The Market Has Spoken: Austerity Is Bad for Business

It used to be that when the Fed Chairman spoke, the market listened; but the Chairman has lost his mystique.  Now when the market speaks, politicians listen.  Hopefully they heard what the market just said: government cutbacks are bad for business.  The government needs to spend more, not less.  Fortunately, there are viable ways to do this while still balancing the budget.

Read more here.

9 Responses

  1. I think what the market said was that austerity is bad for the market. I think the market is bad for business.

    If you think business is good for the economy, it follows that the market is bad for the economy and any austerity should be born by the market alone.

    Or is “business” synonymous with “markets” now?

  2. This makes total sense. Take control of the money supply, and leave the federal reserve and Wall Street in crisis. They love to manage (or create) crisis as that is how they make money…at least the best hedge funds and shadow banking system.

    Give the money supply back to the Treasury!

  3. What I struggle with is understanding the transition between the current banking system and the future one proposed by all this rhetoric. If the government begins printing money without interest obligations and a major source of revenue for the wealthy begins to disappear what happens next? The potential here is to innocently create a financial Iraq where at first it looks so easy to transition between the status quo and a more liberal solution that no one plans the details out.

    Frankly, I cannot see how this will do anything but create massive chaos during the change with people in the streets of all sorts on both sides of this. The cure will be worse than the disease; those that are most negatively impacted will make sure of it. There are also foreign creditors who won’t take kindly to this proposal; I am wondering how they are going to react.

    For this to happen, we need a post-interest-free debt plan and reasonable business people in middle management need to see how this system operates and need to be able to plan out how everyone can remain housed, gainfully employed, eating, and in school during the transition. Otherwise it will go nowhere.

    To me, at this point it is Iraq come to America. I would prefer the devil that we know until someone with a good grasp of political realities and business can lay out a plan and not just a vision.

  4. Good questions, Stanley. I’ll take a stab at it, and accept the critiques that will surely follow. My plan would start with abolishing the personhood of corporations and systematically reviewing corporate charters and revising them as necessary to conform with the ethical standards of a free market. Corporate charters should reflect all the “shalt not’s” and prohibitions our largest corporation, the US Government, was resticted to (and with good reason) . This all would be debatable stuff, but I think short-selling, corps owning other corps, corps engaging in more than one line of business, corps contacting or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, etc would be prime candidates for unethical conduct and grounds for revocation or reorganization. Global corps should be held to even higher standards. TBTF should be grounds, in itself, for break -up and re-organization. Accounting methods should be standardized across specific industries.

    As you say, getting reasonable (and qualified) business PEOPLE to administer the transition and oversight of such a mind-bogglingly complex economic system is going to be a major undertaking employing thousands of hopefully post-graduated-income-tax IRS agents to carry out. I’m talking flat tax. No more loopholes. Fair for one and all.

    We’ll need a Constitutional Convention to make one small change: fictitious persons are not entitled to ANY Constitutional rights. We do need encorporated entities, but on the people’s terms, not their own terms. Corporations should be limited to the status of public utilities as they were originally intended.

    The transitition could be made incrementally over the course of two or three election cycles but the sticking point is going to be getting corporate money out of politics by whatever means necessary. The revolving door between government and global bankers has to be slammed shut and treason prosecuted wherever it’s found. The only thing preventing that right now is the personhood of corporations and that’s probably going to be the first major hurdle.

    No, the first hurdle is going to be organizing the political WILL to stop this train from going off the tracks. If only the people of today held the same fear and loathing of incorporated entities our founders had for British corporations and government in general they’d be horrified at the power of Wall Street. People need to know these things and that there is a non-violent plan to save the country we used to love. to

  5. We need to get a rally of people to go to Iowa for straw poll. I heard they are allowing write in ballot for the first time.
    We can take some air time from the media’s blind eye towards Ron Paul if we the people write him in.
    Spread the word!!

  6. Ron Paul is certainly a step in the right direction.

    • Speaking of Ron Paul, does anyone happen to know why gold standard advocates like him don’t push for silver backing instead?

  7. […] är ju euron också illa ute… så vad kommer att ske? Som en kommentator skrev på Ellen Browns blogg, vi borde ha en plan för vad som ska ske efter kraschen, så att det inte […]

  8. Ms. Brown, I hope my webpage http://www.planmon.webs.com will prove valuable to your efforts. It is about money, banking, the fraccional reserve system and the value and logic of government issued, debt free money. Here are some exerpts.

    “Only government has the right to create money. Creating money is an enormous power. To delegate it to private enitites is to create a secret government more powerful, more despotic, than anyhing imaginable”

    “Money

    This creation, this simple tool, this useful, small, humble measure of values, this piece of paper that has made our life so convenient for so long … is a weapon of mass destruction a thousand times more powerful than the biggest nuclear bomb”

    It is in Spanish and in English. On the upper left of the page is the link to the version in English.

Leave a comment