Finance Capitalism = Retail Apocalypse Save for later Reblogpost

Plague_Doctor
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5,800 stores closures have been announced yet it’s only the first quarter of 2019. U.S. retail is looking very bleak due to the economy is slowing down and people carrying too much debt strangling their personal budgets making them consume less and less. The real economic conditions are worsening, yet mainstream publications are claiming that all of this, or at least the majority of 5,800 US store closures just the beginning of this year, can be explained by the upswing of Amazon and e-commerce.

At the same time in every first and second-world country, including the United States and the United Kingdom, people are getting more and more into bigger and bigger debts impairing their very capacity for production and consumption. It is rather a silent catastrophe since nobody knows that your friend who you go to dine with and attend cinema is borrowing to undertake such activities.  The annual percentage interest rates of store credit cards are about 25% currently more people failing to pay off credit card debt than during the previous year. Credit card debt in the U.S. stands at $1.02 trillion currently. In the UK according to an Irish consumer credit reporting company, half of under 35s adults couldn’t pay a 250-pound bill without getting into debt. The situation is even worse in Canada where about half of Canadians are within $200 of insolvency.

All of this can be attributed to finance capitalism, a system which is characterized by a predominance of the pursuit of profit from the investment in currencies and financial products (bonds, stocks, futures, and other derivatives) and also the culture of lending and borrowing money for unproductive activities. One of the most notiriously inhumane instances of finance capitalism happaned during World War One, or the so-called Great War was deliberately prolonged by multiple years in order to collect more interests on loans issued to powers such as the German Empire, the British Empire and others. It does not matter how many people need to suffer or perish, only the profits matter, only the fact that the international private financial enclavé can make that yearly 7-10% on its money. Maximizing profits is all that really matters.

Industrial capitalism was abolished by the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and seemed to be forever lost in the rubble of Germany after WW2 a few years after Lautenbach put it into practice in Germany in 1931 causing the 1932 defeat of the National Socialist Party at the polls. It was an economic plan which not only successfully defeated the rising Nazi party by reducing unemployment in Germany from 8,000,000 to 200,000 within a very short amount of time. Following WW2 Japan and later during the ’90s China has adopted the model of industrial capitalism which much success building their own respective economies up to world standard and sometimes to the envy of the planet. The Bank of Japan and its policies long since have been shifted away, however, China is still practicing industrial capitalism, at least the part of China which is run by Chinese corporations.

Earlier incarnations of these practices, according to Lyndon LaRouche who did extensive research into this field, were the Mississippi Bay Colony and later the United States (pre-1913). LaRouche called for the current monetary system to be replaced ‘credit system’ which would empower consumption and meaningful production.

Other scholars such as Michael Hudson came to the very same conclusion being that the current finance capitalist system is unsustainable and has to be replaced by industrial capitalism across the planet. Hudson in his most recent book to date titled …and Forgive their Debts has synthesized the habits and the financial culture of European civilization leading to a few new revelations including the perpetual acts of debt forgiveness and its positive implications to the national economies.