EDITOR – Nothing like greed, it kind of defines the human condition.
From paying 50 cents for a plastic shopping bag with advertising all over it to paying banks to lend them our money – deposit charges, for goodness sake!
Why are the poor getting poorer? It will become very clear after the chain of bribes comes to an end and pensioners get paid in April just to avoid serious civil unrest.
This is the third time history has recorded the financial collapse of a global trading empire.
The first time it came to a head was in Rome at the time of Christ. Tiberius Caesar had come to the throne and found that the first western trading empire was bankrupt. How? Money lenders had ruled the middle class Roman economy for three hundred years before Tiberius, but had succumbed to greed or lack of control and begun to victimize the nobility, up to and including the Senate. Everyone was in debt.
Tiberius was a genius! His solution? He made one and a half billion Sesterces (Roman coin) available to citizens over eighteen months.
Without interest! I believe that was the first Zero-sum solution to a massive financial fraud.
The second time was well after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, after the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Balkanization of Europe and only came to a head in Edward the First’s United Kingdom when he discovered that money lenders had been living off middle class loans for over three hundred years, but had succumbed to greed or weak control and had foreclosed on huge English estates. This put the world’s second global trading empire into bankruptcy.
Edward’s solution? He rounded them up and threw them out of the U.K. under the Edict of Expulsion in 1290.
Three hundred years later, they were established in Amsterdam, the hub of the world’s third global trading empire. There, opened the world’s first stock exchange in 1602 – a very upmarket casino that took commissions on both a buy and a sell, combining money lending with gambling.
A stock market ‘Pump and Dump’ scam, now known as Boom and Bust Capitalism was introduced to the world in 1720 with the first bust, the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Google it.
That will be three hundred years ago come 2020.
There have been six credit-driven booms, the most memorable being the ‘fabulous fifties ‘and the ‘swinging sixties’ when everyone thought they were rich, followed by busts, every 50 years since 1720.
What I’m saying is that I believe that it takes 300 years for society to reboot after a serious viral malware is introduced.
I also believe that this SASSA pension crisis could be the trigger that begins this era’s financial reboot and that South Africa could lead at least the third world out of this mire of debt.
Tom Dennen
Durban
