Charles – thanks for posting that good article. What a change this world is going through!

From HulRePublic: ‘The assault on our way of life has been carefully stage managed’: http://goo.gl/ENwR0

Given those 4 points – how would you propose getting from here to where you want to get? Asking the impossible?

As for: ‘I am not saying there won’t be crooks and failures, there will. But at least these people will swiftly be hounded out of business, where appropriate.’ – Wasn’t that Greenspan’s argument?

There is, and can never be a ‘free market’.

Would highly recommend Hobhouse Liberalism http://goo.gl/eoIHf , Polanyi The Great Transformation http://goo.gl/xH6wX & Chang Bad Samaritans for a critique of ‘free markets’.

Given that ‘Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy.’ – http://goo.gl/lnMTf – how would you get from here to there?

http://www.tnr.com/article/how-i-became-keynesian

John Souter – the more I read, the more I reach the painful conclusion that this is and has been a “choreographed shambles”.

Who was it that said – repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different result is the logic of the lunatic.

With regard to the present financial lunacy my question is – is it a mistake or a choreographed shambles intent on the consolidation and supremacy of the financial hegemony?

Which leads on to a second question – If or when they end up owning the world, will they lease it back to the rest of us – will the rates be reasonable – or will they continue to squabble to achieve the alpha status only for the alpha to find the pack has lost interest and moved on?

“The institutions that lent money that cannot be paid back must take their losses. If they cannot then their stockholders and bondholders must be zeroed if necessary to cover depositors, and any alleged “superior” status on derivative instruments must be voided. In short, depositors must be senior to all; the rest of the capital structure falls where it does. And fall it will.

That’s fine. These nations should, at the same time, both enact One Dollar of Capital for all institutions going forward and prosecute all banksters who blow sky high for effectively counterfeiting the currency, because that’s exactly what they did. Put them all in prison.”

Roubini calls for, “Finally, given the unsustainably high public debts and borrowing costs of certain member states, we see no alternative to some kind of debt mutualization.”

Market Ticker responds with:

“Nonsense.

None of the nations who are in the Euro agreed to this. Committing public frauds for years so as to force someone else to rescue you via “mutualization” and “integration” of political systems is tantamount to the taking of political power by force from the people and giving it to those who are not elected.

This is commonly known as an act of war and is full and fair justification for those who have this imposed upon them to take arms and repeal the literal subversion and replacement by force of their political process.”

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=207222

I watched this movie a few weeks back its very good a metaphor on a private money creation where the unit of money is life expectancy and payment in in hours minutes and seconds not pounds shillings and pence. Would that the masses flocked to and understiood the subtext.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efNzhEKm3w4

Regulation will be great if :

1. The regulators have the first clue what the bankers are up to. They don’t and won’t. They never have.
AND/OR
2. The bankers have not captured the regulators. They lobby and bribe the regulators.
AND/OR
3. The bankers are not the regulators. They stuff the oversight panels with their own people.
AND/OR
4. The bankers don’t have teams of high powered lawyers that can think up 100 ways around the latest regulation before breakfast.

Given that to satisfy all 4 points, you are probably asking the impossible, then it is far easier and more fool-proof to turn it around and simply state : the bankers are on their own. No help , no bailouts, no special privilege, no state or central bank underwriting. It is a level playing field. The market will kill them off swiftly if they over-leverage themselves or if they cheat the public. They will be ex-bankers in a heartbeat. Nothing will focus their minds more than that.

I have said before that opponents of the free market keep banging on about market greed, they always fail to mention the stronger free market emotion, fear. Fear , if not removed, is the most powerful regulator known. The fear of failure and personal wipe-out. Remove fear and you have untrammeled greed, but then you also do not have a free market. You have some sort of socially enabled abrogation, as we now have.

PS : If you have a free market choice of money, people would demand the soundest money available(why would they not?), and you will almost certainly have an EFFECTIVE gold standard. Then derivatives are barely possible, because they are not backed directly by gold and volatility tends to zero. By definition. Banks would be fettered. I am not saying there won’t be crooks and failures, there will. But at least these people will swiftly be hounded out of business, where appropriate. That is the best that we can hope for. IMO

True. But central banks were developed to limit the damage caused by the recurrent banking crises of the 19th C – which took down good with bad. Failing banks meant failing businesses and failing lives. But I agree banks should be allowed to fail – maybe along the lines of the Swedish approach: http://goo.gl/AbzPY

Just don’t share your deregulated – in my view dystopian – vision. (For me deregulation = more exploitation; more inequality; less social/economic mobility; monopoly; oligarchy; child labour; workfare; 16 hour working days; awful working conditions; industrial accidents and disease; environmental degredation; the privatisation of public space; no healthcare/education for the masses; etc, etc. – 19th C-style laissez-faire doesn’t appeal somehow. The ‘free market’ is a mirage – see: http://goo.gl/z1Vtb)

What will probably happen is that they will muddle through as long as the extraction process can continue – or for as long as the masses will tolerate it (which amounts to the same thing) – if for no other reason than it would be impossible to reach consensus on change.