Math Is Hard, Interest Rates Harder

Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Can’t Pass a Basic Test of Financial Literacy

Quick: If you take out a $1000 loan that has a 20% rate, how much will you owe a year in interest?

Answer: $200. But if you got that wrong, you’re not alone. Nearly two thirds of Americans can’t calculate interest payments correctly, according to a new study. About a third said they didn’t even know how.

One of the silver linings of the financial crisis was that it was supposed to have taught many Americans a lesson, albeit painful, about the dangers of debt, and financial issues in general. Apparently, the message, though, didn’t get across.

All told, a new study, which was released today, estimated that nearly two-thirds of Americans couldn’t pass a basic financial literacy test, meaning they got fewer than four answers correct on a five-question quiz. Worse, the percentage of those who can pass the test has fallen consistently since the financial crisis to 37% last year, from 42% in 2009.

Continue reading…

From Fortune, here.

Hyehudi.org DEFENDING Satmar?! (Is Everything Alright?)

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein recently accused Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum in Cross-Currents of cheapening Jewish heroism and history. I would comment directly on the site, but I think I’m blocked (Yay!).

Here’s the main part of the article:

A few days ago, R Aron Teitelbaum of Satmar/Kiryas Yoel voiced his disapproval of the New York State Commissioner of Education for her ongoing attempt to force compliance with state curricular standards…

“She wants to change Klal Yisrael and remove us from our religion exactly as the Greeks wanted in their time, to destroy the education institutions, a decree of forced conversion (shmad). Who would have thought that here, in the greatest democracy in the world, a time would come when a decree on education would become reality?”

The Rebbe is known to be a clever, smart man. He cannot actually believe that the NYS Dept of Education is working for the apostasy of the Torah-true Jews of Kiryas Yoel and Williamsburg. So its just a bit of literary flourish, right? A bit of dramatic exaggeration? In a country currently awash with hyperbole, the Rebbe is perhaps no different than many in politics, broadcasting, and the academic world.

But there is something else wrong with this. Employing the “shmad” charge in this context cheapens centuries of Jewish history, and minimizes the sacrifices of countless Jews who laid down their lives in times of real gezeiras shmad. They knew the difference between the NYS Commissioner of Education and the likes of Antiochus, Torquemada, Count Uvarov, and the raiding parties in Iran that forcibly converted entire villages of Jews.

No. What Rabbi Adlerstein cannot imagine is that this is the case with all government education. Public schooling is an intentional threat to all religion or pseudo-religion (except for state “power religion”). Read the relevant chapter in Rothbard’s “For a New Liberty” for the historical proof. Polish up with Gatto’s “The Underground History of American Education” (free here).

Now maybe Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum doesn’t know all that either. But government education really is Shmad! Rabbi Brand expands the halachic “Shmad” category to state expulsions of Jews from the land of Israel, and similar matters as well.

Not hyperbole!

The Rebbe certainly knows that there is no locale in the entire country with a larger percentage of people living on the public dole than Kiryas Yoel. Not too many people are going to believe that the government is trying to wipe them out as a community. The Satmar argument that the State’s demands are excessive has some merit. It would be better, however, if it did not match that excessiveness with words that are a slap in the face of centuries of kedoshim.

That is an actual valid point. “Who pays the piper calls the tune.”

The Anglo-American Establishment (or: Who Are the GOYISH Bad Guys?)

Fake History. How The Money Power Controls Our Future By Controlling Our Past

By Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty

The ‘Fake History’ and ‘Fake News’ pejoratives (like ‘Conspiracy Theory’ before them) have only recently entered common parlance, but the falsification of history and news reporting is as old as history itself. For many a long year television news channels and newspapers owned or controlled by the Money Power (including the British Broadcasting Corporation), have been feeding us a daily diet of fake information. But in a black is white Orwellian reversal of truth it is the very people spreading falsehood who hurl the ‘fake news’ and ‘fake history’ pejoratives at truth tellers. To maintain control and stem dissent, the ruling elites maliciously misrepresent and question the integrity of alternative media and non-corporate news sources which broadcast genuine news, and the honest revisionist historians who relate historical truths. George Orwell suggested in his ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’, ‘ignorance is strength’ thesis that the masses fall for the ruling power’s lies because their critical thinking has been so repressed they will believe any absurdity in contradiction of the plain facts.

Orwell famously added: ‘Who controls the past controls the future.’ Fake history is a weapon wielded by ruling elites to exert control over us, for it is knowledge about the past that has the power to shape us as people and develop our comprehension of reality. True history reveals to those who care to learn that democracy is a sham; that we the people are akin to Orwellian proles in Oceania watched over by Big Brother and accepting of anything he cares to tell us or throw at us. Money Power control of the received history is crucially important (more so than control of fake news) because it enables them to keep us in the dark and ensure our ongoing subservience. After almost seventy years Orwell’s observation may appear somewhat clichéd, but it is now more relevant than ever. The highly perceptive author added: ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’

George Orwell was correct and if humankind is to stand any chance of determining a future without oligarchic totalitarian control, the lies and mythology of our past must be challenged by honest history, hard but necessary truths and historical revision. ‘Revisionism’, according to Joseph Stromberg in an article he wrote about Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, ‘refers to any efforts to revise a faulty exiting historical record or interpretation.’ [1] Professor Barnes, himself one of the greatest revisionists of the 20th century, wrote that revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars because ‘truth is always the first war casualty.’ [2] Hold that important statement close. The emotional abuses and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime. Consequently, both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident and profuse in connection with wars.

The present authors’ years of research into the origins and conduct of the First World War of 1914-18 (though it continued until the signing of peace in 1919) demonstrates just how accurate Professor Barnes understanding was. Mainstream historians tell us that Germany was guilty of starting WW1 and committing the most barbarous crimes throughout. Proud, virtuous Britain, on the other hand, was forced to go to war against this German evil to fight ‘for freedom, civilization and the integrity of small helpless nations.’ It is all a deliberately concocted lie. Patriotic myths and the victors’ wartime lies and propaganda had been scripted into Britain’s ‘Official History.’ In truth, Britain – or to be more precise, immensely rich and powerful men in Britain – were directly responsible for the war that killed over 20 million people. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany did not start the war, did not want war and did what they could to avoid it.

But it is not just First World War history that is involved in the grand deception. Our contention that virtually the entire received history of the twentieth century has been faked and requires urgent and complete revision, will raise no eyebrows in enlightened circles. It will most definitely elicit howls of derision and cries of ‘impossible’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ from the vast majority. Self-interest or cognitive dissonance?

This essay cannot cover the many thousands of examples of historical falsehoods or omissions we found in our historical research – our books do that – but it explains in detail how the men behind the curtain actually create fake history. It is complex and the article is, by necessity, long because corners cannot be cut in relating this hugely important issue.

Who is responsible for faking history?

The elites multifaceted approach ranges from the straightforward destruction or concealment of documents and books, to the more subtle methods of employing Court Historians with their control systems such as ‘peer review’. Before we examine how history is actually faked we need to understand who fakes it. In this regard, the most important influences on our work were books by Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope and The Anglo-American Establishment.

The astonishing 1,300 page tome Tragedy and Hope, published in 1966, revealed the existence of a secret society initially created by the gold and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes in London in 1891. Its aim was to expand the British Empire to all habitable parts of the world. The enlarged empire would be run by wealthy upper class elites and based on English ruling class values as espoused by Professor John Ruskin at Oxford University. These rich and powerful individuals felt obliged to rule the entire world because they considered the vast majority of the human race too ignorant to do so themselves. In the decades following Cecil Rhodes death in 1902, the secret society evolved. It became transnational as the singularly English elite merged with the American money-power – Quigley’s Anglo-American Establishment – and the geographical axis moved from London to New York. The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the United Nations in the U.S. were created as Money Power instruments towards their one world government, that is, the ‘New World Order’ which is openly discussed today.

Members of the secret society controlled the United States, the White House, the Federal Reserve System and Wall Street. They likewise controlled Britain, Downing Street, the Bank of England and the City – the financial district of London. They ruled from behind the scenes and were not necessarily the major political players known to everyone. They selected major political figures and funded and controlled them. They would not be the great teachers or historians, but they decided who would be elevated to the great chairs of learning and funded historians who wrote the fake histories. This secret group has been the world’s major historical force since before World War 1 and, according to Professor Quigley, every major event in history since then has been dominated by them. [3] The secret society was

…one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Group is of such significance that evidence of its existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look. [4]

We looked, followed the clues, trails and names presented by Professor Quigley and were utterly astonished to find that a secret cabal actually existed with unfettered powers in Britain and the United States. Quigley called them the ‘Group’; we have termed them the Secret Elite, but they are also known as the Money Power, the Deep State, the Men behind the Curtain and so forth. The shocking evidence we have uncovered goes much deeper than that exposed by Quigley, and indicates beyond all doubt that the individuals involved in the cabal – in both London and New York – were responsible for starting, and unnecessarily prolonging, the First World War. Through enormous wealth, power and control of Oxford University, they were able to cover their tracks and fabricate a history which blamed Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany. A century later, that fake history is still presented as truth by ‘eminent’ mainstream historians with links to Oxford.

The Rise of the Money Power

Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope revealed the ambitions of those whose wealth bought real power:

…The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.’ [5]

Free from any single political interference, this system was controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Quigley was adamant that ‘Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.’ The power of the central bank in each instance rested largely on its control of the credit and money supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested very largely on their control of loans and gold flows.

Professor Quigley explained how, in 1924, Reginald McKenna, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and at the time chairman of the board of the Midland Bank, told its stockholders:

I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money … And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people. [6]

It was an extraordinarily frank statement from a man close to the inner circles of the British Establishment. The international bankers on Wall Street were intimately linked to the Rothschilds in London and Paris. They manipulated the political power of the state to create the corrupt Federal Reserve System to gain a monopoly over the money issue through it.

Another important contributor to the unmasking of the Money Power, Professor Antony Sutton revealed:

The Federal Reserve has the power to create money. This money is fiction, created out of nothing … In brief, this private group of bankers has a money machine monopoly. This monopoly is uncontrolled by anyone and is guaranteed profit. [7]

With a magic machine that created money from thin air, the international bankers were able to control not merely individual politicians, but entire governments. By comparison, controlling the writing and teaching of history was child’s play. Quigley revealed the names of the rich and powerful banks and bankers – the Gods of Money – who were intimately involved. They included N.M Rothschild, Barings, Hambros, Lazard Brothers and Morgan Grenfell in London. [8] On Wall Street were J.P. Morgan, Kuhn-Loeb & Co., J.D. Rockefeller and Brown Brothers and Harriman. [9] Members of these banks on both sides of the Atlantic ‘knew each other intimately.’ [10]

Carroll Quigley had been invited by the secret society to study its membership, aims and objectives, and states he was helped in this by the British historian Alfred Zimmern who was himself a member of the secret cabal. It appears that Professor Quigley was actually chosen by the secret society to be its official historian. [11] He was one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of American academics. As a student at Harvard, Quigley had gained two top degrees and a Ph.D. He taught history at Princeton University and Harvard before moving to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown as professor of history. He was a distinguished member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association and the American Economic Association for many years. He was also a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy and the Smithsonian Institution. He sat on the Congressional Select Committee which set up the National Space Agency. This is an outstanding professional record. Most academics of ambition would have considered their careers to be crowned by any one of Quigley’s individual achievements. He had entry to the innermost workings of the powers which controlled the United States. It is vital that we appreciate that his voice comes from the inside looking out. He knew what was happening and how the system truly worked.

Yet Quigley’s personal position on these developments remains somewhat confused. He stated that he admired the society and many of its members and its goals, but not its methods. [12] He believed they should abandon secrecy and make their aims and objectives clear to all. This may have been his downfall. To us it remains an enigma that Quigley said he admired these individuals and their globalist aims of a one world government controlled by bankers, yet on the very same page stated that their tendency to place power in and influence into hands chosen by friendship rather than merit, their oblivion to the consequences of their actions, their ignorance of the point of view of persons in other countries or of persons of other classes in their own country … have brought many of the things which they and I hold dear, close to disaster.’ [13]

Did Professor Quigley decide in the end, like his fellow historian Professor Alfred Zimmern, that the secret society posed such a menace to the world that he chose to expose it? We shall never know. Unable to ridicule Tragedy and Hope as ‘conspiracy theory’ because of his exalted academic position and status, when it was published those he named decided to bury the book. Immediately on its release, unknown persons removed it from bookstore shelves in America – ‘faster than exploding Easter bunnies’ as one wit put it. It was withdrawn from sale without any justification and its original plates were destroyed by Quigley’s publisher, the Macmillan Company. The publishing company was owned by the family of the Earl of Stockton, Harold McMillan, who was British Prime Minister 1957-1963 and at the heart of the British Establishment. Years later, when a rare surviving copy of Tragedy and Hope was found and an unknown publisher decided to pirate it, copies began to sell.

Continue reading…

From Information Clearing House, here.

Profit and the Viability of Economies

פרשת ויחי: שִׁמְעוֹן וְלֵוִי אַחִים כְּלֵי חָמָס מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם.

This article draws from Rav Shamshon Rafael Hirsch.

Two Hebrew words for profit, for gain, are Yitron, and Betza. Yitron means ‘expansion’. There is an expansion of goods, services, and value in the economy. Put into Pareto terms, it is possible that everyone can gain, or at the least, that no one loses. So, when Yitron occurs as the result of economic activity and ingenuity, it is a question of distribution of the gains.

Betza is substantively different. It is related to the word Petza which means ‘to wound’. Betza is the type of profit where one person gains at another person’s expense or ‘wounding’. In other words, there’s a ‘zero-sum game’ at play.

The argument is: To the extent that an economy is motivated, organized, and conducted, with reinforcement by legal and financial structures, to achieve Betza, as opposed to Yitron, it is headed for ‘end stage’ failure or collapse. I utilize the term ‘end-stage’ failure much the way the term is used with respect to heart failure or kidney failure. The heart or kidney can be ‘in failure’ and still function, albeit, at a much-diminished capacity, for a while, until… ’end stage’ occurs.

Examples of Yitron abound. Think of innovation and invention that lead to new products, services, or efficiencies. Alas, examples of Betza also abound. Whether or not the reader will agree that the following examples are good examples of Betza, I would suggest that the above-stated argument is still worthy of analysis and debate.

The more common examples are in situations (not every situation) where a seller (or manufacturer) takes advantage of information asymmetry to provide an inferior quality product marketed as a superior quality product. Transaction costs make it prohibitive for the buyer to ascertain the true quality. ‘Marketing’ can be quite convincing, even when patently or mostly false. We all know this from experience. Moreover, in the calculus of the seller, ‘marketing’ costs much less than ‘quality’, and the cost of being revealed is judged to be small.

The seller knows that the poor quality or inferiority will likely be discovered, but doesn’t care. He knows the transaction costs of the buyer recouping part of the payment price are too high to bother. (This is Chamas – legalized stealing). For more expensive items or projects, the seller knows he can wheedle his way out of going to court or having to pay back the buyer. He will have highly polished people on board who can successfully redefine ‘quality’ or show that the product technically met its contractually sculpted specifications, or that it was the buyer’s mistaken assumptions at fault. Alternatively, he will in a subtle but effective way bribe, co-opt, or blackmail the person complaining. Or he will do the same at a higher level of executives, who will then order the lower level complainers to S-h-u-t  U-p or else! The seller has many tools at his disposal to lower the cost of being exposed, which he assumes will happen.
The best sellers will even get the buyers to pay for the repairs or upgrades to the product or project (think: tunnel, tank, plane, you name it) at padded prices. Now that’s a good businessman! (Pardon, the cynicism here)

There is a Mishna in Bava Metzia 4:12 about mixing the wines and advertising superior wine or sifting the bran and cleaning only the top layer: (translation and Bartenura here.)

הַתַּגָּר נוֹטֵל מֵחָמֵשׁ גְּרָנוֹת וְנוֹתֵן לְתוֹךְ מְגוּרָה אַחַת. מֵחָמֵשׁ גִּתּוֹת, וְנוֹתֵן לְתוֹךְ פִּטָּם אֶחָד. וּבִלְבַד שֶׁלֹּא יְהֵא מִתְכַּוֵּן לְעָרֵב…

Of course, this model is predicated on the notion that there is little if any inherent value to integrity and honesty, except for its utility in gaining a profit. (Alas, there is an implicit editorial or, better, lament, here that ‘integrity’ and ‘honesty’ are gone from much of economic life. Oh, we see people claiming these qualities and even putting them onto their product names, but these are lower cost ploys….’marketing’.)

Banks are notorious for Betza. Many (possibly hundreds) of the popular Betza schemes fall under the rubric called ‘predatory lending’ which generates billions in fees (late fees and many hidden fees – that the targeted consumers aren’t keen enough to discern).  The Housing Bubble of the early 2000s may be an example where there was substantial Betza (even though there was some Yitron as well). Banks gave large mortgages to people who could according to the usual financial prudence and calculation could afford (or sustain) only small mortgages.

The reader may be able to think of other economic activity that follows the ‘zero-sum’ game plan or Betza.

I would like to conclude with the notion of Chamas, the Hebrew word which is often translated as robbery or violence. Rav Hirsch translates Chamas as legalized stealing. The sages of the Talmud provide support for this definition by saying that Chamas is stealing less than can be recovered in a court of law. At the time of Noah and The Flood, the world was full of legalized immorality and legalized stealing, Chamas. The decision to let The Flood occur was primarily because of all the Chamas that was the engine of economic activity in the time of Noah.

To this writer, when Betza and Chamas work together (and there is substantive overlap between the two, for sure) and reach some ‘critical mass’ in the economy, ‘failure’ follows. I do hope it’s not ‘end-stage’.