Austerity gives Goldman opportunities to privatize and financialize the economy further;
Austerity allows Goldman to continue to be a parasite sucking on the lifeblood of the economy;
Austerity will guarantee more bailouts when Goldman takes big risks and fails;
Austerity will keep the 1% wealthy and the wealth accumulation for the rich will continue apace;
Austerity keeps wealth within the financial sector where Goldman can enjoy it;
Austerity guarantees Goldman's "rentier" status, i.e., it collects unearned money via debt;
Austerity is financial warfare against labor, against industry and against the government;
Austerity will increase the role of the bank and lead to an increase of power and wealth over the rest of society while citizens suffer from low wages, low or no pensions, high debt and fewer entitlements.
Michael Hudson on Why There is an Alternative to European Austerity
By Stephanie Kelton and Michael Hudson - Naked Capitalism
. . . .
(c. 40:54): “So, in the United States, the real economy of production and consumption has actually declined over the last 30 years. All of the growth in the economy is overhead to the rentier sector—to what we call the FIRE sector: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, which now should include the legal system and the monopoly system. So, almost without the textbooks or anyone noticing, what used to be analysed as industrial capitalism has turned into finance capitalism. And this finance capitalism has not been the kind of finance that was imagined a hundred years ago. It is not financing of industry. It’s financing of economic parasitism and overhead. And all of this is presented as if the way to get rich is to go into debt—to borrow—to buy assets that are being inflated in price. When your real estate and your public enterprises have risen in price, this is not because they’ve actually grown. It is because a house and a property is worth whatever a bank will lend. And as the lending terms have been loosened, you’ve had this huge inflation in asset prices that is way beyond the ability of the economy to pay. Foreclosure time arrives and, so, financial capitalism turns into a bubble economy because the only way that banks can avoid default and a break in the chain of payments is to lend more money.”
. . . .
(c. 54:27) “Whenever you have a misunderstanding of reality year after year, decade after decade, and now for a century, when a false picture of the economy is painted you can be sure that there is a special interest benefiting. A false picture of reality does not happen by nature; it is subsidised. And the banking sector has subsidised a junk economics that is taught in the universities, broadcast from your newspapers, mouthed by the politicians, whose election they sponsor, to try to make you believe, that you’re living on Mars in a different kind of a world—instead of the actual country that you’re living in—and to pretend that there is no financial class that is trying to grab what belongs to the public at large. This is what ends up with a difference between central bank creation by the government with the government aims of economic growth and full employment, as compared with commercial bank credit that aims at economic shrinkage, at austerity, at lower wages, at lower output, so that it can do to you what the commercial banks are doing to Greece, to say give us your ports and your land and your tourist areas and your water and sewer systems, so we can charge you for water and sewer. And we can take the money that you had expected to get in pensions and we can scale it down, so that we can pay ourselves.
(c. 56:10) “This is what it took an army in times past. And today it’s done without an army, as long as you will be passive and believe the science-fiction of the world that banks are painting. Thank you. [Applause]”
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