#Banks: The Biggest Thieves in History

When they start talking about the huge amounts of money we owe I can’t really get my head around it. I mean, you can’t quite grasp the concept of a trillion can you? Britain owes over one trillion pounds while America owes over seventeen trillion dollars. A trillion is a one with twelve zeros after it. A trillion seconds is over thirty one thousand years or, how about: a trillion stacked pennies would reach 870,000 miles high. Come on! An easier way for me is when they talk about Britain owing ￡30,000 per head. It’s a tiny bit more difficult to work out the amounts for America because no one knows how many people are in that country and anyway America already owed trillions and trillions of dollars before the banks got on the bandwagon…Got to get me some of that!

￡30,000? That seems a mite more acceptable, most of us could see the possibility of paying that off in the next ten or twenty years, stick it on the end of your mortgage and you will hardly notice it! But, when you think about it a bit more closely it is more worrying. Take a man with a wife, who doesn’t work, and who has three kids, that means they owe more like ￡150,000! And what about the parents? Do we add them into the equation? After all they are unlikely to be still earning.

No one ever seems to ask the obvious question when these absurd amounts are discussed: who do we owe it to? Or, to be more grammatically correct: to whom do we owe it? If you ask that question at a dinner party say, in America, you get the immediate answer: China. Well hey ho, I think that is rather splendid of China to lend America all that money in the first place, I know they are rich, but seriously? The same question in Britain gets another just as confident answer: the Arabs (or more likely: the bloody Arabs). That is invariably given by people who haven’t been to the Middle East in the last couple of years. And to keep your confidence I’ve asked that question a dozen times on both sides of the Atlantic and I have been in the Middle East twice in the last three years.

So who do we owe it to? (Screw grammar). The answer’s easy: we owe it to ourselves. Well, we owe it to a small number of people living in our countries…yes we do!

The Western World encourages the novel principal that inherited money is a good idea. Okay if it’s you inheriting your parents’ house but consider: great swathes of Britain (80%) are owned by a bunch of idiots whose great-great-great-grandfathers sent the king some soldiers to fight Cromwell. Okay, you voted for it so you must want it. The deal was that these people with huge amounts of money invested it in businesses. The millionaires on Dragon’s Den are doing exactly what they should be doing: investing in burgeoning businesses, helping them grow, creating employment and adding to our balance of payments. They receive profits on their investments in good years but risk losing their money in bad years. This system worked well. It gave us the Industrial Revolution.

Then a gang of crooks, sorry, I mean I mean a group of financial whiz-kids in the city, created Hedge Funds. These are closed investment groups (you can’t join one matey!) which are basically unregulated and exist solely to make rich people richer. It occurred to said whiz-kids that the rich investors would be much more secure by investing in mortgages. The thing is with a mortgage that the bank makes most of its money in the first year with all the extra bits you have to pay for: arrangement fees, transfer fees and all the other ploys they dream up to take your money. After that the banks’ money is tied up for thirty or forty years. If they could sell the loan on they would have that money again to offer to some other poor sod desperate to house his family.

What the hedge funds did was to buy up great bunches of mortgages…your mortgage might well be owned by someone in Sweden or Australia, or even your next door neighbour, you won’t know it of course because he or she will hide behind an official sounding name. Everybody’s happy: the poor sod has got his house, the bank has got its money back and the investors have a long term safe investment for their capital because property is the safest investment. Sad about those new businesses though isn’t it? They suddenly found no one was left to lend them money to help them grow. And the youngsters who were going to work in those businesses, sad about them too. Still never mind, everybody else is happy!

The next problem came when they literally ran out of mortgages to buy up. Easy, the investors and banks came up with another little plot: just take the controls off mortgages…and hey, yes: we can charge extra for that as well! Hurrah!!!

I worked at an Estate Agents in the late Sixties. In those days a man could borrow up to three times his yearly salary, three and a half times if his wife worked. I’m sure that is changed now with the different status of women in work. It was annoying but it stopped people over borrowing, not letting them get carried away by the idea of owning a house that was too expensive for them. In 2007 I was working in Iraq and my wife and I came back to Scotland for a holiday and while we were there we had a look around a holiday cottage. When I told the agent that we would have difficulty proving our salaries he grinned and promised us that he could get us a mortgage within twenty four hours just on the strength of a verbal declaration of our earnings…it was slightly more expensive of course.

So house buying in Britain and America went through the roof, so of course did house prices, but that was all to the good: everyone had a house and everyone was making money.

Everybody knows what happened next. It seemed the whiz-kids weren’t quite such whizzes after all: the whole damned edifice came crashing down. The bankers had over extended themselves, the investors had lost their money. Fair enough, like the Dragon’s Den entrepreneurs they had gambled and lost.

Only they hadn’t because the thing is the banks and the super-rich own the politicians. They finance the political parties and ex politicians and civil servants infest the banking Boards of Directors. Immediately President Bush was rushed onto television saying that it is essential for the economy that the banks are protected. Gordon Brown is dancing to the same tune: of course we have to protect the banks. Not for the banks, not for the super-rich, but for us! All is lost if we don’t bail them out, they can’t be expected to pay their own debts! Good Heavens, banks exist to make profits not to pay debts! We have to cough up, it’s all our responsibility. Faced with an array of politicians all preaching the same doctrine we fall for it, nobody questions it. And I would like you to bear in mind at this point that the entire front bench of the Labour (!) party, let alone the Conservative party, were millionaires in these days. I expect the same applies now but I really cannot be bothered to check it will only depress me more.

The Bank of England responded to the crisis by a process they called quantitative easing. Funny thing, my spell checker didn’t recognise the word, it couldn’t mean that they made it up surely? It means printing more money than the country is worth. This incidentally is the primary cause of inflation, without the overprinting of money inflation simply cannot happen. This will all come out in the economy of the country sometime in the future, we’re not sure just where but you can bet it won’t be out of the bankers’ pockets.

How much did they print? 350 billion! This is not a loan or a gift,  it is a tax and you will have to pay it back. Where did it go? To the old age pensioners to heat their houses? What about (my choice) to the young marrieds to pay for child care? Or, how about to first time home buyers as a deposit? Any of these would have stimulated the economy. But the super-rich can’t go letting ordinary people get given money. No, no, don’t be silly, ordinary people have to earn their money! So instead the Bank of England gave it to the banks and they sat on it and refused to lend it on because it was too risky in our volatile economy. That same volatile economy they had created. The government tried to put pressure on the banks to lend more but they can’t do that can they? The slave can’t put pressure on the slave owner.

Americans had it even worse, their pensions aren’t protected in the ways ours are. My mother-in-law had been working as a legal secretary in Minnesota, all her life, over forty years, and paying into a fund for all of that time. Every damned week for forty years she put her money into that scheme. She was sixty five, tired, ill and about to retire when the banks came along and said that the money had disappeared and they took her pension just like that! When I say took, I actually mean stole. They stole it just like a mugger taking your wallet in a back alley. She later told me that she would now have to work until she was eighty seven and she would lose her house even then. Bear in mind that Americans don’t have our social system to fall back on.

What a brilliant plan it was. Think of it, the rich investors never lost a penny. The banks did even better, they got rid of having to pay that annoying interest on accounts, sorry, they still pay a generous one percent…and the government rewarded them with a 350 billion pound bonus on top.

The greatest war criminals are usually reckoned to be the Nazis, they raped a continent. But at least they had the courage to do it with guns, the bankers raped the world and hid beneath their desks while doing it. But, I hear you protest, think of the millions of people the Nazis killed? Yeah, but gentle reader, how many millions of people are going to die in the third world because of reduced aid? Think of the millions who will no longer be able to afford the inflated prices of life giving drugs. Think of the kids who will die of cholera because they can’t buy chlorine tablets. Think of the wars that will be fought over the limited availability of resources.

The super-rich and the bankers who took part in this plot have the morals of a whore and all the viciousness of a street thug, without the bravery of either. The Mafia is a church group compared to them, the Kray Twins were saints.

Let me leave you with one more statistic: if every person who possessed more than 50 million pounds in the country was made to hand over a third of it then it would pay off the financial loss twice over! But that’s not going to happen is it? It would only leave them with about 30 million to play with…so instead you’re going to pay it!

I’ve been accused of running a pornographic website, I actually think that says more about the accuser than it does about me. But if you want real pornography then it’s right here in this article!

For more of Nicholas Walker’s writing click on: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nicholas-Walker/e/B00PI0XDAG/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0