Yesterday I braved the Christmas Shopping madness in Ashford and today I did a Lidl Run to Hastings to stock up the larder for Christmas and the New Year. While in Hastings I stopped off at Mahavi’s Internet to post onto the cesc website The Wealth of Counties and a primer on Commercial Banks, Central Banks and Governments.
The How Banking Primer has pages on the Unholy Trinities of Banks and Governments and a list entitled Ten More Financial Secrets. Our Banking System is tripartite with the three functions closely interlocked. The first part is that of Central Banking through which money is created; the second part is that of Commercial Banking through which money is distributed; and the third part is that of the Consuming Public through which money is utilised.
The Government’s Unholy Trinity refers to the way Government gets its money. This it does in not one but three ways: by taxation, by borrowing genuine savings and by the Central Bank inventing or creating the necessary amount and thereby increasing its obligations to the joint stock banks which then create new deposits for the purpose.
Here are a few of the Financial Secrets.
Money for most purposes means bank deposits which is a bank-created substitute for metallic money;
Bank deposit money chiefly comes into existence by the actions of the banks themselves which create it initially as a debt at interest. The variation in the quantity of bank deposits…and of paper money generally…is controlled by the actions of the central bank.
Bankers' profits are made out of whatever ‘money’ they can create and issue in excess of their liquid reserve assets.
Banks do not lend their customers' money when making loans or granting overdrafts but create or invent the money for the purpose.
Repaying the National Debt is impossible because it would cancel out an equivalent sum of money decimating the country’s money supply.
The latest figures from the United Nations Organisation has 20 million men and 17 million women in the world infected with HIV…and 4 million new infections a year. As world population is 6000 million this is a tiny figure…less than 1%…so what on earth is all the fuss about? Am I missing something? Has someone dropped a zero?
The UN statistics tell me that each year 2.8 million people die of AIDs and 2.7 million die of malaria…with 2.1 million of the AIDs deaths and 2.4 million of the malaria deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle has teams of world-renowned scientists…including three Nobel laureates…working to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer, HIV/AIDS and other diseases. A study by three of their researchers…Laith Abu-Raddad, Padmaja Patnaik and James Kublin…published in the 8th December 2006 issue of Science has found a link between AIDs and Malaria.
They reckon that tens of thousands of new HIV cases can be attributed to malaria infections, while millions of cases of malaria develop because of immune system impairments related to HIV. According to James Kublin the weakening of the immune system by HIV infection has fuelled a rise in adult malaria infection rates and may have facilitated the expansion of malaria in Africa.
Abu-Raddad’s mathematical model based on HIV and Malaria Co-infections in Malawi was used to measure the effects of the conditions on each other. A detailed study of Kisumu in Kenya was then conducted which revealed that five per cent of HIV infections were attributable to the way in which malaria increases viral load and that ten per cent of adult malaria episodes are related to HIV.
The study was funded by the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at the University of Washington through the Mathematical Modeling Program for HIV/STD Research. The HIV Vaccine Trials Network at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center provided partial support for the study.
Geoff Garnett Professor of Microparasite Epidemiology at Imperial College London said it was an interesting synthesis that showed the potential of one infection to allow another to establish within a population. But he remarked that many other behaviours, infections and environmental factors can similarly influence the disease and that the small effect of interventions targeted at dual infections was particularly interesting.
More interesting is the lack of scientific interest in the Malaria-carrying Mosquito…the ultimate Mobile Dirty Needle…as it goes on its not-so-merry way moving from person to person injecting, mixing and contaminating the blood of its victims. But you can’t make a vaccine for this…or lecture the Ignorant Savages about their sexual habits.
