US/NATO War on Russia

[David Guyatt]

David, I agree with your response in almost every way. I was responding however to answer this sentence.

Numerous media stories over past months have western pols accussing Russia of supplying Ukrainian separatists with weapons.

In the small scheme of things, Putin's support was very significant. (And you said you agree.) Since he had become the lifeline to Novorussiya, they owed him and depended on him. When they were in severe danger to of overrunning and destroying the Ukr forces, he pulled the plug and enforced a cease fire. Bizarre. Now they are re-supplied and well dug in.

BUT in the bigger picture, as you say, this is minor. In the bigger picture the US/NATO conceived, plotted, planned, and worked for years to trigger this war. And it is certainly part of a much larger scheme to impose hegemony on both Russia and China at the expense of millions of lives. And then of course the final prize has been the unachievable one -- planetary domination in a regime of re-imposed serfdom.

Certainly I agree with you and was I guess just quibbling.

On an another note, you wrote:

Having permitted this to occur in order to line private pockets at the expense of taxpayers across the world

I am starting to hear more about the "bail-in," which was used in Cyprus in the European financial crisis to "save the banks." A bail-in appropriates depositor funds to capitalize the troubled bank in question. The rationale I recently heard for this first time event is that this is a more just way of saving a bank since it does NOT inflict pain on the taxpayer but only on the depositor -- you know, the person was stupid enough to put money in a bank that was going to fail. ::

My position is that tax payers have been picking up this bill since 2008. This is certainly true in the UK where there has been considerable economic pain over the last 6 years after the government stepped in and rescued a couple of large banks and kept others afloat through changes in economic policy. The same has been true elsewhere in Europe too.

The Cyprus case is, so far as I am aware, an unusual but very worrying development because it makes depositors bear the pain, which is contrary to sound banking practice - where historically it is the shareholders, who invest in a bank, who quite rightly pick up the bill. That is the risk they take when investing. A depositor however, doesn't invest.

But in the Cyprus case the sums were too large anyway for shareholders to put things right, as I recall (banks there were over leveraged). I understand that part of the background to this was that Putin (and some chums) had some two billions of dollars worth of his own money in Cypriot banks and insisted these funds be returned to him - and that this happened. So some depositors got away with it. Meanwhile, all other non VIP depositors got their savings and, in some cases there pensions too, wiped out for simply using a local Cypriot bank account - which they must have to live there.

Inasmuch as today we all have to use banks and cannot escape from that, it stands to reason that depositors should not bail out banks - because how can they know, in advance, what crazy investment decisions a banks board of directors makes that puts it at risk? This is not usually made public. It happens in the shadows and when things starts to go wrong, it is not unusual for a cover up to occur to stop the inevitable from taking place. Thus compounding the problem. The last people to know are usually the depositors and then only after rumours begin to circulate about the soundness of a bank - and by then it is often too late to get your money out anyway.

In the UK there is a government protection scheme that guarantees depositors will have their deposits protected (up to £85k in any one banking group). Were this not to have been the case, I suspect that back in 2008/9 when everyone was bailing out of the stock markets and into cash and metal, there would have been a massive exodus of money out of the UK into offshore banking destinations, which would've brought to an immediate end the City of London. The government wouldn't permit this to happen, hence their immediate intervention.

There still are too many banks that are too big to fail and, in my opinion, what happened in 2008 will inevitably happen again - and from what I hear from friends who are still in banking, this is, in fact, already happening again as senior bankers once again chase annual bonus payments at the expense of prudent lending. Greed will always force its way to the surface when it comes to playing with other people's money.

But I have read some discussions that seem to suggest that the Cypriot bail-in option has now been virtually secretly enacted as a Europe wide emergency measure for the future.