| | | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 | Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change.
| FHL(C)
User ID: 475062
8/19/2008 11:53 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
Decoupling as they call it will occur(is occurring) but not in a purely financial manner, it will be much more regional and political, and its real effects(particularly regional and national stabilizations), wont be seen clearly until the artificial controls,restraints and mindtwists(by MSM in particular) are cleared out of the way, by the demise of the defacto global fiat currency that was the US dollar, still this does make for dangerous power plays, potential attempts at war and justifications for war by most of the usual suspects and those they want us to believe are the real causes of conflict, and finally of the big money gamers, the banksters, oil/energy mongers , drug lords(legal and illegal), weapon deathdealers and corrupt bureocratjudicarypoliticos . Quoting: FHL(C)
For those who missed the page before gold and silver are showing some severe market manipulations and now many mints are not processing or selling, but not letting the general public know the real reasons why.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 475062
8/20/2008 12:11 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
[ link to news.silverseek.com]
FU&FW
The Anatomy of a Crime.
What we just witnessed in the historic sell-off in silver and gold was a crime. That’s not a crybaby complaint. There were no supply or demand developments that could account for the severity of the sell-off. The proof that this sell-off was criminal lies in public data provided in the Commitment of Traders Report (COT) and a basic understanding of how the futures market works. This has been the most extreme sell-off in the recent history of silver and gold. We are farther below the moving averages than at any point since I have been writing about silver. Price movements this severe are likely to be intentional and not accidental.
Every criminal act must have a motive and an opportunity to commit the crime. By the simple process of elimination, those responsible for this crime are the concentrated commercial shorts on the COMEX. No one else fits the profile. They had the means (through their dominant and monopolistic position), the profit motive and the skill to cause the sell-off.
I can’t identify the concentrated shorts by name, as commodity law protects their identity. But the regulators certainly know who they are and continue to choose to do nothing about them. (They also knew the identity of the SemGroup, which appears responsible for the recent run up and collapse of crude oil prices.) While I can’t identify the perpetrators by name, I can label senior management of the NYMEX/COMEX , as well as the commissioners and other high ranking employees at the CFTC as being complicit and involved in the manipulation.
The most recent COT, for positions held as of 8/12, confirm that the commercials have been on a buying binge for the past month. In other words, they have rigged the sell-offs in silver and gold over the past month and used those sell-offs to collusively buy as many contracts as possible. The numbers are impressive. Since the COT of 7/15, the commercials have bought back and reduced their total net silver futures short position by more than 20,000 contracts (100 million ounces) In gold the commercials have bought back, as a group, more than 90,000 futures contracts, reducing their net short position by 9 million ounces. Undoubtedly, more contracts have been bought by the commercials in the current week.
In addition to this buying on the COMEX, I believe that the naked short position in shares of the silver ETF, SLV, have been bought back, either entirely or in large part over the past month. This was the plan.
However, the percentage of net buying by the concentrated shorts in COMEX silver and gold has decidedly lagged the overall pace of commercial net buying. In silver, the big 4 concentrated shorts only bought back 10%, or 2000 of the 20,000 silver contracts bought, while the raptors (the 9+ smaller commercials) bought 12,000 and the 5 thru 8 largest traders bought a bit more than the 6000 contract balance. In gold the big 4 only bought back 22%, or 20,000 of the 90,000 net contracts bought, with the raptors buying 40,000 contracts and the 5 thru 8 largest traders buying 30,000 contracts.
What this tells us, for sure, is that the concentrated short position of the big 4 in silver and gold, while somewhat reduced in total contracts over the past month, has grown more concentrated and manipulative. The big 4 in gold and silver have grown more and more isolated from the rest of the commercials and, therefore, more desperate. This fully explains the disorderly nature of the recent sell-off and will explain any further disorderliness. The very small amount of short covering by the big 4 increases the likelihood that they may be trapped in these short positions.
Remember, concentration and manipulation go hand in hand, and the more concentrated the short position becomes in silver and gold the clearer the proof of manipulation. Only those that refuse to analyze the public data and reject the very idea that silver and gold could possibly be manipulated can conclude that we are witnessing free market behavior and not a rig job. With the growing evidence of a retail investment shortage in silver, those who deny manipulation are about to look very silly.
lets look at it this way, you have huge sums, electronically and in paper , but the others who have the rest of the paper are beginning to smell a rat, so what to do, leverage the innate greed factor in the shares/stockmarket/casino game, to buy more time to do what you need to hopefully pull out or breakeven, or in worst case, take everyone down with you so the real financial/bankster powers behind you can buy everything left that is worth buying for cents on the dollar. Its simple there are massive games of brinkmanship and chance going on here, attempting to do what the Rothschilds did to the bank of england, and then to the stock markets at battle of waterloo, except this time they are gambling on trying to get the world economy IMO
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 3:18 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
[link to www.worldreports.org]
Dr Greenspan is the 'technician' who invented what we have termed the 'Never Pay Syndrome', which Greenspan developed on instructions from George Bush Sr. Under this deception, one phone call is sufficient to block repeated attempts, involving a large number of Trustees and institutions, to effect the payouts. Trustees, who have been obliged to attend at their banks repeatedly, as instructed, in anticipation of intended payouts, have had their lives turned upside down by this unbelievable corruption, for years. The participating banks have likewise been repeatedly 'stood up' by this means, even though many of these institutions are complicit.
Unbelievably, Greenspan is featured as the lead story in the issue of 'Emerging Markets', a paper produced daily for these Annual Meetings, dated 10th October. His portrait appears on the front page, with an article providing attendees with the guru's latest prognostications on the global financial crisis of which he is the primary technical author.
Specifically, Greenspan gives quote 'a surprisingly upbeat assessment of the state of the financial markets', seeing 'an eventual thawing of the world's frozen credit markets'. Greenspan 'praises the actions of Governments in buying up toxic assets and recapitalising banks'. An extended article by this notorious financial criminal is scheduled for publication in the edition of the paper for 11th October not yet seen by the Editor at nearly 3.00 am here in the long since deserted Press Room.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 3:22 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
more from the same.
The 'Never-Pay Syndrome' was first applied during the precedent, indeed, the model, for this crisis in 1989-92. Then, as today, repeated payout operations were routinely sabotaged while the same duplicitous controllers exploited, duplicated, multiplied and helped themselves directly to funds belonging to others or which had been remitted for a specific purpose. Those who knew anything about this scandal were then systematically liquidated under the Clinton Presidency.
Since William Jefferson Clinton, a CIA operative like his 'wife', 'works for' George Bush Sr., there is now no mystery any longer about why those 420++ people and Bush-Clinton associates who 'knew too much', were systematically liquidated, in a purge recalling Josef Stalin (Djiugashvili-Kochba).
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 3:27 AM | | FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 3:32 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
I thought this was an interesting quote
Mark Hebner of asset management firm Index Funds Advisors.
"The people that get hurt on a roller coaster are the ones that try to get off while it's moving," .
I wonder if the same applies to those who use casinos and electronic dice?
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 3:56 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
I have located some good info on the current derivatives elephant standing on the 800pound us gorilla in the economic living room, will post soon, after condensing, one of the more interesting things is the (not recent)burning/insider arson of 2 major warehouses(one in Britain , one in USA of a recently failed big five wall street institution.
What the info relates to is that no more than 3-5 pinnacle US financial institutions hold 90-95% of the derivatives globally. So lets see then approximate value of yearly derivatives market/trading 500-600Trillion plus, that leaves lets say 5% for the rest of the world, lots of things not right there/here.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 4:12 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
I don't know if this will remain a constant for much longer, that is the up front sockpuppet being credited as the chief harbinger of global economisity.
FU&FW
[link to www.atimes.com]
The Fed chairman is by far the most important personality on the US economic and financial landscape. In fact, both Wall Street and Main Street read his statements more carefully than reading the words of a president or the laws of the land. His words and actions are the most influential in the financial and economic world. Being in large part an independent institution, the Fed, largely under Bernanke's predecessor Alan Greenspan, grasped absolute power over economic policymaking and decided to abandon its regulatory power, enabling the development of financial anarchy under the guise of financial engineering and innovations.
Such myopic faith in the free market has turned the US financial markets into a casino. The US president has negligible influence on economic policymaking and has become merely a symbolic figure. By subscribing fully to Bernanke and Paulson policies, the two presidential contenders have renounced their future economic role. The US Congress has become a rubber stamp of Fed policies. It applauded Greenspan�s policies and it now supports Bernanke-Paulson knee-jerk and costly bailouts. The US public is not so much interested in the presidential debates as in how Bernanke and Paulson policies will affect their jobs, retirement savings, tax liabilities and the very livelihoods of their children.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 4:29 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
[link to www.atimes.com]
Strategic implications
The extraordinary steps taken this week across Europe highlight the flaws of the banking system, but equally of the willingness of politicians to be seen riding to the rescue of the unctuous bankers.
Iceland's example is in particular startling. Confronting a virtual run on its banking system, the country tried to stem the tide by nationalizing the troubled institutions only to find that credit markets in turn shut for the sovereign itself. This necessitated some desperate calls for help that went completely unanswered by the capitals of Western Europe.
Only Russia bothered to return the phone call, and it may be willing to provide longer-term assistance for the country. It is perhaps not the output of the Icelandic fishing fleet that the Russians are after though; the country's strategic position during the Cold War proved an unassailable advantage for the US.
With both the US and EU in deep financial trouble, the chances of any quick rescues of Iceland looks depressingly low, giving more than enough room for the Russians to negotiate non-financial terms for their willingness to help. Pretty soon, it is possible that Arab countries could look to providing similar deals to take over parts of their old empire including Turkey, Spain et al by using the leeway granted by the current financial crisis.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| Anonymous Coward
User ID: 525508
10/14/2008 4:50 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
US surrenders power to appoint World Bank president
Heather Stewart and Larry Elliott in Washington
The Guardian, Monday October 13 2008
The US is to lose its power to appoint the president of the World Bank after the UK's development secretary, Douglas Alexander, brokered a deal to throw open the post to candidates from any country.
Backed by European governments and developing countries, Alexander overcame resistance from the US and Japan to secure a reform he described last night as "a significant step forward".
Washington has had the right to hand-pick the president of the World Bank since the institution was founded after the second world war, with Europe choosing the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
Alexander said: "The agreement provides the opportunity for candidates to be nominated regardless of nationality. It will ensure that the best-qualified candidate is selected."
Developing countries have grown increasingly frustrated at the stranglehold of rich nations on the two Washington-based multilateral bodies, with pressure for change accelerating after the controversial presidency of Paul Wolfowitz, who was forced to step down after a scandal involving his partner's promotion.
Alexander said that more changes were needed: "It is a significant step forward, albeit on a much longer journey."
The bank's development committee yesterday was dominated by concerns that poor countries would fall victim to the global financial crisis. It backed proposals that will give countries from sub-Saharan Africa a third seat on its 25-strong governing board.
The bank's president, Robert Zoellick, urged rich countries not to forget their pledges of financial support to the developing world. The bank believes the number of malnourished will increase by 44 million this year.
Donor countries were also discussing whether to release a multibillion-dollar reconstruction package to Zimbabwe. Alexander said the tests a new Zimbabwean government would have to meet included respecting human rights and allowing charities into the country to deliver aid.
[link to www.guardian.co.uk] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 4:54 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
US surrenders power to appoint World Bank president
Heather Stewart and Larry Elliott in Washington
The Guardian, Monday October 13 2008
The US is to lose its power to appoint the president of the World Bank after the UK's development secretary, Douglas Alexander, brokered a deal to throw open the post to candidates from any country.
Backed by European governments and developing countries, Alexander overcame resistance from the US and Japan to secure a reform he described last night as "a significant step forward".
Washington has had the right to hand-pick the president of the World Bank since the institution was founded after the second world war, with Europe choosing the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
Alexander said: "The agreement provides the opportunity for candidates to be nominated regardless of nationality. It will ensure that the best-qualified candidate is selected."
Developing countries have grown increasingly frustrated at the stranglehold of rich nations on the two Washington-based multilateral bodies, with pressure for change accelerating after the controversial presidency of Paul Wolfowitz, who was forced to step down after a scandal involving his partner's promotion.
Alexander said that more changes were needed: "It is a significant step forward, albeit on a much longer journey."
The bank's development committee yesterday was dominated by concerns that poor countries would fall victim to the global financial crisis. It backed proposals that will give countries from sub-Saharan Africa a third seat on its 25-strong governing board.
The bank's president, Robert Zoellick, urged rich countries not to forget their pledges of financial support to the developing world. The bank believes the number of malnourished will increase by 44 million this year.
Donor countries were also discussing whether to release a multibillion-dollar reconstruction package to Zimbabwe. Alexander said the tests a new Zimbabwean government would have to meet included respecting human rights and allowing charities into the country to deliver aid.
[ link to www.guardian.co.uk] Quoting: Anonymous Coward 525508
thanks Ac, yes very significant, but not for economic reasons directly, religious ones.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/14/2008 5:08 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
[link to www.atimes.com]
THE NAKED HEGEMON
PART 2: The center of the doughnut
By Andre Gunder Frank
All Ponzi schemes build a financial pyramid. Many who pay into them also live in a financial world themselves, but others need to derive their in-payment through earnings from production in the real world. In today's world of financial transactions that every day are a hundredfold more than all payments for real goods and services put together, the financial ones put the real ones into the shadow behind their brilliance.
Moreover, to oversimplify a very complex matter into more intelligible layperson's language, options, derivatives, swaps and other recent financial instruments have been ever much further compounding already compounded interest on the real properties in which their stake and debts are based, which has contributed to the spectacular growth of this financial world. Nonetheless, the financial pyramid that we see in all its splendor and brilliance, especially in its center at Uncle Sam's home, still sits on top of a real-world producer-merchant-consumer base, even if the financial one also provides credit for these real-world transactions.
Now, what if we look at the world as a doughnut, analogous to so many cities in the US rust belt. The center is derelict and hollowed out as production and consumption have moved to the surrounding suburbs (in automobile capital Detroit, the windows of the principal department store Hudson's have been boarded up for years, even as the city has built an expensive "Renaissance Center" to re-gentrify the center, a process that has "succeeded" in some other cities). General Motors' derelict Flint, Michigan, gave us Michael Moore, who featured it in Roger and Me (a reference to GM chief executive officer Roger Smith). We might look at the entire world in doughnut terms, with the whole of Uncle Sam in the empty hole in the middle that produces almost nothing it can sell abroad. The main exceptions are agricultural goods and military hardware that are heavily subsidized by the US government from its taxpayers and its dollar-printing press, and even so Uncle Sam runs a US$600-billion-plus budget deficit.
Should the dollar crash ...
The big difference in this US doughnut is that both the budget deficit and the $600-billion-plus trade deficit are financed by foreigners, as we have seen. Uncle Sam would exclude most of them as persons, but gladly receives the real goods they produce. As world consumer of last resort, as already suggested, Uncle Sam performs this important function in the present global political economic division of labor: everybody else produces and needs to export, and Uncle Sam consumes and needs to import. The crash of the dollar would (will?) crumble this entire world-embracing and -organizing political economic doughnut and throw hundreds of millions of people, not to mention zillions of dollars and their owners, into turmoil, with unforeseen and perhaps unforeseeable consequences.
Many people, high and low on the world totem pole, have a big stake in avoiding that, even if it requires continuing to blow an empty Uncle Sam up like a balloon. Or to refer to a well-know metaphor, to continue to pretend that the emperor with no clothes is dressed up. That still includes China, for which a financial showdown with Uncle Sam would be a blessing in disguise: it would oblige China to change its political economic course, and instead of giving its goods away for free to Uncle Sam, to turn production and consumption inward to its poor interior and outward to its neighbors in East Asia, all of which it could and should be doing already. (The latter China has recently begun to do, but not yet the former.)
Of course, crashing the dollar would finally also in one fell swoop wipe out, that is default, Uncle Sam's debt altogether. Thereby, it would simultaneously also make all foreigners and rich Americans lose the whole of their dollar-asset shirt, of which they are still desperately trying to save as much as possible by not so doing. In fact, this historically necessary transition out from under the US-run doughnut world could bring the entire world into the deepest depression ever - and in all of them the poorest suffer the most. Only East Asia could save itself with greatest ease, but also after paying a high cost for this transition - toward itself! Thus, the Uncle Sam Ponzi Scheme poses the world's biggest and craziest Catch-22 since MAD (mutually assured destruction).
However, even this would not be historically new. Recall how much the transition to Uncle Sam cost: another 30 Years' War from 1914 to 1945 with the intervening second Great Depression in a century that cost 100 million lives lost to war, more than in all of previous world history, not to mention the millions who suffered and died from unnecessary starvation and disease. Or the previous transition to Britain cost the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Depression of 1873-95, colonialism and semi-colonialism, to name a few, and their human costs, especially combined with the most pronounced El Nino climatic changes in two centuries, which ravaged Indians, Chinese and many others with famines. But these were in turn magnified by the imperial colonial powers and used in their own interests, eg increased export of wheat from India especially during years of famine.
The parallels with today, including even again taking advantage a century later of renewed stronger El Ninos, are too horrifying and guilt-generating for hardly anybody to make with Uncle Sam's International Monetary Fund-imposed "structural adjustment" that obliges Mexican peasants to have already eaten the belt that the IMF wants them to tighten still further. And that is not to mention 3 million dead in Rwanda and Burundi, and then some in neighboring Congo, first after IMF-imposed strictures and the cancellation primarily by Uncle Sam of the Coffee Agreement that had sustained its price for these producers. And then we get the scramble for and production and sale there of gold for Uncle Sam's Fort Knox, titanium so we can communicate by mobile telephone, diamonds forever, and so on.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/15/2008 3:24 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
The Woman Who Could Have Prevented This Financial Mess Was Silenced by Greenspan, Rubin and Summers
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, TheNation.com. Posted October 11, 2008.
A sad tale emerges of willfully arrogant behavior designed to undermine a wise woman's good judgment.
"Break the Glass" was the code-name high-level Treasury Department figures gave the $700 billion bailout; it was to be used only as a last-resort measure.
Now millions have been sprayed and damaged by broken glass.
But more than a decade ago, a woman you're likely never to have heard of, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading -- was the oracle whose warnings about the dangerous boom in derivatives trading just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the US and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. In fact, Greenspan, the man some affectionately called "The Oracle," spent his political capital cheerleading these disastrous financial instruments.
On Thursday, the New York Times ran a masterful and revealing front page article exposing the culpability of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers for the era of dangerous turbulence we live in.
What these "three marketeers" -- as they were called in a 1999 Time magazine cover story -- were adept at was peddling the timebombs at the heart of this complex crisis: exotic and opaque financial instruments known as derivatives -- contracts intended to hedge against risk and whose values are derived from underlying assets. To cut to the quick, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers opposed regulating them. "Proposals to bring even minimalist regulation were basically rebuffed by Greenspan and various people in the Treasury," recalls Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve board member and economist at Princeton University, in the Times article.
In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." Born called for greater transparency -- disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses.
Instead of heeding this oracle's warnings, Greenspan, Rubin & Summers rushed to silence her. As the Times story reveals, Born's wise warnings "incited fierce opposition" from Greenspan and Rubin who "concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market." Greenspan deployed condescension and told Born she didn't know what she doing and she'd cause a financial crisis. (A senior Commission director who worked with Born suggests that Greenspan and the guys didn't like her independence. " Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.")
In early 1998, according to the Times story, one of the guys, Larry Summers, called Born to "chastise her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis. But Born kept at it, unwilling to let arrogant men undermine her good judgment. But it got tougher out there. In June 1998, Greenspan, Rubin and the then head of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, Jr., called on Congress "to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations." (Levitt now says he regrets that decision.) Months later, the huge hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed -- confirming some of Born's warnings. (Bets on derivatives were a key reason.)
"Despite that event," the Times reports, " Congress (apparently as a result of Greenspan & Summer's urging, influence-peddling and pressure) "froze" Born's Commissions' regulatory authority. The next year, Born left as head of the Commission. Born did not talk to the Times for their article.
What emerges is a story of reckless, willful and arrogant action and behavior designed to undermine a wise woman's good judgment. The three marketeers' disdain for modest regulation of new and risky financial instruments reveals a faith-based fundamentalist approach to the management of markets and risk. If there is any accountability left in our system, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers should not be telling anyone how to run anything. Instead, Barack Obama might do well to bring back Brooksley Born and promote to his team economists who haven't contributed to the ugly mess we're in.
[link to www.alternet.org]
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 468982
10/15/2008 3:28 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
JPM, CITI, BoA ARE DERIVATIVES MONSTERS, NOT COMMERCIAL BANKS
But when we look at institutions like J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America, we become aware that these large money center institutions have become detached from any conceivable connection to the world of production, wages, transportation, and all other useful and productive activities. These institutions are not commercial banks any more in any meaningful sense of the term. Ten years ago, in the midst of the Asian financial crisis and the aftermath of the Russian GKO state bankruptcy collapse, the boss of JP Morgan Chase went on television to announce that his bank was specialized in the "risk business." The risk business meant that JP Morgan Chase, had simply given up on the traditional activity of commercial banks, which was primarily to provide loans to corporations for productive investment in plant and equipment that would also create well-paid industrial jobs. J.P. Morgan Chase decided long ago that that activity was nowhere near profitable enough to be continued.
Instead, J.P. Morgan Chase devoted itself more and more to the issuance, sale, and purchase of derivatives. As early as 1992, the best definition of J.P. Morgan Chase was that it was no longer a commercial bank but rather a derivatives monster. In 2002, the J.P. Morgan Chase derivatives monster came very close to imploding, collapsing in on itself like the hopeless black hole that it still remains to the present day. According to the most recent report of the Comptroller of the Curreny of the US Treasury dated September 30, 2007, JP Morgan Chase today has between $90 trillion and $100 trillion of derivatives. In reality this is a very low-ball estimate, and the real derivatives exposure is some multiple of this figure perhaps $300 or $400 trillion, especially now that Bear Stearns, a smaller black hole of derivatives has been absorbed. But even a mere $90 trillion is already six times the US GDP (currently estimated between $14 and $15 trillion).
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 530945
10/20/2008 11:13 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
[link to seekingalpha.com]
Coming Soon: The $600 Trillion Derivatives Emergency Meeting
by: The Prudent Investor October 13, 2008
The Prudent Investor
The Prudent Investor
About Toni Straka:
* Bio & more articles
* Toni's blog: The Prudent Investor
Become a Contributor Submit an Article
back to yahoo finance add to my yahoo back to cake
*
Font Size:
*
Print
* Email
Here is an update on the size of the derivatives market with the latest official figures (.pdf) from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Hold your breath, as we are not anymore talking paltry billions but TRILLIONS of whichever fiat currency.
Current emergency meetings on banks and markets are still only in the stage where politicians and central bankers are bickering over how to create a few more hundred billions Euros and FRNs. But toxic MBS pale in comparison to the mushrooming growth of the derivatives market. According to figures released in the quarterly review of the BIS (pp A103) in September the total notional amount of outstanding derivatives in all categories rose 15% to a mindboggling $596 TRILLION as of December 2007.
Two thirds of contracts by volume or $393 TRILLION fell into the category of interest rate derivatives. Credit Default Swaps had a notional volume of $58 TRILLION, seeing the sharpest relative increase after a volume of $43 TRILLION a year earlier.
Currency derivatives reached a volume of $56 TRILLION.
Oh, and every grand balance sheet comes with a trash can. Unallocated derivatives with a notional amount of $71 TRILLION are looming over the heads of the disintegrating investment community too.
However You Look At It, This Is an Accident Waiting To Happen
Don't lose your sleep because of these numbers that KO my desktop calculator. In an ideal world - in which we are not - long and short derivatives would net out each other, leaving only a fraction of risk. The BIS tries to assess this net risk with a total of $14.5 TRILLION (2006: 11.1 TRILLION) in gross market value for all contracts but comes up with a second figure.
The so called Gross Credit Exposure appears almost moderate at $3.256 TRILLION after $2.672 TRILLION a year earlier.
Even when taking the lowest of these figures shudders run down my spine. All emergency talks have so far focused on a few hundred billions in fiat currencies, but the current nervousness demonstrated by hectic talks of finance ministers and central bankers all over the globe should give everybody a vague idea that something here may blow up any day. This pool of so far silent derivatives without a major bust can come to life any day with the failure of a multinational financial firm.
The BIS review is a good way to grasp the dimensions long term monetary expansion has brought upon us. A net risk of $14 TRILLION compares with the annual GDP of the USA. Nobody, absolutely nobody can afford this tab in the case of an unorderly unwinding of this market that is roughly 12 times the size of the global economy. I conclude a lot more paper promises will be burnt in the coming derivatives tsunami. As a reminder, most of these contracts have been moved off balance sheets into under capitalized subsidiaries that profited from the good rating of the parent company. But in case of a default it is this nasty, nasty huge notional amount that becomes a liability.
As the vast majority of these contracts have no market, failure will come in the form of counterparty risk. This makes all the current emergency meeting a bit more understandable if politicians are already aware of the biggest bubble that may find no other way of deflation than a sudden burst. I base my sense of urgency on the rapid growth of the net risk in only one year, rising a stunning 30% at a time when the first signs of the credit crunch appeared.
German chancellor Angela Merkel said ahead of an emergency meeting with French president Nicolas Sarkozy in a TV interview that she would present a rescue package for German banks on Monday. This is also expected from several other European countries. Italian president Silvio Berlusconi went so far as to suggest a concerted stock exchange holiday. It would fit the other crooked nails in the coffin of free markets.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| Anonymous Coward
User ID: 530932
10/20/2008 11:15 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
Good thread Mr J.
Hope all is well. |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 530945
10/20/2008 11:19 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
Good thread Mr J.
Hope all is well. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 530932
How are the part time jobs going, getting experience and good recommendations?
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| Anonymous Coward
User ID: 530932
10/20/2008 11:32 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
Good thread Mr J.
Hope all is well.
How are the part time jobs going, getting experience and good recommendations? Quoting: FHL(C)
I'm all over the show at the moment. This global finance disaster is finally having an impact at my end of the bargain. Damn it.
Hopefully back in the desert next week. Fingers crossed.
Take care, i'm hardly around anymore. |
| Anonymous Coward
User ID: 530932
10/20/2008 11:34 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
Good thread Mr J.
Hope all is well.
How are the part time jobs going, getting experience and good recommendations? Quoting: FHL(C)
As long as your country os residence keep bying the ore, i will be ok.
No one knows exactly what will happen though, if you catch my drift.
All the best to the family. |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 12:09 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
Ok its happened.
Greedy, selfish, spoiled and now playing the vengeance deck in prelude to hot mode, very stupid IMO.
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
Russia's Micex tumbled 14% a day after S&P cut the country's credit outlook to negative from stable. Regulators suspended trading and don't plan to reopen until Tuesday.
I don't know about anyone else here, but there's your answer right now, its war, economic war, and S&P while being belted around by Federal questioning earlier this week, has gone and done it now(probably to try and appease the political mistresses, as opposed to their economic master/owners).
No one is going to now turn around and help US markets, dollar etc, its going to be dominant players(which only just includes the US now, as the decline for the USeconomy is going to start up seriously). I mean really, throwing stones at other peoples glass houses , when you live in an inverted glass pyramid is just begging for a response that will get the first fuhrer of America/s the reasons needed to shred the constitution forever.
In the mean time, there are no more friends, and S&P and its other little abomination competitors, should be immediately forced out of business and replaced by regional/national private or governmental orgs(but not supra national control, supranational meets and coordination is good though) that should do a better job of rating control, because its obvious how partisan and corrupt the big 3 raters are, and funnily enough they all come from the same country.
Lord have mercy.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 12:10 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
Ok its happened.
Greedy, selfish, spoiled and now playing the vengeance deck in prelude to hot mode, very stupid IMO.
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
Russia's Micex tumbled 14% a day after S&P cut the country's credit outlook to negative from stable. Regulators suspended trading and don't plan to reopen until Tuesday.
I don't know about anyone else here, but there's your answer right now, its war, economic war, and S&P while being belted around by Federal questioning earlier this week, has gone and done it now(probably to try and appease the political mistresses, as opposed to their economic master/owners).
No one is going to now turn around and help US markets, dollar etc, its going to be dominant players(which only just includes the US now, as the decline for the USeconomy is going to start up seriously). I mean really, throwing stones at other peoples glass houses , when you live in an inverted glass pyramid is just begging for a response that will get the first fuhrer of America/s the reasons needed to shred the constitution forever.
In the mean time, there are no more friends, and S&P and its other little abomination competitors, should be immediately forced out of business and replaced by regional/national private or governmental orgs(but not supra national control, supranational meets and coordination is good though) that should do a better job of rating control, because its obvious how partisan and corrupt the big 3 raters are, and funnily enough they all come from the same country.
Lord have mercy.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 12:24 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
Just found this
Valid explanation and good pointer to whats coming down the line.
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
For What It's Worth
User ID: 518800
10/6/2008 12:48 PM
Report abusive post
Re: $ US DOLLAR OUTLOOK $ Quote
I posted this on another thread.
Talking to my colleague in Hong Kong (investment banker, ouch!) he is saying the dollar demand is to cover all of the CDS’s unwinding since they are denominated in US dollars ($54 Trillion market with 20-30% estimated to be bad paper). This is creating an artificial demand for dollars that will go on until the CDS paper is settled or the US/Foreign Governments nullify the CDS contracts (has a high probability in his opinion). Basically the dollar will continue to rise for now and then crash back as these trades are completed/nullified.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 12:34 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
And this is just outrageous, and its just one of the many big, bloated, bailed out abominations that act as banks in one form or another.
If you or i did this as individuals, we would go to jail for a very long time, but instead these very same criminals in cahoots with their criminal politician mates and criminal economic system, are now being given even more money, but who is it going to(after injection back into the failed now nationalized institution, and what are those who are receiving it doing with it, i begin to suspect, nay know, they are feathering their nests and bolt holes first, and then trying to work out how to make the current corrupt system work(funny thing that the great moral crusades and high ground of yesteryear are now hollow, as in reality why is this system better than anyone else's, ah i remember now political power comes out of the barrel of a gun so said Mao(more or less) and i think he was not just thinking of China at the time he said it, but also also Russia and the USA and how they both trod the world political stage.
Again Lord have mercy.
FU&FW
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
American International Group Inc. has used $90.3 billion of a U.S. government credit line since it was bailed out last month !!!
Quote
AIG Taps $90.3 Billion, Exceeding Original U.S. Loan (Update2)
By Hugh Son
Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- American International Group Inc. has used $90.3 billion of a U.S. government credit line since it was bailed out last month, an amount that exceeds the size of the original loan meant to save the insurer.
AIG may need more than the $122.8 billion now available to the New York-based insurer, Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy said yesterday. The company, which agreed Sept. 16 to turn over majority control to the U.S. in exchange for an $85 billion loan, got access to an additional $37.8 billion this month. AIG's latest balance was revealed today by the New York Federal Reserve, and is up from $82.9 billion a week ago.
``This emphasizes the uncertainty for anyone trying to put a number'' on AIG's cash needs, said Bill Bergman, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. in Chicago. The financial-products unit that caused most of the firm's losses ``is a big black hole.''
Liddy, the former Allstate Corp. CEO appointed by the government to run AIG last month, is selling businesses including U.S. life insurance, plane leasing and consumer finance to repay the loan. He named Paula Rosput Reynolds today to lead the restructuring six months after she arranged the $6.2 billion sale of Safeco Corp., AIG said.
AIG, which averted collapse last month with the Fed loan, is dependent on ``what happens to the capital markets,'' Liddy, 62, said late yesterday on PBS's ``The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.'' The firm needed cash after credit downgrades forced it to post more than $10 billion in collateral to clients who purchased guarantees on bonds that lost value.
Posting Collateral
``To the extent they continue to go down and we have to keep posting collateral, as it's called in the vernacular of the industry, it's possible it may not be enough,'' Liddy said.
Liddy said in the interview that he thinks AIG ``should be OK,'' that he still hopes to stay within the $122.8 billion ceiling and that Treasury efforts to spur lending ``seem to be working.'' A spokesman for the New York Fed declined to comment. Brookly McLaughlin, spokeswoman for the Treasury, didn't return a call seeking comment.
``The money is to meet our cash needs while we work out the rest of our solution, it's not the total solution,'' said AIG spokesman Nicholas Ashooh. ``We still have to sell businesses and still need a permanent solution to the liquidity drain'' from securities lending and the fixed-income guarantees known as credit-default swaps.
Reynolds, the former CEO of Seattle-based auto insurer Safeco until it was sold to Liberty Mutual Group Inc. for $6.2 billion, was named AIG's chief restructuring officer.
Credit Line
AIG got the $85 billion credit line on Sept. 16 to stave off bankruptcy. It was given access to an additional $37.8 billion on Oct. 8 to shore up its securities-lending program, which lost money on investments made using collateral from assets it loaned to third parties. AIG agreed to turn over an 80 percent stake to the U.S. in exchange for the first loan.
The insurer may seek a third source of cash by tapping a Fed program that buys commercial paper, a person familiar with the matter said last week. AIG will probably borrow less than $10 billion through the program, which is scheduled to start next week, the person said.
AIG sold protection on $441 billion of fixed-income investments, including $57.8 billion in securities tied to subprime mortgages. The swaps plunged in value as the assets they guaranteed declined, forcing $25 billion in writedowns over nine months and leading to three quarterly losses.
``We kind of lost our way, AIG did, and we got out of the basic insurance business that we know so well,'' Liddy said yesterday. ``Within the first two or three weeks of taking that loan, we were at the $69 billion level, so anyone who thinks we didn't need the Federal Reserve as a lifesaver simply doesn't understand the precarious nature of where we were.''
`A Lifeline'
The government ``threw us a lifeline which we desperately needed so that the rest of the financial system wouldn't be contaminated,'' he said.
Liddy told employees on Sept. 18 that the original $85 billion loan was ``a really big number, I think that's enough.'' In an Oct. 3 conference call with analysts, he said that he didn't want to state the company would ``never'' need more.
``One of the lessons from the savings and loan crisis is that firms that were going under forestalled the recognition of how severe the problem was through accounting, and with the cooperation of regulators,'' Bergman said. ``I certainly hope that's not happening with AIG today.''
The insurer agreed to freeze $19 million due to former CEO Martin Sullivan and $600 million in compensation for other executives, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said yesterday. AIG also agreed last week to immediately cancel all junkets and perks, according to a statement jointly issued by Cuomo and the company.
To contact the reporter on this story: Hugh Son in New York at hson1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: October 23, 2008 18:38 EDT
[link to www.bloomberg.com]
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 12:52 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
[link to www.financialsense.com]
US Dollar Death Dance
by Jim Willie, CB. Editor, Hat Trick Letter | October 23, 2008
Print
The USDollar rally in the last several weeks has been remarkable. At closer examination, it highly resembles a spurt prior to death. Imagine an old man who just had a heart attack, lost feeling in certain body parts, his mind not working right, plenty of nonsense gibberish coming from his mouth, and now he is dancing hard on some last gasps. The vast liquidation movement is akin to the old man going through an embalming process while dancing atop the tables at the funeral parlor, as bidding proceeds for his cadaver. Are Americans last to realize the financial structure destruction means the USEconomy does not enter a recession, but rather a bizarre unprecedented disintegration? It seems so. The liquidation of speculative positions, the massive de-leveraging, the payouts of defaulted bonds, these events are the opposite of developments toward revival or resuscitation, like business investment!! Liquidation is the exact opposite of investment, and precedes job cuts, not job creation.
The following survey of important issues is covered in depth in the October Hat Trick Letter. This month, an additional Crisis Coverage report was included, since too much has been happening, most of it confusing. Plenty of stories are occurring behind the stories, many covered. Here is a quick survey touching the surface on issues discussed and analyzed more in depth for subscribers.
FACTORS BEHIND USDOLLAR RALLY
What is pushing the USDollar up cannot be construed as anything remotely resembling healthy factors. In no way whatsoever does it resemble investment. It is more like paid off death contracts, paid off death investments, paid off transfers from toxic US bonds into what are falsely regarded as safer US bonds with a guarantee from a crippled USGovt. Foreign financial entities are liquidating on massive scale. They need a tremendous amount of USDollars in order to complete transactions. Also, a tremendous amount of USDollars are needed for CDSwap payouts as defaulted bonds are resolved. Almost all CDSwap and other credit derivatives are paid out in USDollars. The Lehman Brothers payout was full of lies, again. The Lehman Brothers total volume of corporate bonds was $160 billion, but $400 billion existed in total CDS volume tied to them! It is no surprise that the Dow and S&P500 stock indexes fell hard (by almost 400 points on Dow) and on the Lehman resolution day. And market mavens boasted of no impact on the Lehman funeral date!
The DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corp) reported only a net $5.2 billion payout on the Lehman Brothers failure CDSwap resolution. The ‘Dis-Trust Clearing Corp’ might want to check credit derivative experts who claim between $220 billion and $270 billion in that total after netting. By the way, the DTCC is the official banking entity that oversees all stock clearing overnight, including all the naked shorting. The de-leveraging process has left the central bankers empty handed, exposed as having empty financial cupboards. Thus the need for massive central bank swaps from the USFed, which has perversely farmed out its function to foreigners. In fact, the foreign central banks might be in possession of more US$ inventory items than the USFed. So the US central bank has asked foreign central banks to do its job, and to manage the world reserve currency? This amidst a US$ rally!?!
The Credit Default Swaps are capable of burning Hiroshima holes all over the US financial system, resulting in USEconomic implosion from eliminated bank and financial system structures almost entirely. The process has only begun, but in darkness. The other purpose for big bailouts was to prevent CDSwap explosions, risking a string of bombs to go off. The key aspect of CDSwap contracts is their hidden nature, with fuses intersecting in the dark.
When the market mavens talk about the de-leverage process, they refer to speculative investments being liquidated. Oftentimes, they do not include in the story how Wall Street firms, desperate to stave off bankruptcy, are targeting viciously their own clients. The big accounts lie in hedge funds, where the private wealthy are being decimated. Credit is being pulled. Margin calls are being delivered. Margin ratios are being raised. Those funds whose positions are aligned with the predators on Wall Street continue in their investment portfolios. Those funds in opposition are attacked with artillery, carpet bombs, and early morning raids. The USDollar is rallying amidst this type of sinister liquidation. The result has been numerous spread trades anchored by the USTreasury Bond are forced into sale. That means a USTBond buyback occurs from the short cover on the trade. Whether a spread on mortgage bonds, corporate bonds, emerging market bonds, or crude oil, or gold, the trade is liquidated, and a USTBond is bought back. NO TANGIBLE END DEMAND, ONLY USTREASRY BOND SHORT COVERS. This is the basis for a US$ rally?
WORSENING US$ FUNDAMENTALS
How many times have we seen the US stock market go down, non-government bond yields rise, the USDollar rise, and the USTBond yields fall? That has been the norm in the last few weeks. These are death signals, not investment signals. The USEconomy cannot afford liquidation and constricted credit, a well-known fact, seemingly forgotten today. These signals come amidst falling confidence, more bank distress measures, more job loss, more home foreclosures, and lately, trouble with letters of credit at port facilities.
Financial markets, including the USDollar, have yet to factor in the deep USEconomic recession. The USDollar rally flies in the face of deteriorating fundamentals. See job cut announcements at Caterpillar, Merrill Lynch, General Motors, Chrysler, several Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs today. Weekly jobless claims at close to half a million per week, equal to peak during the unrecognized 2001 recession. See the UMichigan consumer sentiment, Philly Fed index, Empire Fed index, leading economic indicators, durable goods orders, on and on. Retail sales, the backbone of the backwards USEconomy, are plummeting. That is, the plummet is before inflation price adjustments. Car sales are plummeting also.
Exports are to be worse from the higher US$ exchange rate on the table, combined with slower foreign economies. The improved export trade has been a big boast from the lunatics running the asylum. The USEconomy is accelerating in its decline, certain to produce a recession and huge USGovt deficits. That deficit is likely to at least double and possible quadruple next year. USTreasury Bond issuance cannot conceivably finance all, or at least half, of the commitments. The printing press will do the rest, which will cut down the US$ valuation. The USDollar decline lies ahead, when the distortions slow or come to an end. Gold will soar on the other side of this liquidation.
An extreme backlash attack is coming against the USDollar. Rising import prices in foreign economies have already caused alarm. Foreigners will soon attack the US$ in a matter of time, using heavy US$-based reserves. Their banking sectors are in disarray, primarily because they are intimately tied to the US$ and USTBonds. The process has begun with Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, to use their strong reserves and sell into this queer US$ strength. That is what reserves are for. The process will spread to other nations.
GOLD MARKET CLOSE TO BREAKING
The gap between the physical gold market and paper gold market is widening. An example bears this out. In Toronto this week, a major off-market gold transaction took place. The price paid was $1075 per ounce on the physical transaction. Its volume was in the multi-million$. There was no US involvement in the transaction, and the settlement was in euros. Enormous repositioning is ongoing by the groups that will participate in the new, partially gold-backed currency. My take is this movement is from a large financial entity with global activity, and ties to central banks. It might be tied to the upcoming split in the euro, into a Nordic Euro and trashed Latin Euro. The Nordic version might contain a gold component. This and other transactions are taking place with European settlement. They are being satisfied in the alternative market, far from the distortions of COMEX. This was a physical transaction with the real metal being moved. Big shifts occur behind the scenes. A couple of months ago, 400 metric tonnes were moved into storage with the Royal Canadian Mint by a sovereign entity.
The more massive the paper manipulation, the more violent the coming correction. The asylum managers are losing control of their paper-physical arbitrage. Watch the gold lease rates, and silver lease rates, which have each more than tripled in the last two months. Lease rates precede price movement. Bullion bankers, including central banks, are reluctant to lease their physical supply. This time is no different, an event to come after the COMEX criminality is swept aside, or simply overwhelmed in return. One well-informed source, with over two decades of gold market experience, actually expects arrests to take place among COMEX officials before long.
1
John Embry of Sprott Asset Mgmt has raised the possibility of a December gold futures contract default. He is not predicting it, or claiming it as certain, but rather mentions how talk centers on the December gold contract as having extreme stress for actual delivery. Pressure is building. The December contract not only is end of quarter, but end of year. He suggests a possible default. He said, “there is probably going to be such an event to change perceptions.” He cited a possible force majeure that could act as a “seminal event that defines the whole situation.” He explained that the physical gold price would then dictate the paper gold price, a return to normalcy, and with a gigantic move up in the gold price. Right now the paper gold market is overwhelming the physical side, but the physical side is constricted on supply. He explained that hedge funds are being unwound on a massive scale, slaughtered by margin calls. The long side must call for delivery on many contracts. He also expects there will be many questions on the Exchange Traded Funds soon as well, although those are surely not as important as the COMEX contract defaults. Watch and listen to his interview on the Canadian Business News Network (CLICK HERE), and be sure to move to the 10 to 11 minute mark.
NEW BRETTON WOODS II FARCE
Last weekend in Brussels, G8 Finance Ministers met. Among other things, they discussed a reform to the global banking structures. For the many challenged on geography, that city is in Belgium, headquarters for many European Union functions, in Western Europe. Creditors were not present, which means the finance ministers were talking to themselves. Credit masters were not invited. The nations whose banking systems are in the process of implosion are essentially attempting to revise the global currency system. Those in attendance constitute the losers! However, the Arabs and Chinese were not present. This seems entirely backwards. The bankrupt nations do not dictate to the creditors terms of a revised agreement.
Imagine a large business saying the following. “We are bankrupt. We want a meeting. We are going to dictate to you bankers anyway. We are broke. Our economies are shattered. Our banking systems are in ruins. But we going to tell you how we are to restructure our debt and rework a new system. We realize our debts to you are bigger than we can ever repay. We realize we cannot continue in commerce without your continued extended credit. But we will force upon you a new system. It does not matter what your opinion is. You do not have a seat on this elite committee, sorry!” THIS FLOW IS NOT FROM THE WORLD OF REALITY!
No! Bankruptcy receivership is next, where creditors will be left with few options. They will be compelled to run management committees, and dissolve many functions of government. Creditors will probably await the G8 initiative, then summarily reject it. They will next propose their own new global financial structure. The teenager’s credit card is about to be taken away, when the irresponsible kid proposes a new repayment system, new promises, new chores done even. The kid has burned down half the neighborhood, yet thinks he can call the shots! Sadly, the parents will probably ground him and force a tutor to direct his studies, and force a strict drill sergeant to direct his work activities. His friends will not be permitted to form new teams that include him. A ‘Post-US World’ is being planned, and Americans are the last to know. Entire new barter systems between a key pair of nations is about to be launched. Regional bond and commodity organizations are being formed, with exclusion of the US. The US press reports nothing on these important developments.
Foreign creditors will form new committees, which will be recognized in time as the Receivership Committee. Foreigners are watching in horror. Decisions have already been made, with Americans the last to know. In order to arrest the cancer they so clearly see, they are ready to force a complete upheaval. The USDollar will lose its global currency status, a thoroughly abused privilege. The above lack of disclosure only reinforces their motive to take action. They will move when they must, upon a system failure, or when they are challenged, or when flimsy attempts by debtors are made to dictate reform.
Without any changes forthcoming soon, the foreign banking systems and economies face huge threats to failure. To friends, family, and contacts, my approach has been to attempt to explain the underlying forces behind revolutionary financial change. Foreigners must cut off a cancerous body part, the one attached to the United States. Foreigners must cut off flow from a toxic systemic organ, the one attached to the United States. CUT IT OFF OR RISK DEATH. They must disconnect of USDollar from the global currency system attached intimately to their own financial and economic systems. They must to survive.
ARAB GOALS & MOTIVES
Arabs clearly lust to control and manage a global gold trading center. It will be in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The new Gulf dinar currency will pave the road to that center. The Gulf Coop Council is biding time, cutting time delay deals, warding off pressure by the USGovt, appeasing with weapons contracts from the USMilitary, and is working behind the scenes to create a new dinar currency. The new Gulf dinar is likely to be primarily gold in its backing. So, foreign nations will soon be forced to purchase the dinar for all or most of crude oil payments. This forces the purchase of gold in order to purchase crude oil. The demand for gold will thus fortify the global banking system, by means of commodity settlements. Many details are unknown, but the basic structure has been slowly come to light. A new motive flashes red in front of Arabs to institute some changes FAST. The crude oil price is down, cut in half from July. Their revenues are sharply reduced. Russia figures into the complex deal to launch the dinar. The Saudis and small sheikdoms need security protection. The next chapter will involve protection amidst a gold-backed currency, not a military-backed currency, in Saudi eyes.
ISOLATED USTREASURYS
The other side to the Arab dilemma is that the USTreasury Bond demand is quickly eroding from Petro-dollar recycle on trade surplus. The USGovt finds itself as relying far too much on foreign central banks for demand of USTBonds, relying far too much soon on the printing press. The USTBond demand is missing the oil surplus in recycle. Their reduced and unstable oil revenue motivates the Arabs to install a new payment system, based upon an end to the ugly defacto Petro-dollar standard. It shamefully is the basis of what my analysis has called a Protection Racket.
The incredible fact evident in the data is that until mid-September, the US Federal Reserve has drained liquidity from the US private banking system in order to offset its colossal bond swap bailouts for major Wall Street and New York money center banks. Their objective was to avoid undue US$ money supply growth. THEY WERE TARGETING GOLD. They essentially drained the lifeblood from the USEconomy on Main Street in order to subsidize fraud sanctioned and approved on Wall Street. Only since mid-September has the USFed been monetizing USTBond debt issuance. They are running scared, printing with abandon. The gold price is falling as the USDollar printing press is rapidly heating up, no longer offset by bank system drains. Details are in the Hat Trick Letter report.
DESERVED DISRESPECT TO GREENSPAN
Can you believe what is happening before a Congressional banking committee? Greenspan is being grilled, as his past errors are vividly pointed out. His past memos are being read back to him. His wrong premises are being questioned as having being totally discredited. His opposition to credit derivative disclosure is being challenged. His opposition to Fannie Mae reform is being challenged. He has been brought to task for his steadfast opposition for reform in the past during his tenure as USFed Chairman. He is being interrupted by lowly Congressional reps. His time to speak is being cut, in defense of others to be grilled. HE IS BEING SHOWN THE DISRESPECT DESERVED OF ANY FAILED PUBLIC OFFICIAL. Maybe they will demand to know who paid his second paycheck from Switzerland, and what his agenda was! Not likely! My view is that Greenspan was a primary key person used to take down the US banking system, to pave the way for a bigger agenda. These are intelligent people who knew what they were doing, who were the cheerleaders, even the Mythology High Priest.
Greenspan admitted a grand flaw in his free market ideology. He admitted being shocked that financial markets did not self-regulate. Hey Alan! They never self-regulate amidst a Fascist Business Model, since regulators and law enforcement is compromised as much as humanly or institutionally possible! He admitted a failure in the global financial market structure as he perceived it, a stunning admission. He acknowledged the USEconomy is faltering badly. He sees the rise in job layoffs and unemployment. He sees the retrenchment in consumer spending. He sees the price declines in housing without abatement. He forecasted a worsening recession.
His biggest admission is this. He admits to a flaw in the structural model perceived in the critically function for global banking. Wow! THAT IS A BIG ADMISSION, NOT PROPERLY PERCEIVING THE GLOBAL BANK STRUCTURE. He admits to how his risk pricing model did not take into account periods of financial stress. Hey Alan! Is that not what they are designed for? He used to boast for a full decade how offloaded risk via credit derivatives was a sign of sophistication, which enabled economic expansion. Instead, my view is that risk offload devices contributed toward an expansion atop a bubble, which when burst, killed the entire US banking system and then the USEconomy. He used to boast that credit derivatives shared the risk, but in fact it resulted in destruction on a widespread systemic basis. Recall the many claims made by Bernanke, that the subprime mortgage bond bust would be contained. The former Princeton Professor is not a good student of banking and economics! Unlike me, he is greatly encumbered by the limitations of economics credentials! Mathematics and statistics are pure science and its application as artistry.
NO SOLUTIONS FOR ECONOMY FROM BAILOUTS
Almost all US-based bailouts to date are to pay for dead financial firms. Their shareholders and bond holders and asset base have been repaired but not restored. To think this benefits the loan process is folly. It facilitates retirement to the Caribbean for corrupt bank executives. The flow of federal funds will not find its way to the people, or at least only pennies per dollar will. The ‘Top-down Approach’ is destined to fail because the corruption, bond fraud, accounting fraud, financial instrument shell game, and other assorted illicit procedures are the cause of the problem, and all lie at the top of the structure intended to trickle down! To expect benefits downstream is lunacy. In fact, the devices to assist and subsidize the criminal behavior at the top are vastly expanding with multiple branches. No less than five special purpose vehicles created by JPMorgan Chase were announced on Wednesday. The number of USFed lending facilities, all to big banks, none to people on Main Street, has exploded to such an extent that one needs a sportsbook guide to comprehend all the acronyms. David Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch even coined the YAP, yet another program. Proliferation might be what the architects of the Financial Coup d’Etat intended. Confusion is the best friend of coup architects, just like truth is the first victim of war.
The people receive $1 for every $500 given to Wall Street elite in fraud redemption. The rank & file population entered a ‘Revolving Door’ of loan repayments that often do not reduce the loan balance, assured to end in foreclosure within a year or so. The same nonsense of ‘Trickle Down’ was prevailed when it has no past precedent of succeeding.
The lack of disclosure is a tragedy. Congress demands no better disclosure, and receives none. The Lehman Brothers resolution has been conducted in total darkness. Evidence coming my way indicates that JPMorgan is using the dead Lehman carcass as a vast private arsenal to attack hedge funds. Some such funds have most of their assets frozen, while their positions are attacked. What is happening is criminal, a climax of this administration, which has been taken over by Wall Street. A complaint has been made that Treasury Dept documents look like redacted CIA documents, hardly what is needed to instill confidence. One official decree after another undermines investor confidence, the last being short rule restrictions on financial stocks, with an exemption given to Goldman Sachs. This is a selective bailout of Wall Street, a process run by Wall Street, permitting financial crimes worthy of 1000-page indictments.
DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS INTERUPTED
Big disruptive events are occurring in the distribution system. Letters of credit are routinely being refused by export nations who distrust US sources. A fall of 10% to 20% in shipping traffic to western US ports has been reported. Ships are empty at Asian ports, some even loaded but interrupted on their voyage to US ports and European ports. Many details are given in the October Hat Trick Letter reports. Even manufacturers of shipping vessels are being severely affected, as credit has interrupted construction projects. Indian suppliers are often demanding 100% upfront on costs to east coast retailers, again showing the distrust. Almost total attention has been given to banks and credit markets and stock markets. The USEconomy is moving from recession toward something different from depression. The current interruption could actually be more like disintegration. Short-term credit is soon to interfere greatly with truckers and railways in distribution channels on the domestic side, much like letters of credit are wrecking havoc on the overseas shipper side.
The next big shoe to drop is credit cards. Bank of America has announced plans, not yet fully implemented, to cut back on credit cards to lower FICO scorers. The lower 60%-ile of credit score recipients will find themselves without credit cards at all. One friend told me that he used to own 10 credit cards. Recently, all but four were simply discontinued, but a few were not used. Other friends said most of their credit limits were slashed. Changes are coming. Then the next big shoe to drop will be commercial mortgage default. No reprieve, rest, or respite for US bankers. Changes are coming. It will force defaults in most every conceivable financial corner.
DISHONOR AMONG BANKERS
The system is breaking down. Just when the heart attack signals are actually improving, although only slightly, the USEconomy is falling off a cliff, as unprecedented decay is occurring. Some improvement has been seen with the short-term LIBOR rate, the money market funding, TED spreads, and mortgage bond spreads. But bankers and financial subsidiaries are in focus for dishonor.
The following message came yesterday to my desk. It pertains to General Electric. It involved dishonored Letters of Credit (L/C). The US banks not only distrust each other, they are engaging in criminal activity, like contract fraud. If big enough, or connected well enough to the power center, it is permitted. Again, no solutions, only proliferation of chaos.
“Try this one on. One of our clients did a bond early last year (underwritten by RBC/Dain Rauscher) backed up by a General Electric Letter of Credit. There is a tag end of $1 million. The deal was the sale and lease back of 13 bank branches. One remains. The tenant is a regional bank. RBC cannot remarket the bond now because the market is still frozen. So the client, per the documents, called on the L/C for performance (as allowed in the L/C, which extends to 2021). GE has reneged on the L/C and will not pay unless the two principals come up with $1M in cash. The client has said no way, the L/C has no such provision. GE has said, too bad, if you don’t like it, talk to our attorney. We’re not paying.” Stories like this are probably surfacing all over the North American landscape. US banks are defending themselves by dishonoring contracts.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 1:16 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
This is deep into the heart of darkness dressed as glittering light.
FU&FW
[link to www.guardian.co.uk]
Rupert Murdoch, Lord Mandelson and Lord Byron: what's their game?
Comments ()
We anti-conspiracy theorists have been mocked this week for suggesting there may be less than meets to eye to the yachtgate row, enjoyable though it has been for fans of Peter Mandelson, George Osborne and Oleg Deripaska (Russia's now-famous Mr Aluminium) - not to mention the novels of Evelyn Waugh.
As the tale slips down the news agenda, at least until Sunday morning, it's prudent to ask: were we wrong? Earlier this week the official, off-the-record Tory line was that Mandelson had manipulated Nathaniel Rothschild into falling out with his old Bullingdon chum, Osborne, for betraying their August chit-chat.
We laughed at this, not unkindly, when we heard it from Conservative press officers – as we called them in more innocent days, before someone (possibly me) imported the self-promoting term "spin doctor" from the US in 1988. Did they really think even the Crown Prince of Darkness could sway such a rich, wild and worldly figure as the next Lord Rothschild, could persuade him to wreck an old and intimate friendship in so public a way?
My working assumption was that - unless there were motives as yet unknown - this was essentially a social row that had got out of hand. By grassing up Mandelson when a guest of Rothschild, Osborne had embarrassed his Buller chum, as well as his yachtgate host and business partner, Mr Aluminium. Red faces all round, much anger, bad manners, bad form.
The Tory tack has changed now. Today The Spectator, the London Evening Standard and its sister paper, the Daily Mail, plus others I can't afford because the FT is so expensive, all reflect the new line to take.
It is to hint that it is really all about Deripaska's business empire, its ambitions, its current financial pressures (he needs to refinance loans in a global financial crisis) and the possibly sinister role in all this played by ex-EU trade commissioner Mandelson.
Today's Guardian plays a role in all this by revealing that Mandelson was seen dining with Mr Aluminium in a Moscow restaurant as early as 2004, two years before the "few social gatherings in 2006 and 2007" mentioned in his statement; earlier too than reports of them meeting in 2005.
This could prove significant, if more important developments surface. Meanwhile it's all grist to the conspiracy mill, which is now turning up photos of a hitherto little known port in Montenegro called Tivat. Apparently "Hungary's biggest property developer", a firm also called Tivat, co-owned by Nat Rothschild and a Canadian called Peter Munk, want to develop the old Yugoslavian naval base there as the new Monte Carlo.
And Deripaska? He is apparently Montenegro's biggest employer (yes, it's aluminium), its Lord Ashcroft, you might say, in view of the Tory bankroller's mega-standing in Belize. According to the Mail, he makes the key calls to Montenegrin pols.
According to the Standard, he also makes them to top politicos in places you've probably never heard of - like the remote Russian republic of Kalmykia, whose president promised in his campaign to buy every shepherd a mobile phone and sign up Diego Maradona for the local team. If only Gordon could be so imaginative!
Lots of other Russian schemes, deep in the Wild East, are also mentioned. This is all great fun, wily foreigners with funny names, very probably with moustaches too. Sacha Baron Cohen will be found to have been on Mr Aluminium's vulgar gin palace, Queen K, if we search all the lifeboats. Lord Byron's name – always one to panic shareholders – has already been invoked. He passed through Tivat and liked it.
So the real offence, so the new theory goes, must have been that Osborne inadvertently put Deripaska's name (try calling him "Terry Pascoe", it's easier) up in lights at a time when he is firefighting troubles within his empire: court cases, refinancing and stuff. The allegedly mooted £50k donation was chicken feed. Proper money is at stake, not least in a complex court case over the disputed sale of Russia's second biggest insurance firm, Ingosstrakh. Mandelson's office became involved via MEPs who were supporting EU shareholders who blamed Deripaska when the value of their stake in Ingosstrakh was reduced.
This may be important or it may be froth. It doesn't stop there: it never does. New Labour's Lord Byron (a fellow peer, did you notice?) apparently championed Montenegro's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), an epochal event you may have missed. Nudge, nudge. I am beginning to see why Messrs Cameron and Osborne embraced the new American "nudge theory" last summer, though it was thought at the time to mean ways of persuading (but not instructing) voters to adopt better dietary habits.
So, we are back where we were a month ago when Mandelson was recalled to the unByronic Brown cabinet. The papers are digging hard in search of conflict of interest, improper conduct and, failing all that, our old friend "errors of judgment" on Lord M's part (and Master George's).
The diggers may yet turn something up, but before you invest in those costly Sunday papers, let alone put spare savings into buying land in Tivat, remember, they have had a month on the case already, with little to show for it except nudge, nudge. Perhaps the Nudge Hotel should be next to the Lord Byron when Tivat becomes the new Monte Carlo, or even the new Poole Harbour.
As things stand, Mandelson has sustained some damage, though the spectacle of watching Sky News covering him making a business speech last night in Easington was a tribute to his box-office appeal. Osborne's flashily dangerous sense of style has also sustained more damage, though Dave is standing by him. Reports that William Hague is boning up to become shadow chancellor are premature.
My hunch remains that Mandelson and Osborne will survive, albeit a little more shop-soiled. We'll see.
Cameron, incidentally, is fingered in today's Indy for using Matt Freud's private plane to slip off from his Turkish hols to Santorini in Greece, where he paid court to Matt's father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch. New Labour is hardly is a position, alas, to protest at such grovelling. The Great Schmoozer's own gin palace was later moored off Corfu.
Surely, at his age, Rupert should be careful on such boats. Remember how poor old Bob Maxwell slipped and fell. But that is not our concern. Result so far? Much fun and laughter at the expense of politicians with a weakness for bling, nothing more serious, not so far.
But Martin Kettle makes a good point in today's Guardian when he reminds liberals to temper their outrage. Barack Obama has been raising vast private sums to outspend John McCain in the US presidential elections, some of it undoubtedly from very dodgy scumbags of all colours as well as widows' mites. Basking in media approval, he has done so with little complaint from his own side.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 1:23 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
Thanks flatland, this is big/huge, how many other institutions are hidden like this , worth trillions? i only know of one, and its fabled, no clear data on it, based in Europe and owned by the Rothschilds but upfront hidden and controlled by whom, what and where, I know not yet, soon Lord willing.
FU&FW
[link to www.godlikeproductions.com]
flatland
User ID: 504013
10/24/2008 1:08 PM
Add to Favorites
Report abusive post
You don't really own the stocks
Quote
All the stocks and bonds you think you own are actually owned by a company you've probably never heard of, a company owned by the same people who own the US Federal Reserve.
Originally paper stocks certificates were issued as evidence of ownership by companies to investors purchasing shares. But as trading volume exploded in the late 60's this manual system didn't scale. As an increasing number of trades failed due to paper processing backlogs The New York Stock Exchange took the unprecedented steps of closing on Wednesdays in 1968. [.pdf]
In response to the crisis The Central Certificate Service (CCS) was created to electronically settle trades and eliminate the need for share certificates. Although intended as a temporary measure, it is still with us.
Financial assets purchased today aren't registered in your name; rather they are held in what's known as street name. Regardless of the assets purchased or the broker used, this name is almost always a successor of CCS, namely The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTC), or some anomalous sounding variant of "Cede & Co".
Holding assets in excess of $40T (yes, trillion), DTC is the single largest private trust in the world - in fact the largest company you've probably never heard of.
While DTC no doubt provides a critical service - standing behind and insuring the performance of hundreds of thousands of broker / dealers, institutional investors, banks, mutual funds, insurance companies and hedge funds, many people are critical of this quasi-monopoly. While some say a system like DTC facilitates short selling, and and other forms of market manipulation, others claim the interests of American shareholders have been superceded by this system of indirect stock ownership, and the technology now exists to revert to direct ownership of stocks [.pdf].
But, as the business of big business is indeed, big business, whether or not these temporary measures will ever be removed is anyones guess
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 533830
10/24/2008 1:38 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
One more bump before i hit the sack,
Anyone with Info or links to the actual companies, corporations that hold the 500 trillion + in derivatives and where they hold their reserves, also does anyone know who the principles of those orgs/companies/corporations are?
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| FHL(C)
User ID: 534303
10/24/2008 7:25 PM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
FU&FW
[link to us.ft.com]
Swap spreads turn negative
By Michael Mackenzie in New York
Thursday Oct 23 2008 17:55
The turmoil in the financial markets has taken hold of the strategically important trade in long-term interest rate derivatives, pushing rates to levels once thought to be a "mathematical impossibility".
Such interest rate swaps are the most widely traded over-the-counter derivative and are crucially important for insurers, pension funds and other companies that need to fund liabilities decades into the future.
Investors use swaps to lock in interest rates for 30 years or more, trading a floating rate, based on the London interbank offered rate, for a fixed rate, typically based on US Treasury yields, plus a premium, called the swap spread, which reflects the risk of trading with a private counterparty as opposed to the government.
On Thursday, the 30-year swap spread turned negative after briefly flirting with such levels earlier this month. This implies investors are somehow reckoning that they are more likely to be paid back by a private counterparty than by the government.
"Negative swap spreads have been considered by many to be a mathematical impossibility, just like negative probabilities or negative interest rates," said Fidelio Tata, head of interest rate derivatives strategy at RBS Greenwich Capital Markets.
Traders and analysts believe this reflects aftershocks from the demise of Lehman Brothers and capital constraints at surviving banks rather than a loss of confidence in the US government.
The Lehman bankruptcy is important because it led to the termination of outstanding contracts. With many participants scaling back activities, investors have had trouble filling holes in their portfolios, upsetting the normal relationship between the swap spread and the "risk-free" Treasury yield.
For much of this year, the 30-year swap spread averaged between 30 and 55 basis points over the 30-year Treasury yield. It closed at 15bp on Monday, 0.5bp on Tuesday and a "negative" 4.25bp on Thursday. Implied 30-year swap spreads for Europe and the UK have been negative since the demise of Lehman.
"Insurance companies and pension funds woke up and realised that their existing swap contracts had been torn up and that they needed to replace them," said William O'Donnell, UBS strategist.
He said the collapse in swap spreads also reflected the prospect of a rise in Treasury supply. Greater Treasury debt sales tend to narrow the difference between Treasury yields and swap rates.
[link to freewordofgod.yuku.com] |
| .
User ID: 534303
10/25/2008 5:19 AM | | Re: Watch, Its happening ,the global economic change. | Quote |
If credit card debt has also been securitized and sold as investments, as the economy worsens defaults on credit card debt will be a replay of the mortgage defaults. How much debt can the Treasury bail out before its own credit rating sinks?
The contribution of credit default swaps to the financial crisis has not been made clear. These swaps are bets that a designated financial instrument will fail. In exchange for "premium" payments, the seller of a swap protects the buyer of the swap from default by, for example, a company's bond that the swap buyer might not even own. If these swaps are also securitized and sold as investments, more nebulous assets appear on balance sheets.
Normally, if you and I make a bet, and I welsh on the bet, it doesn't threaten your solvency. If we place bets with a bookie and the odds go against the bookie, the bookie will fail, as apparently happened to AIG, necessitating an $85 billion bailout of the insurance company, and to Bear Stearns resulting in the demise of the investment bank.
Credit default swaps are a form of unregulated insurance. One danger of the swaps is that they allow speculators to purchase protection against a company defaulting on its bonds, without the speculators having to own the company's bonds. Speculators can then short the company's stock, driving down its price and raising questions about the viability of the company's bonds. This raises the value of the speculators' swaps which can be sold to holders of the company's bonds. By ruining a company's prospects, the speculators make money.
Another danger is that swaps encourage investors to purchase riskier, higher-yielding instruments in the belief that the instruments are insured, but the sellers of swaps have not reserved against them. |
| .
User ID: 534303
10/25/2008 5:20 AM | | | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 | |
|
