Financial Insanity Grips The World

Rare is the person who is a realist. We collectively live in a world of pretend and extend. Every one of us wants our present civilization to continue, though for countless millions the world has already turned upside down as unemployment has soared and war and terrorism proliferate. The very structure of life in our world is threatened because madmen have undermined the financial system through the creation of debt instead of wealth. We have collectively borrowed against our children’s future until their very future is in doubt.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal thinks that insanity grips the western world. I have to agree and no one who reads the news would disagree. In the “The Sane Society” prominent psychotherapist Erich Fromm suggested that Western society as a whole was lacking in sanity; that the inequities and disharmonies of the entire society were pathological, not just the mental illnesses of people therein.

The newest mirror of financial insanity are the negative interest rates. Today if you are a manager of other people’s money, like a pension fund manager, you are forced to lend out hard-earned money at a loss, to buy worthless paper, issued by governments who only pretend they will be in any position to pay back. Bloombergwrites, “Negative interest rates are an odd fish in the world of finance given that they basically wreak havoc on a central tenet of investing; that investors will be compensated in some way for, you know, investing in things.”

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