The report covers what the Commission views as causes of the financial crisis. The report is 150 pages long and covers a great deal of material in a great detail. Some of the information is valuable perhaps much of it is valuable. The problem with the report is that it addresses only symptoms. It never truly gets to the actual cause of the financial crisis.
The major flaw is this: the report approaches the crisis as if it were something that happened. They do not take the viewpoint that the global financial crisis was, in fact, caused.
Viewing the crisis from this viewpoint takes a willingness and an ability to confront some very unpleasant facts. People have trouble confronting evil. That is why exposes of some of the more unpleasant things in life are often pejoratively labeled “conspiracy theories.”
Call it what you will, but the simple fact is that the so called GFC – the Global Financial Crisis – was a crisis by design.
The problem with the conclusions of the Commission is that in approaching the matter the way they did, is like getting a report from a doctor that says the person’s temperature was high, they weren’t digesting food properly, their heart was beating rapidly and the liver was not detoxifying toxins properly. Conclusion: the person got sick. These things shouldn’t happen and we must prevent them from happening again because they lead to illness.
No real answer and no real solution.
Only when one views the crisis as something that was purposefully created do the symptoms aligned into a pattern that reveals who caused the crisis and why (see my book: Crisis by Design The Untold Story of the Global Financial Coup).
It is also important to note that the second act of this staged play is occurring in Europe “as we speak.” Moreover, it is my opinion that a third act is planned, and it is planned to be played again on the stage of the United States economy. This will occur sometime, as an estimate, in the next 12-18 months.
Congress must take responsibility for the fact that the President signed an agreement with 20 other nations, which, in a very real sense, transferred the financial autonomy of this country to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland without consulting Congress.
The Senate has not reviewed this agreement, which was signed on April 2, 2009 at the G 20 meeting in London. And neither has the House. The United States Congress must review this agreement and must establish, along with other nations, a system of oversight and checks and balances over the international bankers that are now running roughshod over the world’s economies.
I have a picture of a man by the name of Ben Bernanke, and another by the name of Timothy Geithner in hand cuffs; being hauled off to prison. The picture is as clear as day. Envision it for yourselves. It invites feelings of invigoration and yet a contentedness, the likes of which have not been felt in a long time. And that my friends would only be the beginning. Heh heh.
Cool!
John
One of the major underlying causes, if not THE CAUSE, of the current GFC (Global Financial Crisis) is sub-replacement fertility rates. And yes, this is human caused. In fact, according to some sources, the World Bank has been pushing this on other nations for decades, as a condition to receive loans from them.
Clarence Lyle Barber, economist at the University of Manitoba, in 1978, wrote a paper on the causes of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. He pointed out that in 1926, demand for housing in the US began to decline. This he said was caused by the lack of household formation. He thought that this may have been the result of young men who died in World War I. Of course, I am sure that contributed some to this decline. However, I believe proportionately, perhaps about the same number of young men were lost in the battles of World War II, and yet there followed the nearly two decades long baby boom!
I believe that there was a combination of what some called the “lost generation”, those whom World War I affected to become cynical. Doubting that there was a God, they defied prohibition and sexual mores too. They dallied, sexually, but committed less if at all.
Automobiles and electric appliances became the rage, and so more time and effort were put forth to securing these, and less to child bearing. A similar thing has consumed South Korea for some years, contributing to energy and money spent and invested in kitchen appliances and much less so to bearing and raising children. So much so, that around February or March 2008, the South Korean government reverses decades old policies of paying for vasectomies and tubal ligations. Since then their policy has been only to pay to reverse them, since some small towns had not seen a baby born in nearly two decades!
Anyway, back to talking about the Great Depression, by early 1929, the result of all this was, that demand for housing dropped precipitously! And then, in the fall of 1929, we have the first major stock market crash. And then, once in an economic depression, people had even fewer children, due to unemployment and fear of unemployment.
Now, there are fewer babies born today than there were 50 years ago! Of advanced economies in the world, only Israel does NOT have a sub-replacement fertility rate. Europe averages 130 babies born (or less) for every 200 adults (per lifetime). Among white people in the US, they have averaged between 170 and 180 babies born per every 200 adults (per lifetime).
Japan is probably losing a million people per year. Russia 3/4 million per year. Europe, with around 550 million inhabitants, is losing perhaps 2 million live bodies net per year.
In fact, a major contributor to the subprime housing crisis in the US was that moneys flowed from overseas and invested in US mortgages, because, as David P. Goldman, an economist, put it, the US was the leper with the most fingers left (of all advanced economies). So money flowed here to what was viewed as a safe haven for investment. With such unrelenting demand for bundled mortgage loans, lenders kept lowering their standards to keep the money coming, and to take their fees off the top.
But, UNLESS and UNTIL advanced economies get to at least up to, and preferably above human replacement in their fertility rates, neither immigration, nor anything else can substitute for that to right the economy.
Yes, populations are still growing in places in the world. And, as one observer has noted, the huge rise in population in the last century, has not been the result of humans suddenly breeding like rabbits, but rather, they stopped dying like flies. In other words, improvements in healthcare, sanitation and refrigeration, have caused a health boom. So, we have kept many more people alive from infancy to old age.
But sooner or later, the worldwide population will implode everywhere. Now, it is beginning to implode in parts of Europe and Asia. But lagging demand in the US is due to the fact that human population growth is minimal.
You can quote me on this— “Economies can’t grow if populations don’t grow!” That one, you can take to the bank. And, if you don’t have that, you have a ‘bank’ also. It is called ‘bankruptcy’!!!
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