and those with the expertise and supposed regulations said "suck it up!"

People did.

RichGB, always enjoy your erudite comments – particularly as they come from a business viewpoint. And yes, banks have and do play this vital role in providing capital for business. We should not lose sight of this. Of course, that just makes the recent record of corruption and greed even more important to highlight. As Pat said, thank goodness for the internet.

To this I will copy a piece by Chomsky, it summarises a lot of what I would like to be able to communicate more succinctly,

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20080919.htm

Markets have inherent and well-known inefficiencies. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. That is particularly true for financial institutions.

Their task is to take risks, calculating potential costs for themselves. But they do not take into account the consequences of their losses for the economy as a whole.

Hence the financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient," as John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalization and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and also proposing solutions, which have been ignored.

The threat became more severe when the Clinton administration repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, thus freeing financial institutions "to innovate in the new economy," in Clinton's words — and also "to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system," financial analyst Nomi Prins adds.

Is there an endgame? or a way to engage in change? Beyond this obviously far-reaching blog?

It seems almost apocalyptic to keep blogging and waiting for the fall…

I remember Karl Denninger mentioning in several posts that the money multiplier is no where near 2 or 3 times and may in fact be below 1 (admittedly this post is 2 years old now).

I remember recently reading an article or interview with Gordon Brown where he is pretty sure that there will be major growth in the next 10-20 years. I guess most of this growth will take place in the developing world (BRIC countries) and the hope is that the developed world can take advantage of it.

All of this quantitive easing is a very useful way for the west to get lots of new money to invest in the developing worlds infrastructure, with the hope of buying into their future growth. See Michael Hudson for more on this theory

So the all of the QE will not help our economies, but will save the banks and allow us to buy up a lot of productive assets in developing economies so that some of us can profit from their future growth. This is what globalisation is about.

That's an excellent explanation. Keynesian economics probably only works if you're not bailing out the banks at the same time.

I'm one of those people to make use of so much easy credit, to finance my business. At my current rate of pay-back the debt will not be cleared in my lifetime; however, it is debt that I take full responsibility for. I knew what I was doing when I signed the forms.

What I do object to is how banks turn that debt in to more debt via the securitisation process. Banks with a leverage multiple exceeding 20 have nobody to blame but themselves.

How they can even pretend that there will be any growth & get away with it boggles the mind.

When demand shrinks, tax revenue shrinks. When demand shrinks, jobs disappear. When demand shrinks, deficits rise to pay unemployment compensation & other types of welfare.

The problem is simple. You have two sources of spending in a nation's economy — public & private. When the private sector stops spending the public sector has to make up that spending gap by deficit-spending. If it does not then demand collapses.

Yet all governments everywhere are reducing spending, ensuring further unemployment, lower tax revenues and increased social spending, all of which = budget deficits. It's a vicious spiral — the further they cut the budget, the further in deficit the government gets. Which is why governments must deficit-spend to increase demand.

With the money multiplier, every dollar/pound the govt spends to employ people will create 2, 3, 4 dollars/pounds in turn. That means increased tax revenues & falling deficits. In other words, you have to spend money to make money, like most areas in life. But instead they cut, digging an ever-deepening hole, and giving them an excuse to cut further & further ("we still have deficits, we must cut more!")

It's an all-out attack on the working & middle classes, perfectly set up to justify itself until we're all neo-feudal serfs.

From what I know they would be very good. I think the tax dodgers protests are nothing short of inspired.

exactly as you say – the mathematics of interest made the end game a foregone conclusion back in 08. We said the bail out were a madness and a crime then and they are doubly so now. We said they would fail and now they are.

It has been about buying time. They are buying their time with our futures. We can get out and can take them down but they are raising the stakes delisberately to make it seem ever more unthinkable. Sadly for them we are thinking. And we can't be stopped from thinking.

There is no free pain way out now. There never was. But their 'solution' is unravelling faster than they would like.

Already large delegations have been in Dublin and now Brutoin has been over there to flog them the banks WITH all the Irish tax payers bail out money as part of the deal.

In other words the Irish tax payers, all those orphans and Grannies he and his twisted ilk were so very concerned to protect – all those people will have paid their taxes to the richest nations and richest individuals on the planet.

Oh yeah, Sure the financial class and our leaders are on our side. Sure they are. All for our own good.

See here for the story.