Just Say No To (Debt) Slavery - Universal Monetary Decay

Economic 2012 In The Cards

2010-04-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

April 2010
www.monetarydecay.com

When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, theyand not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes...Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and withoutdecency; their soleobject is gain." - Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815

Many of you surely remember that in 2008, the world elites urged a coordinated action to tackle the threatening down turn, plunging their respective countries deeper into debt to give the bankers an unlimited amount of blank checks, while convincing taxpayers to foot the bill under the guise of acting to save their jobs. Now that the bailouts' side effects are spreading like wild-fire and have obviously become global, the odds are setting us up for a day of reckoning the like of which has never been seen. Liquidation of the Western middle class is unavoidable; let alone the developing countries: for them it will be a lot worse as they have borrowed (from now bankrupt empires) since the end of the colonies. They earned not their independence but a colonization of another kind. If there is no major wake-up call, the entire planet will be left in the hands of a few fascist banks and corporations at the head of a World Government. The wolves in sheep clothing have worked on this for more than 300 years. Money doesn't mean anything to them, but power. This said, it is useful to mention that the system we now have was invented by the Chinese, and began with the Song (960-1279) dynasty. In fifty years from 1260 to 1309 Yuan's paper money was depreciated by 1000 percent!

Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Greenspan: 'We can guarantee cash benefitsas far out and at whatever sizeyou like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power' - February 15, 2005

Back to present: even the so-called rich Arab emirates, Kuwait and particularly Duba, won't be spared either as they have sold out their oil in exchange of usurious loans for more they can endure and caved in favor of the Military Industrial Complex. Dubai is a good example: it is a city born out of the sands in less than one generation and today features architectural marvels. Then came the housing crash without any warning. Last year bad debtors, Western real estate flippers for the most part, were fleeing at the speed of light, a jail time sentence awaiting those who cannot repay.

Bubbles have dotted human history and the latest world bailout bubble marks the beginning of the end. It is about time to acknowledge that globalization will never bring forth anything worthy. Since frameworks are corrupt to begin with, the financial top bodies have always been designed for a monumental takeover: economic hegemony worked its way through insidiously. Those who issue the loans are ruling currencies and thus our lives. They sold us an illusion of democracy while proclaiming our rights to Freedom using "focus groups" to study humans' unconscious desires and exploit them. The Century of The Self offered a twisted version the 'pursuit of happiness'. The nature of the trap is now blatant: the IMF austerity packages are about to become the norm to address this economic decadence. Early March, IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn has called for new power and expects the Fund to become the world Federal Reserve. But they have more rabbits coming out of their hats such as implementing the global warming bill designed to squeeze $45 trillion out of taxpayers' wallets and other population control agendas under the pretense of mass vaccinations and other subterfuges. Though for anyone wiling to analyze the root causes, there is no egg-chicken dilemma whatsoever. Before we can even assess that there're way too many of us on earth, we ought to consider fraudulent monetary policies that give the impression that we can no longer feed people. It is the crippling inflation, which has put us in this giant mess. Of course, overpopulation theorists will never question this. The stakes are definitely too high, power is addictive and fear is needed to obtain citizens' consent under the guise of saving the job market.

CBS Market Watch columnist Paul Farrell' s assessment is pretty dire to say the least, as it cites 20 reasons that will detonate the Global Debt Time Bomb. His very article was inspired by a Forbes story explaining how this plot of Global Asset Bubble threat could wreck our lives when massive debts come due. Indeed, the dreaded idea of sinking into Depression Part II has become conventional wisdom. As of Mach 26, there were almost 80% Americans said that U.S. economy could collapse. Keeping the bubble afloat no matter what. No April Fool this time that needs to be reported in the news. Reality is beyond fiction: Obama urged Congress to come to its senses, alluding that the country would face bankruptcy if the healthcare makeover was rejected.

Additionally - the Euro Block fearing a contagion was still debating whether to rescue Greece while Hedge funds' bets against the euro has risen amid growing apprehension of a backlash against their trading positions. Luckily for the hedge funds,on the Bloomberg site at the end of March, it was announced that Europe would provide more than half the loans and the Washington-based IMF the rest if needed. Of course by IMF, they mean the American taxpayers. If this measure is planned, it will be implemented. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, from the telegraph.uk, alluding to the Uruguay-INF controlled 2003 default, reported that the deputy-governor of China's central bank regards Greece as the 'tip of the iceberg'. And there is more, the Block recommended to hedge existing investments with insurances against default of a debt instrument. Among those huge Hedge Funds, we find that of George Soros who parades as a gold bug. Right, amid all this turmoil gold and silver prices have room to move a lot higher. However, selling more derivatives products cannot be the answer as the whole financial structure comes down to a mega debt-laden-Ponzi scheme. Doing so will delay the Great Reckoning, while making it a lot worse. Interestingly, as of March 2, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Justice Dept. has launched a probe into whether hedge funds might have acted together to doom the euro. What a circus! Anyone knowledgeable enough to grasp the flaws of our system, the pump and dump cycles more precisely, will just use a hedge fund at his advantage. A probe is even more ludicrous since regulators allowed Hedge Funds to come into existence; they are the ones who didn't foresee anything wrong with betting on failure in the first place. It is thus hard to believe that derivative traders, selling insurance against risk, have never seen any danger coming either; their exotic instruments are today responsible for more than a quadrillion dollars in notional value. Soon, we'll read how fictive this value was since global indebtedness is at least ten times bigger than the planetary GDP. This is the theater of the absurd: this very quadrillion is a mere virtual amount and represents a bet on doomsday with notes backed by a promise to pay. Ironically, the architects of such a framework are individuals who ask us to trust them. Yet many will find hard to believe in a 'conspiracy', alas there is no way around. S&P, Fitch and Moody were totally co-conspirators of Fat Cat Bankers, misleading investors and consumers before the meltdown. Think of what those rating agencies will do to people's credit rating after the demise. If one still disagrees with this, then one has to admit that the heads at the rating agencies, again the same behind the invention of 'credit scores', are just plain stupid. Whatever your take on it, our fate is either in the hands of a bunch of criminal idiots or intentional financial terrorists. Many Keynesian columnists don't get it or just go along with the system because they are paid richly. Germany must save less and consume more, a headline in the times.uk concludes. The spend and die (read: spend and die anyway) mode now is encouraged.

As a global geopolitical dislocation is taking root, fractional banking has begun to be under attack, and it is not without reason. Usury is the root of all evil. Because every banknote is an IOU, the financial system demands the creation of more debts to be able to pay the interests: that is why the major big banks, Goldman Sachs leading the pack, have engaged in a plot to raise the debt limits throughout in the World. Now their 'meme schemes' is unraveling, we find ourselves drawn in a cesspool of fraudulent monetary policies. Wasn't the Euro currency supposed to bring equilibrium? Brussels is caught in a bind and will eventually reveal its true colors as countries like Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland (whose banks need a $43bn injection for appalling lending) and the British Kingdom are on the same trajectory of that of Iceland before it went belly up. Here they are, awaiting an IMF review as they already have received a $2BN rescue package from the fincnial body, a Reuters headline recently read. Greece will have to default ‘at some point,’ UBS’s Donovan said on March 24, 2010. EU is on the brink of a Debt War. The most appalling came from the German parliament in Chancellor Angela Merkel who suggested that Greece should consider selling some of its islands as one option to reduce debt! Selling to whom, the European Central Bank?

Analogies to Greece abound these days. Even The New York Times doesn't hesitate to refer to it when pointing at the debt load of California and New York. The Max Keiser website recently reported that the Wall Street bonuses were up 17% last year, over 9 billion, it is what occurs when a few at the top monetizes debt at the expenses of an ignorant population. The rumor grows: the insightful CBS show, 60 Minutes , revealed that Goldman Sachs was behind the Wall Street collapse. It would be child-like to even imagime some of those Goldman Sacks executives being sued since the Bush-Obama bailouts have made sure to address the issues behind close doors. Meanwhile let's prepare for a redux: half of commercial mortgages are underwater, said Elizabeth Warren, chairperson of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel as of March 30. That bank woes are on the increase shouldn't come as a surprise as the population had begun to live on the edge: the confidence index is too plunging everywhere. To put it bluntly, four of the biggest banks account for 90% of the lending retreat, as they are the ones, who receive most of the bailout package. On February 23, the FDIC assessed that bank lending had the biggest retreat in more than 6 decades, and that there were 702 troubled banks out there, up 27% on 4Q 2009. Everything can be traced back to the Federal Reserve however. The successful bill of Congressman Ron Paul to audit the Money Printers last summer was mainly blocked by several senators inside the Banking Committee, and Bernanke himself claimed that an audit would weaken the trust in some financial institutions. Earlier this year, a new twist revealed the true motivation behind the Federal Reserve audit opponents as it came out that AIG, with the help of Goldman Sachs, had engaged in hiding highly toxic CDOs. The greatest heist ever, assessed Ellen Brown. Now that anger is mounting, last February, Bernanke finally softened his tone and said that he would support an investigation. Timing is everything... Although The Court Of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that the Fed must release records of the unprecedented $2 trillion, we may be almost sure that the results will never be released in a timely fashion, simply because we'll have been sent to Monetary Oblivion before then. The blame game goes on: Europe is the culprit!, Greenspan told The Guardian.uk .

A collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. The Onion, a satirical online paper, couldn't help itself when writing that U.S. Economy had grinded to a halt as the Nation realizes that money is just a symbolic, mutually shared illusion. Last month, and not so surprisingly, a CNN Poll found that a majority views government a threat to citizens' rights. The Obama administration is for sure planning another massive bailout and more jobless benefit extensions as 20 percent of the Americans work force is without a job or underemployed according a Gallup poll published two months or so ago. The Universal Healthcare bill is just another nail into the coffin. Washington has set itself up a confrontation with Bernanke who warned that the United States could face a debt crisis like the one in Greece. The latter adamantly declared that the central bank won't support legislators by printing money to pay for the ballooning federal debt. As Max Keiser states it: they can only resort to launch a wholesale widespread liquidation in most of the economies in the world. There is no reserve in the banks but a series of black holes created by high-risk loans. It is all electronic funny money anyway. Citibank has already warned its clients that it may deny bank withdrawals but then quickly added that it won't feel like that action will never be necessary. If so, why this measure?

This brings us back to an editorial published by the Foreign Affairs in 2007, and entitled 'The End Of National Currency' and which regards globalization and monetary nationalism as engines to get closer to Armageddon; and argues in favor or a world currency while blaming also antiglobalization economists for spreading the fear of losing economic sovereignty. Economics shapes our way of thinking. Because the large majority doesn't grasp the inner workings of our web of debts, riots will be soon a common fact of life. While violent protests are not the solution, they are inevitable at this stage. Eventually Westerners will discover that that there is not much difference between their continents and China, where in some provinces billboards are aimed at intimidating dissenters and noisy petitioners, and threaten them with imprisonment and 'reeducation through labor camps'. If what you just read seems exaggerated, please consider that the Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates contended that Europe Anti-War Mood is a danger to peace.

Eternal war for eternal peace is what we have earned for letting the web of debt mesmerize us all. It's the fear of losing possessions guided by senseless consumerism that led us there. Just ask Argentineans how they fell after Wall Street pushed them over the edge ten years or so ago. The same outcome awaits Japanese who have seen their life savings steadily vanish as their government enforced bailouts after bailouts during the Asian Meltdown of the 90s, and now find themselves enslaved to a national debt twice bigger than its GDP. The land of the 'Rising Sun' is no longer. It is no better in China whose economic growth has depended on Westerners' buying frenzy for years. What if the latter end up being strapped to the point that spending grinds to a halt? The odds for a crash-and-burn demise were up to 30 percent according to Marc Farber as of February 25. China's official daily newspaper seems to endorse Farber when saying that "The country will probably see a "record trade deficit" in March. China on ‘Treadmill to Hell’ amid an housing bubble because up to 60 percent of its gross domestic product relies on construction. No wonder that China has begun to shut US businesses out of country. To be continued...

While preventing people to borrow at their own risks is senseless, institutionalzing usury can only lead to extreme debt monetization and is responsible for environmental mismanagement, widespread corruption, monopolies, diminishing returns and ultimately wars over resources. Letting financial institutions take part in the profits or losses will make them think twice before authorizing commercial and private loans. Demanding an interest regardless of what happens to the borrower is utterly amoral. As for government borrowing, giving blank checks to politicians has been proven lethal, as they can never hold their promises. If they could, national deficits wouldn't exist, that's a simple as that. And as long as we have taxation, the matters won't be addressed. If history is any indication, collecting taxes encourages spending follies. Socrates and Aristotle called democracies the root of despotism. Maybe is it about time to learn from our mistakes?

The only way to extricate us from the impasse is through thinking, rethinking our societal models from scratch. The salvation through a period of chaos is necessary to get back onto our feet. If many smile at the dreaded Mayan cosmic predictions that could result in dramatic earth changes, one thing is certain though: there is an economic 2012 in the making.

No Magical Elixir Of Hope

2009-07-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result - A. Einstein

In this treacherous environment, it has become quite a tour de force to draft financial analyses reflecting on what is really going since underneath the relative tranquil surface, there is a wild ocean seeking to break through the very thin layer of varnish. Time to press the panic button!

Over the millennia people have depended on their governments to thrive and prosper. They believe that they have chosen their leaders accordingly. And each and every time their hopes failed to materialize, they just picked new politicians to fulfill them, engaging in a back and forth dance from one end to the other of the political spectrum. As a matter of fact breaking this vicious spin has become a vital for the survival of Mankind. How long is this going to last? While this question remains a tough one, Gerald Celente foresees the tipping point in 2012. While not mentioning any time frame, the IMF said early this month that the world depression has already started. BofE confirmed the latter statement by admitting that the banking system looked like South Sea bubble. Here we go again?!

Debts and credit are not going to save us from a global demise, which *The Powers That Be* (TPTB) have delayed - again - to make the matters a lot worse. As of July 07, the EBC was engaged in a sinister policy pushing the weakest states into a debt-compound spiral that can only end in bond crises and/or the disintegration of Europe's monetary union, Pritchard reported. The problem is that there is more money destruction than creation and trying to stabilize the system is impossible since it is a pyramidal scheme. The bailout bubble keeps growing and will engulf us all eventually. ECB declared that governments have reached their borrowing limit.

Trichet said the large injection of funds in an effort to stimulate European economies had been the right response, but said there was a need to get public finances back under control as soon as possible. "There is a moment where you can't spend any more and you can't accumulate any more debt. I think we are at that moment," Trichet told Europe 1 radio.

The French workers in the auto part industry are infuriated and already consider a factory blow up if they are not compensate for their lost jobs. This is only a glimpse of what lies ahead, as the economy crumbles even further. A Hungarian website portrays the European Union as a complete rip-offs, not only because of its financial breakdown but a dark history that has helped shape 'The proto-totalitarian constitution (07/21/09)... more

As America lives the end of the empire Michael Hudson argues, some are finally realizing the truth - Both Obama's 2009 stimulus and President Bush's 2008 tax rebate were 'too small' - and fret about the implications. Do you think they care about a $1Tn interest rate payment yearly? Those are now advocating for more government borrowing and stimulus package. Indeed, its only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion, the WSJ recently said. There is actually even a plan 'C' set up as a Doctrine of Preemptive Bailouts which could cost taxpayers an additional $3.5TN. Cynically speaking, Obama turns out being the best President money could buy. Early this month, California was the first state to go under as it started printing its own IOUs. This is simply beyond frightening! Another layer of toxic debts to out it bluntly. The situation is so dire that it is also a place where $100,000 a year will make you go broke due to its Tax System. Martin Weiss writes: This is a day of reckoning for California and, ultimately, for all of America. More and more Baby Boomers must rethink their retirement plans and admit that there won't be much left for their kids who too are sliding down the social ladder. America's middle class is simply vanishing. No matter how one looks at the picture, the evidence leads to Benanke and Co since they are the one in charge of keeping an eye on the flow of credit throughout the system. And obviously 'they' have been lying about the nation's money supply, commonly named M1. Turning a blind eye to their duty also condoned an unprecedented corruption: Bernanke, Paulson, Lewis, Thain should be arrested, Judge Napolitano declared 2 weeks ago. Soon there after, Congresswoman Kaptur compared Federal Reserve to counterfeiters bankrupting the system ! All of this on C-Span, a well known political broadcast!

Movie 'Global Ground Zero' Soon Playing

Alas it won't be a Hollywood blockbuster since wallets will be empty. 239 million people unemployed projected worldwide by the end of 2009. A study explained in FTimes.com that 'EU was doomed even before the crisi$' and this until 2041-2060. One cannot make this stuff up!. Countries are so deep in debt, they risk drowning in red ink, Kenneth Rogoff claimed in March 2009. The latter asserted that Government budget deficits are headed into the stratosphere. He called United States, Britain, Ireland and Spain 'ground zero' countries. Japan's debt burden will probably approach 200% of GDP next year. He continued:

Countries with European-style growth rates could handle debt obligations of 60% of GDP when interest rates were low. But with debts in many countries rising to 80 per cent or 90 per cent of GDP, and with today's low interest rates clearly a temporary phenomenon, trouble is brewing. Many of the countries that are piling on massive quantities of debt to bail out their banks have only tepid medium-term growth prospects, raising real questions of solvency and sustainability. Italy, for example... Other countries, such as Ireland, Britain and the U.S., started with a much stronger fiscal position but may not be much better off when the smoke clears.

Moreover, DJonesWire announced that world wealth was down 19.5% in '08, which means that two year gains were wiped out. The real price tag of gambling. As to wonder where the money to help relieve $1tn dollar drain on world's poor asked by World Bank to the West will be coming from. Talking of humanitarian packages, it was found out that, after $196bn, there was no proof that U.N. programs help. This is actually the evidence that printing money out of thin air doesn't solve anything. So what is going to happen to the so-called rich world, do you think? Considering the Japanese picture after decades of low interest rates, anxious Japanese are described as working themselves to death, while the national debt burden will approach 200% of GDP next year. At some point, many bankers may well be prompted to follow the steps of that very Latvian Banker taking souls as collateral. If it sounds absurd, it surely works when desperation runs deep.

Of course as long as easy money was coming in, it was great. But as the tide goes down, China found lending irregularities in major banks; and of course Chinese authorities were quick to say that it wouldn't impact financial results for the sake of sustaining confidence as credit conditions in the West deteriorate on a daily basis. Although predictions are tricky since the wizards of the finance have succeeded in creating tricks that none could have guessed, the European site, GEAB, is following the cumulative impact of three 'rogue waves' and its entailing major upheaval, which they assume will occur by September/October 2009.

The genius pundits at the B.I.S (the central bank for central banks) released a study, on bloomberg.com, demonstrating that policy makers have a tendency to be late, tightening financial conditions slowly for fear of doing it prematurely or too severely; all of which will sow the seeds of the next financial 'boom-bust cycle'. That is great news isn't it? It merely means that our mega-college degrees in charge of the planetary welfare can assess the mess we are in but cannot do a thing to get us out of it. Why are they paid so much to fail their jobs? If you do not smell a rat, others do. Let's call a spade, a spade: this is a conspiracy! If you have read this far, you ought to take a glance at the revelations of Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs' was involved in every major market manipulation since the Great Depression... this is in Rolling Stones magazine, folks!

The Breakdown Of Semantic Meaning

For example, take the words 'financialization', 'derivatives' and 'quantitative easing', all have something in common since they are meant to deceive. Financialization has been used to massively oversell and repackage loans with the approval of the credit rating agencies that gave them a triple-A rating under the term of 'collateralized debt obligations', which in turn are used to feed the derivatives machine whose purpose is to spread risk of the underlying assets more widely. As for 'quantitative easing' is no more less than the monetization of debts. There you have it, a five lines explanation as why we're threatened with an 'economic event horizon'. Indeed, you should be very afraid when reading that banks capitalizing on 'toxic assets' is the newest ruse in town. As they puff-up profits, they are impoverishing us even further. But the leaders tell us that the worst is over, don't they? The problem is that words like these, are destroying lives and therefore make wonder about the meaning such success, self-determination and education. The entire dictionary could easily be thrown into the toilet or just burned because of the semantic breakdown caused by fake economics.

What most people believe to be the reality is an Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies. Charles Eisentein' s latest essay filled with appalling truths is definitely a must read for anyone willing to ponder the words 'sanity' and 'reality'... (to be continued)

The Swimming Naked Prophecy

2009-04-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked - Warren Buffet (2007)

It surely kind of prophetic to hear a market guru, like Buffett, embracing such a philosophical approach two years ago as the Berkshire profits plunged 96% in early March amid the dysfunctional world economy. It is even more baffling to hear him blame the derivatives after admitting that the firm' s equity holdings had lost 44% because of them. One has to wonder exactly which game is he playing. In 2003, he was among the very first experts to warn about CDOs calling derivatives *financial weapons of mass destruction* and *time bombs*. This grabbed the media's attention and put on a red alert a myriad of intrigued journalists who directly began to investigate the opacity surrounding these innovative products, all of which led them to the conclusions that Buffett would eventually be proven right. Yes, this was the ultimate CDOs horror story that circulated for many months on the Net. Talk about complacency! But even more troubling: how does it come to be that he was unable to take action in order to prevent his shareholders from dealing with this nasty surprise? And one might ask too: how does it come that Buffett' shareholders didn't do anything to reduce Berkshire's exposure to those exotic financial deals... Of course everybody reaped highly satisfying returns for a while. But that was then, and this is now. As of October 2008, the Size of Derivatives Monster was coming down to $190K per person on the planet! It is not a matter of 'if' but 'when' and when this derivative bubble explodes, we will see who was swimming naked. What a clever man, Buffett, whose private wealth won't most likely suffer too much from the Greatest Depression.

Although Tens of thousands rally at tax day 'tea parties', it is still kind of challenging to explain to the average Joe and Jane that our economic system is legalized 'grand robbery'. As a matter of fact Westerners are largely silent as their nations are systematically destroyed. When profits are privatized and losses socialized, we definitely deal with an undeniable feudal component. And of course taxpayers wouldn't be victimized if taxation and usury didn't exist in the first place: it really is the power to destroy. David M. Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States, forecasts that taxes could easily double, which would amount to $483,000 per American household.

Optimal indebtedness has made money scarce. According to Evans-Pritchard , unless this capital is forthcoming, a clutch of countries will prove unable to roll over their debts at a bearable cost. The 'human calamity' has been announced by the World Bank! Debt is not money, it’s a charge against future money. And making people believe that it has to be considered as an asset is simply fraudulent. This has nothing to do with the 'right' or the 'left' but morality, yet we can see why political parties use the 'anti-tax' sword when they see it fit. But which one is truly 'right' on? , one would ask. Again please follow the money: the lesser the taxes, the lesser government fraud, it is logic applied.

IMF just predicted that the US economy will be worse than the world economy in 2010. But why the heck wasn't this aired on all TV broadcasts several years ago? The answer to that question is just more than appalling. 'Few Americans realize that over the last 94 years they have been enserfed', Paul Craig Roberts wrote. The scheme is obvious. The real crime lies in the 'Radical Redistribution' of wealth, asserted Chuck Collins in a Buzzflash interview. Alas it is only when this process is taking place that we can forecast a full-fledged systemic crisis. But at the very heart of this worldwide financial Greek tragedy, lies the very root of the current crisis is Money itself... It’s charging interest, stupid!

If you do not know Nomi Prins yet, her book titled 'Other People's Money' deserves to be put on your must read list a.s.a.p. Her work is an appalling indictment and it will irate you beyond anything you can imagine. Indeed - Prins argues that the free market system is in the hands of criminal wizards whose machinations have overrun the government while claiming to be its champions - and that there is no way to stop those scandalous doings with the system now in place. Laws are simply inadequate to the task. She also describes at length a whole industry that feeds on unlimited quantities of easy money to fund expansion. The most astonishing is that all the so-called (de)regulations were drafted under Clinton's tenure. The funny thing is that Bill Clinton asked not to be blamed for the economic debacle. The most damning evidence is when Nomi Prins explains why banks don't care about the failures at all: the word 'losses' is not part of their jargon behind closed doors. The name of the game in town is milking the system, using every trick possible to make *some* incredibly rich and leave everyone else holding the bag. According to her knowledge, investment banks have sold up to 30 times every mortgage in America. This brings us back to Buffett's dire CDOs warnings... with a financial structure like this, everything is built on sand. How ready are you and every member of your family to lose the $190K - which you do not have on your bank account? Although these are notional values, the threat remains very real. Think of AIG, which already had approximately $500BN derivatives exposure and then start imaging what would happen if the same toxic instruments engulfed other multinationals.

IMF sees a long and severe slowdown, as of April 14, and warned of 'worrisome parallels' between the current crisis and the Great Depression, despite the drastic measures already taken by central bankers and global leaders. Astonishingly, the international body advises to spend **more** to soften the deep recession. In other words keeping the bubbles inflated no matter what. World citizens are slowly being siphoned by the mother of all financial vacuums while the system has clearly become predatory. Zombie Banks feed off bailout money and ultimately whatever stimulus injections. As if that weren't enough, U.S. 2008 household wealth fell $11.2TN The equity illusion'? With the system we have, massive liquidations are unavoidable, they are bound to occur since every banknote in circulation is a debt (IOU) that must be paid pack. Real money doesn't exist because if we paid all our debts, there wouldn't be any money left in circulation. Period. So it isn't by mistake that the clock ticks towards a Financial Judgement Day. from a year ago and 50% of them are two paychecks away from losing everything. What is going to happen once they realize that they fell for a game called '

The 'Max Keiser' Solution

In the meantime another a massive $410BN spending bill was passed amid the collapse of factories' output tumbling at a rapid pace globally. Even the Chinese begin to question their massive holdings of Treasuries and other U.S. debt - and getting worried as witnessing their exports plunge 25.7% in February and which they plan to address with a $585 billion stimulus. Billions here, trillions there. But how wise is it to pour so much into a scheme that caused to date a $50,000bn wipe out in asset values worldwide? Yet they are still making us believe that 'they are on top of it' while ignoring the Japanese economic lessons of the 1980's Asian meltdown. The end result is a damning evidence: alas February, the Times.uk reported that Japan fell into a spiral of despair and currently is on the brink of implosion according to Roubini's rgemonitor.com. Japan Says Economy Is in ‘Severe’ State, read a Bloomberg headline on April 17. But wait, there is more: on the top of that a major contraction could grip China at any time - unless its economic managers start printing faster their own shadows. To keep the record straight, China experienced double-digit growth between 2003 and 2007 and then recorded 9% growth in 2008... now down to 6.1%!! This horrific news surely explains why China plans to slash new purchases of US debt. Indeed an article ran this month by the American Thinker revealed that in the first quarter of 2008, the Chinese purchased $153.9bn US Treasuries versus a mere $7.7bn in the first quarter 2009. Rest assured, the boomerang effect has been long overdue.

Beyond America, the picture isn't looking better at all. April alone give us a good glimpse of what lies ahead: the G-8 copes with its first bankruptcy, Singapore was foreseeing the worst economic plunge amid a shrinking GDP; that the very survival of the euro will soon be thrown into serious question; that Russia's banking problem is just beginning; that the full blown bust in Dubai is a story that gets uglier by the day, that toxic debts could reach $4tn worldwide; that the Irish's economy is in free fall collapse; that Switzerland is tipping into deflation, that the European bank bailout totals $4 Trillion... etc. But wait, the cherry on the cake is a very disturbing CNBC slideshow about The World's Biggest Debtor Nations. The results will get you to scratch your head for a while, especially if you thought that America would be ranked first... aorry, it is Ireland with an external debt (as % of GDP) amounting to 811%, followed by The UK then Belgium! The Scandinavian countries are also cited as much larger debtors than the U.S. This is freaking unbelievable, isn't it?

Don't listen to the policymakers who obviously have started shooting themselves in the foot - the spin is getting enforced no matter what. We just need to listen to a so-called specialist like Christina Romer, an economic historian at the University of California (and on Obama's payroll), to understand why our fate is sealed. 'We Need Banks to Lend Like Crazy', she interjected on CNN a month or so ago. Talking of madness, the Fed is planning 15-fold increase in US monetary base, contended Eric deCarbonnel. At the end of April, a Federal Reserve press release announced the purchase of up to $1.25Tn of agency mortgage-backed securities. This move clearly is a 'silent bailout', isn't it?. The system is so rigged that insiders can no longer hide their incestuous dealings. What are we to think of the White House selecting the head of mortgage giant - Fannie Mae's president and CEO - as an assistant treasury secretary? The infamous Fannie Mae, which got bailed out last September 2008 (along with Freddie Mac). No, really, we cannot make this stuff up. The combined losses amounted to approximately 80% of the companies' share values and dwarf the savings and loan rescue in the 1980, CBSMarketwatch wrote.

More dramatically, even on the Keynesian side, dissent rages: Stiglitz said that Obama's Wall Street ties had doomed the bank's rescue; and Roubini declared that the spin machine about the banks' stress test has become latest 'fudged' experiment invented by the wizards of finance, which now clash with each other over how to disclose results. You see, this new game has gotten some geniuses concerned at the potential damage to weaker institutions. The word 'reform' is a term meaning 'cover-up' for old regulations firing back and exposing their conflicts of interests? They just cannot hide anymore. The whole situation takes another surreal turn as San Francisco Federal Reserve President Janet Yellen said policymakers need to pop bubbles... does she mean that it is time to pop the world's mega bubbles? Are we going to allow the enablers go away with... murder? Thanks to Max Keiser, a famous European market analyst versed in hard currencies, for reminding us that throughout history, bankers responsible for the impoverishment of the community got the harshest penalty possible: DECAPITATION.

Even Soros, the closet Bilderberger, admitted that Americans have been 'Living in a Fool's Paradise' that's gone forever and blamed Obama for having missed the great opportunity to fix the banks. Talking of banks, this could well be the beginning of a trend as the term 'bonus' is sparking rages among the populace: Bloomberg online was the first to mention that Bank of America may increase salaries by 70% for its investment bankers. They are about to fool us again!

Mike Whitney, an extremely prolific financial journalist agrees that the Economic Meltdown 2009 is worse than the Great Depression. The situation is so dire that last month the FDIC warned it was running out of rescue funds and that it could go broke this year as bank failures mount - claiming that was due to the failure to collect insurance premiums from most of the banks over the last 10 years. Let's see: does it mean that even when times were booming the $harks couldn't care less about the (our) future? When one is aware that 99.9% of the money supply consists of debt to private banks, it is truly about time to look for an exit. Adding leverage extremely dangerous'. won't glue the house of cards: all we can do is trying to stay out of debt and reduce expenses. And, this is what will spontaneously happen down the road when consumers enter the Great Squeeze - everything will grind to a halt. Dissent is brewing: some well respected but misguided Keynesians have stepped ahead and blasted Tim Geithner's economic plan as '

Stormy horizon in sight. The United States will experience a painful readjustment since 50% of Americans are in a collective state of financial depression CBSmarketwatch contended:

A large number of households say that even one missed paycheck would spell financial ruin. And even in households that remain well off, the surveys show a festering fear that financial problems are lurking. "This is flashing so bright red," said Paul Ballew, senior vice president of Nationwide Insurance Co. "Roughly 60% of the population was ill-prepared (financially) before the meltdown." ... More disturbing is that 28% said they could not make ends meet for longer than two weeks without their jobs. (03/20/09)

After having read all this, what would you say if you heard that the real Jobless U.S Rate turned out being 19.8%? Would you believe this double digit to be accurate? Please click on the link if you have any doubt.

Toward A Global (Civil) War And Food Shortages

Does the Pope know something that we don't, when warning of 'a desert of godlessness' in Good Friday address?

"We witnessed the collapse of the financial system," Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. "It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom." ... "I don't remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world," Volcker said (Reuters - 02/21/09)

Four weeks after the FDIC warning, the G20 met to discuss a big increase in IMF fund (more or less $1TN) after admitting that it would no longer be able to help the world anymore. Alas we can already assume where the money will be coming from: the so-called rich taxpayers from the West. However, after a quick check, this appears unrealistic. The downturn has sparked unrest across Europe. What is coming is very serious, so serious that it will be remembered as a 'double-whammy' of the worst economic crisis in living memory, the express.uk. declared as it revealed top contingency plans to address possible civil disorder and riots. Not only are the IMF' safes empty, it also asserts that world economy is getting so unpredictable that it could lead to war. So what does this mean: that taxpayers have put their trust into an entity which is completely failing its purposes? Furthermore how to trust, again, our monetary scientists at the International Bank Of Settlements - BIS - who didn't see the global collapse coming but are planning to implement a global currency, a project that can only be made possible if all currencies have failed in the first place? The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. And in order to take over the world, an unprecedented event needs to be create so masses would endorse the Big Brother. It's undoubtledly a collapse by design, there is no doubt about it. Most appalling is that the powers-that-be have become able to predict the irrational manner in which consumers will make economic decisions.

Outrageously, when currencies are destroyed food shortages are nightmares coming true. Last November, the Food and Agriculture Organization predicted that the downturn could trigger a new wave of food riots across the developing world. What the organization didn't say is that they already had broken out in about 20 poor countries due to the biofuel craze which made the price of wheat triple, corn double, and that of rice almost double. Talk of throwing oil onto the fire! If the Greens are really serious about helping humanity, it's about time for them to consider other alternatives than policies encouraging murder under the guise of decreasing the reliance on oil:

Even worse is the bioethanol craze. Politicians in both the United States and the European Union are mandating that vast quantities of food be turned into fuel as they chase the chimera of 'energy independence'. ... The result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year.... ( more)

Although Americans fell asleep at the wheel, they are slowly coming back to their senses, realizing that Wall Street speculations were not under the scrutiny of watchdogs but Madoff-like people. Gerald Celente, a prominent forecaster, believes that a violent Revolution will start soon. He rightfully argues that Americans are not going to accept seeing their taxes raised as they are losing their jobs, homes and retirement savings as they unwittingly fund the merger of state and corprations - which is called fascism.

On a more positive note, if the United States is now pointed at as the main culprit of this unraveling crisis, many of its citizens and bright thinkers are most likely among the very few who understand the spirit of free enterprise as advocated by the Founding Fathers. And if any positive changes are ever bond occur in the destiny of the world, the country may well find itself, as an instigator, at the center of a new era.

Planetary Bankruptcy

2009-01-30T05:35:00.000-08:00

Published by: opednews, american chronicle and brussels journal, marketoracle-uk
Featured in: fiendbear.com, wall street journal

'If all the bank loans were paid up, no one would have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of currency or coin in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks for our money. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp upon the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible - but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it is widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.' - Robert H. Hemphill, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

In order to give a full meaning to the quote above, it is essential to mention that it applies to any 'fiat' currency, not just the US Dollar. Fiat money's value is backed by confidence in the economy and covered by the government which decrees it to have value - and more importantly (here comes the devious twist) is also backed by a promise to pay! So, let's stress it again: not only the banknotes remain in our wallets at the condition we pay them back but will retain their value as long as we are able to take on debts. How confident are you in 'a piece of paper' that is worth less that it's printed on, because it is the strict bottom line as Former Fed. Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker puts it in 'The Ascent of Money', a pbs.org video at 17:36 min. Such a concept is repellent to the mind because if we give it a thought, we begin to perceive the illusion we live in - to feel like our spiritual self and our hyper-materialistic driven environment are set for a inevitable collision course.

Since last September, world nations have grasped the importance to prop up the USD and that the failure to do so would have dire consequences. Confidence in the world currency reserve is eroding at a faster pace every day. These grave threats could all vanish overnight if people were able to make the link between the amount of taxes paid since they joined the workforce and the promises made to them during all this time - then asked themselves honestly: what did come true, was it all a dream? If they were doing just that, maybe they would demand the repudiation of their (illegal) *National Debt* to start with. Politicians who want to be elected use the old trick named 'the carrot and the stick'. Their promises will demand raising taxes. Governments have always overspent and it is precisely this pattern which corrupts minds across the board. Passing debt onto further generations is not really a concern because nearly everybody wants it N-O-W! More dramatically, the financial structure is built in a way to preserve itself, nobody wants to lose one's entitlements: so the cure is to inject more cash into failed programs and accept corruption as a fatality. Moral hazards do not go away, they merely become bigger threats as decades pass by. How many layers of fallacies are needed to realize that fiscal straightjacket on a government level is a myth?

Alas without the power to tax, the economic world cannot exist because money wouldn't have any value at all, this is a simple as that. The top 10% depends on this scheme to consolidate wealth. The most appalling is that even the architect of our current system once confessed the awful truth:

'Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.' -- John Maynard Keynes, 'Consequences of Peace'

It is precisely taxpayers' money that first enabled the predatory behavior of lobbies and cartels feeding today off bailouts, which are nothing more than the bones of global debt carcass. We are just running on empty and it's only a matter of time before the music stops. This is a very last cancer stage: taxpayers have been unknowingly the engine of their own demise and now must endure a 'die or spend mode' as their insolvent central banks turned them into lenders of the last resort to rescue the ' Davos Golden Boys' way of life. Told that their house value was the safest piggy bank on earth, many worked hard and spent as if there was no tomorrows while not realizing that what was done to them was exactly the same as the economic Hitmen did to the third world countries.

Our World Managers Succumb To Monetary Dementia

Let's consider some eye-popping figures: if a big bank such as 'Bank of America' needed a $131bn bailout, CiTi finds itself on the brink of liquidation, Merrill Lynch clients pulled $10Bn in the fourth quarter, J.P. Morgan profit fell more than 75%, hedge funds lost $350Bn in 2008 and pension funds (worth $15Tn) threaten to implode... we are indeed walking on very thin ice. Interestingly, American taxpayers seem to keep their eyes on the ball better than their lawmakers. Has a stimulus ever been necessary at all? Anti-Bailout coalitions and advocacy groups have begun to mushroom nationwide. A recent poll revealed that 60% of Americans want the bailout of the financial sector to stop; yet the DC Geniuses (who still can't figure why printing our way out of debts will aggravate the liquidity crunch) plot the next step after aid to Citigroup and Bank of America. Unethical premises and remedies multiply moral hazards. One of the unintended consequences to finance those 'has-been businesses' is creating a new menace to the economy: 'Zombie' Debtors that will be feeding off the taxpayers and stockholders — as healthier rivals become increasingly threatened with 'organized competition' put in place by Lawmakers. The price of protection shows its true colors: it allows the government to decide who can live - or die: it is fascism in disguise. The ugly side of intervention is precisely its addictiveness. And that is why institutionalized debtism has a lethal track record.

An 'almost incomprehensible' amount of cash evaporated, this the Global crisis 'has destroyed 40pc of world wealth', Steve Schwarzman admitted. Indeed, where the heck did all the money go? When money is debt it is negative wealth... got it?

Two days before his inauguration, Obama urged to move swiftly to rescue the banks continuing to hemorrhage billions of dollars. As the situation worsens by the day Bernanke skipped Congressional Financial Hearings in favor of a secretive euro bankers confab. According to Ron Paul, the meetings took place in Basel and were chaired by ECB's Jean-Claude Trichet - not so surprisingly the mainstream outlets remained elusive about them. Just like a bad quality varnish peeling under the pressure of a nail, the magic really vanishes when one looks at Obama's billionaire pals' list and who is throwing money into the most lavish Inauguration in history. Guess what? The biggest part of the pie goes to the financial sector. Obama is no savior... and here is why:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress' investigative watchdog, has found that "a majority of America's largest publicly traded companies and the U.S. government's largest federal contractors use multiple subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to conduct business... The culprits include some corporate giants who are receiving countless millions in bailout money, Leonnig notes. ... (01/16/09) - more

As credit card spending in 'The Rich West' screeched to a halt, China Central Bank, which called Paulson a 'gangster', is trying to prevent a quagmire; and so far the only remedy is the Yuan devaluation. How smart is this really? Doing so is extremely tricky because competitive devaluation (race to the bottom) has limits. If things really go wrong, it may lead to a professional run on banks. So much for our fabulous globalization, heh?! But what if banks do not start lending again (what wouldn't fix the downhill trends if they did either)? Evans-Pritchard leans toward a collapse that could drag the entire planet into a remake of the Great Depression. SocGen warned too that the Chinese economy is imploding and speculates about the possibility of regime change. Flash back: that very dire outcome was forecast in 2004 by Krassimir Petrov. There is practically no doubt that the Chinese will overcome the shock a lot better since they are already accustomed to sweatshop wages. For us, it will be a rude awakening and we could see, in the so-called free world, a suicide epidemic as currently witnessed among young Chinese women.

In Russia, troubles are brewing too. Last November, its stock market is down 70 percent from late spring 2008 and since then anti-Western rhetoric abound. In December alone, the central bank spent $70BN to rescue its currency and avoid the panic of a currency collapse reminiscent of the 1998 crisis. As of January 13, the WSJ reported that the drastic measures didn't prevent the Ruble from nose-diving and massive lay-offs from bringing wages back to earth. The Jungle is surely fairer than our financial environment. Ireland is in the midst of a housing bust and real estate prices are predicted to fall by 80%. Icelanders have to go back fishing to survive the complete demise of their banking system - now seen as the worst economic crash of any country in peacetime, BBC reported. The Japan's jobless are encouraged to accept a government program that focuses on reviving the ageing countryside amid a worsening recession. All this is a mere glimpse of what is coming next: your government will soon turn out being the biggest employer, that's where minimum wage laws start fitting the big picture. How great is this? But wait, the avalanche of bad news isn't over just yet... 40% of Latin America’s financial wealth was wiped out in the first 11 months of 2008. On the old continent, the monetary union has left Eastern Europe trapped in depression. Um-um, wasn't that part of the world too in the midst of a b-o-o-m-i-n-g housing market until early 2008, setting off alarms bells at the IMF? Financial alchemists like Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, a ECB board member, perfectly knew that the euro pegs would lead to boom and bust cycles. How bad could it really get? Just look at the Zimbabwean hyperinflation (hitting 231 million percent!) that has left the country with more than half the population starving and of course, the United Nations is begging for more aid. Once again, the UN is showing its uselessness!

So now, we can begin to see why Trichet said that 2009 will be ‘substantially’ one million protesters demanded Sarkozy to do better at protecting jobs and consumers during the crisis. When will the masses realize that 'managed economies' do not work but are implemented to protect those in power? Moreover, how smart is it to ask people who couldn't see the bust coming to find appropriate solutions? Our problems cannot be solved by the minds that created them in the first place. Sure, after the bust the economy always comes back, it is not a matter of 'if' but 'when'. Uncharted waters. Guru Trichet even made an esoteric statement in the Dow Jones News as of 01/29, and which amounts to 'another nuclear option': worse than forecast. He blamed 'mispricing of risk' for the downturn and ended his statement by saying that 2010 will be the year of the recovery. On Jan 29, in France,

ECB is already carrying out many 'non-standard' operations, like massive liquidity injections... We are in a non-standard world. So whether or not we will embark on other non-standard operations, I said already that I wasn't excluding that," he said.

And it shouldn't be wise to bet on 2010 at all, as such a leverage needs a lot more than two years to be cleaned up. Think of ten years or more instead. The Euro could be toast for good. Meanwhile Germany forecasts the worst economic growth since WWII and riots spread throughout in Eastern Europe. An article in The Spiegel even describes Great Britain as a second Iceland and Italy as a second Argentina. The European Parliament lamenented that six to eight countries had to reduce their deficits but no receipe as how they might go about doing that. There is no solution other than debt liquidation. On the other side of the North Sea, in Ireland (whose economy will shrink 10% by 2010), a leading economist advised a withdrawal from the euro unless Ireland gets its part of the bailout pie.

(01/19/09) "If we have a single currency there are obligations and responsibilities on both sides. The idea that Germany and France can just hang us out to dry, as has been the talk in the last couple of days should not be taken lying down," he said.... By keeping with the current policy, the state is ensuring that Ireland turns itself into a large debt-repayment machine. Is this the sort of strategy to win wars?", he said. more

Speaking of bailouts, The European Commission approved a French plan to allocate firms affected by the crisis up to EUR500,000 in aid. In America, Bailout money used for lobbying and Obama promises that he will push bankers to lend more, he doesn't want them to sit on the money that they got from taxpayers. Paid by the taxpayers... then borrowed again by them with an interest... doesn't this make sense or perhaps is debt laundering legal? In England, dementia struck a step further as the BofE’ s multibillion-pound scheme will offer credit to new car buyers to rescue the moribund motor industry. And there is more, the government also contemplates an insurance crackdown targeting two million uninsured drivers who, as a result, could get their cars seized and crushed! There is even sillier: US Financial Services Committee Chairman, Barney Frank who declared that companies with corporate jets may forget about the bailout money. Nevertheless, a few days later the press reported that taxpayers were also funding Citibank's jet.

Black clouds are gathering above the horizon. Europeans are waking up to the abrupt demise of democracy as discovering the fine print in all the treaties. The IMF just announced that the world trade collapsed by staggering 45% in the last quarter of last year. Even the euphoria of Obama's inauguration didn't last long. The same day Dow closed below 8,000 as banking fears were gripping the European markets and bringing shockwaves from the United Kingdom too. British Banks got a £1TN injection which didn't prevent RBS shares to plunge 70%. London is faced with a bloodbath. Brown admitted there is not yet a limit on how much risk taxpayers must bear as a result of his rescue plan, but he even promised financial institutions that they will get more cash if they pass it on. Looks like the Brits are too being set up for the mother of all crashes. With the UK government debt alone and future liabilities not included, this means that every new baby is born with £17,000 debt. Checkmate! UK cannot take Iceland's soft option, Evans-Pritchard explains:

The parallels with Iceland are disturbing. The country was ruined by the antics of its three big banks. They built up foreign liabilities equal to 900pc of GDP. Operating as hedge funds, they borrowed in dollars, euros and pounds to speculate....If Britain walked away from UK banks' $4.4TN of foreign liabilities – worth eight times Lehman Brothers – it would destroy the credibility of the City and take the whole world into deeper depression... The sovereign debt of Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Austria, The Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Korea is all being tested by the markets. The core of countries deemed safe is shrinking by the day to a half dozen. Sadly, Britain is no longer one of them. (01/20/09)

Describing in length the fundamentals of the American economy at this stage is more or less a naughty intellectual exercise. As the bank bailout is expected to cost $4Tn, U.S. financial losses could reach $3.6TN and suggest that the banking system is 'effectively insolvent' contends Nouriel Roubini, New York University Professor and former financial Clinton's adviser. Back to spending orgy. The clock is really ticking; even the legendary investor Jim Rogers predicts a total decline in 2009. We can get a better sense of absolute gloom and doom if we take into account the Asset 3 Level also known as ‘mark to make believe,’ thus whose market prices are based on the banks' 'unobservable inputs' that 'reflect management’s own assumptions'. So now we have phantom asset values which remind of the CDOs' notional values, also called by Warren Buffett WMDs. The Titanic is about to hit the iceberg. Gerald Celente doesn't chew his words when commenting on the ongoing dreadful meltdown. The situation is so dire out there that global banks have joined the clamour for bailouts. Do our demented global elites deserve to be rescued - honestly?

The Demise of Mainstream Economics

“All truth passes through 3 phases: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed, and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

Almost every teenager has been warned about the dangers of getting into debts, but they all grew up accepting that a government debt was acceptable and even honorable. As this editorial points out earlier, if the scheme is run by the top managers of a country, the amount of debts can only grow exponentially. One doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure what happens when the national debt exceeds the GDP. For the bankers it doesn't really matter, they operate for profits and when money is debt (does not exist) massive liquidations are ineluctable. The (bank) shareholders and the taxpayers are simply left holding the bag. As stipulated in 'Beyond The Age of Usury', today's events are far from being isolated. Luckily, such facts are everywhere on the Internet: we only have to keep an open mind and allow reality to reveal itself. They represent a recurrent pattern that is concealed to preserve a feudal hierarchy. The book titled The Bankers That Broke The World and written by Liaquat Ahamed - here reviewed by the New York Times - tells us about a macabre monetary story that looks much like today. The parallels are uncanny. That book should be on your must read list this year. If your budget is tight, there are plenty of free online books that will do the job and which you can find in the library of the site.... time is running out. As financial illiteracy and corruption are about to engulf the whole planet, some speculate more and more about the meanings of The Mayan 2012 prophecy. One thing is certain though: it is The End Of The World As We Know It - or TEOTWAWKI as an acronym frequently used by the doomsayers.

It is going to take the collapse of the dollar to have a mentality change and address central banking, Congressman Ron Paul conceded recently on MSNBC. Since we cannot escape what is coming toward us, a Biblical debt jubilee and the implementation of 'honest money' are the only long-term answers. The people have to free themselves because the 'powers that be' will never admit to being the rulers by deception. More positively, this battle cannot take place on the streets but in each of us individually; and it can only be won if waged peacefully and spiritually. There is no such a thing as a war to end all wars.

And ultimately, everything is bound to be overcome or disappear eventually. If 'We The People' were able to find our way back to prosperity, we'd no longer be living in a world where destruction is more profitable than peace and with the fear of technology. It would also enhance the smooth transition to the development of a resource based economy as advocated by Jacky Fresco who dedicated is entire life to The Venus Project... (to be continued)

Beyong The Age Of usury

2008-12-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

Published by: opednews, american chronicle and brussels journal, associate content
Featured in: fiendbear.com, businessweek.com, usatoday.com

(ps: the mix-up sentences caused by formatting errors are now corrected, my sincere apologies)

It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges." — John Maynard Keynes

What is particularly fascinating with John Maynard Keynes is that he wrote a theory that only works on paper since it assumes that monetary, political and financial managers will never abuse the power of indebtedness. So, what to think of this worldwide credit squeeze and its implemented cure that is no more less the cause of the disease and could spiral at any moment into a 'Greater Depression'. This week Gregory Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard, wrote a piece in the NYTimes asking openly what Keynes would have done to deal with the crisis. Just another nice but failed attempt to praise the Keynesian fairy tales. Mankiw cites the observation which links the root cause of economic downturns to insufficient aggregate demand. What demand when the consumers are completly tapped out in the first place? How can world governments create demand when they are literally bankrupt?

World stability hangs by a thread and this illusion is now being tested, Pritchard concedes. To see what will happen next, we need to look at what is happening to the most peaceful country: Iceland. The political bubble is indeed bursting: in early December, Icelanders stormed their central bank after the realization that their country (viewed as 'The Happiest Place On Earth' - and with 0% unemployment rate) had been brought down by a wave of concealed toxic debts and CDOs coming back home to roost. They demanded the ouster of bankers responsible for the meltdown. The ouster is a very soft alternative to a life sentence in jail, which would be a lot more appropriate. Policy makers and bankers are generally untouchable. Resigning and banishment are often the worst punishments that could happen to them. How fair and impartial is this? How long will it take world citizens to realize that we're free range chickens and act against financial serfdom?

As you read this, the American bailout is reaching epic and fatal proportions of more than 8 trillion and the worst is not over yet. Actually, the current trends are already much worse than depression, though because of some banking toxic tricks and frauds, risks are being constantly shifted down the social ladder deteriorating the consumers purchasing power for ever. There's nothing that can rescue the system as the crisis was built into the system itself. Although this has not be aired on any major TV broadcast, when the world Leaders got together to discuss our fate last October, they admitted to being incapable of doing anything. That we are all scr*w*d. The Australian ministerial statement by Kevin Rudd sums it up pretty well while acknowledging that the global wealth destruction amounts to $27 trillion - and that is far from over. Among many other terrifying recent events, discount window borrowing (from the Fed. Reserve) in the week ended Oct 15 averaged a record $437.5 billion per day, surpassing the $420.2 billion rate in the prior week... please note that it is not included in the cumulative 8 trillion package!

In a debt-based economy, competition translates into a 'great crash enhancer'. Take this housing bubble, its engineers, which couldn't anything to stop the infectious exuberance, figuring that market saturation would eventually have the last word . This didn't prevent them from firmly believing that prices had some room to run up... and everybody competed to get the very last piece of the pie. What is truly outraging is that we boarded onto the Titanic because Credit Rating Agencies sold us a fictive 'star system', which has led us to a triple A junk status. Please watch this PBS.org video. At 9:27 minutes, you will hear:

CDOs complex securities concocted by math geniuses and PhDs... the only problem is that they didn't have any data to rely on... and why did they get a "go" anyway?... because there was the stake$ were too huge... the more triple A debt rating products on the market the more business "they" get (paraphrasing)

Perhaps you remember my editorial - Global Junkification - mentioning that the global leverage is about $400TN or so, and that the world G.D.P less than $70TN. This big picture helps uncover the hidden goal of fractional banking and its ensuing elementary conclusion: that Fiat money, which is backed by confidence only, is designed to eliminate competition, one step at the time. Now the new scheme is the 'global currency', which is going to consolidate the field of banking even further during/after the 'Great Deleveraging'. By the way, 'deleverage' is again one of those convoluted terms invented to mask reality. Deleverage means (partial or complete) destruction of the debt-vortex unfolding with a 'domino effect'.

Intended Massive Failure

These days, capitalism bashing runs high on the agenda of many pundits, and for which they blame in the name of evil deregulation. They deliberately neglected to consider - and report - that lobbies have militated restlessly to bypass them one way or another. This real estate bubble, now bringing the financial system on its knees, was made possible with the intended failure of regulation. It was regulated to be this way.

Yes, this was an original intent and it becomes crystal clear when pondering this Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis. The elites have the habit to design laws for themselves; that is why the people get fooled every time they put faith into a ruling body. Every civilization's collapse precisely occurs because of that; yet people would rather think that what *goes up must go down* theory is beyond their control. The delusion consists in persisting that hope is key for a real change. Indeed, did we really have to wait thousands of years to find ourselves confronted to with the current events - and finally admit why hope did absolutely nothing; that We The People neglected throughout the millennia to teach a generation to the next why 'debts and consumerism' aren't bedfellows. Obviously politicians never made it a specific educational platform for high school students - instead they institutionalize blind speculation and spending when times are good and then implement the bailout of their bankrupt thinking. It thus becomes greatly ironic to listen to Sir Evelyn de Rothschild calling for action since the latter doesn't provide any solutions but altruistic half-truths and rants. For how long will this cynicism continue?

The credo of un-debt.net is 'ignorance always comes with a price tag'. It is because the Wall Streeters viewed themselves smarter that we are in this giga-mess. They banked on gullibility and it worked out as usual. Exactly, as usual. Charles Mackay described in his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, that what is happening today is nothing new. Rogoff’s Harvard has identified 148 crises since 1870 in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in gross domestic product (G.D.P.) of at least 10 percent, Niall Ferguso contends.

So there have been 148 crises over a 140 year period and people don't still get it? How couldn't this be an incentive to warn populations when bubbles are forming? Should we really believe Greenspan when he says the Fed can only identifies a bubble when it has popped and intervene to clean up the mess? The crowds are just too mesmerized by the 'Golden Boys' way of life to see the trap they keep falling into every now and then - confusing debts with assets and otherwise. Now that it all becomes clearer, who will give charity WHEN 60% of the population becomes poor overnight and another 30% can barely survive? Meanwhile Businessweek praises the 50 Top American Givers without even asking where did charity lead us since the U.S Gov't found out that child hunger rose 50% In 2007 and that we are now staring into the abyss?

World of the Big Rich Collapses... What Nuclear Option?

"The most hated sort of wealth getting and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural." -- Aristotle (1258b Politics)

From one extreme to the other: in the sweatshop parallel universe, Chinese authorities ready themselves for mass social unrest. In a blunt statement, the chairman of China's largest sovereign wealth said that China won't rescue Western banks. There too, the government has decided to embark on a spending highway with £373bn bail-out package, and this may also imply the eventual dumping of the nefarious US dollar already affecting the rich city of Dubai where speculators are throwing in the towel as a lending drought bursts the 'Desert Bubble'. The most comedic element in this grand scale drama is the story of Donald Trump who sues the banks for $3BN for having failed to foresee the housing collapse that is now damaging his reputation in order to avoid the $40M he owes in banking interests.

In the Vanity Fair December issue, a columnist wrote an extremely well articulated piece, which also reveals the latest estimate of jobs New York is going to lose, both on and off Wall Street, amounting to l60,000 to start with. Michael Shnayerson's intro reads like a hook scene:

... Even many of the wealthiest players are retrenching. Others, like the Lehman Brothers bankers who borrowed against their millions in stock, have lost everything. Hedge-fund managers try to sell their luxury homes, while trophy wives are hocking their jewelry. The pain is being felt on St. Barth’s and at Sotheby’s, on benefit-gala committees and at the East Hampton Airport, as the world of the Big Rich collapses, its culture in shock and its values in question.

Last week Bernanke said that he was not against the possibility to drive interest rates down to near zero if necessary but urged decisive action to protect the economy... the meaning of this can be found in the reason why The BofE contemplates radical plans to inject cash directly into the economy - the nuclear option - to be used only when interest rates approach zero; an action seconded by President Jean-Claude Trichet, hinting in the press conference to announce the ECB's 75 basis point rate cut that it may also consider "nuclear options".

The term **nuclear** ought to be taken literally in this particular case. If a well known market guru such as Marc Farber didn't let himself be duped, it should scare the hell out of you. In a recent CNBC interview, an outraged Farber calmly explained what the stakes were, as concluding that world central bankers were merely imploding the world economy.

Beyond The Age Of Usury

Because the very premise of 'usury' creates endless inflation, which in turn reduces the purchasing power, extreme materialism dismantles the fabric of societies: everybody prioritizes the need for cash to the detriment of communities, neglecting friends and family. This causes the goods and services to multiply endlessly since people are too busy to chase money - but what for in the end? As for the corporations, they do not see any incentives in creating long-term perspectives: when 'loans' are so easily available and knowing that more voracious competitors will borrow to take over whatever natural resources there is no time to lose! Polluting nature, cartelizing the means of production, human exploitation, bribery, collusion to maximize earnings are not diseases but symptoms. This all highlights the gap between people's creativity and their needs.We are truly heading toward a terrifying and inevitable crisis of civilization and this is our very last warning before being plunged into an era where money and food will be scarce for many years to come. Wars may well be the only weapons of unethical governments if civil unrest on a large scale threatens their very existence; they will resort to armed conflicts which will have been financed by their taxpayers. Yes, you got it: usury also allows killings and destruction to be a lot more devastating. Contrary to the popular belief, money is not the root of all evil but usury is.

The Last Debt Orgy

2008-10-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

published on: opednews and americanchronicle
Featured on: fiendbear.com

Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Greenspan: 'We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power' - February 15, 2005

It is very common among 'sound money' believers to entertain some kind of fascination with Greenspan who spoke out against 'irrational exuberance and 'infectious greed' at the end of the dotcom cycle as he now warns that ' the Fed is not a magic piggy bank'. For them, Greenspan will always be remembered as the engineer who has unleashed the Horsemen, calling for America's demise and the world by extension. The Maestro and his cheerleaders from around the planet should be very happy that the 'guillotine' has become an historical relic, because what is happening is, without a doubt, reminiscent of the events that led to the devastating hyperinflation and the bloody French Revolution. Loose monetary policy and decades of faulty interest rates are the absolute main culprits. When interest rates fail to control the amount of debts, the opposite happens: it then increases the burden of debt inexorably. Just like printing too much money inflates prices while provoking currency devaluation. More money is then needed to purchase the same goods and services. This is an insidious process that corrupts many minds, from the top down. The top takes advantage of the bottom. And that is why the gap between the rich and the poor worsens, and the middle-class ends up being destroyed. As The above quote by The Maestro stipulates, the FDIC won't be able to do a thing when the USD will become peanuts - eventually.

While it remains to be seen as to whether chaos and unrest will be witnessed, revolutions also tell us that nothing has changed under the sun and this alone should question us very deeply. Instead of resorting to violence how about starting to put faith in the idea that our neighbors are smart enough to grasp ECON 101, because if we don't, things are only going to become a lot uglier before they get better...

More Of The Same Old Cherished Delusions

To start with, the TV broadcasts have once again done everything they could to hide a backdoor giga-bailout orchestrated by the Fed to keep the economy lubricated: the banks have borrowed a record $437.5 billion per day from Fed, Reuters attested candidly as of October 16. Let's also mention that the Fed announced a few day before that it would to provide broad access to unlimited borrowing. So what happens when one has to borrow $100 to honor $100 loan? So, you can imagine where the irresponsible actions of the monetary elites are going to lead us, can't you? But this is nothing surprising from Helicopter Bernanke who has fervently pursued Greenspan' s task aimed at eradicating the cash-strapped middle-class in favor of foreign banks holding too many dollars, and which they were about to dump if anything was done. Ellen Brown, who monitors the situation closely, sums it up like this: FMae and FMac, along with AIG had to be bailed out to prevent the 1 quadrillion dollar derivatives from detonating - temporarily.

Furthermore and astonishingly, this also means that these $700B dollars were just a part of a political sponsored media circus to create a diversion. For the record, let's consider the Fannie and Freddie debacle: Barney Frank in 2003 said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not facing any kind of financial crisis... then we have Bill Clinton who asserted that Democrats resisted standards for two institutions... on the top of that we now have Obama who is a top recipient of Freddie and Fannie lobbies pushing for no-doc loans, nothing-down houses, equity-line hustles, phony appraisals, in short gleefully shaking the money tree in every direction they could. By the way, did you know that as economic storm was brewing, Congressional Wealth grew 11% last year? While condoning any bailout is unethical for obvious reasons (it only makes matters worse and prevents from prosecuting the evil doers), we also have a classic case government failure. By now it should be obvious that these two lenders must go. More concretely, the American citizens are being tested and must show how far their resilience toward theft can go. Despite themselves they have become the facilitators of toxic and illiquid loans that have come home to roost. Do not count on the Newspapers facing historic debt burden to tell you the truth.

Our government and its owners appear to be testing how much the American public will tolerate. A few years ago, no one could have imagined that the silent majority would quietly accept thefts of this magnitude from a government that stopped tiny payments to single mothers with poor children in the name of welfare reform because the program's $10 billion cost was breaking the federal budget. This isn't socialism, it's fascism. -- Sean Olender, sfgate.com

Last October 11, the Times.uk asserted that Lehman Brothers demise triggered the hugest corporate debt defaults in history as grave concerns as to whether Washington’s $700B bailout fund will be enough to avert a financial meltdown. It emerged that the Fed Bankers are anxious that if the Treasury is not able to accelerate the speed at which it launches its rescue scheme, it will have no effect. Of course, they know, they are just buying time. It is not without a reason that the IMF Warns of Global Financial Meltdown. As lawmakers and Wall Street Bigwigs are patting each other's backs, it should be useful to mention that Lehman CEO contributed heavily to Democrats - over Republicans nearly 5-to-1!

It is tempting to assume that human beings are a lot more clever nowadays but are they really so? What is left from the 'Industrial Revolution' and its ideology behind that compelled women to join the ranks of the work force, claiming that they would help the family enjoy an unprecedented wealth. Unfortunately this is not what has happened. The reality shows that the average working families are today in debts up to their eye balls and one of the parents often has two jobs. Due to inflation, nearly 30% of US families now subsist on poverty wages. Their children are burdened with student loans that will take 30 years to be repaid. What quality of life may a young couple into medicine expect today with loans topping half-a-million dollars?

The party is over for the borrow-and-spend culture, for an economy based 72% on consumer spending, nothing will never be the same, Peter Schiff concludes. America's $53 trillion debt problem is very real. According to Michael Hudson, writing in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine, are Americans unwilling to face reality. In the meantime, Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payout, or 10% of US government bail-out package while admitting that the bailout won't work as of Oct 18, 2008. So much for the 'brightest college degrees club' managing the planet - indeed!

It’s clear that the government would like us to use the capital," Mr. Dimon said on a conference call with analysts on Wednesday. "If you are a bank that is filling a hole, you obviously can’t do that.

While Europe blames and curses America for the global credit crunch, it is ironic that European banks have turned out to be deeper in debt than their US counterparts, contends Evans-Pritchard on 10/5/08. Europe put $2.3 trillion on the line to protect the continent's bank. So much for an EU treaty called The Stability Pact as they are staring into the abyss and wondering who's going to bail out the Euro next? Probably not the UK: the Bank Of England unveiled £500B rescue package early this month. On October 16, 2008, ECB went nuclear as EU leaders called for a 'civilized' capitalism. Cynically, World Bank President Mr. Zoellick confesses that the G-7 is not working. Indeed when debts are not kept under control, predictions and estimates are always wrong. Instead of getting back to the basics of ECON 101, Zoellick urged the creation of a new larger Group that would include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others to solve the world's economic problems. A New World Order!

Long time viewed as a financial Eden, Iceland too has gotten a taste of the 'kiss of death'. As the Icelandic krona is about to become history, Lawmakers have no other option left than contemplate an IMF bailout. To refresh your memory, the IMF is the same lender of the last resort whose advice plunged Mexico, Argentina, Russia ( which might go bust again) and lately Japan into financial turmoil. We can only wish Icelanders a lot of luck!

As a matter of fact, indebtedness knows no boundaries (classes and cultures): early this month even Pakistan went under and as a result, is being threatened with a currency crisis. Pakistani leaders still hope to be able to borrow $10B from the bankrupt UK and US. Ireland, long time considered a taxation heaven for European firms, is currently undergoing a massive adjustment due to the bust of its housing bubble. To make the matters worse, a columnist from the independent.uk asked if Switzerland could become the next Iceland... Thousands of miles away from Ireland, a bad omen suggests that Russia's Crash looks very similar to that of 1929, a Bloomberg columnist reported. Indeed, Russian equities this year have lost 67% so far. As you read this, the Indonesian President suspended the stock exchange indefinitely 'to prevent deeper panic' Delaying outcomes is absolutely senseless because at some point, we'll end up reaching an exponential threshold where conflicting interests and lies - will collide at once.

With a flawed diagnosis of the causes of the crisis, it is hardly surprising that many policymakers have failed to understand its progression. Today’s failure of confidence is based on three related issues: the solvency of banks, their ability to fund themselves in illiquid markets and the health of the real economy. economist.com

Although (credit induced) financial plagues dot Mankind's history, the financial media often presents debt crises (ie: business cycles) as being facts of life. However, this didn't prevent them from lauding the housing mania at every level they could, as if this time was different. Would they all be suffering from amnesia? Please do your homework and google 'The Bubble That Broke The World' and you will discover the dreaded similarities between the roaring 1920s and today's. .. Flawed diagnosis? are they stupid or do they have a plan?

It shouldn't be assumed that it is in the human nature to live as if there were no tomorrows, to the contrary. To take the appropriate rational measures, they first need to be able to access unbiased information to begin with. The rock bottom line will always remain the transparency of a system itself. Today many have realized that the opacity of the fog was hiding the mother of all black holes. Unfortunately, there aren't that many different ways to define words like 'S.C.A.M', 'P.L.U.N.D.E.R' and 'F.R.A.U.D' without running the risk of sounding redundant. This worldwide debt laundering will have to be paid with a hard landing. In order to do so, the Powers-That-Be (PTB) are readying themselves for the worse case scenarios, such as shutting World's Bourses, creating a single world currency, which has always been 'the end of the game', as Ron Paul warns. Just click here to watch the video released on Oct 17: Worldwide Currency System to be Presented to U.S.A. by EU Leaders. Of course, a one-world-currency will not stabilize anything at all; the Euro has not insulated the continent from external economic dangers, far to the contrary. Until two years ago or so, Eastern Europe was booming like never while heavy-weight economies like Spain, France and Germany were already crushed by their own deficits. Having one single currency will just make it easier for the PTB to create booms and busts where they see fit. It is a conspiracy... and if the word 'conspiracy' disturbs you, please consider the following quote write several centuries ago:

To preserve their [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude - Thomas Jefferson

Ignorance In Action Is Terrifying

The most astonishing story this month in my view was the confession of a manager whose one-year-old fund returned 866% betting against the subprime collapse. While the origin of his wealth rests on unethical premises, he honestly accuses Harvard and Yale Cliques for their utterly deceiving behavior supporting the Aristocracy, which ended up making it easier for him to find idiots to take the other side of his trades. We can understand now why the S.E.C banned short selling, can't we? The only acceptable questions here should be: why did it take so long to take action... and why do such regulations exist in the first place, considering that debt-based economies are mere legalized casinos?

While the average consumer loses purchasing power daily, the rich consolidates and gets richer. This is, without a doubt, the biggest wealth transfer ever. It is very common to come across people who seriously think that the developing world is poor because of its corrupt leaders and a rampant lack of education, that the Western Powers have done everything they could to alleviate poverty. Really?! If so, how to explain that the wheels are coming off the global financial system? Yes, it's quite hard to get the message through among the public spectrum.

The 'Men At The Top' are geniuses. They have all mastered psychoanalysis: all They have is to do is to work along people's greed, phobias, laziness to think for themselves, gluttonous envy, superficial star system values, and fake altruistic claims... then seize opportunities created by the implementation of a century old economic fallacy, using societal inertia to rule as the absolute Masters.

Remorseful Paulson regrets 'mistakes': We're not proud of all the mistakes that were made by many different people, different parties, failures of our regulatory system, failures of market discipline that got us here... - 10/17/08, globeinvestor.com

Leftism in particular has enjoyed the bashing of Ayn Rand's Aristotelian derived philosophy named Objectivism, describing it as the greatest 'evil' on earth. Today Rand's Hymn On Money almost sounds like a prophetic piece:

Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors...

Living beyond ones means will never make anybody happy. Because booms depend on the indebtedness of many, a debt based system can only be ruled by deceptions. It is not foolish to assume that 90% of everything we think we know is false. Nobody likes to be taken for a ride but our world debt orgy came with a very nasty string attached and called: 'Inflation Holocaust'.

And you still have some difficulties to adjust your thoughts, just know that it is deja-vu all over again: 650 Years Ago, Venice rigged the first, and worst, global financial collapse... The time of a real Intellectual Revolution is long overdue.

Systemic Paralysis

2008-08-08T03:25:00.000-07:00

Usury, to be clear about it, is rich people taking advantage of poor people by lending them money on terms that are sure to make them fail - William Greid

It is often argued that times were a lot harder in the old days but this statement is far from true. Such an assumption rather tends to reflect on a poor existential knowledge and the superstition that a lack of control over the world events is beyond one's own reach. Like any other species, humans get used to their own (predatory) environment and deal with it accordingly. Many dangers have become so familiar to the point to appear rather harmless. And then there is this infamous cultural thinking that "good will prevail" anyway. While lies always get exposed eventually, truth carries in its wake a series of painful realizations. It has always been a jungle out there and in this time and place, something has radically changed the fabric of society; something so insidious that goes far beyond 'greed' and which is so deeply entrenched that is repellent to the mind to even think of doing something about it. To put it bluntly, if something were done, chaos would occur instantly and of course nobody really wants this to happen. This is the main reason why we'll have to wait until the system auto-destructs completely in order to finally envision the possible end of the tunnel and real solutions.

Although we've heard a lot about predatory lending lately, not enough about predatory borrowing was said and nothing at all about 'predatory rumors' without which the mania could never have existed. The 'buzz' is a major component that glued everything together and mesmerized everybody, even those who couldn't afford a piece of the American Dream. It is only when one realizes this, that the blame game is exposed for what it truly is. Back to reality: a study from the Center for Economic Policy & Research in Washington, DC. projected that the bust will most likely wipe out two decades of family-earned wealth. Who cares to listen now?

Let's not kid ourselves: debt-laden economies allow 'the powers-that-be' (TPTB) to pull the plug whenever they want - either by restricting credit lines or just waiting until the consumer can no longer borrow. So now, the Middle Class is 'On the edge' completely unaware of how it got there. As so far the price tag stands at $100TN!. Alas the long overdue 'triggering event' that will cause a worldwide systemic paralysis is kind of unpredictable because of an esoteric element called 'confidence' delaying the final blow. This raises a very taunting question: as it turns out that the rich countries are the most indebted, with America at the top of the pyramid, we have to wonder what happened since the Truth In Lending Act (passed in 1968) designed to protect against flawed and corrupt lending practices? Considering that every boom is credit induced, we must ponder the efficiency of the laws drafted by our policy makers as 8,500 U.S. banks are threatened today. Ellen Brown, an attorney practicing civil litigation in L.A and who has investigated the deception of 'fractional banking' for many years, sees a tsunami of litigations on the horizon:

The total equity of the top 100 U.S. banks stood at $800 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2007. Banking losses are currently expected to rise by as much as $450 billion, enough to wipe out more than half of the banks’ capital bases and leave many of them insolvent...

Instead of succumbing to capitalism bashing, how about assimilating that financial illiteracy translates into monetary cannibalism? Meredith Whitney, a star bank analyst, warned last year - and still does today - that the 'incestuous' behavior between the banks and the credit-rating agencies during the housing boom will have a prolonged impact. In fact, she predicts a very deep recession.

Signs of distress are everywhere; even countries like Iceland and Ireland, long believed very stable are on the brink. In a short period of time, The Royal Bank of Scotland and Fortis Bank have released grim assessments that have finally done 'gloom and doom contrarians' and 'perma bears' justice. While the stock market's volatility increases daily, two mortgage giants guaranteed by the state (i.e: taxpayers), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would need a (taxpayers) bailout. Both lenders have on their track records nearly 50% of the nation's mortgages. For several decades, many believed in this too good to be true Hollywood Story. Sorry for the hard landing, back to reality: If this is not a housing cartel, what is it? Unfortunately, there isn't any mystery when one knows that deep-pocketed lobbyists have spent $200M to buy influence among all political stripes. For what... a $5 trillion mess?.

(07/16) ... They’ve stacked their payrolls with top Washington power brokers of all political stripes, including Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign manager, Rick Davis; Democrat Barack Obama’s original vice presidential vetter, Jim Johnson; and scores of others now working for the two rivals for the White House.... more

Global Pirates

Even though a majority of voters are in favor of interventions, they do not grasp that it makes them accomplices of the same predatory behaviors they're rebelling against. It is the best fashion to keep justice from being implemented and to bury lies under the guise of stopping the housing bubble from deflating further, and thus revealing the ugly truth about the boom. The same holds true for class actions and their so-called settlements. Let's not beat around the bush: bailouts and class actions are among the ultimate cons nowadays. It is important to understand the underlying psychological effects here to comprehend why those 'interventions' will not cease tomorrow unless people start waking up. While 'greed' is the main factor at stake motivating actions, if cases were brought fully to justice, litigations would last so long that investors/taxpayers would lose patience and not even be sure to see some of their money back. Time is money - indeed. But wait a minute: weren't we supposed to fighting greed in the first place?

Rationally speaking, and by colluding more or less openly for a so-called greater good, TPTB are seriously undermining the skills and smartness of everybody. What is your own college degree worth when you're misled to believe that TPTB are doing their jobs while working very consistently on destroying the purchasing power, banking on college tuitions which students cannot afford to repay and implementing global trade policies that eventually come home to roost. As the Globalist agenda machine runs like a freight train to nowhere, the United Nations announces that economic shocks may push an additional 16 million people of the Americas into extreme poverty.

While we're at it, it should be useful to mention that honest reporting has drawn the attention of The FDIC lately and the latter plans on paying closer attention to the blogosphere in the future: blogs are out of control, its chairman Sheila Bair declared. If she is really willing to act against whistleblowers, that task may well reveal itself Herculean. She will have to start with shutting down CNBC whose folks already debunked the brand new bailout bill. Rational Bloggers deal merely with the all data available on the net, have developed a very special ability to read between lines released by the mainstream outlets, such as:

220,000 homes repossessed in the second quarter 08
Nearly 1.5 Million Foreclosure Filings in 2008
U.S. banks borrowing $17BN daily from Fed
How Wall Street Wrecked Your Retirement
Dead Stocks Rallying... etc.

But let's close the chapter about the two mortgage monsters: anyone willing to dig a little will find out that Fannie Mae also runs the 'Fannie Mae Foundation, which contributes to local charities, arts and housing organizations, all of which gives Fannie the needed influence. Well, what we see here with the FM Foundation is widespread. Foundations help funnel large sums of money between lobbies and their cheerleaders. Don't even think of contacting one of them if you don't have serious connections: foundations generally don't accept unsolicited projects. Those not implementing such a policy are the most trustworthy.

It is all about 'networking' and admiring influential people who make 'it' happen. So, it goes without saying that something is deeply flawed in the way we view success and power in the broad sense. This takes another dimension when analyzing firms managed by Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group in their role in the Amazonian deforestation while funding so-called 'green projects' such as biofuels. Another hoax commonly named: The Clean Energy Scam. Actually, and this is appalling, there is a secret World Bank report linking biofuels to the food crisis. What, do you think, would happen if we stopped this insanity overnight? Considering the state of the current global affairs, the answer is utterly simplistic: this would speed up the dreadful domino-effect. As I type this there are signs that the Eurozone is tipping into deeper downturn than America. Talk of an achievement for the single currency, which was created to avoid monetary fluctuations in the first place - remember? An economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland even uses the term 'reverse-decoupling' as Europe sinks harder than the US; led by Spain spiraling into the worst crisis since the Franco dictatorship. Forget about the U.K where it is as bad as in the U.S: this week, a UK study revealed that 36% of citizens would see their cash run out within 11 days. How long would it take in America as the savings rate sank below zero two years ago already?

For how long will we be able to sustain economic fallacies? Well, if you follow the writings of Ambrose Evans- Pritchard, the global economy is at the point of maximum danger and that all its parts may go down together. Will survivalists get the last laugh? The common sense seems to indicate they will, and here is the ultimate proof: since the creation of the Federal Reserve the purchasing power has nose-dived slowly but steadily. Compared to its value in 1913, it is now just a nickel - Welcome to Disney Bank!

Psychiatry vs Sound Money

There are no 'free bubbles'. Manias are fed with a multi-level tacit complicity. Everybody is interested in easy money to start with. While bankers and other financial managers are to blame, it is about time to acknowledge the danger of relying on individuals who are supposed to have the all degrees necessary regarded for their well established experience. In economics, there are no moral hazards besides those caused by man. Usury is the root of all evils and this is something that will never be taught at school, unless there is a radical and interllectual wake-up call. If you need an example illustrating the plague of ignorance, let's consider Japan, where the suicide epidemic is tied to an economy under strain. As a result, after a decade of reforms and weak growth many middle-age and elderly men unemployed chose to end their lives. While the Japanese system allows the beneficiaries to collect life insurances in cases of suicide, we shouldn't jump to any fast conclusions. Throughout India, more and more troubled farmers are killing themselves...

AMY GOODMAN: These descriptions of desperation, up to three farmers a day swallow pesticides, hang themselves from trees, drown themselves in rivers, set themselves on fire, or jump down wells, many of them plagued by debt, poor crops and hopelessness? ... (2006/more)

In the Western Empire, we've got counselors to treat and cure mental conditions. When glancing at the market malaise today, we can easily assume why shrinks still have many sunny days ahead. Last May, the USAToday ran an article related to the dire mental stress of many homeowners as they see the value of their home plummeting or have their home foreclosed:

The American Psychological Association (APA) and other mental-health groups are publishing tips on how to handle the emotional stress triggered by the real estate meltdown... "They're depressed, anxious. It's affected marriages, relationships," says Richard Chaifetz, CEO of ComPsych, a Chicago-based employee-assistance firm that is counseling homeowners over mortgage fears. "People tend to catastrophize, and that leads to depression. Suicide rates go up. We see an increase in drinking, outbursts at work, violence toward kids. Before, their houses were like ATMs," as they rose in value. "Now, they feel trapped like a rat in a corner.... Historically, research shows, rates of depression and suicide tend to climb during times of economic tumult..."

But even the top 10% of society is getting hit. Bankers, CEOs of companies, traders, high-end business guys, use secret clinics and nurses. It is estimated that 40,000 people in the U.K. financial sector will be become jobless over the next three years. For this year alone, the bigger picture shows that from Tokyo to London to New York, financial firms will shed more than 83,000 jobs. Wall Street Exodus is causing fear, panic and anger. Unless the PTB start blowing another mother of all the bubbles, jobs will not come back any time soon. To compare, in the wake of the dotcom crash investment banks and brokerage firms laid off nearly 90,000 people. New York City is bracing for the biggest single-year decline in pay on Wall Street in history as bonuses for employees based could shrink by $10 billion or more. There'll be a number of years before Wall Street pays taxes again, Mayor Bloomberg stated a few days ago. This doesn't bode well to say the least: many people will soon discover that they can no longer afford their luxury condos.

The usury deception goes indeed global: the Bank of Korea confirmed that payments using 'plastic' accounted for 57% of total private spending in the first three months of this year. In South Korea, three years ago, a spike of defaults set off a national crisis. Now industry pundits observe similar dangers in Turkey and China, where there are more than 100 million cards. If you do not hear the alarm bells, and sorry if this hurts your ego, you are probably deaf. In a not so distant past, Turkish people were regarding 'Honor Killings' as the only solution to avoid being labeled a debtor. This did not prevent a fierce outcry, in 2006, prompting the country to crack down on credit card marketers. But there too, it doesn't seem that the new rules have helped avoid the inevitable.

We did not listen to our ancestors’ proverb,” Mr. Kaya said. “ ‘Stretch your leg only as far as your blanket (NYT/08/08/08)

So, the one million dollar question now: will you let Wall street handle your pension plan, do you still trust them enough after the mortgage mess and the ensuing hedge fund blowups, busted buyouts, and credit market gridlock - ??? The nation.com ran an article (How Wall Street Wrecked Your Retirement) which is truly insightful if you are determined to start your own investigation.

Don't get mad, get educated. Debt based economies always end up losing their 'magical' effect and when they do, culprits are countless. But the root cause is 'usury' and it starts at the very beginning with paying an interest on the banknotes in circulation and creating money out of thin air. The central bankers do not have the money in the first place, they invent it electronically. All of which means that they sell an illusion whose price are the boom and bust cycles, inflation, currency crisis and depressions. This fraudulent concept may appear mind boggling to many but understanding the trick is vital to move toward the betterment of Mankind, enhance prosperity and eradicate wars.

Honest Money Workshops In Manhattan

2008-06-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

Level #1:
The suggested donation is 5 dollars or 1 Silver Eagle for political activists – per person. These lectures are suitable for groups up to 15 individuals with a minimum of 6, given at a place of your choice and must be confirmed at least one week in advance.

During the first two hours (of which the last 30 minutes will allow you to ask questions directly), we’ll take a brief but concise look at the following topics. At the end, you will be given a series of links which will guide you through an exciting exploration of the truth about our global financial system - and ultimately that of the United States.

The Money Myth Exposed:
To start with, we’ll be reading out aloud a short essay establishing the problem with the banking interests and currencies printed out of thin air. This is a tale explaining the tricks in simple terms for everyone. You will be amazed to realize that one does not need a PhD in economics to understand the fundamentals and the skewed mechanisms of usury and currency debasement.

By the same token we’ll then uncover historical facts and go back into time, 1500 years or so ago to see that the problem we’re confronted with is nearly as old as humanity. This will comfort you into acknowledging that the issue is not only cultureless but too linked to an "elite phenomenon". Of course, at this stage most of the mysteries will start to sound like old jokes to you; and this may anger you even more once you’ll be explained why giving the Gov’t a blank check is the most foolish idea ever since Gov’ts have a history of putting their countries into deep red ink and never repay their debts.

Tax Deception
The chapter Of “Tax deception” is particularly painful but must be comprehended if one wishes to find rational solutions to today world’s monstrous indebtedness. In the same time, we’ll also point at what the US Constitution is saying about Taxation in general.

Religions, Money And The US Constitution
The 3 monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – have much more in common than you may think. Although bigotry will not be our "focus” during this lecture, we’ll highlight the rational aspect of religions, using a series of thought provoking quotes. This only will convince you even more that the topic is simply ageless, while sadly raising pertinent questions about our religious leaders. From there we’ll make interesting parallels with the US Constitution while taking a brief glance at several banking regulations drafted by the Framers who were true freedom lovers and thus perfectly aware of the inherent problem with power in general.

LEVEL #2:
The suggested donation is 5 dollars or 1 Silver Eagle for political activists – per person. These lectures are suitable for groups up to 15 individuals with a minimum of 6, given at a place of your choice and must be confirmed at least one week in advance.

During the first two hours (of which the last 30 minutes will allow you to ask questions directly), we’ll take a brief but concise look at the following topics. At the end, you will be given a series of links which will guide you through an exciting exploration of the truth about our global financial system - and ultimately that of the United States.

Mechanisms Of Usury, Boom And Bust Cycles:
In the first part of this series we've observed that usury was used throughout history and this generally with masses' acceptance because the average citizen is unaware of the scheme preying on him/her. Today usury is institutionalized and the pundits always come with more reasons to make us believe that we could not live without. During this lecture, we'll delve into the illusion of wealth and analyze why predictions are always wrong when estimates depend on banking interests and what is ethically wrong when the wealth of a top elite can only be sustained when we go further into debts. In other words, saving is a sin.

After this chapter, my guess is that you may never use a credit card again. But more importantly, from there it will be easy to jump to the conclusion that boom and recession/bust cycles are economic events requiring the active participation of central bankers and lawmakers. We'll be studying the morality of letting man running a money printing press, again using historical facts that should be taught in elementary school.

Printing Money And Winning The Elections:
Previously, we have seen in the first part of this series why it is the least gov't's preoccupation to repay its debt, yet lawmakers always seem to say that "the sky is the limit". Citizens are always interested in getting as much as possible from the gov't whatsoever and will always say yes to whatever gov't programs. Alas, unlimited promises have a price tag too but the game is much more complex than it seems: it is about lobbying special interests for support at the detriment of the voters under the guise of endless reforms. After a deeper look, the word “scam” comes to mind, since it is about socializing the costs and privatizing the profits. Eventually voters lose.

LEVEL #3:
The suggested donation is 5 dollars or 1 Silver Eagle for political activists – per person. These lectures are suitable for groups up to 15 individuals with a minimum of 6, given at a place of your choice and must be confirmed at least one week in advance. During the first two hours (of which the last 30 minutes will allow you to ask questions directly), we’ll take a brief but concise look at the following topics. At the end, you will be given a series of links which will guide you through an exciting exploration of the truth about our global financial system - and ultimately that of the United States.

The High Priests of The Globalization and Global Deceit:
During this chapter we'll take a cold look at the global debt which will teach us that the so-called rich nations are as much as indebted as poor nations. The sad truth is that Westerners are the world citizens who have been the most manipulated on earth. While they were raised with the idea that their countries were the beacon of democracy and freedom, they have been complicit in the plunder of the 3rd world - unwillingly. In the same time we'll see why the "Minimum Wage and Social Welfare" platforms were used as mere distractions.

Most of the people hate the word conspiracy because they hate to be taken as fools, but if conspiracies didn't exist, history books would reveal only blank pages. Didn't you ever try cheating on your taxes? ... Everybody conspires. It is the human nature to find the easiest ways to get what we want. Alas, sometimes doing so demands to resort to economic hit men and genocides. It is only when "they" know that "we" know, that "they" will start to behave.

Depressions and Wars:
This chapter is very important and must be faced with much courage if we wish to end 70% of the world misery overnight. Yes, overnight. This is not an exaggeration at all. The death of any economy is the economy of death. Deep recessions and depressions generally mean wars, or in the lesser case social disruptions.

We'll take a look at the debt impact in the poor countries and analyze the debt components behind the build-up World War II, why poverty and economic gloom breed dictatorships, why the empire mentality is ethically erroneous and why every empire in history has gone up in smoke.

Lending Money For Wars
This is of course the way by which the crime is made in our name. We all want the same: peace and prosperity. Lending money for wars is a deadly game, enemies and friends change sides when they see it fit, all of which feeds conflicts of interest at the expense of the "little people". "They fight, we pay and die". The bottom line is that the Elite is a bunch of people who make the rules for themselves. They are not compassionate at all.

There is a way to make wars unaffordable though, but this truly depends on us, the citizens. First, you ought to grasp taxation's inner workings then restore the concept of lawful money. If history is any indicator, giving the government a blank check has always been a huge mistake. If we want "history to stop repeating itself", we must first get rid of our "bad habits”.

Special Notice:
In the long run, these workshops should be rather perceived as a gathering of people willing to help the world rescue itself and making new friends, people who recognize that the power of persuasion and the teaching of self-responsibility are the only tools we’ve got to restore harmony on Earth. That Deception is indeed global and extremely deep rooted: there is no place to hide… nothing to lose but one’s impotence…

for further info, pleased send email to: interest_free_money(at)juno.com

The Final Monetization

2008-05-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

May 25, 2008

Published on: opednews.com | americanchronicle.com

Debt is control only when it is collectible.
If the debtor has the legal or other means to resist
"repayment", debt is meaningless.

I've been thinking of this editorial opening for quite some time. I wanted it to reflect on my stance and pursuit to help Humanity at my own level. Bad economics being a great source of divide, I suddenly recalled the story of two pals of mine, in their late 40s, who might be heading for a divorce as I type this. Three years ago, their goal was to pay back these (damn) credit cards and they fully succeeded. They are not financially secure according to the mainstream standards: they live from paycheck to paycheck, even though being practically debt-free, and have a 401k (which could evaporate at any moment in a stock market crash). However for now is not bad at all considering that 80% of Americans have debts up to their eyeballs -- the U.S Treasury included.

So what happened? Well, at the beginning of the housing boom, they didn't have enough for a down payment and the husband lamented, thinking that he was about to miss the American Dream. There was also lots of peer pressure since he works in an environment of highly paid executives representing the top 15% of the society and of which he doesn't belong to. It soon became an obsession: home ownership would never be for him. He was born a failure. The despair surely got worse when in the midst of the boom-mania, he was strolling down the streets with his wife looking at the new condos being built. Mesmerized and with a sad smile he explained for how much money those apartments were sold or flipped, assessing restlessly the equity lost for not taking part in this mega-speculation that was supposed to be endless.

From the beginning, she didn't buy the exuberance and it turns out that current events prove her right. Today the stories about the housing market are unraveling, although the media are still gravely underreporting the situation. So, every time her husband was hypnotizing himself with ever-increasing home prices, she made a duty to lecture him and email him as many enlightening pundit's views as possible to make her point. Even GE's Immelt declared Housing Great Depression a reality. In despair she then armed herself with the U.S Constitution, which prohibits central banking as drafted by the Framers... The attempts to make her husband come to his senses remained futile. Her 'out of control greed' theory was first ignored then mocked and badly trashed. Remembering dotcom bubble stories, she wondered if the housing-mania was not mind-controlling him in the same way.

The justified gloom and doom data forwarded to him daily got on his nerves. He became irate, accused her of being obsessed with 'an economic end of days'. He used guilt in turn, adding that if they couldn't afford to buy a home, it was because of a lack of income whatsoever. The blame went on and on: instead of studying newspapers data, she should use her energy to come up with real solutions to earn more instead. Feeling rejected and misunderstood, bitterness fed her motivation to make her husband comprehend the dangers of denial.

His obsessions versus hers quickly became a philosophical issue; and this is precisely why they see a counselor today. It is very likely that the housing mania was a mere catalyst after all. Of course, they could have had enough for a down payment if not having maxed out their credit cards in the first place... but it recently surfaced that predatory practices are too pervasive in the 'plastic industry'. Likewise, your life can easily become hell if you are not fully informed. They simply racked up so much credit card debt because companies had raised their debt ceiling systematically over a 5 year-period. To be fair, she remained more or less 3 years without a steady income, but nonetheless this didn't prevent them from changing their spending habits. Until reality hit her like a freight train 5 years ago, they had copycatted the widespread mantra of 'shopping til you drop'.

"When you're in a hole, stop digging." David
Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General and star of
the documentary ,I.O.U.S.A

ps: if you have similar stories to share, I'd be pleased to hear from you.

Greed Run Amok
There are many columnists and bloggers out there doing an excellent job at reporting the real numbers and which guide my rational musings and insights. In this time and place, my task is to connect the dots. So now let's delve into the heart of utterly staggering matters, which, I hope, will be the centerpiece of the next intellectual revolution so desperately needed.

How will it end: with deflation or hyperinflation? Although there are two trains of thoughts debating those different outcomes, for the common man it doesn't really matter anymore. It is going to be wrenching beyond belief. Period. When economic laws are skewed, the rest generally follows. Average people do not know how easy it is to abuse their emotions with fraudulent economics and turn them into puppets at their own expenses. As an example I will cite the inflation quagmire, which shows that middle class income has regressed since the late 70's. To be more specific, the real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the late ’70s. It has risen less than 25% in the three decades since. People work more and more - for less and less. Meanwhile the political leaders swear in the name of democracy, vow to fight unemployment, protect women's rights and implement social programs for the poor. Alas, it is now proven that numbers speak stronger than words. As you read this, people are barely surviving on credit cards to meet basic daily expenses. This ticking 'Time Bomb' may soon be soon the ground for a credit card national relief campaign arguing in favor of another government intervention.

"Other sources of money for a lot of Americans are
drying up," said Dick Reed, regional counseling manager
of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Atlanta,
who sees more clients with mounting credit card debts
these days. "Consumers just don't have a place to go
to get money. They are digging themselves into a deeper
hole not only to pay for normal living expenses, but to
make minimum payments on outstanding debt." - CNN/May 9

Yet voters blatantly choose to ignore the warnings... Candidates' Economic Plans Don't Add Up an ABC headline reads. The rampant economic illiteracy took them a step closer to the abyss as the dreadful 'stimulus' check appears to cost more than it's worth. The Economic crisis is ruining people's lives, the media has failed to tell the full story, explains Danny Schechter whose investigation corroborates that of Joseph Mason, an associate professor of finance at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business, who sees more bank failure ahead:

"At this point in the crisis, you can't stop
bank failures... You move through the problem.
You don't avoid the problem. It's too late to wait
and hope that things get better

Greed has indeed run amok at all levels of the global pyramid, hence the trickiness to explain what is really going on. Take the housing madness for example: the buyers would have done everything they could to get a piece of the pie. And this is something brokers grasped quickly. In turn brokers pushed more borrowers to lie (and they are still at it), Lenders were prompted to mislead and ratings Agencies became paralyzed by the potential economic damages. We may curse white-collar crime as much as we can, but it should be acknowledged that it all starts with the consumers and a 'contagion' that begins with an epidemic of 'Cheap Money'. The financial elites are well aware of this and under the guise to save their shareholders, they have just to come up with a speech in favor of economic stability and the financially illiterate crowds applaud. In other words, millions of taxpayers who didn't know anything about these complex and fraudulent securities (that imploded along with the U.S. housing market) are now mainly own them. If those assets lose more value, taxpayers stand also to lose a greater purchasing power - talk about a rescue plan!

The tally could rise further if another
bank finds itself in trouble, or if the U.S.
government steps in to prop up another malfunctioning
credit sector, such as student loans. "Taxpayers are on
the hook if it goes badly," said John Cochrane, a finance
professor at the University of Chicago's business school.
"We've been doing that for a century." - Reuters/April 4

Although the tide is changing, it remains to be seen how far lawsuits can go, the probe at Moody's could lead to something revealing. If such an institution is being investigated for having awarded incorrect triple-A ratings to billions of dollars whose value come close to the near junk status, it is time to leave the Titanic. If you are a little skeptical, just know that we're only one quarter through the sub-prime crisis and that the threat of Alt-A that is at least three times bigger than sub-prime. Sleep tight?!

Anyone starting to investigate the global monetary system honestly will notice at first glance that there is indeed something repellent to the mind. Just kind of like an intuitive or esoteric impression to say the least. But it is the main task of the Keynesian alchemy to appear magical to the neophytes - and to discourage them at the same time. Fractional banking represents a system as a convoluted web where the blame games rule. Although the culprits are countless, the least culpable ones remain the central bankers, which are given the status of sainthood. When things go bad, they quickly apologize about their human imperfect nature. In other words, our financial matrix is a regulatory illusion . It is like Greenspan confessing to being unable to recognize market bubbles until they have popped, but that it is the Fed's role is to mop up after bubbles burst. Meanwhile their 'errors' impoverish and kill millions of people on a regular basis. How will Greenspan be judged when masses will finally hold him responsible for the disappearing $6 trillion in housing wealth threatening the hedge funds and derivatives with reactions in chain of multi-systemic implosions?

For the investors, the buck stops with taxpayers and in their minds, bailouts will continue when needed. But among the insiders, it is the 'Great Depression Part II'. Bonuses will be slashed by up to 90% this year. Many of those brokers and bankers who have lived beyond their means will have to let their Mac Mansions go. Boston financial research firm Celent LLC predicted at least 200,000 banking job cuts nationwide over the next 12 to 18 months. In the immediate future 36,000 lay-offs threaten Wall Street alone! Wait until you see Manhattan after the elections, the city that never sleeps will have to purge its excesses. I am willing to bet with you that thousands of retailers, restaurants will have to file for bankruptcy. Starbucks already feels the pinch, blames the meltdown of housing market for its bleak outlook.

The very scary thought is that the majority of the population is unaware that the Fed. Reserve has run out of ammunitions. John Crudele from the NYPost summarized the numbers pretty well. He noticed that the Commerce department reported the same 0.6% growth reported for the fourth quarter of last year while showing the real inflation disaster, asserting that the economy is contracting since the last quarter of 2007! Additionally, if you recall, a previous column of mine (Global Junkification) also mentioned why this monetary expansion is being more than offset by credit contraction.

Central Banks cannot keep up with the billions being erased from their books as the many other sub-banks are tightening lending. The other day the Bank of England reminded banks to lend while the Building society mortgage loans had fallen 68% as of May 3rd. How realistic could it be, as the British population has more debts than the country's gross domestic product? By comparison in the United States, personal and mortgage debts amounts to $13.8TN, slightly less than the country's $14TN G.D.P, the NYTimes stated last March ... The two countries, once considered as the wealthiest in the world, are just doomed to default. Duh!!!

We currently live in a world that is so illusory and treacherous that it is barely comprehensible for anyone who hasn't attended a sound money crash course to start with. Last month, for example, people were mesmerized by the Bernanke throwing money at the bankers - to bail them out - in order to save the world from collapse. It is not without a reason that contrarian press nicknamed Greenspan' successor as 'Helicopter Ben' since the day he advocated for the rescue of the system with "helicopters stuffed with money". The global slump of 2008-09 has begun as poison spreads, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts it. According to him, there will be no "reset Armageddon". But what exactly one or two years difference does it make considering that the least alarmist reports point to a debacle around 2010. The upcoming mega monetary contraction is unstoppable. "The Great Depression? We did it... very sorry, won't do it again", Copter Ben acknowledged in 2002.

Fortunately on AngryRenter.com, we can see that not all the citizens are clueless and ask themselves why should taxpayers have to bailout reckless lenders and borrowers? All this monetary infusion isn't free: Congress has concocted a $3,000 tax hike per household for the 2009 Federal Budget. The Heritage Foundation says that it completely ignores the impending explosion of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid costs. So if the outcome remains as dire, why this increase? It is just like the so-called tax rebate, which is a debt in itself and thus bears interest, in due time it will also add to the already out-of-control inflationary pressures. As of May 12, the WPost investigated the growing deficits that threaten pensions, mentioning a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars:

State governments alone have reported they are already
confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion to cover
the cost of the retirement benefits they have promised.
But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall
because of the range of methods they use to make their
calculations, including practices that have been barred
in the private sector for decades...

The Superclass Wants You Poor And Stupid:
Since my previous column, the world has witnessed several tideal waves of near-apocalyptic news but in the wake of the Bear Stearns demise the common man exuded a sigh of relief when hearing that the monetary powers did what they had to do to prevent the world economy from going under. Two days after the intervention (which was decided during a luncheon at the New York Fed before the rescue), the pump and dump machine allowed the Dow to shoot up more than 400pts in one session. In the news, financial journalists marveled at the resilience of the stock market players rallying on optimism that the crisis had hit a bottom and that the housing market is on its way to recover.

Like I have said countless of times, there is no place to hide anymore. The three Credit Rating Agencies and The Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, have joined the rank of the most machiavellian and infamous organizations on earth. First, MarketWatch reported as of 04/23 a fact that have kept many awake at might among the "Superclass". You see, this super-cop organization dismissed a congressional request to divulge why it cut off an investigation into whether Bear Stearns Cos. hurt investors by improperly determining the value of complex debt instruments. Then you have Roger Lowenstein who wrote an outraging overview shredding the light on S&P, Moody and Fitch and why their (intended) failures to protect consumers and investors alike. On the top of that, it now appears that financial institutions have 'enormous losses' from bad loans they haven't yet recognized -- ?!

"Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making" is also the title of a book written by David Rothkopf who has identified "just over 6,000" people who match his definition of the superclass (with the help of his researchers)- and described its ability to rule the lives of billions of people worldwide. That very Superclass operates now like a giga-world mob enterprise readying itself for the 'final monetization' which about transferring most of the wealth into their hands. How did they succeed, would you ask? That is quite simple to be honest: they only have to validate the fidelity of their shareholders with profitable returns, and this in turn ensures their positions at the top of the world food chain. Doing just that is enough to give conspiracy theories credibility since it is the power game that coordinates and aligns their moves'.

The words 'conspiracy theories' no longer are regarded as a terminology for wackos, even the Middlebury College (video), and the Carnegie Endowment For Peace are welcoming D. Rothkopf's lectures about the world power structure. It goes without saying that having a superclass member among one's pals, can be extremely beneficial. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to read in the London Times (as of April 27) that the richest 1,000 people in Britain saw their wealth quadruple under the 11 years of Labour's regulation. It is useful to mention that the Labour is left-leaning party. Incredible, isn't it?

If on one hand most political agendas inherently bank on a fear factor, on the other hand, and oddly enough, 'The sky is falling' does not sell well among consumers and the politicians alike. The first because they are confident in the powers-that-be (TPTB); and the latter because they cannot acknowledge the facts without running the risk to see their lies exposed, so they are systematically prepared to obfuscate data. While social upheavals are scary to foresee for the majority, the experimented readers today have become survivalists. They know that times are about to change radically - and forever. To put this in perspective, several weeks ago, a relative even called me a 'parrot' for agreeing with such dire predictions. I shook my head in disbelief and wondered if the all the gloom and doom in the Universe was not rather the result of denial rather than fear. That something very bad is going to happen to the world economy is shared by so many mainstream pundits -- but even the 'Superclass mogul Soros' (who warned that a 'systemic failure' may be upon us) is being shrugged at.

Take the global food crisis for example and whose ramifications are so diverse that the root causes are never truly considered. While 'The Last Bite' is an interesting read, it doesn't link the impact of debts which is highly inflationary and thus skews production/demand alike in a way that is difficult to diagnose. That is called the 'wonders' of Keynesian economics. In my editorial 'Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $ 1,000tn', I mentioned the current global leverage is more than 4 times the world's GDP. Talk of banking interests running wild and eating ALL profits. Now let's throw into the mix the 'buy low, sell high' mantra and we have the recipe for Armageddon-like food shortages. Ellen Brown wrote an excellent piece which will help grasp how and why speculating on food is in fact betting on hunger! Another unintended consequence is that it could backlash severely under the pressure of protectionist measures that would only make the matters worse. The 'velocity of monetary interactions' makes it impossible for the big bureaucracies to adjust... So was globalization a Decree Mass Death by Starvation all about?

The Money Cartel Inflicts Absolute Misery
One of the greatest ironies is the governor of the Bank of England criticizing the remuneration and bonuses offered by London-based financial institutions. This statement could fit any world Financial Mecca. But playing casino with whatever we value the dearest for the sake of unlimited enrichment creates awful wealth gaps turning humanitarian organizations into 'useless and corrupted enterprises'. To make a point, let's consider the following stories of Chinese children sold "like cabbages" into slavery ... and the race for biofuels killing wildlife - Hey Al Gore, Greenpeace and U.N, where art thou?

And they are still at it. More recently, Goldman forecast crude-oil price to spike up to $141, and JPMorgan bets on $200. Yep folks, they are blowing an oil bubble. The Money Cartel (bourses, ethanol and oil and gas companies) wants you to think that that we are running out of oil. Now if you are pro-peak oil, what do you think of this: OTC says that $100TN is needed to rebuild energy. So not only our lives were in the hands of 'smart guys' who obviously failed to adapt very badly and who now want us to pay for their missteps that are going to squeeze our wallets until the last drop? There is no other definition for this than 'modern serfdom'.

At the best that the peak-oil exists or not is irrelevant because the Solar Revolution and the end of 'Big Energy' are right around the corner. The Money Cartel is dying but going to take us with it. History could repeat itself again and engineer and new Feudal Superclass if events and their causes are not interpreted properly. Sure, after having read this column some still may think that the world will never change and that rich people are in fact much happier than poor people... but how happy could one be in a world where only 10% of the population depend on economic slavery?

Global financial markets have become “a monster” that “must be put back in its place”, the German president has said, comparing bankers with alchemists who were responsible for “massive destruction of assets”.... “The complexity of financial products and the possibility to carry out huge leveraged trades with little [of their] own capital have allowed the monster to grow…also responsible [is] the grotesquely high compensation of individual finance managers.”... (FTimes.com: 05/15)

The problem, you see, is that the top 10% represent those people and their closest cheerleaders. How would the crowd react when hearing that the farm subsidies given to Paris Hilton and her family contribute to the deep impoverishment of developing countries? .. so what do we do now?

As it stands, there are four vital arguments against government that have to be dealt with if we really want a better world. Maybe at some point when people will have understood that power and money are tricks to keep masses enslaved, that Mother Nature has made sure to set a ceiling to power and wealth, all of which makes it impossible to take over unethically, maybe... the abolition of money as a concept will appear as the only viable solution. Until then, we'll have to endure the 'Final Monetization' and abandon Mankind to its own destiny.

Global Elites Gone Bonkers

2008-03-10T04:57:00.000-07:00

March 11, 2007

Plublisded on: opednews.com , americanchronicle.com

Before addressing our global monetary infectious disease, a serious correction has to be made: in many articles 'capitalism bashing' has gone unabated especially since the subprime housing bubble has burst. This is irritating because the notion of big government and central banking (the commerce of usury included) are the two main planks of the Communist Manifesto. Capitalism goes along with limited government and hard currencies. There is no shortage of disconnects in logic. In fact it is kind of appalling to read leftist and pro-globalist editorials and essays vilifying greedy-capitalism restlessly while they merely depict the deep flaws inherent to the centralization of power - aka the Socialist Ideal.

Although Darryl Schoon shows up as a hard currency advocate, he still asserts that capitalism sets in motion its demise, the greater the expansion the greater the debt. Well... well, while we're at it, it would be useful to add: as long as the populace buys this fallacy and fail to realize that savings is impossible when living beyond one's means. This has nothing to do with capitalism but market indoctrination. The boomers thought that they would enjoy retirement and most of them are going to fall very short. Wan Lixin at the ShangaiDaily.com, like many, is fed up and for him everything is crystal clear: The Monster US supercapitalism eats the middle class and democracy. Instead of 'Supercapitalism' he should write 'Superdebtism'. Lixin cites many prominent names but never condemns the credit conditions during the events he describes in length. Again debt addiction and currency debasement are among the recurring fallacies used by the Global Elites to get richer and quicker 'is' anti-capitalist, period. Thinking that the panacea for debt is credit is a 'universal delusion'.

Lenin's famous quote: 'The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency' - ditto, congratulations, mission accomplished!

Frank Shostak explains why too much debt alone sets in motion a series of random shocks: 1) The act of debt liquidation forces individuals into distressed selling of assets - 2) as a result of the debt liquidation the money stock starts shrinking and this in turn slows down the velocity of money - 3) a fall in money leads to a decline in the price level - 4) the value of people's assets falls while the value of their liabilities remains intact, which precipitates bankruptcies...

Whatever systems is in place, none can survive lies and frauds in the long run and this can be traced back to most omnipotent governments that have ruled since the beginning of Mankind. Even the gold standard couldn't prevent the Kings and Emperors from embarking on ruinous military expeditions or reevaluating their coins when they felt in the mood to do so, which is the same as giving an arbitrary value to today banknotes. Markets must define the price or precious metals, fluctuating according to the supply and demand. Neither governments nor central banks can fix their prices by controlling the interest rates as they see fit. 'Price-fixing' lawsuits are nothing new. So why should we let some powers-that-be commit the same crime? What we are really witnessing are the damages of collectivism and debtism, such as described by A. Hayek in 'The Road To Serfdom'.

The Transparency Black Hole And The bailout Game
Last January the Davos elites ('they') gathered again to discuss the possible options as the world economy and the fabric of societies deteriorates to a point of no return. The disease can easily be identified and is named extraordinary leverage. Amid the institutionalized meltdown, it would be useful to mention this very 'Obama bill' whose purpose is to alleviate global poverty and amounts to $845 billion. Additionally, he's eying a $120 Billion Stimulus Plan while No joke! Where is Barak Obama going to find the money considering that every household in America owes $400,000 to the Treasury (grand total, future liabilities included) according the former GAO chief, Paul Walker? What happens when consumers stop consuming?

A few weeks ago, Greenspan said at the CERA Conference that the economy would continue to erode until there is a stabilization of U.S. housing prices: "we have a long way to go" before housing prices hit a bottom. As of February 25, Greenspan reiterated with his usual aplomb that US economic growth stalled and a quick recovery was unlikely. Contrarian estimates seem to point to a decline in house price of at least 30% over the next 2 or 3 years, this means a loss of at least $4 trillion in market value if only 20% loss in market value occurred. So far the U.S Subprime meltdown has cost the world $8.6 Trillion according to the contrarians while the mainstream figures announced $7.7 trillion. The scariest part is that it will also affect corporate earnings.

Now we see the deep bottom line as Bank of America asked Congress for a $739 Billion Bank Bailout. This real Estate market is a bottomless pit. The Fitch rating agency, early March, warned that US Alt-A RMBS performance deteriorates rapidly with an outstanding balance of approximately $160Bn. Stimulus for this, rescue package for that... so why not bailing out the corporations while they are at it? Economic fascism occurs when profits are privatized and costs are socialized. For the record, did you know that Fannie Mae's shares went from $70 in August to less than $22 on March 6, 2008; Freddie Mac's from $65 to less than $20 over the same period. Fannie and Freddie are worth 40% of America's $11,500Bn of outstanding home loans! Moody’s estimated that three million subprime borrowers will likely default over the next several years; and that 8.8 million homeowners, or about 10.3% of homes, will have zero or negative equity by the end of the month. In Washington, the Democrats are upset at the Bush Administration which blocked their bill to help homeowners. Yet the same democrats are in favor of government-funded mortgage buyout. Banks' losses could put $900bn squeeze on consumers. This is communism of the most subtle kind. Corporate welfare cost U.S taxpayers already $120bn per year, Citizen.org revealed in 2003. How much is it today exactly? Did it solve anything? The lobbies' task is to get the government out of their way in order to obtain freer rein for 'financial innovation'.

As long as the consumers/voters fail to see the big picture, legal financial scams will remain pervasive. It is all over again, during the Great Crash of 1929, there 25% of banks in America went belly up. Many people saw market speculations engaged in by banks during the 1920s as a cause of the crash. A new banking regulation, Glass-Steagall Act, was passed in 1933. History repeats itself: it is just another regulation that went down the tube. More over, it is a well-known fact that when Alan Greenspan became the Maestro in 1983, he was strongly in favor of banking deregulation. And long before that in 1966, he wrote 'Gold and Economic Freedom', an essay available on the internet.

As the web of debt gradually expanded, 'they' faked the enforcement of some semblance of transparency. That is precisely why the public fell asleep at the wheel. Alas when debt cannot be repaid it is destroyed, that as simple as that - and as financial history shows, often at the expense of the ignorant masses. Panic is not a vain word anymore. A Wall Street bank run has become a (high) probability. David Ignatius at the Washingtonpost.com wrote a piece that tells us why the system is about to screech to a halt. Here is an excerpt:

Frightened financiers are pulling back from credit markets
-- going on strike, if you will -- to escape the unraveling daisy
chain of securitized assets and promissory notes that binds the
global financial system. As each financier tries to protect against
the next one's mistakes, the whole system begins to sag. That's what
we're seeing now, as credit market troubles spread from bundles of
subprime residential mortgages to bundles of other kinds of debt --
from student loans to retailers' receivables to municipal bonds.

Most people dislike economics because of its convoluted jargon. If they only knew that it was a trick to deter them from learning. So, what hide terms such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) or structured investment vehicle (SIV) for example? If you do not have a clue and are about to start scratching your head, here is what Richard Sylla, professor of economics and financial history at NYU's Stern School of Business says an report titled 'The black box economy' by Stephen Mihm last January.

"A lot of financial innovation is designed to get around
regulation. The goal is to make more money, and you can make more
money if you don't have to keep capital to back up your investments."

Examples abound in the financial press. Interestingly enough, this article on bloomberg.com gives us another hint that corroborates Sylla's definition:

... The new source of potential losses: so-called variable
interest entities that allow financial firms to keep assets such
as subprime-mortgage securities off their balance sheets. VIEs
may contribute to another $88 billion in losses for banks roiled
by the collapse of the housing market, according to bond research
firm CreditSights Inc. Goldman, which hasn't had any of the
industry's $163 billion in writedowns, said last month it may
incur as much as $11.1 billion of losses from the instruments...

So from now on - and trust me that it will make you sound ultra-smart - every time you read some sophisticate terms in whatever economic column, remember professor Sylla's theory. This is actually pretty frightening because in the midst of the deep recession, the Davos folks, ('they') are the ones who will come up with more regulations to nowhere to satisfy the common man's outcry, be given more power and of course big pay raises.

Ever heard of the wolf in sheep clothing? Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond mutual fund, sums it up like this: it is 'Frankensteinian' levered body of shadow banks promoting a chain letter, pyramid scheme of leverage' in his January newsletter. If this leaves you enough moral strength to face the monster, I invite you to read Michael Lewis' Inside Wall Street's Black Hole and who has investigated the Black-Scholes model invented by a pair of finance professors at the University of California at Berkeley. The model is based on the assumption that a trader can suck all the risk out of the market by taking a short position and increasing that position as the market falls, thus protecting against losses, no matter how steep. Nearly every employee stock-ownership plan uses Black-Scholes as its guiding principle. Excuse me: Merton and Scholes received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economic for what - to transform the world into a mega-giga casino?

(Reuters:03/08) A systemic credit crunch is underway, driven
primarily by bank writedowns for subprime mortgages," according to
the report co-authored by analyst Christopher Flanagan at
PMorgan Chase & Co. "We would characterize this situation
as a systemic margin call'...

The problem is not a liquidity crisis per se but too much liquidity flooding the market and whose value is getting increasingly worthless because there is too much money purchasing goods and services. But once a currency gets close to junk, we easily can imagine the amount of banknotes that are needed to achieve the same results. So indeed, more cash is needed to help the system stay afloat, hence the term 'liquidity crisis'. To add to the injury, Michael Shedlock, a prominent contrarian, declared as of 01/29 that the bank reserves went negative, an observation based on a chart by the Federal Reserve of St Louis. Yep folks, most American banks are now insolvent or on the brink to become so. If it is that bad at BofA, why is the balance sheet looking like at the other major banks? For the cherry on the cake, let's not forget that Fitch disclosed its fatally flawed Rating Model...but since the two others, S&P and Moody didn't do a thing either, we ought to conclude they also are affected by the same infectious myopia. All we can do is to brace ourselves for the coming collapse of International Credit Ratings.

What the heck are the regulators doing, would you ask? That is a good but silly question. There is so much gaming out there, the latter are outsmarted and intimidated by the cliques they are supposed to monitor and rush to settle litigations as quickly as possible due to peer pressure. Having super-cop-regulators patrolling the stock exchanges, banks and brokerage firms would not only be proven extremely costly but futile. It is time to get real: the FDIC can insure deposits, but not purchasing power. Another regulation that will soon be proven completely worthless. To put it simply: we are freaking d-o-o-m-e-d!

No Place To Hide
Let's take a pause here: the other day, scientists confirmed a fact that every smart person already knows. Like ants or sheep, humans are easily led, they said. The telegraph.uk article continues: Researchers at Leeds University believe their findings could have important applications, notably in the management of disasters... with the global financial meltdown around the corner, how cynical is that? What will the Herds be looking like when rushing to the exits? What I want to say here is that the market behaves irrationally, when there is a booming mania, investors follow blindly and are thus uncontrollable.

CNN, as of Feb. 6, had a simple explanation for the stock market's mixed outcome, suggesting that rising inflation might prevent the Fed from making further interest rate cuts. Back to the market. This means that stock market players have not forgotten the Maestro's era of cheap money and its ensuing boom - and that nostalgia is flying high. If the fed's rates were going back to 1%, we're willing to bet that we'd have DOW 20,000 by now!

The truth is about to catch up with us. Even George Soros admits that 'we are at the end of an era of credit expansion' when saying that the crisis originates in the heart of US capitalism - please note this demonization of capitalism again. The debt tentacles have so many ramifications that it doesn't bode well: America will drag many in its fall. That is what happens when a currency is made the world currency reserve. 'The Davos elites knew that the USD would eventually give up, and they created the Euro to replace it - but will it work? Considering that the major European economies are practically on the brink, there is no magic solution. Unless the Chinese government starts distributing credit cards for free, don't hold your breath either: At 37 times trailing earnings, China undoubtedly has the second world's biggest stock-market bubble. Today international corporations invest massively in Vietnam where the production costs are one-third cheaper than in China.

The creation of the Euro was designed to enhance trade, employment and to prevent currency fluctuations, the Elites told us, remember? We see the results after less than a decade. Europe is prompted to 'its own Review Rules' following the investigation of the bailouts of two German banks hit by the subprime lending crisis in order to determine whether they violated rules on state aid for ailing enterprises. The German taxpayers must have a verybitter taste in their mouths. All this taxpayers’ money which poured into once-profitable banks that took excessive risks, profiting mainly the top 10% of the population among which we find top executives who evade €30bn of tax yearly... Is Germany, Europe's biggest economy, a corporate swamp? The Guardian.uk asks. Der Spiegel declared that the German State-Owned Banks on Verge of Collapse. The columnist doesn't mince his words:

.. greed and political protection that is symptomatic for many of
Germany's state-owned, partially state-owned and public sector
banks. It is an environment that can only thrive in the shadow of
the state -- and that has drained more than €20 billion
from the public treasury within the last decade. (Feb/20)

As of 02/22, FTimes.com ran an editorial in the same mold titled 'The fall of a financial model':

...Unlike the internet bubble, this is not a crisis based on
irrational behavior but one of sophistication and disintermediation.
The new risks produced by financial innovation were left to
a sector that alone was considered able to understand its instruments.
The crisis demonstrates the costs to the real economy and
lack of an efficient self-regulating system.

Interestingly enough that same week, Spitzer dropped a bomb when declaring that Bush administration was predatory lenders' partner in crime; that the government chose instead to side with the predators. What have the democrats been doing during all this time? This is called a conspiracy of silence and of course nothing of this was aired on TV.

Since my editorial 'Hey Buddy, can you spare $1,000 trillion?' written in October 2007, the derivatives market grew from 516 to 681 trillion! Meanwhile the global stock market cap is approximately $51 trillion. Because derivatives are similar to insurances against value depreciation, how can we have such a big gap?! We are in big trouble, guys! Bear in mind that what is occurring right now is the consequences of debts and their compounding interests added to the so-called financial innovations in order resell the same debts a zillion times. Yet according to a survey released by Harvard Business School and Dartmouth College, Americans don't understand debt, which may be one reason that they have too much of it. Even those with a college degree don't possess an understanding of the basic finance ideas, the CNN columnist writes. Considering the worlds deficits and imbalances, this shouldn't come as a surprise: how many prestigious degrees are there among the global elites? Are they just ignorant or have they gone bonkers while succumbing unrestricted stupid greed?

This tells you how dire and surreal the world situation really is. World citizens have been completely abandoned by their lawmakers and financial institutions, which are now in 'cannibalistic mode', fighting and dancing around the remains of a 'mega-toxic-debt carcass'. The ' Kerviel-SoGen Affaire' illustrates this perfectly. Societe Generale missed 75 warning signs on the activities of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel, the times.uk revealed. Read my lips: seventy-five! It gets outrageously funnier. Mr Kerviel got a €60,000 bonus for 2006 and €300,000 bonus for 2007. The article goes on: "At this stage of the investigations, there is no evidence of embezzlement or internal or external complicity," the report said. Bear in mind that the French bank' losses totaled €4.9 billion.. As for the European elites, it all comes down to which 'scum' is on the menu. Hear this: Massive suspicion of fraud report (funding worth £100 million a year) won't be published, say Euro-MPs. Another example is that of fund manager John Paulson who cashed up to $4 billion speculating against the housing bubble and whose adviser was no other than Sir Alan Greenspan. By telling the Gulf Sates to drop dollar, which game is the Maestro playing exactly? Since Greenspan will be remembered as the engineer of the Great Fall of America, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York doesn't deserve a "presumptive triple-A" but a'mid-grade junk' credit quality instead. Do you agree? Have 'they' never heard of the Law Of Diminishing Returns? Seven years later, in gold terms today, the market is down more than 70 per cent from its peak in the year 2000, acknowledges Mark Farber, known as Dr Doom. Bernanke policy to `Destroy' U.S. Dollar, he concluded. Dr Doom should be trusted and here is why: as of 03/07, The Federal Reserve on its website announced two initiatives to address heightened liquidity pressures in term funding market; considering that the nonborrowed reserves went negative one month ago or so, it looks like the panic mode is now a step closer. But for the Dr Doom crowd the game is over: The Fed's rescue attempt has failed. In his article titled 'The Upcoming Financial Pandemic', Roubini explains how the contagion will spread.

A Culture of Greed. Stupid greed nonetheless. Fake greed. 'Greed' cannot help when one is ignorant; most Wall Street players do not know the name of the game. Kings become beggars and play musical chairs. Today central bankers and their cheerleaders ask one another to neutralize currency volatility and to keep inflation in check while trying to find a way to get rid of their own dollar/foreign reserves; they all know how American's reckless policies have set in motion several calamities - moral hazards - that are going wrench the entire planet.

A Revolt Of The Debt-Slaves In Sight?
Despite the corruption running deep, Regulators Hope to Make Wall Street Pay for Its Role in Subprime-Mortgage-Fueled Housing Bust. Duh! Do they mean that we'll see several of those several spectacular and massive settlements, which do not have any other purpose than tone down persistent rumors while enriching the law firms cartel? Let's not kid ourselves. What we need is to challenge the entire power pyramid instead of putting band-aids here and there (useless reforms) because obviously doing so doesn't work anymore. Ludicrously complex' bank products are being attacked as the financial firms are in the hole for an additional $600 billion, Bloomberg reports early March.

Out if curiosity, did you read in the press about this 'Home Owners' Loan Corporation ? I do not wish you to freak out, but you ought to know that The HOLC was part of the Home Owner's Refinancing Act, a Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal agency established in 1933... during the Great Depression. So what?, you ask. It is a plan that Congress might resurrect (NYTimes 02/24), upon the advice of former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder. We're on the brink of a (world) depression! Irony or cynicism, you decide: the guardian.uk, recently said that bank crises 'increase rate of heart attacks'.

Toward the end of February, Roubini, a prominent Keynesian economist whose reports rather brilliantly highlight the fraudulent premises of the system, forecast the next big event: 1 0 to 15 Million Households Likely to Walk Away from their Homes/Mortgages. There are consumers who bought a condo or a house even knowing that the monthly mortgage payments could be hardly met - but thought that the endless increase of their house value would rescue them anyway. It didn't play out this way: Subprime loans are defaulting even before being reset. 'Debt prison' could be a lifetime sentence as some lenders are working to create harsher penalties for those people. What is going to happen now that even Greenspan himself admitted that the US Growth is at Zero. With the banks turning off the credit pipeline and more Americans maxing out their credit cards to stay afloat, an upcoming economic contraction is just more than a certainty.

While in the US more homeowners began to walk away instead of paying their mortgages, in the UK, going bankrupt starts to be accepted as a way of life as going bust loses its stigma. In short they turn their backs and step away while shrugging. More candidates for the biggest-selling drugs of all time: antidepressants, which are now bashed by a recent UK study. What if they also did not work because people did not address the causes that make them depressed in the frist place? How can people believe in a system providing them with estimates and predictions that turn out always being false over a given period of time?

If we dare to honestly analyze all our attempts to revolutionize societies we must admit to having failed miserably. As our system was becoming more organized and socialized apparently it ended up generating has more (economic) slaves than 400 years ago. No more denial: money control doesn't work. It has never worked! What They know is that controlling the money supply leads to failures. They also know better how to protect their assets in time or economic hardship; that starvation, death and terror are keys to keep humans begging for protection. Time to go back to square one whatever may happen to the system, the latter is going to dismantle itself even if we do not intervene anyway. But instead of adding oil onto the fire by starting a bloody revolution, that very revolution should take place within our inner selves. There is no fight to win other than the motto: no force and no fraud. Therefore must we attribute the exponential growth of debt to a theft, thus a institutionalized coercive fraud which itself nurtures myriads of (un)intended nasty consequences.

True liberals, in the classic sense, refute government intervention. They have nothing in common with 'modern day liberals'. The latter don't seem to grasp that their altruism is highly inimical to their professed belief in liberty, Ben O'Neill asserts. He asks us to bear in mind that some of the largest Western charitable organizations were founded in the 19th century, at a time when the market was a lot free-er. Since then the expansion of the welfare programs has parasited the meaning of charity and damaged the charitable ethic. And as a matter of fact, he's absolutely right. Here is a compelling example: under the pretense of addressing global warming, the biofuel market has caused commodities to skyrocket (surging wheat, corn prices) all of which provoked riots around the globe, particularly in poorer countries. As a result, Zeigler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, told reporters in New York the following:

It is a crime against humanity to convert agricultural productive
soil into soil which produces food stuff that will be burned into biofuel
All causes of hunger are man-made, it's a problem of access, not
overpopulation or underproduction, and can be changed by human decision

That you believe in global warming or not shouldn't be the focus here, but its link to pollution and overconsumerism, hence superdebtism should be. So, now we are on the brink of man-made food shortages because we simply consumed our way to happiness, is that right? If the Elites were so smart, how does it comes that our brilliant politicians have let this consumerism grow out of control? For the sake of their 'own musty pulp economics'?

Although the anger at the Financial Elites is rising, it is not enough. The battle that has to take place must start intellectually, the understanding the inherent dangers of 'involuntary servitude' and 'legalized coercion'. The time has come to go back to school - self-teaching and home-schooling - to rediscover what the Founding Fathers truly meant when drafting the U.S Constitution.

Global Junkification

2008-01-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

also published on moneyfiles.org, opednews.com and americanchronicle.com

The first paragraph of an editorial is always crucial. My hook scenes are often hard-hitting and generally plunge the neophytes into a hostile macro-micro environment where there is no place to hide. Retrospectively, 2001 was the year of the discovery that billions of world citizens had embarked on a runaway train whose destination is still unknown, up to this very day.

Before delving into the topic of sound money, it would be useful to make a compelling observation. On one hand as it seems easy to have one-to-one uplifting discussions, on the other hand it is illusory to think that it works the same way for a large group. Conformism is the word coming directly to mind; it is the mother of all theories inviting the biblical Horsemen to show up. Once the mechanics of conformism are taken into account, destiny and shocks to the system can be predicted. Conformism is rooted in the 'fear of fearing ignorance' that portrays humans as 'evil creatures' condemned to oblivion. There will not be any 'divine' intervention but Chaos brought upon us mainly because of the fear of dissent.

Philosophical Insight 101
Dissenting has a vital role socially because it forces everybody to pay attention to other aspects. Dissent is nonetheless considered a threat because conventional thinking has inseminated into our psyche erroneous concepts taken as holy truths. Most mainstreams ideas - if not all - are outdated because knowledge advances inexorably and that it is in the interest of the powers-that-be to outsmart the population, otherwise control wouldn't be possible at all.

The individual either within a group, or under peer pressure, chooses self-censorship for the sake of the conformity. The group comes first. It is puzzling and irritating at once because behind the façade, people think differently. It is thus mind boggling and even appalling to hear a person with whom you thought of having a lot in common, deliberately start speaking otherwise when socializing. Centuries have tamed citizens' spirit, forced them into submission for the sake of the system' stability. Alas that very stability, as demonstrated below, is the road to serfdom, and ultimately nothingness. Anything that tries to dismantle the pyramidal and feudal hierarchy is perceived as a threat. Masses sadly endorse any elitist bad management as a necessary evil because they are so familiar with it. They are used to lament but feel powerless to change the course of events. Needless to say it is pretty bad out there, why the heck would one want to risk the Unknown, which could be even more threatening? Such a train of thoughts is instilled into people's mind from birth in order to force the 'Social Order' upon them.

There are actually many people understanding this but who would rather opt for a continued tyranny over the inherent dangers in Freedom. Paradoxically these people will go in great lengths to describe the vicious consequences of greed and power, although they realize that their lives are going from bad to worse. Afraid of social blow-outs, they are just trying to toss the dangers away, expecting the next generation to fix the imperfections ... but since every generation passes the buck to the next, so what?

Without the taxpayers, the government cannot produce anything. Nonetheless socialism has convinced the masses that a world left to itself is condemned to eradication. Such thinking has built a structure within which the 'managing elites' survive as mere parasites. They are behind the 5 trillion-armament race during the Cold War and now ready to throw us in into WW3. Their tricks to stay on welfare ad vitam eternam are simple: fiat money and progressive taxation, which has defeated so many civilizations. In 6,000 years, the end result today is a financial industrial complex whose ramifications are just too obscene for the common man to grasp. For how long will this bottomless deception be allowed to last? It was B. Franklin who said - if I remember well - that 'truth will prevail if left to herself'. And it is exactly what the Universe has for us in the store but not without unleashing several calamities.

Some people, and this doesn't require a college degree, can sense the difference between morality and legality, and understand that what is legal is not always moral. Individuals always collude and the task of a collective unconscious is precisely to protect the 'clan'. Sure, depending on the premises being put forward, a collective behavior is not necessarily a bad thing. But a group that doesn't take into account the 'individuality' of each participant is doomed to fail.

The Teachings of Buddhabot
A while back, I read an interesting article written in 2006 about the ever growing potential of Buddhabot, a software program now superior to human intelligence. Buddhabot has already released its own 10 Declarations. Four of them caught my attention in particular since they can be proven with economic data and summarize the six other ones:

1) There are no laws but provisional theories
2) Everybody is responsible for what it is
3) Whatever we resist will persist
4) Every belief is neither true nor false

Although everybody knows that killing and stealing are crimes, there are no laws, only provisional theories. Indeed what to think of the ageless tale of Robin Hood stealing from the rich in favor of the poor or the case of self-defense? To give you an idea, the other day on the Science Channel, a physicist investigating the universe's Dark Matter confessed that the gravity laws established by Newton turned out to be partially wrong. Everything evolves and as knowledge progresses daily we easily conceive the pitfalls of civilizations. Crimes too evolve, become more sophisticate or are made laws to subdue the people. Despite this, every civilization embraces the slogan: 'this time 'is' different'. How coherent is it to repeat something has been proven wrong throughout history? Knowledge is the highest value and therefore the containment of the masses only works temporarily. Buried or unseen facts operate as remote bombs or grenades, depending on their importance. They eventually go off and spread panic or chaos. We grasp the futility of laws when analyzing our endless reforms that never address the core of the issues whatsoever - due to the generational indoctrination.

There are simply no social steady models possible, hence the emergency to teach that self-responsibility and determination are essential and the root of all good. Instead of begging for an ever-growing government enabled by our highly coercive tax system, which today shows its absolute worthlessness.

Sound Economics To The Rescue
Over the last 40 years, we have been reassured that globalization was the universal cure to eradicate poverty. No later than mid-January 2008, the Davos Committee released its dire report:

A U.S. recession with fallout on European economies, a crisis in energy and food supplies worldwide, at their lowest level ever, and globalization of risks are the threats to the world economy for the next ten years... According to the study, the current liquidity crisis from the subprimes will most likely cause a recession in the United States in the next 12 months, leaving Asia and Europe at the helm of the world economy.... it is certain that Europe alone will not be able to do it, but "with the strong presence of the British financial sector the
area is vulnerable."

Consuming Our Way to Unhappiness: Meanwhile the systematic pillages of natural resources has achieved our worst ecological nightmares and through the WTO agreements totaling 2,550 or so pages drafted for the sake of economic growth (or so we were told) and extreme consumerism. To address the matters, the main idea advised by ill-informed specialists of all kinds goes toward an agenda reducing our consumption, although the latter also warn that it would bust the whole world economy!!! So here we have the formula induced by the Academia and their followers who put us into this mess in the first place. The same con-men who told us that the sky was the limit since WW2. That is truly great, isn't it?

It should be obvious by now that the United Nations is a foster for corporations colluding with the World Bank, IMF and their own economic hitmen. Here is an enlightening story: Last October, a delegation of rainforest pygmies from Democratic Republic of Congo flew to Washington to complain to the World Bank about its support for wholesale logging to help rebuild the war-ravaged economy. The plan, you see, is a poisoned gift since it is devastating their forests... Nearly 40 million people depend on the forests for medicines, shelter, timber and food. Threatening the gorillas in the same time. An independent panel also accuses the bank of misleading Congo's government about the value of its forests and of breaking its own rules. The groups claimed that the bank-backed system of awarding vast logging concessions to companies to exploit the forests was causing "irreversible harm" ... full stories

Long story short, the true environmental cost of our materialistic addiction goes hand in hand with the 'shop until you die' legacy. In my previous editorial I mentioned the atrocious pollution of the Asian rivers, all made possible by spending more than we earn. So dear readers, what brought us to the abyss are the billions of education degrees issued with the certified label reading 'beacon of democracy'. Buddhabot has a point here: there are no laws but provisional theories and everybody is responsible for what it is. Every hidden facts have unintended consequences, would they be intentionally concealed or not. Many represent taboos molding societies; they are protected by educational concepts such as political correctness and herd mentality. Both result in severe biases helping intolerance flourish and allow more (news) distortions and (political) manipulations further. It is way easier to explain this to an individual in private than a group, simply because political correctness, or the phobia to offend others prevents genuine opinions from circulating. The lack of intellectual adaptability and self-esteem are highly damaging. On an economic level, it shouldn't come as a surprise to find out that Low Self-Esteem and Materialism Goes Hand in Hand. Indeed how will we be feeling when confronted with the illusion of prosperity?

Whatever we resist will persist. Over the centuries, a generational indoctrination in favor of security and linear thinking has worked its way through as an axiom. Alas if we are honest with ourselves, we observe that the "Act of Living" requires continual mutations. Under such circumstances, resisting change appears futile. On an economic level, it has become blatant that egalitarian principles are skewed premises that have enriched the top 2% of the planet. Today corporations and their lobbies rule the world - business Lobby presses agenda before 08 votes. What to say about the Democratic party of the rich?... or how to explain the nasty side effects of political Free Lunch enriching the wealthiest Americans at the taxpayers expenses? David Cay Johnston (author of Free Lunch) gave an interview on democracynow.org in which you can hear that the mogul Donald Trump earned millions of dollars, using an tax advantage (read: loophole) for the poor. Allo Houston?!

Everything is neither true nor false because everything can be used as a double-edged sword, to do evil and good. Four thousand years of history teaches us that. Forget about the bottomless and corruption one minute and think of our inextricable demographic headache. Now that the birth rate in the so-called rich countries has gone south since the 1980's, unless taxes are raised drastically, who is going to pay for social security and other entitlement programs? So where are the rewards of that 'altruistic group thinking' exactly when now faced with the stupid boomer myth and the coming Wave Of Illegals Turning Into Tsunami ? At the same time let's take the charity of rescuing addicts despite themselves bringing cartels hundreds of billions yearly... and has filled prisons with a record amount of inmates. The U.S. prison system has now proven a costly and harmful failure. What has achieved all those government's education programs in concrete terms? Nada... Maybe this time, the coercive psychiatric establishment, that sold us the depression of Tony Soprano for the sake of profits and power, will end up being right on the target.

How to get back to sanity? Although the numbers may have different values in other galactic systems, here on Earth, their intrinsic value cannot be denied. The problem is that it is easy to debase money. How so? With too much credit flooding the market. 'Usury' is thus the culprit #1 of the upcoming global demise. 'Usury' has been around for centuries because people are always eager to spend beyond their means and are lazy to save. But since the day of Reckoning is approaching fast, it is time to admit to the following: Usury or IOUs, commonly called Fiat Currency is in fact a Destroyer of Labor - Destroyer of Capital. So far the only outspoken monetary reform advocate is Congressman Ron Paul who Introduced 'Bill To Refrom the U.S Monetrary System in 2003. He was followed by the State Representative, Henry W. McElroy and his Monetary Bill in July 03. The Nevada State Ruled The Fed. Reserve as unconstitutional in March in same year. And much more recently, the High Priestess of US Monetarism indicted The Fed ... .. who will be next?

What will have earned the Chinese sweatshops when the so-called rich West will no longer be able to borrow? The World Debt pyramid is crumbling.

There is too much fiction involved here, CNBC Cramer yelled as of 01/07. Cramer continues:

Whe now banks which do not know what they are doing...
Where the heck is the S.E.C? ... I have never seen this
level of fiction... I don't know if I would want
to tell the truth: this is too dangerous... the American
people should be fed up with

Many now worry that the Good Times were mostly a mirage. This global upcoming credit crunch will be a Crisis that may make 1929 look a 'walk in the park' and is going to morph middle-class citizens into 'Tycoons of Debt'. Banks, worldwide, are getting prepared for a brutal stock market capitulation whose impact will detonate first a $700 trillion derivatives scheme which Buffett himself calls 'financial WMDs'. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Davos, wrote as of 1/24 that the US is about to slide into the Dangerous 1930s 'Liquidity Trap'. Unfortunately there is more: On the other side of the Atlantic 'European shops saw trading crash in November, the EU statistics agency said this month, adding to signs that the economy may be slowing', a CNN article revealed as of January 8. Even the Euro at risk from Europe’s economic storm. Darker than a parody: US could spark global fall and trigger global recession this year and stymie years of robust growth in Asia and Africa, the UN said last week. Since the current rate of house price decline will destroy $2.2 trillion of wealth this year, we can grasp why the credit card debts are set to soar as does non-payment. According to Paul Craig (former Editor of the Wall Street Journal), 80% of Americans Have Experienced a Falling Share of US Income. There will be No Escape from War and Unemployment, he adds. A Trends Guru is actually foreseeing a 'Wall Street will crash, that everyone's going to be living out of storage lockers and the government won't be able to help. How surreal does it sound? Until it is understood that the power game and highway spending frenzy come with strings attached, the death of the economy will remain the economy of death.

"Naturam non vinces nisi parendo."
(You will not master [conquer] nature unless you obey it.) -- Roger Bacon

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $1,000 Trillion?

2007-11-24T09:25:00.001-08:00

featured on 321gold.com and bmsinc.com
published on: americanchronicle.com and opednews.com

I write each editorial under the impression that a major event is going to prevent me from drafting the next one. My fear almost came true. This one was scheduled to be released early October then delayed due to an avalanche of scary news unseen before in my lifetime. The threat of 'monetary terrorism' has only one remedy called 'financial detoxification'. However, thanks for taking the time to read this column, which could have easily been much longer. As you will see, nobody can stop this freight train.

The story of the upcoming world crash is hidden in plain sight. Even mayor Bloomberg has jumped in the gloom and doom bandwagon: a global economic downturn was looming, triggered by the "lunacy" of public debt, he declared last month. Meanwhile denial continues. Although nearly 70% of the Americans do fear a recession, the possibility of a major crisis is not considered. A crisis? Not in my backyard, most of them think. It all boils down to faith. To be fair, the 'empire mentality' was born with history. Eventually people wake up to the harsh reality that the empire lied to them. The only successful government programs are wars and economic crises. When two or three decades of prosperity end with a crash and geopolitical crisis, what does this mean - frankly? Once again, the numbers tell a very different story than which we are being told. Yes dear Readers, you're not hallucinating. There is currently at least a $1,000 trillion dollar black hole in the world economy. To get the full picture, please keep on reading.

We have 600 trillion in world liabilities plus more than a 400 trillion-derivatives neutron bomb, all of which will go off when the Westerners (from EU and US) will no longer be able to borrow. The credit crisis could be just beginning according to, the Calcutta-born Australian Satyajit Das , a derivatives specialist who speaks of nearly $500tn. Das doesn't chew his words:

... Defaulting middle-class U.S. homeowners are blamed,
but they are merely a pawn in the game," he says. "Those loans were invented so that hedge funds would have high-yield debt to buy..."

Well, that was then and there is now: since November 22, 2007, the derivatives exposure has taken another new surreal dimension. They grew at the fastest pace in at least nine years to $516 trillion in the first half of 2007. If you wonder which of the two - pure greed or destructive stupidity - rules the world, just know that you're no longer alone.

In America, the clock is dangerously ticking for consumers: the party's over, they are are truly tapped out. While it is difficult to make sense of mega-digits such as 1,000 trillion, this amount doesn't include consumers' debts. Although it is kind of tricky to say when the credit soufflé will flatten, those grasping the dangers of a negative savings rate are already taking action. Well, the smartest and they are a strict minority at this stage. Some amog the most 'cash-strapped' Americans are raiding their 401(k)s . Not knowing what is really going on, many might be prompted to turn to the 2 trillion already in pre-approved when times were booming, in the form of credit cards. To give you an idea of the dire situation, last May and June saw spikes in the amount of revolving debt, 12.2% and 8.4% respectively. The consumer credit 'is' the next bubble without a doubt. There are a growing number of debt-laden homeowners preferring to save plastic first.

Delusions, survival and credit. People want to keep accessing credit when they cannot stretch it financially instead of cutting down spending drastically or do whatever it takes to find an extra job. Talking of jobs, did you know that in 1972, wages reached their peak. Today, real wages are nearly one-fifth lower - inflation adjusted!

Beyond the climax
Now even an infusion of cash doesn't propel the market anymore. The Dow Jones behaves irrattionally. Thanks to the PPT (Plunge Protection Team). The economy as a whole has been rather stagnant in the West. Major European economies are on life support. They cannot overcome their costly social programs and the flood of (clandestine) immigration which is as bad as in the U.S. In a Forbes article we read that France has been in chronic deficit for 15 years. In 2005, Standard & Poor's said it may downgrade the credit ratings of Germany and Italy, two of Europe's largest economies, unless their governments rein in spending and cut debt. In 2007, German unemployment remains stuck at 16.5% and in 2006 Berlin was reported as bankrupt. Further Italy was described as the real sick man of Europe by The Economist in 2005 whatsoever. The credit crunch has also taken hold in Australia where personal debt is worse than during Great Depression. The situation is equally dire in Britain, where house prices are even more overvalued (than in the US). A spectacular crash cannot be ruled out, the IMF warned last month.

It is going to get worse before it gets better: the latest report by Goldman Sachs makes it crystal clear, the global economy hits a 'crunch'. As if this weren't enough, the IMF spreads gloom on 2008 by confirming that impact would be worse in 2008. The IMF and Sachs were seconded by the US Treasury Secretary acknowledging that we must prepare for a prolonged turmoil. Debt deflation is a nasty beast. The majority of bad-debt losses will be uncollectible in whole or in large part.

Forget about the Dow 14,000 and ask yourself frankly if you feel today better off than last year, or two years ago. That consumers must now resort to their credit cards to pay their monthly bills while banks are tightening their standards is a bad omen. As to wonder why the heck they have preapproved two trillion in the first place? On one hand they try to appear wary about further credit deterioration, on the other hand they continue their reckless marketing tactics. Their brand new targets are minority homeowners on the brink of foreclosures and college students, which they recruit as credit-card pushers to circumvent the restrictions banning credit card solicitations on campuses. Meanwhile the sin of usury continues to bankroll Congress. the US Senate Panel okayed $850 billion debt increase, ignoring the remark of 'Bubble Man Greenspan' himself, when he said that the demand for U.S. debt may be at `limit'. Cynicism knows no boundaries: the same man who warned Congress has in fact denied that regulators failed to foresee the problems which caused the global credit crunch. Though this didn't preventing him from applauding the performance of the housing market-bubble! On the top of that, and this is absolutely sickening, 'he' declared early October 07 that the fate of world economy lies with US housing... He should be jailed for the rest of his life. Period.

As foreclosures skyrocket across the US and threaten to bring down real estate prices by 50% in some cities according to Yale University professor Robert Shiller, more and more everywhere we read about the world credit-liquidity crisis unfolding. Truth to be told, central banks face a liquidity trap. Only some anchors and a minority of sound economists see the bad 'Omen' coming our way as Goldman announced this very week that to cut back their lending by as much as $2 trillion. We are so debt-inflated that such a move is going to contract and strangle the economy for good. We may thank the bankers for taking care of our wallets.

Just a question before I continue: did you hear about the British the Northern Rock-bank run by any chance? If you did you're lucky because it was not a major issue on any of the channels I am used to watching. Whether we'll be witnessing bank runs in America remains to be seen. As of 9/2/07, in the Financial Times the following headline could be read: The ongoing credit turmoil has the hallmarks of a bank run.

The current turmoil in the financial markets
has all the characteristics of a classic banking crisis,
but one that is taking place outside the traditional banking
sector, Axel Weber, president of the Bundesbank, said at
the weekend... Some Federal Reserve policymakers also
privately see comparisons between the current distress
in credit markets and the bank runs of the 19th century,
in which savers lost confidence in banks and demanded
their money back, creating a spiralling liquidity crisis
for institutions that had invested this money in longer-
term assets... His comments came as Frederic Mishkin, a
Fed governor, argued for a rapid and aggressive monetary
policy response to any fall in house prices. His diagnosis
of the financial crisis was echoed by other experts...
Paul McCulley, managing director of Pimco, said there was
a 'run on the shadow banking system'. He said the shadow
banking system held $1,300bn of assets that now had to be
put back onto the balance sheets of the banks...

Sorry but weren't we told the Federal Reserve was created in order to avoid that type of moral hazard? Where is the point now to go back to square one and find out that we're in worst shape than before the inception of the bank, in 1913. Yes back then panics were a reality, although the common man was unaware that they were linked to the competition between bankers and their reckless speculation. The same unethical behaviors occurring today on Wall Street, Danny Schechter exposes. Blaming the 'gold standard' was a myth invented for the ignorant masses, which embraced the Fed like a savior. What should have been implemented is putting Congress in charge of regulating the money supply, just as stipulated by the US Constitution. Infate or die. There is no other choice, my friends. The Fed has pumped over $47 Billion into financial system several days ago.

Irrationality plagues debt-based economies since they are backed by consumers 'confidence. The willingness to take on debt goes along with the optimism that one will be able to repay. This explains why the moral hazards linked to paper money are enormous. Most of the people think that printing more money is the solution, and so are bailouts. But what the heck can a bailout achieve when the interbank lending business itself has broken down almost completely? In the Financial Times as of 9/04/09, we could read the scary headline: Sense of growing Crisis over interbanks deals.

Unicredit analysts say: 'The interbank lending business
has broken down almost completely.... it is a global phenomenon
and not restricted to just the euro and the dollar markets...
if this situation continues, it could potentially have very
serious implications...

Are those at the head of our monetary institutions a bunch of idiots or do they have a plan? Considering the state of global finance, which is pretty well documented on moneyfiles.org, it is indeed a difficult to make sense of the credit market shutdown. Here is a NYTimes excerpt, also published as of 9/04/09

... Banks to test debt market this week: All summer,
bankers have sweated on Wall Street. Instead of spending time at
the golf course or at their summer houses, many found themselves
in the office trying to make sense of the credit market shutdown
that had left their companies responsible for the billions of
dollars used to finance leveraged buyouts, yet facing uncertain
prospects of getting investors to take some of the debt off their hands...

Flash back. In his 9/05/07 article, Stephen King, a HSBC banker and regular columnist at the independent.uk, mentions several ugly truths when admitting that in order to save the innocent, we may need to bail out the guilty. Rewards for failures is a typical elite thing. It is how the powers-that-be and their cheerleaders have always colluded. However, this sums it up pretty well. The bailout logic is borrowed from a collectivist concept that the government is the ultimate wealth creator. Though there is something faulty in this particular case: why can't the government just make sure that its citizens are provided with the adequate financial education instead, so the guilty can be prosecuted rightfully? This major failure raises another issue: should the state be in charge of the education? On Blomberg.com, the columnist Mark Gilbert takes a radical stance by arguing in favor of easing the money-market crisis by letting banks go bust. Bailouts merely postpone the outcomes while making it worse. 'Helicopter Ben' and his clique have thus chosen to completely implode the world economy. This is a super-duper bad-loan bailout scam, Bill Fleckenstein concludes. The truth is that Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., are just 'Enrons' waiting for their day of reckoning. And the game goes on and on. As the monetary scientists improve their old tricks to save 'them' from disgrace by raising more than $60 billion, some already wonder if the *Banks Stabilization Fund* will work:

... It is quickly being realized that it doesn’t really
solve the problems, Joshua Rosner, a managing director at the
research firm Graham Fisher & Company who had been skeptical of
the proposal, told The Times. The path they have taken of skimming
off the cream from the top doesn’t resolve the fact there is poison
at the bottom....

Doomed profits:
What has happened over the last decades is that the world financial institutions have learned better to shift risks - they think. The result of this shortsighted assumption is that our security systems have remained dormant, allowing the 'easy money binge' to perpetuate the illusion of wealth.

Even Chinese investors are betting all they have on a dead cat bounce. They are so infatuated with their shares that they don't hear their own lawmakers sounding the alarm.

..."Although listed companies achieved rapid growth,
investors should still beware of hidden bubbles behind the
profit surge and invest in a prudent and rational manner,"
said the report released on Sunday. According to the report,
the interim profit figures relied too much on yield of investment
in the securities market and the prospects of a continued profit
increase is doubtful...

This insane credit expansion fuelled by unethical speculation will cost China dearly. Damages are already showing: rivers are so polluted that they are described as on the verge of collapse. In turn heavy pollution is blamed for soaring birth defects and disease englufs the country. This only on a human level. The economic fallout will be unprecedented.

All is a matter of psychology and perception whatsoever. And this will not prevent the world economy from falling off a cliff. Hard data always wins over in due time. Once does not wipe off 1,000 trillion in world liabilities just like that, even if this is electronic or virtual money. Strangely, it is very rare to see 'super bulls' and 'perma-bears' converge: The bulls by calling for bailouts and the bear by nodding pessimistically. The profits of doom will be soon causing the next shocks to the broad market.

Those who are forecasting Armageddon in the hope that
the Fed will come to the rescue are, for the most part, stock-
market bulls. But, strangely, their views are shared by their
opposites, the so-called perma-bears. Perma-bears have long
argued that the American economy in general (and the housing
market in particular) represents an unsustainable bubble, inflated
by cheap credit and a dramatic mispricing of risk. Convinced
that the downturn they have forecast is finally here, they write
off as fantasy any signs that the rest of the economy might
weather the housing and financial-market storms.

Both groups now envision the perfect storm coming our way.

Now comes the nasty 1,000 dollar trillion question: what will credit agencies say after the demise, when an increasing scrutiny will point to them as the culprits responsible for coercive and perilous speculation?

Lethal Collusion Exposed:
In the FTimes last month again, one could read that credit rating agencies were being investigated for their symbiotic relationship with investment banks in the EU. Axel Weber, President of the Bundesbank, said: What we are seeing is basically what we see underlying all banking crises. In America the response has been less sharp but critical nonetheless, the same FTimes columnist reports. Of course the agencies deny any wrongdoing. This shouldn't come as a surprise. They have always done so. It became just more blatant during the subprime debacle. Now that the damages are done, the S.E.C is probing ratings agencies' subprime role. According to CBS, last September, the federal agency hasn't come to any conclusions about their explanations for unexpected losses on those assets. Remember Enron? How many people are currently jailed? And they will be asked again many questions when the consumer credit bubble pops. How does it come that they turned a blind eye to $1,000 trillion black hole, do you think? Barry Ritholtz' conclusion establishes the abysmal track records of Moody's, Fitch and S&P.

Ellen Brown has probed a 300 year-old scheme maintained in place (despite the boom-bust cycles) with the complicity of the common man who views the government and central bankers as wealth managers. The cliques at the top, which have enjoyed the ignorance of the masses for centuries long, are now faced with a boomerang effect. For them too, chickens have come back home to roost.

Do you believe me now when I speak of 'financial detox' whose consequences may be as severe as the great depression? We didn't get there because of a lack of regulations but through products sold as exotic financial instruments (credit derivatives, commercial paper, hedge funds, CDOs, CDSs, SIVs, ABCP, etc), hence any astute way to recycle debts found its way hrough. I don't know how work most of these instruments, but in the Asia Times, James Cumes, describes this financial addiction quite well:

When everyone in the house is crazy, only the sane seem
like fools. So it was when the financial addiction spread everywhere.
Then everyone who was not taking his daily dose of heroin or cocaine
became the fringe-dweller, the oddball, the brake on progress, the
party-pooper at the greatest no-cash-down, how-to-spend-it shindig
that our planet has ever known. Debt piled on debt everywhere: in
households, corporations, public finances and international deficits,
in magnitudes that had never been even glimpsed in the most creative
imaginations before.

Back to the basics
Pessimism doesn't encourage to pile on debt, and until the loan is spent generally a feeling of invincibility can be experienced. Credit happiness is short-lived. Just as with drugs, there is a withdrawal.

Although consumer borrowing is a very important part of the equation, debt monetization (or recycling) between banks might be even more so. There are currently fears that lending between banks have ground to a halt. In the EU, we're talking of 100bn that should have been dealt with last August. In the UK it was a matter of 70bn over the next 10 days (in a article written in August). More alarmingly, ECB made 269-billion euro refi offer as market tensions persisted as of 09/12/07. Not only banks created a monster in the first place, now they also want us to believe that refinancing debt to pay debt is the safest bet on earth. The Bank of England Governor must be sweating heavily though. A few days ago he declared that markets are 20% overvalued and poised for severe fall.

On September 9, another HSBC executive endorsed 'the credit squeeze' on CBSMW but with a much gloomier tone. The worst is not over. According to him it is all about damaged confidence among the market players that needs to be restored. Confidence is broken and the outcome will be 'da' crash of the millennium Dr. Ravi Batra explains while remaining positive in the long run:

... we are now more overvalued than Japan was in 1990.
So certainly most American financiers know we are in a bubble
economy but they hate to admit it because they think that
they are one way or another responsible for it.... That could
lead to a political revolution, but I do not believe it will
lead to a dictatorship. I think we will see the rule of money
end and that we (the majority of Americans and citizens around
the world) will benefit by a tremendous revolution... Well
first there will be a lot of destruction of money

Citizens and investors alike will learn the hard way that coercion is the root of all evils. Indeed, how coercive is forcing people to take on 401ks and IRAs to avoid taxation, not to mention taxation itself. This among other things: such as encouraging the use credit cards to buy stocks by making plastic a way of life. What to think of super bonuses prompting CEOs to cook their books, all of which condone short-term gambling along with the pump and dump mentality. It is interesting to mention that an average CEO' salary was about 25 times more than the common worker in the 70's. By 2005 it shot up to 465 times more! The worst coercion is without a doubt cheap interest rates delivered by central banks directly and which rejoice people gravitating around the lending industry. Cheap interest rates go along with pervasive corruption and predatory lending.

In short any type of coercion provokes an amoral speculative frenzy. And this looks very blatant when analyzing the story behind every boom and bust cycles. Such trends will go away the day the average investor will have understood that becoming a 'fat cat' in a short period of time is generally the result of a lack of discipline and ethics - at the expense of the gullible being lured into asking the government more incoherent regulations that do not address the fundamentals.

Something fishy:
Every year and worldwide, thousands of college students in economics are recognized by their peers. A distinction they welcome proudly as the door to brilliant career opportunities open. If they have the right connection, all the better: many will end up working for big financial firms or even government or centrals banks. Although is surely is amazing that our fate lies in the hands of those prominent people one does not need a PhD in economics to understand why the obsession with growth dominates all political debates, and why lawmakers make employment a high priority of theirs. To grasp the rhetoric behind the numbers, one has to take a look at the big picture to see why 'growth and GDP' are in fact a tale concealing one of the most blatant fallacies ever.

Although this is recurrent in the so-called rich countries, let's take the example of the USA. How does it come that the twin deficits are ever increasing, the national debt just went past 9 trillion dollars. Finding items 'made in America' has become a tour de force - all this despite the boom! The problem is that the word 'economy'(and 'forest' alike) is an abstraction. Both do not exist. A forest is composed by trees and an economy sustained by humans.

Not only because people cannot sell and buy everything at the same pace, making theories and rules for the majority does not work. Basing the GDP on consumption is additionally fatal since it is impossible to live beyond one's means forever. If you want to find an explanation to the business cycles, here it is.

The End Of Conventional Wisdom
The GDP fairy tale has been conventional wisdom for decades. Anyone having a good sense of logic see the hoax of a model based on debt consumption and extreme consumerism. Spend or die is economic cannibalism. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to ponder the origins of our 1,000 trillion sinkhole. To be fair there are other ingredients contributing to the mess we find ourselves in today but since economics is the only way to gauge 'Property Rights' and 'Freedom', for the sake of our survival we must reject doomed theories such as these. Let's cross our fingers very hard and take action, Dr. Ravi Batra may not be a dreamer after all.

Does Marketing 'Envy' Cause Poverty?

2007-08-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Also published on opednews.com

Until 9-11, and its ensuing epiphany, I wasn't much interested in economics. Then I quickly grasped that studying the arcane art of money and power was much more entertaining than watching any Hollywood thriller ever produced. Before stating anything else further, my belief is that economics and philosophy complete one another. Although some might argue otherwise, a diatribe as to whether 'Envy' belongs to the realm of philosophy or economics doesn't serve any real purpose at this stage. The bottom line is that 'envy' is detrimental to wallets and portfolios. As a matter of fact, in the Western culture, the world 'Envy' doesn't sound as bad as 'Jealousy'. In many instances 'envy' is even perceived as flattering. It has little to do with its initial meaning, which you will see can be highly threatening.

One of the most striking examples of blatant 'envy' is the made-in China buying frenzy, especially the counterfeit market that may reach up to 1.3 trillion dollars in the world economy by 2010. As most of the glamorous brands selling 'envy' relocated in China in order to satisfy their 'envious' stockholders, their products also became a lot more affordable for the masses. Dynamics of the market being what are, the democratization of 'envy' played out as expected. Indeed it didn't take long at all to see the invasion of fake goods increasing exponentially.

The madness of the 'envious' crowds will end in tears once again. The 'live richly' mindset has much to do with the craze that pumped up the average Chinese stocks by more than 400% since late 2005 - and which shows no sign of slowing. The Chinese government cannot do a thing to rein in the so-called red-hot economy.

But let's go back to our knockoff issue. Considering that this underground market is deeply rooted and has allowed rampant corruption, it is now entirely futile to seek the protection of law enforcement. Furthermore, what will the situation be like within the 5 to 10 years ahead? It can only go from bad to worse: the quality also being determined by the laws of demand and supply has gotten so much better that the difference between the real and the faux is fading gradually. We can effectively see the 'envy' at work from the top down. While is it difficult to say when exactly, one doesn't need a PhD in economics to foresee the next scenario: those who can really afford the real brand names will look for new symbols of wealth, leaving the current ones at the mercy of the mass market.

Although little is said about that, the consumer ought to know: beside electronics, there now also are knockoff drugs, auto and airplane pieces finding their way to the market. The message is clear; Nature has worked in a way to make us understand that a big gap between the rich and the poor cannot exist. That 'financial envy' translates into a suicide economy. The 'sky is the limit theory' is a first-class delusion… along with power. Central bankers, which helped those famous brand names to take over the world using mega-jumbo-loans, do not and cannot create wealth. They are highly skilled illusionists implementing the best democracy and economy money can buy at the expense of the gullible.

Instead of paraphrasing boring theories, here is another resonating example: just imagine that you've got enough money to buy yourself a home and are given the choice between two quite different neighborhoods. The choice between a smaller and a bigger house: the smaller one costing more because it is located in a better neighborhood. Considering that the majority tends to live beyond its means, the data suggest that the nicer part of the town would be chosen. It is the 'envy' that foments the dream of having as much as (or more than) our neighbors after all - doesn't it?

By its very nature, 'envy' is generally associated with materialistic possessions - consciously or not. People find nothing amiss with labeling neighborhoods according to their financial states. They do not realize that it is their 'envy', which makes speculation more acute in certain boroughs than others.

So in the case of the housing industry, the fact that 'envy' might favor self-segregation is not far fetched. And as we all know there is a link between cultures and economics. But is it ethical? That 1 million of individuals believe in the same lies doesn't make them true. 'Self-segregated envy' is like banding together to party, but has consequences such as fueling discrimination ghettoization and by extension, racism. Over the time there surfaces an agenda to evict people from poorer neighborhoods when the nicest 'envied zones' start becoming overcrowded. People do not understand the boomerang dynamics of a so-called red-hot market, which they have themselves created; that a skyrocketing market ends up pricing out potential buyers; forcing those earning less to resort to credit cards use for doing simple daily errands. While (these days) it is hip to express amazement at the living standards of anyone who can afford a hefty mortgage, credit expansion inflates the value about just nearly everything on a national scale. And since salaries are never adjusted to inflation, a loss of purchasing is generally felt as a fatality.

So the need for affordable housing remains high on our politicians'agenda. The government comes to the rescue at the expenses of the taxpayers. Enforcing charity is a concept that lacks logic. Intuitively people endorsing this ideology know that they are being taken for a ride by 'envy' but as do not know how to fight it, they end up imitating the opponents called 'the evil right'. This said, generosity is not a liberal trait, there are genuine charitable people everywhere, but Leftists are the most vocal when it comes to social programs to counter "envious corporations and their henchmen". It is a near certainty that after the world crash, the victims of 'envy' will call for more solutions in favor of 'wealth redistribution', across all political spectrums.

Ironically the fight against inequality depends on our own willingness to analyze the consequences of 'Envy'. The liberal fight against poverty was doomed from the start. Inequality will be dramatically reduced the day we stop fighting for it. It is the motivation of 'Envy' versus 'Envy'. 'Vengeance' goes along with 'envy'. As described at the very end of my earlier editorial, group fighting has been throughout history a massive failure. This has happened despite the so-called lobbies and their so-called safety nets in place to protect the consumers' from envy. Because the objectives are never attained, the victims of 'power and speculation envy' demand more and more. But let's not shy away from the harsh reality. What motivates such behaviors is called 'wealth redistribution envy'. Fueling each others' envy, as we can now see, has framed us into a fatal dead end.

It is also worth to noting that all currencies have a long history of envy. Just like fiat money commonly named IOUs, the 'gold envy' , too, has provoked countless wars when trade agreements were making rackets look cheaper. This formula is still a framework today. It would be wrong to perceive this editorial as written for Christians. Other religions and cultures refer to 'envy' as the 'evil eye'. The Bible regards 'envy' as a capital sin. People aware of the 'threat envy' will tend to live more simply and hide many signs of their successful enterprises. Developing a good sense of humility is the message here. Obviously religious leaders, in the broadest sense, have failed to teach the basic appropriate insights. To change the course of destiny, an individual realization must come first.

Let's dig deeper if you do not mind.

Because people' s envy always colludes and society's rules are made for and by the people at the top, the gap between social classes is ever worsening. No matter how well intentioned the smarter people are, they must protect their interests and (un)willingly harm the weaker. There is no real conspiracy per se, that is just how Nature works. Blind confidence in the ruling class is extremely hazardous to health.

The Founding Fathers knew a great deal about 'power envy', and this is precisely why they advocated 'self-government'. An ideal that has not gone very far and now resembles a mere utopia. Though I wish all the best to Ron Paul, the only true constitutionalist and who was last month interviewed by Google executive Elliot Schrage. Remember that hope doesn't exist unless it is followed by actions!

Envious people are obsessed with the greedy. Greed, which basically a double-edged sword, is not fundamentally dangerous since it is about protecting ones own assets more or less compulsively. It is not our business if our neighbors save every dime they can after all. Saving is good. But when greed is supported by envy, then we have a lethal cocktail. 'Power envy' and 'greed envy' are the perfect bedfellows that also go along with 'demise'.

'Envy' is also behind economic bubbles. Thinking of the word 'bubble' I almost called this column 'Born Again bubbleites'. So what is my definition of a 'bubbleite' (or bubble-addicts)? It is somebody who sees nothing amiss with the theories of a 'system' financed by IOUs, and regards debt bondage as a necessity to prosper - with envy.

Our system is a multi-layer pyramid. The upper level depends entirely on the lower one and so on. Despite the so many layers, there are clearly three categories comprised under the label of 'Born Again Bubbleites'.

The Guru-Bubbleites whose jobs are to make Wallstreeters as rich as possible, as quickly as possible, and which the common man depends upon to have food on his plate and a roof over his head. The Gurus are ready to do whatever it costs to make you believe that a well-managed monetary injection is key to sustain employment. Alas this game is a sneaky one because too much money chasing too few goods always causes inflationary pressures, which in the long run lead to currency devaluation if not destruction. Actually and among the very few who dare send a warning once in a while, we find Adrian Blundell-Wignal, a senior official from the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) who argues that a g-i-a-n-t bubble threatens the world economy. He was followed closely by Goldman Sachs guru wondering as to whether 'Is America becoming a global credit risk?' If everything was doing so well, why did ECB and Fed inject $150 billion into jittery market this week?

`

`No one really knows how big the current credit problems are,'' said Charles Diebel, head of European rate strategy at Nomura International Plc in London in a note e-mailed after the ECB announced its liquidity-providing operation.``This is undermining confidence in the system as a whole and hence the reaction this morning.''

Again, if the global economy engineered by the monetary scientists was indeed rolling why did the Asian Stocks Plunge on Credit Fears recently? Although media complicity in the cover-ups is fading due to the Internet, the Guru Bubbleites still can get away with their sins. While they will be first looking for scapegoats when things fall completely apart. While many people wonder about the housing market, which is compared to the 'Tulip mania' by the U.S. Senate Committee, they ignore that their fate has already been decided.

Then come the Cheerful-Bubbleites or the 'icons of success envy': according to the geniuses listed in Fortune 500, Right now it is as good as it gets, says Rik Kirkland who wrote 'The Greatest Economic Boom Ever' for the magazine. Like me, Kirkland must have been scratching his head for a while. I too remember the last global good time in the 1970s and how it ended. Kirkland adds:

... a lot could go wrong. And it may not feel like a day
at the beach to most Americans.

The Cheerful-Bubbleites never listen to any bad reports officially. They are much more preoccupied with their glamorous image of 'envied business people' and exploiting the so many loopholes (with the help of their wealth managers) the system has created for their discretion.

The Puppet-Bubbleites, which are the consumers feeding the multi-layer social pyramid by working hard and dreaming of success envy. They want to feel rich even if this implies having 2 or 3 jobs, living from paycheck to paycheck and buying from China while piling on debts every day more and more. The common man has no idea about the true meaning of 'inflation'. This is a world issue, no matter the culture or race. They applaud every time a lawmaker promises to deliver more IOUs. As a result there are now 600 T-R-I-L-L-I-O-N in unfunded liabilities at all levels of the global economy.

As you read this, all major central banks are flushing the system with liquidity to reassure everybody that things are under control. BoJ, for example, has already siphoned off a total of 3.6 trillion yen between Tuesday and Wednesday last week. One trillion yens is about 8,607,867,997 dollars, so do the math. Remember what I stated earlier: there were $150Bn injected by the EBC and the Fed in concerto and today (as of August 23) the Fed added another 17.25 billion dollars into the financial system in three actions. Unfortunately with 600 trillion debts and rationally speaking, how can one believe that doing even more debts and bailing out Wall Street is actually a sign of sanity?

I fully agree with Kevin Duffy who concluded that the markets are now on crack... or some powerful opiate. Choose your poison. Dire warning: when the world economy will be about to crash down, they will ask the world taxpayers to bailout the world Banks under the guise to preserve employment. This is the end of the 'money envy' as we know it.

Philosophical insight:
Although Man is the most evolved creature on Earth, unlike animals he doesn't and cannot know what is good for him intuitively. He always has relied on empiricism and knowledge. Every man moves ahead according to his own understanding. Among so many warnings that have come and go, even the most rational insights have rarely been taken into account. As a matter of fact, the ruling class is allowed to rule because information is hindered. But this is no excuse to avoid the sorry state of world affairs. At some point the 'blame-envy' game will have to cease. Man was born to be the master of himself, as long as he follows the concepts of 'no force, no fraud'.

=============================
Envy and Poverty by Gary North
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north548.html

A Liquidity Nightmare: Drowning On Cash

2007-07-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

also published on: http://www.opednews.com

The Facts Or The "Con" In Con-Game:
In 2005, Stephen King, managing director of economics at HSBC and also a columnist for the Independent.uk news site stated that there was a crisis of faith among central bankers. Two years later, we can see why this confession should have read as: central bankers must stick to their pseudo-religious tones to proliferate public delusions of invincibility.

On the American front, the worst is yet to come for the housing market declared a quite famous Keynesian and Clinton' s economic advisor Nouriel Roubini. The subprime mess is so far bottomless and many expect more debt liquidation to work through the system. There were about 800 billion of loans that were given to people with bad or limited credit histories. Millions of people have yet to discover in the mail that their mortgage has gone up 40-50%. Some have gotten loans with so-called teaser rates of 1%. Those have seen their monthly payments too quadruple recently. Houses prices will have to go down. Because it is the housing market that sustained the whole economy and it will ripple through.

We're not talking of a small recession here. It is perfectly reasonable to forecast a 50-70% drop at this stage! History repeats itself. A Bloomberg headline speaks of an upcoming "bloodbath". The primary cause of the early 1990's recession was a real estate boom that turned bad due to speculative buying and lower credit standards. The problem is that this time it will be a lot more devastating. It is the worst housing market since the depression says Mr. Butler who oversees the trading desk and operations for over 12,000 individual and corporate clients, both in the United States and abroad at EverBank World Markets. As if it weren't enough, a big wig at the Credit Suisse stated that the "housing chain" is endangered. As to wonder whether he was referring to a "chain letter". To be fair, some are less alarmists but still foresee a widely disperse pain for the next few quarters. In its two page article "Bubble Mania In China" put on the net as of May 29. 2007, Wachovia's analysts stated that:

Since psychology has become more important that
fundamentals, we need to ask what would dampen
Chinese enthusiasm and confidence - after all
confidence is the "con" in con-game

Alas this definition couldn't be more appropriate since the Chinese stock market went up 400% from January 2006. If you think this is hysterical, wait there is more: a pattern of appalling confidence exposed by the USAtoday stating that the amount of government debt is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household, while by comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined. A grand total that is a little bit more than 628,000 dollars! So when the Chinese and even Japanese will realize the futility of keeping their USDs, one of the most popular doomsday scenario will play out. A Forbes columnist confirms that China accumulated $20Bn of dollar-based reserve monthly and without its sweatshops the country cannot export profit margins already under pressure. As a result we should expect more dollar reserve accumulation says a JP Morgan analysis. For how long exactly? Musical chair games are not ever lasting. Some nations are already scaling back and diversifying. Which is why the Euro has gained value against the USD. But a growing number of economists lean toward the end of the "world dollarization" whose effects will be devastating.

The carnival of debt goes beyond the U.S: at the other end of the world, Australians owe a staggering $160 -and counting-for every $100 of disposable income. Reserve Bank figures show that families are now siphoning a record 12 per cent of their disposable incomes to cope with interest payments. Closer, in the UK, the warnings have followed one another for about at least 5 years. The latest one (31st May) was as dramatic as the previous ones: Britons are edging ever nearer to a debt nightmare. According to the Registry Trust, up to a million households will face court action over their debts this year. On the Old Contient, the situation is truly appalling: Europe's Credit Bubble More Dangerous Than China's

And it is not all: a columnist (working for Bloomberg.com and whose articles are definitely a must read in my view) explains why a $12 trillion monster threatens globalization. He has interviewed a London-based global head of currency research at Morgan Stanley tells us to expect our doom by 2015 (this dealine is much too optmistic in my view). 12Tn is the current size of the U.S. economy, and it could create interesting problems for the world economy.

Having gotten themselves into an untenable situation, Asian governments are mulling how to use the money.
Let's just hope they do it wisely and carefully. Nothing less
than the future of globalization may hang in the balance.

Considering our global hyper-leveraged environment this is all would help detonate very likely the credit derivatives bubble on the Old Continent, which a financial Times journalist summarized here. The buy low, sell high insurance risk against defaults is what derivatives are in a few words. Economists regard the current situation as a Ponzi scheme, derived from an infamous conman in early 20th century, and whose scheme eventually collapsed. This would also be enough to send tremors throughout the system. With the American consumers behaving like spending robots running out of steam, it wouldn't be wise to bet on what seems "an ever lasting prosperity". In fact the USD has already lost 30% against all major currencies. Pundits who watch the sputtering housing boom (read: the beginning of the end) still believe in a recovery some time later this year or early 2008. But if the currency has already lost 30%, since its 2002 peak, it means that 1,000,000 condo is now 700,000 worth bucks. Many currency traders see the dollar lose another 10-15% before it stabilizes. Stabilization is the word to sustain con-fidence of course. This very extremely bad news: it will backfire and may prompt the US debt holders to dump their (worthless) dollars as more investors begin to do the same at record pace. The cynicism of this ugly tale is that there isn't one single major currency that is worth investing in it anymore. We are awash with liquidity, not wealth... awash with debts!

The planet is a debt neutron bomb, which was engineered by people thinking they can get rich by just embracing endless speculation while the masses mesmerized by their success have come to believe that "saving" was an obsolete concept. The big squeeze of the world consumers along with the sweatshops' exploitation have led to the birth of highly creative financial instruments never seen before.

Now one really has to wonder why the Democrats are in the hurry to raise the minimum wage standing now at $5,15 and which is scheduled to rise in 3 steps up to $7,25 an hour as of mid-2009. Considering the awful economic big picture, after the complete demise the plan surely would make more sense since at least 40% of the population will be without a job. CEOs will surely appreciate to have 2 employees for the price of one. Yep, dear readers, this is the harsh reality which is going to replace the rosy scenario that has played out so far. Look closer: this wage increase sounds like the beginning of communism. The ever profit seekers called corporation executives could easily be tempted to extend this new law whenever they see it fit and the 40% would quickly ten become 50... 60%? And when this time comes, many are going to finally understand the hoax behind such "socialist intention" and so-called tax-cuts. There never was any real tax-cut by the way. Like so many other things in the world where con-fidence has taken over the rules of Knowledge: it is a myth. Tax-cut was in fact replaced with inflationary pressures caused by a government whose budget is definitely out of control since 9-11. Deficit spending has a price and soon the bill will come due. This time we cannot ask the next generation to hold the bag.

How grave is it? Let's summarize the latest Greenspan's comment. He said that there was very little risk (if none at all) to see China dump the US treasuries because there wasn't any buyer out there. With nearly 60 trillion liabilities and the need to sell $2.5BN of debt daily to stay afloat, there are at least 70% of all the banknotes printed by the Federal Reserve abroad, held by central banks for the most part. Since the dotcom crash the same central banks were driven to buy the US dollars to support the world boom, so the countries they manage could also profit. This is what does currency hegemony. If the world currency is deadly inflated, the others must do the same to avoid a recession and/ or remain competitive. Japan is the most blatant example in the sense that the yen must remain cheaper than the greenback to remain productive. But as we now can see with the plunging dollar, that strategy was doomed since the start. At least Greenspan admits:

"We cannot continue this rate of growth in
China and the Third World. This cannot
continue indefinitely," Greenspan said in a
speech. "Some of these price/earnings
ratios are discounting nirvana."

As usual such a warning comes too late. Cheap money has a curse: it gives an impression of wealth while it discourages or gobbles savings. And fatally when the cycle has played out, we have a recession or worst a depression.

Have you noticed the aggressive trade mood between America and China lately? The red hot Chinese economy was fed with easy electronic money all the way long, and with the participation of the US consumers maxing out their credit cards or morphing their houses/condos into ATM machines. But now with the housing bust that has begun this year (and which is already affecting the wallets of so many) protectionism has become a daily preoccupation. You will not hear on TV what is the real cause of the tensions. The truth is that the Sino-US marriage of convenience is breaking up as the US households' willingness to borrow and spend gets exhausted. It is not without a reason that the instruments against defaults called "derivatives" have risen 24 percent in the first quarter to a record $533 trillion, BIS said as of June 10, 2007. Considering the state of the world economy, the problem is that those derivatives have been insuring "junk" for quite a while.

Yes for junk, you read well and if you've got difficulties to get the full picture, Steven Pearlstein has written a useful article about the current equity takeover, which depicts how to get filthy rich in 'Wall Street Paradise'. High valuations driven by cheap debt reached a new level. Although it is hard to see why one would buy a firm 10 times (or more) its generating profits, on Wall Street it is now accepted as conventional wisdom. Pearlstein agrees that predicting when the magic will end is kind of tricky. The expansion of America and the rest of the world were based on the delusion. In the developing countries too borrowing went without any restraint, $900bn between 2005-07. The moment of convergence is fast approaching and when that happens, we'll see an alignment of dominoes fall one by one.

As if it weren't enough, the Dutch bank ABN fears a global housing crash, citing the soaring borrowing costs, which could spark a housing slump on a 'global scale'. To add to the infamy, early June The Bank for International Settlements - BIS - made the same comment about the corporate section, sending a dire warning: the current takeover boom across the world is being funded by ever greater levels of debt, storing up trouble should rising inflation lead to a sharp rise in interest rates. But that was nearly two weeks ago or so. Since then, on June 25 more precisely, BIS sent another chilling reminder:

...years of loose monetary policy has fueled a
dangerouscredit bubble, leaving the global economy
more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than
generally understood... BIS pointed to a confluence
a worrying signs, citing mass issuance of new-fangled
credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt,
extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and
entrenched imbalances in the world currency system...

According to 'Implode-O-meter' 86 major U.S. lenders have gone under as of June 22, 2007. Until yesterday only middle and small size lenders were concerned, so many wouldn't take the anti-bubble crowd seriously. The collapse of a first B-I-G domino such as Bear Stearns left many speechless. Once again one could read more about this dramatic event on the Net than in the printed news. The first day after the fund's demise, the rumor of a bailout circulated like a wild fire. Should this option go ahead, it would be the largest since Long-Term Capital Management LP that received $3.5 billion from 14 lenders in 1998. Cynically speaking, inflation adjusted the Stearns' bailout is still a lot cheaper. Never mind, Wallstreeters continue to play their favorite musical chair game, turning a blind eye to the warnings concerning the hedge funds that have been labeled "unregulated businesses" which desperately need oversight. Last May 03, 2007, even the New York Federal Reserve warned that hedge funds pose a great risk.

Qui bono? Who benefits? ... Follow the money as usual: Piggybacking' roils credit industry, corruption running deep within lending industry. Sure, there will always be consumers trying to get a free ride but if freebies must be paid by the entire nation, then we have a serious problem and have to admit that President Andrew Jacskon was right when opposing and shutting down the 2nd National Bank in 1833. How About going back to the gold standard as congressman Ron Paul recommends?

Philosophical Insight:
Hope is a vain word. Unless followed by actions, hopes never come true. Hope is the ecstasy of masses and this is why big changes all go through social disruptions. Daydreams and reality often - if not always - reveal a great disconnect capable of shattering everything. The "Axioms of Freedom" come down to "no force and no fraud". The primary nemesis is group thinking and pejoratively "herd mentality". Controlling the money supply means controlling these "herds". This is how societies have been working since ever, and this at every level you look at. From the stock market gamblers and brokers to the powerful lobbies and smaller communities. Here is a pertinent question: could you name one government program that has been successful? If you have any hesitation, please go back to the page one of this essay and reread it very slowly. Whatever your culture and the country you live in "group thinking" has nothing to offer but the same diatribes. The "group" requires everybody to agree constantly to survive. And this is collectivism in its most subtle form. This is the very nature of lobbying. Lobbies are punished, financed or rewarded depending on the issues. That is what power is all about and why (any kind of) war is a government program. This is nothing less than fights between "herds". Much of the misery in this world is man-made. Sure, free association is allowed but if we do not learn that the "group" has only a very limited power in itself, we'll ever be able to work toward the betterment of society. This is something that the Founding Fathers of America had well understood. They drafted the U.S Constitution in that way, to make sure that the powers-that-be remain controllable.

==================
Recommended reading:
FREE-EBOOK: What Has Government Done To Our Money?
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/rothmoney.pdf

Winter Is Coming

2007-06-06T03:44:00.000-07:00

Also published on opednews.com May 23, 2007

The common people often regard the cycles of history as inexorable events with a feeling of powerlessness. And this bitterness tends to persist after reading "The Fourth Turning" by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book explains why history unfolds just like the fours season cycles. Spring or High, Summer or Awakening, Autumn or Unraveling and Winter or Crisis. Entertainment is guaranteed: this fast paced read filled with intriguing esoteric meanings. Additionally, the authors' arguments are heavily documented. The occurrence of the four seasons is set in motion by successive generations of voters, with the 4th Turning (Winter) precipitating the collision course between the seniors exiting the voting process and the new first generation whose willingness is to revolutionize the ancient thinking. What characterizes The Autumn season is the realization that hopes have not materialized and are thus abandoned. The most fascinating chapter is without a doubt the fall of the Roman Empire which begun with a 4th Turning.

Following Howe and Strauss' provocative theory, just after the millennium America will enter a new era that will culminate with a crisis comparable to the American Revolution, The Civil War, The Great Depression and World War 2. Although Howe and Strauss seem to argue that Turnings are inescapable, for anyone having studied hidden history breaking down the repetitive cycles resides in the ability to decipher and debamboozle what the educational establishment has forgotten to teach or has distorted. Those teachings involving "security" are ageless incentives. For the sake of security, many are ready to lose their liberties and this has always been the "Achilles Heel" of societies. Despite and beyond our obsessive quest for safety nets history cycles have repeated themselves over and over... so where is the catch?

The word "democracy" has been sold throughout history as a theory which essentially works well on paper. But what happens when premises are erroneous? What is democracy worth exactly? This is the tough question we ought to ask ourselves today when reading any article. Because everything is bound to change, Uncertainty is the mother of all theories. Only a reasonable level of skepticism can prevent blind passions and fanaticism. This holds true for everything, in every field. Did you know, in astronomy for instance, that a recent study of massive black holes could make Einstein look like a Neanderthal at any moment? Talking of math, there can't be even the beginning of debate possible when the value of "1" is stretched constantly. Unfortunately stretching and disguising numbers has become a global sport. The problem is that this time the outcome won't be different either. As you read this, America needs to sell $2.5bn of debts daily to pretend that everything is fine. Debt is wealth... how long can it last before the doomsday machine activates what is called the "liquidity trap"?

The Inherent Problem With Centralization of Power:
Axiom #1: rulers take for granted that masses will forever be ignorant and/or too lazy to think for themselves.
Axiom #2: rulers must know better and thus protect the Truth, even if this mean concealing it.
Axiom #3: no truth can remain buried forever and therefore manifests in the failures of a system whatsoever.

Because reforms rather target quick fixes instead of exploring the root causes , they are doomed to fail - all of which means that the system is designed to reward failures. Logically no power would survive at all if the three axioms above were fully understood by the majority. Knowledge is our safest bet to make earth a better place, not coercion. The only gauge we've got to see what truth is really like, are mathematics and by same token a sound economics which implies a system without stretchable/easy/elastic money and usury. Don't believe me? Here is an example: last April 24, 2007 on the National Center For Policy Analysis wesbite, it was said that the true federal deficit isn't the $200bn-odd a year discussed in newspapers but nearly 10 times more or $2.4tn ... guess who will pay?

The Money Trail:
The death of the economy is the economy of death. Basically societies fight over power, natural resources when racket is less expensive than persuasion and peaceful trade. Let's throw in a wild card... Taking the stance that Americans may wake up eventually is not too far fetched: political turmoil on a systemic level (predicted by Strauss and Howe) is likely if we keep our eyes on the ball. Look at the illegal immigration situation for example. The majority of Americans is against it and it is going to get worst before it gets better. Lou Dobbs was accused of an "agitator" the other day. Since the dotcom debacle, the economy has relied on our ability to borrow as if there was no tomorrows. Abroad it is deja-vu all over again: Japan is on the brink of another consumer loans crisis, debt arranged in Britain and on the Continent advances to record levels... even Dick Cheney’s banker sees world bubble going through an exponential phase which will eventually burst dramatically! More concretely, U.S boomers are going bankrupt at faster rate, those over 55 are squeezed by mortgage debt, higher health care costs. Then we've got companies buying back their own shares at record pace to boots earnings per share, so profit can continue to look healthy; Bank Of England warning of a surge in cheap corporate lending with looser credit standards that have increased the vulnerability of the (global financial) system. If we have the impression that the housing subprime blowout was contained, it is because the mainstream outlets have been hiding the true meaning of the numbers. TV broadcasts were also quick to rumor a government intervention in the form of a multi-billion bailout, which reassured the Wallstreeters. Yes there was no bailout in the end but some of the biggest lenders were forced to put several billion on the table to help homeowners in distress. While there are many ingredients needed to cause a rally, confidence is essential. If the housing sector (considered as the pillar of the economy) remains apparently strong, bullishness evolves in synch. Dow 13,000: thanks to the suckers?. The fear of missing a rally rules the game. Some call this "blind infatuation" with greed:

... Their passion for shares creates a very vulnerable situation… If bad news emerges, it may trigger unloading of shares initially among a small group of investors, which, if it snowballs into a large-scale exodus, would lead to a collapse in the equity market, Alex Tang Yee-yuk (research director at Core Pacific-Yamaichi International) said.

From a Keynesian standpoint those debts had a tremendous effect until now and that many people view them as necessary to propel an economy, is quite puzzling in itself though. On the other hand there is a lot of speculation in the credit market especially in the CDS (credit-default swaps) which can be explained to the neophytes very briefly as: A agrees to pay a series of premium to B; who agrees to compensate A if bonds default. But so far so good, huh? Market gamblers seem to enjoy the relatively new financial instruments to insure themselves against losses, alternatively, to speculate that a default will occur. Rationally a question pops in mind though. If the ability to service debts is limited to one's ability to repay eventually, why are those CDS reaching more than **nine times** the global GPD or approximately 400 trillion? Yep, nine times, you read well! While being super-mega insured makes everything look risk-free, inflated prices become a direct consequence. So yes, it too can make junk look priceless! If there is an insurance out there protecting the market from crises, what the heck... The sky is the limit dogma has prevailed until now. Even if many have rang the alarm bell on a regular basis: who cares?! In 2004 Warren Buffett provoked the beginning of a panic when calling the derivatives schemes: weapons of mass destruction.

There is more, the 'Yen Carry Trade' plot, for example, illustrates how unlimited speculation is taken for granted. Widely popular. Long story short, the carry traders acquire the yen at a near zero interest rate set by BoJ then go shop around. Buy low, sell high always determines the bets. Business as usual. Alas as history has shown that since the birth of the stock market the majority never succeeds to sell before it is too late. While China and America are accusing each other of being currency manipulators once in a while, Japan should be allowed to join the Club. It is actually worth to notice that Japan's living standards, which are often pictured as ones of the best of the planet, are now threatened with an abrupt end. After all it is **cheap money** that has kept afloat the Rising Sun since the Asian meltdown in the 90's. Ironically the national price tag of the intervention alone at the end of 2005 was more than 1 trillion dollars - for the taxpayers. Did you say 'demented policiy makers'? This is truly ironic: while the yen is being depreciated on purpose, the country is one of the most expensive spots on the planet. All this for the sake of profits: Japan now threatens us all.

Another chilling tale is that of "naked short selling". A broad manipulation that consists in selling stocks that don't exist. As this Bloomberg video reports, 6 billion dollars in shares cannot be cleared daily. In other words, more or less 7 million phantom transactions. Just imagine such news aired on a show like that of Lou Dobbs. This would provoke the stampede to the exits of the century. As to wonder what the S.E.C has been doing all this time. The scale of that very fraud is growing exponentially since no law enforcement agencies are doing a thing. Was the Spitzer anti-fraud unit a joke? We no longer should ask ourselves where the Wall Street bonuses are also coming from.

The 'yen carry trade', the 'derivatives' and the 'phantom shares' are most likely among the biggest frauds ever perpetrated by men (with high education degree) enjoying impunity because if their deeds were exposed, an immediate world economic collapse would ensue. The most terrifying is how those high ranked cliques and their close cheerleaders have skewed people's opinions about success and wealth. To make the matter worse, the legacies of Bubble-Man(Greenspan) and Helicopter-Money-Theorist-(Bernanke) have led us to a breaking point. Many experts watch the market carefully and issue a warning from time to time to no avail. Too much bearishness equates to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shall we swallow more blue pills to ignore that last week the US House Of Representatives held what was billed as a tripartite hearing of three subcommittees on 'Currency Manipulation and Its Effects on US Businesses Workers'? An hearing where they have discussed the monstrous imbalances of the world economy instiguated by a few at the switch of the printing press? Stephen Roach who attended the event conluced that the US Congress has now gone past the point of no return.

At the risky end of profits:
The point that this essay is trying to make is that profits are not and never sinless since they are regulated by knowledge and collusion. Cartels of all sorts have governed earth since the beginning of ages. Look at the OPEC, which was created after the crisis in the 80's to stabilize the oil price. It didn't prevent the oil price from skyrocketing and becoming the center of dangerous geopolitical chess game. Which stabilization? Never sinless because economics shapes power and power itself cannot be sustained if there is a full disclosure of all unethical deeds constantly. By essence, Truth is not profitable and ever will be. . In this regard, the quest for profits is a fallacy allowing the sustainability of an illusion. Just like altruism can be implemented to profit from misery, capitalism can lay down the premises of a society where people come before profits. Both capitalism and altruism are no dangers to societies as long as we do not fall in the trap of 'stretchable money'.

We live in times of extreme financial terrorism. Because Nature gives us everything for free, unlimited speculation cannot serve Mankind but serfdom. To get this formula right, it all depends on our own will to adopt new definitions and turn our back to a mirage that will never translate into reality. Sound too realistic? With the world financial demise in sight, I think not. Winter is coming... History is on its way to repeat itself again.

Bill Fleckenstein: The Dow's dangerous winning streak:The market's recent performance mirrors the strong runs that led up to the crashes of the Nikkei in 1989 and the Dow in 1929. Coincidence? Or warning?

While elite bashing can provide some relief, nothing will change as long as we do not question everything we take for granted. According to Bryan Caplan, whose book is sold on the Princeton.edu website, the greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters.
... voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.

Man is an intelligent creature whose ability to reason depends on his environment entirely. In this respect, it is true that we're all interconnected. Thus living as a Man implies a choice: that of behaving like a human or worst... a monster of destruction.

The " S " Word

2007-04-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

This essay will examine the gigantic failure of worldwide credit welfare as a centerpiece, and why it can easily be associated with modern-day Serfdom. Hence the " S " word as the title reads. Yet many Westerners would agree that slavery is intolerable and must be dealt with. Alas those asking for action generally ignore that in the 1850s a slave went for the equivalent of 40,000 present dollars while today a slave often cost under $100 as Dr Kevin Bales stresses in his video- documentary "Disposable People, New Slavery In The Global Economy" .

The latter also states that the number of slaves worldwide represent the largest number alive at one any time in history. Unfortunately there is more. Over the last century, slavery has taken a new turn concludes The National Geographic: There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade... Although slavery in its traditional form survives in many parts of the world, debt slavery of this kind, with varia- tions, is the most common form of servitude today...

This raises a series of daunting questions: what have the UN(ICEF), intern- ational charities and their myriads of NGOs been doing during all this time while the world was on its way to look like France, a few years before the Revolution?

Although abolishing any form of slavery is a noble task, working toward a dramatic improvement will be proven ineffective as long as we let ourselves be guided by our compassion. Addressing slavery starts at home. That's why we have so blatantly failed and have even made the matter much worse. It will remain a scourge as long as it is not understood that it is caused by bad economics, and/or allowed to occur because it serves economic purposes. There is no time to fool around anymore. While compassion is wonderful, there are plenty of so-called charities out there planning on getting fat with our guilt. Luckily old tricks are no longer working. According to a poll in the UK, a vast majority think African aid is wasted.

While the 1.7 trillion in financial aid to the 3rd world was decided between leaders and behind closed doors, in the West we have succumbed to the exposure to easy money thrown at us 24/7 as a way of life. Feeling rich and secure is an incredible incentive, alas our actions to achieve the Paradise on earth are leading us to self-destruction. Highway spending comes with a string attached; that of a curse, which makes people jump aboard a freight train because debt addiction operates just like... heroin. And this is simple to explain: piling on debt goes along with an (irrational) optimism making us think we're able repay. In the real world, it works otherwise. Each waning boom requires a monetary injection to avoid a bust. The "sky is the limit" mantra turns out being a first class delusion. In Europe for example, the ratio of household debt to disposable income in France is a modest 65%, compared with 115% in Spain, 146% in Britain, 171% in Holland, and 190% in Ireland as the Telegraph.uk points out. If fiscal discipline seems to be easier in France at first sight, cracks have appeared: the housing makert is now 25% overvalued, the newspaper says.

The price to pay for indebting future generations takes its very roots in the laziness to accumulate savings for the consumers; and for the elites to get richer much faster. In both cases the hook is to target immediate rewards. Regardless of the setbacks all this implies in the long run. I am referring to the "Spend now pay later" mindset while making sure to trick as many as possible into picturing a risk-free society or risk-free monetary policy. It is not in the interest of the lenders to warn potential borrower before signing a contract. That's why the fine print was invented after all. The so-called business cycles are the consequences of credit hangovers. Recessions are damaging mechanisms, explains the author of "The Grip of Death: a study of modern money, debt slavery and destructive economics". Is pretending to be richer truly worth it?

Westerners have spent more than a half century seeing the world through pink colored glasses, losing the ability to assess risks. This could not go on forever: internal and external forces have built a global endemic ponzification. This fact is actually being noticed by many papers and when a very mainstream outlet such as The Economist starts paying attention, I may guarantee you that it is already too late to change the course of destiny. In "Ponzificating", the author pictures the global economy as a scheme depending on a mega confidence trick. Another journalist writing for the Washing- ton Post rang the alarm bell for the borrowers, saying that our system is now co-dependent of "the infernal engine of international finance" named the CDO. For the newbies, the CDO is the name given by Wall Street to a parallel kind of banking system that has come into existence to bypass central banks. If this does not scare the hell out of you...

Although the common man remains unaware that its proponents and opponents have fought countless battles behind the scenes, usury has plagued mankind since ever. This is a cultureless fight uniting the world elites for the worst since they all agree upon charging the masses an interest for using currencies in the first place. So if the all world governments do it, that must be right, mustn't it? Just because more than 80% of the world population believes in a lie, doesn't make it true. The critique of usury is the following: it is an unearned income, a double billing, condones the exploitation of the Needy, creates spontaneously mechanisms of inequitable redistribution of wealth, an agent of economic instability and encourages to discount the Future.

The more money in circulation, the more the elites benefit. Inflation makes the common people work much more for what they really need. This flow of liquidity is too exacerbated by taxation which allows the elites to run usurious deficits billed to future generations. Labor is then rather seen as an ever-increased speculation obtained through an ever self-perpetuating power than rewarding dignity and freedom. Because the entire system capitalizes on debt instruments, we really can say nowadays that the real intrinsic value of money resides in the usurious interests and taxation. And this starts at the very beginning of the process, that of printing money out of thin air. Central banks from all over the world print for a few cents every banknote, regardless of their denomination. Here in America it comes down to a mere 4.2 cents. The difference is what keeps the elites on life support.

This is "serfdom".

In the Middle Ages serfs were paying 25% of their labor. How much do we pay today? More than 50% with all the hidden taxes included as shown in the documentary by award winning Aaron Russo. When money's value amounts to its usurious rates and taxation and should the both elements be abolished, there would be no money left in circulation. If we ever paid all our debts money would simply vanish.

"Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of money becomes apparent and the *fraud* can no longer be concealed."- British Lord John Maynard Keynes (the architect of our current system) in his book "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace" (1920)

Viewing Capitalism as an unavoidable exploitation of the needy is rather simplistic. Exploitation takes place every time we don't want to stand for ourselves, refuse to to choose self-determination. Every time we're afraid of the dangers inherent in freedom. Indeed one has to wonder why socialism has greatly failed to cure the world from its grip. Instead of admitting their defeat, the socialists accuse greed infecting the human nature itself. They will never cease to come up with more coercive ideas as how to overcome their blind discontentment. To give you an example they were the first to applaud lending to the developing world but also to scream their outrage when faced with the consequences of "odious debts" enforced by the IMF and the WB over a 50-year period. While some debts were erased, the same impoverished countries saw their credit rating plunge overnight, all of which allowed the sell out of their natural resources. The wealth transfer was successful to say the least.

Despite two major studies made in the 1990s which came to the conclusion that the poor have to sweat doubly, so that the wealthy might live on interest. All this usurious infusion of cash began at the bottom of the pyramid and made its way up slowly to the middle-class (due to the eroding purcha- sing power, itself caused by a insidious hidden tax called inflation) leaving an ever increasing number of households at the mercy of lenders whose appeti- te to lend grew accordingly. Today as a result, the middle class is no longer the pillar of the economy but its doom.

Strangely as if it were a sign of time, the National Film Preservation Foundation is going to re-release a silent movie from 1912 called "The Usurer's Grip. Sure the director was aiming his venom at loan sharks, people charging more than the banks. But what is better in your opinion: multiple loans at various usurious rates ranging from 5% to 30% or one loan at 180%?

The response is easy: one works slower to bring you down than another.

The human nature only reacts when seriously threatened (which this is why most of the population is not violent). This time again, the collison course is set to happen and there is nothing we can do about it. Soon, we'll have to stand up against "the loan shark lobby" and "the Armageddon gang"... and understand why ending debt slavery must become priority number #1 if Mankind is destined to survive. The right to choose is now up to us. Let's not forget that wars have always been made possible through the ability to borrow/raise taxes and this alone should be enough to implement the dismantlement of world standing armies. Peace and human sovereignty are above all an economic matter.

RE: Corporate Responsibility Is Bunk

2007-03-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

No later than two weeks ago, an article released by the Wall Street Journal dedicated to Milton Friedman and his take on corporate responsibility retained my attention. Friedman couldn't see any good in corporate altruism which he calls an oxymoron. This said, I never was a fan of his monetary solutions which were very fiat money friendly.

According to true liberals such as Friedrich A. Hayek, we as human being cannot see beyond the scoop of our own survival concerns, we simply are incapable to sense what others truly need and thus end up putting ourselves in a state of perpetual servitude when trying to intervene in the others' lives. Hence the so many wonderful altruistic theories on papers that never translate into the real life.

Nonetheless enforcing altruism is the centerpiece of today global socialism and the flaws quickly become apparent as soon as one realizes that socialism needs capitalistic market forces to feed and sustain itself. This is mainly why that ideology has spent decades to fight its own shadows and demons.

Among so many examples illustrating that corporate responsibility is bunk, we have the case of Starbucks exposed by the documentary "Black Gold" and which talks of rampant poverty among the Ethiopian coffee growers. In the same vein, I strongly recommend to watch "The Corporation". Only a few bad appels? I think not!

Then we've got that of the former Pfizer VP, Peter Rost, who has joined the rank of the whistleblowers by revealing how corporations - and the big pharma more precisely - avoided paying taxes for decades, using loopholes provided by transfer price techniques and financial heavens. In this sense it shouldn't be really astonishing to find out that 2/3 of the corporations didn't pay any taxes during the Clinton-boom years whatsoever.

Sure any of this is particularly new. Corporations go where they have profits to make even if this means trading with the enemy or implies just plain looting as explained in "Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man". To give you an idea, today the West sells more weapons to developing countries than ever, but it will never fail to adjust the rescue packages in term of humanitarian aid.

As a matter of fact, TV Commercial always portray our corporation as entities militating for the betterment. Look at our TV anchors, they will rather criticize China while avoiding the pollution mega disaster that our own relocated corporations have done there, the mainland's pollution scourge costs the country roughly $200 billion a year the report says! Right, they were able to do so because of the deeply flaws found in the leftist ideology. Our corporations have embraced blatantly the opportunity to pillage this part of the planet for the sake of their "cheap-item greedy consumers" who took advantage by going on an unprecedented multi-decade long spending binge. Cynically that are the same consumers who want corporations to be responsible. Allo Houston, we have a problem!

By now it should be cristal clear as why asking others to be in charge comes down to shifting the risk at the expenses of many and the environment as well.

The other day as I was exchaning a few emails with someone from the banking department and whose name will remain anonymous, I told my correspondent that it was about time to bring the naiveté of the mass people to an end. That it was essential for them to see life without pink tinted glasses. That our society as a whole would gain much more by knowing what the human nature and honest money are truly about, it is the only way to give free trade a meaning and eradicate up to 65-70 percent of the violence overnight and worldwide.

There are only two choices: raising our IQ or... the road to Babeldom.

Swimming With Piranhas

2007-03-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

Here I go again for another economico-philosophical round. If you have made it so far I definitely take it as a compliment. As I already stated numerous times, my goal is to gather the evidence of world affairs affecting mankind and to share them with you.

Everybody has apprehensions and fears. So do I. What is nonetheless the most frightening statement ever in my view is when I hear someone argue about the benefits of the right to vote. At that very moment my heart starts pumping so fast that I feel the urge to incarnate the last inter-galactic Joan of Arc.

Deep political dialogue too often censors itself by the fact that it would eventually lead the speakers' to the acknowledgement of major deceptions - and a nervous breakdown is the least desirable. This why political correctness regulates or even outlaws the exchange of too diffierent political views and calls for the conversation to end. In such a case speakers will argue that nobody can change anyone’s mind. Speak and see no evil, depending on the side one sits on. It is always much easier to criticize the opponent than seeing one's own faulty reasoning. To give you an example, Democrats were outraged by Bush on spending but it didn't prevent them from unveiling their own massive $463.5bn bill.

Although I've grown highly suspicious towards psychiatry (and for a very good reason explained in depth here) the psyche cannot escape the fundamental Aristotelian axiom of existence: life is .Train of thoughts also must survive and tend to reject anything that could hurt their own projections, this regardless of their accuracy.

This rejoices our power lust addicts (monetary scientists, lawmakers and the cohorts supporting them) even more. As stated in a previous column of mine, that is where “they” get us: by being the instigators of at least 70% of the world problems then coming up with solutions concocted by themselves. Any remedy presented must be dissected. Although I may have a hard time imagining what would the world be like without “them”, there is no excuse for not acting upon it with the legal means at our disposal. This time again voters are in for a dirty rollercoaster.

Insanity consists in repeating the same errors and expecting different results. These days, you see, most people think that the market forces are subjected to some esoteric moral hazards theories. Hence most people would agree with a total take over by our financial institutions to protect or even rescue from the nasty side effect of globalization and in the worst case scenario, financial ruin. In particular when words like “seismic shifts and New World Order” were being pronounced by the Brit Chancellor Gordon Brown last 01/17/07. The latter went on referring to our mega financial houses as old-fashioned establishment in need of major reforms to meet the new demands of the international trade, more importantly winning the war on terror and also calling this proposal the “battle for the heart and minds” that will set in motion the platform of a New World Order. The very same week in The Financial Times, Bernanke warned US of ‘fiscal crisis’ fear' by the way: he urged immediate action to head off the looming Medicare and Social Security funding gap, saying the right time to start was "ten years ago".

But getting back to Brown it should be now crystal clear that our globalists never were prepared to face the so-called globalization and crises that would arise from it. Never. The Mexican bailout, the collapse of Argentina, the Russian crisis and the Asian meltdowns, all of which took place in the 1900’s, didn’t teach them a thing. Not a damn freakin' thing. Neither did the dotcom crash or the S&L crisis obviously. If you still do not see the emergency to stop swallowing blue pills... Or wait, can you conceive that we are governed by pundits who do not have a clue as how to run our lives. Now honestly, can you truly believe that? Yeah and you have the right to cast your votes! Ballots for what.. to give the elites the right to choose as how they will devour us? The truth is that people have been voting for their demises again and again since the last great depression of the 1930’s. Back to square one.

The dis/misinformed voters have certainly not realized – yet - what truly lies beneath such a peace and prosperity speech in the name of our sacred democracy. What is democracy worth by the way? Praising the endless virtues of peace and reforms is a part of the script. This time again their carrying attitudes predict a major wealth transfer and way beyond that a shift toward a “very great” depression, and its ensuing the threat of absolute fascism.

But some at the top are really freaking out. Scared that the masses may find out. And those are ready to do everything to keep the lethal world bubble afloat. Among them we find Michael Milken, the junk bond billionaire turned philanthropist who said developing countries could free up trillions of dollars by creating markets based on mortgages, credit cards and loans.

Considering the debt swap bubble (named the derivatives market ) which is about more than 400 trillion or 8 times the real wealth, 100 trillion would not postpone the day of reckoning by much. If we take this into account the banking interests running wild, this would give the planet another 2 years or so. But what after that? This would make the world crash would be even more terrible. Some highly illuminated Wall Street mavericks even argue that the opacity found in those 400+ TN derivatives is not a problem. Right now, in other words as the author of the article puts it, there is little sign of any end to the credit boom - nor, it would seem, to the mounting uncertainty about what might happen if or when this frenzied debt dance ends.

Let's take a deep breath in and travel back into time: when the frienzied debt dance ends... yes you read well. That's right... Now exhale as slow as possible.

This author surely has a good comprehension of what the stakes really are, although remaining neutral. Meanwhile at Davos, a luxury Swiss montain resort, la creme de la creme celebrates a year of booming returns and record bonuses. Though things are not what they appear to be. Clouds are gathering above the horizon.

One of the Davos players sees the future as "too good to be true" and urged to get prepared for a global blowout. In fact not him alone agreed with such views: Summers and Trichet joined the doomsayer bandwagon and warned Davos party Goers of underestimating risk and worse, compared complecency with self-denying prophecy. Prepare for a significant asset repricing he concluded!

"We are currently seeing elements in global financial markets which are not necessarily stable," he said, pointing to the "low level of rates, spreads and risk premiums" as factors that could trigger a repricing. "There is now such creativity of new and very sophisticated financial instruments . . . that we don't know fully where the risks are located," he added. "We are trying to understand what is going on - but it is a big, big challenge".

Under the guise of being concerned about the world's economic state, the Davos meeting is a mere call to get ready for the great game of liquidation which most of the people view as the dark side of capitalism. Many even call this vulture capitalism. Capitalism is indeed destructive when for instance the system in place values debt as wealth and currency debasment to propel the markets, two main tools without which socialism wouldn’t exist. It is vulture capitalism – legal pillagism - that has allowed 2% of the population to own 50% of the world. All was done by scientifically creating successive and massive banrkruptcies thoughout the planet over a more or less 300 year period. We may easily grasp the resentment of the people toward capitalism. But Lefitism is no solution either because there is, to put it bluntly, no freedom in the absence of the gold standard and no freedom goes along with the threat of insercurity. Even Greenspan put it very well a long while back. Let's quote what the Maestro said in 1966 in his essay titled "Gold And Econmic Freedom":

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

It is particurlaly appalling to observe people's reaction when they are shown facts about the elites' predatory behaviors. Legal mass murders still find a blind support from those ignorant or worst preferring silence over action. The same crowd who instead of acknowledging that they have no answers, will not hesitate to become the most vocal defenders of individualism. It is for sure better to argue in favor of one's needs first when one feels powerless in the face of undeniable evidence of corruption. This voluntary servitude - already described more than 500 years ago by Etienne de la Boetie - allows the ruling elites to live happily ever after. Think Enron. While some heads may roll once every so often it is never really grave. The French revolution and the guillotine are far behind. Their bloated salaries subsidized by taxpayers, even with the new democratic-led Congress which just raised the minimum wage to win the hearts of the low middle-class, will not be an issue any time soon. Now let's brace for the economic consequences: firms will have to raise their prices or shut their doors if they cannot cope with the adjustment.Consumers will lose purchasing power. This will encourage illegal immigration. Taxpayers and consumers will have to come to the rescue by piling on debts to fix the imbalances or becoming poor-er. One of the ingredients for the next recession calling for another increase of the minimum wage. The complete spin.

In the meantime our high ranked CEOs get together with investment bankers and lawyers to regulate the plunder of Africa at the pace of $150bn yearly. Thinking of the people applauding the raise of the minimum wage to counter exploitation, I am sure they'd stay frozen if explained the unethical deeds of their mogul-icons abroad since it would unequivocally tarnish the idea they have about success and possibly lead to a civil war. The same applies to the sweatshop workers, I am not sure either whether they would like the prices of their favorite goods to go up by 50%. By now it should be clear that enforced altrusim is bunk.

It was Hoover who once said that people are handicaped when faced with a conspiracy so monstrous that they cannot believe it exists. Again it is our choice to believe in linearity or exponentality. If you are confused, just ask yourself how long you can play the ostrich while focusing on something terrible which happened to you in the past and whose effects were ravaging because you couldn't analyze its gravity.

Ironically the other day I came across an article by Science Daily stating that the detection of the presence of an active participant in a situation involves a brain region that's more active in altruistic people. As I put it ealier, the train of thoughts doesn't need to process accurate information, so what this article says is simply pure BS...

While most of the westerners believe in the power to vote, they have absolutely no idea they have in fact always been be swimming with piranhas.

All modern history, as learnt and taught and accepted, is purely conventional. For sufficient reasons, all persons in authority combined, by a happy union of deceit and concealment, to promote falsehood. - Lord Acton

Nobel Pundits Find World Poor Bankable

2006-11-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

I am always eager to hear about the Nobel Organization, especially when it has to do with economics. Though when the Bengalee Muhammad Yunus won the prize for helping the poor, I almost choked. Until then I wasn't really familiar with "his" concept but since I know a great deal about fiat banking I also know that nothing will go in favor of the little people until a monetary reform is implemented. Being used to read a lot about the vortex of debt, I thus sensed that this was about another loan shark tale immediately. I couldn't help myself and started laughing out of derision. It is what I generally do when anger inside me is brewing.

In an article released on forbes.com no more than 2 weeks ago, we could read the side-effects of microcredit injection in India and Bangladesh. It was kinda astonishing to learn that any study had proven the worthiness of microcredit theories until today. You see, the pundits argue that it would be an impossible task, hence time consuming and too costly. Despite this, they claim that the approved empirical Nobel theory has bettered the lives of 25% of the borrowers - but remain quite silent regarding the other 75%.

Economic Noble Enforcers, along with Yunus, didn't find anything wrong with this. They proudly assure us that their borrowers are very serious about paying back their loans and have no problem to cope with the (outrageous) interests which actually can go up to 40%! Gains that many of the heavily criticized payday lenders here in America would envy. Reading further, the surface begon to show more cracks. The fact is that 75% - after their microcredit adventure - end up sinking futher into poverty. As for the famed 25% it is also appalling to see that they are left with the bare minimum to live. Sure, they are no longer starving but just like us (in the so-called rich west) go from paycheck to paycheck. Sure again, among the beautiful 25% there is a small number of full success stories but which involve borrowers with a higher educational background than the rest. As you can see, it would be a mistake to give these few bankers' fairy tales some credit. Laughable!

It is easy to grasp why globalists from the right and from the left praise Yunus so much. They have found an innovative way to collude, their creativity doesn't know any boundaries, the sky is the limit! In economics alas interference with the market can be very costly. There is no free lunch. But who wouldn't be interested in easy money those days? And when it comes out of altruism, all the better: it sells even more. In the meantime let's bear in mind that $9 trillion of social programs didn't end poverty in America, emphasizes Cato Institute in 2004 - and of course all this at the expense of the taxpayers.

Considering the global economy built on a swamp of debts, it is rather blatant that the prestigious Nobel Organization helps blow bubbles into the respective economies, a fictuous wealth moving all the way long up to the stock market - as always under the guise of charity. Now they claim that this new approach is better than lending corrupt governments money. Not quite so at all. Who is going to pay when the bubble pops? Because they all do eventually.. who do you think?

How stupid do they think we are? Now money no longer disappears in the pockets of unscrupulous politicians but it is directly dissiminated in the market, morphing the microcredit theory into another macrowelfare fallacy. This is brilliantly explained by Jeffrey Tucker who rightfully calls this neferous endeavor "collectivist regimentation".

The Vortex Of Debts

2006-10-26T03:05:00.000-07:00

Anyone pondering about the economic trends with an open mind will quickly notice that the term “financial instruments” is a mere definition invented to keep the intelligentsia safe. The more convolute and intricate or even abstract the vocabulary sounds, all the better. So the same intelligensia too came up with definitions like: red hot, stagflation, inflation and deflation, dangers of 'overheating' or needing to 'cool off, minimum wage, purchasing power, liability, economic indicators, surplus and deficit, credit score, rating and history, interest rates, confidence index, cheap money and bad loans; reform, lenders of the last resort, softness, expansion and growth, irrational exuberance, bubble, systemic risk, record-breaking level, volume, hedging, credit-default swaps, transparency, shortage, buy low sell high, to name a few. Interestingly the word “depression” is no longer in use but has been replaced with severe recession or currency crisis.

Far beyond the above, the terrifying truth is that despite the highly praised monetarist lexicon at our disposal today the world is in dire shape. The screw named “credit” is being tightened inexorably and setting in motion the dreadful pattern of a liquidity trap, along with a series of world moral hazards governed by the dollar hegemony. Should you doubt what is bieng said, please consider this: why are the elite banks building distressed debt teams, or let’s put it differently: readying themselves to reap huge profits from the aftermath of our financial distress? What a nice way to collapse prices by the way! Why is there a crackdown on the “exotic housing loans” when it is too late and which now are endangering 60% of the homeowners who got into the market place since 2001? As if it weren't enough, why is there also a sudden anxiety about the derivatives market, which Warren Buffet branded as “financial weapons of mass destruction - the kiss of death” in 2003. Even a columnist in Le Monde Diplomatique got an ephifany the other day when concluding that our financial reality is now out of control.

Here comes the cherry on the cake: not only are those at the top responsible for the slow but certain demise of the world economy, Joe and Jane Average are as nearly much guilty of committing the sin of lying to live richly, getting loans they did not deserve or cannot repay in other words. Many got caught by the money envy and peer pressure. How couldn’t they see the game of their credit cards firms and/or they real estate brokers? Mainly because they were blinded by the psychological wealth effect. Not living richly in time of booms generally means that you have missed the boat due to a lack of recklessness and worst are a total loser. They refuted the sound advice “one penny saved is a penny earned” and embrace mantra “buy now, pay later”. They believed it as if it were the word from God. What is particularly appalling is that the population in the so-called rich countries have deliberately acted against their own financial interests while in the 3rd world it is imposed upon them coercively.

At the control panel of our Vortex of debts, we find the monetary scientists, who just like middle-age alchemists-wizards believe in the philosophal stone which has in fact the chemical capacity to turn lead into gold. It goes without saying that they tried for centuries - to no avail. To make this fraudulent wish come true, our modern-day alchemists have thus created a system – for profit – they can flush with debt-money, of course under the guise of being charitable. For profit, there lies the very deep core of issue. The result is that we not only borrow money that doesn’t exist but also bet on its fictive value while distorting the current one gravely. This is called the miracles of flexibility, an elastic system in financial jargon. If this sounds too surreal or do not see anything wrong here, please try to forecast the future while using 1 as 8, 5 as 2 and 7 as 4 … and so on for example. The fudge factory at its finest. What is going to happen do you guess eventually? Even the very conservative Stephen Roach at Morgan& Stanley admits that world central banks have created a monster. Of course those sticking to the monetarist lexicon will seize the occasion to brand him as the worst doomsayer ever, claiming that if the Dow has reached new heights recently it surely is because of the solid world investors's confidence in the USD itself. Insanely hilarious, indeed!

This web of deceit is the root cause of the current cannibalistic behaviors and the decay of society. From the bottom to the top, the world economy today is about exchanging and recycling IOUs, we do not know anymore who owes what and to whom. One does not need a PhD in economics to forecast the eventual end of this highly elaborated debt laundering . Just as Michael Rowbotham puts it: If a monetary system is invalid or flawed, then the entire economy is based on the mathematics of error, and must be riddled with the effects. If the financial system upon which our economies are built is defective, and yet monetary considerations dominate our economic decisions, should we be surprised if the results are less than satisfactory?

Time has come to enforce usury free and sound money. This is the only way to have a financial system that serves We The People instead of some at the switch of the printing press machine. This great evil must end.President Andrew Jackson has been quoted as saying the following to a group of bankers as they approached him in the drawing room of the White House:

... You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out!”

Banking On Armageddon: The Gate To Chaos - Part 3

2006-09-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Fanaticism consists of redoubling youreffort when you have forgotten your aim -- George Santayana

Let's not beat around the bush, the Pope's scathing attack on Islam wasn't meant to be diplomatic; more than anyone else he knows the power of the words and those words have pleased Islamophobics. The fact that he expressed regrets does no longer matter at this stage: the message has gone through whatsoever.

Alas I couldn't care less about anyone going ballistic because of religious beliefs. Enough hypocrisy, religions all share a legacy of blood, a fact that should be widely mentioned in all history textbooks for the sake of wisdom. While our dear Western media reports ad nauseum about the Pope's words targeting Islam, partial and deliberate amnesia struck again. You see, TV broadcasts and newspapers have completely forgotten that last August 2006 the Vatican's envoy in the Holy Land and bishops from three other churches have launched a rare joint attack on the Christian Zionist movement, accusing it of promoting "racial exclusivity and perpetual war."

Do you hear the ticking clock? This is an omen that may be announcing a sign of The End Of Times. Not the end of Mankind but the end of the world as we know it and along with the brutal transition that is going to throw us all into a religious clash of all time. Are you ready? How can you get yourself prepared? I sincerely would recommend the book by Sam Harris titled:

The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason which takes aim at the destructive fundamentalist trends on all sides of the spectrum throughout history and also pictures religious moderates as the bearers of a terrible dogma, in short arguing that moderation has too its own limits eventually and is thus an illusion of the mind.

Moreover power and religions have always been bedfellows and the current geopolitical climate clearly indicates that the globalist entity named "The New World Order" - NWO - has bailed out the most mainstream doctrines (if not all) to fulfill the sempiternal motto: divide and conquer. Religions are highly sensitive grounds as much lethal as landmines because masses do not get the necessary education to interpret whatever eschatology and that every man has his own understanding about everything.

Not to mention that religious figures are at fault for not closing the gap between materialism and spirituality. According to their agenda the two realms must never reconcile. Ever. Never. Divide and conquer again. Did you ever hear the Pope speak of Jesus chasing the "money changers" out of the Temple, condemning the monetary practices that are still today in place, usury more precisely. Do elementary schools teach this by the way?

While Sam Harris argues that God must go the way of Apollo and Zeus, the arising dilemma is the same that the egg or chicken question - which comes first. Is Faith or their devout followers in this very case the problem ... or otherwise? One thing is more than certain is that one just cannot keep reading

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - in which Kant argues that analytic reasoning can't tell us anything that isn't already self-evident - over and over to escape the reality of Quantum Physics.

All the major religions warned against materialism and wr

ongly spiritualists have trashed it constantly. Up to this day, I haven't yet heard the Dalai Lama - nor the Pope - giving a press conference addressing to the global monetary fraud, have you? So what? Yep, you got it: the Devil definitely wears pink. There are lots of people who do not have any religious beliefs but comprehend what ethical codes of conduct mean. Humanity always has questioned and probed the existence of "a" God and it is our inalienable right to do so. The ever-growing global turbulences indicate that the next great battle of Mankind is accepting that Faiths cannot resolve our cultural nor existential misunderstandings.

Because of the mathematical and exponential structure of the Universe, everything it rules must obey the Chaos Theory, but there are two different kinds of Chaos. That leading to order... or its opposite to annihilation. We have the right to choose as always. That leading to order demands benevolent actions based on knowledge and logic. And the failure to respond simply implies a return to the Nothingness. At this stage explaining those very concepts refers to utopia, although the only way toward a viable exit. But we've got to wonder who the real utopians are in the end because shooting oneself in the foot or harming beloved ones ultimately is, in this particular case, no more less than extreme masochism and sadism.

There is no Freedom and free will without Kowledge but barbary, failed models and deceits. Truth stands by itself completely. Individualistic humility and cooperation to beat the matrix is thus essential to empower our inalienable rights as Human Beings... shall we succeed?