eagle1462010
Diamond Member
- May 17, 2013
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Freeze $1.5 Qaudrillion Derivs As First Step To Recovery
The G-20 leaders are must deliberate a new set of policies capable of leading humanity out of the current crisis. We must first identify the immediate cause which has detonated the present unprecedented turbulence. That cause is unquestionably the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble. Derivatives have provoked the downfall of Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia, and most other institutions which have succumbed. Derivatives have made J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, Barclays, RBS, and money center banks of the world into Zombie Banks.
Derivatives are financial instruments based on other financial instruments * paper based on paper. Derivatives are one giant step away from the world of production and consumption, plant and equipment, wages and employment in the production of tangible physical wealth or hard commodities. In the present hysteria of the globalized financial oligarchy, the very term of "derivative" has become taboo: commentators prefer to speak of toxic assets, complex securities, exotic instruments, and counterparty arrangements. At the time of the Bear Stearns bankruptcy, Bernanke warned against "chaotic unwinding." All of these code words are signals that derivatives are being talked about. Derivatives include such exchange traded speculative instruments as options and futures; beyond these are the over-the-counter derivatives, structured notes, and designer derivatives. Derivatives include the credit default swaps so prominent in the fall of AIG, collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles, asset-backed securities, mortgage backed securities, auction rate securities, and a myriad of other toxic variations. These derivatives, in turn, are pyramided one on top of the other, thus creating a house of cards reaching into interplanetary space.
As long as this huge mass of kited derivatives was experiencing positive cash flow and positive leverage, the profits generated at the apex of the pyramid were astronomical. But disturbances at the base of the pyramid turned the cash flow and exponential leverage negative, and the losses at the top of the pyramid became immense and uncontrollable. By 2005-6, the disturbances were visible in the form of a looming crisis of the automobile sector, plus the slowing of the housing bubble cynically and deliberately created by the Federal Reserve in the wake of the collapse of the dot com bubble, the third world debt bubble. and the other asset bubbles favored by Greenspan. Financiers are trying to blame the current depression on poor people who acquired properties with the help of subprime mortgages, and then defaulted, thus * it is alleged -- bringing down the entire world banking system! This is a fantastic and reactionary myth. The cause of the depression is derivatives, and this means that the perpetrators to be held responsible are not poor mortgage holders, but rather globalized investment bankers and hedge fund operators, the derivatives merchants. We are now in the throes of a world wide derivatives panic. This panic has been gathering momentum for at least a year, since the fall of Bear Stearns. There is no power on earth which can prevent this panic from destroying most of the current mass of toxic derivatives. It is however possible that the ongoing attempts to bail out, shore up, and otherwise preserve the deadly mass of derivatives will destroy human civilization as we have known it. We must choose between the continued existence of derivatives speculation on the one hand, and the survival of human society worldwide on the other. If this be crude populism, make the most of it.
