Germany's Hyperinflation-Phobia and The Rise of the Nazis

With all the "Trump is a Nazi" rhetoric, I thought now would be a good time to repost this diary.

The only thing worse than forgetting history is misremembering it.
Getting your history wrong can cause important mistakes.

  For instance, people wonder why Germany is so insistent on austerity measures in Europe despite the continent sinking into deflation.
  The reason given usually looks like this.

 have a look at Germany, 1933.
In that year, Germany's democratic Weimar republic was foundering under economic depression, mass unemployment and raging hyper-inflation.

 Actually that isn't what happened at all. Germany's hyperinflation and the rise of Hitler were two different issues and two different time periods. Nevertheless, the Hyperinflation = Hitler myth still exists in Germany.

 Present discomfort within Germany with policies designed to reflate the euro-zone economy has been stoked by the assertion of a linkage between hyperinflation and the rise to power of the Nazis in the early-1930s. For example, in 2009, at the nadir of the global recession, Der Spiegel published a special issue focusing on the history of money, which explicitly linked the disaster of the early 1920s to Nazism

 The hyperinflation of 1923 had both winners and losers. The losers were anyone with a savings or pension.
  The winners were anyone with debts, like home mortgages.

 The reality is that what ushered in Nazism wasn't inflation, but deflation. The economic measure that rose with Hitler's prospects wasn't the CPI, but 30% unemployment and economic depression.

  The Nazis only won 32 Reichstag seats in the election of May 1924, and just 12 in 1928. Five years after the hyperinflation the Nazis were a political party without a future.
  They were circling the drain of history, polling at less than 3%. They were an afterthought.

 So what happened?
Germany embraced a conservative economic policy of austerity through the finance expert Heinrich Brüning.
   Brüning's austerity policies were repeatedly opposed and defeated in parliament by the socialists and communists (an event that was considered a "failure of parliament" by conservatives), which led to pushing the austerity measures through by presidential decrees (Brüning called it "authoritative democracy").

  These austerity measures included:
* rolling back salaries to 1927 levels
* hiking interest rates
* dramatically increasing taxes on labor
* gutting unemployment and pension benefits

 Except for interest rates, this is a list of what Germany has currently imposed on southern Europe.

 Most German capitalists and landowners originally supported the conservative experiment more from the belief that conservatives would best serve their interests rather than any particular liking for Brüning. As more of the working and middle classes turned against Brüning, however, more of the capitalists and landowners declared themselves in favour of his opponents Hitler and Hugenberg. By late 1931, the conservative movement was dead and Hindenburg and the Reichswehr had begun to contemplate dropping Brüning in favour of accommodating Hugenberg and Hitler.

      What happened was center-right and center-left parties backed austerity measures that crushed the life out of the middle class. The Social Democrats in particular undermined their own supporters.
   When workers turned to any extremist party who could stop them, one that also hated communists and socialists, the conservatives jumped on board.

 As Paul Krugman has pointed out, “the 1923 hyperinflation didn’t bring Hitler to power; it was the Brüning deflation” of the early-1930s.

 But the story doesn't end there.
   What brought Germany's economy back from the brink under the Nazis? Government spending.

 In the 1930s, Germany had high unemployment, but Germans’ memories of that, and especially of how they exited from it – via a classic Keynesian fiscal expansion – is largely forgotten, as the fiscal injection was Hitler’s rearmament.

 

 In other words, the exact opposite of the conservative economic agenda was what allowed Nazi Germany to recover from the Depression. It's also what could have stopped the Nazis from ever taking over in the first place.

A selective memory of the past may prove worse than no memory at all.

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Which President flirted with deflation more: Trump or Obama?

I just know that Mr Obama pulled the rug out from under the "$100 beater" market, and now I can't buy a cheap car to take my laundry to the laundromat.

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Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long

mimi's picture

are always scared of something. phobia this and phobia that. And the majority has no clue about the things you are talking about. It's book knowledge and those who lived through those times are long gone. It can't explain a general attitude that shows Germans always worried, always complaining and always "knowing better than everybody else".

So there must be something else in the air (or blood or genes) with them being phobistas.

Just saying it's just the time has come were folks don't mind anymore to be openly racist, rude and ready to be violent. The shit has already hit the fan the German average citizen and the train of reasonable behavior has left the station more often than those trains arriving back.

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Bollox Ref's picture

was a ripe brew of socialists, communists, Nazis, conservatives, monarchists, all wrapped up in a 'decadent', jazz age skein of suffering the moment. The Weimar Republic was a still birth.

And then Uncle Adolf came along with really nice uniforms for all.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

The winners were anyone with debts, like home mortgages.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

of currency had a pretty bad day of inflation, after experiencing two long weeks of gradual inflation.

all it took was for the most powerful government in the world to say get a clue

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

I suppose it's a good thing that we remain as traumatized as we are about the collapse of a modern civilization in such a shockingly short span of time (5 years, maybe?) in Germany, but it's a bit tragic that we misremember the details so significantly.

I was once at a school board town hall type thing, where they were debating taking a particular book out of the curriculum -- not out of the library, but just the curriculum -- in response to complaints from very sincere christian types, including a woman whom, I have to admit, I very much liked on a one-to-one personal basis, despite the enormous gulf in our spiritual outlooks. and, i might add, a woman who had endured personal tragedy at such a level that I promise you, not one person on this blog would trade places with her. nonetheless, I felt obliged to speak against the motion.

When my allotted 3 minutes came up, I began by pointing out that in pre-Nazi Germany, public education was organized by faith. The government collected taxes from Lutherans, and gave those taxes to the Lutheran churches to educate Lutheran children. It collected taxes from Catholics, and gave the revenue to the parishes to educate Catholic children. It collected taxes from Jews, and gave the revenue to the synagogues (or other Jewish authority?) to educate Jewish children.

And nobody ever had to worry that their children would ever come in contact with any ideas -- or children -- who made either the children or the parents feel the least bit uncomfortable about their theology. They didn't even have to worry that their own taxes might be funding the promulgation of anathemas.

Of course, in the long run turning the entire institution of public education into a system of religious ghettos worked out really, really badly for one of the groups involved, and in the big picture it worked out pretty fucking badly for almost everyone in Germany -- but I bet that right up until it all went south, a very large proportion of them were happy happy happy that their kids weren't sharing desks with any of those people.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

mimi's picture

@UntimelyRippd @UntimelyRippd @UntimelyRippd

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and there's being mis-educated, cause that's how I learned it.

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EdMass's picture

Alt-right, Nazis, Neo-Nazies, KKK, Militia, et al.

What are there, a couple thousand, a couple of tens of thousand out of a population of 340+ million?

And somehow, these nut jobs are a significant threat to the county and civilization in general?

Alt-left, Antifa, BlackBloc, BLM even less. They wear masks and carry base ball bats and molotovs and seek to be violent against those righties and btw destroy capitalism and the constitution while they're at it, Oh my.

IMHO this all media bullshit. Generated to keep normal citizens cowering in their homes because it's scary out there. You need the help of more Gubmint depending on what they convince you is happening and which political whoring party you currently think you support. BTW there is only one Party and your "vote" is total bullshit.

Top Down. Bottom Up. Inside Out.

But, the good news is that cases of water and bread are back on the shelves of Houston supermarkets.

Rest easy.

Carry on.

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Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!

Firesign Theater

Stop the War!

edg's picture

I know it's not your table, but how exactly is new debt calculated? When total expenses are subtracted from total income for each year in the table, the result is neutral or surplus in 3 years and a small deficit in the other 3 years, except 38/39 where the deficit is 3 billion. But new debt for 38/39 is shown as 27.4 billion. How is that possible?

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@edg

Dunno but maybe this has something to do with it?

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/07/big-banks-funded-the-nazis-and-la...

Big Banks Funded the Nazis and Launched a Coup Against the President of the United States
Posted on July 19, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog

Preface: Not all bankers are bad people. For example, many bankers at smaller banks and credit unions are good people who are trying to help their communities.
Banks Fund Terrorists

It is newsworthy that HSBC has been accused by the Senate of laundering money for terrorists. And see this.

Big banks have been caught in a wide variety of criminal activities recently.

But this is nothing new.
American Banks Funded the Nazis

Many big American banks funded the Nazis.

The BBC reported in 1998:

Barclays Bank has agreed to pay $3.6m to Jews whose assets were seized from French branches of the British-based bank during World War II.

***

Chase Manhattan Bank, which has acknowledged seizing about 100 accounts held by Jews in its Paris branch during World War II ….”Recently unclassified reports from the US Treasury about the activities of Chase in Paris in the 1940s indicate that the local branch worked “in close collaboration with the German authorities” in freezing Jewish assets.

The New York Daily News noted the same year:

The relationship between Chase and the Nazis apparently was so cozy that Carlos Niedermann, the Chase branch chief in Paris, wrote his supervisor in Manhattan that the bank enjoyed “very special esteem” with top German officials and “a rapid expansion of deposits,” according to Newsweek.

Niedermann’s letter was written in May 1942 five months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. also went to war with Germany.

The BBC reported in 1999:

A French government commission, investigating the seizure of Jewish bank accounts during the Second World War, says five American banks Chase Manhattan, J.P Morgan, Guaranty Trust Co. of New York, Bank of the City of New York and American Express had taken part.

It says their Paris branches handed over to the Nazi occupiers about one-hundred such accounts.

One of Britain’s main newspapers – the Guardian – reported in 2004:

George Bush’s grandfather [and George H.W. Bush’s father], the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings … continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act

***

The documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

***

Bush was a founding member of the bank [UBC] … The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush’s father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany’s most powerful industrial family.

***

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world’s largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

***

UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler’s rise to power.

Indeed, banks often finance both sides of wars:

The San Francisco Chronicle also documents that leading financiers Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harriman funded Nazi eugenics programs.

American Bankers Funded Coup Against FDR

According to the BBC and other sources, Prescott Bush, JP Morgan and other leading financiers also funded a coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in an attempt – basically – to implement fascism in the U.S.. See this, this, this and this.

And further regarding the criminal elements taking over finance, government and the world,
much of the information below (assuming it all to be accurate, something of which I'd have no idea) relates not to the past but to what's going on now, with details of which I'd heard nothing, (not that this means much, lol,) and would be very interested to hear our resident experts expound upon. The following certainly sounds like a major cause of our global ills involving an evil essential to shut down - and information which I'm afraid may disappear off the net.

Also, this authors books, mentioned at bottom, would seem to be potentially a good and interesting investment for those still able to afford to buy books.

(Emphasis mine)
https://cosmolearning.org/documentaries/banking-with-hitler-1998/

Date Added: 8 years ago.

Documentary Description

Banking with Hitler

Program Synopsis

Swiss banks have been accused of collaborating with the Nazis during WWII, but they are not alone. British and American bankers also helped fund Hitler's war machine. Officers from the Bank of England sat on the board alongside leading Nazis of the Bank for International Settlements (B.I.S.). While Europe was engulfed in WWII, the B.I.S. laundered plundered gold for the Nazis and paid dividends to the Bank of England. Henry Morganthau, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury for F.D.R., pursued the B.I.S.'s American president, Thomas McKittrick, uncovering evidence that other leading allied banks were collaborating with the Nazis. Allied bankers were never prosecuted after the war.
Source: http://tv.nytimes.com/show/40812/Banking-With-Hitler/overvie...

The US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, began investigating Nazi finances 60 years ago and found Allied banks, including many British and American high street names, who continued to do business with Hitler's Germany throughout the war

371 Swiss banks stand accused of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. This was suspected at the time by by U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who began investigating this collaboration. He found the Swiss were not alone. His archives reveal that both British and American bankers continued to do business with Hitler, even as Germany was invading Europe and bombing London.

This investigative film shows in detail the roles played by the Anglo-German banking clique. Key members of the Bank of England together with their German counterparts established the BIS, the Bank for International Settlement, which laundered the plundered gold of Europe. On its board were key Nazis such as Walther Funk and Hjalamar Schact The president of BIS was an American, Thomas McKittrick, who readily socialized with leading Nazis. Not only the BIS, but other allied banks worked hand in hand with the Nazis. One of the biggest American banks kept a branch open in Occupied Paris and, with full knowledge of the managers in the U.S., froze the accounts of French Jews. Deprived of money to escape France, many ended up in death camps.

The Tower of Basel: Secretive Plans for the Issuing of a Global Currency
Do we really want the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issuing our global currency?

by Ellen Brown, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13239

In an April 7 article in The London Telegraph titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to

A Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:

“A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.

“‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.

“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”

Indeed they will. The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated:

“[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1

And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will. The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s. Founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.” Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.2 In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton-Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.3

In Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Dr. Carroll Quigley revealed the key role played in global finance by the BIS behind the scenes. Dr. Quigley was Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton’s mentor. He was also an insider, groomed by the powerful clique he called “the international bankers.” His credibility is heightened by the fact that he actually espoused their goals. He wrote:

“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. . . . [I]n general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

Quigley wrote of this international banking network:

“[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”

The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The statement echoed one made in the eighteenth century by the patriarch of what would become the most powerful banking dynasty in the world. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791:

“Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”

Mayer’s five sons were sent to the major capitals of Europe – London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Naples – with the mission of establishing a banking system that would be outside government control. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers. Eventually, a privately-owned “central bank” was established in nearly every country; and this central banking system has now gained control over the economies of the world. Central banks have the authority to print money in their respective countries, and it is from these banks that governments must borrow money to pay their debts and fund their operations. The result is a global economy in which not only industry but government itself runs on “credit” (or debt) created by a banking monopoly headed by a network of private central banks; and at the top of this network is the BIS, the “central bank of central banks” in Basel.

Behind the Curtain

For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel. It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates. In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters. The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.” It quickly became known as the “Tower of Basel.” Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force.4 It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.

The BIS is now composed of 55 member nations, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group; and even within it, there is a hierarchy. In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine called “Ruling the World of Money,” Edward Jay Epstein wrote that where the real business gets done is in “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England. Epstein said:

“The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments. . . . A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.”

n 1974, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created by the central bank Governors of the Group of Ten nations (now expanded to twenty). The BIS provides the twelve-member Secretariat for the Committee. The Committee, in turn, sets the rules for banking globally, including capital requirements and reserve controls. In a 2003 article titled “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” Joan Veon wrote:

“The BIS is where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them. . . .

“When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.”5

The Controversial Basel Accords

The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from 6% to 8%. By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks. Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today. Property prices fell and loans went into default as the security for them shriveled up. A downward spiral followed, ending with the total bankruptcy of the banks. The banks had to be nationalized, although that word was not used in order to avoid criticism.6

Among other collateral damage produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to get loans. The BIS capital adequacy standards required loans to private borrowers to be “risk-weighted,” with the degree of risk determined by private rating agencies; and farmers and small business owners could not afford the agencies’ fees. Banks therefore assigned 100 percent risk to the loans, and then resisted extending credit to these “high-risk” borrowers because more capital was required to cover the loans. When the conscience of the nation was aroused by the Indian suicides, the government, lamenting the neglect of farmers by commercial banks, established a policy of ending the “financial exclusion” of the weak; but this step had little real effect on lending practices, due largely to the strictures imposed by the BIS from abroad.7

Similar complaints have come from Korea. An article in the December 12, 2008 Korea Times titled “BIS Calls Trigger Vicious Cycle” described how Korean entrepreneurs with good collateral cannot get operational loans from Korean banks, at a time when the economic downturn requires increased investment and easier credit:

“‘The Bank of Korea has provided more than 35 trillion won to banks since September when the global financial crisis went full throttle,’ said a Seoul analyst, who declined to be named. ‘But the effect is not seen at all with the banks keeping the liquidity in their safes. They simply don’t lend and one of the biggest reasons is to keep the BIS ratio high enough to survive,’ he said. . . .
“Chang Ha-joon, an economics professor at Cambridge University, concurs with the analyst. ‘What banks do for their own interests, or to improve the BIS ratio, is against the interests of the whole society. This is a bad idea,’ Chang said in a recent telephone interview with Korea Times.”

In a May 2002 article in The Asia Times titled “Global Economy: The BIS vs. National Banks,” economist Henry C K Liu observed that the Basel Accords have forced national banking systems “to march to the same tune, designed to serve the needs of highly sophisticated global financial markets, regardless of the developmental needs of their national economies.” He wrote:

“[N]ational banking systems are suddenly thrown into the rigid arms of the Basel Capital Accord sponsored by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), or to face the penalty of usurious risk premium in securing international interbank loans. . . . National policies suddenly are subjected to profit incentives of private financial institutions, all members of a hierarchical system controlled and directed from the money center banks in New York. The result is to force national banking systems to privatize . . . .

“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. . . . The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.”

Ironically, noted Liu, developing countries with their own natural resources did not actually need the foreign investment that trapped them in debt to outsiders:

“Applying the State Theory of Money [which assumes that a sovereign nation has the power to issue its own money], any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.”

When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation. They are forced to divert their production to exports, just to earn the foreign currency necessary to pay the interest on their loans. National banks deemed “capital inadequate” have to deal with strictures comparable to the “conditionalities” imposed by the IMF on debtor nations: “escalating capital requirement, loan writeoffs and liquidation, and restructuring through selloffs, layoffs, downsizing, cost-cutting and freeze on capital spending.” Liu wrote:

“Reversing the logic that a sound banking system should lead to full employment and developmental growth, BIS regulations demand high unemployment and developmental degradation in national economies as the fair price for a sound global private banking system.”

The Last Domino to Fall

While banks in developing nations were being penalized for falling short of the BIS capital requirements, large international banks managed to escape the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure. The mega-banks succeeded in avoiding the Basel rules by separating the “risk” of default out from the loans and selling it off to investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”

However, it was not in the game plan that U.S. banks should escape the BIS net. When they managed to sidestep the first Basel Accord, a second set of rules was imposed known as Basel II. The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14,000 to reach its all-time high. It has been all downhill from there. Basel II had the same effect on U.S. banks that Basel I had on Japanese banks: they have been struggling ever since to survive.8

Basel II requires banks to adjust the value of their marketable securities to the “market price” of the security, a rule called “mark to market.”9 The rule has theoretical merit, but the problem is timing: it was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books. Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent. At least, they would have been insolvent if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule. Financial analyst John Berlau complained:

“The crisis is often called a ‘market failure,’ and the term ‘mark-to-market’ seems to reinforce that. But the mark-to-market rules are profoundly anti-market and hinder the free-market function of price discovery. . . . In this case, the accounting rules fail to allow the market players to hold on to an asset if they don’t like what the market is currently fetching, an important market action that affects price discovery in areas from agriculture to antiques.”10

Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide. In early April 2009, the mark-to-market rule was finally softened by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB); but critics said the modification did not go far enough, and it was done in response to pressure from politicians and bankers, not out of any fundamental change of heart or policies by the BIS.

And that is where the conspiracy theorists come in. Why did the BIS not retract or at least modify Basel II after seeing the devastation it had caused? Why did it sit idly by as the global economy came crashing down? Was the goal to create so much economic havoc that the world would rush with relief into the waiting arms of the BIS with its privately-created global currency? The plot thickens . . . .

Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

This fits into and explains so much. I have no idea as to how to verify such details and must rely upon those here who can, but if this psychopathic group is a/the root enemy of life on the planet, we non-experts need to know, too.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.