Posts Tagged ‘finance’
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 »
In a financial crisis, what counts is what works
Posted by Admin on June 1, 2010
Free-market capitalism has imploded, and Europe’s moment has not come: big-picture explanations of the world rarely hold good for long
Grievous, but perhaps not grievous enough. Sufficient to prompt swift action to prevent the global economy sliding into depression, but perhaps so successful that the option of a return to business as usual has been kept alive.
Almost three years into the financial crisis , all regions are growing, albeit at varying speeds. There is pressure on heavily indebted governments to abandon unorthodox economic policies and return to rigid fiscal austerity. Banks, hedge funds and private equity firms are lobbying hard to water down attempts to rein in their activities.
Adrian Blundell-Wignall, an official at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, spoke for many last week when he said: “How big is big enough?”
Speaking in a personal capacity at the OECD’s annual ministerial forum, Blundell-Wignall warned there was likely to be a second, even bigger, meltdown unless there was radical reform of the financial sector, including splitting up banks with both retail and speculative arms.
Although this is a sombre conclusion, it may prove accurate. The current crisis has yet to have the cathartic impact of the slump of the 1930s, when the economic cost was far higher and the links between the failure of the old laissez-faire model and the drift to political extremism were plain.
Nouriel Roubini, one of the few economists to spot the sub-prime crisis coming , says in his new book, Crisis Economics (with Stephen Mihm, published by Allen Lane), that it is precisely because the downturn has been handled more deftly this time that the impetus for deep, structural reform has faltered. “Had policymakers failed to arrest the crisis, as they failed during the Depression, the calls for reform today would be deafening: there’s nothing like ubiquitous breadlines and 25% unemployment to focus the minds of legislators.”
But, thankfully, policymakers did avoid most of the mistakes of the 1930s and we are where we are. In the circumstances, what the future holds is either full-blown recovery courtesy of the breathing space provided by central banks and finance ministries; another crash preceded by what the late socialist thinker Chris Harman described as “zombie capitalism”; or reform and renewal.
Full recovery would mean that the global economy could continue to prosper even when governments withdraw the support provided by low interest rates, tax cuts and higher public spending. That looks improbable, particularly since there is likely to be a simultaneous tightening of fiscal policy in many countries.
Zombie capitalism is where governments continue to buy up worthless paper from banks, where fundamentally insolvent institutions are kept alive for fear that their failure would cause systemic risk, where every country tries to export its way out of trouble, where the shrinkage of the financial sector depresses growth rates, and where the global imbalances between surplus and deficit countries remain worryingly large. That looks a more likely option.
What, then, are the prospects for reform and renewal? At the very least, this route is likely to be long, hard and strewn with setbacks. It may not be chosen, as Blundell-Wignall and Roubini fear, until there is system failure. The good news, though, is that the ideological vacuum left by the crisis creates the intellectual and political space for change. Since the demise of communism at the end of the 1980s, the west has had three competing belief systems. The first, free-market capitalism, imploded three years ago. The second, Europe, has taken a fearful battering over the past few months. A third, environmentalism, still has only a limited number of devotees.
Simon Tormey, professor of social and political sciences at Sydney University, put it well during a debate on the future of capitalism at the OECD. This, he said, is a pagan world where there is a scepticism about meta-narratives.
Rightly so. History shows that big-picture explanations of the world rarely hold good for long, and end with a fanatical core of true believers seeking to impose their will on the rest of us. If, as Jimmy Porter says in Look Back in Anger, there are no great causes left to fight for, that’s almost certainly a good thing. The demise of the meta-narrative doesn’t mean the end of politics or the abandonment of the search for making life better. On the contrary, it means a messier world in which there is less dogma but greater experimentation.
Let’s put this into some sort of context. Up until 2007, the credo was that markets worked, period. The world would be a better place if the role of government was diminished and financial markets allowed to get on with making money. If there was a role for the state, it was to champion structural reform of economic life: removing barriers to trade and, by investment in human capital, making their workforces more employable.
What actually happened was that endless financial innovation destabilised the global economy, while the benefits of growth accrued to a small cadre at the top and not to the rest of the newly flexible labour market. There was growth, but only because policymakers actively connived in the creation of bubbles. Indebtedness masqueraded as wealth.
The shorthand term for this model was Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and when it blew up it was thought that Europe’s moment had come. The European Union offered a kinder, more civilised way of running the economy in the 21st century, providing solidarity instead of cut-throat competition, protection for its citizens rather than low wages and welfare cuts.
Bonkers beliefs
Belief in Europe was just as messianic – and just as bonkers – as belief in the market. The idea was that you could take a dozen or more countries of wildly differing economic performance, with entirely disparate cultures, and bolt them harmoniously together. What’s more, you could do this without a common language to facilitate labour mobility or a common budget to transfer resources from rich countries to poor countries.
During the bubble years these fundamental design flaws were kept hidden, but they have been exposed by the crisis. Low interest rates allowed countries on the periphery to grow strongly for a while, covering up their steady loss of competitiveness against the country at Europe’s core, Germany. The financial crash resulted in a deep recession, soaring budget deficits and fears in the financial markets of debt default.
For all the talk of European solidarity, there is absolutely no evidence that German taxpayers will agree to a common fiscal policy to provide the budgetary support for the weaker parts of the euro area that Washington provides for the poorer US states. As such, the only options for countries like Greece , Ireland and Spain are devaluation (ruled out by monetary union), default (ditto) or years of deflation. They have opted for the third course, even though this will lead to slower growth and make it even harder to reduce budget deficits. Europe, touted as a progressive alternative to Anglo-Saxon economics, has become neo-liberalism on steroids.
Ultimately, the problem with the meta-narratives is that they don’t deliver. The postwar era of strong trade unions, full employment policies and capital controls produced stronger, more equitable growth than three decades of deregulation, liberalisation and flexible labour markets. The more integrated Europe has become, the worse it has performed.
China and India prove that it is possible to thrive without a meta-narrative. Both countries have systems of managed capitalism fully in the tradition of the mixed economies that prevailed in the west during the heyday of social democracy. What counts is what works. There is a lesson in that somewhere.
Economics Financial crisis European debt crisis Economic policy Banking Recession Greece Spain Ireland Europe European Union Germany Larry Elliott
Posted in Press Releases | Tagged: capitalism, crisis, economy, finance, pluotocracy | Leave a Comment »
Markets could be derailed again, warns Soros
Posted by Admin on April 24, 2010
Markets could be derailed again, warns Soros
APR 14, 2010 07:11 EDT
Railway porter-turned-billionaire financier George Soros delivered a stark warning last night that the financial world is on the wrong track and that we may be hurtling towards an even bigger boom and bust than in the credit crisis.
The man who ‘broke’ the Bank of England (and who is still able to earn a cool $3.3 bln in a year) said the same strategy of borrowing and spending that had got us out of the Asian crisis could shunt us towards another crisis unless tough lessons are learned.
Soros, who worked as a porter to pay for his studies at the London School of Economics after emigrating from Hungary, warned us to heed the lesson that modern economics had got it wrong and that markets are not inherently stable.
“The success in bailing out the system on the previous occasion led to a superbubble, except that in 2008 we used the same methods,” he told a meeting hosted by The Economist at the City of London’s modern and impressive Haberdashers’ Hall.
“Unless we learn the lessons, that markets are inherently unstable and that stability needs to the objective of public policy, we are facing a yet larger bubble.
“We have added to the leverage by replacing private credit with sovereign credit and increasing national debt by a significant amount.”
One crumb of comfort could be the 10-year period between the 1998 Asian crisis and the 2008 credit crisis. If the pattern is repeated, it should at least mean we have another 8 years to go before the next crash…
Posted in Press Releases | Tagged: credit bubble, crisis, economic crash, economy, finance, george soros, global elite, markets, reuters | Leave a Comment »
Despite US Pressure, Beijing Stands Firm in Currency Spat
Posted by Admin on March 29, 2010
Despite US Pressure, Beijing Stands Firm in Currency Spat
Friday 26 March 2010
by: Kit Gillet | Inter Press Service
Beijing – China may be under international pressure, especially from the United States, over the valuation of its currency, but is unlikely to back down in the short term given its worries about its export sector and the jobs that depend on it.
Thus far, the lines have been drawn in the disagreement between China and the United States over the yuan – and neither side seems willing to back down.
China pegged its currency at approximately 6.8 to the dollar in July 2008, mainly to aid the country’s export industry that was badly hit by decreasing global demand and the financial crisis.
On Mar. 15, 130 members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter urging the White House to label China a currency manipulator in its Apr. 10 treasury report, which would be the first step in imposing trade tariffs on Chinese export goods.
The letter stated, “The impact of China’s currency manipulation on the U.S. economy cannot be overstated.” It went on to suggest that the current exchange rate gave an unfair subsidy to Chinese companies at the direct expense of their U.S. counterparts.
China’s Commerce Minister Chen Deming has said the country would “not turn a blind eye” if it was labelled a manipulator, and that it might, in that eventuality, seek to litigate under the global legal framework.
Both countries’ leaders have also weighed in on the issue.
Yet China is unlikely to allow a rapid appreciation of the yuan, which some suggest is undervalued by as much as 40 percent.
“China believes that that a modest revaluation of its currency would have a scant effect on U.S. trade deficits, and that once it made an adjustment, it would be pressed again and again to do more,” wrote Jeff Garten, Juan Trippe professor of international trade and finance at the Yale School of Management, in a recent note.
As the world’s largest exporter, China’s growth depends substantially on its export sector. Any strong revaluation could hurt this industry, which accounted for roughly 27 per cent of Gross Domestic Product in 2009.
“It is in nobody’s interest – China’s, the United States’ or other countries’ – to see big ups in the renminbi (yuan) or big downs in the dollar,” Vice Commerce Minister Zhong Shan told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Wednesday.
“There is no need for us to discuss if it (the yuan) should be appreciated. What we should be concerned about is when and how it is,” Wu Xiaoqiu, assistant president of Renmin University and director of China’s Finance and Securities Institute, said in an interview with IPS. “The government needs to consider the competitiveness of companies in labour-intensive sectors,” he said.
The leading business publication ‘The 21st Century Business Herald’ reports that several government ministries, including the ministries of commerce and information, have been conducting pressure tests to gauge the impact of appreciation in key labour-intensive sectors, but none of their findings have yet been made public.
“Most export companies would rather have the yuan appreciate in one go rather than face the uncertainty of guessing the timing and the degree of gradual appreciation,” said Zhang Bin, a researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
But Zhang expressed concern that some exporters might report fake figures in order to protect their own interests.
China’s export industry suffered in the wake of the economic crisis, and while numbers picked up near the end of last year, Chinese officials are now suggesting that March 2010 could be the first month since 2004 that the value of the country’s imports exceeded that of its exports.
Cheaper competition from developing nations such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, along with a 2008 labour law that increases wages across China, has already hurt the Chinese export industry. Talk of a revaluation is seen by some as a hurdle too far.
“In the words of some of our members, the United States is ‘sharpening its knives and has a murderous air about it,’” said Zhang Yujing, president of the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic goods, at a press conference last week. “I expect many companies won’t be able to bear an appreciation now.”
Zhou Dewen, vice president of the China Middle and Small Enterprises Association, told the ‘Oriental Morning Post’ that the Chinese government should withstand pressure from abroad for at least two or three years.
“If the government fails, a large amount of middle and small Chinese enterprises, which have suffered from the ongoing financial crisis, will be closed and the workers will lose their jobs,” he said in an interview published in the ‘Post’ this week.
Not all share Zhou’s pessimistic view.
“An appreciation will hurt exports. But if appreciation is gradual and modest (we are talking about five to six percent here), I think the impact should be relatively small,” Wang Tao, head of China Economic Research for Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) Investment Bank here, told IPS.
Wang suggested that yuan appreciation, along with more flexibility, can help promote domestic consumption in China, and divert investment from export-oriented industries.
Chinese exporters are estimated to make a return of three to five percent on sales. Any substantial appreciation of the yuan could see the closure of many factories and would add to China’s unemployment rate, which a recent China Academy of Social Sciences report put at 9.4 percent.
It would also force the raising of export prices, which would in turn affect U.S. consumers, by far the largest buyer of China-made products.
Decades of free spending by U.S. consumers has left the U.S.-China trade deficit standing at roughly 227 billion dollars, down from a high of 268 billion dollars in 2008.
Chinese state media and many of its politicians have suggested that the U.S. government is merely looking for someone else to blame for its current woes. “They should not blame the problems they have by finding a scapegoat in China,” China’s new ambassador to the United Nations, He Yafei, told a briefing in Geneva earlier this month.
Visit IPS news for fresh perspectives on development and globalization.
All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.
Posted in Truthout Articles | Tagged: china, currencies, diplomacy, economics, finance, pressure, regulations, usa | Leave a Comment »
Debt Dynamite Dominoes: The Coming Financial Catastrophe
Posted by Admin on March 4, 2010
Posted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: credits, crisis bubble, debt, economy, finance, financial crisis, global research, truth | Leave a Comment »
Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire
Posted by Admin on February 18, 2010
Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire
The Yekaterinburg Turning Point
By Prof. Michael Hudson
June 13, 2009
The city of Yakaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the death place of the tsars but of American hegemony too – and not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground.
Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO.
Yet the meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda is to replace the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry,1 suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) built on the Clinton administration’s legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.
What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multipolar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: credits, crisis bubble, currencies, dollar, economy, empire, finance, geo politics, independent, journalism, trouble, truth | Leave a Comment »
Are Major Countries Preparing to Financially Dismantle the United States and its Empire?
Posted by Admin on February 18, 2010
Are Major Countries Preparing to Financially Dismantle the United States and its Empire?
By Richard Clark (about the author)
For OpEdNews: Richard Clark – Writer
Here are the main points of an important answer to that question by economist and former Wall Street honcho, Michael Hudson:
The six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It was joined recently by Brazil, for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), all of which seek a multi-polar world.
If it’s not a move to make US hegemony obsolete, then what’s the purpose of this new organization? US diplomats may well wonder. After all, this is exactly what a multi-polar world means: no hegemony by any one country. Another clue as to what’s about to happen: in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia.
It seems that the US has inadvertently driven Russia, China and their neighbors to find common ground by developing an alternative to the dollar as a dominant or reserve currency, and hence an end to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.
Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to “build an increasingly multi-polar world order.” What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate — in exchange for paper money of questionable long-term worth!
“The artificially maintained unipolar system,” Mr. Medvedev says, is based on “one big center of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.” At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is simply that the United States manufactures too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting to Russia is U.S. military spending, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and, to all the other BRIC and SCO members as well, the huge US military and commercial buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.
The main worry of all these countries is America’s ability to print unlimited amounts of dollars. Overspending by US consumers on imports (way in excess of US exports), US buy-outs of foreign companies and real estate, and the many billions of dollars that the Pentagon spends abroad . . all end up in foreign central banks. These central banks then face a hard choice: either recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the “free market” force up their currency relative to the dollar thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency.
So, when China and other countries recycle their dollar inflows by buying US Treasury bills to “invest” in the United States, this buildup is not really voluntary. It does not reflect faith in the U.S. economy enriching foreign central banks for their savings, or any calculated investment preference, but simply a lack of alternatives. “Free markets,” US-style, has maneuvered many countries into a system that forces them to accept dollars without limit. But now they want out.
Central banks now hold $4 trillion of U.S. bonds in their international reserves and these huge loans to the U.S. have financed most of the US Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades! Consider that about half of US Government discretionary spending is for military operations including the operation of more than 750 foreign military bases as well as increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and oil-transporting countries.
The international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with US buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold. Therefore, the main political issue confronting the world’s central banks is this: How to avoid adding yet more dollars to their reserves and thereby financing ever more US deficit spending including military spending on their borders.
Posted in Economic Upheavals | Tagged: credits, crisis bubble, currencies, economy, finance, geo politics, global elite, journalism, trouble, 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 »
The Battle of the Titans: JP Morgan Versus Goldman Sachs
Posted by Admin on February 8, 2010
|
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
|
|||||
 |
|||||
|
Global Research, January 29, 2010
|
|||||
|
Web of Debt – 2010-01-28
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
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.
|
|||||
|
Ellen Brown is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Ellen Brown |
|||||
Email this article to a friend
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 »
Revolutionising Awareness 