Glad I had not offended.

Bringing in the liquidity to cover the minimum cash flow to cover payments IS ALL we are doing at the moment and for the last two years.

The global economy is Madoff write gargantuan. Neither the capital invested nor any income to pay for withdrawals exists. All that sustains it is new cash most of it coming from bail outs and share price ramping/inflating.

It will collapse unless a truely gargantuan amount of public money can be funelled into the financial system over at least 5 years. To do this will require the wholesale dismantelling of public servies, welfare and pensions.

Such 'cuts' would be far above the necessary and painful changes that do have to be made to pensions. These we cannot avoid. But what is goingt to be done in order to save the Financial 'ponzi' as you call it – are far more brutal.

If such were to be acheived it will be the reversal of every civilizing idea of the last century.

Tell me, how much is the present situation possible to understand like a Ponzi scheme, in your view?

There seems to be the same obsession with bringing in the liquidity, taking up new loans at any cost if necessary to make the scheduled payments, just to preserve everybody's confidence in the system's ability to honour its obligations for as long as possible – ignoring the total debt and the possibility of paying it all back, until one day the promised payments can no longer be met (total payments too big, further funding is no longer available), and somebody (the tax payer) is left with a huge black hole of IOU "assets" but noone to pay them and collateral bringing in just small fractions of nominal value. Before the tax payer, all the partcipants in the scheme escapes with principal and interests.

Let us, you and I and the others who care to come here, – let us all put out reason to work, together, to struggle together, against greed and ignorance.

I am appalled that my response was hurtful.. i meant it to be tongue in cheek.What I should have written is – Idiotic as it may seem to you AND ME. I agree it IS idiotic and I agree that it is SO idiotic, that it seems not believable to people like us. That is what I meant.

I am terribly sorry and apologize whoel-heartedly to you.

I detest people who write hurtfully and in snide ways to undermine other people. Please accept my apologiy and assurance that I will be more carefull how I phrase things when I try to be funny in future.

"How could I be so stupid as to believe that an insurer has to asess the risque on a contract beforehand in order to calculate the insurance premium? I must be getting too old, losing touch with modern society's ways. "

After having considered it more closely, and enlightened by some of your later posts and comments thereupon, I see now that AIG is in part a Ponzi scheme (I had a notion already when they became main sponsors of MU), and that the Ponzi business model has been taken up by both banks, central banks and nations.

I think the old way of writing insurance was better for all.

Having been ivolved in many litigations concerning Ponzi schemes, and having seen the misery caused, I'd like to see this evil rooted out once and for all.

I despair, because it seems to me the only line of defence is knowledge, and the Ponzis have already employed all the best communication people to sell people on the idea of fast profits out of nothing and with no risk. Reason struggling with greed, desire and hope, I fear for reason's chances.

can you be bothered?

i would also like to add that the ps above posted two years ago was also immediately removed from guardian website as a bad thing to say.

I asked them. No real answer. They did return my post to me, so it wouldn't just cease to exist, which I was grateful for.

I have the same suspision as you – libel laws. I mentioned banks in teh body of the comment if I remember rightly and I think that just made them nervous.

Fair enough.

ps
i seem to remember also that, in the same week in 1997 or 8 as Gordon Brown was making warlike noises to Iran over nuclear sites, Iran lent the 20 odd billion…
wonder how much we owed iraq when we declared war on them.

pps..
here's a nice link from CNBC…the top 16 holders of U.S. debt. I'm sure you know all this anyway but its a handy and well presented laymans guide for such as me, so i pass it on….
http://www.cnbc.com/id/29880401/The_Biggest_Holders_of_US_Government_Debt?slide=2

Normally I'm happy to just read but that hacked me off enough to post something along the lines of, 'why are the guardian deleting intelligent comment when there are posters on the forum calling each other C**nts that remain?'

Rather unsurprisingly my comments were deleted too!

Feeling charitable towards my chosen newspaper it could be down to their current worries about UK libel law but that's a pure guess…