Laundering $800 Mil in Drug $, How Did HSBC Execs Avoid Jail?

[hippifried]

[quote=an8150;1282466]

Actually, my question was whether you had asked yourself why, if as you say governments can just print money with no ill effects, your government doesn't just turn you all into billionaires overnight?

Oh? Actually? You can actually quote yourself & then claim that it's actually different? Oh well... I'll just assume this is another failed attempt to be snide.

Every day, the Mint "prints" the necessary currency to keep enough in circulation for making change. Everything else is numbers in a ledger. Money is an exchange medium. It's not a commodity. Therefore, its "value" is not affected by supply & demand. It doesn't have to be tangible at all. One more time: Money is created by debt, destroyed by payoff or charge off, & the interest grows the "money supply".

[Stavros]

The corporations have long term sketches but not plans.

Fivekatz this is nonsense, the strategic plans to develop the Arctic are not just plans as offshore production from the North Slope of Alaska shows; these are not 'sketches' at all; same with chemicals and computing which in the latter case is developing products for the next generation for whom online connectivity is not the novelty that it has been for my generation but as natural as taking a bus to work.

[Stavros]

[quote=an8150;1282464]

How will you pay for welfare and other so-called entitlements, if you abolish money?

If you read the source -and I think you are familiar with the arguments even if you have avoided reading Marx for yourself- you ought to realise that in Marx's vision, human society is destined to pass through capitalism and socialism to arrive at an ideal state of being called communism; money represents as private property the degradation and enslavement of human society under capuitalism, the abolition of money is thus the supreme abolition of private property which guarantees human freedom, or so the man says. Predicting the future was never one of Marx's strongest points, but that's not my fault.

[Stavros]

[quote=an8150;1282471]

Another dimension to economics? Are you coming over all Flat Earth Society on me?

Sure, you can order economic affairs on the primitive model of bedouin, and a variety of others but, and it's a big but, you'll have to do it a) by taking away those things I value most, and b) be willing to condemn humanity to poverty, starvation and the vicissitudes of a barter economy. Not that it hasn't been tried, but the body count racked up over the last century by your fellow travellers acting on the same impulse inspires confidence neither in your prescription nor in your much-vaunted concern for your fellow man.

You really have missed the point -I don't believe in a processional or Whiggish view of history that sees primitive communism being succeeded by feudalism, feudalism being succeeded by capitalism, capitalism by socialism and so on -or that every stage of history has been an improvement on the last one. My point was that Hobbes was wrong about the State of Nature, just as the Whigs have been wrong about history-- I was giving you examples of what happens when people lose out from a market based economy: they find alternatives that emphasise sharing as a means of handling scarce resources, which doesn't prevent them from returning to a market based system when the rains return and crops are good, when they have a surplus product to sell -because no one system necessarily dominates to the exclusion of all others. It also means that it is pure vanity to speak of 'What I value most' if you live in an economy in which scarce products mean your values are gained at the expense of others, in which case you don't have values in the real sense, but expropriate them from others, as it is mostly others who produce the food you eat, the clothes you wear and the dwelling in which you live, unless you are going to transform yourself into a hippy and live in the woods on your own initiative. You start from the basic premise that free markets are the foundation of a free society, thereby demonising government, taxes, regulations, and so on, without ever bothering to ask how we got where we are today, without taking an interest in actually functioning societies which contradict your religious adherence to the gospel of free markets because they don't believe in it, and are not primitives living in the trees and eating bananas.
As for the body count in history, do you really want to reduce humanity to a numbers game to suit your smug ideology?

[fivekatz]

Fivekatz this is nonsense, the strategic plans to develop the Arctic are not just plans as offshore production from the North Slope of Alaska shows; these are not 'sketches' at all; same with chemicals and computing which in the latter case is developing products for the next generation for whom online connectivity is not the novelty that it has been for my generation but as natural as taking a bus to work.

But my point is that this a sketch. The production from the North Slope and off shore and additional development will be put on hold in a heartbeat if the US market goes on a consumption slow dow for any extended period of time. Big oil would not bring additional supply to the market in the face reduced demand cause by austerity or other phenomena that was not forecast.

The sketch is to milk the remaining reserves for maximum profit by creating a supply side shortage in the face of growing demand. The plan also calls for getting as many controversial leases (federal lands etc) during times of low supply - high demand.

But the oil companies will jump the shark any quarter, mid-quater to ensure that there is not a huge event which would have catastrophic consequence on their short term market capitalization.

Naturally they have divisions dedicated to the development of alternative products but are the efforts any more focused than what Microsoft's were in the face of "cloud"? Looking at Microsoft's history they were short on R&D when it came to IE and related products, long on attempting to use their near monopoly and shear enormity to kill the competitors they could see changing the paradigm from code on plastic to cloud computing.

They not only saw the wrong competitor (Netscape) but did have plans sufficient vision to see what the next generation of mass computing would look like. They had what I call a sketch, with the only thing being hardwired was the need to show consistent quarterly return for shareholders.

These long term plans that petrol chemical companies have are no different than what government has IMO, the difference is that government in many cases over the last four years in the US has been split by the extreme contrasts in the administrative branch and the other two branches, where as corporations guidance appears more constant with the drive being quarterly control of market cap.

There are few if any corporations in the US willing to post 3 consecutive bad quarters intentionally to build a great 5 year performance.

Just my take

[an8150]

[quote=Stavros;1282599]

You really have missed the point -I don't believe in a processional or Whiggish view of history that sees primitive communism being succeeded by feudalism, feudalism being succeeded by capitalism, capitalism by socialism and so on -or that every stage of history has been an improvement on the last one. My point was that Hobbes was wrong about the State of Nature, just as the Whigs have been wrong about history-- I was giving you examples of what happens when people lose out from a market based economy: they find alternatives that emphasise sharing as a means of handling scarce resources, which doesn't prevent them from returning to a market based system when the rains return and crops are good, when they have a surplus product to sell -because no one system necessarily dominates to the exclusion of all others. It also means that it is pure vanity to speak of 'What I value most' if you live in an economy in which scarce products mean your values are gained at the expense of others, in which case you don't have values in the real sense, but expropriate them from others, as it is mostly others who produce the food you eat, the clothes you wear and the dwelling in which you live, unless you are going to transform yourself into a hippy and live in the woods on your own initiative. You start from the basic premise that free markets are the foundation of a free society, thereby demonising government, taxes, regulations, and so on, without ever bothering to ask how we got where we are today, without taking an interest in actually functioning societies which contradict your religious adherence to the gospel of free markets because they don't believe in it, and are not primitives living in the trees and eating bananas.
As for the body count in history, do you really want to reduce humanity to a numbers game to suit your smug ideology?

Let's face it, Stavros, I can afford to be smug given that between 94m and 149m people have not been killed in the name of that which I espouse (The Black Book of Communism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and http://www.scottmanning.com/content/...st-body-count/)

Indeed, if I were in your shoes, I'd be wondering what was wrong with me that, nearly fifty years after Conquest started definitively to confirm what anyone with eyes to see had been telling the likes of Bernard Shaw for decades, I persisted in proselytising what is by far the political creed most destructive of human life in the whole of our history.

Or is the 20th century history of communism a statistic rather than a tragedy?

[an8150]

[quote=Stavros;1282595]

If you read the source -and I think you are familiar with the arguments even if you have avoided reading Marx for yourself- you ought to realise that in Marx's vision, human society is destined to pass through capitalism and socialism to arrive at an ideal state of being called communism; money represents as private property the degradation and enslavement of human society under capuitalism, the abolition of money is thus the supreme abolition of private property which guarantees human freedom, or so the man says. Predicting the future was never one of Marx's strongest points, but that's not my fault.

I wasn't asking Marx, I was asking you.

[an8150]

[quote=hippifried;1282574]

Oh? Actually? You can actually quote yourself & then claim that it's actually different? Oh well... I'll just assume this is another failed attempt to be snide.

Every day, the Mint "prints" the necessary currency to keep enough in circulation for making change. Everything else is numbers in a ledger. Money is an exchange medium. It's not a commodity. Therefore, its "value" is not affected by supply & demand. It doesn't have to be tangible at all. One more time: Money is created by debt, destroyed by payoff or charge off, & the interest grows the "money supply".

I originally posed the question at comment #41. I then repeated it at your request at #104.

And since the question implies the absurdity of your contention, you'd do well to answer it or be left with an absurd contention for which you have no answer.

On the other hand, it is better to stay silent be thought stupid than to open your mouth and remove all reasonable doubt. Actually, yes it is. Actually.

[hippifried]

[quote=an8150;1283259]

I originally posed the question at comment #41. I then repeated it at your request at #104.

And since the question implies the absurdity of your contention, you'd do well to answer it or be left with an absurd contention for which you have no answer.

On the other hand, it is better to stay silent be thought stupid than to open your mouth and remove all reasonable doubt. Actually, yes it is. Actually.

I don't care when you posed anything. There was no question, & still isn't. Your memetic assumptions don't mean anything to me. The only implication is the absurdity of your contention that you have a clue. I'm not impressed. But hang in there. I'm already old. Maybe some day I'll start getting senile & you can try again to convince me that "printing" has something to do with the money supply.

[fivekatz]

There are lots of philosophical takes on economic realities. Whether it is guys like Marx or the wonder of the last score of the 20th Century, Alan Greenspan they never live their philosophical realties of their views.

Unfettered capitalism seems always bubble and burst and the working class always seem to take the hit not those who "took" the risk. There never has been a true socialistic society because men of greed will always game the system hoping to feed the hopes of the masses while lining their own pockets.

The middle of the road has been the invention of the 30's to avoid either a dictatorship or a communist take over which was a taxation system that was redistributive and provided some passive action that would stop the 99% from eating 1% alive which easily could have happened.

US politics have been trying to undo this redistributive taxation and spending policy since 1936. What those trying to undo it have never figured out is that if you do not offer the 99% a Fair Deal it is only a matter of time before they say NO DEAL.

Now American politics since the end of WW2 have walked the final line between the return to laissez-faire economics, American capitalism with its redistributive taxation and policies to smooth out the differences between extreme success and everyone else.

What the 1% never have accepted is that 99% won't accept that inequity. The 1% find comfort in the fact that they can bankroll movements like the Tea Party, make American citizens feel there is something wrong with the idea that every citizen has an equal right to full health care and that there are many sexist, racial, ethic and orientation strings they can pull to distract the 99% from the fact that they are getting the short end of the stick and that there is a lot of shit in their end of that short stick.

But it is folly to think that any system which primarily calls on 99% of the populations to get screwed, to die younger due to the absence of health care and to doomed by class distinction due to the cost of higher education for their children will indefinitely accept that situation simply because 20th Century Communism failed.

At some point this American/Western system of economics has to work. It would not take long IMHO for a pure Libertarian system to cause the masses to turn on the few even if you left their opiates literally unregulated. And as best we can tell from China, communisim is a almost hard to separate form of capitalism from the Western practice of the economic system.

So at some point these giants are going to have to accept playing a fair game, paying their fair share and really playing for the benefit of both their shareholders, stakeholders and customers.

If they don't history suggests that a world movement will take place that will change everything and with the wild card of nuclear weapons that is a very scary option. But the present screw the masses continuum will not sustain itself long enough to prove those that deny climate change wrong.