title: READY FOR FINANCIAL CRISIS ROUND TWO? HOW CRONY CAPITALISM AND CENTRAL PLANNING HAVE DRAINED US
text: This is the definition of insanity-doing the same thing over and over. We just need a Congress strong enough to stop the madness.For over 30 years, sovereign nations, particularly in the West have been buying votes by offering social payments in the form of welfare.The ridiculousness of this should not be lost on anyone. Politicians, in order to be elected, promise to allocate taxpayer funds on social programs that will benefit said taxpayers down the road (we re simply talking about social spending, not infrastructure or other costs).The concept that taxpayers might simply just keep the money to begin with never enters the equation. And because everyone believes that they are somehow spending someone else s money, they play along.When you believe that you are spending someone else s money, it s very easy to write a blank check, which is precisely what Western nations have been doing for years, promising everyone a safe and secure retirement without ever bothering to see where the money would come from.When actual bills came due to fund this stuff, Governments quickly discovered that current tax revenues couldn t cover it  so they issued sovereign debt to make up the difference.And so the bond bubble was created.The large banks, that have a monopoly on managing sovereign debt auctions, were only too happy to play along with this. The reasons are as follows:1) They can use these alleged  risk-free  assets as collateral to backstop tens of trillions worth of derivatives trades. A $1 million investment in your typical US Treasury can backstop over $15 million worth of derivatives if not more. The profits from the derivatives markets remains a primary source of revenue for the banks.2) Sovereign Governments are only too happy to bail out the big banks if the stuff ever hits the fan on the trades that are backstopped by the sovereign debt (see 2006 onwards). Since the banks are the ones holding the sovereign debt, they can always threaten to dump bonds, which would render the whole social welfare Ponzi bankrupt (see what happened in Europe when sovereign bonds collapsed in 2011-2012).3) In a debt-based financial system such as the current one, sovereign bonds are the senior most assets in the system. Those who own these in bulk are at the top of the financial food chain in terms of financial, economic, and political clout.Since it was rarely if ever a problem to issue sovereign debt, Governments kept promising future payments that they didn t have until we reach today: the point at which most Western nations are sporting Debt to GDP ratios well north of 300% when you consider unfunded liabilities (the social spending programs mentioned earlier).Now, cutting social spending is usually considered political suicide (after all, the voters put you in office in the first place based on you promising to pay them welfare payments down the road). So rather than default on the social contract made with voters, the political class will simply push to issue MORE debt to finance old debt that is coming due.The US did precisely this in the fourth quarter of 2014, issuing over $1 trillion in new debt simply to pay back old debt that was coming due.Read more: Zero Hedge