How appropriate is this?
This was written a while ago... anyone recognise it? ****** "Capital must be free to establish monopolies so that its leaders shall have political force". "By centralizing in our own hands the money-power of the world, we can throw all people into the ranks of the proletariat . . The aristocracy benefited by having their people healthy and strong, we are interested in just the opposite". (T: Ring any bells?) "Hunger creates the right of capital to rule the worker. By want and envy and the hatred it engenders we shall move the mob. . . This hatred will be further magnified by the effect of an economic crisis, which will stop dealings on the changes and bring industry to a standstill. By creating this crisis we shall throw upon the street whole mobs of workers simultaneously in all the countries of Europe". "We shall surround our government with a whole world of economists, bankers and millionaires, because in substance everything will be settled on the basis of figures". "We must tear out of their heads the very principle of Godhead, replacing it with arithmetical calculation and material needs . . . We must put industry on a speculative basis, for in that is our strength". "Economic crises have been produced by us through them by no other means than the withdrawal of money from circulation. Huge pools of capital have stagnated, forcing States to borrow from them and thus become their bond-slaves. . . in twenty years, a State which has borrowed money at 5% has paid the whole sum in interest without reducing the debt. . . The State is thus forced to impoverish its masses in order to pay off rich foreigners. Why could those stupid governments not have taken the money they needed from their own people". "They could play tricks with internal loans but not the external, for they know that we shall demand all our money back".

No - I've never read it before. It uses words like "proletariat", "capital" and "monopolies" and talks about "the aristocracy" in the past tense as if their time had passed. I think that would place the writing in the industrial age, in Europe, probably somewhere between 1850 and 1939. "Economic crises have been produced by us through them by no other means than the withdrawal of money from circulation." Few have the power to do that - except perhaps multinational banks - and the piece is written from a perspective of power. No idea.

From the piece above: Economic crises have been produced by us through them by no other means than the withdrawal of money from circulation. Then this from Robert Peston's blog Hoarding by bankers is on the rise. Given the choice between making a bit of extra profit by lending cash and simply keeping the cash at hand to meet any possible emergency, well bank treasurers - under pressure from their chief executives - are opting for extreme caution. This is very bad news for the Bank of England. It means that - again - there has been a partial breakdown in its ability to control demand in the economy, and hence inflation and growth, via changes in its policy rate. The Bank does not explicitly target three-month sterling Libor, the three-month rate for lending between banks. But when it moves its policy rate, the Bank of England expects that to have an influence on the rates that households are charged for mortgages and personal loans and that companies are charged for their debt. The Bank of England hopes to transmit its changes in interest rates to the rates we pay via interbank rates - of which probably the most important is three-month Libor. So it must be worrying for the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee that it has maintained its policy rate at 5% but three-month Libor is well over 6% - and still rising (the BBA's fix this morning was 6.28 per cent, up from 6.2 per cent yesterday). What's more, this rise in thee-month sterling Libor has come at a time when the market actually expects cuts in the policy rate (as shown by the three-month OIS rate I mentioned yesterday in my note on "interbank hysteria"). There are already signs of banks and building societies pushing up mortgage rates again. And I've been contacted by businesses who say they can't obtain new loans at any price. The most basic function of the banking system, to channel funds at the right price to those who can best use it, has broken down.

One of the Rothschilds, by any chance, Tony? I like Robert Peston of the BBC. He broke the Northern Rock story and seems to be genuinely involved with the dramas unfolding and on top of the subject matter as well. Anyone know anything about him?

Not quite Jack. It was from the document that purported to be the minutes of the meeting in Basle in 1897... I thought you might have recognised it - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Percy recently read a book, written some 30 years before that meeting took place, that it is suggested the 'meeting notes' were plagiarised from, but whether or not the Protocols were genuine is largely irrelevant as the sentiments and situations contained in them are exactly what is happening today, and of course, is what happened in the Great Depression. Although there is great turmoil in the markets and financial world, for every loser there has to be a winner. Follow the money and you see what is behind it all. Are the bankers failing? Or are they reaping the biggest windfalls ever with al the free money that is being pumped in by central banks al around the world? When we had our own Black Wednesday in 1992 - a day I remember extremely well - it showed then just how ruthless the speculators could be in virtually bringing down the British economy. The problem is that for every £1 the government can mobilise, the speculators can mobilise £100. The power is with the traders, not the governments... and the traders have to keep their money... in banks. Money is like energy ... it cannot be destroyed, but it can change its shape, type and location.

I was very close then!! The Protocols is an interesting document, but almost certainly a tsarist forgery. And I take your point about winners and losers. But not every banker can be a winner surely?

That depends on who you think the bankers are. I doubt very much that the Rockefellers and Rothschilds are sweating over what is going on. Who do you think that the US government and central banks are going to borrow the money from? Who has sufficient clout to drum up $700 billion at a moment's notice? When the British public think of "bankers" they will invariably think of "The Big Four", but they are not the ones with multinational power. No matter how big they think they are they are totally vulnerable to the market system because that is where they play their game. The real power is in private wealth, not the public corporations with their monolithic structures. It is people with power that make decisions that make or break economies and whether they are made or broken the powermongers will win every single time.

Tony - don't forget the huge spending power of the cash-rich Sovereign Wealth Funds that I mentioned on another thread. These are enormous amounts of ready cash - a very rare commodity these days!

Hmm, SWFs aren't going to be acting against their own interests though, whereas banks have a very long history of not giving a shit about anyone other than themselves. Like American and Swiss banks aiding the Nazis, for example. Money and its owners tend not to be on intimate terms with conscience.

This is a good article on SWFS from The Economist