By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
I was shocked tonight, but not totally surprised, by the incredible revelation I witnessed on a rerun of a May, 2009, episode of CBC-TV’s The Passionate Eye.
Brian Stewart’s guest was internationally renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, the man responsible for many innovative economic experiments now being undertaken in a number of Third World countries.
De Soto revealed that the crux of the current global recession-cum-depression is the fact that ONE QUADRILLION DOLLARS in world wealth is unaccounted for, thanks to the derivatives peddled by financial institutions in recent years.
That’s right – ONE QUADRILLION DOLLARS or ONE THOUSAND TRILLION DOLLARS – is missing.
That’s 20 times the total combined annual economic output of every country in the world, which means it would take every penny produced in the world in the next 20 years to make up the missing money, leaving nothing for anyone in the world to spend on food, housing, autos, furnitures, clothing or anything else during those 20 years.
The world’s governments have already spent over $50 TRILLION U.S. bailing out the banks, the corporations and the billionaire and mega-millionaire controllers of both from some of the “toxic assets” they had in their possession.
That’s right! Many of the world’s major financial institutions and other corporations – and the billionaire and mega-millionaire controllers of them – conspired to create ONE QUADRILLION DOLLARS in phony financial assets and lavish them on themselves.
Then, when their irrational scheme collapsed, they called on the governments and taxpayers of the world to bail them out.
ONE QUADRILLION DOLLARS is one hell of a lot of money and a hell of a lot of phony assets and a hell of a lot of inevitably “toxic” assets. It’s enough to make a million people billionaires!
What has happened is that the super-rich have bathed themselves in a vat redolent with a potion concocted to multiply the value of their assets multifold without actually creating any new real wealth.
This irrational inflation of the value of their phony financial assets – derivatives and subprime mortgages – was bound to collapse ultimately.
But in doing so, it grossly devalued the legitimate assets of almost everyone else.
However, instead of prosecuting and imprisoning and dissolving the phony assets of the billionaires and mega-millionaires, supposedly “democratic” as well as openly non-democratic governments around the world conspired to bail out and actually reward the malefactors – no matter what the cost to everyone else.
So if you’re one of the millions who has been laid off, or had your wages cut, or your mortgage foreclosed or your auto repo-ed, you know who to thank.
And as the global economic crisis continues to worsen, you know who to thank.
But don’t dare blame or punish them!