be important” (Pieczenik, 2012). The Council, however, still has the longest members list of any of the public ‘elite’ talking shops (in addition to the globalists’ flagship periodical: Foreign Affairs magazine). |
| [153] | ^ Although MMT advocates often teach that ‘credit money’ goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, actual cuneiform debt records were primarily for commodity debts, where commodities- including commodity money- had been sold or loaned out and payment in commodities (or commodity money) was due back. Alternately, the credit records recorded the fact that a warehouse depositor of goods had a claim on the commodity deposit, a claim which could be transferred (sold) under very limited circumstances. |
| [154] | ^ More modern variants of moneyless credit/debt involve collateral or retention of title, as in a pawn shop or a land contract mortgage. The pawn seller retains an option to repurchase the pawn with interest. |
| [155] | ^ Like the United States is, geographically, a subset of North America. |
| [156] | ^ MMT has simply failed (in supporting this assertion) to distinguish between “sovereign money” (as defined by Huber, below) and what Wray (2011) has defined as “sovereign currency”. |
| [157] | ^ “...the aristocrats of the rating business, 20% owned by Warren Buffett” (Lewis, 2011, 172). |
| [158] | ^ The ratings AAA, AA, A, and BBB are to be considered “investment grade” bonds; whereas BB, B, CCC, CC, C, WR (“withdrawn”) and NR (“not rated”) are “below investment grade” or “high yield”. A rating of D is for bonds that are already in default. |
| [159] | ^ “Money” being, of course, (approx. 96%) commercial bank credits (TAB) under the present system. See “Banksters”. |
| [160] | ^ This term in particular is only intended for the United States, where (in contrast to the UK) there has been greater pluralism in banking (from, as FDR pointed out, “the days of Andrew Jackson”), as well as (since the 1930’s) a much more extensive regulatory rubrick. The point of this entry is that the ‘American exceptionalism’, in the form of the latter, was systematically dismantled in the 1980’s-’90s; followed, inexorably, by a very substantial decline in the former, in the 1990’s-2000’s. See also “Big 5 (High St.) Banks”, “Provocation operation”. |
| [161] | ^ Although disintermediation is typically used as the d.b.t. for the process of moving funds from bankmoney (which is not intermediated) to near monies, in this usage it refers to formerly old-style (‘full reserve’) lending institutions, such as thrifts, being allowed to transform into ‘fractional reserve’ Lending institutions that no longer have to rely on their account holders’ funds for the financing of new loans to borrowers (as per Kumhof’s “Intermediation of Loanable Funds” theory). |
| [162] | ^ In the 1870’s, City of London doyen Walter Bagehot wrote that “‘A banker, dealing with the money of others, and money payable on demand, must be always, as it were, looking behind him and seeing that he has reserve enough…. Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution... is the life of banking’” (Dunne, 1984, 18); that is, until debt-money’s inherent predilection towards debt-saturation and warfare drove sufficient development of Big Government- and big insurance (a.k.a. ‘moral hazard’)- to, a century later, make this observation obsolete. OTC derivatives, for example (nearly all of them owned by TBTF banks), are more gambling than cautious. The moral stricture on risking ‘other people’s money’, or generally doing things without their consent- ain’t what it used to be. |
| [163] | ^ For more on the false, though still prevalent, ‘financial intermediation’/’loanable funds’ theory of banking, see “Exogenous vs. Endogenous (money creation)”. |
| [164] | ^ In “the 1980s, the financial sector as a whole had become basically a criminalized sector” (Hudson, 2017o). |
| [165] | ^ Fitts’ definition: the financial coup d’etat “...was very much part and parcel of engineering the global modelling.... We made a decision at the highest levels of G7 to shift assets out of government and into private corporations... a model where corporations could grow much faster than the GNP, and so many aspects of the general economy were going to get drained as we centralized this control into the corporate model. And...a lot of that was done illegally…. If you’re gonna make sure that private investors and people who own securities get… much more return than the general economy is producing, then somebody’s got to lose. So you’ve created an enormous Win-Lose relationship between many corporate industries and the general population… and that’s one of the reasons we see productivity slowing way down…. I think part of this is just...a real plan to downsize the population and lower life expectancies, and lower fertility rates" (Fitts, 2018, mn.19-21). See also “Provocation operation (Po)”. |
| [166] | ^ According to its CEO, “over 100 banks worldwide...already… use the technology of Ripple for international transactions” (Huber, 2018, 4). |
| [167] | ^ Hence, an other-worldly or supernatural component is also often emphasized: “Culture is the integration of the divine in everyday life.”- John Edward Hurley (Farrell, 2017, mn.4). |
| [168] | ^ “Some day, you’ll know where you are” (on the merry-go-round). |
| [169] | ^ “Little attention was paid to the Currency School position after its heyday in the 19th century… [and] its successor from around 1900, the state theory of money… [was in some ways] ambivalent in terms of Currency-vs-Banking teachings” (Huber, 2017, 2). See also “Modern Monetary Theory” (a product of that ambivalence). |
| [170] | ^ The author[s] prefers to call the 18th-20th centuries, at least in terms of monetary history, the early modern era, as monetary matters are currently in a state of profound change. See also “Monetary Reform”, “Blockchains”. |
| [171] | ^ The 1st thoroughly global World War between international powers was the British-French Seven Years War (1756-1763), which, though more about simply tradelines than the underlying monetary systems, did directly provoke and lead to the 1st Currency War (between the American colonies, with much French support, and the British Empire) in the 1770’s. Obviously aware of the Americans’ success (with sovereign money) in the 1st C.W., the ink was hardly dry on the Treaty of Paris (1783) when the French Revolution kicked off the 2nd Currency War in the 1790’s. It’s not called a world war, and is, rather, belittled with the label ‘Napoleonic Wars’, because the pro-British Federalists prevented America from openly siding with the French (assignat-toting) revolutionaries through the 1790’s, and the conflict was thus limited to Europe, prior to the ascent of Napoleon’s dictatorship, which made the French cause even less popular in the USA, thus enabling the increased British impressment and harrying of American trade lines that would lead to (the British demonstrating some of the things that they could do, in) the War of 1812. The British system [private banks creating their own money via ‘fractional reserve’] attained the upper hand in America then, although its political cementing of the ‘fractional reserve’ monetary system and economy would not be realized until the 1860’s (“national banking”/FRL era) and, moreover half a century later in the 1910’s (“central banking”/FRL era), when- one should be clear about this- America’s full support had to be attained in order to put down the monetary-economic uprising of Germany and its (state money-friendly) ‘industrial’ capitalism, by any and whatever means possible. That 3rd Currency War (1914-45) is what mostly people call, somewhat incredulously, the First and Second World Wars, as if no one up until the 1910’s had even thought of ever challenging or probing some of the weaker and less just aspects of the British Empire and its fractional-reserve-based monetary/imperial system. The ‘World Wars’ (prior to the founding of the ‘Intelligence Community’ in 1947) The Currency Wars (prior to the I.C.’s internet) 1. Seven Years War (1756-63) [French loss motivates heavy support for the] 1. American Revolution (1775-81) [Am. vic inspires] 2. French Revolution & Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) 2. The Great War (1914-19) [-the same-] 3. ‘The Great War’/’2nd 30 Years War’ (1914-45) 3. The ‘Second World War’ (1937-45) |
| [172] | ^ French support enabled the colonies to break away from (mostly unpopular & useless/parasitic) British political control, but (it would turn out only 5-6 years later) not entirely from British monetary-economic control. See also “Fiat”, Jefferson 1813b. |
| [173] | ^ British operations to counterfeit/inflate-away the French sovereign-fiat Assignats were successful by 18__ (unlike their efforts 15-20 years earlier to sabotage the American sovereign-fiat Continentals, which were salvaged by the French and Robert Morris’ personal wealth). See also “Congress of Vienna”. |
| [174] | ^ Americans, like Pres. Madison, actually thought that they [apparently possessing the only national identity & nationalism in the new world] would easily take large portions of Canada in 1812. Instead, Americans usually found themselves on the defensive from latter 1812 through 1814 (when Madison had to surreptitiously flee the White House on horseback). Andrew Jackson’s Battle of New Orleans in Jan. 1815 was after the commercial treaty had already been prepared in late December, and had no effect on the final terms that Pres. Madison and Congress agreed to in February. Although the British military had usually proven stronger (including a successful blockade that was strangling the American economy), the nationalist Americans were not about to roll over, and there was, by autumn 1814 (six months after Napoleon’s abdication), not much of anything that either of the war-weary sides could realistically hope to attain, apart from restoring trade practices to what they had been like before the Napoleonic Wars had moved the British to seriously impress upon and harass Americans’ trade lines with Europe. |
| [175] | ^ There was substantially more monetary systems divergence during the 1st C.W. than in the 3rd C.W., by which time ‘the international’ system was, it could be argued, just ironing out a relative wrinkle of (public-private) difference, between [given that thesis] the ‘public-controlled’ (by only a slight majority) Reichsbank of the early 20th century (Zarlenga, 2002, 579), and the ‘privately-controlled’ (by only a slight majority) US Federal Reserve from 1914-35. In any case, the (mostly UK) “banking school” teachings & (mostly German) “currency school” teachings of the 1st half of the 19th century had substantially converged (given standard practices and exigencies of imperialism) by the early 20th century, although the ideological heritages were still salient. See also “Congress of Vienna” (which had probably already decided the (new ‘globalist’ order) issue in favor of 1. bankmoney [TAB] over 2. sovereign-state [RAB] money. |
| [176] | ^ Theories of Hitler’s madness [being useful for attainning a 100% ‘unconditional surrender’ of Germany- then the primary nation standing in the way of Finance Capitalism’s ‘globalist’ agenda] aside, the modern re-introduction of ‘total war’ (targeting civilians & economic livelihood), which characterized the 19th and 20th centuries, was due more to the development of technology than to (imagined or thrown-down/after-the-fact) ideological differences. Freud’s (somewhat ethno-centric) “der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen” is perhaps also a useful explanation for the then-unsurpassed brutality of 1] the original 30 Years War (Europe’s first 2-sided civil war), 2] the US Civil War, and then 3] the senseless slaughter of tens of millions of innocent civilians in Europe’s 2nd 30 Years War (a.k.a. The First World War & Second World War). |
| [177] | ^ Debt is to Interest, as the bill is to the tip. |
| [178] | ^ “During the time that the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy [as opposed to equality] takes hold” (Graeber, 121). Hence the German word for it is schuld (literally ‘guilt’), and the Russian dolg (literally ‘duty‘). |
| [179] | ^ Debt is the only form of obligation that is precisely quantified. |
| [180] | ^ Two decades after the widespread debt write-offs and re-settings of the 1940’s, “in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble. But the [early stage] dynamics were there…. [I.e.] The more banks lend, the higher prices rise for real estate… And the more prices rise, the more banks are willing to lend- as long as more people keep joining what looks like a perpetual motion wealth-creating machine. The process works as long as incomes are rising. Few people notice that most of their rising income is being paid for housing…. At least that is what worked for 60 years after World War II...” (Hudson, 2015, 2). |
| [181] | ^ In the mid-20th century (yang/nationalist era), Carroll Quigley noted that governments’ “control...over central banks varies greatly from one country to another, but on the whole [it] has been increasing” (1966, Ch.5); whereas in the 1980’s-90’s “central bank independence” was nearly religious mantra in all corners of the corporate media. |
| [182] | ^ To some insiders, this might seem like a euphemism for monopoly capitalism: “This economy has been engineered over the last 40 or 30 years to basically rig things so that all… businesses flow into big corporations… we’ve been centralizing, and we’ve been using government to do it…. Again and again and again you’ve been subsidizing corporate America, by basically stealing from Main Street” (Fitts, 2017g, mn.21-22). |
| [183] | ^ ...that now “control everything from a center and treat us...as nothing more than digits in a spreadsheet… I got exposed to this mentality while I was at Harvard Business School. It’s very real. The masses are nothing but spreadsheet digits to these people” (Vrabel, 2011, mn.133). |
| [184] | ^ In the 1960s, for example, “banks required a 25-30% down payment by the buyer, and limited the burden of mortgage debt service to only 25% of the borrower’s income. But interest is now federally guaranteed up to 43% of the home buyer’s income. And by 2008, banks were making loans [with] no down payment at all” (Hudson, 2017o). |
| [185] | ^ When money and debt were scarce and low after WW2, “back in those days, banks were still scarred by having caused the Great Depression, which called the 2nd World War, and banks were incredibly conservative after that whole experience and very limited in what they’d lend out and [it] was very tough to get money from a banker. You had to go put your suit on to see the bank manager. Now [after 7 decades of debt-money accumulation], the bank manager comes around to you in a Lamborghini and offers you… [at least one] credit card at your door” (Keen, 2017h, mn.26). |
| [186] | ^ Keen adds that he would prefer to see the debts simply “written off”, as opposed to being (perpetually) covered up with increased government spending [on who knows what]. Rather, a “Quantitative Easing for the People” would target new government money directly to individual accounts, for the express purpose of reducing private debts (Keen, 2015). |
| [187] | ^ DFNM is so named because it is initially issued or injected without interest. |
| [188] | ^ “There is a lot of evidence that, as the financial sector has gotten bigger, its contributions to productivity growth [and] the allocation of resources across economies and across time has deteriorated; and I think it has had very perverse effects- in addition- on the distribution of income. So it’s not clear what we are buying for all this [financial] instability…. This system is an unspeakable mess” (Wolf, 2016, mn.1:09); because it is predicated upon the use of inherently extractive bank credits (TAB) as ‘money’, an exigency that developed over the centuries of endemic European warring and scrambling to attain (i.e. quickly develop) as much of the “New World” as possible. See also “King James’ Bible (K.J.B.)/70 Year Plan”. |
| [189] | ^ as the Dutch Revolt (80 Years War) demonstrated as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries. |
| [190] | ^ The institution of Debt-Money provides the primary criminal opportunity for certain interest groups to siphon off citizens’ wealth, be it cautiously or aggressively. See also “State capture”. |
| [191] | ^ As of 2016, the US holds approx. 1/4th of all the prisoners on Earth, incarcerating “at 8 times the average rate of other first-world countries…” with 96% of inmates not receiving a trial; “[w]e are spending billions of dollars more than we need to… [looking] like a fool in the international space”- Carlson Business School lecturer Sarah Westall (McKinney, 2017, mn.38-39). |
| [192] | ^ A debt-money system is one in which all or nearly all [national or state-stamped] money is born into existence as an interest-bearing debt. See also “Reform, false.” |
| [193] | ^ Apparently Prof. Keen has given up on this 3rd category of private debt (as have researchers at the B.I.S.), “just because the data is really bad” (Keen, 2016y, mn.27). |
| [194] | ^ Circa 1945-2008, US private debt-to-GDP went from about 1/3rd, to 170%, with debt growth outstripping GDP “virtually every year…. Now of course you can’t keep on going to… 6000% of GDP. The deadly line is...something between 1.5 and 2 times GDP… When you get to that point, so many ventures fail to get the...revenue they need… So many people can’t carry their private debt and so on, that the economy falls over [debt saturation] and we start to have very small demands coming from credit… and that’s happened globally… Effectively we’ve become constipated on too much debt, and the only solution is to reduce the private debt level” (Keen, 2015e). |
| [195] | ^ “There isn’t much left for the [debt-money] vortex to suck in, to keep fuelling the storm’s growth” (Vrabel, 2011, mn.123). |
| [196] | ^ From 1980-1994, pioneering debt securities accounted for 1/3rd of the “non-equity liabilities of US non-financial firms, whereas the corresponding number for Japanese non-financial[s]...averaged only 3%...and in Europe…[the] percentage ranges from 0.2% in Germany to about 10% in France…. Domestic debt securities issued by US non-financial enterprises have been of the same order of magnitude as financial firms” in the 1990’s (Schinasi & Smith, 1998). So the United States has gone from enabling private banks to issue money in the early 19th century, to enabling even non-financial corporations (if large enough to meet the million dollar minimums) to issue shadow banking/near monies in the late 20th century, which are now of substantially greater volume than the actual US [TAB-bankmoney] dollars. See also “Shadow Banking.” |
| [197] | ^ In “the law, and we have Supreme Court judgements on this, there is no such thing as a ‘bank deposit’” (Werner, 2018b, mn.19). |
| [198] | ^ Statement balances “ought no longer to be called a ‘deposit’. Actually… [they are] a loan to the bank” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 21). |
| [199] | ^ “The legal facts are very clear, but not very well known. Banks do not ‘take deposits’, and banks do not ‘lend money’…. How is that possible?...Legally… they borrow from the public, because your money at the bank is not on deposit. It’s not held in custody. It’s not a bailment. What is it legally? You have lent money to the bank. So the expressions in banking are designed to mislead what’s really happening…. You are just a general creditor…. [and] No bank has ever lent any money…. Banks purchase securities…. loan contracts [based on] your signature. That’s what creates the money supply…. promissory note[s]” (Werner, 2015b, mn.51-52). “A bank account…. is a record of a bank’s debt to the public” (Werner, mn.53). See also Bank of England, 2014. |
| [200] | ^ not the ‘military-industrial-complex’...as if President Eisenhower was a Marxist in terms of (‘industrial’) rhetoric. Carroll Quigley noted in the 1960’s that |
| [201] | ^ Catherine Austin Fitts points out that this is not exactly correct, because with “a police state you have 1 centralized party that is in control. This… [situation today, however,] is...completely out of control… The governmental structure has lost the monopoly on force. And now you have multiple...sovereign players from around the world [that are now] within any jurisdiction. So we have foreign intelligence agencies...private intelligence agencies- a.k.a. mercenaries- and...government agencies all behaving in...lawless ways… which all traces back...to the fact that the US government is managed on a financial basis, outside the constitution” (2017, mn.17-18). See also “Federal Reserve Bank of New York.” |
| [202] | ^ For example, the 1912 platform for Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party officially stated that: "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day" (Roosevelt, 1913, 578). They won 88 electoral votes and more than 27% of the national vote. 1920’s New York City mayor John Hylan also preferred the term “invisible government”. |
| [203] | ^ For example, 2-time presidential candidate and former Congressman Ron Paul’s comments on then president-elect Trump: “there is an outside source which we refer to as the 'deep state' [from 1860’s] or the 'shadow government' [from 1950’s]. There is a lot of influence by people…[who] are actually more powerful than our government itself, [than] our president” (Paul, 2016). |
| [204] | ^ According to CIA whistleblower Kevin Shipp, the Deep State “secret government…. has 10,000 secret sites within the United States... 1,271 private corporations… that have private operational contracts… [and about as many] other federal agencies… [in addition to] all the military-industrial contractors, which is hundreds of thousands of people… [And all] CIA or NSA secrecy agreements [whether with contractors or with government employees are binding] for life... [meaning that] their entire retirement system, their family’s finances and everything else is dependent on that…. It has got 100,000’s of Americans tied-in financially with their retirements… many good Americans [are] in bondage like that” (Shipp, 2017, mn.30-31). The “apparatus” of penetrating US officials, “including judges” has been going on for about “30 years” (mn.33). The “encouraging thing about all this… especially for me as a former federal agent… is [that] Donald Trump is not a part of this apparatus” (Shipp, mn.33). In January 2018, Shipp clarified his terminology somewhat, establishing that the ongoing intra-governmental conflict that surfaced in 2016 was basically between older “Deep State” and newer “Shadow Government” gears. Fellow ex-CIA talker Robert David Steele has suggested the reform that government employees “should lose their retirement pay if they work for a contractor- period. It’s time we had a government of, by, and for the people” (Steele, 2012, mn.9), not the Wall Street-owned contractors. |
| [205] | ^ According to the foremost researcher on the subject, “the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money, and its ability to co-opt resistance, that it is almost impervious to change… [And] it is populated with leaders whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those same policies in the future” (Lofgren, 2015, 216-17). |
| [206] | ^ According to William Binney, the “FISA court didn’t even know about…[the searchable NSA database] program until February of 2002...4 months after it had started” (Binney, 2018c, mn.16-17). |
| [207] | ^ Catherine Austin Fitts adds that “There were many other conduits were public and private intelligence agencies were listening [in] without that F.I.S.A. warrant. The system is out of control” (2017, mn.17). |
| [208] | ^ According to a co-founder of US Marine Corps. Intelligence, the OMB “in the 1970’s...made a very specific decision that they would just be the green eyeshade types that move the money. And there’s absolutely no coherence and there’s no evidence-based reasoning behind any policy that the US government pursues. It’s all about ideology and paying off campaign contributors and basically the [President’s] cabinet secretaries are [just] there to serve the people who get the taxpayer money, not the taxpayers…” (Steele, 2012, mn.50). |
| [209] | ^ As of April 2017, no one seems to have a clear answer as to what has happened to Trump and his administration during the first 100 days. Ex-CIA activist Robert David Steele “whether he’s been blackmailed, or he’s under mind control- which CIA has taken...to a whole new level. It’s...out of the bag. It’s not just CIA. Yale sells it to everybody. So [George] Soros and Blackwater and all these other bad people have [such technology]. There are many different ways in which Donald Trump may been flipped…. The last possibility is that he’s being really clever and is going to have a Wednesday night [cabinet] massacre…. [vis-a-vis] Mike Pence, the Deep State vice president-in-waiting” (Steele, 2017d, mn.47-48). The “Deep State...is not the Shadow Government. It is above the Shadow Government, looting all of us” (Steele, 2018, mn.27). |
| [210] | ^ ...since at least as far back as the 1940’s, according to CIA-State Dept. psy-ops pioneer Steve Pieczenik (2017c, mn.1-2), although the surveilling and blackmailing has generally been getting (increasingly) worse this century. Pieczenik, a self-proclaimed leader or spokesman of the I.C./Shadow Government patriots/nationalists (as opposed to “globalists”/imperialists) also noted later that year, that “...we have to ask ourselves ‘Are they [20th century institutions] relevant?’ Do we really need a senator and congressman? The answer for me, is no- not in the world of the Internet. They’re totally irrelevant. They take our money. They waste our time” (Pieczenik, 2017k, mn.5). See also “Parties, political”. |
| [211] | ^ Six-term Congressman Rick Nolan says things are very different in the 2010’s than they were when he first served, in the 1970’s. Since the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling in particular, “both parties have told new members [that] they should spend 30 hours a week on calls- and the prospect is keeping people from running for office. ‘I could give you names of people who've said, “You know, I'd like to go to Washington and help fix problems, but I don't want to go to… become a midlevel telemarketer, dialing for dollars”’ (Master, 2016). |
| [212] | ^ CIA whistleblower Kevin Shipp asserts that once a company signs a contract with CIA, “they are bound by the CIA secrecy or non-disclosure agreement for life… [and] not just the CEOs, but [also] their employees… their secretaries- anybody that has access to that contract is now [supposedly] bound by the CIA… [There are] thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans that work for these companies that are bound by CIA secrecy agreements and [supposedly] can’t talk about what they see, even if it’s unconstitutional or illegal…. It is aside from the constitution. It does not follow the constitution. It’s [unconstitutional] charter does not really command it to follow the constitution… Then you’ve got the CIA’s outer nodes, which are these multi-billion dollar military-industrial contract companies that are locked into the CIA, locked into the NSA, with these massive contracts… [Shipp has] been there as a program manager. There is no question about it. They won’t even question what the CIA is doing.... So that’s another node of this matrix called the Shadow Government or the Deep State” (Shipp, 2017b, mn.5-6). Specifically in regards to Silicon Valley, CIA “as they did with the military contractors, they’ve gone out and they’ve recruited segments of…[the Valley] They helped found Google, with advisors, seed money… [and] Amazon has just entered into a $600 million contract with the CIA, and purchased the Washington Post. We’ll talk about that node later… The internet technology segment of the US is now a part of the Deep State, because it is [supposedly] bound by CIA contracts…. I keep going back to that secrecy agreement because that is the glue that holds this whole thing together” (Shipp, mn.6-7). See also US Code 50 U.S.C. 403A. |
| [213] | ^ Prior to the creation of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1974…. [t]he president’s budget was… literally the only source of budget data…. On the bulk of [budgetary] line items, the president’s proposals tended to be rubber-stamped by the appropriations committees” (Barnett, 2017). The CBO was regarded highly in the 1980’s. In this century, however, the reputation of the CBO for accuracy has substantially declined (Santopietro, 2017). |
| [214] | ^ Although the E.M.U. and Lisbon Treaty severely restrict public sector money creation in today’s E.U. |
| [215] | ^ The ancient Greeks, of course, “had other words...that either meant or related to the idea of ‘common people’” (Olin, 2018). |
| [216] | ^ Leaving the ancient Greeks out of it for the time being, popular usage of the term democracy reaches back at least a century prior to its perversion (fascism), back to the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who actually feared democracy, and others like him (and often others even less charitably inclined toward the 3rd Estate) who had assembled at the Congress of Vienna in 1815-16 in order to [post-’continentals’ and post-’assignats’] basically make the world safe for bankmoney. See also “Currency Wars, the”. This author agrees with Fitts that- apart from ‘voting rights’- America in the 2010’s is, in many ways, less ‘democratic’ than it was through most of the 20th century- certainly in terms of those ‘voting rights’ having any meaningful, impact beyond the local level- or even being counted in a way that inspires any confidence. This is in addition to the American public’s (or non-elite/3rd estate’s) traditional zero-influence on either monetary or [with the exception of 1968-70] foreign policy. One should not conflate the presence of corporate media outlets with any reasonable (as opposed to Orwellian) idea of ‘democracy’- a word of dubious pedigree that has done perhaps more harm than good thus far this century. |
| [217] | ^ “The basis of what drives housing prices is...accelerating mortgage debt…. Your flow of demand is really driven by mortgage debts… If that flow of demand is greater than the flow of supply you’re going to have rising prices” (Keen, 2016w, mn.18-19). |
| [218] | ^ For more detail on Latvia’s pilot study (for P.I.G.S.) of debt peonage, extended family co-signings, “50% flat tax”, and “highest tax on employment in the world” combined with the “lowest tax on property”, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Bf4d1oIqk |
| [219] | ^ “The credit risk of derivatives contracts is usually called counterparty risk” (Gregory, 2015, 12). |
| [220] | ^ The most common underlying assets for derivatives contracts are: stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, interest rates, and market indexes. |
| [221] | ^ The “interest rate derivative market is something like 80% of the total [in] derivatives” contracts, “which, before they changed the counting procedure… was $1.48 quadrillion” (Zang, 2017, mn.8). |
| [222] | ^ In 1994 Fortune magazine quoted a bank executive calling derivatives “’the basic business of banking’” (McLean & Nocera, 2011). |
| [223] | ^ Fmr. Goldman Sachs VP Wallace Tuberville also lists “$700 trillion” for 2012. According to the B.I.S. 2014 was near the peak, and the ‘global derivatives market’ has since declined to $613 tn. (SIFMA, 2018, 57). |
| [224] | ^ Derivatives “swaps markets are highly balkanized and many are dominated by [just] 1 or 2 banks” (Tuberville, 2013). |
| [225] | ^ All of them are from the US, and in the usual order: 1. Citigroup (at $54 tn. in self-reported OTC derivatives), 2 JP Morgan Chase, 3 Goldman Sachs, 4 Bank of America, 5. Morgan Stanley, and 6. Wells Fargo (Office of the Comptroller, 2017, table 2). |
| [226] | ^ personalized/emotionalized…’in your face or business’ (not just some abstract), for the purpose of captivity/enserfment and/or destruction, almost always by way of dishonesty. |
| [227] | ^ Westerners, since the naming of ‘Europe’ in ancient Greek times anyway, have not necessarily taken state capture (a.k.a. grand theft state) as some inevitable force of nature, but as something rather more like a crime (and something stupid) that should be corrected. Hence, the ‘natural force’ of Shiva, or (to oversimplify) yin side, was not just written off as half of an inexorable cosmology (program); it was, rather, intentionally demonized as a willful/scheming ‘bad actor’ provacateur, standing in the way of all things good & proper- i.e. whatever was ‘politically correct’ or most popular at that time. |
| [228] | ^ (increasingly) characteristic of the past several centuries |
| [229] | ^ http://positivemoney.org/2016/02/time-for-a-digital-government-mint-financial-times/ |
| [230] | ^ Positive Money now (2016) seems comfortable with the gradual abolishing physical cash, though there is nothing like that in their (2012) book. |
| [231] | ^ The ”team of financial elites who authored the Mayoux Report echoed a widely held perception...associating perverse incentives that undermined the smaller-company sector…[with] the [traditional] underdevelopment of provincial financial centers, the concentration of finance in Paris, and the [ongoing] neglect of [Small & Medium Enterprises] under dirigisme” (Posner, 2009, 77). |
| [232] | ^ The FFR is the New York Fed’s daily calculation of the average rate of interest on interbank [RAB] loans between US lending institutions. |
| [233] | ^ American Banker (est. 1836) admits that “Dodd-Frank has been cited by large banks today as protecting them from competition by smaller banks” (Verret, 2018). |
| [234] | ^ The Federal Reserve overseeing its own member-owner banks is essentially self-regulation, as national central banks have long been ‘self-regulated’ by the B.I.S. club in Switzerland. |
| [235] | ^ Beyond the wildest dreams of even the greediest Persian, Roman, or British imperialist. |
| [236] | ^ As of 2001, “68% of global currency reserves” were in US dollars, up from “51% a decade ago” (Liu, 2002); this (unprecedented) global hegemony mark being passed in the wake of the Persian Gulf War (i.e. the 1st Petrodollar War). |
| [237] | ^ Russia, for example, in 2015-16 banned GMO production and imports. There they can only be used for scientific experiments. |
| [238] | ^ “One Million Kids Under Age 6 on Psychiatric Drugs”- apparently children, even under the age of 6, are no longer spared from the new century’s rule-of-thumb that approx. 1-in-6 Americans are on some type of (chemically-rebalancing) psychiatric medication (Zerohedge, 2018). |
| [239] | ^ In the November general election, Clinton also benefited from “about 3 million illegal voters… [which has] been documented…” in California (Steele, 2017l,mn.42). |
| [240] | ^ Essentially a civic-minded (inclusive) patriotism, or “Civil National Identity”- an ethos characteristic of relative prosperity in times of honesty and freshness/creativity. This same cyclical pattern of social (i.e. “national”) identity has been prevalent in all civilizations on this planet (White & White, 2008). |
| [241] | ^ exemptions & favoritism |
| [242] | ^ Also known as ‘post-war’. Peter Drucker suggested that the transformation to a post-modern [self-aware] world transpired between 1937-57- essentially the era of World War Two and its diplomatic aftermath. The concept of ‘modernity’ developed hand-in-hand with the normalization of (sovereign nation-based) standing armies in the West; the concept of post-modernity with that of war’s madness. Let’s not be fooled into throwing out the baby (national sovereignty) with the bathwater (our current ‘modern’ system’s slope towards excessive debt and militarization-warfare). National sovereignty and public accountability for policy matter now as much as they ever did. |
| [243] | ^ “Modern Economics treats all of the theft- the capital transfer, the transfer payments... as if it were all productive- as if all income is earned" (Hudson, 2012b). |
| [244] | ^ Hence, “the vast majority of economists…delusionally model the macroeconomy as if banks, debt and money don't exist” (Keen, 2015b). “...mainstream Economics [ignores] the possibility that private debt has any role to play in the crisis we’re in” (Keen, 2015e). And”in fact the hostility to non-orthodox views inside the [Economics] profession is worse now than it was before the financial crisis” (Keen, 2016j, mn.8). |
| [245] | ^ Over the 2nd half of the 20th century, Economics and business schools came to constitute an "...academic system that doesn't teach the history of economic thought anymore... so the very concept of economic rent is wiped out. The theory is [that]... 'everything is productive as long as you can pay the banker'. This is what you have to raise the level of abstraction and discussion to, if you want to get widespread support..." (Hudson, 2010b). “[P]eople are not aware either of how destructive financialized management and planning has been... or of the alternative developed by the Enlightenment, classical political economics, and [the] Progressive Era reforms" (Hudson, 2012g). |
| [246] | ^ What has changed since Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, c.1680, said it all: “What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, proved false again? Two hundred more” (Spurgeon, 1870, 483). See also “Censorship, academic”. |
| [247] | ^ The Neoclassicists’ beliefs on natural ‘equilibrium’ necessitate that they “argue...that you can ignore [the role of] banks… debt, and...money when analyzing the macro-economy- except for...the role of increasing government money supply on causing inflation… It is totally and absolutely at odds with the real world, and it frustrates the hell out of me that I’ve got to waste my time even discussing it. But that’s the mainstream view” (Keen, 2016e, mn.23-24). “I once gave a talk to a group of international philosophers from peace organisations and described some of the methodology that economists use. I had them laughing in the aisles” (Zarlenga, 2007). |
| [248] | ^ In other words, the vast majority of Economists “have been more-or-less brainwashed, during their training, in using the wrong methodology- the [classically medieval] deductive method, and they should instead look at [inductive] reality…. The natural sciences all use the inductive methodology. And that’s what we need...” (Werner, 2018, mn.6-7; 11). |
| [249] | ^ And also- perhaps most incredulously for the 20th century- no large institutions. Economics undergraduates “still… imagine that if they stick with the subject, then sometime in graduate school they will at last get to study the [real] world of big firms and complex organizations. The few who make it that far are eventually disillusioned” (Galbraith, 2007, xxiv). |
| [250] | ^ I.e. “It isn’t a money warehouse. It’s a money factory”- Steve Keen (Hudson, 2016s). |
| [251] | ^ When banks are the primary “creators of the money supply… [they are also] deciding about the amount and allocation of new money creation” (Werner, 2016c). See also “Monetary Reform”. |
| [252] | ^ Both Neoclassical and (their primary opposition) Austrian Economists still subscribe “to a childish textbook model” from the 1930’s or earlier, so that “you have one bunch using it to manage the economy, and on another side a...bunch of Austrians who think that they’re going to abolish this form of fraud… One side’s trying to implement- and the other side’s trying to abolish- something that doesn’t exist” outside of textbooks, the primary effect of which has been “driving up asset prices” (Keen, 2017l, mn.20). “Individuals, the very focal point of traditional economics, no longer matter very much” (Galbraith, 2017). What is to be done from this dead-end? “You can’t change the thoughts of somebody whose mind is trained into a tunnel vision. You have to do what was done a century ago and create a new discipline. Unfortunately, Sociology has met the same fate as Economics, [both] largely at the hands of the University of Chicago. So you have to have something… a different discipline”, with a different name (Hudson, 2016p, mn.17-18). |
| [253] | ^ Straight talking Economics insiders agree that the field “is stuck… [and] cannot really bring itself to adjust to the fact that…[its] thought is not particularly pertinent to the major problems that we face…. Compared to what Economics was 60, 70, 80 years ago- a very diverse group of people- what you have now is a machine that produces a substantial uniformity [as opposed to university] of thought” (Galbraith, 2018, mn.1), that was really only relevant to the 2nd Industrial Revolution era (‘the long 20th century’) and that time’s primacy on marshalling everything into ‘market’ economies of scale. |
| [254] | ^ “The classical economists… were trying to shift all taxation to economic rent…[which] is a term that means a profit above a normal profit” (Roberts, 2017d, mn.18). They tried to do this because, “what the [fractional reserve] banking system does…[is] it takes those rents and capitalizes them into debt instruments which result in [more] interest payments to the banks” (Roberts, mn.21). But with “Neoclassical” economics, however, “the banks [simply] bought off economists. And the classical economists lost the argument that said ‘We mustn’t be taxing things like labor, [and] production’. No. We want to tax these economic rents that have no justification [and] no cost of production. That’s what you tax’” (Roberts, 2017d, mn.21). |
| [255] | ^ ...as would later happen [irony intended or not] in communist societies such as the USSR (1920’s), P.R. of China (1950’s), and Mozambique (1970’s); or under other forms of dictatorship such as Libya (1980’s). |
| [256] | ^ With the desertification trend throughout southwest Asia from c.2300 BCE- farmers turned from wheat to (more salt-tolerant) barley, and then barley also failed, and populations declined, encouraging the transformation of bronze ploughshares (from c.3000 BCE) into swords. Raiding pretty much increased throughout the entire 1000’s BCE in particular, until professional raiders, armed with the new, harder iron weapons, ended ‘Bronze Age’ civilization in the Near East, c.1200-800, a.k.a. the ‘1st Dark Ages’ or ‘Bronze Age Collapse’. |
| [257] | ^ With the Occident and Orient, however, it seems that not so much is known. |
| [258] | ^ The Shang Dynasty (c.1675-1046 BCE) approximately covers the Bronze Age in (northern) China, wherein, in order to oversee the backbreaking, labor-intensive process of making pottery from the new, harder alloy, the systematic expansion of central government authority over large areas was first enforced. Like the Near East, what is today China experienced, from c.3000-1000 or so, a general drying trend. In China’s case, it was also a cooling trend, as cattle and horses took the place of elephants and rhinos, and also a trend that grew more pronounced from 1500 BCE and even more austere from 1100 (forcing great migrations to the south and eventually China’s 1st Intermediate period [771-221 BCE]). |
| [259] | ^ Schiedel, 2009. |
| [260] | ^ The ugliness and rapaciousness of terminal-stage Roman usury appears to have also been primary motivation for the formation of Islam (the youngest and most recent of the world’s great or mostly transnational religions) in the 7th century. |
| [261] | ^ In many respects, the term ‘Dark Ages’ stuck with the professional (monied/public salaried) historians of future centuries simply because perhaps the only thing they could all agree upon was that there was a distinct lack of both written and coined historical resources for them to work with, i.e an acute shortage of historical light (much more in Europe than in China [which was simply politically corrupted/subinfeudated, in what they would call the “Dynastic Cycle” as opposed to any ‘western’ notion of a determinant ‘monetary cycle’) characterized the half-millennium… And nearly any other conclusions beyond that were a matter of conjecture, prior to the advent of modern archeological methods. (Hence Early Medieval history has been in the process of being more-or-less re-written this century.) |
| [262] | ^ More than 3 centuries later the issue of monetary accountability is still salient today. See appendix C “1-2-3”. |
| [263] | ^ See Still, 2012 |
| [264] | ^ In terms of physical cash (notes), “it is estimated that between 50% and 70% of all [US cash] notes, or between USD 310 billion and USD 435 billion, is now held abroad” (Batta, 2003, 153), with 29% of that aggregate in the former Soviet Union, and 23% of it in Asia/Oceania (p.154). Most “dollars in international commerce move through banking channels…. [More specifically], Wholesale dealer banks purchase from the FRBNY approximately 90% of the US dollars that are exported to the international markets. Most of the remaining purchases are distributed among the offices of the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco and Atlanta…. [T]he principal international distribution and consolidation hubs for US banknotes” are Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where US banknotes usually arrive “bundled in blue plastic wrappers from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing” (Batta, 156; 157). |
| [265] | ^ US lending institutions’ “Eurodollar borrowings’” in 1994 totalled $221.4 bn. (Roussakis, 1994, 176). The term eurodollars also includes “the use of international banking facilities (IBFs) by [individual] foreigners residing in the United States” (Burton, et al, 262). |
| [266] | ^ For example, in the 1970’s, “a bank headquartered in Illinois found it easier to set up an office in London than to set up a branch across the street, because…state law prohibited banks headquartered in the state from establishing a branch within Illinois” (Aliber, 87). |
| [267] | ^ In practice, the “precise line… depends on the exact interpretation given to ‘short-term’ and to ‘banks’.” (1971, 3). The BIS, however, simply defined eurodollars as: “dollars that have ‘been acquired by a bank outside the United States and used directly, or after conversion into another currency, for lending to a nonbank customer, perhaps after one or more redeposits from one bank to another’” in 1964 (Goodfriend, 12). |
| [268] | ^ ”That giant sucking sound” of dollars and jobs leaving the United States was well underway prior to Dallas billionaire H. Ross Perot forecasting it in 1992-93. See also “Debt cycles”. |
| [269] | ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5QWcJu0fp4, mn.29-31. |
| [270] | ^ Russia, for one, “did not want to place its oil revenues in dollars in US banks where they might be frozen by the US government during the Cold War era” (Mendelsohn, 2006, 12). |
| [271] | ^ Amadeo (2017) estimates that “during the 2008 financial crisis” the figure was 66.6% ($18 tn. out of $27 tn.). |
| [272] | ^ Amadeo (2017) lists $18 tn. in eurodollars “during the 2008 financial crisis”. The comparable figure for USA dollars on account for 2008 is $7.8 tn. (given US M2 of $8 trillion, minus $200 bn. for circulating cash). Thus, based on Amadeo’s estimate, the grand total of $25.8 tn. dollars on account in 2008 was approx. 70% eurodollars, and 30% USA dollars. In 1980, Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. estimated the “gross size of the Eurodollar market at $943 billion…. [up from Morgan’s] earliest estimate… [of less than] $20 billion in 1964” (Goodfriend, 1981, 13). |
| [273] | ^ The “Eurodollar market is essentially a short-term market; most loans and deposits are for less than 1 year” (Ehrhardt & Brigham, 2016, 728). |
| [274] | ^ Eurodollars borrowings have positively correlated with interest rates. The borrowings have primarily been measured in “liabilities of US banks to foreign branches”; although in December, 1990 the Fed also increased eurodollar volume by removing all reserve requirements on US banks’ eurocurrency “liabilities and...[nonpersonal] time deposits… [thus eliminating] the cost of net transfers from [US] banks’ overseas offices to their US offices” (Roussakis, 1997, 175). |
| [275] | ^ As Hudson has pointed out, the disabling of funding government was intended. “The whole idea behind the creators of the ECB is that governments [should] have to pay commercial banks to do what they could really do for themselves, for nothing. They let commercial banks use their computer keyboards, to create hundreds of billions of dollars worth of IOU's that bear interest. Whereas the [traditional] Central Bank [i.e. Bank of England, Federal Reserve] has its own computer keyboard. It could create this credit, just as well. But the ECB doesn't... so the ECB is, from the outset, a [disabled] creature of bank lobbyists" (Hudson, 2011b). The primary result of this condition, for Europe, is that government deficits now shrink the economy (through financial leaching), instead of expanding the economy. |
| [276] | ^ The 12-member “European Community” (EC) of the early ‘90s, as the EU was often called prior to its November, 1993 name change to “European Union” (EU). |
| [277] | ^ Why the passive voice? Paul Craig Roberts has “always understood that the EU itself was a CIA creation, in the sense that the CIA wanted a unified Europe, because it's easier to control the EU than to control all the independent countries. And...the United States was very much frustrated by [French President, 1959-69] Charles de Gaulle's unwillingness to join NATO or to follow American direction" in Europe (Roberts, 2018, mn.10-11). “All the [other] European politicians have done for 75 years is kow-tow to Washington… except De Gaulle“ (Ibid, mn.19). |
| [278] | ^ Ambrose Evans-Pritchard agrees that the Fiscal Compact’s “rigid structure makes it impossible to jetisson a policy regime that amounts to slow suicide… The eurozone needs a complete demolition of the Stability Pact” (2016c). |
| [279] | ^ From 2004-09, the Corruptions Perceptions Index recorded worsening scores for bribery in 10 EMU nations, versus lessening perceptions of bribery in only 4 EMU nations (Verluise, 2010). |
| [280] | ^ This is because the Eurozone’s banking/debt sector holds liabilities of approx. to 300% of Eurozone GDP; whereas in the US this ratio is a less extreme 200% (Stelter, 2018). See also “Japan model, the (asphyxiation).” |
| [281] | ^ EU’s list of overturned plebescites: (Keen, 6/18) |
| [282] | ^ Steve Keen adds that “Often these guys”, at places like the Bank of England, “are subservient to what they’ve been taught- and the people they get taught by- in academic institutions. To come out and say ‘Listen you academics, you’re wrong. This is the actual mechanics… And we have to rewrite Economics to reflect that’. It’s a sign that those institutions, which used to be dominated by academic economics, have shifted away, largely because they have to wear the reality of being wrong…. I respect the Bank of England’s research staff… the OECD… [and] the I.M.F… [All] this is true progress, and it’s not coming from the academics so much. It’s coming from those big institutions, which used to be the ones that lead us astray” (Keen, 2014). |
| [283] | ^ Hudson concurs that Economics textbooks, for many decades now, have been modelling “a fictitious economy that in theory would work without money or debt” (Hudson, 2017o), or also, by inference, the banks that issue debt-money. For economists to deny that banks’ extensions of credit [TAB] create the debt-money/bankmoney that comprises the M1 money supply is as if fish were modelling the existence of their environment without water. |
| [284] | ^ This is even though sources such as the Encyclopedia Britannica clearly explained the bankmoney creation process through the 1st half of the 20th century (in its 14th and 15th editions): “When a bank lends… two debts are created; the trader who borrows becomes indebted to the bank at a future date, and the bank becomes immediately indebted to the trader. The bank’s debt is a means of payment; it is credit [debt] money. It is a clear addition to the amount of the means of payment in the community. The bank does not lend [real] money” (Hawtrey, 1929, 1951), but, rather, simply its own [TAB] credits. |
| [285] | ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz4aNwlNrsg |
| [286] | ^ Somehow it appears that only the Big bank foxes were aware of this bankmoney accounting reality in the 20th century. Were ‘They’ doing a poor job of guarding the proverbial chicken coup? Well, they fooled you. There was no chicken coup. |
| [287] | ^ And if they did (have something to do with the authoritarianism), that would be a different case, of either “Charismatic Authority” (see White & White, 2008) and/or “Charismatic dependency”. |
| [288] | ^ The US’ “entire pharmaceutical supply is highly dependent on China, and the quality control issues are frightening” (Fitts, 2018h, mn.36). |
| [289] | ^ I.e. the USG financial laws and the US constitution. In announcing the new policy, the FASAB claimed “that if they didn’t do this, then the only alternative was to redact the Department of Defense financial statements, which meant that you would have to redact the US government financial statements, which means that we have reached ‘never-never-land’ [a.k.a. ‘czar’ accounting]. Which means the whole thing is a joke” (Fitts, 2018h, mn.26). |
| [290] | ^ Gears-within-gears: ”The Defense contractors who work for the federal government...and provide all the products & services, you now have no idea what their financial statements mean, and you have no idea what DoD’s financial statements mean, which means [that] you have no idea what the US government financial statements mean, which means, as a matter of [illegal] policy, that you have to give them… complete financial disclosure, and honest financial disclosure, by pain of law, or you go to prison, but they [thanks to, since the 1990’s, various ‘czars’ in the Executive] can make up whatever they want… They can publish financial statements that are complete fiction with no accountability to you” (Fitts, 2018h, mn.26-27). See also “Privatization”. |
| [291] | ^ Is this why all cryptos were called “coins” in the first place? |
| [292] | ^ Ranking by total assets reported, as of March 31, 2015. JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs. |
| [293] | ^ The Federal Funds “overnight” rate is not to be confused with the term “overnight” deposits, which is another deceptive banking term for checking accounts/(TAB-bankmoney). |
| [294] | ^ ‘Modern Monetary Theory’ uses and exaggerates US Treasury influence on (what is predominantly) Federal Reserve US monetary policy, in order to advance the theorem that the latter is somehow not a consortium of privately-owned banks, albeit with a titular Board in Washington for dispensing propaganda and statistics. |
| [295] | ^ Sort of like the winter curling sport, the Fed makes a very big deal out of its interest rate- as opposed to quantity- theory of money. Hence “the New York Fed...intervene[s] every day in [the] financial markets- through Open Market Operations, which are the purchase and sale of assets by the Fed- to try to bring the [actual/‘effective’] fed funds rate as close as possible to the target [rate, which has been] set by the [Washington Board’s] FOMC” (Williamson, 2016). See also “Interest rates”. |
| [296] | ^ Estimates for the number of staff at the FRBNY or Washington Board are often inconsistent. Estimates that we’ve seen for the former in recent years have ranged from 2,600-3,200; whereas the Board staff appears to have increased from 1,500 in 1987 (Mallaby, 232) to about 1,850 in 2007 (Federal Bank of New York, 2008). |
| [297] | ^ “It’s one financial operation that runs a lot of the money for all of the agencies” (Fitts, 2017q, mn.47). |
| [298] | ^ What the Federal Reserve does control, however, is certain academic publications (and hence promotion) in its arcane field. Monetary Economist Richard Werner briefly outlined some of Fed’s tactics for maintaining dominance (group-think) at a recent AMI Conference: 1. “‘You have to publish in a very small number of journals’”; 2. “’We’ll have to let you go if you don’t publish in these’”; 3. “the Boards of these journals” are stacked with Federal Reserve economists. The ‘Top 20’ journals in Accounting & Finance are edited by Federal Reserve economists. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking has “96% Federal Reserve people on its Board…. I’d love to do research on this [the F.R. Board], but I’m not allowed to…. Milton Friedman in 1982 said that ‘The Fed should be abolished, because it is a vested interest group… One guy at a desk in Treasury could do the job of the Fed’” (Werner, 2014c). See also “Academia”, “Economics”. |
| [299] | ^ Numerous court cases have ruled on this (superficially tricky) matter, and all of them on the side of the Fed being privately-owned, and thus a private entity (or “federally created instrumentality” in the Court’s prefered euphemism), regardless of the president-appointed Board in Washington. See: “United States Shipping Board, Emergency Fleet Corp. v. Western Union Telegraph Co.” (No. 113; 275 U.S. 415; 1928) ; “Lewis v. United States” (680 F.2d 1239; 1982) ; and “Scott v. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City” (No. 04-2357; 8th Circ. Ct of App; 2005). The FRBNY itself even admits this reality, slyly, when it makes statements like: “New York Fed employees are subject to the same conflict of interest statute that applies to federal government employees” (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2018). The ‘issue’ of Federal Reserve ‘public’ or ‘private’ ownership has always been the same and is only for dupes, especially after the Banking Act of 1935 restructurings made the System more clearly ‘independent’ or private in its outward appearance. See also “Public-Private Partnership (PPP).” |
| [300] | ^ “[T]here is an ambiguity involved– because the president appoints the Washington Board for 14-year periods. But once he appoints them, they are out of his control for 14 years. There is only one appointment [term]… They don’t get a second…. But you don’t find a Ralph Nader being appointed to the Federal Reserve! It is essentially dominated and controlled by the banking fraternity” (Zarlenga, 2007). Hudson adds that, although the president appoints the FRB, the real “problem is that the banks own the government [parties]; not that they [just] own the Federal Reserve! They have veto power over whoever is put in" (Hudson, 2012h). |
| [301] | ^ There are no legal grounds for stating that the FRS is “public” in anything other than its titular board in D.C., which has no direct powers (only “supervisory”) over the 12 privately-owned Reserve Banks, as stipulated in the Federal Reserve Act. The Fed likes to say that “the Federal Reserve System [like Congress] is not ‘owned’ by anyone” (FAQs; March 1, 2017). The fact of the matter, however, is that its dividends (reported profits distributed to owners) are disbursed, bi-annually from the Reserve Banks, to the legal owners/member banks, prior to any net profits being remitted to the US Treasury. The Fed admits this on its FAQs site (Ibid), but seems to think that we’re too dumb (or too tired/suspicious of their Fed-speak) to know what dividends are. |
| [302] | ^ Just a “politically savvy concession...to those who opposed further concentration of power in New York City”, first schemed out at Jeckyll Island in 1910 (Wallace, 103), and not very important to the overall mechanics of the FRS… although they can produce a lot of (often useful) statistics, in addition to the propaganda and P.R. |
| [303] | ^ The DMA goes back at least to the old “Division of Financial and Monetary Affairs” established in 1944. |
| [304] | ^ The DIA goes back at least to 1934 and the old “Division of International Finance”, as distinct from the larger DRS. |
| [305] | ^ The DFS is the new name for what was the (Dodd-Frank created) “Office of Financial Policy and Research” from Nov. 2010 up until the May 2016 name change. Prior to 2010 the Washington Board had a staff of over 200 (neoclassical-trained) economists “divided into [only] 3 main groups: research & statistics, monetary affairs, and international finance. The directors of each group are the chairman’s main advisors….the Fed staff [economists often know]... more about data such as the breakdown of the number of automobiles sold to businesses and consumers than does the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which reports the...GDP data. Some of the governors of the Board [however] have complained that senior staff economists at the Board have more power than they do… because the chairman has so much power, and the senior staff members have the chairman’s ear…[And] the governors are not free to use the staff as they please; only the chairman does…. ‘There’s an old admonition that we remember from grade school arithmetic: Show your work’. But he [fmr. vice chairman of the Washington Board (in the mid-’90s) Alan Blinder] was never allowed to see it” (Croushore, 2007, 437-38). See also “Groupthink”. |
| [306] | ^ Its failures in this are not just recent. “The Fed has never been a vigorous regulator or supervisor in… its entire… existence. What the Fed cares about is… 1] the Federal Open Market Committee… The 2nd thing the Fed cares about is- institutionally it’s run by economists. So they have their own research agendas…[and] a really tertiary concern is supervision” (Black, 2018, mn.2). |
| [307] | ^ One could add to this, after some years of study, that Citibank, since the mid-20th century, has been the #1 bank in New York and the FRBNY (at least in terms of policy influence); whereas Goldman, actually since the 1930s when it was private, has been the preeminent financial institution for Washington political influence-peddling (though often in conjunction with ‘mechanics of globalism’ expert Citi). (Goldman is for Washington & political [verbiage] management what Citi is for Wall St. & mechanical [numbers] management). Their representatives could, as far as we know, get together for dinner every Thursday at so & so’s in NY or DC; but the NSA, at least since the 1990’s (if not actually the 1970’s), would know about it. See also “Government, Hidden”. |
| [308] | ^ “Some investors have a very broad conception of their rights.... [For example,] European companies have recently launched legal actions against the raising of the minimum wage in Egypt” (Wallach, 2013). See also “Nasserism”. |
| [309] | ^ “The issuance of deposit instruments and their historical predecessors, bank notes, has almost always been”, even in eras of so-called ‘Free-Banking’, “a legal privilege” (Ricks, 2016, 10). |
| [310] | ^ From 1898-1918, the citizenry of 31 mostly central & western US states- fed up with being electorally & monetarily shrifted- added citizens’ Initiative & Referendum (I & R) amendments to their states’ constitutions. The I &R prairie fire was stopped cold, however [along with labor unionization], when American ‘doughboy’ conscripts were sent to France in 1918, and for the next 48 years it stayed that way. The prevalent use (propagation) of “democracy” as a noun- instead of its adjective-aspirational form- also dates from the 1910’s and... |
| [311] | ^ In the 100 years since Balfour, it have never been clearly, yet alone consistently, explained why it was that “religious identity suddenly become an issue of nationhood? Had anyone considered giving Catholics such rights in Ireland or Muslims or Hindus such status in India? Was the world to be divided into exclusive religious territories? Of course not. To complicate matters further, one nation (Britain) solemnly promised a national home to what would become in time a second nation (the Jewish State of Israel) on the land which belonged to another people (Palestinian Arabs) while it was still an integral part of a fourth (the Ottoman /Turkish Empire). In pandering to a relatively small group of Zionists, the Balfour Declaration was bizarre, deceitful and a deliberate betrayal of the loyal Arabs fighting in the desert war against the Turks…. What power did these Zionists hold over the British government to ensure their unquestioned co-operation in the first steps towards a Zionist state at the expense of the rightful owners of Palestine?.... The strategic sands of Arabia and the oil-rich lands of Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia had long been prime targets…. It is important to remember that when early discussions about the future of a Jewish homeland in Palestine were in progress, little mention was made of American involvement. The truth is otherwise. America was deeply involved in secret intrigues both directly and indirectly” (Docherty & McGregor, 2017). See also “Pilgrim Society”, “Debt cycles”. |
| [312] | ^ G “” (). |
| [313] | ^ E”” (). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report (1910) |
| [314] | ^ 1. Neoclassical economics took decades to incubate (as Economics departments didn’t even exist until c.1900, and the Fed [to control “monetary economics” propagating] not until 1914), and really didn’t come to the fore until well after the Great War era, in the 1970’s (when it was trialed in Chile), and then finally coming home to roost in 1980’s America, nearly a century after its birth. 2. The political Duopoly was no longer systematically challenged after ‘the Left’ parties’ agenda was co-opted by FDR’s New Deal coalition in the 1930’s (the reactive flashes of Strom Thurmond & George Wallace aside). By the 1980’s the Duopoly was as about strong as ever, although its sellout to Neoclassical-Globalsim would be confronted in the 1990’s, prior to Donald Trump upsetting the applecart in the 2010’s. 3. Finance Capitalism of course bludgeoned its opposition in the Great War era (1910’s-40’s), albeit at the price of having to adopt many of industrial capitalism’s policies. This ‘war-victory economy’ heritage endured a few more decades into the 1970’s, whereupon Finance- like its Neoclassical pseudo-intellectual justifier- stepped up to (apparently ever-increasing) unipolar dominance (at least of the ‘political duopoly’ and its [lapdog] ‘corporate media cartel’). It was readily apparent by the 2000’s that NCE, the Duopoly, and Finance Capitalism were all one big team. 4. Dying for one’s country was the one exception, as its appeal was bled through the 1950’s-’70’s (‘cultural revolution’) era, and has never recovered to first-half-of-the-20thc levels (Robots-machines may be doing most of the soldiering a couple decades from now anyway). 5. 1909 Scofield pernicious 6. Finally, the Rockefeller-ized “health care” sector, which Congress allowed to be taken over by… in the 1910’s (Flexner Report) has been (like the CMC) a particular victim of the 1980’s-90’s financialization (green eye shade) & consolidation wave. By c.2010… (life exp. unspoken cancer epidemic prim. attrib. to ) |
| [315] | ^ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/33490 |
| [316] | ^ The “evidence does not point… any one special interest group. There is no single extractive institution…[or] unequivocal villain in the story. The capture in accounting rule-making appears to be ad hoc and driven by those with the strongest economic incentives in any particular case” (Ramanna, 2015, xixi). What could be more ‘American’ than that? |
| [317] | ^ Surveys from that season “showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans felt that the banks should not be rescued, whatever the economic consequences…” (Graeber, 16).However, “a lot of the fraudulent debt [simply] got moved over to government balance sheets...so government can deal with it” (Fitts, 2017b, mn.43). See also “‘Modern Monetary Theory’.” |
| [318] | ^ “The maximum size of the deficit during the New Deal was 5% of GDP” (Keen, 2015e). |
| [319] | ^ The institutionalization of direct bank welfare payments (i.e. the Federal Reserve paying “Interest on Excess Reserves”) was authorized by Congress two years prior. Section 128 of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s Emergency Economic Stabilization [bailout] Act of 2008, moved up the implementation of The Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006, from 2011 to 2008. Effective only 3 days after its October signing, the Fed began paying interest on member banks’ excess reserve balances. Such (literal) bank welfare is primarily why banks do not lend as much as they used to- they don’t really need so many customers anymore to collect their dole. |
| [320] | ^ According to Mervyn King, recent Gov. of the Bank of England, in The End Of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy (2016): “Without reform of the financial system, another crisis is certain, and the failure... to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely that it will come sooner rather than later”; adding that: “Only a fundamental rethink of how we, as a society, organise our system of money and banking will prevent a repetition of the crisis that we experienced in 2008.”- (King, 2016); http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/28/mervyn-king-new-financial-crisis-is-certain-without-reform-of-banks |
| [321] | ^ This data is mostly from the year 2014. |
| [322] | ^ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TREAST |
| [323] | ^ The new form of tribute? In 2018 “[f]oreign investors [have now also] emerged as the biggest buyers of government bonds in China's domestic market… [reaching] a record 836 billion yuan” ($121 bn. USD) in May, and approx. double the amount of such holdings from 12 months earlier (Hong, 2018). By September, foreign holdings had surpassed 1.03 tn. yuan ($150 bn. USD), “bringing the proportion of outstanding Chinese government bonds held by offshore institutions to a record 8%. The enthusiasm for Chinese bonds stands in stark contrast to other emerging markets, as fears of currency contagion from Argentina, South Africa and Turkey have shaken investors’ nerves, pushing up the US dollar” (Galbraith, A., 2018). China “owns less than 6% of US Treasury debt” (Taplin, 2018). |
| [324] | ^ By this author’s estimate, less than 1% of the American or ‘Western’ population could provide even a halfway sensible (yet alone adequate) definition of either ‘eurodollars’ or ‘Reserve money’, (which seems) not that different from the 1970’s, despite each of the vehicles’ radical increase in prominence since then. |
| [325] | ^ See Gaede, 2008; “Transhumanism”. |
| [326] | ^ The “shadow banking” sector is measured in different ways by different scholars/organizations. |
| [327] | ^ Established in 1934, the FHA has been one of the “attempts…[that was] made to press the banks into making loans on real estate and other slow assets. The banks, being thoroughly frightened, have balked. They have been unwilling again to risk that sort of expansion– at least for the present. To get the banks to make such loans, the Government has been compelled to guarantee mortgages on homes” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 28), with the usual 20th century answer- an insurance scheme. |
| [328] | ^ Fitts was also “asked to join the Federal Reserve as a governor during the George H. W. Bush Administration” (Fitts, 2018 |
| [329] | ^ “If you’re gonna understand my little neighborhood in West Philadelphia, you’re gonna have to understand the whole federal budget. If you’re gonna understand the budget, you have to understand the global capital markets, and there you have it… [I]n a very centralized system, you have to understand the body to understand the molecule, and you have to have the molecule to understand the body” (Fitts, 2017k, mn.3). |
| [330] | ^ “The question is ‘is the Return On Investment for taxpayers positive or negative’?.... You can’t...estimate Return On Investment per taxpayer unless you can look at performance of government investment by place…. Governments are really in the business of place-based investment, and… if you buy a corporate stock, every year you’re required...to get an annual report. But if you pay your taxes to the federal government, you don’t get...an annual report that shows you- contiguous to the area [where] you vote for political representation- what the Return On Investment for taxpayers was from the money you spent, which-conceptually- is relatively easy to do. And that information is some of the biggest secrets in America, because it is phenomenally important for a control mechanism” (Fitts, 2016d, mn.28-30). |
| [331] | ^ “If you look at the reality, if you look at what the American establishment has done to manage the general population... [including] divide & conquer, global [Arab] Spring, vaccines, fluoride, you know [more], we are… under chemical, financial, and legal assault. And then we behave in dysfunctional ways, and the establishment says ‘What an unattractive group of people’... So you have this cycle of disrespect…. I think that’s the question, how do we reverse the cycle of disrespect, and get back to doing something… working towards a human society” (Fits, 2016g, mn.14-15) |
| [332] | ^ “To me, the way you have to start enforcing the law is you have to enforce the law with the money...If ‘crime that pays is crime that stays’ [then] it’s gonna keep on happening” (Fitts, 2018f, mn.21-22). |
| [333] | ^ Fitts was “part of a group of people in the 1st Bush administration who got a law passed requiring the government to produce audited financial statements. It has not complied with that law [now] for 20 years straight”; and no publicly traded corporation could get away with such behavior. Government agencies aren’t producing the audited financial statements “because they are not in compliance with the law” (Fitts, 2017g, mn.23). |
| [334] | ^ In (“tax haven”) “Ireland, it’s not secret who owns the accounts. In [‘launder-mat’] Panama, it is, because… they all end up in Delaware corporations, or Nevada corporations. But they go through the Cayman Islands, Riga, Latvia… There’re all sorts of centers people go through before it ends up in Delaware or Nevada, and then in the New York banks” (2016h, mn.24). |
| [335] | ^ https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/310641/file-1000217413-pdf/Exotics/Exotics_Formatted_PDF.pdf%3Ft%3D1402579938515 ; p.3. |
| [336] | ^ A big part of this massive scale is simply for currency stabilization, the heart of ‘globalization’, which is 100% rigged by the CBs, primarily the Fed, on a daily basis. For example, if Japan suddenly wanted to increase Reserve/RAB money creation (what Roberts calls ‘printing money’), the Fed and other CBs would prefer to know about it in advance and adjust accordingly, lest something upset their global ‘equilibrium’ and long-term planning. For nearly a decade now, “[w]e’ve been watching massive inflation… of the Reserve/RAB…[money, but since] they all move in step together…. If they‘re all printing [at more-or-less the same time], then they all look the same” relative to the other ‘free’-floating currencies in the club (Roberts, 2018c, mn.39). |
| [337] | ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GRiJd5rnm4 |
| [338] | ^ In 1797 there were only 21 chartered banks in the USA, whereas by 1837 there were 775 (Weber, 2005). Some sort of regulatory framework, however skeletal, had to be established. And that new framework was, ironically, often called ‘free banking’- i.e. “free” (of the need for special state legislation) to anyone with sufficient pledged capital and bond securitizations. |
| [339] | ^ A study from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve did not find any published “banknote reporters” in New York prior to 1817 or in Philadelphia prior to 1830 (Weber, 2005, 5). |
| [340] | ^ And it wasn’t until 1840 that basic economic variables such as crop output and manufacturing capital were reported. |
| [341] | ^ The antebellum USA (in the 1830’s-50’s) had approx. 26 fully established states, as opposed to approx. 22 frontier ‘territories’ and future states. In the case of the latter, or even in new states such as Texas (1845), unregulated ‘free-banking’ practices often did indeed predominate until after the Civil War: “In 1845, the first Constitution of the State of Texas provided that ‘[no] corporate body shall hereafter be created, renewed, or extended, with banking or discounting [i.e. money-creation] privileges’, and this prohibition against the chartering of banks was carried forward into the [Texas] Constitutions of 1861 and 1866, deleted in the Constitution of 1869, and added back into the present-day Constitution of 1876 as Article XVI, Section 16. Banking certainly existed during these periods, but was dominated by private, unincorporated (unregulated) banks, most of which issued their own currency” (Texas.gov, 2018). |
| [342] | ^ Prior to the Michigan Act of 1837 bank charters were only enacted through special acts of state legislatures, which appear to have constituted the only regulatory standards. |
| [343] | ^ 19th century economists “envisioned a market [end p. 14] free from rent paid to a hereditary landlord class, and free from interest and monopoly rent paid to private owners. The ideal system was a morally fair market in which people would be rewarded for their labor and enterprise, but would not receive income without making a positive contribution… Adam Smith… Ricardo… Mill and their contemporaries… major aim was to prevent landlords from ‘reaping where they have not sown’” (Hudson, 2015, 14-15). |
| [344] | ^ After growing up with “post-war” 80-90% income tax rates from 1936-63, no doubt (http://federal-tax-rates.insidegov.com). |
| [345] | ^ ...the interest on which constitutes a private tax. |
| [346] | ^ Indentured Servitude differs from (illiterate) serfdom in that it involves a written, individual contract (volition), as opposed to traditional serfdom’s typically group-based identity and implied threats of force. The contracts usually involved debt obligations, so the terms ‘debt servitude’ or ‘debt bondage’ are broadly synonymous. Most European migrants to N. America, from the 1630’s through 1760’s, were indentured; and the US abolished it in 1917 (Galenson, 1984). Modern-day military service (to the nation instead of to creditors) is similar to an indenture. Serfdom’s primary distinction from slavery is that the former was only an economic institution (the subjects’ physical-personal rights were supposed to be maintained). |
| [347] | ^ The Residence Permit (or Hukou in Chinese) has been a permanent fixture of Chinese and Oriental societies for about as long as written records have been kept. For millennia, this was a cardinal distinction between empires of the Orient and the tribes-nations of the Occident. I.e. in the Orient, families and clans were (ideally) categorized for purposes of taxation, conscription and all-around social control, the primary tool for which was determining where subjects were allowed to live. Recently, however, residence permits (hukou) have been substantially watered down in China and actually banned in Korea (2008). The situation in Russia seems somewhere in between. Since “Peter the Great, imperial law had forbidden [serfs, and later] subjects [in general] from travelling without an internal passport outside their permanent place of residence (a radius of about 30km, which was expanded to about 50 in 1894)” (Avrutin, 2010, 91). The internal passport system was apparently abolished around 1918, and then re-instated in 1930, reportedly reaching Maoist levels of control in the 1970s, prior to the USSR collapse in the early ‘90s. It was officially abolished in the 1993 Russian constitution (which guarantees “free movement”), but still continued (and continues) in Moscow and very many other Russian oblasts, in various states of black market protocol and semi-legality. |
| [348] | ^ Unrestricted Rights of Contract- like ‘free movement’, is something that most ‘Westerners’ take for granted today. Ethnic and gender-based restrictions on contract & legal rights in the US had been (with a few exceptions) removed by the mid-1960s- i.e Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights of 1964 and the US Supreme Court’s opinion in United States v. Yazell (1966) that “the institution of coverture is ... obsolete", (several states withstanding for several more years, i.e. Kirchberg v. Feenstra, 1980). In terms of chronology, women have often gained the vote substantially prior to attaining equal property-contract rights. This survey, however, is more weighted towards meaningful everyday freedoms than ceremonial. Some of the few societies in which women did gain reasonably equal property-contract rights substantially prior to voting rights are: Texas (1840), New Zealand (1884), the UK (1893), Mexico (1917), China (1950), and South Africa (1988). |
| [349] | ^ Actual (de facto) citizenship power (as opposed to meaningless ceremonies) is a trickier concept to get a handle on, as indeed this 8th step has been slippery (as oligarchs love to think up new ways of proclaiming that ‘democracy’ and public accountability already exist). In separating democratic accountability propaganda from democratic accountability reality, these dimensions should prove helpful: A] unobstructed rights to participate, not just watch (this involves ballot access and the ability to form parties- more than 2 parties- that are not in any way privileged in electioneering any by state, national, or local laws); B] a plentitude of elected state & local offices (not just rubber-stamping presidents or politicians from impossibly large districts); C] having a fluid & competitive media environment (democratic accountability is as important there as it is for political representatives); D] vote counting procedures that are fully public, audited, and beyond reproach; and (these first 4 factors should result in easily verifiable results, such as:) E] reasonable turnover (instead of incumbent ‘rigging’ and USSR-type 98% re-election rates), and above 50% voter turnout. ‘Democracy rating’ institutes, such as (the majority US government-funded) “Freedom House”, have traditionally only been concerned with measures in the A category (above), and only there to a rather unchallenging standard of having “more than one” political party (or graft club). Other prominent ‘democracy raters’, as is “Freedom House”, are still more about steps 6 and 7 (i.e. 20th century-type de jure enfranchisement & unobstructed rights) than about moving on to step 8 concerns. |
| [350] | ^ One of the first things apparent to serious researchers of this subject is that “debt-money” institutions are typically used to marshall resources for warfare. Thus “national debt” economies (Dutch-UK-US) have typically been most successful at this game- or sport, one might call it- as they have been most successful at putting everyone on the debt-money treadmill or meter. These societies (though some are loathe to admit it) are generally high-tax, and much of this (public) taxation is used to pay for (private) debt, thus resulting in ‘Hamiltonian’/regressive (class bifurcation) pressures, which, ironically, have (for a century now) been answered with still more taxation- only this time “progressive” taxes. Thus the entire public society can at times look like a Marxist football match- fighting, zero-sum-gain, over shifting the tax code (onto whomever gets less votes- or less counted votes). A better way to escape the debt-money (high usury & party tax fights) matrix [and its various incentives for ugliness & cheating] is to simply remove the initial ‘Hamiltonian’ (usurious) pressures from a nation’s monetary design- i.e. to stop issuing new money as debt. This 9th step of/towards freedom- freedom from war-debt usury (and its resultant high taxes)- is yet to be achieved (perhaps because step 8 is a prerequisite), but nearly all of the American colonies had some experience with debt-free relatively peaceful and prosperous monetary systems in the 18th century, prior to the British warring and post-war crackdown of the 1750s-’60s. |
| [351] | ^ Along with freedom from the debt-war-taxes (extraction) machine, achieving a debt-free, democratically accountable, public money system (with only one circuit or class of money, not two) will also bring freedom from poverty and involuntary idleness (unemployment). It is a paradox today that so many people are not working, yet so many jobs and useful tasks in society go undone, year after year. There is no reason in the 21st century (other than political) for there to still be potholes, unanswered telephones, shoddy schools, unaccountable public sectors, and groupthink-dominated universities, yet alone petty crime and violence on the streets. Such unemployments, resentments, and (now) artificial scarcities are the lingering heritages of the (Early) ‘Modern’ usury system’s warping of society towards bifurcation and unfairness. The 1600’s-1900’s will one day be looked back on as ‘the adolescence of mankind’; and the 21st century as its age of majority or societal maturation. This has nothing to do with old Adam Smith or Marx-Engels fables, none of whom ever demonstrated that they even actually understood what money is. It has to do with our internet-’Information Age’ transforming into Knowledge. See also “Boards/Board Systems”, “Appendix C- 1-2-3”. |
| [352] | ^ Although Frank Knight initiated the original March 1933 Chicago Plan to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who dutifully passed it along to President Roosevelt, Henry Simon’s subsequent version (in Nov. 1933) went into more detail, adding a price-level target to be set by (our publicly accountable) Congress, arguing “that monetary policy should be subject to a rule [mechanism] instead of being discretionary. The [publicly stated] goal could be, for instance, price stability, steady growth of the money supply, or some other goal specified by Congress” (Laina, 2015). |
| [353] | ^ Non-Chicago early/original ‘Chicago School’ works included: Currie, Lauchlin (1934) The Supply and Control of Money in the United States, Harvard Univ. Press; and Hart, Alber (1935) “The Chicago Plan of Banking Reform”, in The Review of Economic Studies, Vol.2, pp.104-16 (courtesy of Huber, 2015). |
| [354] | ^ Fisher claimed, in a Nov. 1944 letter to President Roosevelt that, up until then “’[f]our hundred other economists have endorsed the idea’… [and he] renewed his popular campaign for the proposal in 1945 (Phillips, 1995). |
| [355] | ^ Nisbett adds that, thus “Formal logic plays little role in [East Asian] problem solving. In fact, the person who is too concerned with logic may be considered immature” (2003, xvi), as what Psychologists call the “formal operational stage” of development (increasingly abstract logic and mathematics) characteristically comes to the fore and predominates in the minds of 11-17 year olds (adolescents)... or perhaps also the reductionist (limited) “gamma-caste” thinking in Huxley’s “Brave New World” (See also “Corporate Media Cartel”). |
| [356] | ^ AICPA is “sometimes seen as representing the interests of the small auditors over the [mostly British] Big Four” (Ramanna, 2015, 16). |
| [357] | ^ The Security & Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporate Finance is the group tasked with reviewing Wall Street’s quarterly earnings filings. |
| [358] | ^ GAAP standards for private, unlisted companies, since 2012, have been tasked to the newly created Private Company Council (PCC). Although the “creation of the PCC went unnoticed by most Americans… [such] private companies...make up about one-half of US GDP” (Ramanna, 2015, 16). See also “Accounting, ‘Fair Value’”. |
| [359] | ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyT7weE_7PQ |
| [360] | ^ Although the term ‘Single Taxer’ “dropped out of the political field” in the early decades of the 20th century UK & US, many of the most sustainably successful economies of the century- from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, to Denmark and (more recently) Estonia- have been based, at least in part, upon LVT principles (Bauwens, 2011). |
| [361] | ^ Simon Patten, influential Chair of the Wharton School of Business, “expounded it succinctly. ‘Nothing pleases a… single taxer better than... to use the well-known economic theories… (therefore) economic doctrine must be recast’ (Patten, 1908: 219…” (Gaffney, 29). |
| [362] | ^ Just “seven short years after publishing Progress and Poverty in remote California he nearly took over as Mayor of New York City, the financial and intellectual capital of the nation. He thumped also-ran Theodore Roosevelt, and lost to the Tammany candidate (Abram S. Hewitt)” in a corrupt election (Gaffney, 35). Although George was never elected to public office, he was as influential as any intellectual during the turn-of-the-century era. Historian and presidential advisor Eric Goldman, writing in 1956, “found George to have inspired most of the major reformers of the early 20th Century. ‘...no other book came anywhere near comparable influence… a volume which magically catalyzed the best yearnings of our grandfathers and fathers’" (Gaffney, 1994, 37-38). |
| [363] | ^ In the 1880’s and 1890’s, George “became the 3rd most famous man in the United States, only surpassed in public acclaim by Thomas Edison and Mark Twain…[and] was translated into almost every language that knew print, and some of the greatest, most influential thinkers of his time paid tribute. Leo Tolstoy... stressed [that].... ‘People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it’....And Bernard Shaw… wrote, ‘Your father found me a literary dilettante and militant rationalist in religion, and a barren rascal at that. By turning my mind to economics he made a man of me....’” (de Mille, 1979). |
| [364] | ^ Perhaps it is appropriately left to a children-juveniles book paraphraser to sum up for us here that Marx “was certain that Das Kapital would bring him…financial success, but the publication was not well received. Marx was paid 60 pounds, or $88.41 for the first printing of 1000 books, which took 4 years to sell. In typical fashion, Marx did not blame the poor sales on the book’s lack of organization or its erratic focus...” and after 1867 did not write much more (Cates, 2011, 79). |
| [365] | ^ Economics as a discipline, however, predates both “Neoclassical”ism and official “university” departments. See also “Mythomatics”, which reaches back to the 1870’s (and perhaps earlier) with French economists, then housed in Departments of Law, at places like the Lausanne School of Theology (which was not made a “university” until 1890). |
| [366] | ^ “Philosophy reveals to man his knowledge with the All. It shows him that he is a brother to the suns which dot the firmament; it lifts him from a taxpayer on a whirling atom to a citizen of the Cosmos. It teaches him that while physically bound to earth… there is nevertheless within him a spiritual power, a diviner Self, through which he is one with the symphony of the Whole. Ignorance of ignorance, then, is that self-satisfied state of unawareness in which man [or “human”, sans “being”], knowing nothing outside the limited area of his physical senses, bumptiously declares [that] there is nothing more to know! He who knows no life save the physical is merely ignorant; but he who declares physical life to be all-important and elevates it to the position of supreme reality- such a one is ignorant of his own ignorance” (Hall, 1928, 204). See also “Dumb-downing”. |
| [367] | ^ The Anglo and American monetary systems- increasingly similar since the post-Civil War era- more-or-less merged in the mid-20th century. Calling it the ‘Anglo’ system as opposed to the ‘Anglo-American’ system is somewhat quaint. |
| [368] | ^ “History really began when profound and secret deal-making began. History was invented as a means of covering that up”- Jon Rappoport (2015b). |
| [369] | ^ It wasn’t actually ‘at a stroke’ that the English state worked out a new constitution. Things developed piecemeal over the next quarter-century: “The next 25 years saw a refashioning of the state that, by 1714, developed into a structure different from what anyone had anticipated in 1689” (Williams, 2017). |
| [370] | ^ “Uncovered” or “naked” refers to selling shares without even borrowing them first, because one may legally buy or borrow the shares at any time prior to the contracted delivery date. Hence ‘naked short selling’ can reduce interest expenses, in addition to being a fast-acting tool (in driving something down). |
| [371] | ^ So why do people keep falling for it? Stephen Zarlenga explains: “If you don’t separate money [public currency] from [private] wealth, if you define money as wealth, then the wealthy are going to control not only their own money, they are going to control the monetary system– which belongs under societal control. It should not be controlled by particular interest groups, or cliques, or so-called elites. So, the mistake is a psychological one. They are confusing their [private] investments with [public] money” (Zarlenga, 2007). |
| [372] | ^ ...or the Tungsten?- http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-24/get-your-fake-tungsten-filled-gold-coins-here (Durden, 2012); or the gold security certificates?- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVlqwJ00LMU (Still, 2012b). |
| [373] | ^ The Intelligence Community-based ‘Shadow Gov’t” says no to traditional “Deep State” keep-it-flowing venality, whether or not “the swamp” in D.C. is sufficiently drained to the satisfaction of the citizenry- which would be for the first time ever. |
| [374] | ^ “[I]f it doesn’t have its integrity, then it’s [actually] worse than [not] having a government…. What we have out here is an environment of information that is not making sense” (Steele, 2012, mn.118, 120). |
| [375] | ^ whether or not to view it as a crime |
| [376] | ^ Steve Keen adds that “The only reason for the alarm [about Greece] is that the Maastricht Treaty limited the amount of money that their equivalent of the Federal Reserve...the E.C.B. only had to fund only 3% deficits [not 10%]- ‘anything above 7% and you’re on your own’. Well, that’s just insane, because the Central Bank should be funding the activities of its government. So really, in a sense, Europe doesn’t have a CB, and that’s Greece’s real problem” (Keen, 2011e). Paul Craig Roberts adds that the Greek people have been brainwashed, for decades, into accepting German-French bribes and E.U. domination, the object of which is the relinquishing of national sovereignty. |
| [377] | ^ What is happening in Greece “...is what in the past you needed an army to achieve... [But now] simply... buy out the Socialist Party and tell them 'Look, just surrender. Give us your land…’ [because Greece] ….didn't realize that it was signing on to neo-feudalism, and that's what the ECB is all about. It's not a Central Bank… it doesn't finance government budget deficits, which is what the Bank of England and New York Fed [do]” (Hudson, 2011b). |
| [378] | ^ “Protectorates are by their nature utterly inefficient. Parachuted external envoys do not understand local culture, have no access to local networks, and apply solutions ill-suited to local environments. Cheating is the rule of the game in protectorates. The metropolis cannot admit its failure, and it therefore pretends that things are moving forward” (Zielonka, 2015). |
| [379] | ^ “When I was on Wall St. in the 1960’s, banks were afraid to hire...[Greenspan] because he was known for saying whatever the client wanted to be said. So he [as with most of the Chairs since] is a public relations person, and the fact is that’s what Economics is… public relations for the financial interests… It’s a theory of how an economy would work… [while pretending that there is] no government” (Hudson, 2017q, mn.5-6). |
| [380] | ^ “Financial debt-claims on the economy’s income and assets camouflage themselves as wealth”, even though they actually “strip” wealth (Hudson, 2013). The NIPA “ need to recognize the magnitude of the F.I.RE. sector and treat its revenue as eating into the economic surplus, not increasing it" (Hudson, 2012g). |
| [381] | ^ According to Hudson, the national accounts also fail to distinguish “between productive and unproductive investment...[or] credit” (Hudson, 2011c). |
| [382] | ^ As late as 1986 the highest CEO salaries on Wall St. were approx. $3 million, as opposed to the typical $20 million-to-$25 million range since the mid-2000’s. |
| [383] | ^ Actually Gutfreund was asked to head Salomon Bros. in 1978. After the partnership’s merger-acquisition by (publicly-traded) Phibro Corp. in 1981, Gutfreund maneuvered to the top of the Phibro-Salomon board in 1984. |
| [384] | ^ “The Asian populations are considered to have i.q.s of about 5 to 10 points higher than ours. And if you look at what has been going on in this country the past 20 years, with nutrition, with flouride, with geo-engineering… vaccines...[etc.], I think there’s been a really concerted effort to lower i.q.s here” (Fitts, 2018h, mn.35). |
| [385] | ^ “Sooner or later people will wake up. First we have to dump the trap of right and left, this is a Hegelian trap to divide and control…[It] is not between right and left; it is between us and them…”- Anthony Sutton |
| [386] | ^ “…the population at large plays only a marginal role in history, or at any rate in political and military history, which is the preserve of small elites: people do not make [design] history- they make a living [judgement]."- Richard Pipes, Historian and Reagan Admn. “Cold War” architect (Siegel, 2004). |
| [387] | ^ “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress had been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) |
| [388] | ^ ”The history of civilization is one of the success of people who figured out how to make exploration and growth economic, and the failure of those who did not” (Fitts, 2018d, 5). |
| [389] | ^ He who distorts, wins? “The distortions that occur in the past will determine what happens in the future.”- Steve Pieczenik, (2018, mn.5). |
| [390] | ^ “Why Some Economists Could See the Crisis Coming,” Financial Times, Sept. 7, 2009. |
| [391] | ^ “It seems that almost everybody likes just a single enemy. In the 19th century the enemy [was] landlords...and then the enemy in the 20th century became industrial employers. But nobody realized that both the landlords and the employers end up paying most of their revenue to the banks as interest…. and all they [lending institutions] do is load the economy more and more down with debt...” (Hudson, 2017l, mn.2). |
| [392] | ^ “...because all they [NYU] wanted was my money, not my brains” (Hudson, 2017n, mn.33). |
| [393] | ^ According to America’s foremost bank investigator, Bill Black, Citibank was basically set up (like HSBC in the 19th century) as “a criminologic organization”. “That’s an example of the parasite taking over control of the brain… [via its] dominating the [US] Treasury and the financial regulatory systems” (Hudson, 2017g, mn.54). |
| [394] | ^ Libertarians, themselves notwithstanding, like inflation in their house prices if they own them, and in their gold and silver and securities. |
| [395] | ^ World “intelligence” spending for 2008 was est. at $107 bn., with the United States’ I.C. accounting for nearly 2/3rds ($75 bn.) of the global aggregate (Hippner, 2009, 35). The spying and spyware industry has been booming in the ‘crisis’ years since then. The USA’s share of global GDP for the same period was only 23.5% (Ibid). Russia has had the largest number of government employees in intelligence, however- 177,000 for c.2008, compared to 144,000 for the US (not including the unusually large number of private intelligence “contractors” in the latter. If these approx. 56,000 contractors are added, then America also has the world’s largest number of intelligence employees (Hippner, 40). |
| [396] | ^ “CIA was actually spying on its own director...And, sure enough, eventually Mike Pompeo [2017-18] requested to get out of there...[and] was moved over to the Department of State... So the CIA was actively working against its own director. I've actively witnessed operational directors lie to the director" (Shipp, 2018b, mn.11). |
| [397] | ^ ↑ |
| [398] | ^ According to Paul Craig Roberts, the “FBI is supposed to be a federal investigative police [i.e. warrants, not fishing expeditions], but it now functions as an [internal] intelligence agency” (Roberts, 2018b, mn.33). |
| [399] | ^ Mieroop (2002, 54) has also pointed out that early Mesopotamian interest charges could also have been (more flat) rental fees. |
| [400] | ^ Van de Mieroop (2005, 29) has concluded that, at least in 2nd millennium BC Babylon, “the rates of interest stated” in cunneiform contracts “were applied for the duration of the loan, regardless of length. Since many of the loans were taken out for short periods… immediately before the new harvest, the [average] rate of interest per annum was substantially higher than the 20 or 33.33 percent stated.... Such usurious practices are not uncommon in peasant societies when people usually take out loans only as a last resort.” |
| [401] | ^ Whereas the original “Interest on Reserves” (IOR) policy plan from 2006-08 was aimed at securing banks’ [RAB] so that they would lend more [TAB-bankmoney] into the economy; the concurrent “Interest on Excess Reserves” (IOER), according to the Fed narrative , was more about controlling the ‘federal funds’ (interbank) rate of interest, by effectively setting its floor (and preventing the negative interest rates that subsequently appeared in Europe). But obviously when the Fed pays money not to lend, it is breaking its mandate to ‘stimulate the economy to full employment while fighting inflatIon’. In subsequent years, reporters have mostly called the broader policy IOER because, from 2009, US banks’ “excess” Reserves have been about 10x-20x greater than their “required” Reserves. Moreover, both “excess” and “required” Reserves have been collecting the same rate of interest from the Fed since January 2009 (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 2013); hence the 2 terms are often used synonymously. Both IOR and IOER are governed by the Federal Reserve’s Regulation D (“Reserve Requirements of Depository Institutions”, 12 CFR Part 204). |
| [402] | ^ Congress, in the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006, amended the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to allow such hitherto forbidden interest payments (effective in 2011, which a panicked Congress subsequently moved up to 2008). Because of Quantitative Easing, as of 2015, approx. 93% of all such Reserve/RAB accounts were officially in excess of the 10% baseline, and thus received some welfare. According to Rep. Maxine Waters of the House Financial Services Committee, the Fed “paid about $7 billion in interest to banks [in 2015], including more than… $900 million to JP Morgan Chase” (Coy, 2016). In 2017 banks collected $25 billion in IOER payments from the Fed. |
| [403] | ^ “[c]Without the IOER, it would be impossible for the Fed to engage in quantitative easing without losing control of interest rates altogether” (Ng & Wessel, 2018). |
| [404] | ^ One possible alternative explanation for this (in addition to that of IOER being a tool to pull up the FFR) is that some nonbank financial institutions like Government Supported Enterprises (GSEs) still hold deposits at the Fed that do not earn interest. Hence the FFR often (though not always) “trades below IOER, because institutions such as the GSEs are ineligible to earn IOER” (Chabot, 2015, 5). From spring 2018, however, the FFR has moved marginally higher than the IOER rate, indicating that pulling up the FFR (c.2015-2017) is no longer needed; and usage of the Fed’s ON RRP (interest rate “floor”) facility has subsequently collapsed. See also “Reverse Repo agreements (ON RRP).” |
| [405] | ^ More specifically, on Dec.16, 2015, the FOMC (as implemented by “The Desk” at the New York Fed) “decided to increase [a.k.a. “liftoff”] the target range for the federal funds rate from 0-0.25% to 0.25-0.50%, with the discount rate [ceiling] at 1.0%, the IOER [bobber/float] at 0.50%, and the ON-RRP rate [floor] set at 0.25%” (Williamson, 2016). See also “Channel-Floor systems”. |
| [406] | ^ ”With the Fed continuing to normalize [reduce] its balance sheet, a [ongoing] drop in Reserves was likely to keep putting upward pressure on the effective funds rate relative to the IOER rate” (Zerohedge, 2018b). |
| [407] | ^ In Latin it was known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc ("with this, therefore because of this"). |
| [408] | ^ “Obsolete” in the words of Joseph Huber (2013, mn.13). |
| [409] | ^ In 2002, “the FASB and the still nascent … IASB signed a memorandum of understanding to harmonize their rules to facilitate eventual US adoptation of… IFRS”; and 5 of the IASB’s original 14 board members were from the US (Ramanna, 2015, 35; 206, n56). See also “Globalization”. |
| [410] | ^ in 2008 |
| [411] | ^ “Basically, the IMF is a tool of the US State Department and the US Defense Department; just like the head of the World Bank is traditionally...an American Secretary of Defense… McCloy, McNamara, Zellick… So that the IMF now basically is an office operating out of the Pentagon, as part of the new Cold War…. the exact opposite of everything that Gorbachev and Reagan were trying to achieve in the 1980’s…. The IMF doesn’t have competent financial analysts…. They’ve been firing the staff whenever the staff tries to raise a tone of reality...” (Hudson, 2016b). |
| [412] | ^ “...this web of electronics which controls their brains, and brainwashes them into thinking that technology is everything” (Rapport, mn.27). |
| [413] | ^ “Their attitude is ‘We have the money. All you have to do is take us to court’. It’s as simple as that...Court cases with these [matters] can take years, and you need to be very, very rich” (Trower, 2018, mn.24) |
| [414] | ^ This figure includes mergers & acquisitions, “debt capital markets, equity capital markets, and syndicated lending net revenues” (SIFMA, 2018, 59). |
| [415] | ^ Closed-end funds and Mutual funds (which are open-ended) and are both also classified as Management Investment Companies. |
| [416] | ^ I.e. the “creeping socialism” inherent in *any* debt-money system/rubric (see above chart). Both Keen and Hudson seem to agree that the Japan pilot is serving as a model for general paradigms that banksters would like to see transpire in the UK-USA as well (no comment on what they may be trying to accomplish with current policies in Europe). |
| [417] | ^ “Pieczenik has often claimed to have participated in strategic discussions concerning the internet in ‘the 1970’s’; Robert David Steele adds that: “There is absolutely no question that a whole bunch of technology became available in the ‘50’s and the ‘60’s, and [that] it was locked up” (Steele, 2012, mn.22). |
| [418] | ^ Although condemnations of interest and usury are about 6 times more frequent in the Old Testament, the New Testament’s 1st and oldest book, subsequently subscripted as “according to Matthew”, features the first known citation of the Lord’s Prayer, exhorting: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew, 6:12). Matthew, one of the four original evangelists, had earlier worked as a tax collector in Capernaum, and is still known as the patron saint of bankers, accountants, and tax collectors. |
| [419] | ^ ...the approx. ‘70 Year Plan’, compatible-congruent with “Debt cycles”; “And the woman whom you just saw is that great city [“peak Yin” in The (2nd Estate) City] which reigns over the kings of the earth”- New Testament (Revelations, 17:18). See also “Debt cycles”, Appendix C “1-2-3”. |
| [420] | ^ ‘To these corporate person (groupthink) Boardrooms, you defer’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhITvG2gOL4 |
| [421] | ^ Did Thomas Jefferson write this in 1813, 1913, or 2013? “It is a litigated question whether the circulation of paper, rather than of specie, is a good or an evil. in the opinion of England and of English writers it is a good; in that of all other [already excessively cynicized] nations it [paper fiat] is an evil: and excepting England, and her copyist the US. there is not a nation existing, I believe, which tolerates a paper circulation. the experiment [Here Jefferson conflates the American colonies’ experiments with public paper notes, with the UK’s (at that time purely) private bank fiat notes.] is going on however, desperately in England, pretty boldly with us, and at the end of the chapter [i.e. this now-unified monetary flim-flam experiment (UK-USA)], we shall see which opinion experience approves. [F]or I believe it to be one of those cases where mercantile clamor [i.e. the end of one 80-year debt cycle] will bear down reason, until it is corrected by ruin” (Jefferson, 1813b). See also “Debt cycles”. |
| [422] | ^ “Let’s do Jesus’ work and campaign for a debt jubilee” (Keen, 2018b, mn.55). |
| [423] | ^ Once “full employment was achieved”, Keynes “thought the classical economics of the free market system might come into its own” (Galbraith, 2017). Keynes also flip-flopped and hedged on the very nature of money creation in ‘modern’ economies (Werner, 2016). |
| [424] | ^ Sparkassen “are basically separate trusts, and there’s an arm’s length relationship… [not ownership] by local authorities, although most of the funding comes from local authorities… [And] loan officers… can’t make the decision on their own” (Werner, 2018, mn.49). |
| [425] | ^ The U.S. government has not ‘redeemed’ bills or notes in gold since January 30, 1934, when “Congress amended Section 16 of the Federal Reserve Act to read: ‘The said (Federal Reserve) notes shall be obligations of the United States…. They shall be redeemed in lawful money [i.e. more federal reserve notes] on demand at the Treasury Department… or at any Federal Reserve bank’. Federal Reserve notes have not been redeemable in silver since the 1960s” (Federal Reserve Board, 2013). |
| [426] | ^ ...as the British succeeded in imposing on the American economy from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries. |
| [427] | ^ According to Supreme Court justice Harold Burton (1945-58), from 1862-69 the Court had not “intimated that it doubted the validity of the [Legal Tender] Act and it had been widely relied upon by the public” prior to Justice Chase’s ruling in Hepburn v. Griswold (Dec. 1869), which declared the Legal Tender Act unconstitutional, “at least [in regards] to debts incurred before its passage” (Burton, 232). After President Grant filled two vacancies on the bench, Knox v. Lee (1871) and Parker v. Davis (1871) promptly overturned Griswold. 13 years later Juilliard v. Greenman (1884) reinforced and clarified that the Act applied to private debts as well as public, regardless of peace or war. The cases of Broderick v. McGraw (unspecified), Latham's and Deming's Appeals (1869), and Deming’s Appeal (1869) were also supported these judgements on the issue (Burton, 1956, 231). |
| [428] | ^ Americans may now arrange to pay federal taxes at select 7-Eleven stores in 34 states, subject to a $1,000 daily limit and 5 to 7 days processing time (Internal Revenue Service, 2017). |
| [429] | ^ Huber notes that “ever more state agencies, especially the revenue office, demand to be paid in bankmoney [TAB] and refuse to accept cash. This is not without irony considering that the major financial state authority rejects what is left of the state's [own] sovereign currency” (Huber, 2018). |
| [430] | ^ Hence the legal tender ‘issue’ is sometimes a red herring to monetary reform (there hasn’t been meaningful constitutional case law on the subject since the 19th century). |
| [431] | ^ Both Bagehot (1826-77) and Marx (1818-83) resided in central London through most of the 1850’s-1870’s, developing The Economist and Das Capital, respectively. The former’s father-in-law (from 1858) was James Wilson, founder and owner of The Economist. See also “Hegelian dialectic” (with The Economist as “Thesis”, Das Capital as “Antithesis”, and Bagehot’s ‘Lender of Last Resort’ as the eventual convergence/”Synthesis”). |
| [432] | ^ According to Thomas Philippon & Ariell Reshef (2012, p. 1551), “Workers in finance earn[ed] the same education-adjusted wages as other workers until 1990, but by 2006 the premium [was] 50% on average.” |
| [433] | ^ This book is primarily from a USA perspective. In the UK, however, “credit unions are not banks, since they are not allowed to lend to firms in meaningful amounts, and don’t have a banking license” (Werner, 2016c). Credit unions in the UK “aren’t allowed accounts at the Bank of England, but must use one of the high street banks to handle their members’ deposits, withdrawals and loans. Senior staff at the Bank of England… [however] are very interested in proposals to open up access to the Bank’s payments…[system to credit unions]... breaking the monopoly of the high street banks” (Jackson, 2012). |
| [434] | ^ ”Banks” is often used as a synonym/shorthand for “Lending” or “Fractional Reserve” Institutions in this book, as they comprise the majority of the F.R. lending sector. |
| [435] | ^ Etymology: from the Anglo-French lien, or loyen, meaning a "bond", or "restraint" on the owner; further back from the Latin ligamen, or ligare, meaning "to bind". |
| [436] | ^ I.e. ex nihilo or one-party |
| [437] | ^ McConnell cited, as have other sources on Google, the “Dictionary of American Biography, [undisclosed year] Vol. XVIII, pp. 331-333.” |
| [438] | ^ Or in the latest parlance, “wet-ware”d. |
| [439] | ^ In order to become useful monetary reformers, they will need to change so fundamentally that they will no longer be Libertarians, although they should continue to promote fiscal responsibility, bless them. If only they could learn that their heroes, the private bankers, are actually the biggest welfare queens on the planet, they could redirect their anger at the right target and become useful citizens. The founding fathers formed a bigger government for this purpose. Let the libertarians learn the real nature of the founding fathers. They will need to renounce their deceptive leaders and their Adam Smith religion of the perfection of unregulated selfishness and corporate profits. And the alternate is not communism, which the bankers also created. |
| [440] | ^ Part of the problem with LIBOR is that it is not actually “derived from actual unsecured loan transactions in the interbank…[RAB] market. Instead, LIBOR is calculated [or ‘rigged’] based on responses to a daily market survey by the British Bankers Association (BBA)... of large banks” (Fabozzi, 2015, 628). |
| [441] | ^ Including “derivatives and other financial products”, however, “[a]t least $350 trillion…[is] tied to the LIBOR” (Kim & Kim, 2015, 174). |
| [442] | ^ Up “to 97%” (Werner, 2017, mn.7). |
| [443] | ^ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 (June 11, 2018). |
| [444] | ^ The Fed’s Washington board also then stopped “publishing information on its [other] non-M2 components, repurchase agreements and eurodollar holdings…. Information about repurchase agreements…[at least] continues to be available in the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds Accounts” (Hester, 2008, 100). See also “Eurodollars”. |
| [445] | ^ "I have never met an official from any Marxist country that has ever read Marx…. [In the mid-20th century, US Socialist leaders] all had Capital on their bookshelves. Not a single one had...read it" (Hudson, 2010b). |
| [446] | ^ During the “post-revolutionary show trials of the early 1850’s in Cologne… ironically the King of Prussia and other members of a conservative and frightened readership” scape-goated Marx, by putting his curious pamphlet “into the public domain” and public court records (Carver, 69). |
| [447] | ^ ...with the exception of one grandchild, French Socialist-Zionist newspaper publisher Jean-Laurent-Frederick Longuet (1876-1938). |
| [448] | ^ “Marx was...the first [political economist] to focus his analysis on ad hominems. Those prior to Marx [had] limited ad hominems to [only those scenarios] where the situations had effects on the people who suffered or benefited from those situations…. Marxists (including Marx) tend to be fond of saying that things are [somehow] ‘transformed’ [passive voice] from one economic factor or return to another, when in fact they are exchanged for one another. They are like the children who are fooled when a magician puts a rabbit into a hat and pulls out a bird” (Sullivan, 2018). |
| [449] | ^ Age of (coke bottle-glassed) Projectors |
| [450] | ^ “The Future the US Military is Constructing…[is] a Giant, Armed Nervous System” (Tucker, 2017); via geo-spatial engineering. |
| [451] | ^ A.k.a. “the best of the servant class”, as Robert David Steele might say, for expediting the designs of the financial (and I.C.) class that has comprised the real investment and strategic planners. |
| [452] | ^ “...Lockheed is running the Information and Payment systems- certainly at [the] DoD” (Fitts, 2018j, mn.37). Although generally, US government computer systems “basically have 2 components: one is the Defense contractors running the IT systems…[and] the other is the New York Fed running the bank [payment] systems. The New York Fed [more than Lockheed-Martin] is the depository for the US government” (Ibid). |
| [453] | ^ This author would add that World War Two- the maddest spasm of violence in the history of this planet- changed things…. from the traditional “financial intelligence” of the (rather calamitous) 1st half of the 20th century, to the “military intelligence” [based on UKUSA Agreement signals intell sharing] of the (smaller-scale-disastered) 2nd half of the 20th century. The ‘banksters’ and financialists, high-profile though they are these days, have been (at least in the US) ‘little brother’ to the Pentagon & National Security agencies for at least a number of decades now. See also “Hypertrophy (scale bias).” |
| [454] | ^ The Anglo-Americans (then championing “Finance Capitalism) won World Wars 1-2, not the Germans or Japanese (who were championing Industrial Capitalism).This is the distinction between ‘usury-world’ fantasia and industrial bosses ‘putting their pants on one leg at a time’. |
| [455] | ^ “With securities fraud, you can lose a near infinite amount of money, every year, no matter what your budget is” (Fitts, 2017i, mn.9). |
| [456] | ^ Hudson (2017p) characterizes both Mill and George as “Ricardian socialists”, with Ricardian apparently meaning pro-bankmoney & anti-landed aristocracy… Hence, ‘bankmoney socialists’ (or bank-run socialism), the largely unquestioned common denominator or assumption of the past approx. 200 years (Ricardo through Keynes, to the current crisis; i.e. nearly 3 “debt cycles”). Al;though Marx was certainly a ‘bankmoney socialist’ (statist) who did not question the underlying dogmas of (what society uses for) money, George was critical of both constructs and certainly did not support the (Frankenstein-like) combination of the two. See also “Fin de Siecle”, “Statism”. |
| [457] | ^ ...as transpired, albeit crudely, in China, c.1949. |
| [458] | ^ “Ironically, many of these technologically driven shifts in the operational approach...of banks…[such as derivatives] had their origin in efforts to decrease levels of risk in an increasingly volatile marketplace” (Busch, 2012, 29). Maybe someday other fields, like Physics, will pay more heed to the ‘laboratory of the real world’, instead of mythomatics modelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqrZeC2ee0k |
| [459] | ^ Like training wheels for learning to ride a bicycle (which was only invented about a century and a half ago, by the way. Before which was the world lit only by fire and expedited only by horses). |
| [460] | ^ MMT proponents, for example, still insist that the privately-owned Federal Reserve System is ‘part of the government’, when every legal ruling on the subject has held that it is not. “For the purposes of the simplest explication, it is convenient to consolidate the treasury and the central bank accounts into a ‘government account’. To be sure, the real world is more complicated” (Wray, 2012, 98). Whose interest is this conflation (as opposed to separation) of powers ‘convenient’ for? “[W]e have two different words: ‘money’ and ‘debt’.For some reason, Randall Wray, like many others, is resistant to the uniqueness of money and wants all money to be a debt…. A false equivalence is presenting two things as being the same when in fact they are different. One way to do this is to attribute two [very] different meanings to the same word” (Lonergan, 2016). See also “Dumb-downing”, “Orwell”. |
| [461] | ^ ”The so-called 'modern money theory' even misrepresent[s] the present bankmoney regime as a sovereign currency system under government control, while in actual fact it has long since been a privatised money system, backed by the central bank, and warranted [stamped off] by the government” (Huber, 2018). |
| [462] | ^ Washington’s deficit spending doesn't ‘create’ [either TAB or RAB] money, because it is first financed by issuing bonds, via the New York Fed’s ‘Federal’ Open Market Committee (FOMC). The selling of government bonds is what has ‘created’ most [] money in the US (ever since the civil war Greenbacks were phased out in the second half of the 19th century), and the MMT leadership must know this. |
| [463] | ^ In an interview later that day, Huber added that MMT writings often remark upon “the strange situation that… the [US] government first has to make a detour… First it has to 1] sell its bonds to private banks, and then 2] the banks re-finance [those bonds] at the Central Bank and [then] 3] transfer just a small part of…[those] government bonds to the CB- which is seen [sic] by them [MMT] as another government body-...a problematic assumption in itself, particularly in the U.S…. But that’s the way that MMT looks at that...thing… Of course, an obvious question is ‘Why [are you] making that detour?.... Why not directly issue government money, instead of being in debt… with the Central Bank?’” (Huber, 2013c, mn.9-10). |
| [464] | ^ Let’s be clear about this. With today’s debt-money system, “debt [debt-money] generates all the corporate spending and government spending in the system…. The pyramid governs both the private sector economy and the public sector. These aren’t…two different systems, but two components of one monetary vortex… The versions of Socialism and Capitalism that we live under today are actually part of the same [debt-money] system…. [i.e.] mega-empire-level Capitalism, controlled by Wall Street and imperial corporations. These aren’t 2 different systems, but 2 sides of 1 financial dictatorship that runs everything out of Wall Street and D.C.” (Vrabel, 2011, 126). For a detailed (if sometimes contradictory) description of the old USSR’s monetary system, see Garvy (1966). |
| [465] | ^ “I think of the miraculous effects that we ascribe to Modern Monetary Theory as really being a function of having the Reserve currency”- Lee Sheppard of Tax Analysts’ Tax Notes (2017, mn.3); i.e.’ ‘We’ve got the funny-money yardstick’. |
| [466] | ^ That means in accordance with the United States constitution. “Neither the President nor the United States Treasury [Citibank/Goldman Sachs] nor any other agency of the [Executive] Government should have power to alter the volume of circulating medium” that they have been granted by the People, via Congress, to work with (Fisher, et al., 1939, 13). It is not a proper purpose of Monetary Reform to discard what the Glorious Revolution of 1688-94 established- that is that the Legislature (not the Executive) is to have power over the purse strings (in any society that is not a ‘dictatorship’). See also “Separation of Powers”. |
| [467] | ^ “Transparency on the decision process of public money issuance has to be fully guaranteed to the public” (Yamaguchi & Yamaguchi, 2017, 18). |
| [468] | ^ In what have been euphemized as “‘market economies’, [banks are] the decision-making control center of the entire economy...because they [both] create the [aggregate] money supply and they decide who gets money for what purpose…. [a power which can] completely reshape the economic landscape in just a few months or years” (Werner, 2018b, mn.32). |
| [469] | ^ Moving all ‘Deposit’ bankmoney (TAB) into the ‘Federal funds’ or Reserve (RAB) money circuit, thus having one circuit or tier of money instead of two, and mothballing much of the heavy (and time/resource consuming) insurance and regulatory requirements of the 20th century (and recurrent bank failures, panics, and civilian-targeting wars of the 19th-20th centuries). Even in the 1930’s, it was known that with the manufacturing of new “money...made exclusively a Governmental function and the lending [allocation] of money...left to become exclusively a banking or non-Governmental function, some of the vexatious regulations to which bankers are now subject could be abolished. Moreover, the Government could withdraw from the banking business and again leave this field entirely to the bankers… there would no longer be any need of deposit insurance on demand deposits... [And] the principle argument in favor of [interstate] branch banking, which is often regarded as a way to stabilize banking...by eliminating the small [local] banker, would be removed…. Under the 100% [or a single-circuit] system, the demand deposits of both the smallest and the largest banks would be absolutely secure. The pressure toward the concentration of banking and [for] the establishment of branch banking would thus be greatly reduced” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 25-26). |
| [470] | ^ A condition that is, ironically, necessitated by the bifurcating extractions and war-prone nature of bankmoney. |
| [471] | ^ Certainly one of the big lessons of the 20th century was its repeated disasters with centralized power. |
| [472] | ^ As distinct from (unstamped) tokens, chits, rewards, and coupons. See also “Complementary & Local currencies.” |
| [473] | ^ Minsky famously quipped that everyone can create (what they think is) new money; the problem is in getting others to accept it (Gabor & Vestergaard, 2016). |
| [474] | ^ John Locke and Ben Franklin both agreed that what we use for money is simply “valued by its stamp” (Locke, 1718), as did their contemporaries George Berkeley (in Ireland) and Montesquieu (in France). All this of course preceded Adam Smith sowing confusion on the matter, the French [1st known ‘Color’] Revolution and the Congress of Vienna’s subsequent bankmoney agenda. |
| [475] | ^ The “split-circuit 2-tier[ed] circulation” of bankmoney and Reserves (Huber, 2017, 2017d, 2018d) is a formal/full articulation of what may be more colloquially referred to as the (age-old) ‘dual-circuit’, ‘dualist’, or ‘two-tiered’ monetary systems of the pre-computer/Knowledge age. |
| [476] | ^ There is a “myth that economics teachers shove down students’ throats… and [that] they themselves believe, that banks actually lend out Reserves. And they don't. They can't. It's simply false accounting to believe that they can do that" (Keen, 2016f, mn.18). |
| [477] | ^ With the possible exception of residual command economies such as China,as Steve Keen has noted (in minute two): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSfe6uyO5yE |
| [478] | ^ Mathematics is “all about taking the existing status quo for granted” (Hudson, 2016s). |
| [479] | ^ For more on the (western notion of) ‘the 3 Estates’, see also “Separation of Powers”. |
| [480] | ^ “In other words, you [2nd Estate creditors] need the state [1st Estate government] to say ‘I’m going to help the issuers of [credit money] to preserve their promise to pay at [a] par’” with government money (Gabor, 2017, mn.8). “So that’s very important…[the] idea that there has to be a relationship between the state and [any other] money-issuing institutions… because from that relationship the [other/2nd Estate] money-issuing institutions want to run away” (Ibid). See also “Criminalization of Banking, the” (when the 2nd Estate horses did get out of the 1st Estate regulatory barn). |
| [481] | ^ The ”accounts are...widely used as a parking place for funds between the purchase of equities, bonds, and other long-term financial assets” (Sawyer & Sprinkle, 2015, 350). |
| [482] | ^ Although there were “almost no MMMFs in 1978, by mid-2008 they managed almost $3.5 trillion in assets” (Burton, et al. 2010, 260). “For years, repo[s] seemed safe, because every transaction was backed by collateral. Then Lehman Brothers went under when repo investors… stopped rolling over its loans” (McCormick & Spratt, 2017). |
| [483] | ^ During the demise of Bretton Woods era, the first money market fund was brought to market in 1972 by Henry Brown and Bob Bent, after the SEC rejected their application “144 times before it finally [was] approved” (Markham, 2011, 314). |
| [484] | ^ Prior to the Financial Crisis of 2008, money market funds were not insured “by either the FSLIC or the FDIC in the event of investment losses in a money market account [that was] held with a broker-dealer… [This caused] a near-collapse of the money markets [funds] during the subprime crisis” (Markham, 2011, 314). As of 2017, ‘money market mutual funds’ are still generally not government-insured, although ‘money funds’ purchased through a bank are covered by FDIC up to $100,000. |
| [485] | ^ MMT’s assertion, or assumption, is that “modern nation-states…[are] in command of the sovereign currency system, what they call Chartal money. And part of this is the construct of the CB and the government financially belonging together… in the public or state sector… in monetary as well as fiscal policies” (Huber, mn.24). See also “Public Banking.” |
| [486] | ^ Money market mutual funds in the US are “2.5 times” the dollar volume of M1 (Huber, 2018). |
| [487] | ^ According to Robert David Steele, Microsoft “is part of the Deep State” (Steele, 2018b, mn.29). |
| [488] | ^ “As a rule, any loan that [has] been turned into an acronym or abbreviation” (Lewis, 2011, 127). |
| [489] | ^ What kind of nationalism? Col. Nasser, their 34-year-old de facto leader, “was strongly anti-communist and temperamentally fairly sympathetic towards the United States, although this did nothing to lessen his determination to make Egypt fully independent of the West” (Mansfield, 1973, 670). See also Nasser, 1958: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4RK8bj2W0 |
| [490] | ^ G (Kinzer,). |
| [491] | ^ “At a White House meeting between the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, ‘We should do everything possible to stress the “holy war” aspect,’ according to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.” Five years earlier, President “Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh. When Eisenhower took office in January 1953 [however], he immediately unleashed [Allen] Dulles...ousting Mosaddegh in ‘Operation Ajax’” (Kennedy, 2016). |
| [492] | ^ The broader/inclusive term ”public debt”($21 tn. in April, 2018) includes the narrower term “debt held by the public” ($15.3 tn. in April, 2018), which is simply the aggregate amount outstanding that the government has borrowed to date, excluding that portion of the debt which is held in government accounts). The term gross national debt is something of a compromise between the two, including only some of the government accounts. |
| [493] | ^ “Furthermore, the Public Debt Subject to Limit is [technically defined as] the Public Debt Outstanding adjusted for: Unamortized Discount on Treasury Bills and Zero Coupon Treasury Bonds, Miscellaneous debt [pre-1917], Debt held by the Federal Financing Bank, and Guaranteed Debt” (TreasuryDirect, 2018). |
| [494] | ^ Actually, as Niv Horesh has pointed out, the Bank of England’s private “note issue prerogatives were not much discussed” in its early years and decades. “Rather, the Bank had been primarily envisioned as a channel of raising funds from the public so as to support the Crown’s naval expansion and expansionist wars…. [Paper] note issuance was therefore not much conceived as revenue generating in its own right but as a commercial privilege enticing lenders [unquestioned loyalty] to the [new] Crown…. It was only in 1797 that £1 notes were being disbursed by the Bank… for the first time in lieu of gold coinage” (Horesh, 2014, 72-73). |
| [495] | ^ Of the official $19 trillion US national debt in 2016, the two largest foreign holders were Japan and China, at $1.13 tn. and $1.12 tn, respectively. See also Montesquieu, below. |
| [496] | ^ And also honest political philosophers of the 18th century, such as Montesquieu: “Some have imagined that it was for the advantage of a state to be indebted to itself: they thought that this multiplied riches by increasing the circulation. Those who are of this opinion have, I believe, confounded a circulating paper which represents money… with a paper which represents [merely] a debt. The first…[is] extremely advantageous to the State; the last can never be so…. [because] the taxes raised for the payment of interest...[on this] debt, are a hurt to the manufacturers, by [just] raising the price of…labour. It takes the true revenue of the state from those who have activity and industry, [in order] to convey it to the indolent; that is, it gives the…[facilities] of labour to those who do not [work], and clogs with difficulties the industrious… These are its inconveniences. I know of no advantage.”- Spirit of Laws (1748, 394). He might have added the advantages of: 1] mustering finances and manpower for the sacrifices of war, and that 2] ‘national debts’ (unless denominated in someone else’s currency) can always be, like a Simon Says game, written off. |
| [497] | ^ The 2015-16 Trump campaign in America provided a revealing, if imperfect, litmus test on this issue, with many ‘Globalists’ reacting apoplectically to criticism of their religion’s assumed (promised) right to rule the roost without being asked hard questions. |
| [498] | ^ The term ‘government money’ is not used here, because it has other meanings (such as ‘government-issued money’). |
| [499] | ^ Physical money, called cash, is coin, plastic, or paper. It has denominations in fractions and multiples of the legal unit. |
| [500] | ^ In fact |
| [501] | ^ Washington’s “control file system [or a-constitutional Star Chamber] is very serious and very real; and you’ve got a lot of very good people who… you know, they made one mistake or they made two mistakes… So we’ve got to find a way to get a majority of the leadership in this country free of the control file” (Fitts, 2016g, mn.33). See also “Parties, political”. |
| [502] | ^ At “one point...they ran…[a] test across the entire agency… [finding that] 85% of the people in NSA working there were characterized as ISTJ. That means introverted, sensing, technical and judgmental” (Binney, 2015c). |
| [503] | ^ “I worked on Wall St. and the guy with 3% information...was rich compared to the guy who had 1% information, because we never had 100% information. We had to do an act on 3%. Your edge was getting 3%” (Fitts, 2017e, mn.41). |
| [504] | ^ “All of the local communication companies are ‘earning’ economic rents, because they’re all monopolies [or monopolistic competition]- and that’s the result of breaking up the [formerly Ma Bell] monopoly” (Roberts, 2017d, mn.20). George Bush, Jr. “fought to get the telecoms retroactive immunity in 2008, before he left office, because they were in violation of… any number of laws…. [concerning] the privacy rights of their customers…. George Bush and Cheney had to protect them is what happened…. and they wouldn’t tell Congress what they were giving them retroactive immunity for!” (Binney, 2018c, mn.25-26). |
| [505] | ^ Some months after Sept. 11, 2001, “they had the [Project Genoa head] Admiral Poindexter come out with his… Total Information Awareness program, just to test the waters… and of course everybody was violently opposed to it, because it’s clearly violating the constitution. So it got killed right away” (Binney, 2018c, mn.17). Congresspeople knew that “it would give those intelligence agencies, and anybody in power in government, all the information about them...to leverage them in anything they were doing” (Binney, mn.18). |
| [506] | ^ After the publishing of a FISA court memo in January 2018 concerning database protocols, Binney added that: “the FBI and the DEA and the DOJ… [all] also have direct access [to the NSA database]- and so do the other 5 Eyes… through the I.C. Reach program…. [whereas in regards to any meaningful] oversight from the FISA court- they can’t even tell what’s going on. And the intelligence committees, they’re about as worthless as anything…. [The database free-for-all has effectively opened] up everything to industrial espionage everywhere…. [from] anywhere in the world” (Binney, 2018, mn.13-14). See also “Shadow government”. |
| [507] | ^ It is difficult to imagine a more flagrant violation of the 4th Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” (United States Constitution, Amendment 4). |
| [508] | ^ ...which is a violation of the 5th Amendment strictures against compulsory self-incrimination (Binney, 2018d, mn.31), in addition the unwarranted confiscation of private/personal property without due process of (written) law. It also violates the 6th Amendment basic law, that: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed… and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with [which also means the right to question] the witnesses [evidence] against him…” (United States Constitution, Amendment 6), and can also be a severe intimidation or repression of the “1st Amendment… right to free association” (Binney, 2018d, mn.31). |
| [509] | ^ “We can prove that they [US Dept. of Justice] fabricate evidence against people” (Binney, 2018d, mn.47). |
| [510] | ^ ...in addition to unlawful. The Obama Administration’s Executive Order 13526, superces prior classification X.O.s from Bush, Jr. (#13292) and Clinton (#12958), and is “the overall law for classifying material for the US government. Section 1.7 says you cannot classify, maintain classified [status], or…[fail to] de-classify any material that is evidence of a crime, fraud, corruption, waste, abuse, or embarrassment to a person or agency… [Nonetheless operations such as] The Fairview Program [are] taking in data on all US citizens without warrants…[which is also] a violation of the 4th Amendment of the constitution. That’s criminality. That’s corruption” (Binney, 2018d, mn.28). |
| [511] | ^ Some consider ‘near monies’ to be unquantifiable, or nearly infinite in nature; hence ‘M3’s discontinuance in the US. |
| [512] | ^ And US shadow banking liabilities reached $20 trillion in 2007, compared to traditional bank [TAB] liabilities (pretty much the same as “mortgage debt”) of less than $12 trillion (Noeth & Sengupta, 2011). |
| [513] | ^ NIRP puts pressure on banks to lend, while IOR/IOER compensates banks for not lending. |
| [514] | ^ Insiders at the St. Louis Fed agree: “The fact that it is costly to store and protect large amounts of currency means that short-term rates can become slightly negative in some circumstances. Nevertheless, zero is a reasonable approximation on the lower bound for interest rates” (Fawley & Neely, 2013, 82). |
| [515] | ^ Also the vast majority of Italian BB-rated bonds, from 2018, are paying lower rates than US Treasuries. |
| [516] | ^ What Thorstein Veblen coined “Neoclassical” Economics in 1900, developed in large part from the works of Stanley (‘private central bank’) Jevons and John (‘unearned income’) Clark, taking up the oligarchical batton from earlier reprints of Jeremy (“Defence of Usury”) Bentham (1748-1832). |
| [517] | ^ There is evidence to the contrary, that the ‘vested interests’ of the latter 19th century who endowed the new ‘Economics’ schools, took ‘regular American’ Henry George more seriously than they did Karl Marx and his handler Friedrich Engels. As mentioned above (see “Georgism”; Gaffney, 1994), “neoclassical economics” was being formed in late 1880’s and 1890’s America, with the world’s first “Economics” departments opening later that decade. In the ‘economizing’ US and UK at that time, it would not seem hyperbole to say that George was outselling Marx by at least a 20 or 30-to-1 margin, and was a household name. For a long time it seems that Marx’s Das Kapital was only selling well in Russia- 3,000 copies in one year anyway, whereas in Germany (its intended market) the first edition of 1,000 copies took over 5 years to sell (Figes, 1998, 139). Marx’s earlier 23-page Communist Manifesto pamphlet (1848) didn’t even see any publication in the United States until 1872, in Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, a short-lived 1870’s radical New York women’s periodical. |
| [518] | ^ Keen considers continuing these 19th century assumptions into “the 21st century- when we have the mathematical technology to model disequilibrium systems…[and] build models…[that include] credit and money… is intellectually criminal” (2016t, mn.5). |
| [519] | ^ Steve Keen sometimes simplifies the Neoclassical “fantasy planet” to 2 primary elements: “where everything happens by barter and money is irrelevant” (Keen, 2017k, mn.15). See also “Barter”, “Money”. |
| [520] | ^ “Neoclassical theory...puts banks as if they were like this perfect [and invisible!] fuel that never never breaks down. For me they’re like the oil in an engine, which you need. But if you fill it up completely with oil you know… you’ll stop it [from] working. They are a lubricant. They are not the source of wealth” (Keen, 2011b). “It’s almost as if they’re wearing...marble… glasses… They’re not even looking at the important data, even though… the statistical agencies record it. So they’re completely ignoring private debt” (Keen, 2016e, mn.30), as well as banks’ endogenous money creation (mn.31). “So they’re completely blindsided by the most important causal factor.... And they’re still floundering around trying to explain why [significant] growth is not occurring now (2016e, mn.32). |
| [521] | ^ See Zarlenga, 2011, on how “markets” have been “given a sacred character.” |
| [522] | ^ Libertarianism, though it is mostly supposed to be about domestic (legal) policy, is often distinguished from (economic) ‘neo-liberalism’ in terms of being more isolationist (as opposed to interventionist) in foreign policy. |
| [523] | ^ Although the terms a.neoconservative, b.neoliberal, and c.neoclassical are sometimes conflated, they are usually meant to refer to [the formerly discredited terms] a.imperialism (in foreign policy), b.rent-seeking (in domestic policy), and c.’free-market’ism (in economic policy). They also correlate with a.‘neocons’, b.‘libertarians’, and c.‘neo-classicists’, respectively (in the millennial era political-economics lingo). Yes, the oft-changing and similar-sounding names seem to have been applied to evade, confuse, and retard public discussion (slippery labels). |
| [524] | ^ According to Paul Craig Roberts, most Russian and Chinese economists are also trained in “neoliberal” economics. |
| [525] | ^ I.e. the money creation process |
| [526] | ^ The cliche for challenging elitist control over the levers of a lawful society goes ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they bribe or co-opt you, then they fight you, then you win’. |
| [527] | ^ ”A firm that either accepts demand deposits or makes commercial and industrial loans, but not both. [Federal Reserve chairman] Volcker believed that the federal reserve needed to have jurisdiction over nonbank banks” (Hester, 2008, 78, n44), which to some extent was achieved in 1991 (Ricks, 2016, 198-99). |
| [528] | ^ Tax havens, or course, can also be on-shore. “In almost anybody’s list that’s real, Delaware… would be in the top 5 [globally], and arguably number 1, and the various [English] Channel islands would be probably #2.... Switzerland would still be on these [top 5] lists…. And since the whole nature of the business is not asking questions… and not doing investigations, because they don’t want to know… you don’t have to have… a ‘legend’. You don’t have to make a sophisticated legend up and sow the seeds in the electronic records to make it pass...” (Black, 2016c, mn.40-42). |
| [529] | ^ ...an “exploited quasi-feudal entrepot” according to Adam Tooze (Tooze, 2018). |
| [530] | ^ ...that “began in earnest after the Soviet collapse in 1991”, as Chinese & Indian governments changed their attitude towards “foreign capital” (Roberts, 2017). |
| [531] | ^ “The population of Detroit, formerly America’s 4th largest city, declined by 25% in the first decade of the 21st century. Gary, Indiana, lost 22% of its population. Flint, Michigan, lost 18%. Cleveland...17%. Pittsburg... 7%.... St. Louis...lost 20%. These cities were once the home of American manufacturing and industrial might” (Roberts, 2017). |
| [532] | ^ Origins of ‘reform’ (in the prior debt cycle’s depression): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8AgOozM8KQ |
| [533] | ^ For example Warburgs, Schiffs, Mellons. |
| [534] | ^ Specific “queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were [formerly] given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on ‘national security’ grounds” (Henderson, 2011); so one is asked to put up with a little bit of conjecture here (or suggest more reasonable suppositions). |
| [535] | ^ Generally the old school (Corporate Media Cartel; or ‘digital’) media has always aligned with CIA-CFR, about as reliably as the “new media” (analog) has backing/support from NSA-Pentagon. |
| [536] | ^ As clearly as the Trump Admin. (through 2018) has been ambiguous in its strategic direction, there is also considerable overlap between the ‘classic’ F1 and the |
| [537] | ^ The Morgan-Chase-Citibank alliance predates the FRBNY. |
| [538] | ^ “F1”/’Rockefellers were of course also famous for controlling USA’s larger public events/trends in the 1970’s; as were its elected presidents- Nixon and (to a lesser extent) Carter- almost as renown in resisting them. |
| [539] | ^ attributed mostly to the (‘weird’) post-2000 CIA. |
| [540] | ^ GS is often also associated with Merrill Lynch. |
| [541] | ^ Monetary supply & demand is (in the real world of bankmoney endogenous privilege) broadly/initially set by a) the big NY Fed member commercial/investment banks themselves, in conjunction with b) the ‘globalist’ primary dealer banks. The FOMC is really more like a typical quasi-private/public rubber stamp committee, approving what the private sector has already done. The NY Fed itself more-or-less admitted this a few years ago, when its conclusion on the subject of “The Fed Funds Market and Monetary Policy” was that “It is important to remember that actual fed funds rates are determined by market participants, based on market conditions” (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2013). See also “Market fundamentalism”, “Hegelian dialectic”, “Lender of Last Resort”, “Public-Private-Partnership (PPP).” |
| [542] | ^ The Federal Reserve Act stipulates that the Fed may only buy & sell treasury securities in “the open market." Hence, the (mostly private) New York Fed-FOMC and the (private & mostly foreign) Primary Dealer banks are the partners in this creation of new Reserve (RAB) money that underpins all bank credits (TAB); but the government and public are not… even though Reserve (RAB) is created to support the buildup of both government and private debt. |
| [543] | ^ With “Quantitative Easing”, however, the Fed may buy many other securities like MBOs from the banks- or even from other financial institutions like hedge funds- in order to increase Reserve [RAB] liquidity. See also “Quantitative Easing (in the US)”. |
| [544] | ^ Quantitative Easing is, arguably, not really a new tool for the Fed, but more like ‘Open Market Operations, squared’ (just a radical increase in scale). |
| [545] | ^ Central Banks’ new tools (such as Quantitative Easing and Reverse Repos) this decade, although certainly of a larger scale than traditional/20th century OMOs, are not fundamentally different in kind. |
| [546] | ^ For example, a recent BIS-Federal Reserve paper asserts that after deregulations liberated near monies, or “reduced money market segmentation”, “larger open market operations were required to produce a given change in the federal funds rate, but that the pass through of changes in the funds rate to other market rates was also greater” (Carlson & Wheelock, 2016, 2016). |
| [547] | ^ See also Still, 2013, “Censorship, academic”, “Orwell, George”. |
| [548] | ^ “All of this” financialization “is overhead. But there is no distinction [in GDP] between wealth and overhead, and failing to draw that distinction means that the host doesn’t realize that there’s a parasite there. The host economy- the industrial economy- doesn’t realize what the industrialists realized in the 19th century, that if you want to be an efficient economy… you have to cut your price by having the public sector provide roads freely, medical care freely, education freely”; not driving up prices by putting a meter or toll on everything (Hudson, 2016d). |
| [549] | ^ The Whig “party was made strong in England, by the paper stock with which it was enriched and united. In spite of its principles, it was forced by the regimen of this legal wealth to enslave the nation, by poisoning the principles it professed to nurture” (Taylor, 570-71). |
| [550] | ^ It should also be noted that ACH payments, even though they are Electronic Funds Transfers, are regulated by the National Automated Clearing House Association, not Regulation E. |
| [551] | ^ Clearing House Interbank Payment System (CHIPS) |
| [552] | ^ CHIPS is a same-day electronic funds transfer system (open 9-5 EST); whereas cashiers checks and/or money orders require a full business day to clear. CHIPS is less expensive, however, than Fedwire, which provides nearly real-time clearance, and is available 24/7. |
| [553] | ^ See also “Parallel Universe”, “Neoclassical Economics”. |
| [554] | ^ “...just like interbank [RAB] payments have [been] for decades” (Ibid).. |
| [555] | ^ Mathematical obscurantist Stanley Jevons (1835-82) is often credited with starting the movement to replace ‘political economy’ with (the more scientific-sounding) ‘Economics’ in the late 1870’s. “When finally the Science of Money had been...reconstituted [largely in Germany] after being lost for many centuries, the bankers understood that they had to re-bury it in order to protect their parasitic activities...” (Zarlenga, 2002, 357). See also “Neoclassical economics”, “Neoclassical revolution”, “State Theory of Money”, “World War One.” |
| [556] | ^ “The heirs of Keynes… unreflectingly support Banking School reasoning… [a.k.a.] identifying money with bank credit as if that were the most natural thing in the world” (Huber, 2018). |
| [557] | ^ In addition to the US, primary dealers may be controlled by persons domiciled in: the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and Israel. As of June 2017, the 23 primary dealers are: Bank of Nova Scotia; New York Agency; BMO Capital Markets Corp.; BNP Paribas Securities Corp.; Barclays Capital Inc.; Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.; Citigroup Global Markets Inc.; Credit Suisse Securities (US branch) LLC; Daiwa Capital Markets America Inc.; Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.; Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC; HSBC Securities (US branch) Inc.; Jefferies LLC; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc.; Mizuho Securities USA LLC; Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC; Nomura Securities International, Inc.; RBC Capital Markets, LLC; RBS Securities Inc.; Societe Generale, New York Branch; TD Securities (USA) LLC; UBS Securities LLC; and (added in 2016) Wells Fargo Securities, LLC. |
| [558] | ^ “By adjusting the level of Reserve balances [RAB] in the banking system through open market operations, the Fed can offset or support permanent, seasonal or cyclical shifts in the supply of reserve balances and thereby affect short-term [RAB] interest rates and by extension other interest [TAB] rates” (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2007b).. |
| [559] | ^ In 1980, the prime rate famously rose from 11% to 21% in only 4 months. |
| [560] | ^ The RCC pilot fish was already gutted and/or captured several times prior to the larger turn-of-the-century (‘Protocols’) era, including the barbarity of 10th-11th century (pre-Gregorian) popes, Philip the Fair’s physical capturing & relocation of the papacy from 1303-05, and the subsequent century of rivalrous multi-popes, to 1417. During what is sometimes referred to as “the disastrous 14th century” and the 15th century’s nepotist Borgia-Medici rivalry, simony and the the selling of papal indulgences increased to the point of motivating widespread heresy (such as money lending, money-politics). In the early 16th century, it was a Medici pope, Leo X, who ended at least 12 centuries of strict anti-usury (and a half century of Dominican-conservative vs. Franciscan- liberal arguments over the subject) with the Lateran V Council’s official promulgation that “for the first time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church”, interest-bearing loans were now lawful “for charitable purposes… [even ordering] excommunication of all those who publicly expressed doubts concerning…[this] judgment” (Hoffman, 2013, 378-79). Lateran V concluded in March 1517, six months prior to Martin Luther posting his views against selling indulgences and other papal-curia corruptions on October 31st. Since then, there have been nearly 5 centuries of similar stepping stone proclamations, primarily: Benedict XIV’s Vix Pervenit (1745) “to include the lawfulness of interest on investment capital”; Pope Pius VIII curia’s administrative ruling (1830- after the papacy had been kidnapped again by France, in 1798-99 and 1809-14) releasing “Catholic usurers from the obligation to confess taking revenue from interest” if it was at a rate “considered legal by the state”; and then Benedict XV’s 1917 Code of Canon Law promulgation, delivering the coffin nails, that “‘it is not per se [sic] unlawful to contract for the legal rate of interest, unless that be clearly exorbitant’... [with] ‘exorbitant interest’...never defined…[I]n the very next sentence...it is [also] determined that Catholics who have ‘just and proportionate title’ can rightfully receive an interest rate above the legal rate [sic]...[o]nce again…[with] no definition of what constitutes this ‘title’...” (Hoffman, 380-83; 147). For plots concerning the ‘Protestantism’, please see “Scofield Bible” and “Cultural Calendar” (and also the ‘Ecumenical Movement’). For plots against ‘Orthodoxy’, there was of course the Communist Revolution itself. |
| [561] | ^ With the possible exception of North Korea and a few others too small/poor to be of concern. Reversions from the bankmoney or UN protocols/stipulations are not included here. The USSR, by the way, always had “fractional reserve” money (Garvy, 1966), and was an integral part of the United Nations, as Russia is today. |
| [562] | ^ There are different versions of the ‘Protocols’, and King’s (21-point) summary leaves out some of the more famous 24-point ‘Protocols’ points, including: 1) the global enshrinement of “the power of gold” [- - which arguably was already in place, but then lost in the 1930’s]; 2) something about a ‘Jewish king’ to rule over the gold-money world [x- which has obviously not developed], and 3) something about encouraging the primacy of “speculative” capitalism over industrial capitalism, to make (private) debt slaves out of “the gentiles” everywhere [🗸- which would seem to have been achieved for the most part]. With these 3 (hitherto absent) ‘protocols’, the summary total now stands (corrected) at: 4 or 6 objectives (out of 24) not achieved, for an approx. attainment/prescience rate of 79% of “the protocols” (Deng Xiao Peng used to say in the early 1980’s that his predecessor, Chairman Mao (r.1949-76), was approx. “70%” correct.) See also “Jacob’s Ladder”. |
| [563] | ^ One of “the dangers of judgement is “comparing things only in one aspect…. Judgement is not much good with non-linear systems… [nor] much good in feedback situations” (de Bono, 156). “We see what we are prepared to see… what we are used to seeing…. Outside [of] science and objective measurement, judgement is always subjective…. The frame of ‘judgement’ [typically] sets the outcome of the judgement. That is why criticism is so easy and so cheap as an intellectual exercise…. Nothing can possibly satisfy all frames” (1999, 158). |
| [564] | ^ “Capitalism, according to Marx [even though he never actually used the term], was supposed to fulfill its historic destiny of… [among other things] getting rid of the banks and making them public in character...” (Hudson, 2017i, mn.9). |
| [565] | ^ For example, in “Hollywood movies in the 1930’s, [in] the small town, there’d always be a crooked banker, working with the saloon owner, and the land speculator, always giving loans to get the politicians to build a road by their house, to make their property more expensive” (Hudson, 2018d, mn.125). |
| [566] | ^ “[W]e’re going at the state level, the community level, because that’s something we can influence” (Brown, 2018-pt.2, mn.24).”We’ve put our hopes in one president after another, and it never seems to work out. We The People need to do it ourselves…. It’s better if it’s leaderless” (Brown, 2018c, mn.126). |
| [567] | ^ Basically public banks “have much lower costs. They don’t have branches everywhere…. They pay only $280,000 or so… [to] the president of the bank. They don’t have private shareholders… They don’t have to advertise. They’re basically partner[ing] with the local banks, which [means that]... the local bank… [is] dealing with the customer and has all those costs. And the Bank of North Dakota…. In effect...[borrows] the… revenues of the government itself… to lend at a bit more” interest (Brown, 2018c, mn.114-115). |
| [568] | ^ Speaking of ‘scope’, in 1949 the Communist Party of China (CCP) “carried out...a view toward nominating the…[People’s Bank of China] as an all-powerful monobank within a few years. To that end, the PBC was allowed to go beyond traditional central-bank roles and provide credit [directly] to retail and corporate clients” (Horesh, 2014, 220). See also “Separation of Powers.” |
| [569] | ^ I.e. the banks own everything |
| [570] | ^ Former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins characterizes the various QE distinctions as: 1) purchasing “from banks, in the case of the [US] Federal Reserve… 2] purchasing corporate [bonds] in the case of the European Central Bank, and [3) purchasing] equities in the case of the Bank of Japan” (Prins, 2018, mn.10). |
| [571] | ^ Although they will attain, it is obvious, a strategic increase in the size and scope of government in the economy; see “Japan model (asphyxiation), the.” |
| [572] | ^ In summary, Quantitative Easing has had only “...a modest effect on limiting income inequality [which is mostly in TAB], but a very great effect on exacerbating wealth inequality, by inflating asset prices vastly more...” (Hudson & Goodhart, 2018), because Central Bank (RAB) monetary injections pretty much cannot get to the former without first filtering through the latter. See also “Reserve Account Balance (RAB) money.” |
| [573] | ^ The ECB “is involved in a corporate debt bubble…. And that number is increasing”, creating more instability as the ECB tends to purchase more bonds from the northern European countries than southern (Prins, 2018b, mn.27). |
| [574] | ^ £375 billion per capita is “nearly £ 6,000 pounds [>8,000 USD] for every man, woman, and child in the UK…. [and] more...money that the entire government spends in 6 months” (Positive Money, 2014b, mn.3). |
| [575] | ^ Positive Money says that it is simply “making the rich richer by boosting asset prices”; the Bank of England knew, by summer 2016, that extending the policy would just “increase the wealth of the top 5%, when wealth inequality…[was already] threatening social cohesion...” (Boait, 2017b, mn.53). |
| [576] | ^ “40% of corporate profits in the US [2010] were made by the banking sector” (Hudson, 2011d). |
| [577] | ^ Chairman Bernanke actually “never called it QE…. He had a different expression… credit easing. This is closer to my original definition [for ‘QE’]- an expansion in credit creation” (Werner, 2015b, mn.228). |
| [578] | ^ “at face value... In September-October of 2008 the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve quadrupled in one month… [which] doesn’t create inflation…. [or TAB] money [directly], because you’re just shifting assets between the central banks and the banks… away from the bank balance sheets where they are harmful, to the central bank, where they can’t do any harm” (Werner, 2018b, mn.29) |
| [579] | ^ “Reagan could easily be argued to be a practitioner of extreme military Keynesianism, using Pentagon budgets to create jobs and drive economic growth” (Graeber, 398, n.25). |
| [580] | ^ For the UK, Adair Turner adds that “” (Turner, 2014, mn.14-16). |
| [581] | ^ Keen amended this a year later: “90% or more of the money they create just goes to finance real estate- and share buybacks” (Keen, 2017g, mn.23). |
| [582] | ^ For one of countless examples, see Martens, 2012. |
| [583] | ^ In the 1990s the US banking system was “still one of the most heavily regulated in an industrialized country, superseded only the the Japanese [keiretsu-based] financial sector” (Busch, 2012, 73). |
| [584] | ^ From a European perspective, the US financial policy network is “a pluralist system of associations in combination with a [more and more] fragmented regulatory and legislative system leads to policy failure and blockade…[as opposed to the UK, where] market concentration and a [similarly] concentrated regulatory and legislative system create high state capacity, despite a [superficially] pluralist system of associations…. [S]tate capacity varies considerably in the field of banking regulation” (Busch, 2012, 21). See also “Statism”. |
| [585] | ^ The subsequent decades have revealed that America’s stricter regulatory rubric from the 1930’s did seem capable [unlike most other places apart from Germany] in holding the line on banking failures and consolidations- up until the last quarter of the 20th century at least. See also “Criminalization of Banking, the”. |
| [586] | ^ 82% of all US banks are state-chartered (and state-regulated); while larger, nationally-chartered banks are only 18% (Stackhouse, 2017); even though they comprise most of the sector’s market share. |
| [587] | ^ The 54 supervisory bodies have, since 1902, “been represented on the federal level...by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors...whose aim is to ensure the survival of the dual [chartered] banking system” (Busch, 51). |
| [588] | ^ The oldest of the 3 commercial bank regulatory agencies, the OCC used to be responsible for issuing the US dollar, until it was displaced by the so-called ‘Federal’ Reserve in 1914. Now it is “the only one of the 3 federal regulatory agencies whose...jurisdiction exclusively concerns the supervision and regulation of banks…. [The Office spot-checks or oversees] over 2,800 banks operating under national license, as well as 65… subsidiary branches of foreign banks… The OCC [also] controls the licensing process…. [and is tasked with] monitoring the compliance of banks to [various] federal laws such as the Equal Credit Opportunity Act or the Community Reinvestment Act. Most importantly [however], the OCC conducts on-the-spot investigations in even the most far-flung locations to gather information...” (Busch, 2012, 49-50); although that particular rubric (which hasn’t been updated for decades) sometimes means that both a $5 mn. bank in Gallup, New Mexico and a Big 6 megabank in New York receive the same regulatory treatment (i.e. one visit from the OCC every 12-18 months). |
| [589] | ^ “Here is how the New York Fed defines its regulatory regime, under the title ‘Relationship Management’: [Bank] ‘Examiners serve as relationship specialists, financial analysts or surveillance analysts, and focus on large foreign banks, other foreign banks, large domestic banks, regional banks or community banks’. Relationship management is not how the public wants its regulators and prosecutors of financial fraud to function, but that is precisely what we have today” (Martens, 2012). |
| [590] | ^ These approx. 1000 state-licenced, FRS banks “hold about 25% of the total asset value of the commercial banking sector…[More importantly, the] 6,010 [bank] holding companies [BHCs] under Fed scrutiny control over 7,000 banks, with [something more like] 94% of all capital assets [in the sector, giving] the Fed…[perhaps the most] crucial role…[in] bank regulation…. [T]he Fed has claimed that its [sui generis] regulatory remit is essential to its ability to fulfil its tasks as a central bank (even though none of its international counterparts have such regulatory powers)” (Busch, 2012, 50); and in recent years has even sought to substantially broaden its regulatory scope. |
| [591] | ^ The FDIC “also has the right to inspect the books of all those banks who have signed up to its ...insurance scheme… [and] to recommend administrative action against transgressing banks to federal...agencies” (Busch, 2012, 51); |
| [592] | ^ The Dodd-Frank Act assigned “primary consumer compliance supervision of banks with more than $10 billion to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (Congressional Research Service, 2017). |
| [593] | ^ Congress is often, if not typically “a reactive institution responding to or confirming changes rather than initiating them” (Busch, 57). |
| [594] | ^ Per section 11 of the Banking Act of 1933, as promulgated by the Federal Reserve Board. |
| [595] | ^ Reg. Q’s interest rate ceilings “were designed to discourage banks from aggressively expanding their loan books and then funding them with deposits from obtained from their competitors by chasing interest rates higher. This ceiling arrangement was deeply offensive to free marketeers, but Senator Glass...understood that competitive efficiency had to be sacrificed to banking safety, given the moral hazzard[s] of deposit insurance and fractional reserve banking” (Stockman, 2013, 177). |
| [596] | ^ Indeed, Evans-Pritchard adds that “There is no such [public debt] threshold for a mature developed country with deep bond markets, able to borrow in its own currency. Britain's public debt was over 200pc after the Napoleonic Wars. Japan is over 250pc today, and the sky has yet to fall in Tokyo [as it has in Greece]. It is perfectly plausible- perhaps likely- that the US will end up in the much the same place over the next 15 years” (2016c). |
| [597] | ^ “Over the last 1000 years the Catholic Church has been saying [that] it’s noble to be poor. But Jesus never said it was good to be poor. What he said was that rich people are greedy and corrupt. That’s what Socrates was saying, as well as Aristotle and the Stoic Roman philosophers, [and] the biblical prophets in Isaiah” (Hudson, 2017s). |
| [598] | ^ “...landlords, monopolists… and banks” (Hudson, 2016d). |
| [599] | ^ “[M]oney market funds wishing to lend money safely overnight…[often] enter into repo agreements with Broker-dealers” (Chabot, 2015). |
| [600] | ^ However, with ongoing Quantitative Easing in Europe, the ECB “is still buying bonds [‘expanding the balance sheet’] to bolster growth and inflation, leaving fewer bonds available as collateral for repo deals, particularly German bonds… So in December 2016, the ECB announced that it would accept cash [base money?] as collateral for its securities lending program” (McCormick & Spratt, 2017). But this is not an issue with the [global res. currency] Federal Reserve: “[I]t remains highly unlikely that the value of propositions received in an ON RRP operation will exceed the amount of available securities on a given day” (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2015). |
| [601] | ^ Since 2009, the Fed’s policy of “Quantitative Easing”- supplying banks with RAB (central bank/interbank) money- appears to be presenting something of an exception. Chairman Bernanke “increased liquidity for the banking sector…. Something of the order...of increasing Reserves by the rate of two [hundred] or 300% per year, for a while there… [which] did… forestall a serious crash in liquidity” (Keen, 2015e). |
| [602] | ^ Established Dec., 1990. As of 2017, transactions “in excess of the low reserve tranche [loophole] are currently reservable at 10%” (Federal Reserve, 2016). |
| [603] | ^ In Europe, however, banks, as of 2007-08, needed interbank Reserves “of only 2.5–3 [%] euros, of which 1.4 [% of those] euros are coins and notes for ATMs, the rest being non-cash excess reserves ([a.k.a. interbank payment reserves) and a 1% minimum reserve requirement…. [However,] to become comprehensively independent of central banks, and [to] fully complete the reign of the bankmoney regime, commercial banks would have to dispense with the 1.1–1.6% non-cash Reserve and the remainder of the 1.4% cash Reserve. Most banks would like to see cash disappear anyway, as they are not allowed to create coins and cash by themselves and...have to finance [all of it from the CB]... Aside from this, handling cash is [also] more expensive than the computerised handling of money-on-account” (Huber, 2018), such as credit and debit cards. See also “Bankmoney regime”. |
| [604] | ^ Or in other words, their ratio of Reserves “is completely irrelevant to the amount of lending they can do… [which is] actually based on [simply] how much leverage they’re willing to have against their equity base” (Keen, 2018b, mn.39). |
| [605] | ^ The traditional RRR of “10%” in the US has been whittled and loopholed since the 1980’s, and now only applies to lending institutions’ ‘reservable liabilities’ (”net transaction accounts [and] nonpersonal time deposits”) of more than $122.3 mn., and lending institutions with less than $16 mn. in such “total reservable liabilities” are exempt, as are eurocurrencies/eurodollars (Federal Reserve Board, 2016-17). |
| [606] | ^ “Reverse” just means that the repurchase agreement “is initiated by the bond-holder [seller] rather [by] than the investor with cash” (McCormick & Spratt,2017). |
| [607] | ^ ”[A]round $2 trillion of Treasury securities…[were] available for ON RRP operations” in 2015 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2015). The “minimum proposition” on all reverse repos is $1 million, and the maximum for ON RRPs $30 billion (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2015). |
| [608] | ^ According to the the New York Fed, reverse repos (RRPs) are “open to the Federal Reserve’s primary dealers as well as [to] its expanded [list of] RRP counterparties” (FRBNY, 2015). |
| [609] | ^ “The Desk”s 16 approved counterparties for ON RRPs, as of July 2018, are: Ally Bank, Bank of America, Bank of Montreal (Chicago Branch), Barclays Bank (New York Branch), Citibank, Credit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank, Discover Bank, Goldman Sachs Bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Mizuho Bank, Ltd., Morgan Stanley Bank, Natixis (New York Branch), Royal Bank of Canada, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (New York Branch), The Northern Trust Company, and Wells Fargo Bank. https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/rrp_counterparties.html |
| [610] | ^ Debentures and mortgage-backed securities from federal agencies are not used in The Desk’s RRP operations (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2015). |
| [611] | ^ Another effect on the spikiness of reverse repo charts is the technical fact that “ON-RRP borrowing by the Fed occurs between 12:45 and 1:15 p.m. ET, and loans are [always] paid back the next day between 3:30 and 5:15 p.m. ET… [whereas] a fed funds [interbank/Reserves] transaction can occur as late as 6:30 p.m., with funds potentially returned early the next day. So, while a fed funds…[loan] may be riskier… it is also [has a relative advantage in being] more liquid” (Williamson, 2016). |
| [612] | ^ That’s what debt and usury are. |
| [613] | ^ Here is one example of Ricardo’s straight talk: “It is evident...that if the Government itself were to be the sole issuer of paper money instead of borrowing it of the Bank, the only difference would be with respect to interest: the Bank would no longer receive interest and the Government would no longer pay it…” (Ricardo, 1824, 3). Franklin had said the same thing more than half a century earlier in Pennsylvania. |
| [614] | ^ “Ricardo was the bank lobbyist of his day. He went into parliament to be the arguer for the bank. His brothers… ran the capital firm. They underwrote the Greek debt after 1832 that bankrupted Greece already in the 19th century…. You still had a landlord class in England, so... [banks back then] didn’t make their money making mortgage loans. Banks made their money mainly in international trade and international financial transactions” (Hudson, 2016s) . |
| [615] | ^ On Sept. 14, 1823 the Sunday Times remarked in Ricardo’s obituary that during the Battle of Waterloo (1815), Ricardo- the man who would soon become the UK’s most renown political economist since Adam Smith- had "netted upwards of a million sterling", (Skousen, 2009, 99); over 100 million dollars in today’s money. (Perhaps some people conflate this with the more famous [though not officially admitted] Rothschilds-Waterloo story today; perhaps there was some connection.) In any event, he immediately retired from his job in the bond pits, subsequently purchased an estate in Gloucestershire, now owned by Princess Anne, and retired to the country. Ricardo was appointed Sheriff of Gloucestershire for 1818–19, and in August 1818 bought Lord Portarlington’s seat in Parliament for £4,000, as part of the terms of a loan of £25,000. His record in Parliament was that of an earnest reformer for the economic benefits of bankmoney (from 1810) and ‘free trade’ (from 1817). |
| [616] | ^ Approx. half of all OECD jobs (inclusive of all sectors) are also at ‘probable’ risk of robotization, according to an OECD study (Economist, 2018). |
| [617] | ^ ...just under the guise or beard of “private” Board Systems, instead of “public” ‘Big Government’. |
| [618] | ^ Paul Volcker noted that “Titles I and II of the law ‘will undoubtedly take their place among the most important pieces of financial legislation enacted in this century’... Applying reserve requirements to all institutions that accept deposits provided the Fed with valuable ammunition...” (Robinson, 2013); in addition to perhaps doubling its regulatory scope from the early 1970’s. |
| [619] | ^ Ronald Reagan’s OMB Director at the time, David Stockman, perhaps euphemizes the wild developments of the early ‘80’s as simply conferring “vastly expanded asset powers, such as real estate development lending and junk bond investments, on the [already] massively insolvent savings and loan industry… [Congressman] Freddie St. Germain of Rhode Island… was a practical politician who rarely met a lobbyist he could not accommodate. St. Germain’s case for deregulation… [was] simply that it was an unavoidable emergency expedient design to help thrifts to earn [he said with a straight face] their way out of their current balance sheet disasters. The Great Inflation [of the ‘70’s] thus spawned a cure [Federal Reserve dominance] which was worse than the disease” (Stockman, 2013, 177-78). See also “Criminalization of Banking,” “Derivatives”. |
| [620] | ^ Pilloff & Prager, 1998, 1027. |
| [621] | ^ Government regulators eventually closed “1,043 institutions holding $519 billion in assets…. [From] 1986, through year-end 1995, the number of federally insured thrift institutions… declined from 3,234 to 1,645, or by approximately 50%” (Curry & Shibut, 2000, 26). |
| [622] | ^ For example, by law, S&L’s must have at least 65% of their loans in residential mortgages. |
| [623] | ^ Mutual Savings Banks are so-called because their customers are members with voting rights who (as with credit unions) have a say in determining the goals of the institution. See also “Postal Savings & Loan Banks”. |
| [624] | ^ typically/traditionally ‘fractional reserve’ or new money-creating |
| [625] | ^ Since at least the 1930’s, only Stock savings banks have been “Fractional Reserve (monetary) institutions”. Whereas in mutual savings banks, the money put in is invested by the bank on behalf of [its fiduciary] the savings depositor...in stock savings banks, it is borrowed, on term, by the bank from the depositor and gives him no [legal] right to consider it as [his] money...” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 22). |
| [626] | ^ Presumably ‘conservative’ here is a euphemism for the ‘loanable funds’/’full reserve’ system of financial accounting. See also “Exogenous vs. Endogenous (money creation)”. |
| [627] | ^ The traditional dividing line between ‘M2’ (household savings) and ‘M3’ (larger near-money accounts) is $100,000. |
| [628] | ^ ‘Time deposits’ “(i.e. the bank’s liability) cannot under any circumstances be true deposits of physical money. The actual ‘deposit’ is [in fact] a loan to the bank, drawing interest, and therefore not appropriately available as money to the depositor…. if we could rename time ‘deposits’ and call them ‘time loans’, the general public would gain much in its understanding of these matters” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 22-23). |
| [629] | ^ “There are a lot of good books on how Lockheed-Martin actually created the Cold War” (Steele, 2012, mn.15). |
| [630] | ^ “The thinking behind this came from the gold standard era… [because] the Fed [then] held the gold [that was] legally needed for [“gold standard”] backing, and the BEP was solely a service organization for the Fed, working at cost. When the US went off the gold standard internally, in 1933, this arrangement was never changed” (Kortsch & Walton, 2). |
| [631] | ^ The specific phrase “separation…[of] Church & State” was first publicly articulated in 1802, by President Jefferson (who had earlier written the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom during the Revolutionary War in the 1770’s to that effect), in an open/published letter to the Danbury Baptist Assoc. in Connecticut (Jefferson, 1802). |
| [632] | ^ Alexis de Tocqueville famously noted in the 1830’s that “there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth… the American clergy in general, without even excepting those who do not admit religious liberty, are all in favor of civil freedom; but they do not support any particular political system. They keep aloof from parties, and from public affairs” (1839, 303). Whereas the “unbelievers of Europe attack the Christians as their political opponents, rather than as their religious adversaries; they hate the Christian religion as the opinion of a party, much more than as an error of belief; and they reject the clergy less because they are the representatives of the Divinity, than because they are the allies of authority…. The living body of religion has been bound down to the dead corpse of superannuated polity; cut the bonds which restrain it, and that which is alive will rise once more” (de Tocqueville, 313). |
| [633] | ^ In other words, “routed outside the balance sheets of regulated commercial banks and other” fractional reserve (bankmoney-creating) institutions (Noeth & Sengupta, 2011). |
| [634] | ^ For lack of a better term, such “moneyness is a question of immediate convertibility [clearance] without loss of value (at par exchange [1:1], on demand” (Gabor & Vestergaard, 2016); hence shadow banking instruments are exceedingly low-risk, short-term, and high-volume in nature. |
| [635] | ^ Investment banks, ‘universal banks’, ‘public’ banks- the US-centric heritage of compartmentalizing lending institutions doesn’t mean nearly as much in Europe, and far less so in the Orient. |
| [636] | ^ For example, Lehman Brothers on September , 2008. |
| [637] | ^ ...of which “probably 250% of it was speculative debt” (Keen, 2011b). |
| [638] | ^ In addition to Smith’s famous reliance upon canine observations (see Ch. 2), Smith’s more ‘scholarly’ examples of fish, nails, and tobacco being used as money were rejected by those who looked closely. “In the years following… The Wealth of Nations, scholars checked into most of those examples and discovered that in just about every case, the people involved were [actually] quite familiar with the use of money and, in fact, were [sic] using money- as a unit of account” (Graeber, 37). That’s a credit-money system; not “barter.” |
| [639] | ^ Smith went to considerable effort to slander the British government (or any governmental institution) as being “too ‘slothful’, and ‘thoughtless’ to be allowed to run a National Bank based on sound principles… [even though the] private Bank of England… [had established] a dismal track record…. By 1776 more than half of England’s population lived squalidly in cities” (Zarlenga, 2002, 323). |
| [640] | ^ The Economist was founded in 1843, in the City, in order to supply supportive rhetoric and propaganda for the City/British Empire of bankmoney-’globalism’, as it was then getting underway in earnest, not just in the repeal of the UK’s Corn Law tariffs (as they often like to mention), but also in the much larger Opium Wars to attain control of most Chinese trade (having already accomplished the implementation of reasonably pro-bankmoney regimes in about half the world by that decade). See also “Lender of Last Resort (LOLR)”, “Currency Wars, the”, “Bank welfare”. |
| [641] | ^ “100%”- i.e. the Chicago Plan’s 100%-banking and Irving Fisher’s 100%-money- was the most prevalent Monetary Reform term in the 1930’s (see also: Ch.2), when money & banking still had a lot to do with physical cash redemption. The term “Reserve” [RAB] money itself already has enough multiple meanings without “100% Reserve” adding more entendres to the confusion. Huber lists additional reasons for not using “100%” or “Full Reserve” in conjunction with meaningful Monetary Reform. This is a synopsis of Huber, 2015: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rot5fz90ytwa18n/Synopsis%20100%20per%20cent%20reserve%20vs%20plain%20money%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0 |
| [642] | ^ Huber coined the (English) term “Sovereign Money” in the previous decade, implying (from long-standing German notions) that a national government that does not control [as opposed to merely stamp] its own currency (in terms of quantity) is not really in a state of sovereignty. The school of thought is intended to revive Chartalism/State Theory of Money, and has “the most common ground” with “circuitism” [Graziani, 2003] and “monetary quantum theory” [Cencini & Rossi, 2015] (Huber, 2017, 7). |
| [643] | ^ The less prevalent (albeit older) term ‘sovereign money claims’ is also occasionally used by fractional reserve bankers to denote a situation where “the federal government is either issuer or guarantor” of “money claims” (Ricks, 2016, 33). |
| [644] | ^ In terms of plans for “sovereign” or “public” Digital Currencies (a.k.a. Central Bank Digital Currencies [CBDCs]), it bears reiterating that the “notion of sovereign money includes its universal availability as legal tender in general use. This excludes complicated restrictions on its availability to particular actor groups, limitation of its quantity in relation to other means of payment, and delimitation of its uses according to particular interests” (Huber, 2018d). |
| [645] | ^ Wray’s term ‘sovereign currency’ is simply a currency that “is national and nonredeemable in the sense that the government does not promise to redeem it for either precious metal or foreign currency at a fixed exchange rate” (Wray, 2011); in other words, not ‘sovereign’ (debt-free) money at all, but rather what most people would just call a ‘free-floating fiat’ system. |
| [646] | ^ ...via both injections of new money (arterial+), and taxation/withdrawal of existing money from circulation (veinal-). |
| [647] | ^ http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oligarchy |
| [648] | ^http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/nov/11/facebook-posts/congress-has-11-approval-ratings-96-incumbent-re-e/ |
| [649] | ^ http://countryeconomy.com/government/corruption-perceptions-index/usa |
| [650] | ^ When the 1st Bank of the US was liquidated in 1811, it was (only then) revealed that more than 70% of its shares were owned by foreigners, “mostly Dutch and English” (Zarlenga, 2002, 413). |
| [651] | ^ Although Congress in 1816 only granted the 2nd Bank of the US a standard 20 year Charter, the member banks (and the banks behind those banks) originally asked for 40 or 50 years. |
| [652] | ^ “Secrecy leads to privilege, and privilege leads to corruption” (Fiits, 2016b, mn.42). |
| [653] | ^ Has such condition improved from two centuries ago, when Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin: “We are now without…[a] common value of property, and private fortunes are up or down at the will of the worst of our citizens… As little seems to be known of the principles of political economy as if nothing had ever been written or practised on the subject, or as was known in old times, when the Jews had their rulers under the hammer. It is an evil therefore which we must make up our minds to meet and to endure as those of hurricanes, earthquakes and other casualties” (Jefferson, 1815b). |
| [654] | ^ While the mid-19th century British “Currency School [“teachings”] saw excessive issuance of notes by private banks as the reason for excessive inflation, the Banking School [“teachings”] thought the amount of money in circulation was a result of what happened in the economy, instead of a cause” [i.e. that GDP 𝚫 = the velocity of already-existing money changing hands; not of new money creation] (Sindreu, 2016). |
| [655] | ^ “The Secretary General of the United Nations has zero authority over all the specialized agencies… Those are all little fiefdoms… doing things that don’t work… a lot a great theater…. 1/3rd is spies, working on each other. Another 3rd of the United Nations is the idiot nephew of the village chief… [So] 1/3rd is carrying the whole thing…. basically theater… reliant on the member states telling them what reality is” (Steele, 2012, mn.149-50). |
| [656] | ^ Figures are based on an S&P index of 2,476 on Sept. 4, 2017, and 137 on November 19, 1982. |
| [657] | ^ In the UK, stock buy-backs are still illegal (Werner, 2018, mn.30). |
| [658] | ^ Although share buy-backs were first liberalized in the early 1980’s, it wasn’t until two decades later, 2003-04, that |
| [659] | ^ Hudson later revised this to “The average holder of stock in America holds it for 1 minute, maybe not quite” that long (Hudson, 2017i, mn.20). |
| [660] | ^ The Treaty of Westphalia (1648-c.1948) “...based international law on the principle of parity of sovereign states and non-interference. Without a global alternative to letting debt dynamics polarize societies and tear economies apart, monetary imperialism by creditor nations [and the agents that are associated with- and sometimes control- them] is inevitable”. Hudson is wrong if he means that the alternative should emerge from somewhere in the ‘global’ sector, as opposed to ‘grass-roots’-led movements, nation-by-nation, for meaningful monetary and debt reform. ‘Rule of law’ for all starts with having a lawful monetary system. And as Americans it is our right to have it, and our duty to bring it about if we don’t have it. |
| [661] | ^ According to banking expert witness Don Coker, “the bank receiving the [verified] SWIFT message…[then uses either] Fed Wire or CHIPS to [actually] make the transfer” (Coker, 2010). So it would appear that all SWIFT-initiated transactions (or % of global international bank transfers) do indeed go through the FRBNY (or its member banks)... |
| [662] | ^ ...Moreover, this decade there have been widespread reports of routine NSA monitoring of both SWIFT and credit card transactions (Baldwin, 2017; Der Spiegel, 2013). |
| [663] | ^ This is because “securities sold temporarily under repurchase agreements continue to be shown as assets held by the SOMA in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles” (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2015). |
| [664] | ^ According to Huber, tally sticks were also “widely used” in Europe from about the same time frame (c.1100), to sometime during the 15th century… lingering longer in England, until the 17th century. |
| [665] | ^ Tallysticks were also prevalent in medieval and early modern Europe, as evidenced by their reference in the Napoleonic Code of 1804, Article 1333. |
| [666] | ^ people looking for paid work |
| [667] | ^ $150 billion is also the est. cost for 6 months of ‘’Overseas Continuing Operations’ a euphemism for bombing. “Bombing costs a billion dollars a week” (Sheppard, mn.23). |
| [668] | ^ Sophistry is a natural inclination, in-built into even dumb people. It doesn’t take a brilliant person to be a sophist. Kindergartners can do that. It doesn’t take any brains. You spot a sophist and then you nail them. It’s over. Relying on semantic definition can only be used for manipulation. That’s why the rulers use it. It doesn’t lead anywhere and hasn’t changed any in 2000 years. Either one is caught in the matrix of sophistry, or he calls it out. |
| [669] | ^ “According to Positive Money, 40% of the UK stock market is owned by 5% of the population” (2014b, mn.2). |
| [670] | ^ “Genuine Thrifts”- i.e. “savings and loan associations and savings banks…[that] are [in fact] financial intermediaries that raise funds primarily through time and savings deposits and [then] invest principally in residential mortgages and consumer loans” (Pilloff & Prager, 1998, 1025); not (more than 20%) commercial loans, and not at all ‘fractional reserve’ new money creation. |
| [671] | ^ E % mortg. loans |
| [672] | ^ The authors’ “choice of the time period was dictated by concerns… [that the] thrift crisis of the 1980s… [was so bad that it] affected the quantity and quality of data available… for several years before 1991” (Pilloff & Prager, 1026, n4). |
| [673] | ^ Because TAB bank credits are fundamentally (and legally) not money without backing by Reserves, conflating TAB bank credits with terms like: ‘functional-money’ (Yamaguchi), ‘deposit money’, or even ‘credit money’ would seem to be more confusing than edifying. TAB bank credits are just credits, until they are backed up by something else. |
| [674] | ^ ‘Checkbook money’ is the preferred term in the New York Fed’s 1977 publication, “I Bet You Thought…” (Friedman, 1977), which carefully explains that: “Commercial banks create checkbook money whenever they grant a loan. Simply by adding new deposit dollars to accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower’s IOU… which...is often secured or backed by valuable items the borrower owns (collateral)” (Friedman, 22). Checkbook balances would not be “money” in and of themselves, without backing by Reserves. |
| [675] | ^ “Banks create…[credit] by ‘monetizing’ the private debts [promissory notes] of businesses and individuals. That is, they create amounts of...[TAB credits] against the value of those IOUs” (Friedman, 1977, p. 22). |
| [676] | ^ Whether a bank “makes a loan or purchases bonds,” the premise is the same; “it increases its own promises to furnish money on demand by giving to the borrower, or to the seller of the bond, a demand deposit [TAB] credit. By so doing it increases the total volume of demand deposits in circulation” (Fisher, et al., 1939, 15). |
| [677] | ^ Sun Microsytem co-founder Bill Joy’s classic critique of inventor (and now Google executive) Ray Kurzweil’s unabashed technophilia: “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” (http://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/). |
| [678] | ^ “This whole Artificial Intelligence stuff is crap. The human being is the single most elegant manifestation of intelligence in the cosmos” (Steele, 5 June ‘17, mn.41). |
| [679] | ^ More precisely, T-bills mature at 4, 13, 26, or 52 weeks, and “...almost always have the lowest interest rate among money market instruments” (Burton, et al, 262). |
| [680] | ^ The boundary between ‘bonds’ and ‘notes’ can sometimes be blurry. The SIFMA Fact Book 2018, for example, lists “long-term bonds” as being “with maturity of 13 months or longer”; in this category, US Treasury bonds annual aggregate ($7.5 tn.) dwarfs that of the nearest competitors Japan ($1.8 tn.) and Germany ($0.6 tn.) (SIMFA, 2018). |
| [681] | ^ This chart does not include Federal Reserve holdings of US treasuries. |
| [682] | ^ Ibid, mn.17. |
| [683] | ^ On Aug. 11, 2018 President Trump tweeted (= sans media filtering) about ‘his’ Dept. of Justice and Attorney General (traditionally the cabinet position that is most loyal and close to the president): “I have never seen anything so Rigged in my life. Our A.G. is scared stiff and Missing in Action. It is all starting to be revealed– not pretty” (Trump, 2018). The following month it was reported that the Assistant A.G., suggested secretly recording Trump and proposed wearing a wire to surreptitiously incriminate the president, after Trump (acting on the Asst. A.G.’s recommendation) had fired the FBI director in May 2017. |
| [684] | ^ The UKUSA agreement was not revealed in public media until 2005, and not fully disclosed until 2010. Purportedly it was not even known to Australian PM Gough Whitlam as late as 1975, prior to his government being dismissed by the Queen-appointed “Governor General” on 11 November. |
| [685] | ^ Actually it is now more like 13, as this century 8 additional countries “are participating with the NSA in this kind of data acquisition and analysis” (Binney, 2015b, mn.24). |
| [686] | ^ Land Rent is “the rising market price for land. In the era of the French Physiocrats, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill [a couple centuries ago], this land rent accrued to Europe’s hereditary landlord class. Today, the land’s rent is paid mainly to bankers” (Hudson, 2017p). See also “Congress of Vienna”. |
| [687] | ^ ”...that man is able to accomplish the most surprising undertakings with his own native resources” (de Tocqueville, 1839, 173). |
| [688] | ^ “...[W]e started to see the problem of the Europeans. There was no room in which they could all gather…. no coherence. There was also no experience, shall we say, at problem solving. The history of Europe had been solving problems through violent spasms” (Friedman, 2015, mn.24-25), and the occasional funny-money scheme that stayed up. “The Europeans had no peaceful, if illegal, procedures for solving the problem” (Ibid, mn.25). See also “Glorious Revolution, the”. |
| [689] | ^ “If you think… the wealthy Chinese in Hong Kong expect the P.R.C. to respect the rule of law with respect to the assets- hu hu [rolling eyes]. They don’t. They’re [still, as of 2017] moving money to America” (Fitts. 2018h, mn.38). |
| [690] | ^ United States Notes, while being gradually phased out since the 1870’s, were last newly issued (direct by the Treasury) in 1971. The red-sealed notes could be exchanged for gold until 1933, and for silver until 1968. The small 1971 series was maintained with (an even smaller number of) reprints, until the Riegle Improvement Act of 1994 released the Treasury from that obligation. |
| [691] | ^ Kortsch & Walton, 2016, 3 |
| [692] | ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=lZD4ezDbbu4 |
| [693] | ^ As Zarlenga and other have noted, the medieval “classical scholastics, from about 1100 to 1500”, defined usury as “the misuse of the monetary system- not simply the taking of interest- because the taking of interest, in itself, was not usury”; it was then 2-3 centuries later that Jeremy Bentham of “Panopticon” fame (1748-1832) “mis-defined usury as taking more interest than is normal. Actually, in his work on it, he defined usury out of existence, which may have been his purpose” (Zarlenga, 2007). [Hoffman] |
| [694] | ^ “Many have made witty invectives against usury. They say that it is a pity, the devil should have God’s part, which is the tithe. That the usurer is the greatest Sabbath-breaker, because his plough goeth every Sunday…. That it is against nature for [barren] money to beget [still more artificial] money; and the like. I say this only, that usury is a concessum propter duritiem cordis [a concession by reason of the hardness of men's hearts]” (Bacon, 1625). Bacon wasn’t much of a humorist. |
| [695] | ^ Steve Keen calls it a “false vision that labor is the only source of surplus…. [T]hat whole [Marxist] ideology became a huge part of the politics and the way they [USSR] tried to organize industry…”- Steve Keen (Hudson, 2016s). |
| [696] | ^ The Vatican, of course, discovered banking many centuries earlier. The Knights of Malta organization (formally ‘The Sovereign Military Order of Malta’ [SMOM], and/or ‘Grand Military Order of the Knights of Malta’; and formerly the ‘Knights Hospitaller’ from the 11th-13th centuries, prior to picking up some of the [dissolved] Templar Knights’ banking protocol in the 14th century) ...has historically been, since the 1300’s, a banking/financial arm of the Vatican (at least in times when the latter is strong). According to Posner, the “Catholic order…[today] recognizes the Pope’s authority over all its members. It also has sovereign diplomatic relations with over 100 countries, including...Spain, Italy, Russia [and before then the USSR], Austria, Egypt, [and] Brazil…[and is also] a fully accredited ambassador to the European Union…[and] since 1994...a permanent observer at the United Nations” (Posner, 643-44). Why? Prominent US [and hence dual] citizen Knights of Malta have purportedly included Blackwater executive and Bush Jr. inspector general for the Dept. of Defense Joseph Schmitz, Bush Sr.’s deputy CIA director Gen. Vernon Walters, Reagan campaign manager and CIA director Bill Casey, Nixon Admn. insider and Reagan’s initial Secretary of State Gen. Alexander Haig, mid-20 century CIA counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, JFK-LBJ CIA director John McCone, and OSS-CIA founder "Wild" Bill Donovan; as was Adolf Hitler’s first vice chancellor Franz Von Papen. In case one doesn’t see the pattern yet, the “SMOM has long been thought to be [mostly] a front for various western [i.e. UK-USA] intelligence agencies” (Farrell, 2013); at least since the 1940’s or Lateran Treaty. |
| [697] | ^ In 1941 young Red Cross worker Branko Bokun recorded in his diary for June 26- only a month after Pope Pius XII had granted Croatian Ustaše founder Ante Pavelić’s request for a full private audience- that “‘These Catholics [in Yugoslavia] are killing Serbs and Jews, because in their primitive minds they are convinced that it will please the Vatican. If the Vatican does not intervene immediately, the fight between Serbs and Croats will reach such proportions [that] it will take centuries to die down’. The Pope and his advisors were probably better informed about what was happening in Croatia than any other country. Every Ustasan military unit had a priest as a field captain. The Pontiff’s Undersecretary of State, Monsignor Giovanni Battisa Montini- later Pope Paul VI- was in charge of collecting reports from both Croatia and Poland. Aggrieved clerics sent Montini chilling accounts of the atrocities. Every day he briefed Pius, who had a reputation as a Pope who wanted the details. In… Venice, Pavelic [had] boasted to the Italian Foreign Minister as well as [to Vatican Bank honcho Bernardino] Nogara’s good friend, Guiseppe Volpi, that Croatia’s Jewish population had been reduced by a third…. [In 1942, a] frustrated British Minister to the Vatican...told his colleagues that Pius was hedging his bets on a Nazi victory…. [In] the wake of Hitler’s [Jan. 1942] promise to ‘liquidate’ Europe’s Jews, judgment that the Pope was partisan was reinforced when the Vatican opened diplomatic relations with Japan… [even though the US] and Britain had pressed Pius not to [do so]…. Further evidence of the Vatican’s skewed allegiance came in a classified report by… Churchill’s Minister of State in the Middle East. Issued in the same month as Hitler’s speech, it was passed around a handful of [only] senior British ministers with ‘to be kept under lock and key’ stamped across the top. Based on extensive British intelligence data…[it] concluded that throughout a dozen Middle Eastern countries, ‘the Roman Catholic church has developed Fascist and pro-Axis tendencies, which dominate its spiritual functions’... [and] helped distribute fascist ‘political propaganda, and since the war [began] it has lent encouragement to espionage, sabotage and the escape of prisoners of war’... [It] recommended replacing partisan Italian clerics with ‘non-enemy nationals’...[but] That never happened” (Posner, 2015, 89-91). See also “Board Systems”. |
| [698] | ^ In ‘modern’ usage, “60 families of… aristocratic Catholics who stayed loyal to the Pope when Italian troops seized Rome in 1870” (Posner, 27). |
| [699] | ^ In Nov. 1936, when “Pacelli visited the United States… he met with 79 bishops in 12 of the 16 American church’s Ecclesiastical Provinces. And the day after President...Roosevelt’s reelection, Pacelli met…[him] at his Hyde Park home. There is no indication that the Ethiopian invasion [by Italy, 11 months earlier] was discussed. Instead, Roosevelt was concerned with the wildly popular but bigoted radio broadcasts of an American priest, [Father] Charles Coughlin. And Pacelli wanted...the United States to reestablish diplomatic relations… Although the substance of those talks was never to be disclosed, the results were evident. Two days after the meeting, Coughlin announced the last broadcast of his provocative [radio] show that [like Alex Jones, 8 decades later] reached 30 million listeners. And Roosevelt eventually bypassed resistance in Congress to restoring diplomatic relations with the Holy See...dispatching industrialist Myron Taylor as his personal envoy” (Posner, 2015, 71). |
| [700] | ^ For more on Pius XII’s burial, see Posner, p.596, n62; p.167. |
| [701] | ^ Although this author would not disagree with Hoffman’s insinuations about what Paul VI was primarily getting at (the homily does mention “the Council” [of Vatican II] by name, which did famously remove “anti-Jewish language that had been a hallmark of the Catholic liturgy for centuries” [Posner, 598]), the “absurd contradictions” that pontiff bemoans seem also to go deeper. After the liberal Pope John XXIII (r.1958-63) and the initiation of ‘Vatican II’, conservatives such as cardinal Siri though that it would ‘take the Church 50 years to recover from his papacy’.... The bad news, at least for the CIA, was that the [northern European] progressives had coalesced around [one of the CIA cold warriors’ least favorite cardinals] Montini. This development…[seems to have been] due to the spreading of a rumor: on his deathbed, Pope John had supposedly said, ‘Cardinal Montini would make a good Pope’.... the same prelate whom Pius XII had passed over as a cardinal to ensure [that] he would not be eligible to become Pope…. [New York & CIA cold warrior honcho cardinal Francis] Spellman criticized Montini for lack of zeal when it came to fighting communism. Montini’s personal assistant, Father Pasquale Macchi… was an avowed socialist…[and] The Cold War was on Spellman’s mind…. [But] ever the politician…[he] saw a chance to refurbish his standing at the Vatican by helping put Montini over the top. The two cardinals met the day before the conclave. At the end of their three-hour caucus, Spellman had committed not only his own vote but also those of the 4 other American cardinals…. On the 6th ballot… the 65-year-old Montini had the necessary votes…[and] took the name Paul VI [r.1963-78]” (Posner, 2015, 174-75). However, some “controversy developed when Italian newspapers reported that the CIA had the news about the new Pope before it was announced outside the sealed enclave… [leading] to speculation that the CIA had bugged the Apostolic Palace” (Posner, 601). Of course Usury and the CIA are not mutually exclusive. |
| [702] | ^ I.e. commercial bank credits |
| [703] | ^ “‘Steve was one of about two investors who completely understood what was going on’, said one prominent Wall Street analyst” (Lewis, 2011, 175). |
| [704] | ^ “[T]here were already explicit political references in the stage version of 1902…” (Graeber, 398, n.24). |
| [705] | ^ And hence additional forces of urbanization, domestication (over the course of the 20th century). |
| [706] | ^ The US (and World Bank) “wants the world to become dependent on American grain and American agriculture. That’s been the basis of American foreign policy since World War II…. [The World Bank] only lends dollars, basically to buy U.S. exports of infrastructure- U.S. engineering exports- and European.” (Hudson, 2014). |
| [707] | ^ What used to be military conquest- conquering the land by military force and appropriating it on a hereditary basis is now being done financially with much less overhead. The objective is still to obtain the land- by lending and foreclosure, and then emptying out the country; f.e. making room in depopulated Latvia for Swedish [or Islamic] settlers (Hudson, ‘2010’). |
| [708] | ^ The term ‘Ziocons’ “is a mixture of Zionists and [the more common Washington political term] Neocons… I call them the Neocons” (2017b, mn.11). |
| [709] | ^ Future US senator Prescott “Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that [exclusively] represented [key German industrialist] Thyssen's US interests… [continuing ]to work for the bank [even] after America entered the war.... Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts…. [And Prescott] Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world” (Aris & Campbell, 2004); that is until they were no longer deemed necessary by the real PTB of that time (sometime earlier in 1942). |
| [710] | ^ https://www.adl.org/news/article/prescott-bushs-alleged-nazi-ties (both pages accessed Oct 2, 2018). |
| [711] | ^ “Zionists are people who work for the Zionist state of Israel to subvert governments, banks, corporations, media, universities, and so forth. Zionists are enemy agents. Jews are loyal citizens. Let’s be crystal clear on it” (Steele, 2017o, mn.31-32). |
| [712] | ^ Such warnings go back at least 4 centuries: “Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire”- Geneva Bible, Book of James 5:3, 1602 (Hoffman, 2013, 110). See also “F.I.RE. sector”. |
| [713] | ^ High-private debt: “anything over 1.5x GDP” and “a debt level rising by 20% or more over the previous 5 years” (mn.35-36). |
| [714] | ^ “All the debt zombies are trapped in that [150-200%] range- where they can’t get their private debt down- and nobody wants to borrow any more money anyway… So the central banks are pushing on a string in that sense” (Keen, 2016f, mn.21). See also “Debt, private”, which is much more salient to consumption/GDP than is the [much more commonly cited] US gross federal (public) debt, which crossed 100% of GDP in 2012. |
| [715] | ^ China’s private debt level “went from about 100% [of GDP] to 200% in just about 8 years… the biggest bubble in financial history…. It has to end. You won’t see China going much beyond a reported level of, say, 225% of GDP [which was Japan’s 1995 peak]” (Keen, 2017e, mn.32) |
| [716] | ^ Malaysia (approx. 150%), in addition to “Singapore, Thailand… Hong Kong… [and] Belgium” are also soon (1-to-4 years) to join what Keen calls “the walking dead of debt” (Keen, 2016u, mn.9, mn.32). [a]Fed propag.-d.k. [b]'talking around in circles' [c]'mouthpieces for the Fed.' |