Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1463153 Comments:2390
Critics maintain that the bailout is leading to the creation of many “zombie” banks, which are completely dependent on the ECB for finance and are reluctant to provide credit either to each other or to businesses.
There has been no bail out.
These people are criminals who should be brought to justice. But in the Greece of today, it will not happen”. One final source told me shortly before posting, “The Bank of Greece is naked in this matter. We ask them for the reasons why this has happened, and they claim to have no knowledge of such things. This is ridiculous. This could not have been done without their cooperation. There is nobody now in Greece we can trust”.
The illegally denied default of Greece entered a dramatic new phase this afternoon with the revelation by mainstream Greek public health website Health News that, shortly before midnight on March 8th – the eve of Greece’s psi completion on Friday March 9th – on average 70% of public utility funds in varous large, interest-bearing accounts at the Bank of Greece were raided. These included most of the State’s regional hospital budgets, various universities and (it is alleged) at least one utility company.
The shortfalls came to light late last week and this morning as various hospital purchasing cheques in particular began to bounce. The monies – estimated by one source to total some 1.4 billion euros – appear to have been used to pay off the tiny minority of private sovereign creditors
Debt itself has become the obsession du jour: the problem is not the sufficiency of debt or even its costs but the defective structure within which debt subsidizes profitless waste. We love our waste, it makes us feel human: right now the world’s economies are at the point where debt can just barely stretch to fill the waste gap. We can just barely afford the costs of the debt, provided we put to use every sort of extraordinary tactic to manage them. We add more debt, we borrow our way out of it, we shuffle it around: running faster and faster to remain in one place.
Debts can be managed this way only because the state can always run faster: as long as there is a marginal return somewhere within the debt-y universe the system will continue to lend to itself ever-larger nominal amounts. Unfortunately, the real capital that the debt is supposed to represent diminishes while the claims made against capital increase. The efforts to manage debt by ‘renewing’ it become counterproductive. Adding debt becomes another form of waste with costs that cannot be met.
A decline in nominal price of petroleum is no cure: temporary declines allow price-thwarted demand to rush back into the markets and push up the price. This decline-push dynamic remains in force until the ability of customers to meet the high price price is exhausted, when the credit runs out.
Having emptied our accounts at the gasoline pump, the returns on our non-driving endeavors are insufficient to service the debt needed to drive … or do much else.
What is underway is a margin call against the entire unproductive enterprise.
Law-abiding taxpayers are treated like criminals while the criminal class of financiers and State apparatchiks are free to loot and pillage muppets and taxpayers alike.
It's actually very simple: whatever the state or Federal government does to you, that's legal. Whatever action you take to protect your rights is illegal....
Perhaps the closest analogy for these resurgent warmongers are the economists who failed to predict even the vaguest problems with the sub-prime mortgage market, let alone the global financial crisis.
Yet somehow they still shamelessly populate the airwaves, spouting predictions and judgments, which unfathomably never end with the anchor saying: "Mmm. We're going to interrupt you to hear from a cauliflower, because you've got to think it knows more about this stuff than you."
And so with the creatures of the US military-industrial complex, somehow able to pick themselves up from the what should have been career-ending humiliation and call for more of the same. They clearly possess some bizarre, Weeble-style self-righting mechanism, and at some level I suppose you have to admire the chutzpah.
