Thursday 18 September 2008

They should have been reading Freedom


I SAT in amazement and watched two financiers being interviewed by Jon Snow on Channel 4 News last night. Both were in a state of shock over the banking meltdown as though it was something that was totally unexpected.

The collapse of this house of cards has come as no surprise to those of us in the British National Party and it's worth looking back at a couple of reports from past issues of Freedom to see what we were saying at the time. In just five minutes of looking through my file of old newspapers, I found a couple of relative articles. This was the front page from July 2005 called "The Credit Card Time Bomb".

"HOW ON EARTH could a Government that took a country into an illegal war against the wishes of its people be re-elected to serve another five year term?
How could politicians that have presided over the dismantling of British industry and the off-shoring of British jobs to Eastern Europe and the Far East be returned to Westminster?
How could a politcial party that has actively encouraged the settlement of economic migrants in the country with all the strains and stresses this puts on our essential services and the population as a whole, get another manadate to continue for more of the same?
The answer is simple. It has happened because a majority of the British people have disengaged from the political system and turned inwards, just living for the present and thinking solely of themselves and their family.
They have been able to do things because outside pressures of every day life have been temporarily put on hold thanks to the availability of unlimited credit. The bigger picture of Britain's current situation and the looming crises ahead should be setting the alarm bells ringing in homes up and down the country, but at the moment, life can go on relatively undistrurbed thanks to the credit card and the short term escapism that it can buy.
Lloyds TSB, the largest unsecured lender in the UK, is just the latest bank to announce an increase in the number of customers facing repayment difficulties on credit cards and personal loans.
The average family now owes £19,000 on credit cards and this spralling debt crisis in Britain prompted the Government to create a £45 million fund to pay for hundreds of new debt advisers.
The money will largely be given to existing organisations, such as the Citizens Advice Bureau, which already offers debt counselling. It currently has 1,025 debt advisers who had to cope with 1.1 million debt inquiries last year, one of the biggest single problems that prompts people to visit its offices.
The debt charity, Consumer Credit Counselling Service, reported that 25,000 people rang its helpline for advice last month, almost double the number who had called in May the previous year.
The fuse that will ignite the credit card time bomb will be the end of the 0% balance transfer when credit card debit can no longer be shifted from card to card to get a zero interest payment. When that interest rate soars from 0% to 21% overnight, lives being lived on credit card debt will get that long-awaited reality check.
Tony Blair and Labour have survived because Dad can still go to his football, Mum can still go shopping and the children can still have the latest PS2 games. There's still the summer holiday to look forward to and Sky Television to come back to.
When all this ends it will be Labour's time of reckoning. When the cards have been stopped and repayment for the outstanding debt being taken directly from the wage packet, then people's minds will start focussing on what has happened to our country since Labour came to power.
Only then will politics in Britain become meaningful again and will the public really take on board what the different political parties are campaigning for.

More recently there was this offering from March of this year.

LAST month the world's central banks pumped £140 billion of liquidity into global markets. In America, the US Federal Reserve offered $140 billion in secured Government bonds in exchange for packages of American mortgages held by banks in trouble because of the credit crunch, which is in effect part-nationalising the mortgage market there. So now if someone defaults on one of those mortgages, it's the American taxpayer that foots the bill, not the bank which lent the money.
Here, the Bank of England made £10 billion available for banks unable to raise funds because of concerns over their viability to continue in business, and said it would consider providing another £10 billion next month. Remember, that this is your money being used to bail out private banks that have got into trouble because in their greed for higher returns they lent their money unwisely.
What is happening here is that money is being created rather than earned and that will bring the whole system cashing down. The first rule of good banking is that if a bank makes ill-advised loans it should have to pay the penalty for that bad judgement. The credibility of the banking system is built on sound investment, so if bad banks are propped up, then confidence in the system is eroded.
These desperate measures are being taken in a last ditch effort to maintain the supply of easy credit on which the growth of the global economy depends - but it is doomed to failure and that is something that should be welcomed by nationalists in every country across the globe.
Easy credit has certainly been the worst enemy of the people of this country. It has encouraged Britons to look inwards, to feather their own little comfort zone with material goods and luxury services, insulating themselves from the reality of what is happening in Britain today.
The awakening of the British people will spread across the country in direct response to the decline in the availability of easy credit. Once money has to be earned again, the fact that migrant workers are taking the lion's share of the jobs available will become THE political issue of the day and then there will only be one political party that will have the policies that the British people will be demanding - the British National Party.


As I said on Monday, these are historic times that we are currently living through, witnessing the collapse of global capitalism and the greed that is its hallmark. In a future where the British National Party has a significant input into how things are run, it will be 'small is beautiful' for any private enterprise and all of Britain's large scale undertakings will come from the State. That is the magic mix that makes nationalism the only way forward for our country.

2 comments:

Bert Rustle said...

Another take on government sponsored home ownership http://www.vdare.com/allen/homeownership.htm

Bert Rustle said...

Karl Denninger explains how the TARP bailout enables non-US banks to sell securities based on non-US mortgages to US banks which are then to be bailed out by the US taxpayer.

http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/596-The-TRUTH-About-The-Bailout.html

Peter Brimelow has an article sub-titled “ Another Case Of Collusion? It's Time To Take A Hard Look Washington As Well As Wall Street ” http://www.vdare.com/pb/080930_pujo.htm which has to telling quotes (and linked references)

... I really did co-write the first one, for Forbes magazine on Jan. 4, 1993. [The Hidden Clue] The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston had just published a study purporting to prove definitively that mortgage lenders were discriminating against minorities, the hot cause of the day. [Mortgage lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA data (Working Paper 92-7)]

But when my brilliant co-author, Leslie Spencer, asked the Boston Fed's research director, Alicia H. Munnell, what minority default rates were, she said proudly that census tract data showed that they were equal to whites. When Leslie pointed out that this actually proved there was no discrimination, because the lenders had somehow weeded out the credit risks down to the same acceptable level, Munnell was dumbfounded and had to concede (on tape) that she did not, in fact, have definitive proof of discrimination at all. ...


... Bottom line: LTCM seems to have been bailed out because it was well-connected. Its connections were significantly to Goldman Sachs, which in turn was extremely well-connected to federal government. Its former CEO, Robert Rubin, was Treasury Secretary at the time.

By an amazing coincidence, another former Goldman CEO, Henry Paulson, is orchestrating the current bailout.

Significantly, the books revealed that LTCM has made itself the "chosen instrument" of, for example, the Italian government in its efforts to groom the Italian bond market in order to join the Euro. LTCM repeatedly cornered the Italian bond market with the Italian government's tacit connivance, even though this was devastating to Italian small investors.

Dunbar wrote of LTCM that by the end of 1997: "Governments treated it as a valued partner, to be used whenever markets weren't efficient enough to achieve macroeconomic goals."[Inventing Money, P. 179]

My questions: What governments? What goals? Are subprime mortgages just a later example?

How long has this sort of collusion been going on?

After the Panic of 1907, the U.S. Congress set up the Pujo Committee to investigate the so-called "money trust."

Of course, that resulted in the Federal Reserve, which arguably is now part of the problem.
...