Iain Banks - Satanic Vatican - Noam Chomsky - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine TV - Franklin D Roosevelt - Carroll Quigley - Robert Peston TV - United States Bankers Magazine - Nick Robinson TV - Frontline TV - Nova TV - Money Banking & the Federal Reserve TV - The Fall of Lehman Brothers TV - Too Big to Fail 2011 - Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis TV - Charlie Richardson - Webster Tarpley - Bankers TV - Charles H Ferguson TV - Will Hutton & Dispatches TV - Walter Burien - Martin Durkin TV - Niall Ferguson TV - Tony Benn - Masters of Money TV - David Bach - Bill Gates - Edwin Vieira - Zeitgeist Addendum TV - Jeremy Paxman TV - FCIC Financial Crisis - Napoleon Bonaparte - Treasury Department - Andrew Materi - Harold Wilson - Glenn Beck - Chris Wolf - Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe - Eleanor Ferris - George Bernard Shaw - Fraud Squad TV - Monty Python 1983 - Maysles Brothers & Zwerin TV - Misha Glenny - The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire 2017 - The Treason Trilogy 2011 - Meltdown: The Secret History of the Financial Global Collapse 2011 - Sky News: History Repeating? Financial Crisis: 10 Years On TV - Panorama TV - Storyville: Inside Lehman Brothers: The Whistleblowers TV - Wirecard: A Billion Dollar Lie TV - Adam Curtis TV - The Flaw 2011 - Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis 2023 - The Death of the Real Economy 2022 - Antony C Sutton - Planet Finance 2023 - Corbett Report 2023 - Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard 2022 - The Vatican's Financial Power: A Hidden History 2024 - Uncovering HSBC's Dark Financial Empire: The Untouchable Bank 2023 - Goldman Sachs: The Company that Rules the World 2023 - Vanguard: The 8 Trillion Dollar Empire 2023 - The Twisted History of Morgan Stanley 2023 - The Men Who Stole the World 2024 -
I won’t miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven’t dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that’s rearing its grisly head right now. It’s the sheer idiocy, the sheer wrongheadedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society’s broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No, let’s blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don’t even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. Iain Banks, final interview 2013
Three financial families – the Rothschilds, Morgans and Rockefellers – all do the bidding of the Jesuit Order. Satanic Vatican
Fiscal policy constitutes a long-term shift of resources to the wealthy. The ‘staggering’ costs discussed by the federal auditors will be paid by the poor and the working class who have left out of the consumption binge that economists now blame for the clouds on the horizon, just as the taxpayer is called upon to bail out speculators hoping to profit from deregulation of the Savings and Loans institutions, and probably, before too long, the banks that reaped enormous profits by lending to the wealthy classes and neo-Nazi military rulers who took over much of Latin America with US backing from the early 1960s. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
Our financial system is running a doomsday cycle. Noam Chomsky, lecture University of Massachusetts Amherst 27 September 2012, ‘Who Owns the World? Resistance and Ways Forward’
When the great monetary collapse hit Ferenginar, I was hundreds of light years away serving as a ship’s cook on a long-haul freighter. I can’t tell you the heartbreak I suffered knowing that rampant inflation and currency devaluation were burning like wildfires through the lush financial foliage of my home. Star Trek s4e11: Deep Space Nine: Homefront, Quark to O’Brien & Bashir
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centres has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson. Franklin D Roosevelt, 21st November 1933
The powers of financial capitalism have a 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 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. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, cover & p324
Restoration of the gold standard was not something which could be done by a mere act of government. It was admitted even by the most ardent advocates of the gold standard that certain financial relationships would require adjustment before the gold standard could be restored. There were three chief relationships involved. There were (I) the problem of inflation, or the relationship between money and goods; (II) the problem of public debts, or the relationship between governmental income and expenditure; and (III) the problem of price parities, or the relationship between price levels of different countries. ibid. ch7
The structure of financial controls created by the tycoons of big banking and big business in the period 1880 to 1933 was of extraordinary complexity. One business thief being built on another. Both being allied with semi-independent associates. The whole rearing upwards into two pinnacles of economic and financial power. One centred in New York was headed by J P Morgan and company. And the other in Ohio was headed by the Rockefeller Family. When these two cooperated, as the generally did, they could influence the economic life of the country to a large degree and could almost control its political life, at least on the federal level. In the United States it was inevitable that the international banking interests would attempt to establish the same kind of private monopoly over the money system that they had achieved in England, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The same formula would be used: make it look like a government operation but keep the control in private hands. ibid.
Fortunes are being accumulated in the UK on a scale we haven’t seen for a hundred years. We’ve been told that the way the super-rich creates wealth makes all of us, well, a bit better off. But does it? This time around they’ve used new and different financial techniques to enrich themselves. Robert Peston, Super Rich: The Greed Game, BBC 2008
We are picking up the bill in a global greed game. ibid.
London is the capital of capital. ibid.
They’ve created ghettos of fabulously expensive property. ibid.
[Alan] Greenspan slashed rates to just 1%, and the supply of credit soared. ibid.
Since 1997 Labour has tried to make the United Kingdom as a land fit for the super-rich. ibid.
By the start of the twenty-first century these two factors – the power of leverage and low taxes for enterprise – gave birth to a new set of business superpowers; among them are the private equity money who borrow huge sums of money to buy whole companies. ibid.
Colossal funds have been accumulated by hedge fund managers. ibid.
The pay structure they devised: they wrote the rules of the greed game so they couldn’t lose. ibid.
Wall Street banks started by selling good quality loans to raise money and then looked at what else would be sold. ibid.
There was a torrent of cash for sub-prime loans thanks to a banking breakthrough called Structured Finance. ibid.
Most of the world’s big banks ... were stampeding to make profits by turning risky sub-prime loans into supposedly high quality investments. ibid.
More of the borrowers defaulted than they expected. ibid.
Northern Rock went to the brink of insolvency because its business was dependent on raising money by selling its mortgages to international lenders. ibid.
There are still plenty of opportunities for the new super-rich to increase their fortunes. ibid.
I investigate how globalisation went badly wrong. Robert Peston, The Party’s Over: How the West Went Bust I, BBC 2011
Our long boom was founded on a dangerous lie. ibid.
Big Bang allowed big international banks to buy up stock. ibid.
The gap between the very richest and the very poorest widened at a pace we hadn’t seen since the Victorian era. ibid.
The financial revolution spawned a debt revolution. ibid.
The Chinese consume half as much as we do relative to the size of their economy. They save much much more. ibid.
Western banks borrowed recklessly to lend to us. ibid.
The indebtedness of governments exploded. ibid.
The crash of 2008 began to topple an unbalanced global economic system. ibid.
Regulators failed to stem reckless lending by banks, and central bankers kept interest rates far too low. ibid.
There can be no return to debt-fuelled capitalism in the West. ibid.
How in Britain are we going to pay our way in this challenging new world? Robert Peston, The Party’s Over: How the West Went Bust II
Is twenty-first century austerity a journey back into our past? ibid.
Our personal debts remain dangerously large. ibid.
Has financial services become too big? ibid.
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.