Posts Tagged ‘banks’
The Road to World War III – The Global Banking Cartel Has One Card Left to Play
Posted by Admin on October 4, 2010
Posted in Economic Upheavals, Geo-Politics | Tagged: banks, Economic, finance, global elite, history, illuminati, Middle class, nwo, plutocracy, wars, World War II, World War III | Leave a Comment »
Goldman Suchs, truly…
Posted by Admin on April 23, 2010
Goldman Sucks
Something truly extraordinary has happened. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged Goldman Sachs, the greedy, grasping, Midas heart of the Old World Order, with fraud, prompting an immediate slump of over 12% in their share price.
For once, the victims of the evil empire of Goldman Sachs were not the ordinary people, but their own big clients, including the German bank IKB.
This is a momentous hour. Like rats in a sack, the Old World Order have viciously turned on each other. Their united front is disintegrating.
How did it come about? What did Goldman Sachs do that was so outrageous that the SEC could no longer turn a blind eye to the myriad of transactions performed by Goldman Sachs that should have attracted the most serious scrutiny long ago?
What happened was that the hedge fund Paulson & Co, one of the most spectacular beneficiaries of the Credit Crunch, earning billions of dollars while so many other were losing billions, put together a complex portfolio of subprime-mortgage-backed investments that it fully expected to slump in value i.e. it was actually assembling a collection of what it thought were the highest risk, most dubious investments available, and anticipating maximum downside on this portfolio. Its explicit strategy was to bet heavily against this portfolio i.e. to “short” it to the fullest extent. In other words, Paulson & Co regarded this portfolio as utterly toxic, a disaster in the making. This portfolio was “dead man walking” if ever there was one.
Paulson & Co arranged for Goldman Sachs to structure, market and sell this portfolio to its prestigious clients. Goldman Sachs gave it the full, glossy treatment, indicating to many clients that they would be sitting on a potential goldmine if they invested in this portfolio. They completely omitted to mention to all would-be clients that Paulson & Co regarded this portfolio as a collection of the walking dead – a zombie fund heading for the graveyard. Isn’t this a critical piece of information about which every potential client ought to have been made aware? It’s a bit like selling a house for full market value when you know it’s sitting on the edge of a crumbling cliff, a fact that you deliberately fail to tell the purchaser.
In fact, they didn’t mention Paulson & Co at all. They claimed instead that ACA Management, an objective, independent third party with expertise in analyzing risk, had assembled the portfolio. They must have known that if they had admitted the involvement of Paulson & Co, investors might have viewed it entirely differently, given the reputation of hedge funds.
The Goldman Sachs “vice president” at the heart of the scandal is a Frenchman called Fabrice Tourre. In an email sent to a friend a month before he helped to structure the toxic portfolio, Tourre said, “More and more leverage in the system. The whole building is about to collapse anytime now … Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fabrice Tourre … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implication of those monstrosities!!!”
Tourre was described as a “well-mannered, handsome guy from a very refined family.” He had a reputation for throwing noisy parties in his fashionable block of flats. He was a ‘straight-A’ student at the Lycee Henri IV, one of France’s most elite schools, housed in an exquisite 6th Century abbey in Paris. He then studied mathematics at the Ecole Centrale Paris, a top French university, before completing his elite education with the obligatory trip to the USA where he obtained a master’s degree from Stanford. He worked in a luxurious office in a prime location in London.
Posted in Conspiracy Archives | Tagged: banks, corruption, crash, crimes, fall, fraud, goldman sachs, manipulation, nwo, owo, plutocracy, revelation, sec, sub prime crisis, truth | Leave a Comment »
Goldman Sachs FRAUD Charges Filed By SEC Over Subprime Mortgage Securities
Posted by Admin on April 21, 2010
Huffington Post
Goldman Sucks
April 16, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/16/sec-goldman-sachs-charged_n_540377.html
The government has accused Goldman Sachs of defrauding investors by failing to disclose conflicts of interest in mortgage investments it sold as the housing market was faltering.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Friday civil fraud charges against the Wall Street powerhouse and one of its executives. The agency alleges Goldman failed to disclose that one of its clients helped create — and then bet against — subprime mortgage securities that Goldman sold to investors. In essence, Goldman is accused of pushing a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.
Investors in the mortgage securities are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion, the SEC noted.
The SEC claims Goldman Sachs and one of its top officers misled investors by not disclosing that hedge fund manager John Paulson, who made billions betting against the housing market, selected the assets that went into a complex security called “Abacaus.”
Paulson & Co. is one of the world’s largest hedge funds, and paid Goldman roughly $15 million for structuring these deals in 2007.
“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” finance expert Sylvain R. Raynes told the New York Times about such deals. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”
Goldman Sachs shares fell more than 10 percent after the SEC announcement.
Posted in Press Releases | Tagged: banks, credits, crisis bubble, economy, fraud, goldman sachs, journalism, sub prime crisis, truth | Leave a Comment »
Why the Central Bankers Are Meeting In Secret
Posted by Admin on February 14, 2010
Why the Central Bankers Are Meeting In Secret
Many of the world’s central bankers are meeting in Sydney today, at a secret location, to coordinate their drive to force draconian austerity measures on nations, in order to prop up their failed monetary system.
That’s why they are meeting in secret—if the people understood that the central bankers are working out how many people they’ll need to kill to save the banking system, the people might object to them being here.
Consider the chronology of how the world got to this point:
- In July 2007, after a decade of warnings by American physical economist Lyndon LaRouche that the world financial system would disintegrate, the U.S. sub-prime crisis triggered the global financial collapse (Bear Sterns), which by September 2008 turned into a full-blown meltdown of the $1.4 quadrillion global derivatives bubble (Lehman Brothers, AIG).
- In August 2007, LaRouche proposed the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act: to keep people in their homes; to preserve the functionality of the banking system by putting it into bankruptcy protection, to write off their unpayable derivatives and bad debts; and to return the system to Glass-Steagall regulations.
- LaRouche’s solution was rejected, and instead in October 2008, the very central banks which created the crisis, led by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank, dictated a $24 trillion global bail-out of the system by national governments. In Australia, Kevin Rudd implemented the bank guarantee, stimulus spending and the first homebuyers grant, and the Future Fund was put at the disposal of the banks to prop them up.
- By July 2009, it was obvious the bail-out had transferred the bankruptcy of the banking system onto the governments which were propping it up. LaRouche forecast that by October the bankruptcy of national governments would trigger the final meltdown.
- In October 2009, Dubai defaulted on debts of US$59 billion; it was bailed out by Abu Dhabi, but 13 other default risks quickly emerged, including the PIGS in Europe—Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain—Great Britain, and the biggest danger of all, the U.S.
- 2010: on 17th January, Sunday Telegraph economics writer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard revealed advanced plans by the European Central Bank (ECB) to enforce draconian austerity measures on the PIGS, dictating massive cuts to wages, pensions and social services so those nations avoided debt default to save the euro. The ECB intoned sovereignty is a “largely obsolete concept” as it declared it would impose a “permanent limitation” on the PIGS. The chief economist of the IMF, Olivier Blanchard, has since called for the PIGS to impose wage cuts to save the euro. Vicious austerity is on the agenda in other places too: In Australia, Kevin Rudd is blaming the deficit on old people living too long, and in the U.S., Barack Obama is slashing Medicare for the elderly to rein in the U.S. deficit.
The world’s central bankers meeting in Sydney are unaccountable powerbrokers, disguised as “independent”, who have replaced accountable governments as managers of the economy, and globalised the financial system under private control. Through them, the financier oligarchs in the City of London, and its satellites in Wall Street, Amsterdam and Zürich etc., are in charge of the financial system—not elected governments.
Just like in the 1930s, the austerity measures planned by the central bankers cannot be implemented through democratic means, because people tend to object to being killed. To save their system in the Great Depression, the leading central bankers in the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements, backed the rise of Hitler and Europe’s other fascist régimes to impose their austerity program.
What is Sydney’s secret central bank gathering planning to do this time?
Posted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: banking cartel, banks, credits, crisis bubble, domination, economy, finance, geo politics, global elite, independent, journalism, plutocracy, policies, secrecy, truth | Leave a Comment »
Vatican Bank Charged with Money Laundering
Posted by Admin on February 8, 2010
Vatican Bank Charged with Money-Laundering
PressTV, January 24. 2010
Published here: Monday, January 25, 2010 at 7:15 AM
Saints in Sinners
The Bank of the Vatican has been accused of laundering USD 200 million by proxy through an Italian creditor, a report indicates.
The allegation of the Vatican bank’s financial corruption has been made by an Italian magazine that pointed to the financial institute’s purported involvement in stealth fiscal transactions —via several accounts —with Italy’s UniCredit Bank, Russia Today television network quoted the Panorama magazine as reporting.
“This corruption is continuing on a regular basis in the Vatican,” claimed Janathan Levy, a lawyer familiar with the bank.
“Again, there’s no reason for a religion to have a bank that does worldwide commercial activities, dealing in gold, dealing in insurance, dealing in property and then hiding behind the Roman Catholic Church,” Levy pointed out.
“I had the privilege to walk inside this bank. It’s nothing like a bank,” the Russian news channel quoted another lawyer, Massimiliano Gabrieli, as saying.
“If you go there you deposit or withdraw money without limit, without any kind of receipt for the bank and for the client. All you have is a single card with a number,” he stated.
The British London Telegraph, has recently ranked the Bank of the Vatican ahead of the Bahamas, Switzerland and Liechtenstein in banking secrecy.
The Vatican has denied all charges.
Posted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: banks, crisis bubble, domination, economy, frauds, laundering, monies, plagiarism, plutocracy, religion, sovereign, truth, vatican | Leave a Comment »
The Money Assassins
Posted by Admin on February 8, 2010
Stocks and Shares
The Money Assassins
Excerpt from “The Armageddon Conspiracy Website“
Published here: Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 2:38 PM
In Zeitgeist Addendum, “Economic Hitman” John Perkins said:
“We economic hit men really have been the ones responsible for creating this first truly global empire and we work in many different ways. But perhaps the most common is that we will identify a country that has resources our corporations covet, like oil, and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of it’s sister organizations. But the money never actually goes to the country. Instead it goes to our big corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country. Power plants, industrial parks, ports…things that benefit a few rich people in that country in addition to our corporations, but really don’t help a majority of the people at all. However, the whole country is left holding a huge debt.”
It’s such a big debt they can’t repay it, and that’s part of the plan, that they can’t repay it. And so at some point we economic hit men go back to them and say ‘Listen, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debts, so sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies, allow us to build a military base in your country, or send troops in support of ours to someplace in the world like Iraq, or vote with us on the next U.N. vote.’ They have to have their electric utility company privatized and their water and sewage system privatized and sold to US corporations or other multinational corporations.
“So there was a whole mushrooming thing, and it’s so typical of the way the IMF and the World Bank work. They put a country in debt, and it’s such a big debt it can’t pay it, and then you offer to refinance the debt and get it to pay even more interest. And you demand this quid pro quo which you call ‘conditionality’ or ‘good governance’ which means basically that they’ve got to sell off their resources, including many of their social services, their utility companies, their school systems sometimes, their penal systems, their insurance systems, to foreign corporations. So it’s a double, triple, quadruple whammie!”
But the economic hitmen aren’t just taking contracts out on nations, they have us in their sights too. Just as they give big loans to countries to saddle them with debts, they give big loans to ordinary men and women too. They give them massive mortgages to pay off, and cards loaded with credit (aka debt). Soon enough, you’re a slave of the system, with no prospect of escape. You have to keep on the treadmill, you have to scamper forwards with the other rats in the rat race, you have to keep your nose clean, or rather extremely dirty with all that brown-nosing you’re having to do. You can’t afford to aggravate your employer. You’re locked into the system. You’re terrified of losing your job because then you won’t be able to pay your debts. The economic hitman’s silencer is pointing at you right between the eyes.
The Old World Order use the use the same tactics on the big and the small scale: whether it’s a nation or an individual, get them into debt and then you own them.
You’re not free, You’re not human. You’re a performing monkey, a rat with no option but to stay in the race. You’re a slave, completely under their control, which was their goal right from the start.
But if you buy property at the right time, you can be a partial winner. House prices might shoot up, and you will have a valuable asset. But what of others who didn’t get on the property ladder at the right time? They might now be priced out of the market. Ownership of houses generates winners and losers. There’s no skill involved, just luck. Did you get your timing right or not? By chance, some do, and others don’t. That chance could shape your future. You might rise up the pecking order, or fall down. You might have an asset that your children will inherit and then they will have an advantage over less fortunate children who have nothing to inherit from their parents.
Why should home ownership dictate your wealth and status, your prospects in life, and even that of your children? It shouldn’t, but it does. It has nothing at all to do with merit.
One of the classic mantras of the Power Elite to maintain their rule is contained in the principle: divide and rule.
Look at how society is constructed. The basic unit is the family. Each family lives in its own small, square box (house), cut off from others. Each has one or more cars in which they can again cut themselves off from others. Each is determined to do the best for its own members, and to hell with everyone else.
A society based on the family is full of division, of narrow self-interest, of fear and distrust of others. Everywhere, there are barriers between people. No one is cooperating. We are in the most horrific zero-sum game where if one family wins another loses. Families rising up are invariably pushing other families down. Rich families send their children to private schools to ensure that they get a better education than those who can’t afford private school. Once you have gone to a private school, and then an elite college or university, you are eligible for the fine things in life: the best jobs, the best houses, the most attractive partners. You are part of a rigged system, a cartel which is designed to favour you and penalize those who don’t share your privileged background. In Britain, this is known as “the old school tie”. If you walk into a job interview and you have the right tie and the right accent, you will get the job. An equally or more meritorious candidate from a poorer background has no chance. This is how society works. This is the gospel of the family.
Anyone who does not come from a good, stable, prosperous family is in real trouble. They are likely to slip into the dreaded underclass where they will lead a life of grinding misery with little or no chance of improving themselves. They will resort to drugs and crime to get them through.
We have been divided into countless selfish, competing little units and we are being ruled by the elite, dynastic families at the top of the pyramid. We live in a disguised feudal system; the lords at the top and the serfs (us) effectively owned by them.
We are all cutting each other’s throats, desperately trying to climb the pyramid and drag down those above us and stand on those below us. No one is ever condemned for saying, “I’d do anything for my family” (this is the principle by which most parents operate), yet Christianity says “Love thy neighbour as thyself”; “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” No well-off family loves the underclass, no well-off family wants to be done to as they do unto the underclass. None of these families are Christians, even though they say they believe in Christ.
Capitalism is a cut-throat ideology, a robber’s creed. It’s all about how you can get one over your neighbours, how you can get more money, status and power than others. The “American Dream” is about a person or family rising from nowhere to the very top, above everyone else. It’s not about a whole nation rising.
Life is very simple in many respects. Would you rather have leaders who think that society is improved by raising up everyone, or by those who seek their own personal advantage at any cost, regardless of the impact on others. Do you think Wall Street operates in your interests or its own? And if it is not operating in the interests of all the people, why is it tolerated at all? “Greed is good,” said Gordon Gekko. Perhaps for the likes of him, but not for anyone else.
Why do we sign up for our own servitude? It doesn’t need to be like this.
A very simple moral test can be applied to every decision. Is it done to benefit you alone or to help you and everyone else? Wall Street’s morality is the former; Washington DC’s morality is the former; capitalism promotes the former; the family abides by the former.
The antidote to family is community. The antidote to capitalism is community. The antidote to narrow self-interest is community. The antidote to Wall Street and big business is community. “Christianity” is theoretically (but not in practice) about community. Illumination is about community.
And community is all about trying to create the environment for each and every person to achieve their maximum potential. An underclass would be unacceptable in a society based on community. Racism, sexism, discrimination, privilege would be unacceptable.
At the moment, a tiny elite live as gods while the vast majority of humanity live in grim conditions with only a few dollars a day to survive. Imagine a world where everyone is flourishing, achieving, contributing. What could humanity not achieve? This is the path of light, the way to the True God. What we have at the moment is rule by the Demiurge, based on division, conflict, self-interest, hatred, selfishness and greed. The institutions of the world serve his and their interests, not those of the people. His ideology has triumphed. The Power Elite, the Old World Order, are his Chosen Ones who have implemented his destructive, hateful will to the letter.
Do you think there is a single godly person in Wall Street? They are the high priests of the Demiurge, and their skyscraper offices are his synagogues. Their chosen task in life is to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense.
To this day there are people working for the defunct organisation Lehman Brothers. Their task is to unravel all of the deals that Lehman was involved with before it collapsed. These people, who took huge bonuses while their bank was crashing, caused by their disastrous decisions, are still being given huge bonuses because otherwise they would leave and it would be impossible to clean up their mess. In other words, they were paid a fortune while they were destroying their bank with their recklessness and stupidity, and now they are being paid a fortune to clean up their own disaster. They win no matter the circumstances. That’s the way the OWO operates.
A bank robber goes into a bank and steals a million dollars – that’s a crime. A chief executive officer goes into a bank, nearly bankrupts it through his incompetence, then takes out a hundred million dollars in salary, share options, benefits in kind and finally an enormous payoff when he finally gets fired. That’s business. It’s entirely legitimate. But think about it – who’s the bigger criminal? Who has done the most damage to the bank? If you are “authorized”, you can do anything you like. You have a licence to help yourself to as much money as you like. No one will stop you.
Who are the authorities? Who appoints them? Who monitors and regulates them? Who is allowed to remove them from office? Do the people ever have any say?
At Davos, a luxury ski resort in Switzerland, world leaders gather annually to discuss the economic future of the world. Politicians, bankers, industrialists, media moguls…the entire ruling class, the Old World Order, come together to decide how to carve up the world pie. You have no say in any of it. No one consults you. Your opinions are ignored. This is the way the world works. Why do you tolerate it? Why does anyone put up with this?
It was these people, those fat cats who go to Davos, who wrecked the world’s economy, who caused millions to lose their jobs and homes. What makes them think they are experts, that they are “good” for the world, that the world would fall apart without them? The reverse is true. If they vanished, it would be the best thing for the world. As the old joke says, what do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start. The same is true for all bankers, accountants, politicians, stock market traders, advertisers, celebrities.
We won’t be free until it’s no longer possible to point at someone and say, “There goes one of the Power Elite.” There should be no Power Elite, no one with vastly more money than others, no one with vastly more influence, no one who is treated as a king.
Posted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: banking cartel, banks, changers, controllers, credits, crisis bubble, derivatives, dow jones, economy, fraudulent, future, futures, global elite, money, monies, plutocracy, policies, sensex, shares, stocks, wall street | Leave a Comment »
The Battle of the Titans: JP Morgan Versus Goldman Sachs
Posted by Admin on February 8, 2010
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The Battle of the Titans: JP Morgan Versus Goldman Sachs
Or Why the Market Was Down for 7 Days in a Row
by Ellen Brown
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Global Research, January 29, 2010
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Web of Debt – 2010-01-28
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We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Geithner/Summers/Rubin). Left strewn on the battleground could be your pension fund and 401K.
The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.
In 2000, the Rockefellers and the Morgans joined forces, when JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan merged to become JPMorgan Chase Co. Today the battling banking titans are JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that gained notoriety for its speculative practices in the 1920s. In 1928, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end fund similar to a Ponzi scheme. The fund failed in the stock market crash of 1929, marring the firm’s reputation for years afterwards. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers all came from Goldman, and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rose through the ranks of government as a Summers/Rubin protégé. One commentator called the U.S. Treasury “Goldman Sachs South.”
Goldman’s superpower status comes from something more than just access to the money spigots of the banking system. It actually has the ability to manipulate markets. Formerly just an investment bank, in 2008 Goldman magically transformed into a bank holding company. That gave it access to the Federal Reserve’s lending window; but at the same time it remained an investment bank, aggressively speculating in the markets. The upshot was that it can now borrow massive amounts of money at virtually 0% interest, and it can use this money not only to speculate for its own account but to bend markets to its will.
But Goldman Sachs has been caught in this blatant market manipulation so often that the JPMorgan faction of the banking empire has finally had enough. The voters too have evidently had enough, as demonstrated in the recent upset in Massachusetts that threw the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s Democratic seat to a Republican. That pivotal loss gave Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama’s newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board, an opportunity to step up to the plate with some proposals for serious banking reform. Unlike the string of Treasury Secretaries who came to the government through the revolving door of Goldman Sachs, former Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker came up through Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was vice president before joining the Treasury. On January 27, market commentator Bob Chapmanwrote in his weekly investment newsletter The International Forecaster:
“A split has occurred between the paper forces of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Mr. Volcker represents Morgan interests. Both sides are Illuminists, but the Morgan side is tired of Goldman’s greed and arrogance. . . . Not that JP Morgan Chase was blameless, they did their looting and damage to the system as well, but not in the high handed arrogant way the others did. The recall of Volcker is an attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible. That means the influence of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, et al will be put on the back shelf at least for now, as will be the Goldman influence. It will be slowly and subtly phased out. . . . Washington needs a new face on Wall Street, not that of a criminal syndicate.”
Goldman’s crimes, says Chapman, were that it “got caught stealing. First in naked shorts, then front-running the market, both of which they are still doing, as the SEC looks the other way, and then selling MBS-CDOs to their best clients and simultaneously shorting them.”
Volcker’s proposal would rein in these abuses, either by ending the risky “proprietary trading” (trading for their own accounts) engaged in by the too-big-to-fail banks, or by forcing them to downsize by selling off those portions of their businesses engaging in it. Until recently, President Obama has declined to support Volcker’s plan, but on January 21 he finally endorsed it.
The immediate reaction of the market was to drop – and drop, day after day. At least, that appeared to be the reaction of “the market.” Financial analyst Max Keiser suggests a more sinister possibility. Goldman, which has the power to manipulate markets with its high-speed program trades, may be engaging in a Mexican standoff. The veiled threat is, “Back off on the banking reforms, or stand by and watch us continue to crash your markets.” The same manipulations were evident in the bank bailout forced on Congress by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in September 2008.
In Keiser’s January 23 broadcast with co-host Stacy Herbert, he explains how Goldman’s manipulations are done. Keiser is a fast talker, so this transcription is not verbatim, but it is close. He says:
“High frequency trading accounts for 70% of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Ordinarily, a buyer and a seller show up on the floor, and a specialist determines the price of a trade that would satisfy buyer and seller, and that’s the market price. If there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, the specialist lowers the price. High frequency trading as conducted by Goldman means that before the specialist buys and sells and makes that market, Goldman will electronically flood the specialist with thousands and thousands of trades to totally disrupt that process and essentially commandeer that process, for the benefit of siphoning off nickels and dimes for themselves. Not only are they siphoning cash from the New York Stock Exchange but they are also manipulating prices. What I see as a possibility is that next week, if the bankers on Wall Street decide they don’t want to be reformed in any way, they simply set the high frequency trading algorithm to sell, creating a huge negative bias for the direction of stocks. And they’ll basically crash the market, and it will be a standoff. The market was down three days in a row, which it hasn’t been since last summer. It’s a game of chicken, till Obama says, ‘Okay, maybe we need to rethink this.’”
But the President hasn’t knuckled under yet. In his State of the Union address on January 27, he did not dwell long on the issue of bank reform, but he held to his position. He said:
“We can’t allow financial institutions, including those that take your deposits, to take risks that threaten the whole economy. The House has already passed financial reform with many of these changes. And the lobbyists are already trying to kill it. Well, we cannot let them win this fight. And if the bill that ends up on my desk does not meet the test of real reform, I will send it back.”
What this “real reform” would look like was left to conjecture, but Bob Chapman fills in some blanks and suggests what might be needed for an effective overhaul:
“The attempt will be to bring the financial system back to brass tacks. . . . That would include little or no MBS and CDOs, the regulation of derivatives and hedge funds and the end of massive market manipulation, both by Treasury, Fed and Wall Street players. Congress has to end the ‘President’s Working Group on Financial Markets,’ or at least limit its use to real emergencies. . . . The Glass-Steagall Act should be reintroduced into the system and lobbying and campaign contributions should end. . . . No more politics in lending and banks should be limited to a lending ratio of 10 to 1. . . . It is bad enough they have the leverage that they have. State banks such as North Dakota’s are a better idea.”
On January 28, the predictable reaction of “the market” was to fall for the seventh straight day. The battle of the Titans was on.
Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com, www.ellenbrown.com, and www.public-banking.com.
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Ellen Brown is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Ellen Brown |
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Print this articlePosted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: banking cartel, banks, credits, crisis bubble, derivatives, domination, downturn, economy, farce, finance, financial crisis, frauds, geo politics, global elite, goldman sachs, jp morgan, manipulation, plutocracy, recession, truth, wall street | Leave a Comment »
Fake Gold Bars in Bank of England and Fort Knox
Posted by Admin on February 1, 2010
Fake Gold Bars in Bank of England and Fort Knox
[This story was brought to the surface late last year but this article is a great background to what happened and how it’s going to affect the future.]
- Gold plated Tungsten Bars!
Jan 11, 2010
It’s one thing to counterfeit a twenty or hundred dollar bill. The amount of financial damage is usually limited to a specific region and only affects dozens of people and thousands of dollars. Secret Service agents quickly notify the banks on how to recognize these phony bills and retail outlets usually have procedures in place (such as special pens to test the paper) to stop their proliferation.
But what about gold? This is the most sacred of all commodities because it is thought to be the most trusted, reliable and valuable means of saving wealth.
A recent discovery — in October of 2009 — has been suppressed by the main stream media but has been circulating among the “big money” brokers and financial kingpins and is just now being revealed to the public. It involves the gold in Fort Knox — the US Treasury gold — that is the equity of our national wealth. In short, millions (with an “m”) of gold bars are fake!
Who did this? Apparently our own government.
Background
In October of 2009 the Chinese received a shipment of gold bars. Gold is regularly exchanges between countries to pay debts and to settle the so-called balance of trade. Most gold is exchanged and stored in vaults under the supervision of a special organization based in London, the London Bullion Market Association (or LBMA). When the shipment was received, the Chinese government asked that special tests be performed to guarantee the purity and weight of the gold bars. In this test, four small holes are drilled into the gold bars and the metal is then analyzed.
Officials were shocked to learn that the bars were fake. They contained cores of tungsten with only a outer coating of real gold. What’s more, these gold bars, containing serial numbers for tracking, originated in the US and had been stored in Fort Knox for years. There were reportedly between 5,600 to 5,700 bars, weighing 400 oz. each, in the shipment!
At first many gold experts assumed the fake gold originated in China, the world’s best knock-off producers. The Chinese were quick to investigate and issued a statement that implicated the US in the scheme.
What the Chinese uncovered
Roughly 15 years ago — during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] — between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes]. Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day.
According to the Chinese investigation, the balance of this 1.3 million to 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten cache was also gold plated and then allegedly “sold” into the international market. Apparently, the global market is literally “stuffed full of 400 oz salted bars”. Perhaps as much as 600-billion dollars worth.
An obscure news item originally published in the N.Y. Post [written by Jennifer Anderson] in late Jan. 04 perhaps makes sense now.
DA investigating NYMEX executive ,Manhattan, New York, – Feb. 2, 2004.
A top executive at the New York Mercantile Exchange is being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney. Sources close to the exchange said that Stuart Smith, senior vice president of operations at the exchange, was served with a search warrant by the district attorney’s office last week. Details of the investigation have not been disclosed, but a NYMEX spokeswoman said it was unrelated to any of the exchange’s markets. She declined to comment further other than to say that charges had not been brought. A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office also declined comment.
The offices of the Senior Vice President of Operations — NYMEX — is exactly where you would go to find the records [serial number and smelter of origin] for EVERY GOLD BAR ever PHYSICALLY settled on the exchange. They are required to keep these records. These precise records would show the lineage of all the physical gold settled on the exchange and hence “prove” that the amount of gold in question could not have possibly come from the U.S. mining operations — because the amounts in question coming from U.S. smelters would undoubtedly be vastly bigger than domestic mine production.
No one knows whatever happened to Stuart Smith. After his offices were raided he took “administrative leave” from the NYMEX and he has never been heard from since. Amazingly, there never was any follow up on in the media on the original story as well as ZERO developments ever stemming from D.A. Morgenthau’s office who executed the search warrant.
Are we to believe that NYMEX offices were raided, the Sr. V.P. of operations then takes leave — all for nothing?
The revelations of fake gold bars also explains another highly unusual story that also happened in 2004:
LONDON, April 14, 2004 (Reuters) — NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd., the London-based unit of investment bank Rothschild [ROT.UL], will withdraw from trading commodities, including gold, in London as it reviews its operations, it said on Wednesday.
Interestingly, GATA’s Bill Murphy speculated about this back in 2004:
“Why is Rothschild leaving the gold business at this time my colleagues and I conjectured today? Just a guess on my part, but [I] suspect something is amiss. They know a big scandal is coming and they don’t want to be a part of it… [The] Rothschild wants out before the proverbial “S” hits the fan.” — BILL MURPHY, LEMETROPOLE, 4-18-2004
What is the GATA?
The Gold Antitrust Action Committee (GATA) is an organisation which has been nipping at the heels of the US Treasury Federal Reserve for several years now. The basis of GATA’s accusations is that these institutions, in coordination with other complicit central banks and the large gold-trading investment banks in the US, have been manipulating the price of gold for decades.
What is the GLD?
GLD is a short form for Good London Delivery. The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) has defined “good delivery” as a delivery from an entity which is listed on their delivery list or meets the standards for said list and whose bars have passed testing requirements established by the associatin and updated from time to time. The bars have to be pure for AU in an area of 995.0 to 999.9 per 1000. Weight, Shape, Appearance, Marks and Weight Stamps are regulated as follows:
Weight: minimum 350 fine ounces AU; maximum 430 fine ounces AU, gross weight of a bar is expressed in troy ounces, in multiples of 0.025, rounded down to the nearest 0.025 of an troy ounce.
Dimensions: the recommended dimensions for a Good Delivery gold bar are: Top Surface: 255 x 81 mm; Bottom Surface: 236 x 57 mm; Thickness: 37 mm.
Fineness: the minimum 995.0 parts per thousand fine gold. Marks: Serial number; Assay stamp of refiner; Fineness (to four significant figures); Year of manufacture (expressed in four digits).
After reviewing their prospectus yet again, it becomes pretty clear that GLD was established to purposefully deflect investment dollars away from legitimate gold pursuits and to create a stealth, cesspool / catch-all, slush-fund and a likely destination for many of these fake tungsten bars where they would never see the light of day — hidden behind the following legalese “shield” from the law:
[Excerpt from the GLD prospectus on page 11]
“Gold bars allocated to the Trust in connection with the creation of a Basket may not meet the London Good Delivery Standards and, if a Basket is issued against such gold, the Trust may suffer a loss. Neither the Trustee nor the Custodian independently confirms the fineness of the gold bars allocated to the Trust in connection with the creation of a Basket. The gold bars allocated to the Trust by the Custodian may be different from the reported fineness or weight required by the LBMA’s standards for gold bars delivered in settlement of a gold trade, or the London Good Delivery Standards, the standards required by the Trust. If the Trustee nevertheless issues a Basket against such gold, and if the Custodian fails to satisfy its obligation to credit the Trust the amount of any deficiency, the Trust may suffer a loss.”
The Federal Reserve knows but is apparently part of the scheme. Earlier this year GATA filed a second Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Reserve System for documents from 1990 to date having to do with gold swaps, gold swapped, or proposed gold swaps.
On Aug. 5, The Federal Reserve responded to this FOIA request by adding two more documents to those disclosed to GATA in April 2008 from the earlier FOIA request. These documents totaled 173 pages, many parts of which were redacted (blacked out). The Fed’s response also noted thatthere were 137 pages of documents not disclosed that were alleged to be exempt from disclosure.
GATA appealed this determination on Aug. 20. The appeal asked for more information to substantiate the legitimacy of the claimed exemptions from disclosure and an explanation on why some documents, such as one posted on the Federal Reserve Web site that discusses gold swaps, were not included in the Aug. 5 document release.
In a Sept. 17, 2009, letter on Federal Reserve System letterhead, Federal Reserve governor Kevin M. Warsh completely denied GATA’s appeal. The entire text of this letter can be examined athttp://www.gata.org/files/GATAFedResponse-09-17-2009.pdf.
The first paragraph on the third page is the most revealing. “In connection with your appeal, I have confirmed that the information withheld under exemption 4 consists of confidential commercial or financial information relating to the operations of the Federal Reserve Banks that was obtained within the meaning of exemption 4. This includes information relating to swap arrangements with foreign banks on behalf of the Federal Reserve System and is not the type of information that is customarily disclosed to the public. This information was properly withheld from you.”
The above statement is an admission that the Federal Reserve has been involved with the fake gold bar swaps and that it refuses to disclose any information about its activities!
Why use tungsten?
If you are going to print fake money you need to have the special paper, otherwise the bills don’t feel right and can be easily detected by special pens that most merchants and banks use. Likewise, if you are going to fake gold bars you had better be sure they have the same weight and properties of real gold.
In early 2008 millions of dollars in gold at the central bank of Ethiopia turned out to be fake.What were supposed to be bars of solid gold turned out to be nothing more than gold-plated steel. They tried to sell the stuff to South Africa and it was sent back when the South Africans noticed this little problem. The problem with making good-quality fake gold is that gold is remarkably dense. It’s almost twice the density of lead, and two-and-a-half times more dense than steel. You don’t usually notice this because small gold rings and the like don’t weigh enough to make it obvious, but if you’ve ever held a larger bar of gold, it’s absolutely unmistakable: The stuff is very, very heavy.
The standard gold bar for bank-to-bank trade, known as a “London good delivery bar” weighs 400 troy ounces (over thirty-three pounds), yet is no bigger than a paperback novel. A bar of steel the same size would weigh only thirteen and a half pounds.
According to gold expert, Theo Gray, the problem is that there are very few metals that are as dense as gold, and with only two exceptions they all cost as much or more than gold.
The first exception is depleted uranium, which is cheap if you’re a government, but hard for individuals to get. It’s also radioactive, which could be a bit of an issue.
The second exception is a real winner: tungsten. Tungsten is vastly cheaper than gold (maybe $30 dollars a pound compared to $12,000 a pound for gold right now). And remarkably, it has exactly the same density as gold, to three decimal places. The main differences are that it’s the wrong color, and that it’s much, much harder than gold. (Very pure gold is quite soft, you can dent it with a fingernail.)
A top-of-the-line fake gold bar should match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly. To do this, you could could start with a tungsten slug about 1/8-inch smaller in each dimension than the gold bar you want, then cast a 1/16-inch layer of real pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right in the hand, it would have a dead ring when knocked as gold should, it would test right chemically, it would weigh *exactly* the right amount, and though I don’t know this for sure, I think it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1/16″ layer of pure gold being enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You’d pretty much have to drill it to find out it’s fake.
Such a top-quality fake London good delivery bar would cost about $50,000 to produce because it’s got a lot of real gold in it, but you’d still make a nice profit considering that a real one is worth closer to $400,000.
What’s going to happen now?
Politicians like Ron Paul have been demanding that the Federal Reserve be more transparent and open up their records for public scrutiny. But the Fed has consistently refused, stating that these disclosures would undermine its operation.
Yes, it certainly would!
Posted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: banks, bullion, crisis bubble, economy, exchanges, finance, frauds, geo politics, gold, policies, truth | Leave a Comment »
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