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Looking good. Added more last week myself. When this explodes what few available shares will command premiums.
.........al
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This board is for notes and discussions on gold and other precious metals. There are several other boards available to post political discussions. Everyone's cooperation is appreciated. Thank you.
..........al
Social Decay + Illegal Immigration + Poverty = Open War On The Streets Of America
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/social-decay-illegal-immigration-poverty-open-war-on-the-streets-of-america
What did you think was going to happen? Moral standards have been falling for decades, we have allowed massive hordes of criminals, gang members and drug dealers to enter this country illegally, and thanks to our declining economy our inner cities are being absolutely ravaged by poverty. Was such a combination really going to produce peace and prosperity? Should we be so shocked that we now have open war on the streets of America? In the United States today, there are millions upon millions of young people that can't find jobs, that are living in poverty, that have no hope for a better future, and that have been raised without any moral standards. These young people are becoming increasingly desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. As I wrote about the other day, for those under the age of 18 living in the city of Detroit the poverty rate is 60 percent. Should we be surprised that Detroit police are now telling people to "enter Detroit at your own risk". At this point, the FBI says that there are approximately 1.4 million gang members living in our cities. That number has risen by an astounding 40 percent just since 2009. Did we somehow delude ourselves into thinking that there would not be severe consequences for allowing that to happen? Today, Mexican drug cartels are active in more than 1,000 U.S. cities. Are they selling drugs and committing crimes in the area where you live? Well, don't be so shocked. The federal government has left our border with Mexico wide open for decades even though the most violent drug war on the planet has been raging just across that border. Stupid decisions produce stupid results. Sadly, this is just the beginning. When our economy fully crashes the open warfare on the streets of America is going to get much, much worse.
Let's take a closer look at what is currently happening in a few of our largest cities...
Los Angeles
Did you know that Latino gangs are systematically pushing black families out of some areas of Los Angeles?
For example, once upon a time Compton was a predominantly African-American area. But now it is 65 percent Latino, and there is a relentless campaign of intimidation against many of the African-American families that remain.
One of these incidents was recently profiled in the Los Angeles Times. A black family moved into Compton near the end of December, and since that time they have been the victims of endless harassment by Latino gangs. When a 19-year-old African-American friend came to visit the family one day, four thugs told him that blacks were barred from the neighborhood and they started beating him with metal pipes. A story in the Los Angeles Times described what happened next...
The 19-year-old family friend managed to break free that first day and run into the house, where the children were the only ones at home.
The attackers left, but a half-hour later a crowd of as many as 20 people stood on the lawn yelling threats and epithets. A beer bottle crashed through the living room window as the youngsters watched in horror.
"They were scared if they called the sheriff they'd be killed," Westin said. "So they called their mom, who called the Sheriff's Department."
The gang members were gone by the time deputies arrived, but they kept coming back, almost daily, driving by slowly until they got someone's attention, then yelling racial insults and telling them to leave. The mother sent the children to live with relatives and is now packing up to leave herself.
As horrifying as that sounds, the truth is that it is not an isolated incident.
According to the Los Angeles Times, similar attacks "have taken place in Harbor Gateway, Highland Park, Pacoima, San Bernardino, Canoga Park and Wilmington, among other places."
Oakland
Up the coast in Oakland, a horribly violent gang war has gotten so out of hand that city officials are holding press conferences about it.
Violent crime in the city of Oakland increased by 23 percent in 2012, and police say that gang members were responsible for most of the approximately 2,000 robberies and 65 homicides that took place in the second half of the year.
As the San Francisco Chronicle recently explained, the violence continues to escalate and city officials don't know how to solve it...
Nearly all the violent crimes in Oakland in the last few months, including two killings over the weekend, have been committed as part of a "war" between rival groups that was sparked by the slaying of a girl last summer, Police Chief Howard Jordan said Monday.
Jordan said "about 90 percent" of the killings, robberies, shootings and other "senseless acts of violence" in the city since mid-2012 can be directly tied to the killing of a girlfriend of one of the combatants.
Over time, the warring factions have become increasingly violent and have grown in number, sometimes by merging with other groups, Jordan said at a news conference called in response to an outbreak of gunfire over the weekend.
Chicago
Savage murders happen so regularly in Chicago at this point that very few people are even shocked by the headlines any longer. The murder rate in the city increased by about 17 percent in 2012, and 2013 has already started with quite a bang.
Just check out what happened on Saturday. 7 people were murdered and six others were left wounded. The following is how the Chicago Tribune described one of the crime scenes...
On West Van Buren Street, a body could be seen lying in the roadway, near the curb and a bus stop.
A man who only identified himself as the teen victim's uncle said the boy, whose family lived nearby, had simply gone to run an errand.
"He was just going to the store," the man said. "They just killed him just like that."
Later, the man paced back and forth on the sidewalk, shaking his head in disbelief.
So why has Chicago become such a violent city?
It is because of the gangs.
Today, approximately 80 percent of all murders that happen in the city of Chicago are gang-related. And as I have written about previously, there are only about 200 police officers assigned to Chicago's Gang Enforcement Unit to handle the estimated 100,000 gang members living in the city.
Perhaps Chicago could do more to handle all the crime if they had more money, but at this point they are flat broke and so is the entire state of Illinois. In fact, the state of Illinois just had its credit rating downgraded once again.
I picked out three examples to discuss above, but similar things could really be said about hundreds of U.S. cities from coast to coast.
Once upon a time, gang activity was fairly limited to certain pockets of the country. But now, it is more widespread than ever.
According to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican drug cartels were actively operating in 50 different U.S. cities in 2006.
By 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 1,286.
Are you starting to get the picture?
So why doesn't the federal government secure the border and make sure that everyone that is coming into this country is doing so legally?
That is a very good question. For some reason, every single president that we have had in recent decades has chosen to leave the U.S. border with Mexico virtually wide open.
And so millions of criminals, gang members, drug dealers and welfare parasites continue to pour into the country. The following is what one local police chief down in Texas is saying about what he is seeing along the border...
The problem is not going away.
"Most of them have people here or they're just trying to make it over here so they can start making a better living for themselves," La Joya Police Chief Julian Gutierrez told Action 4 News.
No matter how many miles of border fence is erected—it seems nothing will stop the thousands of immigrants, crossing our border illegally, from continuing their journey.
"A lot of times we talk to them and ask them why they're coming here,” Gutierrez explained. “They say they're coming for the 'American Dream.' I always tell them that they're here illegally---how do they expect to find work? They always say it's a lot better than their country.”
So what is the Obama administration doing about this?
They don't consider it to be a problem.
In fact, one of our stations along the border with Mexico will no longer be manned with real people at all. The following is from a recent ABC News report...
Get ready for the very first "unmanned" border station on the U.S.-Mexico border. Slated to open at the end of this month, the Big Bend National Park in Texas will be staffed by, you guessed it, computers.
But what the Obama administration does seem to be concerned about is giving immigrants lots of "benefits" once they get here.
For example, did you know that the federal government actually has a website that teaches immigrants how to sign up for welfare programs once they arrive in the United States?
Meanwhile, we can't even come close to taking care of our own citizens. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 146 million Americans that are considered to be either "poor" or "low income" at this point.
Poverty is absolutely exploding in this country, and the middle class gets smaller with each passing day. When the next major economic downturn strikes, the unemployment numbers are going to start spiking again and millions of families are going to lose all hope that things will ever turn around for them.
Meanwhile, the very foundations of our society continue to rot and decay right in front of our eyes. At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the U.S. lives in a home without a father. The U.S. has the highest divorce rate in the world, the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world, and there are 19 million new STD infections in the United States every single year.
Our nation is a complete and total mess, and many of our major cities are being transformed into gang-infested war zones that are on the verge of total meltdown.
Is it any wonder that millions of American families have chosen to become preppers?
Nothing is going to stop the societal meltdown that is coming. That is especially true with Barack Obama running things.
Sadly, most Americans still have their heads in the sand and are pretending that everything will be okay somehow.
Sadly, most Americans still have a tremendous amount of faith in the system.
But anyone with a brain should be able to see the storm clouds that are coming.
So get prepared while you still can.
Time is running out.
Geithner's Legacy: The "0.2%" Hold $7.8 Trillion, Or 69% Of All Assets; And $212 Trillion Of Derivative Liabilities
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-26/02-hold-78-trillion-assets
As of this morning Tim Geithner is no longer Treasury Secretary. And while Tim Geithner's reign of clueless pandering to the banks has left the US will absolutely disastrous consequences, an outcome that will become clear in time, the most ruinous of his policies is making the banks which were too big to fail to begin with, so big they can neither fail nor be sued, as the recent fiasco surrounding the exit of Assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer showed. Just how big are these banks? Dallas Fed's Disk Fisher explains.
It is important to have an accurate view of the landscape of banking today in order to understand the impact of this proposal.
As of third quarter 2012, there were approximately 5,600 commercial banking organizations in the U.S. The bulk of these—roughly 5,500—were community banks with assets of less than $10 billion. These community-focused organizations accounted for 98.6 percent of all banks but only 12 percent of total industry assets. Another group numbering nearly 70 banking organizations—with assets of between $10 billion and $250 billion—accounted for 1.2 percent of banks, while controlling 19 percent of industry assets. The remaining group, the megabanks—with assets of between $250 billion and $2.3 trillion—was made up of a mere 12 institutions. These dozen behemoths accounted for roughly 0.2 percent of all banks, but they held 69 percent of industry assets.
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What does this mean numerically?
As the most recent weekly H.8 statement shows, there was $11.25 trillion in total assets at domestically chartered commercial banks. Which means that just 12 banks now control some $7.76 trillion.
And that is Tim Geithner's true legacy: the "0.2%" now control 69% of everything.
But wait, this is just the asset side. What about the liabilities that these assets support, and especially the over the counter derivative side?
Well, according to the latest Q3 OCC report, the total amount of derivative exposure at just the Top 4 banks is now some $212 trillion, or 93.2% of the total $227 trillion in outstanding US derivatives.
To summarize: the top 12 banks control 69% of all financial assets, some $7.8 trillion yet just the top 4 are responsible for 93.2% of all derivative exposure.
A job well done, Mr Geithner.
And now, can you please head the Federal Reserve when Bernanke retires in one year to finish your job of completely dismantling these here United States and destroying the country's middle class?
Shock claim: Obama only wants military leaders who 'will fire on U.S. citizens'
http://www.examiner.com/article/shock-claim-obama-only-wants-military-leaders-who-will-fire-on-u-s-citizens?cid=db_articles
On Monday, renowned author and humanitarian Dr. Jim Garrow made a shocking claim about what we can expect to see in Obama's second term.
Garrow made the following Facebook post:
I have just been informed by a former senior military leader that Obama is using a new “litmus test” in determining who will stay and who must go in his military leaders. Get ready to explode folks. “The new litmus test of leadership in the military is if they will fire on US citizens or not.” Those who will not are being removed.
So, who is the source?
Garrow replied: “The man who told me this is one of America’s foremost military heroes.”
Understand, this is not coming from Alex Jones or Jesse Ventura, or from anyone else the left often dismisses with great ease.
Garrow is a well-respected activist and has spent much of his life rescuing infant girls from China, babies who would be killed under that country's one-child policy. He was also nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
His bio on Amazon.com reads:
Dr. James Garrow is the author of The Pink Pagoda: One Man’s Quest to End Gendercide in China. He has spent over $25 million over the past sixteen years rescuing an estimated 40,000 baby Chinese girls from near-certain death under China’s one-child-per-couple policy by facilitating international adoptions. He is the founder and executive director of the Bethune Institute’s Pink Pagoda schools, private English-immersion schools for Chinese children. Today he runs 168 schools with nearly 6,300 employees.
This comes on the heels of Sunday's report in the Washington Free Beacon (WFB) that the head of Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis is being dismissed by Obama and will leave his post in March.
The WFB article states:
“Word on the national security street is that General James Mattis is being given the bum’s rush out of his job as commander of Central Command, and is being told to vacate his office several months earlier than planned.”
Did Gen. Mattis refuse to "fire on U.S. citizens?"
Looks like this was just a typical stock selling pinkie scam all along. I'll be entering the names of the principles in my scammers file for future reference. Don't need the losses for the tax year or I would have sold out already with everyone else. Best of luck in the future for all here.
..........al
Tick, Tick, Tick. eom
s35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/35-statistics-about-the-working-poor-in-america-that-will-blow-your-mind
In America tonight, tens of millions of men and women will struggle to get to sleep because they are stressed out about not making enough money even though they are working as hard as they possibly can. They are called "the working poor", and their numbers are absolutely exploding. As a recent Gallup poll showed, Americans are more concerned about the economy than they are about anything else. But why are Americans so stressed out about our economic situation if things are supposedly getting better? Well, the truth is that unemployment is not actually going down, and the real unemployment numbers are actually much worse than what is officially being reported by the government. But unemployment is only part of the story. Most American workers are still able to find jobs, but an increasing proportion of them are not able to make ends meet at the end of the month. Our economy continues to bleed good paying middle class jobs, and to a large degree those jobs are being replaced by low income jobs. Approximately one-fourth of all American workers make 10 dollars an hour or less at this point, and we see them all around us every day. They flip our burgers, they cut our hair and they take our money at the supermarket. In many homes, both parents are working multiple jobs, and yet when a child gets sick or a car breaks down they find that they don't have enough money to pay the bill. Many of these families have gone into tremendous amounts of debt in order to try to stay afloat, but once you get caught in a cycle of debt it can be incredibly difficult to break out of that.
So what is the solution? Well, the easy answer would be that we need the U.S. economy to start producing more good paying jobs, but that is easier said than done. Our big corporations continue to ship huge numbers of good paying manufacturing jobs out of the country, and millions of Americans have been forced to scramble to find whatever work is available. Today, there are so many very talented American workers that are trapped in low wage work. According to the Working Poor Families Project, "about one-fourth of adults in low-income working families were employed in just eight occupations, as cashiers, cooks, health aids, janitors, maids, retail salespersons, waiters and waitresses, or drivers." A lot of those people could do so much more for society, but they don't have the opportunity.
Sadly, the percentage of low paying jobs in our economy continues to increase with each passing year, so this is a problem that is only going to get worse. So don't look down on the working poor. The good paying job that you have right now could disappear at any time and you could end up joining their ranks very soon.
The following are 35 statistics about the working poor in America that will blow your mind...
#1 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income".
#2 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 57 percent of all American children live in a home that is either "poor" or "low income".
#3 Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among "the working poor". Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.
#4 Back in 2007, 21 million U.S. children lived in "working poor" homes. Today, that number is up to 23.5 million.
#5 In Arkansas, Mississippi and New Mexico, more than 40 percent all of working families are considered to be "low income".
#6 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#7 Half of all American workers earn $505 or less per week.
#8 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.
#9 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
#10 Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.
#11 Median household income for families with children dropped by a whopping $6,300 between 2001 and 2011.
#12 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#13 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
#14 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
#15 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.
#16 Low income families spend about 8.6 percent of their incomes on gasoline. Other families spend about 2.1 percent.
#17 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.
#18 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.
#19 Millions of working poor families in America end up taking on debt in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, but before too long they find themselves in a debt trap that they can never escape. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the average debt burden for U.S. households that earn $20,000 a year or less "more than doubled to $26,000 between 2001 and 2010".
#20 In 1989, the debt to income ratio of the average American family was about 58 percent. Today it is up to 154 percent.
#21 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans households on average have 288 times the amount of wealth that the average middle class American family does.
#22 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
#23 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.
#24 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.
#25 Sadly, the bottom 60 percent of all Americans own just 2.3 percent of all the financial wealth in the United States.
#26 The average CEO now makes approximately 350 times as much as the average American worker makes.
#27 Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.
#28 Today, 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.
#29 The number of families in the United States living on 2 dollars a day or less more than doubled between 1996 and 2011.
#30 The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
#31 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
#32 More than one out of every four children in the United States is enrolled in the food stamp program.
#33 Incredibly, a higher percentage of children is living in poverty in America today than was the case back in 1975.
#34 If you can believe it, the federal government hands out money to 128 million Americans every single month.
#35 Federal spending on welfare has reached nearly a trillion dollars a year, and it is being projected that it will increase by another 80 percent over the next decade.
It Begins: Bundesbank To Commence Repatriating Gold From New York Fed
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-14/it-begins-bundesbank-commence-repatriating-gold-new-york-fed
In what could be a watershed moment for the price, provenance, and future of physical gold, not to mention the "stability" of the entire monetary regime based on rock solid, undisputed "faith and credit" in paper money, German Handelsblatt reports in an exclusive that the long suffering German gold, all official 3,396 tons of it, is about to be moved. Specifically, it is about to be partially moved out of the New York Fed, where the majority, or 45% of it is currently stored, as well as the entirety of the 11% of German gold held with the Banque de France, and repatriated back home to Buba in Frankfurt, where just 31% of it is held as of this moment. And while it is one thing for a "crazy, lunatic" dictator such as Hugo Chavez to pull his gold out of the Bank of England, it is something entirely different, and far less dismissible, when the bank with the second most official gold reserves in the world proceeds to formally pull some of its gold from the bank with the most. In brief: this is a momentous development, one which may signify that the regime of mutual assured and very much telegraphed - because if the central banks don't have faith in one another, why should anyone else? - trust in central banks by other central banks is ending.
Much more importantly, it is being telegraphed as such, with Buba fully aware of just what the consequences of this (first partial, and then full; and certainly full vis-a-vis the nouveau socialist regime of Francois Hollande which will soon hold zero German gold) repatriation will be in a global monetary arena, which is already scraping by on the last traces of faith in a monetary system that is slowly but surely dying but first diluting itself to oblivion. And in simple game theory terms, the first party to defect from the prisoner's dilemma of all the bulk of global gold being held by the Fed, defects best. Then the second. Then the third. Until, in this particular case, the last central bank to pull its gold from the NY Fed and the other 2 primary depositories of developed world gold, London and Paris, just happens to discover their gold was never there to begin with, and instead served as collateral to paper gold subsequently rehypothecated several hundred times, and whose ultimate ownership deed is long gone.
It would be very ironic, if the Bundesbank, which many had assumed had bent over backwards to accommodate Mario Draghi's Goldmanesque demands to allow implicit monetization of peripheral nations' debts has just "returned the favor" by launching the greatest physical gold scramble of all time.
From Handelsblatt:
Die Bundesbank hat ein neues Konzept ausgearbeitet, wo sie künftig ihre Goldreserven lagern will. Nach Informationen des Handelsblatts (Dienstausgabe) sieht dieses Konzept, das am kommenden Mittwoch bekanntgegeben werden soll, vor, den heimischen Standort aufzuwerten, in New York dafür weniger Gold zu lagern und überhaupt kein Gold mehr in Paris zu horten.
Derzeit lagert das Gold der Bundesbank ihren Angaben zufolge in New York, London, Paris und Frankfurt. In der amerikanischen Notenbank Fed lagern 45 Prozent der insgesamt 3.396 Tonnen Gold, in der Bank of England in London 13 Prozent, in der Banque de France in Paris elf Prozent und im Hauptsitz in Frankfurt 31 Prozent. Diese Verteilung soll sich nun ändern.
We present it in the original for fear of losing something in translation, but in broad English terms the above reads as follows:
The German Bundesbank is developing a new approach as to where its gold will be stored. According to exclusive information, to be fully announced on Wednesday, the bank will in the future hold less gold in the New York Fed, and no more hold in Paris (Banque de France). As a result, the distribution of German gold, of which 45% is held in New York, 13% in London, 11% in Paris and 31% in Frankfurt, is about to change.
There is no need to explain why this is huge news (for those who have not followed our series on the concerns and issue plaguing German gold can catch up here, here, here, here, and certainly here) . At least no need for us to explain. Instead we will let the Bundesbank do the explanation. The following section is the answer provided by the Bundesbank itself in late October in response to the question why it does not move the gold back to Germany:
The reasons for storing gold reserves with foreign partner central banks are historical since, at the time, gold at these trading centres was transferred to the Bundesbank. To be more specific: in October 1951 the Bank deutscher Länder, the Bundesbank’s predecessor, purchased its first gold for DM 2.5 million; that was 529 kilograms at the time. By 1956, the gold reserves had risen to DM 6.2 billion, or 1,328 tonnes; upon its foundation in 1957, the Bundesbank took over these reserves. No further gold was added until the 1970s. During that entire period, we had nothing but the best of experiences with our partners in New York, London and Paris. There was never any doubt about the security of Germany’s gold. In future, we wish to continue to keep gold at international gold trading centres so that, when push comes to shove, we can have it available as a reserve asset as soon as possible. Gold stored in your home safe is not immediately available as collateral in case you need foreign currency. Take, for instance, the key role that the US dollar plays as a reserve currency in the global financial system. The gold held with the New York Fed can, in a crisis, be pledged with the Federal Reserve Bank as collateral against US dollar-denominated liquidity. Similar pound sterling liquidity could be obtained by pledging the gold that is held with the Bank of England.
And in case the above was not clear enough, below is the speech Buba's Andreas Dobret delivered to none other than NY Fed's Bill Dudley in early November:
Please let me also comment on the bizarre public discussion we are currently facing in Germany on the safety of our gold deposits outside Germany – a discussion which is driven by irrational fears.
In this context, I wish to warn against voluntarily adding fuel to the general sense of uncertainty among the German public in times like these by conducting a “phantom debate” on the safety of our gold reserves.
The arguments raised are not really convincing. And I am glad that this is common sense for most Germans. Following the statement by the President of the Federal Court of Auditors in Germany, the discussion is now likely to come to an end – and it should do so before it causes harm to the excellent relationship between the Bundesbank and the US Fed.
Throughout these sixty years, we have never encountered the slightest problem, let alone had any doubts concerning the credibility of the Fed [ZH may, and likely will, soon provide a few historical facts which will cast some serious doubts on this claim. Very serious doubts]. And for this, Bill, I would like to thank you personally. I am also grateful for your uncomplicated cooperation in so many matters. The Bundesbank will remain the Fed’s trusted partner in future, and we will continue to take advantage of the Fed’s services by storing some of our currency reserves as gold in New York.
Incidentally, what Zero Hedge did provide after this article, was factual evidence that the Buba's very much "trusted partner" had been skimming it on physical gold deliveries on at least one occasion, in "Exclusive: Bank Of England To The Fed: "No Indication Should, Of Course, Be Given To The Bundesbank..."
So we wonder: what changed in the three months between November and now, that has caused such a dramatic about face at the Bundesbank, and that in light of all of the above, will make is explicitly very unambigous that the act of gold repatriation, assuming of course that Handelsblatt did not mischaracterize what is happening and misreport the facts, means the "excellent relationship" between the Fed and Buba, not to mention Banque de France which will shortly hold precisely zero German gold, has just collapsed.
Also, if the Bundesbank is first, who is next?
Finally, once the scramble to satisfy physical gold deliverable claims manifests itself in the market, we can't help but wonder what will happen to the price of gold: both paper and physical?
If we allow the gov't to take away our 2nd amendment rights, in anyone's opinion which amendment will be next on the list for nullification? Food for thought?
..........al
The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power
By George Friedman
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Last week I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe. I received a great deal of feedback, with Europeans agreeing that this is the core problem and Americans arguing that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.
At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.
The Crisis of the American Middle Class
The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000. Take-home income is a bit less than $40,000 when Social Security and state and federal taxes are included. That means a monthly income, per household, of about $3,300. It is urgent to bear in mind that half of all American households earn less than this. It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner -- normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker -- and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.
Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher. At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and cl osing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.
And this is for the median. Those below him -- half of all households -- would be shut out of what is considered middle-class life, with the house, the car and the other associated amenities. Those amenities shift upward on the scale for people with at least $70,000 in income. The basics might be available at the median level, given favorable individual circumstance, but below that life becomes surprisingly meager, even in the range of the middle class and certainly what used to be called the lower-middle class.
The Expectation of Upward Mobility
I should pause and mention that this was one of the fundamental causes of the 2007-2008 subprime lending crisis. People below the median took out loans with deferred interest with the expectation that their incomes would continue the rise that was traditional since World War II. The caricature of the borrower as irresponsible misses the point. The expectation of rising real incomes was built into the American culture, and many assumed based on that that the rise would resume in five years. When it didn't they were trapped, but given history, they were not making an irresponsible assumption.
American history was always filled with the assumption that upward mobility was possible. The Midwest and West opened land that could be exploited, and the massive industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries opened opportunities. There was a systemic expectation of upward mobility built into American culture and reality.
The Great Depression was a shock to the system, and it wasn't solved by the New Deal, nor even by World War II alone. The next drive for upward mobility came from post-war programs for veterans, of whom there were more than 10 million. These programs were instrumental in creating post-industrial America, by creating a class of suburban professionals. There were three programs that were critical:
1. The GI Bill, which allowed veterans to go to college after the war, becoming professionals frequently several notches above their parents.
2. The part of the GI Bill that provided federally guaranteed mortgages to veterans, allowing low and no down payment mortgages and low interest rates to graduates of publicly funded universities.
3. The federally funded Interstate Highway System, which made access to land close to but outside of cities easier, enabling both the dispersal of populations on inexpensive land (which made single-family houses possible) and, later, the dispersal of business to the suburbs.
There were undoubtedly many other things that contributed to this, but these three not only reshaped America but also created a new dimension to the upward mobility that was built into American life from the beginning. Moreover, these programs were all directed toward veterans, to whom it was acknowledged a debt was due, or were created for military reasons (the Interstate Highway System was funded to enable the rapid movement of troops from coast to coast, which during World War II was found to be impossible). As a result, there was consensus around the moral propriety of the programs.
The subprime fiasco was rooted in the failure to understand that the foundations of middle class life were not under temporary pressure but something more fundamental. Where a single earner could support a middle class family in the generation after World War II, it now took at least two earners. That meant that the rise of the double-income family corresponded with the decline of the middle class. The lower you go on the income scale, the more likely you are to be a single mother. That shift away from social pressure for two parent homes was certainly part of the problem.
Re-engineering the Corporation
But there was, I think, the crisis of the modern corporation. Corporations provided long-term employment to the middle class. It was not unusual to spend your entire life working for one. Working for a corporation, you received yearly pay increases, either as a union or non-union worker. The middle class had both job security and rising income, along with retirement and other benefits. Over the course of time, the culture of the corporation diverged from the realities, as corporate productivity lagged behind costs and the corporations became more and more dysfunctional and ultimately unsupportable. In addition, the corporations ceased focusing on doing one thing well and instead became conglomerates, with a management frequently unable to keep up with the complexity of multiple lines of business.
For these and many other reasons, the corporation became increasingly inefficient, and in the terms of the 1980s, they had to be re-engineered -- which meant taken apart, pared down, refined and refocused. And the re-engineering of the corporation, designed to make them agile, meant that there was a permanent revolution in business. Everything was being reinvented. Huge amounts of money, managed by people whose specialty was re-engineering companies, were deployed. The choice was between total failure and radical change. From the point of view of the individual worker, this frequently meant the same thing: unemployment. From the view of the economy, it meant the creation of value whether through breaking up companies, closing some of them or sending jobs overseas. It was designed to increase the total efficiency, and it worked for the most part.
This is where the disjuncture occurred. From the point of view of the investor, they had saved the corporation from total meltdown by redesigning it. From the point of view of the workers, some retained the jobs that they would have lost, while others lost the jobs they would have lost anyway. But the important thing is not the subjective bitterness of those who lost their jobs, but something more complex.
As the permanent corporate jobs declined, more people were starting over. Some of them were starting over every few years as the agile corporation grew more efficient and needed fewer employees. That meant that if they got new jobs it would not be at the munificent corporate pay rate but at near entry-level rates in the small companies that were now the growth engine. As these companies failed, were bought or shifted direction, they would lose their jobs and start over again. Wages didn't rise for them and for long periods they might be unemployed, never to get a job again in their now obsolete fields, and certainly not working at a company for the next 20 years.
The restructuring of inefficient companies did create substantial value, but that value did not flow to the now laid-off workers. Some might flow to the remaining workers, but much of it went to the engineers who restructured the companies and the investors they represented. Statistics reveal that, since 1947 (when the data was first compiled), corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic product are now at their highest level, while wages as a percentage of GDP are now at their lowest level. It was not a question of making the economy more efficient -- it did do that -- it was a question of where the value accumulated. The upper segment of the wage curve and the investors continued to make money. The middle class divided into a segment that entered the upper-middle class, while another faction sank into the lower-middle class.
American society on the whole was never egalitarian. It always accepted that there would be substantial differences in wages and wealth. Indeed, progress was in some ways driven by a desire to emulate the wealthy. There was also the expectation that while others received far more, the entire wealth structure would rise in tandem. It was also understood that, because of skill or luck, others would lose.
What we are facing now is a structural shift, in which the middle class' center, not because of laziness or stupidity, is shifting downward in terms of standard of living. It is a structural shift that is rooted in social change (the breakdown of the conventional family) and economic change (the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage).
The inherent crisis rests in an increasingly efficient economy and a population that can't consume what is produced because it can't afford the products. This has happened numerous times in history, but the United States, excepting the Great Depression, was the counterexample.
Obviously, this is a massive political debate, save that political debates identify problems without clarifying them. In political debates, someone must be blamed. In reality, these processes are beyond even the government's ability to control. On one hand, the traditional corporation was beneficial to the workers until it collapsed under the burden of its costs. On the other hand, the efficiencies created threaten to undermine consumption by weakening the effective demand among half of society.
The Long-Term Threat
The greatest danger is one that will not be faced for decades but that is lurking out there. The United States was built on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all ships. That has not been the case for the past generation, and there is no indication that this socio-economic reality will change any time soon. That means that a core assumption is at risk. The problem is that social stability has been built around this assumption -- not on the assumption that everyone is owed a living, but the assumption that on the whole, all benefit from growing productivity and efficiency.
If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated. Other superpowers such as Britain or Rome did not have the idea of a perpetually improving condition of the middle class as a core value. The United States does. If it loses that, it loses one of the pillars of its geopolitical power.
The left would argue that the solution is for laws to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class. That would increase consumption but, depending on the scope, would threaten the amount of capital available to investment by the transfer itself and by eliminating incentives to invest. You can't invest what you don't have, and you won't accept the risk of investment if the payoff is transferred away from you.
The agility of the American corporation is critical. The right will argue that allowing the free market to function will fix the problem. The free market doesn't guarantee social outcomes, merely economic ones. In other words, it may give more efficiency on the whole and grow the economy as a whole, but by itself it doesn't guarantee how wealth is distributed. The left cannot be indifferent to the historical consequences of extreme redistribution of wealth. The right cannot be indifferent to the political consequences of a middle-class life undermined, nor can it be indifferent to half the population's inability to buy the products and services that businesses sell.
The most significant actions made by governments tend to be unintentional. The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates. The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership. The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.
It is unclear how the private sector can deal with the problem of pressure on the middle class. Government programs frequently fail to fulfill even minimal intentions while squandering scarce resources. The United States has been a fortunate country, with solutions frequently emerging in unexpected ways.
It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy. Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again, but it usually gets lucky when it is frightened. And at this point it isn't frightened but angry, believing that if only its own solutions were employed, this problem and all others would go away. I am arguing that the conventional solutions offered by all sides do not yet grasp the magnitude of the problem -- that the foundation of American society is at risk -- and therefore all sides are content to repeat what has been said before.
People who are smarter and luckier than I am will have to craft the solution. I am simply pointing out the potential consequences of the problem and the inadequacy of all the ideas I have seen so far.
America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Totalitarian Society
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/america-is-being-systematically-transformed-into-a-totalitarian-society
If someone were to ask you for an example of a “totalitarian society”, how would you respond? Most Americans would probably think of horribly repressive regimes such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, East Germany or North Korea, but the truth is that there is one society that has far more rules and regulations than any of those societies ever dreamed of having. In the United States today, our lives are governed by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations that govern even the smallest details of our lives, and more laws, rules and regulations are constantly being added. On January 1st, thousands of restrictive new laws went into effect all over America, but most Americans have become so accustomed to the matrix of control that has been constructed all around them that it does not even bother them when even more rules and regulations are put into place. In fact, a growing number of Americans have become totally convinced that “freedom” and “liberty” must be tightly restricted for the good of society and that “the free market” is inherently dangerous. On the national, state and local levels, Americans continue to elect elitist control freaks that are very eager to tell all the rest of us how to run virtually every aspect of our lives. According to Merriam-Webster, the following is one of the ways that the word “totalitarian” is defined: “of or relating to a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures”. And that is exactly what we are witnessing in America today – nearly all aspects of our lives and of the economy are very tightly controlled by a bunch of control freaks that just keep tightening that control with each passing year. We still like to call ourselves “the land of the free”, but the truth is that we are being transformed into a totalitarian society unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Where will we end up eventually if we keep going down this road?
If you still believe that America is “free”, just consider some of the things that are illegal in America today…
-Starting on January 1st, it is now illegal to make or import 75 watt incandescent light bulbs anywhere in the United States.
-In Oregon, it is illegal to collect rainwater that falls on your own property.
-In New Jersey, it is illegal to have an “unrestrained” cat or dog in your vehicle while you are driving.
-If you milk your cow and sell some of the milk to your neighbor, you could end up having your home raided by federal agents.
-In Miami Beach, Florida you must recycle your trash properly or face huge fines.
-All over the United States, cops are shutting down lemonade stands run by children because they don’t have the proper “permits”.
-Down in Tulsa, Oklahoma one unemployed woman had her survival garden brutally ripped out and carted away by government thugs because it did not conform to regulations.
-Over in Massachusetts, all children in daycare centers are mandated by state law to brush their teeth after lunch. In fact, the state even provides the fluoride toothpaste for the children.
-At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was arrested for spraying herself with perfume.
-A 13-year-old student at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was arrested by police for burping in class.
-All over the United States cities have passed laws that actually make it illegal to feed the homeless.
With each passing year, the number of decisions that we are allowed to make for ourselves gets smaller and smaller.
This includes some really fundamental things such as basic health decisions.
For example, the CDC will soon be recommending that nearly every single American be vaccinated for the flu every single year. The following is from a recent Natural News article…
An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that every person be vaccinated for the seasonal flu yearly, except in a few cases where the vaccine is known to be unsafe.
“Now no one should say ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’” said CDC flu specialist Anthony Fiore.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 11-0 with one abstention to recommend yearly flu vaccination for everyone except for children under the age of six months, whose immune systems have not yet developed enough for vaccination to be safe, and people with egg allergies or other health conditions that are known to make flu vaccines hazardous.
These “recommendations” are often made into mandatory requirements by school districts and employers all over the country. Will employers all over the nation soon require all of their employees to take these vaccines each year based on these CDC “recommendations”? This is already happening in the healthcare field. Hundreds of healthcare professionals all over the nation are being fired for refusing to take certain vaccines. It doesn’t matter that there is a tremendous amount of evidence that many of these vaccines are dangerous. Many health professionals today are being faced with the choice of either submitting to the “recommendations” of the “experts” or losing their jobs.
We see this kind of “creeping totalitarianism” in the business world as well. As I have written about previously, small businesses all over the country are being absolutely suffocated by mountains of laws, rules and regulations.
One of the biggest changes that small businesses will be dealing with in the next couple of years is Obamacare. Many small businesses have been cutting back hours in an attempt to get around the new requirements contained in Obamacare. The following is one example from a news story that was published earlier this week…
Around 100 local Wendy’s workers have learned their hours are being cut. A spokesperson says a new health care law is to blame.
“Thirty-six to 37 hours a week.” That’s how many hours T.J. Growbeck works at the 84th and Giles Wendy’s restaurant. The money he earns helps him pay for the basics, but that’s not the case for all his co-workers. “There are some people doing it trying to get by.”
The company has announced that all non-management positions will have their hours reduced to 28 a week. Gary Burdette, Vice President of Operations for the local franchise, says the cuts are coming because the new Affordable Health Care Act requires employers to offer health insurance to employees working 32-38 hours a week. Under the current law they are not considered full time and that as a small business owner, he can’t afford to stay in operation and pay for everyone’s health insurance.
But the IRS has announced that it is going to make it very hard for employers to avoid these new Obamacare regulations. According to new IRS rules, all firms that “have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees” will be required to provide healthcare for their employees and their dependents. The following is from a recent New York Times article…
Under the rules, employers must offer coverage to employees in 2014 and must offer coverage to dependents as well, starting in 2015.
The new rules apply to employers that have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees. A full-time employee is a person employed on average at least 30 hours a week. And 100 half-time employees are considered equivalent to 50 full-time employees.
Thus, the government said, an employer will be subject to the new requirement if it has 40 full-time employees working 30 hours a week and 20 half-time employees working 15 hours a week.
So conceivably an employer could have only part-time employees and still be required to provide healthcare coverage under Obamacare.
Of course many small businesses will not be able to afford to do this, so expect to see a significant number of them shut down or to try to survive with skeleton crews in 2014 and 2015.
As the number of laws, rules and regulations that govern our lives continues to multiply, the control freaks that run things will continue to try to use technology to watch us all and make sure that we are obeying their rules.
One way that they are doing this is with automated traffic cameras. Of course much of the time the performance of these cameras is terribly flawed. Just consider the following example which recently appeared in the Baltimore Sun…
The Baltimore City speed camera ticket alleged that the four-door Mazda wagon was going 38 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone — and that owner Daniel Doty owed $40 for the infraction.
But the Mazda wasn’t speeding.
It wasn’t even moving.
The two photos printed on the citation as evidence of speeding show the car was idling at a red light with its brake lights illuminated. A three-second video clip also offered as evidence shows the car motionless, as traffic flows by on a cross street.
But even though technology sometimes fails, the control freaks that run things seem absolutely obsessed with using it to monitor us. After all, there are so many of us and watching all of us is a very big job.
For example, did you know that listening devices are being installed on public buses all over the United States? The following is from a recent Wired article…
Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.
The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.
According to the article, some of these systems are incredibly advanced and pair the audio that is being recorded with video that is being taken at the same time…
In Eugene, Oregon, the Daily found, transit officials requested microphones that would be capable of “distilling clear conversations from the background noise of other voices, wind, traffic, windshields wipers and engines” and also wanted at least five audio channels spread across each bus that would be “paired with one or more camera images and recorded synchronously with the video for simultaneous playback.”
But that is just one example of how the surveillance of the American people is rapidly growing. For many more examples, please see my previous article entitled “29 Signs That The Elite Are Transforming Society Into A Total Domination Control Grid“.
If America continues down the path that it is on right now, the United States will eventually be transformed into a “Big Brother society” that is far more restrictive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of.
We need a fundamental cultural revolution in this nation. We need a revival of the principals of liberty and freedom that were so important during the founding days of this country. We need to teach people that even though liberty and freedom may be unpredictable at times, such an environment is greatly preferable to a society where all of our decisions are made for us by a tiny elite.
Please share this article with as many people as you can. Time is running out, and we need to wake up as many as we can while there is still time.
Caveat Emptor. eom.
A novel idea. Hang em all along with their corrupt crony politicians. Charge a pay per view and I believe the proceeds could go a long way to pay down the national debt.
..........al
Alasdair Macleod's Outlook for 2013
S
http://www.goldmoney.com/gold-research/alasdair-macleod/alasdair-macleod-s-outlook-for-2013.html
2012-DEC-30
I have not faced the prospect of a new year with so much trepidation as when I contemplate what is in store for 2013. Systemic risks abound, which of themselves are not the main story, only milestones on the road to final currency destruction, unless governments somehow regain their senses.
To help understand the perils of 2013 I shall give them their background context first before listing them individually. No such list can be exhaustive or temporally sequenced, but all on it have the same root: the long-term accumulation of a burden of unsupportable debt.
This is a story that started with the end of the First World War, and involves a world which replaced laissez-faire with political motivation in economic and monetary affairs, moving away from wealth-creation into wealth-destruction in the cause of the common good. This was what motivated Keynes. In his Concluding Notes to his General Theory he said as much: he looked forward to the “euthanasia of the rentier” (a term for saver he intended to convey disdain), to be replaced by “communal saving by the agency of the state to be maintained at a level which will allow the growth of capital up to the point where it ceases to be scarce”. Monetarists in charge of central banks join Keynes in this objective, acting as the agency by which savings are destroyed and capital is made to be no longer scarce.
I shall not go into business cycle theory, beyond to say that government and central bank manipulation of their economies and fiat monies has succeeded in deferring the bankruptcies and liquidation of accumulated malinvestments, to the point where their cost can no longer be sustained. By 2007/08 the accumulation of debt was too large for distorted, burdened and weakened economies to support. And this is not just a single-country problem, because it has become a problem everywhere. The United States, the United Kingdom and the eurozone countries reached this terminal point together while Japan had been waiting in the wings for them to catch up. These nations alone account for about half global GDP. The banks to which all this debt is owed are financially interconnected and also linked to other banks in countries where the debt bubble is not so acute.
The coincidence of all nations following the same path to destruction is the result of international coordination that has increasingly dominated global politics since the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. The response to the financial crisis of 2008 was to draw in more participants, leading to the G20 becoming the post-crisis forum for international economic coordination. Never in modern history have we seen so many governments agreeing to make the same mistakes; and it is hard to see, with the underlying inter-connectivity of their banks, how there is room for dissent.
The global banking system for the last five years has struggled with insufficient capital, over-valued collateral, and an underlying tendency for balance sheets to deflate. Their respective governments through their central banks are back-stopping these insolvent institutions by flooding them with both sovereign debt and fiat money, and manipulating credit markets to maintain valuations. Take these distortions away and we see the private sector economy still contracting four years after the credit bubble burst, a fact that is concealed by the expansion of both government spending and fiat money. Otherwise, bank balance sheets would have contracted, wiping out their aggregate capital, in some cases several times over.
Governments do not generally realise they are in the midst of an economic collapse. The manipulation of credit, money and prices has made economic calculation impossible. There is little difference in this respect between the communism of failed states in the past and the regulated and planned economies of today, except perhaps in the degree of state interference. As happened with the Soviet Union, eventually ordinary people, by acting in their individual interests, will bring about the downfall of their governments. It is bound to happen unless governments reverse course.
That is a very brief summary of the global crisis, and being fully committed to Keynesian fallacies it is immensely difficult for governments to turn back. In the longer term, government health and welfare spending is also escalating beyond control. Furthermore attempts to reduce persistent budget deficits through higher taxes on the private sector will only depress economic activity, reducing tax revenues. The majority of economists, the neo-classicists who misunderstand the very basis of their subject, seem unable to grasp the origin of the problem they themselves have helped governments to create.
Systemic risks in 2013
Banks
Banks are interconnected through interbank and cross-border loans. They are also linked by counterparty risk in derivatives and by off-balance-sheet hypothecation of collateral. Collateral is always someone else’s property used and reused profitably without their involvement and often knowledge. The level of bank capital behind on- and off-balance sheet liabilities is inadequate to cover either hidden losses, systemic contagion or a resumed downturn in the global economy. Hidden losses are those covered up by earlier changes in accounting rules and from malinvestments not yet recognised. Systemic risks include sovereign defaults, significant falls in collateral values, and counterparty failure in derivative markets. And the slump in the private sector, stripped out from national statistics, continues.
The banks have become corrupted institutions continually on the verge of failure. They serve themselves and their governments at the expense of their customers. Nevertheless they will continue to be rescued by central banks through further monetary expansion and by state guarantees irrespective of the cost. This will be particularly dangerous for countries with large bank balance sheets relative to their GDP, such as the UK and Switzerland.
Sovereign countries
The US economy, as well as facing the immediate fiscal cliff crisis, is caught between the economically destructive effects of increasing taxes, and rapidly escalating health and welfare costs. The economic recovery upon which forecasts of future deficits depend is made more remote by erroneous economic and monetary policies, and there is little appetite to address mandated spending. The outlook is therefore one of deteriorating government finances, and a possible need to raise interest rates sooner than expected to curb the inevitable price-inflation effects of accelerated money-printing.
The eurozone is clearly in a financial and economic crisis. The ECB is prepared to do all that is necessary to stop the problems of Greece being replicated elsewhere, but it is almost certainly too late. The burden of the euro-system on Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Austria is far too great for them to bear, and we can expect mounting political dissent in this election year for Germany. In 2013 we should see the combined problems of Spain, Italy and France begin to undermine the value of their sovereign debt. Their bonds are over-valued, and owe their status mostly to Basel Committee rules on capital adequacy and on misplaced confidence in the ECB. The eurozone’s banking system is under-capitalised and already bankrupt on realistic assumptions.
In Japan the Bank of Japan faces irreconcilable difficulties. With one quadrillion yen of government debt the new government is now forcing the BoJ to finance its continuing deficit by monetary means. Furthermore savers are now dissaving at an accelerating rate, leading to a developing trade deficit. Japan at last appears to be entering the final stage of her economic collapse, which started with the end of her bubble exactly 24 years ago.
The UK faces similar problems to the US, with taxes actually designed to discourage wealth, and she faces intractable welfare and health costs. Her government is politically weak with a coalition that prevents all attempts to move away from social priorities towards economic reality. She is also exposed to a disproportionately large finance and banking sector with high international exposure, particularly to the eurozone, which will be an unsupportable burden on the state if the banking crisis develops further in 2013.
Watch out for developments in the following
Inflation, which will pick up unexpectedly if there is a shift of preference from money to goods, the consequence being accelerating stagflation. Bear in mind that governments usually under-report inflation, and prices in the US, UK and other nations are already increasing at a significantly faster rate than CPI measures suggest.
Interest rates, which may have to rise sooner than expected due to inflationary concerns. This being the case, an implosion of asset prices could begin if markets price in rising interest rates before they happen, destroying the ability of central banks to retain control of prices in credit markets.
A further downturn in the US private sector economy, (excluding government).
Rising bond yields for Spain, Italy or France.
Deterioration in Japan’s trade balance and weakness in the yen.
The bursting of bond market bubbles, particularly in the US, UK, Germany, Japan or France.
Crisis meetings by governments and central banks that resolve nothing and only further public understanding of their inadequacies.
Derivative markets, and their exposure to counterparty risk, hypothecation and rehypothecation of collateral.
Silver markets, where there are large short positions held by the bullion banks and so are vulnerable to a vicious bear-squeeze. If this happens a sharp rise in gold prices will also be triggered, and possibly spread to other metals and beyond.
Growing social unrest.
Further clampdowns on personal freedom
Is there a solution?
Yes, but it is unlikely to be taken. All that is required is for enough of the G20 membership to stop destroying wealth, in order to contain near-term global systemic risks. A government that understands this will cut its own spending and obligations, remove taxes from savings and discourage its citizens from relying on state welfare. By removing itself from provision of health and education services, the costs to society will be substantially reduced and they will become focused to provide only what is actually wanted of them. Unnecessary resources will be released to be deployed more effectively elsewhere.
Such a government will learn the value of sound money and its importance for economic calculation, and it will move as a matter of policy towards securing sound money in everything it does. It will understand it has no role in the trinity of consumer, saver and entrepreneur, restricting its role to ensuring that property rights are inviolate. It will dispense with its central bank as a tool for intervening in markets. Interest rates will be set by markets in accordance with users’ needs.
And above all it will remove all government regulations, forcing businesses to value and enhance their own reputations, individuals to make their own choices, and savers to decide for themselves how much to save and who to invest it with.
Conclusion
We are one year closer to a renewed banking and financial crisis, the pace of which is quickening, and which can be expected to turn eventually into a fiat currency collapse. These systemic risks increased in 2012, most notably in the eurozone, but also elsewhere. None of the solutions applied anywhere did any good.
On the evidence to date, it has become less likely any Western government can or will take the right steps to avoid an eventual collapse of their currency, so 2013 is more likely to realise systemic failures than 2012.
The Farce Is Complete: In The Case Of Countrywide, Congress Finds Itself Innocent Of Being "Friends Of Angelo"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-27/farce-complete-case-countrywide-congress-finds-itself-innocent-being-friends-angelo
Just when you thought the seemingly endless rabbit hole of Wall Street-Washington corruption, cronyism, co-option, crime and kickbacks may have finally come to an end, here comes the House Ethic Committee to pronounce that no ethics breaches were found among House members in its investigation involving the scandal surrounding Countrywide "VIP loans" and the "Friends of Angelo." And in just doing so, the House effectively cleared itself of any wrongdoing and that's it, case closed - move along... Move along.
For those who may have forgotten, it was only back in July that yet another House Committee, that for Oversight and Government Reform, found "Countrywide used its VIP Program to aid its lobbying efforts as well as to strengthen its relationship with taxpayer backed Fannie Mae. Countrywide partnered with Fannie Mae in a strategic business alliance that also included joint lobbying efforts." Specifically, the report alleged that:
“The Committee’s investigation found Countrywide lobbyists and CEO Angelo Mozilo used discounted loans as a tool to ingratiate itself with policymakers in an effort to benefit the company’s business interests,” said Issa. “A former lobbyist for Countrywide testified that Members of Congress, staff, and other government officials were directed to the company’s VIP program as part of an effort to create a favorable impression of the company on Capitol Hill. This preferential treatment – that varied depending on the influence of the borrower – was not routinely offered to the public.”
Further, as part of its work, this other Committee found that:
A log of all loans processed by Countrywide’s VIP unit showed 17,979 loans between January 1996 and June 2008. Borrowers included Members and employees of Congress, the White House, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, federal agencies, and other government entities. The log listed hundreds of duplicate loans – the actual number of VIP borrowers was considerably less than 17,979. Lawyers for Bank of America acknowledged that the log may not contain the full roster of VIP borrowers.
Countrywide established the VIP unit in 1991 to process loans for senior Countrywide officials and their friends. Referred to internally as Branch 850, the unit had 13 full-time employees trained to provide enhanced customer service. According to VIP Loan Unit operating procedures, the suite of benefits available to VIP borrowers included program/underwriting and pricing exceptions.
[Former Countrywide lobbyist] Jimmie Williams referred Members of Congress and congressional staff to the company’s VIP desk in California to create a favorable impression of the company on Capitol Hill. To better position himself to lobby Members and staff, Williams made sure they received enhanced customer service.
In approximately 2000, Jimmie Williams began routing Members of Congress and congressional staff who he lobbied to a referral desk in California. Williams understood that the referral desk could handle loans for high-profile clients because the staff there frequently handled loans for celebrities. The referral desk was in fact the VIP unit.
Well, as it turns out, all these findings are now moot because, as the AP, reports, the first Committee, that which allegedly represent Ethics at the House (trying typing that with a straight face), has no power to actually do anything for one simple reason: all the allegations of favored treatment involved loans that were granted so long ago that they fell outside the panel's jurisdiction. I.e., the statute of limitation has expired.
How very convenient - as it turns out Congress was abusing taxpayer money and receiving preferential treatment for years, but sorry, nothing can be done about it. It just happened so very long ago...
There is more:
The committee added, however, that participation in the VIP program did not necessarily mean borrowers received the best loan deal available — and most lawmakers were not even aware they were placed in a VIP unit.
The actions of unnamed House staff members were harshly criticized. Emails indicated they reached out to Countrywide lobbyists for assistance with their personal loans, but those actions also were too old to remain in the committee's jurisdiction. The panel said that if the incidents had been more recent, the staff members could have faced discipline.
Not discipline. Anything but discipline...
The Oversight report named six current and former members of Congress who received what Countrywide referred to as discounts. All of their names had surfaced previously.
The committee has no jurisdiction over actions that occurred more than six years prior to the current Congress — which began in January 2011.
But even if the statute of limitations had not run out, the committee said, inclusion in the VIP program was not by itself a violation of House rules or laws. The panel said it found that Countrywide's "discounts" applied to standard loan rates that were commercially available elsewhere.
"They are not the kind of 'gift' which would be, in and of itself, outside the realm of reasonable market rates for commercially available loans," said the statement issued by Ethics Committee Chairman Jo Bonner, R-Ala., and ranking Democrat Linda Sanchez of California.
Even so, the committee said, members must take steps to ensure they are being treated no differently than a member of the public who is similarly situated.
It gets better:
The committee statement added, "Of greatest concern...was email evidence regarding the specific conduct of some employees...who may have reached out to lobbyists or other government affairs officials at Countrywide for assistance with their personal loans."
In other words the biggest concern was the fact that someone was caught with evidence exposing them red-handed, not that there was gross abrogation of congressional responsibilities, abuse of professional position, and receiving kickbacks in exchange for who knows what actions lobbied on behalf of the one firm that has now cost Bank of America tens of billions in contingent liabilities which have become all too real liabilities, and is in the running for the worst M&A deal of all time.
One really could not make this up if one tried...
So just like that, case closed, and once again in the case of people versus crony capitalism, the people lose.
Merry Christmas to everyone.
............al
Merry Christmas to all here.
...........al
Alert Alert:
Just a reminder, Any talk of politics not related to economics belongs on the YE OT board-
http://investorshub.advfn.com/Your-Economy-OT-Conspiracy-Politics-Religion-Terrorism-War-20090/
It takes cooperation from many people to keep this board geared to news, facts and opinions related to economics. Thanks to all.
............al
The Lie that Prosecuting Bank Fraud Will Destabilize the Economy Is What Is REALLY Destroying the Economy
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-12-22/lie-prosecuting-bank-fraud-will-destabilize-economy-what-really-destroying-ec
Submitted by George Washington on 12/22/2012 23:38 -0500
The Departments of Justice and Treasury are pretending that criminally prosecuting criminal banksters will destabilize the economy.
The exact opposite is true.
Failing to prosecute criminal fraud has been destabilizing the economy since at least 2007 … and will cause huge crashes in the future.
After all, the main driver of economic growth is a strong rule of law.
Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t recover:
The legal system is supposed to be the codification of our norms and beliefs, things that we need to make our system work. If the legal system is seen as exploitative, then confidence in our whole system starts eroding. And that’s really the problem that’s going on.
***
I think we ought to go do what we did in the S&L [crisis] and actually put many of these guys in prison. Absolutely. These are not just white-collar crimes or little accidents. There were victims. That’s the point. There were victims all over the world.
***
Economists focus on the whole notion of incentives. People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.
Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future.
Indeed, professor of law and economics (and chief S&L prosecutor) William Black notes that we’ve known of this dynamic for “hundreds of years”. And see this, this, this and this.
(Review of the data on accounting fraud confirms that fraud goes up as criminal prosecutions go down.)
The Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division told Congress:
Recovery from the fallout of the financial crisis requires important efforts on various fronts, and vigorous enforcement is an essential component, as aggressive and even-handed enforcement will meet the public’s fair expectation that those whose violations of the law caused severe loss and hardship will be held accountable. And vigorous law enforcement efforts will help vindicate the principles that are fundamental to the fair and proper functioning of our markets: that no one should have an unjust advantage in our markets; that investors have a right to disclosure that complies with the federal securities laws; and that there is a level playing field for all investors.
Paul Zak (Professor of Economics and Department Chair, as well as the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and a senior researcher at UCLA) and Stephen Knack (a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Research Department and Public Sector Governance Department) wrote a paper called Trust and Growth, showing that enforcing the rule of law – i.e. prosecuting white collar fraud – is necessary for a healthy economy.
One of the leading business schools in America – the Wharton School of Business – published an essay by a psychologist on the causes and solutions to the economic crisis. Wharton points out that restoring trust is the key to recovery, and that trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable:
According to David M. Sachs, a training and supervision analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, the crisis today is not one of confidence, but one of trust. “Abusive financial practices were unchecked by personal moral controls that prohibit individual criminal behavior, as in the case of [Bernard] Madoff, and by complex financial manipulations, as in the case of AIG.” The public, expecting to be protected from such abuse, has suffered a trauma of loss similar to that after 9/11. “Normal expectations of what is safe and dependable were abruptly shattered,” Sachs noted. “As is typical of post-traumatic states, planning for the future could not be based on old assumptions about what is safe and what is dangerous. A radical reversal of how to be gratified occurred.”
People now feel more gratified saving money than spending it, Sachs suggested. They have trouble trusting promises from the government because they feel the government has let them down.
He framed his argument with a fictional patient named Betty Q. Public, a librarian with two teenage children and a husband, John, who had recently lost his job. “She felt betrayed because she and her husband had invested conservatively and were double-crossed by dishonest, greedy businessmen, and now she distrusted the government that had failed to protect them from corporate dishonesty. Not only that, but she had little trust in things turning around soon enough to enable her and her husband to accomplish their previous goals.
“By no means a sophisticated economist, she knew … that some people had become fantastically wealthy by misusing other people’s money — hers included,” Sachs said. “In short, John and Betty had done everything right and were being punished, while the dishonest people were going unpunished.”
Helping an individual recover from a traumatic experience provides a useful analogy for understanding how to help the economy recover from its own traumatic experience, Sachs pointed out. The public will need to “hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again.” In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again, he argued.
Note that Sachs urges “hold[ing] the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible.” In other words, just “looking forward” and promising to do things differently isn’t enough.
Robert Shiller – one of the top housing experts in the United States – says that the mortgage fraud is a lot like the fraud which occurred during the Great Depression. As Fortune notes:
Shiller said the danger of foreclosuregate — the scandal in which it has come to light that the biggest banks have routinely mishandled homeownership documents, putting the legality of foreclosures and related sales in doubt — is a replay of the 1930s, when Americans lost faith that institutions such as business and government were dealing fairly.
Indeed, it is beyond dispute that bank fraud was one of the main causes of the Great Depression.
Economist James K. Galbraith wrote in the introduction to his father, John Kenneth Galbraith’s, definitive study of the Great Depression, The Great Crash, 1929:
The main relevance of The Great Crash, 1929 to the great crisis of 2008 is surely here. In both cases, the government knew what it should do. Both times, it declined to do it. In the summer of 1929 a few stern words from on high, a rise in the discount rate, a tough investigation into the pyramid schemes of the day, and the house of cards on Wall Street would have tumbled before its fall destroyed the whole economy.
In 2004, the FBI warned publicly of “an epidemic of mortgage fraud.” But the government did nothing, and less than nothing, delivering instead low interest rates, deregulation and clear signals that laws would not be enforced. The signals were not subtle: on one occasion the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision came to a conference with copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. There followed every manner of scheme to fleece the unsuspecting ….
This was fraud, perpetrated in the first instance by the government on the population, and by the rich on the poor.
***
The government that permits this to happen is complicit in a vast crime.
Galbraith also says:
There will have to be full-scale investigation and cleaning up of the residue of that, before you can have, I think, a return of confidence in the financial sector. And that’s a process which needs to get underway.
Galbraith recently said that “at the root of the crisis we find the largest financial swindle in world history”, where “counterfeit” mortgages were “laundered” by the banks.
As he has repeatedly noted, the economy will not recover until the perpetrators of the frauds which caused our current economic crisis are held accountable, so that trust can be restored. See this, this and this.
No wonder Galbraith has said economists should move into the background, and “criminologists to the forefront.”
The bottom line is that the government has it exactly backwards. By failing to prosecute criminal fraud, the government is destabilizing the economy … and ensuring future crashes.
Postscript: Unfortunately, the government made it official policy not to prosecute fraud, even though criminal fraud is the main business model adopted by the giant banks.
Indeed, the government has done everything it can to cover up fraud, and has been actively encouraging criminal fraud and attacking those trying to blow the whistle.
ditto.eom
SILVER ALERT: Geithner Panics and Shuts Down Silver Eagle Supply
http://www.roadtoroota.com/public/1063.cfm?awt_l=BJBrQ&awt_m=3mVLjaUrARAZ85B
So word is flying around about how the US Mint has stopped shipping Silver Eagles. Here's the story:
US Mint Sold Out of Silver Eagles
http://news.coinupdate.com/us-mint-sold-out-of-silver-eagle-bullion-coins-1766/
"Authorized purchasers will be faced with a three week period during which there will be no American Silver Eagle bullion coins available to order from the United States Mint."
"The Mint recently informed authorized purchasers that all remaining inventories of 2012-dated Silver Eagle bullion coins had sold out and no additional coins would be struck. Since the 2013-dated coins will not be available to order until January 7, 2013, this leaves a three week void for the Mint's most popular bullion offering."
This is not the first time that the US Mint has either stopped producing the Silver Eagle or tried to ration them when they ran out of silver blanks but it is the first time that IT MAY NOT BE ILLEGAL!
I have written many letters to the US Mint over the years pointing out that they were in violation of the law by stopping production and they continually scrambled to find some convenient excuse but it never trumped the law stating the they were to mint coins in "quantities sufficient to meet public demand".
Back in July 2010 the writing was on the wall and they knew (because I told them) that the Silver Eagle Program was designed by Barney Frank to destroy the banking cabal so they set about to change the law. Here was the article I wrote back then...
The US Mint Fraud
http://www.roadtoroota.com/public/330.cfm
Last year Congress was coerced into changing the law such that it was now up to the JUDGEMENT of the Treasury Secretary
31USC5112(e)
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5112
(e) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary shall mint and issue, in qualities and quantities that the Secretary determines are sufficient to meet public demand...
So there it is....we have to rely on the Treasury Secretary's JUDGEMENT on whether or not there are enough Silver Eagle coins being Minted to "sufficiently" meet supply.
But we ALSO know that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ORDERED the US Mint NOT to make anymore Silver Eagles this year because he's the only one that has the legal authority to do so!
Something BIG is coming in the next few weeks in silver.
Keep an eye out!
Bix Weir www.RoadtoRoota.com
The Krugerrand is 32.77 mm in diameter and 2.84 mm thick. The Krugerrand's actual weight is 1.0909 troy ounces (33.93 g). It is minted from gold alloy that is 91.67% pure (22 karats), so the coin contains one troy ounce (31.1035 g) of gold. The remaining 8.33% of the coin's weight (2.826 g) is copper (an alloy known historically as crown gold which has long been used for English gold sovereigns), which gives the Krugerrand a more orange appearance than silver-alloyed gold coins. Copper alloy coins are harder and more durable, so they can resist scratches and dents.
I can't say for sure on why the premium is different. I think it might be because it is more of a gold coin than a piece made for collectors.
..........al
Uranium- IMHO as long as the premium isn't too much over spot you will be OK. I've always advocated holding physical. If you can't hold it in your hand you don't own it. Welcome to the board. Personally I like K-rands as the retail is usually pretty close to spot.
...........al
Maybe England will jail a few. Here in the good old USA it will be to big to fail, to big to jail. Business as usual.
..............al
From the Q:
Future Financings
The Company will continue to rely on equity sales of the common shares in order to continue to fund the Company’s business operations. Issuances of additional shares will result in dilution to existing stockholders. There is no assurance that the Company will achieve any additional sales its equity securities or arrange for debt or other financing to fund planned acquisitions and exploration activities. The Company obtained additional financing of approximately $291,300 during the fourth quarter of 2012.
Agreed on the bankruptcy. I read to Q and found a few troubling items in it.This really bothered me:
The Company paid management fees to a company under the control of the President of the Company totaling $35,167, for the quarter ended October 31, 2012
I can think of 3 bad case scenarios.
1. Bankruptcy- appears unlikely at present
2. Share dilution after the R/S- most likely of the three
3. SEC sends a cease trading order due to whatever rules they have broken by not releasing the new shares.- at this point in time, I'd say this is a possibility. I myself will be sending a complaint to the SEC if my new shares are not in my account by Jan 1.
Of course all this can be easily negated with some updated audited financials along with shareholders receiving their tradeable shares.
............al
My Worst Fear
http://www.silverseek.com/commentary/my-worst-fear-8306
Theodore Butler
|
December 17, 2012 - 11:11am
Recently, I have received a good number of emails containing conversations between readers and CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton about the allegations of a silver price manipulation because of the large concentrated COMEX short position held by JPMorgan. Chilton had previously led the move to begin the current silver investigation in September 2008 and has always been quick to respond to those writing to him, a rarity for high officials. I couldn’t help but notice that Commissioner Chilton had recently begun to say things that seemed to try to explain away the allegations of a silver manipulation, much different from his former stance of promising to look into it. I found this change disturbing and it has influenced my thinking that the CFTC would never do anything about the silver manipulation. One particular response from Chilton to a reader prompted me to write to the Commissioner myself (aside from sending him all my articles) -
Dear Commissioner Chilton,
A reader sent me the following reply from you to him about the short concentration in COMEX silver –
> Hi Tom
> The Commitment of Traders report does not show net positions. So, simply adding all the largest longs up, or looking at one of them, only give you one piece of myriad portfolio. Those reports also don't give over the counter positions. We look at all of that by trader. While there are a few (at times) traders that have been in excess of what our belated position limits would require, the sizes aren't like they were a few years back. I saw one trader with 22 percent net short a while back. We obviously look to see what that trader did at volatile times. And, for those that claim they know who the traders are, I'm not sure how they make such determinations. Certainly it isn't based upon our reports.
> Best,
> B
In all due respect, much of your reply is factually incorrect. Every long form Commitment of Traders report does show net (and gross) positions for every commodity by the 4 and 8 largest traders on both the long and short side of every market. The whole point of your agency keeping concentration data is to insure that no one trader or small group of traders hold such a large net position on a regulated exchange as to manipulate the price. For you to say otherwise is wrong.
While over the counter positions aren’t included in COT data that is beside the point. I am not alleging that the OTC market is manipulating the price of silver; the manipulation is emanating from the concentrated position on the COMEX, a market under your jurisdiction. A concentrated position on the COMEX (the world’s leading silver market) which manipulates the price of silver can’t possibly be excused just because an OTC position may have been created to take advantage of the manipulated price (by the manipulator itself). Nor would it be legitimate for an entity to acquire physical silver after manipulating the price lower via a concentrated short COMEX position. In other words, it doesn’t matter what positions may exist off the exchange, if the position on the exchange is so concentrated as to constitute manipulation.
I don’t know where you have come to learn this incorrect information, but it has clearly prevented you from fulfilling your obligations as a regulator. In the current COT, for positions as of the close of business December 4, the net concentrated short position of the 4 largest traders is listed at 38.1% (versus 11.3% on the long side).
http://www.cftc.gov/files/dea/cotarchives/2012/futures/other_lf120412.htm
This translates into 54,002 net short contracts held by the 4 largest traders in COMEX silver futures. By the way, since there are over 36,000 contracts listed as spreads in the companion disaggregated COT report that means the true net position of the 4 largest COMEX shorts is more than 51.1% of the market, not 38.1%. This is the largest concentrated net short position in COMEX silver in more than two and a half years.
As I have previously explained in numerous articles that I have sent to you and the other commissioners, your agency disclosed (quite inadvertently) the identity of the biggest COMEX short seller as JPMorgan, in explaining to various lawmakers that the large and sudden increase in the US bank category in COMEX silver futures in the August 2008 Bank Participation was the result of a merger earlier that year that could only have been the JPMorgan takeover of Bear Stearns. I’ll send you a sample copy on request.
Currently, JPMorgan appears to hold 36,500 contracts (of the 54,002 contracts held by the 4 largest traders) on a net basis. After deducting spread positions from total open interest, JPMorgan’s net short position is more than 34.5% of the short side of the market, much greater than the 22% figure a while back referenced in your response.
From your response, it is clear that you are operating on faulty information which may explain why your agency hasn’t intervened in the ongoing silver manipulation. While this is surprising and disappointing at this stage of the manipulation, it also creates the opportunity of setting the record straight should you endeavor to do so. Many citizens and market observers feel your agency has dropped the ball on terminating the silver manipulation. I’m sure you would agree that it is not healthy for so many to doubt our important public regulators and this may present an opportunity to assuage such growing doubts.
Ted Butler
In simple terms, Commissioner Chilton’s response to the reader confirms my worst fear – the reason the CFTC hasn’t moved against the silver manipulation is that they don’t understand it. Even though the agency publishes remarkably detailed and accurate data on concentration in their weekly COT reports, they apparently don’t comprehend what it is they are publishing. As a big believer in the premise that recognition of a problem is 50% of the ultimate solution; I also believe that if a problem is not recognized, it is unlikely to be remedied. I’ve always considered Chilton to be one of the “good guys” at the Commission, so it is quite disheartening to see him so misinterpret his own agency’s data.
This is no small matter. The CFTC’s main mission is to guard against price manipulation, the most serious market crime possible. The reason price manipulation is the most serious market crime is because it distorts the free market, thereby affecting everyone, consumers and producers alike, not just active market participants. The one sure cause of manipulation is a large concentrated position held by one or a few collusive traders. That’s the whole purpose of position limits, namely, to diffuse and prevent concentration. Whether it was the Hunt Bros on the long side of silver in 1980, or the Sumitomo copper trader known as “Mr. 5%” on the long side of copper, or JR Simplot on the short side of Maine Potatoes in 1976, the common denominator of all market manipulations has been the concentrated holdings of one or a few traders. So it is with JPMorgan on the short side of COMEX silver today. What is shocking is that our most important commodity regulator, the CFTC, has seemingly failed to recognize this.
Of course, perhaps it is not that the agency doesn’t understand what is occurring in silver, but more that it doesn’t want to understand. Perhaps there were some guarantees exempting JPMorgan from future charges at the time of the Bear Stearns acquisition. Perhaps JPMorgan and the CME are so powerful and above the law that the CFTC can’t hope to confront them on such a black and white matter of excessive market share concentration. Most remarkable of all is that more market observers have written to the Commission about silver-related matters than the cumulative total of all other issues. Still, the agency doesn’t get it (or want to get it).
What to do about all this? I think the answer may come from none other than the CEO of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon. Truth be told, were it not for silver, Mr. Dimon would rank high on my list of effective business leaders. I’ve followed his business career with admiration for many years. The best thing about him is that he comes off as a no-nonsense, to the point kind of guy. This morning, in a special broadcast on CNBC, Dimon was a featured speaker at a special conference. He talked about the greatness of America in so many ways and bristled at a suggestion that JPMorgan was too forceful in their dealings with the regulators. Mr. Dimon’s retort was that the Bill of Rights allowed everyone, including JPMorgan, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government. I agree with Mr. Dimon and that has largely been my approach concerning my allegations that it is JPMorgan manipulating the price of silver. As citizens, we all have the right to petition the regulators to move against perceived market crimes. I intend to continue to exercise that right and suggest you do the same. I’d also like to help educate the regulators as well, as far as understanding their own published reports. Lord knows, they could use the help.
Chairman Gensler ggensler@cftc.gov
Commissioner Chilton bchilton@cftc.gov
Commissioner Sommers jsommers@cftc.gov
Commissioner O’Malia somalia@cftc.gov
Commissioner Wetjen mwetjen@cftc.gov
Ted Butler
..someone said the company was the holdup, not the TA.
IMHO this was a scam from the get go. My suggestion, that I do myself, is to save all the names involved with this company to a file on your computer. This file should also include any other names you believe were involved in similar plays. When investigating another possible investment, check this file to see if any of the names come up that are in your file. If so, if you don't run away at least raise the red flag. Best of luck to all.
..........al
Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213
If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.
Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.
The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows."
This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's teller windows. Tony Montana's henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional "American City Bank" in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain's most storied financial institutions.
Though this was not stated explicitly, the government's rationale in not pursuing criminal prosecutions against the bank was apparently rooted in concerns that putting executives from a "systemically important institution" in jail for drug laundering would threaten the stability of the financial system. The New York Times put it this way:
Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system.
It doesn't take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderers and terrorists. Even more shocking, the Justice Department's response to learning about all of this was to do exactly the same thing that the HSBC executives did in the first place to get themselves in trouble – they took money to look the other way.
And not only did they sell out to drug dealers, they sold out cheap. You'll hear bragging this week by the Obama administration that they wrested a record penalty from HSBC, but it's a joke. Some of the penalties involved will literally make you laugh out loud. This is from Breuer's announcement:
As a result of the government's investigation, HSBC has . . . "clawed back" deferred compensation bonuses given to some of its most senior U.S. anti-money laundering and compliance officers, and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials during the five-year period of the deferred prosecution agreement.
Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer – asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?
So you might ask, what's the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC's position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we're talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you're the prosecutor, you've got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?
How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.
Sound harsh? It does, doesn't it? The only problem is, that's exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.
It'd be interesting, for instance, to ask the residents of Tenaha, Texas what they think about the HSBC settlement. That's the town where local police routinely pulled over (mostly black) motorists and, whenever they found cash, offered motorists a choice: They could either allow police to seize the money, or face drug and money laundering charges.
Or we could ask Anthony Smelley, the Indiana resident who won $50,000 in a car accident settlement and was carrying about $17K of that in cash in his car when he got pulled over. Cops searched his car and had drug dogs sniff around: The dogs alerted twice. No drugs were found, but police took the money anyway. Even after Smelley produced documentation proving where he got the money from, Putnam County officials tried to keep the money on the grounds that he could have used the cash to buy drugs in the future.
Seriously, that happened. It happens all the time, and even Lanny Breuer's own Justice Deparment gets into the act. In 2010 alone, U.S. Attorneys' offices deposited nearly $1.8 billion into government accounts as a result of forfeiture cases, most of them drug cases. You can see the Justice Department's own statistics right here:
If you get pulled over in America with cash and the government even thinks it's drug money, that cash is going to be buying your local sheriff or police chief a new Ford Expedition tomorrow afternoon.
And that's just the icing on the cake. The real prize you get for interacting with a law enforcement officer, if you happen to be connected in any way with drugs, is a preposterous, outsized criminal penalty. Right here in New York, one out of every seven cases that ends up in court is a marijuana case.
Just the other day, while Breuer was announcing his slap on the wrist for the world's most prolific drug-launderers, I was in arraignment court in Brooklyn watching how they deal with actual people. A public defender explained the absurdity of drug arrests in this city. New York actually has fairly liberal laws about pot – police aren't supposed to bust you if you possess the drug in private. So how do police work around that to make 50,377 pot-related arrests in a single year, just in this city? Tthat was 2010; the 2009 number was 46,492.)
"What they do is, they stop you on the street and tell you to empty your pockets," the public defender explained. "Then the instant a pipe or a seed is out of the pocket – boom, it's 'public use.' And you get arrested."
People spend nights in jail, or worse. In New York, even if they let you off with a misdemeanor and time served, you have to pay $200 and have your DNA extracted – a process that you have to pay for (it costs 50 bucks). But even beyond that, you won't have search very far for stories of draconian, idiotic sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.
Just ask Cameron Douglas, the son of Michael Douglas, who got five years in jail for simple possession. His jailers kept him in solitary for 23 hours a day for 11 months and denied him visits with family and friends. Although your typical non-violent drug inmate isn't the white child of a celebrity, he's usually a minority user who gets far stiffer sentences than rich white kids would for committing the same crimes – we all remember the crack-versus-coke controversy in which federal and state sentencing guidelines left (predominantly minority) crack users serving sentences up to 100 times harsher than those meted out to the predominantly white users of powdered coke.
The institutional bias in the crack sentencing guidelines was a racist outrage, but this HSBC settlement blows even that away. By eschewing criminal prosecutions of major drug launderers on the grounds (the patently absurd grounds, incidentally) that their prosecution might imperil the world financial system, the government has now formalized the double standard.
They're now saying that if you're not an important cog in the global financial system, you can't get away with anything, not even simple possession. You will be jailed and whatever cash they find on you they'll seize on the spot, and convert into new cruisers or toys for your local SWAT team, which will be deployed to kick in the doors of houses where more such inessential economic cogs as you live. If you don't have a systemically important job, in other words, the government's position is that your assets may be used to finance your own political disenfranchisement.
On the other hand, if you are an important person, and you work for a big international bank, you won't be prosecuted even if you launder nine billion dollars. Even if you actively collude with the people at the very top of the international narcotics trade, your punishment will be far smaller than that of the person at the very bottom of the world drug pyramid. You will be treated with more deference and sympathy than a junkie passing out on a subway car in Manhattan (using two seats of a subway car is a common prosecutable offense in this city). An international drug trafficker is a criminal and usually a murderer; the drug addict walking the street is one of his victims. But thanks to Breuer, we're now in the business, officially, of jailing the victims and enabling the criminals.
This is the disgrace to end all disgraces. It doesn't even make any sense. There is no reason why the Justice Department couldn't have snatched up everybody at HSBC involved with the trafficking, prosecuted them criminally, and worked with banking regulators to make sure that the bank survived the transition to new management. As it is, HSBC has had to replace virtually all of its senior management. The guilty parties were apparently not so important to the stability of the world economy that they all had to be left at their desks.
So there is absolutely no reason they couldn't all face criminal penalties. That they are not being prosecuted is cowardice and pure corruption, nothing else. And by approving this settlement, Breuer removed the government's moral authority to prosecute anyone for any other drug offense. Not that most people didn't already know that the drug war is a joke, but this makes it official.
The Cost of the US Presidency
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http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/the-cost-of-the-us-presidency/2012/12/12/
By Bill Bonner • December 12th, 2012 • Related Articles • Filed
I like to be in America
Okay by me in America
Everything free in America
- America, West Side Story
As we reported yesterday, America is the place to be. We've got all that gas and oil. The roughnecks are squeezing it out of rock.
Everybody says that this new energy supply is a 'game changer'.
We don't believe it. If having a lot of energy were the key to success, Venezuela, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia would be the richest countries in the world. Switzerland, Japan, Sweden and Singapore would be desperately poor.
But that ain't the way it works. What matters is what you do with energy, not how much you've got. And the US is squandering its energy in ways that will make it poorer, not richer.
How? By supporting too many zombies. Zombies to the left. Zombies to the right. And zombies on every street-corner when you're trying to get home. Zombies now control the course of events.
They are the voters... and the elected officials...They control the federal government. They are also at the helm of the Fed. They run many of our major corporations and our largest industries. Defence, education, health - for example!
At every level, zombies are settling in...getting comfortable. From the National Review:
'As the Daily Mail in London reported, "High Fliers: Prince William and his wife Kate spent an incredible £52,000 on the one-way flight from LA to London for themselves and their seven-strong entourage." Incredible!
'For £52,000, you couldn't take the president from Washington on a state visit to an ice-cream parlor in a Maryland suburb. Obama flew Air Force One from Washington to Williamsburg, Va., requiring a wide-bodied transatlantic jet that holds 500 people to ferry him a distance of a little over 100 miles. And, unlike their British and Canadian counterparts, the American media are entirely at ease with it.
'Just for the record, William and Kate actually spend an "incredible" £51,410 - or about $80,000 - for nine business-class tickets on British Airways to Heathrow. At the check-in desk at Los Angeles, BA graciously offered the Duke and Duchess an upgrade to first class.
'By now you're probably revolted by this glimpse of disgusting monarchical excess, so, if it's any consolation, halfway through the flight the cabin's entertainment consoles failed and, along with other first-class passengers, Their Highnesses were offered a £200 voucher toward the cost of their next flight, which they declined.
'By contrast, in a republic governed by "we, the people," when the president of the United States wishes to watch a film, there are two full-time movie projectionists who live at the White House and are on call round the clock, in case he's overcome by a sudden urge to watch Esther Williams in Dangerous When Wet (1953) at two in the morning...'
In his recent book Presidential Perks Gone Royal, Robert Keith Gray, a former Eisenhower staffer, revealed that last year the US presidency cost American taxpayers $1.4 billion. Over the same period, the entire royal family cost British taxpayers about $57 million. There's nothing 'royal' about the current level of 'presidential perks': The Obama family costs taxpayers more than every European royal house put together.
In the American republic, even the dogs cost more. The Queen is a famous corgi lover and has been breeding them since she was a young girl. Now in her late 80s she's slowing down and only keeps four.
The president has one pooch, a photo-op accessory called Bo, who unlike the corgis requires a full-time handler. In contrast to the stingy remuneration offered by the royal household, the presidential dog-walker is one of 226 White House staff earning over $100,000 a year.
The fish rots from the head down, and so do republics. A $1.4-billion president has a defense secretary with a private plane to fly him home every weekend, and a chair of the 'White House Council on Women and Girls' with her own Secret Service detail, and all of them ever more detached from the rhythms of American life.
By definition, zombies consume resources; they don't add to them. The more resources - including energy - they use up, the less there is left to build a prosperous future. That's the real trouble with zombies: they represent the dead hand of the past. Deceased companies. Moribund industries. Sclerotic investments. Walking dead institutions.
Naturally, the elite in any society want to hold onto their status. They know the future could topple them from their commanding positions, so they use government to try to prevent the future from happening. Their military tries to control events overseas. Their regulations, taxes, subsidies and giveaways maintain their power, blunt competition and stop change at home.
But zombies beget zombies. Once the zombies are in control, more and more resources get shifted their way... leading to more and more zombies, who demand more and more resources!
And the government is clearly going for broke in its efforts to keep all the zombies living in the style to which they've become accustomed. But the funny side of this story is the way the zombies are now turning on each other - each trying to protect its fresh meat.
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal we discovered how the US government might default on its obligations to the little guys and still keep the big zombies happy. It will simply change the way it adjusts entitlement payments. Instead of using the current measure, a proposal is on the table to adjust using a 'chained' measure of dollar inflation.
How does the 'chained' approach work? Both the current measure and the chained measure use a basket of goods to determine how much prices have risen. But the chained measure gives the statisticians more flexibility as to what goes into the basket. The result is a lower inflation reading.
Switching to this new method would save the feds hundreds of billions of dollars. Retirees wouldn't get what they think they've got coming. But who really knows how the feds adjust their numbers and calculate Social Security cheques? Who complains about the inflation measure? Who gets blamed if the feds shave a little bit off every cheque? Who even notices?
This is a 'default' in the sense that retirees won't get as much as they are now programmed to receive. But so what? It just goes to show how much wiggle room the feds have. It also shows how federal liabilities will be reduced... and how the feds will be able to avoid running out of money without setting off a zombie revolution. They'll just stab the inattentive, small potatoes zombies in the back.
But neither trimming Social Security cheques nor cheaper oil are really game changers. These things just buy time... allowing a corrupt system to continue a little longer. The old shell game continues.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia
The Icelandic Success Story
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-08/guest-post-icelandic-success-story
Emotionally, I love Iceland’s financial policies since the crash of 2008:
Iceland went after the people who caused the crisis — the bankers who created and sold the junk products — and tried to shield the general population.
But what Iceland did is not just emotionally satisfying. Iceland is recovering, while the rest of the Western world — which bailed out the bankers and left the general population to pay for the bankers’ excess — is not.
Bloomberg reports:
Few countries blew up more spectacularly than Iceland in the 2008 financial crisis. The local stock market plunged 90 percent; unemployment rose ninefold; inflation shot to more than 18 percent; the country’s biggest banks all failed.
This was no post-Lehman Brothers recession: It was a depression.
Since then, Iceland has turned in a pretty impressive performance. It has repaid International Monetary Fund rescue loans ahead of schedule. Growth this year will be about 2.5 percent, better than most developed economies. Unemployment has fallen by half. In February, Fitch Ratings restored the country’s investment-grade status, approvingly citing its “unorthodox crisis policy response.”
So what exactly did Iceland do?
First, they create an aid package for homeowners:
To homeowners with negative equity, the country offered write-offs that would wipe out debt above 110 percent of the property value. The government also provided means-tested subsidies to reduce mortgage-interest expenses: Those with lower earnings, less home equity and children were granted the most generous support.
Then, they redenominated foreign currency debt into devalued krone, effectively giving creditors a big haircut:
In June 2010, the nation’s Supreme Court gave debtors another break: Bank loans that were indexed to foreign currencies were declared illegal. Because the Icelandic krona plunged 80 percent during the crisis, the cost of repaying foreign debt more than doubled. The ruling let consumers repay the banks as if the loans were in krona.
These policies helped consumers erase debt equal to 13 percent of Iceland’s $14 billion economy. Now, consumers have money to spend on other things. It is no accident that the IMF, which granted Iceland loans without imposing its usual austerity strictures, says the recovery is driven by domestic demand.
What this meant is that unsustainable junk was liquidated. While I am no fan of nationalised banks and believe that eventually they should be sold off, there were no quick and easy bailouts that allowed the financial sector to continue with the same unsustainable bubble-based folly they practiced before the crisis (as has happened throughout the rest of the Western world).
And best of all, Iceland prosecuted the people who caused the crisis, providing a real disincentive (as opposed to more bailouts and bonuses):
Iceland’s special prosecutor has said it may indict as many as 90 people, while more than 200, including the former chief executives at the three biggest banks, face criminal charges.
Larus Welding, the former CEO of Glitnir Bank hf, once Iceland’s second biggest, was indicted in December for granting illegal loans and is now waiting to stand trial. The former CEO of Landsbanki Islands hf, Sigurjon Arnason, has endured stints of solitary confinement as his criminal investigation continues.
That compares with the U.S., where no top bank executives have faced criminal prosecution for their roles in the subprime mortgage meltdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission said last year it had sanctioned 39 senior officers for conduct related to the housing market meltdown.
Iceland’s approach is very much akin to what I have been advocating — write down the unsustainable debt, liquidate the junk corporations and banks that failed, disincentivise the behaviour that caused the crisis, and provide help to the ordinary individuals in the real economy (as opposed to phoney “stimulus” cash to campaign donors and big finance).
And Iceland has snapped out of its depression. The rest of the West, where banks continue to behave exactly as they did prior to the crisis, not so much.
I know you have read my previous post on this:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81738847
Most of us have been involved with reverse splits before. The most time I have ever seen it take for the new certs was 5 days. To take this long is pathetic and totally the responsibility of management. There is absolutely no excuse that can explain away the delay. It just takes a call or fax to the TA to recall the old and reissue the new certs. To me it is a serious red flag on the competence of the management running this company.
..........al
~ OPHI now trading at .0002 pre-split
Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out. -George Carlin
Still Not Spreading the Wealth Around
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http://azizonomics.com/2012/12/03/still-not-spreading-the-wealth-around/
S
December 3, 2012
Obama has always claimed to want to spread the wealth around. Yet, as I stressed this June (and in my first ever blog post way back in July 2011!) that’s the exact opposite of what he has achieved.
And it’s getting worse, not better.
Wages-as-a-proportion-of-GDP just hit another all-time low:
And corporate-profits-as-a-proportion-of-GDP just hit another all-time high:
Obama might throw a lot of rhetoric about fighting for the middle class.
But the reality has been the opposite. America today is all about the enrichment of big banks, financial corporations and the military-industrial complex, while the working class has rotted.
The truth of Obama’s policies (and successive administrations prior to Obama) is more concentrated wealth within the financial elites and Wall Street. Banks get bailed out. Campaign donors get stimulus money. And the middle class and future generations pay for it in taxation and the Cantillon Effect.
The Obama reinflation is a rotten bubble built on rotten foundations. Trying to reinflate the economy from a starting debt ratio of over 350% of GDP through crony corporatism and helicopter drops to the rich is an absurd notion that is doomed to abject failure.
And the growing gap between the rich and the poor is steadily beginning to resemble neofeudalism.
Global Roundup For The Weekend
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http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?blog=Market-Ticker
In the "laugh-a-minute" department we have this:
The 19 biggest US banks will have to show they are on course to comply with the “Basel III” banking reform package as part of next year’s Federal Reserve stress tests even though the US will not have formal rules in place, global regulators pledged on Friday.
And what if they don't? Remember that The Fed, the OCC and Treasury have all dragged their feet on this, and have even gone so far as to suggest that the middle finger is more akin to the actual response to Basel III.
Now what?
The FSB also said in a statement that in the US the relevant agencies took “very seriously” their commitments to implement Basel III and were working “to conclude the rulemaking process as expeditiously as possible….”
Yes, the "relevant agencies" will double their porn-surfing quota in the United States. That way they'll have something to diddle other than the banksters and their accounting status (not to mention all the other games being played with derivatives, "mark to fantasy" and the like.)
Jonathan Sugarman, who was one of first big whistle blowers in Ireland (and who has been "persued" for telling the truth, incidentally) gave an intereview on Greek TV, which is rather interesting even though I can only understand part of it as the translations (in the background) are incomplete.
He brings to the forefront the real question which is this: How many of the banksters have done to prison? (The answer, of course, is "Zero!")
Then there is also Iceland -- where they did jail the banksters and refused to bail them out, nor did they pay the extortion demanded by international banksters. Did the world end? Nope.
Of course you don't see that reported in the US media; you have to go look at Pravda to find it! It is nonetheless true; gee, what sort of free press do we have in the western world when nobody seems to want to talk about a little nation that literally stuffed the people who had screwed the public in a nice jail cell instead of rewarding them and suckling their (elided).
Oh wait -- there has been some reporting on this. Bloomberg did highlight some lefty accolades of Iceland's policy steps -- kind of.
But isn't it funny how none of the other nations seem to think this is the appropriate path forward, when in fact none of their "programs" have worked but Iceland's did?
We need to start locking up the banksters and de-fang their BS strum-and-furor game, starting with the biggest of them.
That is, if we'd like this result:
Unemployment, which jumped nine-fold between 2007 and 2010, eased to 4.8 percent in June from a peak of 9.3 percent two years ago.
If you want jobs, the answer is simple: Jail the banksters.
Thank you for that article nlightn, I've been saying that for a few years now. Iceland is the only country that did it right.
..........al