Are recessions just a transfer of money, are stock market crashes artificially created? By Roland Michel Tremblay

By Roland Michel Tremblay
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
The Marginal
December 26, 2008
Originally published on OpEdNews July 25 2008

I took three classes in economics when I was in college. I realized then that it was just like mathematics: if you can easily learn everything by heart, you can get a perfect score of 100%. Yes, I excelled at economics, and yet, I was the only one who stated out loud that none of it made any sense, that I could not understand how it could all work. I think I was the only one still based in a world of reality and logic.

“How is capitalism to work,” I asked my teacher; “Why is there a recession every 10 years or so, and a big crash at least every century? What causes them?”

I never found a satisfying answer. And today, I wonder, are recessions just a transfer of money from many poor and rich alike to the billionaires controlling the markets? Are these recessions and stock market crashes artificially created? Dear me, what a thought! This thought could annihilate the world as we know it.

That would explain a lot; finally economics could make sense. None of the identified factors affecting the economy truly affect it, and all those elaborate equations and diagrams to explain how markets evolve, are false and explain nothing.

Those courses I took are way in the past, and today I know next to nothing about money matters. Perhaps it is good that a layman should question what might be really going on, since, can we really trust economists?

Most people in my college class were puzzled indeed about what the world of economics was all about, and never questioned anything. Forecasting the markets is like predicting the weather: they often get it wrong. They get it wrong more often than usual, as if suddenly statistics and probabilities were not operating as they should be in those markets. They don’t. It seems all random, but is it really random?

It is as if, somehow, pretty much everything is controlled at a distance, by governments first, then by powerful financial institutions, then by very powerful corporations and then by very rich men. Who could predict what any of them will do next, how powerful they truly are and how badly it will affect the markets? No one can reliably forecast anything, I thought, especially when a small war between two unknown countries somewhere can affect the markets so much. Who can predict wars? The ones planning and ordering wars, of course.

Not so long ago, it was prohibitively costly to send a shuttle into space; NASA could not spend two billion dollars just like that on a whim. This was how I actually understood what was really expensive and what was not. If you spent a billion dollars on anything, I thought, you are mad.

Twenty years later we are spending 100 billion dollars on a space station, we are spending 500 billion dollars and counting on a war in Iraq, we are spending over 1 trillion dollars in bailouts that are totally useless because this is just the beginning of it all. All of that as if none of it mattered, as if there would not be any consequence to such blind spending. Is it really worth it? Who could possibly gain all that money back, even if we were to steal every single drop of oil out of Iraq and Iran combined?

I understand about inflation and other financial mechanisms, and that a billion today is worth much less than a billion a few decades ago. However, I will not believe that spending a billion today is like spending a million less than 20 years ago. Something is wrong here, really wrong. I am not a fool.

Our salaries have not multiplied by any such factor in the last 20 years. Quite the contrary: the standard of living keeps getting lower and we are getting poorer. In fact, many of us have been demoted, or found jobs that pay much less. Quite often we are earning less than we used to. Where once a man alone could support his entire family, now both the husband and wife are working like crazy and can barely make the ends meet. Moreover, they are being completely alienated at work under such pressures of today’s corporate structure designed to send us all into deep depression, if not driving us to suicide. No one can think anymore, that much is certain.

A quick calculation of what we are spending right now on just about everything, will show you that we are certainly spending at least two if not three trillion dollars we don’t have! How is this possible? How can capitalism still work under those conditions?

Is this just adding to a huge debt somewhere, kept hidden as much as they can, and one day America will declare bankruptcy, like, next week? Is this what this big depression is all about? The one no one wished to make quite official, when economists have known for a quite a while that we were already there, and the worst is still to come?

In that case, you can see that I may feel justified in questioning if recessions are not actually artificially created, and if they don’t profit someone. Trillions of borrowed money and unknown amounts of printed currency going up in smoke.

Is it not obvious then, that after that, the country will have to declare bankruptcy? Or certainly will take forever to get out of that next economic crash, and it won’t be pretty? The results could actually be as bad as if there was a civil war or a nuclear attack, it could easily be worse. No one walked out unto the streets because of George W. Bush’s excesses, electoral fraud, Iraq’s war and everything else that happened recently, but you will see now what will happen, as soon as money runs out, as perhaps this is the only thing that affects them so directly.

And yes, I have read here and there that the American government is actually expecting a civil war over everything that has happened in Iraq, the consequences of 9/11 on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and also, because of the economic crash.

We might still be slow to react when we lose our Constitution and our Freedom; however, when you cannot find any work anywhere and you are starving, after losing your home, suddenly you have a lot of time to think, to read about what actually happened and to act about such matters. I have no doubt that this civil war will take place, and it might still have nothing to do with the fact that this country has become a dictatorship.

If you need convincing on that point, read my article: Bush/Cheney “Dictator’s and Psychopath’s Checklists” Complete: Time for Impeachment:

http://www.themarginal.com/destructivism.htm#dictatorship

It is important here to mention that I am not talking about planes crashing into a few buildings, bringing worldwide chaos into the stock exchange markets, or a few people making a few millions or billions as a consequence. I am talking about a much more devious long term plan of the whole capitalist system, which is set at its core structure for everyone to fail and lose money.

Unless of course you are a big player, that you know the secret rules of success and you are privy to information no one else is. And if you are lucky, you might even help create chaos, working hand in hand with the government, to insure that you will make those billions you so desperately seek.

I remember only one sentence from that teacher I had for three semesters in a row in Economics. He said it only once. Recessions are just a transfer of money from some people to others. And whilst many are ruined, others become overnight billionaires.

Not just George W. Bush and his colleagues at the White House and at the Pentagon, but just about all those who finance their political campaigns and PR machine, might well have thought of a way to insure that this recession will pay off so wonderfully, it is all worth destroying the country and the planet in the process. And if it brings a crash in the financial markets worldwide, so be it, it is all worthwhile for their own financial interests and insatiable greed.

Not only capitalism is flawed, the whole government structure is as well. If you need more convincing on that point, read my article “Political parties must go in order to bring back democracy”:

http://www.themarginal.com/destructivism.htm#politics

There is no need for me here to denounce what the Bush family and their friends have been doing for almost a century now, there are enough articles about that out there. It seems that even the mass media speaks about it at length, and yet no one reacts, no one is scandalized, no one is doing anything about it. It is as if we have just accepted that it is like that, and that there is nothing anyone can do but hope for the return of Jesus-Christ, who might once again rattle their golden cage. Or perhaps Obama will change all that, but will he?

I’m only hoping some people will keep in mind and investigate further if perhaps recessions are artificially created, as a mean to insure that most investors will lose all their money every ten years or so, and if this money will go to larger fish in the financial markets. If this is so, and it is perhaps even already well known, we ought to make it quite clear to everyone, so they will stop investing for no good reason, since they will assuredly eventually lose their money.

And at that point, you get to understand, and you can no longer bury your head in the sand, that capitalism does not work and never did. All it ever did was to make the extra rich people even richer. And whilst they depend on the investments of smaller players, who will perhaps enjoy for a few years a good return on their investment, they will definitely eventually lose it all. So no one would in fact benefit from capitalism except a few rich people.

If this is true, our crime against humanity, that we let happen because of our ignorance and lack of action, will be much more serious than we could ever have imagined. This is not just killing one million Iraqis, or letting millions starve to death in this new worldwide famine, it will actually affect us all directly and leave us all in a hole.

As it means that, this time around, this depression could be worse than the one in 1929, and frankly we might just not recover. Add to this the environmental disaster of global warming and a Third World War looming over our head, and it will be a miracle if humanity survives at all.

If somehow we could identify clearly how it is happening, and prove it, no one would ever trust the financial markets again; it could very well mean the end of capitalism, upon which everything we do is based, even the health care system. The legacy of the likes of the Bush family.

I know now why every ten or twelve years there is a recession. It takes about a decade for all the small investors to feel confident enough to invest all their money and their assets. Then they are ready to give it all away, and a few people are ready then to take it.

I know now why there is a big crash every century. It takes about a century to accumulate such wealth in the worldwide markets, without any suspicion, to make it worthwhile creating the crash that will make it possible to take over all the wealth of the planet in one single transaction.

It is well known that all big fish get all their money out before any kind of recession or depression. They usually profit a great deal from it, they have inside intelligence after all, as they help create the chaos that ruin us all.

What that will go on to finance, I do not wish to know. All I know is that even if you wanted to prevent such recessions and crashes, or alleviate how bad they are going to be, you couldn’t, no one could. And you just wait for the derivatives’ bomb to explode… that will finish us all for sure, leaving us free to reconstruct everything related to finance and economics from scratch. I welcome that day, as none of this should ever be left to private corporations, private banks. Oh, we had a chance now to let them go bankrupt, if there is still any way to prevent those bailouts, we really have to stop it all.

There is no need to let those private investors create money out of thin air with loans, and then collect all our assets once we default on payment, for them to make more and more profits, until they own us all. It is like giving them all we work so hard to possess, and none of it is necessary, as it was not even their own money to lend in the first place, it was ours, though most often it was just virtual money they were lending.

You need to read what the Economist Richard C. Cook says about all this: http://www.richardccook.com/articles.php

You should also check this link: http://www.rudemacedon.ca/dlp/box/box01-money.html

Capitalism is designed to crash and transfer most of the money in the markets to a few hands. Only economists and your financial advisers appear to know nothing about it.

Brace yourself, as planned, in a spectacular way, and for other reasons than stated, it is all about to crash ever more.

***

“Without irony, this life would hardly be worth living.” RM

All previous political articles by Roland Michel Tremblay:

http://www.themarginal.com/destructivism.htm

His email address: rm@themarginal.com

see

Tremblay-Roland Michel

The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2

Cook-Richard C. (recent archive of posts)

Richard C. Cook (Archive of Posts on my old blog)

Bailout for the People: “The Cook Plan” by Richard C. Cook