Liberty Dollar may have some competition...from VIRGINIA

[notorial dissent]

I have never been all that convinced that the so called “mortgage banking” industry ever really followed any kind of set rules. Even the ones run by actual banks seemed to have a very fluid idea of what they should actually have for reserves since the attitude was make the loan and dump it somewhere, so they weren’t really concerned with having much in reserves, and in some cases I always wondered if they even had enough on hand to cover the loans they were making. Events seem to verify the latter rather than the former.

Letting any financial institution self determine what their reserves are is a sure fire guarantee of an eventual collapse, for the simple reason that they can make more money with more money loaned out, and they can’t do that if they have to keep a certain amount in reserve, and the temptation will always be to get as much out as possible, no matter how bad things are looking since they will then be wanting / needing more money.

What truly scares me are the mega financial institutions, as we have seen, the too big to fail maxim doesn’t hold true, and when they do fail, they fail spectacularly and messily. The main problem with very large financial institutions is that they reach a point where they cannot keep track of what is actually happening internally, and when things start to crumble it may be well past the solving point before they realize what is happening and by then it is too late.

Case in point is what was at one time one of the mega banks in the UK, branches all over the UK, and offices all over the world, and in one of their trading branches in Hong Kong, as I remember, they had a trader who was running loose making very bad trades, and he basically traded them in to insolvency. Caused a major upheaval in the UK, and was to my way of thinking the beginning of the banking meltdown there. The same can happen here just as easily.

[wserra]

Since the thread had become a hybrid of (1) the problems with free banking and (2) "who's a moron", I split it here. Once again it goes to Potpourri instead of Flames due to the contributions of the Q-folks.

[wserra]

OK, everybody, the "coins" stuff all went south for the winter.

What is it about this thread?

[webhick]

OK, everybody, the "coins" stuff all went south for the winter.

What is it about this thread?

Someone must have sprinkled drift dust on the thread. It's like crack for off-topic posts.

[The Observer]

And now Utah is flirting with going on the gold standard:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tea-part ... d=13377409

[notorial dissent]

The number of factual errors in that article is mind numbing, and let's not even go in to the alleged logic behind any of it.