Bank Bail-ins: Evolution of The Vampire Squids

Surviving the pandemic on so many different fronts is uppermost in your mind. I hear you. The odds are you haven’t paid much attention to the regular meetings the moneyed elites have in places like Davos, Switzerland and other exotic and excursive places where go knowing they won’t be bothered by any real investigative journalists. But if you have heard something of these elite meetings of the 1% (of the 1%) they will probably have been described as the super elites of the western world getting together to see how they can fix world problems. They think only they can do this. After all, they are the world’s richest so therefor they must be the world’s smartest. The real problem is they have already fixed it (world problems); for themselves. When they meet it is usually to discuss how they can tighten the screws on the working class.

They have fixed it so almost anybody can get a credit card, buy a car or even a house, with very low interest (although Canada’s banks have recently tightened up on getting a mortgage). Use that credit card, keep the economy going, we are ever so slyly urged. Even if young people can’t find a job after graduation, or does find one but gets laid off due to the pandemic, or can only find one that pays peanuts and are stuck with student debt and perhaps no food in the fancy little cupboard in the cool new condo that will soon be repossessed. And when they discover the reality of 17 per cent compound interest on unpaid credit cards, those students with massive student loan debt cannot even declare bankruptcy.

How is it that the richest corporations in Canada and the US can declare bankruptcy while at the same time sucking up unthinkable amounts of fed money and also being protected from creditors and continue to operate while a poor student cannot? And why is it that while the money of the financial elites keep multiplying out of sight while the amounts of money allowed for working class wages amounts to bugger-all? What the elites have decided is that it isn’t enough to have bail-outs when banks are threatened with insolvency (the bail-out is a situation where the federal government pays to keep the banks from going bankrupt, which means the public pays) but have recently also made plans for “bail-ins”.

I wrote a bit about bail-ins in my last posting but from some comments I received this needs a lot more explaining. While a bail-out is horrible, as we are still suffering from the economic effects of the 2008 bail-out, a “bail-in” will allow the banking system to drain every last dollar they can from the bottomed out working class. I will describe this new move that the vampire squids have in store for us. More details on this next time.