The central banks have now created a system which is totally dependent on ever-more credit and QE. So there is nothing that can stop them from printing money. On the contrary, they will need to print a lot more. Instead of central banks printing $2 trillion each year, it will soon be $10 trillion, and eventually a lot more. - Egon von Greyerz, King World News interview: LINKWith no meaningful Government and industry association economic reports due out today, the Federal Reserve good cop/bad cop comedy routine will be in full force today. Three regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents will be out today making their empty rhetorical speeches either in favor or against reducing QE. But all three represent nothing more than a modified Abbot and Costello slap-stick comedy routine.
The quote above represents the truth about QE. It reflects my view ever since Bernanke first uttered the word "taper" in May. That is, I said all along that the Fed has been using QE to keep the big banks solvent and the tracks in the snow leading to this conclusion are in there for anybody to examine using the St. Louis Fed data system. I connected the dots last week for everyone here: There Will Be No Taper
The other tell-tale is in the trading action of the U.S. dollar, in which the dollar looks like it has contracted that nasty new HIV strain that is resilient to treatment. I'll have more to say on this sometime this week. In the meantime, get yourself some snacks and pull up a comfortable chair so you can fully enjoy watching Bullard, Lacker and Fisher sling the bullshit around in one humorous scatological production orchestrated by the most corrupt banking system in history. Oh ya, if the brown stuff flying over the airwaves happens to cause a temporary drop in the Comex-driven paper price of gold, use that as an opportunity to add to your precious metals positions.
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/images/sp_en_6.gif)
No trust..............
ReplyDeleteSIFMA to Address Investor Distrust of Wall Street . . . Really?
When those paid to promote an organization or industry acknowledge that customers do not trust you, then you know you have a real problem.
On that note, Wall Street and, dare I say, Washington as well have real problems. Let’s navigate and work our way through some smokescreens.
The industry’s own trade organization, SIFMA (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association), has recently launched an initiative designated as Our Partnership with You:
This is just one part of a series of initiatives that SIFMA will be rolling out to demonstrate our commitment to putting customers first.
Really? So quaint. Watch your wallets, folks.
SIFMA should save themselves and us a whole lot of time and effort with this initiative and others. If they really care about making a commitment to putting customers first, then perhaps they should simply and vociferously recommend that the industry adopt the fiduciary standard when dealing with customers.
Let’s navigate further down this path and see what those at The Institute for the Fiduciary Standard have to say about SIFMA. From a recent release entitled Wall Street To Try To Win Back Investor Trust, we read:
This week is a big week for Chet Helck. The Raymond James Global Private Client Group Chief and Securities Industry Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Chairman will oversee the launch of an initiative which, reflecting his own “passion”, will become an indelible part of his legacy. On Thursday SIFMA will announce an initiative to address investor distrust of Wall Street when Judd Gregg, SIFMA CEO, speaks at the National Press Club in Washington. Next Monday, Helck will welcome President Bill Clinton to kick off SIFMA’s annual meeting.
Nice gig Judd has. A little trip through the revolving door likely has him getting paid similar do-re-mi to his predecessor who picked up a cool $3 million in that role. And what do you think ol’ Bubba picked up for his platitudes? But I digress. Back to the topic of investor trust . . .
- See more at: http://www.senseoncents.com/2013/12/sifma-to-address-investor-distrust-of-wall-street-really/#sthash.72k52AMs.dpuf
and they bring in same clowns to address the lack of....gregg and clinton?
Nomi Prins, former Wall Street banker and author, says, “There’s this myth . . . that somehow the Fed’s quantitative easing (money printing) is helping to create jobs.” What’s really going on? Prins says, “The big six bank stocks are outperforming the rise in the stock market generally by ten times, and that is really not talked about very much, and that’s a big multiple.” Prins goes on to say, “They are the ones who have received the most benefit, and they are the ones who are still in trouble.” Can the Fed stop supporting the big banks? According to Prins, “The banks can’t survive without the Fed support, period. . . . The Fed will not discontinue its program of helping these banks because the levels of problems are still the same.” According to Prins, depositors could be in trouble during the next banking calamity. Prins contends, “That is a danger. Depositors could lose money because the FDIC would not be able to contain a mega fallout. . . . They’re creating a facade of stability until it falls apart.”
ReplyDeletehttp://usawatchdog.com/big-six-bank-stocks-outperforming-market-by-ten-times-nomi-prins/
You could have put it differently: "The banks which own the Fed would like nothing so much as to avail themselves of trillions of dollars nearly interest free until the end of time."
DeleteJP Morgan Chase, the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act, and the Corruption of America
ReplyDeleteHow different is bribing China’s “princelings,” as they’re called there, from Wall Street’s ongoing program of hiring departing U.S. Treasury officials, presumably in order to grease the wheels of official Washington? Timothy Geithner, Obama’s first Treasury Secretary, is now president of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus; Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag is now a top executive at Citigroup.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is important, and JP Morgan should be nailed for bribing Chinese officials. But, if you’ll pardon me for asking, why isn’t there a Domestic Corrupt Practices Act?
Never before has so much U.S. corporate and Wall-Street money poured into our nation’s capital, as well as into our state capitals. Never before have so many Washington officials taken jobs in corporations, lobbying firms, trade associations, and on the Street immediately after leaving office. Our democracy is drowning in big money.
Corruption is corruption, and bribery is bribery, in whatever country or language it’s transacted in.
http://robertreich.org/post/69412254741
New Documents Show How Power Moved to Wall Street, Via the New York Fed
ReplyDeleteBy Pam Martens: December 9, 2013
Thanks to a trove of historic documents recently released by the St. Louis Fed, we are now able to see how the New York Fed, a bastion of Wall Street interests, maneuvered itself into control of that process.
Strong, through force of personality, began to channel all trading of U.S. government securities through the New York Fed.
Today, even Benjamin Strong would be shocked at the power concentrated at the New York Fed. The New York Fed is the only one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks to have a Wall Street-syle trading floor with Bloomberg terminals and speed dials to the biggest firms on Wall Street. Since 1935, all open market operations of the entire Federal Reserve system have been carried out by the New York Fed.
On its web site, the New York Fed explains its unique role as the central bank’s central bank: It is the sole manager of the System Open Market Account (SOMA) Despite being the regulator in charge of the largest Wall Street banks at the time that obscene levels of leverage and corruption collapsed the financial system of the United States in 2008, even while top Wall Street CEOs sat on its Board of Directors, the New York Fed continues to be in charge of placing examiners in these banks and functioning as their regulator.
The fact that the New York Fed needs the goodwill of the major Wall Street banks to carry out its open market operations and to facilitate the orderly functioning of U.S. Treasury auctions, makes it a highly inappropriate regulator of the same firms, in the opinion of many observers.
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/12/new-documents-show-how-power-moved-to-wall-street-via-the-new-york-fed/
Whistleblower Describes How Private Equity Firms Flagrantly Violate SEC Broker-Dealer Requirements
ReplyDeleteYou can easily substitute “private equity” in this discussion by Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin of the securitization industry’s efforts to trivialize its abject disregard for the law:
To raise the “it’s just paperwork” argument in the context of securitization, however, is unreal. Securitization is all about legal fictions and paperwork. Why on earth would anyone every bother with the complex legal structures of securitization (typically involving two shell entities) other than to take advantage of legal fictions?
As I’ve noted in other venues, securitization is the legal apotheosis of form over substance, and the basis on which this is legally tolerated is the punctilious observance of formalities. Failure to do so can result in a securitization failing to be bankruptcy remote or to lose its off-balance sheet accounting status or lose its pass-thru tax status, any of which are disasterous. Securitization deals were so heavily lawyered precisely because the paperwork matters. They aren’t like a sale of a used sofa over Craigslist.
Whether private equity fund investors have been cheated out of brokerage fees is a difficult question. By not registering, PE firms have evaded the requirement of registered broker-dealers to provide investors with brokerage commission reports. Investors can’t tell whether they have been cheated out of portions of transaction fees that were supposed to be rebated to them because they never got the information they would need in order to know. It’s much like the NSA before Snowden arguing that nobody could prove illegal spying because the fact of the spying was itself a secret.
How has the SEC missed this flagrant violation of the 1934 Exchange Act for so long? The answer is very simple, and has a surreal Catch-22 quality. Basically, the SEC limits its surveillance for security law violations almost exclusively to those who volunteer to be examined, either as “investment advisers” or “broker-dealers”. Other than shutting down flagrant Ponzi schemes run by two bit hustlers, the SEC does very little even to look for securities law violations among investment firms that don’t comply with requirements to self-register as broker-dealers or investment advisers. Almost all PE firms chose to keep the SEC entirely out of their houses by ignoring the requirement to register as broker-dealers. To the SEC, the private equity industry, and its illegal broker-dealer practices, simply didn’t exist. And Dodd Frank’s registration requirements don’t address this issue. Private equity firms are now required to register as investment advisors, but that regime covers different activities than that of broker dealers, and thus is not relevant to the transaction fee abuse. But, natch, the SEC firms are arguing otherwise: the SEC is already supervising [part of] what they do, so that should be more than enough.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/12/whistleblower-reports-rampant-violation-of-broker-dealer-laws-by-private-equity-firms.html#W2A1xFFtUQjFxboQ.99
I wonder how crafty the lawyers were with the shells that house the gold etf's?
Professor: Obama Becoming The Very Danger The Constitution Was Designed To Avoid
ReplyDeleteGeorge Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley had this to say about President Obama: "The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power in every single branch."
http://youtu.be/41kij0HuOmw
University of London Bans Student Protests, Free Speech
ReplyDeleteThe student union outlined their stance, “Occupations are a legitimate form of dissent. When our university exploits our staff, shuts down our student union, and are utterly unaccountable to the students and staff that give it life and make it function, students have no choice but to gain leverage in whatever way they can.”
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2013/12/university-of-london-bans-student.html
here we go....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTcRRaXV-fg
ReplyDeleteAbbott & Costello's "Who's on first?" routine (sorry, Dave, couldn't resist).
I decided to go back to the most basic of basics to see if I could place the w/w epic collapse of 2007-08 in a historical context, since there's nothing but obfuscating lies and useless time wasting garbage coming out of the maws of nearly every so called expert, guru, newsletter writers and bankster brown-nosing frontmen.
ReplyDeleteIf we look at the fall of Rome, the real fall even as given by the best historical researchers down history, it was AD 410, not 476.
This could be why no one sees it, intentionally or otherwise.
AD 410 to 2007= 1597, a clear natural Fibonacci number.
This of course can be broken down into the sum of lesser Fibo numbers, then adding 1.
1597= 987+ 610= 610 +377 +233 +144 +89 +55 +34 +21 +13 +8 +5 +3 +2 +1 +1, +1.
So every major event, including grand historic ones like Columbus, USA 1776, etc inside that timeframe were, as momentous as they seem actually only far lesser events than 2007.
OK, so how big a dead cat bounce comes after, if only briefly? Beats me!
We can already eliminate Pi years after the early 2009 low; we're beyond that.
A 6.18 after that would be about April/2014.
Now look which major asset class despite this huge fall has not crashed yet, not even in 2008 .
Could that be when the cat goes splat?
Dude, cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste. The forum is for individual responses, This is not the Drudge report.
ReplyDeletedo you feel better?
DeleteMaybe they could invite Eric Holder, just for laughs, or Gerald Celente who could tell them where to SIF it.
ReplyDelete"MONTREAL • Revenu-Québec is seeking prison sentences and fines totalling $750-million for Kitco Metals Inc. founder Bart Kitner and directors with several other gold trading firms following one of the biggest tax fraud investigations in provincial history.
ReplyDeleteQuebec’s revenue department on Monday said it filed a total of 1,920 charges against Kitco and 11 other companies as well as their directors and an accountant implicated in an alleged fraud scheme linked to gold processing. Some 120 charges were filed against Kitco and another 120 against Mr. Kitner involving total fines of $454.6-million.
“This is an investigation that’s lasted several years and the evidence is significant,” said Revenu-Québec spokesman Stéphane Dion. “Without a doubt, it’s one of the largest investigations we’ve ever done.”
The total amount allegedly derailed by all 12 companies charged was $350-million over a two year period ending in 2010, Mr. Dion said. The ministry claims Kitco specifically made false statements and tried to obtain tax rebates to which it wasn’t entitled. The amount related to Kitco was not made public.
Kitco forcefully denied the allegations. The company last year filed a lawsuit against Revenu-Québec seeking $122-million in damages caused to the company and on Monday, it said its legal action against the department will escalate as a result of the formal charges.
The penal code charges stem from a probe by the tax ministry dubbed Project Carat, disclosed in June 2011. While it defended itself from the allegations, Montreal-based Kitco was granted bankruptcy protection that month. Its current creditor protection extension is set to expire in March 2014.
During the June 2011 raid, more than 175 provincial investigators with search warrants descended on several Montreal area businesses, private residences and offices of accounting firms and bankruptcy trustees. Revenu-Québec alleged some 125 companies in two separate gold trading networks engaged in tax fraud scam on sales transactions worth $1.8-billion. It claimed the firms also avoided paying the federal goods and services tax.
http://www.theprovince.com/business/Kitco+Metals+among+gold+traders+facing+Quebec+fraud+allegations/9264985/story.html
JP Morgan Chase is but a part of the problem. If you want to cut out the root to the overall confrontation regarding precious metals you must first get to the reason for why physical gold and silver has been controlled from the start leading up until present day. Knowledge is power.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.silver-investor.com/charlessavoie/cs_may05_pilgrims.htm
Luxury home builders won't be immune from diminishing effects of QE. Toll Brothers just proved as much...
ReplyDeletehttp://aaronlayman.com/2013/12/toll-brothers-q4-19-jump-in-cancellations-as-profit-increases/
MAY THE ODDS EVER BE IN YOUR FAVOR – HOPE & DEFIANCE
ReplyDelete“But as the Crisis mood congeals, people will come to the jarring realization that they have grown helplessly dependent on a teetering edifice of anonymous transactions and paper guarantees. Many Americans won’t know where their savings are, who their employer is, what their pension is, or how their government works. The era will have left the financial world arbitraged and tentacled: Debtors won’t know who holds their notes, homeowners who owns their mortgages, and shareholders who runs their equities – and vice versa.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2013/12/09/may-the-odds-ever-be-in-your-favor-hope-defiance/
Good read............
ReplyDeleteChina Prepares For Financial Warfare
Financial War: The Invisible Conflict
Despite arising doubt towards the US dollar (USD) as the global reserve currency since the financial crisis in 2008, the USD-centric system of world trade and finance remains an important cornerstone of the post-Cold War global economic order.
The strategic ‘Game’ to preserve the USD’s global status is now focus of international political and economic activity; the US makes a new kind of non-military offensive against developing and transforming countries derived from her ability to set favorable rules, an ability she possesses through
the dollar hegemony.
Game of Nations: New Frontier
Based on historical encounters (like the Soros attack on Southeast Asian countries) the outcome of successful attacks will not be limited to finance. Outcomes include widely deteriorating trade conditions, widespread enterprise bankruptcies, high level of unemployment and escalation into political-social crises. As the globalized economy evolves, securitization of the real economy and the subsequent leverage from financial derivatives can sharply increase risks to economies targeted by financial war. One successful blow is like a ‘targeted killing’ towards an enterprise or even a nation’s economy, followed by a collapse and then regression.
A financial war may not be violent like a physical conflict, but it makes another succumb to one’s will through different means. A political motive exists as well. A financial attack initiated by a nation or a non-national entity are both able to achieve a national strategic intent.
http://www.ingoldwetrust.ch/china-prepares-for-financial-warfare