"MONEY" "Virtual" [600 CE - 2013 AD] "Red Collar Crime" ~ "Globalization" ~ "Loopholes From Here to China"

What Is Money?

12/03'09| Filed Under » Federal Reserve  ~Everyone uses money. We all want it, work for it and think about it. If you don't know what money is, you are not like most humans. However, the task of defining what money is, where it comes from and what it's worth belongs to those who dedicate themselves to the discipline of economics. While the creation and growth of money seems somewhat intangible, money is the way we get the things we need and want. Here we look at the multifaceted characteristics of money. (Get A Short-Term Advantage In The Money Market. This investment vehicle is often the perfect stop-gap measure for growing your money.)

The Middle Ages (600 – 1500 CE)

The return to virtual credit money .. If the Axial Age saw the emergence of complementary ideals of commodity markets and universal world religions, the Middle Ages were the period in which those two institutions began to merge.

Religions began to take over the market systems.

Everything from international trade to the organisation of local fairs increasingly came to be carried out through social networks defined and regulated by religious authorities.

This enabled, in turn, the return throughout Eurasia of various forms of virtual credit money.

In Europe, where all this took place under the aegis of Christendom, coinage was only sporadically, and unevenly, available. Prices after 800 AD were calculated largely in terms of an old Carolingian currency that no longer existed (it was actually referred to at the time as imaginary money, but ordinary day-to-day buying and selling was carried out mainly through other means ..The Church, meanwhile, provided a legal framework, enforcing strict controls on the lending of money at interest and prohibitions on debt bondage .. The real nerve centre of the Medieval world economy, though, was the Indian Ocean, which along with the Central Asia caravan routes connected the great civilisations of India, China, and the Middle East. Here, trade was conducted through the framework of Islam, which not only provided a legal structure highly conducive to mercantile activities (while absolutely forbidding the lending of money at interest), but allowed for peaceful relations between merchants over a remarkably large part of the globe, allowing the creation of a variety of sophisticated credit instruments. Actually, Western Europe was, as in so many things, a relative late-comer in this regard: most of the financial innovations that reached Italy and France in the 11th and 12th centuries had been in common use in Egypt or Iraq since the 8th or 9th centuries. The word cheque, for example, derives from the Arab sakk, and appeared in English only around 1220 AD.

The case of China is even more complicated: the Middle Ages there began with the rapid spread of Buddhism, which, while it was in no position to enact laws or regulate commerce, did quickly move against local usurers by its invention of the pawn shop – the first pawn shops being based in Buddhist temples as a way of offering poor farmers an alternative to the local usurer. Before long, though, the state reasserted itself, as the state always tends to do in China. But as it did so, it not only regulated interest rates and attempted to abolish debt peonage, it moved away from bullion entirely by inventing paper money. All this was accompanied by the development, again, of a variety of complex financial instruments.

All this is not to say that this period did not see its share of carnage and plunder (particularly during the great nomadic invasions) or that coinage was not, in many times and places, an important medium of exchange. Still, what really characterises the period appears to be a movement in the other direction. Most of the Medieval period saw money largely delinked from coercive institutions. Money changers, one might say, were invited back into the temples, where they could be monitored. The result was a flowering of institutions premised on a much higher degree of social trust.

.. However tawdry their origins, the creation of new media of exchange – coinage appeared almost simultaneously in Greece, India, and China – appears to have had profound intellectual effects. Some have even gone so far as to argue that Greek philosophy was itself made possible by conceptual innovations introduced by coinage. The most remarkable pattern, though, is the emergence, in almost the exact times and places where one also sees the early spread of coinage, of what were to become modern world religions: prophetic Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, and eventually, Islam. While the precise links are yet to be fully explored, in certain ways, these religions appear to have arisen in direct reaction to the logic of the market. To put the matter somewhat crudely: if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant, and selfishness – or even the self – illusory.

http://blog.longnow.org/02010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/

Corruption Currents January 4, 2013, High Tide: From Cash-Only Vatican to the Golden Age of Corporate Investigators >>http://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2013/01/04/high-tide-from-cash-only-vatican-to-the-golden-age-of-corporate-investigators/ 

 

<<Russian billionaire Yuri Milner — who was virtually unknown in Silicon Valley before his first Facebook investment in May 2009 — is a critical connector in this ecosystem. Mr. Milner, the founder of the investment firm DST Global, has plowed more than $1 billion into Facebook, Zynga and Groupon in the last two years. He has also drawn the Wall Street elite into this world, joining with Goldman Sachs for a $1.5 billion investment in Facebook.

>>http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/the-money-network/


12/22/10, NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Today, Hughes wonders where the regulators and auditors were .. Something that simple should have been picked up by the auditors, he wrote to TheStreet.

When allegations of fraud torpedoed the stock of China-based Rino International (RINO) last month, investor J.M. Hughes lost 56% of his investment -- or nearly $19,000 -- in less than a week. 

The attack came from a short seller -- a firm betting that the stock would decline -- so at first Hughes wondered whether the source ought to be "held accountable." It turned out that the allegations were on target, and that the short seller had uncovered accounting discrepancies that U.S. regulators, auditors and exchanges had missed.

Thousands of investors hurt by the collapse of China-based companies are raising the same kinds of questions. Blow-ups of this kind among China-based small caps have cost investors at least $34 billion, over the past five years, a study by TheStreet showed. Most of the losses relate to companies that have gained access to U.S. exchanges through a back-door process known as a reverse takeover, or RTO. Rino is one example.

The RTO process folds a China-based company into an American shell company whose stock is publicly traded. Essentially, the combination of the two companies brings the Chinese company public in the U.S. without regulatory review, allowing the promoters to avoid the regulatory scrutiny normally applied to an initial public offering or a request for a listing of American Depositary Receipts.

Few episodes illustrate more clearly the pig’s ear the United States has been making of globalization than the scandal of “red collar crime.” The phrase  has been coined by my Forbes colleague Joshua Brown to describe a pattern of stock scams emanating from mainland China and targeting millions of unsuspecting American investors. Until recently such scams, which have been facilitated by not only  the Wall Street investment banking community but the American accounting profession, have been largely overlooked by the American and British financial press. Yet, according to an analysis by TheStreet.com, American investors’ losses  had already by last year totaled $34 billion.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2012/12/04/this-is-big-the-sec-at-last-takes-the-lid-off-china-stock-scams/ 

http://news.zurichna.com/article/a15cf74194114e6ee5ce21f1e1184f42/the-sec-at-last-takes-the-lid-off-china-stock-scams 

 http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/061303.asp

Coyote Howlin ~ Our human system of believing, in stocks and bonds as commodities, to interest the/a trader/s of exchanges as investors, had-has purpose?  How to trade an exchange in every imaginable desire / thought / feeling / visions / etc.  The trade must be agreed upon by all those exchanging or the trade is not an equal exchange with full transparency to insure a wholly trusted contract.  To facilitate this with the fastest outcome.

Along the path of evolution the ideology that trading and exchanging human beings as slaves was lucrative.  Empires have been built on the backs of slaves, and what a source of power the slave owner experiences over a lesser powerful.

Slaves were/are capital.  Corrupted, contaminated degenerate religious [faith corporations] power and the other powers that basically parasite and prey upon our own species' to validate "life" had to figure out again as always, the new form of slave ownership and trading "flesh," their own species as a commodity evolved.

The work of Bernays and much earlier, hypnotizing human imagination into belief systems of surrendering the power of the will to be free.  Presto new world of slaves, called consumers.  Globalism was supposed to be the greatest slavery of all time.

Extreme sick superstitions, a form of dark unreality, years of Old Testament and other ignorance has been programmed into brains of potential genius that can't be measured. 

The alarm clock has awakened us before we continue to hypnotically BeLIEve the Middle Ages is real in 2013.