The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #114937   Message #2460448
Posted By: Thompson
08-Oct-08 - 03:05 PM
Thread Name: BS: So it has come to this - Iceland
Subject: RE: BS: So it has come to this - Iceland
Iceland is the canary in the coalmine.

But we're all down there in that coalmine too.

Hold on to your seats, it's going to be a bumpy flight. As Eccles, head of the Fed in 1934, wrote:

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth - not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced - to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.

"Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.

"This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants.

"In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped."

Sound familiar?