December 23, 2012

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Learned Social Classism, Is Working Even Ethical?

November 25, 2012 By 6 Comments

As explained in the article Learning Careerism As A Moral Reward System; our society, specifically our education system teaches and prepared us for a careerist lifestyle. Or simply put, working for money is considered success in our societies.

But not only does it teach us to work for currency. Just as we are put down in school for having poor grades, in society we are put down and even ridiculed, almost as criminals, for having low paid jobs, and even more so for having no paid job at all.

This video shows how people are eager to help someone until people assume they are homeless, and that the homeless are also more eager to help people in need:

We live in a society where those with the most important jobs to our survival work long hours, often physically tiring and are not paid very much. There are only a few kinds of workers that we really need, farmers/food producers, construction/manufacturers, delivery, maintenance/repair, and public services such as hospital workers and good police.

As time goes on there is more automation, so there are less jobs available but more people and so more food, building, maintenance, healthcare, and so on is required. However farmers are being paid less as time goes on, many selling their farms to get a different job, as their valuable work doesn’t even pay the bills. Construction workers, store workers, repair services and delivery are often paid low or minimum wage. Construction or farm work is much physically harder than sitting in an office trading stocks, yet those people are praised because they make more money.

There are often stories of fire-fighters and medical workers on strike because they are on a low wage or have poor quality working conditions, but these are the true heroes of our society, these people save us from death. Farmers, medical workers and fire-fighters should be the highest rewarded and praised workers of society, not some of the least.

We should also give more credit to those who are building and maintaining places for us to live comfortably in.

It is shameful that the harder a job is, the less money the workers will make, and those who make the most money in society actually have the easier jobs and often work the least.

In our society even these workers that we require for survival are not made a priority, money is. We are taught that if we work hard we can get a good job, and a good job pays well, most people still believe this and look up to those with ‘well-paid’ jobs and look down on those with a low paid job or those who are considered poor.

The truth is that in almost all cases the LESS-ethical the persons job, the more money they will earn. We could consider the most ethical of all work to be charity work, helping those with less, yet most of this work is either volunteer work or paid minimum wage. Those without jobs at all are looked down on, even when they volunteer to do charity work. Looked down on by those who mess around with numbers to make bigger numbers (trading stocks and shares), or managers; people who make sure that other people work so that they can take a larger cut.

Our parents tried to teach us good ethics and morals, but then they told us to obey at school, which taught us that these twisted careerist ideologies were moral and ethical.

Those without any paid employment, often also without any debt are sometimes homeless, and our society also tells us that they are homeless because they are drug addicts or alcoholics, and therefore we should not help them, even though many of these people are not drug-addicts or alcoholics, and if they are, it is often a sickness that is created by the world they live in, they simply didn’t have enough money or got kicked out by an ex-partner. Relationship breakdown and illness can happen to anyone.

So we have those who work very unethical jobs making ridiculously high amounts of money, those looked down on for having low paid work, even though it is physically more productive, those who are ridiculed for not having a ‘paid’ job or claiming some kind of state benefit, and then the homeless who cannot even apply for many kinds of state benefits or most jobs because they cannot complete the forms without a valid address, and often an email address or phone number; sometimes even the phone number must be a landline number, and of course to apply for a job most of the time these days a printed Résumé/CV is required.

Amnesty international reported that approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. are homeless, many of them veterans. It is worth noting that, at the same time, there are 18.5 million vacant homes in the country.

AP also reports that nearly 1 in 2 Americans have fallen into poverty.

CBS News reports that “According to a new report out this past week, poverty in America has reached its highest level since 1965″.

So as a whole this brings up a question, apart from a few specific careers, is paid work ethical? How many ethical jobs do you know that are helping people to survive or live comfortably and are not profiting some corporation, or share holders, sat back, relaxing, watching the money you make entering their bank accounts.

When we do get paid, a high percentage of that money gets cut to go to government as income tax, however we give them another chunk of money from VAT, another tax, then depending on where you live there are multiple other taxes such as state tax, council tax, road tax, import tax, property tax, inheritance tax, and so on…

Click for larger image

Filed Under: Banks, Consumerism, Corporations, Economy, Employment, Equality, Featured, Financial Crisis, Housing, Income Inequality, Money, Poverty, Safety, Taxes, Unions, Welfare Benefits

Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF

August 22, 2012 By 1 Comment

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

Filed Under: Banks, Corporations, Corruption, Debt, Economy, Financial Crisis, Human Rights, Iceland, International Monetary Fund, Justice, Law, Money, Politics, Protests, Revolution, Social Unrest

Gold Stockpiling: Is It Worth It?

August 20, 2012 By 2 Comments

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/

Filed Under: Banks, Consumerism, Corporations, Economy, Financial Crisis, Money

Our Decade From Hell Will Get Worse In 2012

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Paul B. Farrell

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Fasten your seat belts: 2011 was far worse than expected. Our earlier predictions for America’s Worst Decade just got worse.

As financial historian Niall Ferguson writes in Newsweek: “Double-Dip Depression … We forget that the Great Depression was like a soccer match, there were two halves.” The 1929 crash kicked off the first half. But what “made the depression truly ‘great’ …began with the European banking crisis of 1931.” Sound familiar?

Lumps of Coal for mutual funds

Commodity Futures Trading Corp, Invesco Technology Sector, Aston Value are among companies Chuck Jaffe has singled out to give his Lumps of Coal awards.

Yes, huge warnings: But America’s deaf. In denial. When we predicted the 2011-2020 “decade from hell” we didn’t see the big macro events dead ahead: Arab Spring virus that’s now Occupy Wall Street, promising to explode into an even more powerful force in 2012 … war on the middle class … widening inequality gap. … Washington gridlock … the Super Rich’s blind resistance to all new taxes.

As Ferguson puts it: “To understand what has been happening in our own borderline depression, you need to know this history. But hardly anyone does.” Get it? America’s already in a “borderline depression,” and virtually nobody gets it. American leaders are dummies about history. Worse, nobody may be able to stop our depression from turning “great.”

Investors beware: Please, protect your assets: “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.” We’ve already forgotten the lessons of the 2008 disaster. No wonder we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the 1930’s triggering the Second Great Depression. Soccer anyone?

More bad news for 2012: from Gross, Grantham, Shilling and Stiglitz

Ferguson’s in good company with his dark forecast. Pimco’s Bill Gross asks rhetorically: “Where is the euro headed? More than likely down, perhaps significantly.” Gross warns of a “terrifying situation” where “the euro may fall … and take the U.S. recovery with it.”

Then there’s Jeremy Grantham, whose GMO firm manages $100 billion. He predicted the 2008 crash a couple years in advance. Predicts ‘Seven Lean Years” ahead, till 2016, the end of the next presidential term. Now, in his latest newsletter he feels “sadly … vindicated by my ‘seven lean years’ forecast.” The world “will not easily recover from the current level of debt,” as our self-destructive American and European leaders have “permanently slowed their GDP growth.”

More bad news: As we close out the first year of the “Worst Decade in American History,” economist and long-time Forbes columnist Gary Shilling just issued his semi-annual outlook: “Global Recession Likely” in 2012. OK, the best he can say is that this one “will be milder than the 2007-2008 nosedive.” Of course, you’ve already forgotten those pains, right?

And over at Vanity Fair, Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz also reexamines the dark history of the Great Depression, warning that in our ignorance of history we’re missing a fundamental economic “shift in the ‘real’ economy,” missing what will generate future jobs, just as we did back in the ‘30s. Yes, we “risk a tragic replay” of the Great Depression.

10 predictions for America’s Worst Decade Ever

Over the past decade we predicted the 2000 crash, the 2008 meltdown, the short-lived 2009 rally. Future historians will look back on the 2011-2020 decade as America’s Worst Decade. Worse than the 1930s Great Depression. Totally predictable. Totally denied.

So here’s an update of the 10 predictions of a chain reaction of events that are building to a critical mass, will consume America in what economist Joseph Shumpeter called “creative destruction” that will eventually, after cleansing the greed from America’s toxic capitalism, trigger a renewal of the American Spirit, as happened in the Great Depression.

Here’s how all this will generally unfold in the coming decade:

2011. Super Rich keep spending billions to control Washington

The conservative takeover of America’s democracy the past three decades became total and complete last year when an activist Supreme Court overturned long-established legal precedent giving soulless corporations — whose sole allegiance is to wealthy shareholders — the same inalienable rights as humans, accelerating their quest for absolute power. Hopefully Senator Bernie Sander’s proposed 28th Amendment will change that, but doubtful.

2012. Super Rich solidifies absolute power over our political system

That Supreme Court decision legalized political bribery. Now, billions pass through lobbyists to politicians with one goal: A promise that politicians vote for their special interests. Our middle class is in a rapid trickle-down into third-world status. The inequality gap steadily widens. Doesn’t matter who wins the 2012 race. Democracy is systemically corrupt by money. Obama, Mitt, Newt, all pawns of the system.

2013. Global population bubble exploding, rapidly wasting resources

America’s Conspiracy of the Super Rich drains trillions from middle-class taxpayers. They see the global population growth explosion of 100 million annually not as exhausting the world’s scarce resources, but as a tool to get richer through free-market capitalism and globalization. They ignore the tragedies as global population climbs to 10 billion, fail to hear the warnings of environmentalists like Bill McKibben that it may “be too late. The science is settled, the damage has already begun,” we can’t save the planet.

2014. Pentagon’s global commodity wars accelerate toward 2020 peak

At the outset of the Iraq War, Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.” And billions of new people will spread unrest worldwide as “massive droughts turn farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” Another history lesson forgotten: “An old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” Yes, in denial politicians chose war and catastrophes over cooperation.

2015. Gilded Age globalization explodes America’s Global Empire

About the time of the Pentagon’s prediction of WWIII in 2020, Kevin Phillips warned in “Wealth & Democracy:” “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.” Similarly, Ferguson, warns in “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire,” that we are in denial, thinking “about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms.”

2016. Reaganomics capitalism self-destructs, crashes, bank bankruptcies

“But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic,” asks Ferguson. “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly,” too rapid to respond in time. True to form, a new conservative president will keep ignoring the lessons of history. And, as Jared Diamond’s warns in “Collapse:” “One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations share a sharp curve of decline … demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak in population, wealth and power.”

2017. Class war and revolution: Rich class loses big, surrenders

Warren Buffett saw the revolution long ago: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” But by the 2016 presidential election, political rage explodes into a new American Civil War over inequality. The gaping income gap pops a bubble, causes economic collapse. Riots spread preventing another massive bailout of our too-greedy-to-fail banks. New depression ignites class rebellion.

2018. The Fed and Wall Street banks collapse, Glass-Steagall reinstated

Diamond warned us: Leaders need “the courage to practice long-term thinking, make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.” Instead, they fail to act boldly, delay. History tells us leaders act in short-term self-interest, not long-term public interests, especially politicians backed by billionaires who see only quarterly earnings, year-end bonuses, next election.

2019. Global commodity wars spread, killing millions, wasting trillions

Over half our federal budget goes to the Pentagon’s war machine, limiting America’s domestic priorities. Predictably, new commodity wars are ignited by an accelerating global population versus a decline in the world’s scarce resources. That also forces a total rethinking of the balance between spending to protect against external enemies and a rapid deterioration of domestic programs: employment, education, health care, retirement.

2020. America’s first woman president, patriarchal dominance is dead

By the end of the decade, it is finally obvious that patriarchy — male dominance of leadership roles in philosophy, economics, politics and culture throughout history — has failed our civilization, bringing the world to the brink of total destruction.

Why do male leaders consistently fail us? Jeremy Grantham brilliantly captured that fundamental flaw in our nation’s character a few years ago: Male leaders are actually quite emotional, myopic and “impatient … management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget.” But true leadership “requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained.”

Unfortunately, “we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.” And that guarantees “every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always to miss it.”

Worse, today’s male brain is so rigidly hard-wired in short-term myopia, it quickly forgets history’s most recent lessons, like 2008. As a result, our males leaders “collectively miss even totally obvious events that happen over and over in history.”

Class war? Or Gender War?

By 2020 we’ll have an answer, but by then it may be too late.

Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/our-decade-from-hell-will-get-worse-in-2012-2011-12-13

Filed Under: Debt, Economy, Financial Crisis, USA

UK’s Unemployment Highest For 17 Years

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Skynews.com.au

https://www.skynews.com.au/businessnews/article.aspx?id=696765&vId=2920635

Britain’s unemployment has hit its highest level for 17 years, with women and young people bearing the brunt of the deepening jobs crisis in the wake of the government’s austerity measures and the economy’s general weakness.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics on Wednesday showed that 2.64 million people were unemployed in Britain at the end of October - that’s the highest level since 1994 and 128,000 more than in the previous quarter.

Following the increase, Britain’s unemployment rate is now 8.3 per cent, up 0.4 per cent on the quarter and at its highest level since 1996.

Unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds increased by 54,000 to 1.03 million - the highest level since records of youth employment started to be kept in 1992. And the number of women unemployed swelled by 45,000 to 1.1 million, the highest since 1988.

The British government has been heavily criticised for cutting programs that help young people break into the job market, and opposition leader Ed Miliband has said in the past that the country faces having a ‘lost generation’ of people who find it impossible to get work.

Prime Minister David Cameron told MPs the government was trying to reduce joblessness.

‘Any increase in unemployment is bad news and a tragedy for those involved,’ he said. ‘We will do all we can to help people back in to work.’

The statistics office also revealed that public sector employment had also fallen by 67,000 to just below six million - the first time the level has been that low since 2003.

Cutting costs in the public sector has been a key part of the British government’s strategy to reduce the country’s debt. It has clashed with public sector unions over its austerity measures, with unions saying the cuts are unfair and hit poorly paid workers the hardest.

Dave Prentis, leader of the public sector union Unison, said the latest unemployment figures showed the government strategy is failing.

‘The government continues to ignore the human cost and push ahead with its hard and fast cuts, clinging to the hope that a struggling private sector can pick up the pieces,’ he said. ‘These figures deliver a cold hard dose of reality. It is shameful to see that yet again women, who make up the majority of low-paid public sector workers, are the hardest hit by job losses.’

The government had hoped that the private sector would create jobs to compensate for those lost in the public sector but the ongoing economic crisis has meant that a number of companies are struggling to stay afloat.

Tour operator Thomas Cook added to the bad news with an announcement on Wednesday that it will close 200 stores and cut more than 660 jobs in Britain as families with young children decide to stay home instead of holidaying at its all inclusive beach resorts.

Thomas Cook also reported its final year results on Wednesday, after postponing their release as it sought new agreements with its creditors. It said its operating profit fell 16 per cent to STG303.6 million ($A472.7 million).

 

Source: https://www.skynews.com.au/businessnews/article.aspx?id=696765&vId=2920635

Filed Under: Financial Crisis, United Kingdom Tagged With:

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

December 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Banks, Corporations, Corruption, Financial Crisis, Money, USA Tagged With:

Exclusive: Ex-Greek PM George Papandreou on Greece’s Fiscal Crisis and Why He Backs Occupy Movement

December 13, 2011 By 1 Comment

By https://www.democracynow.org

In an exclusive interview, we speak with former Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, who is attending the U.N. climate change summit in Durban, South Africa.

Papandreou was forced to resign last month when he suggested holding a national referendum to allow the Greek people to have a say in whether they would accept the European Union’s bailout plan which would necessitate severe austerity cuts.

We speak to Papandreou about the financial crisis, the role of banks, and the importance of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. “The Occupy Wall Street movements … are saying something very, very specific, that inequality, in the end, is an inequality of power, and we need to redistribute power, not just money—power—and this is, I think, the democratic challenge that we have today,” Papandreou says.

 

Source: https://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/9/exclusive_ex_greek_pm_george_papandreou

Filed Under: European Union, Financial Crisis, Money, Politicians Tagged With:

Unemployment Rises in Advanced Economies

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By https://thehill.com on December 13th, 2011 at 10:55 am

Unemployment rates remain stubbornly high in the world’s most advanced economies, causing more headaches for policymakers trying to avoid another global recession.

Data released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows unemployment across the group’s 34 countries rose slightly to 8.3 percent in October, from 8.2 percent the month before.

The OECD says, in total, 45.1 million people in member states were jobless in October, with some of the biggest increases in Europe.

The euro area as a whole saw its unemployment rate edge up to 10.3 percent, the highest it has been since the height of the global financial crisis.

Spain and the Netherlands saw especially big jumps in unemployment, with Spain’s jobless rate hitting 22.8 percent. Analysts fear the ongoing economic woes in Spain could soon force the eurozone’s fourth largest economy to join Greece and other countries needing international assistance.

Some OECD members did manage to lower their jobless rates. Germany’s unemployment rate fell slightly in October to 5.5 percent.

November data from the United States also showed the unemployment rate declining in the world’s largest economy, falling to 8.6 percent.

 

Source: https://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2011/12/13/unemployment-rises-in-advanced-economies/

Filed Under: Financial Crisis Tagged With:

Greeks Stomach Economic Crisis With Help Of ‘Starvation Recipes’

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

BY JOANNA KAKISSIS

When Eleni Nikolaidou began studying the survival diets of World War II Greece a couple of years ago, she never expected to turn the research for her master’s thesis into a cookbook.

But a lot has happened in Greece in the last two years, andStarvation Recipes is selling well in a country that’s suffering through its worst economic crisis in decades, accompanied now by painful austerity measures. The cookbook, which is in Greek, recommends chewing your food slowly to feel full, saving crumbs from the table in a jar, grinding eggplant to use as replacement “meat,” and adding chestnuts for protein to recipes such as baked cabbage.

But Greeks also hate austerity. The unemployment rate has doubled, and personal bankruptcies, homelessness and even suicides are on the rise. Greeks are lining up at soup kitchens for hot meals and for care packages of flour, rice and oil at churches.

“I’ve even seen people rummaging through the garbage for food,” Nikolaidou, a high school teacher and historian, tells The Salt. “The situation is very bleak.”

This is troubling because food here is not just about subsistence. It’s about pride and even love. In a culture known for its epic meals and generous servings, the endless plates of meze and giant pans of homemade spanakopita shared with friends and strangers represent an open heart and a bountiful home.

But building that bounty took decades, especially after the devastation of World War II. That’s a time the Greeks call thekatochi, which means “occupation,” and the word itself still conjures visions of starvation. My father and his two brotherslived in orphanages in the Peloponnese then, surviving on daily rations of wormy string beans and stale bread. Other rural Greeks lived off whatever land the Nazis didn’t burn and tried to manage with a chicken (for eggs), a skinny goat (for milk) and a few olives and figs.

But the Athenians, who were trapped in an occupied city, had it much harder. Nikolaidou says German soldiers confiscated nearly all of the food in the Greek capital, including basics such as flour, sugar and oil.

Desperate Athenians foraged for wild greens and weeds, which they ate boiled, without salt or oil. They picked through the German soldiers’ trash for potato peels. They even hunted stray cats and dogs. “They would eat anything so that they wouldn’t faint from hunger in the streets,” she says. More than 300,000 people died of starvation.

Greece still carries emotional scars from that time, so it’s not surprising that populists here call Germany’s push for austerity a symbol of a Fourth Reich. But even the angriest Greeks do not compare the horrific living conditions under the katochi (and under the devastating 1946-49 civil war that followed) with the tough times of Austerity 2011.

Evangelia Trifona, a 59-year-old housewife I met earlier this year, says she and her husband tried to open a small restaurant, which recently went bankrupt. But she says they’re managing with what they have. “We bake many loaves of bread and share it with our neighbors,” she says. “In return, they share their own food with us — casseroles, egg-lemon soup, the occasional piece of meat or fish. We never waste anything, and so far, we have not gone hungry.”

Tavernas are still busy, and cafes are packed even on weekdays — a sign that the wartime “coffee” made of ground roasted chickpeas won’t replace the real stuff anytime soon. But Greeks are changing their eating habits; they’re dining out less, buying less meat and cooking with cheaper products at home.

Nikolaidou says Starvation Recipes is resonating with those Greeks who want to make more with less. Surveys show that up to 90 percent of Greeks are changing their eating habits; they’re dining out less, buying less meat and cooking with cheaper products at home.

“They have a kilo of flour, for instance, so how do you make that flour last?” she says. Or they make a pot of fasolada, a hearty navy bean soup, that feeds a family for several days.

“Even in my house, there are no exceptions,” she says. “If my husband and son don’t like what I’ve cooked, tough. I say, ‘That’s our food. Now don’t waste it.’”

 

Source: https://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/12/13/143637187/greeks-stomach-economic-crisis-with-help-of-starvation-recipes

Filed Under: Financial Crisis Tagged With: ,

The Real Victims of Jon Corzine & MF Global’s Bankruptcy

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

By Jeff Macke

If you’re obsessed with headlines from Europe, fixated the Federal Reserve’s final policy meeting of 2011, and generally ready to tune out for the rest of the year, that’s just the way Jon Corzine wants it.

The embattled former Senator, Governor, head of Goldman Sachs (GS), and CEO of MF Global will testify again today, this time in front of his pals and former peers in the U.S. Senate. Presumably Corzine will be sternly grilled regarding how MF Global came lose $1.2 billion in client funds. Cynics and those who saw Corzine’s first Congressional testimony last week would logically expect the disgraced ex-Senator to dole out blame to others while congratulating himself for not taking the Fifth.

The gist of Corzine’s defense is that he simply couldn’t understand where the money went. It’s been a performance somewhere between a drug-addled teen trying to track down his keys and Michael Corleone’s testimony in The Godfather II. Corzine totally doesn’t know where the money is and if anyone working for MF Global did anything untoward the titular leader of the firm at the time had no way of knowing about it.

An eviscerating article in Sunday’s NY Times called into question just how hands-off Mr. Corzine was. Citing inside sources, the Times says “Mr. Corzine compulsively traded for the firm on his Blackberry during meetings, sometimes dashing out to check on the markets.”

A presumption of innocence aside, Corzine’s having been an actively trading CEO yet claiming ignorance as to the clearing and processing activities of his firm falls somewhere between implausible and the lie of a financial sociopath.

Former a market strategist for MF Global Rich Ilczyszyn (rhymes with “magician”) has firsthand experience with the firm and the impact its bankruptcy has had. Now the founder of iitrader.com, Ilczyszyn doesn’t claim to know how Mr. Corzine’s legal battle is going to turnout, but he’s willing to hazard a guess as to the reaction of his former co-workers regarding Corzine’s claim regarding the missing $1.2billion.

“I think I can speak for a lot of clients from MF and investors that used the firm, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me!’” he says.

Ilczyszyn clearly has moved on personally and professionally from MF, as have many of those employed by the firm on the trading floors. It’s the other 3,000 or so former MF employees for whom Ilczyszyn reserves his concern.

There are jobs “in this industry if you’re specifically in futures or commodities, but outside my heart goes out to all the back-office support,” he says. “All the people who helped the organization run on a daily basis; there’s a lot of folks I’m in contract with who are still seeking employment.”

Ilczyszyn is sincere in his concern, which means he outranks Corzine as a man if not in terms of their respective titles at MF Global.

The back office people are the real victims of MF Global’s collapse. They’re also the group who Corzine is putting on the hook for what is either his ineptitude or his malfeasance. When Corzine claims he never “intended” to mix client and firm funds or notes that he can’t retrace the numbers because he doesn’t have the paperwork, he’s blaming the everyday people working at a firm he lead into full-on liquidation.

Corzine’s rounds of testimony are the final insult on his way out the door from business leader to full-time defendant. The show starts at 10am; get ready to lose the remote and pass the popcorn.

 

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/real-victims-jon-corzine-mf-global-bankruptcy-131108203.html

Filed Under: Corporations, Corruption, Debt, Financial Crisis, Money, USA Tagged With:
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