Occupy

Occupy Wall Street is a protest against what? The greed on WS? The institutionalized bonus culture of more, more, more even when it gets less? The politicians who don't stop it and seem not to care? It is just a thought?

In Europe and the rest of the world there is also an occupy protest today, Amsterdam 4,000 people, The Hague 1,500.
My protest is this blog. Down with the decisiveless politicians and the greedy speculators.

Eurocrisis

China, Canada and the USA have put pressure on Europe on the IMF summit in New York.
I'm happy with that pressure on and the advice for the delegation of 20 or something! Ministers of Finance got.
Europe is so decisive-less on the crisis with the debt countries in the south.
The European politicians don't decide on the major issues. They postpone the decision how to handle the crisis. In the meantime the crisis on the financial markets deepens.

This is not good for the stability in the world. China, Brazil, India, the USA, Australia, Japan, Indonesia will feel the lack of leadership.
This is the main problem of the EU.

How's life?

So much is going on these day's.

- Israel is bombing Hamas (unbelievable why civilians, especially children and women aren't in shelters. Are they used as human shields?) and the world community is not doing it's utmost to seize fire, or is it?

- The financial credit-crunch is still going on. The impact on the man in the street is growing.

- Obama is only one week away from his presidency.

- Hillary Clinton is almost minister of foreign affairs (is this the name?) She wants the USA to lead the free world again. This leadership needs support of the allies.
When writing this I think allies will always support. It only depends on how far the allies will support the USA. Obama won the election with faith and change. That's what there must be. The situation has changed dramatically in the past years. 8 Years Bush did harm the USA and the world.

- Holland has an obligation to be in Afghanistan in a peacekeeping and rebuilding role till 2010. We might support the Afghanistan mission after 2010.

- In Holland the ice is melting but the winter isn´t over.

- In the Ukraine are again troubles with Russia about the gas-supply to Europe. Eastern Europe is held hostage to to supply gas because the Ukraine in it's role as distributor has debts to Russia. In the midst of winter Hungary, Romania, Slovakya, the Tsjech republic, Germany, Poland have gas shortages. This happening for the 3rd year now. People already died of the cold. The Russians are unreliable from this point of view. Maybe the Ukraine plays a role in it I don't know. They have the benefits of the doubt.

- Life is okay. I got a new coffee machine which makes good coffee. Having a cup of coffee I write my blog. I still cycle, even in winter. After Christmas in the cold dry weather I cycled in total 200K. I feel fine.

- 2 day's ago I made a trip of 50K and found a photo camera, worth €150,=. I made a call of it with the Municipality I found it. The Internet makes life very easy.

- What's not going very well is my neighbor. The cancer is poisoning her liver. However she gets nutrition, she doesn't gain weight. So she decided 5 day's ago to stop the supply of nutrition with a drain. She gets weaker day by day. Last time I saw her was December 27.

A lecture

This long video of a lecture of George Soros.
It's about his book "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means" a book I'm currently reading (in Dutch of course, isbn 978-90-254-2951-5)



There is a lot of criticism on Soros and I don't know why. Of course he earned his money in a way many people disgust, but his theory is quite right. It's about fallibility and reflexivity.

ABNAMRO, Fortis, stakeholders and even life on earth

Imagine yourself. On September 24 2008 you get into a coma and in December 2008 you awake. Bit by bit you start to remember and realize things that happened. It's now, less than a week before x-mas when you start to walk, talk and come to consciousness again. It's a whole different world.

No, it's not the hilarious movie Goodbye Lenin. It's what happened in our times in the past months.

Now it's December 20 and the World is completely different. Some banks went bankrupt,
Obama won the American presidential election, worldwide economy collapsed, the worldwide automotive industry is almost broke, Iceland is on the brink of bankruptcy.

In the Netherlands Governmental intervention prevented 2 banks (ABNAMRO-bank and Fortis-bank), which had to become one bank, to fall. The USA, the European Union, other European nations, Russia, the far east all face a real recession.

In the USA Bernard Madoff, the founder and president of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities , told the police about his fraud in his brokerage firm. The media claims that it's a fraud as high as $50bn. I don't think so, it might be higher, much higher. Also this is probably not the only fraud which becomes obvious together with the fall of the financial system.
This financial crisis might somehow be good for the world economy. It shakes up real life and stresses the values that are really important: The fundamentals of the economy, not the derivative economy.

An example, and I tell you it's not a complaint; I invested € 20.000 in bonds which give a higher revenue when the reference price of the underlying stocks is going up. 2007 Was a profitable year, in 2008 however the bond plunged to 80 or less while 100 or higher is be profitable. Till 2012 I'll have bonds which don´t pay, after 2012 the underlying value will be payed. What, if my bank went broke? Hopefully the Government will support the backbones of the economy. I dislike derivatives as put and call options on company-stocks, specialized products like bonds which are linked to many stocks on invisible markets. It's all not so transparent as you think it is.

These fundamentals are a certain demand on the market and supply of that demand. In fact the demand-factor and supply-factor are the 2 things needed to create a market.
Of course nowadays we need money to trade. However we could do without.
Let's say we need a sound financial system as a ceteris paribus.

Problem is the world has no sound financial system. Regulators fail in many aspects. Banks fail in their task being transparent. According to George Soros in the crisis in global capitalism knowledge of fail-ability of an actor in economy is in certain way positive because it makes the actor aware of his position and the his need to change. (GS. warned the world in 1998 for an unstable (financial) future). A summary of the book.

In a situation of instability of the markets the Children's Investment Fund (CIF) claims in January 2007 that ABNAMRO-bank made to little profit for it's shareholders and other stakeholders. They urged a break-up or sale. This was the start of the Dutch banking crisis which affected all stakeholders. Even today almost 2 years after the carousel started. It's in the worst situation you can imagine.

The stock value plunged from € 5.= to € 0.93, banking personnel is not amused with the uncertain situation, banking customers are not amused with the bad prospectives for their banks whether it is ABNAMRO-bank or Fortis-bank and stock owners are not happy at all. So the theory of CIF didn't stand. All stakeholders are ripped or got away before the crisis started.

I wish you all a merry Christmas, a lot of lights and a fine X-mas tree. Let's celebrate life on earth because there is hope.

George Soros

Seems to be a filantrophe.

He's written a lot of books about the imperfect economy, about the imperfection of the financial marketsystem and the imperfections of the actors on those markets. The latest book (2008) is tittled the international creditcrisis, subtittle the future of the financial markets.

There must be change of that global financial system. We're not in the day's of Bretton Woods anymore. Europe is almost united in the EU and the far east plays another important role. The world isn't anymore what it used to be.

The EU has come to an agreement (under chairmanship of French president Sarkozy) on climate change, the credit crisis, the Irish no previous this year and other things.

While googling on some international English news about the EU-top, I found an artivle of Martin Kettle in the Guardian of 12 December 2008.

You should know that there are some tensions between the Anglo-American (Great Britain) and Rhineland bookkeepers (France, Germany, the Netherlands, etcetera) which model is adequate dealing with the present crisis. I think none of those models because of the reflexivity of the markets. Soros explained that in a 1998 book, tittled The crisis of global economy, subtittle the downfall of the free world.

The person who makes a model which explains the problems we face now, can earn a lot of money when he also knows the shortcomings of his model (because everything is liable to error as Soros said)

Trivia

Do you know that Ian Fleming created James Bond based on the Dutch Prince Bernhard van Lippe-Biesterfeld.

I googled on Prince Bernhard and found this paragraph... The Bilderberger group, founded after World War II by Britain’s genocidal Prince Philip and the Nazi SS Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, represents one of the key nodal points where the international finance oligarchs meet under US-UK leadership to ratify consensus on larger strategic initiatives. It was for example the Bilderberger meeting held near Stockholm in Saltsjøbaden, Sweden in the spring of 1973 which secured the final consensus for the Royal Dutch Shell plans for the October 1973 Middle East War and the attendant “Arab” oil boycott, which looted Japan and Europe and imposed global austerity to stabilize the US dollar and the Atlanticist banking system. That financiers’ staged oil boycott was the 1973 version of today’s “peak oil” hoax. read more on this site

if you put it in today's context you know nothing has changed and that the western banking system has failed and that the failure goes back to times just after World war II