New Empire, New Cities

Now that a variety of factions have harvested the planet for trillions of dollars in the latest round of financial pump and dumps, the questions remains how to launder the money into real assets quickly.

The first big asset that is the target of such efforts is inevitably land and real estate. How to get huge positions in land and real estate that can be developed quickly?

Disaster capitalism is so profitable. You buy the land cheap and then someone else pays for your improvements while you get to keep the equity capital gains. Given how much money is sitting in offshore havens, however, there are not enough hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes to tee up sufficient opportunities fast enough.

So how do we come up with a way that buys up places, launders big money fast and generates a new round of construction contracts while maintaining the socially attractive brand we need to add in government redevelopment deals and stick the cost to the local citizenry?

In situations like this, the first thing that happens is a round of creative conversations by “admired” academics and think tanks looking to attract lots of people who are eager to transform our situation.

Think I am being harsh? Check out a recent description of Paul Rommer “new idea:”

“He [Paul Romer] proposed that developing countries could invite experienced governments such as Finland… to have administrative (and perhaps democratic control from afar) to create new instant cities for 10 million people. As Stewart Brand wrote about Romer’s talk “They would enrich the country where they are built as special economic zones while also rewarding the distant government that makes the investment of building the new city state and installing a set of fair and productive rules. Over time, as with Hong Kong, the new city is turned over to the host country.”

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As Bill King says, “you just could not make this stuff up.”

12 Comments

  2. Catherine,

    Sorry for not being able to give the credit for this.. When I heard it, you immediately came to mind.

    “Do not be misguided by the ideas or thoughts of others unless what they say or do rings true in your heart.

    There are many false prophets.

    True leaders do not tell anybody they are in charge.

    True leaders will have people follow them whether they like it or not.

    True leaders transcend human relationships through their integrity, character and their respect for others. In this humbleness they bring forth the light of God in everything they do and from this spiritual basis, they will find more support than they ever thought possible.”

  4. As sad as it is to admit, I’m not at all surprised by the notion that this is a likely outcome. I’m reminded of what John Perkins said in his “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”. He described how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies and, their natural resources.

  5. They might create a wave of tax sales by creating conditions in which few can pay their property taxes. But I’d expect that to be a move used later in the game, after hyperinflation. If food prices are impossibly high due to hyperinflation and speculation, people could be forced to spend all their paper money just to eat.

    Building those cities makes a lot of sense. It gives a great deal of control, and negates many issues of resistance/opposition. As long they perceive it is happening “somewhere else” to “someone else” people tend to roll over. It sounds like a rehashing of the Export Processing Zone concept. A pretense of special circumstances justifying a legal no-man’s land. We’ve all seen how well EPZs went over as a means of textile production. I wonder if they’d build them as permanent cities designed to control people, or to temporarily hold value until being sold to sucker money.

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