Most of these charges that people pay are economically unnecessary. There's no real cost behind them. There's no real value behind them. So, they're what the classical economist called empty pricing. Prices with no real cost value. What they called rent and fictitious capital. Capital claims on junk mortgage borrowers. The pretense is that all these debts can be paid but it's all fictitious, because everybody knows - at least on Wall Street everybody knows - that many debts can't be paid.

We've turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out. Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can't get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end the creditors always win.

Look at Ukraine. Its currency, the hernia, is plunging. The euro is really in a problem. Greece is problematic as to whether it can pay the IMF, which is threatening not to be part of the troika with the European Central Bank and the European Union making more loans to enable Greece to pay the bondholders and the banks. Britain is having a referendum as to whether to withdraw from the European Union, and it looks more and more like it may do so. So the world's politics are in turmoil.

You'll have to have the governments sell off all of their public domains; sell off their railroads, sell off their public land. You'll essentially have to introduce neo-feudalism. You'll have to roll the clock of history back a thousand years, and reduce the European population to debt slavery. It's as simple a solution as the Eurozone has imposed on Greece. And it's a solution that the leaders and the banks are urging for responsible economists to promote for the population at large.

The myth is that if housing prices go up, Americans will be richer. What banks - and behind them, the Federal Reserve - really want is for new buyers to be able to borrow enough money to buy the houses from mortgage defaulters, and thus save the banks from suffering from more mortgage defaults.

Most of the European leaders look at themselves as having to follow the United States, because if the US opposes them, there will be a regime change.

What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.