Panama, it's the new Switzerland

Mossack Fonseca, Photo: Valenciano

Amid the scandal known as the Panama Papers politicians may rise or fall.  Protestors are calling for the British Prime Minister David Cameron to resign. The Icelandic PM has resigned and a new one has been sworn in. Ties have been identifed with FIFA, UEFA, and some two hundred Americans have been identified with links to the bank.

Banks, sports, companies, governments... the fallout continues to spread and the people, worldwide, are growing discontent with the monied classes and their shenanigans.  

What do you think?

 

Do you Own Your Money?

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is in trouble with the Federales...

CHICAGO — Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is facing federal charges in an alleged attempt to conceal large bank withdrawals, used to pay an individual for past “misconduct” on the part of the former veteran politician, federal prosecutors announced on Thursday. (CBS Local - Chicago)

I'll leave aside the salacious possibility of a closet homosexual pedophile high school coach turned famous politician now extorted by one of his victims. We don't really know what went on there, but I'm sure it will come out. 

For this discussion, let's set aside the pedophilia allegation, and simply stipulate that Hastert wronged someone, and that someone demanded money from him to settle the issue.

Two other aspects disturb me

Both involve an overbearing government intruding in our private affairs:
1) A supposedly-free citizen's use of his own money is de facto and de jure tightly monitored and controlled by our Federal Big Brother
2) Law enforcement officials barge in to bust up a supposed extortion despite a lack of a complainant.

Whose Money is it, anyway?

Hastert was charged with structuring the withdrawal of $952,000 in cash in order to evade the requirement that banks report cash transactions over $10,000, and lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his withdrawals.

Hastert, 73, was charged with one count each of structuring currency transactions to evade Currency Transaction Reports and making a false statement to the FBI, according to an indictment returned by a federal grand jury.

Why are there federal laws requiring us to report private financial transactions?  Worse, why are there laws requiring banks to report on us without a search warrant?

Do we still enjoy a presumption of innocence?

Is the 4th Amendment dead?

What Crime?

The feds moved in because they smelled an extortion of a public figure.  If the public figure, who no longer controls any levers of power, says he does not wish to report a crime, why do they continue to pursue it?

Here's a hypothetical:  Instead of trying to lie his way out of it, what if Hastert had told the FBI that he was withdrawing the money to pay an individual $3.5 million per a private agreement.  Would they drop it?  Should they?   At that point, what business is it of the government?

I know what is at the root of this.  Do you?

Related:  AP News My Way - Hastert Indictment

Free market triumph

Happy All Saints Eve

How do you like your bank fees?  Hidden or clearly stated?

Congress passed a law to “protect consumers” by banning credit card companies and banks from charging merchants a fee for each transaction.

Banks complied, and merchants pocketed the difference, saving the consumer nothing.

Next, Bank of America did the honest thing and announced a flat $5 per month fee for cardholders to make up for the revenue congress took from them.

Result: Consumer is $5 per month poorer and store owners are marginally richer. Thank you Dick Durban and Congress!

Now comes Chase, Citigroup and others saying they will not charge cardholders a fee, giving consumers a clear choice. Unlike government action, the free marketplace gives consumers more choices, as merchants compete for our dollars.

Thanks to the free market, a customer can now choose to do business with a bank that explicitly charges her the fee, or she can go with the bank that hides if from her.

Daily News Corner

Banker's Bailout

How do we fix the banks?  Set them free 

 I normally frown upon blog posts consisting of large chunks of direct quotes, but John Tamney has hit a home run.

Deregulation and free markets didn't wreck the world economy--Government protections did. Bad banksters and the governments who love them are the Bonnie and Clyde of global monetary scams.
 
Governments have shielded banking from market forces, and we're all now paying the price:  

it's apparent from the myriad bailouts of banks within it in modern times that, absent government protection, the financial world would look quite a bit different. Put simply, political unwillingness to apply market forces to the business of finance means that its long-term health and dynamism is in fact reduced.

Government intervention distorts markets and creates perverse incentives

The better, more realistic, explanation for the paralyzed credit situation in the aftermath of Lehman actually goes back to the spring of 2008. It was then that the Fed and Treasury, fearing "contagion" relating to Bear's demise, saved its creditors through a deal in which the Fed took Bear's debased assets on its balance sheet.

Then J.P. Morgan was offered the still-functioning bank on the relative cheap, its downside covered by the federal government. As Wallison put it, "I see the market meltdown that followed the Lehman bankruptcy as a result of the moral hazard created by the rescue of Bear Stearns six months before."

Your government took the toxic assets off of the banksters's accounts and put them on YOURS

Other accounts of the time in question support Wallison's view. The fact that the federal government subsidized J.P. Morgan's acquisition of Bear Stearns created an expectation among healthy financial institutions that they too should have their downside protected in snapping up insolvent firms. 

As Andrew Ross Sorkin put it in his 2009 book, Too Big To Fail, acquirers wanted "Jamie" (J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon) deals whereby the government would guarantee the most toxic assets of companies being purchased. Absent the subsidized buyout of Bear, there would have been no presumption of a government role as savior of any financial institutions, thus a more realistically priced market for banks in trouble.

What the episode teaches us is that while markets can ably prepare for and weather all manner of calamities, what they handle badly are opaque government policy stances whose changing nature causes information vacuums and panics like that of October 2008.

I'd love to see the US Government finally give free market capitalism a try... Source for all Quotes:  Global Economy Held Hostage by Lehman

Attack of The Killer B's

Like all of you, I struggle daily to try to make sense of it all.  I don't believe in conspiracy theories, and I believe that efforts towards unified field theories are futile.  Still, I try to make my way.  I believe that the interconnection between banking, business and governments is the root of what ails liberty-loving people.

An Unholy Trinity:  Big Banks + Big Business + Big Bureaucracy

When not locked together in an iron triangle, none of the Killer B's is inherently evil, and each is beneficial to mankind and society. However, when joined together, they form an axis of evil.

An Axis of Evil

I’m not much for shadowy conspiracy theories. I believe that people are motivated by rational self interest, and if you understand that you can figure most things out.

“Follow the money” is a more popular way to say it, but that doesn’t always work because money is not always the motivation. Why does billionaire Michael Bloomberg so enjoy the high stress, low paying job of mayor of New York City? Power. He enjoys wielding power and making things happen. There are myriad other motivations. People of an engineering bent just want to see things work right, be it a radio or a roadway. People in dangerous professions obviously receive gratification that fear cannot overcome.

The Killer B's

Bankers make money investing your money and loaning it out. No problem—it’s a millennia old institution. But marry it up with a government that can conjure money out of thin air, and a congeries of monetary horrors are spawned:  Fractional banking in which banks loan money they don't have, worthless pieces of paper known as fiat currencies, banks trafficking in valueless money, spinning ponzi schemes and creating bubbles and crashes.

Big Business makes money catering to the consumer’s every whim, until government gets involved. Then the game turns sinister. Instead of competing for the consumers’ money, they turn to romancing lawmakers to seek special favors for themselves. The free market is a jungle, better to trade a little liberty for some safety, and the consumer can go to blazes.

Big Bureaucracy also serves a useful purpose. We need public administrators to run our governments, but the problem comes in when they end up running our lives as well.   Big Bureaucracy wants to regulate Big Banks and Big Business, but it doesn't know squat about them, so it must invite in Big Bankers and Big Businessmen to create regulatory snarls and police these operations.  The fox in the hen house.

Another group not to be forgotten is The People. The Bureaucrats, Bankers and Businessmen use us as propaganda tools while simultaneously propagandizing us.

To Restore Liberty, We Must Shatter the Iron Triangle

I know, fat chance...

If you want to understand banking and money and how badly governments have screwed them up, I highly recommend Murray Rothbard's "What Has Government Done to Our Money?"  He is a brilliant professor with a PhD in economics, but he has a gift of breaking it down for the layman.

You can download the audiobook files for free in mp3 format from The Ludwig von Mises Institute's Media Page.  You can then listen to them at your leisure or while traveling to work.  You won't regret the time spent. 

Rothbard – What Has Government Done to Our Money?

Riot Round-Up

Progressivism is an incoherent jumble that studiously ignores human nature, and the world it built is crashing down around us

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. (Dalrymple - City Journal)

Keynesianism and its attendant government-planned economies has failed, as has the flim flam known as monetarism.

Dimwitted governments are looking to crack down on social networking, when they should be cracking down on socially unacceptable behavior by refusing to reward it with cash prizes, free housing and gang hangouts euphemistically known as community centers.

Taking a Good Idea Too Far

We put child abuse laws on the books, a good thing. The downside of this is that the definition of physical abuse has now expanded to the point a teacher may not even touch a student and a parental spanking that leaves no marks can bring down the wrath of Social Services upon good parents.

A guy called in to a morning radio show and commented that it is a sick joke to think kids are tougher than adults. He recalled that when he was a kid most men were military veterans and they would jerk a kid back in line if things started getting out of hand. Not anymore

Teaching the Wrong Lessons

Government has taught people that they have a right to the property of others, legally confiscated, and we are now suffering the consequences.

I'm reading commentary from relatively liberal columnists, and I think we may end up seeing some Burkean conversions, at least as it applies to law and order.

Liberal Dogma …Amoral Youngsters
Less Political Rebellion, More Mollycoddled Mob
Riots for Rioting’s Sake

You can read any of these rioting and looting stories and just as easily apply the same lawless actions to the banking industry. Same blind government enablers, same immorality, same theft, same result.

Where did all the Money Go?

Everybody is broke, including whole countries. I heard somewhere that total global debt is over 100 trillion! Simply put, progressive government programs were built with borrowed money, and they are not self-sustaining, they are draining. China holds the mortgage note, and the progressive version of the American Dream has turned into a nightmare.

So, Where did all the Money Go?

In the throes of the 2008 crisis, the money didn’t disappear. President Bush explained that it was "stuck," and "clogging the system." Not the disaster he made it out to be, but not good either.

Finance and the banking system facilitates business transactions that power our economy. Think of the truck that regularly delivers goods to your grocery store. The store manager doesn’t stand on the loading dock and write a check in order to get the driver to unload. No, the driver unloads and presses on. Revolving credit accounts facilitate this and millions of other daily transactions. If the financial system locks up, so do these accounts, freezing economic activity.

Making a Bad Situation Worse

Tarp favored large institutions over smaller ones, and our banking system is in even worse shape because of it. Wall Street is gambling bigger than ever, and Uncle Sam is behind them with promises of credit if they shoot craps again, which they will indeed.

community banks have given way to big banks and excessive industry concentration; profits are increasingly driven by risky trading; leverage is taking precedence over prudent lending; compensation is out of control. This toxic combination leads to continued taxpayer risk and threatens long- term U.S. prosperity. (Bloomberg)

Still Too Big to Fail

Fortune Magazine explains that the Dodd-Frank Banking Scam made provisions for too big to fail institutions to have "living wills," which are agreements on how to break them up if another crisis happens.  This is folly:

These "wills," which banks are currently discussing informally with regulators, are a weak, pathetic substitute for what Washington should have really done: that is, break up "systemically important financial institutions" into much smaller pieces. Or segregate their federally-insured-deposit parts from risky things like creating and trading derivatives. (Fortune)

The Fortune writer has nailed it, but alas, it will never happen because it curtails the profits of the banking giants and politicians can't extract bribes from them with such a simple plan.

International Banking:  A Multi-Tentacled Monster

One ugly scene that some analysts are imagining involves a default by Greece leading to losses inflicted on banks in other European countries that own large amounts of Greek debt. [...]

Those losses could then cascade to the United States because the American and European banking systems are so interlocked, lending billions of dollars to each other every day.

American banks and insurance companies may also be liable for the biggest share of default insurance payments to European institutions if Greece or other countries fail. And the trillion-dollar money market fund industry could also suffer.

About 44.3 percent of money-market fund assets are European bank debt... (NY Times - Worries Grow)

The Gig is Up

The beast is strangling us, and we've done it to ourselves.  If our progressive governments had not gone into hock to the tune of tens of trillions, these international Snidely Whiplashes would not now be tweedling the ends of their pointy mustaches and threatening us with foreclosure.  Our politicians, paralyzed with fear and cowering like the trapped rats they are, don't know what to do other than borrow even more.

It has sent the message that we have hit the moment of demosclerosis. Washington is home to a vertiginous tangle of industry associations, activist groups, think tanks and communications shops. These forces have overwhelmed the government that was originally conceived by the founders. (David Brooks - Who is James Johnson)

The solution is clear but impossible:  Get out of debt and disentangle the federal government from its sweaty pornographic embrace with high finance and big business.  The federal government should not be Wall Street's drinking buddy.  It needs to be the cop with the nightstick who cracks the big banksters over the head when they reel out of the saloon drunk and begin marauding and threatening innocent citizens.

The answer to the question, of "Where did the money go?" 

The answer is that it never existed in the first place.  The money was conjured out of thin air.  That's what credit is, and it must be paid back.