[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The mainstream media is calling the Ahmaud Arbery story “the shooting of an unarmed black ‘jogger” by two White men, Greg and Travis McMichael. However, White advocates are calling attention to the attire the “jogger” was wearing, including hiking boots; and the distance that he was from his home, calling into question the idea that he was out on a jog. They add further that he aggressed against one of the gun wielding White men - Travis - which could have been perceived as an attempt by Arbery to take the weapon to use it himself in deadly force; and Travis McMichael using deadly force to prevent the weapon being taken is a self defense argument identical to the Ferguson incident.
Citizen’s arrests are apparently legal in Georgia, and one of the White men, Greg McMichael, is a retired DA police officer; thus familiar with the routine of arrests. But regarding the particularity of the event, McMichael later told police he suspected that Arbery was burglarizing houses under construction in the Brunswick neighborhood and added, “And he’s been caught on the camera a bunch before at night. It’s an ongoing thing out here.”
Vincent James adds - What the Media REFUSES to Tell You About This Story - #118 Amhoud Arbery - that “black males commit 90% of the violent interracial crime and yet the media gives that 10% of White on black interracial crime something like 90% of the coverage.” Whatever the exact percentages of crime and coverage may be, there is no doubt that the media gives loud, lavish and frequent coverage to any of the few White on black violent crimes they can find, while it buries and hushes up the torrents of black on White violence. The Newhouse Group, of which the New York Times was a part, along with most major American city newspapers, was infamous for having a policy to not name the race of violent criminals if they were black. There is apparently little change in the bias of mainstream media coverage in the internet age.
The bottom line: If we had our own countries, this would not be happening.
Grand jury review recommended as video emerges of fatal shooting of unarmed black man
2 armed men—one a former district attorney investigator—claimed they were making citizen’s arrest.
BRUNSWICK, Ga. – A Hinesville district attorney on Tuesday recommended that a grand jury review the fatal February shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, who friends say was killed while jogging in a suburban Brunswick neighborhood.
The recommendation came on the same day that graphic cellphone video purportedly showing the deadly confrontation between Arbery and Travis McMichael, the son of a former district attorney investigator, was posted by a Georgia radio station and circulated widely on social media sites.
“I am of the opinion that the case should be presented to the grand jury of Glynn County for consideration of criminal charges against those involved in the death of Mr. Arbery,” Tom Durden, District Attorney Pro Tempore for the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, wrote in a press release.
Durden, who started investigating the incident on April 13, said he came to the conclusion after careful review of the evidence in conjunction with the Glynn County Police Department, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia.
No one disputes that McMichael, son of Brunswick District Attorney’s Office investigator Greg McMichael, shot and killed Arbery on Feb. 23, but he was not immediately charged because Travis McMichael claimed he was acting within the scope of a citizen’s arrest.
Arbery’s family says deadly force wasn’t necessary and they simply want to know the truth.
RELATED: Fatal shooting of unarmed black man sparks large protest in Brunswick neighborhood
Brunswick radio station WGIG published the “graphic, disturbing” video that reportedly shows the incident on Tuesday afternoon.
“This was given to us by an anonymous source,” the radio station wrote in a post on its website. “We debated whether to put it out, but determined it was in the best interest of the public.”
News4Jax reviewed the 30-second cellphone video before it was removed from the radio station’s website.
(Editor’s Note: News4Jax made the editorial decision not to show the video in its entirety due to the graphic nature of its contents)
The video, which seems to have been recorded by someone driving behind the vehicle, appears to show Arbery running on Satilla Drive towards a white truck that is stopped in the middle of the street.
Travis McMichael, who appears to be standing outside the parked truck, and Arbery then become engaged in a struggle over what looks to be a shotgun.
The gunshots can be heard on the video within a seven-second span. Arbery is seen trying to run away before falling to the ground with bloodstains on his white shirt.
It’s not clear in the video who fired the fatal shots, but the shooter’s father told police that Travis McMichael fired two shots, killing Arbery.
Greg McMichael, who can be seen in the video standing in the back of the truck, called 911 at 1:08 p.m.
Greg McMichael: “I’m out here at Satilla Shores and there’s a black man running down the street.”
911 dispatcher: “I just need to know what he was doing wrong, was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?”
Greg McMichael: “And he’s been caught on the camera a bunch before at night. It’s an ongoing thing out here.”
McMichael later told police he suspected that Arbery was burglarizing houses under construction in the Brunswick neighborhood.
Heimbach “coming to the light”: another example illustrating the inherent instability of the right, including as a result of introducing its elements by means of third positionism.
Light Upon Light Shape Shifters - Matthew Heimbach, a Former White Nationalist. To struggle against hate we need…
“If trouble comes when you least expect it, then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Writing anything about COVID-19 at this moment is a daunting task since the situation is evolving so rapidly, and in so many different locations. Information contained in this piece could be thoroughly outpaced by transformative events by the time it reaches publication, or even by the time I finish up and click “save.” There is also a glut of information online right now, some of it reliable and fascinating, and some of it misleading and counterproductive. Everywhere there is a mixture of growing apprehension, clashing opinion, and outright confusion. If the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center’s interactive map is accurate, there are currently 284,566 cases of COVID-19 worldwide, a figure that is growing. The “true” number of infections, that includes asymptomatic carriers, will be much higher. Beginning on February 24th, an accelerating number of new transmissions emerged outside China, primarily in Italy which currently has over 47,021 cases. At time of writing, France and Germany are also experiencing rapid increases in affected persons, together totaling over 33,000 cases, and Spain is on the brink of a national lockdown with over 25,374. Almost every European country has now been affected, and COVID-19 is now spreading in the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. How will it test the West?
Relations with China
Early speculation on COVID-19, especially in dissident circles, orbited conspiracy theories that the virus was engineered, and that it was either deployed by the United States or was an accidental leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology. In recent days, the former theory has been eagerly taken up by the Chinese themselves, with the added detail that COVID-19 may have been unleashed by visiting American soldiers during the Military World Games, which were staged in Wuhan in October 19-27, 2019. According to epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, in the course of a very interesting interview with Joe Rogan, it’s possible to date the origins of human COVID-19 through a process much like carbon dating, and scientists now have data suggesting COVID-19 became active in humans for the first time in mid-November 2019. Ron Unz has asked:
How would Americans react if 300 PRC officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards, a deadly new plague broke out in that city, with a major risk of spreading throughout the country? Isn’t it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially “unlucky.” It hit China just before Lunar New Year, the absolutely worst possible time, and the epicenter was Wuhan, a key transport hub. It really seems an *astonishing* coincidence that 300 US military servicemen had been visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak, at a peak of international tension.
Other than timing of course, there seems to be little or no evidence that this was a bioweapon attack. Most obviously, one would assume that any attempted bioweapon attack by the United States on China would be much more covert than what has been suggested (a deliberate release by a very public group of soldiers). Also, while we know that SARS-like viruses based on bat coronavirus can be developed in the lab, the genome of COVID-19 has also been examined countless times with the result that there are now over 300 papers on MedRXiv concerning the structure, nature, and origins of the virus. None of these papers have highlighted anything suggesting an artificial origin of any aspect of COVID-19.
Conspiracy theories on the origins of COVID-19 are of course a very convenient and useful tool for the Chinese government, because they deflect attention from the fact the outbreak can easily be attributed to bad government, and to Communism itself. I find the idea that the virus originated in a Wuhan “wild food” market to be utterly compelling (see this documentary by 60 Minutes Australia, and this short piece by Vox), and this has direct consequences for perceptions of Chinese Communism. The consumption of “exotic” foods is itself a legacy of the Great Chinese Famine 1959–1961, after which the government permitted private farming but failed to prevent the monopoly by big companies of the rearing of conventional livestock. The peasantry, priced out of the market, resorted in large numbers to the farming of wild animals, especially, in the initial stages, the farming of turtles. Since this curbed starvation to some extent, the government backed these initiatives, and then in 1988 made the encouragement of domestication and breeding of wildlife an explicit aspect of law. Wildlife farming became an industry overnight. Bears, snakes, rodents, lizards, and bats began to be mass-produced for human consumption, and sold in mass markets in many of the country’s largest cities. In these markets, multiple species, alive and dead, are stacked in cages on top of one another, with the animals soaked in cocktails of urine and excrement—each cage a petri dish for the development new diseases, especially respiratory diseases, with the potential to jump to humans from myriad mammals. Together with its failure to take decisive preventative action in January 2020, and absent conspiracy theory speculation, the origin tale of COVID-19 is ultimately an indictment of Chinese politics and culture.
How that indictment will impact relations between the West and China remains to be seen. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have speculated that while mutual suspicion between the Chinese and the United States will remain high, the coronavirus outbreak will have no meaningful impact on trade between the two countries, and may in fact help de-escalate some prior economic tensions and involve the suspension of tariffs. In the longer term, however, COVID-19 has accelerated discussion about the need to become more independent from China in the production of goods. Several multinational corporations with supply chains based in China, having already considered diversifying their supply chains because of the U.S.-China trade war, are now likely to further their plans. Apple, for example, intends to move some manufacturing of its products (including AirPods and Apple Watches) to Taiwan due to the coronavirus. In Washington, members of Congress have used the outbreak to call for scaling back U.S. reliance on China, especially for prescription drugs, medical supplies, and other critical resources. Since Europe (Germany in particular) is the world’s largest manufacturer of drugs and medicines, we are likely to see a gradual decoupling of the United States from Chinese production, and a greater integration of European-American trade. Brexit Britain, until recently seen by the Chinese as having great potential for a lucrative trade and investment deal, may now present more of a cold house than previously thought. The EU, already resistant to increased Chinese economic influence, is also likely to dig its heels even deeper in the face of Chinese approaches. Some of the lasting challenges of COVID-19 will be how the West can distance itself from economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing, what impact this will have in both the shorter and longer term, and how the Chinese will respond.
Migrant Pressures
The first European outbreaks of COVID-19 fatefully coincided with an aggressive two-week operation by Turkey on its border with Greece, involving the movement of thousands of Syrian and African migrants. Beginning in late February, the Turkish government announced it would no longer stop migrants trying to reach Europe, and then drove thousands to the Greek border, live-streaming the process to encourage more to follow. The move was widely understood as an attempt to force European support for Turkey’s military campaign in northern Syria, and also as an attempt to extort more money from the EU. Although the effort now appears to have concluded with Turkey backtracking in the face of Greek resilience, Europe continues to have this metaphorical human “pistol” pressed to the side of its head.
COVID-19 is going to aggravate the broader migrant problem. Already the clamor is growing that migrant camps on Europe’s borders should be evacuated on health grounds, with the migrants permitted to enter Europe. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have argued that unhygienic and cramped living conditions mean COVID-19 can spread very fast, and that social distancing and hand washing are more difficult. While Europe bans mass gatherings, it’s been said that people in these camps have nowhere to go. Even within European countries, the outbreak has been associated with calls for amnesties and the opening of migrant detention centers. In the UK, lawyers and campaigners have called for hundreds immigration centers detainees to be released “because of fears they will contract coronavirus while locked up.”
The problem with such calls is that they all appear to present COVID-19 as a deadly plague slaughtering all in its path, rather than as something that afflicts the most seriously ill among the old and infirm. As is well known, the average age of Europe’s would-be migrants, particularly those from Syria, is somewhere around the late 20s. Given the known progression of COVID-19 in people in this age category, calls to permit mass influxes of masses of migrants purely because of the outbreak is tantamount to calling for open borders because potential immigrants might otherwise catch the common cold. Such calls are likely to ride the crest of a media-induced wave of panic, however, and the resolve of the West to resist further migrant flows will indeed be tested by twisted forms of moral blackmail in the weeks and months to come.
Life and Death under Liberalism
As stated in my review of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), we live in a decaying society that is in terror of death, and pathologically so. This pathology is rooted in mistaken beliefs that our civilization is dying from, or could imminently die from, disease epidemics, climate catastrophes etc., in the midst of willful and ignorant abdication of a future (via self-hate and industrialized abortion) in favor of mass immigration, consumerism, and instant gratification. Just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become “authentic” in Heidegger’s philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus inevitably collapses into inauthentic decay. COVID-19, while not as lethal as media coverage would suggest, is a reminder of our mortality and human fragility and will necessarily have a jarring effect on a Western liberalism that’s become increasingly distant from the confrontation with death.
Life under liberal finance capitalism is largely one of illusion, in which the prospect of real death is pushed far into the distance, both psychologically and culturally. Postmodern Western liberal culture is largely one of perpetual adolescence, in which the primary virtues are acting according to one’s individual will, identifying oneself in a hyper-individualistic manner, and expressing these identities via conspicuous consumption and behavior. We do not “live towards” Death, with a sense of purpose and a feeling that we are part of a much grander civilizational trajectory. We do not understand that Death has shaped our historical path, and that it hangs over us in ways that should direct our actions in the present.
COVID-19, regardless of current confusion over its true mortality rate, is a corrective to illusions that “progressive” Man has overcome Nature and can shape the world according to the human image, and without consequences. Certainly throughout my own lifetime, I’ve grown accustomed to assertions that life expectancy will continue to increase, and that there will be an endless supply of innovations and social projects that will make the mechanics of life easier and more productive. One increasingly expects that one will live a long life, mostly in very good health. Such a sense of security can breed all kinds of arrogance and fantasies, including the recent perverse luxury of the delusion that one can simply decide to be this or that gender. This new virus, however, presents the possibility, both in itself and its inevitable heirs, that Death is much closer than we ever thought, and that for all our technological advancement and self-congratulation, Nature need only tweak one molecule, so small our naked eyes could never perceive it, and the grave opens before us. The Age of Fantasy is confronted with the ultimate reality.
How the West responds to this realization will be a further cultural challenge. We have grown equally accustomed to the idea that we have “advanced” morally as a society, and that we have overcome some of the more “brutish” aspects of human existence that we perceive in the past. But in a world of apparently increasing plenty, such notions can be hard to test. It’s always easy for a man with a full stomach to condemn the actions of the starving. The conceit of the full-bellied West that it has overcome and surpassed itself and its past will now be tested. I, of course, arise from a political and philosophical tradition that insists there is no shame in the past. I see little or no place for morality in the struggle for survival. And I also see the cracks already forming in the Western conceit. This society that is against “hate” and prides itself on “coming together” is already struggling to stop people rioting over toilet paper and bottled water. If civil order breaks down, will the proud feminists be seeking their own resources, or hoping for a strong man to protect them? If the death toll does rise dramatically, and if curfews and lockdowns are imposed and intensified, I ask: How well will your beloved multicultural societies respond? If resources become scarce and tensions rise, who will you trust? These tests are coming.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 21 March 2020 12:21.
Millennial Woes, in his premature assent to e-celebrity, exercises a 20/20 “hindsight” that actually serves the wishful blindness and seeks to gain audience from the large market of America’s beleaguered White demographic - particularly German/Irish - susceptible in reaction to be overly sympathetic to Nazi Germany, circulating false currency through their internet bubble with it’s insulated and instant “historical expertise”...and in Millennial Woes rookie mistake to go with that blindered perspective, he serves Jewish divide and conquer.
MW Ostracises half of Britain
Millennial Woes says “World War II shouldn’t have happened.”
Daniel Sienkiewicz
7 hours ago (edited)
World War II shouldn’t have happened: Take it to Hitler. He was the one attacking other European ethnonstates. The Nations to his east, which he wanted to take over imperialistically, were all AGAINST the Soviet Union and were All Anti-Semitic - willing to work on deportation plans. I.e, Hitler/Nazi Germany were NOT fighting a defensive war.
FiveLiver
7 hours ago
My agreement with this comment has vanished twice now despite different spellings.
Anglus Patria
2 hours ago
Chamberlain and Hitler both made grave mistakes, both cost their nations everything.
Churchill, FDR and Stalin are evil. Churchill and FDR consciously went against their own people’s interests.
Daniel Sienkiewicz
12 minutes ago
Anglus Patria and Hitler wasn’t evil? Baloney. If you want to exercise 20/20 hindsight then wish that Hitler was not such an asshole as to attack other European countries, including ones that were A) Against the Soviet Union and B) Anti Semitic and willing to deport them.
Turnip Townshend
46 minutes ago
What is this Polish trickery?
Daniel Sienkiewicz
10 minutes ago
@Turnip Townshend There is no Polish trickery here, douche bag. You just conveniently overlook the facts EVEN WITH what should be 20/20 hindsight.
If you want to exercise 20/20 hindsight then wish that Hitler was not such an asshole as to attack other European countries, including ones that were
A) Against the Soviet Union and B) Anti Semitic and willing to deport them.
Daniel Sienkiewicz
1 second ago
@Turnip Townshend And what is this J trickery of yours? “Turnip Townshend” ...you’ve got ONE subscriber. It’s a sock account with an avatar of Hitler’s idol, Frederick the Great Faggot. You obviously aim at divide and conquer of European ethnonationalisms. How kosher of you.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 07 February 2020 05:40.
Largely as a result of pandering to the predominantly German make-up of White Americans, those of us viewing world events from a White Natonalist perspective have been burdened with a preponderance of narratives depicting Germany’s war efforts in previous centuries as part and parcel of virtue, defense and victimization. While there are arguments enough for all of that to not condemn Germany for bygone programs, it can be frustrating as this overcompensating reaction is buoyed to hegemony of opinion to the exclusion of more truthful accounts of the wars (which, being more honest, could pave the way for more trustworthy, cooperative relations between European peoples). Especially as these claims typically purport to be based on a quest for truth, it can be a much welcome measure of actual truth to look upon Germany’s part in wars from The Thirty Years War, to Frederick The Great’s campaigns, to Ludendorff in World War I, to Hitler in World War II as imperialist aggressors. And just as present day Germans don’t need guilt trips for imperialist aggression of their forebears, other European nations don’t need guilt trips for their forebears having defended themselves. Not even for overcompensations in aggression or revenge on the part of our forebears (German or otherwise) do we need guilt trips.
It is to alleviate the guilt trips of a WN perspective laden with stories unsympathetic to the nations Germany aggressed against that accounts such as that of Fritz Fischer (49:15 in the video above) are welcome, with the added solidity of having a genuine ring of concern for truth all but absent in WN revisionism.
The attack on Belgium, and similar attacks in the east, such as on Kalisz circa WWI, are far more characteristically aggressive than defensive.
Note: This blog is based on my notes for a speech at the Harvard Class of 1957 55th reunion in Cambridge, Mass. on May 22nd.
Armageddon was threatening the financial system on Wednesday, September 17, 2008. The largest bankruptcy in American history, that of investment bank Lehman Brothers on Monday, September 15, had roiled global markets, accelerating the stupendous decline in values of every possible investment vehicle—common stocks, corporate bonds, real estate, commodities like oil, copper and gold, private equity and hedge funds alike. In the midst of the chaos Merrill Lynch, the firm that had brought Wall Street to Main Street, was absorbed in a shotgun marriage by Bank of America BAC +0%.
Only days earlier came the recognition at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the US Treasury that AIG, the largest insurance company in the world was running out of money. This required an immediate injection of $85 billion in bail-out funds. And later another $100 billion, still not paid back to Uncle Sam.
That day, Sept 17, an even greater crisis was pending. All day long the chairman of General Electric, a company recognized across the globe as a leading industrial giant, was calling the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson to warn that the next day, Sept. 18, that GE would no longer be able to roll over its short term debt. The American business system was on the cusp of faltering mightily. The US economy was on the brink of a precipice into the unknown.
Messrs Paulson and Bernanke, at the Fed, knew the nation could not suffer the risk of a total breakdown in industry and finance. So, they decided to instantly guarantee the $600 billion commercial paper market, which is widely used to finance day-to-day operations of all major firms. This guarantee became part of the total cost of bailing out Wall Street, which totaled over $7 trillion—when you added guarantees to loans, investments and outright grants. The bailouts were key to raising the Fed’s balance sheet from $1 trillion to $3 trillion—and to upping the nation’s total amount of debt some $5 trillion to a record $15 trillion.
Conversely, the household wealth of the nation, measured by losses in financial markets and the historic drop in residential real estate—was reduced by a sickenly humungus $12-$14 trillion at the very bottom of the whole process in March, 2009. You take that money—$12-14 trillion away from the asset side of the ledger and add another $5 trillion in debt—- and you are bound to experience a decline in the nation’s GDP and a very much slower rate of recovery from such a trauma. A recovery that could take 10 years or more according to Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. That brings us to 2018. Need I say more?
How did we reach this very near call on a total systemic breakdown?
Firstly, there were no cops on the beat. Laissez-faire free market economics was the prevailing public policy. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan spoke of irrational exuberance but took no steps to cool off markets in the late 1990s. In fact, he was asked by Loews chairman Larry Tisch and former Goldman Sachs co-chairman John Whitehead to raise the margins on trading, and refused, claiming falsely that such a move was up to the SEC—and not the Fed. Not true.
In 1999 the Glass-Steagall Act—which had separated commercial banking from investment banking for 66 years, was overturned—a move that opened the door to more speculative trading on the part of Wall Street firms.
Then, in 2000 Messrs. Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Rubin and his successor Lawrence Summers pressed to pass a bill that would prohibit the regulation of derivatives—the fastest growing and most complicated and murky new financial product. This was an incredible mistake, as derivative contracts like mortgage backed bonds and credit default swaps mushroomed in across the globe without any oversight, strict capital requirements and on an organized exchange where buying and selling were handled daily.
The result of this vacuum; no one anywhere knew who owed what to whom across the world. Despite the danger lurking in the rapid depreciation of these contracts, Bernanke publicly stated the absurd amount of sub-prime mortgages being sold to unsuspecting buyers would not spread to a much wider, deeper crisis. He didn’t know what he was talking about, sadly..
Lastly, in 2004 the major firms convinced the SEC to let them value certain assets on their balance sheet at values they chose—rather than marking them t o market—which would reveal what losses they were carrying. This added another dangerous laxity to financial regulation. The system was falsifying its accounts believing the investments would bounce back.
The entire catastrophe’s underlying theme was summed up later by this admission from former Fed chairman Greenspan . ” I made a mistake,” he admitted in a hearing, “in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.” And we made this man into the wise parental guardian of American capitalism for 18 years. We journalists, that is.
Pressed again later on, Greenspan admitted to “shocked disbelief, (because his whole) intellectual edifice had collapsed.” Naive at minimum. At worst, locked into a narrow limited ideological viewpoint that set the stage for the meltdown. Let Goldman Sachs and Citigroup master their own appetite for profits. So much for reining in animals spirits.
Secondly, the banks and investment banks were using reckless amounts of leverage. They borrowed, in many cases, $30 to $40 of debt for every dollar of capital they had. In truth, this was a recipe for disaster, since a decline of only 4% in their capital put them on the road to insolvency. It was as if you bought a million dollar house, put down a payment of $30,000 and borrowed $970,000. What sense of irrational optimism allowed this mad way of doing business.
By the fall of 2008 the decline in the value just of subprime mortgage backed bonds—which lost up to 80% of their value in the market—meant that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, Washington Mutual and Wachovia were in a state of peril. The only way to make money in bank stocks was to short them. My favorite day trader told me after it was all over that I should be worth $50 million. With the run on Lehman Bros. both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were in danger of experiencing a run on their accounts.
Perhaps AIG is the most extreme example of leverage as financial hari-kari. It had sold protection to banks and insurance companies across the globe by issuing $540 billion of credit default swaps, which meant AIG promised to make good on any losses in value of their mortgage holdings.
