The Written Word, January 27th
By Rafe Mair
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 03:45 AM
I hate to say it but it looks to me as if the Olympic wheels are falling off and the bail out of Vancouver’s problems with the Olympic Village is only part of the problem. The Public/Private Partnerships (P3) in other construction areas are in big trouble too. Remember that the deal is that the BC government pays all of the Olympics overruns.
The government’s position will, no doubt, be that the recession/depression has hit everywhere so we must expect it too. I don’t agree.
As I’ve written elsewhere, Wendy and I took stock of the situation back in 2005. We saw the US with a huge trade deficit (mostly with China) a huge annual deficit and an enormous national debt and we asked some rhetorical questions over a beer. How long can this go on? Considering the US financial position and the terrible scandals such as Enron, what’s going to pop up around the corner? We decided that something had to give and that, since we don’t have a “long term”, the banks and cash looked like a good idea. To the consternation of our broker we took our little nest egg out of the market. Every day I thank God that we did.
This isn’t meant to be a note of self congratulation but the foreword to this question: if a couple of folks in Lions Bay could see what was happening, how come the people in the Finance Ministry in Victoria couldn’t see the same thing? Indeed, they had access to information we did not. They have highly trained and well paid experts to advise them on these matters.
The Vancouver/Whistler Winter Olympic games has all the earmarks of the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal leaving taxpayers on the hook for, amongst other things, the stadium dubbed “The Big Owe”.
The government will say ‘we weren’t to know” to which the answer is “you’ve no right to complain because you ought to have known.”
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Posted by: Eagleone on January 27 2009 8:43 AM
the banks created asset bubbles through secured seed capital financing of strategic assets they would later like to own themselves as private assets...
which they then funded through drive by bond sales and IPO's of the dream sold to the unsuspecting masses...
then they allowed client corporations of theirs with insider management to fudge the real financial picture of whole economic sectors in order to sell the full cost of the infrastructure build out or speculation game...
they did this through accounting practices like the reciprocal-revenue where they swapped services and billed the full revenue up front, but claimed the costs over 25 years ignoring completely the idea of truthful accounting (ironically BC was a global leader in this new accounting fraud through BC Hydro (accenture) and 360 Networks)...
deregulation was their mantra...
because the free markets are self correcting they would tell the masses as they ruthlessly applied their policies of financial wizardry that created the 'new reality' of paper on paper 'profits' made in the new derivative speculation markets...
meanwhile those not playing the game with them stand on the sidelines as the 'new money' takes its position in the economy...
the private central banks that control the flow of capital ensures irrational exuberance with cheep new money, because recessions are a thing of the past and can be managed with cheep money... lots of cheep money...
When the signal is given and the owners of the most prized assets are way over leveraged on the 'cheep' capital...
the banksters starve the company or entire sector by taking away access to capital and thus educing a death spiral where the traditional rules of asset allocation no longer apply, so as to make sure the company doesn't fail completely (for the sake of the assets and or the employees)...
and thus the secured debt is all that matters and the managements gets their cut for managing the process keeping value in the 'assets'...
and the bankers take full control of their new assets revalued at pennies on the dollar and debt free to compete with any of the companies that played by the so called rules of a 'free market'...
when the Wall Street ponzi scheme has reached its limit in the real economy its time to tell a good scare story in the tradition of scare story motivation used through the timeless ages to fool those who don't understand into doing what one would like them to do (ie flat earth... don't fall over the edge if you go to far, dragons ect)...
they are getting so efficient they have by passed the need for the war to get the money this time around...
so we give them our tax payer dollars in the billions and trillions as they clean out the last source of resistance to their engineered plan of global consolidation under their dollar printing empire of credit tyranny...
we ask them if they are going to create some more jobs for us and if we will have the income to feed our families...
and they tell us only if we sign here and here and here and everything will be just fine...
In short that is the bankster plan from Wall Street to Main Street and the consolidation of global economic power into the hands of the few. In BC our government and media have been under their spell buying their scare stories for some time now... problem is the real scare story is never the one that is talked about because in the end money talks....