{"id":41804,"date":"2018-12-19T09:20:07","date_gmt":"2018-12-19T14:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41804"},"modified":"2018-12-19T09:20:07","modified_gmt":"2018-12-19T14:20:07","slug":"why-everything-that-needs-to-be-fixed-remains-permanently-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41804","title":{"rendered":"Why Everything That Needs to Be Fixed Remains Permanently Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Everything That Needs to Be Fixed Remains Permanently Broken<\/a><\/h3>\n

Just in case you missed what’s going on in France: the status quo in Europe is doomed.<\/i><\/p>\n

The status quo has a simple fix for every crisis and systemic problem:<\/b><\/p>\n

1. create currency out of thin air<\/p>\n

2. give it to super-wealthy banks, financiers and corporations to boost their wealth and income.<\/p>\n

One way these entities increase their wealth and income is to lend this nearly free money<\/i> to commoners at much higher rates of interest.<\/b> I borrow from central banks at 1% and lend it to you at 4.5%, 7% or even 19% or more. What’s not to like?<\/p>\n

If a bank is insolvent, it can borrow money at 1% from central banks.<\/b> If Joe Blow is insolvent, the only loan he can get is at 23%, if he can get any credit at all.<\/p>\n

3. China has a variant fix for every financial crisis: build tens of millions of empty flats only the wealthy can afford<\/b> as second or third “investment” flats. If the empty flats start dropping in price, government entities start secretly buying flats to support the market.<\/p>\n

4. Empty malls, bridges to nowhere and ghost cities are also a standard-issue fix in China.<\/b> Built it and they will come, until they don’t. But who cares, the developers and local governments (i.e. corrupt officials) already pocketed the dough.<\/p>\n

You see the problem: making rich people richer doesn’t actually fix what’s broken, it only makes the problems worse.<\/b> So why can’t we fix what’s broken?<\/p>\n

It’s a question that deserves an answer, and the answer has six parts:<\/b><\/p>\n

1. Any meaningful systemic reform threatens an entrenched, self-serving interest\/elite which has a tremendous incentive to squash, co-opt or water down any reform that threatens their monopoly, benefits, etc.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Everything That Needs to Be Fixed Remains Permanently Broken Just in case you missed what’s going on in France: the status quo in Europe is doomed. The status quo has a simple fix for every crisis and systemic problem: 1. create currency out of thin air 2. give it to super-wealthy banks, financiers and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[63,127,171,951,281,333,421,431,536,538,587,1302,868],"class_list":["post-41804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-banks","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-corporations","tag-currency","tag-europe","tag-france","tag-income","tag-interest-rates","tag-money","tag-money-printing","tag-of-two-minds","tag-status-quo","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41805,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41804\/revisions\/41805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}