Max Keiser in Parliament

Russia Today is one of the few decent news stations left in the media, and its financial correspondent is Max Keiser; his programmes like the Keiser Report, which he presents almost daily with his wife Stacey Herbert, are very interesting and alternative compared to the finance coverage you'll see on the BBC or CNN. He's very radical indeed compared to most other popular economists; he's a very harsh critic of state bailouts and "austerity measures" (a very creative Orwellianism that!) and he's not scared to use words like "banksters". He supports the Gold Standard system and he's very keen to endorse BitCoin. He's even created his own currency called MaxCoin. He has called for the arrest, imprisonment, and even execution... jokingly of course... of the heads of the major banks. His style is loud, humourous and lighthearted, but with a tone of bittersweet pessimism sometimes bordering on the apocalyptic. See here for his website: http://www.maxkeiser.com/. In April this year he appeared at a live event in Parliament which was hosted by George Galloway, and it attracted a huge audience and was filmed, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CioqqfBdX6g.

An acquaintance of mine attended this event and told me what the atmosphere was like. A lot of the audience in the queue outside were wearing Guy Fawkes masks; how Parliamentary security handled that I can't imagine. Max has long been predicting that most of the currencies that exist in the world today will collapse in the very near future, a "financial holocaust" that will cause millions to die through poverty and suicide. Karen Hudes sees it as a "currency war", see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/world-bank-whistleblower.html, Keiser sees it as a currency Armageddon. At the moment there's a battle going on between the UK Prime Minister David Cameron and the Germans in the European Central Bank over the role the Bank of England is playing in Britain and Europe. Max blames the Bank of England for various finanncial scandals and crimes like the 2008 crash, drug money laundering, the Lehman Brothers collapse and even the massive fraud committed by Bernie Madoff. Max claims that: "This is what David Cameron doesn't seem to be able to see!" I wonder if perhaps David Cameron does see it, but just doesn't give a damn; perhaps it's what he wants. The current national debt of the UK is 700% of its gross domestic product, double what it was before the 2008 bailout, whereas forecasts expect the national economy to grow at between 2.7 and 2.8% this year. "How can you have capitalism without capital?" as Max says. Good question! The problem is that debt, in the form of "credit bonds" is now almost unbelievably treated as an asset, see here for more details: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/give-me-back-my-debt.html. It turns out that one of Gordon Brown's most significant acts as Chancellor of the Exchequer was to sell 60% of British gold stocks in 2002 at a discount price; again, I don't see this as accidental. Max suggests that it might have been a precursor to the 2008 bailout because the meagre revenue from the sales was used to prop up an ailing New York bank, but this bank remains anonymous (pun intended!). However he has uncovered new evidence that leads him to think Germany now have all that gold; this makes a joke out of Cameron's current spat with Germany. This means in any coming currency collapse Britain will be hit particularly badly and it could be that this was planned as long ago as 2002. The UK Government has since 1982 been buying more and more bonds, a massively expanding market in which prices are rising hundreds of percent, seeing as it has no real capital. This policy is based on fear, according to Max. I'd say it's based on a deliberate plot to commit financial suicide. Bonds are a huge bubble whose value can wither to virtually nothing almost instantly; Max advises anybody who owns any private ones to sell as soon as possible; and if you have a pension invested in them, forget retiring! However, almost paradoxically, states around the world have recently been buying gold, especially China; the UK is an exception. Has the penny dropped that they need a buffer when the bond bubble pops? Or are the Iluminati simply placing the next generation of winners and losers on the starting grid for the world to come after that pop? Maybe this all ties into the gold price manipulation Karen Hudes talks about, see the link above. Max simply suggests raising interest rates to deter governments from borrowing any more; at the moment they're often offered huge loans interest-free. This will of course increase banking profits, but he sees this as a temporary situation. He compares it to a medicine that makes you sick, but does you good.

The effect this will have on the general population will be devastating. Max says pension accounts are being raided at the moment and we know banks are imposing "levies" in some countries, I consider this legalized bank robbery, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-bank-robbers-of-cyprus.html. Food and fuel prices will rise as the government desperately tried to save the doomed bond market. We have nothing else to fall back upon because all the real capital, in the form of gold, resources and industrial profit, has gone. Max comes across as a libertarian and sees this mess emerging out of an attempt to regulate capitalism and to "eliminate the boom-bust cycle". However this is a sign that he still sees everything going on as somehow inadvertent, a terrible mess that nobody expected. What if it is intentional, an act of economic vandalism at the most fundamental level? Why? To deconstruct the entire economic system as we know it and rebuild it in a new form. This nightmarish vision is not inevitable and I think Max understands that; he becomes more hopeful towards the end of his address. The disaster that might come hinges completely upon our abdication and cooperation. The solution to this looming crisis is the same one I've suggested many times before: We, the people, have to take sovereign control of our own economic lives through independent banking, LETS schemes, small local currencies and sensible economic structures such as a small business basis and workers cooperatives.

See here for more detail: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-oxford-pound.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/archers-local-economy.html.

And: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/workers-cooperatives.html.

And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/programme-27-podcast-economics.html.