“you cannot touch, feel, squeeze anything they make..”
Goldman is a financial services company.. they are ONLY parasitical to the “real economy”. and yet they are the primary recipient of US Govt bailout money thru the (privately owned) Fed and AIG...
I cannot make the Oligarchy case any more clear than this… the rich get paid first when they produce nothing. they are HARMFUL to the real economy because they feed off of it, to the point of collapse… i don’t think i need to do any proving in this regard, anyone can see it from either Oil Speculation pushing the price of gas up to $4 a gallon or the “Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis”. these are caused by Wall Street… “free market” is a code word tyranny of the rich.
there is only political economy. big gov’t has the job of raising the standard of our poor and putting a leash on the rich…
US government securities seized from Japanese nationals, not clear whether real or fake
Bonds worth US$ 134.5 billion are seized. This is the largest financial smuggling case in history. But are they real? Concern over ‘funny money’ or counterfeit securities is spreading in Asia. The international press is silent.
Milan (AsiaNews) – Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland. They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each. Italian authorities have not yet determined whether they are real or fake, but if they are real the attempt to take them into Switzerland would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history; if they are fake, the matter would be even more mind-boggling because the quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are undistinguishable from the real ones.
What caught the policemen’s attention were the billion dollar securities. Such a large denomination is not available in regular financial and banking markets. Only states handle such amounts of money.
The question now is who could or would counterfeit or smuggle these non-negotiable bonds.
In order to stop money laundering Italian law sets a ceiling of 10,000 euros per person for importing or exporting money without declaring it. The penalty for violating the law is 40 per cent of the money seized.
If the certificates were real, for Italy it would be like hitting the jackpot. The fine alone would amount to US$ 38 billion, five times the estimated cost of rebuilding quake-devastated Abruzzi region. It would help Italy’s eliminate its public deficit.
If the certificates are fakes the two Japanese nationals could get a very lengthy jail sentence for fraud.
As soon as the seizure was made the US Embassy in Rome was informed. Italian and US secret services were called in to assist the Italian financial police.
Some important international financial newspapers had already reported on the existence of ‘funny money’ circulating on parallel, i.e. unofficial, financial markets.
For AsiaNews a few points need considering:
1. When it comes to Italy the world press has tended to focus on Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s personal problems rather than on stories like the bonds smuggling affair which has been front page on Italian newspapers.
2. The fear of counterfeit bonds and securities has spread across Asia with the result that real securities are also considered with suspicion.
3. During the Second World War several countries at war printed and put in circulation perfectly counterfeit enemy money. It is also historically established that some central banks, like the Bank of Italy 65 years ago, issued the same securities twice (identical registered number and code). This way they could print more money with legal tender than they officially declared. The main difference though is that 65 years ago the world was involved in a bloody war, which is not the case today.
I would say that we ARE involved in a bloody war, but that the new warfare is financial… the subprime mortgage collapse is another form of economic warfare.
I usually catch some of MSNBC’s Morning Joe a few times a week and I’ll check out the opening and closing shows on CNBC from time to time so I’m used to seeing Dylan Ratigan around. I considered him to be one of the smarter talking heads on the business news programs. Lately, I noticed him missing so i did a little digging…
Ratigan left (CNBC) on March 27, 2009.The New York Times reported he was considering all options but quoted him as saying he was dedicated to covering the economy, “the story that is affecting every American in every setting.”
Apparently, he’s waking up to the oligarchical nature of the US. But wait, it gets better…
In Ratigan’s final CNBC broadcast from the floor of the NYSE he reported on what he called “an important story developing” that Goldman Sachs and “a variety of European banks”, in his assessment and that of his guests, essentially “perpetrated securities fraud” and an “insurance fraud scam” against AIG—and, by extension, the government and taxpayers funding that insurance company’s “bailout”—by insuring their questionable investment vehicles and, upon their devaluation, making claims on them to be paid by AIG “at 100 cents on the dollar” despite all of the markdowns “being forced upon every other” entity including the government, banks, shareholders, bond holders, taxpayers and homeowners.
“I think that it should be a bigger political issue than whether somebody bought an airplane… Forget the private jets, forget who got a million dollar bonus. Fifty billion dollars“, he emphasized, minimizing what he saw as populist side issues to “the real question” of how “government policy makers” are to deal with the “problems of contract law” inherent in the agreements of businesses receiving government assistance during the financial crisis.
“The banks are being asked to take ‘haircuts’ on their toxic assets, why are the Goldmans and the Deutsche Banks of the world not being asked to take haircuts on their toxic credit default swaps? It’s a real question. I will continue to pursue it for sure, I hope others will as well.” Ratigan praised New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s subpoena of AIG to determine the bank payouts as “legitimate inquiry” and looked forward to “a body of lawmakers in Washington D.C. who are going to ask, it appears, some of the same questions that I’m asking.”
very interesting indeed…
more interesting still are the stories from fox & the new york post about why ratigan left CNBC…
fox does give us this little gem from Ratigan,”The value system of capitalism has been corrupted by a small group of bankers, insurance executives and politicians.”
what exactly is “strategic programming” for CNBC? George Orwell would LOVE that term…
these are interesting because the don’t even mention the AIG money story at all…. in other words, they have something to hide… namely: the biggest robbery in history perpetuated by Wall Street… specifically: Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs, of course, the primary beneficiary of the Wall St orchestrated Crude Oil Speculation Bubble… remember Bart Stupak? and the AIG money… hmmm… gee, it’s starting to look like “Government Sachs” is living up to it’s nickname.
“United States Secretary of the Treasury, serving under President Barack Obama. He was previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner’s position includes a large role in directing the nation’s economic response to the financial crisis which began after December 2007. Specific tasks include directing how $350 billion of Wall Street bailout money is allocated. He is currently dealing with multiple high visibility issues, including the survival of the automobile industry, the restructuring of banks, financial institutions and insurance companies, recovery of the mortgage market, demands for protectionism, Obama’s new tax proposals, and relations with foreign governments that are dealing with similar crises.”
He then attended Dartmouth College, graduating with a B.A. in government and Asian studies in 1983. He earned an M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 1985. He has studied Chinese and Japanese.
His father, Peter F. Geithner, is the director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation in New York. During the early 1980s, Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by S. Ann Dunham-Soetoro, President Barack Obama’s mother, and they met in person at least once.
Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and served as a vice president of Ford Motor Company.
He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Summers was his mentor, but other sources call him a Rubin protégé.
In 2002 he left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department. He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department (2001-2003) at the International Monetary Fund.
In October 2003 at age 42, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His salary in 2007 was $398,200. Once at the New York Fed, he became Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee component. In 2006, he also became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.
In March 2008, he arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns; in the same year, he played a pivotal role in both the decision to bail out AIG as well as the government decision not to save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy, though claims were made after Geithner’s nomination that distanced him from both AIG and Lehman Brothers. As a Treasury official, he helped manage multiple international crises of the 1990s in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand.
Geithner believes, along with Henry Paulson, that the United States Department of the Treasury needs new authority to experiment with responses to the financial crisis of 2008.
Paulson has described Geithner as “[a] very unusually talented young man…[who] understands government and understands markets.”
Hank Paulson? Jim Cramer? Ben Bernanke? Larry Summers?
Instead of giving the money to bankers to bailout toxic paper, China is following in the footsteps of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It will be interesting to see which plan actually works, the US or China’s.
The 4 trillion yuan plan ($849 billion), equivalent to about 20% of China’s GDP, is the biggest injection of cash by a government in history.
The Chinese package is expected to focus overwhelmingly on construction. A statement by China’s State Council said the money would be spent on 10 projects including low-income housing, rural infrastructure, water, electricity, transportation, the environment, technological innovation and rebuilding from disasters.
It is also interesting that China expects its own population to pick up the slack in business lost to Chinese factories because Americans are spending less.
The measures are just shy of the $700bn (£442bn) bail-out promised by the United States, but are wider and more comprehensive than the American plan.
The Chinese government said it would “massively” crank up its spending on roads, railways, healthcare, education, power grids and low-cost housing. It also abolished the tight limits on lending that applied to banks, in a move that will open up credit to tens of millions of riskier borrowers.
The State Council said it would boost the economy partly through hiring millions of workers to build a slew of new projects and partly by encouraging Chinese, who are traditionally inclined to save their money, to spend more.
The government hopes that Chinese households will replace American families as the main customers for China’s slew of low-cost factories. Currently, almost 40pc of China’s economy is tied to exports.
Timothy Bond, chief Asian economist at Merrill Lynch, compared the package to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which shored up the American economy after the Wall Street crash of 1929. “The past two weeks have emphasised a simple point,” he said. “Policy works. In China’s case we expect this positive policy to prevent a sharp slowdown.”
He added: “Financing is not an issue. Public debt is only 21pc of gross domestic product.” In the UK, the official statistics show public debt is 43.4pc of GDP, while the ratio is nearly 61pc in the US.
I’m surprised more people haven’t seen this Dennis Kucinich clip yet. It deserves more attention. He basically is calling or all the things we want, as people of good will. The original source is Russia Today. It goes without saying that this interview was ignored by the US media.
highlights:
War in Afghanistan, Iraq, & threats against Iran totally unnecessary
We need to go back to Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and build infrastructure to fix the economy
We need a new energy infrastructure – wind, solar, etc
We need to cooperate with Russia to disarm & develop the world
The Polish & Czech missiles are wrong & should be removed immediately
Georgia was clearly the aggressor in the South Ossetia/Abkhazia conflict
We have to stop Brzezinski and the policy of empire
Paulson’s bailout is a failure
I’ve included a transcript of Kucinich’s answers with some commentary and links to background info. (more…)
Of course, Gloria Barger is a mouthpiece for Wall Street. We have no illusion about her loyalties to the lampreys, leeches, and asset strippers. But she makes some interesting statements nonetheless.
The incoming administration is also sending clear signals that it could delay its promise to repeal President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. All of which are good signs.
What we’re seeing — even before Obama is sworn in — is a changing of the guard, so the new folks are ready to take charge on Day One.
A tax cut for the wealthy is precisely what we DON’T need right now. Obviously this is bad news.
It’s very clear, from Monday’s moves, that Obama intends to act quickly. There’s no need to dethrone George W. Bush; he’s essentially already irrelevant in this process.
Obama’s plan is pretty clear: Push a stimulus package through Congress ASAP, and have it ready for the new president to sign on January 20. Obama has made its components pretty clear; a large jobs and public works program, money for green technology and, of course, those middle-class tax cuts.
Citigroup, went – the price went – down to a very unreasonable price lately. It still was on very solid grounds..
On very solid grounds?? Is he insane?! Of course, this is why they got a $300 billion bailout today. It’s clearly a reward for their long history of stability.. this is a farce of epic proportions.
Citigroup is a credit card company which got into trouble with derivatives speculation and is now feeling the wrath of negative leverage. This is a corporation who could borrow and the Fed’s prime lending rate and charge working people 19-36% on credit cards. This is a can’t lose business as long as you don’t get greedy and get wrapped up in too much leverage… They got greedy. They lost. Plain and simple. We should not be bailing out bad gamblers.
But wait, there’s more. Al-Waleed also talks about Oil speculation:
..no doubt the the price of oil will go up. But I hope this time it will go up in a very steady manner without the speculative element that makes it go to the triple digits in a manner of months. So we in Saudi Arabia we’re against having these big jumps because our interest, as a producer in Saudi Arabia, very much coincides with the interests of the OECD countries and the west and especially the United States.
“The center is the premier progressive think tank in Washington,” said Mark Green, head of the New Democracy Project, an urban-affairs institute in New York.
Just eight days after the Nov. 4 election, CAP released a 300,000-word volume called “Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President” that offers advice on issues such as economic revival and fixing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Work on the book began almost a year ago.
CAP, which has 180 staffers and a $27 million budget, devotes as much as half of its resources to promoting its ideas through blogs, events, publications and media outreach.
The center’s future was far from certain in 2003, when wealthy donors such as Soros and film producer Stephen Bing gave $10 million or more to fill what they believed was an intellectual void in the Democratic Party and create a vehicle to produce an agenda for the party’s eventual return to power.
There’s a lot more in the original article that I didnt cover and it’s worth checking out. The general point is that Obama is a puppet of finance capital including Soros, the puppet-master of the Ukraine Orange Revolution.
I like how he differentiates between financial markets and the “real economy”.. priceless!
And once again was the fact of being concrete and the efficacy of the actions we agree upon which is helping us to solve one of the most recent crises which have affected our countries, that of the financial crisis, which we must absolutely prevent from being a crisis affecting real economy, as well. (more…)
The plot thickens.. this is the third world leader calling for a new Bretton Woods.
LONDON, October 13 (RIA Novosti) – Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday world leaders should set up a new Bretton Woods system to tackle the global financial crisis. (more…)
Remember when Volcker was head of the FED and we had a 22% Prime Lending Rate? He’s telling is now we have TRILLIONS – not millions, not billions – in credit default swaps
Paul Volcker, FED Chairman (1979-87) when Jimmy Carter was in power:
“Active efforts are underway to develop stronger netting, clearing and settlement arrangements for certain derivatives, in particular the notional trillions of credit default swaps, (more…)
Very interesting.. I wonder if anything will come out of this. The Bretton Woods system existed before currency speculation in a time when exchange rates were determined by treaty. We’d do well to eliminate risk and return to this.
I hope its true.
Berlusconi didn’t give any details about what kind of rules leaders were looking to change, except to say that leaders are “talking about a new Bretton Woods.”
The Bretton Woods Agreements were adopted to rebuild the international economic system after World War II in a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The aim of the agreements was to establish a monetary management system, initially by pegging currencies to gold. The IMF was set up later to help manage the international financial system.
I just saw Interactive Brokers.com on CNBC advertising “No derivatives” so I took a peek at their website. Under the “safety” tab I found this… watch for other financial companies to follow suit.
Well, Paulson got his $770 billion (more like $1.8 trillion) bailout. Now why is the market crashing?
McCain was on today talking about buying up bad mortgages.. some $330 billion for that. Wasn’t this what the bailout was supposed to be for?
The 678.91 point plunge on the DOW today is being blamed on GM losing 30% of it’s value. This is absurd. Blame anyone but Wall Street.
What we’re seeing is the irresistible gravity of $1-2 quadrillion of derivatives turning their “super profit” leverage in the negative direction. It’s a black hole and must be deleted.
Paper is NOT Wealth. Commodities are wealth. Property is wealth. Production is wealth. Paper is an abstraction.
It’s very interesting that the USD is holding up pretty well vs the pound, euro, CAD. The crash seems to be hitting all currencies somewhat equally.
A couple of interesting things about this clip: it’s rare to see a Rothschild, the famous european banking family, in public. Lynn Forester was introduced to her husband, Sir Evelyn, by Henry Kissinger, of all people, at a meeting of the Bilderberg group, of all places.
NEW YORK, October 8 (RIA Novosti) — The U.S. stock market has suffered a $700 billion paper loss in a single session, as measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index, which tracks the stocks of 5,000 U.S.-based companies. (more…)
IMO, this is evidence of their handiwork. The wind didn’t change direction and fix the market, something clearly interfered around 2:45PM, October 6, 2008..
Ok, small consolation here but it’s still entertaining to hear about Lehman Bros CEO getting knocked out after bankrupting the company… He still made out like a bandit, to the tune of $480 million. Fuld should be jailed, his assets should be seized and distributed to the people who lost money… stealing from ppl’s retirement fund is about as reprehensible an act as one can commit. Old people will suffer as a result of this.
The other funny thing is – I’m not sure anyone noticed, but – the hedge fund in question was named Harbinger, as in Harbinger of DOOM. How prophetic.
Again, very interesting… I would love to do away with currency speculation.
Head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn:
“The world economic situation is very worrying and the IMF is going to publish growth forecasts that are markedly lower than what we have had until now.
“The formula of a new Bretton Woods is a pretty formula. What is sure is that it is necessary to review the functioning of the architecture of the global financial system.”
If there is one post you should read on this blog, it’s this one.
September 29, 2008 was a historic day for America and getting out from underneath Wall Street oppression.. the first of many, i hope. Forget what the talking heads are saying, yesterday was a Victory of Populism. The only thing the market lost yesterday was a bunch of numbers in an accounting book. God didn’t come down and take $1.2 trillion worth of property from the world. Factories didn’t disappear, only paper. And paper “assets” are NOT real.
Expect the oligarchy to try every scare tactic in the world to try and extort money from America… but do NOT submit and they will collapse into their own derivatives black holes. BE STRONG and invest in sustainable production, local communities, things in the REAL world. Real commodities, real production. NOT futures. NOT indexes. NOT paper gambling.
They will NOT tell you the people are winning. DOWN WITH OLIGARCHY!
