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Gary Edwards

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

www.zerohedge.com/...lammed-lower-bloomberg-reports

GOLD LiBOR

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • 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

Operation Sleeping Giant: "Breaking The Silver Manipulation Barrier" by Brandon Smith - 0 views

operationsleepinggiant.com

Brandon-Smith GOLD Sir-Charles SiLVER Currency-basket Priced-in-Gold

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 13
     
    Written in August of 2011, this article continues to be an important guideline to understanding Gold and Silver prices, and the efforts of Banksters to manipulate these competing forms of monetary exchange to the US Dollar.  Good stuff.  And i did write Brandon a proposal for a mobile application connecting PayPal to the Storage Vault Depositories he sites in this article (based on the GOLD app design i provided to Tino in 2008). excerpt: China Competes With The Comex As of this summer China now has its own Comex, called the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange. The exchange opened for trade on May 18th (the CME's incredible margin hikes in silver began only weeks before, which suggests to me that they were trying to preempt the positive effects the HKMEX would have on metals). The HKMEX moved into action only five months after the Chinese Pan American Gold Exchange was instituted. The exchange issues its own ETF's in gold and silver. These securities, though, are not based on leverage or derivatives like most Comex based ETFs. The bottom line; the Comex global monopoly on commodities trade is over: How To Break The Barrier Methods for smaller investors to fight back against the market manipulations of large banks have been sparse, and often limited to desperate appeals to the CFTC and the government, who are bought and paid for, and who have no intention of ever stopping global financiers from dragging their unwashed behinds across the face of the planet. Relying on bureaucrats to mend the wounds they themselves encouraged or inflicted is foolhardy, to say the least. Top down solutions are NOT an option now, and I'm not sure if they ever were. This leaves us with only one other choice; to fix the problem with our own hands from the bottom up. This is, of course, easier said than done… In the case of silver manipulation, what we are faced with is an unprecedented effort to subvert and suppress an alternative system so that the mainstream system can continue to
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

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.
Paul Merrell

JPMorgan to pay record $920 million to resolve trading probes - 1 views

www.cnbc.com/...s-into-trading-practices-.html

banksters JPMorgan penalties market-manipulation spoofing

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • JPMorgan Chase is set to pay a record $920 million to resolve probes from three federal agencies over its role in the manipulation of global markets for metals and Treasurys.The figure was released Tuesday morning by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in a statement from Commissioner Dan Berkovitz. Last week, news reports indicated that the New York-based bank was nearing a settlement of almost $1 billion.The penalty is a record for spoofing, which is when sophisticated traders flood markets with orders that they have no intention of actually executing. The practice was banned after the 2008 financial crisis and regulators have made it a priority to stamp out.Of the $920 million, $436.4 million is a criminal monetary penalty, $172 million is a “criminal disgorgement amount” and $311.7 million is for victim compensation, according to the Department of Justice.
  • JPMorgan Chase is set to pay a record $920 million to resolve probes from three federal agencies over its role in the manipulation of global markets for metals and Treasurys.The figure was released Tuesday morning by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in a statement from Commissioner Dan Berkovitz. Last week, news reports indicated that the New York-based bank was nearing a settlement of almost $1 billion.The penalty is a record for spoofing, which is when sophisticated traders flood markets with orders that they have no intention of actually executing. The practice was banned after the 2008 financial crisis and regulators have made it a priority to stamp out.Of the $920 million, $436.4 million is a criminal monetary penalty, $172 million is a “criminal disgorgement amount” and $311.7 million is for victim compensation, according to the Department of Justice.
  • The bank, the biggest U.S. lender by assets, has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ that will expire in three years if the firm satisfies its obligations under the deal. 
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In his statement, the CFTC’s Berkovitz said he opposed the ruling from his agency that JPMorgan’s actions “should not result in any disqualifications under the ‘bad actor’ provisions of the securities laws.” He is apparently referring to the fact that the settlement isn’t expected to result in business restrictions on other areas of the firm.
  • The bank also has quietly settled a long-running lawsuit that accused the bank of manipulating precious metals markets with “spoofing” trades. The lawsuit was filed in 2015 by Daniel Shak, the hedge fund operator and high-stakes poker player, and two metals traders, Mark Grumet and Thomas Wacker.The three plaintiffs had accused JPMorgan of manipulating the silver futures market from 2010 through 2011 through spoofing trades. Details of the settlement were not disclosed in court filings.
  • In September 2019, federal prosecutors charged Nowak and two other former JPMorgan precious metals traders, Gregg Smith and Christopher Jordan, with participating in a racketeering conspiracy in connection with a multiyear scheme to manipulate the markets and defraud customers, as well as other crimes related to alleged spoofing.A superseding indictment was filed in the criminal case two months later, adding another defendant, ex-JPMorgan executive Jeffrey Ruffo, who had worked in hedge fund sales on the firm’s precious metals desk.All four defendants have pleaded not guilty. Trial in that case is scheduled to begin next April in Chicago federal court.
  • The CFTC noted in their press release that the agency continues to pursue civil litigation against Nowak and  Smith, for spoofing and attempted price manipulation.Although Shak’s lawsuit has been settled, JPMorgan still faces a class action lawsuit related to alleged spoofing in the precious metals markets.
Gary Edwards

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

www.thedailybell.com/...tivism-and-the-Coming-Collapse

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

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • 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:
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • 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

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

www.zerohedge.com/...le-silver-manipulation-lawsuit

banksters Deutsche-Bank litigation settlement bid-rigging restraint-of-trade antitrust

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • 2016 is shaping up as the year when countless conspiracy theories will be confirmed to be non-conspiracy fact: from central bank rigging of capital markets, to political rigging of elections, to media rigging of public sentiment, and now, commercial bank rigging of silver. In short, tinfoil hat-wearing nutjobs living in their parents basement have been right all along. Two weeks ago we reported that "In A Major Victory For Gold And Silver Traders, Manipulation Lawsuit Against Gold-Fixing Banks Ordered To Proceed," however one bank was exempt: Deutsche Bank. The reason why was known since April, when we first reported that Deutsche Bank had agreed to settle the class action lawsuit filed in July 2014 accusing a consortium of banks of plotting to manipulate gold and silver. Among the charges that Deutsche Bank effectively refused to contest were the following: employment of a manipulative device claims bid-rigging, and unjust enrichment. price fixing and unlawful restraint price manipulation claims aiding and abetting and principal-agent claims.
Paul Merrell

The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation - PaulCraigRoberts.org - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...s-whys-gold-price-manipulation

financial-collapse gold Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel banksters market-manipulation

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis.
  • The Fed’s policy of monetizing one trillion dollars of bonds annually put pressure on the US dollar, the value of which declined in terms of gold. When gold hit $1,900 per ounce in 2011, the Federal Reserve realized that $2,000 per ounce could have a psychological impact that would spread into the dollar’s exchange rate with other currencies, resulting in a run on the dollar as both foreign and domestic holders sold dollars to avoid the fall in value. Once this realization hit, the manipulation of the gold price moved beyond central bank leasing of gold to bullion dealers in order to create an artificial market supply to absorb demand that otherwise would have pushed gold prices higher. The manipulation consists of the Fed using bullion banks as its agents to sell naked gold shorts in the New York Comex futures market. Short selling drives down the gold price, triggers stop-loss orders and margin calls, and scares participants out of the gold trusts. The bullion banks purchase the deserted shares and present them to the trusts for redemption in bullion. The bullion can then be sold in the London physical gold market, where the sales both ratify the lower price that short-selling achieved on the Comex floor and provide a supply of bullion to meet Asian demands for physical gold as opposed to paper claims on gold.
  • The evidence of gold price manipulation is clear. In this article we present evidence and describe the process. We conclude that ability to manipulate the gold price is disappearing as physical gold moves from New York and London to Asia, leaving the West with paper claims to gold that greatly exceed the available supply.
Paul Merrell

"Secret Scheme To Manipulate The Price Of Silver" - Lawsuits Against Banks Proceed | In... - 1 views

investmentwatchblog.com/lawsuits-against-banks-proceed

banksters litigation silver silver-futures

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Litigation alleging that Deutsche Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia and HSBC Plc illegally fixed the price of silver were centralised in a Manhattan federal court yesterday. The banks have been accused of rigging the price of billions of dollars in silver to the detriment of investors globally. Lawsuits filed by investors since July over the allegations were consolidated yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, following an order issued last Thursday by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, a special body of federal judges that decides when and where to consolidate related lawsuits. The banks abused their position of controlling the daily silver fix to reap illegitimate profit from trading, hurting other investors in the silver market who use the benchmark in billions of dollars of transactions, according to the suit. Investors claim, the banks unlawfully manipulated silver and silver futures.
  • The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ruled that the cases should be handled by U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan, who is already overseeing similar litigation over alleged gold price fixing. Three lawsuits were originally filed in Manhattan, and two were filed in Brooklyn. The plaintiffs in the Brooklyn lawsuits had sought to have the litigation consolidated there. The banks had also asked that the litigation be consolidated in Brooklyn, in the Eastern District of New York. However, the multidistrict litigation panel said Manhattan made more sense because the defendants all had corporate offices there and also because the cases involved issues similar to the gold litigation. The plaintiffs allege that the banks abused their power as participants in the silver fix, a London based benchmark pricing method dating back to the Victorian era, in which banks fixed silver prices once a day by phone. In August, the system was replaced by a new benchmark system administered by the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) and Thomson Reuters.
  • HSBC spokesman Neil Brazil declined to comment and representatives of the other banks did not immediately respond to requests for comment. This follows the initiation of similar actions against some bullion banks for alleged gold price manipulation earlier this year. The three named banks, Deutsche Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, and HSBC are alleged to have abused their position at the LBMA to profit from inside knowledge. The fixing of the price of silver is a daily operation where banks on the panel of the LBMA agree on a price for the precious metals which are then used throughout the financial, jewellery and mining industries throughout the day. It is alleged that some of the banks who fix the price, position themselves advantageously in the silver market before the price is made public. “Defendants have a strong financial incentive to establish positions in both physical silver and silver derivatives prior to the public release of silver fixing results, allowing them to reap large illegitimate profits,” plaintiff Scott Nicholson told the AFP. Separately, Bullion Desk reported yesterday that JPMorgan Chase Bank is now the fifth accredited member of the silver pricing benchmark, the LBMA has confirmed, with others parties “in the pipeline”, a spokesman said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The American multinational bank which has been the subject of silver manipulation allegations by Max Keiser and others, took part in its first silver benchmarking session yesterday. A spokesperson said they had completed “strict regulatory controls” for accredited members.. JP Morgan becomes the fifth member, alongside HSBC Bank USA, Mitsui & Co Precious Metals, the Bank of Nova Scotia – ScotiaMocatta and UBS AG. Furthermore, the LBMA has confirmed that several other parties are also in the process of joining the list, subject to passing regulatory requirements. Several Chinese banks have expressed interest in participating in the new global price setting mechanism for silver, according to the head of the LBMA. The LBMA ushered in a new era of electronic benchmarking for London’s precious metals market in August when an algorithm was used for the first time to set the benchmark price for silver after recent scandals regarding price fixing and concerns about the nature of the gold and silver fix. It will be interesting to see if Chinese banks partake in the new fix process as the concern is that the fixes remain the play things of certain western banks and are not representative of global physical demand and supply of actual gold and silver bullion.
  • Manipulation of the silver market was covered in a recently released ‘Get REAL’ Special on Silver presented by Jan Skoyles. Mark O’Byrne of Goldcore.com was interviewed and the interview was an in depth look at this silver market today.
Paul Merrell

Are Big Banks Using Derivatives To Suppress Bullion Prices? -- Paul Craig Roberts and D... - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...ul-craig-roberts-dave-kranzler

banksters gold-silver-market fraud

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • We have explained on a number of occasions how the Federal Reserve’s agents, the bullion banks (principally JPMorganChase, HSBC, and Scotia) sell uncovered shorts (“naked shorts”) on the Comex (gold futures market) in order to drive down an otherwise rising price of gold. By dumping so many uncovered short contracts into the futures market, an artificial increase in “paper gold” is created, and this increase in supply drives down the price. This manipulation works because the hedge funds, the main purchasers of the short contracts, do not intend to take delivery of the gold represented by the contracts, settling instead in cash. This means that the banks who sold the uncovered contracts are never at risk from their inability to cover contracts in gold. At any given time, the amount of gold represented by the paper gold contracts (“open interest’) can exceed the actual amount of physical gold available for delivery, a situation that does not occur in other futures markets. In other words, the gold and silver futures markets are not a place where people buy and sell gold and silver. These markets are places where people speculate on price direction and where hedge funds use gold futures to hedge other bets according to the various mathematical formulas that they use. The fact that bullion prices are determined in this paper, speculative market, and not in real physical markets where people sell and acquire physical bullion, is the reason the bullion banks can drive down the price of gold and silver even though the demand for the physical metal is rising.
  • For example last Tuesday the US Mint announced that it was sold out of the American Eagle one ounce silver coin. It is a contradiction of the law of supply and demand that demand is high, supply is low, and the price is falling. Such an economic anomaly can only be explained by manipulation of prices in a market where supply can be created by printing paper contracts. Obviously fraud and price manipulation are at work, but no heads roll. The Federal Reserve and US Treasury support this fraud and manipulation, because the suppression of precious metal prices protects the value and status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and prevents gold and silver from fulfilling their role as the transmission mechanism that warns of developing financial and economic troubles. The suppression of the rising gold price suppresses the warning signal and permits the continuation of financial market bubbles and Washington’s ability to impose sanctions on other world powers that are disadvantaged by not being a reserve currency.
Paul Merrell

It Just Cost Deutsche Bank $25,000 Per Employee To Keep Its Libor Manipulating Bankers ... - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...or-manipulating-bankers-out-ja

banksters Deutsche-Bank fraud Libor litigation settlement

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • And so another historic scandal involving the manipulation and rigging of one of the most important global markets, that of Libor which is the reference security for several hundred trillion in derivatives, goes in the history books. Moments ago the NY Department for Financial Services announced that Deutsche Bank would pay $2.5 billion "in connection with the manipulation of the benchmark interest rates, including the London Interbank Offered Bank ("LIBOR"), the Euro Interbank Offered Rate ("EURIBOR") and Euroyen Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate ("TIBOR") (collectively, "IBOR")." According to FT calculations, "this is the largest fine to date in the sprawling worldwide Libor investigation" and beneficiaries of DB's criminal generosity include New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) which will get $600 million, $775 million go to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and 227 million GBP (approximately $340 million) to the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Best of all $800 million will end up in the bank accounts oi the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the same CFTC which can now afford to upgrade from ticker tape and actually have some sense of the pervasive manipulation taking place in the S&P on a daily basis.
  • Most importantly for DB's 98,138 employees is that while DB will "terminate and ban individual employees who engaged in misconduct" nobody will go to jail. Again. In other words it just cost DB's about $25,474 per employee to keep its Libor-manipulating employees (and thus, senior level management because the stench always goes to the very top) out of prison. Considering it has cost JPMorgan $150,000 per employee to achieve the same result, here again we see that famous German efficiency in action.
  • To view a copy of the NYDFS order regarding Deutsche Bank, please visit, link.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Apr 15
     
    Lots of nice quotes from Deutschebank emails, etc.
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Richard Ebeling on Libertarianism, Anarchism and the Truth of Austrian... - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...he-Truth-of-Austrian-Economics

Richard-Ebeling Libertarian banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • These are at least two conceivable methods of compelling the government to stop, or limit, its abuse of the monetary printing press.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 12
       
      Ebeling proposes two methods of reining in out of control government printing of paper money.  There is a third method; one used by Lincoln and Kennedy.  This is the issuance of gold/silver/oil backed reserve notes.  The notes represent gold or silver being held on deposit, and are fully redeemable.   The value of the gold/silver or another commodity represented floats in the marketplace against goods and services.  Nor is there a fixed exchange rate for converting fiat (paper) dollars.  The market will figure those things out if left free to do so.  And that's one big big "if".
  • So the normal market pressures of downward price and wage adjustments in the recession are partly counter-acted by a new monetary expansion that is delaying the necessary re-coordination of market activities. Thus, given these two pressures, prices do not fall as much as a post-recession adjustment may require and they do not rise as much or as fast as might otherwise occur due to the renewed monetary expansion.
  • At the same time, as you correctly ask, the Federal Reserve has been paying banks a relatively low rate of interest to keep large excessive reserves in their accounts at the Federal Reserve, rather than to fully lend those excessive reserves to private borrowers. And given the low market rates of interest that Federal Reserve policy has generated, even the low rate of interest on unlent excess reserves offered to banks by the Federal Reserve appears the relatively more profitable way to use their available funds.
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  • Why has the Federal Reserve done this? They infused these two trillion dollars into the financial markets back in 2008-2010 because they feared that an economy-wide bank collapse was possible. They are afraid to reverse this monetary expansion because to do so would reduce potential bank-lending capacity and put upward pressure on interest rates at a time when the Federal Reserve wants to prevent the sluggish recovery from slowing down even more and also raise the cost of the US government's financing of its trillion dollar a year deficits. So, instead, they leave this excess bank lending power sloshing around in the system, while keeping it off the market and from causing significant new price inflationary pressures, by paying banks not to lend those vast sums.
  • Austrians argue that economics is fundamentally a science and study of "human action." It attempts to trace out the logic and implications of man's intentional conduct in selecting among ends desired and applying perceived means to try to attain them. Austrians emphasize that all human action and the social and market interactions among men occur in a setting of imperfect knowledge, inescapable degrees of uncertainty and always through the passage of time.
  • They try to explain the market processes by which men discover mutual gains from trade.
  • They emphasize that the networks of social institutions in which and through which men discover ways to coordinate their interdependent actions in complex systems of division of labor are not the creations of government edict or command; but are most often among those unintended consequences of multitudes of self-interested individual actions and interactions.
  • They have developed theories of market competition and the role of the entrepreneur as the individuals always alert to market opportunities, and whose actions tend to bring about coordination between market supplies and demands.
  • The Austrian analysis of markets, competition and prices, led them to devastating critiques of the unworkability of all forms of socialist central planning, the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies in virtually all forms of government intervention and regulation, and a theory of money and the business cycle that points the finger of responsibility for inflations and recessions at the doorstep of government monetary and fiscal policies.
  • The philosophy of liberty proclaims that each individual is unique and possessing inherent rights to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property.
  • It is not surprising that classical liberal and libertarian ideas are often attacked. After all they are the ideas that consistently oppose the current political systems of plunder, privilege and power lusting.
  • That government, if it is to exist, is to serve as the protector and guardian of our distinct individual rights, and not the master of men who are obligated to sacrifice themselves for some asserted "national interest," "general welfare," or "common good."
  • "utilitarian" or "consequentialist" libertarians.
  • It is virtually inevitable that those who use political power for their own gain at their neighbor's expense will vehemently resist and oppose any attempt to stop them from feeding at the government trough.
  • there is everywhere a class of plundering peoples – politicians, bureaucrats, special interest groups – receiving tax-based income redistributions and subsidies and benefiting from anti-competitive regulations and protections against and at the expense of their fellow human beings.
  • This is the great battle of the twenty-first century;
  • Austrian Economics, not surprisingly, has been attacked precisely because of its insightful and cogent analysis of how it was government intervention and central bank monetary manipulation that generated the unsustainable boom in the last decade that set the stage for the inescapable bust, which the world is still suffering from.
  • There are "natural rights" libertarians
  • The only reasonable meaning to the "common good" or the "general welfare" is when each individual is free to peacefully live his life as he chooses and is at liberty to voluntarily associate and interact with his fellow men for mutually beneficial improvements to their lives.
  • most convincing case for human liberty
  • Because libertarians have not agreed about this among themselves, nor have they been able to persuade enough others in society to move the world further away from the collectivist premises and the interventionist-welfare state policies that guide so much that goes on in the world.
  • I happen to have been most strongly influenced by the "natural rights" defense of liberty, and especially as formulated by Ayn Rand in her philosophy of Objectivism.
  • First, it is argued that if one believes that the use of any and all forms of coercion are morally unacceptable in human relationships, then this should also imply that any compulsory taxation, even when for the funding of defense and legal justice, is unjustifiable. And, second, it is argued that the private sector could provide such admittedly essential services far more efficiently and cost-effectively than the monopoly agency of government. Murray Rothbard and David Friedman probably have been among the most well-known and articulate proponents of the anarcho-capitalist position over the last 50 years.
  • We should focus on what we all agree upon:
  • From a moral perspective, I am in sympathy with the anarcho-capitalist position, in that I find the compulsory taking of people's income and wealth without their consent for whatever reason to be ethically repugnant.
  • Others like the Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick and Ludwig von Mises have made the case for constitutionally limited government. Their counter arguments have centered on the ideas that conflicts over jurisdiction, disputes among private defense agencies contracted by different individuals who have disagreements, and the likelihood that "defense" would turn out to be a "natural monopoly" anyway – that is, a tendency for one agency to end up being the single provider of defense and judicial services over a wide geographical area – raise questions about the long-run workability and sustainability of competing defense companies in society.
  • This means that the Supreme Court has said that you are the slave of "society" and the government that represents "the people," since, in principle, anything that you do or not do can be argued to have some affect, positive or negative, on others.
  • Think about this Court decision. It is saying that if you do not buy health insurance the government will tax you to pay for it. If you refuse to pay the tax, the government will end up attempting to seize financial assets or real property you own in lieu of failure to pay. If you try to prevent this taking of your property, you are subject to arrest and imprisonment. If you resist arrest or imprisonment, the police have the authority to force you to comply – up to and including lethal force to subdue you into obedience.
  • the freedom and dignity of the individual human being; and the attempt whenever and wherever on our part to reduce, repeal and abolish all forms of regulation, control, restriction, prohibition on the peaceful and honest affairs of our fellow men.
  • Once you accept this premise, there is no end to the minutest detail and content of your life and actions the government cannot claim jurisdiction over to regulate, control or prohibit.
  • Here is that end-of-the-road of the notion of unlimited democratic rule by "the people" and those who claim to speak for "the people" and rule on their behalf.
  • Ayn Rand, of course, rejected any connection or compatibility with libertarianism. She argued this on two grounds. First, she felt that too frequently libertarians spoke of individual freedom, free markets and limited government, but failed to explicitly and clearly ground their political-economic ideas in a demonstrable philosophy of man, nature and society.
  • Government control of money is the potentially most dangerous and damaging form of government power short of outright socialism.
  • Rand's political philosophy arises out of the "natural rights" tradition, that rights are inherent in the nature of man and precede government.
  • Mises believed that rights were, in a sense, "social conventions" that had evolved out of the discovery that certain social institutional arrangements were more conducive to the mutual betterment of all members of society for achieving their individual goals and values
  • What they did agree upon was that, given their respective conceptions of the basis of individual rights, there was no social and economic system more consistent with the protection of those rights and more likely to generate the material and cultural achievements that are potentially possible than laissez-faire capitalism.
  • Second, she rejected the anarchist elements in the libertarian movement, believing that any reasonable analysis of the reality of man and the human condition strongly suggested the inescapable need for a single legal standard for defining and enforcing individual rights and a single authority to as impartially and "objectively" as possible enforce laws defending each individual's rights to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property.
  • And in the twentieth century, Rand and Mises were two of the most principled and uncompromising advocates for the completely free market society
  • "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."
  • Government basically has three ways to acquire the income and wealth of its citizens: taxation, borrowing and printing money
  • So, governments throughout history have turned to the monetary printing press to fund the expenditures not covered by taxes or borrowed money
  • This "non-neutral," or uneven, impact on prices and wages in the economy during the inflationary process brings in its wake distorted profit margins, misallocations of resources and labor and various mal-investments of capital. Here are the seeds for the artificial and unsustainable "booms" that invariably come crashing down in the "bust" once the monetary expansion that has set it all in motion is stopped or slowed down.
  • I believe that the choice and use of money should be left to the market, that is, to the free and voluntary interactive decisions of those buying and selling in the market.
  • I consider a private, competitive free banking system to be the only one consistent with a truly free market society.
Paul Merrell

US's Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...eal-from-win-win-to-mega-loose

must-read banksters big oil Saudis Russia shale-oil U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11 Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power. So, though it was not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today.
  • It seemed brilliant at the time no doubt. On the following day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen, announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the Arctic. Then, just as the ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial terrorism unit. In July, 2014 West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing, traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s. When WTI hit $46 at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different. Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot.
  • They realized that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong they were.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Since that September 11 Kerry-Abdullah meeting (curious date to pick, given the climate of suspicion that the Bush family is covering up involvement of the Saudis in or around the events of September 11, 2001), the Saudis have a new ageing King, Absolute Monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman, replacing the since deceased old ageing King, Abdullah. However, the Oil Minister remains unchanged—79-year-old Ali al-Naimi. It was al-Naimi who reportedly saw the golden opportunity in the Kerry proposal to use the chance to at the same time kill off the growing market challenge from the rising output of the unconventional USA shale oil industry. Al-Naimi has said repeatedly that he is determined to eliminate the US shale oil “disturbance” to Saudi domination of world oil markets. Not only are the Saudis unhappy with the US shale oil intrusion on their oily Kingdom. They are more than upset with the recent deal the Obama Administration made with Iran that will likely lead in several months to lifting Iran economic sanctions. In fact the Saudis are beside themselves with rage against Washington, so much so that they have openly admitted an alliance with arch foe, Israel, to combat what they see as the Iran growing dominance in the region—in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq.
  • This has all added up to an iron Saudi determination, aided by close Gulf Arab allies, to further crash oil prices until the expected wave of shale oil company bankruptcies—that was halted in January by Washington and Wall Street manipulations—finishes off the US shale oil competition. That day may come soon, but with unintended consequences for the entire global financial system at a time such consequences can ill be afforded. According to a recent report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, a major player in crude oil markets, OPEC oil producers have been aggressively increasing oil supply on the already glutted world market with no hint of a letup. In its report Morgan Stanley noted with visible alarm, “OPEC has added 1.5 million barrels/day to global supply in the last four months alone…the oil market is currently 800,000 barrels/day oversupplied. This suggests that the current oversupply in the oil market is fully due to OPEC’s production increase since February alone.” The Wall Street bank report adds the disconcerting note, “We anticipated that OPEC would not cut, but we didn’t foresee such a sharp increase.” In short, Washington has completely lost its strategic leverage over Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom that had been considered a Washington vassal ever since FDR’s deal to bring US oil majors in on an exclusive basis in 1945.
  • That breakdown in US-Saudi communication adds a new dimension to the recent June 18 high-level visit to St. Petersburg by Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister and son of King Salman, to meet President Vladimir Putin. The meeting was carefully prepared by both sides as the two discussed up to $10 billion of trade deals including Russian construction of peaceful nuclear power reactors in the Kingdom and supplying of advanced Russian military equipment and Saudi investment in Russia in agriculture, medicine, logistics, retail and real estate. Saudi Arabia today is the world’s largest oil producer and Russia a close second. A Saudi-Russian alliance on whatever level was hardly in the strategy book of the Washington State Department planners.…Oh shit! Now that OPEC oil glut the Saudis have created has cracked the shaky US effort to push oil prices back up. The price fall is being further fueled by fears that the Iran deal will add even more to the glut, and that the world’s second largest oil importer, China, may cut back imports or at least not increase them as their economy slows down. The oil market time bomb detonated in the last week of June. The US price of WTI oil went from $60 a barrel then, a level at which at least many shale oil producers can stay afloat a bit longer, to $49 on July 29, a drop of more than 18% in four weeks, tendency down. Morgan Stanley sounded loud alarm bells, stating that if the trend of recent weeks continues, “this downturn would be more severe than that in 1986. As there was no sharp downturn in the 15 years before that, the current downturn could be the worst of the last 45+ years. If this were to be the case, there would be nothing in our experience that would be a guide to the next phases of this cycle…In fact, there may be nothing in analyzable history.”
  • October is the next key point for bank decisions to roll-over US shale company loans or to keep extending credit on the (until now) hope that prices will slowly recover. If as strongly hinted, the Federal Reserve hikes US interest rates in September for the first time in the eight years since the global financial crisis erupted in the US real estate market in 2007, the highly-indebted US shale oil producers face disaster of a new scale. Until the past few weeks the volume of US shale oil production has remained at the maximum as shale producers desperately try to maximize cash flow, ironically, laying the seeds of the oil glut globally that will be their demise. The reason US shale oil companies have been able to continue in business since last November and not declare bankruptcy is the ongoing Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy that leads banks and other investors to look for higher interest rates in the so-called “High Yield” bond market. Back in the 1980’s when they were first created by Michael Millken and his fraudsters at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wall Street appropriately called them “junk bonds” because when times got bad, like now for Shale companies, they turned into junk. A recent UBS bank report states, “the overall High-Yield market has doubled in size; sectors that witnessed more buoyant issuance in recent years, like energy and metals mining, have seen debt outstanding triple or quadruple.”
  • Assuming that the most recent downturn in WTI oil prices continues week after week into October, there well could be a panic run to sell billions of dollars of those High-Yield, high-risk junk bonds. As one investment analyst notes, “when the retail crowd finally does head for the exits en masse, fund managers will be forced to come face to face with illiquid secondary corporate credit markets where a lack of market depth…has the potential to spark a fire sale.” The problem is that this time, unlike in 2008, the Federal Reserve has no room to act. Interest rates are already near zero and the Fed has bought trillions of dollars of bank bad debt to prevent a chain-reaction US bank panic. One option that is not being discussed at all in Washington would be for Congress to repeal the disastrous 1913 Federal Reserve Act that gave control of our nation’s money to a gang of private bankers, and to create a public National Bank, owned completely by the United States Government, that could issue credit and sell Federal debt without the intermediaries of corrupt Wall Street bankers as the Constitution intended. At the same time they could completely nationalize the six or seven “Too Big To Fail” banks behind the entire financial mess that is destroying the foundations of the United States and by extension of the role of the dollar as world reserve currency, of most of the world.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15
     
    I give a lot of credibility to this article's author when it comes to matters involving the oil market. Remember when reading that the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar is the Saudi (later extended to all OPEC nations) insistence that they be paid for their oil and natural gas in U.S. dollars, which creates artificial demand for the dollar globally. If the Gulf Coast States begin accepting payment in rubles or yuan, it is curtains for the U.S. dollar in global markets.  
Paul Merrell

How US Propaganda Plays in Syrian War - Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...propaganda-plays-in-syrian-war

war & peace Syria White-Helmets propaganda U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • U.S. foreign policymakers have experimented at planting propaganda in social media and then citing it as evidence to support their goals, a process now playing out in the Syrian “regime change,” as Rick Sterling explains.
  • The major achievement of The Syria Campaign has been the branding and promotion of the “White Helmets,” also known as “Syria Civil Defense,” which began with a British military contractor, James LeMesurier, giving some rescue training to Syrians in Turkey with funding provided by the U.S. and U.K. The group stole this name from the REAL Syria Civil Defense as documented in this recent report from Aleppo. The “White Helmets” are marketed in the West as civilian volunteers doing rescue work. On Sept. 22, it was announced that the Right Livelihood Award , the so-called “Alternative Nobel Prize,” is being given to the U.S./U.K.-created White Helmets “for their outstanding bravery, compassion and humanitarian engagement in rescuing civilians from the destruction of the Syrian civil war.”  But the White Helmets are largely a propaganda tool promoting Western intervention against Syria. Unlike a legitimate rescue organization such as the Red Cross or Red Crescent, the “White Helmets” only work in areas controlled by the armed opposition. As shown in this video, the White Helmets pick up the bodies of individuals executed by the terrorists; they claim to be unarmed but are not; and they falsely claim to be neutral.
  • Many of the videos from Al Qaeda/terrorist-dominated areas of Syria have the “White Helmets” logo because the White Helmets work in alliance with these extremist groups as primarily a media marketing tool to raise public support for continuing the support to the armed opposition as well as the demonization of the Syrian government.  The Rights Livelihood press release said the White Helmets “remain outspoken in calling for an end to hostilities in the country.” But that is false, too. The White Helmets actively call for U.S./NATO military intervention through a “No Fly Zone,” which would begin with attacks upon and destruction of government anti-aircraft positions and aircraft. A Major Act of War Taking over the skies above another country is an act of war that would require a major U.S. military operation, according to senior American generals.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The New York Times reported that in 2012 General Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the White House that imposing a no-fly zone in Syria would require up to 70,000 American servicemen to destroy Syria’s antiaircraft system and then impose round-the-clock control over Syrian airspace. General Carter Ham, former commander of the U.S. Africa Command who oversaw the aerial attacks on Libya in 2011, said on CBS News that “I worry sometimes that, when people say ‘impose a no-fly zone,’ there is this almost antiseptic view that this is an easily accomplished military task. It’s extraordinarily difficult. … “It first entails — we should make no bones about it. It first entails killing a lot of people and destroying the Syrian air defenses and those people who are manning those systems. And then it entails destroying the Syrian air force, preferably on the ground, in the air if necessary. This is a violent combat action that results in lots of casualties and increased risk to our own personnel.”
  • In other words, an appeal for a “no-fly zone” is not a call for a non-violent solution. It is seeking a bloody act of war by the United States against Syria, a nation that poses no threat to America. It also would almost surely be carried out in violation of international law since a United Nations Security Council resolution would face vetoes from Russia and probably China. Also, the White Helmets have never criticized or called for the end of funding to extremist organizations including Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. On the contrary, White Helmets are generally embedded with this organization which is defined as “terrorist” by even the U.S., which is likely why the head of the White Helmets, Raed Saleh, was denied entry to the U.S. The foreign and marketing company origins of the White Helmets were exposed over 1½ years ago – and since then, writer Vanessa Beeley has revealed the organization in more depth in articles such as “Who Are the White Helmets?” and “War by Way of Deception.”  Despite these exposés, understanding of the White Helmets is limited, with many liberal and progressive people uncritically accepting the propaganda and misinformation about Syria. Much of the progressive media has effectively blocked or censored critical examinations amid a flood of propaganda about “barrel bombs” dropped by the “brutal dictator” and his “regime.” 
  • In the last week, Netflix started showing a 40-minute documentary movie about the “White Helmets” that amounts to a promotional video. A substantial portion of it takes place in Turkey where we see trainees in hotel rooms making impassioned phone calls to inquire about their families in Syria.  The “family values” theme is evident throughout, a good marketing angle. The political message of the video is also clear: after a bombing attack, “It’s the Russians …. they say they are fighting ISIS but they are targeting civilians.” The movie includes video previously promoted by the White Helmets such as the “Miracle Baby” rescue, an incident that may or may not have been staged. The video includes self-promoting proclamations such as “You are real heroes.” While no doubt there are some real rescues in the midst of war, many of the videos purporting to show the heroes at work have an unrealistic and contrived look to them as revealed here.
  • “Alternative media” in the West has echoed mainstream media regarding the Syria conflict. The result is that many progressive individuals and groups are confused or worse. For example, the activist group CodePink recently issued a media release promoting the Netflix White Helmets propaganda video. 
  • The White Helmets video is produced by Grain Media and Violet Films/Ultra-Violet Consulting, which advertises itself as a marketing corporation specializing in social media management, grant writing, crowd building and campaign implementation. The only question is who paid them to produce this video.  There is growing resistance to this manipulation and deception. In response to a petition to give the Nobel Peace Prize to the White Helmets, there is a counter petition at Change.org. Following the Right Livelihood Awards’ announcement, there will soon be a petition demanding retraction of the award to the White Helmets. The story of the White Helmets is principally a “feel good” hoax to manipulate public perception about the conflict in Syria and continue the drive for “regime change.” That’s why big money was paid to “Purpose” to “incubate” The Syria Campaign to brand and promote the White Helmets using Facebook, Twitter, etc. That’s why more big money was paid to create a self-promotional documentary. 
  • The judges at Rights Livelihood were probably influenced by the documentary since critical examination of facts around Syria is so rare. It’s a sad commentary on the media. As veteran war correspondent Stephen Kinzer recently wrote, “Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press.”
Paul Merrell

Banks fined over $5 billion for rigging global currency markets | Toronto Star - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...g-global-currency-markets.html

banksters fraud litigation criminal-convictions

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • A group of global banks will pay more than $5 billion U.S. in penalties and plead guilty to rigging the world’s currency market, the first time in more than two decades that major players in the financial industry have admitted to criminal wrongdoing. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Barclays and The Royal Bank of Scotland conspired with one another to fix rates on U.S. dollars and euros traded in the huge global market for currencies, according to a resolution announced Wednesday between the banks and the U.S. Department of Justice. A group of currency traders, who called themselves “The Cartel,” allegedly shared customer orders through chat rooms and used that information to profit at the expense of their clients. The resolution is complex and involves multiple regulators in the U.S. and overseas.
  • The four banks will pay a combined $2.5 billion in criminal penalties to the DOJ for criminal manipulation of currency rates between December 2007 and January 2013, according to the agreement. The Federal Reserve is slapping them with an additional $1.6 billion in fines, as the banks’ chief regulator. Finally, British bank Barclays is paying an additional $1.3 billion to British and U.S. regulators for its role in the scheme. Another bank, Switzerland’s UBS, has agreed to plead guilty to manipulating key interest rates and will pay a separate criminal penalty of $203 million.
  • It is rare to see a bank plead guilty to wrongdoing. Even in the aftermath of the financial crisis, most financial companies reached “non-prosecution agreements” or “deferred prosecution agreements” with regulators, agreeing to pay billions in fines but not admitting any guilt. If any guilt were found, it was usually one of the bank’s subsidiaries or divisions — not the bank holding company.
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  • Big banks overall have already been fined billions of dollars for their role in the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. But even so, the latest penalties are big. Including a separate agreement with the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday and another announced last year, the group of banks will pay nearly $9 billion in fines for manipulating the $5.3 trillion global currency market. Unlike the stock and bond markets, currencies trade nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The market pauses two times a day, a moment known as “the fix.” Traders in the cartel allegedly shared client orders with rivals ahead of the “fix”, pumping up currency rates to make profits. Global companies, who do business in multiple currencies, rely on their banks to give them the closest thing to an official exchange rate each day. The banks are supposed to be looking out for them instead of conspiring to get even bigger profits by using customers’ orders against them. Travelers who regularly exchange currencies also need to get a fair price for their euros or dollars.
  • The number of traders who participated in the criminal activity was small. JPMorgan, in a statement, said the one trader involved has been fired. Citi said it fired nine employees involved. The agreement between the banks and the DOJ is subject to court approval. If approved, all five banks have agreed to three years of corporate probation overseen by a court. The banks will also help prosecutors with their investigations into individual criminal activity related to the currency market rigging. In 2012, HSBC avoided a legal battle that could further savage its reputation and undermine confidence in the global banking system by agreeing to pay $1.9 billion to settle a U.S. money-laundering probe. Another British bank, Standard Chartered, signed an agreement with New York regulators to settle a money-laundering investigation involving Iran with a $340 million payment. In 2014, the Bank of America reached a record $17 billion settlement to resolve an investigation into its role in the sale of mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis
Paul Merrell

The fix is in: how banks allegedly rigged the US$5.3 trillion foreign exchange market |... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...illion-foreign-exchange-market

banksters fraud litigation settlements currency-exchange

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Suppose you’re in the supermarket shopping for groceries. While you’re strolling the aisle with your cart, a shadowy figure looms over your shoulder and changes the prices on the items you want to buy before you get a chance to pick them up. As you reach for some vine tomatoes, you notice the price just jumped 20 cents. When you select some brie from among the cheeses, you witness the number on the sticker change right before your eyes. Ditto when you look for your favorite brand of granola.
  • This is the essence of what regulators learned might be happening in the foreign exchange market, where US$5.3 trillion of dollars, euros and yen are traded every day. In June 2013, Bloomberg reported that traders at some of the world’s biggest banks worked to manipulate key currency rates, racking up profits and costing investors – including your retirement fund – hundreds of millions of dollars globally. They are accused of placing their own transactions ahead of trades requested by clients – known as front-running – which was the reason prices kept changing as people tried to make their own trades, like in the shopping analogy above. They bought euros or dollars, driving up the rate, and then profited by selling to other investors at a higher level.
  • This week six of the currency-dealers being investigated – including JP Morgan, Citigroup and HSBC – agreed to pay a total of US$4.3 billion to regulators in the US, UK and Switzerland to resolve the allegations. The deal is likely only the first in a series of settlements and other penalties that will emerge from the ongoing investigations. The investors most concerned with the alleged manipulation are funds that invest internationally, such as hedge funds, the endowments of charitable or cultural institutions and insurance companies. But it also includes the mutual funds in which many of your 401K or IRA assets are likely invested.
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  • When institutions like these need to buy or sell assets across borders, they call a dealer at one of the big banks, which provides what is basically a wholesale version of the cambio currency kiosks you see at the airport. The dealer quotes a buying price and a selling price, and the fund chooses whether to buy or sell. In addition to trading with customers, the dealers trade among themselves, sometimes to manage their inventory and sometimes hoping to make money by taking speculative positions for a few minutes or even seconds. And that’s how we arrive at the scandal. Every day at 4pm in London, the market sets special “fixing” exchange rates that are used to value the funds’ international investments. The fixing price is set in a simple way: it’s just the average of all prices paid among dealing banks during the 30 seconds before and after the clock strikes 4. Many international fund managers prefer to trade currencies at exactly the fixing price because it’s simpler and smarter to trade at the same price used to value your portfolio. To make these transactions happen, international funds often place large orders with dealers at major banks before the fix.
  • Suppose, for example, a pension fund with major investments in Europe knows it will receive a lot of new IRA money on November 30, when many US employees get paid. And suppose the fund plans to invest €100 million of that in European stocks. At 3:30pm that day the fund might instruct its bank to purchase €100 million at the fixing price. With this kind of advance order, the bank could book its own trades before the fund does, buying the euros it will later sell to the investor.
  • The banks – or more accurately, specific dealers at specific banks – are accused of manipulating the fixing prices based on their knowledge of advance customer orders. In a nutshell, the accusation is that dealers from different banks got together before the fix and compared notes in chat rooms. Most currency trading is handled by 10 or so mega banks, so if just a few of them compared notes, they would have a good sense of whether the exchange rate would rise or fall during the fixing interval that day. The shadowy figure looking over your shoulder at the supermarket to see what you’re going to buy next is like the banks comparing their customer orders before the fix. To finish the supermarket analogy, we need to know how and why the dealing banks could raise the fixing rate to the disadvantage of international pension and mutual funds. Suppose once again that many customers have placed big orders to buy euros at the fix, and the banks figure the euro-dollar exchange rate will rise during the window. This would give them an incentive to buy a lot of euros before it’s set (remember the golden rule of trading: buy low, sell high).
Paul Merrell

The Fed caused 93% of the entire stock market's move since 2008: Analysis - Yahoo Finance - 0 views

finance.yahoo.com/...-2008--analysis-194426366.html

banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel stock-market-manipulation

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The bull market just celebrated its seventh anniversary. But the gains in recent years – as well as its recent sputter – may be explained by just one thing: monetary policy. The factors behind that and previous bubbles can be illuminated using simple visual analysis of a chart. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) doubled in value from November 2008 to October 2014, coinciding with the Federal Reserve Bank’s “quantitative easing” asset purchasing program. After three rounds of “QE,” where the Fed poured billions of dollars into the bond market monthly, the Fed’s balance sheet went from $2.1 trillion to $4.5 trillion. This isn’t just a spurious correlation, according to economist Brian Barnier, principal at ValueBridge Advisors and founder of FedDashboard.com. What’s more, he says previous bull runs in the market lasting several years can also be explained by single factors each time.
  • Barnier first compiled data on the total value of publicly-traded U.S. stocks since 1950. He then divided it by another economic factor, graphing the ratio for each one. If the chart showed horizontal lines stretching over long periods of time, that meant both the numerator (stock values) and the denominator (the other factor) were moving at the same rate. “That's the beauty of the visual analysis,” he said. “All we have to do is find straight, stable lines and we know we've got something good.”
  • Scouring hundreds of different factors, Barnier ultimately whittled it down to just four factors: GDP data five years into the future, household and nonprofit liabilities, open market paper, and the Fed’s assets. At different stretches of time, just one of those was the single biggest driver of the market and was confirmed with regression analyses.
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  • He isolated each factor in a separate chart, calling them “eras” for the stock market. From after World War II until the mid-1970s, future GDP outlook explained 90% of the stock market’s move, according to statistical analysis by Barnier. GDP growth lost its sway on the market in the early 1970s with the rise of credit cards and consumer debt. Household liabilities grew with plastic first, followed by home mortgages, until the real estate crash of the early 1990s. Barnier’s analysis shows debt explained 95% of the entire market’s move during this time. The period between the mid- to late-1990s until 2000 was, of course, marked by the tech bubble. While stocks took much of the headline, that time also saw heightened activity in the commercial paper market. Startups and young companies sought cash beyond their stratospheric share values to fund their operations. Barnier’s regression analysis shows commercial paper increases could explain as much as 97% of the tech bubble. Shortly after the tech bubble burst, a housing bubble began, once more in the form of mortgages and other debt. That drove 94% of the market’s move for the first several years of the current century.
  • As the financial crisis reached a fevered pitch in 2008, the Federal Reserve took to flooding the financial market with dollars by buying up bonds. Simultaneously, interest rates fell dramatically, as bond yields move in the opposite direction of bond prices. Barnier sees the Fed as responsible for over 93% of the market from the start of QE until today. During the first half of 2013, the Fed caused the entire market’s growth, he said. Since the Fed stopped buying bonds in late 2014, the S&P 500 has been batted around in a 16% range and is more or less where it was when the QE came to a close. Investors need to anticipate the next driver, said Barnier. “Quantitative easing has stopped, but now we're into the interest rate world,” he said. “That means for any investor trying to figure out what to do, step one is starting with a macro strategy.”
Paul Merrell

Manipulation of the Gold Market: China has Imported 2400 Tons of Gold and the... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5484112

banksters gold market-manipulation

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • We will no doubt look back upon the current era as the “crime of the century” for so many different reasons. Actually, current times represent the worst financial crimes of ALL TIME! The various crimes and how they are operated are too numerous to list and would probably fill a three volume set of books, let’s concentrate on just one. Central to everything is the U.S. issuing the global reserve currency by fiat knowing full well it truly means “non payment”. The absolute cornerstone to the dollar retaining confidence and thus value has been the suppression of the price of gold. Before getting to specifically what I’d like to point out, let’s look at a couple common sense points which beg questions. How is it China has been importing 2,400 tons of gold over the past two and a half years without any upward push to the gold price? This amount equals almost EXACTLY the TOTAL amount of gold mined annually around the world! How is it possible that ALL production has been purchased by China and yet the price goes down? The answer of course is quite simple unless you purposely close your eyes or disingenuously “apologize”.
  • The argument from the apologists is that “traders” on COMEX and LBMA believe gold will go lower so they are sellers and this is where the downward pressure has come from. You as a reader already know that much of the “selling” is done at midnight (or off hours) in the U.S. which is the lunch break in Asia, China specifically. The massive selling (as much as total global production in less than two trading days) has usually taken place during off hours when the volume is lightest and price moves the most, especially with any significant volume. The result has been gold now trades at or very near the cost of production and silver well below production costs. None of this is new, only a refresher. The reaction in the actual physical markets is backwardation, premiums over spot prices and actual shortages. Put simply, low price has brought out additional physical demand. To the point, the following is a snapshot of inventory movement (or the lack of) within the COMEX gold vaults this month:
  • Yes, yes, the open interest ALWAYS collapses and delivery “always gets made”. But doesn’t it seem strange to you that a market with less than $200 million worth of inventory is the pricing to a $5 trillion monetary asset? In comparison, a single ranch in Texas just got sold for nearly 4 times the size of what COMEX claims they have available for delivery. It used to be the tail was wagging the dog. Now, COMEX inventory has been bled down so far it can be said just a few hairs on the tail is wagging the dog! Surely I will receive comments like “this will go on forever” or “don’t worry, nothing ever comes of these delivery months”. It should be pointed out, as it stands right now a single trade of 1,820 contracts represents the entire deliverable inventory and we have seen on multiple occasions where 3,000-6,000 contracts have been sold (in one trade) to collapse the price. I ask, how does COMEX keep this in the box when something very “REAL” happens? “Real” meaning a mere push of our financial system by China? Or a military shove by Russia? Or something as simple as a “truth bomb” being released on the American public? Can an inventory of less than $200 million fiat dollars make good and keep hidden the core crime to the crime of the century? Is this why China is moving toward a physical exchange? Once they “take it out …they will take it up”!
Gary Edwards

The Fix Is Already in for This Election - The Daily Reckoning - 0 views

dailyreckoning.com/fix-already-election

Trump Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel GOLD

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • But Yellen isn’t going to let any normal course of events happen before Election Day, especially since a Trump presidency would be every central banker’s worst freaking nightmare…Trump is deeply suspicious of the Fed… as many of us are.He’s rightfully and repeatedly said that Fed policies have created a stock market bubble that will burst. He’s called the Fed’s QE nonsense a bad economic idea that produced “phony numbers.”He told GQ that he prefers the gold standard to a Fed-manipulated fiat currency: “Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do — but boy, would it be wonderful. We’d have a standard on which to base our money.”And he also supports an extensive audit of the Fed to bring transparency and accountability to the secretive “central bank” that’s brought devastating boom-and-bust cycles for decades.
  • Of course, nobody knows if Trump will follow through on these promises if elected. Once in Washington, he could very well become just another lying politician. But right now, the last thing Yellen and her New World Order cronies want to do is take a chance on President Trump.They want to keep their unchecked power to create endless amounts of money out of thin air… to build and pop one financial bubble after another… all to redistribute from the little people to the elites… and destroy free-market capitalism in the name of state-manipulated Ponzi finance.We know that won’t change under Clinton. And maybe it won’t change under Trump. But you can bet central bankers don’t trust that business as usual will continue with Trump.So come the next Fed meeting in mid-September, expect a lot of sophisticated talk from Yellen about this or that economic item, assorted indecipherable mumblings and an army of TV talking heads lapping it all up as if an economic god had spoken.Just don’t hold your breath waiting for a rate hike… no matter what the economy’s doing.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 16
     
    "Trump is staging a fierce comeback… Hillary Clinton's post-convention lead in the polls has nearly disappeared. Prominent pollster Rasmussen Reports now has Trump leading Clinton 40% to 39%. Trump also has a 3% lead (45% to Hillary's 42%) in the Los Angeles Times poll. And Hillary's edge in the polls in which she's still leading has narrowed sharply. There'll be more back-and-forth momentum swings in the horse race to come, but these new polls show one thing: The odds of a Trump presidency shot higher this week. And that means the odds of a Fed interest rate hike before Election Day got lower… The fix is in… Look, Janet Yellen isn't going to do anything to jeopardize a Clinton presidency. They're both card-carrying Deep Staters. They're both liberals who served under Obama. They both dress the same: Mao chic. And most of all, Yellen wants to keep her job when her term expires in February 2018. She's a lock to stay on in a Clinton administration. But it won't happen in Trump's. He's already told TheWall Street Journal that he wouldn't keep Yellen as Fed chair. I don't see how Yellen can raise rates between now and Election Day… if Trump can win. If she did, it would tank the stock market, nail the economy and give Trump the White House. When the Fed raised rates in December 2015, the stock market plunged, with the Dow dropping more than 1,300 points in the month following. A plunging market would wipe out trillions in paper wealth and slam the economy into recession."
Gary Edwards

Russia Breaking Wall St Oil Price Monopoly | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

journal-neo.org/...ing-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly

Banksters petro-dollars

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • In the period up until the end of the 1980’s world oil prices were determined largely by real daily supply and demand. It was the province of oil buyers and oil sellers. Then Goldman Sachs decided to buy the small Wall Street commodity brokerage, J. Aron in the 1980’s. They had their eye set on transforming how oil is traded in world markets. It was the advent of “paper oil,” oil traded in futures, contracts independent of delivery of physical crude, easier for the large banks to manipulate based on rumors and derivative market skullduggery, as a handful of Wall Street banks dominated oil futures trades and knew just who held what positions, a convenient insider role that is rarely mentioned inn polite company. It was the beginning of transforming oil trading into a casino where Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP MorganChase and a few other giant Wall Street banks ran the crap tables.First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/09/russia-breaking-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly/
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 16
     
    "Russia has just taken significant steps that will break the present Wall Street oil price monopoly, at least for a huge part of the world oil market. The move is part of a longer-term strategy of decoupling Russia's economy and especially its very significant export of oil, from the US dollar, today the Achilles Heel of the Russian economy. Later in November the Russian Energy Ministry has announced that it will begin test-trading of a new Russian oil benchmark. While this might sound like small beer to many, it's huge. If successful, and there is no reason why it won't be, the Russian crude oil benchmark futures contract traded on Russian exchanges, will price oil in rubles and no longer in US dollars. It is part of a de-dollarization move that Russia, China and a growing number of other countries have quietly begun. The setting of an oil benchmark price is at the heart of the method used by major Wall Street banks to control world oil prices. Oil is the world's largest commodity in dollar terms. Today, the price of Russian crude oil is referenced to what is called the Brent price. The problem is that the Brent field, along with other major North Sea oil fields is in major decline, meaning that Wall Street can use a vanishing benchmark to leverage control over vastly larger oil volumes. The other problem is that the Brent contract is controlled essentially by Wall Street and the derivatives manipulations of banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP MorganChase and Citibank. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/09/russia-breaking-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly/"
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