This news doesn’t surprise me at all: that Paulson, while heading the Treasury under Bush, ran off to his hedge fund GS buddies to conspire to figure out how to profit from the looming credit bubble collapse. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury have long been the private hunting preserve of the banking gnomes. This should end because it is painfully obvious that their rule has been a farce and a failure. They wrecked our economy, wrecked our banking system and wrecked our government. Arrest them all. Charge them with treason.
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There is no treason greater than to totally destroy the economy. It wasn’t wrecked by the unions, these are now nearly totally dead. The more the unions were killed off, the more our economy has been wrecked. It was wrecked by these same international money men and women pushing relentlessly for more free trade so they could kill the unions. All of these actions made the top 1% filthy rich and the rest of us, the lower 99%, increasingly poor.
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Lie, cheat and steal is the motto of the Treasury heads, the head of the Federal Reserve and much of our Congress. And they have collectively destroyed our nation. Here is the story about Paulson from Bloomberg News: How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word – Bloomberg
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Paulson had been pushing a plan in Congress to open lines of credit to the two struggling firms and to grant authority for the Treasury Department to buy equity in them. Yet he had told reporters on July 13 that the firms must remain shareholder owned and had testified at a Senate hearing two days later that giving the government new power to intervene made actual intervention improbable.
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Paulson told Congress and the New York Times that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were solvent. He then called for a secret war room meeting with all his buddies to conspire as to how they could all profit from insider information of what was really going on:
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At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure.
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Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge- fund managers and other Wall Street executives — at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006. In addition to Eton Park founder Eric Mindich, they included such boldface names as Lone Pine Capital LLC founder Stephen Mandel, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.
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Paulson told his gnome drinking/sexcapade buddies that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were insolvent. According to the Bloomberg News reporter, this insider information is legal! But LYING to the PUBLIC isn’t ‘legal’ at all. It is treason. We arrest ‘con artists’ but let this gang of rip off fiends go free? Nay, to be even richer than ever? Ridiculous!
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And nothing is stopping them as they create ever more ‘hedge funds’ that mainly hide money offshore where it can’t be taxed by our increasingly bankrupt government: Ex-Goldman, Mizuho Bankers Plan Edgebell Global Macro Hedge Fund Next Year.
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One of the biggest Derivative Beast operations is Citigroup. And they sell this monster’s excreta to unsuspecting investors who don’t understand derivatives or risk. And they sell this by LYING about risk, pretending that there was no risk at all. Another reason to arrest these con artists. Citigroup Saudi Deal Haunts Pandit as Family Claims $383 Million Wipeout – Bloomberg
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…the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, warned that Abbar didn’t have the risk-management capability of the large hedge funds that were typical clients of the bank’s “hybrid” desk, which in 2006 was trying to persuade him to move his family’s money into complex derivative securities.
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Just as these same gangsters persuaded gold bug hoarders to play the GLD derivative markets and then cheated them all, another Goldman Sachs mentor rip off program, so it was with Citigroup. They had fast talking con artists man the phones to lie to people and thus, gain access to their funds which they used to pay themselves huge ‘bonuses’.
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So, for the last three years everything on earth was done to save these stupid, rich hedge fund gnomes while loading all the mess onto entire countries. Now, all of these are going under, one by one. Unable to tax the rich thanks to offshore banking run by the Queen of England’s gnome army, every country on earth is being forced to turn on its own workers to fund the losses from the global trade/credit bubble. Here is the latest from the EU, the world’s biggest economy which is circling the drain: Belgium credit rating downgraded by S&P and France’s AAA Status in Tatters as Yields Surge. Already, Portugal, Spain and Italy have seen downgrades.
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None of this stops NATO which finished invading and looting Libya and is involved in fighting Serbs who suddenly found themselves in a ‘new country’ cooked up by the Bilderberg gang. NATO soldiers wounded in Kosovo clash comes on the heels of the huge mess in Pakistan. Why is NATO, supposedly designed to defend Europe, running around the planet, attacking everyone?
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The chaos in Europe is growing as 2 million British workers strike. Strikes are now continuous and rolling in Greece. If German workers get mad, all hell will break loose. In Spain, there is huge unemployment which will translate into serious problems. All these nations have voted in ‘conservatives’ in the hopes of seeing some sort of change but this will only make things much worse. The problem isn’t liberal or conservative, it is how does the EU and US run first world economies when the workers are being shoved into third world status?
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Since all the ‘rich’ counties are simultaneously cutting back social spending, their economies are going downhill since spending is collapsing. This, in turn, is hitting Asia as Asian Stocks, U.S. Futures Fall After S&P Downgrades Banks; Yen Weakens which is good news for Japan which is desperate to export to the US and EU and needs a weak currency. So does the EU. Their years as a top currency has caused foreign trade deficits.
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Meanwhile, American Airlines Lands in Bankruptcy. This should overjoy the global warming people. No more airplanes=more polar bears. China, on the other hand, deliberately restricted its own growing credit bubble for the last three years and incidentally, this triggered troubles elsewhere, of course. Now, China Cuts Reserve Ratios as Europe Crisis Threatens Growth. That is, there is no more bubble there so credit can be less restricted.
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The EU and US have joined all of China’s neighbors in trying to isolate China so the US can militarily menace China in Asia by posting more and more troops all over the region. This encircling of China and Russia is the ‘great game’ which will cause WWIII. The US thought they pulled a rabbit out of the hat recently when Clinton gave military promises to all our trade rivals who are killing US jobs. So, China is now retaliating: China pulls out of aid partnership:
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China had been participating in pre-conference talks that have been going for months on a summit draft outcome document, and negotiators from OECD countries had been hoping – naively according to some observers – that it would sign off on a Busan agreement.
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China provided about $40bn in aid over the last six decades, much of it to African countries where Beijing has growing interest in oil, minerals and other natural resources. The African Development Bank says there is concern that China, India and Brazil are blurring the boundaries between aid and commercial investment, undermining the hard-won consensus that aid should be devoted exclusively to reducing poverty.
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The cheek of the Chinese! Tying ‘aid’ to access to markets! HAHAHA. As if the EU and US don’t do this nonstop. As for ‘aid’ reducing poverty: how insane is this???? Here we see, in the first world nations, the very rich pushing very hard to not pay any taxes and to reduce services and aid to the poor! The indifference to their own poor coupled with this pious concern about African poor people is typical of con artists.
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And NONE of this first world ‘aid’ is designed to save anyone in Africa. It is pure bribes to dictators to keep them in power and to keep access to commodities in Africa while keeping the people there mired in poverty, forever. This ‘aid’ is mainly a cover for looting.
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Here is a refreshing story telling some of the truth about EU/US aid: Aid effectiveness, vulture funds and multinationals | Liz Ford | Global development | guardian.co.uk
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We report on the legal loophole that is allowing vulture funds to prey on the world’s poorest countries. A joint investigation by Greg Palast for the Guardian and the BBC found that funds were using loopholes around the world, including in Jersey, to demand repayment of debts from African countries.
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See? Strings attached! Big time! And, instead of arresting the Goldman Sachs insider dealers and Paulson, the homeless and jobless are being rounded up as 200 arrested as cops raid Occupy LA camp.
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[China Cuts Reserve Ratios as Europe Crisis Threatens Growth. That is, there is no more bubble there so credit can be less restricted.] About commercial banks’ reserves’ ratio at Central Banks: this issue confuses many people. Canadian and Australian systems operate without this ratio and seem to do well. When a loan is made by any bank in a system of reserve banking, the amount of the loan is not drawn via the reserves held at the Central Bank but via a new bank deposit so that the banking system’s overall balance sheet would show a simultaneous increase in asset and an increase in liability. If and when the new deposit is spent into circulation, the (new) recipient puts it back into another deposit so that the aggregate reserve at that central bank does not change. Banks thus help you to create (to-day) electronic debt money out of (your) future cash flow, and in case the loan is drawn in cash, the latter is created by the central bank out of thin air by printing it. Therefore, do movements in reserve requirements affect the level of bank lending?
In Philadelphia, arrests of people just marching? (Link:
Exposed: Media fabricated ’empty tents’ story at OccupyLSX
Funny story this.
They claimed that the tents at occupy in London were empty.
But seems like the “newspaper” lied.
‘The chaos in Europe is growing as 2 million British workers strike. ‘
UK is in a massive Depression, yes?
Aid to Africa? Like aid to Haiti Food aid produces more people.
“This should overjoy the global warming people. No more airplanes=more polar bears.”
But the pensioners won’t be happy:
http://tinyurl.com/7qbk6xa
WW3=less people=lot more cockroaches
@shockuhzulu
cockroaches and Keith Richards…?
In China, corrupt bankers can and DO receive the death penalty. And yes, I believe the US should adopt this measure as well. Why? You rob a liquor store of $200 and you get ten years in prison. What IS the proper penalty for looting billions? Oh well, the banking ‘gnomes’ are damn lucky I’m not in charge. I should be, imho.
In the US bankers run things and have for 100 years if not longer. Read this interesting speech by Eugene Debs from 1918. Nothing whatsoever has changed. Wall Street still runs the nation.
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“They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. This is too much, even for a joke. But it is not a subject for levity; it is an exceedingly serious matter. ”
“These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United Sates. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.”
“Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the “patriots,” while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims—they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight. ”
“The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt.”
article continues
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29638.htm
The ruling elite has a very effective system in place to safe guard the system from genuine democracy. Any real impetus for genuine reform or change is eliminated one way or other, either directly through assassination (JFK, MLK and others), police action (the various big popular strikes including the Occupy movements) or more indirectly through media (perception) manipulation, the legal system etc etc
Eric Margolis has written a good article describing the machinations against Syria and the Great Game moves by outside forces like Turkey, Israel etc as I was talking about before. Well worth a read.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29851.htm
Have you seen this?
y William Wan, Published: November 29
The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.
For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.
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These are clips from Chinese TV news reports and from episodes of a TV docudrama that a group of Georgetown students used to help assemble the largest public database on more than 3,000 miles of tunnels dug by the Chinese to hide and move their missiles and nuclear arms. (Note: The text in these clips was not written by The Washington Post.)
These are clips from Chinese TV news reports and from episodes of a TV docudrama that a group of Georgetown students used to help assemble the largest public database on more than 3,000 miles of tunnels dug by the Chinese to hide and move their missiles and nuclear arms. (Note: The text in these clips was not written by The Washington Post.)
Georgetown students set out to map Chinese tunnels that house nuclear weapons
China, India perform dangerous new dance
U.S. pivot to Asia makes China nervous
U.S. names China, Russia as main cybertheft culprits
View all Items in this Story
Led by their hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.
The result of their effort? The largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.
The study is yet to be released, but already it has sparked a congressional hearing and been circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, including the Air Force vice chief of staff.
Most of the attention has focused on the 363-page study’s provocative conclusion — that China’s nuclear arsenal could be many times larger than the well-established estimates of arms-control experts.
“It’s not quite a bombshell, but those thoughts and estimates are being checked against what people think they know based on classified information,” said a Defense Department strategist who would discuss the study only on the condition of anonymity.
The study’s critics, however, have questioned the unorthodox Internet-based research of the students, who drew from sources as disparate as Google Earth, blogs, military journals and, perhaps most startlingly, a fictionalized TV docudrama about Chinese artillery soldiers — the rough equivalent of watching Fox’s TV show “24” for insights into U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.
Repeat:
But the strongest condemnation has come from nonproliferation experts who worry that the study could fuel arguments for maintaining nuclear weapons in an era when efforts are being made to reduce the world’s post-Cold War stockpiles.
Hahhaha ‘experts’
What a joke heh. Fearmongering at it’s finest. Maybe they should have mapped out the US system instead.
@JT…Keith Richards LOL. He’s got more lives than the luckiest cat that ever lived. He won’t die. Just mutate from all those chemicals he ingested…
“A Times article the next day said the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were inspecting Fannie and Freddie’s books and cited Paulson as saying he expected their examination would give a signal of confidence to the markets”….and this was preceded by his testimony at the July 10, 2008 HFSC hearing. He said confidence was being restored to the capital markets, including FNM and FCA, as evidenced by recent capital “investments”. He said this while both stocks were gapping down about 50% that morning as he spoke and not a single enlightened soul on the HFSC knew enough to ask him to explain the contradiction. i was sitting about 15 feet away from him when he said it.
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Is the “GLD” derivative you talk about this EFT (exchange traded fund)?….
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=gld&insttype=&freq=2&show=&time=13
How does investment in GLD constitute a con or a rip-off?
Looks like it has been a great investment vehicle ever since its inception back in 2005. All it does is mirror the price of gold.
But, since it has been growing at a fairly steady rate (about 25%/yr for past 5 years), if it was displayed using a linear vertical axis, it would eventually show a hockey-stick rise … as is true of *all* charts of *anything* which grow at a constant rate, when displayed with a linear vertical scale. So that is all a hockey stick necessarily shows: sleady growth … could be just 0.2% per year … if displayed with a linear vertical axis, and using enough time periods: hockey stick! When the plot starts to exceed 45 degree slope and shoot up rapidly only depends on the scaling, rate of growth and the number of time periods that rate of growth is applied to. Eventually, any steady growth = hockey stick! An unsustainable bubble.
But when displayed with a semi-log vertical scale, the hockey-stick characteristic completely disappears, by mathematical necessity, and instead, the chart will show a line or plot which will steadily rise over time with some constant, characteristic slope proportional to the rate of growth.
So, using a linear vertical scale, a hockey stick will be seen in gold metal (and also GLD), if gold continues to rise at the rate it has over the past 5 years … aka bubble!
Since the banking system is based on promising interest at some rate, that also constitutes steady growth. And it will by necessity result in …. hockey stick! Equal to an unsustainable bubble. So the system of interest payments used by banks is a flawed design … it can work for a while, but then, by necessity, eventually, it must result in an unsustainable bubble and a crash. Always, eventually. It’s really a mathematical necessity.
This type of inevitble bubble can be seen by plotting data right on a web page using the java plotting app at http://www.pa.uky.edu/~phy211/graph_applets/plot_graph.html …
for example use 0 to 100 for the x axis and use 1.25^x for the y parameter, which represents a rate of growth of 25% per period (equals 1.25 raised to the x power = formula for 25% rate of growth for x periods). Then can plug in different rates of growth, such as 5% = 1.05^x to see variations.
Oh, perhaps the GLD derivatives you mention are not GLD specifically, but rather the puts and calls on that index fund. Yes, the options are always manipulated to screw the outside people who trade in them.
That manipulation is well calculated and described here at the Maximum Option Pain Calculator …
http://www.optionpain.com/OptionPain/Option-Pain.php
The insider profiteering, rigged markets and pumped-up military industrial complex (thanks to 30+ years of military stimulus spending) does not end well. If we don’t put a decisive stop to this, the Four Horsemen will begin to ride.
In the 14th century, Venetian banking gnomes rigged the first global economic crash, which led to credit and trade collapse, wars and bloody looting expeditions, rolling famines and food riots, the fall of governments — (sound familiar???) — and eventually, to massive depopulation and the depredations of Black Death. Worldwide population fell by as much as 25%; Europe lost between 35%-50% of its population.
Far from leaving more resources for whoever was left, population collapse caused labor shortages, worsened famines, and halted innovation as the talent pool drained.
The banks themselves used immense speculative leverage and instant credit creation out of thin air to create massive currency speculation schemes, parasitizing and monopolizing real production for decades. After sucking the life out of local economies due to crushing debt, the banks grew massive in size, although effectively bankrupt since their wildly leveraged claims on the value of future goods and services could not be supported by exhausted real production and trade. The bankers demanded rates of return far above the Main street economy’s ability to grow and produce real surplus. As defaults grew, the banks kept the bad news off the balance sheets, and were able to keep operating only because news of their weakened position had not been widely circulated.
Too Big to Fail operated unchecked in an era of no regulation. There were no governments with the national sovereignty to control the banks and the creation of credit, or to force zombie banks into bankruptcy in an orderly way, and replace fictitious bank credit and money with national credit. The only authority to rival the bankers at the time was the Papacy, but far from fighting against the debt-looting of international bankers, the Pope aided and abetted them. Bankers even dictated which cities Crusaders should invade, sack and loot.
Elaine has written about this event before, but the parallels with our world and the eurocrisis are even more striking now than ever.
For an in-depth discussion of exactly how letting banking gnomes run amok caused the fall of governments, and brought war, death and disaster across wide swaths of Asia and Europe, here’s a link to a provocative article written many years ago:
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/954_Gallagher_Venice_rig.html#top
It makes a fascinating, and instructive read, today.
Free trade with no regulation, anyone?
@WilliamMBoston, great post on the mathematical underpinnings of why financiers’ insatiable demands for steady-state growth always and inevitably clash with real world economies.
No ‘real’ system produces steady-state growth, quarter after quarter, always to infinity. In the real economy, farmers, producers and businesspeople have to deal with the vagaries of weather, human and machinery failures, talent shortages, resource scarcities, shipwrecks, volcanoes, floods and earthquakes — in other words, with Life. Although risk pricing, hedging and insurance are supposed to cover these risks, when no one takes a haircut because the whole scheme has been leveraged into the stratosphere, the system must collapse.
Bankers with no skin in the game deserve no return. These jerks long ago removed their own stakes and substituted funny money, leaving the rest of us playing with and risking real capital.
When a thief gets caught in a con, there should be hell to pay — or the game should end altogether, as it’s not worth playing.
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You know what brought the Black Plague to Europe?
Venice. Via trade with China and India! The rats came on the ships that sailed to eastern ports. The Lombards: I descended from that family, the branch that was suddenly left dangling in London back then. They changed their name from the House of Lombard to ‘Bard’.
The collapse of the European economy wasn’t just due to banking or plague. The Little Ice Age began! The Medieval Warm Cycle ended! Ah! Ahem…a story in itself, no? History is full of these cyclical activities we must learn to heed.
A devastating confluence of events: climate change, speculative collapse, disease.
One of which was 100% under human control.
Ruinous financial practices added greatly to human misery, in displacing vulnerable populations, causing shortages of vital commodities, egging on farflung wars and military adventurism.
Without financial collapse, would the world have been in for a hard time anyway, with a Little Ice Age? Undoubtedly,
Would humankind have been better off, more literate, more scientifically advanced, more philosophically enlightened, etc. without having to undergo massive loss of life and talent, diversion of resources into destructive enterprises? We’ll never know. But in looking at history and seeing how we might have produced a better outcome, maybe we can avoid repeating our worst mistakes.
Or can we?
One thing of interest to me is how Europeans suddenly began seeking out warm places to invade during the Little Ice Age exactly like the barbarians came rushing out of an increasingly cold north at the end of the Roman Empire due to declining temperatures.
Tiny climatic changes can cause great social changes.
What may not be well known is that the criminal stupidity of the christians in Europe made the Black Death epidemy much worse in terms of number of deaths. This was the time of witch hunting and tortures of millions of woman and girls for their crimes of satanism and sorcery. And the Catholic hierarchy believed
that witches had familiars, cats which were sent by the Devil to help the
witches and enrich them, carry them on their back to the Sabbath, and so on. So the Popes and bishops ordered that all cats be exterminated by any
means as creatures from Hell. At the time of the Black Death, cats had become extinct in Europe. As they were the only means to control the rat
populations which carry the plague, rats had a field day so to speak.
It is impossible to know how many millions died because of the extermination of cats.
Cats were reintroduced in Europe later from the middle East, from Turkey and Russia.
ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ
ELAINE: Yes indeed. As a cat-witch woman myself, I am very aware of this. My cats are, too. We all think this period was a dark time indeed.
@Claire Voyant
Thanks for that post about Venetian banking gnomes and how the Vatican worked hand in hand with other banking gnomes.
I wonder if Christian cult leaders worked hand-in-hand with banking gnomes from the very beginning of that cult. There was an analysis of the famous Fire of rome prosecutions in Tacitus’ Annales 15:44 and it was revealed that “Christiani” was in fact “Chrestiani” which was not only slang for Christians back then but also meant bankers, userers and speculators. (Link here.) In other words, banking gnomes. Everybody knew Nero wanted a swath of the city cleared for his Golden House and possibly the banking gnomes, wanting to speculate in property by buying it up cheap and selling it at an immense profit to Nero, hired some insane end-times Christians to commit arson and burn the city down. Nero invokes the Lex Talonis (an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth) and has the banking gnomes preyed on by dogs and the psychotic Christian arsonists crucified and burnt at night for illumination.
Rome burned the same way Chicago burned: it was a fire hazard.
Very true. And this is could be true, too: fire hazard + banking gnomes + insane end-times Christians = conflagration.
This time around the conflagration could be WW3! With nukes as the fire hazard.