Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows- Bloomberg News

[SpasticGramps]

Karma?

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/25/news/companies/Benmosche_AIG/index.htm?hpt=T2

Cancer is one of the worst ways to go. Couldn't happen to a better guy.

Many of these banking cartel gangsters would be hung for treason and crimes against humanity if the full extent of their crimes was known to the public and I reckon when the consequences are felt by all they just may.

 

[robbiedublu]

Cancer is one of the worst ways to go. Couldn't happen to a better guy.

Many of these banking cartel gangsters would be hung for treason and crimes against humanity if the full extent of their crimes was known to the public and I reckon when the consequences are felt by all they just may.

Pancreatic/ liver hopefuly, something painful and incurable.

 

[SpasticGramps]

So on Wednesday Nov. 3 the dangerous experiment known as Quantitative Easing Round II (ie hyper inflationary printing) will begin. It will be the Fed's attempt to re inflate what many are now releasing is not re inflatable.

This great article is from the Co-Founder of PIMCO, Bill Gross. PIMCO is one the largest global asset management companies. This isn't some crazy guy like me sitting in the basement stockpiled with peanut butter calling our economic structure one large Ponzi Scam. This one of the big boys having a rare moment of conscious and speaking the truth.

I cut pasted and the important bits of the article to leave the politics out of it and focus solely on the financial and economic ramifications of the end game. This is about economics and financial markets, not politics.

Bill Gross Calls Fed "Most Brazen" Of All Ponzi Schemes, Says 30 Year Bond Market Is Ending, Compares US Economy To Black Hole

Whatever the conclusion, not only investors, but the American people should recognize that Wednesday, even more than Tuesday, represents a critical inflection point in determining our future prosperity. Of course we’ve tried it before, most recently in the aftermath of the Lehman crisis, during which the Fed wrote $1.5 trillion or so in “checks” to purchase Agency mortgages and a smattering of Treasuries. It might seem a tad dramatic then, to label QEII as “critical,” sort of like those airport hucksters, I suppose, that sold whale blubber for a living. But two years ago, there was the implicit assumption that the U.S. and its associated G-7 economies needed just an espresso or perhaps an Adderall or two to get back to normal. Normal just hasn’t happened yet, and economic historians such as Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have since alerted us that countries in the throes of delevering can take many, not several, years to return to a steady state.

The Fed’s second round of QE, therefore, more closely resembles an attempted hypodermic straight to the economy’s heart than its mood elevator counterpart of 2009. If QEII cannot reflate capital markets, if it can’t produce 2% inflation and an assumed reduction of unemployment rates back towards historical levels, then it will be a long, painful slog back to prosperity. Perhaps, as a vocal contingent suggests, our paper-based foundation of wealth deserves to be buried, making a fresh start from admittedly lower levels. The Fed, on Wednesday, however, will decide that it is better to keep the patient on life support with an adrenaline injection and a following morphine drip than to risk its demise and ultimate rebirth in another form.

We at PIMCO join with Ben Bernanke in this diagnosis, but we will tell you, as perhaps he cannot, that the outcome is by no means certain. We are, as even some Fed Governors now publically admit, in a “liquidity trap,” where interest rates or trillions in QEII asset purchases may not stimulate borrowing or lending because consumer demand is just not there. Escaping from a liquidity trap may be impossible, much like light trapped in a black hole. Just ask Japan. Ben Bernanke, however, will try – it is, to be honest, all he can do. He can’t raise or lower taxes, he can’t direct a fiscal thrust of infrastructure spending, he can’t change our educational system, he can’t force the Chinese to revalue their currency – it is all he can do, and as he proceeds, the dual questions of “will it work” and “will it create a bond market bubble” will be answered. We at PIMCO are not sure.

Still, while next Wednesday’s announcement will carry our qualified endorsement, I must admit it may be similar to a Turkey looking forward to a Thanksgiving Day celebration. Bondholders, while immediate beneficiaries, will likely eventually be delivered on a platter to more fortunate celebrants, be they financial asset classes more adaptable to inflation such as stocks or commodities, or perhaps the average American on Main Street who might benefit from a hoped-for rise in job growth or simply a boost in nominal wages, however deceptive the illusion. Check writing in the trillions is not a bondholder’s friend; it is in fact inflationary, and, if truth be told, somewhat of a Ponzi scheme. Public debt, actually, has always had a Ponzi-like characteristic. Granted, the U.S. has, at times, paid down its national debt, but there was always the assumption that as long as creditors could be found to roll over existing loans – and buy new ones – the game could keep going forever. Sovereign countries have always implicitly acknowledged that the existing debt would never be paid off because they would “grow” their way out of the apparent predicament, allowing future’s prosperity to continually pay for today’s finance.

Now, however, with growth in doubt, it seems that the Fed has taken Charles Ponzi one step further. Instead of simply paying for maturing debt with receipts from financial sector creditors – banks, insurance companies, surplus reserve nations and investment managers, to name the most significant – the Fed has joined the party itself. Rather than orchestrating the game from on high, it has jumped into the pond with the other swimmers. One and one-half trillion in checks were written in 2009, and trillions more lie ahead. The Fed, in effect, is telling the markets not to worry about our fiscal deficits, it will be the buyer of first and perhaps last resort. There is no need – as with Charles Ponzi – to find an increasing amount of future gullibles, they will just write the check themselves. I ask you: Has there ever been a Ponzi scheme so brazen? There has not. This one is so unique that it requires a new name. I call it a Sammy scheme, in honor of Uncle Sam (as well as its citizens) who have brought us to this critical moment in time. It is not a Bernanke scheme, because this is his only alternative and he shares no responsibility for its origin. It is a Sammy scheme – you and I deserve all the blame.

Like I said before Ponzinomics, Junk Economics, or more academically enumerated the Keynesian Endpoint within the Austrian Business Cycle of Economics (ie Classic Economics). When the big boys start writing the obituary for the monetary system is when I start buying the peanut butter.

 

[SpasticGramps]

Big day today.

The FED has decided to print $600 billion dollar at a pace of $75 billion a month through 2nd Quarter 2011. Of course, if this does not increase inflation enough they will print more.

Quoted directly from the FOMC (Fed Open Market Committee) Release.

To promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate, the Committee decided today to expand its holdings of securities. The Committee will maintain its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings. In addition, the Committee intends to purchase a further $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011, a pace of about $75 billion per month. The Committee will regularly review the pace of its securities purchases and the overall size of the asset-purchase program in light of incoming information and will adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability.

So what does this look like? (Courtesy of ZeroHedge)

Hilarious!

My question to the Keynesians is...... With the baby boomer generation going into full retirement mode this year and knowing that consumer spending drops off like a stone after the age of 50, but makes up 70% of our GDP.....What if the natural economic cycle should be deflation because of the natural and massive change in demographics? But yet we are determined to print money to maintain at least a 2% CPI. The reason Keynesian economics, or really in this case Neo-Keynesian Economics, will fail is because they only think of supply side economics. Hilarious. Let the mad experiment begin!


In other news, what was laughed away by most for years as "mad conspiracy theory" has now proven to be true. The banks manipulate the price of silver and gold to maintain the illusion of monetary stability.

RICO Suit Filed Against HSBC And JPMorgan For Silver Market Manipulation

From PRNewswire

According to the complaint, JP Morgan amassed a sizeable short position in silver futures and options in part through its March 2008 acquisition of investment bank Bear Stearns. By August 2008, JP Morgan and London-based HSBC controlled more than 85 percent of the commercial net short position in silver futures contracts.

The suit alleges that, starting in early 2008, the two banks began manipulating the silver futures market by accumulating unusually large "short" positions and then secretly coordinating enormous sales of silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange, which is known as "COMEX" and is part of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

According to the lawsuit, JP Morgan and HSBC used a variety of methods to coordinate their manipulation of the market for silver futures contracts, signaling when to flood the COMEX market with short positions, which caused the price of silver futures and options contracts to crash.

The suit describes two "crash" events that were set in motion by JP Morgan and HSBC, one in March 2008, and the other in February 2010, after defendants had amassed large short positions. In the wake of both events, the suit alleges, COMEX silver futures prices collapsed.

"We believe that JP Morgan and HSBC's scheme was carefully conceived and coordinated to maximize their profits at the expense of innocent investors who believed that they were trading in a market free from manipulation," Berman said.

Yes, Dorthy.....everything is a scam.

 

[SpasticGramps]

I haven't seen this movie yet, but from what I understand it's a great explanation of what we've been talking about. These people know what they are doing and now they are going to sell it to you.

Inside Job Reuters Opinion Pieace

One of my dreams in life has long been to have the opportunity to sit down opposite Larry Summers or Bob Rubin, with video cameras rolling, and ask one of the key players in the financial crisis some tough on-the-record questions about the degree to which he’s responsible for it. This is the kind of interview which can only be done on video, which captures evasions and non-answers and general oily shiftiness in a way that no print journalist ever could.

That’s no longer a dream of mine. Instead, I have a new dream: that Charles Ferguson conduct exactly that interview.

Ferguson is the director of Inside Job, the new documentary about the financial crisis which is a must-see for pretty much everybody. I didn’t have very high hopes for the film: I generally consider that video journalism has acquitted itself very badly over the course of the crisis and I blamed the medium rather than the messengers, many of whom are very smart and well-informed.

It turns out, however, that in expert hands, the medium, at least when it’s under the control of Ferguson, can do a spectacularly good job of presenting what happened and why — better than any newspaper series or magazine article or book or radio show.

What Ferguson has achieved here is an extremely impressive balancing act: while his explanations are clear-eyed and accurate, he’s never content to simply tell us what happened. He also takes pains to constantly remind us that people did this and that nearly all of them are still relaxing in plutocratic comfort even as millions of workers in America and around the world have seen their lives destroyed by the effects of the crisis.

Some of those people he manages to coax in front of the camera. The smart ones — including Summers, Rubin, and Greenspan — all said no, while a handful of academics, including Ric Mishkin and Glenn Hubbard, will forever regret saying yes. They’re hardly the biggest villains of the crisis and they’re not presented that way, but they are great examples of the way in which the financial elite is so used to the please-oh-wise-man-tell-us-what-you-thin k school of journalism that it’s genuinely shocked when it encounters anything else. (You won’t soon forget the scene where Hubbard, not even bothering to conceal his anger, spits at Ferguson, saying “you have three more minutes. Give it your best shot”; you will barely believe how Marty Feldstein happily says he has “no regrets” about his position on the board of AIG in the run-up to its collapse.)

A great Pixar movie manages to do two things at once: it entertains and delights the kids, while also giving their parents a fresh view of life with a remarkably adult perspective. Inside Job is similar, in a way: if you don’t really understand what happened during the financial crisis, it will explain that to you very clearly. If you do know what happened during the financial crisis, however, it will do something else: it will rekindle the anger and dudgeon that you might well have lost over the past three years of being buried in the financial weeds. Ferguson doesn’t do that Taibbi-style, by calling people names: he’s more effective than that and this film will surely galvanize the anti-Wall Street wings of both the Democratic and the Republican parties.

No financial journalist could have made this film: we were all far too close to the people and events depicted in it, which turn out to have really needed an outsider’s perspective. This is surely the first and last piece of financial journalism that Ferguson will ever make and it’s much more effective for it.

Still, I can’t help but hope that somehow this generation will somehow produce a Ferguson/Summers series of interviews to rival Frost/Nixon. Nixon only appeared, of course, because he was paid by Frost; Summers hardly needs the money, so Ferguson won’t be able to get him that way. But Ferguson has known Summers for many years, and maybe Summers’s legendary appetite for intellectual debate might persuade him to say yes after he leaves the government. Go on, Larry. I dare you.

 

[SpasticGramps]

Dallas Fed Admits "For The Next Eight Months, The Nation’s Central Bank Will Be Monetizing The Federal Debt", Opens Door To Bernanke Impeachment

Time to begin the Chairman impeachment proceedings. It is one thing for blogs like Zero Hedge to argue (rightly) for the past 1.5 years that the Fed's actions in the Treasury space are nothing but direct debt monetizations. After all, one can always argue semantics, as some peers have enjoyed doing in the past. Yet when an actual Federal Reserve Fed President, in this case Dallas Fed's Dick Fisher states it without any trace of hiding the underlying intent, then things get a little serious. To wit: "For the next eight months, the nation’s central bank will be monetizing the federal debt." It gets worse: even though Fisher realizes that what he is doing is unconstitutional, he also admits that the Fed's actions are now is effectively a policy tool.

Bernanke Testified that he would not monetize the debt. There is a very big reason why he perjured himself.

 

[SilverSurfer_OG]

Have you checked out Benjamin Fulfords blog recently?

He has some very interesting things to say about the current economic events.

The rats are fleeing the sinking ship all right...

 

[SpasticGramps]

No I haven't heard of him. I'll check it out. Thanks!

 

[SpasticGramps]

Irish to Bund Yield spreads are now going parabolic as Ireland prepares for collapse or an IMF takeover of it's economic policy via bailout.

 

[SpasticGramps]

Ireland told: Take EU bailout or trigger crisis

An increasingly isolated Irish government was coming under mounting pressure tonight to seek an EU or International Monetary Fund bailout within 24 hours amid fears that contagion from its crippled banking sector might spread through the weaker eurozone countries.

IMF Checklist
Iceland
Greece
Ireland??
Spain??
Portugal??
Japan??
USA??

Like playin' monopoly.

 

[ibjamming]

Ireland told: Take EU bailout or trigger crisis



IMF Checklist
Iceland
Greece
Ireland??
Spain??
Portugal??
Japan??
USA??

Like playin' monopoly.

More like the game "Risk"...soon they'll own it all. But what condition will it be in?

Yup, I fear "Bennie and the inkjets" is going for his "Hail Mary", if this doesn't work, we're all screwed. Hmmm...did they know we were at the edge of Great Depression II? Is THAT why they picked Bennie? Because he was an "expert" in the Great Depression? Did they KNOW we were so close to going under?

Oh, and thank you to the lawyers, who have succeeded in making sure all foreclosed houses have "questionable" titles. Expect most of the foreclosed houses to never be sold again. Who would when they're making the title questionable? Who in their right mind would buy a foreclosed house now? Nobody...

 

[SpasticGramps]

The first Great Depression was consolidation #1 for the Banking Cabal. This Depression will be consolidation #2. The dismantling of the middle class is a prerequisite for the imposition of tyranny. In our case it is tyranny of the rich. We will go down as the greatest Plutocracy in world history.

These bankers aren't fools. They know exactly what they are doing. I watched Inside Job over the weekend. If anyone has doubts that this isn't destruction by design, that movie will clear it up.

 

[ibjamming]

I've seen probably all the "underground" videos like that. The trouble is there's always parts that aren't true or are politically motivated by the makers. You really can't trust anyone.

DOW is down 200...but gold is also down. For the 3rd POMO, this isn't looking good. I fear the "big boys" are slowly pulling out, as the government slowly adds "funny money" to keep us little guys complacent. Until the big crash and then they split and we're left holding the check.

I so want to buy more silver coins so after the collapse I have actual "money", but I have the alternate future to worry about...the one where they always seem to pull a rabbit out of their hat and save everything. And then precious metals take a dive. Making me lose thousands...again. It seems they counter every "jump" I try to make. I did OK with the silver ETF (AGQ) during the last run up...I'm not sure where the bottom is this correction.

So gramps, how sure are you GD 2.0 will happen? Europe is burning, we're broke, who's left to take our debt? We can't afford retirement now and the boomers are just getting started! We're fucked, but when and how hard?

 

[binaryfission]

Inside Job was professional and is in theaters. good movie.

And lets not forget, we might be "broke" but we are also waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too big to fail. for the world.

When the yuan (or some other currency; Amero) is fighting the dollar to become the world's reserve currency is when i'll start with the purchasing of ammo and peanut butter. Until then, meh.

 

[SpasticGramps]

G20: Look for Even More Friction in the Future Huffington Post

With France and China already plotting to replace the US dollar as the world's reserve currency at the next G20 summit in Cannes, don't count on this international forum lasting too much longer.

The huge fiscal divisions that were already in evidence at the G20 summit in Toronto last June morphed into even bigger and more rancorous divisions on exchange rates at the recent Seoul summit. With the US at China's throat about its record trade surplus, and China at the US's throat over the Federal Reserve Board's blatantly devaluationist policy of quantitative easing, it's little wonder nothing was accomplished.

Reads like the lexicon of war. And "War is a Racket."

 

[SpasticGramps]

So gramps, how sure are you GD 2.0 will happen? Europe is burning, we're broke, who's left to take our debt? We can't afford retirement now and the boomers are just getting started! We're fucked, but when and how hard?

Baby boom = Retirement Bust

Baby Boom Leveraged to the hilt (~70% of GDP is consumer spending)

Baby Boom Consumer spending drops off ~40% (from memory) at around age ~55.

Boomers go bust. Technical chart analysis wins the day. We have serious structural problems. Both ethically and economically. GD 2.0 is coming. Couple of years to a decade max IMO. Who knows? Houses of cards all fall down eventually though.

 

[SpasticGramps]

Ireland capitulates and sells it's people's sovereignty to the ECB and the IMF cartel.

Of course they denied that they needed a rescue package until the very last minute.

EU bailout endangers Irish government, slams banks Forbes

DUBLIN --
Investors dumped Irish bank shares and Ireland's government struggled to survive Monday after conceding it will need a massive bailout aimed at containing Europe's debt crisis.

Experts, however, said the Irish aid package would do little to shield other heavily indebted European countries from the risk of eventual default, most immediately Portugal but also potentially Spain, Italy and Greece.

Ireland's rescue, which follows a Greek bailout in May, is the European Union's latest attempt to win back market confidence and keep its 16-nation euro currency strong and stable. But the cost - both monetary and political - keeps rising by the day.

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen resisted calls from inside and outside his party Monday to resign immediately and permit a snap election, despite signs that his coalition government's razor-thin majority is unraveling.

Cowen insisted he would step down and face re-election only once Ireland's most brutal budget in history is passed and ongoing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank produce a bailout deal expected to approach euro100 billion ($136 billion) - something only a week ago Cowen claimed his government wasn't contemplating.

Liar, Liar, pants on fire. And the contagion continues to spread. Next up Portugal and Spain.

 

[binaryfission]

is it possible that, we are devaluing our currency on purpose to fuck china in the long haul? Making our debt to them worth-less. Forcing their hand on the currency and trade issue.

can i discuss this here. I just want opinions i'm not trying to be argumentative or angry about it.

 

[Happy 7]

At least the old typo was finally fixed...

 

[SpasticGramps]

is it possible that, we are devaluing our currency on purpose to fuck china in the long haul? Making our debt to them worth-less. Forcing their hand on the currency and trade issue.

can i discuss this here. I just want opinions i'm not trying to be argumentative or angry about it.

Well, think about it like this. If our debt to China becomes worthless they would probably stop buying it, right? No one is going buy billions of dollars of something if they know for fact it is worthless and they'll loose all their money. They probably aren't going to be too happy about holding a multi-billion dollar bag of worthless paper either.

It stands to reason if our debt becomes worthless to China then it's worthless to the whole market. This is not a good thing. We borrow 40% of every dollar we spend. If people stop lending us money or significantly raise interest rates to borrow, we're done.