Luxembourg Court backs Iceland’s decision not to pay banker-created Debt

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | JANUARY 29, 2013

Who has to pay the bankers in Iceland’s banking crash? Not the Icelanders. Different from countries such as Spain and Ireland, Iceland decided that taxpayers should not pay for the excesses of an industry that had grown disproportionately, but most importantly, that had ramped up the country’s debt to a point where upwards of 90 % of the debt written under the country’s name was actually bank debt.

Iceland will compensate the British and Dutch two of the countries that had bet more heavily in the fictitious financial products offered by banks out of Iceland. The citizens said no twice through referendums, and now, five years after the collapse of its banking system, a Luxembourg court just gave the northern nation the reassurance that they did what needed to be done to get rid of the bankers’ tentacles.

The Court of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) believes that the country did not violate any law when it refused to return to 300,000 savers money deposited in foreign entities offering some interests that then seemed to good to pass. “It is a victory for democracy. It sends the message that banks can not reap the benefits and send the bill to taxpayers when things go wrong, “says Magnus Skúlasson, an Icelandic economist.

The court, which also represented Norway and Liechtenstein, provides a very interesting nuance: Iceland is not obligated to pay as “the deposit insurance fund was unable to meet its obligations in the event of a systemic crisis “. The decision by the court would be equal to the FDIC fund not having enough cash to ensure the banking entities in the United States, with bankers demanding that U.S. taxpayers assumed the responsibility of a carefully crafted collapse of the American banking system. Just as in the case of Iceland, U.S. taxpayers would not be liable for the banks’ misconduct and therefore they wouldn’t have to pick up the tab.

A community spokesman was quick to answer that Brussels clings to the obligations of the deposit insurance funds that remain “valid also if there is a systemic crisis.” Nevertheless, the European Commission says it needs time to study the ruling. “The ruling is also good for the Netherlands and the UK. If they had won, it would mean that the nation-state is responsible for all bank deposits, something no country wants, “adds Jon Danielsson of the London School of Economics.

After the bankruptcy, the governments in London and Amsterdam used their coffers to compensate customers of the Icelandic bank. Shortly after they began the legal process that came to an end yesterday, as the ruling that Reykjavik considered “satisfactory”, does not admit any appeals.

Despite the support of the courts, Iceland has ended up paying some of the money. Reykjavik has already repaid about 3,300 million euros, about half of the total paid in Icesave, that corresponds to debt that the government itself was actually responsible for. The money corresponds to the debt from Landsbanki, one of three banks that failed in 2008 and led the entire country’s banking system to bankruptcy. The amount paid is more than 90% of the guaranteed minimum that the State was obliged to return.

The Real Agenda encourages the sharing of its original content ONLY through the tools provided at the bottom of every article. Please DON’T copy articles from The Real Agenda and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Do you want a recovery? Let the foreign banks fail

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 24, 2012

Although the financial crisis is said to have begun in 2008, its actual inception started many years before. As explained yesterday, the so-called recovery that almost every politician says governments are seeking is a sham. There are no plans drawn to have a recovery of the kind spoken of on the main stream media. In fact, it is totally the opposite.

It is true; the crisis that we are experiencing is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, but the conditions that created the crisis are the same that have existed for the past century. The system of creating money out of thin air enables the money makers to inject fake capital into economies, in what is called investments. After the economies get addicted to ‘free’ quick money to build their businesses, the issuers of the fake money take it away quickly or demand immediate return on those ‘investments’, which causes the decapitalization of those economies and consequently their collapse.

The causes of what seemed to have unraveled in 2008 began at the start of the 20th century with the adoption of the debt-based economic model. According to its precepts, governments yield the power to issue money to a group of international bankers who issue the it on behalf of governments around the world at a profit of as much as 30 percent or so. The interests accrued due to the issuance of the money — which is given to governments as a credit — is charged on those governments’ credit card and are immediately added to the tabs of the people who work to sustain government spending.

In a sense, the debt-based economic model originated on the irresponsibility from the part of the bureaucrats who manage the  government. Instead of spending the people’s money responsibly, the bureaucrats thought it was a better idea to borrow cash at immense interest rates, rather than decrease spending. Then, they decided to accept bribes and advice from international bankers to finance their out of control expenditures while charging the interests of the debt on the working classes.

The same system initiated in 1913, is still used today everywhere there is a central bank. Whether the bank is a private entity or an agency of the government is irrelevant. The bureaucrats elected to represent the people borrow money from the IMF and the World Bank, for example, in exchange for adopting specific policies that will guarantee the international bankers their ownership of the labor force for many generations into the future.

The money paid by working people to the central governments is not used to improve the communities where they live. They go to pay the interests on the debt acquired by the same central government in the name of the people. The type of improvements promised by politicians during their political campaigns are not paid with taxpayer money, but with the cash borrowed from the international bankers. The bankers arrive to nation-states and offer loans to governments that do not have enough liquidity to carry out the promises made during the political campaign. The government accepts all the conditions on the loan contract and effectively sign away sovereignty to the money makers.

The collapse of the kind the world is experiencing now is the last step of the plan that bankers have put together and implemented to become the sole owners of everything out there. The important difference between previous crises and the current one is that this may just be the last time bankers need to use their plan. That is because this time the bankers may simply walk away with everything, so no more manufactured crises will be needed.

The question is then, how do we stop the bankers from doing the same they’ve done in Greece, where they’ve looted it all? It is very easy, actually. All of Europe and the rest of the world needs to do the same that Iceland did. Instead of saying that international financial institutions were too big to fail, Iceland decided to kick them out. As it turns out, around 90 percent of the debt held by the Icelandic government was debt created by the banks and only 10 percent was actual debt incurred into by the people. After that fact was carefully determined, Iceland decided to take the other path towards a real recovery.

Believe it or not, Iceland decided to let the banks fail, which is exactly the opposite of what was done in Italy, France, Greece, Spain, England and the United States, to cite a few countries. Everywhere else where the crisis touched international banks, governments decided that it was a bad idea to tell the banks to get out of their countries and to take their debt with them. Instead, they printed more fake money to ‘rescue’ those banks and passed the debt to the people, who will have to pay interests on that debt for generations to come. This move not only did not solve the problem because the only thing it accomplished was to increase the debt, but also worsened economic conditions as no real solutions to the crisis were enacted.

At the beginning of 2008, the banks operating in Iceland owed the equivalent of 6 times the country’s GDP. The government there decided to nationalize the 3 most important debtor banks, which caused the devaluation of the local currency — the króna — by 85 percent. This seemed to spell trouble for Iceland, but contrary to common wisdom it actually help the nation have a real recovery while it maintained much of its independence and sovereignty. The government went bankrupt by the end of the year, but the country avoided having to make the citizens responsible for the debt generated by the international banks.

Along with the devaluation of the króna, Iceland experienced soaring inflation immediately after the declaration of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the government decided to take all monies and deposit them in the recently nationalized banks in order to start all over again. The move by the Icelandic government meant a short period of real pain, but also gave the opportunity to the people there to start fresh, with no debt and with spending under control.

By 2010, just two years after the declaration of bankruptcy and the nationalization of the banks, Iceland experienced its first signs of economic growth, which marked the beginning of the recovery. By letting the international banks fail, Iceland not only punished irresponsible bankers for their overreach, but also prevented their people from becoming slaves to the banks. The country also admitted to having some real debt — a tiny portion of the total — and is now working on a successful path to a full recovery.

The lesson we get from all this is the following: We cannot fight fire by dumping gasoline on it. If the origin of the current crisis is the debt-based economic system, no solution will emerge when all we do is create more debt to pay the existing one. The reason why most countries decided to choose the issuance of more debt — as nations in Europe are doing now — is because their politicians are bought and paid for by the bankers to make that decision. If the opposite is done, that is, if the debt generated by the banks is rejected and they are left to fail, we will have many other successful recoveries. It is so simple that even Paul Krugman understands it.

So if you want your country to be free from fake money and fake debt, ask your government to renounce the debt-based development model, which is not even a development model. If all you want is a real recovery, let the banks fail.

The Real Agenda encourages the sharing of its original content ONLY through the tools provided at the bottom of every article. Please DON’T copy articles from The Real Agenda and redistribute by email or post to the web.

If no one believes in the recovery, why are Europe and the world Trying?

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 23, 2012

I don’t know you, but I’m sick and tired of hearing about the financial collapse. The financial crisis we are now in was predicted long ago, and those predictions were correct. So why hasn’t it happened? First of all, it is happening. In fact it began a while ago. While many people expected to have a sudden collapse, which dragged the world into a whole, the fall of the international financial system was not planned to take place that way. Second of all, the financial collapse was planned to occur slowly and painfully, not only because the elites that planned it are financial sadists, but also because that is the only way to carry out their plan successfully.

The slow financial collapse allows the perpetrators to slowly bite off pieces from the grand pie, inflicting lethal but manageable pain and damage into the world’s economic and financial systems. This tactic in turn prepares the field for further deterioration and acquiescence from the public and the governments who they control. The kind of financial terrorism carried out by the largest financial entities in the history of the world, which are controlled by the smallest amount of people ever, makes it possible to successfully materialize the elite’s dream to create the most powerful monopoly of money and resources while they present themselves as the saviors.

The truth however, is that they are not saving anyone but themselves. While they buy off politicians and buy up land and essential resources for pennies on whatever currency they want, governments continue to fail to hold them accountable for their crimes. In fact, the bureaucrats in governments are faithful accomplices of the elites. Only one country has been able to partially defeat these monopoly men, and that country is Iceland. After kicking the bankers out, Iceland is now racing on the path of recovery, with a growing economy that simply sparked to life after telling the bankers that the illegal debt they had put under Iceland’s name was not theirs.

Iceland did what no other country had the guts to do: let the banks fail. Four years later, the country is being praised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). That’s right. One of the most important globalist organizations who are out to destroy countries like Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain, congratulates Iceland for doing the right thing. The Icelandic people did not need to go through austerity programs, they did not lose millions of jobs and neither did they have their pensions or retirement accounts looted by the bankers. “The recovery has been quite impressive. GDP growth has picked up in the last couple of years and is now running around three percent a year,” says Franek Rozwadowski, a visitor from the IMF.

On the other side of the road there are countries like Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal, all of which chose to follow the bankers’ path to destruction. Spain has increased its debt dramatically in a supposed effort to curb the government’s deficit, imposed massive austerity measures, looted pension and retirement accounts, cut public jobs, accumulated a 24% unemployment rate, “rescued” its banks at least twice, adopted deadly economic policies as ordered by Brussels, but still is on its way to the financial precipice. The same model has been used by Greece, Italy and Portugal, who are following Spain on their way to social collapse. It is estimated that the Spanish debt will reach  23 billion euros by the end of the year, with no hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The main reason for this is that the pact completed between the Spanish government and Brussels never intended to take Spain out of the dark tunnel. As explained in the documents obtained from the World Bank, the collapse of most European nations is part of a well-crafted plan that the elite has applied over and over again throughout the world. It happened in small countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, mid-size countries like Argentina, and now in larger economies like Spain, the United States, France, Italy, Greece and others.

As it turns out, the so-called bailouts are not such things. They are more like acquisitions. As explained by Journalist and researcher Greg Palast — who broke the story about the World Bank’s plan — the idea is to secretly repossess the assets of every country in the world. This is achieved through a bribery system in which the global bankers buy off the politicians in different countries so that they adopt IMF and World bank policies that intend to destroy their economies. Once the policies have been adopted, the bankers begin to slowly but surely subtract the resources of those countries unnoticeably, mainly through financial aid programs and trade agreements.

The mistaken belief that a recovery will come out of the current austerity measures and financial bailouts stems from the well engineered propaganda campaign orchestrated by the banking system and the main stream media, who have gone from denying that there is a crisis to accepting there is one and that the same bankers who caused it, who planned it, are going to be the saviors. Little do most people know that the kind of crisis we are now going through is part of the plant to carry out a planet wide extortion scheme through which the globalist banking elite once again walks away with significant amounts of resources.

The difference is that this time the looting is not limited to once small or mid-sized nation, but to several large countries in Europe and the world. Greek islands are now for sale to the best bidder, because the country cannot pay its debt. Guess who will come to the rescue? The monopoly men will come and buy the islands for cents on the Dragma. The same situation will happen in Spain, once Mariano Rajoy requests the financial rescue. So if you are asking yourself why is it that the economy isn’t getting better despite the continuous assurances that everything on the books is being done to get to that point, the truth is that the banker plan does not contemplate a recovery. At least not one where everyone will have the opportunity to thrive.

Read the complete interview given by Greg Palast after learning about and getting the World Bank’s secret documents that detail how the global financial entities destroy nations.

The Real Agenda encourages the sharing of its original content ONLY through the tools provided at the bottom of every article. Please DON’T copy articles from The Real Agenda and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Key lesson from Iceland crisis is ‘let banks fail’

AFP – Three years after Iceland’s banks collapsed and the country teetered on the brink, its economy is recovering, proof that governments should let failing lenders go bust and protect taxpayers, analysts say.

The North Atlantic island saw its three biggest banks go belly-up in the October 2008 as its overstretched financial sector collapsed under the weight of the global crisis sparked by the crash of US investment giant Lehman Brothers.

The banks became insolvent within a matter of weeks and Reykjavik was forced to let them fail and seek a $2.25 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

After three years of harsh austerity measures, the country’s economy is now showing signs of health despite the current global financial and economic crisis that has Greece verging on default and other eurozone states under pressure.

“The lesson that could be learned from Iceland’s way of handling its crisis is that it is important to shield taxpayers and government finances from bearing the cost of a financial crisis to the extent possible,” Islandsbanki analyst Jon Bjarki Bentsson told AFP.

“Even if our way of dealing with the crisis was not by choice but due to the inability of the government to support the banks back in 2008 due to their size relative to the economy, this has turned out relatively well for us,” Bentsson said.

Iceland’s banking sector had assets worth 11 times the country’s total gross domestic product (GDP) at their peak.

Nobel Prize-winning US economist Paul Krugman echoed Bentsson.

“Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net,” he wrote in a recent commentary in the New York Times.

“Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver,” he said.

During a visit to Reykjavik last week, Krugman also said Iceland has the krona to thank for its recovery, warning against the notion that adopting the euro can protect against economic imbalances.

“Iceland’s economic rebound shows the advantages of being outside the euro. This notion that by joining the euro you would be safe would come as news to the Spaniards,” he said, referring to one of the key eurozone states struggling to put its public finances in order.

Iceland’s example cannot be directly compared to the dramatic problems currently seen in Greece or Italy, however.

“The big difference between Greece, Italy, etc at the moment and Iceland back in 2008 is that the latter was a banking crisis caused by the collapse of an oversized banking sector while the former is the result of a sovereign debt crisis that has spilled over into the European banking sector,” Bentsson said.

“In Iceland, the government was actually in a sound position debt-wise before the crisis.”

Iceland’s former prime minister Geir Haarde, in power during the 2008 meltdown and currently facing trial over his handling of the crisis, has insisted his government did the right thing early on by letting the banks fail and making creditors carry the losses.

“We saved the country from going bankrupt,” Haarde, 68, told AFP in an interview in July.

“That is evident if you look at our situation now and you compare it to Ireland or not to mention Greece,” he said, adding that the two debt-wracked EU countries “made mistakes that we did not make … We did not guarantee the external debts of the banking system.”

Like Ireland and Latvia, also rescued by international bailout packages and now in recovery, Iceland implemented strict austerity measures and is now reaping the fruits of its efforts.

So much so that its central bank on Wednesday raised its key interest rate by a quarter point to 4.75 percent, in sharp contrast to most other developed countries which have slashed their borrowing costs amid the current crises.

It said economic growth in the first half of 2011 was 2.5 percent and was forecast to be just over 3.0 percent for the year as a whole.

David Stefansson, a research analyst at Arion Bank, told AFP Iceland hiked its rates because it “is in a different place in the economic (cycle) than other countries.

“The central bank thinks that other central banks in similar circumstances can afford to keep interest rates low, and even lower them, because expected inflation abroad is in general quite (a bit) lower,” he said.

Austerity or “Catastrophe” are the tactics of Economic Terrorism

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
June 27, 2011

The economic terrorists that caused the current financial meltdown have not stopped at it and continue to threaten countries with two different tactics: austerity and the threat of a catastrophe, if their proposals are not implemented. Since Greece, Iceland, Portugal, Spain and other European countries began to show signs of economic stress, the bankers who designed the system itself have told the public -through their bureaucrat pawns- that it is their way or the highway. Literally!

Although the countries with the most to lose are located in Europe, it was George W. Bush who first rang the debt crisis alarm. Bush’s economic team warned taxpayers that a massive bailout was needed to save the financial institutions that themselves caused much -if not all- of the financial crisis. As we now know, all of the reported and unreported bailout monies went to European bank accounts in what we know today as the bank bailout of 2008. Although Henry Paulson told the U.S. Congress and the public that there were some entities that we could not afford to let go down, the $700 + billion -actually $24 trillion- were really not used to save anyone but the bankers themselves, who now are using the bailout monies to purchase Greece, Island, Spain and Portugal for pennies on the euro.

Since neither their bailout nor their QE’s worked, they have now moved to phase 3 of their plan. That is a massive reduction in government spending that cuts all kinds of programs which mostly benefit the middle and lower classes in Europe and the United States. While the bankers and the corporations they own loot everyone, the governments are forced -through the World Bank and the IMF- to cut spending in something they call Austerity. But the austerity only applies to the poor, not to the banks, who as I said, are acquiring infrastructure everywhere they can and paying for it with taxpayer money.

The austerity tactic has enraged millions of people who took to the street to protest and ask their governments to reject IMF austerity policies and simply abandon their membership from this and other globalist financial institutions. Instead, governments like the Greek have decided that they are not accountable to its citizens and that austerity is the way to go. As a response, the Greeks went back out to the streets. While people’s anger grows as they see their pension funds stolen, their salaries cut or frozen and the cost of life growing exponentially, the financial terrorists at the top of the banking industry have decided to once again use their last tool: Financial Terrorism.

Financial Terrorism occurs when the people who engineer the financial crisis -the bankers- in order to consolidate economic power and tighten up their grip on their monopolies, call on their customers -the governments- to pay their debts all at once. Because it is impossible for any government to pay off all its debt to the financial sharks, their institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, the Bank of International Settlements and the Federal Reserve demand that those governments impose austerity programs that further erode the middle and lower classes and that accept new loans with higher interests in order to pay for the older loans.

If a government defies their mandate, the banks impose financial punishments on the debtor countries by increasing the interest rates on their loans and lowering their credit worthiness. That in turn makes it more difficult for the countries to be able to borrow and as a consequence they keep on spiraling down into the hole of poverty. Since countries are no longer able to borrow their way out of debt, the only solution left is to sell their infrastructure -ports, roads, institutions, services, industry and so on- in order to pay for the debt. As you may have guessed it, the buyers of such assets are the banks themselves, who arrive with taxpayer cash in hand to further consolidate their dominion of the borrowing nations.

The scenario that emerges from these actions is not only more ravaged countries with worse economic and financial policies -now under the complete control of the bankers-, but also larger groups of poor people, a smaller middle class and a stronger oligarchy. The difference this time around is that the bankers do not only intend to liquidate a third world nation, but the largest more developed western nations including those with the largest amounts of natural resources and military power, which of course will also become property of the bankers.

The ultimate goal the bankers intend to accomplish is to control it all -not that they already not do that. For that, they built the system we now live in. They carefully socially engineered every single aspect of our lives. The result of such engineering is the passive state in which most people live, where they do not even know anything of this sort is happening, while many others simply do not care. Given this scenario, it is really hard to see how the bankers will have any problem executing their long awaited plan. Even as millions of people rise from their long dormant state, the majority have no idea that their future is ending today. As it happened in the past, it will take a revolution from a minority to make sure that free people remain free. It would be much easier and effective, though, if more folks broke off from their trance and gave them a hand. Although a revolution by the minority may save the majority again, only a revolution from the majority will be able to root the cancer known as the economic and financial Cartel of the Eight Families.