Financial Loan Quotes

I tell everyone never to take more than a fifteen-year fixed-rate loan, and never have a payment of over 25 percent of your take-home pay. That is the most you should ever borrow.

As my father used to say: "There are two sure ways to lose a friend, one is to borrow, the other to lend.

Debt is so ingrained into our culture that most Americans cannot even envision a car without a payment, a house without a mortgage, a student without a loan, and credit without a card. We

The bankers and financiers are badly overplaying their hands, again, and people are starting to catch on to the scam. Real wealth is tangible things produced with tangible effort. Loans made out of thin-air 'money' require no effort and are entirely ephemeral. But if those loans are used to acquire real ownership of real assets, then something has been exchanged for nothing and one party is getting screwed.

Debt is so ingrained into our culture that most Americans cannot even envision a car without a payment, a house without a mortgage, a student without a loan, and credit without a card.

Law firms can create environments for abusive relationships. This is especially true if an attorney has no self-direction, has no independent means of financial support, and has massive student loan indebtedness. You've basically made yourself an indentured servant.

The liabilities of the bank thus became its deposits (on which it paid interest) plus its reserve (on which it could collect no interest); its assets became its loans (on which it could collect interest).

If I loan money to a friend or relative, the relationship will be strained or destroyed. The only relationship that would be enhanced is the kind resulting from one party being the master and the other party a servant.

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

If the world was perfect and smooth we would want to pay everything for cash and never need to get loans. But having any other loans apart from school loan and a mortgage is a huge mistake, these are the only loans which can give you tax breaks and an opportunity to use your monthly cash flow to invest or build savings

poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channelled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.

Understanding the unique needs of each business is crucial in tailoring financial solutions that align with their objectives. It’s never a one size fits all when it comes to financing.

Loan restructuring may be explored as a collaborative solution between commercial bankers and businesses facing financial challenges. In the event of crises, it may be the best option for everyone.

Regulatory compliance is crucial in corporate lending, with financial institutions having to adhere to various laws and guidelines. It represents another set of costs and risks that lenders have to consider.

Refinancing options are considered to optimize a business's financial structure, potentially lowering interest costs and improving overall financial health. But it has to be to the advantage of both the borrower and the lender.

After finishing grad school, the Little Mermaid started a nonprofit to fight for the rights of mercitizens. She decided at that moment that she would never measure her success by financial gain, but instead only by how much good she contributed to the world. Money was irrelevant to her. Later that day she got her first student loan bill.

Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food. Most of the 12 million Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to pay the rent or gas bill, buy food, or meet other regular expenses. Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques—from overdraft fees to student loans for for-profit colleges—specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor.46 If the poor pay more for their housing, food, durable goods, and credit, and if they get smaller returns on their educations and mortgages (if they get returns at all), then their incomes are even smaller than they appear. This is fundamentally unfair.

Commercial lending is a vital component of the financial industry, supporting businesses in achieving their growth and operational goals. Without corporate lenders, the ability and rate at which businesses are able to grow would likely be considerably less.

Lenders assess a company's creditworthiness before approving a loan, considering factors like financial health and repayment ability. So if you’re leading a business, it’s really important for you and your team to be proactive about establishing good credit health for the business.

By loaning banks money for no interest, you’re really letting them into the casinos with the house’s money, aren’t you?

Giving the banks free interest loans is like the government subsidizing the banks. That's crazy!

Defaulting on a corporate loan can result in financial penalties and damage the business’s credit. You wanna avoid default by any moral means necessary.

Restructuring may occur if a business faces financial challenges, involving changes to loan terms. It can be a tedious process, but often times, better than the alternatives.

Corporate lending involves financial institutions providing loans to businesses – and since businesses are the lifeblood of the economy, corporate lending is really important.

In the simplest terms: When you buy stock you are buying a part ownership in a company. When you buy bonds you are loaning money to a company or government agency.

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence co-operative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.” Carroll Quigley

But money doesn’t work in the sense that labor or tangible capital expends effort to produce commodities. Credit is debt, and debt extracts interest. Financial salesmen who promise investors, “Make your money work for you” actually mean that society should work for the creditors — and that means for the banks that create credit. The effect is to turn the economic surplus into a flow of interest payments, diverting revenue from tangible capital investment. As the economy’s reproductive powers are dried up, the financialization process is kept going by easing credit terms and lending — not to produce more goods and services, but to bid up prices for the real estate, stocks and bonds being pledged as collateral for larger and larger loans.

A government always finds itself obliged to resort to inflationary measures when it cannot negotiate loans and dare not levy taxes, because it has reason to fear that it will forfeit approval of the policy it is following if it reveals too soon the financial and general economic consequences of that policy. Thus inflation becomes the most important psychological resource of any economic policy whose consequences have to be concealed; and so in this sense it can be called an instrument of unpopular, i.e. of anti-democratic, policy, since by misleading public opinion it makes possible the continued existence of a system of government that would have no hope of the consent of the people if the circumstances were clearly laid before them. That is the political function of inflation. It explains why inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.

There are pervasive and powerful marketing forces at work seeking to obscure the idea that such a choice exists. We are relentlessly bombarded with messages telling us that we absolutely need the latest trinket and that we simply must have the most fashionable of currently trending trash. We’re told that if you don’t have the money, no problem. That’s what credit cards and payday loans are for.

On its surface, the booming market in side bets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football: a benign, if silly, facsimile of investing. Alas, there was a difference between fantasy football and fantasy finance: When a fantasy football player drafts Peyton Manning to be on his team, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning. When Mike Burry bought a credit default swap based on a Long Beach Savings subprime–backed bond, he enabled Goldman Sachs to create another bond identical to the original in every respect but one: There were no actual home loans or home buyers. Only the gains and losses from the side bet on the bonds were real.

God, was I being too selfish? I could feel my eyes stinging . . . and my resolve crumbling. “Well, Lizzie. It sounds as if you have a decision to make,” my dad said with a sigh. “Dad . . . if you tell me to take this job, I will.” My dad just looked at me for a moment, considering. “Do you want this job?” “No!” I sniffled. “It would be terrible. But if you need me to—” “Then don’t you dare.” His words came out fierce—fiercer than I’ve ever heard in my entire life. “Your mother’s and my financial problems are our own. You don’t get to carry that burden. You’ll have your own as soon as your student loans come due, so don’t worry about us.” “But—” “You have dreams, Lizzie.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Goals. Now is the time in your life to pursue them. Don’t put them on hold. Because if you do, pretty soon you’ll be middle-aged with three children, working a job simply to pay the bills. And you’ll have forgotten what those dreams were.

The economic crisis and subsequent bailout exacerbated inequality by every metric and did not lead to significant reform of the financial sector. Bailed-out banks continued to foreclose on the homes of working-class families while refusing to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers. Under an Ivy League–educated African American president, African American family wealth had collapsed. In fact, it is common knowledge that African American and Latino homeowners were hit hardest by the 2008 financial crisis: by 2018, an African American family owned $5.00 in assets for every $100.00 owned by white families.6 Obama’s identity politics did not translate into economic policies that benefited minorities and working-class people.

unexpected increases in inflation are the de facto equivalent of outright default, for inflation allows all debtors (including the government) to repay their debts in currency that has much less purchasing power than it did when the loans were made.

If you already have the student loans or don’t want to get a loan in the first place, look into the “underserved areas” programs. The government will pay for school or pay off your student loans if you will go to work in an underserved area. These areas are typically rural or inner-city areas. Most of these programs are for law and medicine. If you are in nursing, work a few years in an inner-city hospital with the less fortunate, and you will get a free education, courtesy of the federal government.

His letters and the box may be connected with some other private transaction - a loan, perhaps, or share certificates, which are in the box.’ ‘And the wolfhound no doubt disapproved of the financial bargain. No, no, Watson, there is more in it than this.

When foreign military spending [bombing Korea and Vietnam] forced the U.S. balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in U.S. Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks have been holding some $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves for the past few years — and these loans have financed most of the U.S. Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades. Given the fact that about half of U.S. Government discretionary spending is for military operations — including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries — the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with U.S. buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.

bought one of the software programs, and worked the system. That particular software covered more than 300,000 available scholarships. She narrowed the database search until she had 1,000 scholarships to apply for. She spent the whole summer filling out applications and writing essays. She literally applied for 1,000 scholarships. Denise was turned down by 970, but she got 30, and those 30 scholarships paid her $38,000. She went to school for free while her next-door neighbor sat and whined that no money was available for school and eventually got a student loan.

Harvard was need-blind (that was significantly why he had chosen it), but even his generous financial aid package didn’t cover everything. He didn’t owe much, but he couldn’t conceive of asking Dong Hyun and Bong Cha to help with his loans, and he had not gone to Harvard to be a poor person.

Today, China alone holds more than $1 trillion in public and private American IOUs. Cumulative borrowing from abroad during the six years of the Bush administration amounts to some $5 trillion. Most likely these creditors will not call in their loans—if they ever did, there would be a global financial crisis.

The availability of federal grants and loans to help students meet rising tuition costs virtually ensures that those costs will rise. A college which kept tuition affordable could forfeit millions of dollars annually in federal money available to cover costs over and above what students can afford, according to a financial aid formula. Arguments

The Rothschilds are people we certainly would not attempt to defend given the rumors swirling around them of financial corruption and market manipulation in this era and in earlier eras. However, the way they are held up, by conspiracy extremists and other paranoid thinkers, to represent the Jewish community is an absolute joke. There are good and bad people in all races. The fact that there are many Jews in the banking sector is being used by neo-Nazis and anti-Semites to try to sway the uneducated to believe the Jews are the problem instead of banking shysters and banksters in general. Another important point relating to the current Jewish prominence in the banking world is there is a very obvious historical reason for it...Historically Jews did not have much freedom of choice when it came to their occupations. In fact, they were once forbidden by Christian authorities, and by some Muslim authorities, to pursue most regular occupations. They were, however, permitted and even encouraged to enter the banking industry because, in the medieval era at least, Christians/Muslims were not allowed to charge fellow-Christians/Muslims interest, but someone had to make loans – so the Jews were charged with the task. Jews were also permitted to slaughter animals – another equally unsavory job – and they were then despised and mocked by entire communities for being animal slaughterers and bankers.

The quicker you settle the debt,the quicker you can move forward with your life. Actions are bigger than words and get rid of that nasty debt". "When you are able to buy your home versus renting. The sky is the limit on how much you can and will prosper in years to come. "Good luck and start a budgeting today. Do not wait as no time will ever be the right time.

An IOU which remains for ever a contract between just two parties is nothing more than a loan. It is credit, but it is not money. It is when that IOU can be passed on to a third party—when it is able to be “negotiated” or “endorsed,” in the financial jargon—that credit comes to life and starts to serve as money. Money, in other words, is not just credit—but transferable credit.

I guess I'm a "single aristocrat" (dokushin kizoku). This is a category of people in their thirties who have a decent income, but are not obligated to spend it all on family. Usually a man in his thirties or forties would have a family, house, and loan. But we single aristocrats don't. So we spend all our money on hobbies. If I get married, I can't continue this life, unless my future wife is an otaku girl. If she's an otaku and a working woman, we can share space and save money, and thus have more money to spend on hobbies. I have no admiration for the regular "salary-man" (white collar corporate employee) life. I don't want to fully support a woman financially. I like independent women. I'm going to continue my hobby-centered lifestyle no matter what. --Yanai Jun

In just a few years, the time-tested practices of the entire lending industry had been abandoned under government pressure. One in five mortgages were now financed by subprime loans, and loans with no money down had risen to nearly 14% of all mortgages.39 Denying the laws of financial gravity was not a practice that could go on indefinitely, and it soon led to a tidal wave of home foreclosures across the United States.

The ARM, Adjustable Rate Mortgage, was invented in the early 1980s. Prior to that, those of us in the real estate business sold fixed-rate 7 or 8 percent mortgages. What happened? I was there in the middle of that disaster of an economy when fixed-rate mortgages went as high as 17 percent and the real estate world froze. Lenders paid out 12 percent on CDs but had money loaned out at 7 percent on hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages. They were losing money, and lenders don’t like to lose money. So the Adjustable Rate Mortgage was born, in which your interest rate goes up when the prevailing market interest rates go up. The ARM was born to transfer the risk of higher interest rates to you, the consumer. In the last several years, home mortgage rates have been at a thirty-year low. It is not wise to get something that adjusts when you are at the bottom of rates! The mythsayers always seem to want to add risk to your home, the one place you should want to make sure has stability. Balloon mortgages are even worse. Balloons pop, and it is always strange to me that the popping sound is so startling. Why don’t we expect it? It is in the very nature of balloons to pop. Wise financial people always move away from risk, and the balloon mortgage creates risk nightmares.

Consider the recent financial crisis and its link to faulty reward systems. President Bill Clinton's objective of increasing homeownership by rewarding potential home buyers and lenders is one example. The Clinton administration "went to ridiculous lengths" to increase homeownership in the United State, promoting "paper-thin down payments" and pushing lenders to give mortgage loans to unqualified buyers according to Business Week editor Peter Coy.

A return to classical bank policy would deem loans fraudulent and annul debts when creditors do not lend with any reasonable calculation of how the debt can be paid in the normal course of economic life. Loans made without such a calculation should be considered predatory. The natural check on such behavior is to permit mortgage debtors to walk away from their homes, free of the debts attached to them, letting title revert to the banks that over-lent.

You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons. First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation. Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract. Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made. So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home. What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit. By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.

Even as a former Banker I can see that the Blockchain and Ethereum are challenging the role of traditional banks. I think at some point, traditional banks will become irrelevant and ultimately non existent. Instead, the global standard of how people manage finances will be centered around the blockchain and apps built on Ethereum. Because of this, people and businesses will experience much more financial freedom. And that’s a good thing. So let these big banks collapse - something far better is going to replace them.

How exactly did the Dutch win the trust of the financial system? Firstly, they were sticklers about repaying their loans on time and in full, making the extension of credit less risky for lenders. Secondly, their country’s judicial system enjoyed independence and protected private rights – in particular private property rights. Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property. Imagine that you are the

Estimates suggest that $7.6 trillion of wealth is hidden in tax havens all over the world. The international finance sector acts as a 'circulation system for criminal money acquired through drug trafficking, terrorism, piracy, human trafficking, proliferation and tax evasion.' When we look at the international financial system, we don't find a free-market paradise. Instead, we find incredibly powerful institutions in both the public and private sector shaping the conditions faced by everyone else. Financial institutions 'dress themselves up in liberal trappings of the market, yet capture the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed their own profits.' Yet all this power is held without any democratic accountability. Politicians, technocrats, and financiers work together to decide everything from the interest rates we pay on our loans to who gets what when a state files for bankruptcy. If everyone had a say in determining how these rules were made and enforced, rather than just a privileged few, we'd live in a very different world.

One result of the federal government’s student financial aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nation’s colleges and universities.” Although paradoxical, this result could have been predicted from basic economic theory: when students can come up with more money for college, thanks to the government’s efforts, colleges can afford to increase their tuition. “The empirical evidence is consistent with that—federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation’s colleges and universities.

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings

Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key. Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing? They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […] Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.

The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation. “Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, ‘Turn off your tape recorders.’ Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people—in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.

Back in the 1980s, the original stated purpose of the mortgage-backed bond had been to redistribute the risk associated with home mortgage lending. Home mortgage loans could find their way to the bond market investors willing to pay the most for them. The interest rate paid by the homeowner would thus fall. The goal of the innovation, in short, was to make the financial markets more efficient. Now, somehow, the same innovative spirit was being put to the opposite purpose: to hide the risk by complicating it. The market was paying Goldman Sachs bond traders to make the market less efficient.

Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet. Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become. Yet, like

But derivatives did create new dangers. If you were making a loan, and you were confident you could hedge some of the credit risk of that loan, you might be tempted to make a larger and riskier loan. And the instruments themselves often had leverage embedded in them, so investors could be exposed to greater losses than they realized. Firms weren’t required by law to post any collateral (or “margin”) to make derivatives trades, and the market wasn’t requiring them to post much, either. This meant fewer shock absorbers for the system if those trades went bad. That’s why Warren Buffett had called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.

Here are my simple rules for identifying market tops and bottoms: 1. Market tops are relatively easy to recognize. Buyers generally become overconfident and almost always believe “this time is different.” It’s usually not. 2. There’s always a surplus of relatively cheap debt capital to finance acquisitions and investments in a hot market. In some cases, lenders won’t even charge cash interest, and they often relax or suspend typical loan restrictions as well. Leverage levels escalate compared to historical averages, with borrowing sometimes reaching as high as ten times or more compared to equity. Buyers will start accepting overoptimistic accounting adjustments and financial forecasts to justify taking on high levels of debt. Unfortunately most of these forecasts tend not to materialize once the economy starts decelerating or declining. 3. Another indicator that a market is peaking is the number of people you know who start getting rich. The number of investors claiming outperformance grows with the market. Loose credit conditions and a rising tide can make it easy for individuals without any particular strategy or process to make money “accidentally.” But making money in strong markets can be short-lived. Smart investors perform well through a combination of self-discipline and sound risk assessment, even when market conditions reverse.

Cockroaches are survivors. Turn on the lights and you will see a scattering of casino hosts in three thousand dollar bespoken suits, corporate fruit flies in empty suits, lawyer-class slime on their way to the courthouse to go shopping for other people's money, bankers shilling bad loans by bundling them together with good ones and sending them down the financial pipeline knowing that they stand protected by the political scum from every level of government who have risen to breathtaking heights of mediocrity, tossing a couple of bucks from the public till to the obedient myrmidons in exchange for their votes. While decaying empire crumble, cockroaches multiply among the ruins. - Bonjour Amigos

Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food. Most of the 12 million Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to pay the rent or gas bill, buy food, or meet other regular expenses. Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques—from overdraft fees to student loans for for-profit colleges—specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor.46 If the poor pay more for their housing, food, durable goods, and credit, and if they get smaller returns on their educations and mortgages (if they get returns at all), then their incomes are even smaller than they appear. This is fundamentally unfair. Those

Financial deregulation, easy credit and regulatory neglect combined with the degradation of our value system to create a religion of money and of power. The achievement of infinite wealth and fame became the ultimate standard, to be achieved at any price. The junk-bond peddlers and the raiders, the speculators and the savings-and-loan hustlers with their legions of consultants, their lobbyists and their friendly politicians, turned this country into a vast casino. Crimes were committed, crimes against the entire nation. These crimes will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. They have also undermined confidence in a system that was built up over generations. The nation will need a lengthy recovery from this madness.

But you know what? I’m waving to you from the shores of forty-three and the months are peeling away. It’s looking extremely likely that I’ll still be paying off my student loans when I’m forty-four. Has this ruined my life? Has it kept me from pursuing happiness, my writing career, and ridiculously expensive cowboy boots? Has it compelled me to turn away from fantastically financially unsound expenditures on fancy dinners, travel, “organic” shampoo, and high-end preschools? Has it stopped me from adopting cats who immediately need thousands of dollars in veterinary care or funding dozens of friends’ artistic projects on Kickstarter or putting $20 bottles of wine on my credit card or getting the occasional pedicure? It has not.

It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France.

The danger, of course, is that it is not always easy to distinguish between a default that was inevitable—in the sense that a country is so highly leveraged and so badly managed that it takes very little to force it into default—and one that was not—in the sense that a country is fundamentally sound but is having difficulties sustaining confidence because of a very temporary and easily solvable liquidity problem. In the heat of a crisis, it is all too tempting for would-be rescuers (today notably multilateral lenders such as the IMF) to persuade themselves that they are facing a confidence problem that can be solved with short-term bridge loans, when in fact they are confronting a much more deeply rooted crisis of solvency and willingness to pay

The Debt Snowball method requires you to list all your debts in order of smallest payoff balance to largest. List all your debts except your home; we will get to it in another step. List all of your debts—even loans from Mom and Dad or medical debts that have zero interest. I don’t care if there is interest or not. I don’t care if some have 24 percent interest and others 4 percent. List the debts smallest to largest! If you were so fabulous with math, you wouldn’t have debt, so try this my way. The only time to pay off a larger debt sooner than a smaller one is some kind of big-time emergency such as owing the IRS and having them come after you, or in situations where there will be a foreclosure if you don’t pay it off. Otherwise, don’t argue about it; just list the debts smallest to largest.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

Inefficiency. A centralized financial system has many inefficiencies. Perhaps the most egregious example is the credit card interchange rate that causes consumers and small businesses to lose up to 3 percent of a transaction's value with every swipe due to the payment network oligopoly's pricing power. Remittance fees are 5–7 percent. Time is also wasted in the two days it takes to “settle” a stock transaction (officially transfer ownership). In the Internet age, this seems utterly implausible. Other inefficiencies include costly (and slow) transfer of funds, direct and indirect brokerage fees, lack of security, and the inability to conduct microtransactions, many of which are not obvious to users. In the current banking system, deposit interest rates remain very low and loan rates high because banks need to cover their brick-and-mortar costs. The insurance industry provides another example.

Bank-friendly writers and lobbyists fostered a myth that the economy needed its investment banks to remain solvent to keep the economy functioning. But many former officials, including Bair, SIGTARP‘s Neil Barofsky, and Reagan Administration budget director David Stockman, rejected the claims that public guarantees for reckless bank loans was needed to protect insured depositors. Retail savings and checking accounts were never threatened by the bad gambles that banks made. But this myth had to be promoted in order for Paulson, Geithner Bernanke and other bank protectors to persuade Congress to overrule Bair and make government (“taxpayers”) pay. Their aim was to save the banks from being nationalized, and to protect bankers from being prosecuted for fraud or reining in the exorbitant salaries and bonuses they had given themselves. No attempt was made to change the system that had led to the crash. If

You don’t mention what you’d like to study, but I assure you there are many ways to fund a graduate education. I know a whole lot of people who did not go broke getting a graduate degree. There is funding for tuition remission at many schools, as well as grants, paid research, and teaching assistantships, and—yes—the offer of more student loans. Perhaps more importantly in your case, there are numerous ways to either cancel portions of your student loan debt or defer payment. Financial difficulty, unemployment, attending school at least half-time (i.e., graduate school!), working in certain professions, and serving in the Peace Corps or other community service jobs are some ways that you would be eligible for debt deferment or cancellation. I encourage you to investigate your options so you can make a plan that brings you peace of mind. There are many websites that will elucidate what I have summarized above.

To enable lending to proceed when the IMF’s sustainability criteria were not met, its bureaucrats designed the “systemic risk waiver.” It was a model of circular reasoning that might well be taught to philosophy students. “Severe debt crises all carry the risks of systemic spillovers,” notes Schadler. The global financial system was deemed to be endangered if a debt payment was missed or a haircut imposed on bondholders, because “confidence” was threatened. Any haircut for bondholders might cause panic and “contagion.” So it doesn’t matter what IMF economists say regarding debt sustainability. The IMF is committed to preserving “confidence” at all costs – confidence that the troika will lend governments enough to pay their bondholders and speculators in full (but not pension funds). The systemic risk waiver means that no bondholder should lose. Labor and taxpayers must pay for the losses from risky loans, or else there will be “contagion.

Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans’ generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes.

These crises are really a form of domestic default that governments employ in countries where financial repression is a major form of taxation. Under financial repression, banks are vehicles that allow governments to squeeze more indirect tax revenue from citizens by monopolizing the entire savings and payments system, not simply currency. Governments force local residents to save in banks by giving them few, if any, other options. They then stuff debt into the banks via reserve requirements and other devices. This allows the government to finance a part of its debt at a very low interest rate; financial repression thus constitutes a form of taxation. Citizens put money into banks because there are few other safe places for their savings. Governments, in turn, pass regulations and restrictions to force the banks to relend the money to fund public debt. Of course, in cases in which the banks are run by the government, the central government simply directs the banks to make loans to it.

The math is revealing. The typical American with a $50,000 annual income would normally have an $850 house payment and a $495 car payment, with an additional $180 payment on the second car. Then there is a $165 student-loan payment; and the average credit-card debt is about $12,000, making those monthly payments around $185 per month. Also, this typical household will have other miscellaneous debt on things like furniture, stereos, or personal loans on which they pay an additional $120. All these payments total $1,995 per month. If this family were to invest that instead of sending it to the creditors, they would be cash mutual-fund millionaires in just fifteen years! (After fifteen years, it gets really exciting. They’ll have $2 million in five more years, $3 million in three more years, $4 million in two and a half more years, and $5.5 million in two more years. So they will have $5.5 million after twenty-eight years.) Keep in mind, this is with an average income, which means many of you make more than this!

Recognizing how most great fortunes had been built up in predatory ways, through usury, war lending and political insider dealings to grab the Commons and carve out burdensome monopoly privileges led to a popular view of financial magnates, landlords and hereditary ruling elite as parasitic by the 19th century, epitomized by the French anarchist Proudhon’s slogan “Property as theft.” Instead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with the economy of production and consumption, today’s financial parasitism siphons off income needed to invest and grow. Bankers and bondholders desiccate the host economy by extracting revenue to pay interest and dividends. Repaying a loan – amortizing or “killing” it – shrinks the host. Like the word amortization, mortgage (“dead hand” of past claims for payment) contains the root mort, “death.” A financialized economy becomes a mortuary when the host economy becomes a meal for the financial free luncher that takes interest, fees and other charges without contributing to production.

Oligarchy: Rule by the few, usually the richest One Percent. In Aristotle’s political theory, oligarchy is the stage into which democracy evolves, and which ends up becoming a hereditary aristocracy. “The essence of oligarchic rule,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life ... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors ... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.” The word “oligarchy” has been applied to Russia’s kleptocrats who obtained natural resources and other assets under Boris Yeltsin, most notoriously in the 1994-1996 “bank loans for shares” insider deals. It also applies to Latin American and other client oligarchies that concentrate wealth in the financial and propertied class at the top of the pyramid. However, U.S. media vocabulary defines any country as a democracy as long as it supports the Washington Consensus and U.S. diplomacy.

Docketing a judgment slapped it on a tenant’s credit report. If the tenant came to own any property in Milwaukee County in the next decade, the docketed judgment placed a lien on that property, severely limiting a new homeowner’s ability to refinance or sell.14 To landlords, docketing a judgment was a long-odds bet on a tenant’s future. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line a tenant would want to get her credit in order and would approach her old landlord, asking to repay the debt. “Debt with interest,” the landlord could respond, since money judgments accrued interest at an annual rate that would be the envy of any financial portfolio: 12 percent. For the chronically and desperately poor whose credit was already wrecked, a docketed judgment was just another shove deeper into the pit. But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or purchasing a first home—for that tenant, it was a real barrier on the already difficult road to self-reliance and security.

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

The subprime market tapped a segment of the American public that did not typically have anything to do with Wall Street: the tranche between the fifth and the twenty-ninth percentile in their credit ratings. That is, the lenders were making loans to people who were less creditworthy than 71 percent of the population. Which of these poor Americans were likely to jump which way with their finances? How much did their home prices need to fall for their loans to blow up? Which mortgage originators were the most corrupt? Which Wall Street firms were creating the most dishonest mortgage bonds? What kind of people, in which parts of the country, exhibited the highest degree of financial irresponsibility? The default rate in Georgia was five times higher than that in Florida, even though the two states had the same unemployment rate. Why? Indiana had a 25 percent default rate; California, only 5 percent, even though Californians were, on the face of it, far less fiscally responsible. Why? Vinny and Danny flew down to Miami, where they wandered around empty neighborhoods built with subprime loans, and saw with their own eyes how bad things were. “They’d

In November 1914, the British government issued the first war bond, aiming to raise £350 million from private investors at an interest rate of 4.1% and a maturity of ten years. Surprisingly, the bond issue was undersubscribed, and the British public purchased less than a third of the targeted sum. To avoid publicizing this failure, the Bank of England granted funds to its chief cashier and his deputy to purchase the bonds under their own names. The Financial Times, ever the bank’s faithful mouthpiece, published an article proclaiming the loan was oversubscribed. John Maynard Keynes worked at the Treasury at the time, and in a secret memo to the bank, he praised them for what he called their “masterly manipulation.” Keynes’s fondness for surreptitious monetary arrangements would go on to inspire thousands of economic textbooks published worldwide. The Bank of England had set the tone for a century of central bank and government collusion behind the public’s back. The Financial Times would only issue a correction 103 years later,7 when this matter was finally uncovered after some sleuthing in the bank’s archives by some enterprising staff members and published on the bank’s blog.8

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

The math is revealing. The typical American with a $50,000 annual income would normally have an $850 house payment and a $495 car payment, with an additional $180 payment on the second car. Then there is a $165 student-loan payment; and the average credit-card debt is about $12,000, making those monthly payments around $185 per month. Also, this typical household will have other miscellaneous debt on things like furniture, stereos, or personal loans on which they pay an additional $120. All these payments total $1,995 per month. If this family were to invest that instead of sending it to the creditors, they would be cash mutual-fund millionaires in just fifteen years! (After fifteen years, it gets really exciting. They’ll have $2 million in five more years, $3 million in three more years, $4 million in two and a half more years, and $5.5 million in two more years. So they will have $5.5 million after twenty-eight years.) Keep in mind, this is with an average income, which means many of you make more than this! If you are thinking that you don’t have that many payments so your math won’t work, you missed the point. If you make $50,000 and have fewer payments, you have a head start, since you already have more control of your income than most people.

The American share of the crisis began with grossly improper mortgages provided to wholly unqualified borrowers, all directly caused and encouraged by government distortion of and interference in the market. The government’s market deformation and market intervention was in turn the result of two factors: political favouritism and Leftist ideology, on the one hand; and upon the other, corruption: the blatant cooption of such Friends of Angelo as Mr Dodd and of such bien-pensant Lefties as Mr Frank. The stability and efficiency of any market is directly proportional to the amount and trustworthiness of market information. The Yank Congress, for blatantly partisan and ideological reasons, gave out false information to the market, pushing lenders into making bad loans and giving out, with the appropriate winks and nudges, that Fannie (will Americans ever realise how that sounds) and Freddie, imperfectly quangoised, were ‘really just as good as the Treasury’ and were in any case ‘too big to [be let] fail’: which, as it happens, was untrue. Similarly, this moronic mantra of ‘too big to fail’ was chanted desperately and loudly to drown out the warning sounds of various financial institutions on the brink and of the automobile industry. Incomprehensible sums of public money were thrown at these corporations so that they could avoid bankruptcy, and have succeeded only in privatising profit whilst socialising risk.

As a candidate, Trump’s praise of Putin had been a steady theme. In the White House, his fidelity to Russia’s president had continued, even as he lambasted other world leaders, turned on aides and allies, fired the head of the FBI, bawled out his attorney general, and defenestrated his chief ideologue, Steve Bannon. It was Steele’s dossier that offered a compelling explanation for Trump’s unusual constancy vis-à-vis Russia. First, there was Moscow’s kompromat operation against Trump going back three decades, to the Kryuchkov era. If Trump had indulged in compromising behavior, Putin knew of it. Second, there was the money: the cash from Russia that had gone into Trump’s real estate ventures. The prospect of a lucrative deal in Moscow to build a hotel and tower, a project that was still being negotiated as candidate Trump addressed adoring crowds. And then there were the loans. These had helped rescue Trump after 2008. They had come from a bank that was simultaneously laundering billions of dollars of Russian money. Finally, there was the possibility that the president had other financial connections to Moscow, as yet undisclosed, but perhaps hinted at by his missing tax returns. Together, these factors appeared to place Trump under some sort of obligation. One possible manifestation of this was the president’s courting of Putin in Hamburg. Another was the composition of his campaign team and government, especially in its first iteration. Wherever you looked there was a Russian trace.

Probably my favorite method of funding school, other than saving for it, is scholarships. There is a dispute as to how many scholarships go unclaimed every year. Certainly there are people on the Web who will hype you on this subject. However, legitimately there are hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarships given out every year. These scholarships are not academic or athletic scholarships either. They are of small- to medium-sized dollar amounts from organizations like community clubs. The Rotary Club, the Lions Club, or the Jaycees many times have $250 or $500 per year they award to some good young citizen. Some of these scholarships are based on race or sex or religion. For instance, they might be designed to help someone with Native American heritage get an education. The lists of these scholarships can be bought online, and there are even a few software programs you can purchase. Denise, a listener to my show, took my advice, bought one of the software programs, and worked the system. That particular software covered more than 300,000 available scholarships. She narrowed the database search until she had 1,000 scholarships to apply for. She spent the whole summer filling out applications and writing essays. She literally applied for 1,000 scholarships. Denise was turned down by 970, but she got 30, and those 30 scholarships paid her $38,000. She went to school for free while her next-door neighbor sat and whined that no money was available for school and eventually got a student loan.

In their ongoing war against evil capitalists, some vengeful Democrats have their eyes on banks, which they blame for making millions of loans that resulted in foreclosures and the 2008 financial crisis. Never mind that it was progressives who forced the government to make these loans to low-income borrowers with poor credit ratings through the Community Reinvestment Act and anti-discrimination laws. They promoted minority home ownership without regard to the owners’ ability to repay, and the result was catastrophic. But being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry—just pass a misguided policy and blame everyone else when it predictably fails. Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, emboldened by Democrats recapturing control of the House, issued a stern warning to bankers before the 2019 session began. “I have not forgotten” that “you foreclosed on our houses,” she said, and “had us sign on the line for junk and for mess that we could not afford. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”62 How’s that for good governance—using her newfound power as incoming chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee to punish bank executives for the disaster she and her fellow Democrats caused? Waters is also targeting corporations for allegedly excluding minorities and women from executive positions. Forming a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion, she immediately held a hearing to discuss the importance of examining the systematic exclusion of women, people of color, persons with disabilities, gays, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups.63 Why concentrate on policies to stimulate economic growth and improve people’s standards of living when you can employ identity politics to demonize your opponents?

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

It is the custom in Germany for students to pass from one university to another during the course of their studies—a custom, incidentally, which no other country has. But it would be false to assume that this variety in instruction is a safeguard afainst uniformity of outlook, for although the professors of the various universities fight among themselves, they are all, fundamentally and at heart, in complete agreement. I came to realise this clearly through my contacts with the economists. This must have been about 1929. At that time we published a paper on certain aspects of the economic problem. Immediately a whole company of national economists of all sorts, and from a variety of universities, joined forces and signed a circular in which they unaminously condemned our economic proposals. I made one attempt to have a serious discussion with one of the most renowned of them, and one who was regarded by his colleagues as a revolutionary in economic thought Zwiedineck. The results were disastrous! At the time the State had floated a loan of two million seven hundred thousand marks for the construction of a road. I told Zwiedineck that I regarded this way of financing a project as foolish in the extreme. The life of the road in question would be some fifteen years ; but the amortisation of the capital involved would continue for eighty years. What the Government was really doing was to evade an immediate financial obligation by transferring the charges to the men of the next generation and, indeed, of the generation after. I insisted that nothing could be more unsound, and that what the Government should really do was to take radical steps to reduce the rate of interest and thus to render capital more fluid. I next argued that the gold standard, the fixing of rates of exchange and so forth were shibboleths which I had never regarded and never would regard as weighty and immutable principles of economy. Money, to me, was simply a token of exchange for work done, and its value depended absolutely on the value of the work accomplished. Where money did not represent services rendered, I insisted, it had no value at all. Zwiedineck was horrified and very excited. Such ideas, he declared, would upset the accepted economic principles of the entire world, and the putting of them into practice would cause a breakdown of the world's political economy. When, later, after our assumption of power, I put my theories into practice, the economists were not in the least discountenanced, but calmly set to work to prove by scientific argument that my theories were, indeed, sound economy !

Collateral Capacity or Net Worth? If young Bill Gates had knocked on your door asking you to invest $10,000 in his new company, Microsoft, could you get your hands on the money? Collateral capacity is access to capital. Your net worth is irrelevant if you can’t access any of the money. Collateral capacity is my favorite wealth concept. It’s almost like having a Golden Goose! Collateral can help a borrower secure loans. It gives the lender the assurance that if the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender can repossess the collateral. For example, car loans are secured by cars, and mortgages are secured by homes. Your collateral capacity helps you to avoid or minimize unnecessary wealth transfers where possible, and accumulate an increasing pool of capital providing accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding. It is the amount of money that you can access through collateralizing a loan against your money, allowing your money to continue earning interest and working for you. It’s very important to understand that accessibility, control and uninterrupted compounding are the key components of collateral capacity. It’s one thing to look good on paper, but when times get tough, assets that you can’t touch or can’t convert easily to cash, will do you little good. Three things affect your collateral capacity: ① The first is contributions into savings and investment accounts that you can access. It would be wise to keep feeding your Golden Goose. Often the lure of higher return potential also brings with it lack of liquidity. Make sure you maintain a good balance between long-term accounts and accounts that provide immediate liquidity and access. ② Second is the growth on the money from interest earned on the money you have in your account. Some assets earn compound interest and grow every year. Others either appreciate or depreciate. Some accounts could be worth a great deal but you have to sell or close them to access the money. That would be like killing your Golden Goose. Having access to money to make it through downtimes is an important factor in sustaining long-term growth. ③ Third is the reduction of any liens you may have against these accounts. As you pay off liens against your collateral positions, your collateral capacity will increase allowing you to access more capital in the future. The goose never quit laying golden eggs – uninterrupted compounding. Years ago, shortly after starting my first business, I laughed at a banker that told me I needed at least $25,000 in my business account in order to borrow $10,000. My business owner friends thought that was ridiculously funny too. We didn’t understand collateral capacity and quite a few other things about money.

It felt like fate when I first encountered the automated trading system that promised to transform small investments into substantial wealth over time. The marketing was aggressive, bombarding my social media feeds with images of people lounging on exotic beaches, driving fancy cars, and celebrating their newfound financial freedom. WhatsApp info:+12723328343 As a recent college graduate struggling to make ends meet, I was desperate for a way out of my financial rut, and the allure of easy money was too tempting to ignore. On a whim, I decided to take the plunge. I borrowed from my meager savings and even took out a small loan to fund my excitement. The rush I felt when signing up was like nothing I had ever experienced—an intoxicating thrill, like hopping onto a rollercoaster at full speed. At first, everything seemed to be going exactly as promised. My investment seemed to grow almost overnight, doubling and tripling in value.  My skepticism began to fade, replaced by a sense of confidence and hope for the future. I even shared my success with friends and family, excitedly telling them about the platform that was going to change my life. I imagined a future free from financial worries, a life of luxury and freedom, all thanks to this “revolutionary” trading system. But soon, a familiar sense of unease began to settle in. What had been an impressive surge in profits suddenly plateaued, and I found myself facing unexpected hurdles when trying to withdraw my funds. Pop-up messages about my “account needing an upgrade” and “market tightening” explained away the issues, but the discomfort grew. Still, I convinced myself that success required patience and continued to hold out hope that the system would recover. As weeks turned into months, my investment continued to dwindle. The once-promising account balance plummeted, and each attempt to reach customer support went unanswered. The promises of easy wealth had turned into an unsettling nightmare. Email info: Adwarerecoveryspecialist@auctioneer. net Desperate for answers, I began scouring the internet for any information or advice. That’s when I stumbled across reviews of ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST , a service that seemed to specialize in helping people like me recover lost funds from fraudulent platforms. I felt a glimmer of hope as I read about others who had managed to retrieve their investments with the help of ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST. Perhaps, after all, there was still a way out of this mess. I reached out to their team, and to my relief, they were able to assist me in recovering a portion of the money I thought I had lost for good. ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST gave me the guidance and support I needed to navigate this complicated process, helping me regain control of a situation that had seemed hopeless. Their professionalism and expertise allowed me to salvage what I could, and for that, I am incredibly grateful.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

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