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The World Is Built On A Series Of False Flag Operations
Forget Greece, the US Almost Had a Failed Treasury Bond Auction !
- But for the mysterious ‘direct bidders’ (or buyers), this was a failed 30 year auction. Yes, someone stepped up to prevent this auction failure. For all intent and purpose, Rick Santelli was right: it was an auction failure. This event is humongous in its implications. It is time to run and hide! Take cover, abandon paper assets and go to hard asset like precious metals. It is simply too difficult to predict the ramifications. Graham Summers explains:
While most of the investment world focuses on the various ”senior officials” (none of whom seem to have actual names or positions) commenting on whether Greece will or will not be bailed out/ receive an emergency loan/ offered moral support, etc, a far more significant debt story is emerging in the US.
On Wednesday the US offered $16 billion worth of 30-year Treasuries (US debt that will mature in 30 years). Before we get into the details of how much of a disaster the auction was we’re going to do a brief review of how US debt issuances work.
US Debt is issued by the US Treasury. You can bid as much as 30 days in advance of a debt auction. When the auction actually takes place investors can buy directly (Direct Buyers) by buying Treasuries themselves OR they can buy indirectly (Indirect Buyers) by using a Primary Dealer: one of 18 Banks and Securities Brokers who do business directly with the US Federal Reserve Bank of NY and so HAVE to buy Treasuries at auctions to insure liquidity. Direct buyers buy “off the radar” meaning you cannot track who the buyer is.
If an investor buys indirectly, he or she has to notify the Primary Dealer of his/her intentions in advance. This might sound a bit like showing your hand while playing poker. And it is. The only reason to go through a Primary Dealer (make an Indirect Purchase) is because you want to buy a sizable load of Treasuries (remember, Primary Dealers have a special relationship with the Fed and so can insure you get the amount you require).
Historically, Foreign Governments (China, Japan, etc) have made up the majority of Treasury purchases. Because of this, the Indirect Buyer purchases are typically thought to represent just how demand Foreign Governments have for US debt. I realize this sounds complicated so simply think of it this way:
1. Direct Buyers: folks who buy straight from the Treasury, typically comprising a minor stake in US debt purchases
2. Indirect Buyers: folks who buy LARGE chunks of US debt, typically Foreign Governments
3. Primary Dealers: banks that HAVE to buy US debt to insure an auction doesn’t fail. You don’t want to see a lot of Primary Dealer purchases as this means that those who can CHOOSE to buy US debt DON’T want to.
On Wednesday, February 10 2010, the US Treasury issued $16 billion in 30-year Treasuries. Here are the buyer data points:
Buyer Purchase Amount (%) Primary Dealers 47% Direct Buyers 24% (A RECORD) Indirect Buyers 28%
First of all, we see Direct Buyers hit a RECORD percentage of purchases. This is extremely bizarre and somewhat disconcerting given that we have no way of know who these buyers are. For all we know they could be the Federal Reserve itself or other US-Government entities buying “off the radar.”
Indeed, on that note we know that the US Federal Reserve accounted for 11% of the total purchases. Folks, you’re not dealing with a healthy debt auction when the Fed accounts for 10% of purchases.
However, far, FAR more worrisome is the pathetic Indirect Buyer takedown: 28%. Historically this number has been more around 40% (Tyler at ZeroHedge notes that the average Indirect purchase of the last four long-term Treasury auctions was 39.9%). To see such a MASSIVE drop off in Indirect Buyers (40% down to 28%) is a MAJOR warning sign that Foreign Governments are no longer willing to buy long-term US debt.
This auction was a very small step away from a failed auction. To see Primary Dealers buying so much (remember they HAVE to buy it) and Indirect Buyers so little, only confirms what I’ve been saying for months, that the US is entering a Debt Spiral: a situation in which it must issue more and more debt (while rolling over trillions of old debt) at the very time that fewer and fewer investors are willing to lend to the US for any lengthy period of time (more than ten years).
Folks, forget Greece, the US has its own debt problems. And they’re MAJOR. The fact that stocks RALLIED on this news tells you how disconnected stocks are from reality. The Debt Spiral has started and is now accelerating. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes a full-fledged Crisis. And this one will make 2008 look like a cakewalk.
Europe’s Exposure To ‘PIGS’ Problem!
Damn if they bailout, damn if they don't! France and Germany are in deep deep trouble!
- The Germans and French are screwed. Even if they opt to bailout the PIGS, I doubt it will be a one time deal. The European economy is not doing well. There are too any hotspots to put out in the global economy for optimism in the near future. Damn if they do, damn if they don’t. There is no easy road out of this coming calamity. All roads lead to economic, financial and monetary crisis! My gut feeling is: they will abandon all good financial sense and go for printing money out of thin air (QE) big time. Politically, it is the least costly alternative. Just inflate their way out of the problem! Bloomberg reports:
PIGS Exposure Explains ‘Shotgun Greek Wedding’: Chart of Day
German and French banks’ “enormous” exposure to Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain explains why Europe’s biggest economies are moving to rescue their southern neighbors, Societe General SA said today in a report titled “Shotgun Greek Wedding.”
The CHART OF THE DAY shows how much money German, French, Swiss and U.K. banks have at stake in the so-called PIGS countries. Banks in Germany and France alone have a combined exposure of $119 billion to Greece and $909 billion to the four countries, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements. Overall, European banks have $253 billion in Greece and $2.1 trillion in the so-called PIGS.
“The exposure is enormous,” said Klaus Baader, co-chief European economist at Societe Generale in London. “The crisis in Greece isn’t Greece’s problem alone but a concrete problem for Europe’s whole banking sector. That explains the interest of finance ministers in stabilizing the situation.”
Leaders from the 16-nation euro area said today they have agreed to act if necessary to help Greece reduce its budget deficit and safeguard financial stability in the region. Debt- stricken Greece is struggling to convince investors it is able to reduce its deficit from 12.7 percent of gross domestic product, sparking turmoil on financial markets.
Spain, Portugal and Ireland, also suffering from gaping deficits after the worst recession since World War II, have been sucked into the swirl of widening bond spreads and soaring credit default swaps. The premium investors demand to hold 10- year bonds of the so-called PIGS countries instead of benchmark German bunds, and the cost of insuring against default, have surged this year. “The countries’ situations put the finances of fiscally stronger countries in jeopardy,” Baader said. “That’s one reason why the tone changed.”
Gold Price Will Surge To $5,000 In Two Years!
US$5,000 per ounce by 2012? I won't bet against it!
- When the sheeple realize that fiat currencies are simply a confidence game, they will run to gold and silver. The Vietnamese people are coming to this realization this past 1 year. This week the Vietnamese Dong was devalued again. The Vietnamese people are bidding up the price of gold locally so much so that the local price is at a US$17/- premium over Comex-LBMA prices. Mark my words, what is happening in Vietnam and Zimbabwe will be replicated throughout the world. Fiat currencies are worth just the paper they are printed on. Fiat currencies are in a race to the bottom against hard assets like gold and silver! Commodity Online reports:
Gold Prices will climb to $5,000 within two years due to US dollar weakness and significant buying by players in the hedge fund industry looking to preserve the value of their funds. That is the opinion of New Zealand market trading expert Welles Wilder, who has previously been highlighted by publications such as Forbes and Barron’s for his skill in the markets, stuff.co.nz reports.
His belief was revealed by another local trader Oli Hille, who trades in New Zealand’s currency markets, and is currently writing a book, which is to be titled Creating the Perfect Lifestyle. Mr Hille told the news provider: “He implies his call is based on the US dollar becoming weaker and weaker and basically falling out of bed.”
The trader learnt of Mr Wilder’s opinion on Gold Prices while interviewing him for the book, which also includes an interview with New Zealand’s prime minister John Key. It appears there is a lot of bullish sentiment on Buying Gold outside of the US, with British miner Scotgold Resources’ chief executive Chris Sangster telling the Daily Record: “We see the Gold Price staying high in the long term.”
- Don’t forget gold’s buddy: silver. Silver has even better fundamentals than gold!
Silver US$150 per ounce by 2012?
Niall Ferguson: A Greek Crisis Is Coming To America!
- Greece is but 2-3% of the Eurozone’s GDP, about US$340B. This is peanuts compared with many bankrupt states of America. The Big One is the sovereign debt default of America. Because the USD is the world reserve currency, the ramifications will be felt worldwide. No two ways about it: it will be a financial nuclear detonation when America collapses! Professor Ferguson opines:
It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the Western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate.
There is of course a distinctive feature to the eurozone crisis. Because of the way the European Monetary Union was designed, there is in fact no mechanism for a bailout of the Greek government by the European Union, other member states, or the European Central Bank (Articles 123 and 125 of the Lisbon treaty). True, Article 122 may be invoked by the European Council to assist a member state that is “seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control,” but at this point nobody wants to pretend that Greece’s yawning deficit was an act of God. Nor is there a way for Greece to devalue its currency, as it would have done in the pre-EMU days of the drachma. There is not even a mechanism for Greece to leave the eurozone.
That leaves just three possibilities: one of the most excruciating fiscal squeezes in modern European history — reducing the deficit from 13 per cent to 3 per cent of gross domestic product within just three years; outright default on all or part of the Greek government’s debt; or (most likely, as signalled by German officials on Wednesday) some kind of bailout led by Berlin. Because none of these options is very appealing, and because any decision about Greece will have implications for Portugal, Spain, and possibly others, it may take much horse-trading before one can be reached.
Yet the idiosyncrasies of the eurozone should not distract us from the general nature of the fiscal crisis that is now afflicting most western economies. Call it the fractal geometry of debt: the problem is essentially the same from Iceland to Ireland to Britain to the US. It just comes in widely differing sizes.
What we in the Western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy — zero interest rates plus quantitative easing — did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect
For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.
Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven.” US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.
Even according to the White House’s new budget projections, the gross federal debt in public hands will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years’ time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never.
The International Monetary Fund recently published estimates of the fiscal adjustments developed economies would need to make to restore fiscal stability over the decade ahead. Worst were Japan and the UK (a fiscal tightening of 13 per cent of GDP). Then came Ireland, Spain and Greece (9 per cent). And in sixth place? Step forward America, which would need to tighten fiscal policy by 8.8 per cent of GDP to satisfy the IMF.
Explosions of public debt hurt economies in the following way, as numerous empirical studies have shown. By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted — as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.
Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.
But now the Fed is phasing out such purchases and is expected to wind up quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have sharply reduced their purchases of Treasuries from around 47 per cent of new issuance in 2006 to 20 per cent in 2008 to an estimated 5 per cent last year. Small wonder Morgan Stanley assumes that 10-year yields will rise from around 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent this year. On a gross federal debt fast approaching $1,500 billion, that implies up to $300 billion of extra interest payments — and you get up there pretty quickly with the average maturity of the debt now below 50 months.
The Obama administration’s new budget blithely assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4 per cent. But with rising real rates, growth might well be lower. Under those circumstances, interest payments could soar as a share of federal revenue — from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter.
Last week Moody’s Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers’ killer question (posed before he returned to government): “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”
On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the West has begun in Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of Western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.
Depression 2010 – Western Fiat Money Finished?
- It is not pleasant to be all doom and gloom. Unfortunately, that is how the cards are stacked against the world. I try to tell it like it is. Optimism is great as long as it is not delusional. The facts on the ground say: global monetary crisis, the confidence fiat money game has just about run its course! The Daily Bell reports:
Is the Western world struggling through a bad patch? Our argument, voiced with various levels of clarity at various times, is that the West is currently living through a failure of fiat money – specifically a failure of the global anchor currency: the greenback. The dollar is on its way out not because people want it to be necessarily (though some do) but simply because it is failing as a fiat currency. Central bank fiat currencies always fail. China had a number of fiat episodes and the populace was so scarred that fiat money was reportedly even banned in the 1800s. ….
……
Interestingly, we can see in the above observations that fiat money first created a wonderland of progress and amusement. That’s just what fiat money has done in the West and in Japan as well. It is now happening in China. Wherever fiat money travels it brings tremendous euphoria in its wake, though only to begin with. Cities are energized with false booms. Farm children flock to the urban environment to take jobs in factories producing ephemeral goods or work at useless government jobs – that are created from tax revenues during the boom time. Initially, because fiat money inevitably has a relationship to government, much of the perfection of society is attributed to a wise, fair-minded bureaucracy. The bureaucracy, by the way, believes it.
Monetary stimulation can go on for years. In America, it’s been going on for nearly a century – which is probably the far end of what can be expected. But people can live and die under a central banking regime – which is usually a fiat regime (or ends up that way, anyway). Yes, it cannot be emphasized enough that fiat money (along with its enabler, central banking) is a foundational curse. Just as in China, it funds wars, makes the government look wonderfully efficient and even omnipotent, fools people into believing that the non-essential jobs they have are actually essential “modern” work – and sets the stage inevitably for regulatory regimes that must eventually descend into madness and ruin.
Fiat money empowers corporatism (in the modern age anyway) and distorts civilization by helping to implode agrarian republicanism. It is no coincidence that Thomas Jefferson despised central banking – and was in fact the most famous and influential agrarian republican. We can see the remnants of this sort of society in Switzerland, which has passed laws to maintain small farms. It is difficult to create a totalitarian society – even an ephemeral one – in a land of sturdy farmers. Such individuals grow their own food, have access to water and are willing to defend their land. America was a bit like Switzerland before the Civil War but is not now.
But today, dear reader, we would propose that the West, and the entire globe, is living through a fiat money collapse. Economies all over the world have been inflated to their fullest and people can buy no more useless gadgets and work at no more superfluous jobs. Too many useful endeavors have been marginalized and phony ones have been elevated. An implosion is taking place. The world is reverting to a kind of mathematical practicality. In America, car companies have shrunk because there are too many cars, and houses are not being built because there are too many houses. Banks are not doing deals because too many deals have been done. All that is working overtime are the printing presses. While the greenback is exceptionally at risk we would argue that the same thing is occurring, to a greater or lesser degree, in Europe, in Japan, and even in China – despite all the happy talk about the Chinese miracle. Here’s a famous investor on the subject of China:
Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China … James S. Chanos built one of the largest fortunes on Wall Street by foreseeing the collapse of Enron and other highflying companies whose stories were too good to be true. Now Mr. Chanos, a wealthy hedge fund investor, is working to bust the myth of the biggest conglomerate of all: China Inc. As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China’s hyper-stimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,” he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent. “Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses,” he said in a recent appearance on CNBC. “And there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.” (- New York Times)
Everywhere, major economies are having difficulty. We do not believe by the way that it is absolute serendipity. The power elite knows very well how fiat money and central banking work. Those at the top of the economic food chain readily anticipated more power falling into their laps – and ultimately facilitating a worldwide economic regime. But we have to re-emphasize that these same powerful people apparently did not take the Internet into account. This is most important.
Conclusion: By putting in place the mechanisms that guarantee endless quasi-collapses, the power elite profits inordinately. By not understanding that this time around the entire circus would be available for endless replays on the Internet, the power elite has put the system into tremendous jeopardy. Too many have run across free-market arguments on the Internet and come to believe (this time around) that the system is unfair and even impractical. Too many have witnessed and comprehended the full gamut of central banking’s apparent destructive tendencies. None of this was in the game plan, in our opinion. Yet this seeming unraveling of financial certainty has tremendous ramifications for your portfolios, dear reader. We might suggest a modicum of gold and silver as you watch various fiat money economies of the world, especially the dollar, sputter and sink.
Forget Greece, the US Almost Had a Failed Treasury Bond Auction !
- But for the mysterious ‘direct bidders’ (or buyers), this was a failed 30 year auction. Yes, someone stepped up to prevent this auction failure. For all intent and purpose, Rick Santelli was right: it was an auction failure. This event is humongous in its implications. It is time to run and hide! Take cover, abandon paper assets and go to hard asset like precious metals. It is simply too difficult to predict the ramifications. Graham Summers explains:
While most of the investment world focuses on the various ”senior officials” (none of whom seem to have actual names or positions) commenting on whether Greece will or will not be bailed out/ receive an emergency loan/ offered moral support, etc, a far more significant debt story is emerging in the US.
On Wednesday the US offered $16 billion worth of 30-year Treasuries (US debt that will mature in 30 years). Before we get into the details of how much of a disaster the auction was we’re going to do a brief review of how US debt issuances work.
US Debt is issued by the US Treasury. You can bid as much as 30 days in advance of a debt auction. When the auction actually takes place investors can buy directly (Direct Buyers) by buying Treasuries themselves OR they can buy indirectly (Indirect Buyers) by using a Primary Dealer: one of 18 Banks and Securities Brokers who do business directly with the US Federal Reserve Bank of NY and so HAVE to buy Treasuries at auctions to insure liquidity. Direct buyers buy “off the radar” meaning you cannot track who the buyer is.
If an investor buys indirectly, he or she has to notify the Primary Dealer of his/her intentions in advance. This might sound a bit like showing your hand while playing poker. And it is. The only reason to go through a Primary Dealer (make an Indirect Purchase) is because you want to buy a sizable load of Treasuries (remember, Primary Dealers have a special relationship with the Fed and so can insure you get the amount you require).
Historically, Foreign Governments (China, Japan, etc) have made up the majority of Treasury purchases. Because of this, the Indirect Buyer purchases are typically thought to represent just how demand Foreign Governments have for US debt. I realize this sounds complicated so simply think of it this way:
1. Direct Buyers: folks who buy straight from the Treasury, typically comprising a minor stake in US debt purchases
2. Indirect Buyers: folks who buy LARGE chunks of US debt, typically Foreign Governments
3. Primary Dealers: banks that HAVE to buy US debt to insure an auction doesn’t fail. You don’t want to see a lot of Primary Dealer purchases as this means that those who can CHOOSE to buy US debt DON’T want to.
On Wednesday, February 10 2010, the US Treasury issued $16 billion in 30-year Treasuries. Here are the buyer data points:
Buyer Purchase Amount (%) Primary Dealers 47% Direct Buyers 24% (A RECORD) Indirect Buyers 28% First of all, we see Direct Buyers hit a RECORD percentage of purchases. This is extremely bizarre and somewhat disconcerting given that we have no way of know who these buyers are. For all we know they could be the Federal Reserve itself or other US-Government entities buying “off the radar.”
Indeed, on that note we know that the US Federal Reserve accounted for 11% of the total purchases. Folks, you’re not dealing with a healthy debt auction when the Fed accounts for 10% of purchases.
However, far, FAR more worrisome is the pathetic Indirect Buyer takedown: 28%. Historically this number has been more around 40% (Tyler at ZeroHedge notes that the average Indirect purchase of the last four long-term Treasury auctions was 39.9%). To see such a MASSIVE drop off in Indirect Buyers (40% down to 28%) is a MAJOR warning sign that Foreign Governments are no longer willing to buy long-term US debt.
This auction was a very small step away from a failed auction. To see Primary Dealers buying so much (remember they HAVE to buy it) and Indirect Buyers so little, only confirms what I’ve been saying for months, that the US is entering a Debt Spiral: a situation in which it must issue more and more debt (while rolling over trillions of old debt) at the very time that fewer and fewer investors are willing to lend to the US for any lengthy period of time (more than ten years).
Folks, forget Greece, the US has its own debt problems. And they’re MAJOR. The fact that stocks RALLIED on this news tells you how disconnected stocks are from reality. The Debt Spiral has started and is now accelerating. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes a full-fledged Crisis. And this one will make 2008 look like a cakewalk.
Europe’s Exposure To ‘PIGS’ Problem!
Damn if they bailout, damn if they don't! France and Germany are in deep deep trouble!
- The Germans and French are screwed. Even if they opt to bailout the PIGS, I doubt it will be a one time deal. The European economy is not doing well. There are too any hotspots to put out in the global economy for optimism in the near future. Damn if they do, damn if they don’t. There is no easy road out of this coming calamity. All roads lead to economic, financial and monetary crisis! My gut feeling is: they will abandon all good financial sense and go for printing money out of thin air (QE) big time. Politically, it is the least costly alternative. Just inflate their way out of the problem! Bloomberg reports:
PIGS Exposure Explains ‘Shotgun Greek Wedding’: Chart of Day
German and French banks’ “enormous” exposure to Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain explains why Europe’s biggest economies are moving to rescue their southern neighbors, Societe General SA said today in a report titled “Shotgun Greek Wedding.”
The CHART OF THE DAY shows how much money German, French, Swiss and U.K. banks have at stake in the so-called PIGS countries. Banks in Germany and France alone have a combined exposure of $119 billion to Greece and $909 billion to the four countries, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements. Overall, European banks have $253 billion in Greece and $2.1 trillion in the so-called PIGS.
“The exposure is enormous,” said Klaus Baader, co-chief European economist at Societe Generale in London. “The crisis in Greece isn’t Greece’s problem alone but a concrete problem for Europe’s whole banking sector. That explains the interest of finance ministers in stabilizing the situation.”
Leaders from the 16-nation euro area said today they have agreed to act if necessary to help Greece reduce its budget deficit and safeguard financial stability in the region. Debt- stricken Greece is struggling to convince investors it is able to reduce its deficit from 12.7 percent of gross domestic product, sparking turmoil on financial markets.
Spain, Portugal and Ireland, also suffering from gaping deficits after the worst recession since World War II, have been sucked into the swirl of widening bond spreads and soaring credit default swaps. The premium investors demand to hold 10- year bonds of the so-called PIGS countries instead of benchmark German bunds, and the cost of insuring against default, have surged this year. “The countries’ situations put the finances of fiscally stronger countries in jeopardy,” Baader said. “That’s one reason why the tone changed.”
Gold Price Will Surge To $5,000 In Two Years!
US$5,000 per ounce by 2012? I won't bet against it!
- When the sheeple realize that fiat currencies are simply a confidence game, they will run to gold and silver. The Vietnamese people are coming to this realization this past 1 year. This week the Vietnamese Dong was devalued again. The Vietnamese people are bidding up the price of gold locally so much so that the local price is at a US$17/- premium over Comex-LBMA prices. Mark my words, what is happening in Vietnam and Zimbabwe will be replicated throughout the world. Fiat currencies are worth just the paper they are printed on. Fiat currencies are in a race to the bottom against hard assets like gold and silver! Commodity Online reports:
Gold Prices will climb to $5,000 within two years due to US dollar weakness and significant buying by players in the hedge fund industry looking to preserve the value of their funds. That is the opinion of New Zealand market trading expert Welles Wilder, who has previously been highlighted by publications such as Forbes and Barron’s for his skill in the markets, stuff.co.nz reports.
His belief was revealed by another local trader Oli Hille, who trades in New Zealand’s currency markets, and is currently writing a book, which is to be titled Creating the Perfect Lifestyle. Mr Hille told the news provider: “He implies his call is based on the US dollar becoming weaker and weaker and basically falling out of bed.”
The trader learnt of Mr Wilder’s opinion on Gold Prices while interviewing him for the book, which also includes an interview with New Zealand’s prime minister John Key. It appears there is a lot of bullish sentiment on Buying Gold outside of the US, with British miner Scotgold Resources’ chief executive Chris Sangster telling the Daily Record: “We see the Gold Price staying high in the long term.”
- Don’t forget gold’s buddy: silver. Silver has even better fundamentals than gold!
Silver US$150 per ounce by 2012?
Niall Ferguson: A Greek Crisis Is Coming To America!
- Greece is but 2-3% of the Eurozone’s GDP, about US$340B. This is peanuts compared with many bankrupt states of America. The Big One is the sovereign debt default of America. Because the USD is the world reserve currency, the ramifications will be felt worldwide. No two ways about it: it will be a financial nuclear detonation when America collapses! Professor Ferguson opines:
It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the Western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate.
There is of course a distinctive feature to the eurozone crisis. Because of the way the European Monetary Union was designed, there is in fact no mechanism for a bailout of the Greek government by the European Union, other member states, or the European Central Bank (Articles 123 and 125 of the Lisbon treaty). True, Article 122 may be invoked by the European Council to assist a member state that is “seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control,” but at this point nobody wants to pretend that Greece’s yawning deficit was an act of God. Nor is there a way for Greece to devalue its currency, as it would have done in the pre-EMU days of the drachma. There is not even a mechanism for Greece to leave the eurozone.
That leaves just three possibilities: one of the most excruciating fiscal squeezes in modern European history — reducing the deficit from 13 per cent to 3 per cent of gross domestic product within just three years; outright default on all or part of the Greek government’s debt; or (most likely, as signalled by German officials on Wednesday) some kind of bailout led by Berlin. Because none of these options is very appealing, and because any decision about Greece will have implications for Portugal, Spain, and possibly others, it may take much horse-trading before one can be reached.
Yet the idiosyncrasies of the eurozone should not distract us from the general nature of the fiscal crisis that is now afflicting most western economies. Call it the fractal geometry of debt: the problem is essentially the same from Iceland to Ireland to Britain to the US. It just comes in widely differing sizes.
What we in the Western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy — zero interest rates plus quantitative easing — did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect
For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.
Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven.” US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.
Even according to the White House’s new budget projections, the gross federal debt in public hands will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years’ time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never.
The International Monetary Fund recently published estimates of the fiscal adjustments developed economies would need to make to restore fiscal stability over the decade ahead. Worst were Japan and the UK (a fiscal tightening of 13 per cent of GDP). Then came Ireland, Spain and Greece (9 per cent). And in sixth place? Step forward America, which would need to tighten fiscal policy by 8.8 per cent of GDP to satisfy the IMF.
Explosions of public debt hurt economies in the following way, as numerous empirical studies have shown. By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted — as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.
Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.
But now the Fed is phasing out such purchases and is expected to wind up quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have sharply reduced their purchases of Treasuries from around 47 per cent of new issuance in 2006 to 20 per cent in 2008 to an estimated 5 per cent last year. Small wonder Morgan Stanley assumes that 10-year yields will rise from around 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent this year. On a gross federal debt fast approaching $1,500 billion, that implies up to $300 billion of extra interest payments — and you get up there pretty quickly with the average maturity of the debt now below 50 months.
The Obama administration’s new budget blithely assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4 per cent. But with rising real rates, growth might well be lower. Under those circumstances, interest payments could soar as a share of federal revenue — from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter.
Last week Moody’s Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers’ killer question (posed before he returned to government): “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”
On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the West has begun in Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of Western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.
Depression 2010 – Western Fiat Money Finished?
- It is not pleasant to be all doom and gloom. Unfortunately, that is how the cards are stacked against the world. I try to tell it like it is. Optimism is great as long as it is not delusional. The facts on the ground say: global monetary crisis, the confidence fiat money game has just about run its course! The Daily Bell reports:
Is the Western world struggling through a bad patch? Our argument, voiced with various levels of clarity at various times, is that the West is currently living through a failure of fiat money – specifically a failure of the global anchor currency: the greenback. The dollar is on its way out not because people want it to be necessarily (though some do) but simply because it is failing as a fiat currency. Central bank fiat currencies always fail. China had a number of fiat episodes and the populace was so scarred that fiat money was reportedly even banned in the 1800s. ….
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Interestingly, we can see in the above observations that fiat money first created a wonderland of progress and amusement. That’s just what fiat money has done in the West and in Japan as well. It is now happening in China. Wherever fiat money travels it brings tremendous euphoria in its wake, though only to begin with. Cities are energized with false booms. Farm children flock to the urban environment to take jobs in factories producing ephemeral goods or work at useless government jobs – that are created from tax revenues during the boom time. Initially, because fiat money inevitably has a relationship to government, much of the perfection of society is attributed to a wise, fair-minded bureaucracy. The bureaucracy, by the way, believes it.
Monetary stimulation can go on for years. In America, it’s been going on for nearly a century – which is probably the far end of what can be expected. But people can live and die under a central banking regime – which is usually a fiat regime (or ends up that way, anyway). Yes, it cannot be emphasized enough that fiat money (along with its enabler, central banking) is a foundational curse. Just as in China, it funds wars, makes the government look wonderfully efficient and even omnipotent, fools people into believing that the non-essential jobs they have are actually essential “modern” work – and sets the stage inevitably for regulatory regimes that must eventually descend into madness and ruin.
Fiat money empowers corporatism (in the modern age anyway) and distorts civilization by helping to implode agrarian republicanism. It is no coincidence that Thomas Jefferson despised central banking – and was in fact the most famous and influential agrarian republican. We can see the remnants of this sort of society in Switzerland, which has passed laws to maintain small farms. It is difficult to create a totalitarian society – even an ephemeral one – in a land of sturdy farmers. Such individuals grow their own food, have access to water and are willing to defend their land. America was a bit like Switzerland before the Civil War but is not now.
But today, dear reader, we would propose that the West, and the entire globe, is living through a fiat money collapse. Economies all over the world have been inflated to their fullest and people can buy no more useless gadgets and work at no more superfluous jobs. Too many useful endeavors have been marginalized and phony ones have been elevated. An implosion is taking place. The world is reverting to a kind of mathematical practicality. In America, car companies have shrunk because there are too many cars, and houses are not being built because there are too many houses. Banks are not doing deals because too many deals have been done. All that is working overtime are the printing presses. While the greenback is exceptionally at risk we would argue that the same thing is occurring, to a greater or lesser degree, in Europe, in Japan, and even in China – despite all the happy talk about the Chinese miracle. Here’s a famous investor on the subject of China:
Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China … James S. Chanos built one of the largest fortunes on Wall Street by foreseeing the collapse of Enron and other highflying companies whose stories were too good to be true. Now Mr. Chanos, a wealthy hedge fund investor, is working to bust the myth of the biggest conglomerate of all: China Inc. As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China’s hyper-stimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,” he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent. “Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses,” he said in a recent appearance on CNBC. “And there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.” (- New York Times)
Everywhere, major economies are having difficulty. We do not believe by the way that it is absolute serendipity. The power elite knows very well how fiat money and central banking work. Those at the top of the economic food chain readily anticipated more power falling into their laps – and ultimately facilitating a worldwide economic regime. But we have to re-emphasize that these same powerful people apparently did not take the Internet into account. This is most important.
Conclusion: By putting in place the mechanisms that guarantee endless quasi-collapses, the power elite profits inordinately. By not understanding that this time around the entire circus would be available for endless replays on the Internet, the power elite has put the system into tremendous jeopardy. Too many have run across free-market arguments on the Internet and come to believe (this time around) that the system is unfair and even impractical. Too many have witnessed and comprehended the full gamut of central banking’s apparent destructive tendencies. None of this was in the game plan, in our opinion. Yet this seeming unraveling of financial certainty has tremendous ramifications for your portfolios, dear reader. We might suggest a modicum of gold and silver as you watch various fiat money economies of the world, especially the dollar, sputter and sink.
New 9/11 Photos ‘Prove WTC Exploded From Inside’ !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX_UKdqoa_o&feature=player_embedded
Paul Craig Roberts: It Is Now Official – The U.S. Is A Police State!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2TEhMyRmZg&feature=player_embedded
Americans must wake up and see what the snakes have done to their country. This is but the beginning of America’s nightmare. America is being ‘Nazified’ and will be used to trigger World War 3, much like Germany was used during World War 2. These New World Order Illuminati banksters are raping the country and sending America’s children to die in unnecessary evil wars!
Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil liberties.
The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for “terrorists.” Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.
The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed “terrorists” prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.
As there was no evidence against the “detainees” (most have been released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws against torture in order that the government could produce evidence via self-incrimination. The Bush regime found inhumane and totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) to invent arguments that the Bush regime did not need to obey the law.
The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that it used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized by the regime as “the 760 most dangerous men on earth,” there was little public outcry over the regime’s unconstitutional and inhumane actions.
As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S. citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui an American citizen of Pakistani origin might have been the first. Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military’s notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children were with her at the time she was abducted, one an eight-month old baby. She has no idea what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.
Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24605.htm An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier’s rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier’s excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach resulting in her near death.
On February 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.
Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: “The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers.” An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim. This is the kind of “justice” that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.
The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted. This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.
Anyone can be next. Indeed, on February 3 Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now “defined policy” that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government’s judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.
This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat. I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans abroad as it kills them at home–Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.
Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but Dennis Blair’s “defined policy” is a bold new development. The government, of course, denies that it intended to kill the Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver’s wife and child, or the Black Panthers. The government says that Waco was a terrible tragedy, an unintended result brought on by the Branch Davidians themselves. The government says that Ruby Ridge was Randy Weaver’s fault for not appearing in court on a day that had been miscommunicated to him, The Black Panthers, the government says, were dangerous criminals who insisted on a shoot-out.
In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S. government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime. In contrast, Dennis Blair has told the U.S. Congress that the executive branch has assumed the right to murder Americans who it deems a “threat.”
What defines “threat”? Who will make the decision? What it means is that the government will murder whomever it chooses. There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a police state than the government announcing that it will murder its own citizens if it views them as a “threat.” Ironic, isn’t it, that “the war on terror” to make us safe ends in a police state with the government declaring the right to murder American citizens who it regards as a threat.
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles.
Webster Tarpley: False Flag Underwear Bomber!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU4RjI9ZhKA&feature=player_embedded
Yes, the Christmas underwear bomber was a false flag event. The shadow government is rapidly driving America towards a police state using fear. This is also what Pastor Lindsey Williams highlighted in his videos in October 2009, almost 3 months before the event.
The Big One Is Coming Soon! How To Invest For A Global-Debt-Bomb Explosion!
- Will Germany and France agree to finance a bailout of Greece? Germany’s debt to GDP ration is about 85%, France’s about 80%. These are bad figures although not as bad as the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). Reports are suggesting that Germany may agree to a bailout because their banks are heavily exposed to Greece’s debt. Whichever way you choose to look at it, bailout or otherwise, calamity is ahead. Should they opt to use their citizens’ money to bailout Greece, it creates a moral dilemma. It will also increase their debt to GDP ration. This will simply drag both Germany and France down the sovereign debt default tube. What about the rest of the PIIGS who need bailouts? No amount of money is enough for this crisis!
- Paul B. Farrell opines about this coming debt implosion:
Prepare for an apocalyptic anarchy ending Wall Street’s toxic capitalism
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The Big One is coming soon, bigger than the 2000 dot-com crash and the 2008 subprime credit meltdown combined. A huge market blowout. And as Bloomberg-BusinessWeek predicts: “The results won’t be pretty for investors or elected officials.”
After the global-debt bomb explodes don’t expect a typical bear correction followed by a new bull. Wall Street’s toxic pseudo-capitalism is imploding. Be prepared for a massive meltdown. Yes, already the third major bubble-bust of the 21st century, triggered once again by Wall Street’s out-of-control Fat Cat Bankers. And it’s dead ahead.
Can your family survive in the anarchy after the debt bomb explodes?
America’s already descending into economic anarchy. We’re all trapped in a historic economic supercycle, a turning point that must bleed through a no-man’s land of lawless self-destructive anarchy before a neo-capitalistic world can re-emerge. Investors tell me they “feel” it at a deep level, “know” it’s happening. They keep asking: “What’s the best investment strategy to prepare now?”
This is no joke, folks. Are you prepared? Or preparing? Will your family survive in a post-apocalyptic world, when anarchy is rampant in America? Look at Washington, Wall Street and Corporate America today. You know it’s already begun.
You are witnessing a fundamental breakdown of the American dream, a systemic breakdown of our democracy and our capitalism, a breakdown driven by the blind insatiable greed of Wall Street: Dysfunctional government, insane markets, economy on the brink. Multiply that many times over and see a world in total disarray. Ignore it now, tomorrow will be too late.
Not a war about ideology, but an economic game-changer
This is a war to control 299 million American taxpayers. A war waged by the “Happy Conspiracy” Jack Bogle profiled in his 2004 “Battle for the Soul of Capitalism,” a war machine of Fat Cat Bankers, CEOs, 42,000 mercenary lobbyists and a Congress held hostage to unlimited campaign donations. Their conspiracy has been waging this war against Americans for decades, long before the Supreme Court exposed their dirty secret.
Yes, your enemy is that “Happy Conspiracy:” It has degraded into a pseudo-capitalism with no conscience, no sense of the public good, hell-bent on controlling America’s mind, your money and the global markets for its own selfish ends. And eventually it will trigger the game-changing global-debt bomb, the third global meltdown of the century that finally ignites the Great Depression II, plunging us into an era of anarchy.
Investors keep asking: “If it is coming, how do I invest? Buy gold? Commodities? Hedge? Short trading? TIPS? Hoard cash? Buy and hold? Lazy Portfolios?” What if the Dow sinks below 5,000? Maybe the worst-case scenario recently predicted by Bob Prechter: A deeper plunge to the 1,000 range? Imagine a global depression, a bear market dragging on for decades: “How do I protect my family? Can I ever retire? What do I invest in? How can anyone prepare?”
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Here’s how these savvy Insiders are preparing: In his 2008 best-seller, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” hedge fund manager Barton Biggs, a highly respected Insider in the “Happy Conspiracy,” advised rich insiders to expect the “possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”
His advice: Make tons of money. Buy an isolated farm in the mountains. Protect family against the barbarians: “Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food … It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson.”
How Wall Street insiders will treat Main Street in ‘The Anarchy’
And when the barbarians do come, firing “a few rounds over the approaching brigands’ heads would probably be a compelling persuader that there are easier farms to pillage.” Imagine a scene like Port-au-Prince after the quake. Biggs is no radical anarchist, he’s an establishment Insider, a great guy. We both arrived at Morgan Stanley about the same time. Biggs remained 30 years, was Morgan’s chief global strategist. Ten times Institutional Investor magazine put him on Wall Street’s “All-America Research Team.”
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How can America’s 299 million ’second-class citizens’ invest for anarchy?
So what can the average Joe and Jane, the other 299 million Americans do? Warning: In anarchy, nobody knows. Period. The only possible strategy: “Think Swiss Family Robinson.” Stockpile like a “Happy Conspiracy Insider.”
Many still challenge us about proven strategies like buy and hold, Modern Portfolio Theory, Lazy Portfolios. Unfortunately, they all need a real democracy driven by honest, transparent capitalism to function effectively. They can’t function in anarchy.
And Wall Street’s already lapsed into a toxic pseudo-capitalism, using it to manipulate Main Street America. Eventually that mindset will force Main Street Americans to misuse the same dark “Swiss Family Robinson” tactics as the Insiders in order to survive the coming anarchy.
What’s our alternative? A new American Revolution
But wait, wait, I hear you asking loudly: There must be an alternative to this dark descent into anarchy, to the loss of everything that made America the greatest nation in history? Yes there is an alternative. Out of the ashes of anarchy must come a Second American Revolution. But unfortunately nothing will happen until a great crisis awakens America … shocks the conscience of the masses … we are “asleep” … only a seismic, systemic shock will trigger the necessary revolution.
The future of our economy and indeed our nation demands another political revolution. We must take back our democracy and capitalism from a government run by Wall Street and its “Happy Conspiracy” … their toxic self-serving power hold must be broken and, if not, a rising new conspiracy of China, India, oil-sovereignties and asset-rich nations will replace our homegrown “Happy Conspiracy” as it eventually goes down in the flames of anarchy.
Sadly, that’s the future many of us realists see ahead for America.
MarketClub: Is It Deja Vu Again For the Dow?
History seems to be repeating itself! Click on image to start video!
- Is history repeating itself? The current bull market run from the bottom in March 2009 should be viewed as a bear market correction upwards. The market seems to be following the pattern set in the 1st Great Depression 1929 – 1939. The market plunged precipitously and then staged a stunning 50% recovery into 1930. We are seeing a similar situation now. Will history repeat itself? History repeats itself but not exactly, it ‘rhymes’ so to speak. Watch this video from MarketClub to get a perspective on where the market may be heading!
Side Note:
The following article was published in today's opinion section of The Daily Texan, the school newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin. The Texan has a daily circulation of about 30,000, is the biggest student-run newspaper in the South, and has a large online following - so it's all about getting the word out.
Defending the empire
by Calvin Sloan
"According to professor Robert Jensen of the School of Journalism, “As long as the United States is an empire, government officials will try to keep the public in the dark about the nature of the empire.”
Given the 865 military bases abroad, the euphemistic “Overseas Contingency Operations,” and the military strategy of “full-spectrum dominance” that the United States oversees, our country is without a doubt the global hegemon of the day. Given the us-versus-them framework that is propagated by our politicians and mainstream media outlets alike to simplify, or outright falsify, the nature of our imperial ambitions, the powers that be are without a doubt attempting to keep the U.S. citizenry out of the know.
The most infamous tactic that governments use to alter the public mind in their favor is propaganda. In America, where the synergy and consolidation of private interests dominate both the medium and message of information dissemination, the existence of propaganda is blatantly visible.
However, the empire has another powerful, much less discussed tool in its arsenal: censorship."
Read on at:
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/defending-the-empire-1.2146472
Michael Springman: CIA Ordered Visas For 15 of The 19, 9/11 Hijackers in Jeddah! (Part 1,2 &3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmjAg_-Vi9Y&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHMFlK4r7Js&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFvFAm2ZjV4&feature=player_embedded
Jim Sinclair: Unprecedented Challenges In Financial History !
- When the master Jim Sinclair speaks, I keep quiet and listen. What he says is of great importance. Anyone who wants an ounce of understanding of what is happening in the global financial and fiat currency markets, need to read and ponder what he says. I don’t claim to understand what he says entirely. But I am in agreement with his conclusions: Calamity ahead, global monetary crisis leading to new monetary system and major dislocation worldwide! Maestro Jim Sinclair writes :
My Dear Extended Family,
I doubt there has ever been a time in financial history when there has been challenges of this magnitude. This is not business as usual in any form. When have financial meetings been so top secret?
When has the military cordon off financial meetings?
When have F-18s, F-22s and French Rafales provided air support (as the Swiss did for the Davos seminar) for two central bank meetings in the last few weeks as the USA and Australia did?
Don’t accept terrorism as an excuse for everything that remains unexplained. There are so many lies and so much misinformation out there that the task of figuring out what is real is a daunting task. I implore you to go for safety in everything you do. How can you go wrong hunkering down? Do not speculate.
You cannot out trade these people nor can you read their intentions by charts. Both are impossibilities.Do not deal on borrowed money. Secure you and yours. Take delivery of your precious metals and share certificates. We are in unchartered seas of international financial turmoil. The mega rich have no loyalty to anyone or anything. I know some of them, made one of them from scratch, and I assure you would put their mothers in a microwave for the right price. This is a financial world war taking place behind top secret meetings that are deciding our fate while not even knowing they are out of control. I can’t change this but I can do my best to protect you.
Respectfully,
Jim (9 Feb 2010)
Thought For The Day:
Gold has spoken out both before and after US trading hours for two days now on the developments taking place in the darkened central bankers meeting room. This is the same room with the shades pulled down, military and police guards out front and air support flying above.
The floating exchange system as it now exists is going be folded. We are moving toward a one Western world currency, and one Western world central bank of central banks. Because all Western world federal budget deficits are out of control and there is no PRACTICAL method to reverse this condition in the foreseeable future, there is no other alternative. That means the two major Western World currencies will be Gold and the SDR (type entity).
Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism: Criticism of Obama Regime Serves “The Goals of Al-Qaeda”
Via: ABC News:
In an oped in USA Today, John Brennan — Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism — responds to critics of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies by saying “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”
Brennan writes that, “Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill.”
In the oped, titled “‘We need no lectures’: Administration disrupts terrorists’ plots, takes fight to them abroad,” Brennan writes that politics “should never get in the way of national security. But too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming together to keep us safe.”
The administration op-ed is in response to a USA Today editorial entitled “National security team fails to inspire confidence; Officials’ handling of Christmas Day attack looks like amateur hour.”
He suggests that many critics are hypocritical and clueless.
Senior Chinese Military Officers: Sell U.S. Bonds
Via: Reuters:
Senior Chinese military officers have proposed that their country boost defense spending, adjust PLA deployments, and possibly sell some U.S. bonds to punish Washington for its latest round of arms sales to Taiwan.
The calls for broad retaliation over the planned U.S. weapons sales to the disputed island came from officers at China’s National Defence University and Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed by Outlook Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine published by the official Xinhua news agency.
The interviews with Major Generals Zhu Chenghu and Luo Yuan and Senior Colonel Ke Chunqiao appeared in the issue published on Monday.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) plays no role in setting policy for China’s foreign exchange holdings. Officials in charge of that area have given no sign of any moves to sell U.S. Treasury bonds over the weapons sales, a move that could alarm markets and damage the value of China’s own holdings.
'Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us' in March Issue of Hustler Magazine (Now on Newsstands)
The article brings the story of Edmonds, who was twice-gagged by the Bush Administration's outrageous use/abuse of the "States Secrets Privilege," fully up to date following her naming of names, finally, under oath, in remarkable testimony last summer. (Some of those names: Hastert, Burton, Blunt, Lantos, Schakowsky, Wolfowitz, Perle, Grossman, etc.)
The Hustler piece, "Sibel Edmonds: The Traitors Among Us," also explores reasons for the perhaps-even-more-remarkable complete avoidance of her 4-hour, detailed, video-taped testimony by the corporate media (Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine excepted, if you consider them to be "corporate media") concerning allegations of blackmail of sitting U.S. Congressmembers, the theft and sale of nuclear secrets to the foreign blackmarket, and other allegations of treasonous activities by top State and Defense Department officials over the last decade or more, as we have covered in great detail here at The BRAD BLOG over the years, as the story has unfolded.
So there's your latest excuse to go buy Hustler. While you're at the newsstand, please pick up a copy of the February issue of Maxim as well, featuring Simon Worrall's feature article on the formerly-'censored' story of the mysterous death of GOP IT guru Mike Connell, as detailed in our recent exclusive preview.
Who knew the stories reported almost exclusively by The BRAD BLOG and a handful of others in the independent progressive media were so darn sexy?!
Read more at The Brad Blog
