Last chance saloon

If you, dear reader, read these blogs, you will know I often quote from books recently published. I am searching for guidance, for hope, for sound planning, that our future generations may live a more fulfilling life than we have had. Below are a few examples of, what I believe to be, sound, implementable, planning to save the planet for we humans to deserve to live upon.

All we can do is learn from history how to build social and political structures that are at least resilient and at best antifragile; how to avoid the descent into self-flagellating chaos that so often characterizes societies overwhelmed by disaster; and how to resist the siren voices who propose totalitarian rule or world government as necessary for the protection of our hapless species and our vulnerable world.

From Doom, Niall Ferguson

I watched a YouTube of Bernie Sanders interview with Frankie Boyle, dated a couple of months ago when he visited the UK. He has clear plans we could follow.

https://youtu.be/7FqXDJkko_I

And social justice and prosperity cannot be achieved if the monetary system only provides access to finance for the already rich, those who own assets. The creation of a socially just monetary system – one that promotes widespread prosperity by acting as servant, not master of society and the economy; a monetary system that enables us all – including the public sector – to do what we can do, and be what we can be. That should be the aim of any progressive movement.

Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money

Let us plan for degrowth.

https://theconversation.com/degrowth-isnt-the-same-as-a-recession-its-an-alternative-to-growing-the-economy-forever-202469

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Cast off the Debt Burden

Being free of debt, whether it be an individual or a nation, is a fantasy. Well, so we have been brainwashed to believe.

In fact we have been:

‘bamboozled’ into allowing a small financial elite to create colossal quantities of private wealth while burdening the world with debt, volatility, crises and rising rates of inequality.

Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money

Even the IMF admitted in a paper published in June, 2016:

the neoliberal agenda – a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies – rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition – achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm

Ann Pettifor tells us that Keynes understood how to protect our economies by avoiding mobile capital which had been encouraged to all our detriment since discarding Keynesian advice. He suggested if we close borders to footloose, international mobile capital, we can avoid the pitfalls all of us know only too well.

Read the definition of capital mobility:

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/capital-mobility

Many high income nations have increased their debt more than developing countries between 2005 and 2015.

Read about countries Statista has revealed to have taken on the burden of high debt by borrowing from China:

https://www.statista.com/chart/29603/chinese-emergency-bailouts/

This shows the more desperate the country, the more likely they are to go to China as a lender of last resort.

Bailout amounts provided by China remained quite low in the 2000s and early 2010s, before shooting up from 2015 onwards, climbing to a total of $100 billion for the two decades. The two most common ways in which these loans work is through a liquidity swap with the Chinese Central Bank – where most of the outstanding balances of around $40 billion were located as of 2021 – or through credit lines from Chinese state-owned banks. Three countries, Venezuela, South Sudan and Ecuador, received prepayments on goods they were to deliver to China.

Financiers in the global financial market make decisions which can cause pain in some part of the world they may not even be familiar with….running our lives from a distance with impunity.

Allowing capital to be fully mobile inhibits the management by government of their own domestic financial market and interest rates if:

lenders in international markets offer higher or lower rates beyond a country’s border, rates that may not be appropriate to economic conditions in-country.

Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money

Governments must be free to analyse their own nation’s financial position and adjust interest rates and policies accordingly to the benefit of its population.

…..mobile capital’s absolute power derives from its ability to move effortlessly across borders and to lend at the highest rate of interest to institutions and individuals that need finance…….the IMF provides protection…

Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money

It is therefore imperative to work toward international cooperation and change the system – but we don’t seem inclined to do that these days, and we see populations suffering immensely as a result.

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Permacrisis: Shipping

If we want to look at human activity accelerated to the point of destruction, let’s look at the tragedy of the Mediterranean.

https://sciencing.com/animals-mediterranean-sea-8537277.html

Aerial view of a Cosco cargo ship moored between two piers covered with colorful shipping containers.

TRADECHINA

In Greece’s largest port of Piraeus, China is the boss

Kaki Bali

10/30/2022October 30, 2022

Since 2016, the Chinese shipping company Cosco has been the majority stakeholder in the port of Piraeus. This means a foreign power controls Greece’s main port.

In Germany, a heated debate has been raging about the Chinese state shipping company Cosco buying a minority stake in a container terminal at the port of Hamburg.

Greece, however, seems to have no such concerns. Since 2011, under pressure from both the debt crisis and the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), the Greek government has sold almost all of the country’s important ports and airports to foreign companies. Athens signed a contract with Cosco in 2016 that has allowed the Chinese company to secure a two-thirds majority stake in the port of Piraeus.

https://www.dw.com/en/greece-in-the-port-of-piraeus-china-is-the-boss/a-63581221

Reliable large infrastructure building projects skills have been developed by Chinese companies. China has also invested in container ports around the world.

https://ports.coscoshipping.com/en/

Shipping has a long history in Greece and famous names associated with it such as the Greek Onassis (born 1906 in Smyrna, Turkey), his father in the cigarette business. His family were victims of the slaughter of Greeks in that area, and he escaped and fled when he was 17.

https://greekreporter.com/2021/09/13/the-catastrophe-of-smyrna-genocide-of-greeks-in-asia-minor-remembered/

His human story is worth reading, spanning the turbulent times of the 1920s until his death in 1975, 2 years after the death of his son two years earlier.

https://www.factinate.com/people/facts-aristotle-onassis/

During his lifetime, shipping was part of a respected industry and the many uses of ships was never considered as a potentially harmful ecological component. He became a shipping magnate by being able to take advantage of the 1930s Depression:

Lucky for him, this was the 1930s—The Great Depression—and everyone was abandoning ship on the shipping business. So, Onassis offered to buy up the vessels from the companies that were—pun intended—going under.

Don’t think that Onassis was actually trying to help anyone: He got the ships for well under half price.

Factinate

Many billionaires have achieved their goals by purchasing industries at silly prices when their value has dropped due to a crisis. They have grown the business and gained worldwide fame as a consequence.

In the UK, Mrs Thatcher sold off Britain’s assets:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/britain-land-margaret-thatcher-built

The world of Money impacts all of us and many of us are left with family histories which show the damaging results of ruthless power. But the earth bears the main toll and we watch it dying before our eyes.

Efforts are being made to provide greener fuels for shipping:

https://www.transportenvironment.org/challenges/ships

But that costs money, and budgets are tight, so instead loopholes are sought and a blind eye turned to the toxic waste dumped in our oceans.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/12/shippings-dirty-secret-how-scrubbers-clean-the-air-while-contaminating-the-sea

We all know about the oil spills, but plastic nurdles are another catastrophic cause of ocean death if they end up in the sea:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/29/nurdles-plastic-pellets-environmental-ocean-spills-toxic-waste-not-classified-hazardous

And don’t forget human waste:

A large cruise ship can produce about 170,000 gallons of sewage on a daily basis. On an average of 0.01 to 0.06 m3 of sewage is produced per person in a day.

The UK proposed barge to house 500 migrants has been refitted to be more sanitary than it was when used in Amsterdam. But have they a sewage filtration system which prevents waste going into the sea at Portland? Let us hope so.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/05/anger-at-plan-to-house-asylum-seekers-on-barge-off-dorset-portland

Container cargo ships can become unstable:

ship capsize is a seafarer’s worst nightmare. These incidents are often due to inadequate ship stability caused by a sudden and unplanned rise in the ship’s Centre of Gravity (CoG). Tragic consequences include injury, death, pollution and total loss of ship and cargo. All ships are exposed to this potential danger but some ship types and trades are much more exposed than others. In particular, containerships and general cargo and multi-purpose ships carrying containers on deck – with a high ship CoG and low residual stability are in the instability high risk category

https://maritime-mutual.com/risk-bulletins/stability-vigilance-containerships-and-cargo-ships-carrying-containers

The greenwashing which goes on to present a responsible industry is upsetting. Just as we all understand factory fishing (I wrote about the harm supertrawlers do years ago, see https://borderslynn.com/2021/02/25/we-will-be-fishless-soon-part-one)

has overwhelmed and destroyed the marine life ecosystems, still demand and supply continues unabated. The shipping industry seems to be expanding, not shrinking.

Last, but not least, the tragedy in the Mediterranean of migrant deaths, fleeing in overcrowded and often leaking boats, desperate for a better life.

See here:

https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean

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Respecting Borders?

In 2016, Ann Pettifor wrote, in her book The Production of Money, that if we allow the banking system to continue with no progressive changes, then:

The recurring financial crises of the last four decades will roll on relentlessly and lead inevitably to graver social and political upheavals and even war.

And it has continued through the Covid Crisis which began probably late 2019. Now we are in the era of world division and endless war. Our societies are polarised, and our social media, already running negative dominated algorithms, is entering ChatGPT era. The Chat Bot is with us in all our interactions. Bloomberg has introduced new financial tools using ChatGPT. Some are excited by this roll out of Artificial Intelligence; some want to postpone it, some countries have banned it. But the genie is out of the bottle and maybe our banking systems will apply it, and then, where will that lead?

If we have petroyuan as well as petrodollars, what will ChatGPT do on the trading floors?

We are still hurting from the 2007-8 crash:

The US Treasury estimated that 8.8 million jobs were lost in the US alone, and $19 trillion of household wealth was destroyed during the 2007–09 crisis.

Flawed financial global systems just seem to get worse, no matter how hard alternative and sound approaches have been argued historically, the least good plans, such as the catastrophic Chicago Plan, have been adopted. The suffering planet and most of the 7 billion citizens on it have endured dreadful consequences.

Climate Change is worsening day by day, we see the awful results as the daily news plays out. We knew we had to change our behaviours 50 years ago, and build in resilience to our infrastructures, but the money was not directed in that way with the real will required.

Human impact (overfishing) has damaged around 80 percent of our oceans. Our glaciers are disappearing due to our over use of fossil fuels. Most of our freshwater sources are gone, only 2 percent remains. Wonderful people are fighting to protect and conserve what is left, but the money people are not backing their efforts sufficiently. Our every second breath comes thanks to the oxygen delivered from the oceans. The faulty machinations of the money people are snuffing out life faster than it can recover.

Here in the UK, people are striking because of inadequate income to meet rising bills and inflation. Many have not had a sufficient pay rise for at least 10 years, and every pay offer is so trivial as to be nothing more than an insult.

BRIC countries (the developing countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, have become major game players due to their alliance.

Borders between countries may be permeable if dominated by another, or cross border conflicts ensue. Coercion vs cooperation can induce fear or optimism for a better life. Sovereignty may exist for centuries then come under threat.

Taiwan. It has always been ruled independently: first, of course, by the regime of Chiang Kai-shek, who wanted to “recover the mainland.”

https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/has-taiwan-always-been-part-of-china/

Our tribal, warring ancestors had a pattern of fighting and conquering for thousands of years. Historians tell us about Ukraine invasions thousands of years ago:

Different parts of the area that is today Ukraine were invaded and occupied in the 1st millennium BCE by the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians and in the 1st millennium CE by the Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Avars, Khazars, and Magyars (Hungarians). Slavic tribes settled there after the 4th century. Kyiv was the chief town. The Mongol conquest in the mid-13th century decisively ended Kyivan power.

https://www.britannica.com/summary/Ukraine

Now Mongolia is restricted by its border with Russia to one side and China to the other. Its current economic progress is due to its dependence on energy from Russia and supply of vital goods from China. Mongolia retains its sovereignty for now.

We have had a period of trade where ‘globalisation’ has created positives and negatives in trade, but also industrialised systems for container ports, the latest being one built by China in Greece. These ports greatly improve the economy of countries once they are part of the trading system. The high cost of building the ports often leaves the recipient country in debt to the donor country, with obligations.

Globalization refers to the process of expanding your business operations onto a global scale. This can include selling products or services in other countries or setting up offices or factories in other parts of the world. Regionalization is the opposite of globalization – it refers to the process of dividing your business into smaller units that operate within specific geographic regions.

https://www.politicsphere.com/difference-between-globalization-and-regionalization

Christianity and Islam are examples of globalization. Historically, belief systems have been pushed on to militarily beaten populations, until they are assimilated into that belief and trading system.

Usually militaries will provide security for trade.

Globalization and regionalization have led to the removal of certain traditions and cultures in society. This happened when people became a global village, and others distanced themselves from the rest of the world. 

An analysis of our changes in how we trade with one another after Covid and the event when the Suez Canal became blocked is discussed here:

Some analysts and commentators see a wave of deglobalization forging ahead. The Economist predicted on 24 January 2019: “The new world will work differently. Slowbalisation will lead to deeper links within regional blocs. Supply chains in North America, Europe and Asia are sourcing more from closer to home. In Asia and Europe most trade is already intra-regional, and the share has risen since 2011.” And in the Financial Times, Martin Wolf wrote on 10 December 2020: “The plausible future is not that international exchange is going to die. But it is likely to become more regional and more virtual.”

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/regionalization-globalization-future-direction-trade/

We are now in a ferment of change, caught on the back foot, our world infrastructures are not prepared. Amid the instability, attempts are made to firm up trade relations and diplomacy, but such relations are fragile which reflects the dying planet. There is no certainty for the future though treaties are signed based on a vague belief that some of us will survive past 2050.

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Disastrous oil spills that wreck our marine life

Currently we have an oil spill in the UK. It was 200 barrels which leaked into a beautiful marina which is in Poole, Dorset.

https://youtu.be/JHVi96DrJwY

Then watch the nightmare which is unfolding in the Red Sea.

https://youtu.be/pRp2M47LcuE

We are irresponsible humans, constantly wrecking our world.

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Weaponising interest rates, inducing negativity caused by austerity

Continuing on from the previous blog, here are some further extracts from ‘The Production of Money’ by Ann Pettifor:

Wielding the weapon of interest, finance capital effectively holds societies, governments and industries, but also the entire ecosystem, to ransom over repayment of its loans. This predicament is particularly tragic given that, in theory, the development of banking and of sound monetary systems should have ended the power of any elite to extract outsized returns from borrowers. Today, just as in earlier pre-banking eras, interest rates remain high in real terms, even in rich countries. However, this is only because these societies, elected governments and industries have conceded such despotic power to finance capital.

In Chapter 4 she tells us how the ‘broken record’ phrase governments trot out is ‘there is no money’. That sword through the heart of civil society is a painful experience we have suffered all our lives, and tells us Austerity will continue.

Ann Pettifor:

We live in turbulent political and financial times, and in a global economy dogged by failure. We survive precariously on a planet warmed by human greenhouse gas emissions and disturbed by a human-induced mass extinction. The financial system is currently volatile, corrupted and widely discredited. Scandals of mis-selling, theft, manipulation and fraud abound. And the cry ‘there is no money’ for projects that society holds dear echoes all around us. We are assured that ‘there is no money’ for care of the elderly, or for the mentally ill, or for social housing. There is no money for the commissioning of operas, plays or other forms of artistic creation. There is no money for public investment in water conservation, renewable energy, flood defences, the retrofitting of old, energy-leaking properties, or other investments designed to protect society from climate change. One of the reasons for this chorus of defeatism is the global overhang of debt, and the conflation by many economists (and indeed the public) of both public and private debt. In this chapter I hope to deal with both the ‘there is no money’ meme, and the differences between public and private debt, and why public debt, at times of weakness, ought not to be a barrier to public investment. ‘The state has no source of money’ At the heart of the politically inept responses to the financial crisis is an ideologically driven and mendacious conviction: that while society can afford to bail out a systemically broken banking system, it cannot afford to finance and address economic failure, youth unemployment, energy insecurity, climate change, poverty and disease. Society, it is argued, ‘has no money’ to finance these challenges, to stimulate recovery or create employment.

Every citizen who hopes to get answers to why we have been struggling like this for so long should sit down and read this book. It is so refreshing, it is like therapy to read it, to scrape the fog away of mixed messages spouted by ‘experts’ and politicians.

Debt is defined as an asset by its owners: creditors and international financiers, including private equity investors. Assets are valuable in themselves – think of the rent extracted from property, from income streams generated by the purchase of a football club, or from companies in the form of dividends, etc. But debt (or a loan) is also an asset and has value as a source of ‘rent’ in the form of interest payments made over time. Finally, debts (for example, a bank’s mortgages) are useful as income-generating collateral for leveraging even more borrowing or debt. Think of phone network providers that have thousands of contracts with users. These contracts represent streams of revenue into the future, and holding these contracts provides the phone network company with the collateral needed against further borrowing.

Too much debt carried by borrowers living in austere times leads to defaults, thus the economy deflates beyond rescue.

The politicians responsible for enforcing austerity policies had not just imposed unnecessary suffering and dislocation on millions of people, their communities and countries. They had not only caused public debt to rise. They, in fact, caused disillusionment with democracy to set in among the unemployed and impoverished in Europe and the US. Austerity and the collusion between politicians and the finance sector opened up political space for right-wing, populist political parties like Donald Trump and the Tea Party in the US, the National Front in France, and Golden Dawn in Greece. These were among the social and political consequences of democratic politicians enacting policies that enrich the few while impoverishing the majority; policies based on the interests of the robber barons and on the flawed theories of ‘defunct’ economists.

To see democracy threatened as a result of financial gambling run by those who think they are amongst the brightest brains in the world, is to despair of present day support for this modus operandi we seem saddled with.

Ann Pettifor reminds us, later in her book, that the rate of interest on money is merely a ‘social construct’. We must remember that; some of us have had our financial lives stubbed out by these ‘constructs’.

High rates of interest do harm to the majority and favour the rentier.

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Designing financial instruments which destroy lives

Fact: Those with wealth seek to invest in varioùs assets which have the best return.

Sometimes financial instruments have been designed to fill the shortfall in asset availability.

Many of us have suffered after these machinations inevitably turn foul.

Many ideas central to financial mathematics began with betting … The scientists who cracked blackjack and roulette in the 1960s and ’70s eventually moved into finance, tired of the attention from casino security. To them, the divide was superficial. Like the modern teams tackling sports betting, they just saw another market, another set of inefficiencies, and another game to be beaten.

Adam Kucharski, May 2016, ft.com

It seems the gambling addiction practised in the world of finance has been given a divine status which allows detachment and impunity from being seen as it should be, a major harm to life itself.

Ann Pettifor describes the fallout from the 2007-9 financial crisis and mismanagement:

Among the safest assets are US government bonds (US ‘treasuries’) and British government bonds (‘gilts’). Unfortunately the slump of 2007–09 and its aftermath cut government tax revenues dramatically, as firms failed, individuals lost employment and wages fell in real terms. Instead of supporting the heavily indebted private sector by expanding public investment, increasing employment and supporting wages after the crisis, western governments responded to the slump by cutting spending further. This meant that governments stopped borrowing, and the issue of government bonds declined. At about the same time, central banks embarked on quantitative easing and, by purchasing government bonds and placing them on their balance sheets, helped create a shortage of such safe assets. As a consequence, the prices of all assets have risen, including government bonds, and the yields (the return an investor will realize on a bond) have fallen – in some cases to negative levels! Because of these low yields (returns) and this shortage of bonds, capitalists have to park their funds in other assets. The most attractive asset is property: valuable and scarce real estate in, for example, inner London, New York City or Hong Kong. The outcome of low yields on government bonds is the massive inflation of property prices – which in turn has led to a form of ‘social cleansing’ as prices rocket and ordinary Londoners, for example, can no longer afford to purchase property or pay high rents.

Charles R. Morris, in his book ‘The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown’ takes us into 1994 and the dark world of Wall Street activities which:

took low quality mortgages and created the subprime market. These mortgages became structured Bonds called CMO’s (collateralized mortgage obligations). These bonds were then ‘tiered in horizontal slices, or tranches, and portfolio cash flows were preferentially directed to the top tranches. Since the top tranches had first claim on cash flows, they qualified for the highest investment-grade ratings. The bottom tranches absorbed all the initial defaults but paid high yields. The mix of very high-quality, high-rated instruments plus a smaller quantity of high-yield, high-risk paper matched up well with the preference of long-term investors. Wall Street inevitably pushed the tranching technology to an extreme, triggering a serious mortgage-market crash in 1994.

Efforts were made to redesign the mortgage market into Residential Mortgage Backed-securities (RMBS). These became the standard element in most big investor portfolios.

Next came the CMBS (commercial mortgage-backed securities)

pioneered by the federal agency charged with selling off multibillion of commercial mortgages acquired from failed S&Ls…..tailored to their underlying assets….don’t lend themselves to pooling. The solution was to involve the rating agencies in the construction of the pool. Banks would assemble a detailed profile for each property on a projected pool – it’s financials, management, tenant histoŕy, maintenance records and mortgage details. The rating agencies used proprietary models to estimate default risk and actively negotiated the pool structure – rejuggling properties to improve geographic diversity, or insisting on more buildings with long-term, blue-chip tenants. A typical CMBS had five or six tranches…….

This process enabled asset-backed securities (ABS) to “finance equipment, transportation fleets, or anything else investors could value”

In turn this led to commercial banks use of CBOs (collateralized bond obligations) and investment banks ‘experimented with CLOs (collateralized loan obligations) and the generic name for all types of securitized assets was CDOs (collateralized debt obligations).

“For banks, selling assets and liabilities off their balance sheets reduces strain on regulatory capital; for companies, it lowers apparent debt.”

Morris goes on to write most fascinatingly how each step of this process opened the floodgates which led to

The notional value of credit default swaps-that is, the size of portfolios covered by default agreements-grew from $1 trillion in 2001 to $45 trillion by mid-2007.

Lives destroyed:

What Is the Link Between Homeownership and the American Dream?

In many ways, the American Dream is a concept of optimism. It implies equal opportunity and that any individual can aspire to financial stability and even superior wealth—regardless of their background—through hard work, entrepreneurial ventures, or other means. A large component of financial stability and the American Dream is owning your own home. The Great Recession and the ensuing housing collapse in 2008 cast doubt on the so-called “American Dream.” The economic crisis precipitated by the 2020 lockdowns and job losses didn’t help.

The American Dream is now considered out of reach for many groups in American society. This article focuses on how 2008 started to dismantle it.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/062515/how-was-american-dream-impacted-housing-market-collapse-2008.asp

The pain goes on to the present day:

https://metro.co.uk/2012/08/16/infographic-2008-financial-crisis-led-to-closure-of-800000-businesses-538207

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/articles/the2008recession10yearson/2018-04-30

https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/the-global-financial-crisis-10-years-on-six-charts-that-tell-the-story

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Credit Line

Ann Pettifor explains:

…after the Second World War, the finance sector recruited (directly or indirectly) economists, journalists and politicians to reverse Keynes’s monetary theories and policies…..

[Thank the London School of Economics for much of the defamation of Keynes from then on and]…….led ultimately to the victory of the economy’s robber barons……..the ecosystem, is once again subordinated to the interests of global finance.

The Production of Money

So ideas were put into action such as LIBOR (invented by Minos Zombanakis, banker, 1926-2019) . This concept was manipulated and led to the the banking sector rigging interest rates between them:

The most memorable incidents in earth-changing events are sometimes the most banal. In the rapidly spreading scandal of LIBOR (the London Interbank Offered Rate) it is the very everydayness with which bank traders set about manipulating the most important figure in finance. They joked, or offered small favours. ‘Coffees will be coming your way,’ promised one trader in exchange for a fiddled number. ‘Dude. I owe you big time! … I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,’ wrote another. One trader posted diary notes to himself so that he wouldn’t forget to fiddle the numbers the next week. ‘Ask for High 6M Fix’, he entered in his calendar, as he might have put ‘Buy Milk’. What may still seem to many to be a parochial affair involving Barclays, a 300-year-old British bank, rigging an obscure number, is beginning to assume global significance. The number that the traders were toying with determines the prices that people and corporations around the world pay for loans or receive for their savings. It is used as a benchmark to set payments on about $800 trillion–worth of financial instruments, ranging from complex interest-rate derivatives to simple mortgages. The number determines the global flow of billions of dollars each year. Yet it turns out to have been flawed.

From ‘The LIBOR scandal’, Economist, July 2012.

This is the Timeline of the Scandal, illustrating how the small, tight community of bankers work together globally:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libor-rbs-scandal-idUSBRE9150TB20130206

The global banking sector consists of small, medium and large banks. Sometimes, as in the 2007-8 banking crisis, famous financial sector institutions collapsed, others were ‘bailed out’ by the taxpayer.

Some lists of banks around the world I found are shown below. They all interact with one another and form a banking ecosystem.

It was 1963 when Africa formed its group of banks:

The idea of an Association of African Central Banks was first introduced on May 25, 1963, at the Summit Conference of African Heads of State and Government held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In this regard, African Heads of State and Government unanimously agreed to set up a preparatory Economic Committee to study a large range of monetary and financial issues, in collaboration with Governments and in consultation with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

https://aacb.org/en

2023 list of 50 European Banks:

https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/largest-banks-europe-list/

2023 BANKS IN THE UNITED STATES

There are a 4836 local and national banks offering banking services in United States with nearly 77000 branches in 9922 cities.

https://www.bankbranchlocator.com/banks-in-usa.html

Many books and articles scrutinise the activities of the banking sector as they impact each and everyone of us, and the health of our planet. For example, Wall Street practices monitored here:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/08/china-owned-banks-in-the-u-s-are-getting-u-s-taxpayer-backstopped-fdic-insurance-while-china-threatens-the-second-in-line-to-the-presidency

And what has been going on whilst we sleep?

https://internationalman.com/articles/rise-of-the-petroyuan-the-end-of-the-petrodollars-reign-and-the-impact-on-global-markets/

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Start-up to Scale-up: Do No Harm

Farmers might consider adding seaweed to the diet of their cattle because it will reduce the methane output by the animals by 80%! The research has been revealed in this article:

https://theconversation.com/can-seaweed-save-the-world-well-it-can-certainly-help-in-many-ways-201459

But before we get too excited we must not make the usual mistake we humans so often do when scaling up to meet a demand:

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/592243-hold-off-for-now-on-feeding-seaweed-to-cows-to-reduce-methane

So if we can add other uses of seaweed we might say, ‘Hey! Here’s another good one!’

Biodegradable packaging from seaweed!

https://www.sweed.uk/

This reminds me of the sand battery I included in a blog some time ago:

https://borderslynn.com/2022/07/05/the-sand-is-running-out

So before a great idea can become a grand solution to our desire to save the planet, first we must do a study of an environmental cost benefit analysis to avoid harm.

For example, a sea salt battery might be a better solution than the sand battery:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/12/13/significant-breakthrough-this-new-sea-salt-battery-has-4-times-the-capacity-of-lithium

And Sweden has been building a green steel plant:

https://www.h2greensteel.com/latestnews/h2-green-steel-has-entered-into-a-long-term-frame-agreement-with-fortum-for-electricity-supply-1

Let us hope that is successful. But let us not forget our triumph of mining iron ore historically has done great harm to human health and the environment.

https://borderslynn.com/2021/04/22/iron-ore-industrial-contamination/

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‘Euthanasia of the rentier’: understanding of the fundamentals of the monetary system

From ‘The Production of Money’, by Ann Pettifor

Keynes was ruthless in his approach to the subordination of the finance sector to the interests of wider society and actively campaigned for the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. He regarded the love of money for its own sake as ‘a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a kind of shudder to the specialist in mental diseases’.

Q. What do we all hope for?

A. Three goals:

  • Economic prosperity
  • Financial stability
  • Social justice

The author suggests this can only be achieved if we:

Bring offshore capital back onshore

And to do that we should ban lobbyists, who argue otherwise, from Wall Street and the City of London. They have brought us to this perilous edge which even all politicians of various denominations choose not to recognise.

Ann Pettifor:

The Bretton Woods era (1945–71) was a time during which the private banking and finance sector acted as servant to and not master of the economy. Thanks largely to John Maynard Keynes’s theories, his understanding of the monetary system, and to the implementation of his monetary policies during this period, the financial system was made to work largely in the interests of wider society.

But since then the international expanse of offshore banking has become sufficiently complicated to require enablers (lawyers and bankers) to assist those with legitimate and illegitimate requirements. There are agents who offer such services to this lucrative market. Here is an example:

https://internationalwealth.info/en/offshores/offshore-islands-countries-territories-and-lists/

Why do people want to keep their money offshore?

The above website answers:

Freedom to do business in a secure judicial system, without being bothered, and maintaining your right to privacy are probably the main reasons why people go offshore today.

Pettifor recommends bringing offshore back onshore using capitol control which results in keeping interest rates:

low across the spectrum of lending – essential to the health and prosperity of any economy

And is

essential to the management of toxic emissions and the ecosystem

And this last quote particularly intrigues me. Surely we should all become familiar with the work of Ann Pettifor who has a body of work worth highlighting as our planet and all forms of life are under so much duress from human activity.

Ann Pettifor explains how the wealth generated could have benefited all those who gave their labour, but instead was stolen by the few:

However from the 1960s onwards, private wealth, led largely by private bankers, in collusion with elected politicians, began again to wrest control of the monetary system away from the regulatory democracy of governments. Today the global economy is effectively governed by a small number of actors based in private global banks and other financial institutions. They manage the system in their own vested interests to the detriment of wider society. In the absence of any real political challenge from society, private wealth owners have used the public infrastructure of money, and their power over private money production, to amass astounding amounts of wealth.

And here below, published in The Conversation on 15th March, 2023, an interesting article suggesting central banks are responsible for inflation, written by Richard Werner, University of Winchester:

https://theconversation.com/why-central-banks-are-too-powerful-and-have-created-our-inflation-crisis-by-the-banking-expert-who-pioneered-quantitative-easing-201158

And back to Ann Pettifor, something most of are acutely aware of in this troubled world, the subject of USURY:

Usury is today widely accepted as normal in western economies whose monetary systems have been weakened by the parasitic grasp of finance capital, and enfeebled by heavy burdens of debt. This acceptance blinds society to the way in which usury exacerbates the destructive extraction of assets from the earth.

America has produced great minds who have worked tirelessly to improve the lot of those finding themselves in poverty. Ralph Nader, in his March 27th In the Public Interest Newsletter, tells us of one such great thinker:

Edgar Cahn redoubled his creative efforts as the leading hands-on jurisprudential thinker, writer, advocate and organizer. His deep knowledge of poverty relief programs led to his revolutionary thinking about making these programs work much better. In his seminal book – “No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative” (2000), he showed that helping the poor with public support had to be connected to empowering the poor to improving these programs, policies and delivery, as well as moving on the pathways to self-sustaining livelihoods.

One of his initiatives was based on questioning the monopoly position of the dollar or similar foreign currency. Why not, he asked, establish in communities around the world “Time Dollar Programs” where the currency is in hours volunteered between people helping each other?

A simple example follows: an elderly couple tutors a high school student in physics in return for an equal number of hours by the student mowing their lawns and weeding their garden. No money changes hands, only hours of time.

Edgar Cahn – Making the Law Serve and Empower the People, 27th March, 2023 from Ralph Nader In the Public Interest newsletter

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