What? Try and tell you that this present 'world financial crisis' was contrived? Who, me? Never!
"Abolutely not so," you would understandably say? "What a terrible thing to say!" - Of course.
No, 'they' 'just happened' to institute a period of more than ten years of not merely cheap money but plentiful cheap money! The whole world was rich! Until recently I myself would receive fifty or a hundred friendly invitations per day to borrow, so I know. How supportive! "Take the equity out of your house for that tropical beach holiday you have always dreamed of or next year's model" of this or that car. How very kind! - Though a fat lot of good either of them would be doing me now, I suppose, when I presently receive hardly ten such offers per week to help me with my nightmare problem.
So, ten solid years of persuasion to borrow at one percent, with never a hint that 'they' would hike the interest to what I could never afford, and that, to then safeguard the poor lenders, our home would therefore inevitably be forfeit as security on my foolhardy indebtedness.
But my intended problem of a shakey mortgage would not be the world's problem yet - though it would be a good start. No, the problem would be when the 'international specialists' would 'wholesale' my mortgage with hundreds or thousands of others from the lending institutions and the banks to other financial entities, 'slicing and dicing and packaging' the mortgages arbitrarily according to the alleged 'quality' of the original borrowers, and taking a margin for themselves for so doing. These financial entities would leverage the situation by putting down ten percent and borrowing the rest to acquire these 'cdo instruments' or 'collaterlized debt obligations'. The buyers would then sell these for quick profit to another set of buyers, who similarly would put down ten percent and borrow the rest, and so quickly sell to continue the daisy chain to . . . Have you spotted the problem yet?
The original security of the massively increasing sums involved has not increased, and is diluted with each new tranche of 'leveraged' or borrowed purchase, until the security is a hundredth or a thousandth of one percent of the 'collateralized debts' being lent and sold as investment to all our banks all over the world. And all our banks have been lending these 'ninety percents' of borrowing. The 'derivatives' trade is also involved. The total of their overall movements worldwide which may be in jeopardy is said to be 500 trillion, though two years or so ago I saw the figure of 1,025 trillion, so supposedly it is somewhere between the two.
But, though it was known and even intended that many of our mortgages would default, there are 'credit default swaps' to protect their investments, no? A fat lot of good the 'guarantee' of a 'credit default swap' is going to do when the guarantor is drowning in debt, too, or already disappeared.
But surely it all happened by chance, could have happened to anyone, you say, and everyone was acting with the best of intentions? Sure sure.
So where lies the blame? Well, we borrowers are just incredulous simpletons who have been carefully educated to believe, borrow and consume, nothing more. No, we will have to learn all about suffering all by ourselves, all in good time. The mortgage brokers are just a raft of get-rich-quick cynics who work on fees and commission and never give a damn about anybody but themselves anyway, and so give not a passing thought to the consequences their activities may have on others. The owners of the funds from which they lend are blinded only by dreams of short-term mega-bucks. The banks from which the mortgage funds borrow should know better than to let the 'specialists' wholesale the batches of mortgages for them, but banks exist to take money and to make more money from it, and their directors set targets, so . . . Those who buy on leverage should know what they are doing, and probably do, but they sell quick, perhaps even before they buy, and 'move on' and so are out of harm's way, and those fund-managers and hedge-fund movers and shakers - do they know what they are doing? Well, since the individual managers and dealers are on commission and massive bonuses on turnover, they are going to go ahead anyway. That's all human nature, isn't it? - Isn't it?
- Er, that is 'human', is it? It's as well to know what we're dealing with.
But those 'international specialists' and particularly those international individuals who own 'the Fed' and all 'our' 'central banks', and who instruct such as Greenspan and Bernanke to flood the market with easy money at one percent interest - Of course they know what they are doing! And they know the effect of then raising the interest rate and restricting the availability of money. They know this because they do it every thirty years or so when they think that the last batch who suffered will have forgotten, or that their new crop of thrusting kids will not listen to the oldsters' warnings anyway.
Then who are these people who simply push the appropriate button each couple of generations to impoverish the world and skim off the cream, who know full well that the very existence of their 'finance' and 'money' is a delusion anyway, together with their 'laws' thus penalizing our carefully-structured failure to repay due to the trap they have created ?
Well the name of the worst of them begins with an 'R', and unfortunately doesn't end soon enough to prevent a whole cascade of contrived impoverishment and pain for most of the planet's human inhabitants each thirty or forty years. And the 'international specialists'? - Oh well, though they lie and cheat and deceive, blight our education and warp our information, we should know about them by now. This make-and-break activity - together with managing our media to provide our favorite sit-coms round the clock and protect us from knowing what our brave lads are having to do for them to a bunch of simply beastly foreigners, and manipulating our governments and promoting wars as we see in our various 'civilized' countries right now - is their trade!
"But that's inhuman!" you say. - Yes, it is, isn't it?
But, while the whole process has therefore been about as unpremeditated as the space program, blame or even criticize them? Who, me? Ooh hoo hoo! Never. Mustn't do that, must we? Oh no no no!
By the way, about all that 'money' that 'has been wiped off the books'. Well, remember, it never really existed anyway. It only 'exists' if 'they' say it does, and if 'they say' it has gone, then it has gone and the world is 'impoverished'. Yet still you go on believing these charlatans! You could have co-operated with others and had all you ever wanted, but without working for these devious thieves all these years. But you have to go on believing these snake-oil merchants, don't you? . . . Why?
It really is a bit of a farce, you have to admit. So, after all I have told you all these years, do you really still have to believe we can't do better than this for ourselves?
