Insuring against a future financial crisis

Just rearranging the deckchairs on a titanic, mostly fraudulent, thus doomed, financial sewer.

Governments must stop washy-washy regulating and instead start phasing out, then banning Ponzi and/or rentier fraudulent 'legal' banking practices, like synthetic derivatives, naked shorting, fractional reserve banking, compounding interest etc.... This will be painful, but the eventual alternative is far, far worse; like crash of Rome worse!

Of course this sanity would probably require several miracles and a lot of honest education, so we will probably just see this farce last a little longer, then collapse much harder than the Great Depression, when people finally realise that the central banksters have lost the ability to control this neo-feudal black farce of a market.

Hyperinflation...

I wonder whether the financial industry is geared up for the possibility of hyperinflation. Ok countries have coped with it in the past, and there are countries in the danger zone now, but in my view if it were to occur in countries heavily dependent on computer processing of transactions in the future then there would be far bigger ramifications than hitherto.

The reason being that databases consisting of tables that contain fields for monetary units will not be able to store values (they will overflow).

At some stage a move away from having a decimal point in currencies would be a good way to go, because this will remove a big uncertainty as to how database developers treat currency. Then everyone will treat currency in terms of integers, or bigint's or whatever size you want to predict - migrating from one integer range to a bigger integer range is easier than what would happen if everyone had to migrate from what they use at the moment to something else.

For example, I am sure there are designers out there who use "lossy" formats to store currency. The most extreme example being floating point - could this be a reason why the Taunton to Trowbridge syndrome occurred? (see elsewhere on this forum). It is easy to cite floating point calculations which produce wildly inaccurate results because of the algorithm used - floating point arithmetic is not always commutative.

Certainly people are asking for trouble using float, but there are other number formats which have poor techniques for handling extremely large numbers - which effectively get rid of lesser significant digits, which is fine in the scientific world, but not in commerce. I'm sure many developers use such techniques believing they are sound, but are not.

In short, how many systems are going to break when stress-tested in this way? I suspect one helluva lot. Presumably there is some "test suite" that one can run financial transactions through, but have such suites been developed with an eye for hyperinflation, where currency transactions may consist of 25 or more digits - each of which needs to be accounted for?

As long as fines are never paid by wrongdoers directly...

What change can we expect... Financial services is all just one big scam...

If only...

Ohhhhh if I could've commented here, if I could post... I would have had a tale to tell...

*sigh*

One rule for the rich, another for the rest of us.

Financial Services can be a useful evil but being evil they tend to only want to be useful to themselves. This has been taught repeatedly throughout history but that lesson needs to be taught again and again because we the people, those in charge and anyone dealing with Financial Services tend to ease off the leash when things are going well allowing them to grow.

That is very bad because Financial services do not produce anything, they live off the labour of others. When they are just living off the labour of others they are a small percentage of GDP, a couple percentage but living and helping isn't their nature.

Financial Services do not want to live, they want to be free to feed, to gouge themselves by consuming huge swaths of the economy, 2% of GDP isn't enough for them, they want 3% then 4% and even when the weight of their consumption taxes all of us at 5% they are not satiated.

Instead they use the money they are taking to corrupt the system to allow them to consume ever more.

And we let them. If our standard of living is increasing, if things are good, we tend to live and let live. That has always been a mistake when it comes to Financial Services. When they get big enough they will hire the best to figure out how to get even more out of an economy, even when it is declining, even when we can no longer afford them.

The inherent evil of Financial Services is exposed when things begin to slow down, when people's living standards stagnate or fall. Their demand for yet more of our GDP is not connected to how well the economy or people are doing, they still demand increasing payment. It matters not to them how heavy they weigh on individuals just trying to get by, the money must continue to roll in for them. Even the threat of a total economic collapse will not temper their demands.

In the past a total collapse could sometimes be avoided if the leaders being held ransom took action, or the people put heads on pikes soon enough but those corrective measures have been stifled today. Now to avoid the inevitable we need to take new action, different action.

As technology changes, so does society, so needs to our political systems, and our Financial Services need to be changed, updated. We need to put heads on pikes and a new system in place. What that system is only ever clear in hindsight but it starts by shutting down the old system. Will Financial Services help to make that an easy transition? I look back and say no, they will ride the system they have created to the most destructive of ends, we need to force change unto them.

Of course to do that we will first have to create a new political system that puts the interest of citizens and the Nation first, and that is turning out to be as difficult as is ever has been.