Ponzi Schemin'

Awesome post by Michael Hudson in Counterpunch about the original Ponzi scheme, the 2006 Spanish stamp fund scandal, and how the financial markets really are a Ponzi scheme after all:

We have entered an era in which financial markets resemble the stamp-buying funds. Governments have replaced industrial growth with purely financial wealth creation in the form of a real estate and stock market bubble. This has turned the economic universe upside-down relative to what the classical writers expected to result from the technological progress unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and its parallel agricultural, commercial and financial revolutions. Property and credit have become costs instead of a benefit, institutional forms of rent- and interest-extracting overhead rather than helpful inputs.