Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin | |
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Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 08:21 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin This deserves a snip. "A good sovereign government can always create a new currency, on a new basis, and can also manage the transfer of imputed value from what should be salvaged of the old to find its more durable, new incarnation in the new monetary system." Ape or Man? ************ Such reflections on the present perils of humanity should return our discussion to the topic with which this chapter of the report began: the essential distinction of man from ape. The recent, presently accelerating soaring of prices beyond all rational determination of incurred physical cost of production per capita, expresses the inherent worthlessness of money as a standard of economic value. It was by regulating money, most notably as this was done in the post-1932 U.S. until the radical changes of the 1971-1982 interval, that a pattern of "fair trade" was induced to the effect of keeping the relative prices within ranges which did not depart violently from the ratios consistent with physical, as distinct from monetary values. It was deregulation, as launched during the 1971-1982 interval, which wrecked the U.S. economy in ways for which we are sorely paying today. This contrast between physical and monetary values implicitly poses the question: What are the values which should govern the outlook of the individual and of the institutions of society? Money—price—can not meet that requirement. Therefore, what does? The answer to that question is, essentially: What is the difference in value between an ape and a human individual? 1. Unlike the beasts, the apes included, the human individual's cognitive powers enable that individual to discover and to know universal physical principles, such as Kepler's discovery of gravitation, or the ancient Pythagoreans' knowledge of Sphaerics. These discoverable principles are universal in the sense that the universe is a finite universe, as Riemann and Einstein insisted, in which these discoverable universal principles, since they are universal, are thus extended implicitly to the limits of the universe, and bound the universe as a self-bounded universe. 2. These principles are not sense-objects, but they bound the universe in which sensed objects exist. It is through the application of the mastery of these principles, that mankind increases our species' power to exist, and raises the quality of human individual existence. 3. These principles are of two classes. Most simply, they are universal physical principles, as the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato understood this. They are also the universal principles associated with Classical artistic composition. In the first instance, as universal physical principles, the individual knowing mind addresses the domain of non-living and living processes as such. In the second instance, as universal Classical artistic principles, the subject of the individual person's creative powers is social processes as such. Otherwise, they are the same quality of principles of human cognitive activity. 4. The existence of these principles in human knowledge, defines the human personality as implicitly immortal, as an immortal being temporarily occupying an animal-like body. It is this sense of intimation of immortality which defines the normal standard for a moral human individual. The moral individual does not act under blind compulsion of service to the mortal needs; but, rather, is motivated by a sense of bonds of trust between the living individual and both prior and subsequent generations. Hence, the passion which we rightly identify as patriotism, which is essentially a devotion to the interest of prior and future generations, as that interest is most immediately located in the sovereign society of which one is a part. Therefore, it should be apparent, that the great problem of our society presently, is that it, like most of its fundamentalist cults, has lost a sense of obligation to the immortality of the human individual. It has thus lost a sense of connection to those immortal values, as typified by universal and fundamental principles of physical science and Classical artistic composition, on which the moral character of the individual member of society depends. The characteristic of U.S. and European society, in particular, since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, but, especially since the later 1960s, has been a radical shift in prevalent social values from a moral society, to a society, like the Athens of Pericles, which had doomed itself by that cult of popular opinion, which is otherwise named sophistry. The individual who can not stand for truth, even in defiance of prevalent lies or merely follies of his contemporaries, is not a truly moral person, but a man or woman who has hocked his or her soul in today's great and grubby pawn-shop where popular opinions are bought and sold. With the currencies of the world already rendered more or less worthless by the great waves of hyperinflation now in progress, to what shall the citizen cling as economic values? "Where can I put my money!?" the citizen cries. In what does one invest when money is about to become virtually worthless as a surrogate for value. The answer is, that society shall and can live on, when monetary systems die. A good sovereign government can always create a new currency, on a new basis, and can also manage the transfer of imputed value from what should be salvaged of the old to find its more durable, new incarnation in the new monetary system. Mass evictions in Loudoun County, are an intolerable alternative. We must save the habitation, and thus the social structure of our functioning communities, despite the nominal bankruptcy of mortgages which have been wildly inflated to the point that the prices of the real estate are virtually worse than meaningless. We can do this without wrecking any of the essential, pre-existing institutions of our society; to see our way clear, morally, to make that necessary adjustment, we must arouse in our fellow-citizens a proper sense of the immortality of the human individual soul, the sense of the human individual as a creative soul in the likeness of the Creator and with the mission the Creator has assigned to men and women. With that view, we can look the terrible in the eye, and conquer it. |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 08:22 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 08:25 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin Just about to search for the Boston Globe story. Will be amusing im sure. THE NEW LIBEL AGAINST LAROUCHE: Felix & Fascism by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. April 16, 2006 Frankly, if you do not think of Felix Rohatyn as a fascist, you do him a grave injustice. Both Felix and the wildly libelous attacks on me which have surfaced in the aftermath of the Senate confirmation of the Supreme Court appointment of Justice Samuel Alito, put the essence of filthy Felix on today's global display. By all rational standards, Felix is a fascist who considers me a prominent threat to his currently larcenous schemes. So, in keeping with Felix's fears on that account, the Alito confirmation has been followed by an accumulation of various lunatic libels recently featured against me in prominent mass media and comparable other locations, not only in a bankers' Boston, Massachusetts, but also in a featured hoax published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in prominent Leipzig, Germany pro-fascist and related circles, in a leading France TV channel, and other relevant places. As noted by one person close to me, what is intended by those outlets as attempted defamation of me, relies heavily on the precedent set by the notebooks of E.T.A. Hoffmann and the archives of Charenton. Felix's credentials as a fascist are clearly established. The best-known career connections of that sort, are traced from his association with the U.S.A. extension of Lazard Freres of the Hitler period's Banque Worms operations. Felix is notable from the history of the 1970s for his role in "Big Mac," but also has a much uglier prominence as a key banker in the operation backed by such as George P. Shultz and Henry Kissinger which brought the neo-Nazi General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, and unleashed the neo-Nazi mass-murder campaign in the Americas' Southern Cone during the first half of the 1970s. He is also a key ally of Vice-President Cheney in the scheme for transferring the power of the U.S. military from the control of constitutional government, to a system of private armies, of Cheney's Halliburton, et al., modeled upon Adolf Hitler's program for replacement of the German Wehrmacht by the Nazi SS. In short, fascist Felix is a Synarchist, by expressed faith and by practice, a specimen cast in the tradition of dictator Mussolini's and Adolf Hitler's bankers of the 1920s and 1930s. He is not merely typical of the traditional practices of that collection of Synarchist scoundrels who brought Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and their like to power during 1922-1945; he is, as the legacy of Banque Worms attests, fully witting of the evil he does. The evidence supporting those characterizations which I have just summarized, is abundant, and conclusive, if anyone cared to debate the matter. Otherwise, Middlebury, Vermont's filthy Felix is, like the feral coyote he much resembles, as clever (and as dirty) as a coyote in a feral sort of way, but not very intelligent—in fact he is an oafish boor—in matters of art, science, or morals. He is clever as a thief who knows how to steal money, but has no wish to know actually how to earn it. He has no understanding of economics, and no desire to understand that subject, since any form of rational behavior would conflict with his professional standing, that of the poor boy who achieved fame as the Charles Dickens' Artful Dodger in today's financial world. Therefore, if you are fully sane and rational, you will consider the current rash of such wild-eyed libels against me personally, as marks of the high position of honor which I have earned in the world in recent times. You might also wish to amuse yourself by noting the list of characters who have exposed their own disgusting morals in this matter, beginning with the Boston Globe (the sometime voice of Dracula's Vault), the leading Swiss daily, Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a leading French TV institution, certain political circles in Leipzig, and a few present and former members of the U.S. Congress. Filthy Felix, anyone? |
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Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 08:53 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin It all fits. This article appears in the April 21, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. [link to www.larouchepub.com] Behind the Generals' Revolt by Jeffrey Steinberg On April 15, Lyndon LaRouche hailed the actions by a group of retired flag officers, demanding the immediate firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as both "unprecedented" and "appropriate, given that the nation is being betrayed." In the week preceding LaRouche's comment, some of America's outstanding retired military commanders, including Gen. Anthony Zinni (USMC-ret.), Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (USA-ret.), Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold (USMC-ret.), Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (USMC-ret.), Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, Jr. (USA-ret.), Maj. Gen. John Riggs (USA-ret.), and Maj. Gen. John Batiste (USA-ret.), all surfaced with public calls for Rumsfeld's immediate ouster, on the grounds that he had ignored the advice and warnings of his military commanders and had, as the result, drawn the United States into a disastrous fiasco in Iraq, which is now on the verge of erupting into a full-scale, uncontrollable civil war. While the criticisms of Rumsfeld by the ex-officers ostensibly focussed on Iraq, sources close to the Pentagon have confirmed that the outpouring of calls for Rumsfeld's immediate ouster have more to do with Bush Administration plans for a preemptive military strike against Iran, possibly as early as late April through the middle of May. Ex-military and intelligence sources report that a group of active duty generals and admirals have written to Gen. Peter Pace (USMC), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, threatening to resign, if the White House orders military strikes against Iran. The generals and admirals, according to the sources, are particularly outraged that the White House has refused, ostentatiously, to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons against hardened targets inside Iran. Furthermore, while the generals' ire has been directed at Rumsfeld, they are collectively aware of the fact that the true architect of the Bush Administration's perpetual war policy, including the plan to launch preemptive nuclear strikes against Iran, is Vice President Dick Cheney. Unlike Rumsfeld, who can be fired by President George W. Bush at any moment, the Vice President was elected to office, and his ouster is politically more complicated. The constitutional complications are vastly compounded by President Bush's severe psychological dependency on the Vice President, and Mr. Bush's deteriorating state of mind, as he tries to avoid the unavoidable reality that his Presidency is in a free fall, and that he has been personally written off by a vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, all the way up to the U.S. Congress. The Looming Monetary Blowout The picture, however, is incomplete without identifying the principal factor driving the immediate crisis: the imminent collapse of the entire world floating-exchange-rate monetary system. This crisis is compelling those financiers of the Synarchist (Fascist) International, who control Vice President Cheney, to distract attention from the monetary blowout, by going for a preemptive war against Iran. Under such circumstances, they will go, once again, for dictatorship, as they attempted, with only limited success, following the attacks of 9/11. Inside the United States, this apparatus is most publicly identified with Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz, and is associated with a Boston- and Geneva-centered apparatus of banks, brokerage houses, and hedge funds, known in New England as "The Vault." Through institutions like Credit Suisse/First Boston, this crowd of openly Synarchist bankers maintains ties to those in London and in continental Europe, who are the descendants of the financial backers of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the Vichyites in France. Their policy today is an echo of the perpetual war impulses that led the Synarchist bankers of the 1930s Young Plan era to install Hitler and the Nazis in power, to provoke a war across Eurasia. These bankers know perfectly well that the disastrous 19-year reign of Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve has produced a derivatives and real estate financial bubble that is unlikely to survive through the Spring. The coordinated efforts of leading central banks in North America, Western Europe, and Japan to orchestrate a "controlled" deflation of the bubble, through interest-rate hikes, and the drying up of the yen carry-trade, is doomed to fail. In fact, as LaRouche has warned, the efforts to reverse the Greenspan "wall of money" hyperinflationary policy, will only accelerate the bursting of the real estate bubble. Add to this the growing alarm on the part of the Synarchists, that they have not succeeded in crushing the Franklin Delano Roosevelt American System policy impulse within the Democratic Party. Two sets of recent developments underscore this latter factor. First, under the personal initiative of Felix Rohatyn, a series of coordinated slanders have been published in recent days, targetting Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche Youth Movement, which is the fastest growing institution among young Democrats in the United States, and which has parallel, expanding youth organizations throughout Western Europe. The major slanders appeared in the Boston Globe, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland, and on the French broadcasting network, France Inter. Responding directly to these attacks, LaRouche issued a brief statement: "Felix Rohatyn's Jewish ancestry did not deter him from organizing the financial backing for the Nazi gang associated with Augusto Pinochet's Chile dictatorship and the related fascist death-squad operations in South America's Southern Cone. Perhaps the European antifa ('anti-fascist') crowd is just a front for the neo-Nazis who have been 'earmarked' to call themselves the left." Rohatyn, who, along with George Shultz, has been an architect of the "privatization of war" policy of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Halliburton, makes no bones about the fact that he asserts the primacy of private financial interests over sovereign governments—including in the area of infrastructure investment. Rohatyn's Synarchist ideas were echoed in the second development. On April 14, the Wall Street Journal reported, in a front-page story, that Treasury Secretary John Snow, in a speech at the University of Mississippi on April 12, had launched into an attack against former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and the Hamilton Project, a Brookings Institution-housed effort by a group of former Clinton Administration economists, to shift the nation's economic policy from its current catastrophic course. At a Brookings briefing launching the project, Rubin had invoked Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States, whose policies of national banking and directed Federal government credits for infrastructure and education, had built the U.S. economy. Snow, babbling like a true spokesman for the Bush Administration, lied that Hamilton was a free-trade proponent and advocate of the "private sector," and that, in pushing "for a larger government role" the Hamilton Project had "misappropriated" Hamilton's name. Cheney at the Epicenter While the accelerating time-table of the financial collapse is the leading factor, driving the Bush Administration to a possible preemptive strike on Iran, another issue is also driving the Synarchist crowd to desperate near-term measures. Vice President Cheney, the point-man for Shultz and Rohatyn, has once again emerged as the central figure in the Valerie Plame leak probe by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, was outed as a CIA officer in a July 14, 2003 syndicated column by Robert Novak. Ambassador Wilson had conducted a fact-finding trip to Niger in February 2002 on behalf of the CIA, to probe unsubstantiated intelligence reports that Iraq was seeking large quantities of uranium from that African state. The CIA had been tasked to pursue the Iraq-Niger story by Vice President Cheney. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were false, and when he began making noises that the Bush-Cheney claims of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program—a key justification for the Iraq invasion—were known to be false by top Administration policymakers, Cheney ordered a campaign of leaks to discredit the ex-Ambassador. As the result of a series of recent court filings by Fitzgerald and by attorneys for Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, now under indictment for obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury, new evidence has surfaced, identifying Cheney as the architect of the Plame leak. Fitzgerald's April 12, 2006 thirty-nine-page filing, nailed the fact that a plot existed at the White House, centered in the Office of the Vice President, "to repudiate Mr. Wilson before and after July 14, 2003." While Special Counsel Fitzgerald had reportedly intended to take up Cheney's role in the Plame leak after the November 2006 midterm elections, the timetable has been radically altered, and Cheney's head is now on the political chopping block, as the discovery battle in the Libby case reaches a showdown moment over the next weeks. A senior intelligence community source acknowledged that the moment that Cheney's role as the author of the Plame leak is proven, and an indictment appears likely, Cheney will be forced out. A timely departure of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense is the kind of shock that is now desperately needed, to assure that the Bush Administration does not push the button on Iran, triggering events that no one is prepared to handle. Subscribe to EIW |
Johnny Danger User ID: 74060 United States 04/18/2006 08:55 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin WB OAP. I've been bearing the brunt of the attacks during your absence. Great News your putting up. Do you really think with Katrina and all the housing bubble is about to burst? I mean, the one place that should be booming with housing is down in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. John |
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Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:16 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin Johny, g'day. Yes i believe the economy is ready to crash ... understand the hedge fund saga going on with commodities surge and how the yen carry trade which has been financing all the speculation, now ending. ... it's end time for this system. GM going bankrupt. That in itself will set of a hedge fund blowout. Massive amounts of derivatives tied to GM. Shocking. As for Katrina and a housing boom in the region. What reconstruction in essence???..the area is doomed under present policy. Been left to rot i've noted. And it's flat broke. And if Iran is attacked ... that will blow the economy also. ((((Multiple)))) bubbles are ready to pop. |
Johnny Danger User ID: 74060 United States 04/18/2006 09:20 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin I can only give highlights of the Dr. Tatayana Koryagina Interview. I have the CD Version, but it got scratched, so I merely took the highlights and built it into a web page. Your totally correct in your assessment, and it is being planned to be so. [link to truth4you.no-ip.org] Forgive the crudity of the page. I threw it up in a hurry, in an effort to get this word out. Seems like the days of keeping up with the Joneses is about to pass. John |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:20 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin This glossary appears in the May 27, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. Glossary of the Global Financial Casino Hedge Fund: A form of mutual fund used by wealthy individuals and institutions to engage in aggressive speculative activities prohibited to ordinary mutual funds. Hedge funds are restricted by law to no more than 100 investors per fund, and these investors are presumed to be sufficiently knowledgeable to understand the risks. Most hedge funds have extremely high minimum investment amounts ranging from $250,000 to well over $1 million. Derivative: A financial contract whose value is derived from the performance of assets, interest rates, currency exchange rates, or indexes. Derivative transactions include a wide assortment of financial contracts including structured debt obligations and deposits, swaps, futures, options, caps, floors, collars, forwards, and various combinations thereof. Credit Derivative: A contract between two parties which uses a derivative to transfer credit risk from one party to another, in exchange for a fee. For example, an investor who owns bonds issued by General Motors might buy a credit derivative from his investment bank, which will pay off should General Motors default on the bonds. In return, the investor pays the investment bank a fee, which the bank considers sufficient to run the risk that it will have to pay. If there is no default, the bank makes a tidy profit. Collateralized Debt Obligation: CDOs are securities backed by pools of assets, mainly non-mortgage loans or bonds. In exchange for interest charges, buyers of the CDOs bear the credit risk of the collateral, which means that if any of the loans or bonds in the pool are not repaid, the holders of the CDOs take the loss. CDOs are made up of tranches, with various maturities and risk characteristics, with the equity tranches carrying the most risk, and therefore paying the highest interest rate to the buyer. Capital Structure Arbitrage: A form of arbitrage which exploits differences in the pricing of a company's stock price and its debt. These bets are growing rapidly because of the development of the credit derivatives market. Over-the-Counter Derivative Contracts: Privately negotiated derivative contracts that are transacted outside of organized exchanges. Exchange-Traded Derivative Contracts: Standardized derivative contracts transacted on an organized exchange, and which usually have margin requirements. Off-Balance Sheet Derivative Contracts: Derivative contracts that generally do not involve booking assets or liabilities (for example, swaps, futures, forwards, and options). Swap: A deal in which two counterparties agree to swap the cash flows from different financial instruments, such as securities paying fixed and variable interest rates. A Credit Default Swap is a form of credit derivative in which the buyer pays the seller in exchange for an agreed-upon payment should the specified "credit event," such as a default or the breaking of a loan covenant, occur. The reader is advised that the technical descriptions above do not begin to do justice to the insanity of the processes they describe. Credit derivatives, for example, do not really provide protection against a default, since the institutions which issue them are often in precarious financial positions themselves, and sell the derivatives because they are desperate for the cash flow. In the current environment, a credit derivative is mainly used to provide the accounting fiction that certain mostly worthless assets on a company's books still have value. The derivatives market, overall, is designed to hide the bankruptcy of the system by providing virtual assets to paper over gaping holes in the system, as well as garnering cash flow from selling mafia-like protection to companies ravaged by market manipulations. One of the chief agencies of such manipulations are the hedge funds, which act as front men for the Anglo-American central banks and their sibling financial institutions. George Soros is a prime example of this phenomenon. —John Hoefle Subscribe to EIW |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:23 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:28 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin But why is it up.?? [PDF] HedgeFundLootingIs FuelingHyperinflation [link to www.larouchepub.com] |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:31 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:34 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin Related info from last week. [Sources: April Finan. Times, Bloomberg, wires] COMMODITY PRICES SOAR, RATE OF INCREASE OF THE SUPER-INFLATION INCREASES, DEFINING HYPERINFLATIONARY BLOWOUT. Lyndon LaRouche's September 2005 "Hyperinflationary Patterns" emphasizing its Riemannian shock-wave model, is unfolding fully in the commodities field. Fools are pouring in money on each twitch of the market. "There is a wall of investment money moving into commodities markets," said UBS analyst John Reade April 12. "We estimate around $100 billion was invested via the Goldman Sachs index, the Dow Jones/AIG index and products tracking those [commodities] indices at the end of 2005." The cited investment funds are invested into so-called "passive indices"; they mimic the performance of commodity prices. However, there are hundreds of billions of dollars more that are invested in "active funds" that are "actively" invested, which if taking long positions, forcefully push up commodity prices. The size of all investment in commodities could be one-quarter trillion dollars or more; moreover, this is coupled with sizeable leverage. The commodities prices' defining characteristic is an increase in the rate of increase. For example, between March 31, 2003 and Dec. 30, 2005 (the last day of trading), the price of palladium rose from $170 to $257 per ounce. For that whole 33 month period, its rate of price increase was 51.1% rate; its average rate of increase came out to a hefty 18.6% per year during that span. However, since the start of the year, palladium's price has subsequently jumped from $257 to $348 per ounce by April 12, which were it to continue, would come out to an increase 132% for the year 2006. Between March 31, 2003 and Dec. 30, 2005, a metric ton of aluminium increased in price at a rate of 13% per year; for 2006, its annual rate of increase is 72%. For a metric ton of zinc, between March 31, 2005 and Dec. 30, 2005, its price increased at a considerable—inflationary—rate of 55% per year; for the year 2006, its annual rate of increase is 220%. This underlying process of Weimar Germany is exactly as LaRouche forecast last September. However, the bankers have built such a speculation-laced financial system that whatever they would do to try to save one bubble, will rupture another. The central banks could attempt to break the commodities price spiral by "traditional central banker methods," i.e., raising interest rates. However, the U.S. housing bubble is beginning to contract, severely affected by the rise in mortgage interest rates during the past nine months. An increase of interest rates by 1 to 2 percentage points would puncture the U.S. housing mortgage bubble, which counting the derivatives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, totals $15 trillion. WASH DC, April 11 (EIRNS)—A CITIBANK VICE PRESIDENT BACKED UP ROBERT RUBIN'S WARNING THAT THE US HAD BETTER CORRECT ITS ECONOMIC POLICIES OR IT WILL CREATE A GLOBAL DISASTER. Michael Andrews, a Citigroup VP for International Business Affairs, speaking at a Washington conference on Thailand, was asked by EIR to comment on the recent speech by Citigroup's Robert Rubin, warning that the failed US economic policies were driving the dollar towards a collapse. While the audience tittered, Andrews responded most seriously, saying that, while his friend of 22 years was not speaking for the Bank, Rubin was "sending out a warning shot, that US economic policies must be reformed, to contain the debt, and deal with the imbalances. What determines currency exchange rates is ultimately the underlying economic policies—if they are unsound, that will eventually show itself in exchange rates." He then discussed the continued strength of the Thai economy, but added: "If your characterization of the dollar fall is realized, it will do a great deal of damage throughout the world." [Source: San Diego Daily Transcript, April 10; FDIC] FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION ON MARCH 23 HELD A FORUM ON THREATS FACING BANKING SECTOR, HIGHLIGHTING A REAL ESTATE BUST. The FDIC, which bails out a failed or failing bank, described the roundtable as "scenarios for the next U.S. recession," citing three key economic and banking risk concerns—energy price spikes, a housing slowdown, and mounting household debt. In particular, "changes in the structure of mortgage lending could pose new risks to housing," through interest-only and payment-option mortgages, causing "significant payment shock" for borrowers and losses for local banks and thrifts. Bank exposure to mortgage and home equity lending is now at peak levels, the FDIC said, as 1 in 4 family residential mortgages and home equity lines of credit have risen to account for a combined 28% of total loans and leases in the fourth quarter of 2005. [Source: WSJ B1, April 12] HOTTEST HOUSING MARKETS NOW COOLING THE QUICKEST. Double-digit declines in sales are hitting areas that have seen the biggest price surges in the last 5 years—Florida, California, and Washington D.C. The months-long "drop-off in sales and rising supply of homes could soon put downward pressure on prices." The slowdown reflects: 1) many speculators have started to dump homes; 2) high prices and rising interest rates have reduced affordability; and 3) potential buyers of second homes have pulled back. |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:42 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin The commodities bomb ... silver, copper, oil etc etc. Excellent information. [PDF] CommodityHyperinflation:Bomb AttheEndofIran-WarFuse [link to www.larouchepub.com] |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 09:52 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin Cop this! "The company with the famous cash reserves is now scraping for cash, trying on March 30 to sell its share of Isuzu Motors for $340 million, after having raised $2.7 billion by selling out of Fuji Heavy Industries, Suzuki Motors, and Daiwoo. But the statement by UAW leaders Ron Gettelfinger and Richard Shoemaker on March 31—that if Delphi's outrageous actions are approved by the bankruptcy court, "it will be impossible to avoid a long strike"—could mean early bankruptcy for GM. *********************************** And that in turn promises a blowup of the global credit derivatives market. A Reuters March 29 story was headlined "Credit Investors Ponder a GM-Sized Hole in the Universe." The article reports, "For bond investors, a GM bankruptcy [brought on by a strike] would be hard, but a GMAC bankruptcy would be disastrous," because so much of the credit derivatives markets involve GM/GMAC debt. "To be blunt, it would be total carnage," a Standard & Poor's analyst was quoted. That prospect did not prevent S&P from downgrading GM debt again on March 30, to six levels below junk bonds." *********************************** This article appears in the April 7, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. Congress Reads `My Pet Goat' As Planes Hit U.S. Auto Towers [link to www.larouchepub.com] by Paul Gallagher Perhaps the most devastating week in the U.S. auto industry's long history ended on March 31 with a mild letter of protest by 14 Members of Congress, but no sign of movement towards action to preserve and use America's most versatile industrial capability. While the 50,000-worker Delphi Corporation was demanding clearance in bankruptcy court to virtually liquidate itself in North America, and General Motors was in a desperate scramble to try to avoid bankruptcy, U.S. overall auto sales in the first quarter fell below the level of 1999. Clearly, at least 50% of the unparalleled machine-tool capacity represented by the auto sector, is effectively now unused, awaiting a move by a Congress which is informed how to intervene to use it, but lacks the will. Should its inaction continue, the United Auto Workers will be forced into a long and damaging nationwide strike, and scores of modern tool-and-die floors and hundreds of machine shops in the auto sector will "be turned into concrete slabs in a year," as one auto unionist warned early in the week. The alternative has been before Congress in outline for a year, in a series of memos by Lyndon LaRouche beginning April 2005, on "retooling auto" for other vital production. Should auto's capacity be shut down permanently rather than diversified, LaRouche warned in "Auto and World Economic Recovery" in September 2005, the formerly industrial United States will sink to virtual Third World economic status, unable to recreate or even maintain its own economic infrastructure. As if to drive the point home: On the same day the 14 Congressmen complained about Delphi's abandonment of its North American production and workforce, the Administration acknowledged that it had lost control of both the cost and the performance of contractors rebuilding the levees of New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana for the Army Corps of Engineers, and may be unable to get the work completed at all—certainly not before the 2006 hurricane season hits this Summer. It is just such major, modern infrastructural tasks and projects to which, historically, the nation has been able to turn the versatile (and underutilized) auto industry at critical moments—from building tanks and planes, to railroads, to space rockets and satellites. A 40% Industry Shrinkage The incredible shrinking U.S. auto industry headed for strikes and general bankruptcy at the end of March. GM and Delphi announced offers attempting to flush as many as 40,000 more "excess" workers out of the industry in 60 days, by retirement buyouts at GM's expense. The idea that this would soften Delphi's demands to cut its workers' wages by up to 60% in bankruptcy court, were dashed almost immediately, when Delphi, on March 31, asked New York bankruptcy judge Robert Drain to throw out its contracts with the UAW and the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE). That day, Delphi's pirate CEO, Steve Miller, told the court what UAW leaders had learned three-four days earlier: that the company also wanted to close or sell 20 of its 28 plants in North America, eliminate 75% of its 48,000-strong productive workforce, walk out of many of its supply contracts with GM, and abandon its pension plan costs either to GM or the Federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Delphi would thus use the bankruptcy court, if Drain allows it, to become, in effect, a U.S.-based holding company, run by participating private equity funds, for almost entirely outsourced auto parts production. These 20 auto-parts production plants are even more machine-tool rich than the auto production and assembly plants. GM, which was supposedly to provide the cash for the multi-billions in charges resulting from all this, is being driven toward bankruptcy by it. Not only GM's bonds fell, but its stock actually suspended trading in the NYSE's final hour on March 28, then fell by 4% when traded March 29. This followed news that: accounting reports of both GM and its financial division, GMAC, have to be redone for 2003-05, and there are market rumors of large hidden losses on GMAC's books; new Security Exchange Commission subpoenas have been issued to both GM and GMAC for accounting investigations; GM's planned sale of 51% of GMAC to raise cash, is threatened; and GM acknowledged on March 28 that it may have lost access to its $6.5 billion bank credit line. The company with the famous cash reserves is now scraping for cash, trying on March 30 to sell its share of Isuzu Motors for $340 million, after having raised $2.7 billion by selling out of Fuji Heavy Industries, Suzuki Motors, and Daiwoo. But the statement by UAW leaders Ron Gettelfinger and Richard Shoemaker on March 31—that if Delphi's outrageous actions are approved by the bankruptcy court, "it will be impossible to avoid a long strike"—could mean early bankruptcy for GM. And that in turn promises a blowup of the global credit derivatives market. A Reuters March 29 story was headlined "Credit Investors Ponder a GM-Sized Hole in the Universe." The article reports, "For bond investors, a GM bankruptcy [brought on by a strike] would be hard, but a GMAC bankruptcy would be disastrous," because so much of the credit derivatives markets involve GM/GMAC debt. "To be blunt, it would be total carnage," a Standard & Poor's analyst was quoted. That prospect did not prevent S&P from downgrading GM debt again on March 30, to six levels below junk bonds. Production employment in the U.S auto/auto parts sector as a whole, which was at 1.3 million as recently as 2000, has plunged by 240,000 jobs net since then. But as of the third week of March, with the shocking "retirement buyout" announcements made by GM and Delphi, combined with shrinkages planned by Ford, Chrysler, and a host of parts makers—the miserable prospect is that another 300,000 net jobs will be gone by 2008 or sooner. (Studies by the Chicago Federal Reserve and others have shown three to four auto-supply jobs disappearing for every one in auto production and assembly). Thus, a devastating 40% loss of employment in auto in less than a decade, and a corresponding loss to the nation of high-technology industrial and infrastructural capacity. The shrinkage of auto is a global phenomenon, and the result of globalization. Auto sales worldwide in 2005, for the thrilling Toyotas and the boring GMs alike, fell or stagnated everywhere outside China, India, Brazil, and Mexico. Total auto sales in the United States, which are going at a 16.7 million annual rate so far in 2006, were 16.9 million in 1999, when the United States had 20 million fewer people. Not surprising, when real wages have fallen three of the past four years, household debt is an all-time record portion of household income, and the savings rate has been zero or negative for 12 consecutive months in February. The same real-wage factors of globalization have lowered auto sales in Europe and Japan, and created intense pressures for cheaper and cheaper wages—even as metals and other supply prices have hyperinflated for three years. Election Inaction? The falling real wages of globalization are not reversible by more intensive globalization, which is leading instead to a financial blowout. President Bush's "let the free market handle auto" stance is typically, dangerously incompetent. The Congress, confronting 50% "excess" capacity in auto, along with painful and worsening unmet infrastructure needs laid bare, among other events, by the hurricanes of 2005, has a clear path. Facing the same conditions before, as in 1939-40, we have "retooled" auto, with government credit and under definite mission-oriented reorganization, to meet the nation's prime economic or military needs. Where is the Congress—where are the Democrats—in this auto crisis? In a self-declared election season, in which promises are stressed and action is discouraged? The danger is that both the promises and the inaction are being paid for by financial-contributor networks of Felix Rohatyn's "Democratic" faction of synarchist financiers. These happen to include—in Rohatyn, Kirk Kerkorian, Mike Steinhardt of Cerberus Capital hedge fund, Wilbur Ross, and Steve Miller, Kohlberg Kravits Roberts, etc.—the same financial networks tearing up the auto industry. |
Shadow User ID: 6265 Canada 04/18/2006 09:54 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin An aside: My father-in-law was in mining all his life, said the only time copper really takes off is during/before war. I'd link it to Iraq, but Iraq started in '02 and copper only started to move in '04 from lows of about $0.63/lb. But it didn't take off before Iraq Over the side and damn the barracuda |
BVNDY User ID: 5470 United States 04/18/2006 10:23 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin "COMMODITY INFLATION" ? WHAT the FUCK is that? Sounds like another part of the myth of modern so called "economists", that there are certain kinds of inflation, when inflation is simple really, too much money chasing too few goods. WE'VE had a global economy for the last few decades, the first time in history really, and we've been able to pump money into the system, becaause the system is so large, but now we are awash in a sea of dollars, and are about to go thru the first global HYPERINFLATION , you can call it "commodity" or what ever, its simply politicians running thge printing presses, and with electronic transfers they dont even have to do that, just hit a button on a computer, move a comma a few spaces over, and VOLIA... INSTANT MONEY. WE are in the shit, however, NO MATTER WHat YOU CALL IT |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 10:29 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 10:33 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin Takes ages on dial-up grrrrrr Economic Geography: Auto's Decline and the U.S. Industrial Heartland (PDF) Dreadful stuff. [link to www.larouchepub.com] |
Optimistic Aussie from Perth (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 10:35 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin Shocking crisis now in the making. "for every 100 automobiles built, there's 27 related jobs. So, the impact, after you've built 15 million cars in the world last year" [link to www.larouchepub.com] Sweazy: Yes, you know, something that most people don't even take a look at, is the reciprocating, or the ill-effect of unemployment: Regardless of what area you're in, when there's high unemployment levels, you have social ills. And we've seen that in major cities throughout the United States. But, in the auto industry, for every 100 automobiles built, there's 27 related jobs. So, the impact, after you've built 15 million cars in the world last year, the impact of this can be devastating, not only to the United States, but throughout the world. And if this domino effect would take place, you're looking at an economic crisis, which could cause disaster for the nation and our communities. So, we've seen so many times in the past, that communities, the social level, by which I mean the poverty levels, your population decreases because people want to move to where jobs are. All the social ills associated with disease, everything becomes a prominent factor, and then you see the total deterioration of a community such as Detroit, which had 2 million people in its heyday; less than 900,000 people live there today. There's as many boarded-up homes as there are occupied. And it's a disaster financially for that community. |
OAFP (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 11:04 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
Jack Carcano User ID: 75589 Netherlands 04/18/2006 11:05 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin You people have been saying that the economy is on the brink of collapse since the seventies... And guess what? Nothing happened. Why would this time be any different? |
OAFP (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 11:09 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin Jack Carcano. "It is notable here, that I have made less than a dozen professional's forecasts in the course of my career as an economist." Pick one which failed to come to fruition. |
Shadow User ID: 82861 Canada 04/18/2006 11:13 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Re: Hello. Warning,!! The Great Leesburg Bust of 2006. Bankers Association Warns of Bust...Heads Up, Updates posted. Lot's happening, Headspin >Why would this time be any different?< [link to bigpicture.typepad.com] Greed. Over the side and damn the barracuda |
OAFP (OP) User ID: 1488 Australia 04/18/2006 11:16 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
captain obvious User ID: 82891 United States 04/18/2006 01:06 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |