Answer: None, because they both gamble good money in a futile hope of getting a greater return, Ponzi is private enterprise’s word for it, Stimulus is government’s.
You would need to be living in cloud-cuckoo land to think that our government is running the country. They don’t! It is run by a cabal of thieves, albeit their thievery has been made legal by our unwitting government or condoned when the companies are based overseas — and that’s most of Australian companies isn’t it?
You don’t have to be Einstein to realise that “Stimulus” is an obvious euphemism for the same old Madoff/Ponzi scheme of risking good money in the futile hope of getting a greater return before you get caught out. Instead of helping the economy, Stimulus money is rescuing and enriching the very mandarins of businesses who caused the financial crisis by creaming off the wealth of the companies the managed which also affected the nation’s economy. This variation of the Ponzi scheme is now US government policy, and of course Rudd lemmingly followed. We are in fact paying witless people in Canberra to impoverish us.
Our government is in name only — the business mandarins are the real government of where our nation is going. In the US, the witless government has been conned by the mandarins into letting them amass/steal as much money/power as they could by fair means or foul. Even if it was found to be foul, the mandarins too-easily persuaded the government to change the laws to accommodate foul tactics to make foul practice legal. Ethics — schmethics!
Central to this re-definition of morality is the spinning of lies, and the government couldn’t even declare that unacceptable, because spin is also their stock in trade. Problem is that Business spins more convincingly. One result of this ethically challenged practice was that shares no longer represent a part of the business — shares in companies became mere tax-avoiding devices for accelerating the enrichment of the mandarins. Eventually the mandarins buy-back all of the shares from the profits they steal, then they then own the lot. Share holders are thrown a few crumbs for the borrowing of their savings from honest toil to create chains for themselves.
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The “Ponzi” scheme of using good money to pay the interest on loans for absolutely no substance has gone from being a problem for Madoff’s company, to being America’s and Australia’s adopted method for attempting to finance the woes of their economies. What slow learners politicians are.
Metaphorically, our government is running business by running around from party to party hosted by the rich and powerful to pick up whatever crumbs they can to throw to us chooks to keep us contented in our batteries of urban chook-houses. Instead of managing our economy, our politicians have handed it over to the very thieves who have gotten the Western World into the mess it’s now in, whose only aptitudes for management are hanging the sword of Damocles over the slave drivers who are willing to implement their boss’s greedy demands at whatever human cost it takes.
Many respected economists including Tim Colebatch* warn us that the factors that caused the the world-wide economic collapse last year, are still there, and that we may be in for a more serious downturn. But now, Soothsayers speculate that there will be a cataclysmic economic depression by as early as mid October. Their evidence is convincing, although I pray for everybody’s sake that they’re wrong.
The factors that caused the world-wide economic collapse in Western companies have not been addressed. Whether the crunch comes on October or February is of little importance. The even bigger tragedy is that they will probably not be able to address the underlying problem of not taxing mandarins according to their wealth, because the mandarins are now the real government and will not want to concede one cent of their wealth/power — why would they? And without representative government, there is nothing we can do about it.
Raymond F. Smith
* The Age June 9, 2009 “The data telling us that Australia is in recession ... is overwhelming. The March quarter GDP figure is incongruous with the rest of the data, (and) at odds with itself ...”