It's really the two sides of the coin, the Fed's interbank lending at low rates and the issuing of notes at low rates picked up by the central banks (and other players) of the world. So, foreign central banks pay a hefty price for keeping their employment at home.
whups....you missed a key fact there.... the Fed is NOT a gubmint entity. it's a PRIVATE org....the plutocrats own it, and through it, they control the gubmint, and the money. And via that control, they steadily milk the middle-class....year, after year, after year.... The top feeds from the bottom...forever....until it implodes. K-waves... We don't even have a 'money' system in reality....we have a DEBT system. Debt backed by debt. And that debt MUST continually increase without fail, or the entire system implodes. Yet that debt can NOT increase forever...to infinity...it's not possible. If you look at the rate of debt increase, it is tracing out an exponential curve....the -rate- of debt-increase is getting faster every single day.... We are now in the almost VERTICAL portion of that exponential-curve....i.e. it is taking more and more debt every day just to support yesterday's debt accumulation; not even including the support of actual productive economic activity. Exponential curves have the property of moving VERY quickly once they're on the vertical portion. I do not expect the current system to remain viable much longer at all. Months to several years perhaps. Not even another decade, I don't think. I would guess that the plan is to liquidate massive amounts of this debt....simply wipe zeroes off the books...and at the same time transfer massive amounts of private property (collateral, yes?) into the plutocrats hands. After the great wealth-transfer of the past 50-100 years (via central control of money, i.e. hidden taxation), about all the middle-class has -left- is their homes. But the int-rate manipulations and the massive propaganda conditioning urging people to buy buy buy junk, over the past 20 yrs, have now produced an income/RE-equity scenario where the vast majority will lose their home in the next econ down-swing. The great wealth-transfer operation will then be complete. We'll be back to feudalism and tenant-farming...peonism....the 'new world order'....
I wish I knew.... become rich.....become VERY rich....that's the best thing I can think of. move away from the 'center'...i.e. out of the USA. move to a backwater and live stealth-wealth....appear poor...while living comfortably. live in a small and ratty-looking house....which is solid and warm and dry inside......drive a trashed-out looking car....which is actually mechanically perfect underneath the dents and flaking paint.... etc...
Back around the turn from the 70's to the 80's the joke was to have a luxury automobile that looked like a junker on the outside and was fine corinthian leather, wood paneling, etc... on the inside so you could park it on the street s of NYC. Is that coming back in vogue?
While its almost far-fetched, in the back of my mind I have had a niggling suspicion that something like this might happen. Massive run-up in RE, people pulling equity out of their homes to buy useless junk (ipods, $1000 armchairs from frontgate, etc...) and flippers leveraging themselves to the hilt. While property taxes increase (from the inflated value of the properties), wages remain flat and rents too low to pay for the properties. As long as there is easy credit, the game continues & everyone is OK. However, once credit dries up, for any reason, watch out. Of course, there will be massive foreclosures, and an initial depression in real estate prices. What I am looking to see is what happens NEXT. It doesn't take a banking genius to figure out that in certain parts of the country (northeast, central cities) there isn't any more land to build on - its all been developed. So, some bank, faced with a large portfolio of RE it can't liquidate might say, "Hey - why don't WE manage and rent this stuff out?" Now, if they control the market, they can raise rents quite nicely, thank you, and other independent property managers can go along with it. Now, rental prices increase. Other banks get this idea too. (Hopefully, not from me. But I am sure that this has been considered already.) Get enough of it going through some bad business cycles and we can get into the 99 year leases that they have in london - where you don't even OWN the property it seems (but pay a mortgage like payment none the less.) Scary stuff. Hope that I'm hallucinating.
I would've thought it was far-fetched as well, back when. But some time during the 2nd Klinton term, patterns started clicking into place, and I began doing quite a bit of research, and the way of the world (for many centuries now) became much clearer. I then looked at the socioeconomic "charts" (i.e. trends), and it was glaringly obvious that virtually all were negative-trending....i.e. 'things' were getting worse in every way. Extrapolating them out a few years begged the question of "how can they simply keep increasing debt without limit?". More study provided the answer that they can't. <grin> Private-property among the middle-class was an historical aberration; in the process of being corrected as we speak. By the way, I made an error of phrasing in my post above. I said that "the rate of increase in debt is exponential"; when I meant to say that the increase in debt is exponential. I have not charted the derivative (rate of increase) seperately, so it may be linear or exponential, etc.. Don't know. I just know that total-debt is on almost a vertical acceleration at this time, and that is simply not a sustainable process.
You're correct, but some ignorant people just love to mouth off against any form of govt. It's usually these same idiots who run to the govt. for relief when the market makers screw them out of a profit.