The Money Cult
By Dmitry Orlov
Interest rates and rates of growth are related: a positive interest rate is little more than a bet that the future is going to be bigger and more prosperous, enabling people to pay off the debts with interest. This is an obvious point: if your income increases, it becomes easier to repay your debts; if it stagnates, it becomes harder; if it shrinks, it eventually becomes impossible.
Yes, you can nitpick and split hairs, and claim that there was still some growth, but in the developed economies most of this growth has been in financial shenanigans, fueled by an explosion in debt, and most of the benefits of this last bit of growth accrued to the wealthiest 1%, and did next to nothing for anyone else. Did this growth help support a large, stable and prosperous middle class? No, it didnt.
In fact, wages in the US, which was once the worlds largest economy, have been stagnant for generations. In response, the Federal Reserve has been continuously reducing interest rates, until they hit zero in 2008. And there they have stayed ever since. But now, it turns out, thats not good enough. If the Federal Reserve wants to keep the party going, they have to do more, because
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44840.htm
KPN
(15,587 posts)Inflation is a necessary consequence of real economic growth, unlike monetary growth.
seabeckind
(1,957 posts)Maybe if we go to negative interest rates the wages will start to go up.
uhnope
(6,419 posts)posted by a DUer that consistently promotes that agenda--like vids from a Youtube channel that promotes the fascist "Slavic Union"--every chance they get.
This article plainly says the "Money Cult" (i.e., religion) is "the cult of the god Mammon." This is a well-known codeword for Jews, used often by anti-Semites, as in the anti-Semitic meme "Jews control the world" and "Jews caused the financial collapse".
The author, Dmitry Orlov, recently co-authored a pro-fascist-Putin screed with "The Saker, Victor Katsap and Evgenia Gurevich". "The Saker" is a Holocaust-denying website cesspool of hatred toward Jews. The piece co-authored by Orlov praised Paul Craig Roberts, another white nationalist well-known by and condemned on DU.
Did the poster of this article accidentally post this on DU when they meant to post it on Stormfront? WTF?
Jews, mammon and anti-Semitism
My perspective on the Leonard Abess story was shaped by an op-ed I wrote two weeks prior regarding the on-again, off-game economic blame game that haunts Jews. Ive been writing about the financial scapegoating aimed at Jews and reading a lot of books on the history of Jews and money, and the Christian Science Monitor decided to publish my commentary in tomorrows paper and online now.
I opened by mentioning Zaccheus, Fagin and Shylock, and then got into the medieval history that pushed Jews into moneylending and prepared American immigrant Jews for their meteoric rise from rural peddlers to international financiers. It concludes: