The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. – Benjamin Franklin
– Fed’s Plosser Admits Fed Was Responsible For Last Housing Bubble, Doesn’t Want To “Create Another” (ZeroHedge, July 12, 2013):
The “mutinying” half of the Fed – that which the FOMC minutes indicated wanted an end to QE by the end of 2013 – is not going to take Bernanke’s Wednesday steamrolling lying down. Enter Charles Plosser, who becomes a voting member next year:
- PLOSSER SAYS FED SHOULD HALT QE BY END OF THIS YEAR
Good luck there. But here is the punchline:
– 1994 vs 2013: Spot The Carbon-Copy Similarities (ZeroHedge, July 9, 2013):
The only thing that is necessary for something to happen, is for everyone to say it can’t possibly happen. Such as a carbon copy replica of the 1994 bond crush. Presenting: 1994 vs 2013, or as it is better known “It can’t happen… It can’t happen…It can’t happen… It just happened”
And some rather spot on commentary on just this from Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd, who just like us, sees the inevitable outcome of the upcoming taper (which is coming), as the untaper, i.e., even moar printing by the Chairman (or woman as the case may be in 2014).
From Guggenheim‘s Scott Minerd
The Fed’s Bind: Tapering, Timetables and Turmoil
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
– Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
– George Orwell
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
–Aldous Huxley, 1961
– ABNORMALCY BIAS (The Burning Platform , May 9, 2013)
You can’t make this stuff up!
– Greenspan: Ignore The Economy, “Only The Stock Market Matters” (ZeroHedge, Feb 15, 2013):
Starting at around 1:50, Greenspan states the odds of sequester occurring are very high – in fact, the playdough-faced ex-Chair-head notes, “I find it very difficult to find a scenario in which [the sequester] doesn’t happen” But when asked how this will affect the economy, Awkward Alan is unusually clearly spoken – “the issue is how does it affect the stock market.”While not so many of our leaders have taken the path to direct truthiness, Greenspan somewhat shocks a Botox’d and babbling Bartiromo when he admits “the stock market is the key player in the game of economic growth.”
Read moreAlan Greenspan: Ignore The Economy, ‘Only The Stock Market Matters’ (Video)
YouTube Added: 17.01.2013
Description:
Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) — In today’s “Single Best Chart,” Bloomberg’s Scarlet Fu displays how inflation has increased in the 100 years since the creation of the Federal Reserve. She speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg Surveillance.”
– Marc Faber: “Paul Krugman Should Go And Live In North Korea” (ZeroHedge, Dec 13, 2012):
If there is one thing better than Marc Faber providing a free, must-watch (and listen) 50 minute lecture on virtually everything that has transpired in the end days of modern capitalism, starting with who caused it, adjustable rate mortgages, leverage, why did the Fed let Lehman fail, why was AIG bailed out, quantitative easing, Operation Twist, where the interest on the debt is going, which bubbles he is most concerned about, a discussion of gold and silver, and culminating with his views on a world reserve currency, is him saying the following: “The views of the Keynesians like Mr. Krugman is that the fiscal deficits are far too small. One of the problems of the crisis is that it was caused by government intervention with fiscal and monetary measures. Now they tells us we didn’t intervene enough. If they really believe that they should go and live in North Korea where you have a communist system. There the government intervenes into every aspect of the economy. And look at the economic performance of North Korea.” Priceless.
50 minutes of Faberian bliss:
AGAIN: This is the ‘Greatest Depression’.
– Have the Last 5 Years Been Worse than the Great Depression? (ZeroHedge, Sep 21, 2012):
What Do Economic Indicators Say?We’ve repeatedly pointed out that there are many indicators which show that the last 5 years have been worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, including:
- The housing slump
- The level of inequality between rich and poor (too much inequality destroys economies)
- The interconnectedness of financial systems and economies worldwide (interconnectedness leads to financial instability)
- Runaway spending and greed
Mark McHugh reports:
Velocity of money is the frequency with which a unit of money is spent on new goods and services. It is a far better indicator of economic activity than GDP, consumer prices, the stock market, or sales of men’s underwear (which Greenspan was fond of ogling). In a healthy economy, the same dollar is collected as payment and subsequently spent many times over. In a depression, the velocity of money goes catatonic. Velocity of money is calculated by simply dividing GDP by a given money supply. This VoM chart using monetary base should end any discussion of what ”this” is and whether or not anybody should be using the word “recovery” with a straight face:
In just four short years, our “enlightened” policy-makers have slowed money velocity to depths never seen in the Great Depression.
(As we’ve previously explained, the Fed has intentionally squashed money multipliers and money velocity as a way to battle inflation. And see this)
Indeed, the number of Americans relying on government assistance to obtain basic food may be higher now that during the Great Depression. The only reason we don’t see the “soup lines” like we did in the 30s only because of the massive food stamp program.
Read moreHave The Last 5 Years Been Worse Than The Great Depression?
– The Bill Clinton Myth (ZeroHedge, Sep 9, 2012):
Earlier this week, former U.S. president Bill Clinton gave the keynote address to the Democractic National Convention in an effort to lend some of his popularity to Barack Obama. With the unemployment rate still stubbornly high at 8.1%, Obama has lost many of the enthused voters who put him into the Oval Office in 2008. Clinton was tapped to deliver the speech not only because of his image of a wonkish pragmatist but because of his presiding over the booming economy of the late 1990s. Like a prized mule, Clinton was dragged out to give Democrats someone to point to and say that his policies were the hallmark of smart governance.
From the article:
Comment: It’s not “socialism for the rich”; that’s an oxymoron.
It’s corporatism, i.e. fascism, as defined by Benito Mussolini.
– Audit of the Federal Reserve Reveals $16 Trillion in Secret Bailouts (Sott.net, Sep 1, 2012):
The first ever GAO (Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out.
Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning.
What was revealed in the audit was startling:
Read moreGAO Audit Of The Federal Reserve Reveals $16 TRILLION In Secret Bailouts
– Verified Warnings From Former U.S. Presidents About the “Invisible Government” Running the U.S. With “No Allegiance To the People” (Conscious Life News, Aug 31, 2012):
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”- George Santayana
Past presidents of the United States and other high profile political leaders have repeatedly issued warnings over the last 214 years that the U.S. government is under the control of an “invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”
According to a half-dozen of our former presidents, one vice-president, and a myriad of other high profile political leaders, an invisible government that is “incredibly evil in intent” has been in control of the U.S. government “ever since the days of Andrew Jackson” (since at least 1836). They “virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties… It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”
As a result, “we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
The sources for the above quotes (and more) are listed below. All of the quotes listed in this article have been verified as authentic and have associated links to the source materials. Also included below are statements made by David Rockefeller, Sr, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Federal Reserve Chairman’s Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke that appear to confirm some of the warnings.
Warnings About the Invisible Government Running the U.S.
The warnings listed below, which appear in chronological order, began with our first president – George Washington. The last president to speak out was JFK, who was assassinated. Read what they and other political leaders have said about the invisible government.
“It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am. The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of seperation). That Individuals of them may… actually had a seperation [sic] of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned.” – George Washington, 1st President of the United States (1789–1797), from a letter that Washington wrote on October 24, 1798, which can be found in the Library of Congress. For an analysis of Washington’s warning, see the article “Library of Congress: George Washington Warns of Illuminati”
– WHO DESTROYED THE MIDDLE CLASS – PART 1 (The Burning Platform, June 19, 2012)
– WHO DESTROYED THE MIDDLE CLASS – PART 2 (The Burning Platform, June 21, 2012)
Related:
Transcript and video (and link to a speech by Lord James of Blackheath on Foundation X in 2010) here:
– Lord James Of Blackheath, House Of Lords, February 16, 2012 (Video): FOUNDATION X UPDATE!!!
Looks like this is going viral now …
LORD JAMES OF BLACKHEATH, EXPOSING “TRILLION DOLLAR TERROR”
– Intel Exclusive: Trillion Dollar Terror Exposed (Veterans Today, Feb. 21, 2012):
Bush, Fed, Europe Banks in $15 Trillion Fraud, All Documented
Below is one of the strangest stories in financial history, one involving the US government lying about hundreds of thousands of tons of imaginary gold, illegal wire transfers and loans totalling $15 trillion. The video, from the House of Lords, is amazing in itself.
What it doesn’t express is where the money came from though Lord James of Blackheath proves conclusively that an effort was made to say it came from a gold reserve in Brunei that, in fact, never existed.
At surface, it appears we have stumbled upon the largest terrorist organization in the world and have found original documents tracing its funding to the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, two of the top financial officers in the US. A cursory review of terrorism statues in the US indicate that all transactions we will learn about are, in fact, to be assumed “terrorist money laundering” and that the only thing preventing the immediate arrest of hundreds of top financial officials is their political connections alone.
YouTube Added: 17.02.2012We will be able to offer an alternative, more insights, some hard intelligence and some very valuable background that we hope will offer insightful and realistic perspectives on this amazing story.
Highly recommended!
Flashback:
Nov. 1, 2010: Lord James of Blackheath, Speech on Foundation X (House of Lords, 01/11/2010) (Video)
YouTube Added: 17.02.2012
Description:
Lord James of Blackheath, House of Lords February 16 2012
Breaking news Lord James of Blackheath has spoken in the House of Lords holding evidence of three transactions of 5 Trillion each and a transaction of 750,000 metric tonnes of gold and has called for an investigation.
– http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201212/ldhansrd/text/120216-0002.htm:
16 Feb 2012 : Column 1016
5.20 pm
Lord James of Blackheath: My Lords, I hope the minute that that has taken has not come off my time. I do not wish noble Lords to get too encouraged when I start with my conclusions but I will not sit down when I have made them. I will then give the evidence to support them and, I hope, present the reasons why I want support for an official inquiry into the mischief I shall unfold this afternoon. I have been engaged in pursuit of this issue for nearly two years and I am no further forward in getting to the truth.
There are three possible conclusions which may come from it. First, there may have been a massive piece of money-laundering committed by a major Government who should know better. Effectively, it undermined the integrity of a British bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second possibility is that a major American department has an agency which has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which it is seeking to get at least €50 billion as a pay-off. The third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud, which has not been carried out, but which has been prepared to provide a threat to one Government or more if they do not make a pay-off. These three possibilities need an urgent review.
In April and May 2009, the situation started with the alleged transfer of $5 trillion to HSBC in the United Kingdom. Seven days later, another $5 trillion came to HSBC and three weeks later another $5 trillion. A total of $15 trillion is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland. We need to look to where this came from and the history of this money. I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and where it has come from for a long time.
It starts off apparently as the property of Yohannes Riyadi, who has some claims to be considered the richest man in the world. He would be if all the money that was owed to him was paid but I have seen some accounts of his showing that he owns $36 trillion in a bank. It is a ridiculous sum of money. However, $36 trillion would be consistent with the dynasty from which he comes and the fact that it had been effectively the emperors of Indo-China in times gone by. A lot of that money has been taken away from him, with his consent, by the American Treasury over the years for the specific purpose of helping to support the dollar.
Read moreLord James Of Blackheath, House Of Lords, February 16, 2012 (Video): FOUNDATION X UPDATE!!!
And don’t forget to ask Greenspan for his solution regarding social security, medicare, medicaid and unemployment …
… or even overpopulation.
Remember that Alan Greenspan is THE ONE who created this mess in the first place.
Peter Schiff on Alan Greenspan:
‘Alan Greenspan is not just the worst Fed chairman we’ve ever had, I think he’s the worst American we’ve ever had.’
‘Alan Greenspan is a TRAITOR to everything America stands for.’
YouTube
Now listen to the TRAITOR…
– The Key to Fixing the Housing Market? (CNBC, Oct. 7, 2011):
Transcript:
buying homes and destroying them or burning them was the low cost option. i could demonstrate that at the time i made that statement of all of the alternatives that were available, had the united states government taken all of those units off the market, and really prevented prices from falling as sharply as they did, the net effect would have been far less own russ than what we have run into. so, yes, that particular strategy in retrospect, especially, turns out to have been the low cost strategy. does that mean it is viable politically? absolutely not.
Flashback:
– ‘Welcome to the Recovery’: Why Another 11 Million Mortgages Will Go Bad
– Welcome to the Recovery (New York Times, by Timothy Geithner, August 2, 2010)
– If it doesn’t do something about its underwater mortgages, America could sink without trace (Guardian, Oct. 2 2011):
Stimulating the economy is all very well in the short term. But the national legacy of unpayable property debt will weigh the US down for years
It’s now more than six years since Alan Greenspan, in the days when he was still known as the “maestro” of the world economy, conceded that there might be a little “froth”, perhaps even a few “local bubbles”, in the American housing market.
Read moreUnderwater Mortgages Could Sink America Without A Trace
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan“When a country embarks on deficit financing (Obamanomics) and inflationism (Quantitative easing = printing money = inflation) you wipe out the middle class and wealth is transferred from the middle class and the poor to the rich.”
– Ron Paul
See also:
– Head Of The World’s Biggest Hedge Fund Sees ‘Economic Collapse’ Due To Money Printing By Early 2013
– The US Monetary System And Descent Into Fascism An Interview With Dr. Edwin Vieira
Happy US Weimar Republic!!! (Got gold and silver?)
– No Chance of Default, US Can Print Money: Greenspan (CNBC, Aug 7, 2011):
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on Sunday ruled out the chance of a US default following S&P’s decision to downgrade America’s credit rating.
“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default” said Greenspan on NBC’s Meet the Press
“What I think the S&P thing did was to hit a nerve that there’s something basically bad going on, and it’s hit the self-esteem of the United States, the psyche” said Greenspan
Read moreABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS … Alan Greenspan: No Chance of Default, US Can Print Money (CNBC)
(Dylan Ratigan Show from April 07, 2010)
Added: 20.03.2011
This article originally appeared in RS 1106 from June 10, 2010.
(Rolling Stone Magazine) — It’s early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp – word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once-indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.
The real shocker is a thing known among Senate insiders as “716.” This section of an amendment would force America’s banking giants to either forgo their access to the public teat they receive through the Federal Reserve’s discount window, or give up the insanely risky, casino-style bets they’ve been making on derivatives. That means no more pawning off predatory interest-rate swaps on suckers in Greece, no more gathering balls of subprime shit into incomprehensible debt deals, no more getting idiot bookies like AIG to wrap the crappy mortgages in phony insurance. In short, 716 would take a chain saw to one of Wall Street’s most lucrative profit centers: Five of America’s biggest banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) raked in some $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. By some estimates, more than half of JP Morgan’s trading revenue between 2006 and 2008 came from such derivatives. If 716 goes through, it would be a veritable Hiroshima to the era of greed.
Gold (and silver) is the real money of the elite. The elite really loves gold, everything else is worthless paper to them.
The elite only ‘fears’ and ‘hates’ gold because it shows that all those statements on recovery, green shoots, stimulus packages etc. made by their elite puppets (like Obama, Biden, Bernanke, Clinton, Brown, Darling, King, Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Papandreou to name a few) are lies.
There is no recovery and there has nothing been done to help the people. Those elite puppets do everything in their power to loot and bankrupt the people and shovel taxpayer money into the hands of their elite masters.
Only 1 % of the people own gold, which means that the elite can rape 99 % of the people – that remain totally unprotected – with their plans and then present the New World Order as only solution.
“When a country embarks on deficit financing and inflationism you wipe out the middle class and wealth is transferred from the middle class and the poor to the rich.”
– Ron Paul
See also:
– EU Bids For Unprecedented Power Over National Budgets
I highly recommend that you read Alan Greenspan’s famous essay on ‘Gold and Economic Freedom’ below.
There were a few questions raised about the note on the long term chart of the SP 500 deflated by gold which was posted last night, and which is reproduced here above, which read “This is why the financial engineers like Bernanke hate and fear gold; it defies their plans and powers.”
The chart shows something that most investors have suspected. There has been no genuine recovery in the price of stocks since the decline that cannot be fully explained by the monetary inflation of the dollar, as can be discovered by the ultimate store of value, which is gold.
I thought that this was a fairly straightforward observation, but it apparently jarred a few people and their thinking. So perhaps we have some new readers who are not familiar with the long standing animosity towards gold that is uniformly expressed by all those who promote centralized command and control economies, from both the left and the right.
(April 07, 2010)
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
In case you have problems viewing this video, then watch it here:
– The Dylan Ratigan Show (MSNBC)
Added: 21st Mar 10
On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.
The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses – meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a “bailout tax” on banks. Maybe this wasn’t the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.
Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. “In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines,” he said, “I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative.”
Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we’re so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.
Goldman wasn’t alone. The nation’s six largest banks – all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry – set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a gesture of self-sacrifice, Blankfein himself took a humiliatingly low bonus of $9 million, less than the 2009 pay of elephantine New York Knicks washout Eddy Curry. But in reality, not much had changed. “What is the state of our moral being when Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?” asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.
Beyond a few such bleats of outrage, however, the huge payout was met, by and large, with a collective sigh of resignation. Because beneath America’s populist veneer, on a more subtle strata of the national psyche, there remains a strong temptation to not really give a shit. The rich, after all, have always made way too much money; what’s the difference if some fat cat in New York pockets $20 million instead of $10 million?
The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because there’s still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street “earns” its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around “earns.” The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits – Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation – is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?
The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.
