Courting Revulsion

 

by James Howard Kunstler

www.kunstler.com/
Originally posted November 23, 2009

HOW INFANTILE IS AMERICAN SOCIETY?  Last night’s CBS “Business Update” (in the midst of its “60 Minutes” program) featured three items: 1.) The New Moon teen vampire movie led the weekend box-office receipts; 2.) Cadbury shares hit an all-time high; 3.) Michael Jackson’s rhinestone-studded white glove sold at auction for $350,000. Some in-house CBS-News producer is responsible for this fucking nonsense. How does he or she keep her job? Is there no adult supervision at the network?

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times this morning, Paul “Nobel Prize” Krugman writes:
“Most economists I talk to believe that the big risk to recovery comes from the inadequacy of government efforts; the stimulus was too small, and it will fade out next year, while high unemployment is undermining both consumer and business confidence.”

Disclosure: I’m not one of the economists that Mr. Krugman talks to (nor am I an economist). But it’s sure interesting to know that the ones palavering with Mr. Krugman imagine that that the US can possibly return to an economy based on the fraudulent securitization of reckless debt. Does Mr. Krugman think that the production housing industry can resume paving over the nether exurbs with half-million-dollar houses (to be bought with no money down loans by the sheet-rockers working inside them)?

Does he think all those people receiving cancellation notices from their credit card issuers are in a position to flash their plastic at the Gallerias this Friday? Or ever will be again?  Is he perhaps misusing the term “recovery?”  After all, that is generally taken to mean resuming a prior state, which is, in turn, presumed to be a healthy prior state.  Is that what the economy of the past decade was?  And, incidentally, what exactly is a “consumer?”  And why, at the highest levels of journalism in this land, do we refer to citizens that way?  As if the American people have no other purpose except to buy things? Or is that the only way an “economist” can imagine them?

Cold Turkey Thanksgiving 2009

by Darryl Robert Schoon
Originally posted November 24, 2009

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. –John Kenneth Galbraith, former professor of economics at Harvard, writing in Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975).

J.K. GALBRAITH’S STATEMENT THAT COMPLEXITY is used by modern economics to confuse the truth about money is a fact. Simply put, bankers replaced money with credit and debt in order to profit by the indebting of others. It’s why bankers are now so rich. It is also why others are now so poor.

Understanding money is not rocket science. Modern currencies are a fraud, a fraud that has escaped detection much as did Bernard Madoff’s ponzi-scheme. Bernard Madoff’s scheme was based on the fraud that investor’s money was, in fact, invested. The fraud of modern economics, however, is that money isn’t actually money—and they don’t want you to know it.

MERRY OLD ENGLAND: THE MOTHER OF MODERN MONETARY FRAUD
From the time of Charlemagne until the 12th century, the silver currency of England was made from the highest purity silver available. Unfortunately there were drawbacks to minting currency of fine silver, notably the level of wear it suffered, and the ease with which coins could be “clipped”, or trimmed, by those dealing in the currency.

In the 12th century a new standard for English coinage was established by Henry II — the Sterling Silver standard of 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper. This was a harder-wearing alloy, yet it was still a rather high grade of silver. It went some way towards discouraging the practice of “clipping”, though this practice was further discouraged and largely eliminated with the introduction of the milled edge we see on coins today. By 1696 the currency had been seriously weakened by an increase in clipping during the Nine Years’ War to the extent that it was decided to recall and replace all hammered silver coinage in circulation.

The Biggest Rip-off of All Time

 

by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
Originally posted November 23, 2009

IN THE SCENARIO I’M ABOUT to paint for you, the dialog is fictional, but all the facts and figures are real.

The time: 1 a.m., November 23, 2011, exactly two years from now.
The place: the White House, suddenly and unexpectedly under siege as a new financial crisis erupts.

The economic booms of 2010 have morphed into superbooms … the superbooms into bubbles … and the bubbles into busts.
Large banks are again on the brink. Financial markets are again in turmoil. Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley — the outstanding survivors of an off-again-on-again debt crisis — are now its primary victims. Investments like long-term U.S. Treasury bonds — long sought as safe harbors — are now collapsing in price, turning into torpedoes that can sink even the sturdiest of portfolios. But most important, the government’s too-big-to-fail bailouts, shotgun mergers, and mad money printing — previously hailed as cures that killed the contagion of 2008 — are now widely viewed as far worse than any disease.

President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner have huddled in the Oval Office for hours, struggling to find new solutions to old problems: Wall Street meltdowns, renewed threats of a great depression, millions more thrown out of work. After a long and heated debate, the president slumps back into his armchair, signaling it’s time to talk more frankly — to reminisce about past policies and rethink what might have gone wrong.

“With 20-20 hindsight,” he remarks after an introspective pause, “it’s clear we were overly focused on the intended consequences of our efforts — the economic recovery, the bounceback in markets, the jobs saved. Meanwhile, we were blindsided by the unintended consequences, many of which have proven to be bigger, more durable and, ultimately, more impactful than the benefits we did achieve.”

The Treasury Secretary, weary from marathon meetings on precisely the same subject, nods in silent agreement. “So, perhaps one of our tasks,” continues the president, “should be to document two basic issues: What precisely are the unintended consequences? And what exactly did we do to cause them?”

“We don’t have to,” says Geithner sheepishly.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s already been done. Those issues have already been thoroughly documented.”
“Since when?”
“Since the fall of 2009. That’s when SIGTARP — the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program — revealed the mistakes we made with the giant AIG bailout. And that’s also around the time the public began to react to the enormous contradiction between massive unemployment on Main Street and the monster we helped to create on Wall Street.”

The Game Has Changed – The Achilles Heel Exposed

by Rob Kirby, KirbyAnalytics.com
Originally posted 6 October 2009

IN A DISCUSSION I HAD EARLIER this week with Dr. Jim Willie, we discussed how the prices of gold and silver have been arbitrarily managed for years. In this discussion, I contended that, while the prices of gold and silver have been closely managed, the growing “off-take” of physical bullion is inflicting great damage on price managers. We can see manifestations of this reality in that price corrections [sell-offs] are much shallower and shorter lived than they were even last year.  Jim asked me if I could provide any “hard data” or minutia showing the amounts of physical metal being taken off the market in recent weeks.

Unfortunately, I cannot. The reason for this was best encapsulated in comments by GATA Secretary / Treasurer Chris Powell back in April, 2008 in Washington, D.C. when he opined:

“Indeed, the disposition of Western central bank gold reserves is a secret more closely guarded than the blueprints for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.”

With the micro details being withheld or obscured, the proof to the thesis that price managers are hemorrhaging physical bullion is more “macro” in nature. So here’s a review of the macro picture (or “known-knowns” in Rumsfeld-ian double-speak), starting with a daily chart of gold for Sept. 8, 2009:

A Free $100 Trillion Note

From Casey Research
Posted November 19, 2009
Contributed by a Casey Research guest, from an undisclosed location in the U.S.

YOU’VE HEARD STORIES ABOUT the absurd inflation in Zimbabwe. Well, it’s now gone to the sublime: the government just printed a 100-trillion-dollar note.

[courtesy of assetstrategies.com]

This is an authentic $100 trillion bill, so feel free to print the image and use it. After all, an existing government has manufactured pieces of paper with these embedded images and declared them as genuine currency in its country. It is currently circulating them to its citizens who are to use them to buy goods and services. It’s not backed by anything, but it is money because the government says it is.

The problem is, no merchants in Zimbabwe will accept them. If you own one of these bills, you can’t do much with it. You can’t even buy a loaf of bread with this bill (and that’s if you can find a loaf of bread). The government on that particular plot of soil has been so reckless with its policies that its own money is worthless.

Thank goodness dollar devaluation or currency inflation could never happen to us. I mean, yes, our government also manufactures pieces of paper and declares them official currency, but the images on ours are much more superior. And sure, our government circulates this as currency, but I can buy plenty of loaves of bread – heck, I bought a week’s worth of groceries with mine! And I know that our dollars aren’t backed by anything, either, but our government would never do anything so careless as to dilute them.

No, our country is much more responsible. Our government is debt-free, has a balanced budget, promotes a free-market society, keeps a strong currency by absolutely refusing to print more currency, doesn’t take dollars from some to bail out others who make mistakes with theirs, and only takes from its citizens what is absolutely necessary in taxes. Whew.

I mean, if they did any of those things, I’d probably do something completely absurd, like buy gold and silver coins. And can you imagine the horror of our government doing all of those things at the same time? Adding to the fright would be if other countries threatened to stop buying dollars from us because of our irresponsibility – well, I count my lucky stars that foreigners are so supportive of our currency. No, those people who buy gold and silver are antiquated, out-of-touch individuals on the fringes of society.

The dollar losing value or the idea of inflation coming to our country is just a scare tactic. That will never happen here. The dollar’s fine. Besides, the stock market is going up, so party on, dudes!

Starving the Vampire Squids

by Trace Mayer

RuntoGold.com
Originally posted  November 14, 2009

THE VAMPIRE SQUIDS OF WALL STREET and Washington DC are parasitic organisms and you are locked in mortal combat with them. They desire to suck all the value they can from you and then toss your carcass aside. As with most parasites they prefer subtle tactics that do not attract attention.

But now the spotlight is being directed towards them and individual humans are becoming increasingly aware of their status as human livestock to be feasted upon and slaughtered by these parasitic vampire squids. Increasing numbers are declaring their independence from these nefarious parasites. There are a few simple things you can do to defend yourselves from these repulsive psychopathic parasitic vampire squids and assert your sovereignty.

IMPROVE YOUR INFORMATION DIET
If an individual sustains life by eating low quality junk food then they are more susceptible to disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, inflammation and a host of other health problems. A few small changes in one’s physical diet can have a tremendous effect on one’s health and general feeling wellbeing.

So likewise your time and attention is extremely valuable. Most Americans watch 5–10 hours of television per week. A significant problem with television and corporate media is the degree of misinformation and subliminal programming.

A subliminal message is a signal or message embedded in another medium, designed to pass below the normal limits of the human mind’s perception. These messages are unrecognizable by the conscious mind, but in certain situations can affect the subconscious mind and can negatively or positively influence subsequent later thoughts, behaviors, actions, attitudes, belief systems and value systems.

Gold Market reaching the Breaking Point

 

by Eric deCarbonnel
Originally posted October 29, 2009

BACK IN JANUARY, I WROTE ABOUT the significance of gold breaking above $1000 again.

Gold
Rising demand for physical gold is a threat to the dollar because it signals a growing loss of confidence in the paper currency. It is also key to understand that gold prices aren’t rising because of the changing fundamentals of gold, but because of the changing fundamentals of the dollar. In other words, gold isn’t rallying, THE DOLLAR IS FALLING.

Gold is history’s oldest and most stable currency. Its utility is simply that it is rare, and for 5,000 years people have used it to store value for the future. All the gold that has ever been produced would fit in a solid cube of about 19 meters on each side, and this cube is only expanding by about 12 centimeters a year (2%). Since the value and supply of gold itself are fairly constant over long periods of time, the main driver of gold price fluctuations is the ebb and flow of confidence in paper currencies. Rising gold prices are, therefore, a signal of a weakening currency, which is why governments hate them and try to suppress them.

Right now, there is unprecedented worldwide demand for physical precious metals. As a result of this surging demand, gold futures have experiencing backwardation, a rare market condition where gold futures trade under spot prices. It is a signal that gold prices are headed higher and that confidence in our currency is fading quickly. When gold prices break above 1,000 again, the event should be recognized for what it is: the herald of a dollar collapse.

Gold is becoming money once again. The market for the standard gold one-ounce coin is no longer fragmented. Both the ugliest and the most beautiful gold coins are traded strictly by the quantity and quality of metal content, disregarding the outward appearance of the coin. Even Indian gold buyers, who, for years, considered buying jewellery to be the best investment option, are shifting from buying gold jewellery to gold coins.

Some snippets from the International Forecaster…

 

by Bob Chapman, The International Forecaster

Originally posted Wednesday, 11 November 2009

THE AMERICAN JOURNEY THAT BEGAN on 8/15/71 is going to end over the next several years. The problems that have manifested themselves over the past few years signal the final stages of a destructive process that has stifled production and innovation and encouraged fraud in Wall Street and banking. The injection of money and credit into the financial system via the Fed and the Treasury has almost exclusively benefited the wealthy financial sector and has spread only crumbs to American citizens. The residential housing sector is dying, as now is the bubble in commercial real estate. It is now only a matter of time that the stock markets new bubble is broken. Insolvency in insurance, banking and on Wall Street has been temporarily papered over. These are the culprits who created our problems along with their mentor the Federal Reserve. These are the same people who created fraudulent CDOs and MBSs, which caused the credit collapse. For that they have been rewarded.

Free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing have ripped the heart out of our industrial base and now are shredding our service sector unabated. At the rate of our present decline we will be a second tier nation in five years. The loss of 8 million jobs over the last nine years is staggering. What has been done to our economy is criminal. Every month we hear of revelations of insider trading scams, Ponzi schemes, front running by 16 major market makers led by Goldman Sachs, naked shorting by major brokerage firms and market manipulation by the Treasury and the Fed and nothing is done to stop it. Billions of dollars are being stolen daily from American investors.

It is now quite obvious that the Illuminists have decreed that the dollar is to be abandoned as the world reserve currency and it is to be replaced by either a new international trading unit or a one-world currency. The US banking system and the dollar are being taken down slowly so that the public won’t catch on to what is being done to them.

Central Banking: A Blight On Humanity

by Rob Kirby, KirbyAnalytics.com
Originally posted 9 October 2009

IMPECCABLY RELIABLE SOURCES have informed me that as recently as Sept. 30, 2009 – the last possible day of trade in the Sept. 09 gold futures – a number of well-heeled market participants “bought” substantial tonnage worth of gold futures on the London Bullion Market [LBMA] and immediately told their counterparties they wanted to take instantaneous delivery of the underlying physical bullion.

The unexpected immediate demand for substantial tonnage of gold bullion created utter panic in at least two banks who were counterparties to this trade – J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank – because they simply did not posses the gold bullion which they had sold short [an illegal act which in trading parlance is referred to as a “naked short”].

Because these banks did not have the bullion to honor their contracted commitments, one or both of them approached the counterparties and asked if there was any way they could settle this embarrassing matter quietly on a “cash basis” to absolve the banks from fulfilling their physical bullion delivery obligations. The purchasers were not interested in a ‘cash settlement’ and demanded delivery of physical bullion giving these banks 5 business days to resolve the situation.  A premium of as much as spot plus 25 % [that would be 1,250 – 1,300 per ounce of gold] was offered to settle this matter in fiat money instead of the embarrassment of a very public “failure to deliver” on the part of the London Bullion Market Association.

Earlier this week, no less than two Central Banks became involved in effecting the physical settlement of this situation. One of these Central Banks was British [that would be the Bank of England] – and reportedly, even they were only capable of providing less than pure, non-compliant gold bars that did not meet good delivery standards stipulated by the LBMA.  Like it or not, this is a testament to lack of physical gold available, folks.

To summarize: Banks like J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bk. – who sold endless amounts of gold futures at prices of 950 – 1025 and then tried to make “side deals” with the folks they sold the futures to – offering them spot + 25 % [let’s say 1,275 per ounce] to settle in fiat – only after their counter parties demanded substantial tonnage of physical gold bullion.

Stunningly, if accurate [and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is not accurate], this means that gold is already in SEVERE backwardation and this fact is being hidden from the public.

Then, to protect the “integrity” of the futures market as a ‘price discovery mechanism’ – Central Banks – aiding and abetting – plunder the sovereign assets of their respective countries to bail out their agents / friends in an attempt to ‘sweep the whole bloody mess under the carpet’. Does anyone wonder why our financial system and fiat money will soon to be TOAST?

What a disgraceful insult to humanity.

As Foreclosure Nightmares Increase, will more Homeowners pay off their Bankers in Violence?

 

by Scott Thill
Originally posted Posted November 9, 2009

THE ECONOMIC CRISIS REVEALED  late-capitalism’s central offense: Human beings are being transparently treated if they were mere transactions. And they’re going postal over it. Anger and discontent are reaching a boil as a lethal combination of economic corruption and political collusion are deleveraged across the United States.

From recent rampages in Orlando, Fla., to mortgage-related torture in Los Angeles, certain members of the citizenry seem to have had their fill of being manipulated for the financial gain of others, and they’re firing back with force. And the situation threatens to burn hotter as the winter holidays – always a peak period fof domestic violence, due mostly to financial stress – approach to spark its frazzled strands.

“They left me to rot,” Jason Rodriguez said when asked why he went on a shooting rampage at the Orlando engineering firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills that had fired him two years ago.

That compressed vitriol is also found in the Los Angeles case, where Daniel Weston and Gustavo Canez allegedly imprisoned and tortured loan-modification agents Lamond Dean and Luis Garcia while three others – Mario Soloman Gonzales, Marissa Parker and Mary Ann Parmelee, a realtor – sat and watched.

According to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, “Weston and Parmelee live in a house that is in foreclosure,” and they “allegedly sought loan-modification assistance from the victims but believed that nothing was being done and wanted their money back.” When they didn’t get it, they evidently extracted their payback in violent revenge.

“That’s not right,” explained Kathleen Day, spokeswoman for the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending. “But clearly people are really mad about what’s happened to them. This is the kind of thing that happens when lenders don’t lend responsibly. You can’t abuse your customers forever.”