“There you go dears, a lovely ‘worry free’ retirement. Your money with us as safe as in a bank, we even call ourselves Banksia Mortgage Fund. Please sign along the dotted line and we will take your cheque now”.
Retirees were queuing up investing their hard earned savings in Mortgage Funds including the Banksia Group. It’s funny what a name can do to one’s image and image is what it is all about, isn’t it? Safe as a Bank…but safe as BANKsia, I think not.
Why is it that it is taking so long to realize that unfettered ‘freedom of market forces’ means usually, sooner or later, freedom to get obscenely rich for just a few at the cost of poverty for the majority?
The exposure last night on ABC Four Corners about the plight of tens of thousands of retirees having lost billions of hard earned retirement savings invested in so many well known but dodgy Mortgage Funds will no doubt soon be forgotten in the annals of our previous exposures of similar ‘Investment schemes’.
Every ten years or so, this turns up assuaging a few but nothing ever gets done.
I give you ‘Capitalism’.
Who has forgotten Estate Mortgage many years ago? Investors were returned 5c in the dollar. In many countries those kind of financial investment vehicles are strictly regulated but in some, including Australia, it is a free grab for young and old but the pensioner ends up in a caravan or trailer home and the human sharks setting up those fleecing vehicles are whooping it up grandly in huge waterfront McMansions with 12 flat TV’s, 9 Bathrooms and 44 bidets with hordes of fly blown lovers rinsing and selling them their whoring wares.
Is it inevitable that our western style of democracy inexorably remains slanted in favour of the criminal sociopath unable to feel even the slightest empathy towards their victims? Are they so unable to put themselves in their position? It appears so. Last night it was revealed that those people running their lucrative schemes are happy to be foreclosed upon, having salted away millions in family trusts first, only to reappear again around the corner and starting all over again. No doubt, another 4 Corners program will be shown again in a few years time.
And so it goes on!
The latest Forbes Magazine rich lists includes 1426 names of people who have more than 1000.000.000 dollars with this year adding another 210 new members. They are known as belonging to the so called 1% list, meaning they own 99% of the world’s wealth. It seems out of kilter doesn’t it?
In the meantime the 16 000 investors in Banksia Securities have started a class action. Indications are they will get 50 cents back out of every dollar invested. The lawyers claim the accounts were wrong and are asking how the Company could all of a sudden owe $660million. – Where were the accountants, but more importantly; where were the regulators?
And so it goes on!
Tags: ABC Four Corners, Banksia Mortgage Fund, Capitalism, Estate Mortgage, Forbes
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