Refresh Panel

ARCHIVES: Jan-Jun 2010  July-Dec 2010  Jan-Jun 2011 Jul-Dec 2011 Jan-Jun 2012 Jul-Dec 2012

The Daily Bail  Creation of Credit Derivatives    RT On Air  American Banker

Webster Tarpley Podcasts Keiser Report  Max Keiser TV  Market Watch  The Young Turks

"Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves."
Norm Franz in Money and Wealth in the New Millennium, 2001

MSM: "Prosecutors Consider Using RICO Law Against Steven A. Cohen's SAC Capital Advisors" [05/22/13] "Prosecutors may use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, most commonly associated with prosecutions against the mafia, to move against Cohen's $15 billion hedge fund company, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. While this is one option under consideration, no final decision has been made, the source added. Indeed, the approach carries its own set of risks and would require approval from top Department of Justice officials, legal experts said. A spokeswoman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the Justice Department. SAC Capital has previously denied any wrongdoing and a spokesman for the $15 billion firm declined to comment on the potential use of RICO against it. [...]" 

MSM: "Krugman: Austerity Policies Based On 'A Mythical 70s That Never Was'" [05/20/13] "They say hindsight is 20/20, but according to Paul Krugman it may actually be much worse than that when it comes to economic policy-making. The Nobel-Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist wrote in a blog post Sunday that current policymakers are basing their decisions to cut spending, leading in many cases to high unemployment, on the false notion that the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s was caused by too much government debt and too many government handouts.  During the period leading up to that recession government debt was low and stable or falling as a share of the economy. What actually caused the recession of the late 1970s, Krugman writes, was an unfortunate vicious cycle of workers demanding more money because they expected prices to rise, companies raising prices to pay for their increased costs as well as big oil price shocks. “It would be bad enough if we were basing policy today on lessons from the 70s,” Krugman wrote in the blog post Sunday. “It’s even worse that we’re basing policy today on a mythical 70s that never was.” Though Krugman has been criticizing some policymakers’ obsession with austerity for years, the strategy has recently come under fire after a widely-cited paper by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff thought to prove that high levels of government debt correlated with economic downturns, turned out to be riddled with errors. [...]"  

Commentary: "European Commission Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe" Matt Taibbi [05/17/13] "According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data: [...]"  :

MSM: " Banks’ Lobbyists Win Softer Rule on Derivatives Trades" [05/16/13] "A rule set for regulators’ approval could protect Wall Street’s control over the $700 trillion derivatives market, a lucrative business that helped cause the financial crisis. [...]"  

Commentary: "10 Scenes From The Economic Collapse That Is Sweeping Across The Planet" [05/14/13] "The next wave of the economic collapse may not have reached Wall Street yet, but it is already deeply affecting billions of lives all over the planet. Much of Europe has already descended into a deep economic depression, very disturbing economic data is coming out of the second and third largest economies on the globe (China and Japan), and in most of the world economic inequality is growing even though 80 percent of the global population already lives on less than $10 a day. Just because the Dow has been setting brand new all-time records lately does not mean that everything is okay. Remember, a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts. The next major wave of the economic collapse is already sweeping across Europe and Asia and it is going to devastate the United States as well. I hope that you are ready. The following are 10 scenes from the economic collapse that is sweeping across the planet... [...]"  

MSM: "Bloomberg News Caught Spying On Goldman Sachs Through Bloomberg Terminals" [05/12/13] "Goldman Sachs recently confronted Bloomberg LP after learning that reporters for the business news service have been using the company’s terminals to monitor employees of the Wall Street bank, Mark Decambre of The New York Post reports. Specifically, Goldman officials learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but also how many times they had used particular functions, sources told The Post. [...]" Related: "Goldman Sachs Employees Concerned Bloomberg Using Terminals To Snoop" "Bloomberg’s terminals have become the lifeblood of Wall Street trading shops, particularly those that mine the terminals’ reams of data to help make daily trading decisions. Wall Street firms pay about $20,000 a year to rent each terminal — allowing the company founded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to ring up annual revenue of more than $6 billion. Mayor Bloomberg, who is worth about $25 billion, no longer oversees the day-to-day running of Bloomberg LP but controls the privately held company. As of May 2010, there were 310,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscribers worldwide. [...]"  

MSM: "California Sues JP Morgan for Fraudulent and Criminal Debt-Collection Practices" [05/10/13] "Attorney General Kamala D. Harris today filed an enforcement action against JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Chase) alleging that the bank engaged in fraudulent and unlawful debt-collection practices against tens of thousands of Californians. The suit alleges that Chase engaged in widespread, illegal robo-signing, among other unlawful practices, to commit debt-collection abuses against approximately 100,000 California credit card borrowers over at least a three-year period... [...]"  

Commentary: "On The Verge Of Witnessing The Death Of The Paper Gold Scam" [05/09/13] "The legal claims on physical gold far exceed the amount of physical gold that the banks actually have by a very, very wide margin. And right now the bankers are scared out of their wits because their warehouses are being drained of physical gold at a frightening rate. So what happens when their physical gold is gone but they still have lots and lots of people with legal claims to gold? When that moment arrives, it will represent the end of the paper gold scam. Many believe that the recent takedown of the price of paper gold was a desperate attempt by the bankers to put off that day of reckoning, but it appears to have greatly backfired on them. Instead of cooling off demand for precious metals, it has unleashed a massive "gold rush" all over the globe. Meanwhile, word has been spreading among wealthy families in both North America and Europe that they had better grab their physical gold out of the banks while they still can. This is creating havoc in the financial community, and at least one major international bank has already declared that it will only be settling those accounts in cash from now on. The paper gold scam is starting to unravel, and by the time this is all over it is going to be a complete and total nightmare for global financial markets. [...]"  

MSM: "May 7th: Major DDOS Attack Planned On US Banks And Government" [05/07/13] "Hacking group Anonymous has launched OperationUSA (#OpUSA), a coordinated online attack against nine US government sites and more than 130 financial institutions for 7 May, according to a post published in failbin. The attack, according to Anonymous, would be a response to social and political injustices. “America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently you have committed war crimes in your own country. …Now it is our time for our Lulz (fun),” the group said. Here is a list of the websites that they plan to target: [...]" 

MSM: "German Finance Minister Who Helped Start Euro Now Calls For Its End" [05/07/13] "The leftwing opposition politician who was Germany's finance minister when the euro was adopted says it's time to think about abandoning the common currency in the wake of the enormous economic problems in southern Europe. Oskar Lafontaine says on his website that struggling eurozone countries have not been able to devalue their currencies to help them cope with the economic crisis that has seen several slip into recession. Lafontaine proposes a restructuring of Europe's banking system, stricter controls on lenders, and a return to the European monetary system that preceded the euro. Lafontaine is now out of federal politics but is still an influential member of the Left Party, the successor to former East German communists. [...]" 

MSM: "Study: Austerity Has Cost The U.S. Economy 2.2 Million Jobs" [05/07/13] "That's the conclusion of a new study by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney at the Brookings Institution. In the 46 months since the Great Recession ended, state, local and federal governments have cut about 500,000 jobs. In contrast, in every other U.S. recession since 1970, the government hired approximately 1.7 million people, on average. That means the U.S. is an estimated 2.2 million jobs in the hole. [...]"  Related: See below: "Goodbye To Austerity" [04/29/13]; "EU Backs Off Austerity" [04/23/13] ; "Academic Paper Often Used To Make The Case For Austerity Cuts Contains Major Errors" [04/21/13]  

MSM: "The US Regulatory Vice Closes On Bitcoin" [05/07/13] "Just six weeks after the US Treasury decided enough-was-enough with this upstart non-fiat, non-controlled-by- TPTB currency (and applied money-laundering regulations), US financial regulators are now looking for supervisory control over Bitcoin. As The FT reports, CFTC’s Bart Chilton notes “it’s not monopoly money – real people have real risk in these instruments,” and that regulating the controversial cyber-currency “is sure something [CFTC] needs to explore.” Chilton’s remit to regulate this “shadow currency” is predicated on it becoming a basis for derivative contracts as opposed to purely transactional (akin to the monitoring of physical oil transactions that can influence crude futures.) Since the Treasury’s March decision, at least three North American companies have had their accounts seized by the banks but while this attempt to control the virtual currency follows the ECB’s ‘ponzi attack’ last year, the ‘regulators’ may note that, “even if US regulations make it hard for Bitcoin businesses to operate in the US, that doesn’t mean it will make it difficult for people to use Bitcoin as a currency in the US. Bitcoin is a world currency.” [...]" 

Concepts and Practices: "Do Not Be Fooled By the Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme" [05/04/13] "Kaspersky Lab has found a Trojan virus that turns a PC into a miner for Bitcoins. In fact, the “infected machine [becomes] a slave of the bitcoin generator. The usage of CPU grows up significantly. This virus is spread through Skype messages.” Those affected by the virus are mainly “in Italy, Russia, Poland, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, Ukraine and others.” The virus appears to have originated in India, connecting to other servers; such as in Germany.  In 2010, Banminer, another Bitcoin Trojan emerged that “sniffed out graphical processing units and used them to crank out Bitcoins.”  [...] Alternative media has been singing the praises of Bitcoin as the answer to the predicament Cyprus has posed. Those who support the move toward virtual currency ignore the obvious issues that it creates. Those with vested interest in Bitcoin constantly impress the incorrect claim that “it’s outside the banking system [and] it does not feed the bankers.” ... The unsuspecting public is not aware that those who push Bitcoins and use the fear-mongering of how the technocrats are syphoning out money from depositors in Cyprus assert that “the stock, bond, and fat currency markets have all crashed against Bitcoin.” In the end the admonishment is “just buy Bitcoin and be a part of the bankless currency revolution.” [...]  The illusion is that this digital currency can allow any “two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party”; however while based on the collective control of computers, a “chain of digital signatures” and a “trusted central authority” to keep the monetary system from relying on printed fiat. Virtual cash, the digital exchange offered by Bitcoin, is gaining ground as the possible future replacement for global currencies as a network of global computers.  The actuality of Bitcoin is that it is no different than any other type of e-currency and subject to manipulation by the technocrats. Should people transfer their fiat into Bitcoin thinking they can avert theft from banksters, they will soon realize that ALL digital currency plays into the central banking schemes to extract wealth from the people. [...]"  Note: The whole scheme is absolutely delusional. Buffoonish theatre over concepts that relate to nothing, by those reincarnated retreads with insecure existential leanings. Very Shakespearean .. much ado about nothing.  Related: "Bitcoin Exchange Gox Hit By $75 Million Lawsuit"  

MSM: "U.S. May Charge JPMorgan For Power Market Manipulation: Analysts" [05/04/13] "The regulator of U.S. power markets appears likely to pursue manipulation charges against JPMorgan Chase & Co , analysts said, after a New York Times report on the agency's document that seemed to lay out its case. The Times said on Friday it reviewed a confidential, 70-page government document that the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) sent to JPMorgan in March, which alleged the bank manipulated the power market in California and Michigan in 2010 and 2011. FERC investigators found JPMorgan devised "manipulative schemes" that transformed "money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers," the Times reported, citing the document. It said the bank has until mid-May to respond. It has been clear since last summer that FERC was pursuing a deep enquiry on JPMorgan's trading activities, the latest in a string of FERC investigations that have rattled the U.S. power market and - in the case of rival bank Barclays Plc - concluded with $470 million in proposed penalties. [...]  The document also criticized Blythe Masters, JPMorgan's head of global commodities and former chief financial officer, saying she "falsely" denied under oath that she was aware of schemes carried out by a group of energy traders in Houston, according to the Times.""We strongly dispute that Blythe Masters or any employee lied or acted inappropriately in this matter," JPMorgan spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli said. "We intend to vigorously defend the firm and the employees in this matter."  Related: "JPMorgan Caught in Swirl of Regulatory Woes" "Government investigators have found that JPMorgan Chase devised “manipulative schemes” that transformed “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers,” and that one of its most senior executives gave “false and misleading statements” under oath. The findings appear in a confidential government document, reviewed by The New York Times, that was sent to the bank in March, warning of a potential crackdown by the regulator of the nation’s energy markets. The possible action comes amid showdowns with other agencies. One of the bank’s chief regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is weighing new enforcement actions against JPMorgan over the way the bank collected credit card debt and its possible failure to alert authorities to suspicions about Bernard L. Madoff, according to people who were not authorized to discuss the cases publicly.  [...]" |"JPMorgan Directors Feel Heat In A Vote" | Will JPMorgan's "Enron" Be The End Of Blythe Masters?"

MSM: "Afghan Government Faces 'Cash Crunch', I.M.F. Says" [05/03/13] "A confidential assessment by the US-supported International Monetary Fund said the budget shortfall was caused by tax evasion, corruption and slow economic growth. [...]"  Related: "Hamid Karzai Confirms CIA Payments To Afghan Government" |"Ghost Money From MI6 And CIA May Fuel Afghan Corruption, Say Diplomats" |"CIA Cash Fueled Corruption, Empowered Warlords, And Undermined Exit Strategy From Afghanistan" [05/01/13] "For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency. “We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.” Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan. Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations. It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.[...] But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials. Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates. The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the C.I.A.’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”[...]"   

MSM: "JPMorgan: Global Manufacturing Is Near A Standstill" [05/03/13] "The rate of expansion decelerated slightly during April, meaning that growth so far in 2013 has remained, at best, only marginal," they wrote. "This is still an improvement compared to the contractions signalled throughout much of the second half of last year." [...]"  

MSM: "IMF Sees Little Alternative To Austerity" [05/03/13] "The US-controlled IMF chief Christine Lagarde has said that she sees little alternative to the agenda of austerity being pushed across Europe. [...]"  Note: She hasn't been paying attention to the fact that austerity has been proven a bad and ill-conceived policy. Related: See below: "Goodbye To Austerity" [04/29/13]; "EU Backs Off Austerity" [04/23/13] ; "Academic Paper Often Used To Make The Case For Austerity Cuts Contains Major Errors" [04/21/13]

Commentary: "The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo: Diminishing Returns" [05/03/13] "On the surface, the Status Quo appears stable, if not quite healthy. This stability is illusory, however, for the Status Quo has a fatal disease: diminishing return. The basic idea of diminishing return is closely related to marginal utility and marginal return: the more capital, energy and labor committed to a project, the lower the return/yield/output. [...]"  

Commentary: "Financial Treachery & Harsh Consequences" [05/02/13] "The Fascist Business Model came into vogue in 2001. The merger of state with the largest of corporations, primarily the big banks, the big defense contractors, the big news media networks, and the big pharmaceuticals, has created a chokehold around the neck of the nation, without 5% recognizing the function of the model during the strangulation in progress. The merger with the deeply corrupted corporations in power became standard fixtures following the 911 attacks, an elaborate self-destruction of the fundamental structure of the nation and its priorities by the syndicate. Think a massive elaborate bank heist of gold bars, bearer bonds, and diamonds, but such discussion belongs in other venues. Let it be said that the events of September 2001 were the syndicate coming out party and the Patriot Act their Nazi Manifesto, with painfully little recognition of events by the sheeple masses or the subservient press talking heads. The national socialists are back in force after a 70-year hiatus, with far more toys and devices. Their telltale signals are bank welfare and a flag wrapped in a cross with unending press coverage of terrorism. During the last twelve years, financial treachery and banking criminality have run rampant in a true global spectacle, their stock & trade. However, treachery with permitted bank and bond fraud, rigged financial markets, naked short ambushes, flash crashes, and lawsuits that convert criminal procedures into standard low business costs all have resulted in profound consequences.  [...]"  

MSM: "Lehman Brothers Sues Intel Over $1 Billion In Seized Collateral" [05/02/13] "Bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers has sued Intel Corp, accusing the chip maker of seizing $1 billion in collateral in breach of a swap agreement, a court filing showed. [...]"  

Commentary: "Goodbye To Austerity" [04/29/13] "There is a new campaign to end austerity. First, the IMF lets it be known it has second thoughts about it; then we are told the threshold of 90% government debt to GDP which must not be crossed, set by Professors Reinhart & Rogoff, is based on an excel spread-sheet error. Lastly, Bill Gross of PIMCO, the largest bond fund in the world, tells us austerity is not working. The new mood is spreading, to the relief of beleaguered countries like Spain and Italy. Austerity is painful, and politicians don’t like it because it makes them unpopular. Nor do Keynesian and monetarist economists, who see its failure as justification for more intervention. Austerity, as practised by Western governments, involves maintaining public spending at the cost of the private sector. [...]" Related: See below: "EU Backs Off Austerity" [04/23/13] ; "Academic Paper Often Used To Make The Case For Austerity Cuts Contains Major Errors" [04/21/13]

Commentary: "Cash Isn't Going Anywhere Yet" [04/28/13] "...Even a cursory examination of the growth and magnitude of the U.S. currency supply in circulation with the public reveals that predictions of the advent of the "cashless society" are unfounded. Despite financial innovations giving rise to convenient substitutes for cash, per capita cash holdings continue to increase and by the end of 2011, amounted to $3000 for every man woman and child residing in the U.S. While this figure does not comport with our common sense notion of how many dollars the average person holds in her wallet, we show that Europeans and Japanese citizens hold even larger amounts of cash. Two explanations are offered for these large cash holdings. The first posits that a large fraction of U.S. currency is held abroad, the second that large amounts of cash are employed to undertake transactions that individuals and firms prefer to hide from the government either to avoid taxes, regulations or punishment for illegal activities. [...]"   Related: "$2 Trillion US Underground Economy: Is the Free Market Striking Back?"

Commentary: "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever" Matt Taibbi [04/26/13]   "Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets." That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps. Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget. It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks [...]"  

MSM: "Manufacturing In U.S. Cools As Durables Orders Slump" [04/25/13] "Demand for durable goods slumped in March by the most in seven months, adding to signs manufacturing in the U.S. cooled at the end of the first quarter. Bookings for merchandise meant to last at least three years fell 5.7 percent after a revised 4.3 percent gain the prior month that was smaller than previously estimated, the Commerce Department reported today in Washington. The less-volatile category that excludes transportation equipment unexpectedly dropped for a second month. [...]"  

MSM: "Federal Reserve To Release New $100 Dollar Bill In October" [04/25/13] [0:44]  April 24, 2013 CNN

MSM: "Ex-CEO Jon Corzine Sued By Former FBI Director Louis Freeh For MF Global Collapse" [04/24/13] "The trustee in the MF Global Holdings bankruptcy case has sued ex-CEO Jon Corzine and two other former executives, alleging that they “failed to act in good faith” while running the company. The lawsuit, filed Monday in bankruptcy court in New York, says Corzine and others “dramatically changed” the company’s business plan “without addressing existing systemic weaknesses that ultimately caused the plan to fail.” The lawsuit says that Corzine allowed the company to take on risky trading strategies that weren’t properly monitored. MF Global collapsed in October 2011 after a calamitous bet on European bonds. Former FBI director Louis Freeh is the trustee overseeing the wind-down of MF Global and trying to recover money for creditors. Creditors have not received any payments so far.  [...]"  Related: "The Case Against Jon Corzine"  

MSM: "The Ripple Effect" [04/24/13] "Misinformation can spread quickly on Twitter, resulting in real world impacts. On Tuesday, hackers took over the Associated Press Twitter account and falsely claimed that there had been explosions at the White House and that the president was hurt. The tweet was up for a few minutes and tweeted more than three thousand times before Twitter took the account offline. The AP immediately confirmed the news was not true, but it was up long enough to impact the stock market, which dropped 143 points. Real tweets have the power to end careers, cause diplomatic tensions, fuel a revolution and find a kidney. Fake tweets can have the same ripple effects, and damage control is difficult. There is no way to edit or append a correction to a tweet, and once it has been retweeted, those 140 characters take on a life of their own. A follow-up tweet with the correct information might not be seen by the same people. [...]"  Note: Well, the people who promoted the social website system lacked foresight and logic ... it's obvious that this kind of thing would happen. Anyone who deals with the stock market, which is influenced by innuendo and emotion, is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Related: "AP Twitter Account Hacked, 'Explosions At White House' Tweet Crashes Markets"  

Commentary: "Could The US & Israel Hack The US Banking System and Falsely Blame It On Someone Else" [04/24/13] "... So what it looks like is being planned, and pre-sold to the American people with all these stories about celebrities' personal information being hacked and made public (an activity that produces no profit for the hackers other than news headlines), and the "Syrian" (nudge nudge wink wink) hack of the AP Twitter feed that shocked the US stock market, is that the US Government will itself take down the US financial computers, and blame it on Iran /Russia/ China/Al Qaeda/Syria/Arabs and others to be named as convenient. This gets Wall Street and Washington DC off the hook, because now the financial melt-down is an ' act of war', rather than the result of decades of Wall Street crime and corruption and the predations of Private Central Banks. US banks have already been hit with cyber attacks over the last two weeks, to set the stage. And this would also explain why the US corporate media is paying scant attention to the riots in Spain and Greece so that Americans still dependent on MSM will remain oblivious to the fact that the Euro is falling apart. This scenario also explains the testing of means to interfere with DNS to silence websites that may offer opposing interpretations of events (this too will be blamed on Iran). Such a cyber false-flag also gives the US Government the excuse to take total control of the internet so that those pesky truth-seeking bloggers don't give the slaves uppity ideas that this is just another war-starting hoax like the attack on the USS Liberty or 9-11 or the Boston bombing.  [...]"  Note: We shall see. Related: Political Theatre: "Syrian Electronic Army’s 'Twitter Hacking Campaign' Racks Up Another Victory" Yeah ... right.

MSM: "Bloomberg Attempts Hit Piece on Gold: Ron Paul Sets Him Straight on the Crimes of the Fed" [04/24/13] [12:33] "To the anchor’s dismay, Ron Paul calls out the crimes on the Comex at 8:00 into this piece. “There was one person that dumped 53,000 contracts in one sale” [...]"  

Commentary: "Physical Gold vs. Paper Gold: The Ultimate Disconnect" [04/24/13] "...Previously, there was little difference between the physical and paper markets for gold. Yes, there were premiums and delivery charges, but everybody regarded the futures market as the base quote. I believe this is changing; people don't trust the paper market as they used to. Instead of capitulating to fear of greater losses, the demand for physical gold has hit new records. The US Mint sold a record 63,500 ounces – a whopping 2 tonnes – of gold on April 17 alone, bringing the total sales for the month to 147,000 ounces; that's more than the previous two months combined. Indian markets, which are more oriented to physical metal, now have a premium of US$150 over the futures price in Chicago. Demand at coin dealers has increased as the price has dropped. And premiums are much bigger than they were as recently as a week ago. [...]"  

Commentary: "Chinese Sue Fed For Monopoly USD Devaluation" [04/23/13] "In what could to grow into a class action in US courts, a Chinese woman is suing the Federal Reserve after discovering that the real value of the USD250 she put in an account in 2006 had shrunk by 30%. She claims it was the result of the Fed issuing too much money, and as The South China Morning Post reports, her son Li Zhen, the lawyer, called the lawsuit “litigation for the public good”. Alleging “abuse of monopoly in issuing currency,” the People’s Court of Kunming has yet to rule on the litigants’ demand that the Fed cease-and-desist from its quantitative easing policy. While this may seem frivolous, there are some interesting points being made that bear watching, as Li notes, since “the Fed is private institution which enjoys monopoly over the issuing of currency, US Dollar holders can sue it for printing too much money.” [...]" 

Commentary: "Gold Deliveries Into China Soar To 1,000 Tons" [04/23/13] "On the heels of his appearance in the extraordinary CBC production titled, “The Secrets of Gold,” today whistleblower Andrew Maguire spoke with King World News about the incredible action which continues to take place in both the gold and silver markets. Maguire also told KWN about the staggering amount of physical gold tonnage that Eastern central banks continue to buy each day in London, in a market that, remarkably, is not seeing any supply. Below is what Maguire had to say in part I of his remarkable and exclusive interview. [...]"  Related: "The Secret World Of Gold Part 1" [14:55] Part 2 [13:25] Part 3 [14:18] "April 18 2012 [...]" 

MSM: "EU Backs Off Austerity" [04/23/13] "Limit Austerity, EU Official Says A top European Union official signaled his support Monday for relaxing Europe’s austerity drive, in what could be a significant break for countries struggling to hit tough budget targets amid persistent economic weakness. In a speech, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the policy of austerity pursued by the EU in recent years no longer has the public backing needed to work. – [...]"  Related: See below

Commentary: "Academic Paper Often Used To Make The Case For Austerity Cuts Contains Major Errors" [04/21/13] "Another surprise is that the mistakes, by two eminent Harvard professors, were spotted by a student. It's 4 January 2010, the Marriott Hotel in Atlanta. At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Professor Carmen Reinhart and the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, are presenting a research paper called Growth in a Time of Debt. Word about this paper spread. Policymakers wanted to know more. And so did student Thomas Herndon. His professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst had set his graduate class an assignment - pick an economics paper and see if you can replicate the results. It's a good exercise for aspiring researchers. Thomas chose Growth in a Time of Debt. It was getting a lot of attention, but intuitively, he says, he was dubious about its findings. [...]"  Related: "Study Debunking Austerity Research Sparks Wide Reaction" [14:39]

Flashback: "7,000 Tons of Gold Bullion Removed from Fort Knox From 1973-74" [04/20/13] "SD has discovered the manuscript of a 1981 article by The Globe which reported that 7,000 tons of gold bullion were removed from Fort Knox from $1973-74, and the only bullion that remained was from melted down gold coins & was of such poor quality (at least 10% copper) that it would not be accepted on the open market by any nation. “300 truckloads of bullion were simply driven away.” [...]"  

Commentary: "Former Israeli Intelligence Operatives Now Working For Hedge Funds" [04/19/13] "A company staffed with former operatives of Israel’s top intelligence agencies and founded with the help of the former head of the Mossad is being used by hedge funds looking for an edge in the financial markets. Kela Israeli Intelligence has increasingly become a popular service on Wall Street. The firm employs about 40 former intelligence operatives and analysts, most of them ex-members of the Israeli army’s secretive 8200 unit, which is often described as Israel’s equivalent to the National Security Agency and believed to be behind the Stuxnet computer worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. [...]"  

Commentary: "China Attacks The International Supremacy Of The US Dollar" [04/18/13] "Internationalization of the Yuan is an official goal of the Chinese authorities. So far, China attempted to reduce the dollar’s role in bilateral trading in the Asian region and South America, but its latest steps show that Europe is the next target. For the first time ever, Chinese monetary authorities have signed a bilateral swap agreement with France. The most surprising aspect of the signed agreement is that the initiative of the swap came from the French central bank. Most observers were surprised by the fact that a European central bank is willing to help China in its quest to internationalize the Yuan at the expense of the US dollar. China Daily reports that "The Bank of France has been working on ways to develop a RMB liquidity safety net in the euro area with due consideration of a supporting currency swap agreement with the People's Bank of China" [...]"  

MSM: "Nigel Farage: "This EU Is The New Communism. It Is Power Without Limits" [04/18/13] [3:03]    

Legal Case: "Nationwide Loan Modification Scam Alleged" [04/18/13] "The National Mortgage Help Center and its unscrupulous owner scammed homeowners by advertising loan modification assistance, then charging to refer them to predatory lenders, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America claims in court. The Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) sued Connecticut-based Matthew Goldreich and his companies National Media Connection and National Mortgage Help Center. Many homeowners who responded to the defendants' ads "discovered that the National Mortgage Help Center was a sham - or worse, have been scammed by Goldreich's and NMC's unscrupulous clients - were and continue to be disgusted by the fraud to which they fell victim and consequently have ceased participating in the market for mortgage assistance services," according to the complaint. NACA claims it offers legitimate services to consumers, and that Goldreich scams them, competing deceptively and unfairly and violating trademark. It claims Goldreich has advertised his scam widely, including on network TV. Goldreich sells himself as an "expert in television and radio infomercial and short form marketing," the complaint states. But actually, he "scams" desperate homeowners and leaves them "disgusted" after fleecing them and passing them along, NACA says in the complaint. NACA claims the National Mortgage Help Center is a "fictitious entity" Goldreich created to profit from "the current economic crisis by developing fraudulent advertisement campaigns designed to gain the trust of desperate consumers and then selling those consumers as sales leads to the highest bidder - often to predatory financial services companies peddling bogus products."  [...]"  

Legal Case: "Goldman Sachs Can't Shake Fraud Lawsuit" [04/18/13] "Goldman Sachs cannot dismiss Prudential's claims that it falsely represented more than $375 million in residential mortgage-backed securities in its offering materials, a federal judge ruled in New Jersey. In September 2007, New Jersey-based Prudential Insurance and five investment subsidiaries held about $13.5 billion in residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and $241.1 billion in total investments. From 2004 to 2008, Goldman Sachs & Co. bought and pooled mortgage loans and underwrote and sold more than $375 million worth of RMBS to Prudential, according to U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton's history of the case. In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs created and underwrote 93 RMBS and 27 mortgage-related collateralized debt obligations, totaling about $100 billion.  [...]"  

MSM: "Buying Frenzy Continues: China, Japan, And Australia Scramble For Physical Gold" [04/18/13] "...Japanese and Chinese gold retailers seeing a “frenzied” surge in demand. In Australia, “the volume of business… is way in excess of double what we did last week,… there’s been people running through the gate,” and Japanese individual investors doubled gold purchases yesterday at Tokuriki Honten, the country’s second-largest retailer of the precious metal. [...]"  

Commentary: "The Gold Price Crash Is Further Evidence Of Market Rigging" [04/17/13] "John Kemp at Reuters has calculated that based on a normal distribution, you would expect to see movements like Monday’s only once in every 500 million trading days, or two million years. The news which would justify such a price swing is curiously absent – in fact, my view is that the market ought to be bullish for gold. Something doesn’t add up [...]"  Note: Again, it is the paper gold market (GLD) and the paper silver market (SLV) which are collapsing the value of the actual metals, which have been overvalued by the fabricated markets of paper metal (IOUs) certificates.

Commentary: "Massive Paper Gold Selling Eclipses Annual Mine Production" [04/16/13] " Gold bullion prices have been subjected to a cleverly orchestrated bear raid in our opinion. Selling of paper Comex contracts on Friday, April 12th, and Monday, April 15th, totaled 1 million contracts, exceeding global annual gold production by 12%. The attack succeeded when the technical support in the low $1500’s/oz. easily gave way and led to waves of forced selling. The volume is without precedent and has all the characteristics of a panic liquidation driven by naked short selling…. There is no way to know where or when the liquidation will end, but it will inevitably do so, probably sooner rather than later. According to our source at the World Gold Council, physical buying from India and China, which represents half of global gold consumption, remains robust. Central bank buying activity shows no signs of abating. The notion that weak peripheral European states will be forced to sell their gold holdings is fanciful. A more likely scenario is that these holdings would be used as collateral to support additional credit to the sovereign. [...]"  

MSM: "Wealth Tax To Pay For EU Bail-Outs" [04/16/13] "Wealthy households would face new taxes on property and other assets under German plans to prop up the struggling eurozone. The proposals, from members of Germany’s council of economic experts, raise the prospect of taxes being imposed on property in a country like Spain if its government was forced to seek a bail-out. The council, known as the “Five Wise Men”, is often used to test new policies that are later adopted officially. The German suggestion is the latest sign that Berlin is intent on imposing even tougher rules on weaker southern euro members in exchange for using its economic might to support their finances.  [...]"  

Commentary: "Fed Argues that Mortgage Abuses are Trade Secrets, Meaning Institutionalized Fraud" [04/15/13] "When the media discusses how banks have ridden like a steamroller over borrowers and investors, the typical response is a combination of minimization and distancing: that the offense wasn’t such a big deal and that it was a mistake. Recall the PR barrage in the wake of the robosigning scandal: its was “sloppiness,” “paperwork errors”. Servicers kept claiming, despite overwhelming evidence of bad faith and the institutionalization of impermissible practices, that there was really nothing wrong with how they were operating. Remember it was important for them to take that position, because if they were to admit that the bank knew it was engaging in widespread abuses with management knowledge and approval, it would be admitting to fraud. Two major government settlements later, this position is looking awfully strained. And the Fed, in stonewalling Elizabeth Warren’s and Elijah Cumming’s efforts to get more information about the Independent Foreclosure Reviews, presented the bad practices as servicer policies, which means that they were deliberate, hence, fraudulent. [...]"  

MSM: "Interest on Student Loans to Give Government $34 Billion a Year in Revenue" [04/15/13] "Even as the economy struggles to recover from the bursting of the sub-prime mortgage debt bubble in 2008 a new debt crisis over student loans looms on the horizon, and this time the federal government is actually profiting off of debtors. [...]"  Note: All for an 'education' as a bridge to nowhere ... what has become a social fabrication and a lie .... condemning a generation to eternal debt.

Commentary: "The Great Global Tax Grab is Already Underway" [04/14/13] "The world will soon be facing a tsunami of defaults on bad debts. This will include municipal or local government defaults such as the one now occurring in Stockton California, governments “defaulting” on promises they’ve made to the people (Social Security, Medicaid), a default on the social contract between society and politicians such as the one in Cyprus (a default on the notions of private property and Democracy), stealth defaults on debts in the form of inflation and finally, of course, outright sovereign defaults. However, the last option will be sovereign defaults; all other options will be tried first. The reason for this is that sovereign bonds are the senior most collateral posted by the banks for their hundreds of trillions of Dollars worth of derivatives bets. [...]" 

MSM: "Congress Exempts Most Federal Workers From Key Insider Trading Reporting Requirement" [04/14/13] "Back in 2012, amid “intense pressure from Obama” including an appeal for its passage in his 2012 State of the Union address, Congress passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act (with 96-3 theatrical votes in the Senate, and 417-2 even more theatrical votes in the House) – a bill prohibiting the use of non-public information for private profit, including insider trading by members of Congress and other government employees. It is unclear why until 2012 it was perfectly legal for congress to trade on inside information, something we pointed out in May 2011 when we wrote that a “A Hedge Fund Comprised Of Junior Congressional Democrats Should Outperform The Market By 9%” as it turned out flagrant insider trading abuse occurred mostly within the democrat ranks of the House (compared to a mere 2%+ outperformance by Congressional stock trading republicans). It turns out that any cynical skepticism regarding Congress’ ability and willingness to police itself was well founded, as last night the House eliminated a “key requirement of the insider trading law for most federal employees, passing legislation exempting these workers, including congressional staff, from a rule scheduled to take effect next week that mandated online posting of financial transactions.” [...]"  

MSM: "Former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman: The Entire Economy Is A Ponzi Scheme" [04/14/13] [5:16] "Bill Gross, Nouriel Roubini, Laurence Kotlikoff, Steve Keen, Michel Chossudovsky, the Wall Street Journal and many others say that the entire economy is a Ponzi scheme. Former Reagan budget director David Stockman just agreed: [...]"   Related: "Is Global Finance a Ponzi Scheme? Ask a Russian Expert" "Sergei Mavrodi is one of the most infamous names in Russia's recent history. Back in February 1994, amid the turmoil of the country's transition to a market economy, the mathematician organized a Ponzi scheme called MMM. He offered returns of 100 percent a month and advertised aggressively on national television. Before the pyramid crashed in July 1994, it attracted as many as 10 million depositors, making it more popular than the voucher privatization program that was supposed to give regular Russians a chance to take a stake in formerly state-owned enterprises. [...]" |"The Entire Economy Is a Ponzi Scheme" Zerohedge

Commentary: "Grayson Asks For An Investigation Into Federal Reserve’s FOMC Leak" [04/14/13] "The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee released its recent minutes 24 hours early to a handful of big banks, private equity firms and other insiders. Congressman Alan Grayson wrote the following letter to the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (Darryl Issa) today: [...]"  

MSM: "British Offshore Banking Under Fire In EU Tax Haven Battle" [04/13/13] "Austria has accused Britain of being a haven for money laundering and tax evasion as the Alpine nation comes under European Union and German pressure to axe its banking secrecy laws.[...]"  

Commentary: "Hundreds Of Thousands Of Defrauded: Small Savers Face Loss Of Life Savings In Spain" [04/12/13] "Approximately 710,000 Spanish bank customers and their families have been inappropriately sold "preference shares" in their banks, according to financial consumer association ADICAE (Association of Bank and Savings Bank Users). Most are ordinary savers who were persuaded to convert their life savings into this much riskier form of investment, which they were told was just as safe. This was a lie. Between 1999 and 2004, some €18.3 billion (US$24 billion) worth of preferential shares were sold in Spain, to around 50,000 people, mainly pensioners. But with the onset of the global financial meltdown in 2008, banks embroiled in the toxic property loans market began selling a lot more of these shares as the property boom collapsed. Around €31 billion worth of preferential shares were sold by Spain’s major banks and savings banks ( cajas de ahorro ). Banking staff were instructed to pressure customers, who for the most part had no idea what these financial products were, to buy these shares. In many cases, clients were deliberately conned. According to a report by the Consumers and Users Organization (OCU), 80 percent of those affected are older than 65. The banks deliberately targeted this age group because they were considered to “trust” banks more. They were then “recommended” the product as a good new investment due to its “high profitability” without being told that returns were not guaranteed, or that the state Deposit Guarantee Fund would not cover losses. There are thousands of stories of the callousness with which banks imposed themselves on these small investors, including one pensioner suffering Alzheimer’s disease and at least one illiterate person who signed by dipping a finger in ink. [...]"  

Commentary: "Why Since 1790, The United States Has Suffered 16 Banking Crises, And Canada Has Experienced None" [04/12/13] "It turns out Canada can thank the French for their stable system, according to a paper by Columbia University’s Charles Calomiris, presented at the Atlanta Fed’s 2013 Financial Markets Conference. When it became a British colony, the majority of Canada’s population was of French origin — and the French inhabitants hated the British government. So to keep the colony firmly within the Empire, British policymakers steered toward a government structure that would limit the power of the French-majority while also giving Canada more and more self-government. The eventual result was a highly-centralized federal government which controlled economic policy making and had built-in buffers for banker interests against populist forces, the paper argues. That anti-populist political system — known in political science as liberal constitutionalism or liberal democracy — is a key ingredient in Canada’s stable banking track record, Mr. Calomiris contends in his paper, which is a summary of a much longer book he’s written with Stephen Haber due out in September. That’s because this kind of political system makes it difficult for political majorities to gain control of the banking system for their own purposes, the authors contend. [...]"  

Commentary: "Top Bitcoin Exchange Freezes, Arbitrarily Shuts Down" [04/12/13] "It is now abundantly obvious that bitcoin has become an insidious "trap" that's taking money from suckers who are deluded into believing the "bitcoin cult." The top bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, now openly admits that its trade engine crashed during the yesterday's panic selloff, preventing people from being able to get out of the bitcoin market. Today, Mt.Gox now says, "Trading is halted until 2013-04-12 02:00am UTC to allow 'the market' to 'cool down' following the drop in price," meaning that the #1 bitcoin exchange has arbitrarily decided to stop processing orders [...] #1) The bitcoin infrastructure cannot handle a selloff. Once the rush for the exits gains momentum, you will not be able to get out. Only those who sell early will be able to exit the market. #2) The bitcoin infrastructure is subject to the whims of just one person running MTGox who can arbitrarily decide to shut it down whenever he thinks the market needs a "cooling period." This is nearly equivalent to a financial dictatorship where one person calls the shots. #3) Every piece of bad news will be "spun" by exchanges like MTGox into good-sounding news. As bitcoin was crashing yesterday by 60% in value in mere hours, MTGox announced it was a "victim of our own success!" So while bitcoin holders watched '$1 billion in market valuation' evaporate, MTGox called it a 'success'. Gee, then what would you call it when bitcoin loses 99%? A "raging" success? Keep in mind that MTGox makes money off bitcoin transactions, meaning the organization has every reason to spin bad news (just like Wall Street) and keep the market "churning" so that more transactions are taking place. Listening to bitcoin advice from people who are making money off bitcoin transactions is a lot like listening to Obama promise you how he'll protect your liberty. You are a fool if you believe anything now coming out of the "bitcoin cult.""  Note: A digital pie in the sky ...  Related: MSM:"Bitcoin Has No Intrinsic Value, And Will Never Be A Threat To Fiat Currency"  

Legal Case: "U.S. Workers Alarmed by Inside Trading Law" [04/11/13] "A law meant to keep elected officials from inside trading exposes civilian government employees to terrorists, criminals and ID theft by posting their financial information on the Internet, the workers claim in court. The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and four government employees sued the secretary and sergeant at arms of the U.S. Senate and the clerk of the House, in Federal Court. Two plaintiffs are high-level employees in the Government Accountability Office and two work or worked for the Congressional Research Service. They challenge the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, passed by Congress in April 2012. The Act requires that "by April 15, 2013, the Secretary of the Senate, the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, and the Clerk of the House of Representatives must ensure that detailed financial data regarding the assets and financial transactions of these non-elected Legislative Branch employees and theirs spouses and dependent children will be posted on the Internet." The complaint states: "The STOCK Act was introduced in response to news stories and allegations that members of Congress were using 'insider information' to make money and investments, but, as members of Congress, they purportedly could not be held liable for insider trading. As a result, "Details of their financial affairs, and the financial affairs of their spouses and dependent children, will be available to literally anyone in the world who has access to the Internet," the plaintiffs say. "No record will be made of who views the information. No restrictions will be placed on how the information will be used or distributed. Simply because they are employed by the Legislative Branch, those filers will suffer the permanent loss of their confidential financial information. The plaintiffs claim that, no thanks to the STOCK Act, just about anyone has access to their private financial information, because "no login or identification will be required to obtain internet access to the internet postings to be made by April 15, 2013. No login or identification will be required to view, search, and sort the data contained in the reports to be posted on the Senate and House websites. A login may be required for downloading data from the Senate and House websites, but it is child's play to create an Internet login that reveals nothing about one's identity." They seek declaratory judgment that Section 8 of the STOCK Act is unconstitutional, and an immediate and permanent injunction preventing the government from publishing their financial information on the internet.[...]"  Note: Stupid sequentials .... sigh ... it never ends with these people.

Commentary: "Break Up The Banks' Bill Gains Steam In Senate As Wall Street Lobbyists Cry Foul" [04/10/13] "Momentum to break up the nation's largest banks is building quickly on Capitol Hill, just weeks after a unanimous, symbolic vote in the Senate to end taxpayer subsidies to Wall Street. The latest sign of this swift and unexpected shift in the political wind came Monday when Rob Nichols, a lobbyist with the Financial Services Forum, attacked new capital standards proposed by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and David Vitter (R-La.) as "comically high." The Brown-Vitter bill is, in fact, designed to put banks in a difficult position. As Brown told HuffPost in February, he hopes to move legislation this year to break up big banks; Vitter echoed Brown's comments on the Senate floor. By crafting a bill that requires banks with more than $400 billion in assets to hold at least 15 percent of those assets in hard capital, the senators hope to encourage the handful of multitrillion-dollar behemoths to split up into smaller firms. [...] The Senate's moves come as Wall Street is making significant inroads on deregulation in the House. Last month, the House Agriculture Committee cleared six bills to deregulate derivatives -- the same instruments that were tied to mortgages at the heart of the 2008 financial crash. The Brown-Vitter bill would force all banks to carry at least 10 percent of their total assets in shareholder equity, limiting the amount of borrowed money they can put on the line. Banks with at least $400 billion in assets would have to carry an additional 5 percent, bringing their total capital ratio to 15 percent.[...]" 

MSM: "Oregon Lawmakers Aim To Raise $275 Million In Taxes On Wealthy, Corporations" [04/10/13] "Oregon Democrats want to tax high-earners and corporations to fill a $275 million hole in their proposed state budget. Under the plan, individuals with taxable incomes of $125,000 or more and couples with joint incomes of $250,000 or more would be subject to a limit on income tax deductions, similar to federal tax rules. Those same taxpayers would also see a reduction or elimination of their personal exemption. Corporations would face a higher minimum payment. The bill also targets loopholes that allow corporations to move money to off-shore "tax havens." House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, and Rep. Peter Buckley, D-Ashland, the chief budget writer for the House, rolled out the plan Monday afternoon.  [...]" 

Flashback: "US, Its Economy Nearing The End Of Time With Rise Of China" [04/09/13] "Firstly, there is a huge shift of economic power from the USA to China. Within four years, China’s economy will have overtaken that of the USA. In real terms the Chinese economy has grown seventeen times since 1980. This has happened because China has NOT opened its borders to capital flows (of the sort which produced the 1998 Asian financial crisis). It does NOT have a so-called ‘independent’ central bank (and here the word ‘independent’ means that such a bank only implements the interests of the corrupt selfish financial elite and never the interests of the population as a whole). It has NOT had austerity-type financial and monetary policies.  [...]" 

MSM: "Secret Athens Report: Berlin Owes Greece €162 Billion In WWII Reparations" [04/09/13] "The headline on Sunday's issue of the Greek newspaper To Vima made it clear what is at stake: "What Germany Owes Us," it read. The article below outlined possible reparations payments Athens might demand from Germany resulting from World War II. A panel of experts, commissioned by the Greek Finance Ministry, spent months working on the report -- an 80-page file classified as "top secret." Now, though, the first details of the report have been leaked to the public. According to To Vima, the commission arrived at a clear conclusion: "Greece never received any compensation, either for the loans it was forced to provide to Germany or for the damages it suffered during the war." The research is based on 761 volumes of archival material, including documents, agreements, court decisions and legal texts. Panagiotis Karakousis, who heads the group of experts, told To Vima that the researchers examined 190,000 pages of documents, which had been scattered across public archives, often stored in sacks thrown in the basements of public buildings. The newspaper offered no concrete figure regarding the possible extent of reparation demands outlined in the report. But earlier calculations from Greek organizations have set the total owed by Germany at €108 billion for reconstruction of the country's destroyed infrastructure and a further €54 billion resulting from forced loans paid by Greece to Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1944. The loans were issued by the Bank of Greece and were used to pay for supplies and wages for the German occupation force. The total sum of €162 billion is the equivalent of almost 80 percent of Greece's current annual gross domestic product. Were Germany to pay the full amount, it would go a long way toward solving the debt problems faced by Athens. Berlin, however, has shown no willingness to revisit the question of reparations to Greece.[...]"  

Document: "Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions" PDF [04/08/13] "A joint paper by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England 10 December 2012 [...]"  Note: Here's the document that describes the 'bail-in' theft model that the FDIC and BOE conspired to create. Many/most other Western regimes already have their own “bail-in” rules firmly in place. The entire premise of the “bail-in” (i.e. confiscating money from peoples’ accounts) is flawed and fraudulent; meaning there could never be any rational or legitimate reason for this policy – making it a simple act of theft. Having established each of these points in previous commentaries; it’s now time to bring this analysis (in general terms) to a culmination: pointing out that the “bail-in” rules already in place do not merely contemplate stealing from bank accounts, but rather stealing any/every kind of paper asset from “the financial system more widely.” Related: See below: "Cyprus Template: "Bail-In" Concept For Banks Prosecuted As Illegal During Time of FDR" [04/07/13] Video ; "The Canadian Government Offers “Bail-In” Regime" [04/06/13]; "Bank Of England To Become One Of World's Most Powerful Central Banks" [04/01/13]; "It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors" [03/30/13]; "Big Brother In Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty" [03/30/13]; "FDIC & Bank Of England Created Resolution Authority In 2012 For Unlimited Cyprus-Style “Bail-Ins” For TBTF Banks" [03/30/13] and articles dealing with the Cyprus issue and the fallout.

Concepts and Practices: "The Dutch Tulip Bubble of 1637" [04/08/13] "The later part of the 20th century saw its share of odd financial bubbles. There was the real-estate bubble, the stock market bubbles, and the dot com bubble, just to name a few. In each instance of price inflation people paid exorbitant amounts for things that shouldn't have been worth anything like the going price. And each time people stood around afterwards and said “What were we thinking?” One has to believe that the same thought occurred to the Dutch in the 17th century when they settled down after their bout with tulipomania, wherein the humble tulip bulb began to sell for prices to make New York Realtors blanch. As much as the tulip is associated with Holland, it is not native there. Rather it was introduced in 1593 by a botanist named Carolus Clusius, who brought it from Constantinople. He planted a small garden, intending to research the plant for medicinal purposes. Had Clusius's neighbors been morally upright, the tulip might still be a rare exotic in the gardening world. Instead they broke into his garden and stole some of his bulbs in order to make some quick money, and in the process started the Dutch bulb trade. [...]"  Related: "Bitcoin Bubble: How 'Geeks' Sent Prices Parabolic"   "With the price surging more than 50 percent in just the past three days, even Bitcoin supporters acknowledge that the digital currency is unofficially in bubble territory.  [...]" 

MSM: "Largest Dutch Bank Defaults On Physical Gold Deliveries To Customers" [04/08/13] "Last week, a rubicon was crossed in the precious metals market as one of the largest banks in Europe defaulted on their gold contracts, and informed their customers there was no physical gold available for delivery. ABN AMRO, the largest Dutch bank in the Eurozone, issued a letter to their gold contract customers of failure of delivery, and instead will pay account holders in a paper currency equivalent to the current spot value of the metal. ABN AMRO, the biggest Dutch bank, has sent a letter to its clients stating that they will no longer be able to take physical deliveries of the gold they have bought through ABN. Instead they are offered money at the current market rate for gold. Basically, instead of owning a risk free, physical asset (a gold bar or a gold coin), the bank’s clients now own a monetary claim on ABN AMRO, being exposed to the bank's credit risk. - Voice of Russia  [...]"  Related: "Talking Gold Manipulation with GATA" "...Central banks that want to support their currencies — and support the US dollar in particular — want to control interest rates and government bond prices, so they intervene in the gold market by selling their gold outright, by leasing it into the market through bullion banks and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and by swapping it to other central banks that will be doing these sales or leases. They also sell gold options and futures contracts through the BIS. They do a lot of shorting of gold to control the price. [...]"  

Commentary: "Major Computer Malfunctions At Three Of The Dutch Too Big To Fails" [04/08/13] "This past week three banks, ING, Rabo and SNS, simultaneously suffered major computer malfunctions, leading to a temporary closure of their on-line facilities. Their problems were ‘unrelated’. It is completely unprecedented. The chances of a coincidence are close to zero. For years some in the blogosphere have speculated that ‘computer problems’ might be a good excuse for the Money Power to call a bank holiday and ‘reorganize’ their system. This looks like a drill. NG’s problems were the worst, it’s off-line again today. ING is one of the biggest banks in Europe with a trillion plus balance and one of the living dead. It’s a zombie bank, propped up with massive credit lines from the ECB and handouts and guarantees from the Dutch taxpayer. It has 40 billion of Spanish debt on its books and it needs to write off untold billions, maybe as much as hundreds of billions, from its commercial real estate portfolio. Obviously this would vaporize the Dutch economy over night, should it have to bail out ING. The Dutch economy is one of the worst in the world in terms of debt. All the nonsense about ‘lazy Greeks’ and ‘thrifty and frugal Dutch’ is just that: complete baloney. We have a usurious debt based monetary system. However hard one works, eternally growing debt and interest charges are inevitable, it has nothing to do with character. Meanwhile, the economy is being destroyed with ridiculous austerity, 45 billion was taken out of the budget over the last two years. The Government loses 80 cents in income due to falling aggregate demand in the economy for every euro it takes out of the economy through taxation or austerity. Same thing that destroyed Southern Europe. It’s incredible that this kind of insanity can happen in the modern age. Considering the situation in Cyprus and depositors now knowing they are fair game, it seems clear that the Money Power is organizing a bank run to further the depression it wants so badly. [...] So what does this computer malfunction mean? It’s an exercise. And probably not for Holland itself. The Dutch economy is midsized and a good place for a drill for something bigger. Like the US, which is the real target here. Two weeks ago, Chase Manhattan had some problems too: accounts were suddenly drained and set to zero. Interestingly, this was also going on with ING. [...]" 

MSM: "Cyprus Officials Warns Of Imminent Default Amid Crisis" [04/08/13] "Officials in Cyprus have warned of an imminent default by the end of April amid the escalating financial crisis in the cash-strapped island nation. Cypriot Finance Minister Harris Georgiades told parliament's finance committee on Monday that “public funds will have reached their limits by the end of the month…. It's time to pay the bill. We can only spend what is in our pocket. There is no other option.” The minister said the country’s ailing economy is at a difficult juncture and that Nicosia must secure EU bailout funding.  [...]"  

MSM: "Secret Files Expose Offshore's Global Impact" [04/08/13] "Dozens of journalists sifted through millions of leaked records and thousands of names to produce ICIJ’s investigation into offshore secrecy [...]" The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike. The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories. [...]"  Note: This is the biggest unveiling of the sequentials secret finance empire and dealings.  Related: See below:

MSM: "Mysterious Mail Triggers Global Tax-Haven Probe" [04/07/13] "The cascade of WikiLeaks-style revelations shedding light on the often murky world of offshore tax havens began when Gerard Ryle received a mysterious letter in the post. The experienced investigative journalist had been busy trying to unravel the details of a large financial fraud in his native Australia when the prospect of an even bigger scoop landed on his doormat. The letter contained part of a hard drive with the details of 2.5 million digital files, a treasure trove that would ultimately yield information on 120,000 offshore companies and nearly 130,000 individuals. Ryle, who moved to Washington to head the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) soon after receiving the hard drive, admits he was not entirely sure what he was dealing with at first. "My instinct told me it was big but you do not know," Ryle told AFP. Technical impediments also frustrated his early attempts to pore over the information he had received. [...]"  Related: "Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze" "The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010. To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world. Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen’s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC. He said the documents remind him of the scene in the movie classic The Wizard of Oz in which “they pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.” [...]" | "Identities Of The Rich Who Hide Cash Offshore" | "Europeans Slammed By Austerity Measures Now Enraged By Political Corruption" "A wave of corrosive political scandals at a time of economic woe is exacerbating the outrage of European citizens, who are channelling resentment into street protests or at the polls. Italy, Spain and Greece have all been hit by fraud or graft cases allegedly involving the top brass. France joined the ranks of scandal-hit nations this week after its former budget minister was charged with tax fraud. “Everything is coming together to reinforce populist theories — the theory that ‘they’re all rotten’,” said Eddy Fougier, a researcher at the Paris-based IRIS think tank, which analyses international issues. [...]"  Note: Again, the best-laid plans of mice and sequentials come to the fore.| "Offshore Banking and the Shadow of the Gallows"   "In a sense, it could not have happened to a more deserving class of people. These lawyers, accountants, doctors and businesspeople are the types that have donated to those who have now purchased the rope to hang them. The regulatory democracy they have helped create is now taking dead aim at their fortunes and lifestyles.[...]" 

Concepts and Practices: "Cyprus Template: "Bail-In" Concept For Banks Prosecuted As Illegal During Time of FDR" [04/07/13] [27:15] "Dennis Mason sits down with EIR’s Paul Gallagher to discuss the differences in approach under FDR, versus the bail-in crime of today. [...]" 

MSM: " White House Push: Offer Home Loans To People With Weaker Credit" [04/07/13] [5:44] Note: Stupid sequentials, again, running with the only loop they know, making the same mistakes, over and over.

MSM: "Bank Of Cyprus CEO Hard Drives Sanitized" [04/07/13] "As the investigation into unusual loan write-downs and the ‘premature’ movement of capital away from Cyprus by the elites of that nation progresses, Cyprus Mail reports that the investigators – Alvarez and Marsal (A&M) – have found that the information provided by Bank of Cyprus (BoC) was incomplete and data deleting software were found on the computers of two senior executives. “Our computer forensic technologists have found that the computers of two employees, (former CEO) Mr. (Andreas) Eliades and (senior manager group treasury and private banking) Christakis Patsalides, have had wiping software loaded, which is not part of the standard software installations at the BoC.” Investigators found no e-mail files, mailboxes or user documents on Eliades’ desktop computer – “we had significant gaps in the e-mail data received from BoC for the period 2007 to 2010, a key period for our scope of investigation,” and no email backups were performed. [...]" 

MSM: "Christine Lagarde On Cyprus Bailout: Grand Theft Cyprus "Sounds Good To Us" [04/06/13] Video clip  [1:42]"The International Monetary Fund has demanded that Cyprus cut state pension costs and reform its welfare system as the price of a €1bn loan to help bail out the stricken island. The IMF's managing director, Christine Lagarde, said the poorest Cypriots would be protected from the worst of the cuts, but Cyprus must press ahead with measures to bring its annual state budget into surplus by 2018. [...]"  Related: "IMF 'Has Confidence' In Lagarde" [03/28/13] "The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said it continues to have "confidence" in its managing director Christine Lagarde. An IMF spokesman said the fund's board backed Ms Lagarde despite a French inquiry into alleged abuses of power.  [...]"| "Anti-Corruption Police Raid The Home Of IMF Chief Christine Lagarde" [03/20/13] "Relates to £270m payout to Bernard Tapie when she was finance minister. Court of Justice of the Republic ruled that she may have abused her position [...]" 

Commentary: "The Canadian Government Offers “Bail-In” Regime" [04/06/13] "As part of the 2013 budget in Canada, the Minister of Finance tabled the Economic Action Plan 2013 which included the newest buzzword ‘bail-in’.  “The [Canadian] Government proposes to implement a “bail-in” regime for systemically important banks. This regime will be designed to ensure that, in the unlikely event that a systemically important bank depletes its capital, the bank can be recapitalized and returned to viability through the very rapid conversion of certain bank liabilities into regulatory capital. This will reduce risks for taxpayers. The Government will consult stakeholders on how best to implement a bail-in regime in Canada. Implementation timelines will allow for a smooth transition for affected institutions, investors and other market participants. Systemically important banks will continue to be subject to existing risk management requirements, including enhanced supervision and recovery and resolution plans. This risk management framework will limit the unfair advantage that could be gained by Canada’s systemically important banks through the mistaken belief by investors and other market participants that these institutions are ‘too big to fail’.” A depositor is an unsecured creditor to a bank. The Canadian government presents its position to be one of shielding the taxpayer from the need to pay for bailing out a failing bank. As a taxpayer that is comforting.[...]"  Related: See also, below: "Canadian Government Proposing Cyprus Should Be Used As Blueprint For Future Bank Failures In Canada" [03/29/13]

MSM: "Former Goldman Sachs Exec In Line To Be Next U.S. Envoy To Canada" [04/06/13] "Bruce Heyman, a Chicago-based Goldman Sachs executive and one of Barack Obama’s top fundraisers, is in final talks to become the next U.S. ambassador to Canada, according to sources. Mr. Heyman would be the second ambassador to Canada to hail from Chicago, replacing David Jacobson. A person familiar with the selection process confirmed Mr. Heyman was “in the mix,” adding that he has long been an ardent supporter of the U.S. President. However, the source added that the process is not over and no final decision has been made. [...]"  

MSM: "Fury As Judges Nix ‘No-Fault’ Wall Street Deals" [04/05/13] "They’re like stealth bombers. A growing number of federal judges have had about as much as they can take with Wall Street firms paying hefty fines to settle probes into serious wrongdoing — without admitting any guilt or any executive taking the fall. So at least four judges, in New York and Washington, are not going to take it any more. The mostly quiet attack by these judges on a long-standing business practice could mushroom into one of the most serious threats to bad corporate culture in many years. The pushback against the “neither admit nor deny guilt” settlements comes as many Americans grow frustrated that few executives have been held personally accountable for toxic mortgages, betting against the client and insider-trading practices. [...]" Related: "Money-Laundering Banks Still Get a Pass From U.S." "The attorney general of the United States says the country’s largest banks may be too big to jail, but the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund isn’t exactly convinced. Simon Johnson, the former top IMF economist and a current professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, published a blistering editorial in Bloomberg News this week that makes an argument for imprisoning the banksters responsible for the nation’s last financial crisis — and possibly the next one — much to the chagrin of Attorney General Eric Holder. Large international banks, writes Simon, are guilty of money laundering to the degree of epidemic proportions. If recent admissions from the biggest name in the American economy are any indication, though, they have nothing to fear. [...]"| "NYT: JPMorgan Faces Multiple Criminal Investigations " "As the nation’s strongest bank, JPMorgan Chase used to be known for carrying special sway with regulators. Now it increasingly finds itself in the cross hairs of federal authorities. All told, at least eight federal agencies are investigating the bank, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. in New York are also examining potential wrongdoing at JPMorgan. [...]" | "Madoff Contacts Congress: 'JPMorgan and Other Major Banks Were Complicit In My Crime'"  

Commentary: "BRICS Regimes Forge New World Bank, Call for Global Currency" [04/05/13] "... As The New American has been reporting for years, the push for a planetary fiat currency is gaining traction as the privately owned Federal Reserve continues to destroy the dollar. Unsurprisingly, the BRICS regimes agreed with the Socialist International and other powerful forces seeking to build a global central bank with a new world currency. In the final BRICS Durban declaration, signed by all five rulers on March 27, the totalitarian- minded alliance openly called for expanding the role of the International Monetary Fund’s proto-global currency known as Special Drawing Rights. [...]"  Note: There is not enough time for this dynamic to play out.

MSM: "BRICS Dumping Euro Amid Simmering EU Banking Crisis " [04/05/13] "Emerging economies – including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) – are dumping the euro, having sold €45 billion of the currency in 2012, according to data gathered by the International Monetary Fund. Last week, China and Brazil agreed to a $30-billion swap deal that would give each the ability to borrow the other’s currency in the event of future turbulence in the global financial system. The move undercuts the need to use the dollar as a reserve currency; given China’s increasing economic might, Beijing appears to be steadily promoting its national currency, the renminbi. [...]" 

Commentary: "Dan Atkinson: How The Euro Turned Into The Biggest Theft In History" [04/04/13] "British expats in Cyprus face a near-total wipe-out of any deposits over £85,000 as the full nightmare of the stricken island’s EU bailout became clear yesterday. The blow will fall on customers of the country two biggest banks – Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank. Bank of Cyprus savers will see 37.5 per cent of any deposits over €100,000 (£85,000) converted into shares in the bank, with a strong possibility that these will prove worthless. Another 40 per cent will be repaid only if the bank does well in future, while 22.5 per cent will go into a contingency fund that could be subject to further write-offs.[...] For a currency that promised to provide a sure bet on a glorious future, the euro is turning into the biggest theft of people’s savings in Western Europe since the war. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain were among the first to be crushed by the fallacy of a one-size-fits-all currency. Now it is Cyprus’s turn, and the scale of losses for some savers is eye-watering. Last week, the latest Cypriot bailout proposals hinted at a 40 per cent levy on all deposits of more than €100,000, or £85,000. This weekend, it emerged that the true cost for those better-off depositors could be much closer to 80 per cent. British expats feature prominently among those who will suffer from an effective confiscation of their assets. Claims that the victims are shady Russian oligarchs have a nasty whiff to them, and even if some of the cash that will be taken is of doubtful provenance, that cannot justify the burden now being placed on the tiny island economy. Smaller savers may not have been hit by a levy on their bank accounts, but they will be swept up in the economic storm that is sure to descend on Cyprus as a result of such draconian measures. It’s tempting to wonder why any troubled eurozone country like Cyprus was ever let into what was obviously a rich man’s club. But that is unfair – the poorer members were welcomed with open arms, with the assurance that the euro would turn them into German-style economic titans. It was like persuading a pauper to join a casino. Yes, Cyprus let its banking sector balloon wildly and, yes, it is the Cypriot government that has dreamt up some of the more masochistic features of the various bailout plans. But all this human sacrifice in the eurozone – austerity, mass unemployment, arbitrary bank account levies – is about saving the euro. You wonder how much pain there has to be before someone realises that what must be sacrificed is the euro itself. [...]" 

MSM: "World's Largest Bitcoin Exchange Goes Down" [04/03/13] "Mt. Gox, the world's first and largest Bitcoin exchange, appears to be down. Earlier today, Bitcoin service Instawallet said it had been hacked and was shutting down until further notice. These outages highlight the fundamental problem with the virtual currency that has seen its price surge in 2013 – confidence. [...]" 

Concepts and Practices: "Central Banks: Controlling The World Since 1694" [04/03/13] "... The fact is that money is not a physical object, or not merely so. It is a medium of exchange. It is a store of wealth. It is a measure of value. Fundamentally, it is an idea. Physical objects can only be “controlled” through possession, but ideas can be controlled more subtly, and more centrally. All that is needed is to control the understanding of that idea. And this, it turns out, is not nearly as hard as you might think it would be. To understand the development of this idea, we need to examine some history. Specifically, the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, part of the Nine Years' War that pitted King Louis XIV of France against most of the rest of Europe. The Battle of Beachy Head was the French navy's single greatest tactical victory in that war, sinking upwards of 11 English and Dutch ships without the loss of a single French vessel. Realizing (correctly) that England's dominance rested on its ability to control the seas, King William III committed his court to rebuilding the English navy. There was only one problem: money. The government's coffers had been exhausted by the waging of the war and William's credit was drying up. [...]"  

Commentary: "US Citizens Increasingly Facing Austerity Dictatorship" [04/03/13] "To the extent that the modern world thinks at all about the problem of fascism, there is a tendency to regard this form of bankers’ totalitarian dictatorship as something which happens suddenly and all at once.  [...]" 

Commentary: "The Icelandic Revolution and the New World Order" [04/02/13] "Ruling crime families seem to be quite flexible when it comes to making allowances for societal differences in culture, religion and mentality. They also seem to be reasonably accommodating to individual inclinations of the local ‘elite’. However they can get quite nasty, in cases where a country’s leadership openly refuses to take orders. In most cases, those countries are quickly brought back under control through a variety of measures. Blackmail, murder disguised as accidents and acts of terrorism are just the beginning. If they don’t work those countries and their leadership see themselves quickly vilified and internationally isolated as ‘rogue states’, and their economies systematically destroyed. If that doesn’t do the job either, an international coalition of countries will sooner or later rape and pillage them under some flimsy ‘humanitarian’ pretext. One country that doesn’t seem to fit into this grim picture though is Iceland. [...]"  Related: "Cyprus Parliament President Says “No Future” Under Troika, Calls For “Iceland” Solution"  

Commentary: "The Philosophy of Fraud – Stefan Molyneux" [04/02/13] [37:12] "Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses various legal and moral implications of fraud, and how it can be dealt with in a free society.  [...]"  

Commentary: "5 Of 10 Top Economies In The World Drop The Dollar" [04/02/13] "The U.S. Dollar is quickly losing its status as the world reserve currency. Five of the top ten economies in the world, plus a few others, no longer use the dollar as an intermediary currency for trade. This trend poses a huge risk to the dollar and the United States along with it. ZeroHedge points out today that Australia, the world’s 12th-ranked economy, has now joined a growing list of nations that have agreed to bypass the dollar in bilateral trade with China. China, ranked 2nd behind the U.S., also has similar agreements with Japan (3rd), Brazil (6th), India (9th), and Russia (10th). Although unilateral agreements have been in place for some time between China and the countries listed above, last week the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India & China) agreed to set up a development bank to compete with the IMF, indicating it’s gearing up to compete in a post-dollar world. Additionally, Brazil, who agreed in principle to drop the dollar with bilateral trade with China some time ago, just made it official with $30 billion in annual currency swaps which will facilitate around 50% of all trade between them. [...]"  Related: "Bye Bye Banksters – Hello BRIC" "Yes, it looks like it could be a permanent good-bye to the City of London Bankster’s worldwide web-of-debt, a system using the hijacked US Petro Dollar as the world’s exchange medium. The demise of this system has been long predicted and BRIC is just one of many new trade systems now arising all over the world which directly oppose it. And despite all the Banksters hard core corrective actions to hang on to what they acquired through many years of covert warfare against America and many of the people of the world through their worldwide web-of-debt, their evil rule is being eroded by the day and their system is being replaced one brick at a time (pun intended). [...]" | "US Dollar: Ring-Fenced & Checkmate" "An unstoppable sequence of events has been put into motion finally. The pressure has been building for months. Some themes are plainly evident, except to those who wear rose colored glasses in the US Dome of Perception. [...]"  Note: These processes would take some time to play out ... probably more time than we have, here.

MSM: "China Yuan Hits Record 19- Year High Against the Dollar" [04/02/13] Related: See below: "Australia to Abandon US Dollar in Trade with China" [04/01/13]

MSM: "Cyprus Plans Tax Breaks, Casinos To Kickstart Economy" [04/02/13] "Cyprus plans to lift a ban on casinos and offer firms tax exemptions on profits reinvested on the island under a package of reforms to kickstart its ailing economy, its president said on Monday. Cyprus's euro zone partners agreed on a 10 billion euro rescue package last Monday following weeks of tense negotiations, but it's tough terms look set to deepen the island's recession, shrink the banking sector and cost thousands of jobs. President Nicos Anastasiades, who briefed ministers on the economy during an informal meeting, said the 12-point growth plan would be put to the cabinet for approval within the next 15 days. The programme includes measures to attract foreign investment to the island - a hub for offshore finance - as well as tax exemptions on business profits reinvested there, and the easing of payment terms and interest rates on loans. [...]"  

Commentary: "List Released With 132 Names Who Pulled Cyprus Deposits Ahead Of "Confiscation Day" [04/01/13] "With every passing day, it becomes clearer and clearer the Cyprus deposit confiscation "news" was the most unsurprising outcome for the nation's financial system and was known by virtually everyone on the ground days and weeks in advance: first it was disclosed that Russians had been pulling their money, then it was suggested the president himself had made sure some €21 million of his family's money was parked safely in London, then we showed a massive surge in Cyprus deposit outflows in February, and now the latest news is that a list of 132 companies and individuals has emerged who withdrew their €-denominated deposits in the two weeks from March 1 to March 15, among which the previously noted company Loutsios & Sons which is alleged to have ties with the current Cypriot president Anastasiadis. [...] These 132 companies and individuals have withdrawn all deposits in euros, dollars and rubles, which were transferred to other banks outside Cyprus. The disclosure of the list, which shows that the outflow of deposits from local banks other financial institutions outside Cyprus became massively raises suspicion that some had inside information about the decisions taken by the other 16 eurozone countries in exchange for financing deficits of the economy. In listings, and the company is Loutsios & Sons Ltd, which carried 21 million deposit in a UK bank, while the owner of the company is alleged to have family ties with the President of the Republic, Nikos Anastasiadis. The first column are names of companies and individuals in the second record of the amounts withdrawn in the third column refers to the amount withdrawn in the same currency, the currency in the fourth and the fifth and last column refers to the date of transfer."  Related: See below.

MSM: "Cyprus’ President-Related Company Transferred €21 Million To London Prior To Bailout Agreement" [04/01/13] "A company owned by in-laws of Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades wired €21 million from Laiki Bank to London days before the Eurogroup’s crisis-triggering levy proposal, claims a Cypriot newspaper. The president demands an investigation. During two days, 12 and 13 of March, the company A.Loutsios & Sons Ltd., co-owned by Loutsios John, the husband of Nikos Anastasiadis’ daughter, Elsa, took five promissory notes worth €21 million from Laiki Bank. The money was then transferred to London, reported Cypriot newspaper Haravgi, affiliated to the communist-rooted AKEL party. The withdrawal was fulfilled just three days before the Eurogroup meeting when euro finance ministers agreed a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) bailout for Cyprus. [...]" Note: Once again, the City of London proves to be the financial terrorist’s best friend…

MSM: "Bank Of England To Become One Of World's Most Powerful Central Banks" [04/01/13] "The Bank of England will become one of the most powerful central banks in the world on Monday after the biggest overhaul of financial regulation since 1997. As part of sweeping changes that will undo the system set up by former chancellor Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has been replaced with three new bodies – the Financial Policy Committee (FPC), the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Slammed for being "asleep at the wheel" during the financial crisis, the so-called tripartite structure – comprising the FSA, the Treasury and the Bank of England – has made way for a new system to regulate the financial sector and ward off future crises. [...]" 

Trends: "Australia to Abandon US Dollar in Trade with China"[04/01/13]  "A month ago we pointed out that as a result of Australia’s unprecedented reliance on China as a target export market, accounting for nearly 30% of all Australian exports (with the flipside being just as true, as Australia now is the fifth-biggest source of Chinese imports), the two countries may as well be joined at the hip. Over the weekend, Australia appears to have come to the same conclusion, with the Australian reporting that the land down under is set to say goodbye to the world’s “reserve currency” in its trade dealings with the world’s biggest marginal economic power, China, and will enable the direct convertibility of the Australian dollar into Chinese yuan, without US Dollar intermediation, in the process “slashing costs for thousands of business” and also confirming speculation that China is fully intent on, little by little, chipping away at the dollar’s reserve currency status until one day it no longer is.[...]" Related: "China-Russia Coalition Creates Alternative to IMF, World Bank" "After 70 years of the dollar’s supremacy, the BRICS at their summit in Durban, South Africa, have reached an agreement to establish a joint financial institution that would serve the same functions as the American-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank. With America hurting and Europe terminally burdened by debt and loss of economic competitiveness, the BRICS appear to be seizing the opportunity to attack the dollar’s preeminence.  [...]" See also "China And Brazil Ditch US Dollar In Trade Deal Before BRICS Summit" [03/29/13]; "Hegemonic Corporations Scared As BRICS Plan Bank To Rival IMF" [03/29/13]

MSM: "Australia: Inactive Bank Accounts To Be Seized" [04/01/13] "After legislation was rushed through parliament, the government will from May 31 be able to transfer all money from accounts that have not been used for three years into their own revenues. This will mean that accounts with anything from $1 upwards that have not had any deposit or withdrawals in the past three years will be transferred to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. The law is forecast to raise $109 million this year as inactive accounts for three years or more are raided by Treasury. The money can be reclaimed from ASIC but the process can take months. Experts warn this will have a negative impact on people that may have put money away in a special account for their children's education or decided to put an inheritance in a separate account for a rainy day. The previous legislation allowed for bank accounts to remain inactive for up to 7 years before the money was transferred to ASIC.[...]" 

Commentary: "Cyprus: As the Dust Settles, Talk of Reciprocity and Whispers of Retribution" [04/01/13] "The tension fueled by the fear of financial loss and hardship was palpable on the morning of Mar 29th when the banks finally opened up after 15 days, but no major incidents took place in Nicosia. The Cypriots surprised the world again on Friday, re-enforcing their reputation as the most calm, cool and collected member of the European Union. This is probably due to the fact that this particular Mediterranean civilisation, in the words of one old resident, “has been occupied for 3,000 years”. That’s not diminishing the present-day reality of an island divided by a war with Turkey in 1974, and a capital city which now has its own version of Check Point Charlie dividing Greek Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus. [...]"  Note: Interesting article with background material on the historical Cyprus dynamic.

MSM: "U.S Senator Inhofe: The Banks Never Paid Back Bailouts" [04/01/13] [3:23] "Luke Rudkowski interviews U.S Senator James Inhofe about his opposition to the 700 billion dollar bank bailout in 2008 and martial law threats he received from Henry Paulson. Even though the public has been led to believe that the banks payed back this money, according to Senator Inhofe this is false and the full amount was never payed back. [...]" 

Legal Case: "Judge Dismisses LIBOR Lawsuits Against Big Banks" [03/31/13] "Banks being probed over alleged interest-rate manipulation scored a big victory in their battle against scores of private lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in potential damages. A federal-court judge on Friday agreed to dismiss claims that the 16 banks targeted by the suits broke federal antitrust laws through alleged suppression of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. In a 161-page ruling on the banks' motions to dismiss the leading suits seeking class-action status, U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald allowed some of the claims to proceed, including allegations the banks breached commodities laws. But if her ruling stands, it would take out a central plank of the litigation. The federal antitrust claims that the judge threw out can pay up to triple damages. Unless the plaintiffs can prevail on appeal, Friday's ruling on the antitrust claims would significantly reduce the potential cost to the banks. The ruling also is likely to reduce the financial inventive for new plaintiffs to join investors, cities, lenders and other parties that have already filed lawsuits. [...]"  

MSM: "IMF Proposes $1.40 A Gallon Gas Tax On US Drivers" [03/31/13] [3:45] "The national average for a gallon of gasoline is currently at $3.65. On top of that sky-high price, the International Monetary Fund has now proposed that the U.S. should impose a tax of $1.40 per gallon in order to pay for social programs around the world and help the environment. [...]"  

Commentary: "It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors" [03/30/13] "Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US FDIC and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier: Big Brother In Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty June 2009); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds. [...] Can They Do That? Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.” The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills." No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks. If our IOUs are converted to bank stock, they will no longer be subject to insurance protection but will be “at risk” and vulnerable to being wiped out, just as the Lehman Brothers shareholders were in 2008.[...] An FDIC confiscation of deposits to recapitalize the banks is far different from a simple tax on taxpayers to pay government expenses. The government’s debt is at least arguably the people’s debt, since the government is there to provide services for the people. But when the banks get into trouble with their derivative schemes, they are not serving depositors, who are not getting a cut of the profits. Taking depositor funds is simply theft. What should be done is to raise FDIC insurance premiums and make the banks pay to keep their depositors whole, but premiums are already high; and the FDIC, like other government regulatory agencies, is subject to regulatory capture. Deposit insurance has failed, and so has the private banking system that has depended on it for the trust that makes banking work.[...] • The Swedish Alternative: Nationalize the Banks" [...]" Note: Again, this, and other plans and programs they have up their sleeves, will NOT come to much fruition ... there is not enough time, and if it isn't in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter how hard up they get or how hard they try to do things ... efforts will be foiled or delayed by circumstances .... it's happening now on many fronts.    Related: "FDIC & Bank Of England Created Resolution Authority In 2012 For Unlimited Cyprus-Style “Bail-Ins” For TBTF Banks"  The BOE-FDIC report says that the December 2012 study is just the first step, and that they will have detailed plans in place by the end of 2013 for each and every G-SIFI — which are all the principal international banks in the world.

Concepts and Practices: "E-Gov Link Enables Local Governments to Accept Bitcoin" [03/29/13] "E-Gov Link announced today integration of Bitcoin payments into its popular E-Gov suite of products. Bitcoin, a global digital currency, is "gaining in popularity", and provides citizens and municipalities "a more cost effective solution" for payments. E-Gov Link was quick to react to the guidance from the US Department of the Treasury (FinCEN), which came out last week, defining the parameters for using virtual currencies. This guidance clarified the rules, and opened the door allowing municipalities to accept Bitcoin. Government entities accepting Bitcoins is a natural evolution, as Bitcoin "becomes more popular." [...] Bitcoin, the world’s first decentralized digital currency, has a "current market value" of approximately "$95 per Bitcoin". With nearly 11 Million Bitcoins in circulation, the Bitcoin economy is more than a billion dollars strong. The system uses advanced cryptographic mathematics to protect the money supply and to validate transactions, and peer-to-peer technology to maintain a world-wide common ledger, tracking which accounts contain Bitcoins. This means that users can transfer money world-wide nearly instantly for almost no fee, without trusting a corporation, bank, or other middle-man. It’s truly a "revolutionary technology."  Note: Right ... it's another trap in their experiential loop, trying to start a world "currency" scheme where they would have complete control over everything and everyone.  Related: "Bitcoin Mythology: Red-Herrings And Bullshit" | See also below: "Confessions Of a BitCoin Scammer" [03/29/13]; "Bitcoin Privacy Extension To Have Backdoor For Government Snooping?" [03/25/13] ; "Bitcoin & Cyprus Scheme: How Technocrats Manipulate All Digital Currency" [03/22/13] ; "Euro Beware: The Real Threat May Be Bitcoin, The Online “Crypto-Currency" [03/22/13]; "Bitcoin: CIA Eyes Fed Alternative" [03/07/13] ; "BitCoin Ponzi Scheme" Video [15:00] [03/07/13] and related stories/videos.  

LaRouche: "The Cyprus Template is Global" [03/29/13]   "Dean Andromidas of Executive Intelligence Review magazine, discusses the unraveling situation in Cyprus and why this is already a European wide and global crisis. Glass-Steagall cannot be put off a minute longer. [...]"  

Commentary: "Canadian Government Proposing Cyprus Should Be Used As Blueprint For Future Bank Failures In Canada" [03/29/13] "Cyprus-style bank account confiscation is actually in the new Canadian government budget. It's on pages 144 and 145 (PDF) of "Economic Action Plan 2013" which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons. This new budget actually proposes "to implement a 'bail-in' regime for systemically important banks" in Canada. "Economic Action Plan 2013" was submitted on March 21st, which means that this "bail-in regime" was likely being planned long before the crisis in Cyprus ever erupted. So exactly what in the world is going on here? Apparently the goal is to find a way to rescue "systemically important banks" without the use of taxpayer funds...[...]"   

MSM: "BRICS Summit Ends Without Development Bank Deal " [03/29/13] "The leaders of the five BRICS nations stopped short of establishing a highly-touted development bank at this week’s summit in South Africa, instead saying they would enter “formal negotiations” on the issue. But the summit did yield some agreements, including big-money bilateral trade deals. [...]"  Related: "China And Brazil Ditch US Dollar In Trade Deal Before BRICS Summit" "China and Brazil agreed to trade in each other’s currencies just hours ahead of the Durban, South Africa 26 - 27 March 2013 BRICS summit in South Africa. [...]" | "BRICS Nations Plan New Bank to Bypass World Bank, IMF" [03/28/13] "The biggest emerging markets are uniting to tackle under-development and currency volatility with plans to set up institutions that encroach on the roles of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The leaders of the so-called BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are set to approve the establishment of a new development bank during an annual summit that starts today in the eastern South African city of Durban, officials from all five nations say. They will also discuss pooling foreign-currency reserves to ward off balance of payments or currency crises. “The deepest rationale for the BRICS is almost certainly the creation of new Bretton Woods-type institutions that are inclined toward the developing world,” Martyn Davies, chief executive officer of Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory, which provides research on emerging markets, said in a phone interview. “There’s a shift in power from the traditional to the emerging world. There is a lot of geo-political concern about this shift in the western world.” The BRICS nations, which have combined foreign-currency reserves of $4.4 trillion and account for 43 percent of the world’s population, are seeking greater sway in global finance to match their rising economic power. They have called for an overhaul of management of the World Bank and IMF, which were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, and oppose the practice of their respective presidents being drawn from the U.S. and Europe.[...]"   Related: "Hegemonic Corporations Scared As BRICS Plan Bank To Rival IMF" [6:59] 

UK: "British Banks Ordered To Stockpile Extra £25billion To Prepare For Another European Financial Crisis" [03/28/13] "Britain’s banks have been told to stockpile £25billions by the end of the year to prepare for future financial crises. In a major blow to borrowers, the Bank of England warned banks they face a potential £50 billion hit over the next three years from eurozone shocks, bad debts and mis-selling scandals. Leading high street chains are warned they must bolster their balance sheets to plug a hole in their capital reserves, in a move which critics warned will further limit lending to businesses and homebuyers. The Bank of England warned lenders need to be better prepared for potential fines and future eurozone shocks [...]"  

MSM: "Top Banks Investigated On Collusion In Derivatives" [03/28/13] "European antitrust authorities are preparing a case against some of the world's largest banks, alleging collusion in the $27 trillion market for credit derivatives, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing “people familiar with the investigation.” The European Commission is investigating 16 financial groups on whether they sought to stifle competition from exchanges in the market for credit-default swaps, which pay out when a country or a company defaults on its debts. [...]" 

MSM: "JP Morgan Chase Awarded ‘Crisis Management’ Prize For Disaster It Created" [03/28/13]   [4:02] "The London Whale trading calamity cost JP Morgan Chase and its investors nearly $6 billion in credit derivatives and last Thursday the firm accepted an award for its performance handling the situation. Many critics feel that the bank doesn’t merit an award for “crisis management” for a problem it created, including the US Senate who critiqued the financial institution for evading regulations and misleading stockholders. Comedian Dan Wilbur offers his take. [...]" 

Commentary: "Confessions Of a BitCoin Scammer" [03/28/13] [7:20] 

Commentary: "Losses Inflicted On Depositors In Cyprus Would Be The Template For Future Banking Crises Across Europe" [03/27/13] [0:49] "The euro fell on global markets after Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch chairman of the eurozone, told the FT and Reuters that the heavy losses inflicted on depositors in Cyprus would be the template for future banking crises across Europe. Ditching a three-year-old policy of protecting senior bondholders and large depositors, over €100,000, in banks, Mr Dijsselbloem argued that the lack of market contagion surrounding Cyprus showed that private investors could now be hit to pay for bad banking debts. [...]"  Note: The eurozone had been planning to roll out the ESM as a "big bazooka" in mid-2014 that could help save banks and prevent financial turmoil in countries such Spain or Italy, a development that has been delayed by German resistance. Related: "Eurogroup Head Jeroen Dijsselbloem: ‘Levy On Wealth Is Defendable In Principle’"   Note: Some say money isn't wealth. See below. But, if money isn't wealth .... they should have no reason to try and confiscate it. They can't have it both ways.

Concepts and Practices: "Money and Goods" [03/27/13]   [6:55] "The value of goods are expressed in money, while the value of money is expressed in goods. Money and goods are clearly not the same things, but are exactly opposite things. Goods are wealth which you have, while money is a claim on wealth which you do not have. Goods are an asset; Money is a debt. If goods are wealth; money is clearly not wealth, it is negative wealth, maybe even anti-wealth.” — Carroll Quigley [...]"  

Commentary: "World Derivatives Market Estimated As Big As $1.2 Quadrillion Notional, as Banks Fight Efforts to Rein It In" [03/27/13] "We wrote earlier about the recent move by bankers — and the politicians who serve them — to unreform the derivatives market, to return it to its pre–Dodd-Frank, pre–Crash-of-2007 state. This is a serious move by banks and bank lobbyists, and it could well happen soon. The seven bills in the House package of “tweaks” — as the House Agriculture website dishonestly puts it — have cleared the committee with Democratic support and are headed to the House floor. In the meantime, there are companion bills in the Senate. [...]"  Related: See below: "The Global Financial Pyramid Scheme By The Numbers" [03/22/13]

MSM: "US Student Loan Write-Offs Hit $3 Bn In 1st Two Months Of Year" [03/26/13] "US banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013, up more than 36 per cent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow US economic recovery, an Equifax study showed.  [...]"  

Commentary: "Unwise Deepening Of An Unnecessary Crisis" [03/26/13] "Dominant Social Theme: Cyprus has been saved and you need not look behind the curtain. Free-Market Analysis: Cyprus seems to us to join a number of other recent events as a miscalculation of the elites running the EU and even the Western World. This article in the UK Telegraph makes the same kind of point, though its analysis is restricted to Cyprus. The idea is that the Cyprus eruption is part and parcel of a larger dysfunction that is built into the European Union itself. [...]"  

Trends: "Stockton, California: Pension Funds Wary as Bankrupt City Goes to Trial " [03/25/13] "Wall Street is taking America’s biggest pension fund to court this week, for a long-awaited battle over who takes the losses when a city goes bust — workers and retirees, municipal bondholders, or both. Stockton, Calif., declared Chapter 9 bankruptcy last year after suffering one of the country’s sharpest riches-to-rags swings when the mortgage bubble burst. Struggling to stay afloat, Stockton has slashed tens of millions of dollars’ worth of city services — firefighters, senior centers, library programs for at-risk children — and said it would cut its municipal bond repayments to a degree never seen before in a municipal bankruptcy. But it has drawn the line at slowing down its current workers’ pension accrual, or cutting the benefits its retirees now receive.  [...]"  

Commentary: "Bastiat On The Socialization Of Wealth" [03/25/13] ".... While Bastiat appeared sanguine about what was going on around him, he understood that the reigning political-economic system indeed enabled the illegitimate privatization of what in a free market would have gone into the communal realm. “Of course, I know that in practice the ideal principle of property is far from having full sway,” he wrote. “Against it are conflicting factors: there are services that are not voluntary, whose remuneration is not arrived at by free bargaining; there are services whose equivalence is impaired by force or fraud; in a word, plunder exists. ” Bastiat, who coined the phrase “legal plunder,” of course had the state in mind as the chief culprit. [...]"  Related: See below

MSM: "Cyprus Bailout: Deal Reached In Eurogroup Talks" [03/25/13] "Eurozone finance ministers have agreed a deal on a bailout for Cyprus to prevent its banking system collapsing, officials say. Reports suggest the deal will include a levy on deposits of more than 100,000 euros in Cyprus’ two biggest banks.  [...]"  Related: "Moody's: Even With The New Deal, Cyprus Could Still Default And Leave The Euro" | See also stories below. 

MSM: "Cyprus: Up To 40% Theft From Bank Accounts" [03/25/13] "Eurozone finance ministers have agreed a deal on a bailout for Cyprus to prevent its banking system collapsing, officials say. Reports suggest the deal will include a levy on deposits of more than 100,000 euros in Cyprus’ two biggest banks. The levy on accounts in Laiki Bank – the country’s second-biggest – could be as high as 40%, correspondents say. Cyprus needs to raise 5.8bn euros (£5bn) to qualify for a 10bn-euro EU bailout and avoid bankruptcy. An EU official told the BBC that under the draft agreement, Laiki Bank will be wound down with “a significant levy” affecting those with deposits of over 100,000 euros. Large deposits in the country’s biggest bank, Bank of Cyprus, could also be hit by the levy, reports say. Laiki is also likely to be split into “good” and “bad” banks. Earlier reports said good assets would be merged into Bank of Cyprus and administrators appointed to liquidate the remaining toxic assets. [...]" Now, haircuts will be forced only on uninsured depositors at Bank of Cyprus and Laiki, tracing the path of a more typical bank restructuring process.

Commentary: "Bitcoin Privacy Extension To Have Backdoor For Government Snooping?" [03/25/13] "Bankers are desperate to force governments into regulating decentralized virtual currencies like Bitcoin. With good reason. As currency wars rage with a rush to devaluation while banker bureaucrats openly rob depositors in Cyprus and as financial privacy disappears, Bitcoin has become a safe haven currency to a growing number of people. Bankers and governments can't control it or tax it, but now they're attempting to do fix that. Andrew Leonard of Salon writes: The more popular Bitcoin gets, whether as a symbol of resistance or a perceived safe haven in financially troubled times, the more government attention it will inevitably draw, and the more inexorably it will be sucked into existing regulatory structures. Incomes denominated in Bitcoins will be taxed. Efforts at money laundering will be cracked down upon. It’s the price of success. Resistance is futile. [...] Additionally, the CIA's venture capital firm In-Q-Tel has taken a great interest in Bitcoin and has called some of its developers to give a presentation about Bitcoin this June, which is troublesome for the prospect of freedom and privacy. But resistance is not futile as Andrew Leonard would like his readers to believe. Other developers are working on Bitcoin extensions to add further privacy for users. Bitcoin transactions are already fairly anonymous even though they can be viewed on a public open-source record."  Related: See below: "Bitcoin & Cyprus Scheme: How Technocrats Manipulate All Digital Currency" [03/22/13] and related stories. |Irony: "BitCoin Calls LiteCoin A Pyramid Scheme" [3:02] 

Commentary: "EU Caught Playing Dirty And It’s All About Russian Gas" [03/24/13] "There was a lot going on this week, but it’s all being overshadowed by the fascinating geopolitical game over Cyprus. This is a stage on which a country’s pending financial collapse hinges explicitly on its hydrocarbons potential, and whoever turns up with aid will win access to exploration blocks. Yesterday morning, Oilprice.com’s Jen Alic took us through the nuances of this game, noting that Russia could bail out Cyprus in return for a nice chuck of exploration acreage offshore. By the close of the day, that is exactly how things appeared to be unfolding. Later in the day, it began to emerge that Gazprom had reportedly offered Cyprus a bailout deal in return for offshore exploration rights. But by Friday, Russian and Greek Cypriot officials had said no deal had been reached. The deal Cyprus put on the table was the creation of a Cypriot state company with control of gas reserves into which Russian companies could invest, along with a nice stake in Cypriot banks to be rescued by the Russian investment fund. It’s not enough for Moscow, which is holding out for more—and likely to get it if the EU refuses to budge. This all came after the EU tried to get Cyprus to agree to partially fund an EU bailout package by putting a levy on bank deposits and offering account-holders compensation in the form of potential gas futures. This is where the EU was caught playing dirty—and it’s all about Russia. Russian oligarchs use Cyprus for their offshore banking needs, and as such hold a lot of the bigger accounts that would have been targeted under this scheme. The EU would never have done this in the past because Russia would have just turned off the gas spigots that control European supplies. What’s behind the new bravado? Quite simply, 122 trillion cubic feet of Mediterranean gas in the Levant Basin, discovered by Israel (in a US-Israeli partnership), and in Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus. If all goes well, the estimated 425 billion cubic meters (16 trillion cubic feet) of gas found in Israel’s Leviathan field will eventually be pumped via undersea pipeline directly to Turkey and then on to Europe. Another Israeli gasfield, Tamar, has 250 billion cubic meters (9 trillion cubic feet) and production should begin in April. This is Europe’s answer to the Russian gas stranglehold. It’s no longer afraid of Russia turning the spigot off. However, it gets tricky when Cyprus isn’t playing along. The Greek Cypriots rejected the EU bailout scheme and headed straight for Moscow, knowing full well the power of negotiation behind the island’s estimated 60 trillion cubic feet of gas. [...]"  Related: See below: "Russian Company Offers to Bailout Cyprus in Exchange for Gas Exploration Rights" [03/20/13] 

MSM: "Cyprus, Troika Agree To 20% Tax On Deposits Over 100,000 Euros At Bank Of Cyprus" [03/24/13] "Cyprus and the Troika have agreed to a 20 per cent tax on deposits over 100,000 euros at the Bank of Cyprus and 4 per cent on deposits held at other banks. [...]"  

Commentary: "Russia Says Door Still Open for Cyprus Rescue Deal" [03/23/13] "Russia is still willing to provide Cyprus with financial aid to help it overcome its economic woes, but only after the European Union and the island nation work out a joint plan for its recovery, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday. [...]"  

MSM: "Bernanke: "Bank Account Seizure Unlikely In U.S."" [03/22/13] [1:37] "Bernanke does not say bank or wealth confiscation, like we're seeing in Cyprus, would be impossible here in the U.S. But rather he says it would be extremely unlikely. [...]" Related: "Full Press Conference"   [56:51] "We Have No Idea How Much Money We're Giving The Banks"

Commentary: "The Cyprus-Steal Versus Wealth Taxation" [03/22/13] " There are many things which need to be said about the deliberately provocative move by European bankers to engage in a sovereign version of an “MF-Global” style bank-heist. Unfortunately none of these things are being said by anyone in the mainstream media. To start with, this “plan” was intended to fail. It was simply another staged event. In this case, the goal was first to isolate Cyprus politically/economically, and then “make an example” out of it to other Western governments, and their peoples. Regular readers will recall a previous commentary about how Iceland successfully stood up to the banksters, threw them out of their nation; and has since prospered economically. Since that time I have iterated the mantra of the Financial Oligarchs on many occasions “no more Icelands.” [...] Thus first these Oligarchs engage in a blatant act of theft which was intentionally intended to be as punitive as possible to the masses. This would ensure maximum outrage within the Cyprus population, and thus make it political suicide for any politician to support the measure. A Bloomberg article spells this out clearly: …France’s Pierre Moscovici said he had wanted an exemption for accounts worth less than 100,000 euros ($129,500). Austria’s Maria Fekter said ECB demands made that impossible. The central bank, Fekter said on Monday, wanted to lowball the tax on larger depositors, magnifying the hit on the smaller ones. This is nothing less than a written confession. Individual European governments were pushing for the bank-robbery to at least be structured fairly – stealing the most from those who could most afford it. It was the ECB (the “front” organization for the Oligarchs) which vetoed those intentions, and insisted on “magnifying the hit” on ordinary people." [...]" 

Commentary: "Bitcoin & Cyprus Scheme: How Technocrats Manipulate All Digital Currency " [03/22/13] "... The European Central Bank (ECB) is setting the stage of a complete financial collapse of fiat currencies across the globe. Joining in the scheme are other technocratic institutions such as the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank. Under the guise of preventing a system failure during the global financial crisis, there will be “an extension of the existing temporary US dollar liquidity swap arrangements until February 1, 2014.” This action allows the central bankers to liquidate currencies under their jurisdiction “should market conditions so warrant.” Under this plan, euros backed by nothing can continue to pour into the system throughout the Eurozone “in addition to the existing liquidity-providing operations” in the US. This liquidation will take place “until further notice.” Alternative media is reporting that to salvage their funds, Europeans are beginning to invest in Bitcoin. Indeed, Bitcoins have been purchased and “downloaded” at a record high of $52 euros per Bitcoin in an attempt to keep customer cash safe from the plundering of technocrats. [...] Supporters of Bitcoin incorrectly claim that the scheme is not centralized as an alternate form of currency that would be of itself a protest to the technocrats. However Bitcoin has been given that status of a “payment service provider” (PSP) by French financial institutions Aqoba and Crédit Mutuel. Officially, they are not a PSP because of the banks they are aligned with who are. This means Bitcoin is able to take advantage of their PSP status without having to be one themself. Bitcoin now has an International Bank ID number (IBAN) which allows transactions through PayPal and WorldPay and other digital payment networks; as well as issue debit cards, enabled to process monetary transfers to other banks and accept transfer of digital currency to their own “location”. A Bitcoin account will be as viable as any other bank account with other established banks worldwide. Deposits will be subject to compensatory laws that are applicable when dealing with printed fiat in traditional accounts and balances in Bitcoin accounts can be exchanged for the fiat in that country (i.e. euros, US dollars, Yuan, etc. . . ).Virtual cash, the digital exchange offered by Bitcoin, is gaining ground as the possible future replacement for global currencies as a network of global computers. The actuality of Bitcoin is that it is no different than any other type of e-currency and subject to manipulation by the technocrats. Should people transfer their fiat into Bitcoin thinking they can avert theft from banksters, they will soon realize that ALL digital currency plays into the central banking schemes to extract wealth from the people."  Related: "In Spain, The Bitcoin Run Has Started" | "The Global Financial Pyramid Scheme By The Numbers" | "Euro Beware: The Real Threat May Be Bitcoin, The Online “Crypto-Currency"  

MSM: "Freddie Mac Sues BofA, UBS, JPMorgan Alleging Libor Rigging" [03/22/13] "Freddie Mac sued Bank of America Corp., UBS AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and a dozen other banks over alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, saying the mortgage financier suffered substantial losses as a result of the companies’ conduct. Government- owned Freddie Mac accuses the banks of acting collectively to hold down the U.S. dollar Libor to “hide their institutions’ financial problems and boost their profits,” according to a complaint filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. “Defendants’ fraudulent and collusive conduct caused USD LIBOR to be published at rates that were false, dishonest, and artificially low,” Richard Leveridge, a lawyer for Freddie Mac, said in the complaint, which was made public yesterday. Manipulation of interest rates by some of the world’s biggest banks has spawned probes by half a dozen agencies on three continents in what has become the industry’s largest and longest-running scandal. More than $300 trillion of loans, mortgages, financial products and contracts are linked to Libor. [...]"  

MSM: "Big Banks Offer Payday Loans At 300 Percent Interest: Study" [03/22/13] "Step aside, Tony Soprano: Big banks will now lend money at 300 percent interest without threatening to break a leg. Then again, the payday loans some big banks are offering can have other ill effects, such as financial ruin, according to a new study by the Center for Responsible Lending. Even as public anxiety grows about the dangers of payday lending, with 15 states recently banning the practice, many big banks are offering the service to their customers. [...]"  

Commentary: "What JPMorgan Was Doing in Its Chief Investment Office: Profiting On the Death of Employees" Link Fixed [03/21/13] "Gambling on high-risk synthetic credit derivatives is not the only area of interest at JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) – the division that has thus far admitted to losing $6.2 billion in the London Whale debacle. According to Exhibit 81 released by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Ina Drew, the head of the CIO, was also overseeing the investment of funds in the firm’s Bank Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) and Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLI) plans – a scheme enshrined by the U.S. Congress in 2006 that allows too-big-to-fail banks as well as many other corporations to reap huge tax benefits by taking out life insurance policies on workers – even low wage workers – and naming the corporation the beneficiary of the death benefit. [...]"  

MSM: "New Zealand Government Now Planning a 'Cyprus-Style Confiscation' to Fund Bank Bail Out" [03/21/13] "The National Government are pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts, the Green Party said today. Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.” “Bill English is proposing a Cyprus-style solution for managing bank failure here in New Zealand – a solution that will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts,” said Green Party Co-leader Dr Russel Norman. “The Reserve Bank is in the final stages of implementing a system of managing bank failure called Open Bank Resolution. The scheme will put all bank depositors on the hook for bailing out their bank.” [...]"  

MSM: "Argentina Hits HSBC With Fresh Claims The Bank Laundered $100million" [03/20/13] "HSBC has been accused of facilitating money laundering and tax evasion in Argentina, allowing clients to hide more than $100million. The Argentinian government is pursuing a criminal investigation into the banking giant after accusing it of creating an illegal scheme enabling clients to hide millions of dollars. The UK bank was last year fined £1.2billion for facilitating money laundering in the US and Mexico, channelling money for drug cartels. [...]"  

MSM: " Russian Company Offers to Bailout Cyprus in Exchange for Gas Exploration Rights" [03/20/13] "The Russian energy company Gazprom is offering to bailout Cyprus in exchange for gas exploration rights, according to media reports. “Russian energy giant Gazprom has offered the Republic of Cyprus a plan in which the company will undertake the restructuring of the country’s banks in exchange for exploration rights for natural gas in Cyprus’’ exclusive economic zone, local media reported,” reports GreeceReporter.com. “Gazprom is,” the site notes, “the largest extractor of natural gas in the world and the largest Russian company.” [...]"    Note: Anomaly.

Commentary: "World Banking System to Give Up the Ghost" [03/20/13] "The news about the Cyprus banks has been on the radar screen recently. Somehow, the most frequently asked question is what will Russian oligarchs do about it, because it’s them who have created an offshore world of their own there. Will they seek new offshore havens? Get the money back to Russia? Stay in Cyprus and adapt to the new realities of life on the island? In fact, the oligarchs and their money are an issue of minor importance. It all brings more serious things in focus, like, for instance, the future of world banking system that had became sick a long time ago. The Cyprus events produce evidence the system is at death’s door… Now, about the signs testifying to the assertion. [...]" 

MSM: "Cyprus Warned Over Parliament's Bailout Rejection" [03/20/13] "Germany's finance minister has warned Cyprus that its crisis-stricken banks may never be able to reopen if it rejects the terms of a bailout. Wolfgang Schaeuble said major Cypriot banks were "insolvent if there are no emergency funds". He was speaking after the Cypriot parliament rejected an international bailout deal that would have imposed a one-off tax on bank deposits. Frantic talks are under way to try to agree an alternative plan. The BBC's Mark Lowen, in Nicosia, says the country is in turmoil and the eurozone's plan has completely unraveled. Not a single MP voted in favour of the controversial deal, sending a clear message to Brussels that the strategy needs a drastic rethink, our correspondent adds.[...]"   Related: MSM: "Parliament Rejects Deposit Tax For Bailout" [03/19/13] "Cypriot lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected a deeply unpopular tax on bank deposits on Tuesday, throwing into doubt an international bailout for the troubled euro zone member needed to avert default and a banking collapse. The 56-seat parliament voted by 36 votes against and 19 abstentions to bury the bill, a condition of a 10 billion euro European Union bailout for the Mediterranean island. One deputy was absent. [...]" |  Commentary: "Euro Bank Collapse is Back Underway" "With the expropriation of the Cypriots to save the banks, the five-year Eurozone bank collapse, which had "ended" in late 2012, clearly has not ended, and has exploded again.  [...]" See below: "President Of Cyprus Doesn't Have Backing To Push Through Controversial Bailout Deal" [03/19/13]; "IMF: Eurozone Banks Are In Trouble, Trample Taxpayers and Democracy To Bail Them Out" [03/18/13];"German Commerzbank Suggests Wealth Tax In Italy Next" [03/18/13] ; "How The Cyprus Bailout Is Going Down In The U.K." [03/18/13] ; "Could The “Cyprus Fiasco” Occur In The United States?" [03/18/13]; "There Are Already Plans To Revise The Cyprus Bank Tax" [03/17/13];  "Cyprus: Panic As Savings Levy Is Imposed" [03/17/13] 

MSM: "Nigel Farage - Cyprus Rejection Sets Up A Crash In Markets" [03/19/13] "Today Nigel Farage told King World News the Cyprus government officials would vote out of fear to save their own lives and that’s exactly what happened.  Farage, who is Britain’s popular MEP, told KWN that what just happened in Cyprus is much bigger than the Icelandic revolt, and that it has now set up a crash in markets.  Here is what Farage had to say in this extraordinary interview:  “Even my direst predictions about what the bureaucrats in Brussels would do to prop-up the failing eurozone crisis, even I didn’t predict they would resort to theft, and that is all you can call this.  It is theft.  It is the breach, of course, of their deposit guarantee they put in place in 2008.” “And perhaps on a higher level it’s actually a breach of the basic principle of the rule of law, which is one of the governing functions of the whole of our Western civilization.  So it is a truly astonishing thing that they (central planners) have done. [...]" 

Commentary: "Occupy Movement Files Lawsuit Against Every Federal Regulator of Wall Street" [03/19/13] "In several respects, Occupy Wall Street reminds me of the feminist movement. Corporate funded media has declared the women’s rights movement dead ad nauseam for four decades — and yet it thrives and reinvents itself. Similarly, corporate funded media has eulogized Occupy Wall Street from almost the moment of its nascent birth in the Fall of 2011. If there is a common thread connecting these movements and the dire media prognostications of their demise, it is likely that when either one advances, entrenched power — and its iron grip on the wealth of a nation — loses. Now, similar to the early court battles for women’s rights, Occupy Wall Street has tossed aside its encampments and bullhorns and donned its legal garb and pro hac vices. Occupy Wall Street’s brain trust, Occupy the SEC, just filed a Federal lawsuit that encapsulates the crony capitalist state that passes today for democracy. The organization is suing every Federal regulator that resides in the pocket of Wall Street – which means they are suing every Federal regulator of Wall Street. And, spunky group that they are, they’re naming individuals too. Here’s the rundown:  [...]"  

MSM: "Chinese Solar Panel Company Defaults on $541 Million Worth of Bonds" [03/19/13] "Chinese solar panel manufacturer Suntech announced today that it has defaulted on a $541 million bond payment. It is the first company from mainland China to default on its bonds, Bloomberg News reported. Failing to make the payment has triggered defaults on loans from International Finance Corp and Chinese domestic lenders, Bloomberg News reported. Suntech, the world’s biggest solar panel maker as recently as 2011, has run short of cash after reporting losses in 2011 and 2012, the Associated Press reported. [...]"  

Interviews: "Majority Report: Matt Taibbi On JP Morgan Chase" [03/19/13] [121:01] "Rolling Stone Magazine's Matt Taibbi breaks down the Senate hearings on the JP Morgan Chase.  [...]"  Related: "JP Morgan Wins Dismissal Of Silver Price-Fixing Lawsuit" 

MSM: "Judge Napolitano: Government Can Steal Your Money" [03/19/13] [3:45] "The Judge weighs in on Cyprus and the possibility of bank account seizure in the U.S. and other Eurozone countries. Judge Napolitano says yes, it could be done, and "The people who have more than $100,000 in the bank are targets for any government that's looking for money to shore up its own inability to manage its finances."[...]"  The Euro and the EU are dying ...  Related: See below: "Could The “Cyprus Fiasco” Occur In The United States?" [03/18/13] 

Commentary: "Cyprus President To Rehn: “I Told You Tax Wouldn’t Pass. Regards To Mrs Merkel”" [03/19/13] "To say that the tensions within the European “Union” are getting unbearable would be an understatement. According to Mega TV, Anastasiades is reported to have said to Rehn and Brok: “When I warned you that there would not be a parliamentary majority to pass the agreement, you didn’t want to listen. Give my regards to Mrs Merkel.” We eagerly wait to hear back what message Merkel has for the Cypriot leader now that the entire plan is falling apart. [...]"  

Commentary: "President Of Cyprus Doesn't Have Backing To Push Through Controversial Bailout Deal" [03/19/13] "The EU bailout of Cyprus banks negotiated this weekend, which contains a controversial haircut on depositors, has just been pushed back again. Originally, it was scheduled for today, but this morning, it was postponed until tomorrow. Now, Peter Spiegel at the FT reports that tomorrow's vote has been cancelled as well. According to a report from Antenna TV (via Bloomberg), Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades will tell the Eurogroup that he doesn't have the backing in parliament to pass the bill. [...] JP Morgan's Alex White discussed the possibility of this scenario in a note to clients over the weekend, writing: "A ‘no’ vote, or a failure to bring the package before parliament in the immediate term could have significant regional implications. Germany has made clear that it won’t bring any measure which does not include depositor haircuts before the Bundestag  [...] the damage would already have been done if Cyprus sees significant deposit flight, absent a deal. In the context of the Troika’s current disagreement with Greece on further disbursements, and the likelihood of political dead-lock in Italy, a return to a more stressful episode of the European crisis cannot be discounted, in our view. Should these hurdles be passed, longer-term we think there is a possibility of legal challenge to the package, under both Article 23 of the Cypriot Constitution, and under the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) given the requirements of both in respect of property rights." [...]"  Note: Too bad they don't have the urge to do what Iceland did. Related: See below: "Cyprus: Panic As Savings Levy Is Imposed" [03/17/13]; "There Are Already Plans To Revise The Cyprus Bank Tax" [03/17/13]; "German Commerzbank Suggests Wealth Tax In Italy Next" [03/18/13] ; and several stories immediately below:

Commentary: "Could The “Cyprus Fiasco” Occur In The United States?" [03/18/13] "Politics aside, the bottom line is that the Rubicon has been crossed, and deposits have now been forcefully confiscated in what Europe promises to be a standalone case. What is certain, is that nobody will wait to find out how long it takes before Europe’s class of increasingly more desperate and ill-meaning despots is found to be have lied once more (as it has about everything else since the start of the European crisis). And while the mainstream media will be focused primarily on Europe in the coming days, as BCG and we have warned, the topic of “wealth taxation” is now front and center, and it stars not only Europe, but the US as well. The question then becomes: what does the funding structure of the US private depository institutions look like, and is there any possibility of Cyprus “wealth tax” recurring on the other side of the Atlantic. To answer this question, we present the summary layout of the consolidated US depository system, which according to the Fed’s December 31, 2012 Flow of Funds report had a grand total of $15 trillion in assets, and a matched number of liabilities, of which 72%, or a total of $10.9 trillion was in the form of deposits. So, if the US was to go the Cyprus route, and begin impairing balance sheet liabilities to remark assets, there would be precious little space (with just $4.3 trillion in total other funding liabilities), before one would need to start eating into the deposit base, should Congress decide to implement a very “fair and just” financial asset tax in the US next. [...]" 

MSM: "How The Cyprus Bailout Is Going Down In The U.K." [03/18/13]   "And here's how the Cyprus bailout is going down in the U.K. where uber-popular newspaper the Daily Mail proclaims the haircut on depositors to be 'The Great EU Bank Robbery'. An interesting angle here is that apparently a lot of U.K. service personnel have accounts in Cyprus, which the government will reimburse them for, costing U.K. taxpayers. [...]" Video clip  [5:20] 

MSM: "Markets Are Diving All Across Asia" [03/18/13] "The weird thing about finance: A bailout deal that will save Germany a few billion in taxpayer dollars (by shifting the burden to Cypriot depositors) is wiping exponentially more than that off the world's market indices today. [...]"

Commentary: "German Commerzbank Suggests Wealth Tax In Italy Next" [03/18/13] " It seems the European Union (IMF et al.) have decided that the route to crisis stabilization, just as we outlined here over a year ago and updated here, is through a wealth tax. However, as Handelsblatt reports, the gross distortions of wealth distribution among both core and peripheral nations (evident in the chasm between ‘mean’ and ‘median’ net assets – or wealth) makes some nations more ‘capable’ of ‘giving’ and as Commerzbank’s chief economist notes, median wealth in Italy is EUR164,000 (as opposed to Austria’s median of around EUR76,000 and mean of around EUR265,000) meaning that, in theory, Italy has no debt crisis (with net assets at 173% of GDP – significantly more than the Germans at 124%), “so it would make sense, in Italy a one-time property tax levy,” he suggested. “A tax rate of 15% on financial assets would probably be enough to push the Italian government debt to below the critical level of 100 percent of gross domestic product.” So there you have it, the ‘new deal’ in Europe, as we warned, is wealth taxes and testing the “capacity of Cypriots” appears to be the strawman on what the public will take before social unrest becomes intolerable. [...]" 

Commentary: "IMF: Eurozone Banks Are In Trouble, Trample Taxpayers and Democracy To Bail Them Out" [03/18/13] "Why is it that 17 nations have to fundamentally reorganize themselves and shift sovereignty away from national parliaments to new layers of transnational, beyond-control bureaucracies that can extract untold wealth from taxpayers—just to save the banks? That’s what the Eurozone has to do, or else banks will topple, and the monetary union will not be sustainable, according to the “first ever European Union-wide assessment of the soundness and stability of the financial sector,” released Friday by the institution that the world couldn’t do without, the IMF. “Financial stability has not been assured,” the report stated flatly about the fiasco in the Eurozone, despite ceaseless hope-mongering by Eurocrats and politicians, and banks remain “vulnerable to shocks.” The report, which never mentioned banks or countries by name, discussed a number of “risks” that could topple these banks, with some of these “risks” already having transitioned to reality: [...]"

MSM: "There Are Already Plans To Revise The Cyprus Bank Tax" [03/17/13] "The essence of the Cyprus bailout is that all bank depositors will be subject to a tax/confiscation/haircut/levy. As it currently stands, if you have over 100K euros in the bank, you'll pay a tax on of 9.9%. Under 100K euros and you'll pay 6.5%. This is incredibly controversial, and there is no guarantee that the plan, as it stands, will pass the Cypriot parliament. Dow Jones' Matina Stevis (who is in Cyprus now, and a must follow on Twitter for all sorts Greece/Cyprus/Eurozone stuff) tweets plans to make the tax more progressive ... 5% (0-100k Euros) 9.9% (100k-500k Euros) 13% (500k+ Euros) [...] This will ease the burden a bit on the little guy, and even more squeeze the wealthy Russian oligarchs and mobsters who are believed to hold a lot of cash in Cypriot bank accounts. Cyprus banks reopen on Tuesday. The next 24 hours will be very interesting.[...]"  Note: This item is an update on the dynamic below.

Concepts and Practices: "Cyprus: Panic As Savings Levy Is Imposed" [03/17/13]   "Cypriots rush to ATMs before savings are docked as part of a bailout deal agreed in Brussels. Cypriots reacted with shock that turned to panic on Saturday after a 10% one-off levy on savings was forced on them as part of an extraordinary 10bn euro (£8.7bn) bailout agreed in Brussels. People rushed to banks and queued at cash machines that refused to release cash as resentment quickly set in. The savers, half of whom are thought to be non-resident Russians, will raise almost €6bn thanks to a deal reached by European partners and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is the first time a bailout has included such a measure and Cyprus is the fifth country after Greece, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal and Spain to turn to the eurozone for financial help during the region's debt crisis. The move in the eurozone's third smallest economy could have repercussions for financially overstretched bigger economies such as Spain and Italy. People with less than 100,000 euros in their accounts will have to pay a one-time tax of 6.75%, Eurozone officials said, while those with greater sums will lose 9.9%. Without a rescue, president Nicos Anastasiades said "Cyprus would default and threaten to unravel investor confidence in the eurozone." [...]"  Related: "Cyprus President: Nation Faces Total Financial Collapse And Euro Exit Without Bailout" "In the early hours of Saturday, Cyprus agreed to a "bailout" with the EU and IMF that is very controversial because it imposes an immediate one-time tax on everyone with money in a Cypriot bank before banks reopen on Tuesday (Monday is a holiday). Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades warns 'total financial collapse and euro exit if there's no deal'  [...]" | "Economist: The Cyprus Bailout Is An 'Unfair' Short-Sighted Failure, And Makes No Strategic Sense" | "Germany Told Cyprus They Could Tax Their Depositors, Or Leave The Eurozone" "The country has been ailing for quite some time, and everybody knew that a bailout was coming. But the big surprise is that depositors in banks will be subject to an instant one-off tax to raise nearly 6 billion euros. The background is that because Cyprus has an enormous banking system -— and houses a lot of offshore Russian money — there was not much political appetite to bail it out, even though the amount of cash was minimal. In fact it seems, Germany was comfortable letting Cyprus go completely. [...]" |"Germany And IMF Initially Demanded Stunning 40% Of Total Deposits" |  "Europe Just Pissed Off A Whole Bunch Of Russian Mobsters And Oligarchs With Its Stunning Bailout Of Cyprus" "You may remember that along the way during the crisis, Cyprus has sought aid from Russia, which was unusual. Well the reason for that is that (Island of) Cyprus is a place where Russians are believed to do a lot of money laundering, which involves parking cash in Cypriot banks. What's stunning about Saturday's bailout is that depositors with over 100K euros in a Cypriot bank will see a 10 percent tax instantly before banks reopen on Tuesday. That will infuriate domestic savers, and it will mean that a lot of Russian oligarchs/mobsters/money launderers/etc. will take big hits. [...]" "Cyprus Bailout Risks Europe Bank Runs"  

MSM: "Foreign Banks Banned From Opening Branches In Russia" [03/16/13] "Vladimir Putin has signed a government-sponsored law banning foreign banks from opening branches in Russia, PRIME reported on Friday, citing a post on the government legal information website. [...]"  

MSM: "JP Morgan Hid Mistakes As Trade Losses Grew, Senate Investigation Finds" [03/15/13] "Bank executives to testify Friday after report claims company misled public during $6.2bn London Whale trading debacle. JP Morgan's $6.2bn London Whale trading debacle was born out of secretive trades and creative bookkeeping as the bank attempted to limit losses using a practice that one regulator called "make believe voodoo magic", a Senate investigation has concluded. The report by the Senate subcommittee on investigations, published on Thursday, detailed a series of failures in which accounts were hidden and trades were valued incorrectly to minimize losses. It also alleged that regulators were kept in the dark, a head trader's concerns went unheeded and a $51bn trading portfolio ballooned to $157bn in three months. The inquiry follows JP Morgan's own internal investigation in January and provides the first look into the emails and internal discussions at the bank around the infamous Whale trade. It centers on the secretive JP Morgan chief investment office, which accounted for as much as one-sixth of the bank's assets last year. The 300-page report alleges that JP Morgan hid losses, did not share information with its regulators, and misled the public. The report also blames the bank's regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and recommends reforming the way regulators oversee derivatives, the complicated financial instruments that played a role in the Whale trades and the financial crisis. The report also concludes that JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bonus was cut in half to $11.5m last year, knew about the sustained trading losses when he dismissed the incident as a "tempest in a teapot" in April 2012. The report precedes a Senate hearing on Friday in which key players will testify, including former JP Morgan chief investment officer Ina Drew. Dimon will not take the stand.  [...]" "The Full Senate Report"   

MSM: "The Fiscal Cliff and Israel’s Appetite for US Welfare Funds" [03/15/13] "US legislators who regularly squabble over local spending, never fail Israel’s appetite for taxpayer’s largesse. Now they have another opportunity to show their servitude when considering bill H.R. 938 United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2013; a uniquely privileged status putting Israel’s welfare ahead of members of the US army. [...]"  

MSM: "The Tie That Binds–State Of Ohio Buys $42 Million Of Israel Bonds" [03/14/13] "Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has purchased $42 million in Israel Bonds, the largest single government purchase of Israel Bonds in United States history. The purchase was completed March 1. Mandel’s office in Columbus announced it to the Cleveland Jewish News that day. “We believe this is a sound investment for the taxpayers of Ohio and consistent with our strategy of investing in safe and strong securities,” Mandel said in a telephone interview March 4. The investment increases the total amount of Israel Bonds in the Ohio treasury portfolio to more than $80 million, the largest amount of Israel bonds held by an Ohio treasurer, according to information provided by Mandel’s office. [...]"  

MSM: "U.S. To Let Spy Agencies Scour Americans' Finances" [03/14/13] "The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters. The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates. Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of "suspicious customer activity," such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has full access to the database. However, intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, currently have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN. The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before, helping them look for patterns that could reveal attack plots or criminal schemes. The planning document, dated March 4, shows that the proposal is still in its early stages of development, and it is not known when implementation might begin. [...]"  

MSM: "Illinois Settles SEC Charges It Misled Investors On Pensions" [03/13/13] "Illinois, which has struggled for years to fix the worst-funded public pension system in the United States, agreed on Monday to settle federal civil securities fraud charges alleging it misled municipal bond investors about the underfunding of its pensions, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday. Illinois, which neither admitted or denied the charges, was not ordered to pay a penalty. It consented to an order to cease and desist from committing or causing any securities act violations. [...]"  Related:"SEC Charges Illinois With Securities Fraud Over Pension Obligations" [03/12/13] "Usually when you see Securities and Exchange Commission charges it is against individuals or firms bilking individuals. That is why today's round of SEC charges looks more than just interesting. [...]"  

Commentary: "IMF Faces Losing Second French Boss" [03/12/13] "Christine Lagarde is part of an inquiry into whether former government officials were complicit in the payment of huge damages to a tycoon, which could lead to a second French head of the International Monetary Fund being forced to step down.  [...] Speculation is growing that Ms Lagarde, the former French finance minister who succeeded Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the helm of the IMF, may be placed under formal investigation after being summoned to answer questions by a judge in the next few days, reports The Sunday Times. She is facing accusations of “complicity in embezzlement” of public funds for instigating an arbitration process that awarded £348m to Bernard Tapie, a businessman who claimed to have been defrauded by a state-owned bank in the 1990s. Investigators are trying to determine whether Lagarde’s decision to refer the long-festering dispute between Tapie and the Crédit Lyonnais bank to arbitration in 2008, rather than let it work its way through the courts, was an abuse of power designed to help Tapie reap bigger damages from the French treasury. "  

Commentary: "DOJ Urges Federal Court to Approve Sweetheart Deal with Drug-Tainted HSBC" [03/12/13] "In Reckless Endangerment, a lively exposé of the frauds at the heart of the subprime meltdown, journalists Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner wrote that if “mortgage originators like NovaStar or Countrywide were the equivalent of drug pushers hanging around a schoolyard and the ratings agencies were the narcotics cops looking the other way, brokerage firms providing capital to the anything-goes lenders were the overseers of the cartel.” Their observations are all the more relevant given the outrageous behavior by major banks which polluted an already terminally corrupt financial system with blood-spattered cash siphoned-off from the global drug trade. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to insist that drug money laundered by financial giants like HSBC and Wachovia were in fact, little more than “hedges” designed to offset losses in residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS), sliced and diced into toxic collateralized debt obligations, as the 2007-2008 global economic crisis cratered the capitalist “free market.” [...]"  

Commentary: "Stock Market Backup Disaster Plan To Trade Without Humans" [03/10/13] "The New York Stock Exchange is readying plans to be able to operate without human traders in case another disaster, such as Superstorm Sandy, forces the shutdown of its historic trading floor in downtown Manhattan, The Wall Street Journal reported. NYSE Euronext (NYX.N) is preparing to submit details of the plan to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the report, which cited people involved in the preparations. If activated, the plan would represent the first time the 221-year-old exchange would rely entirely on computer systems, without the oversight of floor-based traders, the paper said. [...]" 

MSM: "10 Companies Profiting Most From War: 24/7 Wall St." [03/10/13] Part 2 "From 24/7 Wall St.: The business of war is profitable. In 2011, the 100 largest contractors sold $410 billion in arms and military services. Just 10 of those companies sold over $208 billion. Based on a list of the top 100 arms-producing and military services companies in 2011 compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 companies with the most military sales worldwide in 2011. [...]"  

Commentary: "The Human Cost of Fiscal Mismanagement of Government" [03/07/13] "During the Great Depression, there were countless suicides. People jumping out of buildings because they lost everything and could not face a future that was destitute. The photographs of such scenes will live forever. The same is taking place throughout Southern Europe today and it is a cry for fiscal responsibility upon government. In Italy, just since the start of the year, 23 entrepreneurs have committed suicide. Politicians are responsible for these economic declines. It was their corruption allowing NY bankers to do whatever they feel like as long as they fund their elections. These are people you would not give a $20 bill to and send to the store for an errand to by $5 of something because they sure as hell would not return with any change. Yet we elect these people who have NO experience whatsoever, make promises they have no intention to keep, and then they always blame us for their mess. [...]"  

MSM: "Occupy Movement Files Lawsuit Against Every Federal Regulator of Wall Street" [03/07/13] "Occupy Wall Street has tossed aside its encampments and bullhorns and donned its legal garb and pro hac vices. Occupy Wall Street’s brain trust, Occupy the SEC, just filed a Federal lawsuit that encapsulates the crony capitalist state that passes today for democracy.  The organization is suing every Federal regulator that resides in the pocket of Wall Street – which means they are suing every Federal regulator of Wall Street. And, spunky group that they are, they’re naming individuals too. Here’s the rundown: Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Martin Gruenberg, Chairman of the FDIC, Elisse Walter, Chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler, Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Thomas Curry, Comptroller of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Mary Miller, Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the Treasury, Neal Wolin, Acting Secretary of the Treasury.  Occupy the SEC is serving a valiant public service in bringing this lawsuit. It explains to the court that one of the most critical components of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that was supposed to reform Wall Street has yet to be enacted by the regulators and this is in violation of law. The key component is the Volcker Rule, named after former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, that would prohibit most forms of trading for the house on Wall Street, known officially as proprietary trading.  The lawsuit informs the court that Dodd-Frank required that regulators adopt rules relating to this section “within nine months after the completion of a study by FSOC [Financial Stabilization Oversight Council] relating to the Volcker Rule. The FSOC completed that study in January 2011.” The complaint proceeds to explain that the legislative language “is unequivocal in setting this mandatory deadline, which the Defendants and the agencies under their control have missed.”  [...]" 

Concepts and Practices: "Bitcoin: CIA Eyes Fed Alternative" [03/07/13] [15:30] "C.I.A. not-for-profit Venture Capital Firm In-Q-Tel Evaluates Bitcoin Virtual Currency for Investment Potential and possible replacement for the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and the Global Monetary Fund. [...]"  Related: "BitCoin Ponzi Scheme" [15:00] "Part 1 of a two part series on the Bitcoin. [...]"|"Complete Detail Of How Bitcoin Works" [45:35] |"Bitcoin Ready To Go Mainstream With First U.S. Exchange – Forbes" Recently armed with $500,000 in seed funding and a partnership with Silicon Valley Bank, Coinlab, a startup based out of Seattle, is bringing its innovative Bitcoin project closer to the U.S. market. [...]"

Commentary: "New Laws Allow States To Buy Israeli Issued, US Securities" [03/05/13] "A history of two destroyed currencies might well have precluded Israel from selling its own shekel bonds. So, back at the turn of the 21st century, it seems to have invented a counterfeiting scheme to sell U.S. bonds to Americans. It now issue bonds in America payable in dollars, not shekels. The problem is, the program was a success, and Israel now owes, or will soon owe more dollars than it can ever repay because it cannot print US dollars, as it prints shekels. What is Israel’s solution? Sell more dollar bonds, and use the proceeds from the new bonds to pay off the old bonds! In this article I will differentiate this practice from a Ponzi scheme. [...] Israel may well be the power behind change in U.S. state laws. The Development Corporation for Israel (DCI), with a New York address and U.S. stockbroker connections, is the bond monger that has been working this project for years, with few noticing. I discovered Israel dollar bond huckstering only when someone told me of an impending change to the laws in the State of Colorado, such that only Israel could benefit, and Coloradans, especially state employees, could only lose. It seems DCI has set up 25 sales offices across the U.S. to market Israel’s “Jubilee” bond series seven. It came as a shock to me that “Jubilee bonds” (probably first issued in 1998) are denominated in dollars, not shekels, the currency I had to buy and use when I was in Israel. Can a foreign state legally sell bonds denominated in U.S. money, and why would they want to? Israel cannot print dollars, so how can it commit to repaying hundreds of billions of U.S. dollar bonds? The answer seems all too obvious: Israel doesn’t plan to repay these bonds. It is a small country, smaller in business than Finland or Greece, with less natural resources than the State of Colorado or Arizona. Eventually the bonds must fail, because the only way Israel can come up with tens of billions of dollars to pay off what they tell us is their seventh series of dollar bonds, is to issue many billions of “New Shekels” (NIS) to buy U.S. dollars in the world currency market."  

Documentary: "Goldman Sachs - Power And Peril" [03/05/13] [42:23] "CNBC Original takes a revealing look at Wall Street's most powerful and profitable bank fighting to restore its reputation through a one-hour documentary reported by CNBC is David Faber. CNBC Original takes a revealing look at Wall Street is most powerful and profitable bank fighting to restore its reputation through a one-hour documentary reported by CNBC is David Faber. Goldman Sachs is the most famous name on Wall Street. Founded nearly 150 years ago as a one-man operation, the firm is a powerhouse whose 34,000 employees are known as the best and the brightest. Its unique corporate culture and history of success have long been the envy of its competitors, but now Goldman Sachs finds itself fighting to restore its reputation. CNBC, First in Business Worldwide, takes viewers inside the firm is tightly knit corporate culture of extraordinarily driven professionals to help explain both its success and the reasons why it is come under such widespread criticism. The program looks at how Goldman Sachs' aggressive trading culture has come under scrutiny both in Washington, D.C. and on Main Street, amid accusations that the investment bank misled investors. CEO Lloyd Blankfein is on record as defending the firm is actions and maintaining that it acted appropriately. Faber reveals how Goldman Sachs benefited from controversial deals before, during and after the global economic crisis. CNBC travels to Cleveland, OH where critics believe that Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks fueled reckless mortgage lending that created a real estate bubble whose implosion battered neighborhoods. The one-hour documentary also considers Goldman Sachs' unparalleled presence in Washington. Numerous executives from Henry Paulson to Robert Rubin and Jon Corzine have left Goldman Sachs over the years to take on influential roles in government. Faber speaks to critics who question whether the firm's presence in Washington gave it an unfair advantage in surviving the global financial crisis. [...]" Related: " How A Secret Goldman Team Violates The Volcker Rule" [5:52] "Neil Barofsky, former special inspector for the U.S. Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program, talks about a secretive Goldman Sachs unit called Multi-Strategy Investing that wagers about $1 billion of the firm’s own funds on the stocks and bonds of companies. [...]"  

Trends: "Arizona Senate Approves Gold, Silver As Legal Tender" [03/04/13] "Arizona's Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill on Wednesday to make gold and silver legal tender in the state. According to Capitol Media Services, Republicans who pushed the measure through said they feared the value of the dollar could tank, making the law necessary. While the U.S. Constitution bans states printing their own currency, supporters argued it does not prohibit private organizations from minting gold and silver coins. [...] In 2011, Utah became the first state to approve gold and silver coins as legal currency. States such as Montana, Missouri, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Washington have considered similar measures in recent years."  

Commentary: "Did JPMorgan’s CIO Intentionally And Maliciously Start The Margin Call Avalanche That Crushed Lehman?" [03/04/13] "It is conventional wisdom that in the days leading to Lehman’s bankruptcy filing on the night of September 15, 2008, sheer panic and utter confusion ruled ever back- and middle-office, over concerns that a counterparty, any counterparty, but especially Lehman, would end up being “not money good“, and the result was that trigger-happy margin clerks had the potential to make or break a company, by demanding just enough variation margin that would send the notice recipient promptly into bankruptcy.  [...]"  

MSM: "Leaked Info Allegedly Shows The Absurd Lengths BofA Goes To Spy On Hackers" [03/03/13] "Anonymous hackers have released 14 gigabytes of information allegedly related to Bank of America and a web intelligence firm it hired to spy on hackers and social activists last year. Emails detail how employees of TEKSystems actively watched hacker forums and social media sites for any remotely relevant pieces of "intelligence." The leak includes a list of more than 10,000 words, phrases, and (seemingly arbitrary) Wikipedia entries — everything from "jihad" to "keg stand" to "I Wish That I Had Duck Feet" — used to find items on forums like anonops and sites including Facebook, Twitter (and Tweetdeck), pastebin, and various blogs[...]"  

MSM: "China Manufacturing Slows Almost To A Halt" [03/02/13]   "A preliminary reading of a privately run version of the China manufacturing PMI, released Monday, showed a drop to a four-month low of 50.4, down from 52.3 in the previous month. [...]"  Note:  ".... To be sure, (globally) a collapse is not only coming. It is happening before our eyes in what used to be ultra-slow motion. Each year the pace quickens. Two years ago, the MFGlobal client account theft episode was preceded by another red-line event a few months before, and followed by another a few months after. But nowadays, the crisis events occur every month or every week. With $1.2 trillion doled out by the USFed to European banks in January, the Germans demanding repatriation of their official gold account, the Italians electing a comedian to halt the property tax hikes that bail out banks, the British sponsoring a Chinese Yuan Swap Facility, the attack on Mali to wrest its gold for German repayment, the move to shut down the Mongolian copper & gold mine by Rio Tinto, the raids larger and bolder of the GLD inventory, the USFed preparing for QE5 (or rather QE187), the US facing a fiscal cliff, the Japanese ratcheting up the competitive currency devaluations, the Swiss managing their Euro-Franc peg, the Russians hosting a G-20 Meeting of finance ministers to coordinate the alternative to US$-based trade, the Iranian sanctions coming to a conclusion in US acquiescence, and a gathering of five aircraft carriers in the Chesapeake (against all rules, angering the Pentagon), to be sure, the pace of extreme events is quickening. All these have occurred just since the new year began less than two months ago. Extreme events have become the norm. A series of climax events is coming very soon. The changes will be rapid and breath-taking. [...] Some mid-sized seemingly minor bank will fail. It will have linkage to another big bank in a corresponding role. The obligations will not be possible to cover. The contagion will spread to numerous large banks across Europe to London and New York. The derivatives could be involved, very unmanageable. If not a mid-sized bank, then a major bank will fail from the inability to contain the profound insolvency and massive bleeding during capital flight. The Greek zone has been contained, where disaster runs its course. But larger Italy, Spain, and France are rapidly breaking down, each in its own unique important way. A great many fuses lie, each waiting to be lit." Related: "China Central Bank Says It Is "Fully Prepared For Looming Currency War" "...We look forward to the female head of the IMF explaining how China is obviously confused and that it is not currency war when one crushes their currency to promote "economic goals." Of course, that same organization may want to read "Zero Sum for Absolute Idiots" because in this globalized economy any attempt to promote demand (by an end consumer who has no incremental income and stagnant cash flow) through currency debasement has no impact when everyone does it. But then again, this is the IMF - the same organization that declared Europe fixed in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and so on. [...]"

MSM: "Will Italy Be The Spark That Sets Off Financial Armageddon In Europe?" [02/28/13] "Is the financial collapse of Italy going to be the final blow that breaks the back of Europe financially? Most people don’t realize this, but Italy is actually the third largest debtor in the entire world after the United States and Japan. Italy currently has a debt to GDP ratio of more than 120 percent, and Italy has a bigger national debt than anyone else in Europe does. That is why it is such a big deal that Italian voters have just overwhelmingly rejected austerity. The political parties led by anti-austerity candidates Silvio Berlusconi and Beppe Grillo did far better than anticipated. When you combine their totals, they got more than 50 percent of the vote. Italian voters have seen what austerity has done to Greece and Spain and they want no part of it. Unfortunately for Italian voters, it has been the promise of austerity that has kept the Italian financial system stable in recent months. Now that Italian voters have clearly rejected austerity, investors are fearing that austerity programs all over Europe may start falling apart. This is creating quite a bit of panic in European financial markets right now. On Tuesday, Italian stocks had their worst day in 10 months, Italian bond yields rose by the most that we have seen in 19 months, and the stocks of the two largest banks in Italy both fell by more than 8 percent. Italy is already experiencing its fourth recession since 2001, and unemployment has been steadily rising. If Italy is now “ungovernable”, as many are saying, then what does that mean for the future of Italy? Will Italy be the spark that sets off financial Armageddon in Europe? [...]"  Related: Commentary: "Italian Voters Reject The European Union’s Austerity Measures" "Italian voters have unambiguously rejected the politics of the Monti government and the European Union. This has triggered panic and outrage in Europe's capitals and unleashed ferocious tremors on the international finance markets. Some 55 percent of the electorate voted for parties that spoke out against the EU in their campaigns. The slate headed by outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti, which was supported by Brussels, Berlin, the Catholic Church and numerous Italian businessmen, only received 10 percent of the vote. [...]"  

Commentary: "Bloomberg’s Benevolence: “Like Many Other Billionaire Elites His Goal Is… Control”" [02/28/13] "By all public appearance, New York City’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg is very concerned about the health of his citizens. My goodness, he outlawed big sugary drinks, he required that chain restaurants list the nutritional data of their offerings and he even put baby formula under lock and key in NYC hospitals in an attempt to shame mothers into breast-feeding regardless of their personal opinions on the matter. He has even shared his “agenda” (more on this in a minute) with the public, letting everyone know how noble his intentions are: [...] The following report from Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper provides some insights into the benevolent motivations behind one of the nation’s most tyrannically-minded politicians. Hint: Follow the money. This not about benevolence or public health, it’s about restrictive control, a massive government power grab, and generating revenue for elite conglomerates.[...]"  

MSM: "Emails Prove JPMorgan Committed Massive Mortgage Fraud" [02/27/13] "JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has tried his best to suggest that the financial crisis was someone else's fault. But a batch of court documents released this week undermine this claim, indicating that the bank knew the mortgage investments it sold were seriously flawed. [...] The court documents make clear that JPMorgan employees were well aware of these flaws and even exchanged emails about them. For example, after a review finding that at least 1,154 mortgages were delinquent, JPMorgan told investors that only 25 loans were delinquent."  

MSM: "Banker Admits “We Engineered The Global Financial Crisis" [02/27/13] [15:51] Related: "Senator Warren Rips Ben Bernanke and Other Financial Regulators Over “Too Big” Banks" 2  | "Congressman Followed Elizabeth Warren's Lead And Pummeled Bernanke On 'Too Big To Fail' Today" [0:32] "Perhaps Elizabeth Warren's sickness over 'too big to fail' (TBTF) is catching. Today, Ben Bernanke was testifying before the House Financial Services Committee. The hearing lacked some fireworks without retired Congressman Barney Frank, but his fellow Massachusetts Democrat Representative Michael Capuano did his part to make things interesting. Following Senator Warren's lead from yesterday, Capuano questioned hard Bernanke about TBTF and the "subsidy" big banks get in the form of lower borrowing costs. [...]"  

MSM: "Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States" [02/25/13] "Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent. With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates. While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals. “Without the assistance of the banks in processing and sending electronic funds, these lenders simply couldn’t operate,” said Josh Zinner, co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which works with community groups in New York. The banking industry says it is simply serving customers who have authorized the lenders to withdraw money from their accounts. “The industry is not in a position to monitor customer accounts to see where their payments are going,” said Virginia O’Neill, senior counsel with the American Bankers Association. But state and federal officials are taking aim at the banks’ role at a time when authorities are increasing their efforts to clamp down on payday lending and its practice of providing quick money to borrowers who need cash. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are examining banks’ roles in the online loans, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Benjamin M. Lawsky, who heads New York State’s Department of Financial Services, is investigating how banks enable the online lenders to skirt New York law and make loans to residents of the state, where interest rates are capped at 25 percent.  [...]" 

Commentary: "When The Insane Run The Asylum" [02/22/13] "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was right. If you sat beside Ben Bernanke in his Washington Nationals box seats while he slurped on his ice cream cone and you had a general conversation with him, he probably wouldn’t come across as being insane. “That was a nice home run,” he’d say. You’d nod. But it is people like Bernanke who believe in collectivist systems and top-down economics who are insane. He believes that an economy should be overseen and manipulated, Soviet Union-style, by a few white men, preferably with beards, in a secretive boardroom. Here begins the real tragedy of the commons. Often, those who believe that we need these types of systems are not the best and the brightest. Even if they were, there still is no way to do it any better than without the top-down system. And for decades the kind of people who think they can have gravitated to the rings of power, gathering mostly in high-priced lower education colleges and universities where they are taught by prior collectivists over decades things that are truly totally insane. [...] They believe that the more a group of people in a geographic region spend (which they call Gross Domestic Product – GDP) the better off everyone will be. This, of course, makes no sense on an individual basis. On an individual basis, the more you produce and save the better off you will be, but they have an insane belief that it is the opposite once there is more than one person involved (the supposed “paradox of thrift”, the habits of savings that benefit the individual become harmful to the economy when practiced en masse). The fallacy of GDP has been thoroughly and inarguably refuted by many from the school of Austrian economics; a school I just call “real economics”. As Frank Shostack put it: "We can thus conclude that the GDP framework is an empty abstraction devoid of any link to the real world. Notwithstanding this, the GDP framework is in big demand by governments and central bank officials since it provides justification for their interference with businesses. It also provides an illusory frame of reference to assess the performance of government officials." People like Bernanke, and probably 99% of people involved in the financial markets also believe that the increase in prices in an economy can be best gauged by things like the US government’s Consumer Price Index (CPI). This, too, has been easily debunked for decades. You cannot add up the prices of everything in an economy and come to a number that makes any useful sense whatsoever. Try adding up the price of everything in an economy, I dare you. How do you add up the price of a particular haircut, an apple, a new Samsung Galaxy Note II and a buggy whip? You can already see some of the problems. What if hairstyles change (it’s been known to happen)? The Galaxy Note II didn’t even exist a year ago, and while buggy whips used to be something of import, it isn’t really all the rave with the kids nowadays. And, besides that, once you have added up all these numbers, what do you divide it by to come to anything that makes sense? Would you add up the cost of those four things and then divide by four? Assuming for a moment we even knew what the average price of those products were, what would the number be? A hundred and fifteen? Only to insane people does that number mean anything.[...]"  

MSM: "Authorities Are Investigating A Heinz Trade That Came From A Swiss Goldman Sachs Account " [02/22/13] " A Goldman Sachs private wealth client is the holder of the Swiss account at the center of an investigation into insider trading in H.J. Heinz Cooptions, regulators said in a court filing late Wednesday. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against unknown traders last week, alleging they used a Goldman account in Zurich to buy an unusual amount of Heinz options the day before the ketchup maker agreed to sell itself for $23 billion. In an SEC application to freeze the defendants' assets, dated February 15 but filed with the court Wednesday, staff attorney David Brown said the commission had been told by Goldman that "the account holder is a Goldman Sachs Private Wealth client in Switzerland. [...]"  Related: "FBI Launches Insider Trading Investigation On Blockbuster Heinz Sale" [2:31] "SEC Sues Suspicious Heinz Stock Traders" Note: Good Background piece.

Commentary: "20 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Heading For Big Trouble In The Months Ahead" [02/22/13] "Is the U.S. economy about to experience a major downturn? Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of signs that economic activity in the United States is really slowing down right now. Freight volumes and freight expenditures are way down, consumer confidence has declined sharply, major retail chains all over America are closing hundreds of stores, and the "sequester" threatens to give the American people their first significant opportunity to experience what "austerity" tastes like. Gas prices are going up rapidly, corporate insiders are dumping massive amounts of stock and there are high profile corporate bankruptcies in the news almost every single day now. In many ways, what we are going through right now feels very similar to 2008 before the crash happened. Back then the warning signs of economic trouble were very obvious, but our politicians and the mainstream media insisted that everything was just fine, and the stock market was very much detached from reality. When the stock market did finally catch up with reality, it happened very, very rapidly. Sadly, most people do not appear to have learned any lessons from the crisis of 2008. Americans continue to rack up staggering amounts of debt, and Wall Street is more reckless than ever. As a society, we seem to have concluded that 2008 was just a temporary malfunction rather than an indication that our entire system was fundamentally flawed. In the end, we will pay a great price for our overconfidence and our recklessness. So what will the rest of 2013 bring? Hopefully the economy will remain stable for as long as possible, but right now things do not look particularly promising. The following are 20 signs that the U.S. economy is heading for big trouble in the months ahead... [...]" 

MSM: "The Real Sequester Deadline Is Not Actually March 1" "March 1 is not a hard deadline like a debt ceiling or a government shutdown. In a note this morning, Nomura explains why people are kind of calm. The expectation of insiders and lobbyists is that the issue will be dealt with in March sometime. As both sides try to best their opponent's creative interpretations of the words "credible" and "plan," our economists note that while they do not expect an agreement to alter the automatic cuts before March, they "do expect the cuts to be modified before the end of March". Representatives of the defence industry appear to agree, with the Hill reporting that industry groups have given up a more than 18-month campaign to prevent the cuts to focus on getting them reversed as soon as possible. Markets appeared to take little note of the noise, leaving one to wonder whether contentious negotiations will resume with the aim of resolving the sequestration ahead of expectations or if this is part of broader positioning ahead of the budget negotiations. [...]" Related: "11 Ways The Sequestration Will Ravage The Government's Ability To Function" | "Pentagon Warns Workers May Need To Take Unpaid Leave If Sequester Kicks In - Washington Post" "The Pentagon warned 800,000 civilian employees worldwide Wednesday that they will be forced to take unpaid leave if deep budget cuts take effect next week, fueling growing anxiety about the impact of the automatic spending reductions on the nation's ... [...]"  Note: Remember that the Post is associated with the CIA and the control system ... 

LaRouche: "A Bailout was Never Possible: The Intent is Genocide" [02/20/13] PDF "Lyndon LaRouche forecasts 'the only possible future policy direction' that can result from the current ‘bail-out’ and ‘quantitative easing’ policies under, presently, Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. [...]"  

Commentary: "Parallel Worlds: The Visible And Invisible Worlds Of Finance" [02/17/13] Part 2 "It’s a long time world money lenders see themselves as gods. Like the Creator they have started to create the world of their own out of nothing, making money “coming from air”. So an invisible parallel world has started to take shape along with the financial world that is real and can be seen with your own eyes. he visible financial world – commercial banks, funds, investment companies, central banks, ministries of finances; financial markets (stock exchange, currency, loans, insurance), financial instruments (bonds, shares, derivatives and other treasures) etc. The life in this world is reflected in financial accounts, official statistics, it is under the oversight of financial regulators, parliaments, accounts chambers, media, and experts and so on. The functioning of the visible world goes in accordance with constitutions, laws, international agreements.  [...] The invisible financial world is something the majority of people have no idea of. The major part of it is the shadow sector of world financial system – financial institutes and financial operations conducted under the cover of off-shores and falling out of the sight of financial regulators (central banks, ministries of finances, security and exchange commissions etc.) . One can only guess how large it is, there is no way to have a clear picture of what it is like because all the activities are conducted beyond any supervision. No books kept, no accounting before state structures exists. The world dwellers are criminal gangs related to drug trafficking, arms trade, slave trade and so on. It’s not even grey sector activities, but rather “black” economy breaching al norms of penal law. According to experts, the turnover is a few trillion dollars a year… Besides, the shadow sector encompasses various structures that do not hide underground. Many of them openly offer various services to individuals and corporations.  [...]" 

MSM: "Elizabeth Warren's Aggressive Questioning Prompts Anger From Wall Street" [02/16/13] "Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) meeting with bank regulators Thursday left bankers reeling, after the politician questioned why regulators had not prosecuted a bank since the financial crisis. At one point, Warren asked why big banks' book value was lower, when most corporations trade above book value, saying there could be only two reasons for it. "One would be because nobody believes that the banks' books are honest. Second, would be that nobody believes that the banks are really manageable. That is, if they are too complex either for their own institutions to manage them or for the regulators to manage them," she said. That set off angry responses to Politico's Morning Money. "While Senator Warren had every right to ask pointed questions at today's Senate Banking Committee hearing, her claim that 'nobody believes' that bank books are honest is just plain wrong," emailed a "top executive" to the financial newsletter. " Perhaps someone ought to remind the Senator that the campaign is over and she should act accordingly if she wants to be taken seriously." [...]"  

Commentary: "Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail" Mat Taibbi, Rolling Stone [02/15/13] "The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses. People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching­ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated­ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway. [...]" 

MSM: "No End In Sight For Global “Currency Wars" [02/15/13] "G20 Meeting in Russia: A January 16th warning issued by Russia’s central banker Alexei Ulyukayev has also set the narrative for the G-20 meeting. “The world is on the brink of a fresh “currency war.” Japan is weakening the yen and other countries may follow. If Japan continues to pursue a softer currency, reciprocal devaluations would hurt the global economy,” Ulyukayev warned. “We’re on a threshold of very serious and confrontational actions. The new government of Japan is a course towards a very protectionist monetary policy through a sharp depreciation of the yen. Other colleagues from respected central banks and governments already pursue this policy. This is not a path towards global coordination but rather a separation,” Ulyukayev declared.  [...]" Related: "Hedge Funders Cash In Huge On The Collapse Of The Yen" "U.S. hedge fund investor George Soros has gained about $1 billion since November betting against the yen, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people with knowledge of the firm's position. [...]" | "Currency Wars Come To Moscow As G20 Spars Over Yen" |  "Secret Funding Helped Build Vast Network Of Climate Denial Thinktanks" "Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science [...]"[Cross-Posted] | Flashback: "George Soros Think Tank Proposes 13 Pieces Of Emergency Gun Control Legislation" "Now it seems that another ruling class control freak is jumping on the bandwagon as well. None other than George Soros, has come forward, through his “Center for American Progress” think tank, and put forward 13 different pieces of legislation that would restrict gun ownership and use among peaceful people. According to Breitbart: “George Soros’ Center for American Progress (CAP) has published a list of 13 new pieces of legislation they claim we need right now, in the wake of " the crime at Sandy Hook Elementary" [...]"  | "Soros Fears ‘Rebellion’, Warns "The Euro Could Destroy The EU" |See also, below: "Billionaires Continue To Dump U.S. Stocks, Traders Are Betting Against U.S. Economy" [02/12/13] 

MSM: "Vatican Bank Assets Seized In Rome" [02/15/13] "Italian authorities have seized €23 million ($31 million Cdn) of Vatican bank assets as part of an investigation into suspected money laundering. The Vatican said it was confused as to why financial police targeted the funds in a Vatican account at the Rome branch of the Italian bank Credito Artigiano Spa. “The Holy See is perplexed and surprised by the initiatives of the Rome prosecutors, considering the data necessary is already available at the Bank of Italy,” the Vatican said in a statement Tuesday. The statue of the Lady of Lourdes is carried in a procession in Saint Peter’s Square on Feb. 11.The statue of the Lady of Lourdes is carried in a procession in Saint Peter’s Square on Feb. 11. (Max Rossi/Reuters) Bank chairman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and director-general Paolo Cipriani are also being investigated to determine whether European Union money-laundering rules have been violated, news reports said. The Vatican said it has the “utmost faith” in the two men who head the bank, officially known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR). The probe is not the first time the bank has faced legal scrutiny. In the 1980s, it was implicated in a scandal that resulted in a banker being found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London. [...]"   Related: "Vatican's New Chief Banker Has Financial Ties to Warships" "With controversy already surrounding Pope Benedict XVI's surprise retirement announcement from earlier this week, another scandal is brewing in Vatican City. Vatican officials have long maintained that no church money goes to funding war, but today they scrambled to address concerns over their newly appointed bank president, who has business ties to a warship builder. The pope approved German lawyer Ernst von Freyberg to head the Vatican bank (officially known as the Institute for the Works of Religion) today, according to a Reuters report. The appointment could be Benedict's last major decision before he retires at the end of the month, and Catholics are counting on von Freyberg to rehabilitate the tarnished image of a bank beset by last year's money laundering scandals. The bank has been without a president since Ettore Gotti Tedeschi's ouster in May 2012. [...]" | See stories below: [02/14/13]

Commentary: "Pope Benedict Resigned To Avoid Arrest, Seizure Of Church Wealth By Easter" [02/14/13] "The historically unprecedented resignation of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope this week was compelled by an upcoming action by a European government to issue an arrest warrant against Ratzinger and a public lien against Vatican property and assets by Easter. The ITCCS Central Office in Brussels is compelled by Pope Benedict's sudden abdication to disclose the following details: [...]"  Related: "Pope Benedict To Seek Immunity And Protection From Italian President Giorgio Napolitano On February 23"   "Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger, has scheduled a meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano for Saturday, February 23 to discuss securing protection and immunity from prosecution from the Italian government, according to Italian media sources. [...]" 

LaRouche: "Collapsing Financial System & World War" [02/13/13] [22:37] "Question 2 from the February 8th, 2013 LaRouchePAC webcast. What is the Common Principle Behind the Collapse of the World Financial System, and the Escalating Threat of World War? [...]"  

Commentary: "Why The Banking Elite Want Riots in America" [02/12/13] ".... Although the likes of the IMF and the World Bank have pillaged half of the globe with their economic terrorism, America remains the ultimate prize. The first step of the four step process for bankster seizure of a country – privatization of state-owned assets – is already well under way in America, with infrastructure being sold off to foreign corporations, with the aid of Goldman Sachs, at a frightening pace. A key component of the banking elite’s insidious agenda to bring about an economic collapse in America by design also centers around the process of de-industrializing the country, eviscerating the nation’s platform for self-sufficiency and replacing it with dependence on banker bailouts. This has already been largely achieved in Europe – with just about every major economy on the continent run by Goldman Sachs-affiliated technocrats. In the United States, 32 per cent of manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000, while 56,000 manufacturing facilities have been mothballed since 2001. The Obama administration has also declared war on the coal industry, with Obama himself promising to “bankrupt” anyone who tries to build a new coal plant. Meanwhile, China builds a new coal plant every two weeks. Given the clear economic motive for stirring unrest in the United States, we’d expect to see preparations for domestic disorder in numerous different guises – and indeed the signs are everywhere. [...]"   Related: See below

Commentary: "Billionaires Continue To Dump U.S. Stocks, Traders Are Betting Against U.S. Economy" [02/12/13] "Billionaires Dumping Stocks, Economist Knows Why Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast. Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of "disappointing performance" in dyed-in-the- wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods. In the latest filing for Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in "consumer product stocks" by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in California-based computer parts supplier Intel. With 70% of the U.S. economy dependent on consumer spending, Buffett's apparent lack of faith in these companies' future prospects is worrisome. Unfortunately Buffett isn't alone. [...]" 

MSM: "World Banker Makes Stunning Confession" [02/11/13] [19:01] "Former World Bank president James Wolfensohn discusses 'the future of the global economy'. [...]" Note: they struggle to comprehend the 'elusive obvious' about the system, that it, itself, will not last into 'the future', matter what the percentages are. 

Commentary: "When The System is Backed Only By Credibility, Corruption Scandals Can Bring the Whole System Down" [02/10/13] "One of the primary focal points of our research is the corruption that has become endemic to the political and financial elites of the world. When we refer to corruption we are referring to insider deals, cronyism, lies and fraud. Since the Great Crisis began in 2008, these have become the four pillars of the financial system replacing the pillars of trust, transparency, truth and reality that are the true foundation of capitalism and wealth generation.  As we regularly note, corruption only works as long as the benefits of being “on the take” outweigh the consequences of getting caught. As soon as the consequences become real (namely someone gets in major trouble), then everyone starts to talk. This process has now begun in Spain. [...]" 

MSM: "Senior ATF Agent In Charge Of Fast 'N Furious Gun Running Program Was Also Working For JPMorgan" [02/10/13] "In an unusual arrangement, a senior official of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives involved in the controversial gun operation Fast and Furious is receiving his government salary while working full time for the investment bank J.P. Morgan, according to two Republican lawmakers. In a letter Tuesday to B. Todd Jones, the acting ATF director, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said that Deputy Assistant ATF Director William McMahon, who oversaw the agency’s Western region during the Fast and Furious operation, has been receiving two salaries simultaneously. McMahon was one of five ATF officials recently singled out in a congressional report on the botched gun operation. The report alleged that McMahon knew that no safeguards were in place to prevent a large number of guns from getting into Mexico, but he made no effort to stop them. [...]"  

MSM: "A ‘Mysterious’ Trader Is Betting On Something ‘Very Bad’ Happening In The Next 60 Days " [02/07/13] "CNBC Stocks have been rallying relentlessly to post-crisis highs. Meanwhile, the volatility index (aka the VIX, aka the "fear index") is near historic lows. But according to UBS's Art Cashin, some options trader has made an enormous $11.25 million bet that the VIX will explode higher very soon. And a rally in the VIX is usually accompanied by a drop in the stock markets. From this morning's Cashin's Comments (emphasis ours): [...] In past years I have reported on trades that were so large it appeared someone had inside knowledge of a pending event. Sometimes those were massive put positions on the S&P. A new trade just appeared that suggests there will be a market event in the near future. Last week somebody put on a call spread on the VIX using the April 20 and 25 puts. They bought 150,000 contracts for a net of $75 per contract. That is an $11,250,000 bet that the VIX will move over 20 over the next 60 days. You would have to be VERY confident in your outlook to risk $11 million on a directional position with the VIX at five year lows and the markets trying to break out to new highs. Jim then goes on to list some of the scheduled events and deadlines visible over the next 60 days (mostly in Washington). When you add in the broad variety of geo-political possibilities, it's a decent reason to stay extra alert."  

MSM: "Madoff Tells of $9 Billion He Stashed Away With Friends: Prisonmate" [02/07/13]   "Ponzi king Bernard Madoff is telling fellow jailbirds that he secretly funneled $9 billion in swiped funds to three people before he was nabbed, an inmate told The Post. Madoff says that his partner in crime Frank DiPascali knows who the recipients are—and that he suspects DiPascali is using that information to cut a better deal with the feds, according to the inmate at the medium-security prison in Butner, NC. At Butner, Madoff is known for regularly hanging around with another notorious inmate—Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel while working as a civilian intelligence analyst for the US Navy—and former New York pharmacist John Mancini, who was locked up for illegally distributing millions of painkillers. [...]"  

Commentary: "The Unelected, Unaccountable Central Bank Of The World" [02/06/13] "An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.“ The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does.... [...]"  

MSM: "Bank of America Still Violating Loan Modification Agreements Even after Court Settlement" [02/06/13] "Bank of America has been accused of violating the terms of a multi-billion dollar mortgage settlement before it has even been approved. Two years ago, BofA reached an $8.5 billion settlement to resolve claims over mortgage abuses by Countrywide Financial, which it acquired during the 2008 financial crisis. That settlement has yet to be approved by a federal judge, and now three Federal Home Loan Banks and Triaxx, an investment vehicle that bought mortgage securities, have filed court documents claiming the deal, among other things, has shortchanged thousands of investors. In addition, the documents say BofA has continued questionable loan-related practices and put its own interests ahead of investors while modifying troubled mortgages. The bank also failed to purchase bad mortgages in full once it had lowered the payments and principal on the loan—which is reportedly a violation of its agreements with investors who bought the securities that held the mortgages. “The filing raises new questions about whether a judge will approve the settlement,” The New York Times wrote. “If it is denied, the bank would face steeper legal obligations.” [...]"  

MSM: "U.S. Government Slams S&P With $5 Billion Fraud Lawsuit" [02/06/13] "The government is seeking $5 billion in its civil lawsuit against Standard & Poor's, accusing the ratings service of defrauding investors, in one of the most ambitious cases yet from the Justice Department over conduct tied to the financial crisis. [...]"  

MSM: "Anonymous Claims It Hacked Fed, Releases Confidential Banker Information" [02/06/13] "A year and a half ago, when the hacker group Anonymous launched its anti-Bernanke, anti-Fed campaign dubbed Operation Empire State Rebellion (or OpESR), we stated, rhetorically and jokingly, that "perhaps in the aftermath of the IMF "very major breach" by anonymous hackers, it is really time to make sure all external access points to FedWire and FedLine are truly safe and sound. It will be very sad if it is uncovered that this source of externally accessible portal to hundreds of billions in emergency Fed funding has been somehow compromised. Just imagine the loss of confidence in the system... Why, a global distributed attack would really stretch the Fed's 1,200-strong police force quite thin." It appears that either FedWire or FedLine may not have been "truly safe and sound" after all. [...]"  Related: "Anonymous Posts Personal Data Of 4,000 Bankers Online"    

Commentary: "The Linchpin Lie: How Global Collapse Will Be Sold To The Masses" [02/03/13] "In our modern world there exist certain institutions of power. Not government committees, alphabet agencies, corporate lobbies, or even standard military organizations; no, these are the mere “middle-men” of power. The errand boys. The well paid hit men of the global mafia. They are not the strategists or the decision makers. Instead, I speak of institutions which introduce the newest paradigms. Who write the propaganda. Who issue the orders from on high. I speak of the hubs of elitism which have initiated nearly every policy mechanism of our government for the past several decades. I am talking about the Council On Foreign Relations, the Tavistock Institute, the Heritage Foundation (a socialist organization posing as conservative), the Bilderberg Group, as well as the corporate foils that they use to enact globalization, such as Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Carlyle Group, etc. Many of these organizations and corporations operate a revolving door within the U.S. government. Monsanto has champions, like Donald Rumsfeld who was on the board of directors of its Searle Pharmaceuticals branch, who later went on to help the company force numerous dangerous products including Aspartame through the FDA. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have a veritable merry-go-round of corrupt banking agents which are appointed to important White House and Treasury positions on a regular basis REGARDLESS of which party happens to be in office. Most prominent politicians are all members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which has openly admitted on multiple occasions that their goal is the destruction of U.S. sovereignty and the formation of a “one world government” or “supranational union” (their words, not mine). However, one organization seems to rear its ugly head at the forefront of the most sweeping mass propaganda operations of our time, and has been linked to the creation of the most atrocious military methodologies, including the use of false flag events. [...]"  

Commentary: "How the Manipulated Stock Market Became Food Stamps For the 1%" [02/02/13] "For most of the past four or five years, I have spent the majority of my time studying the dominant forces that fuel the power structure that exists in these United States today, and indeed throughout the world. My education began quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of the last decade when I started understanding fiat money, Central Banking and the global monetary system. Since then, I have expanded my understanding to mainstream media brainwashing, the military-industrial complex, the role of the political oligarchs in Washington D.C., the corruption of the food industry under the complicity of the FDA itself and much more. The more I peered under the curtain, no matter what the industry, the clearer it became that the system had no chance of survival under its current form. What’s worse, it became obvious that the very small 0.01% of the population that I call oligarchs (financial and political), who are actively gaming the system for their own pleasure, are well aware of the system’s terminal nature. That’s why they are rapidly putting in place the police state grid. That said, this article is not about the implementation of the surveillance state. I cover that pretty much daily these days. This post is more of a philosophical stream of consciousness; a guilty pleasure that I have not engaged in as of late. [...]"  

MSM: "Record Withdrawals At U.S. Banks As Americans Lose Trust In Financial System" [02/02/13] "You probably haven’t heard much about it from the mainstream media, but the latest figures released by the privately-owned Federal Reserve (FED) indicate that America’s largest banks saw record cash withdrawals during the first full week of January 2013. As reported by Bloomberg Businessweek and scant others, account holders withdrew a record $114 billion in just one week, which represents the largest one-week withdrawal sum made in America since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The data, which accounts for all cash withdrawals made from the nation’s 25 largest banks, has reportedly shocked many financial analysts who say they are unsure exactly what sparked this minor bank run. Some have speculated that the December 31, 2012 expiration of the Transaction Account Guarantee (TAG) insurance program, which was designed to protect smaller banks from insolvency, may have played a role in triggering what appears to have been a wave of panic withdrawals. [...]"  

MSM: "The Big Cities' Financial War on Guns May Backfire" [02/01/13] "While the White House and some congressional Democrats in Washington launch their legislative campaign for stricter gun control, officials in a small but growing number of states and cities are vowing to pull investment dollars from manufacturers of guns and ammunition. History shows that the strategy could backfire. As Bloomberg News reported on Jan. 14, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, has appointed himself the field general of a nascent financial war on the firearm industry. Elected officials and pension system executives in New York, California, and Massachusetts are reviewing their gun investments or actively removing firearm companies from their portfolios. [...]"  

MSM: "Libor Lies Revealed In Rigging Of $300 Trillion Benchmark" [01/31/13] "Where Libor is set each day affects what families pay on their mortgages, the interest on savings accounts and returns on corporate bonds. Now, banks are facing a reckoning, as prosecutors make arrests, regulators impose fines and lawyers around the world file lawsuits claiming the manipulation pushed homeowners into poverty and deprived brokerage firms of profits. For years, traders at Deutsche Bank AG, UBS AG, Barclays, RBS and other banks colluded with colleagues responsible for setting the benchmark and their counterparts at other firms to rig the price of money, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and interviews with two dozen current and former traders, lawyers and regulators. UBS traders went as far as offering bribes to brokers to persuade others to make favorable submissions on their behalf, regulatory filings show. Members of the close-knit group of traders knew each other from working at the same firms or going on trips organized by interdealer brokers, which line up buyers and sellers of securities, to French ski resort Chamonix and the Monaco Grand Prix. The manipulation flourished for years, even after bank supervisors were made aware of the system’s flaws. “We will never know the amounts of money involved, but it has to be the biggest financial fraud of all time,” says Adrian Blundell-Wignall, a special adviser to the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. “Libor is the basis for calculating practically every derivative known to man.” [...]" 

Concepts and Practices: "'Better Than Cash Alliance' Backed By Bill Gates To Usher In Cashless Society" [01/30/13] "It appears that while Bill Gates was content to play the role of Microsoft innovator and billionaire philanthropist early on, he has decided that the second half of his life deserves a more open and slightly more honest twist. Indeed, in recent years Bill Gates and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have funded a variety of initiatives aimed at reducing population, promoting toxic vaccinations, and now hyping and funding the development of the cashless society. In a recent article by Peter McCoy published in Bloomberg Businessweek, McCoy reveals that Bill Gates is opposed to physical cash currency because, like vaccine-free populations who are able to determine their own reproduction rates, it hurts poor people (according to Gates). Sarcasm aside, the push toward a cashless society under the guise of benefiting the poor and underserved is a very real movement. As McCoy points out in his article, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been instrumental in this regard as major backers of the Better Than Cash Alliance – an organization that was established last September whose stated objectives are to reach the following goals by 2017:  [...]"  Note: This will never have enough time to manifest itself. 

MSM: "Facebook Gets $500 Million Investment From Goldman" [01/29/13] "Leading online social networking website Facebook Inc. has received a $500 million investment from investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and a Russian investor. Goldman, the New York-based bank, invested $450 million, while Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies contributed $50 million in cash, according to a report by the New York Times' Dealbook. Experts say that the investment may grant Goldman the inside track on becoming the lead underwriter for Facebook’s IPO in the future, which could generate hundreds of millions in proceeds for the bank. [...] Forbes magazine, which ranks the wealthiest people, said the United States is home to more than 400 billionaires, the most of any country.[...]"  

Commentary: "How Iceland Overthrew The Banks: The Only 3 Minutes Of Any Worth From Davos" [01/28/13] [2:58] "Why do we consider banks to be like holy churches?” is the rhetorical question that Iceland’s President Olafur Ragnar Grimson asks (and answers) in this truly epic three minutes of truthiness from the farce that is the World Economic Forum in Davos. Amid a week of back-slapping and self-congratulatory party-outdoing, as John Aziz notes, the Icelandic President explains why his nation is growing strongly, why unemployment is negligible, and how they moved from the world’s poster-child for banking crisis 5 years ago to a thriving nation once again. Simply put, he says, “we didn’t follow the prevailing orthodoxies of the last 30 years in the Western world.” There are lessons here for everyone – as Grimson explains the process of creative destruction that remains much needed in Western economies – though we suspect his holographic pass for next year’s Swiss fun will be reneged… [...]" 

Commentary: "Daniel Hannan | Occupy Wall Street Debate | Oxford Union " [01/28/13] [10:42] "Daniel Hannan MEP gives his opposing opinion to the motion of "The House would Occupy Wall Street". The past and present bailouts of each and every bank (and ‘important’ industry) will, one day, be seen as a generational offense is how MEP Daniel Hannan begins this thoroughly British demolition of the three critical myths surrounding the crisis, that despite market optics, we are still living through. From the idea that capitalism has failed (it has not in his view, it has been ravaged by political pandering), to the crisis being caused by lack of regulation, and that greed is the single-driver of the mess that we remain in; Hannan suggests in a brief but extremely eloquent debate that there is a world of difference between being pro business and pro market as he destroys any semblance of credibility that the political (and elite) class has echoing a young Ron Paul in his thoroughly libertarian free-market sensibilities. [...]"  Note:  About The Oxford Union Society: The Union is the world's most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. It has been established for 189 years, aiming to promote debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.

UK: "Banks Charge Us £9bn A Year For Current Accounts Through Complex Fees" [01/27/13] "Complex charges are allowing the big banks to make almost £9billion a year from current account holders, a report reveals. Five years after many banks were saved by receiving billions of pounds in public money, they continue to give customers a raw deal, the Office of Fair Trading says. Little or no interest is paid on balances in current accounts, people do not understand overdraft charges and there is no sign the banks compete to offer a better deal, the report says. [...]"  

Commentary: "China's Plan To Establish ‘China Cities’ And ‘Special Economic Zones’ All Over America" [01/24/13] "Over the past several years, the Chinese government and large Chinese corporations (which are often at least partially owned by the government) have been systematically buying up businesses, homes, farmland, real estate, infrastructure and natural resources all over America. In some cases, China appears to be attempting to purchase entire communities in one fell swoop. So why is this happening? Is this some form of “economic colonization” that is taking place? Some have speculated that China may be intending to establish “special economic zones” inside the United States modeled after the very successful Chinese city of Shenzhen. Back in the 1970s, Shenzhen was just a very small fishing village, but now it is a sprawling metropolis of over 14 million people. Initially, these “special economic zones” were only established within China, but now the Chinese government has been buying huge tracts of land in foreign countries such as Nigeria and establishing special economic zones in those nations. So could such a thing actually happen in America? Well, according to Dr. Jerome Corsi, a plan being pushed by the Chinese Central Bank would set up “development zones” in the United States that would allow China to “establish Chinese-owned businesses and bring in its citizens to the U.S. to work.” Under the plan, some of the $1.17 trillion that the U.S. owes China would be converted from debt to “equity”. [...]"  Related: See the following stories below: "Corrupt Chinese Politicians are Buying Billions in U.S. Real Estate" [01/23/13] ; "China Poised To Play Debt Card – For U.S. Land" [01/22/13] 

MSM: "Goldman Sachs Made $400 Million Betting On Food While People Starved, Says Anti-Poverty Group" [01/24/13] "Chicken isn't the only thing that way more expensive than it used to be. Global food prices are more than double what they were in 2003, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation's latest release. One of the biggest food speculators in the market is Goldman Sachs, which made an estimated $400 million from speculating on food, according to a report by World Development Movement (WDM). "Goldman Sachs is the global leader in a trade that is driving food prices up while nearly a billion people are hungry," said WDM's Christine Haigh. From the report: "The US has passed legislation to limit speculation, but the controls have not been implemented due to a legal challenge from Wall Street spearheaded by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, of which Goldman Sachs is a leading member. Similar legislation is on the table at the EU, but the UK government has so far opposed effective controls. Goldman Sachs has lobbied against controls in both the US and the EU." [...]" 

Trends: "HSBC Buys $876 Million Worth of Silver" [01/24/13] "HSBC has quietly moved into acquiring large amounts of silver bullion. The bank has secured another deal to buy silver bars from KGHM which brings their total purchases of silver from KGHM alone in the last 12 months to $876 million or PLN 3.65 billion. KGHM is one of the largest producers of silver in the world and is the second-largest producer of refined silver in the world. [...]"  Note: HSBC? This British bank is a transnational criminal enterprise at heart, as we have seen: Related: See stories listed below: "Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke" Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone [01/18/13] ; "Federal Judge Dismisses Silver Manipulation Lawsuit Against JP Morgan and HSBC" [01/01/13] ; "Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations HSBC Money Laundering Case History" PDF [12/17/12]; HSBC Backlash: Oregon Sen. Merkeley Accuses DoJ of Violating Congress's Laws Against Terrorism; British Role Exposed" [12/16/12]; Video -"HSBC Couldn't Track $60 Trillion in Suspicious Activity?" [5:29] [12/16/12]; Greek Journalist Acquitted for Blowing Tax Fraud Whistle" [11/14/12]; Widespread Corruption Linked to Private HSBC Accounts" [11/14/12] ; "Obama May Levy Carbon Tax To Cut The U.S. Deficit, HSBC Says" [11/08/12] ; "HSBC Caught in New Drug Money Laundering Scandal" [11/05/12] ; "HSBC Caught in New Drug Money Laundering Scandal" [11/05/12] ; "Criminal Banking Cartel Dominates US, British Governments" [08/05/12]; "Drug Money And Terrorism Fuel HSBC? – Senate Probe" [07/18/12] ; "Many Wall Street Executives Says Wrongdoing Is Necessary: Survey" [07/11/12]. 

MSM: "DOJ Criminal Chief Lanny Breuer Stepping Down" [01/24/13] "Lanny Breuer is leaving his position as head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. [...]"  Note:  During his tenure as Assistant Attorney General, Breuer has substantially increased enforcement of the FCPA, bringing in billions in penalties and leading prosecutions against numerous individuals.[5] His team has secured convictions against over three dozen individuals since 2009. Among the most noteworthy corporate resolutions in the FCPA area since Breuer became AAG are those involving BAE Systems ($400 million),[6] JGC Corporation ($218.8 million),[7] Daimler AG ($185 million),[8] and Johnson & Johnson ($70 million). In 2010, Breuer created a Money Laundering and Bank Integrity Unit within the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section in order to pursue financial institutions and individuals who violate the money laundering statutes, the Bank Secrecy Act, and other related statutes.[14] Since its creation, the Unit has had several notable successes, including the resolution of an investigation of HSBC, the British banking giant. On December 11, 2012, Breuer announced that HSBC agreed to forfeit $1.25 billion – the largest forfeiture by a bank in U.S. history – and to pay $665 million in civil penalties for violating the Bank Secrecy Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Trading With the Enemy Act.[15] HSBC would not be criminally prosecuted for alleged terrorist financing. Commentator Glenn Greenwald noted the disparity between that decision and the extremely harsh penalties regularly doled out to powerless American Muslims accused of similar behavior.[16] A New York Times editorial called the decision, a "dark day for the rule of law."[17] Breuer was featured in FRONTLINE’s documentary, The Untouchables, which aired on Tuesday and explored the reasons why no Wall Street executives have been prosecuted for fraud in connection with the financial crisis. Breuer told FRONTLINE that the DOJ had pursued charges when officials found evidence of fraud. “But in those cases where we can’t bring a criminal case — and federal criminal cases are hard to bring — I have to prove that you had the specific intent to defraud. …If we cannot establish that, then we can’t bring a criminal case,” he said. Related: "PBS FRONTLINE "The Untouchables" why no Wall St. execs have faced fraud charges for the financial crisis.

MSM: "US Treasury Freezes Assets Of Top Gangsters From Around The World" [01/24/13] "Earlier today, the Department of the Treasury announced sanctions against the members of three international crime syndicates in an effort to crack down on organized crime. President Obama had previously named the Camorra, Yakuza, and Brothers’ Circle as TCOs, or transnational criminal organizations, in July 2011, and instructed the Treasury to follow up with sanctions. [...]" 

Trends: "India And Vietnam Are Trying To Get Their People Off Gold" [01/24/13] "... Some countries are starting to take issue with their residents’ preference for storing wealth in gold bars, rather than bank accounts. Large gold imports can throw off a country’s current account balance – the difference between what a country earns and what it spends on foreign trade. Widespread investments in physical gold also mean that large pots of wealth sit idle, instead of being put to work in the broader economy. And in countries where gold is a popular investment, those financial institutions which carry large gold deposits, lend cash against gold or offer interest-bearing gold deposit accounts, can pose a risk to the financial system if commodity prices suddenly shift. Governments in India, the largest gold importer in the world, and Vietnam, a country which imported 95% of its domestic gold consumption in 2011, have taken steps in the past year to discourage savers from hoarding gold. The Indian government doubled import duties on gold bullion to 4 percent in March and with current account deficits at record highs, recently announced another hike to 6 percent. [...]  both Vietnam and India walk a tightrope in trying to wean citizens off gold in times of high inflation and economic uncertainty, while also trying to avoid encouraging a black market. “As with India, the government will be wary of driving more of the gold trade underground,” Ric Deverell, Credit Suisse’s Head of Commodities Research wrote about Vietnam in a recent research note. “Gold’s utility as a highly portable, high-value store of wealth is as relevant today as it has ever been.” [...]"  Note: The medium of gold has been in these cultures for more than a millennium. It's not likely that this will be tolerated very well by the population.

MSM: "Corrupt Chinese Politicians are Buying Billions in U.S. Real Estate" [01/23/13]   "... Now we also discover that part of the bid to U.S. real estate has come from another criminal class. In this case, we are talking about corrupt Chinese officials who are pulling their ill gotten gains from their homeland and desperately placing it in real estate all over the globe. From The Telegraph: As China’s new leaders intensify a campaign to root out corruption, thousands of Communist party officials have been panicked into a fire sale of their illicit properties while billions of pounds have been smuggled overseas. t said the volume of deals had intensified by “a hundred times” after Xi Jinping, the incoming Chinese president, warned that corruption could kill the Party and put one of the country’s most vigorous and resolute politicians, Wang Qishan, in charge of stamping out graft. It also claimed that an astonishing $1 trillion (£630 billion), equivalent to 40 per cent of Britain’s annual GDP, had been smuggled out of China illegally in 2012. Marco Pearman-Parish at Corporation China, a company in Beijing that helps clients find properties abroad, said there had been a strong rise in clients looking for homes in the Cayman Islands. In the United States, the National Association of Realtors said that more than $7 billion of properties had been bought by Chinese in the US last year. Some high-end homes are now specifically built for rich Chinese with ponds for koi carp and a second kitchen for pungent cooking. [...]"  Related: See below

Commentary: "China Poised To Play Debt Card – For U.S. Land" [01/22/13] "Could real estate on American soil owned by China be set up as “development zones” in which the communist nation could establish Chinese-owned businesses and bring in its citizens to the U.S. to work? That’s part of an evolving proposal Beijing has been developing quietly since 2009 to convert more than $1 trillion of U.S debt it owns into equity. Under the plan, China would own U.S. businesses, U.S. infrastructure and U.S. high-value land, all with a U.S. government guarantee against loss. [...]"  

Commentary: "World’s 25 Richest Earned Enough In 2012 To End Global Poverty" [01/21/13] "... The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,” while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report PDF said. The report highlights that even politics has become controlled by the super-wealthy, which leads to policies “benefitting the richest few and not the poor majority [...]"

MSM: "House G.O.P. Agrees to Lift Debt Limit" [01/19/13] " Backing down from their hard-line stance, House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months, with a requirement that both chambers of Congress pass a budget in that time to clear the way for negotiations on long-term deficit [...]"  

Interviews: "Celente: The 2013 Financial Collapse Will Be One For The Ages" [01/19/13] "Today top trends forecaster Gerald Celente told King World News the Western world is heading into a massive financial collapse in 2013. Celente also provided KWN exclusively with a small portion of a frightening new piece from the former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan, which is contained in the interview below.  [...]"  

Commentary: "Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke" Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone [01/18/13] "If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me. Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank. The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows." [...]"  

Commentary: "Robbing Mali To Pay Germany" [01/18/13] "... It quickly became apparent that the problem of tungsten filled bullion bars was widespread. Because many of the fake gold bars had the marking of US sources, nations began to ask for audits and tests of the gold bullion held in their name by the New York Federal Reserve. To the surprise of many, the New York Federal Reserve refused! Indeed the New York Federal Reserve refused the German government permission to simply look at their bullion! Germany's private central bank then went public assuring the Germans that they trusted America's private central bank and did not need to see the gold. That was followed by a bizarre editorial from CNBC's Senior Editor Jim Carney that it didn't really matter if the bullion was really there at the New York federal Reserve, as long as the bookkeeping said it was! [...] The German government started demanding their physical gold to be repatriated back to Germany from both the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve. Germany demanded all of the 374 tons of gold held by the Bank of France, but only 300 tons of the 1500 tons of bullion held by the New York Federal Reserve. Both the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve have stated that the process of returning the gold will take years, five years for the French gold, and seven for the gold coming from the New York Federal Reserve. The delay makes the situation clear. Neither the Bank of France nor the New York Federal Reserve actually have the gold Germany deposited, sending tungsten fakes back to the very nation that first spotted the fraud is risky, the France and the United States are scrambling to find replacement gold.  [...] Mali is one of the world's largest gold producers. Together with neighboring Ghana they account for 7-8% of world gold output. That makes them a rich prize for nations desperate for real physical gold. So, even as Germany started demanding their gold back from the Bank of France and the New York Federal Reserve, France (aided by the US) decided to invade Mali to fight "Islamists" working for "Al Qaeda." Of course, "Islamists" has become the catch-all label for people that need to ne killed to get them out of the way of the path to riches, and the people being bombed by France (aided by the US) are not "Al Qaeda" but Tawariqs, who have been fighting for their independence for 150 years, long before the CIA created "Al Qaeda". Left to themselves, the Tawariqs could sell gold to whoever they want for whatever they want, and right now China can outbid the US and France. [...]" Related: See below: "Bundesbank to Repatriate 374 Tons of Gold From Bank of France, Substantial Portion of Gold Held at the NY Fed" [01/15/13]; "It Will Take The Fed Seven Years To Deliver 300 Tons Of German Gold"   Also, see below:

World Politics: "2013 And The New Scramble For Africa" [01/17/13] "France’s military aggression in Mali is only the latest expression of a renewed Scramble for Africa being undertaken by all of the continent’s former imperialist overlords. This involves not only those powers that directly ruled Africa from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s, such as France and Britain, but above all the United States. Paris has never fully abandoned its imperial designs on Africa, as its recent record in Rwanda and Libya demonstrates all too brutally. It still has 9,000 troops stationed in the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Gabon, Central African Republic, Chad and Djibouti. Its return to Mali is not about combating Al Qaeda and Islamist fundamentalism, but rather a means of staking its claim to the country’s uranium, gold and untapped oil deposits and those of the West African region and throughout a landmass recently proclaimed by President Francois Hollande as “the continent of the future.” It is as yet unclear whether the US will go beyond providing aerial support to France in Mali. But if it does not, it is only because it does not want to help a rival predatory power. 2013 opens amid a whole number of military operations being waged by Washington in a continent upon which America now depends for fully a quarter of the oil and raw materials it consumes—including oil, gold, diamonds, copper, iron and big money crops such as cocoa. Africa is in play as far as Washington and all other major powers are concerned. US aims in Africa centre on securing hegemony over the entire continent, a conflict in which its chief rival is now China. [...]"  

MSM: "The Derivatives Time Bomb" [01/17/13] [15:31] "According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s fourth quarter report for 2011, approximately 95% of the $230 trillion in total U.S. derivative exposure was held by just four financial institutions: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs. The unregulated multi-trillion dollar derivatives market exceeds global GDP and poses a clear danger to the global economy, Chris Whalen, Senior Managing Director at Carrington, and Barry Ritholtz, CEO at Fusion IQ, tell Bloomberg Law's Lee Pacchia. "The fix is very simple," says Ritholtz, "repeal the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and suddenly this becomes like every other financial instrument."  [...]"  

MSM: "Spain Plunders 90% Of Social Security Fund To Buy Its Own Debt" [01/16/13] "Spain has been quietly tapping the country’s richest piggy bank, the Social Security Reserve Fund, as a buyer of last resort for Spanish government bonds – with at least 90% of the €65 billion ($85.7 billion) fund has been invested in increasingly risky Spanish debt. Of course, this is nothing new, the US (and the Irish) have been using quasi-government entities to fund themselves in a mutually-destructive circle-jerk for years – the only difference being there are other buyers in the Treasury market, whereas in Spain the marginal buyer is critical to support the sinking ship. [...]"  

MSM: "US Taps Pension Fund To Avoid Passing Debt Limit" [01/16/13] " Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the government has begun borrowing from the federal employee pension fund to keep operating without surpassing its debt limit. Geithner says in a letter to congressional leaders that the move will free up $156 billion in borrowing authority while Congress debates increasing the $16.4 trillion debt limit. The government reached its borrowing limit on Dec. 31, but began using bookkeeping maneuvers to keep from surpassing it. Geithner has told congressional leaders that Treasury expects to exhaust those measures by mid-February to early March. The latest action has been taken by other Treasury secretaries and will not put in jeopardy any monthly pension payments. Geithner said he will replace the funds removed from the pension account after the borrowing limit is raised.  [...]"  

Max Keiser: "Bundesbank to Repatriate 374 Tons of Gold From Bank of France, Substantial Portion of Gold Held at the NY Fed" [01/15/13] "While Bernanke spent his afternoon today outlining why the gold standard can never work (never mind the fact that it worked perfectly for 2 centuries in America), the Bundesbank has just shattered the remaining confidence in the fractional bullion banking system, announcing that it will repatriate a portion of its gold reserves from the NY Federal Reserve, and ALL 374 tons of its gold held at the Bank of France! In the months that followed Hugo Chavez’ 110 ton gold repatriation request in the summer of 2011, gold exploded nearly $400 as the bullion banks panicked. As the Bundesbank’s official gold holdings held at the Fed and the Bank of France dwarf Venezuela’s 110 tons, don’t be surprised if the price of physical gold goes super-nova as Germany’s repatriation request plays out, as paper gold rehypothecated 100 times over must suddenly be conjured up in physical form. [...]"   Related: "It Will Take The Fed Seven Years To Deliver 300 Tons Of German Gold" "What is news is that courtesy of the supplied calendar of events in the Buba statement, it will take the Fed some seven years to procure Germany's 300 tons of gold. This is the same Fed that, in its own words, holds some "216 million troy ounces of gold" or some 6720 tons, in its vault 80 feet below ground level. Putting the above in perspective, the amount of gold that Germany will have to wait 7 years for is shown in red. The amount of gold the Fed supposedly holds, is shown in yellow with a shade of tungsten. Why it will take the Fed 7 years to part with an amount of gold that is less than 5% of its total holdings is anyone's guess... unless of course, the bulk of the gold in the column on the right has been rehypothecated numerous times to serve as collateral for countless counterparties, and it is no longer clear just who own what to anyone. [...]"  

MSM: "Goldman Bankers Set For Bonus Windfall As Profits Rise" [01/15/13] "Analysts expect the Wall Street bank to have amassed a total compensation pot, which includes bonuses and salaries, of between $13.3bn (8.2bn pounds) and $13.8bn for 2012. That is up from $12.2bn in 2011, when the bank suffered only its second quarterly loss since becoming a public company in 1999. Goldman is expected to have enjoyed a better final quarter of last year, with both bond and share trading delivering a more robust performance. "We anticipate fourth quarter market conditions were fair for both equities and fixed-income businesses," said Howard Chen, an analyst at Credit Suisse.  [...]" 

MSM: "JPMorgan Chase Lays Off 839 Employees In Fallout From Foreclosure Review Settlement" [01/15/13] "The layoffs came swiftly at JPMorgan Chase and Co. last week following the announcement that a much-maligned program meant to identify and compensate borrowers who were hurt by fraudulent foreclosures was being shut down. But the heads rolling were not those belonging to the bank executives, corporation counselors or operations managers who helped run the program into the ground. Instead, according to an announcement posted to the New York State Department of Labor website, the bank began firing 529 of the employees who had been poring over individual foreclosure files from within a suite in downtown Brooklyn. [...]" 

MSM: "British Prince Charles Accused Of Helping Money Laundering At Baltic Bank" [01/13/13] "A close ally of Britain’s heir to the throne, Prince Charles, has been accused of money-laundering at the Baltic International Bank, founded by the Prince of Wales and a Kuwaiti entrepreneur. The accused eastern European financier has also been appointed to the board of trustees of The Prince’s Foundation, one of Charles’s charities.  [...]" 

Max Keiser: "Neo-Feudal Castles With Moats Popping Up In America As Economy Collapses" [01/13/13] "The pitch is “Libertarian Paradise” – but that’s just the way they figure they can hook you. It’s snake oil. It’s BS. It’s people trying to build sheltered communities protected by their own military to protect them from the people they fucked over pursuing their vision of a ‘libertarian paradise.’ Glenn Beck wants to start one of these in Texas (he’s raising $2 bn. dollars). We’ve been saying for a few years now that ‘neo-feudalism’ will take society and the economy back to a pre-Enlightenment era of religious superstition, book burning, anti-science run by all powerful ideologues ruling as media mad dictators. The Jim Jones cult, the Hale-Bopp comet cult, and other similar experiments all ended in mass suicides as the reality bubble engineered popped with only suicide providing meaning to an otherwise horse’s-ass life (that Beck so brilliantly personifies). This time, like the death cults we read about in history books, we’ll see entire ‘libertarian’ cities commit mass suicide to cleanse themselves of ever having to face reality. [...]"  

Interviews: "One Of The Biggest And Most Elaborate Falsehoods Ever Sold" [01/12/13] [10:45] Related: See below.

Commentary: "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout" Rolling Stone [01/11/13]  "It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right? Wrong.... It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an un-governable, un-regulatable, hyper-concentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn. [...]" 

MSM: "Basel Banksters: Secretive Elite Group Pulls Strings of World Finance" [01/11/13]   [2:36] "As the economic crisis continues to rage on, regulators are coming under fire for making banks’ lives easier rather than the people’s. And it appears the wider public knows little of how and where the big decisions about the global financial future are being made. [...]"  

Matt Taibbi: "Hank Greenberg Should Be Shot into Space" Rolling Stone [01/09/13] "... The only problem is, the suit is being filed by maybe the biggest douchebag of all time, Hank Greenberg (and his company, Starr International), a man who has not only been proven to be corrupt and a fraud, but who perhaps more than anyone else was responsible for the galactic balance-sheet goat-fuck that caused AIG's implosion in the first place. If there is such a person as an innocent AIG shareholder who was harmed by the government's conduct, it sure as hell isn't Hank Greenberg. In fact, since the collapse of AIG was perhaps the most important event in causing the financial crisis of 2008 to spiral out of control, you can put Hank Greenberg on the very short list of individuals who are most responsible for the economic catastrophe. A few weeks ago I put former Countrywide chief Angelo Mozilo, former Lehman head Dick Fuld and Greenberg's former subordinate Joe Cassano (the former head of AIG's Financial Products unit) on that list, but Greenberg should be right there riding the bus of shame with all of those excellent folks. [...] Like all narcissists, Greenberg is physically incapable of admitting any mistake he's ever made, and he's made plenty of them. Among other things, Greenberg in 2000 helped AIG artificially bolster its reserves by green-lighting a phony reinsurance transaction with a company called General Re (a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway) that puffed up AIG's loss reserves by about $500 million. Even though a federal judge ruled that Greenberg was a conspirator in that case, and even though that scandal led to AIG in 2006 paying what at the time was the biggest settlement ever ($1.6 billion, paid to Eliot Spitzer's New York state regulators and George W. Bush's Justice Department and SEC), Greenberg has always denied responsibility, and his bumlicking minions in the financial press like Maria Bartiromo are still protesting his innocence long after everybody on Wall Street forgot about the case (that was nineteen billion-dollar scandals ago!). Moreover, despite the fact that Greenberg personally settled for $15 million in another fraud case that led to a $2 billion accounting restatement by AIG, he's never accepted responsibility for any of his actions there, either. In fact, even after he paid the $15 million in that case, and even after AIG restated its balance sheet to the tune of $2 billion, Greenberg went out of his way to say the restatement was mostly "unnecessary" and that he had "no responsibility" for any fraud. That's just the kind of guy he is."  Related: See below.

MSM: "Amid Public Rage, AIG Opts Out Of U.S. Government Lawsuit" [01/09/13] "The board of American International Group Inc decided on Wednesday not to join a lawsuit against the U.S. government over the terms of the company's bailout, following two days of fevered backlash from Congress and the public over the prospect. [...]"  Related: "AIG, Bailed Out By America, May Sue America" "In a story that seems almost too audacious to believe, insurance company AIG, which only just finished paying back its $182 billion taxpayer rescue, is reportedly considering joining a lawsuit against the U.S. government over the terms of that rescue, by far the most controversial and publicly derided of the Wall Street bailout era. The possible legal action comes as AIG is also running a splashy national ad campaign saying “Thank you, America,” for saving the company from total collapse. A federal judge in New York in November tossed out the lawsuit AIG is considering joining, noting that AIG had two options in 2008: Agree to terms of the bailout or go into bankruptcy. It chose the bailout. But the lawsuit continues on a separate track in federal court in Washington and in a federal appeals court. [...] 

US Politics: "Republican Austerity Fanatics In New Drive For US National Bankruptcy" [01/09/13] "The first round of Washington haggling over the US federal budget and taxation policies has ended with a tactical victory for Obama, but one which risks becoming a strategic defeat in short order. The central issue at the end of the old year was the so-called “fiscal cliff,” a combination of automatic tax increases and budget cuts ( called the “sequester”). At the last minute, Obama and Biden, working primarily with the Republican minority in the Senate, were able to secure majority votes in both houses for a 5% tax increase on plutocrats earning more than $400,000 per year, while postponing the sequester - including large defense cuts -- for two months, until March 1, 2013. Obama’s backers trumpeted the humiliation of the reactionary Republican Party, which had absolutely refuse to support increases in federal taxation over the last 22 years - since George Bush the elder violated an anti-tax pledge, and lost the 1992 election in part because of his heresy. Technically, by the time the Republicans voted for the tax increase, it was actually a tax cut for those earning less than $450,000. But it is true that anti-tax fanaticism has been the ideological glue holding the Republican Party together, and that cohesion has now been fatally weakened. If Obama were actually pursuing a strategy of smashing the Republican Party, this would be a useful tool. But all indications are that Obama will try to keep the Republican Party alive to provide a cloak and pretext for upcoming austerity cuts demanded by Obama’s own Wall Street controllers.  [...]"  

Concepts and Practices: "Platinum Coin" Ban Would Nix Debt Ceiling Tactic" [01/08/13] "Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) is introducing legislation that would ban Obama and the U.S. Treasury from 'minting platinum coins' to avert the ' debt ceiling' standoff. The billraises the profile of "the platinum option," which has received little serious attention in the nation's capital. It also rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the debt ceiling and how the magic coin trick -- officially known as "coin seigniorage" -- would work. A 1996 law grants the Treasury Department the power to mint platinum coins with any face value, regardless of how much platinum is used. A 1-ounce coin could be minted at $1 trillion, $5 trillion or any other amount. Once the coin is deposited in Treasury's account at the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration could begin paying bills with this new money. "This scheme to mint trillion-dollar platinum coins is absurd and dangerous," Walden said in a written statement Monday. "My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air. We sat down and figured out how to balance the books. That’s what Washington needs to do as well. My bill will take the coin scheme off the table by disallowing the Treasury to mint platinum coins as a way to pay down the debt."  [...]" Related: "Krugman: Trillion-Dollar Coin A 'Silly But Benign' Debt-Ceiling Fix " Note: The whole dynamic consists of mental concepts and belief systems, albeit with a 'fiat' system ... used to manipulate the planet and its population for the benefit of a few. Even within their own paradigm, why not nationalize the Federal Reserve concept, canceling the national debt and allow resources to rebuild the infrastructure, increasing employment virtually overnight, etc.? Because the existence of the population is not a concern. From a larger perspective, the population is just here for the experiences, so continuity of infrastructure, and indeed the civilization itself, is not necessary beyond a certain point. That's where we're at right now.

Commentary: "The Financial War Against the Economy at Large" [01/07/13] "Today’s economic warfare is not the kind waged a century ago between labor and its industrial employers. Finance has moved to capture the economy at large, industry and mining, public infrastructure (via privatization) and now even the educational system. (At over $1 trillion, U.S. student loan debt came to exceed credit-card debt in 2012.) The weapon in this financial warfare is no larger military force. The tactic is to load economies (governments, companies and families) with debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack the means to pay. Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain. Indebting companies enables creditors to seize employee pension savings. And indebting labor means that it no longer is necessary to hire strikebreakers to attack union organizers and strikers. [...]"  

MSM: "Banks Win Watered Down Liquidity Rule To Prevent Lending Squeeze" [01/07/13] "Global central bank chiefs agreed to water down and delay a planned bank liquidity rule to counter warnings that the proposal would strangle lending and stifle the economic recovery.  [...]"  

Historical Analysis: "10 Fascinating Economic Collapses Through History" [01/05/13] "Pazzi Conspiracy and Medici Banking Collapse: The Medici family was one of the leading families of Renaissance Italy. They controlled the politics of Florence; served as popes and assisted the rise of Leonardo DaVinci. The source of the family’s wealth was rooted in the banking worldwide banking system they had founded in the late fourteenth century. Under the leadership of Cosimo de’ Medici, the bank rapidly expanded and found itself overstretched by the time of his death. At the same time as the Medici were stretched to the limit the Pazzi and Salviaiti banking families attempted to replace them as rulers of Florence. On April 26, 1478, two members of the Medici family were assaulted at Mass in Florence. Despite the failure of the plot, the Medici were unable to reassert complete control. The Medici bank was characterized by its dangerously low cash reserves, usually around 10% of assets. As the Pazzi Conspiracy and various wars reduced the competitiveness of the bank, it approached insolvency. As a result Lorenzo de’ Medici taxed the citizens of Florence in the name of military defense to a near tyrannical level. Finally, in 1494 the bank collapsed due to this corruption, faulty investments, and incompetent management. After the bank collapsed, millions were lost from the Florentine economy and it took years for a complete recovery. Since the company had also defrauded the account of Charles VIII of France that paid for dowries the crisis had worldwide implications. [...]"  

Concepts and Practices: "Spain Plunders 90% Of Social Security Fund To Buy Its Own Debt" [01/04/13] "With Spanish 10Y yields hovering at a 'relatively' healthy 5%, having been driven inexorably lower on the promise of ECB assistance at some time in the future, the market has become increasingly unsure of just who it is that keeps bidding for this stuff. Well, wonder no longer. As the WSJ notes, Spain has been quietly tapping the country's richest piggy bank, the Social Security Reserve Fund, as a buyer of last resort for Spanish government bonds - with at least 90% of the €65 billion ($85.7 billion) fund has been invested in increasingly risky Spanish debt. Of course, this is nothing new, the US (and the Irish) have been using quasi-government entities to fund themselves in a mutually-destructive circle-jerk for years - the only difference being there are other buyers in the Treasury market, whereas in Spain the marginal buyer is critical to support the sinking ship. The Spanish defend the use of pension funds to buy bonds as sustainable as long as it can issue bonds - and yet the only way it can actually get the bonds off in the public markets is through using the pension fund assets. The pensioners sum it up perfectly "We are very worried about this, we just don't know who's going to pay for the pensions of those who are younger now," or those who are older we would add. [...]"  

Commentary: "Deutsche Bank Warns Of A 'Violent' Turn In The US Dollar In 2013" [01/04/13] "In their daily briefing, Deutsche Bank commodities analysts Michael Lewis and Christina McGlone point out that in 2012 – notwithstanding a few big winners like lumber and soybean meal – commodities as an asset class were the worst investment on a total return basis. The analysts see that changing in 2013. Namely, they suggest that precious metals like gold and silver, which languished into last year's end, are set to rebound. Historically US dollar cycles persist for an average of seven years, hence the current bear cycle in the US dollar is in its 11th year, and consequently should be viewed as long in the tooth. This has important implications for commodity markets not least given the growing correlation between risk assets since the onset of the financial crisis. Turns in the US dollar following bear cycles can be violent. For example, when the dollar turned in July 1980, the dollar appreciated by just over 40% within the following 12 month period. Given the ongoing weakness in the US basic balance we expect a turn in the dollar is some way off and that the US dollar will display weakness in the first half of this year. [...]"  

MSM: "Global Markets Soar After US Steps Back From "Fiscal Cliff" [01/03/13] "The world's financial markets surged on Wednesday in a show of relief after United States politicians averted the tax hikes and immediate spending cuts of the "fiscal cliff" that had threatened to plunge the world's largest economy into recession. [...]"  Related: "Judge Napolitano: Republicans Did Opposite Of What They Were Elected For With Fiscal Cliff Bill" [3:26]

Commentary: "US ‘Fiscal Cliff’ A ‘Political Jockeying’: Dr Paul Craig Roberts" [01/02/13] Press TV [4:43] "A former US Assistant Treasurer says the US 'Fiscal cliff' is mainly hoax and that it amounts to a mere one tenth of the growth of the US public Debt per year. In the background of this, the 'fiscal cliff deadline looms' with politicians unable to strike a deal on a package to prevent a 'potential crisis that could send the US back into recession' according to American media. An agreement by Congress before the deadline has been urged by Obama. The fiscal cliff concerns whether it is necessary to implement tax hikes on middle class families combined with cuts in government spending. [...]"  

Commentary: "As Fiat Fails, Technocrats and BRICs Nations Posture For World Government" [01/02/13]   "...The BRICs countries are pushing for a global gold standard that will alleviate the inflation caused by fiat currency. The major economies of the world are facing an estimated $7.5 trillion in bond payments, which is how the central banking cartels keep their Ponzi scheme afloat. April of 2012 marked a new direction for the BRICs countries as they ended their summit in New Delhi, India with talks of moving away from the US dollar as the global reserve currency.Over 180 countries have signed onto the BRICs agreement as evidenced in their declaration. While the global Elite still hold power over the G5 countries, the rest of the world is standing up, severing their ties and making plans for a new world without them. [...]"  Note: Never mind the $1.7 Quadrillion in goofy derivatives they don't mention.

Max Keiser: "Year of Banking Death Penalty (E387)" [01/02/13]   [27:08] "In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the two big themes for 2013: the execution of the too big to fail outlaw banks and the death of the Bretton Woods engineered fiat and faith debt based system as nations around the world ask for the return of their gold. They also talk to several Keiser Report guests about their predictions for 2013, including predictions from Rob Kirby on JP Morgan's collapse, Mitch Feierstein on JP Morgan's copper ETF, Ned Naylor-Leyland on the CFTC investigation into silver manipulation and the Yes Men's Andy Bichlbaum on the Global Spring.  [...]" 

MSM: "Executives At Collapsed Iceland Bank Jailed For Fraud" [01/01/13] "Two former executives at an Icelandic bank which collapsed in the 2008 financial meltdown were sentenced to jail on Friday for fraud which led to a 53 million euro loss, in the first major trial of Icelandic bankers linked to the crisis. All three of the small North Atlantic island's top banks collapsed in quick succession in October 2008 due to big debts incurred during a rapid overseas expansion. Glitnir was the first to fall after the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused international credit markets to freeze up. A Reykjavik court sentenced Glitnir's former chief executive, Larus Welding, and former head of corporate finance, Gudmundur Hjaltason, each to nine months in jail, of which six months were suspended for two years. They had denied the charges. Prosecutors said the two approved a loan to a company which owned shares in Glitnir so that the company could in turn repay a debt to Morgan Stanley. The decision, taken outside the regular decision-making process, meant Glitnir was too exposed to the company and cost the bank at least 53.7 million euros (43 million pounds), the prosecution said. The sentence was less than the jail terms of at least five years demanded by Iceland's special prosecutor, who is looking into alleged wrongdoing connected to the crisis. [...]" 

Commentary: "Federal Judge Dismisses Silver Manipulation Lawsuit Against JP Morgan and HSBC" [01/01/13] "Federal US District Court Judge Robert P. Patterson Jr. has dismissed the class-action litigation suit brought against JP Morgan (and originally HSBC) regarding silver market-rigging. Judge Patterson cited lack of specifics and claims of bad intent necessary to bring the suit to trial. Perhaps Judge Patterson never bothered to actually read the litigation, because if he did, (assuming he was not paid off) he would have come to the same conclusions we did when the suit was filed in September of 2011: The lawsuit completely exposes JPMorgan’s silver manipulation from insiders’ perspectives for all to see. Click here for full details of Judge Patterson’s dismissal of the suit, as well as the full original class-action suit: [...]"  

  

 

Nothing on this website should be construed as implying a recommendation
 to buy, sell, or hold any financial instrument or asset.

See  Archives at Top of Panel for Previous Material
All entries in this category prior to Feb 1, 2009 were mixed in with Special Articles.