FINANCIAL MARKET REALITY
JUNE 1, 2011. I know that many readers are with me as I go to the wall and gladly blow through it to depict and explain the power of imagination (magic) and present a completely different picture of reality. All this information and MUCH more is in my audio seminars, where unique exercises are presented as well.
But you see, other people cozily opt for consensus reality, which is the bottom of the creative barrel and is, hilariously, thought of as rock solid and dependable all the way along the line.
“I dunno about this imagination stuff, I think I’ll stay with plain ordinary every-day reality. I wuz brought up that way…”
Yeah. Sure.
So with that, have a look at the recent financial meltdown from a different perspective.
Aside from those famous sub-prime mortgages, what else do we need to know about? The whole investment-market universe is a propaganda-induced hallucination. How about that?
There was a time, maybe 50 years ago, when people bought stocks because they saw them as a symbol for confidence in companies and growth and expansion and, therefore, confidence in America and democracy and ingenuity and so on.
A hard-working moderately successful husband, who wanted to parlay his assets into something more, for the future, would find a broker and open up an account. “Buy something, Bill, and hold on to it, and let it rise.”
Long-term investing.
But all that changed, as the game of buy and sell itself became the main event. It morphed into Vegas.
So-called stock speculation, which carried an aura of sleaze, became the hip thing to do.
“Buy and sell in your underwear from home. Buy and sell 20 times an hour and become a millionaire by next Friday. I did it, and I’ll show you how.”
Clue: He didn’t do it. If he did, do you think he’d be wasting his time teaching you his secrets? Judging from his demeanor, he’d be on his yacht with seven hookers and a liquor cabinet.
With the Great Morph in the way trading was done, the companies whose stock people were buying was the last thing on their minds. America? The future? Confidence in this great nation? Is that what a demented addict at the craps tables on the Strip is thinking about as he blows on the dice?
The whole game changed.
And big companies like banks and insurance outfits and even pension funds got deeply into the deal. They were all investing in the market and shoving in their chips on making a profit that way.
The reach of the game widened.
In this vast interlocking CONSENSUS REALITY OF VEGAS-ON-WALL-STREET, everybody and his brother got into the act.
So if the market suddenly tanked, the reality could split at the seams.
Probably the Pope could develop ulcers.
From this perspective, think about the following: institutions whose lifeblood is lending money to people…if those guys are investing, investing, investing in the market, and if they suddenly experience big losses, and they don’t have the same ability to lend money, then everybody who wants loans to start businesses or order new materials is up the creek and creek is dry.
This consensus reality, involving so many various players, could cause the whole economy of the country to spiral down out of control.
That’s ordinary reality for you.
That’s the religion so many people are backing.
From the point of view of a company that’s selling stock to raise money for expansion, the vagaries of the market can be brutal.
“We’re performing well as a company, but our stock goes up and down without any seeming reference to that.”
What did you expect? Sanity?
When bad mortgages were packaged in units, like stocks, and traded like baseball cards all over the world, it was with the assumption that the whole game of buying and selling could somehow remain independent of the value of those mortgages, forever. Big banks in this game, finally incurring huge losses, tightened up their lending policies on all fronts…and in a society that runs on credit (loans), the curtain began dropping.
Of course, at that point, things became quite confusing, because these banks and other big players started lying in new and inventive ways. Who knows how many lies were told?
But regardless, when loose credit turns into tight credit overnight, the chance of a crash and depression looms.
Hence, the bailout.
Imagine players at a Vegas casino, where the bosses (insanely) extend blanket credit to cover losses and encourage further gambling…and then, one night, the bosses say enough. No more credit. Lots of people at the tables are caught with their pants down.
When the government issued $700 billion to patch-patch the broken system, banks turned around and said, “You want us to lend this money now. You want the credit to flow again, but at the same time you’re telling us to be more cautious about whom we lend money to.”
In this nexus, there was certainly lying and cheating going on, but the upshot was the lending didn’t smoothly pick up again.
The fundamental thing a person asks for, from consensus reality, is that it be consistent. If you have a table, and you put objects on it, they stay there. They don’t start walking around on the table and floating in the air. Because if they do, what’s a table for? Each thing has a function, and the functions mesh.
The sudden bubble in the trading markets popped because the commonly held hallucination developed flaws. Its elements didn’t obey their assigned functions. And then, as the repair work began, the loans didn’t flow as they were supposed to. More dysfunction.
Remember AIG, the insurance giant? A trader there invented a money maker. AIG would sell insurance to companies that were trading the packaged bad mortgages…just in case the packages turned bad. Of course, the idea was they would never turn bad. Well, what kind of insurance plan is that? “We’ll sell health insurance on the premise that no one will ever get sick.”
People inside the hallucination were doing things that would explode it. Why? Because they were convinced the consensus would hold, no matter what. The hallucination would remain.
It’s not so very different from a person on LSD who, say, walks around thinking he’s a Dutch settler in the American colonies. It all works until he arrives in New York looking for Indians who want to unload Manhattan for a handful of beads.
Assume for a minute that the financial meltdown happened through manipulation, on purpose, as a way of impoverishing, demoralizing, and pressing down on populations and making them helpless and malleable. Even then, we’re still talking about a basic set-up (trading markets and how they operate) that massive numbers of people have to buy into, in the first place, as consensus ordinary reality.
“This is America. This is the world. This is the way it works. This is a mutually beneficial trillion-dollar operation that goes on and on and on…and smart people take advantage of it, to expand their assets…this is what every intelligent person does.”
Brush your teeth twice a day, buy stocks.
Bottom line?
Every ordinary reality has loopholes, and people will try to capitalize on them, and in the process, actual holes will show up and expand, until the hallucination sags and deteriorates…at which point the monitors will do anything they have to, to re-inflate it.
These ordinary realities, through thick and thin, are viewed by most people as basic to life itself.
The truth is, they are products of imagination.
And since that is so, why not start from the real platform of power, which is you and your imagination and what you deeply want to create?
JON RAPPOPORT
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