Screw the Banks and Investment Firms

[can't sit still]

Trish, if GOV wants to take something, I doubt that they'll let a technicality stop them. I read that very few people actually turned in their gold. There is also the argument that the value of all the gold is minuscule compared to the value of instruments. It wouldn't be worth much. For some strange reason, the U.S. GOV values it's stash of gold at $ 42.37 an ounce.
There is a small group of writers who seem to have an inside track. The first that appeared was "another". In later discussions "friend of another" appeared. Then "friend of a friend of another" appeared. This guy,FOFOA has written some astonishing work. It's well worth the time to read everything on his blog. The most surprising work I've seen is; his argument that there is a thin separation between LBMA / COMEX gold sales and BIS gold sales. He supports his claim that BIS gold is valued at about $ 26,000 an ounce;
http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2010/05/open- ... state.html

Gold was revalued / the dollar devalued in 1933. There is nothing that precludes this from happening again. It's looking impossible to avoid. If you look at the Asian currency crisis, you see the magical power of gold. It fixes all problems. Central bankers may call it a barbaric relic but, the rest of the world does not. The people were asked to voluntarily turn in their gold to stabilize the currency. They did.

You always hear claims that gold is too high priced. And then next week, it goes higher. Whenever it climbs too fast, there is always a reset. That's normal. I posted a link that showed the relative devaluation of currency. The price of gold is just a reflection of the loss of value of paper.
The FED seems to be inflating the currency supply at about 6.2% a year;
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Infl ... supply.asp
GOV needs lots of money so they print it faster than the growth of the GDP. That gives us price inflation. This is the so-called "hidden tax" That's why GOV hates a gold backed currency. It precludes them from paying for wars with the credit card.

The U.S. currency could be easily backed with gold [assuming that we still have some] if gold were revalued. The U.S. doesn't want competing currencies, especially gold-backed ones. http://www.silverbearcafe.com/dinar.html
It remains to be seen where this will all lead.
Then, there is the wild card. Thomas Moray reportedly had good success at manufacturing gold;
http://www.zoklet.net/totse/en/fringe/f ... moray.html
The latest vid from Inventor, John Bedini claims that he worked out a process for manufacturing gold. He reports that U.S. and Russia are both manufacturing elemental gold. It's impossible to ignore this stuff when you look at the low energy transmutation that occurs in cold fusion. They start out with Palladium and water and end up with a cookbook of elements
Then, there is also the curious story of hundreds of barrels of mineral found in a treasure shipwreck. No one had a good explanation of why they were included with a cargo of treasure. There are claims that this particular mixture of minerals had the power of transmutation. Sounds ridiculous. There aren't any good explanations for platinum cannons found in the wreck. Supposedly, they are just platinum to a certain depth. It makes for interesting reading. I have no idea of veracity;
http://www.platinumcannonshipwreck.com/

Rex Research has some interesting links and info concerning treatments that 'cause" far higher yields of PM from low-concentration PM ores.
All very interesting

[can't sit still]

Things are really starting to heat up in the financial world. The big banks are working like crazy on consolidation. The number of bank failures doubles every year. The FDIC has opened a few new offices to handle all the new liquidation work.
Here's an article that lays out many of the problems.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... -s-history
Reportedly, Bob Chapman is very pessimistic;
" my Intel source inside the Fed says absolutely no later than November the banking system should implode."
The banks are locking up every penny that they can get their hands on. There is very little money circulating in the economy. Ron Paul said that the banks would crash the dollar to save themselves. Others have said the same.
In general, hyperinflation is the printing of money to meet ALL the debt payments. I'm still trying to understand all of this. If GOV prints tons of money to pay debt service, will this translate to consumer price inflation? Is it possible to have currency inflation without causing price inflation?
The consumer has a certain amount of dollars. If you raise prices without raising wages ,overall sales will reflect the fixed amount of purchasing power. The economy will shrink.
As the economy shrinks, deflation arrives. So, in labor and goods that aren't from an industry that has monopoly, prices will go down. Goods produced from monopoly industry will go up in price.
Wages down,, energy up. What has happened in L.A. is that; costs for water and power have gone up,,, people are cutting back and conserving. The water and power dept has mostly fixed costs. As people conserve, they raise the rates to meet their fixed costs. People conserve more.
As the banks crash the economy, there is less and less tax base and less and less commerce. The banks will willingly bring it all down to preserve their power.
GOV is equally ready, willing and able to tax the economy to death to preserve GOV.
Banks / GOV seem to believe that the economy has unlimited resiliency,,, unlimited money-generating capacity. They're incorrect.

[can't sit still]

This is a very interesting article about the relationship between banks and oil companies,,, BP specifically;
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-Gener ... thers.html

[Trishntek]

Guess that gives a whole new meaning to "liquid assets".

[cowboyangel]

The Collapsing Western Way of Life
The greatest threat to the Western Way of Life is the Western Way of Life itself.

by John Kozy


Global Research, June 18, 2010





The Age of Enlightenment was born sometime around the beginning of the eighteenth century. A mere three-quarters of a century later, industrialization ushered in the Age of Endarkenment, and human life has grown more and more perilous ever since. The Golden Age of capitalism cannot be recreated merely by applying the right mixture of spending, subsidies, re-regulation, and international agreements. Because the economic advantages of industrialization rely on overproduction and profit, balanced trade is impossible if the advantage is to be preserved; it entails no economic profit. Industrialism is a Hegelian synthesis which embodies the forces for its own destruction. The greatest threat to the Western Way of Life is the Western Way of Life itself.


That human beings seem unable to solve their most pressing problems is too obvious and well known to deserve much mention; that most of the problems that human beings seem unable to solve are caused by human beings themselves deserves mention but rarely is.

Human beings act as though having to deal with problems whose causes are beyond human control is not enough. Cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods are apparently not serious enough to command human attention. These problems, apparently, have to be supplemented by self-made catastrophes to keep our minds engaged. But most manmade problems could be avoided by careful and complete analysis of the ideas that, when implemented, have dire results.

Time-tested and effective ways of analyzing problems have been known for centuries. Rene Descartes published his Rules for the Direction of the Mind around 1627 and the Discourse on Method in 1637. John Stuart Mill published his Methods in his System of Logic in 1843. The mathematical method known as reductio ad absurdum has been employed throughout the history of mathematics and philosophy from classical antiquity onwards, as has the method known as counterexample. And root cause analysis is a highly developed method often used in information science and other places. Oddly enough, however, even most well educated Americans seem to be unaware of any of these analytical techniques, and when attempts are made to analyze ideas, these attempts are rarely carried out logically or all the way to their ultimate ends. Americans rarely "follow the argument wherever it leads;" even those good at analysis often stop when they come across something that looks appealing.

John B. Judis recently published a piece in the New Republic in which he summarized some claims made by Robert Brenner, a UCLA economic historian. Judis writes:

"Brenner’s analysis of the current downturn can be boiled down to a fairly simple point: that the underlying cause of the current downturn lies in the “realâ€

[can't sit still]

Degradation in all things seems to be the name of the game
Supreme Court Guts Anti-Corruption Law

Murder She Wrote




In a decision written by Ruth Bader Ginsberg the Supreme Court has gutted the most important section of anti-corruption safeguards in US corporation law. No longer is it illegal for corporation officers in finance or commerce "deprive another of the intangible right of honest service." Enron’s CEO Jeffrey Skilling, whose appeal led to the decision, is now off the hook. From now on all deception of financial and business customers is allowed unless there is a specific kickback or bribery in evidence. If a broker sticks you with a bad investment, misrepresenting everything, hiding from you his true evaluation of the investment for his own gain, that is OK. Only if someone else is caught paying him to deceive you will the case be actionable.

Hundreds of previous convictions will now be vacated and the the white collar class will go free and get their fines back. It is now open season on the unsophisticated and gullible -- and unsophistication is relative, depending on who has the fastest computer, the sharpest corporation lawyers, and the most tricky mathematical economists (e.g. Lawrence Summers).

Now the "honest service" law may be used only to prosecute bribery or kickbacks -- if the deception was motivated by personal gain or a tacit understanding of mutual gain in a conspiracy persecutors can forget about it. If you screw people for your friends or you class or your secret fraternity it is now OK -- as long as you were altruistic about it and didn't take any direct compensation.

From now on federal prosecutors seeking to fight public corruption will be constrained by the rule: No if you can't find a bribe or a kickback then any form of dishonesty in representing an investment or venture cannot be prosecuted. What used to be left up to the jury to interpret -- what is honest service in financial transactions -- is now determined by rigid narror and rare criteria of whether a kickback or bribe has been paid. The honest services provision is no longer a threat to Money Power organized crime. Federal prosecutors used the law to pursue corrupt public officials and business executives who use their position for personal gain. You won't be seeing much of that any more. The fine net of justice for catching the big fish looks more like a tic-tac-toe grid with squares a mile wide.

Bader Darling of White Collar Crime

This ruling will affect the investigations of Alan Mendelsohn, an indicted Republican campaign fundraiser; convicted Ponzi schemer and political donor Scott Rothstein; former House Speaker Ray Sansom; former GOP chairman Jim Greer; and other lawmakers who held Republican Party credit cards. Honest services charges also have been used regularly in public corruption cases stemming from the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, including in the pending retrial of former Abramoff associate Kevin Ring.

[can't sit still]

As y'all know, when a bank creates money out of thin air, it only creates the principle. The interest comes from generally 3 places.
It's taken from the principle of later loans [ponzi]
Infrastructure is sold off.
Natural resources are sold off.

Once lending diminishes, there are no new loans to pay off old interest.
Many countries have sold off infrastructure to pay off loans. GB is now trying to sell railroads and other stuff that was paid for by the taxpayer. Greece seems to be trying to sell off some islands;
http://thedailybell.com/1162/Greece-Sells-Islands.html

The last option is selling resources. After Russia defaulted, they dumped oil on the marked to try to recapitalize their currency. Since the U.S. has strict environmental laws, it generally costs more here to produce raw materials. If we wanted to be price competitive in raw materials,we would have to gut the environmental protections.
It remains to be seen just how we're going to pay our debts.

[cowboyangel]

With war? War on governments. War on people. War on the environment. War on religions. War on space. War on science. War on information. War on peace. War on music. War on thought. War on individuality. War on Heaven. War on hell. The devil is the new god.

[cowboyangel]

Unwise bailouts to one of the big evil greedies-CitiBank? Evil bankers strike again but this time they went to far....

http://video.ap.org/?f=CANOV&pid=4mRm0W ... mhWONZi4da

[can't sit still]

"Banks around the world must refinance more than $5 trillion of debts in the coming three years, "
"banks are currently borrowing substantially less on debt markets than they require simply to replace their maturing debts"
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2 ... redit.html

[cowboyangel]

Yesterday, Evil Evil Evil son of a bitch Goldman execs said that it was ok to take billions in tax payer money to short sell the housing market. Dirty evil rat fuck bastards. Will biblical plagues please descend upon this morally bankrupt vampire class of public rapists?

More from Ellen Brown:


Wall Street banks have been saved from bankruptcy by governments that are now going bankrupt themselves; but the banks are not returning the favor. Instead, they are engaged in a class war, insisting that the squeezed middle class be even further squeezed to balance over-stressed government budgets. All the perks are going to Wall Street, while Main Street slips into debt slavery. Wall Street needs to be made to pay its fair share, but how?

The financial reform bill agreed to on June 25 may have carved out some protections for consumers, but for Goldman Sachs and the derivatives lobby, the bill was a clear win, leaving the Wall Street gambling business intact. In a June 25 Newsweek article titled "Financial Reform Makes Biggest Banks Stronger," Michael Hirsh wrote that the bill "effectively anoints the existing banking elite. The bill makes it likely that they will be the future giants of banking as well."

The federal government and Federal Reserve have advanced literally trillions of dollars to save the big Wall Street players, to the point where the government's own credit rating is in jeopardy; but Wall Street has not had to pay for the cleanup. Instead, the states and the citizens have been left to pick up the tab. On June 17, Time featured an article by David von Drehle titled "Inside the Dire Financial State of the States," reporting that most states are now facing persistent budget shortfalls of a sort not seen since the 1930s. Unlike the Wall Street banks, which can borrow at the phenomenally low fed funds rate of .2% and plow that money back into speculation, states don't have ready access to credit lines. They have to borrow through bond issues, and many states are so close to bankruptcy that their municipal bond ratings are collapsing. Worse, states are not legally allowed to default. Unlike the federal government, which can go into debt indefinitely, states must balance their budgets; and they cannot issue their own currencies. That puts them in the same position as Greece and other debt-strapped European Union countries, which are forbidden under EU rules either to issue their own currencies or to borrow from their own central banks.

States, of course, don't even have their own state-owned banks, with one exception -- North Dakota. North Dakota is also the only state now sporting a budget surplus, and it has the lowest unemployment and mortgage delinquency rates in the country. As von Drehle observes, "It's a swell time to be North Dakota."

2010-06-28-graphndunemployment.jpeg

But most states are dealing with serious, chronic defaults, putting them in the same debt trap as Greece: they are being forced to lay off workers, sell public assets, and look for ways to squeeze more taxes out of an already over-taxed populace. And their situation is slated to get worse, since the federal government's stimulus package will soon be cut, along with assistance to the states.

The federal government is not only leaving the states high and dry but is threatening to impose even more taxes on their beleaguered citizens. Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chairman and current White House economic adviser, said in April that Congress needs to consider a Value Added Tax (VAT) - a tax on various stages of production of consumer goods. A VAT of 17.5% is now imposed in Britain, and 20% is being proposed; while some EU countries already have a VAT as high as 25%. In Europe, at least the citizens get something for their money, including federally-funded health care; but that is not likely to happen in the U.S., where even a "public option" in health care is no longer on the agenda. The VAT hits the lower and middle classes particularly hard, since they spend most of their incomes on consumables. The rich, on the other hand, put much of their money into speculative trades, and those sales are not currently taxed.

Business Cycle or Class War?

Ismael Hossein-Zadehi, who teaches economics at Drake University in Iowa, calls the whole economic crisis a class war. What is being billed as public debt began as the private debt of financial speculators who offloaded it onto the public. The governments that bailed out these insolvent speculators then became insolvent themselves; but the bailed-out banks, rather than lending a helping hand in return, have demanded their pound of flesh, with payment in full. The perpetrators are blaming the victims and insisting on "fiscal responsibility." Wall Street bankers are dictating the terms of repayment for debts they themselves incurred.

"Fiscal responsibility" means cutting spending, something that is inherently deflationary during a recession, as seen in the disastrous Depression-era policies of President Herbert Hoover. Not that it was solely a Republican error. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt also cut public spending, tipping the economy back into recession. Spending cuts cause tax revenues to shrink, which results in more spending cuts. Contrary to what we have been told, national governments are not like households. They do not have to balance their budgets and "live within their means," because they have the means to increase the money supply. They not only have the means, but they must engage in public spending when the private economy is shrinking, in order to keep the wheels of the economy turning. Virtually all money now originates as bank-created credit or debt; and today the money supply has been shrinking at a rate not seen since the 1930s, because the banking crisis has made credit harder and harder to get.

Instead of "reflating" the collapsed economy, however, national governments are insisting on "fiscal responsibility;" and the responsibility is all being put on the states and the laboring and producing classes. The financial speculators who caused the debacle are largely getting off scott free. They not only pay no tax on the purchase and sale of their "financial products," but they pay very little in the way of income taxes. Goldman Sachs paid an effective income tax rate of only 1% in 2008. Prof Hossein-Zadehi writes:

It is increasingly becoming clear that the working majority around the world face a common enemy: an unproductive financial oligarchy that, like parasites, sucks the economic blood out of the working people, simply by trading and/or betting on claims of ownership. . . . The real question is when the working people and other victims of the unjust debt burden will grasp the gravity of this challenge, and rise to the critical task of breaking free from the shackles of debt and depression.

Working people don't rise to the task because they have been propagandized into believing that "fiscal austerity" is something that needs to be done in order to save their children from an even worse fate. What actually needs to happen in a deflationary collapse is to spend more money into the system, not pull it back out by paying off the federal debt; but the money needs to go into the real economy - into factories, farms, businesses, housing, transportation, sustainable energy systems, health care, education. Instead, the stimulus money has been hijacked, diverted into cleaning up the toxic balance sheets of the financial gamblers who propelled the economy into its perilous dive.


Evening Up the Score

While Congress caters to the banks, the states have been left to fend for themselves. Where is the money to come from to pull off the impossible feat of balancing their budgets? Bleeding a VAT tax out of an already-anemic working class is more likely to kill the patient than to alleviate the disease. A more viable and equitable solution would be to tap into the only major market left on the planet that is not now subject to a sales tax - the "financial products" that are the stock in trade of the robust financial sector itself.

A financial transaction tax on speculative trading is sometimes called a "Tobin tax," after the man who first proposed it, Nobel laureate economist James Tobin. The revenue potential of a Tobin tax is huge. The Bank for International Settlements reported in 2008 that total annual derivatives trades were $1.14 quadrillion (a quadrillion is a thousand trillion). That figure was probably low, since over-the-counter trades are unreported and their magnitude is unknown. A mere 1% tax on $1 quadrillion in trades would generate $10 trillion annually in public funds. That is only for derivatives. There are also stocks, bonds and other financial trades to throw in the mix; and more than half of this trading occurs in the United States.

A Tobin tax would not generate these huge sums year after year, because it would largely kill the computerized high-frequency program trades that now compose 70% of stock market purchases. But that is a worthy end in itself. The sudden, thousand-point drop in the Dow Industrial Average on May 6 showed the world how vulnerable the stock market is to manipulation by these sophisticated market gamblers. The whole high-frequency trading business needs to be stopped, in order to protect legitimate investors using the stock market for the purposes for which it was designed: to raise capital for businesses. As Mark Cuban observed in a May 9 article titled "What Business Is Wall Street In?":

Creating capital for business has to be less than 1pct of the volume on Wall Street in any given period. . . . My 2 cents is that it is important for this country to push Wall Street back to the business of creating capital for business. Whether it's through a use of taxes on trades, or changing the capital gains tax structure so that there is no capital gains tax on any shares of stock (private or public company) held for 5 years or more, and no tax on dividends paid to shareholders who have held stock in the company for more than 5 years. However we need to do it, we need to get the smart money on Wall Street back to thinking about ways to use their capital to help start and grow companies. That is what will create jobs. That is where we will find the next big thing that will accelerate the world economy. It won't come from traders trying to hack the financial system for a few pennies per trade.

Besides protecting legitimate savers and investors by exempting stock held five years or more, they could be exempted from a Tobin tax on total stock purchases of under $1 million per year. That would make the tax literally a millionaire's tax -- and a small one at that, at only 1% per trade.

At the G20 summit in Toronto last weekend, a financial transaction tax was discussed and supported by France and Germany but was opposed by the U.S. and Canada, although nothing binding was resolved. However, the states do not have to wait for the federal government or the G20 to act. They could levy a Tobin tax themselves. Objection might be made that the Wall Street speculators would take their revenues and go elsewhere, but big banks and brokerages have branches in every major city in every state. They are hardly likely to pack up their tents and leave lucrative centers of business. Nor can it be argued that we should cater to the pirates who are looting our stock markets because they are paying us a nice bribe, because they aren't even paying a bribe. Financial trades do not currently generate tax revenues.

Two Green Party candidates for governor, Laura Wells in California and Rich Whitney in Illinois, have included a state-imposed Tobin tax in their platforms. Both are also campaigning for state-owned banks in their states, on the model of the Bank of North Dakota. People around the world look to the United States for boldness and innovation, and California and Illinois are two of the hardest hit states in the nation. If those states manage to turn their economies around, they could establish a model for economic sovereignty globally.
Books & More From Ellen Brown

[can't sit still]

Looks like spam to me. We all know about ESL scams. Just search ESL + scam on google.
The pay is terrible. Korean schools are famous for not paying teachers.

[cowboyangel]

allicia458 must work for Goldman....

[cowboyangel]

Hey the slime bitch is gone! The Eplaya mods are doing their job! Yeah!

[can't sit still]

Here's a good example of "bankspeak" logic;
"Statement 159, adopted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in 2007, which allows banks to book profits when the value of their bonds falls from par"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-1 ... ecast.html
whatever !!

[cowboyangel]

Thanks BIS, Goldman, Chase, Hank Paulson, Tiny Tim, Evil Allen and the rest of you criminal blood sucking hell rats. Hell is too good a place for ya all.....



Collapse in Living Standards in America: More Poverty By Any Measure
15 million unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities

by Christine Vestal


Global Research, July 14, 2010
Stateline - 2010-07-08


More than 15 million Americans are unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities, and 38 million people are receiving food stamps, more than at any time in the program’s almost 50-year history.



Evidence of rising economic hardship is ample. There’s one commonly used standard for measuring it: the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty rate. It guides much of federal and state spending aimed at helping those unable to make a decent living.



But a number of states have become convinced that the federal figures actually understate poverty, and have begun using different criteria in operating state-based social programs. At the same time, conservative economists are warning that a change in the formula to a threshold that counts more people as poor could lead to an unacceptable increase in the cost of federal and state social service programs.



When Census publishes new numbers for 2009 in September, experts predict they’ll show a steep rise in the poverty rate. One independent researcher estimates the data will show the biggest year-to-year increase in recorded history.



According to Richard Bavier, a former analyst for the federal Office of Management and Budget, already available data about employment rates, wages, and food stamp enrollment suggest that an additional 5.7 million people were officially poor in 2009. That would bring the total number of people with incomes below the federal poverty threshold to more than 45 million. The poverty rate, Bavier expects, will hit 15 percent — up from 13.2 percent in 2008, when the Great Recession first started to take its toll.



Still, the U.S. Census Bureau’s new numbers will offer only a partial picture of how the nation’s sputtering economy is affecting the poorest Americans — a problem state officials and the Obama administration want to address.



Overestimating food costs



The current formula for setting the federal poverty line — unchanged since 1963 — takes the cost of food for an individual or family and multiplies the number by three, under the assumption that people spend one-third of their incomes putting meals on the table. While the formula may have been a good way to estimate a subsistence cost of living in the early 1960s, experts say food now represents only one-eighth of a typical household budget, with expenses such as housing and child care putting increasing pressure on struggling families.



In addition, the official measure fails to account for regional differences in the cost of housing, it doesn’t include medical expenses or transportation, and at $22,000 for a family of four, the poverty line is considered by many to be simply too low.



Equally worrisome for policy makers is the Census Bureau’s failure to consider in-kind federal and state aid in calculating income. The existing formula counts only pre-tax cash income, leaving out such benefits as food stamps, housing vouchers and child-care subsidies, as well as federal and state tax credits for the working poor.



As a result, the nation’s official poverty count is unaffected by the billions spent on safety-net programs. Yet it remains by far the most frequently used measurement of how well governments are taking care of their most vulnerable citizens.



Conservatives have consistently argued that if safety-net programs were taken into account, the poverty rate would be much lower. At the same time, advocates for the poor have argued that poverty counts would be much higher if the cost of housing, child care and other expenses were factored in.



Nearly two decades ago, Congress asked the National Academies of Science (NAS) to revisit the official poverty measure and come up with recommendations for a new measure that would satisfy critics on both ends of the spectrum.



This past March, the Obama administration said it would use the NAS 1995 guidelines to update the federal government’s poverty calculation and promised to unveil the first new “supplemental poverty measureâ€

[can't sit still]

The Dept of Agriculture expects food stamp participation to go to 44 million next year. The IMF says to dump SS;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-bake ... 43506.html
The White House says not to expect help for the states. I don't suppose that AIPAC will let us cut the military budget.
I suppose that it is more important to kill Afghans and Iraqis than to prevent American deaths.
The states are expected to be $ 127 billion short next year. I don't even want to think how that will affect the unemployed.

[cowboyangel]

The Dept of Agriculture expects food stamp participation to go to 44 million next year. The IMF says to dump SS;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-bake ... 43506.html
The White House says not to expect help for the states. I don't suppose that AIPAC will let us cut the military budget. :(
I suppose that it is more important to kill Afghans and Iraqis than to prevent American deaths.
The states are expected to be $ 127 billion short next year. I don't even want to think how that will affect the unemployed.

...that and Obama's financial team working on cuts to social security and medicare before the November election cycle. The deficit reduction crowd are truly insane. Germany tried that and they got worsening unemployment and Hitler...

[can't sit still]

This came in mail;
Oil and Finance

November 11, 2009 — Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), BP (BP), Total (TOT), Shell (RDS.A), Deutsche Bank (DB) and Societe Generale (SCGLY.PK) founded the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate "dark pool" trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. "Round-trip" trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.

This is how the geniuses on Wall Street earn their big bonuses—they steal it. . . "It appears clear that BP and Goldman Sachs have been working collaboratively—at least at a strategic level—for maybe 15 years now. Their trading strategy has evolved over time as the global market has . . . become ever more financialised. . ."

[can't sit still]

Cowboy, this ones for you;
July 2, 2010 — By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world—Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more—have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people—mostly children—couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions". . .
Full story: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 16088.html

[cowboyangel]

Thanks Dan, I'll read that. Nothing like the death of industrial capitalism to make way for its evil twin, finance capitalism. Goldman got off the hook today with their puny 500 mil settlement. I thought the SEC would show more shark teeth, but alas....wonder if private party civil suits will commence?


Jail Lloyd and Tony Hayward.

[cowboyangel]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... lenews_wsj


Oh this is very interesting... the two republicans on the SEC commission wanted to pursue the Goldman case and were out voted by the three dems.

the settlement was blood money. fuckers.

[cowboyangel]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... lenews_wsj


Oh this is very interesting... the two republicans on the SEC commission wanted to pursue the Goldman case and were out voted by the three dems.

the settlement was blood money. fuckers.

I've been thinking about this. It looks like part of it at least is Obama pay back to Goldman, it was their money, and lots of it, that put him in the white house, more than to McCain. Wall St. owns the democrats.

Here's an interesting mp3 of what Obama is planning after the November elections:

Lest any of who still believe that Obama is the answer, find out here how he really is the curse:

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/62402

Guns and Butter - "Obama Plans Lame Duck Sell-Out of Social Security" with Webster Tarpley.

The Financial Reform Bill, including The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, more popularly known as the White House Deficit Commission, the Austerity Commission, or the Peterson Commission; the G20 meeting in Toronto; the effort to export the depression.


Oh, could it be that the republicans on the SEC who wanted to pursue Goldman were thinking about other un-named investors who were screwed by Goldman? The settlement only went out to a few firms. Any thoughts people?

[Trishntek]

His Heinous stated back when he was a U.S. Senator that, ",,,under my cap and trade plan, electricity bills will necessarily skyrocket."

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That, IMHO will be the legacy of the lame duck session after the Social Justifiers get their hat handed to them in Nov.[/i]

[cowboyangel]

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[cowboyangel]

It's amazing that Obama has children since he doesn't have any balls....to truly shut down the gambling curse that is derivatives. FDR did it. So can Bama. When your money comes from Goldman and Wall St. it's hard to bite the claw , the hand, that feeds you.

How Brokers Became Bookies: The Insidious Transformation of Markets Into Casinos

Tuesday 13 July 2010

by: Ellen Brown, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

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(Photo: rtomazela)

"You all are the house, you're the bookie. [Your clients] are booking their bets with you. I don't know why we need to dress it up. It's a bet." - Sen. Claire McCaskill, Senate Subcommittee investigating Goldman Sachs (Washington Post, April 27, 2010)

Ever since December 2008, the Federal Reserve has held short-term interest rates near zero. This was not only to try to stimulate the housing and credit markets, but also to allow the federal government to increase its debt levels without increasing the interest tab picked up by the taxpayers. The total public US debt increased by nearly 50 percent from 2006 to the end of 2009 (from about $8.5 trillion to $12.3 trillion), but the interest bill on the debt actually dropped (from $406 billion to $383 billion), because of this reduction in interest rates.

One of the dire unintended consequences of that maneuver, however, was that municipal governments across the country have been saddled with very costly bad derivatives bets. They were persuaded by their Wall Street advisers to buy credit default swaps to protect their loans against interest rates shooting up. Instead, rates proceeded to drop through the floor, a wholly unforeseeable and unnatural market condition caused by rate manipulations by the Fed. Instead of the banks bearing the losses in return for premiums paid by municipal governments, the governments have had to pay massive sums to the banks - to the point of pushing at least one county to the brink of bankruptcy (Jefferson County, Alabama).

Another unintended consequence of the plunge in interest rates has been that "savers" have been forced to become "speculators" or gamblers. When interest rates on safe corporate bonds were around 8 percent, a couple could aim for saving half a million dollars in their working careers and count on reaping $40,000 yearly in investment income, a sum that, along with Social Security, could make for a comfortable retirement. But very low interest rates on bonds have forced these once-prudent savers into the riskier and less predictable stock market, and the collapse of the stock market has forced them into even more speculative ventures in the form of derivatives, a glorified form of gambling. Pension funds, which have binding pension contracts entered into when interest was at much higher levels, need an 8 percent investment return to meet their commitments. In today's market, they cannot make that sort of return without taking on higher risk, which means taking major losses when the risks materialize.

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Derivatives are basically just bets. Like at a racetrack, you don't need to own the thing you're betting on in order to play. Derivative casinos have opened up on virtually anything that can go up or down or have a variable future outcome. You can bet on the price of tea in China, the success or failure of a movie, whether a country will default on its debt, or whether a particular piece of legislation will pass. The global market in derivative trades is now well over a quadrillion dollars - that's a thousand trillion - and it is eating up resources that were at one time invested in productive enterprises. Why risk lending money to a corporation or buying its stock, when you can reap a better return betting on whether the stock will rise or fall?

The shift from investing to gambling means that not only are investors making very little of their money available to companies to produce goods and services, but the parties on one side of every speculative trade now have an interest in seeing the object of the bet fail, whether a company, a movie, a politician or a country. Worse, high-speed program traders can actually manipulate the market so that the thing bet on is more likely to fail. Not only has the market become a casino, but the casino is rigged.

High frequency traders - a field led by Goldman Sachs - use computer algorithms to automatically bet huge sums of money on minor shifts in price. These bets send signals to the market that can themselves cause the price of assets to shoot up or tumble down. By placing high-volume trades, the largest speculative traders can, thus, intentionally "fix" prices in any direction they want.

"Prediction" Markets

Casinos for betting on what something will do in the future have been elevated to the status of "prediction" markets, and they can cover a broad range of issues. MIT's Technology Review launched a futures market for technological innovations, in order to bet on upcoming developments. The NewsFutures and TradeSports Exchanges enable people to wager on matters such as whether Tiger Woods will take another lover, or whether bin Laden will be found in Afghanistan.

A 2008 conference of sports leaders in Auckland, New Zealand, featured Mark Davies, head of a sport betting exchange called Betfair. Davies observed that these betting exchanges, while clearly gambling forums, are little different from the trading done by financial firms such as JPMorgan. He said:

"I used to trade bonds at JPMorgan, and I can tell you that what our customers do is exactly the same as what I used to do in my previous life, with the single exception that where I had to pour over balance sheets and income statements, they pour over form and team-sheets."

The online news outlet Slate monitors various prediction markets to provide readers with up-to-date information on the potential outcomes of political races. Two of the markets covered are the Iowa Electronic Markets and Intrade. Slate claims that these political casinos are consistently better at forecasting winners than pre-election polls. Participants bet real money 24 hours a day on the outcomes of a range of issues, including political races. Newsfutures and Casualobserver are similar, smaller exchanges.

Besides shifting the emphasis to gambling ("Why Vote When You Can Bet?" says Slate's "Guide to All Political Markets"), prediction markets, like the stock market, can be rigged so that they actually affect outcomes. This became evident, for example, in 2008, when the John McCain campaign used the Intrade market to shift perception of his chances of winning. A supporter was able to single-handedly manipulate the price of McCain's contract, causing it to move up in the market and prompting some mainstream media to report it as evidence that McCain was gaining in popularity.

Betting on Terrorism

The destructive potential of prediction markets became particularly apparent in one sponsored by the Pentagon, called the "policy analysis market" (PAM) or "terror futures market." PAM was an attempt to use the predictive power of markets to forecast political events tied to the Middle East, including terrorist attacks. According to The New York Times, the PAM would have allowed trading of futures on political developments including terrorist attacks, coups d'état and assassinations. The exchange was shut down a day after it launched, after commentators pointed out that the system made it far too easy to make money with terror attacks.

At a July 28, 2003, press conference, Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-North Dakota) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) spoke out against the exchange. Wyden stated, "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," while Dorgan called it "useless, offensive and unbelievably stupid."

"This appears to encourage terrorists to participate, either to profit from their terrorist activities or to bet against them in order to mislead US intelligence authorities," they said in a letter to Adm. John Poindexter, the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office, which developed the idea. A week after the exchange closed, Poindexter offered his resignation.

Carbon Credit Trading

A massive new derivatives market that could be highly destructive economically is the trading platform called Carbon Credit Trading, which is on its way to dwarfing world oil trade. The program would allow trading in "carbon allowances" (permitting companies to emit greenhouse gases) and in "carbon offsets" (allowing companies to emit beyond their allowance if they invest in emission-reducing projects elsewhere). It would also allow trading in carbon derivatives, for example, futures contracts to deliver a certain number of allowances at an agreed price and time.

Robert Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and a co-founder of the US Climate Task Force, has warned, "We are on the verge of creating a new trillion-dollar market in financial assets that will be securitized, derivatized, and speculated by Wall Street like the mortgage-backed securities market."

Eoin O'Carroll cautioned in The Christian Science Monitor:

"Many critics are pointing out that this new market for carbon derivatives could, without effective oversight, usher in another Wall Street free-for-all just like the one that precipitated the implosion of the global economy.... Just as the inability of homeowners to make good on their subprime mortgages ended up pulling the rug out from under the credit market, carbon offsets that are based on shaky greenhouse-gas mitigation projects could cause the carbon market to tank, with implications for the broader economy."

The proposed form of cap and trade has not yet been passed in the US, but a new market in which traders can speculate on the future of allowances and offsets has already been launched. The largest players in the carbon credit trading market include firms such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, Fortis, Deutsche Bank, Rabobank, BNP Paribas, Sumitomo, Kommunalkredit, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch and Cantor Fitzgerald. Last year, the financial services industry had 130 lobbyists working on climate issues, compared to almost none in 2003. The lobbyists represented companies such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.

Billionaire financier George Soros says cap and trade will be easy for speculators to rig. "The system can be gamed," he said last July at a London School of Economics seminar. "That's why financial types like me like it - because there are financial opportunities."

Time to Board Up the Casinos and Rethink Our Social Safety Net?

Our forebears considered gambling to be immoral and made it a crime. As the Industrial Revolution and the ascendance of capital changed religious mores, gambling gradually gained acceptance, but even within that permissive paradigm, derivative trading was originally considered an illegal form of gambling. Perhaps, it is time to reinstate the gambling laws, board up the derivatives casinos and return the stock market to what it was designed to be: a means of funneling the capital of investors into productive businesses.

Short of banning derivatives altogether, the derivatives business could be slowed up considerably by imposing a Tobin tax, a small tax on every financial trade. "Financial products" are virtually the only products left on the planet that are not currently subject to a sales tax; and at over a quadrillion dollars in trades annually, the market is huge.

A larger issue is how to ensure adequate retirement income for the population without forcing people into gambling with their life savings to supplement their meager Social Security checks. It may be time to rethink not only our banking and financial structure, but the entire social umbrella that our founding fathers called the Common Wealth. The genius of Social Security was its recognition of the basic economic truth that real "security" rests on the ability of a society to provide for and take care of those who, because of age, health or economic conditions, cannot take care of themselves.

Deficit hawks cry that we cannot afford more spending; but according to Richard Cook, a former US Treasury Department official, the government could print and spend several trillion new dollars into the money supply without causing price inflation. Writing in Global Research in April 2007, he noted that the US gross domestic product in 2006 came to $12.98 trillion, while the total national income came to only $10.23 trillion; and at least 10 percent of that income was reinvested rather than spent on goods and services. Total available purchasing power was, thus, only about $9.21 trillion, or $3.77 trillion less than the collective price of goods and services sold. Where did consumers get the extra $3.77 trillion? They had to borrow it, and they borrowed it from banks that created it with accounting entries on their books. If the government had replaced this bank-created money with debt-free government-created money, the total money supply would have remained unchanged. That means a whopping $3.77 trillion in new government-issued money could have been fed into the economy in 2006 without inflating prices. Different proposals have been made concerning how this money should be distributed, but at least some of it could be used to provide adequate Social Security checks, relieving the pressure to gamble with our savings.

The Federal Reserve has funneled $4.6 trillion to Wall Street in bailout money, most of it generated via "quantitative easing" (in effect, printing money); yet, hyperinflation has not resulted. To the contrary, what we have today is Depression-style deflation. The M3 money supply shrank in the last year by 5.5 percent, and the rate at which it is shrinking is accelerating. The explanation for this anomaly is that the Fed's $4.6 trillion added by quantitative easing fell far short of the estimated $10 trillion needed to "reflate" the money supply after the "shadow lenders" disappeared. When these investors discovered that the "triple-A" mortgage-backed securities they had been purchasing from Wall Street were actually very risky investments, they exited the market, credit dried up and the money supply (which today consists almost entirely of credit or debt) collapsed.

The only viable way to reflate a collapsed money supply is to put more money into it; and creating the national money supply is the sovereign right of governments, not of banks. If the government wants to remain sovereign, it needs to reassert that right.

Niko Kyriakou contributed to this article.

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This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

[cowboyangel]

What Goes Around Comes Around
IMF-Style Austerity Comes to America

By ELLEN BROWN

When billionaires pledge a billion dollars to educate people to the evils of something, it is always good to peer closely at what they are up to. Hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson was formerly Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the New York Federal Reserve. He is now senior chairman of Blackstone Group, which is in charge of dispersing government funds in the controversial AIG bailout, widely criticized as a government giveaway to banks. Peterson is also founder of the Peter Peterson Foundation, which has adopted the cause of imposing “fiscal responsibilityâ€

[can't sit still]

Part of the reason that things crashed so badly is that there are many "perverse incentives" in the market. Cannibalism pays very well. The new bank bill will not remove these incentives. One of the things that it WILL do is to make the bond rating agencies liable for bad ratings. Very interesting. It has frozen up asset-backed bond sales for the moment;

Bond Sale? Don't Quote Us, Request Credit Ratings Agencies
by Anusha Shrivastava - Wall Street Journal

The nation's three dominant credit-ratings providers have made an urgent new request of their clients: Please don't use our credit ratings. The odd plea is emerging as the first consequence of the financial overhaul that is to be signed into law by President Obama on Wednesday. And it already is creating havoc in the bond markets, parts of which are shutting down in response to the request.
Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are all refusing to allow their ratings to be used in documentation for new bond sales, each said in statements in recent days. Each says it fears being exposed to new legal liability created by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The new law will make ratings firms liable for the quality of their ratings decisions, effective immediately. The companies say that, until they get a better understanding of their legal exposure, they are refusing to let bond issuers use their ratings. That is important because some bonds, notably those that are made up of consumer loans, are required by law to include ratings in their official documentation. That means new bond sales in the $1.4 trillion market for mortgages, autos, student loans and credit cards could effectively shut down.

There have been no new asset-backed bonds put on sale this week, in stark contrast to last week, when $3 billion of issues were sold. Market participants say the new law is partly behind the slowdown. "We are at a standstill right now," said Bingham McCutchen partner Ed Gainor, who specializes in asset-backed securities. Several companies are shelving their bond offerings "indefinitely," according to Tom Deutsch, executive director of the American Securitization Forum, which represents the market for bonds backed by assets such as auto loans and credit cards. He said he knew of three offerings scheduled for coming weeks that are now on hold.

The change caught the ratings agencies by surprise. The original Senate version of the bill didn't include the provision. It was only on June 30, when the Dodd-Frank bill was passed, that the exemption was removed. The Senate passed the amended version on July 15. The offices of Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Rating firms have warned that sections of the legislation concerning ratings' firms legal liability could cause them to pull back from certain parts of the market.

In an April 21 conference call, Moody's Chief Executive Raymond McDaniel told investors that "we remain concerned that the bill's liability provisions would lead to unintended consequences that could negatively impact the credit markets." If greater liability provisions were passed, he continued, "we would implement appropriate changes." He added that Moody's, a unit of Moody's Corp., would rethink whether it still made sense in a new regulatory environment to give ratings "for as many small and perhaps marginal issuers as possible."

The confusion comes as investors, bankers and ratings companies across Wall Street seek to digest the intricacies of the new law, the most sweeping since the 1930s. The overhaul touches on virtually every part of the financial-services world, part of an effort by lawmakers to head off another financial crisis. Ratings providers became a lightning rod for criticism after the financial crisis. Their overly rosy assessments of many bonds, particularly complex securities and bonds backed by subprime mortgages, were blamed for helping fuel the meltdown of the credit markets. In response, the Dodd-Frank bill revamped how the government treated credit-ratings firms, which receive a special government designation that allows them certain privileges and market access.

Once the bill is signed into law, advice by the services will be considered "expert" if used in formal documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That definition would make them legally liable for their work, meaning that it will be easier to sue an firm if a bond doesn't perform up to the stated rating. That is a change from the current law, which considers ratings merely an opinion, protected like any other media such as a newspaper.

Prior to the Dodd-Frank bill, issuers were allowed to include the description of the ratings in the offering documents without the consent of the rating firms. Now, they will have to get written permission. And the rating providers are concerned that giving such consent exposes them to liability they haven't been exposed to in the past. Unlike many parts of the larger financial-overhaul bill, these changes go into effect as soon as it is signed into law. The speed of the move has spooked the three firms. All issued statements in recent days saying they will continue to issue bond ratings. But they said they won't allow those ratings to be used in formal documents accompanying bond sales, known as prospectuses and registration statements.

One solution to the logjam is for sellers of bonds to offer their deals privately. That means they would offer ratings that can be used in private transactions but not in deals registered with the SEC and sold to the general public. The private market is much smaller and more expensive than the public one. On Friday, S&P, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos., issued a release saying it would "explore mechanisms outside of the registration statement to allow ratings to be disseminated to the debt markets."

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2 ... ng-to.html

[cowboyangel]

The US Treasury Running on

The US Treasury Running on Fumes: The Obama regime has made War the Business of America
Down to the last trillion in red ink

by Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, July 28, 2010

The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.â€

[can't sit still]

Cowboy, all this makes you want to try to predict an outcome. Roberts does a vid where he talks about the US being a puppet state of Israel;


OK, so where does all this lead??????????????????????????????????????
It appears that the demands of israel will break the US eventually. Where does that leave israel? We're trying to stir up a wider mid-east war. That isn't in the best interests of the rest of the world. BRIC and the G-20 aren't something to be ignored.
Is israel going to ride this tired horse right to the end? Then what?

israel is insolvent and bankrupt. They're a well off country but, the cost of maintaining a garrison is too high. They have hundreds of nukes but that doesn't make anybody wealthy. As the parasites slowly bring America down to the level of a third-world country, will AIPAC bleed out the last dime? If we get REALLY broke, we won't be able to defend israel. What contingency plan do they have for that?
We're being bled to death to try to accomplish the impossible dream.

Is the rest of the world just waiting around for us to collapse so that our war machine grinds to dust? What say you?