Thursday, July 28, 2011

Business Insider Presents: The College Bubble Visualization
















The theory behind the higher education bubble says that while the cost of an education increases, the ability to pay back student loans decreases.
The theory has its roots in the late 1980s when Secretary of Education William Bennett, Jr. suggested student loans could be leading to drastic tuition increases and a coming education bubble.
The following chart offers some perspective on the rate of tuition increases compared to the consumer price index and home prices.

Original Article 

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A Historical Perspective of Usury















"For the love of money is the root of all evil" -- II Timothy 6:10

Money

"The most sinister and anti-social feature about bank-deposit money is that it has no existence. The banks owe the public for a total amount of money which does not exist. In buying and selling, implemented by cheque transactions, there is a mere change in the party to the whom the money is owed by the banks. As the one depositor's account is debited, the other is credited and the banks can go on owing for it all the time.

"The whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today. Starting with nothing whatever of their own, they have got the whole world into their debt irredeemably, by a trick.
"This money comes into existence every time the banks 'lend' and disappears every time the debt is repaid to them. So that if industry tries to repay, the money of the nation disappears. This is what makes prosperity so 'dangerous' as it destroys money just when it is most needed and precipitates a slump.
"There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative." -- Frederick Soddy, M.A., F.R.S., Nobel Prize Winner, 1921

As the above makes clear, banks are able to manipulate "money" using various methods like the debiting of one account and the crediting of another, and so on, thus "balancing" the accounts. Banks also "create" money in more ways than one, through a trick that will be looked at later on.

Economists use the term "create" when observing the process by which money comes into being. Thus, creation means making something that did not exist before.
A sawmill makes boards, workers build houses from timber, a glass-blower makes fancy glass ornaments. In these examples, they did not "create", but converted already existing materials into a more usable, and thus more valuable form.

However, money "creation" is somewhat different. Here, and here alone, man "creates" something out of nothing. Pieces of worthless paper are printed, given various denominational values, which can be used to purchase, for example, a glass ornament. Its value (of the money, or piece of paper) has been "created" literally out of thin air.

As we can see from the above, manufacturing money is dirt cheap, and whoever does the "creating" and issuing stands to make impressive profits  (Click below for full article)