Thursday, February 28, 2013
Finally explained!
Well, the word finally isn't accurate, except on a personal level.
I've been looking since Sept 2008 for a plausible explanation of what happened then. It was clearly a coup, and it smelled like blackmail. Our Goldman-slave government and Goldman-slave media refused to even ask the question.
Oddly enough, the answer was published in a mainstream essay in May 2009, but I didn't see it until now. Thanks to the Econned blog for pointing to it.
The explanation, along with plenty of good background info, was in The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson, former head of IMF. His experience in dealing with third-world countries enabled him to understand this third-world country in a way that other observers couldn't or wouldn't:
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.Well, that's it then. Not explicit old-fashioned blackmail as I suspected, but extortion nonetheless. The foreign lenders who had been propping up our fake "economy" saw the game starting to collapse, and began pulling out the props. Goldman dba "US Government" had to satisfy them to keep the Ponzi rolling. ¶ 3:28 AM
