How a Tyco Lawyer Channeled
Windfall Into an Unlikely Cause
Indicted Counsel Mark Belnick Gave
Catholics Millions After Converting
By LAURIE P. COHEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In July 2000, Mark Belnick, then the top in-house lawyer at Tyco International Ltd., received a $2 million payment toward a $12 million bonus. For Mr. Belnick, it was the latest reward in a meteoric legal career that ran from some of the highest-profile business cases of the 1980s and 1990s to Tyco, a hugely successful conglomerate and Wall Street darling.
Today prosecutors say that payment bought Mr. Belnick's silence about the looting of Tyco by its extravagant former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski. Mr. Belnick, facing criminal charges, has become one of the most celebrated casualties of the recent wave of corporate wrongdoing.
But few people know just what he did with that $2 million. Almost immediately, he gave most of it to a small Catholic college in California and to the Culture of Life Foundation, a Catholic pro-life group in Washington, according to e-mails to and from Mr. Belnick at the time and interviews with people involved with the donations.
Three months earlier, Mr. Belnick, formerly an observant Jew, had quietly converted to Catholicism and become an active supporter of Opus Dei, a conservative group within the church. While prosecutors accuse his boss, Mr. Kozlowski, of taking millions from Tyco to buy artwork and posh homes and to entertain friends in Sardinia, Mr. Belnick was using some of his allegedly unlawful Tyco haul for an entirely different purpose. In addition to his donations to the Catholic college and foundation, he gave money to a Catholic television network, two parishes and an Opus Dei bookstore and information center. It was all part of a midlife transformation that Mr. Belnick, the former president of a suburban Westchester, N.Y., synagogue, long kept secret from most of his friends and even his own family.
For Mr. Belnick, two journeys intersected at Tyco: He became embroiled in one of the messiest corporate scandals ever, and simultaneously pursued a sudden conversion and devotion to Catholic philanthropy.
I think some may wonder where the intersection of The City of London (Jewish banksters) intersects with Rome (in the NWO). I believe this goes back to what is called the "black nobility", merchant banksters (Jews) to the Popes.
Lost Wages User ID: 494677 9/19/2008 4:41 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
650 Years Ago:
How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash
by Paul Gallagher
Printed in the American Almanac, September 4, 1995.
Six hundred and fifty years ago came the climax of the worst financial collapse in history to date. The 1930s Great Depression was a mild and brief episode, compared to the bank crash of the 1340s, which decimated the human population.
The crash, which peaked in 1345 A.D. when the world's biggest banks went under, “led” by the Bardi and Peruzzi companies of Florence, Italy, was more than a bank crash -- it was a financial disintegration. Like the disaster which looms now, projected in Lyndon LaRouche's “9th Economic Forecast” of July, 1994, that one was a blowup of all major banks and markets in Europe, in which, chroniclers reported, “all credit vanished together,” most trade and exchange stopped, and a catastrophic drop of the world's population by famine and disease loomed.
Like the financial disintegration hanging over us in late 1994 and 1995 with the collapse of Mexico, Orange County, British merchant banks, etc., that one of the 1340s was the result of 30-40 years of disastrous financial practices, by which the banks built up huge fictitious “financial bubbles,” parasitizing production and real trade in goods. These speculative cancers destroyed the real wealth they were monopolizing, and caused these banks to be effectively bankrupt long before they finally went under.
The critical difference between 1345 and 1995, was that in the fourteenth century there were as yet no nations. No governments had the national sovereignty to control the banks and the creation of credit; or, to force these banks into bankruptcy in an orderly way, and replace fictitious bank credit and money with national credit. Nor was the Vatican, the world leadership of the Catholic Church, fighting against the debt-looting of the international banks then as it is today; in fact, at that time it was allied with, aiding, and abetting them.
The result was a disaster for the human population, which fell worldwide by something like 25 percent between 1300 and 1450 (in Europe, by somewhere between 35 percent and 50 percent from the 1340s collapse to the 1440s).
This global crash, caused by the policies and actions of banks which finally completely bankrupted themselves, has been blamed by historians ever since on a king -- poor Edward III of England. Edward revolted against the seizure and looting of his kingdom by the Bardi and Peruzzi banks, by defaulting on their loans starting in 1342. King Edward's national budget was dwarfed by that of either the Bardi or Peruzzi; in fact, by 1342 his national budget had become a subdepartment of theirs. Their internal memos in Florence spoke of him contemptuously as “Messer Edward” …”we shall be fortunate to recover even a part” of his debts, they sniffed in 1339.
A “free trade” mythology has been developed by historians about these “sober, industrious, Christian bankers” of Italy in the fourteenth century “doing good” by their own private greed; developing trade and the beginnings of capitalist industry by seeking monopolies for their family banks; somehow existing in peace with other merchants, and expiating their greedy sins by donations to the Church. But, goes the myth, these sober bankers were led astray by kings (accursed governments!) who were spendthrift, warlike, and unreliable in paying their debts which they forced the helpless or momentarily foolish bankers to lend them. Thus, emerging “private enterprise capitalism” was set back by the disaster of the fourteenth century, concludes the classroom myth, noting in passing that 30 million people died in Europe in the ensuing Black Death, famine, and war. If only the “sober, Christian” bankers had stuck to industrious “free trade” and prosperous city-states, and never gotten entangled with warlike, spendthrift kings!
Name Goes Here User ID: 505562 9/19/2008 9:51 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
650 Years Ago:
How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash
The Real Story
Two recent books help to turn over this cover story, though perhaps that is beyond the intention of their authors. Edwin Hunt's 1994 book The Medieval Supercompanies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence, establishes that this great bank was losing money and effectively going bankrupt throughout the late 1330s, as a result of its own destructive policies -- in Europe's agricultural credit and trade in particular -- before it ever dealt with Edward III.
“Indeed, the great banking companies were able to survive past 1340 only because news of their deteriorated position had not yet circulated....”
Just as in 1995.
And Hunt adds a shocker for the historians, based on exhaustive restudy of all the surviving correspondence and ledgers of the Bardi and Peruzzi. He concludes that their lending to King Edward III was done with such brutal “conditionalities” -- seizing and looting his revenues that his true debt to them may have been no more than 15-20,000 pounds sterling when he defaulted. Mr. Hunt himself works for an international bank, so he knows how such “conditionalities” of lending work today. He probably knows that the true international debt of Third World countries today is a small fraction of what the banks and the International Monetary Fund claim they owe. He definitely understands that fourteenth century England was a Third World country to the Bardi and Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli international banks. They loaned Edward II and Edward III far less than their promises -- but their promises have been dutifully added up as “total loans” by historians, starting with their fellow banker Giovanni Villani.
Even if we accept the highest figures ever given for Edward III's 1345 default against the bankers of Florence, the debt to them of the city government of Florence which they controlled, was 35 percent greater, and those bonds also defaulted.
More revealing is the latest work of the historian of Venice, Frederick C. Lane, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. This work shows that it was Venetian finance which, by dominating and controlling a huge international “bubble” of currency speculation from 1275 through 1350, rigged the great collapse of the 1340s. Rather than sharing the peace of mutual greed and free enterprise with their “allies”-- the bankers of Florence -- the merchants of Venice bankrupted them, and the economies of Europe and the Mediterranean along with them. Florence was the fourteenth century “New York,” the apparent center of banking with the world's biggest banks. But Venice was “London,” manipulating Florentine bankers, kings, and emperors alike, by tight knit financial conspiracy and complete dominance of the markets by which money was minted and credit created.
As long ago as the 1950s, in fact, one historian Fernand Braudel consciously demonstrated that Venice, leading the Italian bankers of Florence, Genoa, Siena, etc., willfully intervened from the beginning of the thirteenth century to destroy the potential emergence of national governments, “modern states foreshadowed by the achievements of Frederick II.” Frederick II Hohenstauffen was the Holy Roman Emperor in the first half of the thirteenth century, an able successor of Charlemagne's earlier achievements in spreading education, agricultural progress, population growth, and strong government. The great Dante wrote De Monarchia in a vain attempt to revive the potential of imperial government based on divine law and natural law, which had been identified with Frederick's reign.
Wrote Braudel:
“Venice had deliberately ensnared all the surrounding subject economies, including the German economy, for her own profit; she drew her living from them, preventing them from acting freely.... The fourteenth century saw the creation of such a powerful monopoly to the advantage of the city-states of Italy ... that the embryo territorial states like England, France and Spain necessarily suffered the consequences.”
In addition to what Braudel shows, Venice intervened to stop the accession of the great Alfonso the Wise of Spain, as successor to Emperor Frederick II.
This triumph of “free trade” over the potential for national government, rigged the fourteenth century's global human catastrophes, the worst onslaught of death and depopulation in history. It was not until the Renaissance created the French nation state under Louis XI, 100 years later, and then England under Henry VII, and the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel, that the human population could recover.
Population: The Fundamental Measure
The clearest measure of the destruction wrought by the merchants and bankers of Venice and its “allies” in the financial crash of the fourteenth century, is shown in Figure 1. What had been 400-600 years of increasing population growth in Europe, China, and India (altogether, three-fourths of the human population) was reversed. The world's population collapsed. Famines, bubonic and pneumonic plagues, and other epidemics killed more than 100 million people.
Wars, dominated by military slaughters of civilians as in Rwanda and Bosnia today, raged throughout Eurasia; Mongol armies alone slaughtered between 5 and 10 million people. This depopulation did not begin with the 1340s banking crash, although it accelerated after that for nearly a century. The policies of Venetian-allied finance were already reversing human population growth for 40-60 years before their speculative cancer completely exhausted what it monopolized, bringing on the 1340s rolling crash of all major banks which had not collapsed earlier.
How did free enterprise finance, with no government able to control it, collapse all the economies of the Eurasian continent? How could banks concentrated in one part of Europe -- tiny on the scale of modern banks work such a global catastrophe?
A Cancer on Production
In the eleventh, twelfth, and into the thirteenth centuries the growth and development of population both in Europe and particularly in China was accelerating. China's population doubled in 200 years during the “neoConfucian” renaissance of the S'ung Dynasty, to 120 million; the population density of northern France and northern Italy began to approximate the levels these regions have today. After the collapse and depopulation of the Roman Empire long before (300-600 A.D.), Europe's population had been growing at a steadily increasing rate for 700 years up to 1300 A.D., due to huge increases in the amount of agricultural land productively cultivated.
In addition, there had been several periods in which the rural technologies for using the plow, seed, animal power, water power, and wind power, leaped forward. Classical education of youth in monastery schools (oblates) was spreading up through the twelveth century, when the great cathedral building movement arose in France. These advances spread particularly rapidly due to the impetus of Charlemagne and his English and Italian allies from 750-900, and then again from 1100-1250, the period of the Hohenstauffen Holy Roman Emperors in Germany, Italy, and Sicily, ending with Frederick II.
But about the turn of the fourteenth century, the growth of food production and of population stopped in Europe. (China's population was already being devastated, on which more below.) There were major famines (multiple successive crop failures or extreme shortages) in 1314-17; in 1328-29; and in 1338-39. One historian concludes that:
“we gather from (the Italian chronicler) Villani's statements that a scarcity of more or less severe character put in an appearance about three times each decade. About once each decade the scarcity became so intense as to assume the proportions of a famine.”
The most productive rural regions of northern Italy and northern France began to be depopulated from about 1290 onward, while the towns and cities' population merely stagnated. (The Milan region was the counterexample, due to aggressive construction of government infrastructure, water control works, 3,000 hospital beds in the city for 150,000 people).
The production of wool in England began to decline from about 1310. English and Spanish wool were the basis of European clothing production, although cotton cloth was just beginning to be produced.
“In England, beginning with the reign of Edward I (1291 to 1310) and reaching a climax with Edward III, the Bardi and Peruzzi had acquired a status that gave them a practical monopoly of the procuring and export of wool....”
From 1150 onward, the famous Champagne Fairs had been the hub of trading in cloth and clothing, ironwork, woodwork, wool, agricultural implements and food for all of Europe; year round fairs were held in six cities in the Champagne region around Paris. Merchants had been accustomed to make profits of 34 percent annually in hard cash and goods trading here. The Venetian and Florentine bankers intervened into these fairs with large amounts of credit, bank branches, and with luxury goods “from the East,” and took them over.
By 1310, an Italian banker from Lucca boasted that he could raise 200,000 French livres tournois in credit on the spot at the Fair of Troyes but the actual trade in physical goods at the fairs was declining. Hunt's analysis of the successive sets of books of the Peruzzi bank shows that the Florentine bankers expected 810 percent annual profits up to 1335. This was far above the rate at which the physical economy of Europe was producing real surplus, and that physical rate of production was falling. The Venetians expected much higher rates of profit still, for reasons outlined below.
“At the end of the thirteenth century a slowdown in trade hit commodities first; credit operations kept going longer, but the fairs went into severe decline,” wrote Braudel.
In the late 1330s, the beginning of the 100 Years War between England and France led to the clothing industry of Flanders the main clothing production region of Europe being boycotted and completely shut off from wool; by the late 1340s, this industry was in complete decline, and was actually moving out of the towns and cities into tiny “cottage industries” in the countryside.
On top of all this, from the 1320s on, there was a “massive flight of silver oltremare (“over the sea,” that is, to Venice's maritime empire in the Middle East and Byzantium) which upset the equilibrium of Europe in the midfourteenth century.” Venetian exports of silver from Europe from 1325-50 equalled “perhaps 25 percent of all the silver being mined in Europe at that time.” Standard silver coin had been the stable currency of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, and of England, since Charlemagne's time. This massive export from Venice to the East “created chronic balance of payments problems as far away as England and Flanders,” and severe problems in making payments in trade. France “was emptied of silver coinage.” King Phillip's mintmaster estimated that 100 tons of silver had been exported “to the land of the Saracens” (the Islamic Middle East).
So production of the most vital commodities in Europe had been severely reduced, and the trade and circulation of its money completely disrupted, over decades before the 1340s crash, by Italian banks which appeared to be making usurious rates of profit. “The Florentine supercompanies resembled very closely in their operations the huge international grain companies of today, such as Cargill and Archer-Daniels Midland,” writes Hunt. “They used loans to monarchs to dominate and control trade in certain vital commodities, especially grain, and later wool and cloth.” Their dominance and speculation progressively reduced the production of these commodities.
We can see this in more detail, but keeping in mind that the story of the Florentine bankers and the fourteenth century crash and Black Death, is itself a coverup. These bankers were operating on an international scale limited to Western Europe and some Mediterranean islands. The maritime/financial empire of Venice -- and Venice only -- was speculating on the scale of all of the Eurasian landmass, and on this evidence alone, it had to be the merchants of Venice which rigged the devastation and depopulation of the majority of the human race in the fourteenth century. The Florentine bankers were sharks swimming in Venice's seas. The catastrophe of the Black Death in Europe, so often described, was exceeded by death rates in China and Islamic regions under the homicidal rule of the Mongol Khans from 1250, until nearly 1400. The Islamic chronicler Ibn Khaldun wrote:
“Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish.... Civilization decreased with the de crease of mankind.”
Venice was also the “banker,” slave market, and intelligence support service for the Mongol Khans.
(con't.)
Anonymous Coward User ID: 505562 9/19/2008 9:52 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
650 Years Ago:
How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash
The Black Guelph
The Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuouli family banks, along with other large banks in Florence and Siena in particular, were all founded in the years around 1250. In the 1290s they grew dramatically in size and rapaciousness, and were reorganized, by the influx of new partners. These were “Black Guelph” noble families, of the faction of northern Italian landed aristocracy always bitterly hostile to the government of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne, 500 years earlier, had already recognized Venice as a threat equal to the Vikings, and had organized a boycott to try to bring Venice to terms with his Empire.
Venice in 1300 was the center of the Black Guelph faction which drove Dante and his co-thinkers from Florence. In opposition to Dante's work De Monarchia, a whole series of political theorists of “Venice, the ideal model of government” were promoted in north Italy: Bartolomeo of Lucca, Marsiglio of Padua, Enrico Paolino of Venice, etc., all based on Aristotle's Politics which was translated into Latin for the purpose. The same “coup” made the Bardi, Peruzzi, etc.
Black Guelph banking “supercompanies,” suddenly two or three times their previous size and branch structure. Machiavelli describes how by 1308, the Black Guelph ruled everywhere in northern Italy except in Milan, which remained allied with the Holy Roman Empire, and was the most economically developed and powerful city-state in fourteenth century Italy.
The charter of the Parte Guelfa openly claimed that it was the party of the papacy, and with Venice, the Black Guelph openly pushed for the Popes to change usury from a mortal sin to a venial (minor) sin. Lane remarks that the Venetians seemed to enjoy an effective exemption from the Catholic Popes' injunctions against usury, and also from their ban on trading with the infidel -- the Seljuk and Mamluk regimes of Egypt and Syria.
A century earlier, in the 1180s, Doge (Duke) Ziani of Venice had provoked hostilities between the two leaders of Christendom, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, the grandfather of Frederick II. Doge Ziani, in time-worn Venetian style, then personally mediated the “Peace of Constance” between the Pope and the Emperor. The doge got his enemy, Emperor Frederick, to agree to withdraw his standard silver coinage from Italy, and allow the Italian cities to mint their own coins.
Over the century from that 1183 Peace of Constance to the 1290s, Venice established the extraordinary, near-total dominance of trading in gold and silver coin and bullion throughout Europe and Asia, which is documented in Frederick Lane's book. Venice broke and replaced the European silver coinage of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Byzantine Empire's silver coinage, and eventually broke the famous Florentine “gold florin” in the decades immediately leading into the 1340s financial blowout -- which blew out all the financiers except the Venetians.
Privatization
The Black Guelph bankers of Florence did not simply loan money to monarchs, and then expect repayment with interest. In fact, interest was often “officially” not charged on the loans, since usury was considered a sin and a crime among Christians. Rather, like the International Monetary Fund today, the banks imposed “conditionalities” on the loans. The primary conditionality was the pledging of royal revenues directly to the bankers -- the clearest sign that the monarchs lacked national sovereignty against the Black Guelph “privateers.” Since in fourteenth century Europe, important commodities like food, wool, clothing, salt, iron, etc. were produced only under royal license and taxation, bank control of royal revenue led to, first, private monopolization of production of these commodities, and second, the banks' “privatization” and control of the functions of royal government itself.
By 1325, for example, the Peruzzi bank owned all of the revenues of the Kingdom of Naples (the entire southern half of Italy, the most productive grain belt of the entire Mediterranean area); they recruited and ran King Robert of Naples' army, collected his duties and taxes, appointed the officials of his government, above all sold all the grain from his kingdom. They egged Robert on to continual wars to conquer Sicily, because through Spain, Sicily was allied with the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, Sicily's grain production, which the Peruzzi did not control, was reduced by war.
King Robert's Anjou relatives, the Kings of Hungary, had their realm similarly “privatized” by the Florentine banks in the same period. In France, the Peruzzi were the cooperating bank (creditor) of the bankers to King Philip IV, the infamous Franzezi bankers “Biche and Mouche” (Albizzo and Mosciatto Guidi). The Bardi and Peruzzi banks, always in a ratio of 3 to 2 for investments and returns, “privatized” the revenues of Edward II and Edward III of England, paid the King's budget, and monopolized the sales of English wool. Rather than paying interest (usury) on his loans, Edward III gave the Bardi and Peruzzi large “gifts” called “compensations” for the hardships they were supposedly suffering in paying his budget; this was in addition to assigning them his revenues.
When King Edward tried forbidding Italian merchants and bankers to expatriate their profits from England, they converted their profits into wool and stored huge amounts of wool at the “monasteries” of the Order of Knights Hospitalers, who were their debtors, political allies, and partners in the monopolization of the wool trade. It was the Bardi's representatives who proposed to Edward III, the wool boycott which destroyed the textile industry of Flanders -- because by 1340 it was the only way to continue to raise wool prices in a desperate attempt to increase King Edward's income flow, which was all assigned to the Bardi and Peruzzi for his debts! Genoese bankers largely controlled the royal revenues of the Kingdom of Castille in Spain, Europe's other supplier of wool, by 1325.
In the first few years of the 100 Years War, which began in 1339, the Florentine financiers imposed on England a rate of exchange which overvalued their currency, the gold florin, by 15 percent relative to English coin. Edward III, in effect, now got 15 percent less for his monopolized wool. Edward tried to counterattack by minting an English florin: the merchants, organized by the Florentines, refused it, and he was defeated. By this action, the Bardi and Peruzzi themselves, in effect, provoked Edward's famous default, and demonstrated his complete lack of sovereignty at the same time.
Even the famous account, by banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, of Edward III's default which triggered the final crash, acknowledges that his debt to the Bardi and Peruzzi included huge amounts he had already paid -- the curious arithmetic of the IMF to Third World debtors today:
“The Bardi found themselves to be his creditors in more than 180,000 marks sterling. And the Peruzzi, more than 135,000 marks sterling, which ... makes a total of 1,365,000 gold florins -- as much as a kingdom is worth. This sum included many purveyances made to them by the king in the past, but, however that may be....”
Even larger revenue flows came to the Vatican in the collection of its church contributions and tithes. Under John XXII, the Black Guelph Pope from 1316-1336, “papal tithes skyrocketted,” reaching the apparent value of 250,000 gold florins per year. All were collected by agents of the Venetian banks (for France, the largest source of papal revenue) and the Bardi bank (for everywhere else in Europe except Germany). They charged the Vatican sizable “exchange fees” to transfer the collections.
“Only they [the Venice-allied bankers] had the reserves of cash at Avignon [in France, temporary seat of the papacy for about 70 years] and in Italy, to finance papal operations. They transferred collections from Europe, and loaned them to the Popes in advance.”
Thus, Venice controlled the papal credit, and the continuing hostilities between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors.
(con't.)
Anonymous Coward User ID: 506444 9/19/2008 9:53 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
650 Years Ago:
How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash
Perpetual Rents
In Italy itself, these bankers loaned aggressively to farmers and to merchants and other owners of land, often with the ultimate purpose of owning that land. This led by the 1330s to the wildfire spread of the infamous practice of “perpetual rents,” whereby farmers calculated the lifetime rent-value of their land and sold that value to a bank for cash for expenses, virtually guaranteeing that they would lose the land to that bank. As the historian Raymond de Roover demonstrated, the practices by which the fourteenth century banks avoided the open crime of usury, were worse than usury.
In the Italian city-states themselves, the early years of the fourteenth century saw the assignment of more and more of the revenues of the primary taxes (gabelle, or sales and excise taxes) to the bankers and other Guelph Party bondholders. From about 1315, the Guelph abolished the income taxes (estimi) in the city, but increased them (estimi) on the surrounding rural areas into which they expanded their authority. Thus, because the bankers, merchants, and wealthy Guelph aristocrats did not pay taxes -- instead, they made loans (prestanze) to the city and commune governments. In Florence, for example, the effective interest rate on this Monte (“mound” of debt) had reached 15 percent by 1342; the city debt was 1,800,000 gold florins, and no clerical complaints against this usury were being raised. The gabelle taxes were pledged for six years in advance to the bondholders. At that point, Duke Walter of Brienne, who had briefly become dictator of Florence, cancelled all revenue assignments to the bankers (defaulted, exactly like Edward III).
Thus were the rural, food-producing areas of Italy depopulated and ruined in the first half of the fourteenth century. The fertile Contado (county) of Pistoia around Florence, for example, which reached a population density of 6065 persons per square kilometer in 1250, had fallen to 50 persons/square kilometer in 1340; in 1400, after 50 years of Black Plague, its population density was 25 persons/square kilometer. The famines of 1314-17, 1328-9, and 1338-9 were not “natural disasters.”
Some of the famous banks of Tuscany had failed already in the 1320s: the Asti of Siena, the Franzezi, the Scali company of Florence. In the 1330s, the biggest banks, with the exception of the Bardi, (the Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli, Buonacorsi) were losing money and plunging toward bankruptcy with the fall in production of the vital commodities which they had monopolized, and which their cancer of speculation was devouring.
The Acciaiuoli and the Buonacorsi, who had been bankers of the Vatican before it left Rome, went bankrupt in 1342 with the default of the city of Florence and the first defaults of Edward III. The Peruzzi and Bardi, the world's two largest banks, went under in 1345, leaving the entire financial market of Europe and the Mediterranean shattered, with the exception of the much smaller Hanseatic League bankers of Germany, who had never allowed the Italian banks and merchant companies to enter their cities.
Already in 1340, a deadly epidemic -- unidentified but not bubonic plague -- had killed up to 10 percent of many urban populations in northern France, and 15,000 Florentines had died out of 90-100,000 that year. In 1347, the Black Plague, which had already killed 10 million in China, began to sweep over Europe.
Venice, the World's Mint
“Venice,” wrote Braudel:
“was the greatest commercial success of the Middle Ages -- a city without industry, except for naval-military construction, which came to bestride the Mediterranean world and to control an empire through mere trading enterprise. In the fourteenth century she was in the ascendant to her greatest periods of success and power.”
And most importantly, Frederick Lane writes:
“Venice's rulers were less concerned with profits from industries than with profits from trade between regions that valued gold and silver differently.”
Between 1250 and 1350, Venetian financiers built up a worldwide financial speculation in currencies and gold and silver bullion, similar to the huge speculative cancer of “derivatives contracts” today. This ultimately dwarfed and controlled the speculation in debt, commodities, and trade of the Bardi, Peruzzi, et al. It took all control of coinage and currency from the monarchs of the time.
The banks of Venice were deceptively smaller and less conspicuous than the Florentine banks, but in fact had much greater resources for speculation at their disposal. The Venetian financial oligarchy as a whole, which ruled a maritime empire through small executive committees under the guise of a republic, centralized and supported its own speculative activities as a whole. The “Republic” built the ships and auctioned them to the merchants; escorted them with large, well-armed naval convoys of their empire, with naval commanders responsible to the “Committee of 10” and the magistrates for the convoys' safety. This same oligarchy maintained several public mints and did everything possible to foster the centralization of gold and silver trading and coinage in Venice.
As Frederick Lane demonstrates, this was the dominant trade of Venice by no later than 1310. Like today's “mega-speculators” in currencies and derivatives, such as the Morgan and Rothschild-backed George Soros and Marc Rich, the Venetian banks and bullion-dealers were backed by large pools of capital and protection.
The size of the Venetian bullion trade was huge: twice a year a “bullion fleet” of up to 20-30 ships under heavy naval convoy, sailed from Venice to the eastern Mediterranean coast or to Egypt, bearing primarily silver; and sailed back to Venice bearing mainly gold, including all kinds of coinage, bars, leaf, etc.
The profits of this trade put usury in the shade, though the merchants of Venice were also unbridled in that practice. Surviving instructions of Venetian financiers to their trading agents in these fleets, specify that they expected a minimum rate of profit of 8 percent on each six-month voyage from the exchange of gold and silver alone: 1620 percent annual profit.
One astonishing speech to the Council of 10 by Doge Thomasso Mocenigo, from a time after the 1340s financial crash, goes further. Compare the magnitude of these figures to those discussed earlier for the Papacy, for England, for Florence (keeping in mind that the Venetian standard coin, the gold ducat, was roughly comparable to the Florentine gold florin):
“In peacetime this city puts a capital of 10 million ducats into trade throughout the world with ships and galleys, so that the profit of export is two million, the profit of import is two million, export and import together four million [from the two annual voyages, 40 percent profit --PG].... You have seen our city mint every year 1,200,000 in gold, 800,000 in silver, of which 5,000 marks (20,000 ducats) go annually to Egypt and Syria, 100,000 to your places on the mainland of Italy, to your places beyond the sea 50,000 ducats, to England and France each 100,000 ducats...”
How was this possible? Not by private enterprise, but by imperial Venetian “state usury.” The gold from the East was being looted out of China (until then the world's richest economy) and India by the murderous Mongol empires, or being mined in Sudan and Mali in Africa and sold to Venetian merchants, in exchange for greatly overvalued European silver. The silver from the West was being mined in Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, and sold more and more exclusively to Venetians with bottomless supplies of gold at their disposal. Coinages not of Venetian origin were disappearing, first in the Byzantine empire in the twelfth century, then in the Mongol domains, then in Europe in the fourteenth century.
Crusades and Mongols
The so-called Christian Crusades (the first in 1099, the seventh and last major one in 1291) had had only one strategic effect: expanding and strengthening the maritime commercial empire of Venice to the East. Venice provided the ships to take the Crusaders to the Middle East; Venice loaned them money, and Venetian Doges often told them what cities to try to capture or sack. Through the Crusades, Venice gained effective control of the cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Acre in Lebanon and Lajazzo in Turkey, and strengthened its domination of commerce through Constantinople. These were the coastal entry-points for the “Silk Routes” through the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions to China and India. During the Mongol Empires (1230-1370), these routes were virtual “Roman Roads” maintained by Mongol cavalry.
The empire of the Mongol Khans was for a century the largest and most murderous empire in human history. The Mongols eliminated, by slaughter and disease directly in their domains, perhaps 15 percent of the world's population, and destroyed all the greatest cities from China west to Iraq and north to Russia and Hungary -- including all the trading cities whose competition bothered Venice. The strategic alliance between Venice and the Mongol Khans, up to and through the financial collapse of the 1340s, has been treated as a historical curiosity of the adventures of Marco Polo's family. But it gave Venice final control of the trade to the East, and along with the trade through Egypt for the gold mined in Sudan and Mali, it gave them huge amounts of gold with which to dominate world currency trading in the decades leading to the financial disintegration of the fourteenth century.
The Mongols, in their genocidal rule of China, looted all the gold of S'ung China and of the part of India under their control, replacing it with silver currency, and for the lower castes (i.e., the Chinese), with paper money. Mongol middlemen met Venetian merchants at the Mongol-ruled Persian trading cities of Tabriz and Trebizond, and the Black Sea port of Tana, and traded gold for silver from Europe. A large-scale trade in slaves from Mongol domains was associated with this currency trading. This was the so-called “tanga gold,” from the tanghi or uncoined pieces bearing the seal of the Mongol Khans, as well as bar and leaf gold. The silver was in small Venetian ingots called sommi, which “were the common medium of exchange throughout the Mongol and Tatar Khanates.... [T]he demand for silver in the Far East was continually increasing,” writes Lane. “The Venetians were able to raise the price of silver despite the existence of record quantities” coming to Venice from Europe.
The Crusades also consolidated the alliance of Venice and its allied Black Guelph-ruled cities, the Papacy, and the Norman and Anjou kings, against the Holy Roman Empire centered in Germany, which Dante and his allies were struggling to restore to its potential. By the late thirteenth century, the Mongols were a conscious part of this Venetian-led alliance, and the Mongol rulers of Persia even proposed Crusades to the European kings and the Popes! Pope John XXII granted Venice alone the license to trade with the infidel Mamluk sultans of Egypt in the 1330s. This was overvalued European silver and Mongol slaves for gold from Sudan and Mali.
(con't.)
Name Goes Here User ID: 505562 9/19/2008 9:56 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
650 Years Ago:
How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash
”Derivatives”
Thus, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice provided all the coinage and currency-exchange for the largest empire in history, which was looting and destroying the populations under its rule. Venice had taken over the currency trading and coining of what remained of the Byzantine Empire, and also of the Mamluk Sultanates in North Africa. Venice, over this period, took the East off a gold standard and put it on a silver standard (it was the richer region of the world, and being more intensively looted). It took Byzantium and Europe off a 500-year old silver standard and put them on gold standards.
And the Venetian financiers and merchants were making annual rates of profit of up to 40 percent on very large, overwhelmingly short-term (six-month) investments, in a world economy characterized at its most productive, by perhaps 34 percent annual rates of real physical ``free energy”: surplus wealth (see Figure 2). The other Black Guelph Italian bankers' operations were subsumed by Venetian financial manipulations, but they were also realizing rates of profit far above the rate of physical reproduction of the economies of Europe. Because of the dominance of these speculative cancers, all the major real physical economies were shrinking.
What was the effect of this Venetian global currency speculation on the European economies before the 1340s crash and the Black Death? It was the short-term vise that caught the other European bankers and rigged the crash itself.
From 1275-1325, the ratio of the average gold price, to the average silver price, steadily rose, though with continual short-term fluctuations, from about 8:1 to, finally, about 15:1. In this period, Europe's large production of silver was looted through Venice's command of Mongol and African gold. “Venice had the central position as the world's bullion market,” writes Lane, ``and attracted to the Rialto (the bridge area which was Venice's “Wall Street”) the acceleration of buying and selling stimulated by the changing prices of the two precious metals.” From 1290 into the 1330s prices rose sharply for the most crucial commodities.
In this process of quickening speculation, Venice “ensnared all the surrounding economies, including the German economy” where production of silver, iron, and iron implements was concentrated. By the 1320s, Venetian merchants no longer even travelled to Germany to trade: They compelled German producers and merchants to come to Venice and take up lodgings near the large Fondaco dei Tedeschi (“Warehouse of the Germans”) where their goods were stored for sale.
Venetian bankers on the Rialto (and Venetian bankers alone in the world at this time) made cashless bank transfers among merchants' accounts, allowed overdrafts and gave credit lines on the spot, created “bank money,” and speculated with it. They did this not out of cleverness, but by simple control of currency speculation worldwide: They had the reserves.
In fact, the famous “bills of exchange” of the Florentine bankers, were really a crude form of the “derivatives contracts” of the 1990s speculative cancer. The Bardi, et al. charged fees to those involved in trade, for exchanging currencies, since there were so many regional and city currencies. These exchange fees were a cost looted out of all production and trade, and a usurious profit to the bankers. But the banker made the “bills of exchange” even more expensive, to hedge against their own potential losses in currency fluctuations being manipulated by Venetian bullion merchants. Thus bills of exchange in the fourteenth century cost 14 percent on average, worse than borrowing at interest (usury).
Venice switched Europe to gold by force of looting silver. England, for example, from 1300-1309 imported 90,000 pounds sterling in silver for coining; but from 1330-1339, it was only able to import 1,000 pounds. “But in Venice there was no lack of silver at all in the 1330s.” The Florentine bankers, with their famous gold florin, enjoyed great speculative profits in this process.
However, from 1325-1345, the process was reversed. The ratio of gold price to silver price, dominated by Venetian manipulation, now fell steadily from the 15:1 level, back down to 9:1. When the price of silver started rising in the 1330s, there was an unusually large supply of silver in Venice! And through the 1340s, “the international exchange of gold and silver greatly intensified again,” Lane shows, and there was another wave of sharp commodity price increases.
Now the Florentine bankers were caught, having loans and investments all over Europe in gold, whose price was now falling.
After Venice triggered the fall of gold with new coins in the late 1320s, the Florentines did not attempt to follow suit until 1334 when it was too late; the king of France did not follow until 1337; and last came the pathetic effort of the king of England in 1340, mentioned above.
As Lane shows:
“The fall of gold, to which the Venetians had contributed so much by their vigorous export of silver and import of gold, and in which they found profits, hurt the Florentines. In spite of their being the leaders of international finance ... the Florentines were not in a position, as were the Venetians, to take advantage of the changes that took place between 1325 and 1345.”
Venetian superprofits in global currency speculation continued right through the bank crash and financial market disintegration of 1345-47 which they had rigged, and beyond.
In the period 1330-1350, the Black Death of bubonic and pneumonic plague had spread through southern China, killing between 15 and 20 million people, as the Mongols' looting process came to exhaustion. The Mongols' “horse culture” (they grazed huge herds of horses for hunting and warfare) had destroyed the infrastructure of agriculture wherever they went. It had also moved the population of Plague -- carrying rodents from the small area of northwest China where it had been isolated for centuries, down into southern China and westward all the way to the Black Sea.
In 1346, Mongol cavalry spread the Black Death to towns in the Crimea, on the Black Sea, and from there it was carried by ship to Sicily and Italy in 1347, and spread throughout Europe. The European population had stagnated for 40 years while becoming more concentrated into cities, where water and sanitation infrastructure had decayed. In Florence, for example, all the city's bridges had been built in the 13th century, none in the fourteenth. Nutritional levels had already fallen as grain production declined. During the Crusades, the practice of classical education in monasteries had been viciously attacked by the “preacher of the Crusades,” Bernard of Clairvaux, and his Cistercian order. In 1225, the Vatican had finally forbidden the presence of young students oblates in monasteries. Europe's broadest form of education had disappeared.
After the financial crash and the entry of the Plague, Europe's population fell for 100 years, from perhaps 90 million, to roughly 60 million.
(con't.)
Name Goes Here User ID: 505562 9/19/2008 9:57 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
650 Years Ago:
How Venice Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash
No More Venetian Methods
God allows evil, so that we will become better by fighting it, said Gottfried Leibniz, who founded the science of physical economy in the seventeenth century. The Black Death in Europe destroyed the Malthusian idea that fewer people would mean better life for the survivors -- against it, came the Renaissance idea of the dignity and sanctity of each individual life. The chronicler Matteo Villani wrote in the 1360s:
“It was assumed, on account of the lack of people, that there would be an abundance of everything the law produces. But on the contrary, because of man's ingratitude, everything was in unusually short supply ... and in some countries there were terrible famines. It was thought there would be a profusion of clothing and of everything the human body needs besides life itself, and just the opposite occurred. Most things cost twice as much or more than they did before the plague and wages increased disjointedly to double.”
The marked price rises in the aftermath of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics, lasted more than a generation. This then led to a sharp deflation and collapse of wages from about 1380.
After 1400, in the years which led to the Golden Renaissance, political forces turned against the methods of the Italian free enterprise bankers. In 1401, King Martin I of Aragon (Spain) expelled them. In 1403, Henry IV of England prohibited them from taking profits in any way in his kingdom. In 1409, Flanders imprisoned and then expelled Genoese bankers. In 1410, all Italian merchants were expelled from Paris. When Louis XI became King of France in 1461, he organized national forces to make it the first strong and sovereign nation state. Along with the development of ports, roads, and support for the cities, Louis XI insisted on a single, standard national currency, created and controlled by the crown. For both Louis XI and England's Henry VII in the same period:
“mercantilist forms of economic nationalism were combined with a pronounced hostility to Italian techniques of credit and clearing.”
(End)
Anonymous Coward User ID: 506497 9/19/2008 11:24 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
- Corporations use deceptive accounting practices to inflate the perceived value of their business
- Said corporations then rack up debt to other corporations which they are in league with
- The deceptive accounting is made public on purpose to debase or lower that corporation's perceived value
- The executives get slaps on the wrist and get to keep their enormous separation packages while stockholders are left with worthless shares
- The government then "bails out" that company's debt so the other companies won't go out of business and "to prevent weakening the economy"
- The companies that received this "bail out" benefit from having debt from the "bailed out" corporation have actually just found a way to get lots of money from the government while looking like innocent bystanders of a company's immoral accounting practices
- The former executives are all much richer than they were and now their company can be acquired for a mere fraction of what it was worth before
Sounds like a very, very intelligent and well thought out way to make a ton of money; get it from the government and conspire with your colleagues to share monopolies over all major industries. It also works the other way around and they can just debase a legitimate company using any number of tactics so they can buy the company for less than what it's actually worth.
Pretty smart. I'm not sure what they're doing with their money, but whether it's going to London, Rome or anywhere else, people should understand the basics of the how the capitalist world around them actually works.
This is big stuff.
Name Goes Here User ID: 505562 9/19/2008 11:43 AM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
The farmer just wants the wool off his sheep. Whatever it takes, short of killing the sheep. Then, send them back out into the fields naked and let the sheep do what they do until they're nice and wooly again. Repeat.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 362124 9/19/2008 12:21 PM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
This guy has also been removed from google.finance
Sadly, in all the years of this place, he was the one and only truth. All others have been a shame.
Gob Bless Reinhardt
yeah..this site was deleted too www.victorthorn.com
for posting this...
Now that we know the Federal Reserve is a privately owned, for-profit corporation, a natural question would be: who OWNS this company? Peter Kershaw provides the answer in "Economic Solutions" where he lists the ten primary shareholders in the Federal Reserve banking system.
1) The Rothschild Family - London 2) The Rothschild Family - Berlin 3) The Lazard Brothers - Paris 4) Israel Seiff - Italy 5) Kuhn-Loeb Company - Germany 6) The Warburgs - Amsterdam 7) The Warburgs - Hamburg 8) Lehman Brothers - New York 9) Goldman & Sachs - New York 10) The Rockefeller Family - New York
Now I don't know about you, but something is terribly wrong with this situation. Namely, don't we live in AMERICA? If so, why are seven of the top ten stockholders located in FOREIGN countries? That's 70%! To further convey how screwed-up this system is, Jim Marrs provides the following data in his phenomenal book, "Rule By Secrecy.
" He says that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which undeniably controls the other eleven Federal Reserve branches, is essentially controlled by two financial institutions:
1) Chase-Manhattan (controlled by the Rockefellers) - 6,389,445 shares - 32.
3%
2) Citbank - 4,051,851 shares - 20.
5%
Thus, these two entities control nearly 53% of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Doesn't that boggle your mind? Now, considering how many trillions of dollars are involved here, and how the bankers are WAY above our "selected" officials in Washington, D.C., do you think the above-listed banks and families have an inordinate amount of say-so in how our country is being run? The answer is blindingly apparent.
Where does the money come from?
We all know that the Federal Reserve CORPORATION prints money - then loans it, at interest, to our government. But wait until you see what a total scam this process is. But before we get to the meat of this issue, let's remember one thing about the very essence of banking - primarily that money should have some type of standard upon which its value is based. In the case of America, we operate on what is called a "gold standard" (i.e. our money is backed by gold).
So, with that in mind, let's look at how money is actually created, and at what cost. If the Federal Reserve wants to print 1,000 one-hundred ($100) bills, their total cost for ink, paper, plates, labor, etc. would be approximately $23.00 (according to Davvy Kidd in "Why A Bankrupt America"). Now, if you do the math, the total cost of 10,000 bills would be $230.00 ($.023 x 10,000). But, and here's the catch - 10,000 $100 bills equals $1,000,000! So, the Federal Reserve can "create" a million dollars, then LEND it to the U.S. Government (with interest) for a total cost of $230.
00! That's not a bad deal, huh!
The banking industry calls this process "seignorage." I call it outright THEFT. Why? Well, regardless of the immense profit margin ($1,000,000 for $230), plus the huge interest payments, our government then needs to STEAL the American people's money to payoff their debts via a Mob-like agency called the IRS. So the bankers steal from the government, then the government turns around and steals from the people. I'm no genius, but who do you think is getting screwed in this process? US - the people at the bottom rung of the ladder.
What's worse is that - now catch your breath - there's NO MORE gold left in Fort Knox! It's all gone. In other words, the GOLD STANDARD that our financial system was based upon is now an illusion. We can't convert our money into gold --- only other currency. The entire underlying basis for our money is now a lie - a sham. The Federal Reserve has become so arrogant that they've become a literal MONEY MAKING MACHINE, creating currency out of thin air! So that's where the Fed gets their money - they literally make it, then lend it to us so they can make even MORE money off of it.
Money As A Religion
The above-detailed process has become so ridiculous that William Grieder, former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, wrote a book in 1987 entitled, "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" that details how the Controllers have conditioned us to accept this absurd situation.
To modern minds," he writes, "it seemed bizarre to think of the Federal Reserve as a religious institution. Yet the conspiracy theorists, in their own demented way, were on to something real and significant. The Fed did also function in the realm of religion. Its mysterious powers of money creation, inherited from priestly forebears, shielded a complex bundle of social and psychological meanings. With its own form of secret incantation, the Federal Reserve presided over awesome social ritual, transactions so powerful and frightening they seemed to lie beyond common understanding.
"
Mr. Grieder continues, "Above all, money was a function of faith. It required implicit and universal social consent that was indeed mysterious. To create money and use it, each one must believe, and everyone must believe. Only then did worthless pieces of paper take on value.
"
Do you get it? MONEY is an ILLUSION! Why? Because the gold standard upon which our money is supposed to be based has been eliminated. There's no more gold in Fort Knox. It's all GONE! Now, money really IS only paper!!! In the past, money was supposed to represent something of tangible value.
Now it's simply paper!
Taken one step further, many of us don't even use paper money any more! Why? Well, here's a scenario. Many places of employment directly deposit their employee's paychecks into the bank. Once the money is there, when bill time comes around, the person in question can write out a stack of checks to pay them. Plus, when they need gasoline they use a credit card; and groceries a debit card. If this person goes out for dinner on Friday night, they can charge the tab on their diner's card. But what about the tip? They simply scribble in the amount at the bottom of the check. So far, the person hasn't spent a single dollar bill. Plus, if you bring electronic banking into the picture, we've virtually eliminated the use for money.
And, God forbid, what happens when encoded microchips are implanted into the backs of our hand?
In essence, money has become nothing more than an illusion - an electronic figure or amount on a computer screen. That's it! As time goes on, we have an increasing tendency toward being sucked into this Wizard of Oz vortex of unreality. Think about it. Americans as a whole are carrying more personal debt than in any other time in history. Plus our government keeps going further and further into the hole, with no hope of ever crawling out. But we have less and less actual MONEY! We're being enslaved by the debt of electronic blips on a computer screen! And 70% of the banks that control this debt via the Federal Reserve exist in foreign countries! What in God's name is going on? As author William Bramley says, "The result of this whole system is MASSIVE debt at every level of society.
"
We're getting screwed in a sickening way, folks, and the people doing it are demented magician-priests that use the ILLUSION of money as their control device. And I hate to say it, but if we allow things to keep going as they are, the situation will only get worse. Our only hope ... ONLY HOPE ... is to immediately take drastic action and remedy this crime.
(to be continued)
www.victorthorn.com...
Quoting: Skipper
Goodness. It almost reminds me of the bible. There were 10 kingdoms and 3 were subdued. Lehman is subdued. There might be a biblical connection to all this. ESPECIALLY since the bible, revelations specifically, calls for markings and whatnot about the financial system.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 362124 9/19/2008 12:29 PM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
China is the largest holder of Fannie and Freddie bonds, so they'll do what the FRB tells them to do , I guess... Or not.
Japan is quite Romanized and it was so, before WW2. The Jesuits main city of power was Nagasaki which is why the Zionists behind the US Atom Bomb dropped it on that city, to make a point about the Vatican-supported liquidation/inquisition of WW2. It's King (Pharonic Ptolemiac Zionist bloodlines) versus Priest (Vatican, killers of Kings) just like it's been all down through history ever since Akhenaten closed down the temples and pissed off the priests. Akhenaten's grandfather, Thutmosis IV built the stelae which the Pope has in his front yard.
We may have found the missing link.
Bump for a pin.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 506226 9/19/2008 4:18 PM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
I had to stop and sweep the house, and am back to read more from Name Goes Here (NGH). NGH, are a you a regular GLPer or did this thread bring you from eleswhere?
Damn, this is a lot to absorb. Is this what Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice was about?
Anonymous Coward User ID: 340322 9/19/2008 5:16 PM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
How would a wise colonist have invested their income.. and what foreign markets would they have invested in?
First.. attention should be given to how a “global crossing” is planned.. and paid for.
In modern times.. the planning committees for outsourcing projects are referred to as “closed-door energy task forces”.
Now that we know now what would have been nice to know then.. a colonist may have well been advised to turn to history in order to make wise investment decisions.
In 1607.. even 150 years since its invention, the European powers that be.. and Gutenberg’s movable type printing press.. are still having difficulty co-existing.
Throughout the 16th Century.. most printed books still fail to avoid the church’s “forbidden books list”.
But.. one book slipped through the cracks.
A colonist’s history book.
A colonist’s history book of.. global trade, high finance, and disruptive technologies.
“NO COLONIST LEFT BEHIND”
chapter 1
What Was Outsourced First?
..
In the beginning, it was.. canal projects.
A little later.. it was iron.
Then.. technology was ”spread” [outsourced] all over God’s flat-earth.
..
The history of outsourcing.. can be summed up as follows:
* canals (people worked a lot cheaper on the other end of the canal)
* dynasty
* wheel
* wheel technology transfer
* empire
* iron
* iron technology transfer (please.. there had to be at least one rugged individual Philistine with a single-minded pursuit of profit) then..
* wage stabilization.. then..
* religion
* religion
* religion
* religion and..
* more canals
Now.. how was the new world upgraded to be able to support The Virginia Company of London’s lofty outsourcing goals?
Here’s how.
Around the year 1521.. the conquistador Hernan Cortiz conquered the Aztec empire of Mexico and “became a man of unimaginable wealth and power”.
About ten years earlier.. King Ferdinan of Spain had sent Cortiz to the Western Hemisphere with the command ”Get Gold!”
Cortiz mistakenly thought the King said “Keep Gold!”
A wise colonial market-investor might ponder whether Ferdinan who.. after all.. was the King.. could “imagine” Cortiz’s unimaginable wealth and power?
King Ferdinan should have clarified his command with “Get Gold,” then..
“Bring Gold Back!”
.. because, in the 1550s, Spain.. has some bills to pay.
In hindsight, some question whether King Ferdinan should have sent another explorer to go “take care”.. of Cortiz.
In 1555 Arthur Anderson’s Spanish subsidiary changed its name to Accenture.
And.. two years later Spain filed for bankruptcy..
..so did France.
Now.. unlike Cortiz.. Spain is NOT a country of “unimaginable wealth and power.”
If it was - then maybe Spain could afford its canal projects without having to start wars.
Cortiz could have stepped in as the lender of last resort.
In reality.. Cortiz was probably the “one-greedy guy”.. the
“single-guy conspirator”
There is one thing that will never change about upgrading the next foreign nation to be able to support the world’s outsourcing requirements.
It all got accomplished by the actions.. of one.. greedy.. guy.
Hey.. times are hard – blame Cortiz.
A Colonial investor tip:
Bankruptcy is often blamed on a phenomena referred to as “too many loans” during industrial revolutions.. and global crossings.
Bankers never seem to learn from these financial “blunders” often repeated throughout history.
So.. shortly after Spain’s bankruptcy, the board members of the Bank Of Genoa changed their names to Huguenots to make themselves sound.. less French.
Then, the newly minted Huguenots hightailed it to sunny Florida.
This is eventually referred to as “fleeing investor persecution”
In early 1558.. following a five-year faith-based initiative.. England changed its form of currency (”re-coinage”).
In the fall of 1558.. England told England’s outside investors that it changed.. its form of currency.
Although England’s ”re-coinage” made it harder to buy food during the famine that followed.. the citizens appreciated the church’s “restoration of Catholicism” just the same.
England’s financial event kicked off a war in France.. known as the “Wars of Re-Coinage & Bankruptcy” that lasts about 30-odd years.
Presently.. England, France.. and Spain are quietly referred to as the.. “lands of.. somewhat limited opportunity.”
Bankruptcy, currency changes, famine, inquisitions, and war in one part of the world are what makes other parts of the world seem like.. lands of opportunity.
In 1563 the term “puritan” was first introduced in England.
In 1564.. the term “f____g puritans” was introduced in England.
Periods of heavy outsourcing and faith-based initiatives have been traveling partners for a very long time.
In 1565 Sir Thomas Gresham founded the Royal Exchange of London.
Not too far off in the future - exchange fraud will create - pilgrims (but thats another market crash).
Tip: Dutch Settlement Scheme 101: If you wish your citizens to leave.. take their money.. (and their food) and.. they will consider.. leaving.
Between 1565 and 1567 the bankrupt French and the bankrupt Spanish commence with war.. and a little trade.. in Florida.
Colonist investment tip: This would have been a good time to consider avoiding the healthcare sector as tobacco is about to be prescribed.. as a cancer cure.
At the time.. money should have been invested in sweet potatoes and tobacco.. and maybe war commodities.. and if you have been paying attention you will begin to observe a pattern here:
* next big thing
* move it somewhere else
* observe how it is paid for and..
* commence with war (to galvanize the outside investors)
In 1574..
.. the idea of digging a canal through the Suez isthmus was put to the Council of Ten by the republic of Venice.
The project was abandoned as “being too expensive” (without a couple more.. “Wars of Canal constructio.. errr.. I mean “Wars of Religion”). So..
.. in 1575 Spain.. files for bankruptcy – again.
And wouldn’t you know it.. along comes the fifth, sixth, and seventh wars of religion.
back to goings-on in the New World..
Spain and France have got their eye on a fairly sizable canal project in the vicinity of what is later called Panama.
England has got its eye on a fairly sizable harbor project in the vicinity of what is later called.. Jamestown, which is about to become the newest district office of the Virginia Monopoly Of London.
Back then.. monopoly grants were called.. “Royal Charters.”
In a little while (1696).. Issac Newton and John Locke will be letting you know their definition of.. a “Royal Exchange”
Regarding the Virginia Company of London:
For those of you who are rowing.. on the slave side of the boat on these “perilous journeys”.. if you really wish to receive slave reparations.. start with the legal department of the..
.. Virginia Company of London
.. or try Portugal
after all..
they started it.
Well back to history and investing.. Spain has big dreams.
And, if you can dream it.. you can do it.
But, because of Cortiz.. Spain has a small budget.
And.. Europe.. has no budget.
Spain came to the sad realization that Spain cannot afford.. anything.. so Spain.. replaces all 30 members of its General Accounting Office.
Now I hate to sound like a broken record here but - guess what happens in the year 1607?
You guessed it..
Spain files for bankruptcy.. again.
If you have been paying attention.. you are not only a colonist, but you are also.. a financial history expert..
at least up until 1607.
Oh, and there was that little coin-clipping thing back in 1278.
In 1559 Paul the IV.. came out with his recent entries to his forbidden books programme.
Such titles included:
* “The History Of The World Up To 1559..With The Money Part Put Back In”
* “Globalization Revisited; The New.. New.. Reality”
* “Competing With Slave Wages For Dummies”
* “A Complete Guide To Offshore Tax Havens”
* “Rome Didn’t Fall; Rome was Outsourced”
* “Jobs Europeans Haven’t Wanted to do.. Throughout History” (digging canals in the “new worlds” all over the world.. was one of those menial jobs European workers.. didn’t want.)
One other thing..
Approximately 801 years before 1607 (around the time of Leif’s journeys) the construction of the Amsterdam harbor was under way.
Investor tip: The reason there have been so many wars throughout history is because there have been a hell of a lot of canals and roads to be built.
A few decades prior to 1605 canal lock technology “fled religious persecution” (emigrated) from China.. to Holland.
Then.. the Dutch began to build their canals with “single-locks.”
This single-lock invention lifted trade to new heights and it was soon invented.. over and over again.. in developing nations.. all over the God’s flat-earth.
Actually, the Crusades were organized to officially “bridge” the world’s “canal-lock divide.”
Take note: As a colonist, you may not be aware, but the word “colonize” is a.. biblical metaphor for..
“dig another harbor”
Waterway modernization is pretty important if one is interested in global trade but supposedly.. Amsterdam Harbor was only needed just in case any Viking [cargo] ships were accidentally “blown off course.”
Outsourcing do’s and don’ts:
The place you plan to outsource your homeland jobs too, will require an infrastructure.. equal to.. or better than your own.
This will include aqueducts and roads.. and they cost.. mucho coinage.. and.. it tends to irritate the homeland labor force.
Colonist tip:
Watch out when you hear the words:
“Largest Single Foreign Investment”
These words are usually preceded with the words:
“Closed Door Task Force”
And these words are usually followed with the words:
“Greatest Accounting Fraud Ever”
.. which is always followed with the words:
“Because Its War!”
You colonists have got a lot of war coming - so if you aren’t into war that much - you might want to pay attention to the reason war is.. waged.
In the next chapter..
The informed colonial investor will learn about “New World travel promotions” and find the answer to the questions:
1. Why didn’t Shakespeare flee religious persecution?
2. Powhatan and Pocahontas: ..why would any father name his daughter..
reinhardt predicted a September crash. Semetember is not over. Regarding the 15th, he stated:
and the negative news that will move the market downward should occur Sept 15
Gosh, where have I heard your defaulting homeowners BS before? Good deflection.
And, he was NOT talking about millions of dollars. He was talking and absolute transfer of wealth out of the US economy, into private and RCC hands.
Fuck off with your shilling. You're out of your league, here.
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 385176
Clearly both you and the other poster have no idea of what I just said. I harbor no illusions that the economy is on a "upswing"; you and your pal are just too kooky and paranoid to think about, uhh, actual economics. Besides, why do that when you can believe it's a shadowy organization and a nice juicy conspiracy.
Apparently I'm out of my league because I haven't used the F word as elegantly as you. Ahh, quite an argument, I bow before your superior intellect and obvious knowledge of the economy.
Until you can prove to me how some random Catholic group has ANY influence at all on the market, this "reinhardt" goon will have as much credibility as you - ZERO.
Anonymous Coward User ID: 385176 9/19/2008 9:12 PM
Re: Man calls todays stock market crash to the date, on a message board? must read.
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