Glass Steagall Today, Before It's Too Late

Britain's banks are bankrupt. We have said it many times. They are trading while insolvent, and in this country at least, that is illegal.

The British establishment is owned lock, stock and barrel by these banks, and so nothing is done. They have already taken us very close to the point of no return, and the financial collapse is only one symptom of their fraudulent thinking.

As we published recently in the paper edition of the UK Column, this stage of the process began in 1971, with the double whammy of the "Nixon Shock", where President Nixon unilaterally cancelled the US Dollar's link to gold that essentially ended the Bretton Woods system of international financial exchange, combined with Rothschild's formation of the Inter Alpha Group.

The Inter Alpha Group is a cartel of European banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, AIB and ING among others. The most notable name in the list is Santander. Notable because it is exhibiting the greatest symptoms of bankruptcy.

As a result of that bankruptcy, Santander has been sucking the blood out of any and all profitable assets the banking system may still have through mergers and acquisitions, in an vain effort to stay afloat.

For example, lets take the case of Allied Irish Bank. AIB, also an Inter Alpha Group member, is also insolvent. It went cap in hand recently to the Irish Government for bailout money. The Irish Government, in their emminent wisdom, told AIB that they could have bailout money, but that they would have to attempt to raise as much capital for themselves first, as a condition of it.

As a result of that condition, AIB sold the only profitable portion of its operation - its wholly owned Polish subsidiary, Bank Zachodni WBK to Banco Santander. AIB then qualified for bailout by the Irish taxpayer. AIB was asset stripped, leaving the bankrupt empty shell, on the backs of the Irish. Job done.

Santander has done the same in the UK, sucking the final embers out of Bradford and Bingly, Alliance and Leicester, and Abbey, as well as the hight street branches of RBS and Natwest in Scotland.

It seems, though, that none of this has been enough to save Santander, which has had to announce a 26% drop in its third quarter "profits." The bank had to write off around €400 million in bad debts during the quarter as a result of new bank accounting rules in Spain, and it has announced a floatation of 20% of its UK arm in an attempt to raise €3 billion.

Santander is merely the leader on the way to hell, as Greek, Irish and other Spanish banks follow quickly behind. All are on European Central Bank life support machines - isn't it time these were switched off?

As Bloomberg recently reported, Spanish, Irish and Greek banks took 61% of the loans supplied by the ECB in September, which was 50% up on August. Why? Because no-one wanted to invest in their bonds.

All this resulted in last week's agreement, led by the Cabbage Patch himself, to make changes to the Lisbon Treaty which will create a permanent bailout mechanism to "preserve the stability of the euro."

The truth is that we are at the end of the road with the current financial system. Those setting policy are bent on destroying our nations, asset stripping them, "normalising" living standards globally and imposing global governance. So they continue to actively push the collapse, which is not limited to the financial system. Food supplies, energy, roads, rail - all our key infrastructure necessary for maintaining our population is collapsing at an accelerating rate. In the case of food, we are already using food reserves in order to feed ourselves today.

This is the worst depression the world has known. As I have said many times before, it is similar in nature to the breakdown that occurred in Germany in 1923, except this time, there are no national boundaries to contain it.

The Solution - Glass Steagall

The Banking Act of 1933, known as the Glass-Steagall Act, was American legislation which introduced post-depression banking reforms, designed to control speculation. Its repeal effectively removed the separation between investment banks and high street banks, and paved the way for the speculation which brought about the present financial collapse.

There are more calls daily for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall type banking regulation, mainly in Europe.

In Austria, the financial spokesman for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) parliamentary group, Lutz Weinzinger, said his party is in favor of a banking system like the one that was introduced as a reaction to the 1929 stock market collapse:

It should concretely result in a split between commercial bank activities and investment bank activities ... It is a matter of protecting them [the commercial banks], because they provide deposit, credit functions, and safe money-transfer operations - customer-oriented services with low risk and modest profits ... In the future, investment banking firms should be like all firms, and in case of failure, they should be out of the economy, lest they jeopardize the functionality of 'basic banking.'

In Switzerland, Konrad Haedener, a Thun city council member, posted a call for Glass-Steagall on his blog on Oct. 3. The statement reads:

We need regulatory interventions in the financial economy, namely the partition of today's universal banks into a separate banking system, where payments, credit and mortgage loans, capital management, and investment banking are separated again. The U.S.A. had such a regulation in the Glass-Steagall Act, as a lesson from the 1929 stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression. After the lifting of this split-system in 1999, the problems started in the U.S.A., which led the country and partly also Europe into the serious crisis in the financial and real economy, which we are still in.

I couldn't agree more with these sentiments. Bringing in Glass Steagall style legislation has to be done immediately. If it isn't we are dead; the nation is dead. Realistically, that means the CameronClegg lovefest has to end. We need them out, and all their criminal colleagues. In fact, taking control of our financial system is not the only reason to do that.

What else we might do - fixed exchange rates, banks in administration, writing off the fraudulent national debt, taking control of our national currency,  government sponsored infrastructure rebuilding and so on - can't happen until Glass Steagall style legislation is in place.