harry writes:
On May 12, 7:47=A0pm, "js.b1" wrote:
On May 12, 5:10=A0pm, "harryagain" wrote:
I wonder how safe your money is in Santander these days?
There are two schools of thought; the gov't permitted fiction, the
reality.
The gov't permitted fiction for USA UK Spain etc banks is that
emergency accounting changes permitted Balance Sheets to suspend Mark-
to-Market. This in turn means that any bank can fiddle the "Stress
Tests". This is all about preventing cascading bank bailouts, run on
banks and absolute financial collapse.
The reality is the market knows banks are not particularly well
capitalised, recovery of substance is elusive, so losses have to be
realised in a waterfall fashion. Essentially Germany knows the system
is stuffed, it is a case of 1) pouring a concrete floor under the bank
losses via fiddling accounts and 2) letting losses be occured &
recapitalise repeatedly over a decade.
The political reality is actually more important than the financial
nonsense.
People will only vote for a certain amount of "hardship" per unit
time, in effect voting themselves benefits into perpetuity - which
clashes with eventual need for financial balance. Thus eventually the
system will fail, because it has to. No gov't can do that which is
necessary, because it would never see office again. Ironically it will
be other countries gov't that eventually force a solution when their
political & economic cost is too great.
I think it is 10yrs for a credit bubble to resolve, but in the
meantime they want housing to continue as before - because without a
Housing-ATM & Housing-Consumerism there is no economy. We lost it,
regaining it is via declining labour rates but that misses the problem
of simply too many people for the global economy. Insufficient job
creation to meet birth rate, which will result in a standard of living
shear at some point, and unsustainable benefit & public sector bill.
For liquidity reasons, do use multiple banks - borrowing large sums
for a few months is not cheap if you are waiting for a payout. This is
particularly true where the money may be needed at short notice.
Good little essay that. It puts in a nutshell what I suspect.
ie, We're f****d.
There are plainly problems related to hard facts like population levels
and food and energy supplies.
But having millions under-employed or unemployed (probably billions
world wide) can only make things worse. They could be doing useful
things, contributing in some way to human society, and a few might even
come up with workable schemes to contain the problems.
How you achieve that, I don't know, and I don't see anyone other than
dogmatists who claim to know the answer.
I suspect that the best systems are those which don't try too hard to
alter human nature but rather to work with it. Which leaves out fascism
and communism, except in very limited form.
Something has to be done with the money system, though.
It's largely smoke and mirrors, a matter of who is prepared to believe
what (and somehow money is always found for important things like a
war) but the conventional cures destroy productivity, jobs, and lives.
Which is fine, if you're rich and powerful, but could hardly be
described as 'the greatest good for the greatest number'.
It was Bliar wot dun it.
One man in one small island with a small population was able to destroy
the entire world economy.
And it happened before, when British socialists pushed interest rates
up to unsustainable levels in the U.S. as well as here (or was it the
other way round?).
Just as well that the U.K. had Thatcher to set things right.
I heard that Soreass fella tell the BBC that the Greeks were just
expecting a free lunch.
He himself apparently made his billion by betting against the ERM, no
doubt putting in quite a lot of work.
If 10,000 per hour was his rate, and he slaved for 10 years at that
rate, he would have 'earned' his money, but I don't believe that was
the case.
No, his was a free lunch.
--
Windmill,
Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost