Last week, the bankrupt insurance giant AIG received an additional $30 billion in bailout funds from the United States government, raising its total take to $170 billion. The funds, however, aren’t going into the benighted firm’s coffers to aid the liquidation and deleveraging process. Rather, the AIG bailout masks the bailing out of other firms that AIG pays in order to maintain credit default swap guarantees offered to investors who purchased them to hedge risk. These firms include (according to the WSJ) Goldman Sachs ($6 billion), Deutsche Bank ($6 billion), Merrill Lynch, Société Générale, Calyon, Barclays, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group.
It appears that we all work for Wall Street, in one way or another. Nonetheless, the convergence of capital markets and government must stop if the institutions of a liberal international order (1, 2) are to be maintained.
{ 9 comments }
I’m not sure there ever was a true “liberal international order” to maintain. If there was, it has long since passed from the scene.
Witness the S&L debacle of the 1980s, the LTCM scandle in the 90′s, or the Fed’s reaction to the stock market and housing busts from this decade. Anytime the real market began to assert itself and correct a preceding intervention, the government and banking elite would step in and turn a correction into a disaster.
What we need is a complete separation of capital and state. What we’re getting is its opposite. The results will not be pretty.
@Steve Hogan “What we need is a complete separation of capital and state. What we’re getting is its opposite. The results will not be pretty.”
Boy oh boy you can say that again! Throughout history, time and time again, the meddling by the state in the capitol systems of the people has led from one disaster to another.
But the state has a place in the maintenance of law and the common defense. How do we fund it without it becoming our master? How do we keep it from demanding more funds and taking control where it does not belong?
How do we fund it? I don’t know. What I do know is that we don’t need a federal government that spends nearly $4 trillion dollars to enforce contracts. Most of them should be handled by the states anyway.
How do we keep it from demanding more? Only a people willing to live in freedom can keep the parasitic state from growing like a cancer. Once the government got control of the schools, and thus the control over what/how people think, the game was up.
The rest is a matter of waiting for democratic mob rule to ruin this country and usher in a despot to “save” us from ourselves.
Despot and czar, wait wait, I mean commissar. The fact of it is well explained in your your comments Mr. Hogan. The fact is in 2001 the fed cut interest rates in result of the stock market bubble burst, and to prevent recession. In turn created a new bubble in the housing market, which helped create this crises we are in now. So Im saying stop preventing or trying to prevent recessions, they are a natural part of the cycle, this prevention only creates worse recessions. Anyone oppose?
Then get rid of the state. It is fundamentally incapable of policing itself. The state’s position of privilege negates efficiency where checks and balances are concerned. Even if the state could provide for a ‘common defense’, there is no reason to believe that this ability would result in defending against things worth defending against. Governments tend to predate their people as well as other governments’ people in the name of protection. All too often, common defense results in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario in the militaristic sphere.
Designs for limited government are just attempts at limiting its crimes, not stopping them. The state is the nascent military industrial complex and ultimate slave master supported by a primitive belief system.
Petition To End Kosher Certification Labels And To End The Involvement Of the Federal Food and Drug Administrations Participation
http://www.petitiononline.com/kashruth/petition.html
Who did what, in a 1:16 minute Youtube video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pbiv1iuEes&feature=channel_page
“We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot”. – U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau…May 1939
Here are ten fact about the great depression that are well worth reading.
Isn’t socialism grand?
@Deefburger: But the state has a place in the maintenance of law and the common defense.
Only in appearence, in fact it works against them. If you want to explore this, here are two starting points:
Crime protection is a fraud:
http://www.my-shirts.biz/06/index.html#Chapter_4
Military protection is a fraud:
http://www.my-shirts.biz/06/index.html#Chapter_5
Comments on this entry are closed.