with huge thanks to Zeus ... from
(snip)"Why is savings so important? In short, savings are the holy grail. On the opportunism side, savings represent hundreds of trillions of dollars of stored wealth, just ripe for the plundering. On the supervisory side, savings are the last reality hedge. Savings provide the annoying anchor for financial sanity and fundamentals, and serve as a barrier to exploitation, outright debt peonage, and monetary tyranny.
I’m defining savings as any stored real, productive value: money in a savings account, paid-down house, gold, land, a business, etc. Savings have utility. Savings can be exchanged or used to purchase material needs and wants or make room for the non-material, experiential elements of the good life—time, leisure, education, travel. In order to make a financial coup complete, savings have to be rounded up and led to the slaughterhouse.
Meaningful, value-backed savings means autonomy and choice, and autonomy/choice represents power, ability resist, to “choose other” than what some financial power wants from you, your money, and your productivity. Restricting consumer choice is absolutely essential to maximizing corporate profit, since low quality and high prices improve profits short-term but deter consumption medium-term for uncaptured market players. Without personal savings that can be maintained, stored, and accessed a person has no leverage in their own finances nor in their ability to “vote” as an economic citizen. One is merely a debt slave.
It appears prevailing powers will go to any length to prostitute themselves against any true price discovery that would reward savers. Reversion to the mean, trading volume, velocity of money, margin, etc. all mean nothing when you can simply pour in an infinite amount of counterfeit currency. Along with this, it becomes almost impossible to assess and determine what is counterfeit because the official numbers, formulas, and information upon which accountability rests have been so distorted and obscured as to make value determination impossible (see calculation trends in employment numbers, inflation base line, etc.). Political pressures and decisions have simply caused a regauging of “undesirable” numbers to make it look like there is no problem.
Profit used to be an engine of savings and investment, the oil of small business, entrepreneurialism, and a growing economy. In the current global situation most profit has turned cancerous. It has simply come to mean parasitic wealth extraction. If I can profit by debasing your savings or forcing my debts on to your books, and you accept it as necessary to keep the system you’ve invested in from collapsing, I can control you and your future opportunities.
In short, I now possess your power as a citizen. This is why Thomas Jefferson was so clear about everyone owning property. One’s own means of support is necessary if a corrupt government emerges. One must be capable of refusing to participate, to exercise civil disobedience, and to be supported in a community significantly immune to upper-level manipulation.
Historical economics are premised on observations of human behavior converted into “natural” laws and forces, given certain conditions. Those conditions are being actively and systematically subverted. We are now seeing human institutions and behavior operating as purely synthetic phenomena. There is no Adam Smith’s “hidden hand,” no collective rational self-interest, but rather devolution to leveraged control and power.
We have the worst of neo-liberal state welfare, mixed with neo-conservative corporate welfare—a state for the corporation, and the corporation for itself. Citizens are being treated simply as productivity and investment batteries, like some twisted adaptation of The Matrix. With no protection from law or market fundamentals canny rational responses can be checkmated.
By Zeus Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D., copyright January, 2011 "(snip)



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