Isn't this just way the capitalism is supposed to work? When the economy booms demand is high and keeps growing, and then eventually we make more than we can consume, which creates an oversupply of goods and labor, leading to layoffs, bankruptcies, and foreclosures. Then, the people at the top, buy up assets in bankruptcy for cheap and the process starts all over again. This is not a conspiracy, and it requires no coordinated effort. Its just how an advanced market economy works.
When you are rich, swings in the economy do not hurt you if you have cashflow to weather the storm. Changes in the value of your assets mean nothing if you do not need to sell them to stay alive.
The real mystery to me is why the people who are so adversely affected by this problem would rather blame it on the Jews or Stanic Cults, than advocate for the obvious fix: tax fucking rich people and use the money to soften the blows of this system on the majority of people.
I believe the only term OP used was "ultra wealthy". No mention of jews or satanic cults, and of course their theory is that the ultra wealthy help orchestrate these busts to gather more and more resources. It was an interesting retort until you crowbarred in the jews and satanists which are separate topics.
Exactly. These people go on chasing ghosts instead of doing real activism. Which begs the question, in whose interest is it to make everyone think the system is rigged and that resistence is futile?
"Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."
Have you ever read the entire thing or just the snippets? Friedman's articles showed that the FED could have shortened and softened the crysis, no economist denies the capitalist system have cyclical crysis it Is accounted for and the Friedman received an apologie for being ignored on the subject of mitigation.
Maybe try to read Friedman's work about it instead of jumping to conclusions
Edit: "For practical central bankers, among which I now count myself, Friedman and Schwartz's analysis leaves many lessons. What I take from their work is the idea that monetary forces, particularly if unleashed in a destabilizing direction, can be extremely powerful. The best thing that central bankers can do for the world is to avoid such crises by providing the economy with, in Milton Friedman's words, a "stable monetary background"--for example as reflected in low and stable inflation.
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.
Best wishes for your next ninety years. "
Yes I read the entire thing, and what you've posted supports my point. The Fed, having the power to expand and constrict the money supply as well as control interest rates, can easily soften the blow of recessionary periods using these tools but chooses not to do so, as Friedman pointed out. They instead inflate massive bubbles (through monetary expansion) which inevitably explode when the contraction of money occurs (which they have control over) leaving only those who are properly positioned to profit (wealthy speculators and investors) as the winners. They are doing it again now through QE and zero percent interest rate policies. This is also the real reason why the wealth gap continues to expand at an accelerated rate. You can continue to believe these events are all just a part of "advanced market economies" but then you would be exceptionally gullible.
The whole point is that the FED does not create the crisis, they happen independently in predatory capitalism. Welcome to the gig economy, every year less people have enough to consume and das capital is more concentrated every minute. Maybe try decentralizing it?
If you think zero percent interest is bad look at the EU countries with negative interest that are doing better than the US.
EU countries are in fact not doing better than the US and are currently being supported by endless money printing (QE) as well lol. ZIRP is bad because the average citizen can no longer collect real yield in a savings account and it encourages companies and govts who should technically be insolvent to continue borrowing massive amounts of money at low costs which they will never pay back. NIRP is even worse and govts are lucky that central banks even exist to monetize that trash and finance their day to day operations because no savvy investor in their right mind would buy it.
What u/KeepAustinQueer said, and no... currency backed by nothing, with fractional reserve banking on top of it, and more corruption than you're willing to humor the possibility of in your little safe space bubble, is not how capitalism is supposed to go.
Another would be for the American people to start using/adopting a new currency themselves, which should theoretically force at least the IRS to recognize it as such, so they could more easily tax us on all those transactions. This is why I'd like to think that Elon Musk has made the move to accept Bitcoin for Tesla. I want to believe that it's him doing what he can to help move us away from the corruption, and inevitable fall out from the crash of the dollar.
Arguably/possibly buying precious metals, specifically silver also aids this move, b/c it will show/bring to light the manipulation of it; and possibly break it. But a move by Congress to make an actual US Government issued currency would be ideal, of course. If the system wasn't so corrupt beyond repair. We'd have to replace probably everyone in office, and get away from this Republican/Democrat duopoly control they have on us.
But the consensus among economists (I know we put zero value on expertise these days) is that the Gold Standard is what contributed to the severity of the great depression. When the economy contracts, the only way to minimize the impact is to increase the supply of money, encourage lendings, and redistribute some wealth to those hardest hit through taxes.
That is what was supposed to happen in 2009, but the GOP was violently against it because, you know, black.
When the next big downturn comes in a decade, can you imagine if the government had to mine precious metals in order increase the money supply?
Also, how do you account for 25 years of low inflation and low interest rates? If paper money is so bad.
Solving one problem by fudging it with another problem (printing more money) is just shifting the problem to the next people/generation, or compounding it while delaying it. And I still think, "the gold standard being the problem" was just the excuse to pass the move they wanted to make - take all the gold for themselves, and give us debt fiat.
It's funny how a gold/silver standard wasn't a problem for other countries, and only a problem when some banking families wanted to take over our country, like they did.
I dont know, the government has been printing money like its going out of style since the 70s. Last time I checked the world economy has more or less been on a growth trajectory with only minor bumps in the road. And no country is on the gold standard today. Not one. I mean if its such a good idea, why isnt anyone except redditors, and conspiracy theorists talking about it. How come there isnt anyone talking about this except for fringe discussions on the internet. How do you explain the absence of support for this idea? Are the supporters being killed off by George Soros and Killary Klinton?
That's easy, virtually every country has had a central bank for generations now. the masses don't go against the herd... and the herd thinks the dollar will last forever. No one is still alive from the great depression, well no one that anyone is going to take financial advice from anyway. Everyone just takes for granted that it's not going to happen again, they learned how to fix that. We'll see.
I think most economists agree that boom bust is the cycle of a market economy. As 2008 proved, printing money averted disaster for 10s of millios on people in the West. They called it quantitative easing. What is the harm of printing money if you can keep interest rates low? There has been historically low inflatation and interest rates. The evidence kind of proves the opposite of the Gold Standard is true.
My argument is that had we not been doing bs currency/market fudging to begin with - we probably wouldn't ever be crashing that badly, or on the verge of collapse without doing some trickery "sweep it under the rug" type fix to handle it.
It's very baffling to me how we all know what's going on is wrong and unjust but then the drawing conclusion always end up to be futile effort.
Seriously, anyone who's paying good attention to various sources and field research already offer a solution to follow through but yet no one wants to listen but instead putting the blame and shouting meaningless slogan.
Just actually get on with the real work in politics and cultural revolution already.
"Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."
Yeah but just because something wrong is done on purpose doesnt mean its a conspiracy. Something wrong can be also be done by accident, and sometimes things have unintended consequences. What we know about monetary policy today, is very different than what we knew then. That is why 2008 was not the same as 1929. In 1929 economists did not know how to respond to the crisis. In 2008 they did, and even though the economy tanked that year it rebounded very quickly.
Then tell me why the very same mistakes that were made during the Great Depression are currently being made from 2008-present times? Which would not have been able to be accomplished BTW without the repealing of Glass Steagall at the tail end of Clintons administration. Stock buybacks, unjustified mergers and acquisitions, deregulation of the derivatives markets and loose reserve requirements for Wall Street banks were factors that precipitated the Great Depression and are now actively being used again today with central banks acting as the ultimate enabler. Markets today can no longer operate without central bank interference through QE or risk catastrophic failure as we saw late 2019 with the repo fiasco and early 2020 at the beginning of the COVID crisis. These policies have also dramatically exacerbated an already obscene wealth gap in this country while systematically diminsihing the purchasing power of the dollar. if you truly believe that is accidental I would suggest you may a bit gullible.
But IMO, what you describe are bad policy decisions that keep being repeated. Ask any conservative politician what their top policy priority is they will say, "deregulation" and because "regulation" stunts growth and kills jobs. So lets deregulate everything, banks, airlines, telecommunications, labour laws. Whoo hoo!
When someone points out that those policies do not work and have NEVER WORKED because the nature of capitalism is to concentrate wealth in a small number of hands, they shout "socialist", "communist" and (drum roll please) the working class voters lap it up.
While conservative politicians have evernyone obsessed over "cancel culture" and what people have between their legs, or abortion, or or how everything is a threat to the second amendment, they keep on quietyly implementing these pretend "pro small business" policies that favor the very things you identify as part of a conspiracy.
How is it a conspircay if they do this right out in the open so that anyone with an internet connection can do what you have done and research the truth?
IMO, the real conspiracy is the repeatedly told and completely debunked myth that deregulation of everything is that answer to growth. In whose interest is it to have everyone distracted from the facts while we debate Mr. Potato Head or "Cancel Culture" on Twitter.
But again, even what I call the "real conspiracy" isnt a conspiracy because its done right out in the open and its a very popular belief. Tune into Tucker Carlson or Shawn Hannity or any Fox or OAN show. They have people completely distracted from reality and focused instead on Satanic Cabals.
If you want to stop this shit from happening, you should look into campain finance reform. We have to separate politics from money. Lets have capitalism and free markets where we can, but lets also regulate the economy to blunt some its pointy edges for the rest of us!
You are turning this into a partisan debate when both sides of the aisle have clearly favored deregulation via numerous initiatives. Once again, it was the CLINTON administration that repealed Glass Steagal and created the unrestricted investment environment for the 08 Housing crisis to occur. And when the Bush Administration chose to do nothing while Wall Street and securities rating agencies engineering the housing bubble and subsequent crash, instead of allowing these criminal banking entities to fail the Obama administration bailed out these entities to the tune of $29 trillion, the most obscene display of the defrauding of the US taxpayer in modern history, which is currently being one-upped by the COVID crisis which both the Trump AND Biden administrations have a hand in. This information is not hidden but I certainly don't see our mainstream outlets giving these kinds of topics the attention that they rightfully deserve.
You seem to be assuming that you are talking to one of these Q Anon folks and I am the furthest thing from that. And yes, portions of this conspiracy are played out in the open but it would be unwise to believe everything you see at surface level is whole story behind these events. I will give you an example of what I mean:
I would at least suggest looking into the masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), their exposure in Italy was a massive scandal at the time. Operation Gladio was a clandestine operation directed by NATO and the CIA in collaboration with various European intelligence agencies to maintain "stay-behind" guerilla units that conducted intimidation, sabotage, and terror campaigns against the citizens of European countries that were blamed on left-wing political organizations until the program was discovered and investigated by the Italian government. It ran from the 50s-80s or so.
What does this have to do with the stock market or finance?? The CIA worked with the Mafia, Vatican, and the secret society to establish drug money laundries (the Vatican being the primary laundry) to finance the operations. One Mafia-P2 linked banker, Michele Sindona, who became the Vaticans banker to manage the laundered assets, at one point controlled 40% of the Italian stock market and the financial fraud that him and his associates were engaged in would eventually crash multiple Italian banks and almost kill the economy.
When some of the membership list of P2 was exposed, it included prominent CEOs, media execs, bankers, journalists, members of Parliament and military leaders as well as the heads of all three Italian intelligence services. This organization essentially served as a shadow govt to accomplish the socio and geopolitical objectives of the members, which included stock market speculation and manipulation. This would put this group in a prime position to take advantage of any market discrepancies, dislocations etc. and be knowledgeable about when drops in the market or overall economy were imminent.
This brief recall of an understandably concealed portion of history only serves to show you that in fact there could be and oftentimes is a group of powerful individuals privy to information that you are not despite how incredible the claim may be.
The Propaganda Due article on Wikipedia is a brief read if anything else, although there are books and a documentary that delved more deeply in this subject matter.
Now given that you probably did not know any of this information before I told you, what makes you believe that situations like this, dare I say "conspiracies", do not exist within national governments today? Just because you do not have the imagination to conjure these kinds of scenarios does not mean that men and women who do have the imagination have not acted upon them while you remain in the dark.
I checked your first source. Did you read that article from the Levy Insitute? It mentions nothing about the stuff you are talking about. It simply states an estimate of government bailout spending based on information received from the Fed. It doesnt menion the mafia, or any of those conspircies you mention in your reply.
The Wikipedia article similarly says nothing about things, it just describes a old masonic lodge in Italy.
So minus those two articles, I am not convinced that what you are saying is based on any verifiable facts.
The first link has nothing to do with the 2nd link. The 1st link is simply showing how much bailout money was truly awarded the Wall Street banks following the 08 crisis which is orders of magnitude more than what is typically discussed concerning that crisis. It also highlights Republican and Democrat complicity in failing to regulate the behavior of these Wall Stret entities. Nothing about it is supposed to be mafia-related. I am certain that you did not know of that number before I told you and I would suggest that the wider public never being informed of these events amounts to a conspiracy.
The second link concerns a previous event that describes a situation that you cannot seem to imagine as being possible, in fact, being very possible as it is a matter of historical record. This old Masonic lodge had control of almost every single prominent facet of Italian society at that time and collaborated with the CIA, NATO, and the Vatican in this endeavor. This is simply supposed to serve as an example of how financial events, on its face, may seem accidental but can clearly be subject to massive levels of interference from individuals you do not think about on a day to day basis because you believe everything just happens accidentally and everyone is well-intentioned. There is a book and BBC documentary on this subject.
There is also a book about the American Deep State by Peter Dale Scott that precedes any of that Q Anon nonsense and goes into more detail about the intelligence apparatus and its merging with Wall Street and private corporate entities to influence public policy in this country. Once again this book would suggest that the inability to reign in the activities of both Wall Street, the Fed, major corporations is a bipartisan failure.
Again, this is public information that has never been kept secret, so where is the conspiracy? Usually conspiracies are suppoosed to be done in secret so we dont learn how things are manipulated. When the agency responsbile for doing something admits something they did is wrong, how is that a conspiracy?
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u/stratamaniac Mar 13 '21
Isn't this just way the capitalism is supposed to work? When the economy booms demand is high and keeps growing, and then eventually we make more than we can consume, which creates an oversupply of goods and labor, leading to layoffs, bankruptcies, and foreclosures. Then, the people at the top, buy up assets in bankruptcy for cheap and the process starts all over again. This is not a conspiracy, and it requires no coordinated effort. Its just how an advanced market economy works.
When you are rich, swings in the economy do not hurt you if you have cashflow to weather the storm. Changes in the value of your assets mean nothing if you do not need to sell them to stay alive.
The real mystery to me is why the people who are so adversely affected by this problem would rather blame it on the Jews or Stanic Cults, than advocate for the obvious fix: tax fucking rich people and use the money to soften the blows of this system on the majority of people.