Sunday, February 07, 2010

Lending into Subservience

The Post World War development efforts entailed a large number of sizable loans to the central banks of third world nations. The corrupt governments used this money on projects that centralized economies and led to even worse living conditions for their people. The result of the "benevolent" lending of the banks was worse poverty and debilitating debt.

In the United States, we have massive lending programs to put people into houses. These lending policies jacked up housing prices and led to a situation where American consumers struggle under unbearable debt.

We are now being told that the answer to the current job crisis is a massive lending program to small businesses.

Our ruling class and big banking system keeps positioning benevolent lending as the solution to economic challenges, yet history keeps showing that the lending programs lead to economic centralization and debilitates large swathes of the economy under debt.

The path to sustainable prosperity is not built on loans but is built on the development of solid equity. Large lending programs flood the market with cheap money and undermine the substantive equity needed for sustained economic growth.

The $30billion in new loans for small business is not an investment in small business, but a margin play. The true path to prosperity isn't more lending and cheap money but the hard work that builds sustainable equity. Obama would do more for the economy if he simply paid back any outstanding loans in the TARP program and encouraged Ameicans to return to a structure where small business grew through the organic reinvestment of profit.

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