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To understand what is really going on behind the scenes, we need to understand the tools used by Big Money to manipulate markets. In the next chapter, we'll take a look at the investments vehicle known as the "short sale," which underlies many of those more arcane tools known as "derivatives." A massive wave of short selling was blamed for turning the Roaring Twenties into the Great Depression. The same sort of manipulations are going on today under different names...
Originally posted by Mary Rose
I've heard that term "short sale" before as well. Not sure what it means. I'll find out in the next chapter.
A bear raid is the practice of targeting stock for take-down, either for quick profits or for corporate takeover. Whenever the market decline slowed after the 1929 crash, speculators would step in to sell millions of dollars worth of stock they did not own but had ostensibly borrowed just for purposes of sale, using the device known as the "short sale." When done on a large enough scale, short selling can actually force prices down, allowing assets to be picked up very cheaply.
...when short sellers sell stock they don't own, they don't actually get the permission of the real owners...
...The lending of shares by a broker who holds them in trust for his customers is comparable to the goldsmiths' lending of gold held in trust for his depositors. The broker's customers may have agreed to lend out their shares in the fine print of their brokerage contracts, but they are probably not aware of it.
Originally posted by ukWolf
I have also read most of Web of Debt and found it very good so far, in addition to the book I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the debt money system a film made by the poeple that made the Money Masters, called The Secret of Oz, (2009). Ellen Brown is featured in this and her ideas for a soloution are offered.
In March 2006, the People's Bank of China reported that its M2 money supply had increased by a shopping 18.8 percent from a year earlier. Under classical economic theory, this explosive growth should have crippled the economy with out-of-control price inflation; but it didn't. By early 2007, price inflation in China was running at only 2 to 3 percent. In 2006, China pushed past France and Great Britain to become the world's fourth largest economy, with domestic retail sales boosted by 13 percent and industrial production by 16.6 percent . . . China has managed to keep the prices of its products low for thousands of years, although its money supply has continually been flooded with new currency that has poured in to pay for those cheap products. The "economic mystery" of China may be explained by the Keynesian observation that when workers and raw materials are available to increase productivity, adding money ("demand") does not increase prices; it increases goods and services. Supply keeps up with demand, leaving prices unaffected.
If the bait that caught Third World countries in the bankers' debt web was the promise of foreign loans and investment, for Americans in the twenty-first century it is the lure of home ownership and the promise of ready cash from home equity loans...
The housing bubble was another ploy of the Federal Reserve and the banking industry for pumping accounting-entry money into the economy. In the 1980s, the Fed reacted to a stock market crisis by lowering interest rates, making investment money readily available, inflating the stock market to unprecedented heights in the 1990s. When the stock market topped out in 2000 and started downward, the Fed could have allowed it to correct naturally; but that alternative was politically unpopular, and it would have meant serious losses to the banks that owned the Fed...
After the Fed set the stage, banks and other commercial lenders fanned the housing boom into a blaze with a series of high-risk changes in mortgage instruments, including variable rate loans that allowed nearly anyone to qualify to buy a home who was willing to take the bait...
Originally posted by ISHAMAGI
This sounds like something everyone should read. I'm going to get it today. It does astound me that people know so little about these things.
To me addressing this is priority number one and all else is background.
Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
Although a very good book, one in which I've read cover to cover several times already it is not perfect. And some of her history is flat out wrong. I suggest you look at some of the well thought out reviews over on amazon.com discussing her book.
Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
I'm just saying it's not perfect and there are is some revisionist history in the book or atleast some very justified alternative explanations for some of the arguments she makes.
Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
Even better book is the Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlenga which Ellen uses as a source for book many times throughout.
...Billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett has warned that America, rather than being an "ownership society," is fast becoming a "sharecroppers' society." Paul Krugman suggested in a 2005 New York Times editorial that the correct term is "debt peonage" society, the system prevalent in the post-Civil War South, when debtors were forced to work for their creditors. American corporations are assured of cheap, non-mobile labor of the sort found in Third World countries by a medical insurance system and other benefits tied to employment. People dare not quit their jobs, however unsatisfactory, for fear of facing medical catastrophes without insurance, particularly now that the escape hatch of bankruptcy has narrowed substantially. Most personal bankruptcies are the result of medical emergencies and other severe misfortunes such as job loss or divorce. The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 eroded the protection the government once provided against these unexpected catastrophes, ensuring that working people are kept on a treadmill of personal debt. Meanwhile, loopholes allowing very wealthy people and corporations to go bankrupt and to shield their assets from creditors remain intact.
Originally posted by Zosynspiracy
Even better book is the Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlenga which Ellen uses as a source for book many times throughout.
Originally posted by HighDefinitionFilms
The BEST book about this got the author jailed by TPTB
"Debt Virus"
Originally posted by Mary Rose
Something made me return to Chapter 29 of this book, "Breaking the Back of the Tin Man: Debt Serfdom for American Workers."
The 2005 bankruptcy bill was written by and for credit card companies. . . Approximately 60 percent of credit card users do not pay off their monthly balances and among those users, the average debt carried on their cards is close to $12,000. This "sub-prime" market is actually targeted by banks and credit card companies, which count on the poor, the working poor and the financially strapped to not be able to make their payments. According to a 2003 book titled The Two-Income Trap by Warren and Tyagi: "More than 75 percent of credit card profits come from people who make those low, minimum monthly payments. And who makes minimum monthly payments at 26 percent interest? Who pays late fees, over-balance charges . . . Families that can barely make ends meet, households precariously balanced between financial survival and complete collapse. These are the families that are singled out by the lending industry, barraged with special offers . . . all with one objective in mind: get them to borrow more money."