Photos
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Make Money Formula: Entrepreneurs…Do You Know The One Essential Ingredient The Bankers Left Out?
Welcome back!
The “make money” formula is really very simple, yet some of the biggest banks in the world got it wrong because they left out one essential ingredient.
What is the formula and what essential element did the failed and bailed out banks leave out? Read more
Tags: banking crisis, banks, financial crisis, make money, making money, mortgages, securitization, valueRelated posts
Financial Crisis Silver Lining: The Money-Making Mindset Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Bankers
The global financial crisis has a money-making silver lining for entrepreneurs.
The idea of a “silver lining” comes from the old proverb, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” The proverb looks for some unexpected good outcome following some bad event.
For many entrepreneurs, business owners, real estate investors, and wage earners, the financial crisis is all too real, leaving millions with devastating losses.
What is the silver lining in all of this? Read more
Tags: bank meltdown, bankers, banks, entrepreneur, financial crisis, make money, making moneyRelated posts
Banking Crisis: Why The Banks Went Broke Making Money From Mortgage Loans
The banking crisis raises many questions.
Do you wonder how banks that claimed to hold billions of dollars in real estate mortgage assets could go broke?
And most importantly, how did a banking crisis involving mortgages turn into a global financial crisis that affects all of us? Read more
Tags: bank crisis, banking, banking crisis, economic crisis, financial crisis, make money, money making, mortgage loan, mortgage loans, no doc, no doc mortgage, no docs, subprime, subprime mortgageRelated posts
House votes to restrict Wall Street pay: Congress acts to end million dollar bonuses paid with bailout money
The United States House of Representatives passed a bill that restricts bonuses to bank executives.
Nothing has enraged ordinary people more than the idea that the biggest banks used bailout money to pay huge bonuses to their executives.
The House voted Friday to slap restrictions on how Wall Street executives are paid after nine banks that took government bailout money rewarded thousands of their employees with bonuses topping $1 million each. House Votes
In the same year the banks were failing, and taking billions of dollars in bailout money, the banks were paying their executives million dollar bonuses.
The core of the problem is the connection between reward and risk. Safe investments tend to be low paying investments. Often, the greater the risk, the greater the profit.
One of the reasons that the economic system got so out of whack is because the biggest banks found ways to make greater profit with riskier loans after the Glass-Steagall Acts were rescinded in 1999.
The Glass-Steagall Acts were passed in 1932-33 to prevent another Great Depression.
I wrote a report, “Why Banks Went Broke Making Money: The Money-Making Magic That Triggered The Global Recession.” In this report, I explain why the ability of banks to make more and more money with risky loans that violated every standard of responsible banking practices led to the financial crisis of 2008.
The real estate boom years coincided with successful political efforts to de-regulate the banking system. Based on the idea that government regulations limited free-market capitalism, Congress passed laws to set the banks free from all kinds of restrictions about what different types of banks could do, and significantly reduced oversight of banking.
Those who believed that “the best government is no government” argued that these restrictions and regulations were impeding free market capitalism. “The most notable results of this effort to set the banks free from government regulation were the repeal of the “Glass-Steagall Acts” of 1932 and 1933, and the enactment of the “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act” of 1999.
“Glass-Steagall” required a clear distinction between investment banks and commercial banks, to separate risky ventures from ordinary banking services. “Gramm-Leach-Bliley” removed these restrictions. This Act allowed commercial banks to engage in speculative investment banking.
With new-found freedom from all kinds of post-Great Depression era regulations, the biggest banks threw caution to the wind, and created a dazzling array of paper instruments which allowed them to make massive profits. Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Why Banks Went Broke Making Money,
Without these restrictions, the biggest banks had great incentive to engage in risky banking. The riskier the banking, the greater the potential profit.
As the banks took greater risks, their actions also had the potential to create great harm to the economy. The “mortgage meltdown” and the bank bailouts are all the direct result of increased risks by banks.
According to Barney Frank, the banks realized that they would make great profits only if they took great risks.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who sponsored the bill, said the extra regulation is necessary to ensure bankers and traders aren’t rewarded only if they take big risks. Under the provision banning risky incentive-based pay, regulators would be given nine months to dictate precise guidelines.
If a bet goes wrong, “the company loses money and the economy may suffer, but the decision makers do not,” he said. House votes
As the banks took greater risks, their actions also had the potential to create great harm to the economy. The “mortgage meltdown” and the bank bailouts are all the direct result of increased risks by banks.
The practice that has enraged ordinary people more than anything else has been the extremely generous executive bonuses paid to bankers who were running their banks and the economy into the ground.
It’s one thing to realize that the banks have been paying millions of dollars in bonuses to executives who were making such bad banking decisions. People were angry enough about that. What turned anger into outrage is the realization that the banks were continuing to pay generous bonuses after they received government bailout money.
At its core, the financial crisis is a banking crisis, brought about by risky behavior by banks and lack of regulation by government agencies. This action by the House is an effort to change the risk to reward ratio, so that bad banking is not so rewarding to the people who made the bad banking decisions.
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Tags: bank bailout, banks, Barney Frank, executive bonuses, financial crisis, Glass-Steagall, House of Representatives, make money, recession, Wall StreetRelated posts
Money Making Blind Spot. Why Economists Couldn’t See The Financial Crisis Before It Happened.
Money Making Blind Spot. One of the most disturbing elements of the current financial crisis is that so few people saw it coming. This is especially true of people who spend their entire lives studying economics and financial markets.
This is why a statement, such as the one by the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, is such an astonishing admission. In testimony before the House Oversight Committee in October 2008, Greenspan admitted that that he was shocked at the economic crisis. He never saw it coming,
The 82-year-old Mr. Greenspan said he made “a mistake” in his hands-off regulatory philosophy, which many now blame in part for sparking the global economic troubles. He quoted something he had written in March: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
He conceded that he has “found a flaw” in his ideology and said he was “distressed by that.” Yet Mr. Greenspan maintained that no regulator was smart enough to foresee the “once-in-a-century credit tsunami.” Greenspan Admits Errors to Hostile House Panel
Why would people who devote their lifetimes to studying economics and finances be so blindsided by what has happened recently?
Robert J, Samuelson raises the question about why economists simply didn’t see these problems coming.
One intriguing subplot of the economic crisis is the failure of most economists to predict it. Here we have the most spectacular economic and financial crisis in decades—possibly since the Great Depression—and the one group that spends most of its waking hours analyzing the economy basically missed it. Oh, a few economists can legitimately claim some foresight. But they are a handful. Most were as surprised as the rest of us.
Economists Out to Lunch
Samuelson finds the answer to his question in Niall Ferguson’s upcoming PBS documentary, “The Ascent of Money.”
The most significant part of this explanation concerns money itself.
The creation of money was a seminal historic event; so was the subsequent invention of finance—the saving and investing of money. Without them, we could never have moved beyond barter to a modern economy based on specialization and building for the future. But these advances came interwoven with bubbles, crashes, swindles and hyperinflations. Finance has been a wellspring of both progress and instability. Economists Out to Lunch
The point of the article is that money itself is the root of the financial crisis, but very few economists have paid enough attention to money itself, and so never saw the problems coming.
The crisis originated in financial markets (the markets for stocks, bonds and many complex securities), and yet finance occupies a peripheral position in mainstream economics.
Economists Out to Lunch
This is the blindspot that lies behind the crisis. We want to make money, but we don’t think enough about what those words mean. What does it actually mean to “make money?”
The people who created the financial crisis understood all too well how to make money. One of the most basic causes for the financial crises that have wracked the world is that economists let money-makers make money without any limits.
The real secret to making money is to understand what the words, “make money,” really mean.
Find out what it means to make money at
http://www.makemoneyinsight.com/
“The greatest limit to money is the belief that money is limited.”
For your abundant success,
Kalinda
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Author of: No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors:
Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Real Estate Game
That Transforms Your Money Struggles Into Financial
Abundance.
Award Winner of National Best Books Award
Business: Real Estate Category
And Finalist in Business: Personal Finance
Category
Kalinda@nomoneylimits.com
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/
http://www.makemoneyinsight.com/
Related posts
When Creative Financing By Banks Gets Out Of Control
What is the basic cause of the financial crisis? It is the process called creative financing, because creative financing creates money. Creating money is different from mining for gold or drilling for oil. Mining and drilling seek to find something that already exists. But money cannot be discovered the way that gold or oil can be discovered. Money is an idea of value and is created in transactions.
The Monopoly Game involves players and a banker. The rules of game state that the banker cannot go broke. The significance of this rule is a critical element in No Money Limits. Yet, one of the dominating experiences of recent months has been the spectacle of banks going broke. We have seen banks receive billions of dollars in “bailouts” or “rescue” packages, and still go broke.
At its core, the economic crisis began with the banks, as they multiplied techniques to use creative financing to fund the real estate boom. The reason banks have gone broke is that the banks stopping playing the kind of role the banker plays in the Monopoly Game.
In Monopoly, the banker serves the players as a utility. The banker provides a useful function to collect and distribute cash, to allow the players to play a real estate trading game. In the real world of the real estate boom, the banks were no longer content to be utilities. Instead, the banks began to be drivers of the economy. The banks used increasingly creative financing techniques because they understood that money is not found. Money is created.
The root cause of the financial crisis is that people who understand the essential nature of money carried creative financing too far. They became ingenious in their methods to create money on paper, with a variety of clever techniques.
The bankers on Wall Street created an array of techniques, such as mortgage securitization, credit swaps, and derivatives. All of these creative techniques created more and more paper assets, until the whole system was revealed as so much mumbo-jumbo, and collapsed like a giant soufflé.
In the Disney classic “Fantasia,” one of the most memorable episodes is the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The young sorcerer taps into magic he cannot control. Watch the ”The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
This is one of the best illustrations of what went wrong with the banking system during the real estate boom. The bankers tapped into the magical power to create money by using creative financing techniques and the whole process quickly got out of control.
[This is the second post in a series about how creative financing techniques, which created money out of thin air, led to economic crises around the world.]
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Find out more about the nature of money and how money is created out of thin air in No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Real Estate Game That Transforms Your Money Struggles Into Financial Abundance, National Best Books 2007 Awards Winner in Business: Real Estate Category and Finalist in Business: Personal Finance Category.
Tags: bailout, banks, banks create money out of thin air, creative financing, financial crisis, money, real estateRelated posts
How You Can Create Financial Freedom In A Time Of Financial Crisis
The financial crisis fills the news. Each day, we hear about more billions for stimulus packages to banks “too big to fail.” We also hear dire warnings about the collapse of major corporations, such as the Big Three auto makers in the United States. The crisis is real, as is spreads throughout our entire economic system, both nationally and internationally.
In all of this, we hear talk of Main Street and Wall Street. To this point, the rescue packages, the stimulus packages, the bailout packages, have gone to Wall Street, with very little directed toward Main Street—the small businesses and ordinary people who are being dragged down with little hope of immediate rescue.
What I want to focus on is the contrast between two types of stories. One story teaches us to hope for rescue. The other story teaches us to be heroic and rescue ourselves.
Let’s start with the stories that teach us to wait for rescue. From earliest childhood, we have been taught to hope for a savior. The movies and TV shows have taught us that rescue will come, usually at the last minute, in the nick of time. The cavalry will ride over the hill. Reinforcements will arrive. The knight in shining armor will show up and we will be saved.
The hope of being rescued touches a deep psychological need for all of us. We hope that someone will help. Someone will care. Someone will do something to solve the problem.
Christian religion has made salvation a central promise of the gospel message. You are lost. You are hopeless. You are struggling. God sends a savior, to rescue you, because you cannot rescue yourself.
Twelve step programs teach that we are incapable of saving ourselves from our addictions. We need help. We need a higher power. We need to be rescued.
In other words, we hope for a hero to save us.
In all of this, I don’t mean to undermine, diminish, or challenge the idea that sometimes we really do need help. We really do need rescue. We really do need to be saved. If you fall off an ocean liner, you will need someone to throw you a lifeline, to haul you back in.
But that fact that we sometimes need to be rescued, does not mean that we always need to be rescued.
In heroic stories, the hero is the one who finds a way to solve the problem. Sometimes the hero rescues others. Often, the hero has to rescue herself or himself. No one saves the hero. The hero is the one who does the saving.
And this leads me to my point. Especially now, when the economic crises pile up day after day. When things seem to get worse and worse, this is the time to be heroic about your situation. Rather than wait for rescue, resolve to find a way to rescue yourself.
The unofficial entrepreneur’s motto is: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” This single belief is the real distinctive of true entrepreneurs. They don’t wait for permission, approval, or help. If they are in trouble, they act to save themselves.
The real danger right now is for everyone in financial trouble—which includes millions of people—is to wait for the savior to come. These are tough times and they require commitment, determination, and a plan of action.
I wrote a book with a man who faced a financial crisis and did exactly that. He made a commitment to get himself out of his financial crisis, with focus, passion, and motivated action. In the process, he created a formula for the essential elements of financial freedom. Find out the formula that saved him from financial ruin here.
Maybe the government will find a way to bail out Main Street, and solve your financial problems. But don’t wait for it. Most of us do not fall into the category of “too big to fail.” This means that the only real salvation will come from saving ourselves.
Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
One of the primary reasons for the economic crisis is that banks have abused their ability to create money out of thin air. Find out how banks create money in No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Real Estate Game That Transforms Your Money Struggles Into Financial Abundance, Winner of 2007 National Best Books Award in Business: Real Estate Category.
Related posts
Syndicate
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.