"By the middle of the stage of financial capitalism, however, the organization of financial capitalism had evolved to a highly sophisticated level of security (paper asset) promotion and speculation which did not require any productive investment as a basis.Corporations were built upon corporations in the form of holding companies, so that securities were issued in huge quantities, bringing profitable fees and commissions to financial capitalists without any increase in economic production whatever.Indeed, these financial capitalists discovered that they could not only make killings out of the issuing of such securities, they could also make killings out of the bankruptcy of such corporations, through the fees and commissions of reorganization.A very pleasant cycle of flotation, bankruptcy, flotation, bankruptcy began to be practiced by these financial capitalists. The more excessive the flotation, the greater the profits, and the more imminent the bankruptcy."Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope
More Central Banker Questions
Q. Why is there no real recovery, and little to no reform? Why are the same old policy errors being replicated again and again? Why are we seeing the creation of yet another paper asset bubble without a robust growth in the middle class?
A. Because the moneyed interests are still in control, and they like things just as they are. This is a pleasant repetitive cycle of accumulation for the one percent.
Not only are the Banks not bearing the losses from their speculation, but their gambling is subsidized by the creation of money and the rules of taxation on the profits, and their losses are transferred back to the victims.
Why would anyone wish to change it, who is motivated by a fairly narrowly interested, almost pathological, desire for the personal accumulation of wealth and power?
Since when are sociopaths reasonably expected to be self-effacing, altruistic, and rationally self-regulating?
At the very heart of self-destructive evil is the inability to say 'enough.' I have enough power, money, land, sex, control, pleasure, wealth, admirers, etc.
If this type of obsession was not present to some extent in the human genome, history would not be littered with autocrats, dictators, and despots.
Alas, the untempered bent of history on a large scale is not to create egalitarian democracies where each person lives like an angel, but the excessive and destructive creations of autocrats, oppressions, and tyrannies.
