Eleven out of 50 states have now introduced resolutions into their state legislatures calling on Congress to pass Marcy Kaptur’s H.R. 129 to re-instate Glass-Steagall, and South Dakota has become the first state to pass the resolution through both houses.Jason interviews Michael Kirsch of LaRouche PAC about the efforts to reinstate the act. These resolutions have broad bi-partisan support, as the matter or bankruptcy reorganization of the banking system is a matter of national prosperity. Here is a state by state breakdown of co-sponsors for state resolutions, and national co-sponsors of Kaptur’s bill. These were inspired by normal citizens contact their elected representatives with the great need for action, and the more state legislators which can be inspired to put pressure in this way on Congress, the better. Glass-Steagall will enable the commercial banking system, though with a shrunken but purified capital, to become an agency of a national credit system guided by a chief lending institution for national infrastructure projects and associated industries. Listen for more information at: www.HolisticSurvival.com.
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Michael has written for a new credit Bank of the United States to lend for national industry and agriculture, modeled on the system of public credit of Alexander Hamilton, Mathew Carey, and John Quincy Adams, and Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation’s industrial loans. A video presentation of the history is available. It would broaden and define the guiding boundaries of the economy as a permanent coordinating agency for credit agreements, rather than serve as a special emergency institution.
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Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary for you to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host Jason Hartman.
Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today. And we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website at HolisticSurvival.com. You can subscribe to our blog, which is totally free, has loads of great information, and there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site, so make sure you take advantage of that at HolisticSurvival.com. We’ll be right back.
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Start of Interview with Michael Kirsch
Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Michael Kirsch to the show. He is a political activist and economic researcher for the Larouche Policy Institute and Executive Intelligence Review Magazine. He’s coming to us today I think from Virginia. Right, Michael?
Michael Kirsch: That’s right.
Jason Hartman: How are you doing?
Michael Kirsch: I’m doing pretty good, thank you.
Jason Hartman: Good. It’s great to have you on, and there’s a lot to talk about. Every time I have a Larouche person on it becomes a long discussion because there’s a lot of background, a lot of knowledge that your group has. And let’s first talk about the real big change in the economy as far as the US side goes and then let’s get into a little bit about the Euro’s own problems as well. But, Glass-Steagall; that was a big deal, wasn’t it?
Michael Kirsch: Yeah. I would say that some of your discussions perhaps would be associations like you said, there’s a lot of background but I can tell you right now that the immediate action that needs to be taken is real simple. Right now the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall act is the only solution in the immediate solutions that has to be put through, and would immediately solve the crisis. It’s not an option for anyone at this point; the alternative to not doing it could be death and most probably, especially if you are living right now in Europe, and I’ll just want to fast forward to the fact that you have these people now standing in the lines in Cypress saying they are unable to get their money, and one of the gentlemen that was interviewed on TV said that it reminds him of living under Hitler.
Jason Hartman: It’s 300 Euros a day; that’s all you can withdraw. And if you leave the country; I guess you’re allowed to leave but you’re only allowed to take a thousand Euros with you. This is just insane what is going on, this money grab. But tell us, what is Glass-Steagall? Explain that to the listeners and why it was appealed. What are the interests, what are the motivations behind it?
Michael Kirsch: Okay, so we’ll come back to this. The Glass-Steagall act was the separation of investment and commercial banking. And that meant that no bank could lend money to institutions that were trading in securities, no bank could have a partnership with an institution and no bank that had the FBCI guarantee could have more than 2% of their capital invested in securities. Alan Greenspan pushed that up to 20% or so; it was repealed earlier in the 80s to make it 5 and 10%.
But the real issue is that the commercial banking system is there for the reliable depositors and effectively long term investment credit. And the Glass-Steagall act became in 1933 part of the bank act of 1933 which had a number of these provisions and that was also when the FDIC was set up. And what happened is that the repeal in 1999 allowed for this balloon of derivatives. Derivatives went from 80 billion dollars in commodities to 700 trillion.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s trillion with a T. But I want to take a little bit of an issue on the derivatives point in a moment, but what really fundamentally happened when Glass-Steagall was repealed, was the banks became a lot less pure and lot less safe, and became risk enterprises, right?
Michael Kirsch: Well, yes. The shadow banking system which Thomas Hoenig of the FDIC, formally head of the Kansas City federal reserve has a great article on restructuring of the bank system and the need for a 21st century Glass-Steagall. He reviews the buildup of the shadow banking system. The shadow banking system, all of these mutual funds and money market funds, and credit defaults, interest rates, all these things that could make large returns on essentially high risk speculation and so forth, were what subsidized the take down of the real economy over the 1980s. And it required the repeal of Glass-Steagall at the end of the 1990s for that bubble to grow. They needed to grab the commercial deposits. And basically the access to the commercial deposits banks to use them for big leverage was what the whole repeal of Glass-Steagall was about.
And the merger of Citigroup allowed them a whole other types of commercial banks to set up these investment banks within them. And all the ones that went down, Lehman Brothers had two FDIC backed commercial banks. Merrill Lynch, three FDIC backed commercial banks. An AIG, a huge FDIC backed commercial bank. So the idea that the repeal of Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have prevented the crisis since it was these investment banks that were the trigger, so called, is rubbish. And largely, what James Rickards of LTCM said he managed that hedge fund.
Jason Hartman: Let me explain that. That was long term capital management. The hedge fund that said they had mathematically figured out the market and had a way they could basically never lose money, and they were the first big bail out.
Michael Kirsch: That’s right. The 1998 crash. And he points out that this argument, the fundamental argument that you get when you meet with staffers and people in congress and what the banks that come and lobby the state legislators and say don’t pass this Glass-Steagall say, is that Glass-Steagall would not have prevented the crisis. But he points out all the bundling of the mortgage backed securities was done by banks that were operating under that repeal and was able to do it because of that repeal. And then giving those to the investment banks to speculate in. So this idea that derivatives were this great instrument for everybody to make money on, and I was at an Italian bankers meeting in 2005 watching Alan Greenspan give a speech, and he said that derivatives were the new invisible hand of Adam Smith and that they would self-regulate themselves and that they were never going to fail.
So if you’re an investor and you say well, we lost 30% of our money in 2008, but maybe things are going to come back; they’re never going to come back because we didn’t build anything real in this country for a long time and all of that money that was made was not related to real physical profit. And unless we protect now the valid commercial assets that are still left in our banks, they are going to be seized or wiped out just as people’s deposits were seized in Cypress. Just as in Spain, they made people cash in their actual deposits to become stock holders of the bank as part of their bail out, and they’ve just been told that they’re losing 99% of that value. The Euro zone is finished and they’re going to be now doing this. Grabbing at these valid assets of people to continue to bail out the speculators. And that will happen here in the United States if we don’t have Glass-Steagall.
Jason Hartman: Okay, so who wants Glass-Steagall in like it is now? Who wanted the repeal? It was the banks that wanted to get into the funny business of this financial house of cards, or the investment banks or both?
Michael Kirsch: It was the whole machine, yes. The speculation investment banks, it was the large international cartels and basically these huge financial institutions that view themselves as superior to nation states. And you know the way a lot of these people talk about, oh these are just the sovereign debt institutes, the welfare states, and basically people who are followers of the idea that government and all nations are now second place in private capital and wealth, and basically you could call it a monetary empire. But let me just get real concrete here: The first line of defense here, if we want to defend the country, is to say that those institutions will not be bailed out by our FDIC. They’re not all-powerful. We know that they would have gone down in 2008 if we had not bailed them out. They all would have gone down. They needed the nation to bail them out.
Now we’re at the point where we have to control this process, and twelve states of the union right now have introduced into their legislatures resolutions calling on congress to reinstate Glass-Steagall because it’s very clear Dodd Frank has done nothing, derivatives have increased 40%, and Collin Peterson, representative from Minnesota last week at a hearing where they deregulated the last 8%. It was 90% and now it’s 98% deregulated relation of commodities. That just wiped out anything that was good or at all decent of Dodd Frank.
They know that’s not going to work, and 12 states in the union have introduced resolutions calling on congress to reinstate this, and a lot of congressmen are saying that is the difference of whether they’re going to stick their neck out and either introduce something in the senate, or co-sponsor what is now House Resolution 129, introduced by Marcy Kaptur and has 43 cosponsors.
Ten of those were introduced last week, just two days ago John Dingell from Michigan, he’s the most senior democrat in that state. The Progressive Caucus, with Marcia Fudge and Keith Ellison have become cosponsors. Very rapid signing on; far beyond anything in the last session where there were 83 cosponsors of this similar resolution, HR 14 89. So a lot of these people are saying, it’s because I can see this movement in the state. And the congressmen who don’t have their state legislature passing it are saying, what are you doing? You’re letting me hang out here in the wind. You guys have got to move.
And South Dakota has become the first state to pass through both sides. It was the vote of 67-2 in the house, a crushing majority, and 19-15 in the senate, has passed through the state legislature. And in the other 11 states it’s been introduced. There are 7 or 8 other states that are pending and we’re working on it and calling other concerned citizens to help us in other states get people they know in the state legislatures and the city councilmen and others to put the pressure on their congress.
Jason Hartman: Sure. Well, let’s switch, well before we switch to the Euro zone, let’s just tie it in with the Glass-Steagall. What does that mean to the people in Cypress? What does it mean, is it the relationship to the sovereign debt? What does it mean to the Euro zone? Well, let me just say that Iceland for example, is a country which has not had the collapse of medical care, social explosion, general demoralization because the government decided to make the bond holders pay and the speculators pay rather than the government.
And in just last week, the government of Iceland, there was a committee on industry and trade and a unanimous vote passed the resolution calling on, they didn’t say the words Glass-Steagall, but a resolution for banking separation, separation of investment and commercial banking. And a parliamentary minister that would produce a report by October on exactly how those can be done. And Belgium, and Switzerland, and Sweden, and France, and Italy, and also the UK have all introduced exclusive Glass-Steagall resolutions the majority of the parliament of Great Britain, but my point in opening was that you look at Greece and the austerity of the bail out and the rapid rate of suicide, the loss of everything , and Greece and Spain have 60% unemployment amongst youth, it’s basically like a concentration camp without the camp.
Jason Hartman: When you say among the youth, up to what age is that?
Michael Kirsch: I don’t know exactly what it is; I can’t remember.
Jason Hartman: It’s probably 30.
Michael Kirsch: Maybe 25 or 30, yeah.
Jason Hartman: Because they don’t much work until they’re about 30 there.
Michael Kirsch: They’re basically being thrown in the junk heap. If you don’t have any work, you have no future.
Jason Hartman: Oh, absolutely not.
Michael Kirsch: So it’s really a question here of governments acting to say we will defend the nation. Now the Euro zone is completely trend. Everybody knows that at this point, because effectively it’s now no longer the Euro in Cypress. They have instituted capital controls. And so what that means is that basically Euro bank in Cypress, you cannot do business with the rest of Europe at this point as long as this continues. So it’s really not a Euro. You have a Cypress Euro, and the rest of Europe has a different Euro.
Jason Hartman: Is the EU going to make it? That seemed like such a great thing in the 90s. Europe would become this more unified power house, a lot of Eastern Europe would be developed. And there has been some development. I’ve traveled all around Europe several times, including Eastern Europe. And you see the signs for all the new EU roads and transportation and so forth, but these countries are just too dissimilar. They can’t have the same currency. It just seems too problematic.
Michael Kirsch: It can’t work. It’s sort of like the tower of Babble. Everybody is building this thing, nobody understands each other. But it’s bad economics. And it’s been the export of heavy industrial materials to cheap labor areas, it’s been actually a decline in overall productivity. A lot of people, including Helga Zepp-Larouche in 1989-90 weren’t exactly about this; the whole justification for it was a fraud. It was saying this is going to prevent war, we’ll never have war again when there was no threat of war in Europe at that time. Now there’s threat of war.
You have a committee that just yesterday was convened in Russia saying something on World War III in Cypress. But yeah, the Euro concept is, you need a sovereign currency. The value of your currency, your own currency, has to be related to the productivity of your nation. That’s what it was under Bretton Woods. You had fixed exchange rate systems up until 1971, and they’re not completely fixed, but they were moved relative to decision about what the new value of the currency was. Because a currency is not intrinsically wealthy. Everybody knows that now with the worthlessness of a lot of this fiat money that’s moving all over the place. A currency is simply a means to basically exchange different productive actions in manufacturing and technology and you know, selling and producing of goods. That’s how it is.
And so if you don’t have a nation that has an internal economy, has a measurement of the value of its currency based on that, all this kind of destruction is taken place. A flight of real productive capital outside of countries that were productive. Italy’s productive economy has declined, other economies in Europe have declined, so there’s nothing good about the Euro, there’s never a reason for it and it was combined with a Maastricht treaty which said countries can only have 3% of their GDP in debt. Well if you’re going to invest in long term infrastructure rail systems, power plants, heavy machinery as a nation that gets involved in these types of actions, you have to have more than 3% of your GDP in debt. Because of course you have to be able to go into debt for long term investment.
Jason Hartman: So what would happen if a Glass-Steagall was reinstituted? How would the world change and how quickly would it happen?
Michael Kirsch: Well, what would happen is, that right away we would protect the valid assets of you. You, for instance, and everybody else listening on this call is going to lose everything, just as people lost, whoever had any investments, all but 20-30% in 2008. The collapse is going to be far beyond that now if we have to, as we stared out this discussion, hold up the worthless assets which are actually in the quadrillion dollars of derivatives, 700 trillion.
And all these banks that are continuing to use most of their capital to try to make profits and derivatives are putting the tax payer at risk because the FDIC is still going to guarantee this, right? And the banks have continued since 2008 to use their capital because they have to. If you’re a bank and you have all these worthless assets that are actually not valuable, mortgage backed securities, asset backed securities, all these credit things, they have to keep making a profit in those and it’s much better to do that if you were them than to lend for anything productive. If the government would enact Glass-Steagall, what it would mean is it would mean bankruptcy reorganization. It’s entirely different than just regulation and it’s just by itself. That’s what Dodd Frank is. They’re fundamentally different. Bankruptcy reorganization versus regulation.
Through bankruptcy reorganization, we would relieve these banks of the worthless assets that they have, that the government tried to uphold by printing money, and the federal reserve has upheld since 2010 especially in buying now 80 billion dollars a month, I think it’s 45 billion dollars of mortgage backed securities a month, and the bank lending however, while this quantitative using has gone on and 3 trillion dollars has been printed and is sitting there in these banks, the lending of banks has declined. There’s ten trillion dollars of total bank assets within the banking system of the United States. There’s only 7 trillion dollars of actual lending. It’s a negative fractional reserve ratio.
So if we were to do Glass-Steagall, we would basically buy the removal of the FDIC, most of the worthless assets would go up in smoke, there would be a fire sale of these things, but it would be orderly. It would be an orderly reorganization, whereas what’s going to happen in next week, the following week, who knows how long this Euro zone thing can stick together, when all hell breaks loose, the speculators and the investment banks of the United States and JP Morgan who is now not really a bank, they only lend 30% of their capital, all these guys, they’re going to grab whatever they can and it’s not out of the question that JP Morgan would say, we’re having our own bank holiday and when we reopen you’ll have 10% less of your deposits. That’s all you get.
Well that’s what just happened to people in Cypress. And that is definitely something that could happen here if we don’t have the government say we’re going to do a bankruptcy reorganization. And some of these investment banks would much rather have chaos, grab what they can…
Jason Hartman: For government debt?
Michael Kirsch: Right.
Jason Hartman: Bankruptcy reorganization for government debt or private debt or both?
Michael Kirsch: We’re talking private debt here.
Jason Hartman: So, private debt of everybody?
Michael Kirsch: No, private debt of the 6 or 7 huge banks, and you can look at what Thomas Hoenig of the FDIC, the vice president now, is saying that these banks have to be taken through reorganization. Richard Fisher of the Dallas Federal Reserve has said just two weeks ago, he said we would need to make sure there’s no guarantee of these investment banks and we need to take the bigger ones through reorganization and all other bank holding companies.
Jason Hartman: Okay. So, let me ask you a question. I’ve had a lot of guests on the show talking about the derivative time bomb. You say it’s 700 trillion dollars, some say it’s 200 trillion, either way it’s vastly more than the GDP of the entire planet, and a lot more than the GDP of the US. It’s big. But are you saying that, you’re painting a really scary picture, okay, which may well be accurate. I just want to understand it better though. Are you saying that the derivative time bomb is going to blow up and that is going to cause the disaster that’s coming?
Michael Kirsch: Yeah, the number I got just so you know, came from Collin Peterson this last week. In the congress he said that the two worst votes he ever cast was the commodities whatever it was, investment act, and then the repeal of Glass-Steagall. And he said that since the repeal of the commodities investment act, the derivatives have gone up from 80 billion dollars to 700 trillion.
Jason Hartman: But what does that… just talk about how that blows up. I have simplified the concept of derivative. I call it the thing about the thing. How do you like that for simplicity? Okay, the thing about the thing. I like to really make things simple so that everybody can get their head around them. I think Ronald Reagan was great about that. And the derivatives, they’re like this shadow of an investment. They’re not a real thing. They’re just the thing about the thing. And so they’re worse than fiat money, because they’re like the fiat on the fiat on the fiat. It’s like layer and layer and layer of fake stuff. It’s a smoke and mirrors game; it’s a house of cards.
Michael Kirsch: Yeah, interest rate swaps, credit default swaps… look, this is speculation.
Jason Hartman: It’s massive speculation.
Michael Kirsch: In the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, it said in its preamble was to prevent speculation. Although Dodd Frank doesn’t do anything like that. It was to block what was a resolution in 2010 by McCain and Cantwell to put this through. And Obama blocked it. Yeah, the derivatives are just pure speculation. This is something that’s already happened though, and it already blew up. And what was the consequence? The United States economy has been in depression now for 5 years, and we have terrible unemployment. It’s far worse than anybody thinks.
Jason Hartman: Oh, we all know that. Unemployment is above 20%; underemployment makes it even worse than that. Unemployment is at great depression levels. The statistics are totally manipulated. It’s totally hokey, and same with inflation. And virtually everything else. Student loan debt being over a trillion and the default rates are much higher than they’re reporting. We’ve done shows on that; couldn’t agree with you more. But, let me ask you on the derivative issue. The derivatives, they’ve blown up; they’re going to blow up worse, you’re saying? It’s going to be a much worse day when this…
Michael Kirsch: The point is that you can’t, as you just said, what’s the ratio of the real world economy to this fiction?
Jason Hartman: It’s a fictional economy.
Michael Kirsch: And the Euro zone is a perfect example. They’ve continued to try to bail it out and Draghi of the ECB has said that he would buy bonds endlessly, they would do whatever they have to do to bail it out, the whole refrain of the Euro system continually has been bail out, and it’s not working. It’s reached at its end. They’re grabbing the deposits of people to bail out the speculators. That’s what’s going on. It’s not about Cypress. They’re stealing. In a world without Glass-Steagall, the banks will rob you. That’s what’s happening. The banks are robbing directly to bail out assets.
And the Troika and London and Wall St., if they continue to have on their lap all of the congressmen and they continue to make sure that the population of the United States views somehow their gambling, people who just make money off of transactions of money as superior in value to people. We will die. We are going to lose. States are already bankrupt. We’re going to lose medical care, we’re going to lose everything. Obama is already trying to grab Medicare and Medicaid. And Bernie Sanders of Vermont is saying, I’m not going to let you do it. But the fundamental issue here is saying that this stuff is worthless, it’s speculation that we don’t need Wall St….
Jason Hartman: It is worthless. Look, I agree with you. I constantly make the distinction between the real economy and the smoke and mirrors economy. And every financial “innovation” that Wall St. comes out with is just another big scam. It’s another big fake thing; it’s a thing about a thing. It’s not a real thing. We need more farming, we need manufacturing, real goods. That’s what we all live on. I totally get the real economy. The main street economy is real; the Wall St. economy is fictional.
But the question I ask you about these derivatives: everybody is talking about the derivatives blowing up. It’s all speculation, it’s all fake, it’s all paper and electronics. Agreed, but isn’t there a counter party to every transaction? So what if the derivatives blow up. There’s someone on the other side of that trade. I don’t understand how that happens, granted these are highly massively leveraged products. But there’s a counter party to it. So when something fails, someone benefits.
Michael Kirsch: The counter party is that the necessity to try to uphold the profits of these gamblers has led to a decline in commercial bank lending for the real economy by 2.5 trillion over the last few years.
Jason Hartman: Say that again?
Michael Kirsch: The whole thing, the bailout, the quantitative easing by the federal reserve of 85 billion dollars a month has not increased; it’s actually decreased. The overall effect has been a decrease in bank lending over the last few years for the real economy.
Jason Hartman: Well, that’s true. And that’s real, so that has contracted the economy. And it’s amazing. You look at the GDP statistics and that is so maligned as well just like every other thing. Because you adjust for inflation, you adjust for increases in population, and the economy is shrinking. It’s shrinking rather fast.
Michael Kirsch: The point is that Glass-Steagall is the last step in a process. We lost 30%. If you look at the Bauru of Labor Statistics, we lost 30% of a number of manufacturing in the United States. Our machine tool sector is gone. The machine tool sector related to the auto sector in 2005 was looted. They just blew up factories. They sold it off, fire sale. You have debt of companies turned into stock by laws, and the owners of now the stock of the company, formally the debtors, sell off the company. We had a fire sale of machine tools and floor space that could have been retooled for something productive. We lost it. The only remaining sector is the aerospace. That’s been declining.
We’re losing the ability to rebuild the nation, and we’re losing our manufacturing, our agriculture is declining; farmers have been moving out of cities for a while because we haven’t built the needed water projects. We’re subsidizing on the other hand crazy. So the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall was a step in the process for them to grab the remaining assets of the country and use them for speculation.
When that blew out, which everybody wanted to believe that it would keep going, this mortgage backed security bond which was not a mortgage backed security because it wasn’t backed by the mortgage, because there was no guarantee that the mortgage would keep being paid since it was all based on a continual idea that it would increase in profit, like every bubble. All of that whole process, looting the economy since 2000, when that blew out we should have said wow we were just hoodwinked by Allan Greenspan throughout the 1990s.
Instead of that, most people and the general population who had all these investments and earnings from the 90s, didn’t want to believe that it was fake. We didn’t build a nation in the 1990s, so why did we deserve all this money? Well we didn’t. And now we’re going to pay the price. We have to get the people who want to build a nation right now to say, I’m going to get my state legislator to push Glass-Steagall. We can at least now have an orderly process and save what we have left. Otherwise it’s going to be wiped out. And the financial control are going to try to push through the kind of austerity that is in Greece. That’s coming home to roost.
Jason Hartman: Oh yeah, it is. I agree. I think the standard of living is declining quite a bit in America quite quickly. Your prediction as things are, as you’ve outlined everything, are we looking at an inflationary future or a deflationary future?
Michael Kirsch: I don’t really know. What the hyperinflation threat is that the Federal Reserve has 3 trillion dollars that it just printed and it’s sitting in the banks there, saying that it’s not inflationary because the banks aren’t using it. And they’re paying the banks interest to not use it, which is totally absurd.
Jason Hartman: This is just absurd.
Michael Kirsch: I don’t think that really matters to tell you the truth. Because the issue is not what individuals are going to do out there with their money or something, the issue is whether the nation is going to succeed and protect the interest of the people and uphold the value of currency at all, whether it’s deflationary or inflationary, and people in Germany are saying we’re seeing the threat of hyperinflation coming. Of course if these currencies that are in the developed sector keep inflating, then people other places have to print more money to keep exploiting their goods and people buying them so they’re not so pricey for people who are buying them.
But all that stuff to me is much secondary to the actual process, which is people deciding to hold the nation hostage and fire sell all the assets or just plain rob them to bail themselves out, or this draconian austerity that we see in Europe and it’s now going to be happening here. But let me just say that the solution after Glass-Steagall is to use whatever remaining assets we do have left like the $11 trillion dollars of US debt like Hamilton did when he founded the country, as a capital stock of a credit bank. A bank of the United States that would lend directly for industry, infrastructure, agriculture, and join with the reorganized, maybe shrunken commercial banks but now reorganized with the remaining valid assets they have in doing joint loans, joint credit loans, and whatever we have to do in addition to that to start getting a valid profit.
So pension funds, investment funds, people that are listening to your call, they will be able to, there will be long term investment in the real economy. And commercial banks can share in the valid interests and the loans that they make that’s related to the conversion of raw material and replenished goods, that’s related to the sale of agricultural and industrial goods.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, I would definitely say investors, be involved in and investing in the real economy and real things that have intrinsic value, that are kind of hard for the government to get. Governments always go for the easy road; they always go for the low hanging fruit. They can nationalize pensions pretty easily, especially if they’re not in self-directed accounts, brokerage houses, they can just declare by fiat that they’re just going to take over brokerage accounts or bank accounts, all of this stuff. But things that are dispersed, it’s harder for them to get at that kind of stuff. So, things that are real and have intrinsic value, that’s where investors need to be. Good advice. Good thoughts. Give out your website. Tell people where they can learn more, Michael.
Michael Kirsch: Yeah. The website, there’s an article on Huffington Post today that also linked to our Glass-Steagall page saying a flashy headline about why we’re at the end of the road and we need Glass-Steagall and they linked to our website where we have all of the state by state legislative support, that you can see every state that’s introduced a resolution. That’s Larouchepac.com/GlassSteagall, and also just Larouchepac.com. You’ll see up on the top, Glass-Steagall the credit system. And we have draft legislation on our website for a new bank of the United States that would participate with a reorganized banking system and create the kind of credit that we need for industry and so forth.
And you can find example resolutions that states have put forward. You can find the PDFs of the actual legislations in the legislatures for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall and get them to your legislator as an example of what they should immediately introduce. As well as finding out if your congressman’s a cosponsor of HR 129 of Marcy Kaptur, which is bipartisan in the federal congress but much more bipartisan as the state legislature resolutions.
Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Hey Michael, thanks so much for joining us today. We appreciate having you on the show to talk about this stuff, and keep up the good work.
Michael Kirsch: Thank you for having me on, Jason.
Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show. Protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show, which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own, and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.
Transcribed by Ralph
The Holistic Survival Team
