Wednesday, November 5, 2014

The worldwide Battle for economic Justice

Perhaps the time has come to say loudly what has been taboo till now. It is that the central bankers of the major powers regularly conspire to favor some people over others, and they manipulate the financial systems in such a way as to make these people rich. The bankers do that for the good reason that without such “remedies” the economies tend to stagnate with the nefarious consequences that everyone dreads.

The bankers do not make a distinction between people because of their race, color of skin, religion or what have you. No. The people that the bankers favor are those driven by the entrepreneurial spirit, no matter what they look like. Of course, there is the true entrepreneurial spirit, and there is the fake one … and so, a number of fakes manage to benefit from the bankers' largess when they shouldn't. But this is a price that the bankers are willing to pay to help the economies of the world move forward, grow and renew themselves.

To understand why this is the case, and what the bankers do to make things work, we need to get a sense as to how economies grew before the invention of fiat money. Well, this may come as a shock to some people, but progress was never achieved on this planet without a dose of injustice. The reality is that things do stagnate when everything is placid. They start moving – up or down, in a good direction or a bad one – when someone stirs the pot and causes ripples to form. And this is something that is usually done at someone else's expense.

In the distant past, powerful men or groups of them pushed societies out of their lethargy by exploiting the people they looted or enslaved. Later, they offered the people they drafted into their cause a level of personal security, and a way – however modest it may have been – to feed their families. They asked in return for the loyalty and hard work of their “subjects.” Then came the idea of employing people for wages, a development that gave birth to the principle of an exchange between the labor of the workers and the compensation of the employers … with the possibility of negotiation between the two.

With the rise of the unions and the labor laws to protect the workers from exploitation, the employers who are true entrepreneurs, found themselves at such a disadvantage, they lost the appetite to make moves such as the one undertaken by Henry Ford when he decided, on his own, to pay his worker enough so that they may buy what they produce. Worse, many entrepreneurs saw no point in expanding their businesses beyond the ability to make a decent living … and be happy with that. The trouble is that when a culture reaches this point, and sees the attitude spread massively throughout society, it is ready to descend into the kind of stagnation that has kept many ancient cultures in a permanent state of placidity.

But how do individuals who may be endowed with the true entrepreneurial spirit know it is worth taking a risk, and forge ahead with new ideas? They do it by comparing their current state with the promise of what they might become if they took the risk. If what they have now assures them a steady existence and no risk of falling back, most will prefer it to the promise of a higher level of existence but with the risk of losing everything and getting back to square one. Well, the central bankers found a way to make these people take the risk, and not worry about getting back to square one.

This is what the bankers did. They, in effect, told the entrepreneurs: If you are already rich and have properties, go ahead and bundle those properties into commercial papers. We, the central banks, will buy these papers and give you the cash you can invest in high growth areas of the world, or deposit with us for a modest return. And while this is going on, the money supply will increase with none of it going to the rest of society. The move will automatically make you wealthier than before without you having to take any unnecessary risk. So now, you should be able to develop the appetite for taking a limited amount of calculated risk.

America and China did that for a while then passed the baton to the Europeans and the Japanese who are now engaged in doing quantitative easing. It is unjust, but it is the only way to get the economies off their placid stagnation mode; to move forward, grow and renew themselves.

Where the experiment will go from here is anyone's guess. But there are things we should watch for because a transformation is coming, and we must be prepared for it.