Alternative forms of money are designed to compete directly against global financial power, and this is a good news. Indeed, on 28 January 2012 at the gates of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, it was presented to the media a new version of community global currency, i.e. the OCCupy-CUrrency or Occcu. The project has been developed in Austria by a team of students led by Roland Alton Scheidl at Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences with the aim to offer a Basic-Income answer as the present double dip recession gives sign of shifting into the Greatest depression.
In 2008, a multi-trillion bailout of European and US banks saved the global economy from a complete meltdown, but three years later, it appears that central banks did not learn the hard lessons that brought on the liquidity crisis. The only countries left in 2011 without a Central Bank owned by the Rothschild Family are Cuba, North Korea and Iran. Economist Jim Grant spoke in an interview on November 16th with Bloomberg News that the world's central banks are now at the point where they are insolvent, over leveraged, and in default. "The Italian yields did not fall on their own. It raises questions of overall integrity of market prices. In the US the Fed has nationalized the yield curve. In Europe much the same is going on: the SNB is expanding its balance sheet at astonishing rates of speed. The world over there is seeing immense money printing and there is a huge race to debase on the behalf of the sponsors of paper money. The ECB has a ratio of non-AAA rated assets to equity of 14 to 1. What the European Central Bank has been doing is stepping in where private money fears to tread. In the private sector we call that heading for trouble... The New York Federal Reserve is leveraged 100 to one."
A trillion euro bail-out to save the EU’s single currency is in danger of unravelling after Germany’s central bank warned that the rescue measure was too dependent on the high-risk deals that caused the economic crisis.
The Fed is proposing another round of “quantitative easing,” although the first round failed to reverse deflation. It failed because the money went into the coffers of banks, which failed to lend it on. To reverse deflation, the money needs to be funneled directly to state and local economies.
In 2002, in a speech that earned him the nickname “Helicopter Ben,” then-Fed Governor Bernanke famously said that the government could easily reverse a deflation, just by printing money and dropping it from helicopters. “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent),” he said, “that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” Later in the speech he discussed “a money-financed tax cut,” which he said was “essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.” You could cure a deflation, said Professor Friedman, simply by dropping money from helicopters.
Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history. Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand. A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged. The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown -- collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.
As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created -- and ultimately provided most of the money for -- new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain [1] that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those.
It's All About the Future: The Future is a very convenient political out, because it can never ever arrive. The past is past and can be studied, and today (the present) is always here; but "The Future" has become a political mantra because it can never be attained. The Future is forever locked into something that shall always be "coming" but never does it ever arrive. That's why politicians and scam-artists and so many religions have always turned to this over-used word to justify whichever con their trying to pull off.
After some interesting intro material, Max Kaiser talks with William Black. In just a few minutes you’ll learn more about the reality of the US financial system than you could get from a Harvard MBA.
You may have heard recently that U.S. companies have emerged from the financial crisis in robust health, that they've paid down their debts, rebuilt their balance sheets and are sitting on growing piles of cash they are ready to invest in the economy.
You could hear this great news pretty much anywhere, maybe from Bloomberg, which this spring hailed the "surprising strength" of corporate balance sheets. Or perhaps in the Washington Post, where Fareed Zakaria reported that top companies "have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash," leaving them in the best shape, by some measures, "in almost half a century."
When a national police association accuses its government of what amounts to treason it is time to sit up and pay attention. Michael O'Boyce, President of the Garda Representative Association (GRA), said at its annual conference in Limerick, at the end of April, 2010, that the Irish Government had been 'corrupted' and had been 'bought' by developers and bankers. (A garda is an Irish policeman, gardaí in the plural.)
Everybody knows that people go to work so they can get money to buy things. The things people buy are paid for with money people earn by making the things people buy. And that would be all there is to say about it if it weren't for a big problem that keeps happening: "From conspiracy theorists to conspiracy watchers - Seigniorage fraud."
On this edition of the Keiser Report, Max and co-host Stacy Herbert look at the latest scandals of filling black holes of debt with austerity plans and imperial plans. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Cedric de Serigny of the School of Economic Warfare in Paris about rating agencies and financial terrorism.
Is Europe facing its own “Bear Stearns” moment? That was the question hanging over the markets on Wednesday as the sense of uncertainty spread. The AFP reports that three people were killed in a firebomb attack on a bank in central Athens on Wednesday during a demonstration. Twenty others were being evacuated from the building. It’s obvious that the firebombing is the result of the major economic crisis in Greece. People are upset, they fear that their futures, which once seemed so bright, are being taken away from them or at the very least clouded in darkness. This truly is a country on the brink of collapse. We can only wonder what its impact will be on the Euro and, of course, on the European Union as a whole.
"All of us are angry, very, very angry," bellowed Stella Stamou, a civil servant standing on a street corner, screaming herself hoarse, a block away from where the bank had been set alight. "You write that – angry, angry, angry, angry," she said, after participating in one of the biggest ever rallies to rock the capital since the return of democracy in 1974. "Angry with our own politicians, angry with the IMF, angry with the EU, angry that we have lost income, angry that we have never been told the truth.
Across Athens today the signs of that anger were everywhere: in the central boulevards and squares that resembled a war zone, the burning cars, the burning hotels, the burning government buildings and rubbish bins and shattered windows and pavements. What had started as a general strike called by unions to protest against deeply unpopular austerity measures turned into a tidal wave of fury as an estimated 100,000 private and public sector workers took to the streets screaming "let the plutocracy pay".
"Why should we, the little man, pay for this crisis?" said Giorgos Didimopoulos. "What people forget is that we Greeks don't like authority. We have always resisted when we think something is unfair. We fought against the Persians at Marathon, the Germans during the second world war and we will fight the IMF because in reality we no longer have a government. It is foreign forces who are in charge of us now."
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