Capitalism is living inside a casino in ireland

Sceala Clann Counsellor Location: KERRY

It is all so insane. like a cheap casino in jimmy's dublin. i was not dreaming that we - ireland, just recently, loaned a few billion to bailout bust Greece. ROFL
now bust england is offering bust ireland some money. ROFL as this goes on, most of my american friends say that the usa can't print new money fast enough.
once Ireland gets some money in, we should do the decent thing, call up bust portugal and bust spain, see if they want a few billion loan. someone somewhere must be making some real cash out of this virtual reality money. it would be funny if it was not causing so much pain to so many people.
anyone got a fiver billion i can borrow till the end of the month. i will pay you back as soon as mr x pays me, he is waiting for mr a to pay him. being irish, i will fully guarantee i will pay out
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anatomy of casino capitalism

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The term Casino Capitalism was coined by Susan Strange who used it as a title of her book Casino Capitalism published in 1986. She was one of the first who realized that

1. "that the roots of the world's economic disorder are monetary and financial"
2. "that the disorder has not come about by accident, but has in fact been nurtured and encouraged by a series of government decisions." (p. 60). In other words its was a counter-revolution (dismantling New Deal) from above.

According to Susan Strange transformation of industrial capitalism into casino capitalism involved five trends all of which increased the systemic instability of the system and the level of political corruption:

1. Innovations in the way in which financial markets work
2. The sheer size of markets
3. Commercial banks turned into investment banks
4. The emergence of Asian nations as large players
5. The shift to self-regulation by banks (pp.9-10).

The key to understanding of Casino Capitalism is that it was a series of government decisions (or rather non-decisions) that brought on the present state of financial instability and economic disorder. In other words casino capitalism has distinct "Made in the USA" and "Government property" marks. It was the USA elite, which refused to act responsibly in the face of changing economic conditions resulting from its own actions, and instead chose to try to perpetuate, by whatever means it had at its disposal, the institutional advantages that it had vis-a-vis its main economic rivals, stemming from the role of dollar as international reserve currency.

Self-reinforcing ‘positive’ feedback loops prevalent in Casino Capitalism trigger an accelerating creation of various debt instruments, interest of which at some point overwhelm systemic carrying capacity. Ability to lend against good collateral is quickly exhausted. At some point apparently there is no good collateral against which lending freely was possible, even at high rates. This means that the next stage of financial innovation involves scam and fraud, on increasing scale. Gradually Ponzi economy is replaced with Madoff economy.

This means that "society at large" does not have effective brakes to the assent of financial kleptocracy (or financial oligarchy), save the laws of physics—gravity and thermodynamics. In a way this was a silent coup. I would add to this the computer revolution and internet that made many financial transaction qualitatively different and often dramatically cheaper that in previous history. Computers also enabled creation of new financial players like hedge funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), as well as high-frequency trading and derivatives.

For Strange the speed at which computerized financial markets work combined with new much larger size and their now, near-universal pervasiveness is an important qualitative change. One of the side effects of this change is that volatility extends globally. Approximately $1.5 trillion dollars are invested daily as foreign transactions. It is estimated that 98 per cent of these transactions are speculative. In comparison with this casino Las Vegas looks like a aborigine village in comparison with Manhattan.
read some more
http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Financial_skeptic/casino_capitalism.shtml

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Capitalism is living inside a casino in ireland

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