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Gary Edwards

Who owns the Bank of England? |Dark Politricks - 0 views

www.darkpolitricks.com/...who-owns-the-bank-of-england

banksters Banksters-of-America Rothschild-Bank-of-England

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Sep 13
     
    "Who owns the Bank of England? A brief history of World Banksters By Dark Politricks First a few historical comments by people who helped create two of the worlds most famous central banks, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve. "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence The Bank of England was created in 1694 by a Scotsman William Paterson who famously said: The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing. - William Paterson The history of the Bank of England and how it was taken over by one powerful family hundreds of years ago. Up until 1946 when it was nationalised the Bank of England was a private run bank that lent money it created out of nothing to the English government and was paid back with interest. A very famous story relates to the Bank of England and the infamous Rothschilds, that all powerful banking family. This story was re-told recently in a BBC documentary about the creation of money and the Bank of England. It revolves around the Battle of Waterloo in which Nathan Rothschild used his inside knowledge of the outcome and his faster horses and couriers to play the market by getting the result of the battle before anyone else knew the outcome. He quickly sold his English bonds and gave all the traders who looked to him for guidance the impression that the French had won at Waterloo. The other traders all rus
Paul Merrell

Are The Middle East Wars Really About Forcing the World Into Dollars and Private Centra... - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...d-private-central-banking.html

banksters dollar reserve currrencies Libya Iran Africa Gadafhi

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Why is the U.S. targeting Iran’s central bank? Well, multi-billionaire Hugo Salinas Price told King World News: What happened to Mr. Gaddafi, many speculate the real reason he was ousted was that he was planning an all-African currency for conducting trade. The same thing happened to him that happened to Saddam because the US doesn’t want any solid competing currency out there vs the dollar. You know Gaddafi was talking about a gold dinar. And as I noted in August: Ellen Brown argues in the Asia Times that there were even deeper reasons for the war than gold, oil or middle eastern regime change. Brown argues that Libya – like Iraq under Hussein – challenged the supremacy of the dollar and the Western banks: Later, the same general said they planned to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.
  • The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. Kenneth Schortgen Jr, writing on Examiner.com, noted that “[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.” According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Libya – Punishment for Ghaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar”, Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. *** And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:
  • One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned … Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.
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  • Adding credence to the theory about why Gadhafi had to be overthrown, as The New American reported in March, was the rebels’ odd decision to create a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The decision was broadcast to the world in the early weeks of the conflict. In a statement describing a March 19 meeting, the rebel council announced, among other things, the creation of a new oil company. And more importantly: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.” The creation of a new central bank, even more so than the new national oil regime, left analysts scratching their heads. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” noted Robert Wenzel in an analysis for the Economic Policy Journal. “This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences,” he added. Wenzel also noted that the uprising looked like a “major oil and money play, with the true disaffected rebels being used as puppets and cover” while the transfer of control over money and oil supplies takes place.
  • Similar scenarios involving the global monetary system — based on the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, backed by the fact that oil is traded in American money — have also been associated with other targets of the U.S. government. Some analysts even say a pattern is developing. Iran, for example, is one of the few nations left in the world with a state-owned central bank. And Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, once armed by the U.S. government to make war on Iran, was threatening to start selling oil in currencies other than the dollar just prior to the Bush administration’s “regime change” mission. While most of the establishment press in America has been silent on the issue of Gadhafi’s gold dinar scheme, in Russia, China, and the global alternative media, the theory has exploded in popularity.
  • Posted on January 13, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog The Reason for the Wars in the Middle East and North Africa:  Dollars The Middle Eastern and North African wars – planned 20 years ago – don’t necessarily have much to do with fighting terrorism. See this,  this and this. They are, in reality, about oil. And protecting Israel (and read the section entitled “Securing the Realm” here). But as AFP reports today, there is another major motivation for the expanding wars: The latest round of American sanctions are aimed at shutting down Iran’s central bank, a senior US official said Thursday, spelling out that intention directly for the first time. “We do need to close down the Central Bank of Iran (CBI),” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity, while adding that the United States is moving quickly to implement the sanctions, signed into law last month. *** Foreign central banks that deal with the Iranian central bank on oil transactions could also face similar restrictions under the new law, which has sparked fears of damage to US ties with nations like Russia and China. “If a correspondent bank of a US bank wants to do business with us and they’re doing business with CBI or other designated Iranian banks… then they’re going to get in trouble with us,” the US official said.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 14
     
    I only highlighted snippets. Lots more and lots of links. 
Gary Edwards

The Federal Reserve is a privately owned Corporation « orwelliania - 0 views

orwelliania.wordpress.com/...-a-privately-owned-corporation

End-the-Fed Banksters Globalist Rothschild-Banksters Central-Banks

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Jun 12
     
    Incredible.  Watch your breathing rate as you read this.  Otherwise you might pass out. excerpt: Who actually owns the Federal Reserve Central Banks? The ownership of the 12 Central banks, a very well kept secret, has been revealed: Rothschild Bank of London Warburg Bank of Hamburg Rothschild Bank of Berlin Lehman Brothers of New York Lazard Brothers of Paris Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy Goldman, Sachs of New York Warburg Bank of Amsterdam Chase Manhattan Bank of New York (Reference 14, P. 13, Reference 12, P. 152) These bankers are connected to London Banking Houses which ultimately control the FED. When England lost the Revolutionary War with America (our forefathers were fighting their own government), they planned to control us by controlling our banking system, the printing of our money, and our debt (Reference 4, 22). The individuals listed below owned banks which in turn owned shares in the FED. The banks listed below have significant control over the New York FED District, which controls the other 11 FED Districts. These banks also are partly foreign owned and control the New York FED District Bank. (Reference 22) First National Bank of New York James Stillman National City Bank, New York Mary W. Harnman National Bank of Commerce, New York A.D. Jiullard Hanover National Bank, New York Jacob Schiff Chase National Bank, New York Thomas F. Ryan Paul Warburg William Rockefeller Levi P. Morton M.T. Pyne George F. Baker Percy Pyne Mrs. G.F. St. George J.W. Sterling Katherine St. George H.P. Davidson J.P. Morgan (Equitable Life/Mutual Life) Edith Brevour T. Baker (Reference 4 for above, Reference 22 has details, P. 92, 93, 96, 179) How did it happen? After previous attempts to push the Federal Reserve Act through Congress, a group of bankers funded and staffed Woodrow Wilson's campaign for President. He had committed to sign this act. In 1913, a Senator, Nelson Aldrich, maternal grandfather to the Rockefell
Paul Merrell

BofA Said to Split Regulators Over Moving Merrill Derivatives to Bank Unit - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-derivatives-to-bank-unit.html

banksters toxic-derivatives BoA JPMorgan FDIC Dodd-Frank too-big-to-fail

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.
  • Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC- insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms. “The concern is that there is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the insured institution,” said William Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. “We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”
  • Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Bank of America’s long-term credit ratings Sept. 21, cutting both the holding company and the retail bank two notches apiece. The holding company fell to Baa1, the third-lowest investment-grade rank, from A2, while the retail bank declined to A2 from Aa3.
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  • The Moody’s downgrade spurred some of Merrill’s partners to ask that contracts be moved to the retail unit, which has a higher credit rating, according to people familiar with the transactions. Transferring derivatives also can help the parent company minimize the collateral it must post on contracts and the potential costs to terminate trades after Moody’s decision, said a person familiar with the matter. Bank of America estimated in an August regulatory filing that a two-level downgrade by all ratings companies would have required that it post $3.3 billion in additional collateral and termination payments, based on over-the-counter derivatives and other trading agreements as of June 30. The figure doesn’t include possible collateral payments due to “variable interest entities,” which the firm is evaluating, it said in the filing.
  • Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events such as changes in the weather or interest rates. Dodd-Frank Rules Keeping such deals separate from FDIC-insured savings has been a cornerstone of U.S. regulation for decades, including last year’s Dodd-Frank overhaul of Wall Street regulation. The legislation gave the FDIC, which liquidates failing banks, expanded powers to dismantle large financial institutions in danger of failing. The agency can borrow from the Treasury Department to finance the biggest lenders’ operations to stem bank runs. It’s required to recoup taxpayer money used during the resolution process through fees on the largest firms.
  • Bank of America’s holding company -- the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit -- held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades. 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.
  • Moving derivatives contracts between units of a bank holding company is limited under Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, which is designed to prevent a lender’s affiliates from benefiting from its federal subsidy and to protect the bank from excessive risk originating at the non-bank affiliate, said Saule T. Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. “Congress doesn’t want a bank’s FDIC insurance and access to the Fed discount window to somehow benefit an affiliate, so they created a firewall,” Omarova said. The discount window has been open to banks as the lender of last resort since 1914. As a general rule, as long as transactions involve high- quality assets and don’t exceed certain quantitative limitations, they should be allowed under the Federal Reserve Act, Omarova said.
  • In 2009, the Fed granted Section 23A exemptions to the banking arms of Ally Financial Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, Fifth Third Bancorp, ING Groep NV, General Electric Co., Northern Trust Corp., CIT Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., among others, according to letters posted on the Fed’s website. The central bank terminated exemptions last year for retail-banking units of JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and Deutsche Bank AG. The Fed also ended an exemption for Bank of America in March 2010 and in September of that year approved a new one. Section 23A “is among the most important tools that U.S. bank regulators have to protect the safety and soundness of U.S. banks,” Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, told Congress in March 2008.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Nov 13
     
    So according to Bloomberg, JPMorgan's commercial bank was the recipient of 99 percent of JPMorgan's $79 trillion (face value of derivatives) in bad bets. So adding JPMorgan's $78 trillion or so to the $75 trillion in bad bets Bank of America unloaded on its FDIC insured subsidiary, we arrive at $153 trillion in bad bets moved by two investment banks alone under the FDIC umbrella. Meanwhile, FDIC has authority under Dodd-Frank to liquidate these insolvent banks but doesn't, despite several successful lawsuits to recover the value of toxic derivatives that they sold to smaller banks that failed (which implies that FDIC could tell JPMorgan and BoA's investment banksters that they've got to pay off the toxic assets they transferred to their commercial banks, rather than diluting the insurance for normal depositors. Problem: the two big investment banks don't have sufficient assets to absorb those losses, so the too-politically-connected-to-fail factor kicks in. Note that I have not done any legal research in regard to these issues and am basing these observations on what has been stated about legal requirements in various media articles.
Paul Merrell

The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it | David Graeber... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-iou-bank-of-england-austerity

banksters Bank-of-England report

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.
  • The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.
  • It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."
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  • When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU.
  • What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.
  • The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again.
  • So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity.
  • In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards.
  • Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.
  • Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Mar 14
     
    Okay. The Bank of England finally fesses up and tells the truth about banking and government. Incredible!
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Gary Edwards

Doug Casey: All Banks Are Bankrupt - Casey Research - 1 views

www.caseyresearch.com/...g-casey-all-banks-are-bankrupt

Doug-Casey Banksters Cyprus Casey-Research

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Apr 13
     
    This interview should be must reading for every citizen of this world.  Doug Casey lays it out, explaining in the simplest of terms the problem of corrupt governments and banksters.  Put this RSS feed right next to Sir Charles' Priced In Gold" blog as essential to start your day with reading. excerpt: "Anyone with any sense should withdraw whatever cash they have in European banks, whether in euros or any other currency, immediately. Cyprus demonstrated that governments are quite willing and able to confiscate money sitting in a bank account in order to preserve the banking system. We live in Bizarro World. L: Why would it spread? Cyprus was said to be particularly vulnerable because of its strong Greek connections; Cypriot banks had bought of lot Greek debt. Would people in Luxembourg be as exposed? Doug: All banks are in effect creatures of the state at this point. They all own a lot of government bonds, which are considered the most secure form of capital. Of course, that's the opposite of the truth; all these governments are bankrupt as well. The Greek government is just more overtly bankrupt than most. Actually, we should take a minute here to discuss what a properly run banking system looks like. Historically, banks offered two types of accounts: demand deposits and time deposits. Demand deposits are what we call checking accounts today, but the original idea was that you'd pay your bank to store your money securely, and you had the right to "demand" your deposit back immediately, and to transfer funds via check. The idea of time deposits, which became savings accounts, was that the bank would pay you interest when you deposited your money with them for a specific period of time. That's why it's called a "time" deposit; you lent the bank your money for a given time, as did other depositors, and the banks would always know how much money they could lend out - at higher interest rates. Furthermore, loans made against time deposits were always short term
Gary Edwards

Reinventing Banking: From Russia to Iceland to Ecuador - 1 views

www.counterpunch.org/...m-russia-to-iceland-to-ecuador

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Global developments in finance and geopolitics are prompting a rethinking of the structure of banking and of the nature of money itself. Among other interesting news items: * In Russia, vulnerability to Western sanctions has led to proposals for a banking system that is not only independent of the West but is based on different design principles. * In Iceland, the booms and busts culminating in the banking crisis of 2008-09 have prompted lawmakers to consider a plan to remove the power to create money from private banks. * In Ireland, Iceland and the UK, a recession-induced shortage of local credit has prompted proposals for a system of public interest banks on the model of the Sparkassen of Germany. * In Ecuador, the central bank is responding to a shortage of US dollars (the official Ecuadorian currency) by issuing digital dollars through accounts to which everyone has access, effectively making it a bank of the people.
  • A major concern with stripping private banks of the power to create money as deposits when they make loans is that it will seriously reduce the availability of credit in an already sluggish economy. One solution is to make the banks, or some of them, public institutions. They would still be creating money when they made loans, but it would be as agents of the government; and the profits would be available for public use, on the model of the US Bank of North Dakota and the German Sparkassen (public savings banks). In Ireland, three political parties – Sinn Fein, the Green Party and Renua Ireland (a new party) — are now supporting initiatives for a network of local publicly-owned banks on the Sparkassen model. In the UK, the New Economy Foundation (NEF) is proposing that the failed Royal Bank of Scotland be transformed into a network of public interest banks on that model. And in Iceland, public banking is part of the platform of a new political party called the Dawn Party.
  • Particularly interesting is a proposal to provide targeted lending for businesses and industries by providing them with low-interest loans at 1-4 percent, financed through the central bank with quantitative easing (digital money creation). The proposal is to issue 20 trillion rubles for this purpose over a five year period. Using quantitative easing for economic development mirrors the proposal of UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbin for “quantitative easing for people.”
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  • William Engdahl concludes that Russia is in “a fascinating process of rethinking every aspect of her national economic survival because of the reality of the western attacks,” one that “could produce a very healthy transformation away from the deadly defects” of the current banking model.
  • Iceland’s Radical Money Plan Iceland, too, is looking at a radical transformation of its money system, after suffering the crushing boom/bust cycle of the private banking model that bankrupted its largest banks in 2008. According to a March 2015 article in the UK Telegraph: Iceland’s government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal – removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank. The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled “A better monetary system for Iceland”.
  • Under this “Sovereign Money” proposal, the country’s central bank would become the only creator of money. Banks would continue to manage accounts and payments and would serve as intermediaries between savers and lenders. The proposal is a variant of the Chicago Plan promoted by Kumhof and Benes of the IMF and the Positive Money group in the UK.
  • Ever since 2000, when Ecuador agreed to use the US dollar as its official legal tender, it has had to ship boatloads of paper dollars into the country just to conduct trade. In order to “seek efficiency in payment systems [and] to promote and contribute to the economic stability of the country,” the government of President Rafael Correa has therefore established the world’s first national digitally-issued currency.
  • Unlike Bitcoin and similar private crypto-currencies (which have been outlawed in the country), Ecuador’s dinero electronico is operated and backed by the government. The Ecuadorian digital currency is less like Bitcoin than like M-Pesa, a private mobile phone-based money transfer service started by Vodafone, which has generated a “mobile money” revolution in Kenya.
  • According to a National Assembly statement: Electronic money will stimulate the economy; it will be possible to attract more Ecuadorian citizens, especially those who do not have checking or savings accounts and credit cards alone. The electronic currency will be backed by the assets of the Central Bank of Ecuador.
  • That means there is no fear of the bank going bankrupt or of bank runs or bail-ins. Nor can the digital currency be devalued by speculative short selling. The government has declared that these are digital US dollars trading at 1 to 1 – take it or leave it – and the people are taking it. According to an October 2015 article titled “
  • Banking Moves into the 21st Century The catastrophic failures of the Western banking system mandate a new vision. These transformations, current and proposed, are constructive steps toward streamlining the banking system, eliminating the risks that have devastated individuals and governments, democratizing money, and promoting sustainable and prosperous economies.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Dec 15
     
    Excellent article on banking, lending, and currency reform initiatives.  Thanks to Marbux!
Gary Edwards

The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever - and the VESTS Solution - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...l-Ever--and-the-VESTS-Solution

Banksters matt-taibbi LiBOR

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13
     
    excerpt: Uber financial investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has discovered what we too realized when we began to scrutinize the financial industry. In his latest article, he writes, "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever." The article's cut line is, "The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix." Taibbi's incredulity is evident throughout the article, as well it should be. The interest-rate swap market is part of the larger derivatives market that totals over one billion TRILLION dollars............................... "Given the endless financial scandals that keep sweeping across the industry, it is fairly obvious that this regulatory system needs a good deal of improvement. In fact, I think that it may be no coincidence that so much is being revealed now. The idea is surely to create the conditions for another international regulatory effort that will end up further controlling what is left of free-market capital raising. It is a global game for globalists. The game is to regulate everything and then to position oneself above the regulations and above the governments that wield them. This gives you tremendous power over everyone else. One of the tools being used to whip up sentiment for a larger regulatory revisiting is scandal and more scandal. There have been revelations of so-called crooked practices in a number of areas lately, mostly in the area of industry pricing. It turns out that many standard prices are set via indications of interest rather than outright competition. We can see the same system at work in the gold market, where a small group of wise men set the price for physical gold every day. And now, as Taibbi and others have revealed, the dysfunctional system also affects interest rate swaps. This has incensed Taibbi, who opens his article as follows: Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the
Gary Edwards

The Biggest Financial Scam In World History           : Information Clearing ... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31768.htm

banksters LiBOR

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 12
     
    Marbux sent me this link to series of videos explaining the LiBOR bankster crisis.  The awesome Bill Black is featured in two of the video interviews.  Others include Matt Taibi of the Rolling Stone Magazine.  Matt's work on bankster criminals is legendary.  This is incredible stuff.  Very heated.  Clearly we are at the heart of the largest criminal fraud ever perpetrated, and it involves the worlds largest banksters.  Including the Queen of England (Bank of England).  $800 Trillion in fraud.  Incredible. Yes, the Libor Scandal Affects You By Jack Hough July 06, 2012 "Smart Money" - -A liger is a cross between a lion and a tiger. Libor, on the other hand, is a daily approximation of what banks charge each other for loans. It turns out only one of these things is real. Awkwardly, it's not the one used to set prices on an estimated $800 trillion in global financial instruments, or $116,000 worth for each person on earth, ranging from complex derivatives to student loans. That's a problem for holders of bank stocks - which includes just about anyone who owns a mutual fund or 401(k). Barclays (BCS) agreed last week to pay $453 million to settle allegations that it manipulated Libor, which stands for London interbank offered rate. As The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, it's likely only the first: More than a dozen banks on three continents are under investigation. Libor is compiled by asking 18 banks what they think they would pay if they needed money. Some banks may have submitted artificially low responses during the global financial crisis to give the appearance of high creditworthiness. Others may have tinkered with the reading to profit from trades, or avoid losses. The Barclays settlement is affordable, at less than 7% of the company's projected profits this year, but the size of legal claims it and other banks face is difficult to imagine. Trial lawyers will do their best to work out the sums, of course. Libor may have been subject
Gary Edwards

How Government Failure Caused the Great Recession - The American, A Magazine of Ideas - 0 views

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banksters obammunism financial-collapse

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  • Gary Edwards on 29 Dec 10
     
    The banking crisis that began in August 2007 shocked markets and precipitated the Great Recession. To fully explain the banking crisis, one must account for its timing, severity, and global impact. One must also confront a startling historical contrast. If we define "banking crisis" to mean bank failures and system losses exceeding 1 percent of a country's gross domestic product (GDP), we find that in the period 1875-1913, a period of marked expansion in international trade and capital flows comparable to the last three decades, there were only four banking crises worldwide.1 By contrast, in the period 1978-2009, a period of much more extensive bank regulation, central bank intervention, government protection of depositors and other bank creditors, and government control of mortgage markets, about 140 banking crises occurred worldwide. Of these, 20 were more severe than any crisis from the earlier period of 1875-1913, in terms of total bank losses as a percent of GDP. Leading financial economists such as Charles Calomiris have argued that a necessary condition for a banking crisis is government policy that distorts the micro-incentives of banks. Likewise, University of Chicago scholar Richard Posner has argued the banks that got into trouble during the recent crisis were simply taking "risks that seemed appropriate in the environment in which they found themselves."2 In the period 1978-2009, about 140 banking crises occurred worldwide. But then why didn't a banking crisis erupt sooner-say, in the recession years of 1990-1991 or 2001-2002? What changed in recent years that led to business risk-taking capable of wrecking the U.S. housing market and the U.S. banking system and other banking systems throughout the world? Further, why were prudent credit practices reasonably maintained in credit card and commercial mortgage securitization in recent years, but wholly abandoned in residential mortgage securitization?
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Doug Casey on the Continuing Debasement of Money, Language and Banking... - 0 views

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Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • This isn't going to last because the way you get wealthy is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference – not by consuming more than you produce, and borrowing the difference. With the Fed keeping interest rates at artificially low levels, hoping to increase consumption, they're making it very foolish to save – when you get ½% or 1% on your savings. So people are saving less and they're borrowing more than they otherwise would. This is a formula for making things worse, not better.
  • They are, idiotically, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be.
  • In point of fact, the Fed should be abolished; the market, not bureaucrats, should determine interest rates. We wouldn't be in this pickle to start with if the government wasn't involved in the economy.
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  • The Chinese, the Japanese – everybody is selling, trying to pass the Old Maid card of US Government debt, which represents return–free risk. Nobody other than the Fed is buying, and interest rates would skyrocket if they stopped. The more QE there is, the more distortions it will cause, however, making for a bigger disaster the longer it goes on.
  • Will the Fed continue to inflate the money supply? Doug Casey: They have to, because with the huge amount of debt in the world – and the amount of debt in the world has increased something like 40 or 50% just since the Greater Depression started – if they don't keep increasing the amount of money in the world then nobody's going to be able to service the huge amount of debt that is out there. So I don't see anything changing in the years to come. They've truly painted themselves into a corner. They're caught between Scylla and Charybdis, and we don't have Odysseus steering the ship of state.
  • Let me say, again, that the Fed serves no useful purpose and it should be abolished. Central banks create "super money" by buying government or other debt with new currency units that they credit to the sellers' accounts at commercial banks. That's the actual engine of inflation.
  • But it's greatly compounded in the commercial banking system through fractional reserve lending – which would not be possible without a central bank. Fractional reserve lending allows banks to multiply the money supply several times.
  • If $100 of Fed super money, freshly created, is deposited in a commercial bank like Chase or Citibank, then $90 can be lent out with a 10% reserve, the current number. That money is redeposited. They'll then lend out 90% of that $90, or $81, and then 90% of that $81, so it multiplies.
  • Central banking and fractional reserve lending go hand-in-hand.
  • Without a central bank, any bank that engaged in fractional reserve banking would be considered guilty of fraud and, when discovered, would be punished by a bank run, followed by criminal charges. The point to be made here is that the entire banking system today is totally unsound and totally corrupt.
  • In a sound banking system you have two types of deposits – checking account (or demand) deposits, and savings account (or time) deposits. They are completely different businesses. With demand deposits, you pay the bank to store your money securely, and write checks against it. A bank should no more lend out demand deposit money than Allied Storage should lend out the furniture you're paying them to store.
  • Savings accounts are completely different. Here you lend money to a bank, perhaps at 3%, and they relend it at 6%, making 3% to cover costs, risks and profits. A sound bank not only has to match the maturities of its deposits with the maturities of its loans, but must insure loans are both highly secured and self-liquidating.
  • These principles have been totally lost. Today banks operate as hedge funds.
  • As an aside, if someone were to set up a well-capitalized 100% reserve bank in a tax haven, especially using gold as an alternative currency, it would be immensely successful in the years to come – when most all conventional banks will fail.
  • By all historical, normal parameters, the stock market is greatly overvalued.
  • The trillions of new currency units that the Fed is creating are creating bubbles, and one of them is in the stock market. The biggest bubble, of course, is in the bond market – that's a super bubble.
  • Not only does the dollar have no real value but the banks you keep it in are all insolvent.
  • There are few sound investments out there. Today there are no investments; there are only speculations.
  • From the economist's point of view, the bubbles created by central banking are a disaster, but from a speculator's point of view they're a godsend. It's becoming harder and harder to be an investor; I define an investor as someone who allocates capital to productive business. It's hard to be an investor because you now have to spend more money on lawyers than on engineers and workers if you want to produce something. You're increasingly forced to be a speculator in today's climate.
  • Stock and bond markets all over the world are overpriced – with the exception of Russian stocks right now; they could be a very interesting speculation. I wouldn't touch anything in China yet, because all the Chinese banks are going to go bust.
  • The Chinese have been more profligate inflating the yuan than the Americans have been with the dollar. It's fantastic what the Chinese have done since Deng liberalized the economy in the early '80s, but now's not a time to be in their markets.
  • You've got to remember there are two types of people in the world: people who want to control material reality and people who want to control other people.
  • It's that second type who go into politics. They play games – here it's called the Great Game, which dignifies it in a way it shouldn't be – with other people's lives and property. It's been this way ever since the state was created about 5,000 years ago, and I don't think you should play games with other people's lives.
  • On the bright side, there are more scientists and engineers alive today than in all of human history put together, and so technology is advancing more rapidly than ever for that reason. That's a huge plus.
  • The second good thing is that the average person, at least those who aren't on welfare, tries to produce more than he consumes. That creates capital.
  • But I'm afraid that Western civilization reached its peak before World War I. World War I destroyed a huge amount of capital and, more importantly, it changed the moral bases of so many things.
  • Then World War II institutionalized the State as the most important part of society – which is perverse, because the state is actually the enemy of civil society.
  • I think Western civilization reached its peak in 1913, when it reached its maximum geographical extent. That was coincidental with the peak of its technological and philosophical influence on the world, much the way the Roman Empire reached its peak at about the end of the first century, then went down, slowly at first and then quickly. That's what's happening to the West.
  • Relative to the rest of the world, and contribution to world production, our piece of the economic pie is getting smaller and smaller. If we have another serious war it would be absolutely smaller, and the final nail in the coffin. Meanwhile, the US, with its bloated military, is just itching for another war. It's out of control, and unlikely to change at this point. That's a big trend that is in motion that I think is going to stay in motion.
  • Europe is in particularly bad shape. The place is a fascist/socialist disaster.
  • It was possible for the average European to keep his head above water through tax evasion in the past, but now those governments have broken bank secrecy everywhere, and it will destroy a lot of capital.
  • The "nation-state" is a really stupid and dysfunctional idea, and I'm glad it's on its way out.
  • That said, even the US, which from a cultural point of view is as much of a country as any place in the world, should actually break up into at least five or six regions.
  • Canada should break up into at least five or six regions initially.
  • I don't think politically; politics is the problem, not the solution. I think that the ideal solution is for every individual to opt out of the current system. When they give a war, you don't come. When they give a tax, you don't pay. When they give an election, you don't vote. You even try not to use their currency and their banking system. T
  • he ideal thing is to let the system collapse under its own weight as opposed to starting a new political party and then continuing to act politically, which is to say to use force on other people.
  • Market risk is huge today, but political risk is even bigger. One indication of that was, when the banks in Cyprus went bust some months ago, the government essentially confiscated everybody's account above 100,000 euros, in what they called a "bail-in."
  • You need several options. It seems like people haven't learned anything from what happened in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1933, China in 1948, Cuba in 1959, or Vietnam in 1975. Rwanda, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Syria ... there are lots of examples and these things can and will eventually happen almost everywhere. When the chimpanzees go crazy, you don't want to be where they are. You've got to have a Plan B. You've got to have a crib out of that political jurisdiction. Acting like a plant, and staying put, isn't a good survival strategy for a human.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 15
     
    "Doug Casey: I don't see a real recovery until they stop debasing the currency, radically cut government spending and taxation and eliminate most regulation. In other words, cease doing the things that caused this depression. And that's not going to happen until there's a collapse of the current order. Things have cyclically improved since the height of the crisis of 2008-09. The trillions of currency units created by the Federal Reserve have jammed the stock market higher and kept the big banks from going under. What surprises me is that retail prices have not moved as significantly as I would have expected. The reason, I believe, is that most of that money is still sitting in financial institutions. It has gone into cash out of fear, into stocks because they represent real wealth with earning power and into various speculative assets like artwork and collectible cars. Real estate has recovered somewhat, not because of strong fundamentals but strictly because of money creation. This isn't going to last because the way you get wealthy is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference - not by consuming more than you produce, and borrowing the difference. With the Fed keeping interest rates at artificially low levels, hoping to increase consumption, they're making it very foolish to save - when you get ½% or 1% on your savings. So people are saving less and they're borrowing more than they otherwise would. This is a formula for making things worse, not better. They are, idiotically, doing exactly the opposite of what they should be. Although, I hasten to add, I hate to pontificate on what the Fed "should" do. In point of fact, the Fed should be abolished; the market, not bureaucrats, should determine interest rates. We wouldn't be in this pickle to start with if the government wasn't involved in the economy. In fact, if it wasn't for the state, I suspect we'd all have a vastly higher standard of living, and would be colonizing the Moon, Mars and
Paul Merrell

Iceland Stuns Banks: Plans To Take Back The Power To Create Money | Global Research - C... - 0 views

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banksters Iceland monetary-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Who knew that the revolution would start with those radical Icelanders? It does, though. One Frosti Sigurjonsson, a lawmaker from the ruling Progress Party, issued a report today that suggests taking the power to create money away from commercial banks, and hand it to the central bank and, ultimately, Parliament. Can’t see commercial banks in the western world be too happy with this. They must be contemplating wiping the island nation off the map. If accepted in the Iceland parliament , the plan would change the game in a very radical way. It would be successful too, because there is no bigger scourge on our economies than commercial banks creating money and then securitizing and selling off the loans they just created the money (credit) with. Everyone, with the possible exception of Paul Krugman, understands why this is a very sound idea. Agence France Presse reports: Iceland Looks At Ending Boom And Bust With Radical Money Plan Iceland’s government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal – removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank. The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled “A better monetary system for Iceland”.
  • “The findings will be an important contribution to the upcoming discussion, here and elsewhere, on money creation and monetary policy,” Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson said. The report, commissioned by the premier, is aimed at putting an end to a monetary system in place through a slew of financial crises, including the latest one in 2008.
  • According to a study by four central bankers, the country has had “over 20 instances of financial crises of different types” since 1875, with “six serious multiple financial crisis episodes occurring every 15 years on average”. Mr Sigurjonsson said the problem each time arose from ballooning credit during a strong economic cycle. He argued the central bank was unable to contain the credit boom, allowing inflation to rise and sparking exaggerated risk-taking and speculation, the threat of bank collapse and costly state interventions. In Iceland, as in other modern market economies, the central bank controls the creation of banknotes and coins but not the creation of all money, which occurs as soon as a commercial bank offers a line of credit. The central bank can only try to influence the money supply with its monetary policy tools.
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  • Under the so-called Sovereign Money proposal, the country’s central bank would become the only creator of money. “Crucially, the power to create money is kept separate from the power to decide how that new money is used,” Mr Sigurjonsson wrote in the proposal. “As with the state budget, the parliament will debate the government’s proposal for allocation of new money,” he wrote. Banks would continue to manage accounts and payments, and would serve as intermediaries between savers and lenders. Mr Sigurjonsson, a businessman and economist, was one of the masterminds behind Iceland’s household debt relief programme launched in May 2014 and aimed at helping the many Icelanders whose finances were strangled by inflation-indexed mortgages signed before the 2008 financial crisis.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Apr 15
     
    In closely related news, a Pentagon spokesman announced that soldiers of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Brigade and 22nd and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units were in the "mopping up stage" of routing terrorists who had captured the city of Reykjavík, Iceland in an April 7, 2015 surpise attack. According to knowledgeable sources in the White House, the terrorist invasion was reported by an unidentified official of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who had received urgent telephone calls from counterparts in Iceland's central bank. "We're still assessing the situation, but it looks like all members of the Icelandic government were brutally executed by the terrorists just before they retreated," Rear Adm. John Kirby said. Asked for the name of the terrorist organization that carried out the attack, Adm. Kirby said that the name had not yet been declassified, but said that he hoped to be able to announce that information soon.     
Paul Merrell

Amend the Federal Reserve: We Need a Central Bank that Serves Main Street | Global Rese... - 0 views

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banksters federal-reserve Federal-Reserve-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • December 23rd marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve. Dissatisfaction with its track record has prompted calls to audit the Fed and end the Fed.  At the least, Congress needs to amend the Fed, modifying the Federal Reserve Act to give the central bank the tools necessary to carry out its mandates. The Federal Reserve is the only central bank with a dual mandate. It is charged not only with maintaining low, stable inflation but with promoting maximum sustainable employment. Yet unemployment remains stubbornly high, despite four years of radical tinkering with interest rates and quantitative easing (creating money on the Fed’s books). After pushing interest rates as low as they can go, the Fed has admitted that it has run out of tools. At an IMF conference on November 8, 2013, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers suggested that since near-zero interest rates were not adequately promoting people to borrow and spend, it might now be necessary to set interest at below zero. This idea was lauded and expanded upon by other ivory-tower inside-the-box thinkers, including Paul Krugman. Negative interest would mean that banks would charge the depositor for holding his deposits rather than paying interest on them. Runs on the banks would no doubt follow, but the pundits have a solution for that: move to a cashless society, in which all money would be electronic. “This would make it impossible to hoard cash outside the bank,” wrote Danny Vinik in Business Insider, “allowing the Fed to cut interest rates to below zero, spurring people to spend more.”
  • Business Week quotes Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office: “We’ve had four years of extraordinarily loose monetary policy without satisfactory results, and the only thing they come up with is we need more?” Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, calls the idea “harebrained.” He is equally skeptical of quantitative easing, the Fed’s other tool for stimulating the economy. Roberts points to Andrew Huszar’s explosive November 11th Wall Street Journal article titled “Confessions of a Quantitative Easer,” in which Huszar says that QE was always intended to serve Wall Street, not Main Street.  Huszar’s assignment at the Fed was to manage the purchase of $1.25 trillion in mortgages with dollars created on a computer screen. He says he resigned when he realized that the real purpose of the policy 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.”
  • Bernanke created debt-free money and bought government debt with it, returning the interest to the Treasury. The result was interest-free credit, a good deal for the government. But the problem, says Lounsbury, is that: The helicopters dropped all the money into a hole in the ground (excess reserve accounts) and very little made its way into the economy.  It was essentially a rearrangement of the balance sheets of the creditor nation with little impact on the debtor nation. . . . The fatal flaw of QE is that it delivers money to the accounts of the creditors and does nothing for the accounts of the debtors. Bad debts remain unserviced and the debt crisis continues.
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  • Bernanke delivered the money to the creditors because that was all the Federal Reserve Act allowed. If the Fed is to fulfill its mandate, it clearly needs more tools; and that means amending the Act.  Harvard professor Ken Rogoff, who spoke at the November 2013 IMF conference before Larry Summers, suggested several possibilities; and one was to broaden access to the central bank, allowing anyone to have an ATM at the Fed. Rajiv Sethi, Barnard/Columbia Professor of Economics, expanded on this idea in a blog titled “The Payments System and Monetary Transmission.” He suggested making the Federal Reserve the repository for all deposit banking. This would make deposit insurance unnecessary; it would eliminate the need to impose higher capital requirements; and it would allow the Fed to implement monetary policy by targeting debtor rather than creditor balance sheets. Instead of returning its profits to the Treasury, the Fed could do a helicopter drop directly into consumer bank accounts, stimulating demand in the consumer economy. John Lounsbury expanded further on these ideas. He wrote in Econintersect that they would open a pathway for investment banking and depository banking to be separated from each other, analogous to that under Glass-Steagall. Banks would no longer be too big to fail, since they could fail without destroying the general payment system of the economy. Lounsbury said the central bank could operate as a true public bank and repository for all federal banking transactions, and it could operate in the mode of a postal savings system for the general populace.
  • The Federal Reserve Act was drafted by bankers to create a banker’s bank that would serve their interests. It is their own private club, and its legal structure keeps all non-members out.  A century after the Fed’s creation, a sober look at its history leads to the conclusion that it is a privately controlled institution whose corporate owners use it to direct our entire economy for their own ends, without democratic influence or accountability.  Substantial changes are needed to transform the Fed, and these will only come with massive public pressure. Congress has the power to amend the Fed – just as it did in 1934, 1958 and 2010. For the central bank to satisfy its mandate to promote full employment and to become an institution that serves all the people, not just the 1%, the Fed needs fundamental reform.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 13
     
    In my view, the Fed is beyond salvage. It needs abolition, not a new role. The Constitution grants Congress the power to mint and coin money, not a group of rent-seeking banksters. 
Gary Edwards

Gold Price "Manipulated For A Decade", Repeatedly Slammed Lower, Bloomberg Reports | Ze... - 0 views

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GOLD LiBOR

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  • Gary Edwards on 01 Mar 14
     
    "While the FT promptly retracted an article on precisely the topic of gold manipulation from earlier this week (recorded for posterity here), Bloomberg appears to not have had the same "editorial" concerns and pressures, and today released an article once again slamming the final conspiracy theory that while every other asset class is manipulated, gold is in a pristine class of its own, untouched by close-banging, price fixing traders or central bankers, and reports that "the London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewelers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say." Of course, over the past 5 years we have reported time and again how official gold manipulation started in earnest some time in the 1960s (who can forget the "reshuffle club") but we will start with a decade. Here is what BBG finds: Unusual trading patterns around 3 p.m. in London, when the so-called afternoon fix is set on a private conference call between five of the biggest gold dealers, are a sign of collusive behavior and should be investigated, New York University's Stern School of Business Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz and Albert Metz, a managing director at Moody's Investors Service, wrote in a draft research paper.   "The structure of the benchmark is certainly conducive to collusion and manipulation, and the empirical data are consistent with price artificiality," they say in the report, which hasn't yet been submitted for publication. "It is likely that co-operation between participants may be occurring."   The paper is the first to raise the possibility that the five banks overseeing the century-old rate -- Barclays Plc, Deutsche Bank AG, Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC Holdings Plc and Societe Generale SA -- may have been actively working together to manipulate the benchmark. It also adds to pressure on the firms to overhaul the way the rate is calculated. Authorities around the world, already inv
Gary Edwards

The Project To Restore America - 0 views

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Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • One hundred years ago this month, on December 23, 1913, the Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing a national central-banking system in the United States. The governing board of the Federal Reserve was organized on August 12, 1914, and the Federal Reserve banks opened for operation on November 16, 1914.   On the surface, the preamble to the Act, which summarized the purpose of the new government-created institution, seemed fairly innocuous:   “An Act to provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.”
  • The Powers of the Federal Reserve   But what this meant was the start of the monopolization of monetary matters in the hands of a single politically appointed authority within the boundaries of the United States.   Those innocuously sounding functions listed in the Act’s preamble, however, gave the Federal Reserve the power to:   (a) Control the quantity of money and credit supplied in the United States.   (b) Influence the value, or purchasing power, of the monetary unit that is used by the citizenry of the country in all their transactions.   (c) Indirectly manipulate the rates of interest at which borrowers and lenders transfer savings for investment and other purposes, including the funding of government budget deficits.
  • A Century of Central Bank Mismanagement   The 100-year record of the Federal Reserve has been a roller coaster of inflations and recessions, including the disaster of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the “excessive exuberance” of the late 1990s that resulted in the “Dot.Com” bubble that burst in the early 2000s, and the recent boom-bust cycle of the last decade from which the U.S. economy is still slowly recovering.   The crucial and fundamental problem with the power and authority of the Federal Reserve is that it represents monetary central planning. In a world that has, for the most part, turned its back on the theoretical error and practical disaster of believing that governments have the wisdom and ability to centrally plan the economic affairs of a society, central banking remains one of the major remaining forms of socialism practiced around the globe.   Government control and planning of the monetary system has resulted in extensive political power over virtually every aspect of our economic life. In 1942 Gustav Stolper, a German free-market economist then in exile in America from war-torn Europe, published a book titled “This Age of Fables.” He pointed out:
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  • “Hardly ever do the advocates of free capitalism realize how utterly their ideal was frustrated at the moment the state assumed control of the monetary system . . . A ‘free’ capitalism with government responsibility for money and credit has lost its innocence. From that point on it is no longer a matter of principle but one of expediency how far one wishes or permits government interference to go. Money control is the supreme and most comprehensive of all governmental controls short of expropriation.”
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Dec 13
     
    Interesting two part summary of the Federal Reserve that emphasis' the essential relationship between central banking and socialism.  The author, Richard Ebeling, goes as far as to say that not only is central banking essential to socialism but also that free market - individual liberty capitalism cannot coexist with central banking. IIRC, there is a clause int he Federal Reserve Act of 1913 where the US Treasury can purchase back control of the money supply at a cost of $144 Million dollars.  Not sure where I read that, but the cancellation of near two thirds of the interest due on our national debt would work wonders for the dollar.
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Richard Ebeling on Higher Interest Rates, Collectivism and the Coming ... - 0 views

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Richard-Ebeling The-Daily-Bell Austrian-Economics Liberty-Tryanny

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  • The "larger dysfunction," as you express it, arises out of a number of factors. The primary one, in my view, is a philosophical and psychological schizophrenia among the American people.
  • While many on "the left" ridicule the idea, there is a strong case for the idea of "American exceptionalism," meaning that the United States stands out as something unique, different and special among the nations of the world.
  • the American Founding Fathers constructed a political system in the United States based on a concept on which no other country was consciously founded:
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  • But the American Revolution and the US Constitution hailed a different conception of man, society and government.
  • n the rest of the world, and for all of human history, the presumption has been that the individual was a slave or a subject to a higher authority. It might be the tribal chief; or the "divinely ordained" monarch who presumed to rule over and control people in the name of God; or, especially after the French Revolution and the rise of modern socialism, "the nation" or "the people" who laid claim to the life and work of the individual.
  • the idea of individual rights.
  • That is, as long as the individual did not violate the equal rights of others to their life, liberty and property, each person was free to shape and guide his own future, and give meaning and value to his own life as he considered best in the pursuit of that happiness that was considered the purpose and goal of each man during his sojourn on this Earth.
  • Governments did not exist to give or bestow "rights" or "privileges" at its own discretion.
  • Governments were to secure and protect each individual's rights, which he possessed by "the nature of things."
  • The individual was presumed to own himself. He was "sovereign."
  • The real and fundamental notion of "self-government" referred to the right of each individual to rule over himself.
  • Each individual, by his nature and his reason, had a right to his life, his liberty and his honestly acquired property.
  • during the first 150 years of America's history there was virtually no Welfare State and relatively few government regulations, controls and restrictions on the choices and actions of the free citizen.
  • But for more than a century, now, an opposing conception of man, society and government has increasingly gained a hold over the ideas and attitudes of people in the US.
  • It was "imported" from Europe in the form of modern collectivism.
  • The individual was expected to see himself as belonging to something "greater" than himself. He was to sacrifice for "great national causes."
  • He was told that if life had not provided all that he desired or hoped for, it was because others had "exploited" him in some economic or social manner, and that government would redress the "injustice" through redistribution of wealth or regulation of the marketplace.
  • If he had had financial and material success, the individual should feel guilty and embarrassed by it, because, surely, if some had noticeably more, it could only be because others had been forced to live with noticeably less.
  • left on its own, free competition tends to evolve into harmful monopolies and oligopolies, with the wealthy "few" benefiting at the expense of the "many."
  • They are the crises of the Interventionist-Welfare State: the attempt to impose reactionary collectivist policies of political paternalism and redistributive plunder on a society still possessing parts of its original individualist and rights-based roots.
  • it is in the form of communism's and socialism's critique of capitalism.
  • Unregulated capitalism leads to "unearned" and "excessive" profits; unbridled markets generate the business cycle and the hardships of recessions and depressions;
  • These two conflicting conceptions of man, society and government have been and are at war here in the United States.
  • And if it cannot be gotten and guaranteed through the redistributive mechanisms of the European Union and the euro, well, maybe we should return power to our own nation-states to provide the jobs, the social "safety nets" and the financial means to pay for it through, once again, printing our own national paper currencies.
  • This is the political-philosophical bankruptcy of the West and the dead ends of the collectivist promises of the last 100 years.
  • Ludwig von Mises's book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, originally published in 1922, demonstrated how and why a socialist, centrally planned system was inherently unworkable.
  • The nationalization of productive property, the abolition of markets and the prohibition of all competitive exchange among the members of society would prevent the emergence and operation of a price system, without which it is impossible to know people's demands for desired goods and the relative value they place on them.
  • It also prevents the emergence of prices for the factors of production (land, labor, capital) and makes it impossible to know their opportunity costs – the value of those factors of production in alternative competing uses among entrepreneurs desiring to employ them.
  • Without such a price system the central planners are flying blind, unable to rationally know or decide how best to utilize labor, capital and resources in productively efficient ways to make the goods and services most highly valued by the consuming public.
  • Thus, Mises concluded, comprehensive socialist central planning would lead to "planned chaos."
  • And, therefore, there is no guarantee that the amount of investments undertaken and their time horizons are compatible with the available resources not also being demanded and used for more immediate consumer goods production in the society.
  • As a consequence, financial markets do not work like real markets.
  • Thus, the interventionist state leads to waste, inefficiency and misuses of resources that lower the standards of living that we all, otherwise, could have enjoyed.
  • We cannot be sure what the amount of real savings may be in the society to support real and sustainable investment and capital formation.
  • Government intervention prevents prices from "telling the truth" about the real supply and demand conditions thus leading to imbalances and distortions in the market.
  • We cannot know what the "real cost" of borrowing should be, since interest rates are not determined by actual, private sector savings and investment decisions.
  • Government production regulations, controls, restrictions and prohibitions prevent entrepreneurs from using their knowledge, ability and capital in ways that most effectively produce the goods consumers actually want and at the most cost-competitive prices possible.
  • This is why countries around the world periodically experience booms and busts, inflations and recessions − not because of some inherent instabilities or "irrationalities" in financial markets, but because of monetary central planning through central banking that does not allow market-based financial intermediation to develop and work as it could and would in a real free-market setting.
  • But in the United States and especially in Europe, government "austerity" means merely temporarily reducing the rate of increase in government spending, slowing down the rate at which new debt is accumulating and significantly raising taxes in an attempt to close the deficit gap.
  • The fundamental problem is that over the decades, the size and scope of governments in the Western world have been growing far more than the rates at which their economies have been expanding, so that the "slice" of the national economic "pie" eaten by government has been growing larger and larger, even when the "pie" in absolute terms is bigger than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
  • European governments, in general, take the view that "austerity" means squeezing the private sector more through taxes and other revenue sources to avoid any noticeable and significant cuts in what government does and spends.
  • So there is "austerity" for the private sector and a mad rush for financial "safety nets" for the government and those who live off the State.
  • In reality, of course, it is the burdens of government regulation, taxation and impediments to more flexible labor and related markets that have generated the high unemployment rates and the retarded recovery from the recession.
  • Instead, the "common market" ideal has been transformed into the goal of a European Union "Super-State" to which the individual countries and their citizens would be subservient and obedient.
  • Keynesian policies offer people and politicians what they want to hear. Claiming that any sluggish business or lost jobs are due to a lack of "aggregate demand," Keynes argued that full employment and profitable business could only be reestablished and maintained through "activist" government monetary and fiscal policy – print money and run budget deficits.
  • What Britain and Europe should have as its goal is the ideal of the classical liberal free traders of the 19th century – non-intervention by governments in people's lives, at home and abroad. That is, a de-politicization of society, so people may freely work, trade and travel as they peacefully wish, with government merely the protector of people's individual rights.
  • Take the benefits away and tell people they are free to come and work to support themselves and their families. Restore more flexibility and competitiveness to labor markets and reduce taxes and business regulations.
  • Then those who come to Britain's shores will be those wanting freedom and opportunity without being a burden upon others.
  • What was needed was a change in ideas from the statist mentality to one of individual freedom and unhampered free markets.
  • In an epoch of collectivist ideas, don't be surprised if governments regulate, control, intervene and redistribute wealth.
  • The tentacle of regulations, restrictions and politically-correct social controls are spreading out in every direction from Brussels and its European-wide manipulating and mismanaging bureaucracy.
  • In the name of assuring "national prosperity," politicians could spend money to buy the votes that get them elected and reelected to government offices.
  • And every special interest group could make the case that government-spending programs that benefitted them were all reasonable and necessary to assure a fully employed and growing economy.
  • Furthermore, the Keynesian rationale for government deficit spending enabled politicians to seem to be able to offer something for nothing. They could offer, say, $100 of government spending to voters and special interest groups but the tax burden imposed in the present might only be $75, since the remainder of the money to pay for that government spending was borrowed. And that borrowed money would not have to be repaid until some indefinite time in the future by unspecific taxpayers when that "tomorrow" finally arrived.
  • instability
  • Keynes argued that the market economy's inherent
  • arose from the
  • who were subject to irrational and unpredictable waves of "optimism" and "pessimism."
  • animal spirits" of businessmen
  • Mises argued that there was nothing inherent in the market economy to bring about these swings of economic booms followed by periods of depression and unemployment.
  • If markets got out of balance with the necessity of an eventual correction in the economy to, once again, set things right, the source of this instability was government monetary policy.
  • Central banks too often followed a policy of trying to create "good times" in the economy by expanding the money supply through the banking system.
  • With new, excess funds created by the central bank available for lending, banks lower rates of interest to attract borrowers.
  • But this throws savings and investment out of balance, since the rate of interest no longer serves as a reliable indicator and signal concerning the availability of real savings in the economy in relation to those wanting to borrow funds for various investment purposes.
  • The economic crisis comes when it is discovered that all the claims on resources, capital and labor for all the attempted consumption and investment activities in the economy are greater than the actual and available amounts of such scarce resources.
  • The recession period, in Mises's view, is the necessary "correction" period when in the post-boom era, people must adapt and adjust to the newly discovered "real" supply and demand conditions in the market.
  • Any interference with the "rebalancing" of the economy by government raising taxes, imposing more regulations, or new artificial government "stimulus" activities merely makes it more difficult and time-consuming for people in the private sector to get the economy back on an even keel.
  • Friedrich A. Hayek, once observed, unemployment is not "caused" by stopping an inflation, but rather inflation induces the artificial employments that cannot be sustained and which inevitably disappear once the inflation is reined in.
  • The recession of 2008-2009 was the result of several years of central bank stimulus.
  • From 2003 to 2008, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about 50 percent.
  • Interest rates for much of this time, when adjusted for inflation, were either zero or negative.
  • Awash in cash, banks extended loans to virtually anyone, with no serious and usual concern about the borrower's credit-worthiness.
  • This was most notably true in the housing market, where government agencies like Fannie May and Freddie Mac were pressuring banks to make mortgage loans by promising a guarantee that they would make good on any bad home loans.
  • Since 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve has, again, turned on the monetary spigot, increasing its own portfolio by almost $3 trillion, by buying US Treasuries, US mortgages and other assets.
  • So why has there not been a complementary explosion of price inflation?
  • In some areas there has been, most clearly in the stock market and the bond market, But the reason why all that newly created money has not brought about a higher price inflation is due to the fact that a large part of all newly created money is sitting as unlent reserves in banks.
  • This is because the Federal Reserve has been paying banks a rate of interest slightly above the market interest rates to induce banks not to lend.
  • (a) general "regime uncertainty," that is, no one knows what government policy will be tomorrow; will ObamaCare be fully implemented after January 2014?;
  • Among the reasons for the sluggish jobs growth in the US are:
  • (b) what will taxes be for the rest of the current president's term in the White House
  • (c) what will the regulatory environment be like for the next three years – in 2012, the government implemented around 80,000 pages of regulations as printed in the Federal Registry;
  • (d) how will the deficit and debt problems play out between Congress and the White House and will it threaten the general financial situation in the country; an
  • (e) what wars, if any, will the government find itself involved in, in places like the Middle East?
  • China
  • is still a controlled and commanded society, with a government that works hard to try to determine what people read, see and think.
  • All these building projects have been brought into existence by a government that not only controls the money supply and manipulates interest rates but also heavy-handedly tells banks whom to specifically loan to and for what investment activities.
  • Central planning is alive and well in China, with the motives being both power and profits for those inside and outside the Communist Party having the most influence and connections in "high" places.
  • In my opinion, China is heading for a great economic crisis, resulting from a highly imbalanced and distorted economic system still guided far more by politics than sound market decision-making.
  • global financial markets in any foreseeable future. It is a money that still primarily exists to serve the political purposes of those who sit in the "inner circles" of power in Beijing.
  • One hundred years ago, in 1913, how many could have predicted that a year later a European-wide war would break out that would lead to the destruction of great European empires and set the stage for the rise of totalitarian collectivism that resulted in an even worse global war two decades later?
  • Thus, whether, at the end of the day, freedom triumphs and the future is one of liberty and prosperity is partly on each one of us.
  • Near the end of his great book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises said:
  • "Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us . . . Whether society shall continue to evolve or where it shall decay lies . . . in the hands of man."
  • In my view, the idea of a "soft landing" is an illusion based on the idea held by central bankers, themselves, that they have the wisdom and ability to know how to "micro-manage" the all the changes and adjustments resulting from their own manipulations of the monetary aggregates. They do not have this wisdom and ability. So hold on for what is most likely to be another rocky road.
  • It was Mises's clear vision that once society has broken the relationship between value and payment, sooner or later people would not know the price of anything.
  • At this point, investment ceases and business becomes furtive and transactional.
  • People cannot plan for the future because they do not understand the reality of the present.
  • Society begins to sink.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13
     
    Incredible.  A simple explanation that explains everything.  Rchard Ebeling's "Unified Theory of Everything" is something every American can understand.  If only they would take a break from "Dancing with the Stars" and pay attention to the future of their country and the world.  It's a future where either "individual freedom", as defined by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, will win out; or, the forces of fascist socialism / marxism will continue to roll and rule.  Incredible read!!!!
Paul Merrell

Michael Hand, Fugitive Who Ran Scandalous CIA Front Bank, Found Alive in U.S. - WhoWhatWhy - 0 views

whowhatwhy.org/...-front-bank-found-alive-in-u-s

deep-state CIA Nugan-Hand-Bank Australia

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Michael Hand, co-founder of the infamous Nugan Hand Bank who disappeared in 1980 after authorities began investigating the bank’s shadowy past following its sudden collapse, has been found. The Nugan Hand bank was a CIA-linked cesspool of drugs, money laundering, and organized crime.  In the words of Jonathan Kwitny, the bank was “a true tale of dope, dirty money, and the CIA.” Hand, who now lives under the name Michael Fuller, was found by an Australian news crew in Idaho, where he runs a company that makes survival knives for U.S. military clients, including Special Operations personnel. (Hand, a former green beret, previously resurfaced in the early 1980s working as a military advisor to CIA-linked military forces in Central America.) Hand has been dubbed “one of Australia’s most wanted fugitives,” but does Australia have the political will to seek the extradition of a man widely believed to have been a CIA asset? Initial indications appear to be no.
  • Michael Hand, co-founder of the infamous Nugan Hand Bank who disappeared in 1980 after authorities began investigating the bank’s shadowy past following its sudden collapse, has been found. The Nugan Hand bank was a CIA-linked cesspool of drugs, money laundering, and organized crime.  In the words of Jonathan Kwitny, the bank was “a true tale of dope, dirty money, and the CIA.” Hand, who now lives under the name Michael Fuller, was found by an Australian news crew in Idaho, where he runs a company that makes survival knives for U.S. military clients, including Special Operations personnel. (Hand, a former green beret, previously resurfaced in the early 1980s working as a military advisor to CIA-linked military forces in Central America.) Hand has been dubbed “one of Australia’s most wanted fugitives,” but does Australia have the political will to seek the extradition of a man widely believed to have been a CIA asset? Initial indications appear to be no. As one observer noted, “The fact that Hand has been allowed to live the free life in the United States suggests he belongs to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind.” Hand’s partner at the bank (Frank Nugan) was not as lucky, dying under murky circumstances prior to Hand’s disappearance.
  • If Australia summons the political will to seek Hand’s extradition, will the US agree? For those who follow the dark undercurrent of “deep politics,” this one is well worth watching…
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15
     
    Blast from the past! In ye olde days, The Wall Street Journal covered this scandal as it unfolded. Nugan Hand Bank was beyond shady; it was a classic Ponzi scheme and its board of directors was like a who's who of former high U.S. government officials. Its director of legal affairs was former CIA Director William Colby. Nugan Hand funneled drug money and illicit treasure for, inter alia, the Shah of Iran, Imelda Marcos, wealthy Saudis, gun-runners, et ilk. But it also bilked many Australians out of millions of dollars. Then poof! It was gone and so was co-founder Michael Hand. Turns out he's been living in Idaho under an assumed name, but using the same Social Security number he got as a teen-ager, which suggests that the FBI didn't look for him very hard when the Interpol and Australian arrest warrrants were received.  
Paul Merrell

The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5376904

banksters CIA 9-11 arms-deals opium congtinuity-of-government

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6
  • In the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and other financial institutions but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. The inclusion of Wall Street conforms with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”18 FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.19 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from two successive administrations for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.20
  • since its outset, the CIA has always had access to large amounts of off-the books or offshore funds to support its activities. Indeed, the power of the purse has usually worked in an opposite sense, since those in control of deep state offshore funds supporting CIA activities have for decades also funded members of Congress and of the executive – not vice versa. The last six decades provide a coherent and continuous picture of historical direction being provided by this deep state power of the purse, trumping and sometimes reversing the conventional state. Let us resume some of the CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-books funding for its activities. The CIA’s first covert operation was the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”25 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)26 Dulles, together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, then found a way to provide a legal source for off-the-books CIA funding, under the cover of the Marshall Plan. The three men “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”27
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  • The international lawyers of Wall Street did not hide from each other their shared belief that they understood better than Washington the requirements for running the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote in the 1930s to a British colleague, The word “cartel” has here assumed the stigma of a bogeyman which the politicians are constantly attacking. The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic and because the political organization of the world has under such influence been so backward, business people who have had to cope realistically with international problems have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.21
  • In the 1960s and especially the 1970s America began to import more and more oil from the Middle East. But the negative effect on the U.S. balance of payments was offset by increasing arms and aviation sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Contracts with companies like Northrop and especially Lockheed (the builder of the CIA’s U-2) included kickbacks to arms brokers, like Kodama Yoshio in Japan and Adnan Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia, who were also important CIA agents. Lockheed alone later admitted to the Church Committee that it had provided $106 million in commissions to Khashoggi between 1970 and 1975, more than ten times what it had paid to the next most important connection, Kodama.31 These funds were then used by Khashoggi and Kodama to purchase pro-Western influence. But Khashoggi, advised by a team of ex-CIA Americans like Miles Copeland and Edward Moss, distributed cash, and sometimes provided women, not just in Saudi Arabia but around the world – including cash to congressmen and President Nixon in the United States.32 Khashoggi in effect served as a “cutout,” or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to the CIA and the companies he worked with. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting, and nothing else to prevent their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.33
  • The most dramatic use of off-the-books drug profits to finance foreign armies was seen in the 1960s CIA-led campaign in Laos. There the CIA supplied airstrips and planes to support a 30,000-man drug-financed Hmong army. At one point Laotian CIA station chief Theodore Shackley even called in CIA aircraft in support of a ground battle to seize a huge opium caravan on behalf of the larger Royal Laotian Army.30
  • At the time of the Marshall Plan slush fund in Europe, the CIA also took steps which resulted in drug money to support anti-communist armies in the Far East. In my book American War Machine I tell how the CIA, using former OSS operative Paul Helliwell, created two proprietary firms as infrastructure for a KMT army in Burma, an army which quickly became involved in managing and developing the opium traffic there. The two firms were SEA Supply Inc. in Bangkok and CAT Inc. (later Air America) in Taiwan. Significantly, the CIA split ownership of CAT Inc.’s plane with KMT bankers in Taiwan – this allowed the CIA to deny responsibility for the flights when CAT planes, having delivered arms from Sea Supply to the opium-growing army, then returned to Taiwan with opium for the KMT. Even after the CIA officially severed its connection to the KMT Army in 1953, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc. supplied arms for a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU, that also was financed, at least in part, by the drug traffic.28 Profits from Thailand filtered back, in part through the same Paul Helliwell, as donations to members from both parties in Congress. Thai dictator Phao Sriyanon, a drug trafficker who was then alleged to be the richest man in the world, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in addition to [former OSS chief William] Donovan [who in 1953-55 was US Ambassador to Thailand]. Donovan and Helliwell divided the Congress between them, with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and Helliwell taking the Democrats.29
  • The power exerted by Khashoggi was not limited to his access to funds and women. By the 1970s, Khashoggi and his aide Edward Moss owned the elite Safari Club in Kenya.34 The exclusive club became the first venue for another and more important Safari Club: an alliance between Saudi and other intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms.35
  • As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni, In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.36 Prince Turki’s candid remarks– “your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. …. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together … and established what was called the Safari Club.” – made it clear that the Safari Club, operating at the level of the deep state, was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions of the public state in Washington (decisions not only of Congress but also of President Carter).
  • Specifically Khashoggi’s activities involving corruption by sex and money, after they too were somewhat curtailed by Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear to have been taken up quickly by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Muslim-owned bank where Khashoggi’s friend and business partner Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and a principal Safari Club member, was a part-owner.37 In the 1980s BCCI, and its allied shipping empire owned by the Pakistani Gokal brothers, supplied financing and infrastructure for the CIA’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) biggest covert operation of the decade, support for the Afghan mujahedin. To quote from a British book excerpted in the Senate BCCI Report: “BCCI’s role in assisting the U.S. to fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation is drawing increasing attention. The bank’s role began to surface in the mid-1980′s when stories appeared in the New York Times showing how American security operatives used Oman as a staging post for Arab funds. This was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal of 23 October 1991 which quotes a member of the late General Zia’s cabinet as saying ‘It was Arab money that was pouring through BCCI.’ The Bank which carried the money on from Oman to Pakistan and into Afghanistan was National Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned 29%.”38
  • In 1981 Vice-president Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, working together, won congressional approval for massive new arms sales of AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. In the $5.5 billion package, only ten percent covered the cost of the planes. Most of the rest was an initial installment on what was ultimately a $200 billion program for military infrastructure through Saudi Arabia.41 It also supplied a slush fund for secret ops, one administered for over a decade in Washington by Prince Bandar, after he became the Saudi Ambassador (and a close friend of the Bush family, nicknamed “Bandar Bush”). In the words of researcher Scott Armstrong, the fund was “the ultimate government-off-the-books.” Not long after the AWACS sale was approved, Prince Bandar thanked the Reagan administration for the vote by honoring a request by William Casey that he deposit $10 million in a Vatican bank to be used in a campaign against the Italian Communist Party. Implicit in the AWACS deal was a pledge by the Saudis to fund anticommunist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere that were supported by the Reagan Administration.42 The Vatican contribution, “for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party,” of course continued a CIA tradition dating back to 1948.
  • The activities of the Safari Club were exposed after Iranians in 1979 seized the records of the US Embassy in Tehran. But BCCI support for covert CIA operations, including Iran-Contra, continued until BCCI’s criminality was exposed at the end of the decade. Meanwhile, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Washington resumed off-budget funding for CIA covert operations under cover of arms contracts to Saudi Arabia. But this was no longer achieved through kickbacks to CIA assets like Khashoggi, after Congress in 1977 made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreign officials. Instead arrangements were made for payments to be returned, through either informal agreements or secret codicils in the contracts, by the Saudi Arabian government itself. Two successive arms deals, the AWACS deal of 1981 and the al-Yamamah deal of 1985, considerably escalated the amount of available slush funds.
  • It is reported in two books that the BCCI money flow through the Bank of Oman was handled in part by the international financier Bruce Rappaport, who for a decade, like Khashoggi, kept a former CIA officer on his staff.39 Rappaport’s partner in his Inter Maritime Bank, which interlocked with BCCI, was E.P. Barry, who earlier had been a partner in the Florida money-laundering banks of Paul Helliwell.40
  • After a second proposed major U.S. arms sale met enhanced opposition in Congress in 1985 from the Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated instead a multi-billion pound long-term contract with the United Kingdom – the so-called al-Yamamah deal. Once again overpayments for the purchased weapons were siphoned off into a huge slush fund for political payoffs, including “hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”43 According to Robert Lacey, the payments to Prince Bandar were said to total one billion pounds over more than a decade.44 The money went through a Saudi Embassy account in the Riggs Bank, Washington; according to Trento, the Embassy’s use of the Riggs Bank dated back to the mid-1970s, when, in his words, “the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States.”45 More accurately, the financing was not for the United States, but for the American deep state.
  • This leads me to the most original and important thing I have to say. I believe that these secret funds from BCCI and Saudi arms deals – first Khashoggi’s from Lockheed and then Prince Bandar’s from the AWACS and al-Yamamah deals – are the common denominator in all of the major structural deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted America since the supranational Safari Club was created in l976. I am referring specifically to 1) the covert US intervention in Afghanistan (which started about 1978 as a Safari Club intervention, more than a year before the Russian invasion), 2) the 1980 October Surprise, which together with an increase in Saudi oil prices helped assure Reagan’s election and thus give us the Reagan Revolution, 3) Iran-Contra in 1984-86, 4) and – last but by no means least – 9/11. That is why I believe it is important to analyze these events at the level of the supranational deep state. Let me just cite a few details.
  • 1) the 1980 October Surprise. According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches, the principal founder of the Safari Club, arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments, in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran until Reagan was in power. Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal and the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.46 In addition, John Cooley considers de Marenches to be “the Safari Club player who probably did most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure.”47 2) the Iran-Contra scandal (including the funding of the Contras, the illegal Iran arms sales, and support for the Afghan mujahideen There were two stages to Iran-Contra. For twelve months in 1984-85, after meeting with Casey, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, in the spirit of the AWACS deal, supported the Nicaraguan Contras via Prince Bandar through a BCCI bank account in Miami. But in April 1985, after the second proposed arms sale fell through, McFarlane, fearing AIPAC opposition, terminated this direct Saudi role. Then Khashoggi, with the help of Miles Copeland, devised a new scheme in which Iranian arms sales involving Israel would fund the contras. The first stage of Iran-Contra was handled by Prince Bandar through a BCCI account in Miami; the second channel was handled by Khashoggi through a different BCCI account in Montecarlo. The Kerry-Brown Senate Report on BCCI also transmitted allegations from a Palestinian-American businessman, Sam Bamieh, that Khashoggi’s funds from BCCI for arms sales to Iran came ultimately from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who “was hoping to gain favor with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”48
  • 3) 9/11 When the two previously noted alleged hijackers or designated culprits, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, arrived in San Diego, a Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi both housed them and opened bank accounts for them. Soon afterwards Bayoumi’s wife began receiving monthly payments from a Riggs bank account held by Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal.49 In addition, Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to the wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. In all, “between 1998 and 2002, up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar’s wife Haifa … – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi.”50 Although these sums in themselves are not large, they may have been part of a more general pattern. Author Paul Sperry claims there was possible Saudi government contact with at least four other of the alleged hijackers in Virginia and Florida. For example, “9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited s home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.”51
  • But it is wrong to think of Bandar’s accounts in the Riggs Bank as uniquely Saudi. Recall that Prince Bandar’s payments were said to have included “a suitcase containing more than $10 million” that went to a Vatican priest for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party.52 In 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Riggs Bank, which was by then under investigation by the Justice Department for money laundering, “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials.”53 Meanwhile President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “siphoned millions from his country’s treasury with the help of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C.”54 For this a Riggs account executive, Simon Kareri, was indicted. But Obiang enjoyed State Department approval for a contract with the private U.S. military firm M.P.R.I., with an eye to defending offshore oil platforms owned by ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess.55 Behind the CIA relationship with the Riggs Bank was the role played by the bank’s overseas clients in protecting U.S. investments, and particularly (in the case of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea), the nation’s biggest oil companies.
  • The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of at least two (and possibly more) of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report on 9/11, the entire 28-page section dealing with Saudi financing was very heavily redacted.56 A similar censorship occurred with the 9/11 Commission Report: According to Philip Shenon, several staff members felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection to the hijackers, but a senior staff member purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government, and moved the explosive supporting evidence to the report’s footnotes.57 It is probable that this cover-up was not designed for the protection of the Saudi government itself, so much as of the supranational deep state connection described in this essay, a milieu where American, Saudi, and Israeli elements all interact covertly. One sign of this is that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11 caused, has been among those calling for the U.S. government to make the redacted 28 pages public.58
  • This limited exposure of the nefarious use of funds generated from Saudi arms contracts has not created a desire in Washington to limit these contracts. On the contrary, in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, The Defense Department … notified Congress that it wants to sell $60 billion worth of advanced aircraft and weapons to Saudi Arabia. The proposed sale, which includes helicopters, fighter jets, radar equipment and satellite-guided bombs, would be the largest arms deal to another country in U.S. history if the sale goes through and all purchases are made.59 The sale did go through; only a few congressmen objected.60 The deep state, it would appear, is alive and well, and impervious to exposures of it. It is clear that for some decades the bottom-upwards processes of democracy have been increasingly supplanted by the top-downwards processes of the deep state.
  • But the deeper strain in history, I would like to believe, is in the opposite direction: the ultimate diminution of violent top-down forces by the bottom-up forces of an increasingly integrated civil society.61 In the last months we have had Wikileaks, then Edward Snowden, and now the fight between the CIA and its long-time champion in Congress, Dianne Feinstein. It may be time to see a systemic correction, much as we did after Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which was followed by Watergate and the Church Committee reforms. I believe that to achieve this correction there must be a better understanding of deep events and of the deep state. Ultimately, however, whether we see a correction or not will depend, at least in part, on how much people care.
Paul Merrell

Central Bankers: By 2019 Get Ready For the End of 'Too Big to Fail' | nsnbc international - 0 views

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  • Mark Carney, chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and governor of the Bank of England (BoE) has proposed new rules to put an end to the concept of “too big to fail” and taxpayer banker bailouts. Carney said: Once implemented, these agreements will play important roles in enabling globally systemic banks to be resolved (wound down) without recourse to public subsidy and without disruption to the wider financial system.”
  • The total loss-absorbing capacity (TLAC) of the past has allowed for the banks to benefit from taxpayer injections of cash to compensate for speculative betting on the stock market. Now banks “will have to fund themselves with loss-absorbing capital equal to 16-20% of their risk-weighted assets.” The 30 largest banks in the world are considered “systematically important” and affected by TLAC rules; however certain loopholes in the new rules could facilitate “different market conditions” paving the way for a specific assessment of an individual case to “even the playing field”.
  • Proposed ideas include the inception of “Goldman Sachs and HSBC [to] have a buffer of bonds or equity equivalent to at least 16 to 20 percent of their risk-weighted assets, such as loans, from January 2019.” Set in motion in 2013, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervisors (BCBS) has applied the underlying pressure on US banks to liquidate to appease global markets. The American taxpayer is picking up the tab for this turn of events. BIS is giving these banks until 2019 to comply with their new rules. Capital to prop up the banks will be needed while they liquidate assets such as bonds, mortgages, loans and stock shares.
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  • The European Central Bank (ECB) is setting the stage of a complete financial collapse of fiat currencies across the globe. Joining in the scheme are other technocratic institutions such as the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank.
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