Sicilianthing wrote:
What is Trump going to do with the Fraud of the Plunge Protection Teams?
Good question. I guess it all depends on the fraud committed and the ease of convicting the fraudsters. Some fraud is prohibitively difficult to prove, some relatively easy. Some types of fraud are grievously harmful to a large group or section of the population, other types are hardly detectable either from their effects or by observation. It will be interesting to me as an outside observer...
Sicilianthing wrote:
Richard Wolff: The Next Economic Crisis Is Coming
Every time I sit down with economist Richard Wolff, he demonstrates why the field of economics is so necessary in the cultural critique of our American empire. In my recent interview with him, we discussed why the thriving economy touted by President Donald Trump hasn’t translated into real gains for the majority of Americans.
Is that so? I'd like to see the raw data on that statistic because just about everyone I know and speak to about this tells me that yes, they are doing better now than they ever have done before, and they attribute their greater comfort and success directly to the Trump administration either cutting taxes, reducing government fees and regulations, or both. It would seem that we do not operate in the same 'America'.
Sicilianthing wrote:
We also went over what is hidden by the economic indicators that allow the financial industry to celebrate while so many Americans are still suffering.
Suffering from what? And how many is
so many?
Sicilianthing wrote:
Professor Wolff talked with me on my show “Redacted Tonight: VIP” on RT America. Enjoy this excerpt from the interview.
LEE CAMP: Professor Wolff — thanks for joining me! Last month was, apparently, the worst December for the stock market since the year 1980. What’s going on here?
RICHARD WOLFF: A lot of things are coming to a head. Each one of them by itself might have gone by without this, but they’re too many.
To list major ones: The tariff war with China, Europe and the rest creates enormous uncertainty. It makes all the predictions and plans of corporations and entire countries uncertain. People are holding back. Number one.
Professor Wolff talked with me on my show “Redacte... (
show quote)
'Tariff war'. Love it! There is no 'tariff war! Yes, certain tariffs were raised on certain products in an attempt to highlight the one-sided trade taking place across certain borders, namely between the United States and China, and the United States and the European Union. As for China, products shipped out of China are heavily subsidized by the Communist regime over there, making trade with Chinese companies a very one-sided operation and causing American companies and workers untold hardships. Interestingly, now that there are import taxes being levied against these subsidized products, the Chinese government are suddenly open to renegotiating the terms of their relationship with American importers. Europe is a similar scenario, but on a much less grand scale.
Sicilianthing wrote:
Number two, the capitalist system that we’re all part of has a downturn on average every four to seven years. It’s been more than seven years since the last crash — 2008/9 —so everybody knows it’s coming.
It’s not a question of whether, we’ve never been able to overcome these kinds of instabilities in our system. So we’re overdue for one.
Hmm. A Marxist college professor who bad-mouths capitalism. Imagine that. He's spot on about the frequency of so-called downturns, but that's not because we have 'capitalism' in America. Far from it. It's because we have a central bank endowed with monopoly rights to the issuance of a fiat currency that the American people are forced to use and accept as payment by law.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-30/how-everything-bubble-will-endSicilianthing wrote:
And here’s another one that people don’t talk about. The big tax cut last December, 2017, gave an awful lot of money to the richest Americans and to big corporations. They had no incentive to plow that into their businesses, because Americans can’t buy any more than they already do. They’re up to their necks in debt and all the rest.
Horse Puckey!
Everybody got a tax cut. Not just 'the richest Americans'. Once again, Marxist disinformation being disseminated as fact. This guy has the gall to call himself an economist.
Sicilianthing wrote:
So what they did was to take the money they saved from taxes and speculate in the stock market, driving up the shares and so forth. Naive people thought that was a sign of economic health. It wasn’t. It was money bidding up the price of stock until the underlying economy was so far out of whack with the stock market that now everybody realizes that and there’s a rush to get out and boom, the thing goes down.
Very serious. The question now is how badly the underlying economy — jobs, incomes, and debts — will be impacted negatively by all of this stock market downturn.
So what they did was to take the money they saved ... (
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The stock market was artificially inflated for years by the Federal Reserve printing currency like there was no tomorrow. When the money base triples in a few short years, all that currency has to go somewhere, and with bank interest rates at or near zero, the stock market is the only obvious alternative. He's right about the negative impacts, but wrong about the causes, I think purposely so.
Sicilianthing wrote:
LC: You brought up predictions of an impending crash because it’s been seven or eight years, even JPMorgan Chase has told investors that the next crash, the crisis, they think will be in 2020. What does it mean when the largest financial firms in the world are saying, “Oh yeah! We’re just going to have another financial crisis around the corner”?
RW: It’s a wonderful sign. (Laughs) And by the way, JPMorgan Chase is not the only one. Goldman Sachs has done that, the International Monetary Fund, lots of the major players know it’s coming. The only disagree on exactly when which you can never know anyway. But here’s what it means, it means that they have accepted, as if it were like rain falling from the sky, that this economic system we have crashes every few years. As if it’s kind of in the cards. Unchangeable. Unaffected by anything we might do.
It’s kind of like giving up on the human desire not to be plunged into a crazy unemployment and cutback every few years that interrupts people’s lives, their educations, their savings for the future. I mean, we ought to have an economic situation, or at least a debate, about an economic system that works this way rather than simply accepting it in the manner of these predictions. As if there’s nothing we can do.
LC: You brought up predictions of an impending cra... (
show quote)
One more time: "I mean, we ought to have an economic situation, or at least a debate, about an economic system that works this way rather than simply accepting it in the manner of these predictions. As if there’s nothing we can do." That's right, we should. That should start and end with ending the Federal Reserve and leaving people to make their own decisions about what they will accept as money. End the Fed and the 'boom-bust cycle' ends with it.
I can't do this anymore. This guy has absolutely zero interest in making honest appraisals of the economic disaster about to break across the globe once again and he seems more interested in pushing his Marxist propaganda as some kind of panacea for the real distress being caused in our everyday lives. No wonder the colleges are producing socialists and outright communists by the cartload, these kids are being indoctrinated by the likes of 'Professor' Richard Wolff and his comrades.