Einleitung auf deutsch

Introducción en español

Bevezetés magyarul

Introduction

"consumer society": payment of interest and liquidation of debts, as a sign of poverty and a moment of further impoverishment for the private debtor

Welcome! Here you find my publications of the last decades – articles and books, partial or as a whole.

One of my favourite topics is the history – and present performance – of money, credit and banks, in sum, finance capital.

For a while I intensely investigated the economic history of Austria in the 19th century, focusing on the credit system, banks, the stock exchange, securities, and the like.
In those days, the 90-ies and at the beginning of this millenium, this was considered a rather exotic pastime. Even more so as economical history has been lowered in importance since the fall of the Iron Curtain: if there is no alternative to market economy, why have too close a look at it? – this seems to be the logic of the people who decide on what is to be considered science and which jobs and areas of research are to be maintained or created.

Since then the whole financial system has undergone very substancial alterations. The first was the enhancement of credit to the sphere of the working class. Though already usual in several, mostly Anglo-Saxon countries, in many other countries of Europe this was a new phenomenon. Laws on rent restrictions, real estate property and credit rating were changed and mortgage became easier accessible to people who until then had been considered too risky clients for the banks. The credit card as a means of payment started to become fashionable in Continental Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. These developments represented a complete novelty in the former socialist countries where credit was seen as an adequate means to fulfil the promised and desired rise in living standards that could not be achieved with miserable salaries.
After these consumer credits had become quite voluminous they were used for the creation of derivatives. New terms were created for making money out of nothing: "financial engineering", "financial products", "financial vehicles" – all trying to assure the customer of the genuine essence and solidity of those airy creations.
When the whole card house broke down – and it has not recovered till today – the financial "industry" was heavily backed by the governments and their power about the currencies they emit. We are now facing a very instable cooperation between governments, national banks (including the ECB) and financial capital as represented in private banks, insurers, hedge or pension funds, and the like. Leaning heavily upon each other they try to make it through the uncertain waters of threatening bankruptcy, for the most part decoupled from actual and factual production of commodities of any kind.

In the course of these developments some principles of the credit system are being upheld and defended tooth and nail, as: Debts have to be served! But another principle has gone astray: Debts mostly don’t have to be repaid any more. A perpetual debtor is a constant source of income to the creditor, he prefers to keep it like that. This way the debtors repay their debt 3 or 4 or more times and still remain debtors. The wealth of the creditor produces the impoverishment of the debtor, and vice versa.
At least as long as the debtor pays interest. While we are facing zero or negative interest at the level of public debt or bank bonds this abnormal state of affairs does not reach to the sphere of humble mortgage loan borrowers or bank account overdrafters. They still have to pay interests that often overburden them, and as a consequence can be evicted or have the bailiff knock on their door if they miss a deadline of payment. The debt trap has replaced the debt tower. Still these humble clients are not discarded, as – on the contrary to companies – they have the advantage that they cannot dissolve in case of bankruptcy and therefore are more prone to serve their debt.
As a consequence of this practice usury has come back to Europe in the form of short-term loans, assisted by legislation.

Apart from these unpleasant developments in the credit sector another focus of my theoretical reflections has been the transformation of former socialist countries. After all, those were economically rather stable states that more or less fed and clothed their population and supplied it with medical treatment and education. Many of those states have now been made the back yard of the western member states of the EU – "old" Europe – and serve as a market and a reservoir of cheap workforce, with consequences like depopulation and social disintegration.
Of course, this didn’t come out of nowhere and was not only forced upon them. Many of the members of the former communist elites first always tried to catch up with the capitalist economies, and in the end happily handed their land and people over to the capitalist "investors", with a nice share for themselves.

Another focus on this website is on imperialism – that is, the competition between world powers and their relation to the states within their sphere of influence. This includes wars, invasions, the support of puppet governments, regime change, commercial treaties and cyber war. It also monitors the decline of present empires and the rise of powers-to-be.

Finally, what also can be found on this website, is the idealism prevalent in journalism and science: the desire to imply a prefabricated scheme on the analysis of reality, seeking to put all facts into boxes of concepts, in order to fortify a worldview that fits into the familiar system of democracy, human rights, freedom and the like. This approach is contrary to science as it should be: analysing facts, dividing the general from the accidental, searching for essential and thus coming to conclusions that satisfy the search for scientific understanding of reality.
Whoever is keen on this old-fashioned idea of analysis and grew tired of idealistic phrases like "inequality", "sustainability", "injustice", "freedom" and the like might find something interesting on this website.

Nowadays we face a shift in the understanding, the concept of science: while real and worthy science can only analyse the facts, the actual reality, "science" has become the synonym of prophecy. Experts of all kinds predict the things to come, and they are highly valued – not only by investment funds, but everywhere. Of course nobody remembers them when their prophecies don’t come true.
Whoever is tired of this pretence science may find more profound analysis on this website.

Some of my publications were on Nietzsche, on whom I wrote my thesis.

If you have questions, suggestions or criticisms, write to me:

About myself

Books, published and unpublished articles (in German)

Articles in English

Articles in Spanish

Books and articles in Hungarian

Travelogue or The Wild East

Η εμπορικη πολιτικη της Αυστριας και οι Eλληνες