(May 26 2020)
Today I want to focus on a single and seemingly minor fraud because, even considered by itself and in isolation, by total amount it still accounts for nearly all debt everywhere.
I am referring to the illegal concealed-credit-charge skim from the sales-tax revenue that is run through credit/charge-card accounts as part of the gross purchase volume (by total $ throughput).
On a $100 purchase for example, based on a 5% concealed credit charge the bank’s rake-off will be $5.00. But if you then impose a 10% sales-tax, the total amount of the voucher goes to $110 and the bank’s rake-off goes to $5.50 cents. That extra 50 cents may not seem like much until you start applying it to $10 trillion-plus in gross annual taxable throughput.
But first, and to appreciate the full effect of it, it is helpful to review the following excerpt from “Nominal my butt”:
Entrenched-money-power surfs the long term interest tsunami ever rolling forward
A more recent globally-shared event demonstrates the same essential (managed reality) phenomenon but from a different perspective. Over longer periods, even at still relatively low rates the difference [between a real interest rate and its corresponding nominal or decoy interest rate] is increasingly significant and eventually monumental. On June 11, 2008, Prince Charles was widely reported as having paid off a debt incurred and owed by his (alleged / legally-pretended) family (King Charles II) some 357 years earlier.
At a real interest rate of 6% per annum, the original £453 debt with interest (as at 2008) was about (rounded) 490 billion pounds (£490,000,000,000). Here is the (full text) story from Associated Press. Note especially the mix of studious avoidance and positive deceit as the powers that be dance around the issue of the interest (emphasis added):
Prince Charles pays centuries-old royal debt – without interest
June 11, 2008 – 14:34
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON – Prince Charles has paid off a royal debt from the 17th century. But he showed modern day financial prudence by declining to pay the accumulated interest, which would have been substantial after more than 350 years.
The payment of 453 pounds and three shillings, or about $900, was made yesterday during a visit to Worcester by Charles and his wife Camilla. The debt was incurred in 1651 when King Charles II was preparing for the Battle of Worcester.
He asked the Clothiers Company in Worcester to prepare uniforms for his soldiers and pledged to pay afterward – but his forces were defeated and Charles fled to mainland Europe.
He left behind the unpaid bill, and never got around to paying it after he returned from exile in 1660 to claim his throne as king of England.
Worcester businessmen have tried to collect the bill for the last 15 years, and according to a statement released by his office, Prince Charles decided to pay it as “a gesture of goodwill.”
The Master of the Clothiers Company of Worcester, Andrew Grant, received the money from the prince in a 1650-style gaming purse made by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The two met at the Commandery, the royal headquarters during the battle.
“We are very grateful to the Prince of Wales for repaying the debt to the Worcester Clothiers Company,” Grant said.
Prince Charles said he was happy to take care of the debt but said he would not be paying the interest because “I was not born yesterday.” With interest, the bill would have exceeded 47,000 pounds, or $94,000, according to the British Broadcasting Corp.
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Although (carefully / studiously) misrepresented in the above article, the general (but still unstated) quasi-consensus (in a plausible-deniability-if-later-challenged sort of way) from all the articles (and / or commentary on the AP story) that I could find through the internet (I spent about an hour searching and reading on the day of the event), is that £47,000 is what the same quantity and quality of uniforms would cost today. None of the articles that I found dealt with the amount of the debt at actual commercial interest rates, or even much lower judgment or pre-judgment interest rates, since the time the debt was incurred (i.e., other than to misrepresent it as in the above article).
So why would they do that? News and newspaper editors are constantly and actively looking for ways to sensationalize their stories, yet here where the very subject is unpaid debt-interest charges, they carefully avoid – and apparently deliberately and radically downplay or misrepresent, the fact of it.
Again, at even a relatively modest real 6% per annum the £453 would have grown to almost £500 billion (£490,000,000,000). The story was carried all over the world but, as far as I have been able to determine, not a single mainstream (or even alternative) media outlet dealt with the enormity of the real debt, even to speculate – as if the subject of debt-growth / compounding were itself taboo. At a real-world commercial rate of 2% per month on overdue trade accounts, the royal debt with interest would have grown to £3,119,784,110,359,810,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (i.e., £3.1 octillion-billion). Albert Einstein said “The most powerful force in the universe is compound [constant rate] interest”. He knew what he was talking about.
At a nominal 6% per annum, meaning an actual 0.5% per month (or real 6.167% per annum), the Royal Family’s debt with interest would have increased from £490 billion to £861 billion versus a real / actual 6% per annum or 0.4868% per month. At just a fraction over a real 6.2% per annum the debt would have grown to exactly £1 trillion.
If I were the editor of a newspaper, especially a stereotypical British tabloid, I would have had a two-inch banner headline screaming: “Royal Family artfully dodges £1Trillion (£1,000,000,000,000) in overdue interest!!!”. And on a slow news day I would have had some trouble resisting “Prince of Wales welches on £1Trillion Royal Debt!!! Probably explains regardless why I’ll never be hired as a mainstream newspaper editor. Real-world editors would seem to know instinctively that they can’t go there.
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The most important thing to note is that if the Royal Family had made the 6% annual interest payment each year for the 357 years, then it would have paid a total of about £30,000. But because it made no interest payments over the entire period the total owing at the same rate in 2008 was almost £500 billion (£500,000,000,000).
Likewise during fiscal 2019 the sales tax skimming was about the USD-equivalent of $200 million per day or about $60 billion for the year. Now the amount of total throughput has been growing for 50 years, and the relative level of sales taxes has been growing for 50 years, but the interest on the constructive trust has also been compounding for 50 years.
The result is that the total value of the trust is likely greater than all the debt owed by the governments from whom the tax revenue was effectively stolen or otherwise obtained by criminal means.
And, again, this is just one minor racket for the global private banking system. Even if all the debt in the world were recognised as null and void, the private banks would till owe us all ten times the amount.
So things are not anywhere near as bad as they have been made to appear. All it takes is a minor bookkeeping adjustment.