BORROWER BEWARE

Last month I went to a one day Māori women’s leadership hui organised by FOMA, and co-sponsored by Westpac.  The focus was, initially, the Māori economy.  The keynote speaker Nanaia Mahuta was great.  Then Jenny Shipley strolled in.

Ms Shipley said our cultural parameters needed to be reformed, because it was critical we not talk to ourselves.  She reckoned that our future lay not in the Māori economy but in the global economy.  And she advised that in the “post-settlement” era, Māori needed to open ourselves up to partner with international financiers, including the Chinese.

Neither Shipley nor her kōrero float my boat, but this is someone who is part of the military industrial complex [MIC] in which the world’s politicians, their armed forces, and the defense industrial base that supports them both, all scratch each other’s itches.  So what she had to say was probably the most important korero of the day.

In order to operate globally, the MIC controls the banking system.  Regardless of whether a lender is based in Shanghai, Wall Street or Kaitāia, there is only one banking system.  It is centred in the city of London and its sole focus is (and always has been) the destruction of national sovereignty in favour of MIC sovereignty .

One of its main tools is arbitrage (the practice of shifting cash between two or more markets in order to take advantage of price differences between them).  Lending is one way of shifting money, so banks work hard to make debt look attractive to the borrower.

Those of us in our middle age have already seen more debt bubbles blown and burst in our lifetimes than in all other eras combined.  Housing, cars, credit cards, student loans; you name it and banks will blow it for you.  But now the bubbles have all burst, currencies around the world have been inflated into worthlessness, and MIC members are looking to cash out and shift into hard assets that generate or control food, water, health care and other necessities of life.  Think land and asset sales.

This is where Shipley and her international financiers come in, and where Iwi had better watch out.  Here in the Far North they are courting pre-settlement iwi with attractive rates.  But, unless the iwi business model is one which fully anticipates and is able to pay loans back, these lenders should be seen for what they are; aneurysms looking for new homes, having blown their former ones. 

Chinese lenders are a special worry, not because of their race but because of America’s racism which has forced them into being the only ones buying America’s foreign debt.  Now they’re looking to lend their devalued American dollars into anything, so they can get it off their books. 

E ngā iwi, kia tūpato.  There is no sentimentality involved here, only one banking system.  Non-payment will trigger, at best, a renegotiated loan on higher terms; at worst, foreclosure.  Let the borrower beware.