November 5, 2012

Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF

Originally posted by Jeff Neilson for thestreet.com on August 15, 2012

VANCOUVER (Silver Gold Bull) — For approximately three years, our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement. We were told that the key was to stomp on the Little People with “austerity” in order to continue making full interest payments to the Bond Parasites — at any/all costs.

Following three years of this continuous, uninterrupted failure, Greece has already defaulted on 75% of its debts, and its economy is totally destroyed. The UK, Spain and Italy are all plummeting downward in suicide-spirals, where the more austerity these sadistic governments inflict upon their own people the worse their debt/deficit problems get. Ireland and Portugal are nearly in the same position.

Now in what may be the greatest economic “mea culpa” in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have been forced to acknowledge that Iceland’s approach to economic triage was the correct approach right from the beginning.

What was Iceland’s approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail out the criminal Big Banks, at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing.

The bankers told us that no amount of suffering (for the Little People) was too great in order to make sure that the Bond Parasites got paid at 100 cents on the dollar. Iceland told the Bond Parasites they would get what was left over, after the people had been taken care of (by their own government).

The bankers told us that our governments could no longer afford the same education, health care and pension systems which our parents had taken for granted. Iceland told the bankers that what the country could no longer afford was to continue to be blood-sucked by the worst financial criminals in the history of our species. Now, after three-plus years of this absolute dichotomy in economic policymaking, a clear picture has emerged (despite the best efforts of the propaganda machine to hide the truth).

In typical fashion, the moment that the Corporate Media is forced to admit that it has been serially misinforming us for the past several years; the Revisionists are immediately deployed to rewrite history, as shown in this Bloomberg Businessweek excerpt:

…the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to the country said.

In fact, from the moment the Crash of ’08 was orchestrated and our morally bankrupt governments began executing the plans of the bankers, I have written that the only rational strategy was to put People before Parasites. While I wouldn’t expect national policymakers to take their cues from my writing, when I wrote out my economic prescriptions for our economies I didn’t base my views on compassion, or simply “doing the right thing.”

Rather, I have consistently argued that it was a matter of simple arithmetic and the most-elementary principles of economics that “the Iceland approach” was the only strategy which could possibly succeed. When Plutarch wrote 2,000 years ago “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics,” he was not parroting socialist dogma (1,500 years before the birth of Socialism).

Plutarch was simply expressing the First Principle of economics; something on which all of the modern capitalist economists who followed in his footsteps have based their own theories. When modern economists produce their own jargon, such as the Marginal Propensity to Consume; it is squarely based on the wisdom of Plutarch: that an economy will always be healthier with its wealth in the hands of the poor and the Middle Class instead of being hoarded by rich misers (and gamblers).

So when the Bloomberg Revisionists attempt to convince us that Iceland’s strong (and real) economic recovery was a “surprise”; this could only be true if none of our governments, none of the bankers and none of the media’s precious “experts” understood the most-elementary principles of arithmetic and economics. Is this the message the media wants to convey?

What is even more disingenuous here is the congratulatory tone in this exercise in Revisionism, since nothing could be further from the truth. As I detailed in a four-part series one year ago, the campaign of “economic rape” perpetrated against the governments of Europe over the past two and half years (in particular) has been expressly designed to take away “the Iceland option” for Europe’s other governments.

IMF headquarters in Washington, DC

One of the reasons for Iceland being able to escape the choke-hold of the Western banking cabal is that its economy (and its people) still retained enough residual prosperity to tough it out — as the banking cabal tried to strangle Iceland’s economy as retribution for rejecting their Debt Slavery.

Thus, austerity has been nothing less than a deliberate campaign to destroy these European economies so that the Slaves would be too economically weak to be able to sever their own choke-holds. Mission accomplished!

One can only assume that neither the Corporate Media nor their Banker Masters would have allowed this clear acknowledgment that Iceland was right and we were wrong to appear within its own pages, unless it felt secure in the knowledge that all the remaining Debt Slaves had been crippled beyond their capacity to ever escape this economic oppression.

Indeed, for evidence of this we need only look to Greece: the one other European nation where there had been “rumblings” (i.e. riots) aimed at toppling the Traitor Government that served the banking cabal. After two elections, the combination of fear and propaganda bullied the long-suffering Greek people into choosing another Traitor Government — which had expressly pledged itself to reinforcing the bonds of economic slavery. When the Slaves vote for slavery, the Slave Masters can afford to gloat.

Here, the purpose of this Bloomberg propaganda was not to praise Iceland’s government (when both the bankers and Corporate Media despise Iceland with all of their considerable malice). Rather, the goal of this disinformation was to manufacture a new Big Lie.

Instead of the Truth: that from Day 1 Iceland’s approach was the only possible strategy which could have succeeded, while our own governments chose a strategy intended to fail; we get the Big Lie. Our Traitor Governments were acting honestly and honourably; and Iceland’s success and our failure was yet another “surprise which no one could have predicted.”

We saw precisely the same Revisionism following the Crash of ’08 itself, where the mainstream media trotted out all their expert-shills to tell us they had been “surprised” by this economic event; while those within the precious metals sector had been predicting precisely such a cataclysm, in ever more-assertive terms, for several years.

The real message here for readers is that when an economic strategy of People before Parasites succeeds that there is nothing the least-bit “surprising” about this. As with all the remainder of the world around us, promoting the health of Parasites is only good for the Parasites themselves.

Source: https://www.thestreet.com/story/11665082/1/iceland-was-right-we-were-wrong-the-imf.html

Gold Stockpiling: Is It Worth It?

Originally posted by weare1776.org on August 18, 2012

Author: Alec Scheer

 

Alternative news websites, such as my own, are generally perceived by their fans to perform the service that mainstream media (MSM) should perform, but either can’t or won’t. Our job is to spread the message of truth and liberty and to act as the watchdog over government, a role that MSM has all but abandoned.

Every day we see ads and articles on alternative news websites like Info Wars (www.infowars.com) and Occupy Corporatism (www.occupycorporatism.com) addressing the imminent banking/financial collapse, which is bound to happen. It is not a question of if, but of when. These ads and articles suggest that everybody buy gold or other precious metals. When a friend recently pointed out this gold scheme, I did my own research into the matter and arrived at the conclusion that there is, in fact, a giant confidence game being pulled off by the wealthy elite. My intent is to alert you to the potential for fraud and to dispel some of the misconceptions.

Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com) has published an article entitled “Soros Reveals Stake in Facebook” in which it is stated that George Soros “completely dumped his stakes” in Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs. Here is an excerpt from that article:

According to the report, Soros completely dumped his stakes in Citigroup (420,000 shares), JP Morgan (701,400 shares) and Goldman Sachs (120,000 shares), leaving him with no position in any major financials at all.

Before and after dumping his shares, Soros and many other banksters have been stockpiling gold and other precious metals. The following excerpt is from Mini Web (www.miniweb.com) describing the latest trend in gold buying with regard to Soros:

According to SEC filings George Soros has been back buying gold – and this on its own has probably given a lift to the gold price, with many big money investors likely to see that as a lead to follow.

Now, let us put all of the legitimate financial collapse theories aside and focus on this theory: Since Soros is selling, followed by Paulson (Forbes article), the idea seems to be that the public will soon follow. The reason as to why this would happen is because the public, noticing the activities of the investors who are presumed to have the “inside scoop,” will sell their shares in the stock market and proceed to buy gold, just like the elites who are setting the trend. Next thing you know the sheeple mindset kicks in and many others start buying gold because “oh, well, the Wall Street insiders (elitist crooks) are buying gold, so they must be preparing for something—I should buy some gold, as well.” This mentality actually creates the demand for gold, but who will supply the gold? Well, it is this simple: while you were being duped by the stock market, men like Soros and Paulsen were stockpiling gold in preparation for snookering you again. How are they duping you again? After stockpiling mass amounts of gold, they pull out their shares from the market creating a panic, which causes the public to follow suit selling their shares and following the gold buying trend. These deceptive acts of investors such as Soros and Paulsen alter both the supply and demand of gold and other precious metals, which in turn influences the market rates of these commodities, artificially driving the prices up or down at will. Essentially the people who will supply the gold to the public now demanding it will be the wealthy interests who drove the price up in the first place knowing they could con the public into a massive scam via an artificial panic, and a gold purchasing spree. When it is all said and done, the bankers will have pulled off another get rich quick scheme.

Remember, that this is a trend created by the people we oppose because they so consistently act contrary to the best interests of the people. It is rather simple:

They buy gold, and then sell their shares.

This creates a panic.

The public follows suit by demanding gold.

The bankers who stocked up in preparation for this demand then supply the gold to the purchasers demanding it.

They rake in mass amounts of money from an artificial panic/gold buying scheme they devised.

I want to point out that a monetary system would not be effective in a complete financial collapse because it would not benefit anyone; however, a system of barter would benefit everyone because people would exchange their resources for other services/resources.

Think before you buy. Resist the lies. Open minds. Spread liberty worldwide.

 

Source: https://weare1776.org/1441/us-news/gold-stockpiling-is-it-worth-it/

The Truth About Diamonds…

My name is Chris Everard - I have spent 17 years travelling to eleven countries investigating and reporting on how the super-wealthy families - who have become known as ‘the illuminati’ to many - gain their riches… I have established a monthly magazine which publishes fully illustrated reports and iBook/articles about the Aristocratic-Royal Elite, cover-ups, secret episodes of world history and other matters which are ignored by the mainstream media. FEED YOUR BRAIN MAGAZINE refuses all big corporate advertising and is instead funded by it’s readers via subscriptions. It gives us the the kind of editorial freedom which, say, the BBC do not have - for example, the Director General of the BBC is actually appointed by the Queen…

In this DIAMOND JUBILEE year, I decided to publish investigations into the DIAMOND industry - every diamond on the planet has been the result of some form of exploitation of people or the environment…

You can get a free copy of FEED YOUR BRAIN MAGAZINE by submitting your email in the little box at https://www.FeedYourBrainMagazine.com/ - this is a snippet of the kind of research and investigation I publish each month….

In the 40 years between 1952 - 1992 the Queen avoided paying tax. Does she really have any respect for the British people? She has almost completely avoided paying any contribution towards the upkeep of Britain. Now take a close look - a really close look - at her facial expressions on those rare occasions when the royal family step out onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace. Complete and utter control of the BBC newsfeeds has allowed - up until now - a very effective ‘news blackout’ on the investments of the royals - and their attitude towards the British working class…
Some of the Queen’s most important investments have been in the Nuclear electric industries… and DIAMONDS…

Fortunes have been made and lost in the age-old trading of diamonds. Three of the world’s largest diamonds are owned by the British Queen - whose real name is Elizabeth Saxe Coburg und Gotha (her name is not really ‘Windsor’ - that is a ‘styled’ title-name). The combined value of these diamonds is in excess of $1,000million dollars - perhaps as much as $2,000 million. If these diamonds were re-cut and sold, the accrued fund of money could be placed in a high return deposit savings account, producing an annual income which would provide enough cash to provide the National Health Service with Scanners and dialysis machines FOREVER. Additionally, African & Indian communities in the areas where the diamonds were originally discovered would also benefit from an annual income.

Diamonds are NOT rare - at the African Ekati diamond mine, they are transported on conveyer belts - in giant heaps. A direct result of diamond mining is the diversion of rivers to allow for the mining of alluvial diamond deposits. When the mine is depleted, the rivers are not redirected to their original courses, which in turn results in the pollution of waters and destruction of surrounding flora and fauna. The mining activities also degrade the surrounding land by increasing atmospheric air pollution, contaminating surface and ground water and increasing soil erosion and leaching. The pollution is, in the most extreme cases, leading to desertification and permanently changing land use from agriculture to waste, rendering it useless to traditional inhabitants when the diamonds have all been mined. In the short run the inhabitants of the region are suffering from sickness and disease related to contaminated drinking water supplies. Such diseases include dissentry, Malaria, schistosamiases and Biomphalaria pfeiffer. Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Congo and Angola are the foremost sources for diamonds in Africa - all these countries have been thrown into civil war and chaos by British Military forces & mercenaries. The ensuing chaos guarantees that the diamond mining can go on unhindered by democratically elected leaders demanding a fair cut of the profits for the African people. The royal elite have mountains of diamonds in stock and carefully control the sale & distribution, giving the impression that diamonds are ‘rare’.


Just recently, Sierra Leone erupted into what the BBC described as “civil war”. The truth is that most of these ‘turf wars’ play into the hands of diamond prospectors, with the displacement of millions of Africans quite - just by chance, of course - enabling mining companies to set up shop, their facilities looking like high security prisons which mar the natural beauty of the landscape and strip the subterranean strata using high powered water hoses and acids in search of yet more shiny transparent crystals. There is, without question, a strange paradox, that many African villages rely on a single standpipe of water, whilst just yards away, high powered water hoses flush diamonds underground by workers who have to suffer the indignity of anal probes and x-rays as they leave their workplace, the bosses making sure that none of their modern slaves have swallowed a small uncut gem to allay the horrendous inequality of their society. (below): The Indian Koh-I-Nor diamond set into a platinum crown owned by Queen Elzabeth’s dead mother.

The royal greed for diamonds has scarred our wonderful planet. In Kimberly, South Africa, we see an abandoned mine which was dug by hand using local labourers who were paid pennies for their hard work in arduous conditions. The giant hole left behind after the royal-elite diamond traders moved on to trash yet another landscape could easily be converted into a hydro-electric power station to benefit the local community. It was abandoned in 1914.

The Russian ROMANOV royal family are cousins to the British-Bavarian house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor. An orgy of top soil washing and feverish mining has left ridiculously huge chasms and black holes in the Rusiian countryside. A mine at Mirney in Siberia is 1,200 meters in diametre and more than 500 meters deep. The royals have left a giant sink hole at Yellowknife in Canada - a territory stolen from First Nation Canadian Indians - which is so big it can be seen from space. The Diavik diamond mine could easily be converted into a marine biology research station - but like so many other diamond mines, it will probably be left as an ugly scar on our planet.

In the 1930s, a third of British children suffered growth defects caused by malnutrition. This is the era in which queen Elizabeth II grew up - whilst beggars and child prostitutes fought hand and mouth for food and favour from the rich outside the walls of royal palaces, the young Elizabeth was being groomed to take her place as an adult princess - she had her own child sized six-roomed thatched cottage in the garden of the Royal Lodge at Royal Windsor Great Park (situated near Windsor Castle). The London Times reported; ‘The Small House is fully furnished with running water, electric light, and a wireless.’ Architect John Nash rebuilt the Royal Lodge for King George IV and it became one of the Queen Mother’s many homes. She died there, aged 101, after a century of indulgence, fine champagne and enjoying whole-body blood transfusions at the tax payer’s expense.

Since the 1800s, the British-Bavarian royal sovereign houses have been asset stripping Africa and India and building vast estates which are now almost impossible to value accurately. Their investments are global, with rumours suggesting that Queensland in Australia is actually owned by the royal Crown Estates (perhaps that would explain the reason for it’s name), and every building in Regent Street in central London is owned by the Crown Estates. Officially, the Crown Estates are custodians, merely owning properties on behalf of the British people - but that, as far as I am concerned, is nothing but window dressing and political double-speak - as at no time in history has any of the Crown Estates been sold off in order to build hospitals or fund public services. On the rare occasions when there are sell-offs, they are usually Leasehold, and the properties eventually return back to the Crown.

From 1953 up until 1992, the monarchy paid not a single penny in tax. More than 2,400 tax rises took place in that period, with the cost of goods being ramped due to massive amounts of duty being levied on them.
In 1992, a paltry £1million was begrudgingly handed over in ‘tax’ - perhaps this is the reason why the queen described 1992 as her “Anus Horribilis”. In the same year, a mysterious fire at Windsor Castle resulted in taxpayers being told that they would have no less than £30 Million taken from their wage packets to pay for the damage! Ten years later, in 2002, the Queen apparently was not required to pay tax on the cash bequeathed in her mother’s will. The Queen Mother often gave the impression that she was ‘broke’. But she owned not one, but TWO castles! Allegedly, £140 million was placed in Swiss Trusts for the benefit of her grandchildren… If true, then this shows that the Queen Mum was one of the wealthiest people in the world. She was allegedly in debt due to horse racing gambling fetishes - if this is true, then surely a 100 year old woman would not have needed TWO castles and one of these giant estates could have been commercialised or sold off or rented out as a hotel to take the burden off her ‘debts’.

THE CROWN’S ESTATES
So, let us now take a closer look at these so called ‘Crown Estates’… What we have here is a portfolio of some of the world’s most famous landmarks and buildings worth a conservative £6 billion, with urban properties valued at £4.2 billion, and rural holdings valued at £919.5 million; and an annual profit of £226.5 million - that’s almost £1 million profit per day earned from rental and lease incomes. The majority of the estate’s income is derived from urban cities - most notably properties in central London. The Crown’s estate also owns 272,000 acres (110,000 hectares) of agricultural land and forest, and, wait for it, more than half of the UK’s foreshore - beaches, ports, promenades, piers etc. It also includes Ascot racecourse and the aforementioned Windsor Great Park… I think you’re beginning to get the ‘big picture’…
This cosy little arrangement, where vast amounts of tax free cash is paid directly into the bank accounts of Royals has continued, with every succeeding sovereign renewing the arrangement made between King George III and Parliament and is now recognised as “an integral part of the Constitution [which] would be difficult to abandon”. That is, of course, an odd term - as Britain does not have an official ‘Constitution’.

The Crown Estates has an interesting history, where various monarchs have played a kind of ‘soft shoe shuffle’ moving assets in and out of the Crown Estates portfolio as and when their heavy drinking/heavy gambling/heavy tipping (delete as appropriate) habits needed. Upon King George III’s accession of the throne he ‘surrendered’ the income from the Crown lands to Parliament in return for a fixed civil list. What this means is that to this day there very often is a minister inside the Cabinet Office who is described as ‘Minister Without Portfolio’ and it is this minister’s responsibility to manage the Crown Estates. Old King George surrendered to parliamentary control the hereditary excise duties, post office revenues, and “the small branches” of hereditary revenue including rents of the Crown lands in England, (which amounted at that time to about £11,000) and was granted a ‘civil list’ annuity of £800,000 for the support of his household and the expenses of civil government, subject to the payment of certain annuities to members of the royal family. So, in other words, he forewent the few tens of thousands of peasant rents the Crown Estates were levying, handed over control to a puppet minister, and in exchange picked up nearly a £1 million tax free sum every 12 months. However, although the king had retained large hereditary revenues, his income proved insufficient for his expensive life style! Why? Because he used to reward friends with bribes and lavish gifts! Debts amounting to over £3 million during the course of King George’s reign were paid by Parliament, and the civil list annuity was then increased from time to time - leading to the situation we have today, where vast mortgages and massive ‘salaries’ are now paid to more than two dozen Royals who have seldom had ‘normal’ jobs.

55% of Britain’s foreshore is owned and operated by the Crown Estates - permission has been granted time and time again for ugly and dangerous nuclear reactors which belch radioactive waste into the English channel, North Sea and Irish Sea.

Max Igan’s Trance-Formation (Full)

Full film available for download at:
https://thecrowhouse.com
IP: https://67.20.81.143
from May 15th 2012

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. - Howard Zinn

Universal Law trumps all others.

1. No man or woman, in or out of government shall initiate force, threat of force or fraud against my life and property and, any and all contracts I am a party to, not giving full disclosure to me, whether signed by me or not, are void at my discretion.

2. I may use force in self-defense against anyone that violates Law 1.

3. There shall be no exceptions to Law 1 and 2.

Britain is ruled by the banks, for the banks

By on December 12, 2011 8:00PM GMT

Is David Cameron’s kid-glove treatment of the City remotely justified, when it neither pays its way nor lends effectively?


The City, London . . . Britain’s finance sector contributes less to the country than manufacturing. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

The national interest. It’s a phrase we’ve heard a lot recently. David Cameron promised to defend it before flying off last week to Brussels. Eurosceptic backbenchers urged him to fight for it. And when the summit turned into a trial separation, and the prime minister walked out at 4am, the rightwing newspapers took up the refrain: he was fighting for Britain. In the eye-burningly early hours of Friday morning, exhausted and at a loss to explain a row he plainly hadn’t expected, Cameron tried again: “I had to pursue very doggedly what was in the British national interest.”

As political justifications go, the national interest is an oddly ceremonial one. Like the dusty liqueur uncapped for a family gathering, MPs bring it out only for the big occasions. And when they do, what they mean is: forget all the usual fluff about ethics and ideas; this is important.

You heard the phrase last May, as the Lib Dems explained why they were forming a coalition with the Tories. More seriously, Blair used it as Britain invaded Iraq.

But here Cameron wasn’t talking about foreign policy; nor about who governs the country. The national interest he saw as threatened by Europe is concentrated in a few expensive parts of London, in an industry that would surely come bottom in any occupational popularity contest (yes, lower even than journalists): investment banking.

In its haste to depict events as Little Britain v Big Europe, the Tory press hasn’t dwelt on the inconvenient details of last week’s fight. But it was only after the prime minister failed to secure protection for the City from new financial regulation mooted by the EU that he told Nicolas Sarkozy to get on his vélo.

On one issue in particular, Cameron had a good case: Britain wants banks to put more money aside for a rainy day than the EU is considering. Elsewhere, he just looked unreasonable – what exactly is wrong with having international banking supervision? One reason for the euro crisis was that its members have 17 national bank watchdogs and barely anyone looking across borders.

Step back from what even EU officials were calling “arcane” details, though, and the big principle is this: the prime minister effectively stuck relations with the rest of Europe in the deep freeze in order to protect one sector of the economy.

In my recollection, no British minister in recent times has termed one industry as being of “national interest”. “Vital” or “key”? Why, such words are the very currency of the MP’s address to a trade association. But on the big phrase, I asked the Guardian’s librarians to check the archives from 1997 onwards. They came back empty-handed.

Cameron is merely expressing more openly something Labour frontbenchers also believe: that the City is pretty much the last engine functioning in Britain’s misfiring economy. Indeed, one of the Labour lines of attack against Cameron this weekend has been that he has left the City more open to regulation.

A few weeks ago, the shadow chancellor Ed Balls warned against any further taxes on financial trading within Europe. However, he said, he would urge a “Robin Hood tax with the widest international agreement”. In other words, Balls will give his fullest support to something that has no chance of happening.

This is the same kind of political subservience towards the City, observed by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in its report into the collapse of RBS. According to the watchdog, a major reason why Fred Goodwin wasn’t checked as he drove RBS off a cliff was because of “a sustained political emphasis on the need for the FSA to be ‘light touch’ in its approach and mindful of London’s competitive position”. Had regulatorsbeen harder on the bankers, “it is almost certain that their proposals would have been met by extensive complaints that the FSA was pursuing a heavy-handed, gold-plating approach which would harm London’s competitiveness”.

As all British taxpayers know by now, securing the “competitiveness” of RBS has wound up costing us around £45bn.

So what is it that justifies the kid-glove treatment of the finance sector? Switch on the news and you normally hear some minister or lobbyist (come on down, Angela Knight of the British Bankers’ Association) talking about the vital contribution banking makes to employment. Our tax revenue. Or the role banks ideally play in directing money to needy businesses.

These claims are repeated so often that they rarely get even the briefest patdown from interviewers, let alone backbench MPs or economists. Yet they are largely bogus, as explained in a new book called After the Great Complacence, produced by academics at Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc). Indeed, on nearly any important measure, finance actually contributes less to Britain than manufacturing.

Take jobs. The finance sector employs 1m people in Britain. Chuck in the lawyers, the PRs and the smaller fry that swim in its wake and you are up to a grand total of 1.5m. And most of these people are not the investment bankers for whom Cameron went to war in Brussels. At the big British banks such as RBS and HBOS, 80% of the staff work in the retail business. Even if Sarkozy were to shroud Canary Wharf in a giant tricolore, those staff would still be needed to staff the branches and man the call centres. Even in its current state of emaciation, manufacturing employs 2m people.

What about taxes? Lobbyists like to point out that banks are usually the biggest payers of corporation tax, but usually omit to mention that corporation tax isn’t that big a money-spinner. For their part, even leftwingers will usually assume that the bankers effectively paid for the tax credits, hospitals and schools we enjoyed under Labour.

It’s not true. The Cresc team totted up the taxes paid by the finance sector between 2002 and 2008, the six years in which the City was having an almighty boom: at £193bn, it’s still only getting on for half the £378bn paid by manufacturing. It would be more accurate to say that the widget-makers of the Midlands paid for Tony Blair’s welfarism. But that would be a much less picturesque description.

Even in the best of times, the finance sector hasn’t paid anything like as much to the state as the state has had to pay for them since the great crash. According to the IMF, British taxpayers have shelled out £289bn in “direct upfront financing” to prop up the banks since 2008. Add in the various government loans and underwriting, and taxpayers are on the hook for £1.19tn. Seen that way the City looks less like a goose that lays golden eggs, and more like an unruly pigeon that leaves one hell of a mess for others to clear up.

Ah, but what about lending? After all, this is why we have banks in the first place: to channel money to productive industries. The Cresc team looked at Bank of England figures on bank and building society loans and found that at the height of the bubble in 2007, around 40% or more of all bank and building society lending was on residential or commercial property. Another 25% of all bank lending went to financial intermediaries. In other words, about two-thirds of all bank lending in 2007 went to pumping up the bubble.

This doesn’t look like a hard-working part of an economy humming along: it’s nothing less than epic capitalist onanism.

If the statistics don’t support the arguments for the City’s pre-eminence, the public don’t either. In 1983, 90% of the public agreed that banks in Britain were well run, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. By 2009, that had plunged to 19%.

In other words, both the evidence and the voters are against investment bankers. So why do the politicians cling on to them?

Part of the answer is financial. Bankers used the boom to buy themselves influence – so that, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the City now provides half of all Tory party funds. That is up from just 25% only five years ago.

Another part must be cultural. Running this government are two sons of bankers. Cameron’s father was a stockbroker, Clegg’s is still chairman of United Trust Bank (and famously helped his son get some work experience). For its part, Labour spent so long outsourcing all economic thinking to Gordon Brown and Ed Balls that it has long lost the ability to argue against the orthodoxy of giving the City what it wants.

In a poorer country, the cosiness of relations between bankers and politicians would be scrutinised by an official from the World Bank and disdainfully pronounced as pure cronyism. In Britain, we need to come up with a new word for this type of dysfunctional capitalism – where banks neither lend nor pay their way in taxes, yet retain a stranglehold on policy-making. We could try bankocracy: ruled by the banks, for the banks.

What are the results of bankocracy? It means that the main figures arguing for a Robin Hood tax are the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Bill Nighy. It means that opposition to the rule of banks isn’t found in Westminster, but in tents outside St Paul’s or among a few grizzled academics and NGO-hands – with no political vehicle to carry them. Meanwhile, the politicians declare that the national interest of Britain can be defined by what suits one square mile of it.

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/12/britain-ruled-by-banks

Occupy Endgame: Law Enforcement Arrests 1%’s War And Economic Criminals

By Carl Herman

 

 

The brilliant 2-minute video Waiting for the Storm, as seen below, is a message for police, sheriff, and military law enforcement to arrest US political, economic, and corporate “leadership” who have committed obvious crimes.

Occupy’s endgame, in retrospect, will be obvious: after a period of “emperor has no clothes” expository communication from independent Internet media to the 99%, and citizen engagement with those facts, those with arrest authority will exercise it to remove criminal leadership from power.

The first criminal arrests will be for War Crimes and financial fraud. The most notable will be “leadership” of both US political parties and from the largest financial institutions involved in mortgage and “investment” frauds.

Importantly, the “criminal 1%” include corporate media who are criminal accomplices to enable and cover-up the murder of millions, deprivation of billions, and looting of trillions of our dollars. Their manipulative voices will be removed from power, quickly facilitating public communication of the objective facts of the depth of State crimes, and the inspirational future humanity is entering.

Occupy’s victory means peace from criminal wars based on obvious lies, economic security and sufficiency for 100% of humanity, and unleashing suppressed technologies that will transform what it means to be human into unimaginable status.

As an academic in the fields of government and economics, here are the resources I’ve developed to explain, document, and prove the “emperor has no clothes” obvious facts that require the arrests of US political and financial “leaders”.

 

 

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/occupy-endgame-law-enforcement-arrests.html

Bank of America 2012: The Worst Is Yet To Come?

By: Dan Freed

Bank of America may have had a dismal 2011, but you haven’t seen nothing yet.

The thinking on Bank of America has long been that valuations are so low, the stock can’t get any lower — and then lower it goes. The problem, by and large, has been mortgage risk. Bank of America can’t ever seem to get a handle on how much exposure it has. The number just keeps growing and growing.

But that won’t be the problem in 2012. As the famous saying goes, you don’t know who isn’t wearing swimming trunks until the tide goes out. In this case, however, we do know: it’s Bank of America. And things have been so bad for the bank — not only in 2011 but ever since the crisis — that we tend to forget that the tide hasn’t even gone out yet. We’ve had a serious crisis in Europe, massive political instability in the Middle East and Russia, and a recession in the U.S. and the S&P 500 is only down 2.53 percent.

Some may see this as a sign of the market’s resilience, but that would be a mistake. Investors are still counting on the European crisis resolving itself. They are betting that European governments believe they have too much to lose by not eventually creating euro bonds.

But as Financial Times managing editor Gillian Tett explained on Charlie Rose last week, look how hard it was for former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to get the “bazooka” he needed from Congress to restore investor confidence in U.S. markets.

“I mean if you get, have problems getting one person for a bazooka, try to think about 17 people for a bazooka [that will shoot] in a straight line.”

The 17 people, of course, are the 17 countries that use the euro. If you think getting the U.S. Congress to agree on anything is tough, you haven’t seen a thing.

What that means is that, even if we don’t see Greece move back to the drachma, leading to a military coup, as was postulated in The New York Times on Tuesday, we are likely to come far closer than we have so far. That means a sharp market selloff at the very least, by which I mean a 5 percent-plus drop in the S&P 500 in a single day and volatility reminiscent of what we saw in 2008. If you think that means good things for Bank of America stock, you are sadly mistaken.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan tried to assuage investor concern over this issue in a speech to investors earlier this month.

“With the uncertainty around some of the economies in the world, what’s going [on] in Europe on a given day, what could happen in the U.S., we continue to position ourselves and make sure that we are in good shape to last through anything we see ahead,” he said.

Looking at the combined Bank of America Merrill Lynch balance sheets from the third quarter of 2008, Moynihan said loans were at $1 trillion, and are 17 percent lower today. The loans are of better quality, he says, funding is less short-term than it used to be, he says.

And yet, you still have analysts like Deutsche Bank’s Matt O’Connor predicting the bank will have to issue $15 billion worth of stock next year.

It doesn’t take a Bank of America-related disaster to send the stock lower. Wednesday’s action was a good indicator of this fact, as Bank of Americas shares were down 1.69% about 75 minutes before the close as Europe-related tumult continued to roil the stock market. Shares of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, meanwhile, were in positive territory.

Will Bank of America survive the coming market disaster?

Probably, but let’s get real, folks: this is not a canoe you want to be sitting in when the storm comes across the Atlantic.

 

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/id/45673978

Fitch Downgrades Ratings on Five Major European Banks

By: CNBC.com

Fitch Ratings downgraded its credit ratings on five major European commercial banks and banking groups Wednesday as part of a broader review of its ratings on the largest banks in the world.

In a press release, the rating firm said it downgraded Banque Federative du Credit Mutuel, Credit Agricole, Danske Bank, OP Pohjola Group and Rabobank Group.

The firm said the downgrades reflect the “broader phenomenon of stronger headwinds facing the banking industry as a whole. Exposure to troubled euro zone countries through their subsidiaries was a direct consideration in the downgrades of Danske Bank and Credit Agricole.”

For the other banks, Fitch said the crisis had “negative indirect consequences.”

Capital markets, “in particular interbank markets, are not functioning effectively, and, along with more global factors, the crisis is driving economic slowdown,” according to Fitch.

 

Britain Is Ruled By The Banks, For The Banks

By

Is David Cameron’s kid-glove treatment of the City remotely justified, when it neither pays its way nor lends effectively?

The national interest. It’s a phrase we’ve heard a lot recently. David Cameron promised to defend it before flying off last week to Brussels. Eurosceptic backbenchers urged him to fight for it. And when the summit turned into a trial separation, and the Prime Minister walked out at 4am, the rightwing newspapers took up the refrain: he was fighting for Britain. In the eye-burningly early hours of Friday morning, exhausted and at a loss to explain a row he plainly hadn’t expected, Cameron tried again: “I had to pursue very doggedly what was in the British national interest.”

As political justifications go, the national interest is an oddly ceremonial one. Like the dusty liqueur uncapped for a family gathering, MPs bring it out only for the big occasions. And when they do, what they mean is: forget all the usual fluff about ethics and ideas; this is important.

You heard the phrase last May, as the Lib Dems explained why they were forming a coalition with the Tories. More seriously, Blair used it as Britain invaded Iraq.

But here Cameron wasn’t talking about foreign policy; nor about who governs the country. The national interest he saw as threatened by Europe is concentrated in a few expensive parts of London, in an industry that would surely come bottom in any occupational popularity contest (yes, lower even than journalists): investment banking.

In its haste to depict events as Little Britain v Big Europe, the Tory press hasn’t dwelt on the inconvenient details of last week’s fight. But it was only after the prime minister failed to secure protection for the City from new financial regulation mooted by the EU that he told Nicolas Sarkozy to get on his vélo.

On one issue in particular, Cameron had a good case: Britain wants banks to put more money aside for a rainy day than the EU is considering. Elsewhere, he just looked unreasonable – what exactly is wrong with having international banking supervision? One reason for the euro crisis was that its members have 17 national bank watchdogs and barely anyone looking across borders.

Step back from what even EU officials were calling “arcane” details, though, and the big principle is this: the prime minister effectively stuck relations with the rest of Europe in the deep freeze in order to protect one sector of the economy.

In my recollection, no British minister in recent times has termed one industry as being of “national interest”. “Vital” or “key”? Why, such words are the very currency of the MP’s address to a trade association. But on the big phrase, I asked the Guardian’s librarians to check the archives from 1997 onwards. They came back empty-handed.

Cameron is merely expressing more openly something Labour frontbenchers also believe: that the City is pretty much the last engine functioning in Britain’s misfiring economy. Indeed, one of the Labour lines of attack against Cameron this weekend has been that he has left the City more open to regulation.

A few weeks ago, the shadow chancellor Ed Balls warned against any further taxes on financial trading within Europe. However, he said, he would urge a “Robin Hood tax with the widest international agreement”. In other words, Balls will give his fullest support to something that has no chance of happening.

This is the same kind of political subservience towards the City, observed by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in its report into the collapse of RBS. According to the watchdog, a major reason why Fred Goodwin wasn’t checked as he drove RBS off a cliff was because of “a sustained political emphasis on the need for the FSA to be ‘light touch’ in its approach and mindful of London’s competitive position”. Had regulatorsbeen harder on the bankers, “it is almost certain that their proposals would have been met by extensive complaints that the FSA was pursuing a heavy-handed, gold-plating approach which would harm London’s competitiveness”.

As all British taxpayers know by now, securing the “competitiveness” of RBS has wound up costing us around £45bn.

So what is it that justifies the kid-glove treatment of the finance sector? Switch on the news and you normally hear some minister or lobbyist (come on down, Angela Knight of the British Bankers’ Association) talking about the vital contribution banking makes to employment. Our tax revenue. Or the role banks ideally play in directing money to needy businesses.

These claims are repeated so often that they rarely get even the briefest patdown from interviewers, let alone backbench MPs or economists. Yet they are largely bogus, as explained in a new book called After the Great Complacence, produced by academics at Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc). Indeed, on nearly any important measure, finance actually contributes less to Britain than manufacturing.

Take jobs. The finance sector employs 1m people in Britain. Chuck in the lawyers, the PRs and the smaller fry that swim in its wake and you are up to a grand total of 1.5m. And most of these people are not the investment bankers for whom Cameron went to war in Brussels. At the big British banks such as RBS and HBOS, 80% of the staff work in the retail business. Even if Sarkozy were to shroud Canary Wharf in a giant tricolore, those staff would still be needed to staff the branches and man the call centres. Even in its current state of emaciation, manufacturing employs 2m people.

What about taxes? Lobbyists like to point out that banks are usually the biggest payers of corporation tax, but usually omit to mention that corporation tax isn’t that big a money-spinner. For their part, even leftwingers will usually assume that the bankers effectively paid for the tax credits, hospitals and schools we enjoyed under Labour.

It’s not true. The Cresc team totted up the taxes paid by the finance sector between 2002 and 2008, the six years in which the City was having an almighty boom: at £193bn, it’s still only getting on for half the £378bn paid by manufacturing. It would be more accurate to say that the widget-makers of the Midlands paid for Tony Blair’s welfarism. But that would be a much less picturesque description.

Even in the best of times, the finance sector hasn’t paid anything like as much to the state as the state has had to pay for them since the great crash. According to the IMF, British taxpayers have shelled out £289bn in “direct upfront financing” to prop up the banks since 2008. Add in the various government loans and underwriting, and taxpayers are on the hook for £1.19tn. Seen that way the City looks less like a goose that lays golden eggs, and more like an unruly pigeon that leaves one hell of a mess for others to clear up.

Ah, but what about lending? After all, this is why we have banks in the first place: to channel money to productive industries. The Cresc team looked at Bank of England figures on bank and building society loans and found that at the height of the bubble in 2007, around 40% or more of all bank and building society lending was on residential or commercial property. Another 25% of all bank lending went to financial intermediaries. In other words, about two-thirds of all bank lending in 2007 went to pumping up the bubble.

This doesn’t look like a hard-working part of an economy humming along: it’s nothing less than epic capitalist onanism.

If the statistics don’t support the arguments for the City’s pre-eminence, the public don’t either. In 1983, 90% of the public agreed that banks in Britain were well run, according to the British Social Attitudes survey. By 2009, that had plunged to 19%.

In other words, both the evidence and the voters are against investment bankers. So why do the politicians cling on to them?

Part of the answer is financial. Bankers used the boom to buy themselves influence – so that, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the City now provides half of all Tory party funds. That is up from just 25% only five years ago.

Another part must be cultural. Running this government are two sons of bankers. Cameron’s father was a stockbroker, Clegg’s is still chairman of United Trust Bank (and famously helped his son get some work experience). For its part, Labour spent so long outsourcing all economic thinking to Gordon Brown and Ed Balls that it has long lost the ability to argue against the orthodoxy of giving the City what it wants.

In a poorer country, the cosiness of relations between bankers and politicians would be scrutinised by an official from the World Bank and disdainfully pronounced as pure cronyism. In Britain, we need to come up with a new word for this type of dysfunctional capitalism – where banks neither lend nor pay their way in taxes, yet retain a stranglehold on policy-making. We could try bankocracy: ruled by the banks, for the banks.

What are the results of bankocracy? It means that the main figures arguing for a Robin Hood tax are the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Bill Nighy. It means that opposition to the rule of banks isn’t found in Westminster, but in tents outside St Paul’s or among a few grizzled academics and NGO-hands – with no political vehicle to carry them. Meanwhile, the politicians declare that the national interest of Britain can be defined by what suits one square mile of it.

 

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/12/britain-ruled-by-banks

It’s On: Iran Closes Straits Of Hormuz, Oil Explodes

By Tyler Durden

Iran has closed the Straits of Hormuz for military training as was expected yesterday, according to RanSquawk. Oil, and all other commodities, are soaring.

And for those curious about more, RanSquawk speculates that the source of the data is a report in the Tehran Times saying that Iran will hold War Games in which it would close the Straits. Unclear if this is what Ran referenced when they said the Straits were already closed.

TEHRAN - MP Parviz Sorouri of the Majlis National Security and
Foreign Policy Committee has said that Iran plans to practice its
ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most
strategically important chokepoints, which accounts for about 30% of the
world’s seaborne oil shipments.

Currently,the Middle East region supplies 70 percent of the world’s energy needs,
(most of) which are transported through the Strait of Hormuz. We will
hold an exercise to close the Strait of Hormuz in the near future. If
the world wants to make the region insecure, we will make the world
insecure,” ISNA quoted Sorouri as saying on Tuesday.

 

Source: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/its-iran-closes-straits-hormuz-oil-explodes