Counties in Oregon who feel that Eugene isn't listening want a referendum to leave Oregon and join Idaho. And why shouldn't they be allowed to? I've been writing about this since 2012, particularly in the blue book below. Political decentralization will continue to gain importance as an issue.
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Perhaps Sam Bankman-Fried is not less moral than those who run our financial system, only less clever. I would even argue that the system requires the occasional "rogue actor" that causes large amounts of supposed assets to be exposed as worthless in order to conceal the larger reality of how over-leveraged the entire system is.
"if one mouths the right empty shibboleths, one can do whatever one wants"- SBF
We live in a fraudulent financial system built on fiat government money (chits with no intrinsic value backed only by government force) and leverage. Thus, those with access to cheap credit can buy up the real assets of the world on leverage. Success isn't won by merit so much as knowing how to play the game. The game of pleasing those who run the system enough to give you the easy credit (financial as well as PR) you need to start leveraging. Do you work hard providing good service to others but question the narratives that the ruling class wants you to parrot? No easy money for you!
The first step, after saying all the "right" things and getting access to larger amounts of easy credit, is to use it to create an "asset". You could work hard and provide real useful products and services to others so that what you have created has actual value. This however, is hard and is completely unnecessary to get rich quickly in today's fraudulent economy. The perceived value of the asset means more than the actual value, because you can entice people to buy a piece of what you are selling if the perceived value is high. Getting the mainstream media to talk about your product in a favorable manner is worth more than being good to your customers.
You then use that perceived increase in value to obtain more credit and buy or "create" another "asset", whose value you also have every reason to inflate. At each step, you use the perceived increase in value to obtain another asset, which you use to make your portfolio worth even more. It isn't even about making a real, working, profitable business. If you can sell the possibility of future profits (and the establishment media can make you or break you on this, so repeat all the things they tell you to believe), you can borrow more money and buy even more stuff.
The trouble is that at some point some of those assets lose value. Maybe a shell game is exposed, or maybe there is a general malaise in the sector with the asset in it. It becomes known that the true value of that asset is not as great as the money that it was used to gather up, be it in stock price, corporate debt, or both. If I can convince someone to loan me ten billion dollars at 2% then I only need the assets I acquire with that money to increase in perceived value at a rate of four percent to be "worth 200 million dollars" at the end of the first year. But if they don't get me any more value, or worse, lose value, then I am hundreds of millions in the hole. This is going on all over the economy and so many who got on top this way have to keep the plates spinning or the whole thing crashes.
For the 2008 bank bailouts, the system literally just created all of the currency out of thin air that they needed to keep the plates spinning. If favored players had assets that were underwater, the Fed Discount window either bought them at above market prices or loaned money with them as collateral at better-than-market terms.
But this had a cost. The debt created to supposedly back this currency will have to be paid for by sacrificing future consumption. But in a system built on this kind of gas, there is no point at which you can say "ok we are going to tighten our belts now" without crashing the entire system. Also, the shear amount of debt needed to sustain it is going to raise red flags. Eventually the world will figure out that all of this "genius financial investing" is simply the result of the government writing trillions in hot checks to sustain the illusion of solvency a little bit longer. So they can't just borrow their way out.
As a way to put off the inevitable, the system needs fall-guys. That is, it has to find a way to allow some of the underwater assets to get liquidated at a loss. They can't keep all the plates spinning at once, so they are trying to blame the individual plates that drop instead of the entire system.
Bear Sterns was a "bad actor". MF Global was a "bad actor" (yet the very connected John Corzine never went to jail). Most of the Big Banks were caught being "bad actors" in the sense that they recklessly overleveraged in 2008. Like I said, the government kept the plates spinning by moving their bad bets to the taxpayer's books. But that outlet has exhausted itself because they have stolen all they can steal via those means without collapsing the economy. They have to wait until it recovers from their past skimming before they skim again at that magnitude. The parasites risk killing the host.
Now FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried was a "bad actor". He was playing the game, with these connected people selling paper assets to one another at more and more hyped up prices. But he got took. Instead of dumping their bad assets on the government's books, they played him for a chump and got him to take it. That wasn't all that happened of course. He got desperate when the true value of this stuff asserted itself and used money he wasn't supposed to in order to try and keep those plates spinning. But ultimately, he leveraged to the moon on hyped-up assets just like the rest of them- his assets were just worse.
Look for there to be more such cases in the future, not fewer. The system won't correct this because it can't. It has to have a way to bleed off some of the toxic assets without taking down the whole system. If they can't have no damage (because 2008 style taxpayer bailouts are off the table for a while) then they will try to find some patsy to take the fall. They will find some guy who isn't really that sharp, build up his reputation, then sell their trash to him on borrowed money. When it goes bad, he is exposed as a fraud, and the system goes on- not exposed as a fraud.
End fiat currency and limit leverage. There is no way to save this system anyway, and even if there was, it does not deserve saving.
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"The Atlantic" has come under harsh criticism for suggesting that people should let bygones be bygones concerning the vast harm caused by authoritarian lock-down and vaccination policies. Zerohhedge has an article citing numerous responses from angry people who lost loves ones, who have been disabled, or whose mothers had to die alone, due to useless authoritarian measures and under-tested vaccines that have been increasingly shown to be unsafe. Those who implemented these measures are now suggesting that "forgiveness" and an "amnesty" is in order.
These are in large part the same people who reject God and take pains to expunge Christian values from all of society in exchange for the shifting sands of their own opinions. Yet when caught in monstrous crimes against their neighbors, they selectively appeal to the primary Christian virtue of forgiveness. Not for your sins against them, mind you. You are still to be held to full account for each and every perceived micro-aggression. They mean that you are to forgive them. Not due to their heart-felt repentance, they still want to be authoritarians, but rather their desire to evade justice and accountability.Get the books:
