Have you noticed how every banker wants the Recession to be over, but how everyone of them also wants someone ELSE to be the one to take the fall necessary to get it done? They all have plans for what ‘we’ should do. But I don’t think ‘we’ includes them.
Listening to the policians and bankers talk about their ‘worries’ and their ‘efforts’, it’s like those old Miss World beauty contestants. Remember how, every one of them, one after another, without the slightest hint of irony or, aparently, even any awareness of their own fatuous insincerity, ALL simpered at the microphone about how much they wanted world peace and caring for kittens. In my personal, Rocky Horror Bankers Show – it’s banker’s perfectly tanned heads, all Harvard educated, with the rictus-like-grin, of-the dead-eyed, sleepless-predator, which wobble and lear at me, from on top of bikini clad corpses.
Maybe I need to ease off on the Strong Cheddar before bed. What do you think?
Anyway – enough about my problems – in all seriousness, everyone knows what the ONLY real solution requires, it’ s just no one, NO ONE, is prepared to be the one to do it. You see, someone, somewhere HAS to pay their debts. Every banker knows it. But back when it was the banks who had the bad debts, no one, on pain of death, was allowed to admit it. Back then, they would have been good god damned if its going to be them. Not a whisper was allowed about clearing bad debts.
Now that their debts have been shifted to the Soveriegn purse – ah now, you can’t hear the sound of the incoming arc-light- apocalypse, for the clamour of them telling us. This is Prisoners Dilemma played out, to the ride of the Valkyries! Feel that adrenaline surge as we fly in first-class and watch those gun ships blow the shit out of the little debtors as they run and cry out in those funny voices they have. Oh Yeah man, GET SOME! Mother fucking bankers RULE you shit eating peasants!!!
THAT is where we are. Its the ultimate immersive 3 Trllion dollar Grand Theft Wall Steet GAME.
The way the game works is that someone has to get poorer. Debts have to be cleared. The bond market insists. We all agree on that. But in the Prisoner’s dilemma game the trick is to promise we are all in it together and then CHEAT. Get some other gullible cretin to take the pain.
If someone can be convinvced, or failing that just forced, to clear THEIR debts and for them to get poorer, then those who have just not quite got round to clearing theirs will NOT get poorer. So if the banks can find some weaker vicitms – lets say some nation who were never near the ear of real power from the start – if they can be forced to clear their debts and get a whole lot poorer then those who have not cleared any debts will emerge from this whole crisis imeasurably MORE powerful and more untouchably wealthy than before.
Someone has to BE sacrificed in order to restore confidence and monetary value to all the bankers remaining debts. So let’s get Greece, maybe Portugal, Ireland’s already very helpfully bent over, and Spain if we have to – Hey, it’ll be a ‘price worth paying’ as the saying goes.
And once all these ‘unfortunate but unavoidable’-I am so very sorry – cue the rictus predatory smile for the cameras – sacrifices for the graeter good have been made -BY OTHER PEOPLE – then those in the smartest suits can re-emerge into the diamond light and continue where they left off.
That’s the plan, as I understand it anyway.
Hi Golem
What's the solution to the toxics ? Maybe check out this Guardian commenter – I like the cut of his jib on liquidation of insolvent financial institutions
http://www.guardian.co.uk/users/kurringai/comments
( 30 may 6.47am )
Dave
Morning frog2,
Thanks for the link. I took a look. Yep. Another person saying what people have been saying for the last two years. At some point we will reach a critical mass.
I agree that onyb a root and branch solutin has a hope. I don't agree with reaching for the good/bad bank solution. That doesn't seem to me to be rrot and branch.
You can't lance a boil by carefully taking the puss and moving it to some less sore part of your body.
It's not bad debts its now bad institutions and in fact a bad system binding them together – it is now systemically toxic.
Give the financial sector a timetqble for when you are going to forcibly mark everything to market. Do it in tranches. Give a few months between stages to allow the banks to do the paper work. Give them a firm timetable at the end of which everything they have not marked to market themselves, will be done for them. And everything they have not been able to sell is now worthless.
Nearly all the banks will implode. They will lumber on in receivership as they wind themselves down. For as we all know, floating in the sea of lies and debt there is still a vast wealth of GOOD assets and paying debts. Those good debts MUST be disentangeld from the derivative purgatory they are caught in. If the banks won't do it. we do it for them.
It's not so far from compulsory purchasing of properties. And like all such compulsoin it is NEVER a fair price. This time the bankers get to feel robbed. And I'll cry them a river.
If there are not enought real buyers still standing, then buy/transfer the good assests at compusory purchase price – which given what we have already paid into them and what hthey therefore owe us – probabaly means we pay NOTHING more – a compuslsory price I like the sound of – Those assets we simply transfer to newly capitalised publically owned banks.
In the UK we could use the Post Office. We could also put money into healthy banks such a s The Cooperative. _ Hey, why do we feel fine about pouring money into dead banks but feel its somehow wrong to do the same for healthy ones? Makes no sense to me. This is a crisis. We need to cast aside failed assumptions.
So take whatever is left of the insolvent banks sell it off or simply transfer to clean newly capitalised banks (you can IPO them later).
The debts of the dead banks we deal with by cramming down the bond holders. Yes, the rich, the mighty, the sacred bond market and all the funds aand pensions and insurace whose value is tieed to them. I KNOW. Take the bond holder's money, starting with the lowest, and cram it down to pay off the debt. And you just keep going. Right up until the last super senior if you have to.
Pensions will get pole axed. AS THEY GOING TO BE NO MATTER WHAT. We really do have to grow up here. Pensions are screwed. In fact they have been for a number of years.
What we don't want, or rather what I don't wabnt, is to be forced to indebt myself further pursuing a plan which will fail to 'recover' anything other than the wealth of the wealthy.
Golem said: 'In my personal, Rocky Horror Bankers Show – it's banker's perfectly tanned heads, all Harvard educated, with the rictus-like-grin, of-the dead-eyed, sleepless-predator, which wobble and lear at me, from on top of bikini clad corpses.'
This deserves a picture. Oh, I wish I could draw!
LOL.
I think we both might be glad you can't.
Yes, Mr. Golem, the way you describe the end game as it should play out, placing the loss with those to whom it truly belongs, is the way to go. Please develop this in more detail.
I fear we have some fighting to do to see it happen, not least ideologically. The financial class employs a lot of megaphones. "It's the problem wiht living in a parallel reality from the mian media and their experts. Somtimes I think it would be more appropriate if this blog came in on crakly wavering short wave not in digital clarity" (excellent prose, you remember "You are only coming through in waves…."
People must be painted the true picture. We must wake up the comfortably numb. If the people loose, the financial class get to keep their stack while the people looses all their pensions and savings. We say; before any final loss on public purse is taken, bond holders and financial institutions shall be stripped to the bone!
Looks like I started something there !
The reason I don't actually know what a Bad Bank ""solution"" is, is that it just intuitively sounded to me like bullshit . The same with Carbon Trading — which struck me as a false market with huge possibilities for scams. Revealing that ENRON and Goldman were so enthusiastic about it . I am indebted to the late Postman Patel, the blogger Edward Teague, for his witty de-bunking there !