here is my strategy
1. only allow the government to use the countries currency through loans from you at interest
2. at some point issue a directive refuse to give out loans to the real economy at all, contracting the money supply and destroying the economy
3. bribe politicians to borrow money from us at interest, and give that money back to us and claim it somehow helps the economy
4. come up with a variety of other reasons why the economy has failed as long as the solution is to give more power to the government which i control
5. oh and of course own the media to get the public to be stupid enough to not see what is happening
6. make the debate about cutting services for the people or raising taxes, both of which are good solutions

bonus points - throw out democratically elected governments and install bankers as heads of state to take all the money from the people against their will - see italy and greece

launder money from drug cartels

You know, I have this strange feeling that if I owned a banking cartel, I'd already be rich.

i guess it depends what you mean by rich... and own. if you want to be pedantic you probably couldnt own a cartel or it would be a monopoly

If you "owned" a banking cartel, terms like "rich" would cease to have meaning for you.

blankflag,

It doesn't really matter. For example, even if you only meant, "If you owned 1% of the stock in a multinational bank," that would suffice for me to be unbelievably wealthy; and it would clearly fall far short of any reasonable interpretation of your actual words.

Semck and tolstoy said it best. In banking it takes money to make money, and you'd have to be rich to own a banking cartel.

If you own a banking cartel and your not rich, the easiest and fastest way to make money would be to disband and divide the cartel into a dozen or so commercial banks, issue IPOs to the banks and sell them off to the public, live off the billions of dollars you made from selling the banks.

sidenote has anyone here watched the documentary moneymasters on youtube (or somewhere else)? there is a great quote in there from a banker saying on some specific date, refuse to give out any loans under any circumstances, call in all loans. with this strategy we can crash the economy and take ownership of huge swaths of land and be able to rent it back to the people who once owned it.

somehow the narrator then thinks the 2008 collapse was different in some way, in spite of all the evidence presented from all the historical collapses... but besides that, a good film.

If I owned a banking cartel, I would understand that banks make money by loaning money, so if I wanted to make more money I would keep loaning money. If I had recently made a bunch of lousy investments by loaning money to high-risk borrowers, I would pull back a bit and stop making so many stupid loans, because I would realize how much money I lost on those stupid loans, and since my goal would be to make money I woul want to stop losing it. And if some other idiot banker - let's call him "Bob" - came along and said, "Hey, we can rule the world if we stop making loans!" I'd say, "Sure, Bob, let's do it!" and when Bob announced that he was going to stop making loans I'd announce that I was still in business, albeit with slightly higher interest rates, and everyone would hate Bob's Bank and flock to mine. It would be a beautiful backstab, but I would feel a little bit bad for Bob so I'd buy him a Bentley with a puny fraction of the extra money I earned.

uh... no. the amount of money you can make by owning property and renting it back to americans could be who knows, up to half the income of the country, depending on how much you can inflate housing prices after seizing ownership. the money you make from making loans is a lot smaller. and in order to make money from loans you need to pull that money from somewhere. once the money is mostly stripped from everyone you need to take more than just promises of future money, you need to seize real assets, the little of it that you dont already own.

If you owned a bank cartel, you wouldn't be playing Diplomacy. Anyway, here's my strategy:

• Fall asleep
• Dream
• Have a huge house
• Have a smoking hot girlfriend
• Own a bank cartel
• Party for seven sleeping hours
• Wake up
• Forget it so that it can happen again tomorrow

Or, if I started to refuse to make new loans, and if I called in all my outstanding loans, everyone who owes me money could say "screw you, we're not giving you anything" and they could all stop payments and then I would lose all my money and my banking cartel and people who hated me would shoot me and I'd be dead. No thanks, I'd rather be alive with 30 billion dollars than dead trying to get 500 billion dollars.