Its obvious that the reason for our current financial crisis is the unlimited expansion of credit. Real estate financiers were forced to take on sub-prime loans. Investment funds bought up companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars on credit, putting up as security the very same companies. Hedge funds traded everything under the sun with very high leverage that you used to see only in forex markets. The US government even started a war on credit and ran up unheard-of new debt. In other words - everything crashed because of cheap credit. As soon as cheap credit was removed, the markets contracted and we witnessed a global game of musical chairs to see in what order the players would collapse.
But where did the cheap credit come from? Who is to blame? I'll tell you who - Greenspan - the man responsible for dropping interest to zero between 2000 and 2003.
But why did Greenspan do this? He was fighting a recession caused by Enron and all the other companies that were fudging their numbers in the 90's.
But why did the companie fudge their numbers? Their boards and stockholders screamed about how the dot-coms are growing on paper without profit or even sales! Increase profits quarterly! Buy-back your stock! And then the dot-coms went belly-up...
So why did the dot-coms boom initially? Well! At the time the entire economy was stagnating, interest rates were being lowered, and new money was injected into venture capital companies as borrowing costs went downhill. As interest rates began to increase afterward, so came the crash of the dot-coms. 9-11 was only the final nail in the coffin to finish this process.
And why were interest rates in the early 90's low? That was their way to fight recession, and this terrible recession still managed to last a while! Nothing seemed to help.
Why was there a recession? The stock market collapsed, and since many companies were/are/ financed by the sale of junk bonds, helping corporate raiders takeover and liquidate other companies. Michael Milken was responsible for a lot of these junk bonds, and since these are considered as investment vehicles, they almost escaped without government regulation and oversight. And in general there was a boom of investments in the market.
So ... what are bonds and savings and loans? It can't be ALL Milken's fault!!! No, he only took advantage of the situation, and it was Ronald Reagan that deregulated the industry and helped him. Paul Volker also helped - first he raised interest rates through the roof, then relaxed them and money started coming in in droves.
Did Reagan and Volker go crazy or something? Nothing of the kind! They were fighting stagflation, that itself came from the oil embargo - the arabs cut off the supply and commodity oil prices jumped through the roof (at least through the roof as they knew it back then!).
So why did the arabs start an embargo against the west? That was their little passive-agressive attempt at getting revenge against Israel for the trouncing it gave them in '67 and '73.
So - is Israel responsible for our crisis??? Hardly, because then its England's fault for promising to grant them a homeland in 1916, although most Jews had been driven from Israel almost two thousand years ago, and many arabs lived there. How can there not be arguments about who owns the land when two neighbors live on one plot of land?
Everything would still have been ok, with Jews having returned to their homeland. But - they didn't leave their lands voluntarily. They were driven from Israel by Roman emperor Hadrian in 132 AD, ostensibly for their rebellion led by Simon Bar Cochba, and this rebellion caused almost two thousand years of wandering the world, looking for a homeland. Even the later misuse of the name of the land was a backhanded slap by the Romans - calling Israel Palestine in honor of the Philistines - a misnomer that still keeps blood running in the streets.
What was Hadrian's problem with the Jews? Or more appropriately - what was their issue with Hadrian? It seems that Adrian renamed Jerusalem, and on the ruins of the Second Temple put up a statue of his thirteen-year-old lover Antinous, whom he had deitified and forced Israel to revere as a God. A worse way to tread on the religious views of Israeli Jews could hardly be imagined.
So why would Hadrian do something so shocking and antagonistic of the residents of Israel? Its all because he was in a rotten mood. That year he and Antinous took a trip to Egypt - and Antinous drowned in the Nile. Adrian had him deitified, a rare step for non-family, and had statues erected in his honor all over the empire. He finally took his anger out on the Jews.
So now we get to what's really behind our economic crash - Antinous! And so - the modern world crumbles - and all because of one gay kid sleeping with the emperor! Damn that guy! Why the hell couldn't he learn to swim?!?!?!?!?!?
www.acmewomen.com
<< Back to article
