Understanding Quantitative Easing & Why Only The l% Are Thriving

[mother earth]

Michael Hudson says quantitative easing is a pretext for assisting banks to make even more profit - March 11, 2015

Part 1 of 2

Michael Hudson, the president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is a Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He is the author of Super Imperialism, The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and its Discontents. His upcoming book is titled Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.

Killing The Host, Michael Hudson

“The financial sector has succeeded in depicting itself as part of the productive economy, yet for centuries banking was recognized as being parasitic. The essence of parasitism is not only to drain the host’s nourishment, but also to dull the host’s brain so that it does not recognize that the parasite is there.

This is the illusion that much of Europe and the United States suffer under today. The aim of this book is to pierce this illusion and replace junk economics with economics based on reality. In Killing the Host, Michael Hudson argues that financial crises will continue unless we radically transform our economic and political structures, and reclaim the best ideas of classical economics.”

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13385
Full interview at link:

its cover story is it's supposed to help employment. And the pretense is an old model that used to be taught in textbooks 100 years ago. The pretense is that banks lend money to companies to invest and build equipment and hire people. But that's not what banks do. Banks lend money to real estate. They lend money to corporate raiders. They lend money to buy assets. They don't lend money for companies to invest in equipment and hire. Just the opposite. They do lend money to corporate raiders, and when they take over companies, they outsource labor, they downsize labor, and they try to squeeze out more from the labor force, and they try to grab the pensions.
So the Fed was pretty open in what quantitative easing is supposed to do since 2008. It's supposed to lower the interest rates, which raises bond prices, and it inflates the stock market. And since 2008, they've had the largest monetary inflation history--$4 trillion of quantitative easing by the Fed. But it's all gone into the stock market and the bond market.
So what has this done? Well, it's helped stock and bond holders get richer. And who are the stock and bond holders? They're the 1 percent and they're the 10 percent. And people are wringing their hands and saying, why isn't the economy getting richer? Why is it since 2008 economic inequality and the distribution of wealth have worsened instead of gotten closer together? Well, it's because of quantitative easing. It's because quantitative easing has increased the value of the stocks and the bonds that the 1 percent or the 10 percent hold, and it hasn't helped the economy at all, because the Fed is really concerned with its constituency, which are the banks.

[mother earth]

1. Part 2, The ECB's Trillion Euro Plan to Keep The Banks Afloat

The European Central Bank's Trillion Euro plan to make the economy grow will only help keep the banks afloat - March 11, 2015

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13405
Taken from full interview at above:

So, in that sense quantitative easing and the refusal of central banks to fund governments, but only to fund commercial banks, is a new kind of class war. And it's not the old kind of class war, which was simply between employers and their workforce over what wages will be. It's by the financial sector trying to take over the economy, and especially to take over the public sector, to take over the public domain, to take over public utilities, to take over whatever assets a government has, and to force governments to--essentially, if governments cannot borrow from central banks, they have to begin selling off property.
PERIES: Michael, this is exactly what's happening in Greece right now. The SYRIZA government is somewhat forced to continue privatization as a part of the agreement of the loans that they have been given by European banks. What could they do in this situation?
HUDSON: Well, this is really a scandal, because most privatizations are corrupt. In Greece, they're almost as corrupt as they are the United States--well, nothing could be that corrupt. But the SYRIZA Party coming in said, wait a minute, the privatizations that have been done are by a governmental people to their own cronies at a giveaway price. How can we balance the budget if we're giving away the public utilities instead of getting a fair price for them? The European Central Bank said, no, no, you have to give away privatization to cronies at pennies on the dollar just like Russia did under Yeltsin, just like the United States did with the railroad giveaways of the 19th century.
And remember, the American privatization [incompr.] cronies created essentially the ruling class of the 20th century. It created the stock market. Well, the same thing's happening in Greece. It's told, create a new oligarchy, endow a new kind of a feudal lord--although in the case of some monopoly lord, by giving them away, these privatization giveaways--and if you don't do that, we're going to bankrupt the banking system. Well, Varoufakis went back to the party congress in Parliament and said, will you approve this? Well, so far, the left wing in Greece has said, no, we won't approve the giveaways. This is crazy. The pretense is that privatization is to make money. But the European central bank is really saying, no, no, you can't make money; you have to give it away to your cronies, who are our cronies, and it's all one happy financial family. This is escalating financial warfare.

[GoneFishin]

2. Electronics sold out of the back of a van are sold cheaper because it is stolen property.

Politicians who sell public assets are selling stolen property. They don't give a shit if they get top dollar, in fact it is possible they, or a friend, or a relative will end up being one of the new owners.

Privatization is selling stolen property cheap, but being able to get away with it because no one is watching the watcher.

[mother earth]

3. It is essentially, class warfare, as Chomsky, Hedges and others have all been saying.

Poverty will end when we do what it takes to end this greed, instead of enriching the tiny faction of uber-wealthy who already rule over the masses, it is time to come to a full understanding of why it is continuing.

[father founding]

4. Chicago

Otherwise known as the Rahm it up your ass principle. Aren't you sorry now, windy citiers ?

[blkmusclmachine]

5. THEFT. And the DEMS are in on it.

[DeSwiss]

6. Definition: ''Quantitative Easing'' is a process wherein:

(1) A Central Bank prints digital munnies directly into specific computers which are at specific banks, but they do not print munnies to nobody else in the world.

(2) The computers that receive these digital munnies are owned and operated by the owners of the banks but nobody else in the world receives any of these munnies.

a. And the owners and operators of the banks who are also the owners of the computers and which receives these Central Bank munnies -- are also usually members of the Boards of Directors of the very Central Bank which gave them the munnies in the first place, but they also did not give any of these munnies to nobody else in the world.

i Which makes things extremely convenient in allowing this process to work as well as it does -- for the bank owners and the computer owners, but it does not work well for anybody else in the world.

End of definition.

- I say, let's create our own system and just let them have at it......

K&R

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