Category Archives: Financial

Stephen Lendman ~ Corporate America Loves Jason Furman

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SteveLendmanBlog June 17 2013

Jason Furman

Key Obama officials comprise a virtual rogues gallery of scoundrels. On June 10, he nominated Jason Furman to replace Alan Krueger. He’ll serve as White House Council of Economic Advisors chairman.

He was Clinton’s Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the National Economic Council. He began advising Obama in 2008.

Since January 2009, he’s been Obama’s National Economic Council deputy director. His nomination requires congressional approval. More on him below.

Krueger’s returning to Princeton. He’s Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He compromised his integrity in Washington. Prior to becoming CEA head, he was Obama’s Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy.

He and other Obama economic officials hail economic recovery. They do so duplicitously. They’ve done so throughout protracted Main Street Depression conditions. They willfully turned a blind eye.

They endorse corporate friendly policies. They spurn popular ones. Real unemployment’s 23%. Monthly jobs reports are phony. Fantasy best describes them.

Good jobs are vanishing in plain sight. Low pay mostly service employment replaces them. Thirdworldizing America is policy. A race to the bottom continues. Krueger substituted dissembling for truth and full disclosure. It’s part of the package he accepted.

Perhaps his Princeton students fare no better. They’d be wise to make better choices. He’s returning for the fall semester. Obama called him “the driving force behind many of the economic policies that I have proposed that will grow our economy and create middle class jobs.”

Obama’s done more to wreck America’s economy than any US president in history. As key Treasury official and CEA head, Krueger helped craft some of his worst policies.

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$9,000,000,000,000 Missing From The Federal Reserve [Video]

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RepublicTV June 11 2013

Rep. Alan Grayson questions the FED Inspector General where $9 TRillion dollars went… and Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman hasn’t a clue…Dunno whether to laugh or cry – I am still getting over the shock and have watched 4 times.

Listen carefully to what is said. The Inspector General of the United States has no jurisdiction to investigate the FED!  This is pure evil!

Pam Martens ~ The Consumer Has The Power To Fight Back Against Wall Street

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Wall Street On Parade June 17 2013

A study conducted by Edward N. Wolff for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in March 2010 made the following findings:

The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11 percent.

Debt was the most evenly distributed component of household wealth, with the bottom 90 percent of households responsible for 73 percent of total indebtedness.

Wealth concentration in too few hands while the general populace is saddled with too much debt to buy the goods and services produced by the corporations, is a replay of the conditions leading to the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression.

Writing in his book, “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner explained the situation leading up to the depression of the 1930s:

“The national flood of income was indubitably imposing in its bulk, but when one followed its course into its millions of terminal rivulets, it was apparent that the nation as a whole benefited very unevenly from its flow. Some 24,000 families at the apex of the social pyramid received a stream of income three times as large as 6 million families squashed at the bottom — the average income of the fortunate families was 630 times the average income of the families at the base…And then there was the fact that the average American had used his prosperity in a suicidal way; he had mortgaged himself up to his neck, had extended his resources dangerously under the temptation of installment buying, and then had ensured his fate by eagerly buying fantastic quantities of stock – some 300 million shares, it is estimated – not outright, but on margin, that is, on borrowed money.”

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Max Keiser ~ The Collapse Of The Current Bankster Regime Is Upon Us

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Infowars.com June 17 2013

We’re in a post-capitalist, post-socialism world. I have just come back from the G8 protests in Belfast and it occurred to me – at this point; we’re post both capitalism and socialism – and this point needs to be made clear, but we also see some vestiges of both systems in a new, emerging economy that has yet to be named.

I agree with the G8 protesters in Belfast that capitalism – as it’s been iterated in the West in the post WWII era has run its course. The main cause for its demise, as I see it, is that during the 1980’s; thanks to deregulation, futures and options speculation and leverage migrated over to the burgeoning field of ‘financial futures’ and the price discovery mechanism associated with supply and demand and the ‘invisible hand’ – over the ensuing few decades – completely broke down. Money itself lost any anchor to value as futures traders speculated with virtually no risk on contracts worth many billions that had been willed into existence by financial engineers not by dint of any underlying economic activity.

And there’s no going back now. You see, financial futures are trading on prices that are based – not on any underlying economic reality – but rather a series of assumptions based on academically-concatenated theories and theorems which in turn generate a new set of prices. The result is that capital flows into destabilizing ‘malinvestments’ all hidden by the outsized returns of intermediaries like hedge funds who make billions mining what has become essentially a broken system of monetizing fraud.

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Marina Walker Guevara ~ ICIJ Releases Offshore Leaks Database Revealing Names Behind Secret Companies, Trusts

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ICIJ June 14 2013 (Thanks, C.R.)

Search the ICIJ database here

ICIJ Releases Offshore Leaks Database to Public [~6 min. video]

When Bernard Madoff built his $65 billion house of cards; when food distributors passed off horsemeat as beef lasagna in Europe; and when Apple, Google and other American companies set up structures to channel their profits through Ireland — they all used tax havens.

They bought secrecy, minimal or zero taxes and legal insulation, the distinctive products that tax havens market and that allow companies to operate in a fiscal and regulatory vacuum. Using the offshore economy is akin to acquiring your own island where the rules that most citizens follow don’t apply.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalistspublishes today a database that, for the first time in history, will help begin to strip away this secrecy across 10 offshore jurisdictions.

The Offshore Leaks Database allows users to search through more than 100,000 secret companies, trusts and funds created in offshore locales such as the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands and Singapore. The Offshore Leaks web app, developed by La Nación newspaper in Costa Rica for ICIJ, displays graphic visualizations of offshore entities and the networks around them, including, when possible, the company’s true owners.

Attacking Apathy

The data are part of a cache of 2.5 million leaked offshore files ICIJ analyzed with 112 journalists in 58 countries. Since April, stories based on the data — the largest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization — have been published by more than 40 media organizations worldwide, including The Guardian in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany,The Washington Post and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

ICIJ’s investigation — called Offshore Leaks by the Twittersphere and the public —has shaken the political and economic establishments from South Korea to Canada, sparking investigations, resignations and a renewed sense of urgency among world leaders that this is the time to rein in offshore abuses .

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Andy Hoffman ~ Olympus Has Fallen, NSA Orwellian Crimes, PHYSICAL Gold & Silver Surge [Audio]

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SGTbull07 June 16 2013

SGT Report Unbound: This week we visit with our friend Andy Hoffman from Miles Franklin. Andy and I talk about a variety of current events and global concerns including the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush crime cartel, the international Banking cartel, NSA crimes, the realization that “Olympus” really has fallen AND the fact that despite the endless cartel propaganda global demand for PHYSICAL silver and gold IS surging.

Andy’s website:
http://www.milesfranklin.com/

Bob Adelmann ~ Central Banks’ Bubble Bursting, Sending Markets Down Worldwide

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The New American June 13 2013

When the Japanese stock market lost more than six percent of its value on Wednesday in a massive sell-off, pundits jumped on the move to try to explain what happened, and what it all means. Evan Lucas, a market strategist at IG Markets, wrote:

The storm clouds are building: the Dow has just suffered its first three-day losing streak for the year, the Chicago VIX [fear] index has climbed further; Europe is sliding off its highs; China is slowing down faster than expected, and the BOJ [Bank of Japan] is holding [off] on additional stimulus action.

Hans Goetti, chief investment officer at Finaport, explained why:

We’ve been living in an environment where economically speaking, bad news was good news because bad news meant more monetary stimulus. The rally that we have had over the past one-and-a-half years has been mainly driven by central banks and now the punch bowl is about to be taken away.

Two analogies are often used to describe the actions of the Federal Reserve in the United States as well as other central banks around the world: the punch bowl, and the drug addict. Each is helpful in explaining the addictive nature of easy money (or alcohol or drugs) and the inevitable withdrawal that takes place when the stimulus is removed.

According to Austrian school business cycle theory these declines in markets are the inevitable consequences of an expanding money supply, sold as the answer to fighting a recession. Low interest rates, Keynesians believe, help to stimulate borrowing and investment which works to reverse the economic downtrend and get things moving again. There are numerous flaws in this theory, including not knowing just how much new money needs to be printed, or when to stop. The problem is simple: Central bankers don’t know the answer to either question and as a result are unprepared for the consequences, or even to recognize them while they are occurring.

What’s being reported are those consequences. On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rose by more than 100 points early in the day, reversed course and dropped 260 points, ending the day down 126 points, capping its first three-day losing streak in 2013. Similar losses were recorded by the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq, while the “fear index” (the CBOE Volatility Index) spiked over 18 (five points above where it usually trades).

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Monty Pelerin ~ Why Things Will Get Worse — Much Worse

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Monty Pelerin’s World June 12 2013 (Thanks, A.L.)

It is easy to be upset about what is happening all around. The economy is being destroyed, deliberately, by insane economic policies. Incentives to work are being eliminated by punishing work. At the same time rewards are increasing for not working. Not surprisingly we get less of what we penalize (work) and more of what we subsidize (non-work).

As an economist I get sick over what I see happening to what was once a great engine of productivity, capital creation and improvements in standards of living.

After two centuries of progress that amazed the world, the conditions necessary for growth and productivity are steadily being removed. Their presence allowed the miracle of America. Their absence guarantees the decline. Carried to extreme, the US could become a second or third-world nation within a few decades. Virtually all changes in the last five to ten years point in this direction and these changes are accelerating.

As pained as the economic retrogression is, the loss of freedom is even more disturbing. It was free markets and free men that made America the dominant economic power and the beacon of freedom. Without freedom, no economic policy can succeed. Yet, just as economic policies seem designed to destroy rather than create, so too does the role of government as steadily destroys freedom with its expanded oppression and power. The absence of freedom is tyranny. The absence of freedom is also poverty.

Economic decline is difficult to convey, although data are useful. The decline of liberty, however, is not easily quantifiable and even more difficult to communicate. An email from Simon Black (I have no link to the text, the link included is to his website), expresses his concern regarding Leviathan government and its increasing oppression. It provides as good a qualitative measure of what is occurring to freedom in this country:

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Matt Taibbi ~ Everything Is Rigged, Vol. 9,713: This Time, It’s Currencies

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RollingStone June 13 2013

I’ll get into this in more detail later (I’m on deadline for a magazine feature), but this story just landed. Given the LIBOR story, the Interest Rate Swap manipulation story, the Euro gas price manipulation story, the U.S. energy price manipulation story, and (by now) countless others of the “Everything is Rigged” variety, this screams out for immediate notice. Via Bloomberg:

Traders at some of the world’s biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice . . .

Employees have been front-running client orders and rigging WM/Reuters rates by pushing through trades before and during the 60-second windows when the benchmarks are set, said the current and former traders, who requested anonymity because the practice is controversial. Dealers colluded with counterparts to boost chances of moving the rates, said two of the people, who worked in the industry for a total of more than 20 years.

This time the rates allegedly being rigged are in the foreign-exchange or “FX” markets, meaning that if this story is true, it would almost certainly trump LIBOR for scale/horribleness.

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Simon Black ~ What Use Can We Really Be After Capital Controls Or A Currency Crisis?

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SovereignMan June 11 2013

It’s one of the hardest habits to break.

We begin pledging our allegiance to the state before we even know what that means. We learn to sing bombastic, patriotic songs of praise at an age when we don’t understand the vocabulary of the lyrics.

And after years of repetition and social reinforcement, the idealistic devotion to country becomes profoundly ingrained in our personalities.

It’s a lifelong indoctrination underpinned by a deep instinct to belong to something greater than ourselves.

Human beings are not meant to exist in isolation. We strive for inclusion and acceptance of our peers. And the forming of social groups, whether families, tribes, dynasties, and kingdoms is as old as human civilization itself.

Over the centuries, though, the social constructs have changed dramatically. It used to be closely knit, smaller groups with shared values and dedication to the other members. Now our loyalty is manipulated towards a political union… and the government which represents it.

In other words, we’re inculcated to have an unquestioning allegiance to the system.

The combination is so powerful that even in the face of overwhelming evidence, the sentiment is difficult to shake.

It’s clear now that the system has turned on the very people who invest their faith and confidence in it.

We can see the obvious effects of decades of morbidly destructive policy.

We can see how the way of life we grew up with has become a distant memory, replaced by a cheap masquerade.

We can see the debt, the money printing, the police state, the utter collapse of justice and rule of law… and the shiny facade of mindless entertainment and wanton consumerism as an attempt to cover it all up.

And yet… it’s still so hard to turn one’s back. Deep within ourselves there’s still a quiet voice that says “This can be fixed. It’s going to get better.”

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Adam Taggart ~ Ron Paul: “It’s Going to Get Much, Much Worse”

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PeakProsperity June 9 2013 (Thanks, A.L.)

Dr. Ron Paul has long been a leading voice for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, sound money, civil liberty, and non-interventionist foreign policies.

His last term in the U.S. House of Representatives ended earlier this year, so we caught up with the former Congressman to get his latest perspective on how successfully our national leadership is dealing with America’s economic challenges.

In Dr. Paul’s assessment, Washington is too committed to deficit spending and the debt-based economy – both operationally and philosophically – to expect it to embrace a more fiscally-responsible model without a forcing crisis (which he believes is coming):

[T]hey believe it like a religion that spending is good no matter what the spending is on. And that the deficits don’t matter; deficits are not a burden. And even though we have this national debt and we have a foreign debt, they don’t consider that so bad, as long as people will spend money. And if the people won’t spend any money, the government has this moral obligation to do it.

I don’t expect anything else because they are reflecting what I consider “prevailing attitudes.” And the prevailing attitudes for the last 50 or 60 years, especially since the 1930s, has been spending and deficits and printing money is the way to go.

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