Using the Banker Code Book - Pt 2

If you go to Japan, though it won't do much to get your adrenaline flowing you can see the Bunraku. This is a type of puppet theater that differs sharply from what you might see in the West, in that the puppeteers are not hidden from sight on some level above the puppets and handling strings. Instead they appear right there on the stage, one with the puppets and operating their charges with hands buried in the puppets' costumes, moving their lips and their bodies in unison. These manipulators do make a concession to the suspension of your belief or whatever you want to call it, by wearing dark and unremarkable clothing, but their heads, emphasized by haircuts that make them look as if they are fresh from the barbershop, are bright and shiny and in full view, making them easily distinguishable with obvious personalities of their own.

If the news services are doing their job -- and maybe sometimes they do , in spite of operating in otherwise strict obeisance to the dictates of their regressive owners -- I'm banking on being able to see the biggest wheeling and dealing in the human experience as if it is a Bunraku performance, with the puppeteers being the Money-Changers of the world, i.e. the Central Bankers, as exposed recently in the Hitchcock article.

Lately the Money-Changers have been in the news every day, not necessarily the main one in the U.S., the Federal Reserve, but the big operators just one level below, mostly names like Bear-Stearns, Countrywide, Lehman's, and Merrill-Lynch. These institutions have been getting into trouble. There's something called the Credit Crunch and something else called the Subprime Mortgage Morass. Anyway apparently they have a lot of loans out but the borrowers are unable to pay the interest, much less the principal, and so these noteholders are running up lots of red ink.

You would think that these bleeding cash cows (if I understand all this correctly, and there's not the slightest guarantee that I do) wouldn't attract buyers, but one outfit, the Bank of America, has been going around buying up a bunch of these ailing bovines, while letting others either get rescued by the government or sink.

So what seems to be happening with the Money-Changers now is that mostly they're just deciding who gets to sit at the Big Table and who gets carried outside to be dropped down the incinerator chute.

I'm not acquainted enough with any of these guys to be able to know what sorts they are and therefore to make any kind of reasonable-sounding guess about what this means for the future, except that these characters are so less individualistic than Bunraku puppeteers that it doesn't make any real difference anyway.