‘Economics was made complicated to mystify people.’ The Money Fix, female interviewee
Money actually becomes the controlling element in economics. Those that control money control everything. ibid.
Tim Woodman ... joined the ranks of those unemployed in the depression of the 1890s, a victim of the unwillingness of the eastern gold bugs to countenance an increase in the stock of money through the addition of silver. Hugh Rockoff, The Wizard of Oz as a Monetary Allegory
Baum is following history in suggesting that the movement was started first by the western farmers, was joined ... by the working man, and then, once it was well under way, was joined by Bryan. The roaring lion is a good choice for one of the greatest American orators. ibid.
Coxey was a greenbacker, and his ideas were simple: the federal government should build public works and pay for them by printing money. ibid.
Every penny, every dollar, we have in circulation is created as an interest-bearing debt. Byron Dale, author Modern Money Secrets
We must go forward cautiously and consolidate each acquired position, because already the inferior social stratum of society is giving unceasing signs of agitation ... When through the law’s intervention the common people shall have lost their homes, they will be more easy to control and more easy to govern, and they shall not be able to resist the strong hand of the government acting in accordance with ... the control of the leaders of finance. United States Bankers Magazine 1892
By dividing the electorate this way we’ll be able to have them spend their energies at struggling amongst themselves on questions that for us have no importance whatsoever. ibid.
Spending has been Britain’s national obsession. There’s nothing we like better than to splash a bit of cash … So have our politicians. Only now the party’s over. Nick Robinson, Your Money and How They Spend It I, BBC 2011
The biggest spending squeeze since the Second World War. ibid.
£692 billion: now there are seven big budgets which make up more than three-quarters of all government spending ... Transport, Law & Order, Defence, Debt Interest, Education, Health, Social Security £194 billion. ibid.
Politicians find it very hard to cut back on spending on the elderly ... Politicians are much more scared of their grannies. ibid.
But now he’s in government David Cameron has in the last few weeks approved the closure of A&E and maternity units not just at King George’s but at another London hospital. ibid.
Then there are all those extra little things that are nice to have: like money for culture or the arts. ibid.
Arts spending for the whole of England is $447 million. ibid.
Welcome to the fire control centre for the north-east of England ... The technology didn’t work; the building behind me is empty at a cost to you of $97,000 a month for the next 24 years. And there are eight others like it around the country. ibid.
They keep spending money they haven’t really got ... Today’s deficit is a whopper. ibid.
What looked like a downturn became a crash. ibid.
By the time of the last General Election, Britain had the biggest deficit since the war: £160 billion. ibid.
Why if you live in some parts of Britain do you get more spent on you than other parts? ibid.
Infrastructure may be important but it doesn’t have a vote. ibid.
There’s nothing that politicians fear more than telling us our taxes are going up. ibid.
We put pressure on the Chancellor to spend more and more, and then we’re incredibly resistant to more tax to pay for it. Nick Robinson, Your Money and How They Spend It II
Taxes are for the very rich effectively voluntary. ibid.
We’re living way beyond our means. ibid.
By the end of the seventies a new Tory government came to office promising lower income tax for all. The basic rate was cut to 30%, the top rate to 60%. ibid.
Gordon Brown had scrapped the lower level of income tax – the 10p band. ibid.
Tax and national insurance – they pay for exactly the same things. ibid.
We never seem to think we’re getting a bargain. ibid.
Takeaways used to be tax-free until back in 1984 the then Tory government decided to extend VAT to cover them. ibid.
Who creates new money? How does new money get into the economy? And what is debt really being used for? RichPlanet TV: The Monetary System with Ian Crane
Fractional banking: the game-plan right from the outset is to asset strip ... You put the money in which is owed back to you ... with interest. ibid.
North Dakota today is the only state in the United States of America that has a Bank of North Dakota that is owned by the people of North Dakota. ibid.
We are staring into the abyss ... Anybody who believes the Euro can survive is living in loo-loo land. Ian R Crane, interview On the Edge, AlexG
The reason they get their bonuses is the same reason everybody else gets their bonus and that is they did exactly as they were asked to do which is effectively to destroy the economy of the respective countries. ibid.
Ten years ago the price of gold was £275 an ounce ... Gordon Brown was instructed to sell 415 tons of the UK’s gold reserves ... [to] the Rothschilds. ibid.
The recession had destroyed eleven trillion dollars of Americans’ net worth. A recovery seemed far off. Occupy Wall Street wanted bankers held responsible. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street I, PBS 2012
Credit Default Swaps – a kind of derivative that ensures a loan against default. ibid.
And so they began selling derivatives that were simply bets on any and all portfolios whether the bank owned them or not. These products came to be known as Synthetic Collateralised Debt Obligations – Synthetic CDOs. ibid.
A wave of lending abuses. ibid.
By the end of 2005 the total outstanding value of credit default swaps around the world was measured in trillions of dollars and was doubling every year. ibid.
AIG was on the hook for $440 billion of credit default swaps. ibid.
It was on a cold March day in 2008 that the fear of a meltdown would become a reality. After the real estate bubble burst it would only be a matter of time before investors would start to lose confidence in Wall Street’s biggest banks. Bear Stearns was the first to crack. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street II
Bear was party to complicated financial deals. Geithner learned that Bear had made credit default swap deals worth trillions of dollars all over Wall Street and around the world. Geithner saw what central bankers feared most: systemic risk. ibid.
A bail-out of Bear Stearns was not [Henry] Paulson’s style. But [Ben] Bernanke and Geithner believed it was too big to fail. And by that weekend options were dwindling. ibid.
One of the most basic moral tenets of the free market – Moral Hazard. ibid.
Paulson told President Bush what was needed now was to rebuild confidence in the economy ... It became known as the Summer of Assurances. ibid.
Then it hit: in the cross-hairs the world’s fourth largest investment bank – Lehman Brothers. ibid.
Paulson delivered the message: Lehman was in a death spiral and there would be no government bail-out. ibid.
Geithner realised that if AIG went down the consequences would be even worse than Lehman. He argued for another bail-out. ibid.
Conservative Republicans in the House were in full revolt. ibid.
The Congress finally passed Paulson’s Bill ... Paulson was about to hand out billions of dollars. ibid.
The Stock Market was down more than 6,000 points. Frontline: Money, Power and Wall Street III
The mega-bank Citibank was failing. ibid.
Barack Obama had made the economy a key issue. ibid.
For months there had been public anger of Wall Street. ibid.
The anger was not just confined to the streets. On Capitol Hill Congress responded to the public anger – they summoned the heads of the nation’s biggest banks. ibid.