How Iceland Escaped From The One Bank by Jeff Nielson, Sprott Money
What have the governments of the corrupt Western bloc spent most of their time doing since the Crash of ’08? We can answer this question in three parts:
1) Creating increasingly falsified “statistics” to fabricate the illusion that their economies were not on the verge of all-out economic collapse;
2) Hacking and slashing every social program in sight in order to generate the false savings known as Austerity; and
3) Creating new funny-money and taking on new debt at an exponentially increasing rate in order to delay collapse, since all that Austerity accomplished was an acceleration of these death spirals.
Making these points apparent to newer readers will require additional elaboration. The starting point is the Crash of ’08 itself. What caused these nations to go from being merely heavily indebted to hopelessly insolvent overnight? That can be summed up in a single euphemism of fraud and crime: “too big to fail.”
At the end of 2008, the West’s puppet governments succumbed to History’s ultimate act of blackmail at the hands of History’s largest and most rapacious crime syndicate: the One Bank . “Give us all your money, or we’ll blow up your entire financial system.” That is the real meaning of “too big to fail”: institutionalized extortion, in perpetuity.
What was the real price tag for this massive extortion operation? Forget the phony numbers published by our corrupt governments and their mouthpieces in the corporate media. The total quantum for these extortion payments was in the tens of TRILLIONS . Obviously the Deadbeat Debtors of the West couldn’t raise more than a tiny fraction of that amount of blackmail money up front. Thus, most of this shakedown of (supposedly) sovereign governments came in the form of future tax breaks and “loss guarantees.”
In the Shakedown of ’08, our governments did not merely clean out every penny they could scrounge from our public treasuries and borrow every penny that they could. In addition, they mortgaged the future of our children and grandchildren by pledging infinite corporate welfare for the One Bank.
Western governments had no money left to spend on their own people after committing tens of trillions in extortion payments to this banking crime syndicate while also having to deal with rapidly rising interest payments (to the same crime syndicate) on all their new debts. So Western governments then pulled out their chainsaws and attacked our social programs.
Infinite dollars in “interest payments” go to the crime syndicate; no pennies are left for the people. That is Austerity. However, so-called Austerity represents more than simply another act of economic treason against Western populations; it is also the self-inflicted, fatal wound for these economies.
Austerity treason took economies that were already in a slow-motion descent toward collapse and rapidly sped up that suicide cycle. The evidence here is overwhelming, but it can be summed up most easily in one word: Greece.
Greece has had far greater and more punitive amounts of Austerity treason heaped upon its victim population than any other regime in the Corrupt West. It was demanded by the economic sadists known as “the Troika”: the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. The result? This nation was bankrupted twice within a span of five years.
Which nations are closest behind Greece in Europe’s Bankruptcy Derby? Spain and Portugal. These are the #2 and #3 nations in terms of inflicting the greatest amounts of this suicidal Austerity on their own populations. Austerity kills. More Austerity kills faster.
Here, people need to understand that it was always totally predictable that Austerity would fail. It was always totally predictable that Austerity would harm these economies more than help them. And this was predicted (repeatedly) in previous commentaries .
How do you make any economy stronger? The key lies within one of the most fundamental principles of economics: the Marginal Propensity to Consume. This law of economics is universally accepted because it is ½ simple arithmetic and ½ common sense.
In elementary terms, the fastest and easiest way to make any economy stronger is to place a dollar into the hands of a member of the Poor or Middle Class. Why? Because these people will spend most of that dollar (the Middle Class) or all of that dollar (the Poor) immediately. This extra dollar of consumption then gets divided up into wages, payments to suppliers, tax revenues for the government, etc.
Then additional portions of that dollar are spent and re-spent. This is known as “the multiplier effect,” and it explains why the Marginal Propensity to Consume is a universally accepted principle.
But what happens if we put a dollar into the hands of the Rich, rather than the Poor or Middle Class? By definition, the Rich person will hoard the vast majority of that dollar. As a matter of the simplest logic and arithmetic, no person can become “rich” unless/until they have spent years hoarding wealth, or they win a lottery.
Thus every time a Rich person receives a dollar, most of that dollar is hoarded and disappears from the economy. Only a few pennies of that dollar are ever circulated, and as a result the multiplier effect is virtually nil . This is known by the economic euphemism of “trickle-down economics.” Put all the new dollars into the hands of the wealthy, and only a few pennies will ever “trickle down” to the economy.
“Trickle-down economics” has been the official policy of nearly all of the traitorous governments of the Corrupt West since the start of the new millennium, and, in the case of the U.S., it goes back at least a full generation. This policy of everything-for-the-Fat-Cats and nothing for the Little People is one of the primary reasons for the relentless decay in our standard of living and the relentless collapse of our economies.
How do you then make these sick economies even sicker? Start taking extra dollars out of the hands of the Poor and Middle Class – Austerity. Every dollar of Austerity treason creates a Reverse Multiplier Effect: removing more and more dollars from the system and thus starving the economy of the fuel which allows our consumer economies to survive: consumer spending.
Austerity causes the economy to get even sicker, leading to larger deficits, more borrowing, and thus even higher interest payments to the parasitic One Bank. Debt slavery . The response from these puppet governments to this vicious circle? Even more Austerity. If something fails, do much more of it.
However, one Western nation that was caught up in the original Crash of ’08 did not climb aboard this treadmill of economic suicide and blackmail: Iceland. As a result, alone among the nations of Europe, Iceland enjoys real robust economic growth. The standard of living of its population is once again rising rather than falling as it is throughout the rest of the Corrupt West.
How? How did one, small island nation succeed while every other Western government failed miserably and completely? As with the economic suicide now practiced throughout the Corrupt West, Iceland’s success also traces back to the same four words: “too big to fail.”
What happened when Iceland’s Big Banks (more tentacles of the One Bank) arrogantly demanded that the government rubber-stamp the principle of crime of “too big to fail” – sacrificing the System in order to save the Big Banks? Iceland’s government responded that it had a different, radical idea: it would sacrifice the Big Banks, and save the System.
Iceland’s Big Banks folded. As with all blackmailers, the One Bank responded to Iceland’s refusal to be blackmailed by immediately lashing out in revenge. Among other things, it attacked Iceland’s currency (i.e. manipulated it lower), yet another criminal conspiracy for which the Big Banks have now been convicted.
However, Iceland’s government stood firm and did not cave in to the attempted extortion by this crime syndicate. It weathered the financial/economic reprisals. It proved that “too big to fail” was always nothing more than a lie and a myth created by the banking crime syndicate. No entity within any system could ever be more important than the system itself. This was always elementary logic. Iceland has validated that logic.
Iceland refused to be blackmailed. Iceland refused to take on the extra debt (and debt slavery) that came with the blackmail. Iceland refused to touch its social programs. Iceland has the strongest economy in the Western world.
Game, set, and match.
About Jeff Nielson
Jeff Nielson is co-founder and managing partner of Bullion Bulls Canada; a website which provides precious metals commentary, economic analysis, and mining information to readers/investors. Jeff originally came to the precious metals sector as an investor around the middle of last decade, but soon decided this was where he wanted to make the focus of his career. His website is www.bullionbullscanada.com.
