Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged Priced-in-Gold

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Gary Edwards

Porter Stansberry : This key gov't statistic is signaling crisis - 0 views

  • These obligations aren't future promises to pay. This isn't Medicare spending projected out until 2040. These are all obligations that either have known maturities or will come due in the next two or three years.
  • What's a reasonable rate of interest on these debts? Right now, it costs the U.S. government almost 5% to borrow for 30 years. Let's assume the blended borrowing cost goes to that amount – which is well below the government's average borrowing costs since 1980. That would equal $1 trillion in interest payments due, per year. That's 100% of all income taxes paid in 2009.
  •  
    Key Stat: The amount of the government's revenues that must go towards paying interest. The U.S. already has more debt than it can afford, which puts it at an enormous risk of a debt and currency collapse.  ... Our "short term" debt means we'll have to "roll over" roughly $4 trillion in the next 30 months. That's in addition to funding another $3 trillion or so in additional annual deficits. As of today, China is a net seller of Treasury debt. If we can't fund our debts in the bond market, the Federal Reserve will be forced to monetize our deficits by buying Treasury bonds. If that happens, inflation will soar and the price of gold will double or triple almost overnight. By the end of OBAMA!'s first presidency (2013), I believe the U.S. will owe roughly: $17.8 trillion in federal debt, $2 trillion in GSE debt/guarantees, $500 billion in FDIC obligations, and $500 billion in FHA obligations. My only big assumption is $1.5 trillion in additional deficits each year, which is what the president's budget also predicts.  Right now, it costs the U.S. government almost 5% to borrow for 30 years. Let's assume the blended borrowing cost goes to that amount - which is well below the government's average borrowing costs since 1980. That would equal $1 trillion in interest payments due, per year. That's 100% of all income taxes paid in 2009. This amount of debt isn't sustainable. Felix Zulauf, one of Europe's top money managers, "Eventually the U.S. will arrive at the point where, as Marc Faber says, interest payments on government debt all of a sudden go to 20%, 25%, 30% of tax revenue. And once you go above 30%, you are done. You go into default or your currency breaks down and your system collapses."  act now to protect yourself. If you wait until the last minute to get your assets out of the U.S., you'll never make it.
Paul Merrell

Deutsche Bank Pays $38 Million To Settle Silver Manipulation Lawsuit | Zero Hedge - 0 views

  • 2016 is shaping up as the year when countless conspiracy theories will be confirmed to be non-conspiracy fact: from central bank rigging of capital markets, to political rigging of elections, to media rigging of public sentiment, and now, commercial bank rigging of silver. In short, tinfoil hat-wearing nutjobs living in their parents basement have been right all along. Two weeks ago we reported that "In A Major Victory For Gold And Silver Traders, Manipulation Lawsuit Against Gold-Fixing Banks Ordered To Proceed," however one bank was exempt: Deutsche Bank. The reason why was known since April, when we first reported that Deutsche Bank had agreed to settle the class action lawsuit filed in July 2014 accusing a consortium of banks of plotting to manipulate gold and silver. Among the charges that Deutsche Bank effectively refused to contest were the following: employment of a manipulative device claims bid-rigging, and unjust enrichment. price fixing and unlawful restraint price manipulation claims aiding and abetting and principal-agent claims.
Paul Merrell

"It's Carnage" - Swiss Franc Soars Most Ever After SNB Abandons EURCHF Floor; Macro Hed... - 0 views

  • Over two decades ago, George Soros took on the Bank of England, and won. Just before lunch local time, the Swiss National Bank took on virtually every single macro hedge fund, the vast majority of which were short the Swiss Franc and crushed them, when it announced, first, that it would go further into NIRP, pushing its interest rate on deposit balances even more negative from -0.25% to -0.75%, a move which in itself would have been unprecedented and, second, announcing that the 1.20 EURCHF floor it had instituted in September 2011, the day gold hit its all time nominal high, was no more. What happened next was truly shock and awe as algo after algo saw their EURCHF 1.1999 stops hit, and moments thereafter the EURCHF pair crashed to less then 0.75, margining out virtually every single long EURCHF position, before finally rebounding to a level just above 1.00, which is where it was trading just before the SNB instituted the currency floor over three years ago.
  • The SNB press release:
  • The resultant move across all currency pairs has seen the EUR and USD sliding, the USDJPY crashing, and US futures tumbling even as European stocks plunged only to kneejerk higher as markets are in clear turmoil and nobody knows just what is going on right now. In other asset classes, Treasury yields, understandably plunged across the entire world, and the entire Swiss bond curve left of the 10 Year is now negative, with the On The Run itself threatening to go negative soon as can be seen on the table below: All Swiss government bill and bond yields out to 7 years are negative: pic.twitter.com/b4YCVSDFu7 — Jamie McGeever (@ReutersJamie) January 15, 2015 Crude and other commodities, except gold, are also tumbling, as are most risk assets over concerns what today's epic margin call will mean when the closing bell arrives. An immediate, and amusing, soundbite came from the CEO of Swatch Nick Hayek who said that "words fail me" at the SNB action: "Today's SNB action is a tsunami for the export industry and for tourism, and finally for the entire country." More from Reuters:
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Swatch Group UHR.VX Chief Executive Nick Hayek called the Swiss National Bank's decision to discontinue the minimum exchange rate on the Swiss franc a "tsunami" for the Alpine country and its economy.   "Words fail me! Jordan is not only the name of the SNB president, but also of a river… and today's SNB action is a tsunami; for the export industry and for tourism, and finally for the entire country," Hayek said in an emailed statement on Thursday.   Swiss watchmakers, which are also grappling with weak demand in Asia, are very exposed to moves in the Swiss franc exchange rate because their production costs are largely in Swiss francs, but most of their sales are done abroad.   Shares in Swatch Group fell 15 percent at 1056 GMT, while Richemont CFR.VX was down 14 percent, underperforming a 9 percent drop in the Swiss market index .SSMI following the SNB's announcement.    "Absolutely shocking ... For companies with international operations – translated earnings are going to be lower and if companies make products in Switzerland it is going to hurt margin. It is a terrible day for corporate Switzerland," Kepler Cheuvreux analyst Jon Cox said
  • Indeed, in retrospect, it does seem foolhardy that the SNB, whose balance sheet ballooned to record proportions just to defends it currency for over three years would give up so easily. The one silver lining, so to say, is that gold prices in CHF just crashed by some 13%. Some more soundbites from strategists, none of whom foresaw this stunning move:
  • However, the best soundbites today will surely come from US hedge funds which are just waking up to the biggest FX shocker in years, and of course, any retail investors who may have been long the EURCHF, and who are not only facing epic margin calls, but are unable to cover their positions, as one after another retail FX brokerage has commenced "Rubling" the Swissy and the CHF pair is suddenly not available for trading for retail accounts. To say that today will be interesting, is an understatement.
Paul Merrell

US Investigates World's Largest Banks for Precious Metals Price-Fixing / Sputnik Intern... - 0 views

  • The US Department of Justice is investigating a possible breach of law by 10 major banks during the price-setting process for precious metals, the Wall Street Journal reported. US prosecutors are currently examining the pricing for gold, silver, platinum and palladium in Britain's capital London, while the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has started a civil investigation, the newspaper said Monday, citing undisclosed sources close to the inquires.
  • The US Department of Justice is investigating a possible breach of law by 10 major banks during the price-setting process for precious metals, the Wall Street Journal reported. US prosecutors are currently examining the pricing for gold, silver, platinum and palladium in Britain's capital London, while the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has started a civil investigation, the newspaper said Monday, citing undisclosed sources close to the inquires.
  • Both agencies have already requested that banks provide the information necessary for the probe and even issued a subpoena to the world's second largest bank, the UK-based HSBC Holdings PLC. The list of banks under scrutiny also includes such giants as Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale. The investigation, which is currently in its early stages, is part of the US Justice Department inspection of alleged banking manipulation of financial standards, including the rigging of lending rates between banks as well as the handling of currency markets.
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Security vs. Securities | TomDispatch - 0 views

  • I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my place, three stories of brick painted Big Bird yellow. It's a charming little corner of the city. Each fall, the trees outside my window shake their leaves and carpet the street in gold. Nora Ephron, if she were alive, might've shot a scene for her latest movie in one of the lush green parks that bookend my block. The neighborhood wasn't always so nice. A few years back, during a reporting trip to China, I met an American consultant who had known Capitol Hill in a darker era. "I was driving up the street one time," he told me, "and walking in the opposite direction was this huge guy carrying an assault rifle. Broad daylight, no one even noticed. That's what kind of neighborhood it was." Nowadays, row houses around me sell for $1 million or more. I rent.
  • Washington's a fun place to live if you're young and employed. But as a recent Washington Post story pointed out, the nation's capital is slowly pricing out even its yuppies who, in their late-twenties and early-thirties, want to start families but can't afford it. "I hate to say it, but the facts show that the D.C. market is for people who are single and relatively affluent," a real estate researcher told the Post. The District's housing boom just won't stop; off go those new and expecting parents to the suburbs. And we're talking about the lucky ones. Elsewhere in the country, vulnerability in the housing market isn't a trend story; it's the norm. The Cedillo family, as Laura Gottesdiener writes today, went looking for their version of the American housing dream and thought they found it in Chandler, Arizona. They didn't know that the house they chose to rent rested on a shaky foundation -- not physically but financially. It had been one of thousands snapped up and rented out by massive investment firms making a killing in the wake of the housing collapse. As Gottesdiener -- who has put the new rental empires of private equity firms on the map for TomDispatch -- shows, the goal of such companies is to squeeze every dime of profit from their properties, from homes like the Cedillos', and that can lead to tragedy.
  • Drowning in Profits A Private Equity Firm, a Missing Pool Fence, and the Price of a Child’s Death By Laura Gottesdiener
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The same month that the family rented the house at 1471 West Camino Court, Progress Residential purchased more homes in Maricopa Country than any other institutional buyer. Nationally, Blackstone, a private equity giant, has been the leading purchaser of single-family homes, spending upwards of $8 billion between 2012 and 2014 to purchase 43,000 homes in about a dozen cities. However, in May 2013, according to Michael Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Progress Residential bought nearly 200 houses, surpassing Blackstone's buying rate that month in the Phoenix area. The condition and code compliance of these houses varies and is rarely known at the time of the purchase. Mike Anderson, who works for a bidding service contracted by Progress Residential and other private equity giants to buy houses at auctions, was sometimes asked to go out and look at the homes. But with the staggering buying rate -- up to 15 houses a day at the peak -- he couldn’t keep up. “There’d be too many, you couldn’t go out and look at them,” he said. “It’s just a gamble. You never know what you’ve got into.”
  • Security is a slippery idea these days -- especially when it comes to homes and neighborhoods. Perhaps the most controversial development in America’s housing “recovery” is the role played by large private equity firms. In recent years, they have bought up more than 200,000 mostly foreclosed houses nationwide and turned them into rental empires. In the finance and real estate worlds, this development has won praise for helping to raise home values and creating a new financial product known as a “rental-backed security.” Many economists and housing advocates, however, have blasted this new model as a way for Wall Street to capitalize on an economic crisis by essentially pushing families out of their homes, then turning around and renting those houses back to them. Caught in the crosshairs are tens of thousands of families now living in these private equity-owned homes.
  • Global private equity firms have not been, historically, in the business of dealing with pool fences and the other hassles of maintaining single-family houses. But following the housing market collapse, the idea of buying a ton of these foreclosed properties suddenly made sense, at least to investors. Such private-equity purchases were to make money in three ways: buying cheap and waiting for the houses to gain value as the market bounced back; renting them out and collecting monthly rental payments; and promoting a financial product known as “rental-backed securities,” similar to the infamous mortgage-backed securities that triggered the housing meltdown of 2007-2008. Even though the buying of the private equity firms has finally slowed, economists (including those at the Federal Reserve) have expressed concern about the possibility that someday those rental-backed securities could even destabilize -- translation: crash -- the broader market.
  • ince Wall Street was overwhelmingly responsible for the original collapse of the housing market, many have characterized these new purchases as a land grab. In many ways, Progress CEO Donald Mullen is the poster-child for this argument. An investment banker who enjoyed a brief flurry of fame after losing a bidding war to Alec Baldwin at an art auction, he was the leader of a team at Goldman Sachs that orchestrated an infamous bet against the housing market. Known as “the big short,” it allowed that company to make “some serious money“ when the economy melted down, according to Mullen’s own emails. (They were released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2010.) As Kevin Roose of New York magazine has written, “A guy whose most famous trade was a successful bet on the full-scale implosion of the housing market is now swooping in to pick up the pieces on the other end.”
Gary Edwards

Lipsky: Obama Making Same Mistakes That Led to Great Depression - 0 views

  •  
    Interview with Seth Lipsky, former Wall street Asia - NY Sun editor, and journalist.  Seth explains the constitutional requirements that Congress control and protect a hard currency.  He also explains his support for Ron Paul, the Paul-Perry-Cain "flat tax" proposals, and the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel.  Hard to believe Seth worked for the Wall Street Journal, otherwise known as the globalist bankster voice.  IMHO, no one has done more to confuse the public with free market - capitalism posturing while promoting outrageous banksterism, crony capitalism and a militaristic global corporatism that threatens the sovereignty of the USA than the WSJ.  Seth however is great. excerpt: The founding fathers named the U.S. currency after a coin called a Spanish-milled dollar, which represented 371.25 grains of pure silver, and put protecting its value in the hands of Congress. "They meant the dollar to be a measure of value and in fact they gave Congress the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof in the same sentence of the Constitution in which they gave Congress the power to fix the standards of weights and measures," Lipsky told Newsmax.TV. _________________________________________________________ Editor's note: To get 'It Shines for All' at a great price - Click Here Now. _________________________________________________________  "What the reform movement that we have been covering in The Sun wants Congress to do is to step up to that Constitutional responsibility to establish a proper value to the dollar, and then we wouldn't have to worry about inflation and rising prices," he said. "We would have to conduct the government's budgetary operations in a way that didn't result in a collapse in the value of our currency," said Lipsky. Under President Obama, the White House has enacted stimulus measures to incentivize job creation while the Federal Reserve has flooded the economy with money and swollen its balance sheet in an effort to spur
Paul Merrell

The Money Changers Serenade: A New Bankers' Plot to Steal Your Deposits | Global Research - 0 views

  • Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” November 11, 2013), Andrew Huszar confirms my explanation to be the correct one. Huszar is the Federal Reserve official who implemented the policy of QE. He resigned when he realized that the real purposes of QE was to drive up the prices of the banks’ holdings of debt instruments, to provide the banks with trillions of dollars at zero cost with which to lend and speculate, and to provide the banks with “fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions.” (See: www.paulcraigroberts.org) This vast con game remains unrecognized by Congress and the public. At the IMF Research Conference on November 8, 2013, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers presented a plan to expand the con game. Summers says that it is not enough merely to give the banks interest free money. More should be done for the banks. Instead of being paid interest on their bank deposits, people should be penalized for keeping their money in banks instead of spending it. To sell this new rip-off scheme, Summers has conjured up an explanation based on the crude and discredited Keynesianism of the 1940s that explained the Great Depression as a problem caused by too much savings. Instead of spending their money, people hoarded it, thus causing aggregate demand and employment to fall.
  • Summers says that today the problem of too much saving has reappeared. The centerpiece of his argument is “the natural interest rate,” defined as the interest rate at which full employment is established by the equality of saving with investment. If people save more than investors invest, the saved money will not find its way back into the economy, and output and employment will fall. Summers notes that despite a zero real rate of interest, there is still substantial unemployment. In other words, not even a zero rate of interest can reduce saving to the level of investment, thus frustrating a full employment recovery. Summers concludes that the natural rate of interest has become negative and is stuck below zero. How to fix this? The way to fix it, Summers says, is to charge people for saving money. To avoid the charges, people would spend the money, thus reducing savings to the level of investment and restoring full employment. Summers acknowledges that the problem with his solution is that people would take their money out of banks and hoard it in cash holdings. In other words, the cash form of money provides consumers with a freedom to save that holds down consumption and prevents full employment. Summers has a fix for this: eliminate the freedom by imposing a cashless society where the only money is electronic. As electronic money cannot be hoarded except in bank deposits, penalties can be imposed that force unproductive savings into consumption.
  • for Summers, the plight of the consumer is not the problem. The problem is the profits of the banks. Summers has the solution, and the establishment, including Paul Krugman, is applauding it. Once the economy officially turns down again, watch out.
  •  
    Paul Craig Roberts exposes Larry Summers formula for the banksters to grab money from everyone: eliminate all but electronic-currency and penalize savings. Not mentioned by Roberts, but much of the infrastructure for this is already in place. For example, late last year all recipients of Social Security and VA benefit checks were notified that after March 1, 2013, they would be in violation of the law if they continued to receive paper checks. They were required to enroll in approved electronic deposit programs, all of which are offered by banks. Until about two years ago, people could merely state in writing that they didn't want it and could continue receiving paper checks. But Congress closed that loophole.  (I remain out of compliance.) Debit card is now mandatory, although they have not yet enacted penalties for non-compliance.  So the banksters now get the "float" on virtually all federal SS and VA benefit payments until spent. That's as opposed to the prior Treasury Department drafts whose funds were not in the banking system.   More to the point, the web portal for the federal "Go Direct" program to sign up for direct deposit is in place and debugged. It wouldn't take much beyond a bigger data set to issue debit cards for everyone in the U.S. during a transition to a cashless economy.  The Constitution says gold and silver only for payment of debts; paper currency paved the way for financial abuse of the economy by banksters. Now Summers wants to do away with cash entirely in favor of digital currency with penalties for saving? My life savings must be surrendered to a bank so I can be penalized for saving? And of course moving to all-digital currency would give the spy agencies a much more detailed record of your purchases to work with. The location where you bought that last cup of coffee is instantly available to the NSA? Gimme a break!    
Paul Merrell

It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors - 0 views

  • Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.  
  • Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.”  The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.
  • The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.”  It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.” Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state: An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks.
  • If our IOUs are converted to bank stock, they will no longer be subject to insurance protection but will be “at risk” and vulnerable to being wiped out, just as the Lehman Brothers shareholders were in 2008.  That this dire scenario could actually materialize was underscored by Yves Smith in a March 19th post titled When You Weren’t Looking, Democrat Bank Stooges Launch Bills to Permit Bailouts, Deregulate Derivatives.  She writes: In the US, depositors have actually been put in a worse position than Cyprus deposit-holders, at least if they are at the big banks that play in the derivatives casino. The regulators have turned a blind eye as banks use their depositaries to fund derivatives exposures. And as bad as that is, the depositors, unlike their Cypriot confreres, aren’t even senior creditors. Remember Lehman? When the investment bank failed, unsecured creditors (and remember, depositors are unsecured creditors) got eight cents on the dollar. One big reason was that derivatives counterparties require collateral for any exposures, meaning they are secured creditors. The 2005 bankruptcy reforms made derivatives counterparties senior to unsecured lenders.
  • One might wonder why the posting of collateral by a derivative counterparty, at some percentage of full exposure, makes the creditor “secured,” while the depositor who puts up 100 cents on the dollar is “unsecured.” But moving on – Smith writes: Lehman had only two itty bitty banking subsidiaries, and to my knowledge, was not gathering retail deposits. But as readers may recall, Bank of America moved most of its derivatives from its Merrill Lynch operation [to] its depositary in late 2011. Its “depositary” is the arm of the bank that takes deposits; and at B of A, that means lots and lots of deposits. The deposits are now subject to being wiped out by a major derivatives loss. How bad could that be? Smith quotes Bloomberg:
  • . . . Bank of America’s holding company . . . held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June . . . . That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show. $75 trillion and $79 trillion in derivatives! These two mega-banks alone hold more in notional derivatives each than the entire global GDP (at $70 trillion).
  • Are you safe, then, if your money is in gold and silver? Apparently not – if it’s stored in a safety deposit box in the bank.  Homeland Security has reportedly told banks that it has authority to seize the contents of safety deposit boxes without a warrant when it’s a matter of “national security,” which a major bank crisis no doubt will be.
  • Another alternative was considered but rejected by President Obama in 2009: nationalize mega-banks that fail. In a February 2009 article titled “Are Uninsured Bank Depositors in Danger?“, Felix Salmon discussed a newsletter by Asia-based investment strategist Christopher Wood, in which Wood wrote: It is . . . amazing that Obama does not understand the political appeal of the nationalization option. . . . [D]espite this latest setback nationalization of the banks is coming sooner or later because the realities of the situation will demand it. The result will be shareholders wiped out and bondholders forced to take debt-for-equity swaps, if not hopefully depositors.
  • President Obama acknowledged that bank nationalization had worked in Sweden, and that the course pursued by the US Fed had not worked in Japan, which wound up instead in a “lost decade.”  But Obama opted for the Japanese approach because, according to Ed Harrison, “Americans will not tolerate nationalization.” But that was four years ago. When Americans realize that the alternative is to have their ready cash transformed into “bank stock” of questionable marketability, moving failed mega-banks into the public sector may start to have more appeal.
Paul Merrell

The Dying Dollar -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org - 0 views

  • Since 2006, the US dollar has experienced a one-quarter to one-third drop in value to the Chinese yuan, depending on the choice of base.   Now China is going to let the dollar decline further in value.  China also says it is considering undermining the petrodollar by pricing oil futures on the Shanghai Futures Exchange in yuan. This on top of the growing avoidance of the dollar to settle trade imbalances means that the dollar’s role as reserve currency is coming to an end, which means the termination of the US as financial bully and financial imperialist.  This blow to the dollar in addition to the blows delivered by jobs offshoring and the uncovered bets in the gambling casino created by financial deregulation means that the US economy as we knew it is coming to an end. The US economy is already in shambles, with bond and stock markets propped up by massive and historically unprecedented Fed money printing pouring liquidity into financial asset prices.  This month at the IMF annual conference, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said that to achieve full employment in the US economy would require negative real interest rates.  Negative real interest rates could only be achieved by eliminating cash, moving to digital money that can only be kept in banks, and penalizing people for saving. The future is developing precisely as I have been predicting. As the dollar enters its death throes, the lawless Federal Reserve and the Wall Street criminals will increase their shorting of gold in the paper futures market, thereby driving the remnants of the West’s gold into Asian hands.
  • The People’s Bank of China said the country does not benefit any more from increases in its foreign-currency holdings, adding to signs policymakers will rein in dollar purchases that limit the yuan’s appreciation. “It’s no longer in China’s favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves,” Yi Gang, a deputy governor at the central bank, said in a speech organized by China Economists 50 Forum at Tsinghua University yesterday. The monetary authority will “basically” end normal intervention in the currency market and broaden the yuan’s daily trading range, Governor Zhou Xiaochuan wrote in an article in a guidebook explaining reforms outlined last week following a Communist Party meeting.
  •  
    By Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Merrell

The U.S. Has REPEATEDLY Defaulted | Washington's Blog - 2 views

  • It’s a Myth that the U.S. Has Never Defaulted On Its Debt Some people argue that countries can’t default.  But that’s false. It is widely stated that the U.S. government has never defaulted.  However, that is also a myth.
  •  
    Excellent article Paul! But it left me in tears. The bastardos are destroying the currency. Quick Count of The U.S. defaulting on its debt obligations: ... Continental Currency in 1779 ... Domestic debt between 1782 through 1790 ... Greenbacks in 1862 ... Liberty Bonds in 1934 ... 1933 Dollar to GOLD devaluation (1/35 th per ounce) ... 1971 Nixon ends GOLD backing of dollar, violating the terms of the Bretton Woods Agreement ... 1979 Treasury defaults, refusing to redeem maturing treasury bonds The only thing keeping the American Economy going is the massive rush to convert the fiat currency the Federal Reserve is churning out into hard assets; like land and corporate stock. In 2008 the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel pumped $29 Trillion into the world banking system. They continue to pump $85 Billion per month into Bankster financial markets, buying up bad mortgage paper and backstopping the many insured derivatives scams now unwinding. The Banksters were bust in 2008, but are now flush with more dollars than anyone knows what to do with. Instead of "loaning" this money out, and investing in traditional business productivity, they use the freshly minted dollars to purchase hard assets. Business loans would provide profit based on interest - a gambit that requires confidence in the value of the dollar since the dollar is the measure of the economic reward. The purchase of hard assets is different. The "value" is not in the profitability of the investment, as measured in fiat currency. The value is in hard asset and any future economic power that asset holds through the expected currency crash. The only mystery here is that of military might. How do the banksters and global elites protect their assets in the future collapse they have made certain? Oh wait - private security companies capable of waging war. It's no accident that the early geopolitical energy wars of the 21st century saw a massive buildup of private corporate military and i
Paul Merrell

Paul Craig Roberts: Our Collapsing Economy and Currency - 0 views

  • Is the “fiscal cliff” real or just another hoax? The answer is that the fiscal cliff is real, but it is a result, not a cause. The hoax is the way the fiscal cliff is being used. The fiscal cliff is the result of the inability to close the federal budget deficit. The budget deficit cannot be closed because large numbers of US middle class jobs and the GDP and tax base associated with them have been moved offshore, thus reducing federal revenues. The fiscal cliff cannot be closed because of the unfunded liabilities of eleven years of US-initiated wars against a half dozen Muslim countries--wars that have benefitted only the profits of the military/security complex and the territorial ambitions of Israel. The budget deficit cannot be closed, because economic policy is focused only on saving banks that wrongful financial deregulation allowed to speculate, to merge, and to become too big to fail, thus requiring public subsidies that vastly dwarf the totality of US welfare spending.
  • The real crisis facing the US is the impending collapse of the US dollar’s foreign exchange value. The US dollar’s value in relation to silver and gold has already collapsed. In the past ten years, gold’s price in US dollars has increased from $250 per ounce to $1,750 per ounce, an increase of $1,500. Silver’s price has risen from $4 per ounce to $34 per ounce. These price rises are not due to a sudden scarcity of gold and silver, but to a flight from the dollar into the two forms of historical money that cannot be created with the printing press.
  • What can be done? For a number of years I have pointed out that the problem is the loss of US employment, consumer income, GDP, and tax base to offshoring. The solution is to reverse the outward flow of jobs and to bring them back to the US. This can be done, as Ralph Gomory has made clear, by taxing corporations according to where they add value to their product. If the value is added abroad, corporations would have a high tax rate. If they add value domestically with US labor, they would face a low tax rate. The difference in tax rates can be calculated to offset the benefit of the lower cost of foreign labor. As all offshored production that is brought to the US to be marketed to Americans counts as imports, relocating the production in the US would decrease the trade deficit, thus strengthening belief in the dollar. The increase in US consumer incomes would raise tax revenues, thus lowering the budget deficit. It is a win-win solution.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The second part to the solution is to end the expensive unfunded wars that have ruined the federal budget for the past 11 years as well as future budgets due to the cost of veterans’ hospital care and benefits. According to ABC World News, “In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, 2,333,972 American military personnel have been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan or both, as of Aug. 30, 2011 [more than a year ago].” These 2.3 million veterans have rights to various unfunded benefits including life-long health care. Already, according to ABC, 711,986 have used Veterans Administration health care between fiscal year 2002 and the third-quarter of fiscal year 2011. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-veterans-numbers/story?id=14928136#1 The Republicans are determined to continue the gratuitous wars and to make the 99 percent pay for the neoconservatives’ Wars of Hegemony while protecting the 1 percent from tax increases. The Democrats are little different.
  • No one in the White House and no more than one dozen members of the 535 member US Congress represents the American people. This is the reason that despite obvious remedies nothing can be done. America is going to crash big time. And the rest of the world will be thankful. America along with Israel is the world’s most hated country. Don’t expect any foreign bailouts of the failed “superpower.”
Gary Edwards

Paul Ryan: My Plan to Save America - 0 views

  •  
    "Newsmax asked vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan to provide his prescription for fixing the American economy and a defense of his proposed agenda, in light of the Obama's administration's refusal to address out-of-control entitlements. Here is his exclusive Newsmax Op-Ed. When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he assumed a degree of command over the federal government that few U.S. presidents have enjoyed. His party had just enlarged its already-large majority in the House of Representatives, and gained a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The president enjoyed tremendous popularity following his historic victory. During his campaign, then-Sen. Obama argued that what had stopped us from meeting our nation's greatest challenges had been "the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics - the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems." To solve this problem, he pledged to help us "rediscover our bonds to each other and get out of this constant, petty bickering that's come to characterize our politics." Urgent: See Newsmax's Special Report on Paul Ryan - Includes Exclusive Interview The last three and a half years of divisive politics and broken promises have been disappointing. "
  •  
    A few random thoughts on the budgetary gridlock in Congress: -- The elephant in the room that both parties are ignoring is bankster control of the money supply. Any budgetary reform is doomed unless the power of banksters to print as many dollars as they want is eliminated. In terms of purchasing power, the incredible dilution of the dollar's value that commenced when we abandoned the gold standard has put massive upward pressure on prices and budgets, both governmental and private. The Constitution explicitly forbids anything other than gold or silver to be used for payment of debts. -- Both parties and Obama have been guilty of drawing lines in the sand as preconditions to negotiation. E.g., no entitlement cuts, increased taxes on the wealthy, no defense cuts, no new taxes, etc. These are terms of surrender, not terms of negotiation, akin to an advertising campaign based on the fine print of the sales agreement rather than on why the customer should buy the product. As any successful negotiator knows, the keys to a successful negotiation are: [i] agreeing at the outset that there s no deal until all terms have been agreed to; and [ii] focusing on what you are willing to offer the other side as incentives to agree to a deal, not on areas of disagreement. A successful negotiation results in a deal where both sides feel that the deal puts them ahead of where they began. -- Arguing over pre-conditions is not negotiation; it is no more than a lame excuse for not negotiating. But that is what the White House and both parties have been doing. -- By functioning as an echo chamber for preconditions to negotiation, constituents, wittingly or not, aid in prevention of serious negotiation. Serious negotiation has no substantive preconditions; everything is on the table. And the focus is on what each side is willing to give the other if the entire deal is agreed to, not on what each side is unwilling to offer. -- The major players in the White House and Congress alre
Paul Merrell

2015 Will Be All About Iran, China and Russia / Sputnik International - 0 views

  • Fasten your seatbelts; 2015 will be a whirlwind pitting China, Russia and Iran against what I have described as the Empire of Chaos.
  • So yes – it will be all about further moves towards the integration of Eurasia as the US is progressively squeezed out of Eurasia. We will see a complex geostrategic interplay progressively undermining the hegemony of the US dollar as a reserve currency and, most of all, the petrodollar. For all the immense challenges the Chinese face, all over Beijing it's easy to detect unmistakable signs of a self-assured, self-confident, fully emerged commercial superpower. President Xi Jinping and the current leadership will keep investing heavily in the urbanization drive and the fight against corruption, including at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Internationally, the Chinese will accelerate their overwhelming push for new 'Silk Roads' – both overland and maritime – which will underpin the long-term Chinese master strategy of unifying Eurasia with trade and commerce.
  • Global oil prices are bound to remain low. All bets are off on whether a nuclear deal will be reached by this summer between Iran and the P5+1. If sanctions (actually economic war) against Iran remain and continue to seriously hurt its economy, Tehran’s reaction will be firm, and will include even more integration with Asia, not the West.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Now let’s take a look at Russian fundamentals. Russia’s government debt totals only 13.4% of its GDP. Its budget deficit in relation to GDP is only 0.5%.  If we assume a US GDP of $16.8 trillion (the figure for 2013), the US budget deficit totals 4% of GDP, versus 0.5% for Russia. The Fed is essentially a private corporation owned by regional US private banks, although it passes itself off as a state institution. US publicly held debt is equal to a whopping 74% of GDP in fiscal year 2014. Russia’s is only 13.4%. The declaration of economic war by the US and EU on Russia – via the run on the ruble and the oil derivative attack – was essentially a derivatives racket. Derivatives – in theory – may be multiplied to infinity. Derivative operators attacked both the ruble and oil prices in order to destroy the Russian economy. The problem is, the Russian economy is more soundly financed than America's.
  • Considering that this swift move was conceived as a checkmate, Moscow’s defensive strategy was not that bad. On the key energy front, the problem remains the West’s – not Russia’s. If the EU does not buy what Gazprom has to offer, it will collapse. Moscow’s key mistake was to allow Russia's domestic industry to be financed by external, dollar-denominated debt. Talk about a monster debt trap  which can be easily manipulated by the West. The first step for Moscow should be to closely supervise its banks. Russian companies should borrow domestically and move to sell their assets abroad. Moscow should also consider implementing a system of currency controls so the basic interest rate can be brought down quickly. And don’t forget that Russia can always deploy a moratorium on debt and interest, affecting over $600 billion. That would shake the entire world's banking system to the core. Talk about an undisguised “message” forcing the US/EU economic warfare to dissolve.
  • Russia does not need to import any raw materials. Russia can easily reverse-engineer virtually any imported technology if it needs to. Most of all, Russia can generate — from the sale of raw materials – enough credit in US dollars or euros. Russia's sale of its energy wealth — or sophisticated military gear — may decline. However, they will bring in the same amount of rubles — as the ruble has also declined.  Replacing imports with domestic Russian manufacturing makes total sense. There will be an inevitable “adjustment” phase – but that won’t take long. German car manufacturers, for instance, can no longer sell their cars in Russia due to the ruble's decline. This means they will have to relocate their factories to Russia. If they don’t, Asia – from South Korea to China — will blow them out of the market.
  • The EU's declaration of economic war against Russia makes no sense whatsoever. Russia controls, directly or indirectly, most of the oil and natural gas between Russia and China: roughly 25% of the world's supply. The Middle East is bound to remain a mess. Africa is unstable. The EU is doing everything it can to cut itself off from its most stable supply of hydrocarbons, prompting Moscow to redirect energy to China and the rest of Asia. What a gift for Beijing – as it minimizes the alarm about the US Navy playing with "containment" across the high seas.  Still, an unspoken axiom in Beijing is that the Chinese remain extremely worried about an Empire of Chaos losing more and more control, and dictating the stormy terms of the relationship between the EU and Russia. The bottom line is that Beijing would never allow itself to be in a position where the US could interfere with China's energy imports – as was the case with Japan in July 1941 when the US declared war by imposing an oil embargo, cutting off 92% of Japanese oil imports. Everyone knows a key plank of China’s spectacular surge in industrial power was the requirement for manufacturers to produce in China. If Russia did the same, its economy would be growing at a rate of over 5% per year in no time. It could grow even more if bank credit was tied only to productive investment.
  • Now imagine Russia and China jointly investing in a new gold, oil and natural resource-backed monetary union as a crucial alternative to the failed debt "democracy" model pushed by the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, the Western central bank cartel, and neoliberal politicians. They would be showing the Global South that financing prosperity and improved standards of living by saddling future generations with debt was never meant to work in the first place. Until then, a storm will be threatening our very lives – today and tomorrow. The Masters of the Universe/Washington combo won’t give up their strategy to make Russia a pariah state cut off from trade, the transfer of funds, banking and Western credit markets and thus prone to regime change. Further on down the road, if all goes according to plan, their target will be (who else) China. And Beijing knows it. Meanwhile, expect a few bombshells to shake the EU to its foundations. Time may be running out – but for the EU, not Russia. Still, the overall trend won’t be altered; the Empire of Chaos is slowly but surely being squeezed out of Eurasia.
Gary Edwards

Charting the Federal Reserve's Assets - 1915 to 2012 - Gresham's Law - 0 views

  •  
    Gresham provides us with a history of the Fed in charts. Relly cool charts!  Gresham's conclusion? - "the Fed has degenerated from a by and large passive institution (dealing only in high-quality self-liquidating commercial paper and gold) to an active pursuant of junk, an enabler of wars, a 'benevolent' combatant of the depressions of its own creation, a central planner of employment & prices and of course a forgiving friend to inconvenient market follies."   The Fed's Assets from 1915 to 2012 - Hover & Click to View Each Time Period…
Paul Merrell

Petrodollar Alert: Putin Prepares To Announce "Holy Grail" Gas Deal With China | Zero H... - 0 views

  • While Europe is furiously scrambling to find alternative sources of energy should Gazprom pull the plug on natgas exports to Germany and Europe (the imminent surge in Ukraine gas prices by 40% is probably the best indication of what the outcome would be), Russia is preparing the announcement of the "Holy Grail" energy deal with none other than China, a move which would send geopolitical shockwaves around the world and bind the two nations in a commodity-backed axis. One which, as some especially on these pages, have suggested would lay the groundwork for a new joint, commodity-backed reserve currency that bypasses the dollar, something which Russia implied moments ago when its finance minister Siluanov said that Russia may refrain from foreign borrowing this year. Translated: bypass western purchases of Russian debt, funded by Chinese purchases of US Treasurys, and go straight to the source. Here is what will likely happen next, as explained by Reuters:
  • Igor Sechin gathered media in Tokyo the next day to warn Western governments that more sanctions over Moscow's seizure of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine would be counter-productive.   The underlying message from the head of Russia's biggest oil company, Rosneft, was clear: If Europe and the United States isolate Russia, Moscow will look East for new business, energy deals, military contracts and political alliances.    The Holy Grail for Moscow is a natural gas supply deal with China that is apparently now close after years of negotiations. If it can be signed when Putin visits China in May, he will be able to hold it up to show that global power has shifted eastwards and he does not need the West. More details on the revelation of said "Holy Grail": State-owned Russian gas firm Gazprom hopes to pump 38 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas per year to China from 2018 via the first pipeline between the world's largest producer of conventional gas to the largest consumer.   "May is in our plans," a Gazprom spokesman said, when asked about the timing of an agreement. A company source said: "It would be logical to expect the deal during Putin's visit to China."
  • Summarizing what should be and is painfully obvious to all, but apparently to the White House, which keeps prodding at Russia, is the following: "The worse Russia's relations are with the West, the closer Russia will want to be to China. If China supports you, no one can say you're isolated," said Vasily Kashin, a China expert at the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) think thank. Bingo. And now add bilateral trade denominated in either Rubles or Renminbi (or gold), add Iran, Iraq, India, and soon the Saudis (China's largest foreign source of crude, whose crown prince also happened to meet president Xi Jinping last week to expand trade further) and wave goodbye to the petrodollar.
  •  
    The follies of an empire in decline that still imagines itself the master of the planet. 
Paul Merrell

Venezuela Launches First Nuke In Currency Wars, Devalues Currency By 46% | Zero Hedge - 0 views

  • While the rest of the developed world is scrambling here and there, politely prodding its central bankers to destroy their relative currencies, all the while naming said devaluation assorted names, "quantitative easing" being the most popular, here comes Venezuela and shows the banana republics of the developed world what lobbing a nuclear bomb into a currency war knife fight looks like: VENEZUELA DEVALUES FROM 4.30 TO 6.30 BOLIVARS VENEZUELA NEW CURRENCY BODY TO MANAGE DOLLAR INFLOWS CARACAS CONSUMER PRICES ROSE 3.3% IN JAN. And that, ladies and gents of Caracas, is how you just lost 46% of your purchasing power, unless of course your fiat was in gold and silver, which just jumped by about 46%. And, in case there is confusion, this is in process, and coming soon to every "developed world" banana republic near you.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 56 of 56
Showing 20 items per page