I'm not worried about how high in price gold is going, I'm worried about what the world around us will look like when it gets there
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Must-See TV: Steve Liesman Once Again Confirms His Stupidity For Us
Steve Liesman's brains must have fallen out of his head with all of his hair. I have a better cost index than the Government CPI: my monthly out of pocket living expenses.
I discuss how and when the Progressive Dictatorship in the United States was overthwown by the "Banksters, Military Industrial Complex" (Regressive Dictatorship) and how this will lead to continual war and ruin. The progressive dictatorship once operated under the idea that nobility must conduct itself for the best outcome of the people while the regressive dictatorship is only self interested.
I Know What You Did Last, Summers: The Shady Deals That Will Hand Larry The Fed
As today’s press conference made clear, President Obama is just about the only person left in this country — or at least the country outside of DC and lower Manhattan — who thinks it’s not completely batshit insane to nominate Larry Summers as the new Fed chief.
I’d been putting off writing about Summers’ impending nomination because I’d assumed it was just some silly rumor floating around. Surely even someone as grotesquely compromised as Obama wouldn’t consider something this stupid. No human being on this planet could possibly be a worse candidate for the job of Federal Reserve chief than Larry Summers — Bernie Madoff would make a better candidate, at least he’s not as slippery as Summers and the damage Madoff caused is a drop in the bucket compared to Summers’ financial holocausts.
The flaw here, I suppose, is in assuming that failure somehow disqualifies you from the gig. In this America, failure on the job is the key to success, and few people understand that like Larry Summers, serial failure, understands. And so, as Obama made clear, Summers is a front-runner for the Fed chair nomination. Actually that’s an understatement, hopeniks: Larry Summers is THE front-runner. As Ron Suskind put it: “first among equals to replace Bernanke.”
That’s in reference to a deal Larry cut with Obama just before he took office in January 2009 . As crude and cronyist as this may sound — Obama basing his choice for Federal Reserve chief based on a backroom political “deal” he cut years ago — it’s worked for Summers in the past. It’s how he got the job as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton — at least, that’s according to Summers’ mentor and the man he replaced as Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin.
In his memoir, “In An Uncertain World,” Rubin recounted how he cut a secret deal with Summers in the beginning of Clinton’s second term: If Larry agreed to stay on as Treasury undersecretary, then Rubin promised to step down in the middle of Clinton’s second term and hand the top Treasury job to Summers. Rubin writes: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/scribble/5658/2bffdd802304e61ea30b732efb10931a1ddcd512/
out of control....when will people wake up to the fact it's a stacked game.
The Author of an Explosive New Expose "American Coup: How a Terrified Government is Destroying the Constitution"
Then we speak with one of America’s premier military experts who, along with the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, wrote the groundbreaking expose of the privatized national security state “Top Secret America”. William Arkin joins us to discuss his explosive follow-up “American Coup: How a Terrified Government is Destroying the Constitution”. We discuss his brand new book that describes the desk-bound takeover of the highest reaches of government by a coterie of “gray men” of the national security establishment that he calls the executive agents. We look into how doomsday has become every day in contemporary America as a result of the forever war and how the mechanism is already in place for an American coup that William Arkin warns about in this latest and most powerful reminder of our fading freedoms that we are trading away for a fictional guarantee of security.
This a-hole Liesman is an example of what is wrong with the entire lame stream media. I cut cable T.V. because I was tired of the bullshit that is being spewed daily. The reward has been more time researching for and finding the truth. As the famous quote reads, "seek the truth and it shall set you free".
Liesman is nothing but a muppet not to mention a shill for TPTB Can't cut cable now though, not with a new season of Duck Dynasty just starting. The dumbing down of the masses is in high gear.
Dave, please be honest. IMO, you are angry NOT because Steve Liesman is stupid. You feel irate just because he is too ugly. You will feel much better if the remarks are made by some hot bimbos.
yeah, with a digital television I get more stations using a rooftop antenna than with a $50/mo basic cable subscription. Better signal quality as well. It was sickening watching the cable companies brainwash citizens into believing they needed a cable subscription to watch digital signal tv. Total hype via time warner. Of course, I never watch tv anyway, but it's nice to show my friends a crystal clear picture using a radio shack rooftop antenna since they all hate the cable company. They're addicted though, heaven forbid they get an original thought in their head. Thanks for allowing anonymous comments Dave. Silver crossed 22.
This is my candid view as I explained it to a few of my top supporters who asked me for my thoughts. It will cover a whole host of subjects including hyperinflation, GOFO and backwardation, GLD, whether or not local coin shortages are related to tightness in the overall physical flow, discerning between the inevitable and the speculative, the past, present and future as I view it, gold mining in Freegold, the utter disconnect between the price of gold and the physical market today, the basic structure of the physical market and how its connection to the price will be reestablished, and even how I foresee the revaluation unfolding. It's more than 80 pages of mind-bending views, so just beware of the potential for exploding heads. ;D
Look at food, energy and healthcare expenses over the last 10 years. The things that people need to live have soared in price and the dollar hasn't even taken the big devaluation yet.
"People sending email to any of Google's 425 million Gmail users have no "reasonable expectation" that their communications are confidential, the internet giant has said in a court filing.
Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals.
"Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director. "People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy, don't use Gmail."
It's a tragedy that "stupid" has to get in the way of what is a state of emergency.
This is not a test run. There may not be a second chance.
Buy physical gold and silver and realize that by doing so you are securing lifeboats to your ship. By all indications we will be in turbulent seas soon enough.
Dave, It's Thursday morning and it looks like the tresury paper is being "beamed back" to Bernanke from China and Japan. Is this the begining of the end ?
Walmart Earnings Disaster Exposes a Collapsing Economy: Davidowitz
Those are the numbers, but not the whole story. Walmart is the thermometer of the American economy. Disregard the government data. Jobs and GDP and all the rest are at best inaccurate measures of the economy and at worst flat out corrupt. Walmart is capitalism writ large. The entire organization is focused on nothing but selling goods and services to Americans. It may be an empire in decline, but Walmart sells more than $1 billion worth of merchandise in a bad quarter. When Walmart misses estimates, it can only mean one of two things: either Walmart or the American economy is weaker than anyone thought.
Haruhiko Kuroda doesn’t wear a wizard’s hat when he arrives at Bank of Japan headquarters each morning. Once inside, I do wonder if he dons a cloak, waves a magic wand and concocts mysterious potions.
Kuroda has done something truly supernatural in his five months as governor of the central bank. The more yen he conjures up to produce inflation, the more he mesmerizes markets. Investors are more bewitched by Kuroda than they are by the number 1,000,000,000,000,000. The 15 zeros now needed to express Japan’s national debt almost have a dark-arts quality all their own. Yet a week after Japan’s IOUs reached the 1 quadrillion yen ($10.28 trillion) mark, yields have actually declined.
What is Kuroda’s secret? Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve would love to know as he fends off bond vigilantes, that mysterious cast of characters who protest fiscal or monetary policies they deem dangerous. Kuroda is winning bondland’s full obedience with two forms of trickery. The first is what economists call “financial repression” -- essentially transferring money via monetary policy from citizens to the government. The second is outright monetization of public debt.
Of course, Kuroda can’t admit he’s engaging in either practice. The first would anger Japan’s 126 million people; the second might have hedge funds the world over shorting Japanese government bonds and credit-rating companies pouncing. So far, Kuroda is getting away with it. The longer he does, the better the chances Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can pull off his own miraculous feat of deregulating the economy. Suspending Disbelief
Sure, Kuroda crushed the skeptics with overwhelming monetary force. But the powers of financial repression deserve far more credit. The yield volatility that accompanied the first wave of Kuroda’s doubling of the monetary base in April shook Japan Inc. to its core. Government bonds are the main financial asset held by banks, companies, pension funds, universities, endowments, insurance companies, government-run institutions, the postal-savings system and individuals. Rather than reduce their debt exposure, the Japanese doubled down.
Thomas Drake On Government Overreach, Obsessive Secrecy, and Constitutional Abuses
Thomas Andrews Drake is a former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower.
In 2010 the government alleged that Drake 'mishandled' documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.
On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pled to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer.
excerpt: Demand for gold bars and coins rose 78 percent in the second quarter to 507.6 tonnes, as retail buyers took advantage of lower prices to add to their long-term holdings, the World Gold Council said.
Hathaway: The first thing is that there is a big short squeeze taking place...People who have paper claims on gold, which would be futures, derivatives, ETFs and so forth are demanding settlement in terms of physical gold. Why that's important is because the paper gold market is leveraged more than 100 to 1 versus the underlying bullion. So it looks like to me that people are losing confidence in the traditional intermediaries between the paper and physical markets.
Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal The federal government has made it easier than ever to borrow money for higher education - saddling a generation with crushing debts and inflating a bubble that could bring down the economy by Matt Taibbi AUGUST 15, 2013
Not only had the president succeeded in moving the goal posts on his spring scandals, he'd teamed up with the Republicans to perpetuate a long-standing deception about the education issue: that the student-loan controversy is now entirely about interest rates and/or access to school loans.
Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of student rights by taking on banks and greedy lenders like Sallie Mae. Three years earlier, he'd scored what at the time looked like a major victory over the Republicans with a transformative plan to revamp the student-loan industry. The 2010 bill mostly eliminated private banks and lenders from the federal student-loan business. Henceforth, the government would lend college money directly to students, with no middlemen taking a cut. The president insisted the plan would eliminate waste and promised to pass the savings along to students in the form of more college and university loans, including $36 billion in new Pell grants over 10 years for low-income students. Republican senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander bashed the move as "another Washington takeover."
The thing is, none of it – not last month's deal, not Obama's 2010 reforms – mattered that much. No doubt, seeing rates double permanently would genuinely have sucked for many students, so it was nice to avoid that. And yes, it was theoretically beneficial when Obama took banks and middlemen out of the federal student-loan game. But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It's not the cost of the loan that's the problem, it's the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.
In the early 2000s, a thirtysomething scientist named Alan Collinge seemed to be going places. He had graduated from USC in 1999 with a degree in aerospace engineering and landed a research job at Caltech. Then he made a mistake: He asked for a raise, didn't get it, lost his job and soon found himself underemployed and with no way to repay the roughly $38,000 in loans he'd taken out to get his degree.
Collinge's creditor, Sallie Mae, which originally had been a quasi-public institution but, in the late Nineties, had begun transforming into a wholly private lender, didn't answer his requests for a forbearance or a restructuring. So in 2001, he went into default. Soon enough, his original $38,000 loan had ballooned to more than $100,000 in debt, thanks to fees, penalties and accrued interest. He had a job as a military contractor, but he lost it when his employer ran a credit check on him. His whole life was now about his student debt.
In your previous post on negative GOFO rates, Dave, you mentioned that James Turk is one of the few analysts whom you keep an eye on. That's good to know and I too will read him from now on. Besides James, and yourself of course, who else merits attention? There are a lot of shills out there as well as those who are simply misinformed, and I'd like to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Who else should a fellow pay attention to within the investment community? Thanks in advance.
I read read Alisdair Macleod, I like William Kaye's interviews on King World News, Sinclair, Dan Norcini, Eric Sprott, John Embry, Jesse's Cafe Americain. Those are the guys I try to follow regularly
DOJ Compounds Stat Screwup by Whitewashing Old Eric Holder Speech
It turns out that Barack Obama's Justice Department, in the person of Attorney General Holder, didn't just grossly overstate the success of its Mortgage Fraud Task Force. In what at best is a bonehead mistake, the Department channeled 1984 and whitewashed a web page, re-transcribing an old speech of Holder's to better reflect the "updated" version of the mortgage facts.
By now most people who follow white-collar crime know the backstory. Last year, on October 9th, Mr. Holder gave a press conference in which he touted the efforts of Barack Obama's Mortgage Fraud Task Force, claiming that in a year's time, the Department had secured "285 federal criminal indictments and informations against 530 defendants for allegedly victimizing more than 73,000 American homeowners --and inflicting losses in excess of $1 billion."
Two days after that appearance, a pair of pain-in-the-ass Bloomberg reporters, Phill Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg, reported that at least one of the cases Holder was citing was a Bush-era prosecution, and multiple others had been filed long before the Task Force existed. "There is no attempt to fudge the numbers," an FBI spokesman grumbled lamely at the time.
Subsequently, Bloomberg writer Jonathan Weil continued to follow up, pestering the DOJ for a list of the cases Holder was talking about. He repeatedly asked a DOJ spokesperson for the list, and whether the delay was coming from the FBI (which had the information) or the DOJ, he never got the information he was after.
Last Friday, the reason for that stalling finally emerged. The DOJ issued a revised press release, admitting that it had not, in fact, prosecuted 530 individuals in the program, but 107 – as Weil noted, an 80% decrease. Wrote Weil this weekend, in a piece entitled "Eric Holder Owes the American People and Apology":
Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.
Chinese State Press On How The Fed Has Been Manipulating The Price Of Gold For Decades This is an article from the Chinese state press agency CNTV (China Network Television), which later appeared on www.best-news.us. The writer describes how soon after Nixon closed the gold window in 1971 - and the price of gold sky rocketed to $800 an ounce - the Fed started to combat the price of gold up until today in order to maintain the dollar hegemony. Their main tactics; leasing gold and shorting it. The Chinese are fully aware of this game and know exactly how it's going to end. Nice read on what everybody knows but what western governments and mainstream media refuse to say. Google Translate from here: http://koosjansen.blogspot.nl/2013/08/chinese-state-press-on-how-fed-has-been.html
Britain is fast turning into a Banana Republic, wilfully blind to corruption
August 17th, 2013
You may remember that, back in November 2010, it emerged that a “cocky” Prince Andrew appeared to welcome and endorse bribery and corruption — or at least that he abhors those who would seek to get in its way, including anti-corruption regulators and investigative journalists (by the way, we only know this thanks to the efforts of the recently convicted U.S. army private Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks and The Guardian).
In an October 2008 U.S. embassy cable Tatiana Gfoeller, the U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, revealed that during a 2008 engagement at a hotel in the central Asian republic’s capital, Bishkek, a “rude” Prince Andrew — who for some inexplicable reason is a UK trade representative — attacked the Serious Fraud Office for what he called “idiocy”.
In the cable Gfoeller wrote: “Rude language à la British … [Andrew] turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anticorruption investigators, who had had the ‘idiocy’ of almost scuttling the al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia.” The prince, she explained, “was referencing an investigation, subsequently closed, into alleged kickbacks a senior Saudi royal had received in exchange for the multi-year, lucrative BAE Systems contract to provide equipment and training to Saudi security forces”. The dispatch continued:
“His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to ‘these (expletive) journalists, especially from the National [sic] Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere’ and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business. The crowd practically clapped.”
What I find disturbing is not just the behaviour of the oafish Andrew, it is that many of Britain’s regulators seem to share the Prince’s views. They either welcome corruption and collude with corrupt companies to help them cover up past wrongdoing, or are simply too lazy or frightened to bother tackling high-level fraud and corruption.
This story was published on page five of the current issue of Private Eye (9 August – 22 August 2013):
Structured Finance: Price Manipulation Includes Silver and Gold (Part One) Posted August 17, 2013 By Janet Tavakoli
Price manipulation is a time-honored tradition in structured finance. There will be abuse anytime there is a price “fixing” or a price set on the basis of a trade.
Instances of abuse are the dragons that “regulators” are supposed to constantly slay. When regulators are too slow, unwilling, or unable to do the job—and if you haven’t been paying attention, regulators have been all three for decades—market professionals take matters into their own hands. Price manipulation: Business as Usual
JPMorgan Chase: "Super Jamie" down from his pedestal
It's missing a halo Jamie the Magnificent to have built the largest U.S. bank by assets. But nobody wants to see the signs of his fall, yet noticeable since the crisis. It is true that between 2009 and 2011 the spotlight of media have been trained on issues of Goldman Sachs and the challenge to his chief, Lloyd Blankfein.
First, the person does not take the measure of regulatory upheaval occurred since 2009. Judging "childish" and "anti-American" Volcker Rule prohibiting paris on equity, the CEO is not only the opinion the wrong way, but encourages operators to cross the red line. A start in the top two in London French trader Bruno Iksil the heart of the case called "The Whale" ...
In his mind became an untouchable icon, a demigod, this character brutal and full of himself constantly put sticks in the wheels of the police market. Moreover, the acquisition of Bear Stearns he discovered the world of hedge funds and trading ofcommodities . The creation of the Chief Investment Office (CIO), the Treasury Department responsible for the bank to grow excess liquidity, shows his new appetite for risk
Late's diner offers 1964 prices to customers paying with silver coins
Why?
Restaurant owner Karl Birkenstock said the answer to that is simple. The idea originally crossed Birkenstock’s mind because of the increased conversation about how goods have become more expensive.
“Like any other person in business, you are compelled to raise your prices because your costs go up and you feel terrible about it,” he said.
Birkenstock has been at the diner for 14 years. He wanted to show people how the value of their dollar is changing, causing the prices to presumably “rise,” but it’s essentially the same. “I decided to illustrate that by taking all of our prices and applying what the cost of it would be if you were paying in the currency of the ‘olden days,’ being 1964 or before, with silver coins,” Birkenstock said.
Gold Gone? Germany baffled as Fed bars access to bullion
Published on Aug 15, 2013 The world is losing trust in the dollar as a safe haven. A major blow came after Germany's Bundesbank demanded the repatriation of a big chunk of its gold being held in the US. Because as RT's Gayane Chichakyan reports, some are concerned the assets of foreign nations in the Federal Reserve are not secure or even there. The Germans were infuriated when the US Federal reserve didn't even let them examine their own assets properly. Peter Boehringer, the founder and chairman of 'German Precious Metal Association', says that's a bad sign.
The Fed has been talking about bubbles for 20 years. I've been diligently studying bubbles and money and credit for longer. I'm here with a sense of humility. After all, I'm again relegated to wearing the proverbial "dunce cap", as I persevere through my third major bull market, "new era" and "new paradigm".
The great American economist Hyman Minsky is best known for "stability is destabilizing" and the "financial instability hypothesis" - the evolution of finance from "hedge finance" to "speculative finance" and finally to highly unstable "Ponzi finance". Minsky saw the evolution of capitalist finance as having developed in four stages: commercial capitalism, finance capitalism, managerial capitalism and money manager capitalism. "These stages are related to what is financed and who does the proximate financing - the structure of relations among businesses, households, the government and finance." Late in life Minsky wrote: "Today's financial structure is more akin to Keynes' characterization of the financial arrangements of advanced capitalism as a casino."
The above quotes were from a Minsky paper published in 1993. That year was notable for the inflation of a major bond market speculative bubble. This bubble began to burst on February 4, 1994, when Fed raised rates by 25 basis points (bps). I still view 1994 as a seminal year in finance. The highly leveraged hedge funds were caught in a bond bubble; there were serious derivative problems; and speculative deleveraging was having significant global effects, most notably the financial and economic collapse in Mexico.
Caroline Kennedy discloses financial information for ambassadorship
The documents reflect that beyond her holdings in family trusts, she has positions through Phil Falcone’s Harbinger Capital, Apollo, Goldman Sachs, Vornado Realty Trust, JP Morgan, Blackstone and the Arctic Royalty Limited Partnership, which reportedly relates to two family-owned oil companies.
She also reports almost $1 million annually from speaking engagements and royalties from books.
Not Too Big to Jail: Why Eliot Spitzer Is Wall Street’s Worst Nightmare
Before Eliot Spitzer’s infamous resignation as governor of New York in March 2008, he was one of our fiercest champions against Wall Street corruption, in a state that had some of the toughest legislation for controlling the banks. It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers.” The editorial exposed the collusion between the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street in deregulating the banks in the guise of regulating them, by taking regulatory power away from the states. It was an issue of the federal government versus the states, with the Feds representing the banks and the states representing consumers.
He is one of the few people with not only the insight and experience to expose Wall Street corruption but the courage to go after the perpetrators.
Less than a month after publishing this editorial, Spitzer had been exposed, disgraced, and was out of office. Greg Palast pointed to the fact that Spitzer was the single politician standing in the way of a $200 billion windfall from the Federal Reserve, guaranteeing the toxic mortgage-backed securities of the same banking predators that were responsible for the subprime debacle. While the Federal Reserve was trying to bail them out, Spitzer was trying to regulate them, bringing suit on behalf of consumers.3
In a December 2011 article in Slate titled “We Own Wall Street,” Spitzer argued that bad corporate behavior could be stopped by a political movement uniting shareholders, pension funds and mutual funds – the actual owners of the corporations – who could then take coordinated action demanding transparency and accountability.
This is the sort of creative thinking that will be needed if we the people are to take back our power from Wall Street and the corporatocracy. We need a mass movement, coordinated action, and leaders who can organize it; and Eliot Spitzer is one of the few people in a position to play that role who have the experience, vision and courage to carry it through.
The "X article" -- The US was Overthrown
ReplyDeletePublished on Aug 13, 2013
I discuss how and when the Progressive Dictatorship in the United States was overthwown by the "Banksters, Military Industrial Complex" (Regressive Dictatorship) and how this will lead to continual war and ruin. The progressive dictatorship once operated under the idea that nobility must conduct itself for the best outcome of the people while the regressive dictatorship is only self interested.
http://youtu.be/t-EBLxZ3FFU
I Know What You Did Last, Summers: The Shady Deals That Will Hand Larry The Fed
DeleteAs today’s press conference made clear, President Obama is just about the only person left in this country — or at least the country outside of DC and lower Manhattan — who thinks it’s not completely batshit insane to nominate Larry Summers as the new Fed chief.
I’d been putting off writing about Summers’ impending nomination because I’d assumed it was just some silly rumor floating around. Surely even someone as grotesquely compromised as Obama wouldn’t consider something this stupid. No human being on this planet could possibly be a worse candidate for the job of Federal Reserve chief than Larry Summers — Bernie Madoff would make a better candidate, at least he’s not as slippery as Summers and the damage Madoff caused is a drop in the bucket compared to Summers’ financial holocausts.
The flaw here, I suppose, is in assuming that failure somehow disqualifies you from the gig. In this America, failure on the job is the key to success, and few people understand that like Larry Summers, serial failure, understands.
And so, as Obama made clear, Summers is a front-runner for the Fed chair nomination. Actually that’s an understatement, hopeniks: Larry Summers is THE front-runner. As Ron Suskind put it: “first among equals to replace Bernanke.”
That’s in reference to a deal Larry cut with Obama just before he took office in January 2009 . As crude and cronyist as this may sound — Obama basing his choice for Federal Reserve chief based on a backroom political “deal” he cut years ago — it’s worked for Summers in the past. It’s how he got the job as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton — at least, that’s according to Summers’ mentor and the man he replaced as Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin.
In his memoir, “In An Uncertain World,” Rubin recounted how he cut a secret deal with Summers in the beginning of Clinton’s second term: If Larry agreed to stay on as Treasury undersecretary, then Rubin promised to step down in the middle of Clinton’s second term and hand the top Treasury job to Summers. Rubin writes:
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/scribble/5658/2bffdd802304e61ea30b732efb10931a1ddcd512/
out of control....when will people wake up to the fact it's a stacked game.
The Author of an Explosive New Expose "American Coup: How a Terrified Government is Destroying the Constitution"
DeleteThen we speak with one of America’s premier military experts who, along with the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, wrote the groundbreaking expose of the privatized national security state “Top Secret America”. William Arkin joins us to discuss his explosive follow-up “American Coup: How a Terrified Government is Destroying the Constitution”. We discuss his brand new book that describes the desk-bound takeover of the highest reaches of government by a coterie of “gray men” of the national security establishment that he calls the executive agents. We look into how doomsday has become every day in contemporary America as a result of the forever war and how the mechanism is already in place for an American coup that William Arkin warns about in this latest and most powerful reminder of our fading freedoms that we are trading away for a fictional guarantee of security.
http://ianmasters.com/content/august-13-north-carolinas-assault-voting-rights-author-explosive-new-expose-american-coup-ho
This a-hole Liesman is an example of what is wrong with the entire lame stream media. I cut cable T.V. because I was tired of the bullshit that is being spewed daily. The reward has been more time researching for and finding the truth. As the famous quote reads, "seek the truth and it shall set you free".
ReplyDeleteLiesman is nothing but a muppet not to mention a shill for TPTB Can't cut cable now though, not with a new season of Duck Dynasty just starting. The dumbing down of the masses is in high gear.
DeleteKen
Dave, please be honest. IMO, you are angry NOT because Steve Liesman is stupid. You feel irate just because he is too ugly. You will feel much better if the remarks are made by some hot bimbos.
ReplyDeleteyeah, with a digital television I get more stations using a rooftop antenna than with a $50/mo basic cable subscription. Better signal quality as well. It was sickening watching the cable companies brainwash citizens into believing they needed a cable subscription to watch digital signal tv. Total hype via time warner. Of course, I never watch tv anyway, but it's nice to show my friends a crystal clear picture using a radio shack rooftop antenna since they all hate the cable company. They're addicted though, heaven forbid they get an original thought in their head. Thanks for allowing anonymous comments Dave. Silver crossed 22.
ReplyDeleteMy Candid View – Part 1
ReplyDeleteThis is my candid view as I explained it to a few of my top supporters who asked me for my thoughts. It will cover a whole host of subjects including hyperinflation, GOFO and backwardation, GLD, whether or not local coin shortages are related to tightness in the overall physical flow, discerning between the inevitable and the speculative, the past, present and future as I view it, gold mining in Freegold, the utter disconnect between the price of gold and the physical market today, the basic structure of the physical market and how its connection to the price will be reestablished, and even how I foresee the revaluation unfolding. It's more than 80 pages of mind-bending views, so just beware of the potential for exploding heads. ;D
http://fofoa.blogspot.ca/
Look at food, energy and healthcare expenses over the last 10 years. The things that people need to live have soared in price and the dollar hasn't even taken the big devaluation yet.
ReplyDelete"People sending email to any of Google's 425 million Gmail users have no "reasonable expectation" that their communications are confidential, the internet giant has said in a court filing.
ReplyDeleteConsumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals.
"Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director. "People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy, don't use Gmail."
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/14/google-gmail-users-privacy-email-lawsuit
(doesn't matter what we use - constitutional laws brought back to life is what we need.)
It's a tragedy that "stupid" has to get in the way of what is a state of emergency.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a test run. There may not be a second chance.
Buy physical gold and silver and realize that by doing so you are securing lifeboats to your ship.
By all indications we will be in turbulent seas soon enough.
Dave, It's Thursday morning and it looks like the tresury paper is being "beamed back" to Bernanke from China and Japan. Is this the begining of the end ?
ReplyDeleteWalmart Earnings Disaster Exposes a Collapsing Economy: Davidowitz
ReplyDeleteThose are the numbers, but not the whole story. Walmart is the thermometer of the American economy. Disregard the government data. Jobs and GDP and all the rest are at best inaccurate measures of the economy and at worst flat out corrupt. Walmart is capitalism writ large. The entire organization is focused on nothing but selling goods and services to Americans. It may be an empire in decline, but Walmart sells more than $1 billion worth of merchandise in a bad quarter. When Walmart misses estimates, it can only mean one of two things: either Walmart or the American economy is weaker than anyone thought.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/walmart-earnings-miss-exposes-collapsing-economy-davidowitz-142435260.html?
we're in the tank...............
The Government is Finally Arresting Wall Street Bankers...For Losing Wall Street's Money
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/V-hG7ID3jr8
Debt of One Quadrillion Yen? Not a Problem
ReplyDeleteHaruhiko Kuroda doesn’t wear a wizard’s hat when he arrives at Bank of Japan headquarters each morning. Once inside, I do wonder if he dons a cloak, waves a magic wand and concocts mysterious potions.
Kuroda has done something truly supernatural in his five months as governor of the central bank. The more yen he conjures up to produce inflation, the more he mesmerizes markets. Investors are more bewitched by Kuroda than they are by the number 1,000,000,000,000,000. The 15 zeros now needed to express Japan’s national debt almost have a dark-arts quality all their own. Yet a week after Japan’s IOUs reached the 1 quadrillion yen ($10.28 trillion) mark, yields have actually declined.
What is Kuroda’s secret? Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve would love to know as he fends off bond vigilantes, that mysterious cast of characters who protest fiscal or monetary policies they deem dangerous. Kuroda is winning bondland’s full obedience with two forms of trickery. The first is what economists call “financial repression” -- essentially transferring money via monetary policy from citizens to the government. The second is outright monetization of public debt.
Of course, Kuroda can’t admit he’s engaging in either practice. The first would anger Japan’s 126 million people; the second might have hedge funds the world over shorting Japanese government bonds and credit-rating companies pouncing. So far, Kuroda is getting away with it. The longer he does, the better the chances Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can pull off his own miraculous feat of deregulating the economy.
Suspending Disbelief
Sure, Kuroda crushed the skeptics with overwhelming monetary force. But the powers of financial repression deserve far more credit. The yield volatility that accompanied the first wave of Kuroda’s doubling of the monetary base in April shook Japan Inc. to its core. Government bonds are the main financial asset held by banks, companies, pension funds, universities, endowments, insurance companies, government-run institutions, the postal-savings system and individuals. Rather than reduce their debt exposure, the Japanese doubled down.
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-15/debt-of-1-000-000-000-000-000-yen-not-a-problem.html
Thomas Drake On Government Overreach, Obsessive Secrecy, and Constitutional Abuses
ReplyDeleteThomas Andrews Drake is a former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower.
In 2010 the government alleged that Drake 'mishandled' documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.
On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pled to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2013/08/thomas-drake-on-government-overreach.html
Gold Investors Seek Alpine Haven in Swiss Army Bunkers (video)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-14/gold-investors-seek-alpine-safe-haven-in-swiss-army-bunkers.html
excerpt: Demand for gold bars and coins rose 78 percent in the second quarter to 507.6 tonnes, as retail buyers took advantage of lower prices to add to their long-term holdings, the World Gold Council said.
Gold 'ridiculously oversold'
ReplyDeletehttp://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000191449
Hathaway: The first thing is that there is a big short squeeze taking place...People who have paper claims on gold, which would be futures, derivatives, ETFs and so forth are demanding settlement in terms of physical gold. Why that's important is because the paper gold market is leveraged more than 100 to 1 versus the underlying bullion. So it looks like to me that people are losing confidence in the traditional intermediaries between the paper and physical markets.
Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal
ReplyDeleteThe federal government has made it easier than ever to borrow money for higher education - saddling a generation with crushing debts and inflating a bubble that could bring down the economy
by Matt Taibbi
AUGUST 15, 2013
Not only had the president succeeded in moving the goal posts on his spring scandals, he'd teamed up with the Republicans to perpetuate a long-standing deception about the education issue: that the student-loan controversy is now entirely about interest rates and/or access to school loans.
Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of student rights by taking on banks and greedy lenders like Sallie Mae. Three years earlier, he'd scored what at the time looked like a major victory over the Republicans with a transformative plan to revamp the student-loan industry. The 2010 bill mostly eliminated private banks and lenders from the federal student-loan business. Henceforth, the government would lend college money directly to students, with no middlemen taking a cut. The president insisted the plan would eliminate waste and promised to pass the savings along to students in the form of more college and university loans, including $36 billion in new Pell grants over 10 years for low-income students. Republican senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander bashed the move as "another Washington takeover."
The thing is, none of it – not last month's deal, not Obama's 2010 reforms – mattered that much. No doubt, seeing rates double permanently would genuinely have sucked for many students, so it was nice to avoid that. And yes, it was theoretically beneficial when Obama took banks and middlemen out of the federal student-loan game. But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It's not the cost of the loan that's the problem, it's the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.
In the early 2000s, a thirtysomething scientist named Alan Collinge seemed to be going places. He had graduated from USC in 1999 with a degree in aerospace engineering and landed a research job at Caltech. Then he made a mistake: He asked for a raise, didn't get it, lost his job and soon found himself underemployed and with no way to repay the roughly $38,000 in loans he'd taken out to get his degree.
Collinge's creditor, Sallie Mae, which originally had been a quasi-public institution but, in the late Nineties, had begun transforming into a wholly private lender, didn't answer his requests for a forbearance or a restructuring. So in 2001, he went into default. Soon enough, his original $38,000 loan had ballooned to more than $100,000 in debt, thanks to fees, penalties and accrued interest. He had a job as a military contractor, but he lost it when his employer ran a credit check on him. His whole life was now about his student debt.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815?print=true?
look at those fees....
In your previous post on negative GOFO rates, Dave, you mentioned that James Turk is one of the few analysts whom you keep an eye on. That's good to know and I too will read him from now on. Besides James, and yourself of course, who else merits attention? There are a lot of shills out there as well as those who are simply misinformed, and I'd like to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Who else should a fellow pay attention to within the investment community? Thanks in advance.
ReplyDeleteI read read Alisdair Macleod, I like William Kaye's interviews on King World News, Sinclair, Dan Norcini, Eric Sprott, John Embry, Jesse's Cafe Americain. Those are the guys I try to follow regularly
DeleteDOJ Compounds Stat Screwup by Whitewashing Old Eric Holder Speech
ReplyDeleteIt turns out that Barack Obama's Justice Department, in the person of Attorney General Holder, didn't just grossly overstate the success of its Mortgage Fraud Task Force. In what at best is a bonehead mistake, the Department channeled 1984 and whitewashed a web page, re-transcribing an old speech of Holder's to better reflect the "updated" version of the mortgage facts.
By now most people who follow white-collar crime know the backstory. Last year, on October 9th, Mr. Holder gave a press conference in which he touted the efforts of Barack Obama's Mortgage Fraud Task Force, claiming that in a year's time, the Department had secured "285 federal criminal indictments and informations against 530 defendants for allegedly victimizing more than 73,000 American homeowners --and inflicting losses in excess of $1 billion."
Two days after that appearance, a pair of pain-in-the-ass Bloomberg reporters, Phill Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg, reported that at least one of the cases Holder was citing was a Bush-era prosecution, and multiple others had been filed long before the Task Force existed. "There is no attempt to fudge the numbers," an FBI spokesman grumbled lamely at the time.
Subsequently, Bloomberg writer Jonathan Weil continued to follow up, pestering the DOJ for a list of the cases Holder was talking about. He repeatedly asked a DOJ spokesperson for the list, and whether the delay was coming from the FBI (which had the information) or the DOJ, he never got the information he was after.
Last Friday, the reason for that stalling finally emerged. The DOJ issued a revised press release, admitting that it had not, in fact, prosecuted 530 individuals in the program, but 107 – as Weil noted, an 80% decrease. Wrote Weil this weekend, in a piece entitled "Eric Holder Owes the American People and Apology":
Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/doj-compounds-stat-screwup-by-whitewashing-old-eric-holder-speech-20130814#ixzz2cEdDpGPr
Chinese State Press On How The Fed Has Been Manipulating The Price Of Gold For Decades
ReplyDeleteThis is an article from the Chinese state press agency CNTV (China Network Television), which later appeared on www.best-news.us. The writer describes how soon after Nixon closed the gold window in 1971 - and the price of gold sky rocketed to $800 an ounce - the Fed started to combat the price of gold up until today in order to maintain the dollar hegemony. Their main tactics; leasing gold and shorting it. The Chinese are fully aware of this game and know exactly how it's going to end.
Nice read on what everybody knows but what western governments and mainstream media refuse to say.
Google Translate from here:
http://koosjansen.blogspot.nl/2013/08/chinese-state-press-on-how-fed-has-been.html
Britain is fast turning into a Banana Republic, wilfully blind to corruption
ReplyDeleteAugust 17th, 2013
You may remember that, back in November 2010, it emerged that a “cocky” Prince Andrew appeared to welcome and endorse bribery and corruption — or at least that he abhors those who would seek to get in its way, including anti-corruption regulators and investigative journalists (by the way, we only know this thanks to the efforts of the recently convicted U.S. army private Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks and The Guardian).
In an October 2008 U.S. embassy cable Tatiana Gfoeller, the U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, revealed that during a 2008 engagement at a hotel in the central Asian republic’s capital, Bishkek, a “rude” Prince Andrew — who for some inexplicable reason is a UK trade representative — attacked the Serious Fraud Office for what he called “idiocy”.
In the cable Gfoeller wrote: “Rude language à la British … [Andrew] turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anticorruption investigators, who had had the ‘idiocy’ of almost scuttling the al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia.” The prince, she explained, “was referencing an investigation, subsequently closed, into alleged kickbacks a senior Saudi royal had received in exchange for the multi-year, lucrative BAE Systems contract to provide equipment and training to Saudi security forces”. The dispatch continued:
“His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to ‘these (expletive) journalists, especially from the National [sic] Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere’ and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business. The crowd practically clapped.”
What I find disturbing is not just the behaviour of the oafish Andrew, it is that many of Britain’s regulators seem to share the Prince’s views. They either welcome corruption and collude with corrupt companies to help them cover up past wrongdoing, or are simply too lazy or frightened to bother tackling high-level fraud and corruption.
This story was published on page five of the current issue of Private Eye (9 August – 22 August 2013):
http://www.ianfraser.org/britain-is-fast-turning-into-a-banana-republic-wilfully-blind-to-corruption/
Structured Finance: Price Manipulation Includes Silver and Gold (Part One)
ReplyDeletePosted August 17, 2013 By Janet Tavakoli
Price manipulation is a time-honored tradition in structured finance. There will be abuse anytime there is a price “fixing” or a price set on the basis of a trade.
Instances of abuse are the dragons that “regulators” are supposed to constantly slay. When regulators are too slow, unwilling, or unable to do the job—and if you haven’t been paying attention, regulators have been all three for decades—market professionals take matters into their own hands.
Price manipulation: Business as Usual
http://www.tavakolistructuredfinance.com/2013/08/structured-finance-gold-silver-price-manipulation/
JPMorgan Chase: "Super Jamie" down from his pedestal
ReplyDeleteIt's missing a halo Jamie the Magnificent to have built the largest U.S. bank by assets. But nobody wants to see the signs of his fall, yet noticeable since the crisis. It is true that between 2009 and 2011 the spotlight of media have been trained on issues of Goldman Sachs and the challenge to his chief, Lloyd Blankfein.
First, the person does not take the measure of regulatory upheaval occurred since 2009. Judging "childish" and "anti-American" Volcker Rule prohibiting paris on equity, the CEO is not only the opinion the wrong way, but encourages operators to cross the red line. A start in the top two in London French trader Bruno Iksil the heart of the case called "The Whale" ...
In his mind became an untouchable icon, a demigod, this character brutal and full of himself constantly put sticks in the wheels of the police market. Moreover, the acquisition of Bear Stearns he discovered the world of hedge funds and trading ofcommodities . The creation of the Chief Investment Office (CIO), the Treasury Department responsible for the bank to grow excess liquidity, shows his new appetite for risk
http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2013/08/16/jpmorgan-chase-super-jamie-descend-de-son-piedestal_3462335_3234.html#xtor=AL-32280270
Late's diner offers 1964 prices to customers paying with silver coins
ReplyDeleteWhy?
Restaurant owner Karl Birkenstock said the answer to that is simple. The idea originally crossed Birkenstock’s mind because of the increased conversation about how goods have become more expensive.
“Like any other person in business, you are compelled to raise your prices because your costs go up and you feel terrible about it,” he said.
Birkenstock has been at the diner for 14 years. He wanted to show people how the value of their dollar is changing, causing the prices to presumably “rise,” but it’s essentially the same.
“I decided to illustrate that by taking all of our prices and applying what the cost of it would be if you were paying in the currency of the ‘olden days,’ being 1964 or before, with silver coins,” Birkenstock said.
http://www.htrnews.com/article/20130814/MAN0101/308150187/Late-s-diner-offers-1964-prices-customers-paying-silver-coins?nclick_check=1
Gold Gone? Germany baffled as Fed bars access to bullion
ReplyDeletePublished on Aug 15, 2013
The world is losing trust in the dollar as a safe haven. A major blow came after Germany's Bundesbank demanded the repatriation of a big chunk of its gold being held in the US. Because as RT's Gayane Chichakyan reports, some are concerned the assets of foreign nations in the Federal Reserve are not secure or even there. The Germans were infuriated when the US Federal reserve didn't even let them examine their own assets properly. Peter Boehringer, the founder and chairman of 'German Precious Metal Association', says that's a bad sign.
http://youtu.be/NyemAwLD2N0
Government quasi-capitalism
ReplyDeleteThe Fed has been talking about bubbles for 20 years. I've been diligently studying bubbles and money and credit for longer. I'm here with a sense of humility. After all, I'm again relegated to wearing the proverbial "dunce cap", as I persevere through my third major bull market, "new era" and "new paradigm".
The great American economist Hyman Minsky is best known for "stability is destabilizing" and the "financial instability hypothesis" - the evolution of finance from "hedge finance" to "speculative finance" and finally to highly unstable "Ponzi finance".
Minsky saw the evolution of capitalist finance as having developed in four stages: commercial capitalism, finance capitalism, managerial capitalism and money manager capitalism. "These stages are related to what is financed and who does the proximate financing - the structure of relations among businesses, households, the government and finance."
Late in life Minsky wrote: "Today's financial structure is more akin to Keynes' characterization of the financial arrangements of advanced capitalism as a casino."
The above quotes were from a Minsky paper published in 1993.
That year was notable for the inflation of a major bond market speculative bubble. This bubble began to burst on February 4, 1994, when Fed raised rates by 25 basis points (bps). I still view 1994 as a seminal year in finance. The highly leveraged hedge funds were caught in a bond bubble; there were serious derivative problems; and speculative deleveraging was having significant global effects, most notably the financial and economic collapse in Mexico.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-190813.html
Caroline Kennedy discloses financial information for ambassadorship
ReplyDeleteThe documents reflect that beyond her holdings in family trusts, she has positions through Phil Falcone’s Harbinger Capital, Apollo, Goldman Sachs, Vornado Realty Trust, JP Morgan, Blackstone and the Arctic Royalty Limited Partnership, which reportedly relates to two family-owned oil companies.
She also reports almost $1 million annually from speaking engagements and royalties from books.
http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/kennedy_discloses_finances_SeC5KEM45P0RocO3i3wK9L
things don't change when everyone feeds from same trough.................
Not Too Big to Jail: Why Eliot Spitzer Is Wall Street’s Worst Nightmare
ReplyDeleteBefore Eliot Spitzer’s infamous resignation as governor of New York in March 2008, he was one of our fiercest champions against Wall Street corruption, in a state that had some of the toughest legislation for controlling the banks. It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers.” The editorial exposed the collusion between the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street in deregulating the banks in the guise of regulating them, by taking regulatory power away from the states. It was an issue of the federal government versus the states, with the Feds representing the banks and the states representing consumers.
He is one of the few people with not only the insight and experience to expose Wall Street corruption but the courage to go after the perpetrators.
Less than a month after publishing this editorial, Spitzer had been exposed, disgraced, and was out of office. Greg Palast pointed to the fact that Spitzer was the single politician standing in the way of a $200 billion windfall from the Federal Reserve, guaranteeing the toxic mortgage-backed securities of the same banking predators that were responsible for the subprime debacle. While the Federal Reserve was trying to bail them out, Spitzer was trying to regulate them, bringing suit on behalf of consumers.3
In a December 2011 article in Slate titled “We Own Wall Street,” Spitzer argued that bad corporate behavior could be stopped by a political movement uniting shareholders, pension funds and mutual funds – the actual owners of the corporations – who could then take coordinated action demanding transparency and accountability.
This is the sort of creative thinking that will be needed if we the people are to take back our power from Wall Street and the corporatocracy. We need a mass movement, coordinated action, and leaders who can organize it; and Eliot Spitzer is one of the few people in a position to play that role who have the experience, vision and courage to carry it through.
http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/not-too-big-to-jail-why-eliot-spitzer-is-wall-streets-worst-nightmare/
While I am no fan of either guy yelling defending the Gov's inflation numbers is nothing short of ludicrous.
ReplyDelete