American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [108]
That’s called globalization, I guess. Just like IBM sending its laid-off American workers overseas to countries like India “where your skills are in demand.”74 Fed Chairman Bernanke is also a board member of something called the Bank for International Settlements, based in Basel, Switzerland. The BIS encouraged all the speculative investment banking that led to our current debacle. Carroll Quigley, in Tragedy and Hope, wrote that the BIS was created as the apex of “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.” The goal being control “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.”
Based inside the BIS is a new agency called the Financial Stability Board. It’s proposed to “strengthen” and “institutionalize” a mandate to “promote global financial stability.” Sounds good, but some see this as the “latest sinister development in a centuries-old consolidation of power by an international financial oligarchy.” Third World countries who can’t pay off their debts would be required to sell off their national assets to private investors. The board has oversight over all “systematically important” financial institutions, instruments, and markets. (Like gold, oil, and food maybe?) Yet there’s no treaty involved, merely a private committee looking out for national sovereignty. Seems like the fulfillment of what banker Mayer Rothschild said back in 1791: “Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”75
Thomas Jefferson warned the country back in 1815: “The dominion which the banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens ... must be broken, or it will break us.”76 Is it naïve to think about banking returning to the austere, staid practice of simply taking deposits and making conservative loans at low interest rates to qualified borrowers, under rigid regulations administered by moderately paid federal employees? Wouldn’t that greatly reduce systemic risk? Here’s what some smart economists think we need to do:
Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act and wall off commercial banking from investment bank gambling, and require strict leverage limits.
Insulate the federally insured depositors from reckless investment schemes with no social utility whatsoever like these “credit default swaps” that are entered into by entities that don’t own the underlying bonds.
Withdraw the massive handouts and taxpayer-backed guarantees given to prop up specific banks and financial institutions, and use these funds to instead support the struggling homeowners and defaulting borrowers who form the root of this crisis. This will reduce the record rate of foreclosures and put a floor under asset prices at a sustainable level, which will in turn stabilize financial institutions that are still hemorrhaging from increasing foreclosures and loan defaults. In other words, bottoms-up, not topdown economic support.
Let the already-insolvent banks go bankrupt and begin removing the bad debt from the system. We need a sound banking system, but there is no reason we need the specific banks we have now. There are plenty of regional and community banks in this country which avoided exposure to risky mortgage and credit derivatives, and which would gladly replace the market share held by the too-bloated-to-fail banks for loans issued to small businesses and consumers, if they were able to compete in a truly free market against these subsidized behemoths. In short, why doesn’t the public demand a financial system that serves the people rather than enslaves us to a treadmill of debt?
The national debt is basically what the government owes from years of borrowing money to pay off the yearly deficits (the amount by which spending exceeds revenue from taxes and the like). Back in 1791, our national debt was $75 million; today it rises by that amount every hour or so.77 During the years of