Infowars.com
February 22, 2010
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-suspend-the-income-tax-for-3-4-years/
High-stakes duel between Rep. Paul and Bernanke intensifies
Silla Brush
The Hill
December 9, 2009
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Rep. Ron Paul and Ben Bernanke are locked in a clash of titans.
Paul, the 74-year-old House libertarian from Texas with the high-pitched voice, has fought for decades to kill off the Federal Reserve.
Bernanke, the mild-mannered ex-Princeton professor and chairman of the bank, is waging a high-stakes battle for the Fed’s reputation. And he’s doing everything possible to knock out Paul.
The fight is still in the early rounds. But with the full House expected to vote this week to give government auditors more power to scrutinize the Fed, Paul has the upper hand.
The Senate is a much more difficult round for Paul, though a similar stew of liberal and conservative support is starting to simmer in the upper chamber behind the Republican’s wonky auditing measure.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/high-stakes-duel-between-rep-paul-and-bernanke-intensifies/
Copenhagen’s Hidden Agenda: The Multibillion Trade in Carbon Derivatives
Washington’s Blog
December 8, 2009
As I have previously shown, speculative derivatives (especially credit default swaps) are a primary cause of the economic crisis.
And I have pointed out that (1) the giant banks will make a killing on carbon trading, (2) while the leading scientist crusading against global warming says it won’t work, and (3) there is a very high probability of massive fraud and insider trading in the carbon trading markets.
Now, Bloomberg notes that the carbon trading scheme will be centered around derivatives:
The banks are preparing to do with carbon what they’ve done before: design and market derivatives contracts that will help client companies hedge their price risk over the long term. They’re also ready to sell carbon-related financial products to outside investors.
[Blythe] Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity — in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases…
Who is Blythe Masters?
She is the JP Morgan employee who invented credit default swaps, and is now heading JPM’s carbon trading efforts. As Bloomberg notes (this and all remaining quotes are from the above-linked Bloomberg article):
Masters, 40, oversees the New York bank’s environmental businesses as the firm’s global head of commodities…
As a young London banker in the early 1990s, Masters was part of JPMorgan’s team developing ideas for transferring risk to third parties. She went on to manage credit risk for JPMorgan’s investment bank.
Among the credit derivatives that grew from the bank’s early efforts was the credit-default swap.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Some in congress are fighting against carbon derivatives:
“People are going to be cutting up carbon futures, and we’ll be in trouble,” says Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington state. “You can’t stay ahead of the next tool they’re going to create.”
Cantwell, 51, proposed in November that U.S. state governments be given the right to ban unregulated financial products. “The derivatives market has done so much damage to our economy and is nothing more than a very-high-stakes casino — except that casinos have to abide by regulations,” she wrote in a press release…
However, Congress may cave in to industry pressure to let carbon derivatives trade over-the-counter:
The House cap-and-trade bill bans OTC derivatives, requiring that all carbon trading be done on exchanges…The bankers say such a ban would be a mistake…The banks and companies may get their way on carbon derivatives in separate legislation now being worked out in Congress…
Financial experts are also opposed to cap and trade:
Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why financial types like me like it — because there are financial opportunities”…
Hedge fund manager Michael Masters, founder of Masters Capital Management LLC, based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands [and unrelated to Blythe Masters] says speculators will end up controlling U.S. carbon prices, and their participation could trigger the same type of boom-and-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities…
The hedge fund manager says that banks will attempt to inflate the carbon market by recruiting investors from hedge funds and pension funds.
“Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment product to people that have nothing to do with carbon,” he says. “Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this movie before.”
Indeed, as I have previously pointed out, many environmentalists are opposed to cap and trade as well. For example:
Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.
“Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history, the banks’ ability to turn climate change into a new commodities market should be curbed…
“What we have just been woken up to in the credit crisis — to a jarring and shocking degree — is what happens in the real world,” she says…
Friends of the Earth’s Chan is working hard to prevent the banks from adding carbon to their repertoire. She titled a March FOE report “Subprime Carbon?” In testimony on Capitol Hill, she warned, “Wall Street won’t just be brokering in plain carbon derivatives — they’ll get creative.”
Yes, they’ll get “creative”, and we have seen this movie before …an inadequately-regulated carbon derivatives boom will destabilize the economy and lead to another crash.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/copenhagens-hidden-agenda-the-multibillion-trade-in-carbon-derivatives/
Sen. Sanders Attempts to Block Fed Mob Boss Second Term
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
December 3, 2009
Let’s thank Bernie Sanders, Vermont Independent, for blocking for now the re-confirmation of Ben Bernanke to the Federal Reserve.
Sanders talks about removing Fed kingpin Bernanke.
At the same time, we need to correct Sanders’ critique of the Fed.
“The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interest of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few,” Sanders wrote in a statement. “What American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”
Sander also said the Fed could have averted the financial crisis but failed to perform its “core responsibility” and because of this it’s time for Bernanke to go.
In fact, the Fed is performing its “core responsibility.”
Mr. Sanders apparently believes the Federal Reserve is part of the government when in fact it is a bankster criminal organization masquerading as a federal agency. The Fed is not federal. It has no reserves. It is not a bank. It was created in 1913 by agents of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and European bankers to take over the U.S. money supply and monopolize the banking system.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Our current economic problems are directly related to the fact the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, and the IMF are allowed to create money out of thin air and create global inflation. Like the corrupt government of Zimbabwe, these criminal organizations create funny money out of nothing. It is a parlor trick accomplished by entering numbers in a computer.
Sanders blames the Bush administration for the economic crisis. It does not matter if a Republican or Democrat is in office. Federal Reserve monetary policy remains the same no matter who the front man in the White House is. Partisan politics and blaming the last seat-warmer will not solve anything.
“The current Globalist Financial Crisis is a Financial False Flag operation. It is a controlled collapse of the globalist economic system, engineered by an international war crimes racketeering organization. The globalist financial system is being intentionally destabilized,” writes Alfred Lambremont Webre.
In response to their engineered collapse — and depressions are now scientifically created, as Lindbergh rightly noted after the creation of the Federal Reserve — the banksters and their political minions are demanding world government and a global banking cartel to “regulate” (dominate) the world economy.
Tossing Bernanke out on his ear will not save us from this globalist financial false flag operation. Stalling Bernanke’s re-anointment will not slow down the scam.
Only an audit and eventual abolition of the Federal Reserve will save us from the banksters and their criminal scheme. Open the Fed’s books will allow us to identify the criminals, arrest them, and put them on trial for economic crimes against humanity.
Sanders and other members of Congress opposed to the bankers need to correctly identify and expose the banksters and their grand scale heist of the global economy.
It does not matter if Bernanke is re-installed on the Federal Reserve throne. It does not matter if his re-nomination is delayed a couple hours or a few days.
The Fed needs to be abolished — and sooner before later if we are going to prevent a total collapse of the economy, the imposition of a dictatorial world government, and the installation of world-wide serfdom and a high-tech slave and surveillance grid.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/sen-sanders-attempts-to-block-fed-mob-boss-second-term/
Goldman Sachs Bankers Buy Guns to Defend Against “Populist Uprising”
Alice Schroeder
Bloomberg
December 1, 2009
“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.
While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image — and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.”
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/goldman-sachs-bankers-buy-guns-to-defend-against-populist-uprising/
Audit the Fed: Bernanke and the Bankers Are Running Scared
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
November 28, 2009
Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve mob boss, is running scared. He is deathly afraid an audit of his criminal organization.
“These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States,” Bernanke wrote in the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post.
Bernanke penned his tribute to central banking and globalism prior to his scheduled testimony before a Senate panel on his renomination to serve a second four-year term as Fed mob boss.
Bankster tool Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, tried to derail an effort to audit the Fed but failed. A proposal to audit the Fed’s monetary policy deliberations won a committee vote recently over Frank’s objections.
In his Mockingbird media editorial, Bernanke “conceded the Fed had missed some of the riskiest behavior in the lead up to the crisis. But he said the Fed had helped avoid an even more damaging economic meltdown and has stepped up its policing of the financial system.”
In fact, the Fed was specifically designed to create financial crises. It was all plotted in 1910 when minions of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, the Rothschilds and Warburgs met on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. In 1913, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was created as a direct result of that secret meeting. Said Congressman Charles Lindbergh on the midnight passage of the Federal Reserve Act: “From now on, depressions will be scientifically created.”
In order to scientifically create an economic depression, the Fed prompted irresponsible speculation by expanding the money supply sixty-two percent between 1923 and 1929. The so-called Great Depression followed. This depression “was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence,” declared Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking Committee. “The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.”
In March of 1929, Paul Warburg issued a tip that the scientifically created crash was coming. Before it did, John D. Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, Joseph P. Kennedy, and other banksters got out of the market.
A few years later, the banksters and their minions met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and plotted the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The purpose of these two criminal organizations was to set-up a global Federal Reserve system and wage economic warfare on billions of people. The weapon they used was debt and the loss of sovereignty that follows.
In 1971, then president Nixon fit one of the last pieces into the puzzle — he signed an executive order declaring that the United States no longer had to redeem its paper dollars for gold. It was a great day for the banksters and the global elite. The gold standard ensured predictability and regularity in the economy and the banksters wanted to put an end to that. For the bankers, order and control is realized out of chaos and misery.
Fast-forward to the present day. Bernanke’s Fed has meticulously sabotaged the economy in order to create a crisis in classic Hegelian fashion. The corporate media tells us the crisis is the result of ineptitude and mismanagement at the Federal Reserve. Au contraire. Like the Great Depression, the even Greater Depression now on the horizon was scientifically created.
The Fed is the primary instrument the bankers are now using to destroy the middle class, hand over all public assets and resources to them, implement a crushing austerity, usher in a new era of global corporatist feudalism and build a sprawling planet-wide slave plantation based on China’s totalitarian model.
It is the ultimate dream of the banking cartel. It will be used as the foundation to build world government. Destroying the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is only the beginning.
Bernanke knows Ron Paul and the audit the Fed movement are extremely dangerous. That’s why he is pushing this facile “oops” theory. In order to fix things, the Fed will use its “knowledge of complex financial institutions” in order to supervise them, he writes in his Mockingbird editorial. Allowing audits of Federal Reserve monetary policy would increase the perceived influence of Congress on interest rate decisions, he says.
No, it would lay bare the criminality of the Federal Reserve. Maybe Bernanke is worried he will be obliged to wear an orange jumpsuit in the wake of an audit.
As for Congress, Bernanke needs to read Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Congress shall have exclusive power to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof,” not a criminal cartel of monopoly men who dream of a prison planet.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/audit-the-fed-bernanke-and-the-bankers-are-running-scared/
Bernanke the Dollar-Destroyer and the Coming Stock Market Crash
Bob Chapman
The International Forecaster
September 21, 2009
To borrow from an old joke about politicians, we ask our subscribers if they know how to tell when Helicopter Ben Bernanke, the current Fed Head, is lying. Answer: Whenever his lips are moving. Now we hear from the Dollar-Destroyer that our recession has technically ended (heaven forbid that we should call our current Fed-caused calamity a depression, which is what it has been since Obama took office) . So we guess that we should take his word for it, seeing that every call he has made during his short tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has been 100% wrong.
Surely you’re joking, Mr. Bernanke!!! Apparently, we are just supposed to ignore our tanking dollar, rising unemployment, ever-weakening consumer spending (which only accounts for 70% of our GDP), a moribund real estate market, trillions in losses lying dormant in the zombie bank mark-to-model scam, not to mention all the off-the-books losses in derivatives pawned off on bank customers after Glass-Steagall was repealed as well as a glowing, smoking Quadrillion Dollar Derivative Death Star waiting to go supernova to the tune of tens of trillions in losses that will vaporize the entire world banking system thanks to the total deregulation of OTC derivatives courtesy of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. Then there are the ongoing multi-trillion dollar money siphons in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of banks, including all the “anointed” legacy banks, that are buried in derivatives and about to fail, a bankrupt Social Security System, a totally naked FDIC, a Fed printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, in secret, without any accountability, and future multi-trillion dollar budget deficits being incurred to keep a totally comatose economy on artificial, taxpayer-sponsored life support. If that sounds like the end of a recession to the people on planet earth, then beam us up Scotty, we’re on a planet full of psychopaths suffering from hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. Oh, and Scotty, make sure you remember to beam our gold and silver up with us. We’re certainly going to need it the next time we come back to Planet Earth for an exploratory visit to see if the collective, ongoing phantasmagoric, mushroom-induced hallucinations of its inhabitants have finally run their course.
Note that open interest for the USDX, after rising to a little over 41,000, which is above average, has suddenly collapsed to below 34,000 as of 9/16/09. The dollar is no longer being defended because the Illuminist cabal plans to take the stock markets up to a blow off interim top around Dow 10,000 to 10,500 with a final short-covering rally either this week, or perhaps the middle of next month, as general stock market options expire. They will then attempt to orchestrate a major stock market correction, which is now long expected and long overdue, just as gold and silver really start to take off.
The only question is, how long and how high will they try to take the stock markets before the long awaited correction is allowed to occur as the PPT withdraws its support. The answer, as usual, will be determined by the gold and silver markets, and the strength of their now ongoing rallies. If the rallies in gold and silver get out of hand as hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians jump on the gold and silver bandwagons while China reneges on its losses in OTC gold and silver shorts, you can count on a major stock market correction immediately. Another tip off will be a large jump in open interest for USDX futures contracts again, this time probably to well above the 50,000 level. This will be the dollar’s and treasury’s last hurrah as the Illuminati will be immediately forced to recommence the stock rally or face the defeat of any and all of their proposed legislation on Goldman Sachs’ “cap and trade” scam, on the Obama-Kennedy-Kavorkian Euthanasia Plan and on the military expenditures for Afghanistan. After citizens watch their pensions and mutual funds nose-dive toward oblivion for a second time, they will immediately decide that they can’t afford to spend another penny. Crashing stock markets beyond a 50% correction would thoroughly discredit Obama’s Stimulus Pork Plan and would also put crushing pressure on the Fed. Unless the stock markets recover quickly, the sheople will scream for the Fed’s blood and the Audit the Fed bill will become a foregone conclusion.
A stock market crash will make people downright venomous toward this cabal of middle class pauper-makers. The Illuminati are now caught between a rock and hard place. If they don’t crash the stock markets, the tanking dollar and treasuries will be toast and gold and silver will rip them a new one and expose their mishandling of our money supply and our economy. If they crash the stock markets to put an obstruction in the path of gold and silver, they risk political annihilation, legislative suicide and an audit of the Fed, which will be followed by a hue and cry for its termination when everyone finds out how thoroughly they have been screwed for the past 95+ years. Their options are weak and few. All they can do is play the obstructionist with bogus delay tactics, but in the end they will get buried.
If they fail to take gold and silver down low enough to cover, a distinct possibility, the cartel’s shorts will get vaporized, and gold and silver will go on a moon-shot. They are now fighting the combined populations of China, India, Japan, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Germany and most of Western Europe, as well as the governments of Germany, China (especially the region of Hong Kong) and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, whose gold they have stolen, leased or encumbered. These nations, who foolishly entrusted their bullion to the US Illuminist cabal, have been left exposed as sitting ducks for a hyperinflationary supernova. These countries are hopping mad about this, and all they have on their minds now is self-preservation and vengeance. Due to the ongoing financial debacles and bailouts going on globally, and the profligate policies of central banks worldwide that are causing fiat currencies everywhere to lose ground against gold, people will be looking to precious metals for an alternative to paper assets denominated in fiat currencies.
We would highly suggest that Buck-Busting Ben Bernanke and the twelve Presidents of the regional Federal Reserve Banks make arrangements for the international banking cabal’s version of The Last Supper. We hear through the grapevine that an “Upper Room” is available in the US Capitol Building. You can bet Ben will be running for his helicopter before the crucifixion gets under way! Obama and the twelve members of the Federal Open Market Committee can then do a repeat performance (but without Ben who will be long gone in his helicopter). You can bet Obama will be headed for Air Force One for a one-way trip to Kenya, or Indonesia, or wherever the heck he really comes from! Where is the Border Patrol and ICE when you need them to remove an illegal alien!?
Friday September 18th is the day our government will no longer guarantee money market funds. In anticipation of this event professionals have been moving funds out of these vehicles; some 15% over the past month. What the administration, and particularly the Treasury want to do is try to get those funds directly into Treasuries and into banks. From our point of view neither are safe, nor are credit unions. Those funds should move into gold and silver related assets and for those who must have currency liquidity, those funds should go into Canadian and Swiss Treasuries to profit from the continued fall in the US dollar. You must get your money out of banks, US government debt and anything connected with the US stock and bond markets. The exception being gold and silver shares. All major American banks, which hold 70% of deposits, are broke and so is the FDIC. You have no insurance unless you are willing to accept $0.30 on the dollar. You must be out of all these vehicles. The money market funds are loaded with suspect corporate debt never mind Treasury debt. We recommended Swiss and Canadian Treasuries some time ago. The dollar has fallen and all these thousands of investors have made money. Get out of money market funds. Already 1/3rd of these funds have had their NAV’s below a dollar since 7/07. They are still holding some very risky paper. Almost 40% is in CD’s of foreign banks, 10% in short-term corporate paper and over 12% in medium-term corporate paper. About 68% is in taxable non-government funds. You will see a great decline in money market fund assets as holders foolishly transfer the funds into FDIC-insured accounts, CD’s and Treasury instruments of one form or another. The only real safe place to go is to gold and silver related assets and if you must Canadian and Swiss Treasuries.
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Commercial paper rose $16.1 billion; asset backed CP rose $18.1 billion versus $6.2 billion the previous week. ABCP outstanding was $501.5 billion versus $483.5 billion the prior week. Unsecured financial CP issuance fell $9.7 billion versus $6.2 billion.
Capital from foreign sources was $612 billion in 2007 and $675 billion in 2008. This year in May it was -$54.6 billion; -$57 billion in June, -$56.8 in July and -$97.5 billion in August.
Capital is leaving at an accelerating rate. This means interest rates should be raised. The Fed is monetizing and in all likelihood that will increase and that will lead to a currency crisis. The Fed has said it will ease quantitative easing, but if it does the stock and bond market will fall. If they increase there will be a currency crisis. There is now no question the dollar is being sacrificed. The idea is to allow it to fall incrementally and as slowly as possible.
We have continued to state the Amero will not replace the dollar and that it is and has been a false issue. The dollar will be replaced by another dollar in either 2010, 2011 or 2012. As we explained in early May when the dollar was 89.5 on the USDX, that this was the top. Next stop by the end of October would be 71.18, or at least by yearend. After that comes 40 to 55 and then an official devaluation and default; as all currencies and debt would be dealt with at a special meeting involving all countries.
Debt in the banking system is going to be absorbed by the Fed. Almost all major banks are bankrupt. That is why you do not want to have much money in banks and no CD’s; cash value life policies or annuities. Next year we will witness a second round of debt write offs and a crisis in the derivative market. If the Fed doesn’t monetize the debt the system will collapse, but then again there may be no Fed if HR1207 becomes law. Every problem would then lie in the lap of the Treasury. The American financial system is unsustainable and our foreign wars and occupations will come to a close in 2010 or 2011. The cost will no longer be sustainable. The US stock and bond markets will fall and you will not want to own any US government obligations. It could be that the role-played by the Fed, if the Fed is replaced, could in part be played by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Due to the Fed’s absorption of bad assets it could be that the Fed will self-destruct in the process of being legislatively being eliminated. Recovery of the US economy would then depend economically on tariffs on goods and services to bring manufacturing back to America.
A CBS News blogger named Declan McCullagh seized on the documents, which CEI obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, and said: “The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.” He added: “At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.”
The Bank Implode-o-meter: Wells Fargo’s Commercial Portfolio is a ticking time bomb.
In order to sort through the disaster that is Wells Fargo’s commercial loan portfolio, the bank has hired help from outside experts to pour over the books… and they are shocked with what they are seeing. Not only do the bank’s outstanding commercial loans collectively exceed the property values to which they are attached, but derivative trades leftover from its acquisition of Wachovia are creating another set of problems for the already beleaguered San Francisco-based megabank, Wachovia, which Wells purchased last fall as it teetered on the brink of collapse, was so desperate to increase revenue in the last few years of its existence that it underwrote loans with shoddy standards and paid off traders to take them off their books.
According to sources currently working out these loans at Wells Fargo and confirmed by Dan Alpert of Westwood Capital, when selling tranches of commercial mortgage-backed securities below the super senior tranche, Wachovia promised to pay the buyer’s risk premium by writing credit default swap contracts against these subordinate bonds. Should the junior tranches eventually default, then the bank is on the hook.
For the past 14 years, the gap between the two measures has grown persistently, with operating earnings topping GAAP earnings by an average of $2.47 a share per quarter.
When using a 10-year trailing average of earnings to erase cyclical gyrations, operating earnings are nearly 24% higher than GAAP earnings, the highest ever.
It isn’t clear why the difference has grown so wide. One inescapable conclusion is that, since 1995, either by happy accident or accounting shenanigans, one-time losses have grown more quickly than one- time gains, elevating the operating earnings that Wall Street watches.
The investment implications are many. For one thing, two earnings measures produce two market valuations. The S&P 500 trades at 21 times the past 10 years’ GAAP earnings and 17 times operating earnings. Neither is exactly cheap, but one is much pricier than the other.
Japan urges talks on US military base Japan considers revision of a deal with the US to relocate a military base to be a top diplomatic priority, Tokyo’s newly appointed foreign minister has told the Financial Times, waving aside concerns that reopening the agreement could undermine the alliance between the countries.
The declaration by Katsuya Okada, a senior member of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party (DPJ), highlights the international implications of the party’s determination to set a more independent diplomatic agenda. GQ excerpts Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor by ex-Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer:
We wrote speeches nearly every time the stock market flipped. Meanwhile, the White House seemed to have ceded all of its authority on economic matters to the secretive secretary of the treasury…(In the weeks that followed, Paulson changed his spending priorities two or three times. Incredibly, he’d been given the power to do with that money virtually anything he pleased. All thanks to a president who didn’t understand his proposal and a Congress that didn’t stop to think….)
Chris had just come from a secret meeting in the Oval Office, and without so much as a hello he announced: “Well, the economy is about to completely collapse.”
You mean the stock market?” I asked.
“No, I mean the entire U.S. economy,” he replied. As in, capitalism. As in, hide your money in your mattress.
The Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, had sketched out a dire scenario. And Chris said we’d have to write a speech for the president announcing his “bold” plan to deal with the crisis. (The president loved the word bold.) The plan… Basically, it could be summed up as: Give me hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and then trust me to do the right thing…In some cases, in fact, Secretary Paulson wanted to pay more than the securities were likely worth in order to put more money into the markets as soon as possible. This was not how the president’s proposal had been advertised to the public or the Congress. It wasn’t that the president didn’t understand what his administration wanted to do. It was that the treasury secretary didn’t seem to know, changed his mind, had misled the president, or some combination of the three.
When White House press secretary Dana Perino was told that 77 percent of the country thought we were on the wrong track, she said what I was thinking: “Who on earth is in the other 23 percent?” I knew who they were—the same people supporting the John McCain campaign. Me? I figured there was no way in hell any Republican would vote for that guy. John McCain, the temperamental media darling, had spent most of the past eight years running against the Republican Party and the president—Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the White House hated him. Choosing John McCain as our standard-bearer would be the height of self-delusion.
He [Bush] paused for a minute. I could see him thinking maybe he shouldn’t say it, but he couldn’t resist. “If bullshit was currency,” he said straight-faced, “Joe Biden would be a billionaire.” Everyone in the room burst out laughing.
The latest propaganda on quantitative easing and reining it in reaches us. Evidentially the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh later this month will put together a roadmap outlining how to reverse previous stimulation of world economics. If that happens the world financial structure will collapse. They know that just as well as we do. The IMF wants the G-20 to coordinate the unwinding of these efforts. Of course, the players all know inflation is on the way and they want to make people think they are going to do something about it. Even the Fed says it is ending quantitative easing at the end of the fiscal year on 9/31/09. We know that cannot be true with the Treasury issuing $2 trillion in bonds in this coming fiscal year.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/bernanke-the-dollar-destroyer-and-the-coming-stock-market-crash/
The Global Credit Crunch Is Not Receding, It Is Intensifying
Zero Hedge
September 18, 2009
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Granted, you wouldn’t know it if you followed the stock market melt up as the wild rush to eek out any and all P&L before tax loss selling season hits (assuming there even is one this year), but read on. If nothing else, SocGen’s Albert Edwards, unlike many others, has stuck to his convictions.
The reasoning behind the acceleration of the credit crunch is simple and needs to be reemphasised. The unwinding of the grotesque debt excesses of the last decade have only just begun (see chart below)! Rapid expansion of government debt and QE will not and cannot prevent the revulsion that is now underway (the Fed publishes the Q2 update of the debt data today, Thursday.
In addition, banks are retrenching their loan books as policy makers force higher capital requirements. In all probability this process would occur irrespective of government involvement as banks inevitably act pro-cyclically, exacerbating both boom and bust. But as we repeatedly highlight, one of the lessons from Japan is not to mistakenly believe that banks are the problem. Similarly a healthy, recapitalised banking sector is not the solution. As Japan experienced before, it is de-leveraging that is the problem and retrenchment takes many years, rendering the economy extremely vulnerable to rapid relapses back into recession when any reverse or pause in extreme stimulus occurs. The Great Moderation relied on the debt super-cycle which is dead and buried.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/the-global-credit-crunch-is-not-receding-it-is-intensifying/
Congress Considers Raising Debt Ceiling Again to Borrow from Bankers
CNN
September 18, 2009
Congress has raised the debt ceiling four times in the past two years and will probably have to do it again in the next month.
With the government borrowing record amounts of money, the nation’s current debt ceiling of $12.1 trillion will be pierced soon.
That ceiling is the cap on how much the country allows itself to have in debt. In credit card parlance, the ceiling is the U.S. credit limit. At the end of August, U.S. debt totaled $11.8 trillion. That’s roughly $349 billion shy of the statutory limit.
The ceiling is meant to serve as a brake on spending because lawmakers would have to think very seriously before they breach the limit and take a very difficult political vote to do so. In reality, lawmakers really don’t have a choice but to raise the ceiling and they know it.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/congress-considers-raising-debt-ceiling-again-to-borrow-from-bankers/
Ron Paul: End the Fed, Save the Dollar
Brian Beers
CNBC
September 17, 2009
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“Nothing good can come from the Federal Reserve,” writes Texas Congressman Ron Paul in his latest book hitting shelves this week, titled “End the Fed.”
“It is the biggest taxer of them all. Diluting the value of the dollar by increasing its supply is a vicious, sinister tax on the poor and middle class.”
Paul makes the case that the Fed is the main culprit responsible for the current economic mess the country faces through the destructive policies of cheap credit and excessive money printing.
“Prosperity can never be achieved by cheap credit,” says Paul. “If that were so, no one would have to work for a living. Inflated prices only deceive one into believing that real wealth has been created.”
The Federal Reserve, created in 1913, has been acting as the main central bank of the United States for nearly one hundred years. Many Americans are either not sure or not interested in what role the Fed plays in managing the economy. “The economic crisis has changed everything,” writes Congressman Paul.
URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-end-the-fed-save-the-dollar/
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