Debt // Current TV

EU report welcomes Irish 'progress' - RTÉ News

"A European Commission report says Ireland has made "important... more

TheInquiringOne
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9 months ago
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The US Sues Itself While Europe Crumbles

There Has Been a Clear Crisis of Confidence, says IMF head Christine Lagarde. What... more

Schnookums
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9 months ago
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16 comments

When Debt Levels Turn Cancerous

Now we know where the tipping point lies. Debt becomes poisonous once it reaches 80pc... more

Schnookums
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9 months ago
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1 comment

When Our System of Debt & Credit has become a Fraud, Debt Forgiveness is the Last and Only Remedy

Finally serious economists are considering a position I have been maintaining and writing about since the 2008 financial meltdown. Whatever its name— jubilee, repudiation, abolishment, cancellation, erasure—debt forgiveness, will have to eventually emerge forefront in global efforts to solve an ongoing systemic financial crisis.

“On a grand scale the only way to erase counterfeit money and (counterfeit) assets of hundreds of trillions of dollars is to erase the debts associated with those fake assets. (Let me underscore again, these are not “toxic” assets, they are fake assets.)… Forgiveness in general, and forgiveness of debt in particular, stand as virtues if they free us up to acknowledge, address, and learn from our culpability, start anew, and create forward.” ( The Big Squeeze, Part 3: The Quiet Rebellion: Civil Disobedience, Local Markets, and Debt Erasure (January 29, 2011)

Debt forgiveness, therefore, accomplishes two important things. It eliminates the increasing and outsized portion of productive enterprise to pay off unproductive obligations, and it clears the ground for new opportunities, new thinking, invention, and entrepreneurialism. This is why the ability to declare bankruptcy is so essential in the pursuit of both happiness and innovation.

Currently we are mired in a “new normal” and calls for “austerity” which are nothing more than the delusional efforts of a status quo to avoid the consequences of its own error and fraud and to profit evermore. So bedazzled by the false wealth created by debt multiplication and its concomitant fantasy of ever-higher returns, this status quo continues to be stupidly amazed that people are not spending and that the economy is not picking up. But how could it be otherwise?

Productive wealth has been trapped in a web of parasitic theft, counterfeiting, liability evasion, non-regulation, and prosecutorial non-accountability. All the fundamental attributes of a functioning exchange economy have been warped to reward creative criminals. I spoke extensively about this in my posts from 2008. ( Imaginary Worth, Empire of Debt: How Modern Finance Created Its Own Downfall (October 15, 2008)

The unsustainable nature of debt

Two observations: 1) Fabricated/parasitic so-called “wealth” destroys value by diluting the value of productive wealth. 2) Debt/credit that cannot be paid back is never an asset and is always a hot-potato liability (needing to be foisted to a greater fool to garner “profit” and transaction fees):

“The models [modern debt are] based upon had no contact with reality. They assumed unlimited growth and ability to pay. When matched against the reality of people paying ten times their salary for mortgages that actually added more money owed to their principal (i.e. with negative amortization), required no money down, and set up “balloon payments,” large step-ups in payments after a few years) there is no possible way they could NOT default in a predictable span of time.” ( Part II: How the Credit Default Swap Scam Works (October 13, 2008)

Systemically, all debt that charges a percentage (“usury”) originates in delusion. Debt grows exponentially indefinitely, growth (income and otherwise) cannot. This leads to a widening condition where the fruits of productive “growth” devoted to interest payments increase until those fruits are entirely consumed. (The Elephant In The Room: Debt Grows Exponentially, While Economies Only Grow In An S-Curve (Washington's Blog)

Once this happens, stores of wealth (hard assets) begin to be cannibalized to make up for the difference. You see this in Greece with its sale of public assets to private companies, and in middle-class America where people are liquidating retirement accounts to pay for their cost of living.

This problem is compounded by a private Federal Reserve that lends money into circulation at interest, and then allows the multiplication of this consumer debt-money liability through fractional reserve banking. The money in circulation today could pay only a small fraction of the total private and public debt. That fact alone is evidence of a kind of systemic fraud.......

Please continue at:
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept11/Zeus-debt-forgiveness-9-11.html?source=patrick.netFinally serious economists are considering a position I have been maintaining and... more

Schnookums
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9 months ago
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28 comments

What is debt? An interview with economic anthropologist David Graeber

The real question is not how does barter generate some sort of medium of exchange,... more

Cabal
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9 months ago
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Government gone wild

If we don't do something we're toast. http://www.youtube.com/embed/VtVbUmcQSuk

DDJohnAdams
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9 months ago
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Tea Party Movement Getting Americans Steamed

The Tea Party movement, as an idea, was originally about anger at the way things... more

LOrion
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10 months ago
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Debt wreck at Welchers’ Corral – five uneasy lessons

Clearer than before, the Tea-vangelist GOP (the New Vandals) have cemented how they... more

hoosierdaddy
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10 months ago
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US Gov't Monitoring Facebook for End the Fed Protests

Uploaded by TruthSquadTV on Aug 8, 2011 http://truthsquad.tv/?p=731 On June 22nd... more

rodstradamus
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10 months ago
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China warns US: pay your debt or no more iPads

Beijing -- The government of China has officially called in all of the loans it has... more

mbalton
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10 months ago
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Moody's says U.S. needs to find more deficit cuts

Ratings agency Moody's repeated a warning on Monday it could downgrade the United... more

sitsi
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10 months ago
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Economic Rumble USA (Liberal Propaganda)

Neutral economic facts in America are hard to come by these days. On one hand, you have our liberal commentators, who say 40 million Americans are living on food stamps (~12% of the population) , and that the middle class is disappearing. This side tends to blame the 400 billionaries who "own" Congress, and says things like, "if you don’t have a job, it is in part because Cheney cut taxes on the super-rich and made it impossible for the Federal government to ameliorate the economic straits of the middle class with various programs. This problem just got worse, with the budget deal this year." So, the rich are to blame for all our problems, and "we increasingly look like a Third World robber baron country with a few rich at the top and luckless peasants toiling below."

The other side says "the rich create jobs and that taxing them would hurt the economy." Some conservatives even go so far as to say that it's the unemployed's fault they have no jobs, because "GDP is now higher than it has been in the entirety of U.S. history," so the 10+% unemployed we have now must just have been working useless jobs before. "The fact that the United States has pre-crisis levels of output with fewer workers raises doubts as to whether those additional workers were producing very much in the first place." They recommend the jobless retrain or otherwise adapt to our new society, because the old jobs are not coming back.

How can these two sides coexist? They seem to be completely at odds and both vilifying the other side. If your job was outsourced or downsized, and then you were told it's your fault, how would you respond? Similarly, if you could make more money with less workers, why would you hire more people?

Yet even with all this animosity, Americans show no sign of protest or revolution. Alternet has some theories that we're just too fearful, over-medicated, financially stressed, brainwashed, distracted or plain dumb to organize a fight.

The new budget only increases these problems, by preserving all tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy while cutting from everywhere else. Education, Medicare, Social Security, even the military are all up on the chopping block. Exact cuts still remain to be determined.

Instead, if we just undid the Bush-era tax cuts, we wouldn't have to cut so much other stuff...

But, can we raise taxes without fueling the class wars? Raising taxes doesn't scare millionaires away, and it might make more sense to tax the rich than the poor. Not only are the rich, well, RICH; they are the only ones benefiting from the current economic climate. If we try to tax the middle class that is already suffering or cut more benefits from the poor, we might finally find their breaking point.

(full post at http://liberal-propaganda.blogspot.com/2011/08/economic-rumble-usa.html)Neutral economic facts in America are hard to come by these days. On one hand, you... more

fernweher
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10 months ago
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Debt and delusions

The theatre of the past thirty days has been a wasteful exercise of trying to equate... more

hoosierdaddy
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10 months ago
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2 comments

Al Gore speaks with Keith Olbermann on debt ceiling and democracy

These are the words of a man who truly cares for his country. And as a man who spent many years in the confines of Washington DC he got to understand the dysfunction all too well. And he is absolutely correct. This should have been a discussion about jobs, explicity clean energy jobs and how becoming much more aggressive about transitioning to a clean energy economy could jumpstart this country and begin to pay down our debt. This should not have been a bill that attached "super congress committees" and triggers to it that force the agenda to be skewed in favor of the moneyed interests that have run this government's policies for far too many years at the expense of those most vulnerable, education, environment and other programs that are needed. The vote on this may be over, but the fight has just begun.

I can't tell you how refreshing it is to hear this man speak and how happy I am that he is still here in the dialogue. But it too saddens me when I think of what could have been had we had that non violent Tahrir Square right here a deacde ago in support of our true president. There is no disputing that more people now see just what we missed out on. But we should not now allow that to cloud the reality of what we face today and I am grateful for his continuing to spark debate in this conversation of regaining our democratic republic. Through all of this he has remained above all a true statesman and a man of grace and I love him very much for that.

Which is why I support his words here and his call to once again regain the conversation and to work to bring much needed life to our democratic process which is now in critical condition. I will be in Washington Dc this October. I will go because I am standing up for my planet, for my country and for those I love. I will go because we as citizens can no longer sit at home and think it will fix itself. Like the climate crisis our democracy crisis cannot be fixed by standing on the sidelines. Only when we become proactive, focused and willing to truly stand up for what is right will we be able to make changes. It won't be easy, but damn it, my son is worth the fight and so is the country I love that has been so good to me.These are the words of a man who truly cares for his country. And as a man who spent... more