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From: John Hemington
From: John Hemington
These days it seems as if threats of various enormity abound almost everywhere. Cable news seems never to stop selling fear and loathing – regardless of which political agenda is being cast as the evil one. But there is one very real threat that few media of any stripe are reporting and it may be, in many respects, the most serious of all. That is the accumulation derivatives by the four major Wall Street mega-banks as detailed in the attached article by Pam and Russ Martens of Wall Street on Parade. One bank, Citi, holds derivatives with a notional value of $54.8 trillion dollars. To get an idea of just how problematic this is, the global GDP of all nations is estimated to be only $75.6 trillion in notional value. As stated in the article, there is no way that there could ever be sufficient counter-parties to cover this in the event of another financial crash. More importantly, little or nothing has been done since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 (GFC) to correct the problems in the financial industry which led to the 2008 crash. Dodd-Frank when passed was too little, too late and it has since then diluted and de-toothed at the behest of these financial titans. When the next crash comes, and it almost certainly will, since the same basic players remain in charge both in and out of government, it is likely to be far more devastating and destructive than the one which preceded it.
If there was not a sufficient threat from nuclear war given the insane policies put in place by the Trump administration, not to mention the two previous administrations, cataclysmic financial crises almost always lead to global warfare. We got lucky in 2008 because the financial bleeding was stopped, but the non-financial victims were never made whole as were the bankers who got to keep all of their ill-gotten gains as well as all of their power to continue operating multi-trillion dollar gambling operations – which is what derivatives really are. Unfortunately, the main stream media will almost never pay attention to the criminals in high places and instead focus on crime in the streets. As a result, it is likely that, as before, the crisis will almost certainly find most Americans unprepared (though it is certainly difficult for one to know how to prepare for such a collapse). Because the victims of the 2008 GFC have never been made whole and have since been ignored and/or denigrated by both major political parties, we have the rise of right-wing nationalism and the election of a very dangerous president with little capacity for restraint or for rational decision making. As such these are extremely volatile times in which almost any event can lead to catastrophic consequences for us all.
John
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