A couple of decades ago when I was just starting out in the film industry I worked for a film company that was in merger talks with two other film companies. Our company was 10-15 million dollars in debt and it appeared the only way to save ourselves was by merging with two stable companies so that the overall debt percentage would be minimized. Our company had already made a name for itself so with a bigger, better company (aka too big to fail) would come better times.
The unknown problem was that all three companies were actually hiding their own 10-15 million dollars of debt. Each company assumed the other two merging companies was debt free. After the merger the three companies realized that each company had brought debt into the merger. The new and improved too big to fail company actually had 30-45 million dollars of debt and went out of business in a relatively short amount of time.
I bring this story up now because I see my microcosmic experience is actually recreating itself on a much grander scale. You see, the whole world is in debt, and nobody really has a solution other than to try and hide their own debt from others. I have a solution to the hide the debt game that is being played and since I am a nobody, I may be correct when I say "nobody" has a solution.
Credit card interest rates and the gargantuan consumer debt liability that has been created in part from the interest rate charges, has destroyed a very fragile yet essential aspect of the worldwide economy. Consumers all over the world have less money to spend because more and more of their income is going towards repetitive interest rate charges.
While the actual amount of worldwide consumer debt may not seem like a substantial amount of the overall worldwide debt, it is having a profound affect in many insidious ways.
The bottom line is the amount of disposable income that each and every consumer is able to create is dramatically shrinking, and in the process, disposable income no longer first travels between consumers and within local economies, disposable income now goes directly to pay a bank debt or some type of tax, and this is a huge problem.
We have reached a point where the absolutely profoundly rich are now draining the worlds resources by expecting to get the best return on obscene amounts of money. Money that should no longer be receiving interest payments is actually siphoning more and more capital away from the everyday person who is just trying to make ends meet.
Banksters worldwide keep stalling the inevitable, apparently not realizing the longer they wait to eliminate interest rate charges on existing consumer debt and home mortgages, the worse things will be for the worldwide economy for a longer and longer period of time.
Too much emphasis is being placed on maintaining profit margins even when those profit margins are actually spiraling every country into deepening economic woes that devalue the actual worth of the profit that the banks are desperately trying to hold on to.
A separate but ironically parallel concern involves the worlds need to transition to forms of energy that each and every country can generate on their own land for their own needs. The key stumbling block to this energy transition paradigm is it needs to happen within the cost parameters of existing oil prices, and there in lies the parallel problem.
We can't seem to create other energy sources that effectively compete with petroleum. To compound the problem even further, petroleum is not being exclusively used to create the necessary infrastructure to improve the efficiency of alternative forms of energy.
The longer we wait to mobilize oil for the primary purpose of ramping up other forms of energy as quickly as possible, the less likely we will ever be able to make such a successful energy transition while also being able to service 6 billion people worldwide (and growing) energy requirements on the planet.
What does the world's inability to harvest new sources of energy have to do with interest rate charges? Interest rate charges enslave people to work longer and harder just to maintain their same level of debt. As consumers work longer and harder they consume more and more petroleum at a time when that petro should be used to create alternative forms of energy.
One example of reallocating how we use petroleum to create alternative forms of energy is the idea of completely redoing the electrical grid infrastructure. Actually re laying every bit of electrical wire in the entire United States with the most efficient forms of conductive wiring could significantly reduce the amount of power that needs to be generated.
Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in place to simply create a public works program to make the revamping of the energy grid a likelihood. Instead, we have people working extra hours, (assuming they can find work) using existing, inefficient methods of power just to tread water when it comes to paying down their own bills.
Consumer Interest rate charges are creating an enslaved society that will do anything to be able to pay their bills, and most of the work that is being done to pay our bills and those nasty interest rate charges, further removes us from the urgent energy goal of replacing petroleum as the dominant energy supply source on the planet.
What the world needs to do is DECREASE the amount of hours the worlds workers need to work to maintain their present lifestyle. Each work hour reduction creates more flexibility and more time for actually improving the energy infrastructure of our planet.
Any banker or politician that thinks creating more work hours so consumers can keep repaying repetitive interest rate charges on existing debt is actually helping to accelerate a possibly preventable economic and ecological global catastrophe.