Dec
21
December 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dec
21
December 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dec
16
December 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Click here to watch the video
Dec
16
December 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: timesonline.co.uk]
The West is indirectly funding the insurgency in Afghanistan thanks to a system of payoffs to Taleban commanders who charge protection money to allow convoys of military supplies to reach Nato bases in the south of the country.
Contracts to supply British bases and those of other Western forces with fuel, supplies and equipment are held by multinational companies.
However, the business of moving supplies from the Pakistani port of Karachi to British, US and other military contingents in the country is largely subcontracted to local trucking companies. These must run the gauntlet of the increasingly dangerous roads south of Kabul in convoys protected by hired gunmen from Afghan security companies.
The Times has learnt that it is in the outsourcing of convoys that payoffs amounting to millions of pounds, including money from British taxpayers, are given to the Taleban.
[End of Excerpt]
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Dec
15
December 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: nydailynews.com]
BY PETE DONOHUE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, November 19th 2008, 11:03 AM
MTA’s planned cuts include everything from station agents to entire train lines.
The MTA’s doomsday budget will wipe out the W line, zap the Z line and ax more than 1,500 NYC Transit jobs, the Daily News has learned.
The list of bus and subway cuts the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will unveil at its monthly board meeting Thursday is extensive and potentially bruising, sources said.
[End of Excerpt]
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Dec
15
December 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: reuters.com]
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The global economic downturn sparked a warning of sharply lower growth in the giant Chinese economy, a large drop in oil prices and setbacks for the auto industry worldwide as Washington grapples with a rescue for crippled automakers.
The International Monetary Fund said on Monday Chinese growth could be cut almost in half next year, while Japan reported its sharpest crash in business sentiment in three decades. Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp said it is suspending completion of its newest plant in Mississippi indefinitely in response to a “steep decline” in U.S. auto sales.
[End of Excerpt]
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Dec
15
December 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: wsj.com]
TOKYO — As the Federal Reserve considers rate cuts Tuesday, U.S. interest rates are approaching those of Japan, the nation which for years boasted the most easy monetary policy among major economies. The shrinking rate gap could drive Japanese investors from the U.S., leading to a further weakening of the dollar.
Many economists expect the Fed to cut its policy rate by half a percentage point to 0.5% Tuesday, nearing the Bank of Japan’s 0.3%. The U.S. rate hasn’t been lower than Japan’s since 1993.
Higher rates in the U.S. have lured many Japanese investors, including its giant insurance companies …
Dec
15
December 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: independent.co.uk]
As the banking giant prepares to unveil shock figures, Morgan Stanley braces itself to add its own bad news
By Simon Evans
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, is this week expected to post its first loss since the Wall Street crash of 1929 when it unveils full-year results on Tuesday.
[End of Excerpt]
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Dec
3
December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: marketwatch.com]
Temporary shutdowns prompted by sagging demand
By MarketWatch
Last update: 5:09 p.m. EST Dec. 2, 2008
JFE Steel Corp. is considering shutting down some of its seven blast furnaces in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, and Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture, possibly on a rotating basis. The JFE Holdings Inc. subsidiary decided last month to lower October-March production by 1.5 million tons from its initial target, but a company official told Nikkei that output may have to be cut by more than 2 million tons.
Kobe Steel Ltd. is debating whether to idle one of its three blast furnaces in Kobe and Kakogawa, both in Hyogo Prefecture. Nippon Steel Corp. meanwhile, may extend the suspension of an Oita Prefecture blast furnace already scheduled for repairs, Nikkei reported, citing a company official.
Blast furnaces are rarely deactivated, except for maintenance, because cooled steel trapped inside can make them difficult to restart. No leading steelmaker has shut one down to adjust production in about seven years, according to Nikkei.
Steel makers are faced with slowing orders from automakers — their top customers - and began reducing output in October. Hit by a worldwide economic slowdown, Japan’s 12 automakers are expected to decrease production, including overseas output, by a total of 1.89 million units in fiscal 2008, according to the Nikkei report.
On Tuesday, Japanese companies were among automakers posting steep declines in November U.S. vehicle sales. Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. both posted drops more than 30%. See full story on U.S. auto sales.
The cutbacks are also forcing Mitsui Chemicals Inc. and other makers of automobile-use synthetic resins to rein in their own output, Nikkei reported.
Dec
3
December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: reuters.com]
Mon Dec 1, 2008 6:10pm EST
By Elinor Comlay and Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co said on Monday it will eliminate about 9,200 jobs at the former Washington Mutual Inc, which on September 25 became the largest U.S. bank to fail.
The cuts amount to more than 21 percent of the workforce at Washington Mutual, which ended June with 43,198 employees.
Washington Mutual had been the largest U.S. savings and loan before JPMorgan bought its banking assets for $1.9 billion, in a transaction arranged by U.S. regulators. The holding company for Seattle-based Washington Mutual later filed for bankruptcy protection.
About 4,000 of the jobs will be cut by the end of January, and another 5,200 later, JPMorgan spokesman Christine Holevas said. The 5,200 workers will receive double their annual salaries retroactive to October 1, payable in a lump sum when their employment ends, Holevas said.
Seattle will bear the brunt of the cuts, with 3,400 layoffs out of a total of 4,300 Washington Mutual employees in the city, JPMorgan said. Another 1,600 layoffs will be in the San Francisco area, and the remaining 4,200 will be elsewhere.
[End of Excerpt]
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Dec
3
December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: timesonline.co.uk]
December 1, 2008
Jane Macartney in Beijing
The Chinese President has issued a rare warning to the ruling Communist Party, telling his officials that the global economic downturn is so severe that it could shake its 59-year grip on power.
President Hu Jintao’s remarks, at a weekend meeting of the ruling 25-member Politburo, appeared on the front page of the party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily. It was his bluntest message yet delivered on the crisis to China’s 1.3 billion people and more than 70 million members of the party.
The subtext of his speech was the increasing risk of social unrest caused by China’s rising unemployment, as a slump in exports leads to factory closures and a fall in property sales results in abandoned construction projects.
The President, who is also the head of the Communist Party, said: “In this coming period, we will starkly confront the effects of the sustained deepening of the international financial crisis and pressure as global economic growth clearly slows.” He said that the slowdown would “steadily weaken our country’s traditional competitive advantages”.
[End of Excerpt]
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Dec
3
December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: signonsandiego.com]
By JULIET WILLIAMS, The Associated Press
1:13 p.m. December 1, 2008
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday declared a fiscal emergency and called lawmakers into a special session to address California’s $11.2 billion budget deficit.
Unless budget corrections are made quickly, the state is likely to run out of cash in February and see its revenue gap widen to $28 billion over the next 19 months.
[End of Excerpt]
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Dec
3
December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: ca.reuters.com]
Mon Dec 1, 2008 4:06pm EST
(Reuters) - The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said.
The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted.
“In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent.”
Bank of America Corp (BAC.N: Quote), Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote) represent over half of the estimated U.S. card outstandings as of September 30, and each company has discussed reducing card exposure or slowing growth, Whitney said.
Closing millions of accounts, cutting credit lines and raising interest rates are just some of the moves credit card issuers are using to try to inoculate themselves from a tsunami of expected consumer defaults.
[End of Excerpt]
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Nov
21
November 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Energy Bulletin]
Nov 11 2008
Nov
21
November 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: CNBC.com]
The United States may be on course to lose its ‘AAA’ rating due to the large amount of debt it has accumulated, according to Martin Hennecke, senior manager of private clients at Tyche.
“The U.S. might really have to look at a default on the bankruptcy reorganization of the present financial system” and the bankruptcy of the government is not out of the realm of possibility, Hennecke said.
“In the United States there is already a funding crisis, and they will have to sell a lot more bonds next year to fund the bailout packages that have already been signed off,” Hennecke told CNBC.
In order to solve or stem the economic slowdown, Hennecke suggested the US would have to radically reduce spending across all sectors and recall all its troops from around the world.
As for a stimulus package, there is not much of an industry left to stimulate back into life, Hennecke said.
[End of Excerpt]
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Nov
21
November 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Reuters.com]
Sat Nov 15, 2008 3:14am EST
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has converted financial reserves into gold to avoid future problems, an adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in comments published on Saturday, after the price of oil fell more than 60 percent from a peak in July.
Iran, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, is under U.N. and U.S. sanctions over its disputed nuclear programme and is now also facing declining revenue from its oil exports after crude prices tumbled.
With the plans of the presidency…the country’s money reserves were changed into gold so that we wouldn’t be faced with many problems in the future,” presidential adviser Mojtaba Samareh-Hashemi was quoted as saying by business daily Poul.
He gave no figures or other details.
[End of Excerpt]
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Nov
21
November 21, 2008 | Comments Off
[Source: NPR.org]
“Morning Edition, November 21, 2008 · U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the United States is likely to lose its dominant global position in the coming years, with economic and political power shifting to countries such as China and India.”
“Still, the assessment is largely sobering. The intelligence analysts who prepared the global outlook foresee increased international conflict over food, water, energy, and other scarce resources. International institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the United Nations, will become less effective, owing to the multiplicity of global players. “Non-state actors,” including tribal groups, religious organizations, private corporations and even organized criminal networks, will play more important roles.”
“Among the more startling conclusions in the global trends report is a judgment that an unnamed government in Eastern or Central Europe “could effectively be taken over and run by organized crime.” The report also speculates that some states in Africa or South Asia could “wither away” as a result of the failure of their governments to provide basic services to the population.”
[End of Excerpt]
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Nov
21
November 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: CNN.com]
NEW YORK (Fortune) — Investors who think shares of Sears Holdings are a bargain after plummeting 80% from their peak should think again.
That might sound like a no-brainer after retailers across the board - from Macy’s (M, Fortune 500) to Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) - have been reporting dismal third quarter results amid one of the worst consumer spending downturns in decades. But there are reasons why Sears (SHLD, Fortune 500) is likely to disappoint more than most when it reports earnings Dec. 2.
[End of Excerpt]
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Nov
21
November 21, 2008 | Comments Off
Click here to watch
Nov
18
November 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: democracynow.org]
NAOMI KLEIN: Thanks so much, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: “Criminal”? Explain.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, there’s a few elements now that are being described as illegal that we’re finding out. First of all, the equity deals that were negotiated with the largest banks and also some smaller banks, representing $250 billion worth of the bailout money, this is the deal to inject equity into the banks in—to inject capital into the banks in exchange for equity. The idea was to address the so-called credit crunch to get banks lending again. The legislation that enabled this was quite explicit that it had to encourage lending. Barney Frank, who was one of the architects of that legislation, has said that it violates the act if the money is not going to that purpose and is instead going to bonuses, is instead going to dividends, going to salaries, going to mergers. He said that violates the acts, i.e. it’s illegal. But what we know is that it’s going precisely to those purposes. It is going to bonuses. It is going to shareholders. And it is not going to lending. The banks have been quite explicit about this. Citibank has talked about using the money to buy other banks.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the interview
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Nov
13
November 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[It's interesting that Bloomberg News has filed a lawsuit to compel Paulson under FOIA to disclose who he's giving the cash to.
It's also interesting that on May 5, 2006, Bush signed a memo entitled "Assignment of Functioning Relating to Granting Of Authority For Issuance of Certain Directives: Memorandum For The Director of Nation Intelligence" (at the time John Negroponte). The document empowered Negroponte to waive SEC reporting rules for certain publically traded corporations in the name of national security. Given the US President has always had this power, it's curious that for the first time in history our US President Mr. George W. Bush has delegated the authority to someone else. (1)
Plausible deniability?
I suspect Mike Ruppert is correct when he says if you were able to obtain a list of the companies granted a reporting exemption by Negroponte and if you were able to obtain a list of the companies Paulson is doling out money to and you placed the lists side-by-side, I bet they'd line up quite nicely. -AR]
[Source: Solari.com (Bloomberg.com)]
By Laura Litvan
Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) — House Republican leader John Boehner (pictured right) called for the Federal Reserve to disclose the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers and the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
Boehner, in a prepared statement, also asked the Federal Reserve to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request seeking details about the loans.
The Fed “should comply with this Freedom of Information Act request, and in the interest of full and fair disclosure, they must begin providing lawmakers and taxpayers all information about how they are using federal tax dollars,” Boehner said.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, there is little disclosure about how the programs are being implemented.
Bloomberg News requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure.
Oct
27
October 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
For my two loyal readers out there, this is going to be my last post for a while. I need to read less news and focus more on happy things like cooking and planning next years garden. If you were reading this blog near June’s end you would have had a 3-month advanced notice of the crash so hopefully you were able to leverage that information. I suspect we’ll see the DJI bottom in the next 3-6 months landing somewhere between $3,000 to $6,000. Unemployment is going to go way up and crime with it. If you live in the city, this my be a nice time to think about moving to the country and starting a farm. Hyperinflation is on the way.
Good luck out there.
Buy canned goods.
Oct
20
October 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Okay, for those that didn't know, this is a joke -AR]
Oct
16
October 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Comment: Paul Hodes is one of the few voices in Congress working for the benefit of many. It is for this story and others we should work to see him re-elected on November 4, 2008 --AR]
Oct 16, 2008
Dear Fellow Granite Stater,
I want to give you a quick update on some of the things that I’ve been working on for you in the past few weeks.
Demanding Accountability from AIG
I was troubled by the recent reports of improper spending at American International Group. Just one week after the federal government rescued AIG, the company’s executives spent over $400,000 on a meeting at a luxury resort. This money was spent on meals and spa treatments and, on the day that the federal government announced it would provide billions more in support for AIG, the company said it would be holding another lavish event.
As taxpayers’ funds keep AIG in business, it is simply intolerable that the company would spend families’ hard-earned money in such a reckless fashion. Millions of Americans have had to forego a family vacation this year because of high gas prices and tough economic times. Why should Granite Staters foot the bill for AIG executives who spend taxpayer money on resorts and spas? I wrote to Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke demanding that the executives reimburse the federal government for the unnecessary expenses.
I also called for effective and comprehensive oversight for AIG and any firm receiving federal government assistance, including those that will receive assistance under the recent Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. Although I did not support the bailout, I’m going to work hard to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent in a responsible manner. I will continue to fight for stricter regulation and oversight of the financial firms on Wall Street.
Oct
14
October 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Counterpunch.org]
By MICHAEL HUDSON
The press lauds Mr. Bernanke as “a student of the Great Depression.” If he were, he should know that what led to the 1929 collapse were harsh U.S. Government creditor policies toward its World War I Allied governments. This created a situation where the Federal Reserve had to provide easy credit to hold interest rates artificially low so as to encourage U.S. investors to lend to Britain and Germany, which would use these dollar inflows to pay their Inter-Ally arms and reparations debts. Mr. Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan, promoted easy credit simply for ideological reasons, to enrich Wall Street by enabling it to sell more debt.
A student of the Great Depression would understand the conflicts of interest between retail commercial banking and wholesale investment banking and money management that led Congress to pass the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 – conflicts unleashed once again when Pres. Clinton backed then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican leader (and McCain hero) Senator Phil Gramm in leading the repeal of this act, opening up the floodgates to today’s financial double-dealing that has cost the American economy so much.
If Mr. Bernanke does know this history, his behavior is simply that of an opportunistic student of the art of political self-advancement, toadying to Wall Street in campaigning for one last great rip-off before the Bush Administration goes out of business. The Fed has given Wall Street newly minted Treasury bonds, added to the national debt out of thin air. It has done this without feeling any need to rationalize it by drawing absurd public-relations pictures about how the government may “make a profit for taxpayers.”
[End of excerpt]
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Oct
14
October 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Telegraph.co.uk]
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Nuclear-armed Pakistan is bleeding foreign reserves at an alarming rate leading to fears that it could default on its loans.
There are mounting fears that Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Argentina could all now slide into a downward spiral towards bankruptcy, while western banks exposed to property bubble across Eastern Europe have seen their share price crushed.
The markets are pricing an 80pc risk that Ukraine will default, based on five-year credit default swaps (CDS) – an insurance policy on a country being able to pay its debts.
[End of excerpt]
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Oct
14
October 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Bloomberg.com]
Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) — After a four-year spending spree, Icelanders are flooding the supermarkets one last time, stocking up on food as the collapse of the banking system threatens to cut the island off from imports.
“We have had crazy days for a week now,” said Johannes Smari Oluffsson, manager of the Bonus discount grocery store in Reykjavik’s main shopping center. “Sales have doubled.”
Bonus, a nationwide chain, has stock at its warehouse for about two weeks. After that, the shelves will start emptying unless it can get access to foreign currency, the 22-year-old manager said, standing in a walk-in fridge filled with meat products, among the few goods on sale produced locally.
[End of excerpt]
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Oct
12
October 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Gata.org]
Submitted by cpowell on Fri, 2008-10-10 01:31. Section: Daily Dispatches
9:15p ET Thursday, October 9, 2008
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
24hGold has added an interesting little feature — a mechanism that converts numercial values in U.S. dollars, euros, British pounds, Australian dollars, Japanese yen, Canadian dollars, and Swiss francs to either current values in gold and silver or to gold and silver values on past dates. The converter seems likely to have any number of uses. First it might help masochists calculate how much better off they would be if they had simply purchased coins or bullion and put them under their bed instead of purchasing mining shares. But over the next few weeks the converter also might help central banks figure out how high they would need gold and silver prices to be for their gold reserves to give the necessary backing to their sagging currencies. You can find 24hGold’s converter here:
http://www.24hgold.com/tools/gold_silver_currency_calculator.aspx
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
Join GATA here:
New Orleans Investment Conference
Thursday-Monday, November 13-18, 2008
New Orleans Marriott Hotel
http://www.NewOrleansConference.com
Oct
11
October 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Mike Ruppert, From the Wilderness]
Friday, October 10, 2008
9:30 PM EST
This move, announced today, is absolute confirmation for me that this is an intentioned shut down of the economy. Each bank or financial institution that the Treasury buys into will give it (and Goldman Sachs) the power to shut each bank down and to decide when it shuts down. It couldn’t be more transparent. They’re going to turn out the lights in an orderly fashion and it’s obviously an attempt at a controlled fast crash. They’ve only got three months left in office. That would essentially make Barack Obama an economic janitor employed by the same firm. I can just hear Bush and Cheney cracking a joke about it.
MCR
c. 5 P.M. EST
UNDERSTANDING FRIDAY, Oct. 10th, 2008 — NO CAPITULATION AND WORRIES ABOUT THE ELECTION
[DISCLAIMER:
From here on out I will write under the assumption that those who read me are familiar with Rubicon, the FTW site and its archives, and my videotapes. I'll assume that you already know what GATA is and that you understand all of my/our previous work on gold, intelligence agencies and economics. The reason for that is that I am, and will always be, most loyal and responsive to the thousands --perhaps tens of thousands -- who have been with me and the FTW gang for years. I cannot and will not go back and rewrite what I spent years writing and waste the time or focus of those who just need/want to hear what my inisghts are today. We just don't have time to waste. For those willing to do a little homework, the FTW acrhives are there and available. The easiest thing to do is to go to the FTW search engine (not a great one) and, under Search Options select "Find exact phrase". Then enter whatever terms or subjects that we use here andyou will find a quick-study course to help bring you up to speed. --MCR]
Bear in mind that everything that happened today happened in absolute silence about Citigroup. The latest there is that there is supposed to be a court hearing next week about a suit Citi may bring against Wells and Wachovia. Meantime, Citigroup has waived all claims to acquiring any of Wachovia’s assets (cash deposits). My suspicion is that out of fear Citi is hanging back for any kind of discussion about its stability. Then again, they just might be waiting for the right moment to break the bad news to achieve the worst effect: capitulation. Citigroup is in a worse position than it was two weeks ago. It is still heavily weighed by bad mortgage debt and “bailout options” are becoming an endangered species, especially when Citigroup would be the biggest bailout ever — by a wide margin. The seemingly blessed AIGwas/is nowhere near as big, especially in terms of impact.
VOLATILITY –
I have never seen such a volatile market as I saw today. I saw (maybe there were more) no less than eight swings back and forth between positive and negative in the Dow. Five of them were in the last hour of trading. Up by a hundred then down 800. Then back up to even. Then back down again to -600. And then back and forth by 200-300 pts five times. A key moment, when the Dow was down by 600+ was a sudden drop in the price of gold by around $50 an ounce — out of nowehere. When that happened, the 600 point loss evaporated to 128 or so points. The continuing blatant manipulation in gold prices is so obvious as to be ludicrous. It is sucking the last bits of cash out there into the markets. GATA has been right all along and I have said so consistently for many years. The panicked sheep who have been”looking at” gold (late, but not too late) will hesitate and leave their money in stocks, blindly believing we have hit the bottom on Wall Street.
There is no bottom until there is CAPITULATION. Today’s volatility was anything but CAPITULATION. It looks to me like the violent, last-gasp throes before death which I have seen before in real life.
Capitulation is when the market hits a bottom and just stays there…for days and weeks. When there are no signs of struggle or life. No heartbeat. No thrashing.
When the Citigoup bomb is going to drop is anybody’s guess but I just don’t see how we can go through next week without major media starting to ask questions on the air and in print.
I repeat that the U.S. government is doing everything it can to step on the economy like a cockroach. Every move by the Executive or the Fed has not helped, but hurt share prices. This is deliberate.
Christ, I’m tired. We all must be. And now I must sound a warning about something else. I am worried about the election. I am not predicting anything but I am worried.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Oct
10
October 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Gata.org]
Submitted by cpowell on Thu, 2008-10-09 04:02. Section: Daily Dispatches
By Martin Crutsinger
Associated Press
via Yahoo News
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
[Source: Yahoo.com]
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is considering taking ownership stakes in a number of U.S. banks as one option it might use to deal with a serious credit crisis, an administration official said Wednesday.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Oct
9
October 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: CNN.com]
CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — An outraged sheriff in Illinois who refuses to evict “innocent” renters from foreclosed homes criticized mortgage companies Thursday and said the law should protect victims of the mortgage meltdown.
Sheriff Thomas J. Dart said earlier he is suspending foreclosure evictions in Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago.
The county had been on track to reach a record number of evictions, many because of mortgage foreclosures.
Many good tenants are suffering because building owners have fallen behind on their mortgage payments, he said Thursday on CNN’s “American Morning.”
“These poor people are seeing everything they own put out on the street. … They’ve paid their bills, paid them on time. Here we are with a battering ram at the front door going to throw them out. It’s gotten insane,” he said.
[End of Excerpt]
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Oct
8
October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
February 01, 2007
Oct
8
October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Oct
8
October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Gata.org]
Submitted by cpowell on Wed, 2008-10-08 12:49. Section: Daily Dispatches
By Keith Weir and Daniel Trotta
Reuters
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Central banks around the world cut interest rates in unison on Wednesday in a joint response to the global financial crisis, giving a boost to battered stock markets.
The Fed said it was cutting its key federal funds rate by 50 basis points to 1.5 percent. China, the European Central Bank (ECB) and central banks in Britain, Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland also cut rates in the coordinated response which analysts had been demanding.
U.S. stock index futures leapt on the news and world stock markets trimmed their losses.
Before the rate cut, stock markets across the world had continued their downward spiral amid the worst financial crisis in nearly 80 years and fears of a global recession.
“The fact that we have got them coming across the board suggests that this is the end game,” said Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank in London. “Will it help the markets? Questionable in the short term.”
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Oct
8
October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Reuters.com]
Tue Oct 7, 2008 6:13pm EDT
By Dan Wilchins
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co is likely to get about 75 to 80 percent of Wachovia Corp’s deposits, while Citigroup Inc would get the remainder, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday.
The situation is in flux and the outcome is still unclear, the person cautioned, adding Wells Fargo may end up with 100 percent of Wachovia’s deposits, and Citigroup with none.
Oct
8
October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Oct
7
October 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: PressTV]
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:03:52 GMT
Brazil and Argentina have launched a new payment system in their bilateral trade, doing away with the US dollar as a medium of exchange.
The two Latin American nations started the Payment System on Local Currency (SML) on Monday following a last month agreement inked by their presidents to use local currencies in a bid to end transaction in dollars.
On Thursday, Argentine Central Bank President Martin Redrado and his Brazilian counterpart Henrique de Campos Meirelles signed the enforcement of the agreement for the SML, under which exports and imports between the two countries will take place with the Brazilian real (BRL) and the Argentine peso (ARS).
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Oct
7
October 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Truthout.org]
Monday 06 October 2008
by: Isambard Wilkinson
The Telegraph UK
Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves are so low that the country can only afford one month of imports and faces possible bankruptcy.
Islamabad - Officially, the central bank holds $8.14 billion (£4.65 billion) of foreign currency, but if forward liabilities are included, the real reserves may be only $3 billion - enough to buy about 30 days of imports like oil and food.
Nine months ago, Pakistan had $16 bn in the coffers.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the full story
Oct
6
October 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler]
God knows what manner of deals went down this past weekend in the Hamptons wine cellars and below-decks among the Chesapeake Bay sailboat fleet. All these hidey-holes must have been dank and fetid with the sweat of mortal fear. Will the US Government declare itself a subsidiary of General Electric? Will Vlad Putin be roped in to save Goldman Sachs? Meanwhile, the whole noisome rat maze of international counter-party deals was taking on sewer water and rodents of every nationality were seen leaping for daylight all over the fusty old motherlands of Europe. A cascading collapse of international finance is underway. While many fixers may jump heroically into the tumbling wreckage hoping to rescue this-and-that, the outcome by Friday is liable to be an unrecognizable smoldering landscape of the G-7’s hopes and dreams.
Some big questions for the week: will the Euro survive as a currency? Will the rush into the US dollar continue even as the US financial system dematerializes in a Fibonacci fever of accelerating de-leveraged infinitude? Will the remaining Big Boyz, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan succumb to the counter-party hemorrhagic fever? Will great rows of lesser banking dominoes now start clacking onto their faces? Will all fifty states follow the leads of California and Massachusetts and line up at the US Treasury’s hand-out window. Will the entity that calls itself the civilized world be left at week’s end with anything resembling money?
Your guess is as good as mine. We’ve entered the realm of phase change, where everything is slipping and nothing has settled. The final result, when the dust settles — and that may not be for weeks to come — will certainly be a poorer western world. Will it be so poor that it can no longer afford to import anything? Including oil from the land of the date palm? If so, we are really in for a rough ride, poised as we are at the edge of the heating season here in the temperate regions. Notice, by the way, that the $700 billion just approved by congress to bail out Wall Street is exactly the same sum of money that we send to the oil exporting nations this year.
Will millions stop receiving paychecks due to the turmoil in banking? It’s certainly possible, starting with the poor drones in Mr. Schwarzenegger’s motor vehicle bureau and eventually ranging to every payroll office in the land. Will Sarah Palin’s fellow Six-packers line up around the parking lagoons of the suburban banks trying desperately to withdraw the last seventy bucks in their checking accounts? (And will their thoughts in the event be: this economy is fundamentally sound….) Will the supermarket shelves of chipoltle-flavored crunchy snacks and power drinks go empty as truckers refuse to deliver their loads without up-front payment? And how long does it take a hungry public to turn mean?
We could see a parallel problem in the motor fuel supply sector. So far, gasoline shortages have only appeared in parts of the Southeast USA, due to interruptions caused by two hurricanes. If the oil tankers quit offloading now for lack of credible payment, then the whole nation will get an interesting lesson in the shortcomings of the suburban development pattern.
The candidates’ debate Tuesday night should be interesting. I don’t expect too much give-and-take on the subject of East Ossetia this time around.
Even at this point, the current crack-up in world finance makes the 1929 crash and the events of the 1930s look in comparison like an orderly small town auction of somebody’s grandmother’s effects. Back in that sepia day, America had plenty of everything except ready cash. We had, especially, plenty of our own oil, and — you’re not going to believe this but it’s true — the stuff was selling for as little as ten cents a barrel, it was so abundant. And yet still, America in the 1930s plunged into a dark depression of inactivity, loss of confidence, and impoverishment.
This time around, things could get more disorderly. Personally, I think we may be beyond the reach even of fascist authoritarianism, because unlike the programmed industrial masses of the 1930s, we are unused to regimentation, to lining up at the factory gates and the movie theaters. Back then, society was so regimented that everybody wore uniforms in-and-out of the military. Look at movies from the 1930s. Every man-jack wore either a necktie and hat or overalls. The industrial masses behaved like termites. Once unemployment hit, they were waiting to be told what to do, to line up for something. It worked fabulously for Hitler, who took every advantage of this mentality. Luckily, the US went for Roosevelt (both FDR and Hitler entered office the same winter of 1933, by the way). FDR was more like everybody’s kindly Uncle Frank, and his reassuring persona enabled Americans to suck up their bad luck and altered circumstances. Many of them retreated to the family farm (which still existed then) and waited things out — and, anyway, the melodrama of the Great Depression soon resolved in the Second World War when Hitler’s love of regimentation led him into military misadventure. He shouldn’t have picked a fight with someone who had so much petroleum — end-of-story.
Okay, what happens here and now? To this point (9:am Monday October 6, 2008) events have been proceeding under a veneer of still-just-barely-credible authority. We (as represented by congress) have allowed Mr. Paulson to advance and activate his remedies. As things unspool further, he will be out of credibility, perhaps in a few days, and it’s unlikely that his successor will have any either. Mr. Bernanke has simply gone AWOL. Notice, he has vanished from the media landscape. We may soon be hearing the declaration of various “emergency” measures involving the allocation of food and the rationing of oil products. The Big Bailout of last week may be partially rescinded as it becomes obvious that it has had no effect — I believe about half the $700 billion has already been allocated, which is to say: lost. I realize these things sound pretty extreme. But forces have been set in motion and momentum rules. One thing for sure: the American public is about to undergo a severe mood adjustment. There will be fewer American Idol fans and worshippers of Donald Trump by the close of business on Friday.
Oct
6
October 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The End of America
A film by Annie Sundberg & Ricki Stern
Based on The New York Times Best Seller by Naomi Wolf
Click here to see the preview
Oct
6
October 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Oct
6
October 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Interview with Naomi Wolf author of “Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries” given October 4, 2008 on Mind Over Matters, KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle.
Oct
5
October 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted October 2nd, 2008 by OFallonBrent
In yesterday’s Senate bailout bill, also known as the ‘‘Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008’’ is the following, seemingly innocent section.
Section 203 of the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006 (12 U.S.C. 461 note) is amended by striking ‘‘October 1, 2011’’ and inserting ‘‘October 1, 2008’’.
So they moved the date of the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006 up by 3 years. Big deal you say, and what the heck is the FSRRA of 2006? It was a series of amendments to 12 U.S.C. 461 of course! Well, okay, I don’t expect you to know what that is, so here it is (and the other related documents).
The bailout bill
Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006
12 U.S.C. 461
You may want to open those in new tabs, we’ll be bouncing around them a bit.
(Comment: The author continues with the conclusion up front)
The changes eliminated the requirement for banks to keep reserves of cash on hand to cover deposits, they abolished the Federal Reserve’s Earnings Participation Account, they granted the ability for the Fed to create their own rules for distributing their earnings, and they granted the ability to make payments to foreign banks.
These things were not scheduled to go into effect for 3 more years. Unclear is why they needed these changes at all, the other is why they need them now.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Oct
5
October 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: 911Blogger.com]
On Thursday’s edition of The Colbert Report, bestselling author Naomi Klein argued that the Bush Administration creates crises in order to “enrich themselves and their friends,“ drawing parallels between the torture of prisoners and the economic bailout being provided to Wall St. by US leaders.
Previously, Klein called out the sprawling economic crisis as just another example of the Bush ’shock doctrine,’ a key component to the ruling regime’s corporate agenda.
Paste the link below into your web browser to see the 5 minute video of The Colbert Report
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18051
Oct
5
October 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: The Money Changer]
Friday, 3 October a.d. 2008
In the face of last week, I’m not certain I have anything either intelligent or intelligible to say. The House finally passed the bailout bill, but only after the Senate had larded it with nearly $200 billion in tax breaks for the “friends of Congress”. In the end, the banks got what they wanted, a gigantic grave to shovel all their corpses into, & the assured silence of the cops (read: Yankee Government). Relax. Government by the banks, of the banks, and for the banks shall not perish from the earth. The corruption is complete, the constitution dead, but, gee-whillikers, we won’t have to face an awful deflationary depression. Nope, we’ll face a hyperinflationary depression instead.
Well, well, aren’t I jolly today?
To markets. The week beat everything to death, & unless you are blind & know nothing about the US Treasury’s slush fund (”Exchange Stabilisation Fund”) installed in the 1930s to manipulate the prices of gold, the dollar, & whatever else might be fun to play with, you perceived that the US Treasury & Fed manipulated the dollar’s value upward, in the face of the worst financial crisis in 70 years. Now the dollar index has again reached the long term downtrend line. Will it break out, or stall in a double top & fall back? I don’t know. Friday’s sell off in silver, gold, & stocks suggest the market proverb,”Buy the rumour, sell the news.” The stock market’s failure to rally on news of the bailout passing certainly looks bad for stocks. I simply do not believe that market demand drove the dollar up on Friday; twas the Nice Government Men “stabilising.”
Markets are so out of whack I don’t know what to say. In 28 years trading silver & gold professionally, I’ve never seen markets like this. The paper gold price closed Friday at 828.90, down 10.10, but if I want to buy gold to hold in my own hand, physical gold, I would have had to pay 879.07 an ounce (US$50 more) to get Mexican 50 pesos, US $923 to get American Eagles, and US$949.35 to get French or Swiss 20 francs.
Silver closed at 1127 cents, down 20.5 cents, but to buy US 90% silver coin and wait 2-8 weeks to get it I would have to pay 1518 cents per ounce, a 36% premium over the paper price. And silver American Eagles? Well, forget them. They cost 1681 cents, a 50% premium, & heaven only knows when I’ll get delivery.
How can this be explained? It appears incontrovertible that demand for silver & gold–real, physical, deliverable silver & gold–is so strong, so frantic, that the public is willing to pay huge premiums to buy it. That casts the validity of the paper price into doubt, & points to some government manipulation holding down the price, so the weakness of their rescue operation won’t be called into question by a gold price over $1,000.
For the future it says to me that silver & gold will go much, much higher, & that this period of suppressed prices is a gift, an opportunity, to load up on silver & gold at bargain prices. Stocks will fall further yet. Whether the US Dollar extends its rally or not, it won’t last long and in eight weeks or so will hit the skids again.
Many surprises are possible, but I cannot imagine how this bailout will fail to result in huge inflation, perhaps hyperinflation.Hold dollars at your own risk.
Many of y’all have kindly inquired about my wife, Susan’s health after her heart surgery 28 August. Yesterday I drove her to Nashville for her first post-op check-up & she got a very good report. She is off most of her medications, which had slowed down her heart leaving her fatigued & often nauseated, & only has a few more weeks on coumadin. The doctor allowed her to drive again, great for her but murder for me because I’m the one who has to keep restraining her from overdoing it. All in all it was a splendid report, & we thank God for his mercy.
Yesterday I learned a friend of mine died at age 87, Leslie Fleming. Years ago, in the early 1970s, I met Les when he & his wife were homesteading in northern Arkansas. He taught me how to think, how to search for the core of what things mean. In every facet of his integrity, he was what I call an “Old American,” that is, as they used to be before luxury & government education & the entitlement mentality corrupted them. Leslie Fleming was man too great for the age, unshakeable in his principles. Thank you for teaching me. Requiescat in pace.
Y’all enjoy your weekend!
Argentum et aurum comparenda sunt –
– Silver and gold must be bought.
Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger
Oct
1
October 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Summary from GNN.tv]
Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:36:40 -0500
Summary:
So where are the headlines? asks Peter Tatchell. Indeed. A quick search shows basically the opposite picture of Ahmadinejad has been promoted recently, as always.
Well, you can never trust a madman, can you? And you know he’s been misquoted before, right?
[Posted By Beagle17]
By Peter Tatchell
Republished from Guardian
The Iranian president has said he would accept a two-state solution if the Palestinians agree
Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made a remarkable announcement. He’s admitted that Iran might agree to the existence of the state of Israel.
Ahmadinejad was asked: “If the Palestinian leaders agree to a two-state solution, could Iran live with an Israeli state?”
This was his astonishing reply:
If they [the Palestinians] want to keep the Zionists, they can stay … Whatever the people decide, we will respect it. I mean, it’s very much in correspondence with our proposal to allow Palestinian people to decide through free referendums.
Since most Palestinians are willing to accept a two-state solution, the Iranian president is, in effect, agreeing to Israel’s right to exist and opening the door to a peace deal that Iran will endorse.
Sep
30
September 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: FromTheWilderness.com]
June 14th 2006, 12:59pm [PST]
Organized crime is now officially legal and combined with the stock and capital markets — all enforced by force and rigged profits. This is the economic infrastructure for fascism.” – Catherine Austin Fitts
June 14th 2006, 12:59pm [PST] – On three prior occasions in its eight and a half year history (2001, 2002, 2004) From The Wilderness has issued economic alerts to its subscribers. Two of those alerts (2001, 2002) proved to be astonishingly accurate.
Two days after our first alert was issued on September 9th, 2001, the “terror” attacks of 9/11 shut down Wall Street and allowed the government to open the US Treasury to flood massive amounts of taxpayer money directly into the hands of corporations that were on the brink of a major liquidity crisis. (FTW has never asserted that this was the primary motive for US government participation in the attacks. It was one of many motives as described in Crossing the Rubicon; chief of which was Peak Oil).
Just days after our second economic alert in 2002 a collapse of US financial markets began which saw the Dow drop by 1400 points and more than one trillion dollars in shareholder equity wiped out. We called that one perfectly.
And while the events predicted in our third December, 2004 economic alert did not transpire as predicted, I am perhaps most proud of having written and published this one. Because in it I wrote an almost clairvoyant description of the political, ecological, energy and economic worlds in which we live eighteen months later — today.
The reasons why the events predicted in the third alert did not take place have to do with what my dear friend and colleague Catherine Austin Fitts calls the Tapeworm Economy; the ability of financial and criminal elites to manipulate the rapidly-hollowing shell and façade of a financial system destined to collapse. They do this while keeping appearances (controlled by major media) as normal as possible so that the “suckers” (you) will keep trusting and spending your money in ways that hurt you and progressively wither your needed survival skills and resources.
This is the way that all parasites function until they kill their hosts and move on.
“Fast Crash or Slow Burn?” – Irrelevant!
This apparent longevity of a doomed system has led Fitts and me to agree to disagree about how things are likely to play out in the Empire’s final days or years. I believe that a fast-burn crash is likely (or at least must be prepared for). Fitts thinks it more likely that the elites, using technology like PROMIS software, their total control (ownership) of all branches of government, and a dozen other factors will be able to pull rabbit-after-shrinking rabbit out of the hat until the incremental “bust-out” liquidation of the American economy produces a final whimper in the last-remaining “I-still-believe” consumer. It doesn’t matter that each successive rabbit will be smaller and weaker. What does matter is the pathological willingness of most people to believe that – because a thimbleful of water is produced – a mighty conflagration might still be extinguished.
Fitts and I do agree that a fast burn (crash) would be much better than a slow burn. This is because a sudden slap in the face would leave individuals and families with more resources and tools available to adapt once they had relinquished their vision of a world that no longer exists.
The first thing that must be liberated in an emergency is the mind: so that it can see the emergency. Remember the old maxim about how easy it is to cook a frog by turning up the heat in tepid water slowly versus throwing a frog into boiling water. In the first case the frog just sits patiently and waits to be cooked. In the second case, recognizing the emergency, it jumps out immediately.
Taking into account a multitude of factors such as: unpredictable collapses of large oil fields (e.g. Burgan in Kuwait); global warming and hurricanes; rapidly spreading geopolitical instability; the collapsing housing bubble; soaring bankruptcies; exploding military budgets; the continuing ascendancy of nations like Venezuela, Iran, Russia and China; earthquakes; volatile insurgencies in West Africa; declining global food production and many others, I see things that the elites cannot control. These are (to one degree or another) wildcards that could leap into the game at any time, triggering chaos, war and/or collapse. The elites can influence these factors but there’s a big difference between influence and control. History has demonstrated a perfect batting average when it comes to the inevitable fate of empires in decline and their inability to control events.
This fourth-ever economic alert will be different from the previous ones because rather than describing predicted events, it describes a state of affairs which is – in and of itself – so alarming that we no longer care about the “when.” What we are warning about now is the certainty of the “what” and the necessity of being prepared to manage successfully in the face of a “fast burn,” a “slow burn,” and the wildcards.
To sum it up, large highly centralized corporations and banks – particularly those dependent on US government finances – are no longer worthy of investment.
No one reads tea leaves perfectly and no sound byte encompasses all realities. But if I were to sum up how I think a slow burn is being engineered, I would say that the two biggest manmade factors controlling the crash of the American economy are the Chinese and US governments. I sense a quiet consensus among and within all the economic powers-that-be that as long as the Federal Reserve agrees to the slow strangulation of the economy by continuing to raise interest rates, the Chinese will incrementally respond by continuing, in small increments, to float the Yuan free from its dollar peg. This will allow a semi-orderly transfer (looting) of the most wealth (into gold, oil reserves, the Euro, the Ruble and the Yuan) while keeping suckers in the game.
More than any other two factors, the dollar and the Yuan are the ones which, if they get “sideways,” could cause a crash, collapse or chaos at any minute. But these are only the human-controlled variables.
As it was with Robert Rubin in the Clinton years, Goldman Sachs has again acquired the “franchise” to operate the Treasury under its new Secretary Hank Paulson. Paulson will continue Treasury’s role as a key member of the Plunge Protection Team to manipulate the markets, hide fatal maladies, manipulate investor confidence, and assure that the largest number of people continue to stay roped into the system until it is too late to avoid going down the drain in the largest organized crime bust-out in history.
To sum it up, the American economic system – as a result of recent developments – has become a parasitic Zombie that cannot and should no longer be trusted under any circumstances. It has become lethal, venal and – for lack of a better term – the enemy.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Sep
30
September 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: CNN.com]
By Jeffrey A. Miron
Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Jeffrey A. Miron is senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University. A Libertarian, he was one of 166 academic economists who signed a letter to congressional leaders last week opposing the government bailout plan.
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (CNN) — Congress has balked at the Bush administration’s proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Under this plan, the Treasury would have bought the “troubled assets” of financial institutions in an attempt to avoid economic meltdown.
This bailout was a terrible idea. Here’s why.
The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.
Worse, beginning in 1977 and even more in the 1990s and the early part of this century, Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending. The industry was happy to oblige, given the implicit promise of federal backing, and subprime lending soared.
This subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle.
Once housing prices declined and economic conditions worsened, defaults and delinquencies soared, leaving the industry holding large amounts of severely depreciated mortgage assets.
The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government.
The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.
Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Sep
29
September 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: DemocracyNow.org]
There Must Be a Strict Supervision of All Banking and Credits and Investments. There Must Be an End to Speculation with Other People’s Money.”
We now move three-quarters of a century back in time to 1933. It was the middle of an era that our current moment is sometimes compared to: the Great Depression. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his oath of office in March of that year, over 10,000 banks had collapsed, following the stock market crash of 1929. One-quarter of American workers were unemployed, and people were fighting over scraps of food. We play an excerpt of FDR’s inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, and speak to Adam Cohen, author of the forthcoming book, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America.
Sep
29
September 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source hubpages.com]
Protests took place on Wall St. to protest the bail out plan - and the mainstream news media didn’t even mention it
Hundreds of protestors demonstrated agains the proposed $700 Billion bail out plan for the finance and banking industry, yet the national news media in America didn’t even report it! Why not? It seems strange that this barely generated a gander from the big news outlets like ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC etc. all of whom have a presence in New York City. Despite having such a large protest event occurring in their backyard, the major news media chose not to tell the American people about it. I had to stumble upon this on the internet to find out about it. That’s really indicative of the pathetic state of affairs in the U.S. media today.
Anyway, in case you haven’t seen it, I have collected a bunch of video from the protests on Wall Street (Sept. 25) and posted them below. Have a look at what the news media DIDN’T show you! Warning: some of the protest videos contain profanity.
Sep
28
September 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Farm Aid Board of Directors, Farmaid.org]
September 25, 2008
Dear Congress,
As you consider the distribution of $700 billion to the very banks and corporations that have gotten our country into the mess we’re in now, we ask you to pause for a moment and consider what that money could do for the people who build our country from the ground up… for our schools, healthcare system, our states, cities and towns, alternative energy development, the homeowners who were the pawns of the banking and mortgage industry. As the Board of Directors of Farm Aid, we want to alert you to what a mere $1 billion could do in the hands of the people who grow our food.
American family farmers are the backbone of our economy, the first rung on the economic ladder. For 23 years, we’ve worked to keep family farmers on the land. But it’s not enough just to save family farmers; we have to create new farmers. When farms fail, Main Street businesses fail. The opposite is true too: When farms thrive, Main Street businesses and local communities thrive. Far from Wall Street, family farmers are creating real wealth, producing real value, growing from seeds and sunlight a product that nourishes us both physically and economically. Supporting diverse decentralized family farming will do far more for the stability and vitality of our country than a handful of global agribusiness corporations could ever do.
The proposed $700 billion bailout asks taxpayers to foot the bill without giving them the opportunity to share in any gains. A $1 billion investment in family farm agriculture would enrich us all, because we are all shareholders of the family farm. The return on investment in the family farm includes thriving local economies, nutritious food for better health, a safer and more secure food supply, a cleaner environment and more renewable energy. Investing in local, sustainable and organic food would shorten the distance between eaters and farmers, conserve energy, create economic opportunities and new jobs through innovative processing and distribution systems, resulting in a better, greener, more efficient food and farm economy.
We’ll leave the economic details to the experts, but we know from traveling the highways and back roads of this country that trickle down economic policy has not created wealth for the vast majority of Americans. Let’s start from the ground up. When we invest in our family farmers, we invest in the revitalization of our country.
Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and Dave Matthews
Farm Aid Board of Directors
Sep
23
September 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Part 1
Part 2
Sep
23
September 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Truthout.org]
Monday 22 September 2008
by: David Sirota, In These Times
Using the shock doctrine, Wall Street and Washington’s wrecking crew aim to get the most expensive free lunch in American history.
If a museum in the next superpower nation ever commemorates the decline of the last great superpower, it will make the two-and-a-half page bill introduced this week the center of the display.
Just as they do today at the National Archives’ Declaration of Independence exhibit, tourists in the future-perhaps in Beijing, perhaps somewhere else-will line up to see a framed draft of this week’s White House legislation demanding Congress surrender its power of the purse, and give an unelected appointee-in this case, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson-the power to hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money to “any financial institution,” “without limitation…on such terms and conditions as determined by [him].” In a nation priding itself on separating powers between the branches of government, the bill explicitly states that decisions by Paulson may not even “be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
Whether the bill passes or not, the drafting of it-even the mere thinking of it-is the single most clear sign that all of the major tenets of American democracy are on the auction block these days: from constitutional checks and balances, to legislative and judicial oversight to electoral accountability itself.
In the immediate aftermath of what could be the starting gun of a second Great Depression, the public this week will face a wave of propaganda from Washington. Using the same playbook that succeeded in passing the Patriot Act and the Iraq War authorization with almost no questions, politicians will inevitably invoke love of country, fear, loathing and red-alert emergency-all designed to ram this bill into law as fast as possible, with as little scrutiny as possible. Put in book terms, we will see Thomas Frank’s wrecking crew using Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine to justify a bigger free lunch than David Cay Johnston ever imagined.
Here are five key questions we should all be asking:
Click here to read the rest of the article
Sep
22
September 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Lisa Buckingham & Simon Watkins, Financial Mail
21 September 2008, 10:12am
Hedge funds are expected to launch legal action against the Financial Services Authority, seeking compensation for what they claim will be multi-million-pound losses caused by the watchdog’s sudden decision to outlaw short-selling.
…
A senior source close to the regulator said the FSA believed its decision was ‘well within its legal powers’. The ban will be reviewed in 30 days and the source said the FSA could decide to lift the block at any time if it was convinced stability had returned.
…
Veteran stockbroker Andy Stewart, founder and chief executive of Cenkos Securities, was enraged by events. ‘It really is hilarious that the only way the banking sector can be propped up is by stopping people doing what they have always been legally authorised to do,’ he said.
Click here to read the entire article
Sep
22
September 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: online.wsj.com]
September 21, 2008, 6:08 A.M. ET
By Iain McDonald
SYDNEY — The Australian Securities and Investments Commission Sunday banned covered short selling of all listed shares following moves by other countries to ban short selling of financial stocks.
In a rapid escalation of the clampdown on short selling, ASIC said in a statement that it had decided to ban covered short selling from the start of trading Monday because a number of countries had banned covered short selling of financial stocks and there was a risk that if Australia didn’t follow with its own ban that there would be a risk of “unwarranted …
Sep
22
September 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: shanghaidaily.com]
BANK of China said yesterday it will buy a 20 percent stake in La Compagnie Financiere Edmond de Rothschild for 236.3 million euros (US$340 million) and the two will develop private banking and asset-management services.
“This partnership forms part of Bank of China’s global development strategy,” Bank of China chairman Xiao Gang said in a statement. “We expect to further strengthen our asset management operations and product design capabilities in private banking business, and widen the product and service offerings to our clients.”
Beijing-based Bank of China said it sees a promising future for private banking and other services for China’s newly affluent amid rapid economic growth.
“With the rapidly growing global demand for wealth management services, private banking and asset management are becoming increasingly important parts of the Chinese financial services industry,” the statement said.
Bank of China said it hoped the deal would strengthen its presence in Europe. China’s top banks are among the world’s largest in financial terms but inexperienced at consumer services. They have formed ties with foreign partners to introduce credit cards and other products.
Click here to read the full story
Sep
21
September 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Sep
19
September 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Thu Aug 30, 2007 5:36pm EDT
NEW YORK, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Lehman Brothers has hired Jeb Bush, brother of the President of the United States, as an advisor to its private equity business, a source familiar with the situation said.
Lehman hired another relative of U.S. President George W. Bush last year–George Walker, a second cousin, who heads up the bank’s asset management business.
Jeb Bush is the former governor of Florida.
Lehman Brothers declined to comment.
(Reporting by Dan Wilchins)
[Source: Reuters.com]
Sep
18
September 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: http://www.reportonbusiness.com]
JOHN HEINZL
Globe and Mail Update
September 10, 2008 at 6:00 AM EDT
To hear Donald Coxe tell it, the commodity selloff ripping through Canada’s stock market is no accident. It is the result of a deliberate, brilliantly executed plan hatched at the highest levels of the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury.
Mr. Coxe is no paranoid conspiracy theorist. As the chairman and chief strategist of Harris Investment Management in Chicago, he is one of the most respected investment authorities in North America. He also happens to have lost about 10 per cent of his personal wealth in the commodity rout, which came at the worst possible time for his Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund that started trading in June.
“This has done more damage to my personal wealth than anything in the last 20 years,” he said in an interview yesterday. But he has too much respect for how the U.S. authorities engineered the collapse in commodities – a move he said was necessary to shore up the global financial system – to be bitter.
“My attitude is, goddamn it, they’re good … it was brilliant.”
[End Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire story
Click here to see a statement from Don Coxe with a posted-to-Google date of February 2007.
Sep
18
September 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
AMY GOODMAN: What started all this?
NOMI PRINS: What started all of this was a complete lack of transparency and regulation in the banking system. If we go back to a history where we had a similar situation on Wall Street, which was 1929, when we had a stock market crash followed by a Great Depression, in 1932, when FDR was elected and Herbert Hoover was ousted, right after that, we put together—he put together—
AMY GOODMAN: But interestingly, FDR didn’t come in on a plank of changing everything the way he did. It happened—didn’t it?—after he became president with—
NOMI PRINS: He had to take a look at the banking system, which was undermining the general economy, which had undermined the general economy, and say, “You know what? We do not understand what’s going on here. We have two types of banks. We have speculating investment banks, and we have commercial banks that deal with the public, take deposits, take savings, make mortgage loans, understand what’s going on. We’ll back those. The government will back those commercial institutions that deal with the public. It will not back speculative investment banks. And, by the way, those two things have to split. You pick a side. You want to be an investment bank? You be an investment bank. You want to be a commercial bank? We’ll back you. The Fed will back you. We will be there. We’ll create an insurance company, the FDIC, to back deposits for the public. We’ll have your back.” There was no—there was no agreement to have the back of the speculative investment banks.
Over the years, these things have merged and merged and merged. And in late 1999, Glass-Steagall, that act, was repealed, killed, died in Congress. And now you have a situation where everything that went wrong up until the creation of that act is happening now with a lot more capital and a lot more international interplay and a lot more money on the federal government to have to bail out when things go wrong. So, we have gone backwards in banking history, and having Merrill be a part of Bank of America is a tremendously big accident waiting to happen. Bear Stearns’s assets part of JPMorgan—they’re all part of recombining speculation and commercial.
Click here for the video (requires Real Player)
Click here for the audio (mp3)
[Source: DemocracyNow!]
Sep
15
September 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: Bloomberg.com]
Commentary by Jonathan Weil
Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Now can we get some subpoenas flying?
What happened this weekend at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is nothing short of remarkable, and I’m not just talking about its death. Sunday night, one by one, stunned Lehman employees were filmed by TV news crews leaving Lehman’s offices carrying away boxes and duffel bags full of heaven knows what.
Is there anybody left in the government with a pulse? Where’s the yellow police tape? How about a cease-and-desist order to prevent document destruction? Are we supposed to believe that everything carted out of Lehman this weekend was a personal effect?
Can anyone give me a good reason why Lehman offices shouldn’t be treated as a crime scene now? Or why there has been no sign of any investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into any aspect of Lehman’s accounting or disclosure practices? Where is the Justice Department? Where is New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo? How about the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority?
Not only is Lehman dead. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which cooked their books in broad daylight, are taxpayer-owned zombies. American International Group Inc. and Washington Mutual Inc., whose accounting practices also stink, are on the brink. And while it’s true that AIG is the subject of SEC and Justice Department probes, there’s no sign that anyone in the government is looking into whether executives at these other places violated the law.
Never has it been more evident that the SEC and other government agencies think their job is to protect financial companies and financial executives, rather than the investors they rip off.
Chasing Shorts
Just two months ago, the SEC was firing subpoenas all over hedge-fund land trying to find a short seller to burn for spreading false rumors about Lehman. (They’re still looking.) And yet there’s no sign it ever occurred to anyone at the SEC to check if Lehman’s books were cooked, or if Lehman’s executives ever misled the public about the company’s prospects.
There’s no sign the SEC has done anything to inquire about the impossibly optimistic asset values on Lehman’s balance sheet. There’s no reason to believe the government has asked about Lehman’s Enronesque dealings this year with an off-balance-sheet hedge fund run by former Lehman executives called R3 Capital.
There’s been no signal that anyone in the government has expressed even a curiosity about whether Lehman executives believed the rosy falsehoods they spread this year about their company’s financial health. All the SEC has been able to muster in the wake of Lehman’s collapse so far are some boilerplate assurances that Lehman customers’ assets will be protected.
Only Choice
After bailing out Bear Stearns Cos., as well as Fannie and Freddie, letting Lehman fail was the only acceptable option for the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. And it’s a good start toward giving investors a reason to have confidence again someday that the capital markets are not a completely rigged game.
Merely letting companies fail isn’t enough, though. For a free-market economy to work, investors must feel confident that they can trust the financial reports public companies produce. And to make that leap of faith, they must have confidence that the government will enforce the law when it’s broken.
A big reason Lehman failed is that investors rightfully concluded that Lehman’s financial reports and happy-talk assurances couldn’t possibly be true. Yet there also was the sense that as long as Lehman remained alive, nobody in the government would do anything about it.
Before we get out of this banking crisis, we’re going to need some scalps. There should be plenty for the government to find. Messes like the one we’re in don’t happen without a large number of highly paid people doing something very wrong.
Sep
15
September 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: 911blogger.com]
Posted on: Monday, 15 September 2008, 15:00 CDT
….To mark the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist acts, on 12 September Russian Channel One TV showed a controversial documentary, “Zero”, which questions the official version of events. The screening of the film, made by prominent Italian journalist and MEP Giulietto Chiesa, was followed by a studio discussion, in which two groups of experts - those who agree with Chiesa’s version and those who disagree - expressed their views.
“The film, justifiably or not - we’ll be discussing this tonight - questions the official version of events, but the film - and I’ve watched it with great attention almost twice over - never directly accuses the US government or Congress, or some dark forces in America, or the [American] Foreign [Policy] Council, of masterminding and organizing the terrorist acts. So, I am asking you: who did it?” moderator Aleksandr Gordon said at the beginning of the debate.
According to Aleksey Pushkov, author and presenter of the “Postscript” current affairs programme on Russian Centre TV and director of the Strategic Studies Institute under the Diplomatic Academy, the terrorist acts in New York in September 2001 were organized by a “very influential group of people who needed them”.
Vitaliy Tretyakov, editor-in-chief of the Political Class magazine and former editor-in-chief of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta heavyweight daily, described the US official report as “fiction”. He said he could not believe that a small group of terrorists could have masterminded the attacks.
On the other hand, Vladimir Rubanov, former head of the KGB’s analytical department, said he could not see anything extraordinary in what happened and it was plausible.
Mikhail Leontyev, Channel One TV presenter and editor-in-chief of the Profil magazine, said he did not believe the official version of events for three reasons. The first, he said, “is that it was a one- off [terrorist] act. A certain organization committed a totally extraordinary act from the point of view of its coordination. Allegedly, this organization still exists, it continues fighting and killing people; it is keeping the US army in two countries in the world and, at the same time, there has not been a single [terrorist] act on the territory of the United States since.”"The fact that there has not been a single repetition of this terrorist act proves that the first one was false,” he added.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Sep
15
September 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Source: From The Wilderness
Monday, Septermber 15, 2008
This is what collapse looks like on Wall Street. October looks like it is going to be bloody beyond belief. Read the story closely and smell the fear. There is now a $400 trillion derivatives bubble hanging in the balance. The government has drawn the line on bailouts. That’s good but it means the Fed is getting seriously squeezed and it hasn’t dealt with Ike yet. We don’t have a clue as to how much damage Ike did yet but it was serious. The price of gold has been bombed as bad as the price of oil. Both are due for huge breakouts and capital is looking for the exits. Today is going to be a busy, busy day. We have passed the Plunge Protection Team’s pay grade.
I have no way of knowing because I won’t take the enormous time to do it; but I wonder if Lehman was also trading oil. You see all the lies that the short-sighted markets tell themselves have maturity dates beyond the markets’ visual range. Then, like two trains, they round a bend from opposite directions and things get “marked to market”. Lehman is only one car in the train. Bear Stearns was the first; then Lehman. Fannie and Freddie are a different train wreck with the same cause. B of A just bought Merril Lynch. How many times have I said it was always going to be a liquidity crisis that broke things open? There isn’t enough opium in Afghanistan or Coca in Bolivia to fix this one.
MCR
Sep
14
September 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
(Source: 911blogger.com)
YouTube links for Friday evening’s historic telecast on Russia state TV Channel One have been posted, and the discussion following the telecast of “ZERO: Investigation into 9/11″ begins halfway through Part 11 - anybody working on an English translation of this?
The full broadcast (including the film) can be found in 15 parts here:
http://ru.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9ACEDF9EDB98B47C
Sep
6
September 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Iranians make clear distinction between American people and American policies
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Click the image below to see the documentary
Sep
6
September 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Video Interview and Dispatch
Pakistan: Taliban Key Challenge for Next President
Our correspondent in Karachi describes a country in civil war
BY Joe RubinAugust 28, 2008
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Click here for Frontline/World video
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Our reporter in Pakistan says the next U.S. president faces major policy challenges there as the hearts and minds of future generations are being won in Taliban-influenced religious schools, and a weak and warring civilian government shows little appetite to take on the growing insurgency. Watch her interview and video clips from Karachi and read her dispatch below.
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A Country in Peril
by Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy
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Pakistani politics are not for the weak hearted. In a typical week here, the president of the country resigned, the two main political parties had a falling out, two powerful bomb blasts ripped through the country and at least 100 people were killed in skirmishes in the Tribal belt.
I was born and raised in Pakistan, but I have spent the better part of the past 10 years living in the West, mainly the United States and Canada. My husband and I made the decision to move back to Pakistan early last year. After all, the economy was doing well, security had improved tremendously, and a number of young Pakistanis were opening up new businesses. It was safe to say, society was thriving.
The bubble burst soon after we landed this year.
In the past few months, newspaper headlines here have screamed out news of scores of girls’ schools being burnt, video stores being ransacked, women being beheaded, hundreds of suicide bombers ready to attack, offices shut down for immoral behavior, stunning the country into silence.
The Taliban has arrived
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the article
Sep
6
September 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source http://www.dailytech.com]
Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.
The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.
The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth.
According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.
When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.
But this year — which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 — has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.
In 2005, a pair of astronomers from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson attempted to publish a paper in the journal Science. The pair looked at minute spectroscopic and magnetic changes in the sun. By extrapolating forward, they reached the startling result that, within 10 years, sunspots would vanish entirely. At the time, the sun was very active. Most of their peers laughed at what they considered an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The journal ultimately rejected the paper as being too controversial.
The paper’s lead author, William Livingston, tells DailyTech that, while the refusal may have been justified at the time, recent data fits his theory well. He says he will be “secretly pleased” if his predictions come to pass.
But will the rest of us? In the past 1000 years, three previous such events — the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a “mini ice age”. For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who runs a climate data auditing site, tells DailyTech the sunspot numbers are another indication the “sun’s dynamo” is idling. According to Watts, the effect of sunspots on TSI (total solar irradiance) is negligible, but the reduction in the solar magnetosphere affects cloud formation here on Earth, which in turn modulates climate.
This theory was originally proposed by physicist Henrik Svensmark, who has published a number of scientific papers on the subject. Last year Svensmark’s “SKY” experiment claimed to have proven that galactic cosmic rays — which the sun’s magnetic field partially shields the Earth from — increase the formation of molecular clusters that promote cloud growth. Svensmark, who recently published a book on the theory, says the relationship is a larger factor in climate change than greenhouse gases.
Solar physicist Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, tells DailyTech the correlation between cosmic rays and terrestrial cloud cover is more complex than “more rays equals more clouds”. Usoskin, who notes the sun has been more active since 1940 than at any point in the past 11 centuries, says the effects are most important at certain latitudes and altitudes which control climate. He says the relationship needs more study before we can understand it fully.
Other researchers have proposed solar effects on other terrestrial processes besides cloud formation. The sunspot cycle has strong effects on irradiance in certain wavelengths such as the far ultraviolet, which affects ozone production. Natural production of isotopes such as C-14 is also tied to solar activity. The overall effects on climate are still poorly understood.
What is incontrovertible, though, is that ice ages have occurred before. And no scientist, even the most skeptical, is prepared to say it won’t happen again.
Article Update, Sep 1 2008. After this story was published, the NOAA reversed their previous decision on a tiny speck seen Aug 21, which gives their version of the August data a half-point. Other observation centers such as Mount Wilson Observatory are still reporting a spotless month. So depending on which center you believe, August was a record for either a full century, or only 50 years.
Aug
21
August 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph, London
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
A war breaks out in the Caucasus, pitting Russia against a close ally of the United States. Inflation reaches a new peak in the euro-zone. The CPI reaches the highest in Britain since Bank of England independence. Rampant inflation sweeps the developing world.
Yet gold crashes. It has failed to deliver on its core promises as a safe-haven and inflation hedge, at least for now. Why?
Four possible answers:
1) Nobody seriously believes that Russia will over-play its hand. The world could not care less about Georgia anyway. Ergo, this is a bogus geopolitical crisis.
2) The inflation story is vastly exaggerated in the OECD core of countries that still make up 60pc of the global economy. The price of gold is already looking beyond the oil and food spike of early to mid 2008 (a lagging indicator of loose money two to three years ago) to the much more serious matter of debt-deflation that lies ahead.
3) The seven-year slide of the dollar is over as investors at last wake up to the reality that the global economy is falling off a cliff. Indeed, the US is the only G7 country that is not yet in or on the cusp recession. (It soon will be, but by then others will be prostrate). As an anti-dollar play, gold is finished for this cycle.
4) The entire commodity boom has hit the buffers. Looming world recession (growth below 3pc on the IMF definition) trumps the supercycle for the time being.
Gold has fallen from $1030 an ounce in February to $807 today in London trading. It has collapsed through key layers of technical support, triggering automatic stop-loss sales. The Goldman Sachs short-position that I have been observing with some curiosity has paid off.
For gold bugs, the unthinkable has now happened. The metal has fallen through its 50-week moving average, the key support line that has held solid through the seven-year bull market. This week is not over yet, of course. If gold recovers enough in coming days, it could still close above the line.
Courtesy of my old colleague Peter Brimelow - whose columns on gold are a must-read - note that Australia’s Privateer point and figure chart has also broken its upward line for the first time since 2002. This is serious technical damage.
So have we reached the moment when gold bugs must start questioning their deepest assumptions. Have they bought too deeply into the “dollar-collapse/M3 monetary bubble” tale, ignoring all the other moving parts in the complex global system? Nobody wants to be left holding the bag all the way down to the bottom of the slide, long after the hedge funds have sold out.
Well, my own view is that gold bugs should start looking very closely at something else: the implosion of Europe. (Japan is in recession too)
Germany’s economy shrank by 1pc in Q2. Italy shrank by 0.3pc. Spain is sliding into a crisis that looks all too like the early stages of Argentina’s debacle in 2001. The head of the Spanish banking federation today pleaded with the European Central Bank for rescue measures to end the credit crisis.
The slow-burn damage of the over-valued euro is becoming apparent in every corner of the eurozone. The ECB misjudged the severity of the downturn, as executive board member Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi admitted today in the Italian press. By raising interest rates into the teeth of the storm last month, Frankfurt has made it that much more likely that parts of Europe’s credit system will seize up as defaults snowball next year.
As readers know, I do not believe the eurozone is a fully workable currency union over the long run. There was a momentary “convergence” when the currencies were fixed in perpetuity, mostly in 1995. They have diverged ever since. The rift between North and South was not enough to fracture the system in the first post-EMU downturn, the dotcom bust. We have moved a long way since then. The Club Med bloc is now massively dependent on capital inflows from North Europe to plug their current account gaps: Spain (10pc), Portugal (10pc), Greece (14pc). UBS warned that these flows are no longer forthcoming.
The central banks of Asia, the Mid-East, and Russia have been parking a chunk of their $6 trillion reserves in European bonds on the assumption that the euro can serve as a twin pillar of the global monetary system alongside the dollar. But the euro is nothing like the dollar. It has no European government, tax, or social security system to back it up. Each member country is sovereign, each fiercely proud, answering to its own ancient rythms.
It lacks the mechanism of “fiscal transfers” to switch money to depressed regions. The Babel of languages keeps workers pinned down in their own country. The escape valve of labour mobility is half-blocked. We are about to find out whether EMU really has the levels of political solidarity of a nation, the kind that holds America’s currency union together through storms.
My guess is that political protest will mark the next phase of this drama. Almost half a million people have lost their jobs in Spain alone over the last year. At some point, the feeling of national impotence in the face of monetary rule from Frankfurt will erupt into popular fury. The ECB will swallow its pride and opt for a weak euro policy, or face its own destruction.
What we are about to see is a race to the bottom by the world’s major currencies as each tries to devalue against others in a beggar-thy-neighbour policy to shore up exports, or indeed simply because they have to cut rates frantically to stave off the consequences of debt-deleveraging and the risk of an outright Slump.
When that happens - if it is not already happening - it will become clear that the both pillars of the global monetary system are unstable, infested with the dry rot of excess debt.
The Fed has already invoked Article 13 (3) - the “unusual and exigent circumstances” clause last used in the Great Depression - to rescue Bear Stearns. The US Treasury has since had to shore up Fannie and Freddie, the world’s two biggest financial institutions.
Europe’s turn will come next. We will discover that Europe cannot conduct such rescues. There is no lender of last resort in the system. The ECB is prohibited by the Maastricht Treaty from carrying out direct bail-outs. There is no EU treasury. So the answer will be drift and paralysis.
When EU Single Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy was asked at a dinner what Brussels would have done if the eurozone faced a crisis like Bear Stearns, he rolled his eyes and thanked the Heavens that so such crisis had yet happened.
It will.
Gold bugs, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Gold at $800 looks like a bargain in the new world currency disorder.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Aug
21
August 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
U.S. mint suspends gold coin sales; futures price is a fiction
Submitted by cpowell on Fri, 2008-08-15 04:27. Section: Daily Dispatches
12:25a ET Friday, August 15, 2008
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
The U.S. Mint has suspended sales of American eagle gold coins and is refusing orders from dealers, two coin and bullion dealers confirmed Thursday.
The mint’s suspension of gold coin sales follows its tight rationing of sales of silver eagle coins, begun in May, when sales to the public were terminated and sales to the mint’s 13 authorized dealers were tightly limited.
Word of the mint’s suspension of gold coin sales came from the American Precious Metals Exchange in Edmond, Oklahoma, (http://apmexdealer.blogspot.com/2008/08/news-alert-us-mint-suspends-sale…) and from Centennial Precious Metals in Denver, Colorado.
The suspension is overwhelming evidence that the futures contract price of gold on the commodities exchanges is substantially below the physical market price and that, indeed, the commodities exchanges are being used as GATA long has maintained — as part of a massive scheme of manipulation of the precious metals, currency, and bond markets.
Michael Kosares, proprietor of Centennial Precious Metals and host of its Internet bulletin board, the USAGold Forum (http://www.usagold.com/cpmforum/), explained Thursday:
“The U.S. Mint buys direct from the refiners, and this suspension of gold eagle sales may be an indication that the supply line is already backing up, or that the mint expects that it will back up for the rest of the year. I wonder who would give up physical metal at these prices and under these circumstances except distressed sellers. The central banks are in a hunker-down mode as far as I can determine, and it’s the mines that supply the refiners. So if the mint, which buys from the refiners, is having a difficult time locating metal, what does that tell you? I keep saying that we may get a surprising rubber-band effect later in the year when the pre-holiday/festival season kicks off in September/October. It may happen sooner. One of our indicators of approaching a bottom in gold is how many calls Centennial Precious Metals gets from our U.S.-based Indian clientele. Here’s a quote from my office’s report to me at the end of the day today: ‘Today was a good day. … There must have been an Indian convention where someone was handing out USAGold business cards.’ That may give you a clue as to thinking in India proper and probably the rest of the Asian rim.”
That is, through their agents the bullion banks the Western central banks, desperate to prop up a corrupt and totteringt financial system, have put gold so much on sale that even the U.S. Mint can’t find any now. The price reported from the commodities markets is a fiction — a scary one, perhaps, but a fiction no less.
You can strike a blow at the market riggers who are defrauding the world — just buy a little real metal. The dealers listed at the bottom right of this dispatch will be glad to help you do it.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
Aug
21
August 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The Great American Yard Sale
Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008
By JEFF ISRAELY/PARIS, WILLIAM BOSTON/BERLIN
When Belgian-based, Brazilian-controlled InBev launched a hostile offer for American beer king Anheuser-Busch last month, xenophobia quickly foamed to the top. Beer drinkers in St. Louis, Mo.–A-B’s home–vowed to swear off Bud if those foreigners bought “our” beer.
They’ll get over it. A-B’s shareholders sure did, considering the $52 billion price tag, which at $70 a share was a 27% premium for a stock that had gone flat. The ruling Busch family ultimately faced up to the fact that the U.S. is for sale, and foreigners are buying. It’s everything from the St.-Tropez crowd buying up condos in Palm Beach, Fla., to Asian and Middle Eastern governments sinking billions into U.S. banks to Europeans taking over U.S. pharmaceutical and infrastructure companies. Even tourists are busy using their euros and pounds to snap up iPhones, jeans, shoes and everything else they can stuff into the empty suitcases they carry along for just that purpose, damn them.
The weak dollar and our weakening economy are underwriting the great American yard sale. Investors from Dubai are behind the June purchase of the General Motors Building in New York City for $2.8 billion. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council’s sovereign wealth fund bought a 90% stake in the landmark Chrysler Building. General Electric’s plastics division is gone, and its famed appliance unit could soon be in the hands of China’s Haier or South Korea’s LG. Chrysler is hoping to hook up with India’s Tata Motors or Italy’s Fiat. Switzerland’s Roche Holding is offering about $44 billion to acquire the 44% of the biotechnology outfit Genentech that it doesn’t own.
The surge of foreign buying spans the economy. Since 2003, foreign-led mergers and acquisitions have increased more than sixfold. Last year there were over 2,000 foreign-led acquisitions of U.S. companies in deals worth some $405.4 billion, twice the value of deals in 2006 and up from $60.8 billion in 2003, according to Thomson Reuters, the financial-information company. Unlike the 1980s panic about the Japanese buying up American landmarks like Rockefeller Center, the response of the financial establishment has been to welcome the latest rush of foreign investment. “The U.S. needs these flows, particularly now,” says Bank of America chief market strategist Joseph Quinlan. “It helps create income and jobs for Americans.”
That would include Anne Marie Moriarty, a vice president at Corcoran Real Estate Group, who shuttles between New York City and European capitals, tempting foreign buyers with choice American properties. Moriarty is brokering the $16 million sale of an apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to an Italian buyer, just one of the latest in her run of foreign deals. She says that since March 2007 her residential sales to foreigners have doubled, which is part of the reason that New York’s real estate prices have held up in an other wise tanking market. “It’s bucking the trend,” says Moriarty. Foreigners “see it as a long-term investment. Part of [real estate] for them is owning a piece of New York.”
Foreign companies were also the buyers in four of the top U.S. commercial real estate deals in 2007, according to Real Estate Alert newsletter. Rome-based investor Valter Mainetti has been building his Michelangelo Fund around trophy properties, ones that have historical or architectural value beyond their location and square footage. In 2006 he acquired a minority share in New York City’s Flatiron Building, a property that today is valued at $180 million. In June he raised his holdings to a 53% share of the famous building. “The Flatiron is expensive, but with the [cheap] dollar, it made sense to increase our share,” says Mainetti. “The stability of the New York real estate market is unique. This current crisis will pass, and the dollar will re-establish itself. We are confident.”
Foreigners spent $52.2 billion on U.S. commercial real estate in 2007, double the previous year’s total, according to Real Capital Analytics, a research group based in New York City that tracks property investment. Dan Fasulo, head of research at Real Capital Analytics, says foreign investment in U.S. property is a relatively recent phenomenon. He compared the current trend to the globalization of stock-market portfolios in the 1980s. “This isn’t just about the dollar. The strongest driver is that investors are looking for geographical diversification. The same situation played out on Wall Street about 10 to 15 years ago,” he says.
Buy American (Companies)
Over the past five years, foreign takeovers of U.S. companies have steadily risen. Among the more notable: Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis’ $39 billion staggered buyout of Alcon, the world leader in eye care; British energy distributor National Grid’s takeover of utility KeySpan Corp. for $11.8 billion; Saudi Arabian petrochemical company SABIC’s acquisition of GE’s plastics division for $11.6 billion; and Italian aerospace company Finmeccanica’s pending takeover of the U.S. military contractor DRS Technologies in a $5.2 billion deal. Some 55% of foreign direct investment in the U.S. came from the Old Country last year, with extra impetus now coming from its currency advantage. Says Scévole de Cazotte, senior policy director for Europe at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: “European companies are very much conscious of the potential windfall. You buy cheap now with the belief that in 10 years the currency will have rebounded.”
Infrastructure is a prime example. Barcelona-based Abertis has been buying up airport-operation contracts from Atlanta and Burbank, Calif., among others, and a variety of service contracts in tele communications and parking garages. Now it is seeking a $12.8 billion deal to operate the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but the state legislature has balked. The road to growth leads to the U.S., says Abertis spokesman Toni Brunet, who notes that states and municipalities have lagged behind European public entities in privatization. “In terms of infrastructure, the U.S. is an emerging market,” says Brunet.
Indeed, European infrastructure firms calculate that the U.S. needs a massive infusion of capital to modernize its roads, bridges and power lines, highlighted by a recent spate of blackouts and the tragic collapse of a Minneapolis highway bridge last year. Steve Lucas, cfo of British power utility National Grid, says estimates are that the U.S. will spend $2 trillion in the next two decades upgrading electricity and gas infrastructure. “That’s bigger than China,” he notes.
Aug
21
August 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Sharp US money supply contraction points to Wall Street crunch ahead
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 3:04pm BST 19/08/2008
The US money supply has experienced the sharpest contraction in modern history, heightening the risk of a Wall Street crunch and a severe economic slowdown in coming months.
Data compiled by Lombard Street Research shows that the M3 ”broad money” aggregates fell by almost $50bn (£26.8bn) in July, the biggest one-month fall since modern records began in 1959.
“Monthly data for July show that the broad money growth has almost collapsed,” said Gabriel Stein, the group’s leading monetary economist.
On a three-month basis, the M3 growth rate has fallen from almost 19pc earlier this year to just 2.1pc (annualised) for the period from May to July. This is below the rate of inflation, implying a shrinkage in real terms.
The growth in bank loans has turned negative to a halt since March.
“It’s obviously worrying. People either can’t borrow, or don’t want to borrow even if they can,” said Mr Stein.
Monetarists say it is the sharpness of the drop that is most disturbing, rather than the absolute level. Moves of this speed are extremely rare.
The overall debt burden in the US economy is currently at record levels, raising concerns that a recession - if it occurs - could set off a sharp downward spiral.
Household debt is now 131pc of disposable income, compared with 93pc at the top the dotcom bubble, 79pc in the property boom of the late-1980s, and 62pc at the end of the 1970s.
The M3 data measures both cash and a wide range of bank instruments. It tends to provide an early warning signal of major shifts in the economy, although the US Federal Reserve took the controversial decision to stop reporting the statistics in 2005 on the grounds that the modern financial system had rendered the data obsolete.
Monetarists insist that shifts in M3 are a lead indicator of asset prices moves, typically six months or so ahead. If so, the latest collapse points to a grim autumn for Wall Street and for the American property market. As a rule of thumb, the data gives a one-year advance signal on economic growth, and a two-year signal on future inflation.
“There are always short-term blips but over the long run M3 has repeatedly shown itself good leading indicator,” said Mr Stein.
He cautioned that the three-month shifts in M3 can be highly volatile.
M3 surged after the onset of the credit crunch, but this was chiefly a distortion caused by the near total paralysis in parts of the American commercial paper market. Borrowers were forced to take out bank loans instead. The commercial paper market has yet to recover.
The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment has fallen to the lowest level since the 1980s recession.
The US economy is without doubt facing severe headwinds going into the autumn.
Richard Fisher, the ultra-hawkish head of the Dallas Federal Reserve, warned over the weekend that growth would be near “zero” in the second half of the year.
Aug
19
August 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
August 18, 2008
Catherine Austin Fitts Blog: Mapping the real deal
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By Barrons
Last update: 2:54 p.m. EDT Aug. 18, 2008
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It may be curtains soon for the management and shareholders of beleaguered housing giants It is growing increasingly likely that the Treasury will recapitalize Fannie and Freddie in the months ahead on the taxpayer’s dime, availing itself of powers granted it under the new housing bill signed into law last month. Such a move almost certainly would wipe out existing holders of the agencies’ common stock, with preferred shareholders and even holders of the two entities’ $19 billion of subordinated debt also suffering losses. Barron’s first raised the possibility of a government takeover of Fannie and Freddie in a March 10 cover story, “Is Fannie Mae Toast?”
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[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Aug
18
August 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
It’s one thing that US foreign policy wonks imagined that Russia would remain in a coma forever, but the idea that we could encircle Russia strategically with defensible bases in landlocked mountainous countries halfway around the world…? You have to ask what were they smoking over at the Pentagon and the CIA and the NSC?
We could have spent the past ten years getting our own house in order — waking up to the obsolescence of our suburban life-style, scaling back on the Happy Motoring, reconnecting our cities with world-class passenger rail, creating wealth by producing things of value (instead of resorting to financial racketeering), protecting our borders, and taking the necessary measures to defend and update our own industries. Instead, we pissed our time and resources away. Nations do make tragic errors of the collective will. The cluelessness of George Bush is nothing less than a perfect metaphor for the failure of a whole generation. The Boomers will be identified as the generation that wrecked America.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the entire post at Clusterfuck Nation
Aug
17
August 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Aug
16
August 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Wed August 13, 2008
CNN.com/Crime
[Excerpts from article]
(CNN) — The chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party died Wednesday, about four hours after a shooting at the party’s headquarters, police said.
The suspect walked into the downtown headquarters, near the state Capitol building, before noon.
The gunman said he was interested in volunteering, said Sam Higginbotham, a 17-year-old volunteer at the headquarters, The Associated Press reported.
The man asked for Gwatney and spoke with another employee before pushing his way into his office and pulling a gun on Gwatney, Hastings said.
After the shooting, the suspect entered a nearby Arkansas Baptist State Convention and pointed a gun at an employee.
A vehicle description was provided to police, Hastings said, and officers found it. A chase involving Little Rock police, Arkansas State Police and the Grant County Sheriff’s Office ended about 20 miles south of Little Rock, where the suspect was shot and taken into custody, he said.
Police said the suspect drove into a ditch and around a set of spike strips in an attempt to evade police.
Grant County authorities used a squad car to hit the suspect’s vehicle from behind and ram it into another unit.
The man then got out of his vehicle and began shooting at officers, who returned fire.
In Sheridan, Arkansas, where the chase ended, a crowd gathered near the suspect’s blue pickup as police cordoned off the area with yellow crime-scene tape. What appeared to be bullet holes could be seen in the truck’s windshield.
Click here to watch Little Rock’s THV11’s report about Gwatney’s alleged killer: Timothy Dale Johnson
Aug
16
August 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Aug
16
August 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Before I say anything else, I just want to say that I was running from Geogrian troops bombing our city, not Russian Troops. I want to say Thank You to the Russian troops that were helping us out.”
–Amanda Kokoeva
Aug
13
August 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Tuesday 12 July 2008
Act 2: From the Wilderness’ Peak Oil Blog
The Russian advance has stopped. Mikeil Saakashvili has said that Georgia will never allow itself to be broken up. Russia has meanwhile imposed an effective annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and put a ring of armor around those enclaves with air support above.
Two other events are setting the stage for renewed — and possibly more dangerous — conflict. First Georgia has resigned from the Commonwealth of Independent States. Second, NATO has announced that it will proceed with plans to admit Georgia to the Alliance. Excuse me…was that the Georgia that existed last week or the Georgia that exists today as a new NATO member? I cannot see NATO admitting a partitioned Georgia. Saakashvili overplayed his hand and will likely lose internal support. So what? Georgia is a U.S. baby no matter who holds office. Russia and NATO do not appear any closer to blinking even though one of them will ultimately have to. And that’s where the presuure on geopolitical fault lines has not lessened. This week may have only been a foreshock.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire post
Aug
12
August 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
After four days of heavy fighting, Russian tanks are now approaching central Georgian cities away from the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian officials say Georgia provoked the assault by attacking South Ossetia late last week, causing heavy civilian casualties. NATO’s Secretary General and President Bush have both condemned Russia’s “disproportionate” use of force in Georgia.
Click here to watch the Real Video Stream from Democracy Now!
Aug
11
August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[Source: From the Wilderness' Peak Oil Blog]
Russia will not pull out voluntarily. Georgia will be occupied, either totally or enough to make sure that it can pose no risk to Moscow — ever again. Forget the BTC pipeline. And who is BTC’s primary owner-operator? British Petroleum. The simultaneous bombing of BTC by Kurdish PKK (Marxist/Leninist) “separatists” in Turkey drives the point home. “We can take out this pipeline any time we want, from any place we want.” Investors in Caspian oil are going to start drastically rethinking their decisions. Caspian production is certain to fall and I can now see a possibility that Russia might eventually get what it has wanted more than anything, a return of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan into a Russian sphere of influence. If that happens, especially as Saudi Arabia is starting t ofade, Russia will be the energy king of the planet, especially in terms of natural gas.
[End Excerpt]
Click here and scroll to post dated August 10 to read the rest of the article
Aug
11
August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[HotNewsTurkey.com]
Aug 7, 2008
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline (BTC), which is still ablaze, will remain shut for about 15 days after an explosion sparked a fire in a section in eastern Turkey, news agencies reported on Thursday. The supply concerns pushed oil prices back to over $119. (UPDATED)
Fire-hit Azeri-Turkish oil pipeline to remain closed for 1-2 weeks
The blast occurred late Tuesday in a pump at a section near the eastern town of Refahiye, in Erzincan province. The fire was likely to continue burning for another two days until the oil remaining in the pipe runs out, an official from Turkey’s state-run oil and gas company BOTAS told the state-run Anatolian Agency.
Stocks at the Ceyhan depot, which had been used to keep the one million barrels per day (bpd) pipeline flowing have run dry, the official added.
“No trace suggesting sabotage has been found so far, but the cause will become clear after the fire is over,” the official said.
Turkey’s Energy Minister Hilmi Guler will travel on Thursday to the region to inspect the site of the explosion and said ahead of his departure that the incident was under control.
“The explosion is under control. Consequently, our fire-fighting efforts continue,” Dogan News Agency quoted Guler as saying.
Although the local authorities ruled out the possibility of sabotage and said a fault in the system had been detected before the blast; PKK terror organization reportedly has claimed the responsibility. The investigation is underway to find the cause of the blast.
The supply concerns helped to push oil prices higher and jump back above $120 a barrel on Thursday. Light, sweet crude for September delivery advanced $1.64 to $120.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after earlier rising as high as $121.78.
In London, September Brent crude added $1.45 to $118.51 a barrel.
BTC PARTNERS DECLARE FORCE MAJEURE
BP said the BTC partners had declared force majeure on exports, freeing themselves from contractual obligations, Reuters reported.
BP said on Thursday the group which it leads producing oil in Azerbaijan had started diverting crude slated for the Turkish port of Ceyhan to other routes, including the Georgian port of Supsa, after the explosion.
“We are actively considering alternative routes,” BP’s spokeswoman in Azerbaijan told Reuters.
She said some crude had already been diverted to Supsa on the Black Sea, adding BP and its partners had started reducing oil output from their fields to avoid a glut on the onshore facilities.
The BTC pipeline pumps one million barrel a day, equivalent of more than 1 percent of world supply, from fields in the Azeri sector of the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast.
BP owns 30.1 percent of BTC, while Socar holds 25 percent. Other shareholders include U.S. Chevron and ConocoPhillips, Norway’s StatoilHydro, Italy’s ENI and France’s Total.
Construction footage of the BTC pipeline below
Aug
4
August 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Aug
4
August 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment
By Steven Oberbeck
The Salt Lake Tribune
Saturday, August 2, 2008
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_10079510
Over the past several years, Patrick Byrne’s campaign to clean up Wall Street and end a practice that has destroyed companies and cost unwary investors billions of dollars generated plenty of publicity for him, mostly the wrong kind. Critics labeled him nuts, a conspiracy theorist, a complete wack job.
Byrne, the chief executive of the Utah-based discount online retailer Overstock.com, even found himself tagged a member of the “tin-foil hat” brigade, a reference to the flying saucer fanatics of the 1950s who adorned their heads with aluminium to ward off, or enhance, thoughts from aliens in outer space.
These days, when people talk of Byrne, the word “vindication” comes up a lot.
“You can always tell who the pioneers are — they’re the ones with all the arrows sticking out of their backs,” said James Angel, a finance professor at Georgetown University. “You really can’t understate what Byrne has accomplished.”
Three years ago Byrne, believing Overstock.com’s shares were under pressure from an illegal trading tactic known as “naked short-selling,” launched a campaign to end the practice. He termed it his own personal “jihad,” or holy war.
Short-selling is a legal practice in which brokerages allow investors to borrow and then sell a company’s stock on the hope its price will drop. If that happens, investors then can buy back the stock at a lower price, pocket the profit and return the shares to the brokerages.
Naked short-selling takes place when investors sell stock without first borrowing it. In market parlance, the seller is “naked” those shares. The usual outcome is that it creates an artificially high volume of shares for sale, which can drive down a company’s stock price.
In a naked short sale, the transaction is never truly completed because the short-seller doesn’t really possess the stock that was sold. That means the seller cannot deliver the shares to buyers, which in market jargon is called a “failure to deliver.”
… Big Victory
Byrne’s biggest victory in his jihad came July 15 when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued an emergency order that prohibited naked short-selling in the shares of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and 17 large investment banks.
The fear was that aggressive short-selling could exacerbate the plunge in those company’s share prices. The SEC goal was to stem the downward pressure on the shares by requiring short-sellers to actually borrow shares before selling them.
“Even though they [the SEC] would never admit it, Patrick Byrne helped instruct them in the danger. When the time came, they understood the threat,” said Peter Chepucavage, a former attorney in the SEC’s Division of Market Regulation now with the Plexus Consulting Group in Washington, D.C.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Aug
4
August 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Thursday 31 July 2008
by: Faiz Shakir, ThinkProgress.org
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh - a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker - revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.
In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.
During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:
HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build - we in our shipyard - build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.
Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of - that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.
Watch it:
http://blip.tv/file/1144340
Hersh argued that one of the things the Bush administration learned during the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz was that, “if you get the right incident, the American public will support” it.
“Look, is it high school? Yeah,” Hersh said. “Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.”
Transcript:
HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected - which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted - one of the items was why not…
There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build - we in our shipyard - build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.
And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of - that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.
So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected - uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.
But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we’re into it.
…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up. Get it going.
Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.
Kevin Drum adds:
If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In one of David Manning’s famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:
“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”
In the end, of course, we didn’t do this. We just didn’t bother with any pretext at all.
Jul
28
July 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Summary:
A 61-foot barge carrying 419,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil was struck by a 600-foot tanker ship which caused an oil spill on the Mississippi river from the center of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.
The barge has been leaking fuel oil for two days underneath the Crescent City Connection Bridge, formerly known as the Greater New Orleans Bridge.
The effect on the economy is estimated at $100,000 a day and probably more as the river remained closed. Further, some of the suburbs stopped drawing drinking water from the river.
It was found that the tugboat operator, from a local company, was improperly licensed, having only the equivalency of an apprentice certificate.
[Posted By shades]
By seattlepi.com
Republished from The New York Times
Barge operator was improperly licensed
NEW ORLEANS — A sheen of oil coated the Mississippi River for nearly 100 miles from the center of this city to the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday following the worst oil spill on the river here in nearly a decade, after a fuel-laden barge collided with a heavy tanker the day before.
The thick industrial fuel pouring from the barge could be smelled for miles in city neighborhoods up and down the river, even as hundreds of cleanup workers struggled to contain the hundreds of thousands of gallons. Some environmentalists worried about reports of fish and bird kills in sensitive marsh areas downstream, though officials said they had so far heard of only a handful of oil-covered birds. Booms to protect areas richest in wildlife, at the river’s mouth, were being deployed.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the article
Jul
26
July 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jul
25
July 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[From Wikipedia]
John Conyers, Jr. (born May 16, 1929) is a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Michigan’s 14th congressional district, which includes all of Highland Park and Hamtramck, as well as parts of Detroit and Dearborn. A Democrat, he has served since 1965 (the district was numbered as the 1st District until 1993). In January 2007, Conyers became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in the 110th United States Congress.
Conyers is currently the second-longest serving member of the House (just after fellow Democrat from Michigan, John Dingell) and the fifth member of entire Congress by length of service (after Robert Byrd, Dingell, Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye). He is married to Monica Conyers, who is a member of the Detroit City Council.
Jul
24
July 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
[From Wikipedia]
Matthew R. Simmons, chairman and CEO of Simmons & Company International, is a prominent oil-industry insider and one of the world’s leading experts on the topic of peak oil.
Simmons was motivated by the 1973 energy crisis to create an investment banking firm catering to oil companies. In his previous capacity, he served as energy adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush.
Jul
24
July 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
2:11a ET Thursday, July 24, 2008
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
In a videotaped statement Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, disclosed some shocking details of the housing bailout legislation being rushed through Congress:
– The two troubled federal mortgage agencies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, will be given unlimited access to the U.S. Treasury without requiring any further approval from Congress.
– The U.S. national debt ceiling will be raised by $800 billion, which suggests that the bailout is expected to cost a lot more than the country is being told.
– All credit card transactions will have to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service, as if the country isn’t under enough government surveillance already.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
[source: http://www.gata.org/node/6446]
Jul
23
July 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Published: July 18, 2008
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Angry investors stormed out of the Karachi Stock Exchange on Thursday, hurling stones and planters at the building in protest over slumping share prices.
[Begin Excerpt]
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The benchmark index on the Karachi Stock Exchange, the nation’s biggest, declined by nearly 3 percent on Thursday. Investors demanded a temporary halt to trading. When the exchange management refused to stop trading, investors went on a rampage. The index has dropped by 36 percent since reaching a record high in April.
Some of the fury was also directed at the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, which this week removed a 1 percent daily limit on price declines. The restriction was aimed at halting a slide that has wiped out $30 billion in companies’ combined market value over three months.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Jul
21
July 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
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Letter from Marcus C. Rodriguez, CFP to Commodities Trading Futures Commission
Marcus C. Rodriguez, CFP®
30 S. Wacker Dr., 22nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60606
Phone: (312) 296-9598
Email: mrod@chicagocorp1.com
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Commodities Trading Futures Commission
Division of Market Oversight, Director
Mr. Richard Shilts
Three Lafayette Centre
1155 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20581
VIA: FACSIMILE: (202) 418-5527
RE: COMEX GC / CBOT ZG CAPPING / MARKET MANIPULATION, SYSTEMIC RISK POSED BY UNDUE CONCENTRATION & INADEQUATE MAINTENANCE MARGIN
Dear Mr. Schilts:
The CFTC glossary defines Manipulation as “any planned operation, transaction, or practice that causes or maintains an artificial price. Specific types include corners and squeezes as well as unusually large purchases or sales of a commodity or security in a short period of time in order to distort prices, and putting out false information in order to distort prices.” I suggest that this has been the case as it relates to the most recent visible coordinated intervention in the week of July 14th through the 18th with regard to gold (GC/ZG). Please see the following chart noting points A,B,C and D.
http://www.gata.org/node/6436
Jul
19
July 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:29pm EDT
By Emily Chasan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s emergency rule to curb abusive short selling in major financial stocks has ignited confusion on Wall Street about how it will be enforced.
On Tuesday, the SEC issued an emergency rule to prevent investors from making “naked” short sales of some of the biggest financial stocks.
The rule takes effect on Monday, and could last up to 30 days. But while the rule says what will not be allowed, Wall Streeters are scrambling to clarify how the rules will work to make sure they will be ready to trade next week.
“Right now, market participants are trying to get clarity on the many implementation and interpretative issues,” said Susan Grafton, a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who represents broker-dealers and investment managers.
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association has already approached the SEC about the rule.
“We hope to solicit clarification on several important issues to ensure the market continues to operate smoothly and with the necessary liquidity,” Ira Hammerman, general counsel and senior managing director at SIFMA, said in a statement.
SIFMA declined to elaborate further on the clarifications it was seeking.
Among the top concerns may be whether the SEC will grant an exemption for options market makers, who often sell shares short to keep their markets running smoothly.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the full story
Jul
19
July 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has received a deluge of requests to amend short-selling rules it enacted just two years ago as the New York Stock Exchange continues its efforts to enforce existing regulations.
JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) has become the fifth bank to be censured and fined by the NYSE’s regulatory division for violations of trading rules meant to curb abusive short-selling.
The New York bank agreed to pay $400,000, without admitting or denying guilt. NYSE Regulation said Tuesday that JPMorgan violated numerous rules related to its handling of stock short-sales, a strategy in which the trader is supposed to borrow the shares, or at least find a broker who says he has them and is willing to lend them, before he makes the trade.
NYSE Reg says JPMorgan violated Regulation SHO, a rule put into effect in January 2005 by the SEC to curb abusive trading practices by limiting the ability of traders to do what’s called a naked short-sale, which is selling a stock they haven’t borrowed.
The exchange’s enforcement arm says JPMorgan inaccurately marked sell orders, submitted inaccurate trading data and transacted short sales without reasonable grounds to believe the stocks could be borrowed. JPMorgan also had programming and systems errors that caused many of the problems.
A naked short-sale frequently results in those shares not being delivered to the buyer within the mandated three-day window. This is called a “failure to deliver,” and despite assertions by some that the problem is not pervasive, it is enough of a problem to have attracted the increasing attention of the SEC and market regulators.
In July, Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), Daiwa Securities, Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ) and Credit Suisse collectively paid $1.3 million for similar violations. They were the first firms to be slapped with a NYSE censure since the enactment of Reg SHO.
Daiwa paid the heftiest fine of those four, $400,000. NYSE Reg said one of the firm’s proprietary trading desks transacted 103,000 short-sales without locating the shares to be borrowed. Also, the NYSE said, Daiwa’s stock loan desk didn’t document compliance with the stock locate requirements.
Critics complain that the enforcement efforts to date lack sharp enough teeth to discourage future abuses.
JPMorgan’s fine looks miniscule compared to its $160 billion market capitalization. Through June, the bank had reported $1.7 billion in revenue from equity markets activities. A bank spokesman had no comment Tuesday.
“By levying a fine that is but a tiny fraction of the ill-gotten gains, the SEC is pinning a ‘Kick Me’ sign on the backside of the rule of law,” says Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com (nasdaq: OSTK - news - people ), and big activist for reform in trading rules. “But the SEC is not monolithic: Though the brass are mostly captured regulators, in the rank and file, and at the highest echelons, I believe there are people who understand the gravity of the situation and who want to do something about it.”
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the story
Jul
15
July 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jul
12
July 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Thursday, 10 July a.d. 2008
Normally I don’t read the news because it just makes me mad & I can’t do anything about it, but this morning Yahoo financial ran a catchy little story: “Fannie, Freddie Stocks & Bonds Plummet. A firestorm of anxiety over the ability of US mortgage giants Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac to get the capital they need to survive sent their stocks & bonds plummeting on Thursday.”
Translation: As a sop to banks & the building industry, congress years ago set up two Government Sponsored Enterprises, a.k.a. “engines of inflation,” called Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. For at least the last 10 years both have been really sick with corruption, but both were necessary to have a hole into which to shovel & legitimate the rotten mortgage-backed paper that Goldman Sachs & Bear-Stearns & their ilk were floating, not to mention rotten mortgages from the land’s length & breadth.
Now that the accumulating gas hath blown the sewer sky-high, the problems with Fannie & Freddie are worsening, and nobody wants their paper. But wait! It’s time to shuck the mortgage-backed credit crisis off onto the taxpayer’s back & away from Wall Street.
Fannie & Freddie are in trouble, squawk! Save them, save them, congress, or else how will the government bail out the banks that caused this mess?
Bottom line: Does this mean more inflation, or less?
Bernanke already bailed out Bear-Stearns & other culprits, & has tossed into the fire about half the Fed’s assets. Will he toss in government assets to keep these two beasts alive? Can a duck swim? Is a pig’s rear pork? However they work this latest subcrisis of the great crisis out, (1) they will inflate much more, & (2) the taxpayer, not the culprits, will pay.
Having vented, let us now to markets!
STOCKS hinted, whispered, & winked today that they will, after all, rally, rising 81.58 to 11,229 (Dow). Rally will be short-lived and shallow. Doubt it will rise above 12,250. Stocks will, I fear, drop much further.
Dow in Gold Dollars today is barely 1/20th ounce off its post-1999 low. Sell stocks while you may yet find a buyer.
The US DOLLAR INDEX, bless its heart, doesn’t know which way to turn. It lost 8 basis points today to wind up at an equivocal 72.49. Most likely it is headed up, probably to 74.50, but not fast, & not steadily.
Before I forget: Remember that the Fed (& the government) have two & only two weapons: inflation & blarney. They are already shooting that inflation machine gun, & since that’s not working they will shortly blast us with blarney. Paulson, Bernanke, even King George himself will appear mouthing how “the economy is basically sound & recovering, the dollar is healthy, etc.” & other laughable incredibilities. But watch for it. That’s their next move, to buy time.
GOLD & SILVER have already broken out of their correction ranges but they are in that sticky break out area where they have not yet revved up the motor enough to pull away from the past. That would mean crossing the last highs at 945 & 1835 with a two-day close over those levels. I have been thinking we would see at least one and maybe two more down days before that happens, but all that may be past, thanks to Fannie, Freddie, Bennie, and Muffie.
Do not under ANY circumstances short silver or gold. In fact, buy and keep buying all you can get. An enormous upmove is beginning — don’t miss it.
Argentum et aurum comparenda sunt –
– Silver and gold must be bought.
Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger
Jul
12
July 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Wednesday 09 July 2008
By: Dean Baker, The Center for Economic and Policy Research
Plummeting house prices will leave millions of homeowners dependent almost exclusively on Social Security in their retirement.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that with the loss in home value in the housing meltdown, many families will be left with nothing but Social Security and Medicare to support them in retirement.
Washington, DC- As Senators McCain and Obama fine-tune their plans for Social Security in preparation for the 2008 presidential election, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) shows that, due to the collapse of the housing bubble, the vast majority of Americans have accumulated little or no wealth. This means that they will be almost completely reliant on Social Security and Medicare to support them in their retirement years.
The study, “The Impact of the Housing Crash on Family Wealth,” analyzed the wealth holdings of families in all age cohorts in 2004 and projected the wealth of these families in 2009. The findings are presented by income quintile under three scenarios- real house prices remain at current levels, real house prices fall by an additional 10 percent, or real house prices fall by an additional 20 percent. In all three scenarios, the vast majority of these families will have little or no housing wealth in 2009.
“This extraordinary destruction of wealth will have tremendous implications for millions of families,” said report co-author Dean Baker. “Coupled with a very low personal savings rate, this means that many people, especially those near retirement will only have Social Security and Medicare to rely on once they leave the workforce.”
The report projects that if house prices stay the same through 2009, the median household headed by a person between the ages of 45 and 54, those in their prime earning years, will have 24.7 percent less wealth than did the median household in this age group in 2004. These households will have accumulated just $113,268 in net worth in 2009, barely $15,000 more than their counterparts in 1989, whose net worth totaled $97,600.
If real house prices fall 10 percent, the median household in the 45 to 54 cohort will see a 34.6 percent loss in wealth compared with the median in 2004 while families in the 18 to 34 cohort will lose of 67.6 percent. If prices fall by 20 percent, the most pessimistic scenario, families in the 55 to 64 cohort will experience a loss of 49.6 percent of their wealth compared to the same cohort in 2004.
This analysis should also prompt serious re-examination of policy proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare for near retirees. Baker commented, “policies that perhaps could have been justified at the peak of the housing bubble make much less sense now that tens of millions of near-retirees have just seen most of their wealth disappear.”
In analyzing wealth holdings for these families, the authors used data from the Federal Reserve Board’s 2004 Survey of Consumer Finance. The authors also used the S&P 500 and the Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Index to adjust for equity values and home price changes between 2004 and 2009.
———-
The Center for Economic and Policy Research is an independent, nonpartisan think tank that was established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives. CEPR’s Advisory Board of Economists includes Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz; Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University; and Eileen Appelbaum, Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.
[http://www.truthout.org/article/housing-market-meltdown-cause-massive-losses]
Jul
12
July 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Colum Lynch and Nora Boustany
Washington Post
July 11, 2008
[http://www.infowars.com/?p=3285]
UNITED NATIONS, July 10 — The chief prosecutor of the Internationals Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity in the orchestration of a campaign of violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the nation’s Darfur region during the past five years, according to U.N. officials and diplomats.
The action by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, will mark the first time that the tribunal in The Hague charges a sitting head of state with such crimes, and represents a major step by the court to implicate the highest levels of the Sudanese government for the atrocities in Darfur.
Some U.N. officials raised concerns Thursday that the decision would complicate the peace process in Darfur, possibly triggering a military response by Sudanese forces or proxies against the nearly 10,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers located there. At least seven peacekeepers were killed and 22 were injured Tuesday during an ambush by a well-organized and unidentified armed group.
Representatives from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — met with U.N. officials Thursday to discuss the safety of peacekeepers in Darfur. U.N. military planners have begun moving peacekeepers to safer locations and are distributing food and equipment in case the Sudanese government cuts off supplies.
“All bets are off; anything could happen,” said one U.N. official, adding that circumstantial evidence shows that the government of Sudan orchestrated this week’s ambush. “The mission is so fragile, it would not take much for the whole thing to come crashing down.”
Sudan’s U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, said rebels are responsible for the attack on U.N. peacekeepers, and insisted that Sudanese forces will not retaliate against foreign peacekeepers. However, he warned that the announcement of charges against Bashir or other senior officials would “destroy” international efforts to reach a peace settlement in Darfur.
“Ocampo is playing with fire,” Mohamad said. “If the United Nations is serious about its engagement with Sudan, it should tell this man to suspend what he is doing with this so-called indictment. There will be grave repercussions.”
Bashir has been at the center of international efforts to seek a political solution to the crisis. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and President Bush have routinely reached out to Bashir on issues such as counterterrorism and the deployment of peacekeepers. Bush envoys have met regularly with Bashir, and former envoy Andrew S. Natsios delivered a missive from Bush to the Sudanese leader in March 2007 urging him to allow more U.N. and African peacekeepers in Darfur.
“I will present my case and my evidence to the [ICC] judges, and they will take two to three months to decide,” Moreno-Ocampo said in an interview Wednesday, referring to a pretrial panel made up of judges from Brazil, Ghana and Latvia. “We will request a warrant of arrest, and the judges have to evaluate the evidence.” On Thursday, Moreno-Ocampo’s office said in a statement that the prosecutor will “summarize the evidence, the crimes and name individual(s) charged” at a news conference Monday in The Hague.
[End of excerpt]
Click to read the rest of the article
Jul
11
July 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Congressman Hodes-
I’m writing to express my gratitude to you for voting nay on H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. It is for this and your voting record to date that come next election, you have my vote.
It’s obvious to most of us now that our country is in an absolute crisis.
On September 10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld reported to Congress that the Pentagon can’t account for 2.3 Trillion Dollars.
We also know from Mr. Fujita’s testimony in the Japanese Parliament that people profited from insider trading with foreknowledge about 9/11 placing Put options against both United and American Airlines.
Just last night on a conference call Dennis Kuncinich stated he doesn’t even know if Continuity of Government is currently in effect and what it would take for the President to escalate our crises by suspending the Constitution.
Blackwater was recently caught for opening a new facility on the border of Mexico under the name of two subsidiaries of a shell company which begs the question, “How many other Blackwater training facilities have been built across the nation using the same tactics?” And all of this after a very suspicious incident in the Middle East where many civilians were killed by Blackwater employees and to date not a single person has been held accountable.
Under the Patriot Act our government can search our homes when we are/are not home without a warrant evening taking our possessions without court approval.
Torture is now legal and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 has gutted Posse Comitatis allowing our troops to operate within the United States against the Governor’s will.
And in addition to all of this whistle blower Sibel Edmonds claims we have a nuclear black market run by some of the highest officials in Washington. Of course we’ll never learn who these people are since John Ashcroft used the 1999 State Secrets Act to stifle her entire case and gag her from speaking to anyone — except for Congress if she is subpoenaed to testify.
With news like this one has to wonder what direction this country is headed in. Again, I want to thank you for doing your utmost to get this country back on track.
Jul
9
July 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“I’ve been sitting on this interview for a while, but after viewing the latest BBC piece on WTC7, I feel the time has come to release it in its entirety.”
Submitted by enigs on Wed, 07/09/2008 - 4:24pm
[http://www.911blogger.com/]
I’ve been sitting on this interview for a while, but after viewing the latest BBC piece on WTC7, I feel the time has come to release it in its entirety.
After locating Barry in mid 2007, Jason and I visited him and he graciously granted us an interview during a lunch break. He had agreed to grant us an interview under the conditions that we, at no time, associate his interview with his place of employment.
Jason and I were so thrilled with the content of the interview that we decided to release a few bits and pieces of it on both our show and Alex’s.
A few months later, as the film was nearing completion, I called Barry again to touch base and see how things were going. It took him a bit to remember who I was, but as soon as he did, he began complaining about phone calls to his place of employment and that he was in danger of losing his job. He requested to have his interview pulled from Loose Change, and I honored his request.
Fast forward to February, 2008, where I’m doing an interview with the BBC, and I’m informed by their crew that Barry told them the reason he asked for it to be pulled was because of the article on Prisonplanet claiming he was stepping over dead bodies, which he denies saying. I call Barry to attempt to rectify the situation, and he is adamant that he did not use the phrase “we were stepping over people”
Fast forward one more time to two days ago, when the BBC piece finally aired. I now feel an obligation to release his interview, in its entirety, into the public where it belongs for three reasons:
1) To see the difference between the interview he gave us, and the interview he gave the BBC.
2) To establish Barry’s timeline in his own words.
3) To preserve his testimony, in his own words, for the historical record.
I have remained true to my word and kept his interview out of the film, however, I can no longer keep it from the public. They deserve to hear Barry’s story, out of his own mouth.
As I say in the end of the video, I would appreciate it if Barry could enjoy his privacy and live his life in peace. My intention with releasing this is so his story can be told, not to cause him any further grief or suffering.
Click here to watch the entire interview about his experience inside WTC Building 7
———
Review Barry Jennings testimony in the recently released BBC documentary, The Third Tower starting at 18 min 20 sec
Jul
2
July 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment
On 9/11/2001, Indira worked for JP Morgan in a field called Risk Management, involving computer systems and programs designed to keep JP Morgan’s entire information and financial structure safe. She had also worked with a Defense Advanced Research Project - DARPA-funded technology group, with close ties to the CIA. This provided her with contacts deep within the government and corporate America. She was working on a program for JP Morgan - the next generation of risk software - whose function was to think about all the information going on throughout the enterprise as bank business was being conducted worldwide.
“I think there is a CIA within the CIA,” Indira told FTW. “I think there is a Shadow CIA that does the Iran-Contra type of things–they get funding from illicit methods–and that the Saudi’s are in on it. They might have trained some operatives, and later it backfired.”
“It was blowback within blowback perhaps.”
Click here to listen to the June 8, 2008 interview
Jul
1
July 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Fortis expects a complete collapse of the US financial markets within a few days to weeks.”
De Telegraaf | June 30, 2008
BRUSSELS/AMSTERDAM - Fortis expects a complete collapse of the US financial markets within a few days to weeks. That explains, according to Fortis, the series of interventions of last Thursday to retrieve € 8 billion. “We have been saved just in time. The situation in the US is much worse than we thought”, says Fortis chairman Maurice Lippens. Fortis expects bankruptcies amongst 6000 American banks which have a small coverage currently. But also Citigroup, General Motors, there is starting a complete meltdown in the US”
This fits in the picture, with the other press releases last week, like the short advise of Goldman Sachs and some other of the same messages last week.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the full article
Jul
1
July 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jun
30
June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall “below zero”.
Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:46:15 -0500
[Summary from GNN.tv]
Summary:
As the American economy crumbles, the U.S. stock market is attempting to lower itself in line with the real economy. However, nothing upsets people who own stock in companies (capitalists) more than major losses in the stock market. In an attempt to protect the capitalist class, the chairman of the nation’s banking cartel is going to respond to major stock market hits by creating more money to pump the markets, for example by lowering interest rates, by increasing fiat loans to bankrupt fellow cartel members, and by using proxies to buy up troubled companies.
All of these measures are inflationary, meaning that they increase the supply of new paper money in circulation while actually available goods and services are disappearing. While a growing economy can absorb such inflation, in a collapsing economy such inflation risks becoming hyper-inflationary, and threatening the currency itself. There are only enough seats in the inflationary lifeboat for the biggest & best connected capitalists, so we can expect to see many small-time capitalists being wiped out.
[Posted By bacchus]
Click here to read the article in The London Telegraph
Jun
30
June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Officials should stop wringing their hands over sky-high rice prices caused by alleged changes in rice’s supply-demand fundamentals, and politicians should refrain from pointing accusative fingers at speculators and hoarders. The rice-price problem is a weak dollar problem. Until the dollar strengthens, the nominal dollar prices of rice and other commodities will remain elevated.”
by Steve H. Hanke and David Ranson
Steve H. Hanke is professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. David Ranson is head of research at H.C. Wainwright & Co., Economics Inc.
This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on June 10, 2008.
Rice prices have ratcheted up during the past three years. In the last year alone, they’ve more than doubled, sparking urban food riots in several countries. Politicians have been quick to blame speculators and hoarders. Their blame is misplaced.
The most recent rice price spike is partially the result of countries such as India and Egypt imposing restrictions and bans on exports, plus the desire of other governments including the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer, to bulk up their stockpiles. But the blame for the long-term trend of higher prices should be placed upon those who’ve delivered a weak U.S. dollar.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the story
Jun
30
June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“So will the dollar collapse this summer? Yes, I expect so.”
28 June 2008 — GoldMoney Alert from James Turk
It has been my view expressed in these alerts and elsewhere over the past several months that there will be a currency crisis this summer caused by a plummeting US dollar. Summer of course began a few days ago, so it is reasonable to ask whether my view has changed. It hasn’t.
The US dollar is now standing on the edge of the precipice. In fact, it is already peering over the edge as we can see in the following chart of the US Dollar Index.
There are several important observations to make from this chart. First, the dollar is in a major bear market. It peaked at 120.97 on July 5, 2001 and has been declining ever since within the major downtrend channel delineated by the red parallel lines.
Trends do not change unless there is some solid fundamental reason for them to change. There is only one way to strengthen a currency - raise interest rates. The Federal Reserve again failed at its FOMC meeting this past week to raise rates. So the only logical and prudent assumption is that the downtrend in the dollar will continue.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the article
Jun
30
June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor
Last Updated: 1:21am BST 01/07/2008
The global economy may be heading for a far deeper crisis than is expected and a bout of deflation in the world’s biggest economies is now a possibility, according to one of the world’s most highly regarded economic institutions.
The Bank for International Settlements has warned that many in the City and elsewhere may have underestimated the scale of the coming economic downturn in one of its most sombre portraits yet of the international financial system.
The Swiss institution - known as the central bankers’ bank - issued the alert in its annual report, released today.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the entire article
Jun
30
June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
Click here to read Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article in its entirety
Jun
29
June 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jun
27
June 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jun
25
June 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
By Paul Richardson and Paul Okolo
June 21 (Bloomberg) — Chevron Corp.’s Nigerian unit halted onshore oil production after one of its pipelines in Delta state was “breached” by a suspected act of sabotage. A militant group said the attack was carried out by “patriotic youths.”
About 120,000 barrels a day of crude have been halted by the blowing up of the pipeline, Agence France-Presse reported today. That equates to about 6 percent of the nation’s daily output, according to Bloomberg calculations. The incident, which occurred June 19, has been reported to authorities, San Ramon, California- based Chevron said in an e-mailed statement today.
“Onshore production has been shut in order to protect the environment,” Kurt Glaubitz, a spokesman for Chevron, said in a phone interview from San Ramon. “We’re hopeful that production can be restored as soon as possible.”
He declined to say how much crude output was affected.
Nigeria is Africa’s second-largest oil producer after Angola. Rebels in the Niger Delta, which produces all of the nation’s oil, are sabotaging the industry’s infrastructure to press their demand for a greater share of the area’s oil wealth and more political power. Royal Dutch Shell Plc said on June 19 it shut down the Bonga oil field in Nigeria because of militant action, halting shipments as much of 190,000 barrels a day.
Nigeria produced 1.9 million barrels a day of oil in May, according to Bloomberg estimates.
`Angry Youths’
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a rebel group known as MEND, said the Chevron pipeline, known as Abiteye-Olero, was attacked by “angry youths who we are now empowering with more powerful explosives and new techniques to destroy additional pipelines.”
Continuing supply disruptions in Nigeria have been a factor in the near doubling of crude prices in the last year. Crude oil for July delivery rose $2.69, or 2 percent, to $134.62 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on June 20. Futures climbed to a record $139.89 on June 16.
Nigeria’s government should free Henry Okah, a MEND leader, in order for the attacks to be halted “before Nigeria’s oil export reaches zero,” Jomo Gbomo, a MEND spokesman, said in the group’s statement. The movement has made the release of Okah, who is facing a secret trial in the northern city of Jos for treason and weapons-smuggling, a condition for suspending their activities.
After MEND’s attack on Shell’s facilities on June 19, Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua ordered security for oil installations in the Niger Delta to be “beefed up” and said militants must be prepared to face the consequences of their actions.
“Yar’Adua should not be deceived by the criminals within the armed forces who are pushing him to enter into a fight for their own selfish interest as we don’t see how the military can emerge victorious in guerrilla warfare,” Gbomo said.
Segun Adeniyi, a spokesman for Yar’Adua, declined to comment on the Chevron incident when contacted today in the national capital, Abuja.
To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Richardson in Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net; Paul Okolo in Lagos at pokolo@bloomberg.net.
Jun
25
June 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jun
23
June 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
2008-06-23 17:28:07
Commodity Online
HANOI: Vietnam has chosen a novel method to contain trade deficit that has tripled this year—temporarily ban gold imports.
Vietnam, the second largest gold investor in the world has already imported 60 tonnes of gold valued at US$ 1.8 bn, a 100 percent increase over the same period last year. The price of gold was quoted by local dealers at around $US873 an ounce, lower than international prices
The suspension of gold imports is not likely to raise domestic prices because of plentiful supplies and weak demand. This is as part of the country’s effort to rein in inflation.
But traders added only a prolonged suspension could cut domestic supplies and trigger a scramble for safe-haven assets. Fears that the dong could fall in value are making dollar holders reluctant to let go of their foreign exchange.
Traditionally, Vietnamese use gold for savings, jewellery and real estate transactions but when inflation is high many choose gold or the U.S. dollar to hedge against inflation.
The central bank have given quotas to 40 banks and trading houses to import 73 tonnes of gold in 2008, up slightly from about 70 tonnes in 2007.
Vietnam imported 77.7 tonnes of gold for jewellery and investments in 2007. On the other hand main gold consumer India imported more than 700 tonnes last year. Analysts,however, don’t expect the Vietnamese decision to have any significant impact on gold markets.
Following a year of overheating and high credit growth, 2008 has been strained for Vietnam, where macroeconomic stability was taken for granted as it boasted one of the world’s highest growth rates, averaging 7.5% a year since 2000.
Jun
23
June 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Summary from GNN.com
The following quote should make all U.S. citizens hang their heads in shame, especially when you consider the source: “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.”
Who said it? No, it was not some weak-kneed Democrat who found a moment of courage. It was made by now retired Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba who led the investigation in the Abu Ghraib fiasco.
The remarks are part of a new report compiled by Physicians for Human Rights that found U.S. personnel used torture on detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Doctors and mental health experts examined 11 detainees held for long periods in the prison system established by President Bush after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. All of them eventually were released without charges.
The doctors and experts determined that the men had been subject to cruelties that ranged from isolation, sleep deprivation and hooding to electric shocks, beating and, in one case, being forced to drink urine.
The report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” concurs with a five-part McClatchy investigation of Guantanamo published this week.
By Warren P. Strobel
Republished from
McClatchyU.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account….
[end excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the article
Jun
22
June 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This is the full CBS 60 Minutes 2004 interview of Former Secretary Of Treasury Paul O’Neil and reporter Ron Suskind that discusses Bush asking his National Security Council to “find a way” to invade Iraq during their first meeting in January 2001. Almost 9 months before the September 11th attacks. This seems to have been forgotten by the mainstream media, and the Congress.
Jun
21
June 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jun
21
June 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jun
19
June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The clash between the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve over monetary strategy is causing serious strains in the global financial system and could lead to a replay of Europe’s exchange rate crisis in the 1990s, a team of bankers has warned.
“We see striking similarities between the transatlantic tensions that built up in the early 1990s and those that are accumulating again today. The outcome of the 1992 deadlock was a major currency crisis and a recession in Europe,” said a report by Morgan Stanley’s European experts.
Jun
19
June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Following his attempt to impeach Dick Cheney in 2007, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential contender, said Monday he wants the House of Representatives to consider a resolution to impeach President George W. Bush. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi consistently has said impeachment was “off the table.” The Democratic Party are hesitant to cause a scene on the sidelines of the Presidential Election that could distract voters. Kucinich read his proposed impeachment language, which resembled that used against Cheney in 2007, in a floor speech Monday 9 June 2008.
According to Tom D’Antoni of the Huffington Post, 35 Articles of Impeachment were delivered. Only one Article is required to justify the impeachment of the president. He contended Bush deceived the nation and violated his oath of office in leading the country into the Iraq war. Kucinich’s efforts to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney were unsuccessful. That resolution was killed, but only after Republicans initially voted in favor of taking up the measure to force a debate. Despite this failure, Kucinich has been widely commended for the motion. Kucinich won 50 percent of the vote in a five-way House Democratic primary in March, beating back critics who said he ignored business at home to travel the country in his quest to be president
Jun
19
June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Oil company Royal Dutch Shell says it has temporarily stopped production at its main offshore oilfield in Nigeria [Niger Delta], following a militant attack. The cut in supply equates to 6% of their total output of 2 million barrels or 120,000 barrels a day. With Nigeria as the number 3 OPEC supplier to the United States at 1.1 Million barrels a day and the US consumption rate of just under 20 millions barrels a day, this militant attack and resultant reduction in oil production doesn’t sound good for the American way of life.
The raid took place overnight on the Bonga oil platform about 120km (75 miles) off the coast of the Niger Delta, the company said.
It is the first attack on the oilfield, which normally produces about 200,000 barrels a day.
Shell has also been blamed for an oil spill in the Ogoni region of the Delta.
Oil is gushing from disused pipes abandoned by the company when it left the region nearly 15 years ago, following local protests.
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the story
Jun
19
June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
For generations, we’ve taken it for granted. But as prices soar and reserves dwindle, the time is fast approaching when mankind will have to live without oil. Are we ready to confront some really inconvenient truths? Michael Savage reports from the North Sea.
Thursday, 12 June 2008
Worryingly, for a world reliant on the dirt-cheap energy that oil provided throughout the last century, the idea that oil production in all nations may soon start to decline just as in the North Sea has been seeping into the mainstream. The “peak oil” theory – that oil production has reached its maximum and will soon begin its decline, bringing potentially catastrophic consequences to the modern world – no longer just comes from internet crackpots and conspiracy theorists; now geologists, market analysts and oil prospectors believe that this scenario is becoming reality. And within the past year, there have been signs that the major oil companies are admitting this themselves. If they are right, high petrol prices could be the least of the world’s problems.
The idea is simple enough. Those warning against an imminent peak oil crisis – the “peakists” – say that while the world will not totally run out of oil, all of the oil that is easy to reach has been all but used up, meaning that producing enough oil to meet the growing world demand is becoming an ever harder task. Worse, we now stand at the high water mark of oil production. That means that not only will we never be able to produce much more oil than the 87 million barrels a day we now consume, but world oil production will actually begin to fall very soon, causing not only ever higher prices, but also creating the prospect of shortages, industrial upheaval, battles over ever-depleting resources, and even an end to the modern world built upon the assumption of a plentiful supply of cheap oil.
“A lot of people keep talking about ‘this peak oil theory’ – but there’s nothing theoretical about it. It’s just a very obvious fact of nature,” says Colin Campbell, a geologist who searched for oil on behalf of several oil companies, and is the high priest of the peakists. “Oil is formed in the geological past. That means it’s a finite resource. That means production begins and ends, and passes a peak in between. So the fact that there is a peak is beyond dispute. We’ve had the first half of the age of oil, which has changed the world in every conceivable way. We now face a decline.”
Campbell is in no doubt that the world’s oil production is as high as it is ever going to get. “The result of the latest update I made using industry data was that the regular, conventional oil peaked in 2005 and if you put all the other types in – the heavy oils, the gas liquids, the Arctic oil, the deep water projects – I have it this year,” he says, in a softly spoken, matter-of-fact tone. “That’s not cast in stone. It could slip a year or two. But I’m absolutely confident that it’s in the right area.”
[End of Excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the story
Jun
19
June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
TEHRAN, June 16 (Reuters) - Iran has withdrawn around $75 billion from Europe to prevent the assets from being blocked under threatened new sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear ambitions, an Iranian weekly said.
Western powers are warning the Islamic Republic of more punitive measures if it rejects an incentives offer and presses on with sensitive nuclear work, but the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter is showing no sign of backing down.
“Part of Iran’s assets in European banks have been converted to gold and shares and another part has been transferred to Asian banks,” Mohsen Talaie, deputy foreign minister in charge of economic affairs, was quoted as saying.
[End of excerpt]
Click here to read the rest of the story
Jun
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June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
June 18 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve is just days away from completing the financing for its bailout of Bear Stearns Cos., after which the central bank will have another big decision to make: how to account for it.
Flip through the footnotes to the Fed’s latest annual report, and you’ll come across an open secret. The Fed doesn’t follow normal accounting rules, as promulgated by any of the major standard-setting boards. Rather, the Fed writes its own, in a document called the Financial Accounting Manual for Federal Reserve Banks.
If you ever wanted to design an accounting regime to help a bank cook its books, the Fed’s would be perfect. This doesn’t exactly inspire faith in the U.S. financial system, at a time when a good example might help a lot.
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Jun
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June 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
RBS Issues Global Stock and Credit Crash Alert
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph, London
Wednesday, June 17, 2008
The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.
“A very nasty period is soon to be upon us — be prepared,” said Bob Janjuah, the bank’s credit strategist.
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Jun
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June 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
