Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged economy →  View Popular

In Latvia, this has already led to a social disaster. The government has decided to close half of the hospitals in the country by the end of the year, which means there will no longer be any guarantee of medical care for broad layers of the population.

In an implicit rejection of the government´s own report on “social mobility” issued in 2009, the review states, “Inequality does not just come from your gender or ethnicity, your sexual orientation or your disability. Co-existing and interwoven with these specific inequalities lies the persistent inequality of social class…the persistence of class divides in education is revealed by concerns about the under-achievement of many white working class boys,” who the review later identifies as the most marginalised social group in the education system.

The introduction of tuition fees would place a further crippling burden on those entering higher education, with a forecast from the National Union of Students (NUS) indicating that charging £7,000 in fees would leave the average student in £32,000 worth of debt at the end of his or her studies.

What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic
drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class
victims — and so they started eating each other, using the
exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest
of the country.

Then, on March 11th — around the same time that mystery
Nostradamus was betting $1.7 million that Bear was about to
collapse — a curious thing happened that attracted virtually
no notice on Wall Street. On that day, a meeting was held at the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York that was brokered by Fed chief Ben
Bernanke and then-New York Fed president Timothy Geithner. The
luncheon included virtually everyone who was anyone on Wall Street
— except for Bear Stearns.

There was nothing to prevent that broker — let's say he
has only a million shares of IBM total — from making the same
promise to five different hedge funds. And not only could brokers
lend stocks they never had, another loophole in the system allowed
hedge funds to sell those stocks and deliver a kind of IOU instead
of the actual share to the buyer.

This is the basic outline for how to seize the assets of a
publicly traded company using counterfeit stock. What naked
short-sellers do is sell large quantities of stock they don't
actually have, flooding the market with "phantom" shares that, just
like those Island Rubles, depress a company's share price by making
the shares less scarce and therefore less valuable.

Or why bother reporting that the top five managers at Harvard Co. managed to rake in between $3.9 and $6.4 million apiece in bonus compensation during fiscal 2008, even as their debt-leveraged portfolio was poised to devour the school’s operating capital?

Moreover, the anemic growth that is projected is largely dependent on massive state subsidies to the banks and other stimulus measures, totaling thus far, according to the IMF, $2 trillion worldwide.