It 'aint over !

Just when we are being told that the Great Financial crash of 2008 is over, two news stories this week should scare the pants off those with superannuation money in the hands of the banking industry.

J P Morgan Chase, one of the biggest of the US banks - has reluctantly conceded that a complicated hedging strategy has gone wrong - and that it lost $ US 2 billion dollars.   J P Morgan Chase can withstand that loss and it will survive without the need for a bailout, but this is one of the banks that have led the charge to water down regulating legislation to curb credit default swaps and derivative trading.   It is precisely those same strategies that are delivering this repeat scenario.

When these strategies succeed they deliver handsome profits that fuel big salaries for bank bosses and return good dividends to customers, but when they go wrong - they throw the world's money markets out of kilter and come close to causing a world wide depression.   The banks are gambling with our money - and it seems that they have learned nothing since the lesson of 2008.

The other unsettling event is a general election in Greece.   The Greeks went to the polls and failed to deliver a government because the political parties can see that the country is in a hopeless situation !
Greece is broke - bankrupt - and the terms that have been imposed on it's citizens in exchange for massive loans that they will never be able to repay - is penury for this entire century.

Logic insists that a number of financially failing countries be allowed to leave the European Union and the Euro and reestablish themselves.   It will be a long, hard road back to prosperity, but as things stand the only winners are the rich countries of Europe, who are underpinning their standard of living by clinging onto a failed union.

Unless common sense is applied to the banking world and it is brought into line on standards, and the mess that is the EU is resolved in accord with the law of supply and demand, it is inevitable that we will see a replay of the 2008 GFC - and that is hovering just over the present horizon !