TheBookkeeper

Bank Nationalization: It's Just Plain Wrong

www.pbs.org/moyers/jou...

Bank Nationalization: It's Just Plain Wrong

ClydeDNA This movie
www.pbs.org/moyers/jou...
is surely designed by the present state of the mind of economists. Money is book-keeping's debit system. A great deal of economic exchange takes place without the assistance of banking at all. Our culture needs to understand how a proper double-entry book-keeping framework works if we are to even begin to understand how money works.

The role portrayed in this film, of banks being exclusive money lenders, is completely misleading. as to what makes a well run culture successful. Yes is true that banks, particularly since book-keeping is being done by bogus book-keeping software, have become corrupt. But to get a handle on how a culture trades it goods and services, you have to look at those goods and services, and not at the money that is so easily corrupted by schemers.

This film is a bad joke on unstudied minds, which includes most of today's economists who believe that economics can be expressed mathematically. It cannot. If one studies book-keeping in the detail that this film attempts to study money, they would find that book-keeping, and the money supply, are in fact grammatical language. There is a subject, predicate, and object involved in every business transaction. The object is a story we live by. That our culture, as story, is so badly corrupted today is the work of liars, not miscalculation. Book-keeping, after all, can be precise without going beyond simple arithmetic. If you want a clear picture of today's best alternative solution view this interview:
www.pbs.org/moyers/jou...

Furthering the Discussion on Bank Nationalization

“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.”

Wouldn't it be nice if Secretary Geithner's words were in fact a.true statement of fact? The fact is that our financial system is being run by dreamers who are guessing "What might we try next," in the way of a solution to 40 years of Ponzi schemers using new-found computer power to accelerate bad ideas into today's crash.

Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Citadel: Earnings Troubles All Around

You said:
"Tighten, don't loosen, accounting rules for financial institutions,"

Surely you know, sir, that the rules that accounting must follow are the 650 year old double-entry book-keeping framework of rules, no? If banks had been accounting to those rules the nation would not be where it is today.

"making them mark-to-market financial asset portfolios that specifically cannot be held on a long-term basis. Also clarify rules around consolidation of off-balance sheet vehicles,"

There is no legal 'off balance sheet vehicle.' A book-keeper's job is to administer contracts with transparency to all entities that are parties to the contract, and that surely includes stockholders. If a vehicle is placed off the balance sheet then any obligations an entity has to that vehicle's contract belongs on the entity's balance sheet. This is book-keeping 101, which is to identify an entity's boundaries of contractual obligations. aka "rights to ownership."

"forcing all but the most clearly dissociated entities to be recorded as on-balance sheet obligations."

There is no "all but." There is either a contractual obligation or there is not an obligation. All else is fudged books. Banks are failing because they are not doing their bookkeeping. An accountant is not a bookkeeper. Accounting and bookkeeping interests are as different as the baseball pitcher and the umpire who is calling balls and strikes.

Can Capitalism Survive Its Latest Entanglement With Socialism?

Does an economist know how double-entry bookkeeping works? It is today's problem, but I never hear it mentioned. Why? A credit default swap would never post in a proper double entry framework of rules.. It is an illegal entry because it commingles rights to ownership. Why is this never talked about?

How to Spend $700B and Actually Solve the Problem

This makes sense, and it approaches the solution used in the Great Depression, when commercial banks were formed. They could only lend county-wide. Banks became a service the citizenry that were restricted from gambling with the citizen's money that was on deposit..

Short Sales: SEC Turns Back the Clock to 1931

However you slice it a naked short bet that pays off is somehow collecting counterfeited money. And if the short bet loses money, who gets that profit? The broker? There is no way that such practices could be being posted to a proper double entry bookkeeping framework of rules.