Capitalism ‘unchained and uncaring’
March 5, 2013
“There you go dears, a lovely ‘worry free’ retirement. Your money with us as safe as in a bank, we even call ourselves Banksia Mortgage Fund. Please sign along the dotted line and we will take your cheque now”.
Retirees were queuing up investing their hard earned savings in Mortgage Funds including the Banksia Group. It’s funny what a name can do to one’s image and image is what it is all about, isn’t it? Safe as a Bank…but safe as BANKsia, I think not.
Why is it that it is taking so long to realize that unfettered ‘freedom of market forces’ means usually, sooner or later, freedom to get obscenely rich for just a few at the cost of poverty for the majority?
The exposure last night on ABC Four Corners about the plight of tens of thousands of retirees having lost billions of hard earned retirement savings invested in so many well known but dodgy Mortgage Funds will no doubt soon be forgotten in the annals of our previous exposures of similar ‘Investment schemes’.
Every ten years or so, this turns up assuaging a few but nothing ever gets done.
I give you ‘Capitalism’.
Who has forgotten Estate Mortgage many years ago? Investors were returned 5c in the dollar. In many countries those kind of financial investment vehicles are strictly regulated but in some, including Australia, it is a free grab for young and old but the pensioner ends up in a caravan or trailer home and the human sharks setting up those fleecing vehicles are whooping it up grandly in huge waterfront McMansions with 12 flat TV’s, 9 Bathrooms and 44 bidets with hordes of fly blown lovers rinsing and selling them their whoring wares.
Is it inevitable that our western style of democracy inexorably remains slanted in favour of the criminal sociopath unable to feel even the slightest empathy towards their victims? Are they so unable to put themselves in their position? It appears so. Last night it was revealed that those people running their lucrative schemes are happy to be foreclosed upon, having salted away millions in family trusts first, only to reappear again around the corner and starting all over again. No doubt, another 4 Corners program will be shown again in a few years time.
And so it goes on!
The latest Forbes Magazine rich lists includes 1426 names of people who have more than 1000.000.000 dollars with this year adding another 210 new members. They are known as belonging to the so called 1% list, meaning they own 99% of the world’s wealth. It seems out of kilter doesn’t it?
In the meantime the 16 000 investors in Banksia Securities have started a class action. Indications are they will get 50 cents back out of every dollar invested. The lawyers claim the accounts were wrong and are asking how the Company could all of a sudden owe $660million. – Where were the accountants, but more importantly; where were the regulators?
And so it goes on!
Tags: ABC Four Corners, Banksia Mortgage Fund, Capitalism, Estate Mortgage, Forbes Posted in Gerard Oosterman |
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Even intelligent/educated people fall to the lure of more interest on investments. Been happening for a long time. Then they go bust and people lose a lot of money. They keep doing this. Why are they so gullible and trusting. Why not stick with a term investment with a proper bank or building society.
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Vivienne:
Yes, but as was shown on that ABC 4 Corners. Those schemes were promoted in communities that trusted the advisers. The advisers might also have been victims. You are right stick to Banks or building societies. However, much stricter regulations need to be put into place, especially being able to grab any property or possessions still in the hands of those directors whose companies were foreclosed upon.
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Yes, in the case of Banksia, a whole lot of locals invested in, what seemed to be a local ‘bank’, because it behaved exactly like a bank, and were prepared to take a fairly modest profit, to ‘invest in the local community’. They were completely unaware that Banksia was the local front of a bigger company, who’s principals acted, well, with principles.
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….with, perhaps lack of principles!
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I felt so sorry for those good hardworking, ordinary people to tried to save for their retirement, and then ended up with nothing, I felt sad and angry…how is it possible that this still happens today…
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I feel the same dismay about the unbridled lack of regulation of the pay-day to pay-day money lenders that have poor people strung out basically in their thrall, more robbers.
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Year in and year out we hear the same. Royal commissions, Icac, enquiries and nothing happens accept tens of thousands get stung. Those type of Mortgage investments should at least guarantee the initial investment to be water tight and refundable in full.
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‘Shoe, I once led a small team who built a system for government clients to monitor “sensitive” trades by pawnbrokers and second hand dealers – to find stolen property and to locate ‘persons of interest’. I got to visit a good number of pawnbrokers and second hand dealers to make sure the system we were building could work in practice (it did).
But along the way I learned a lot.
Apart from hopeless junkies breaking, entering and stealing, most of the money pawnbrokers make comes from the desperately poor. I met a woman in one of those pawnshops whose pension rarely made it from one fortnight to the next. Every fortnight she used to pawn her gold wedding ring for fifty dollars for one week. The mongrel bastard pawnbroker (who actually believed he was providing a service – credit to the un-creditworthy) charged her $5 for the loan of $50 FOR ONE WEEK! Work that out over a year. It makes credit cards at 18% look dirt cheap.
That guy had a Ferrari parked out the back. I kid you not. I also learned that a surprisingly large number of owners of pawnshops are …… no, not convicted criminals …. but retired cops.
This gives us all the lesson that if you lie down with wolves, you often get up with fleas – that is if you ever do get up again.
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I felt marooned in non-comprehension when a manager of one of these places told me without as much as a skip in the beat of their confidence that she was helping the client. It took me a while to recognise she saw herself as better than blameless. Social service providers nearby went a strange bilious colour at the merest mention of the practice of these lenders. Yes, that is right, re pawnbrokers being my own experience a category of retired policemen and they manage the buying and selling of noxious street weaponry. They are the supply.
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Very interesting, TT
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Witness the comment Sam the cane farmer on 4 Corners last night made regards leaving school at 15 and re committing money into the hands of conversely, educated people to make money for him and themselves, and what do they do but lose the lot. Sam referred to not being educated at least twice that we heard. They didn’t lose ‘the lot’, this distant ‘they’ but began, on superficial appearances naturally enough, by pocketing a percentage and so on. 😦
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But what a character that Sam turned out to be. He played the guitar and had become rather philosophical at his old age. He worried about others more than himself.
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Yes, Gez, that is a culture among the farmers. Growing up there I was given an education about each farm and family/farmer, travelling between ports of call with my dad negotiating with farmers they not succumb to ag product salesmen knocking door to door,and checking his experimental trials, which I referred to I recall when I was first dropping in visiting the Pigs Arms. I imagined Sam when he was a young feller helping his dad work the farm. Poignant when he pulled out the guitar and in the manner of the old entertained us in the new.
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