Category: Economy

Reading Pluto’s piece on Chase, America’s soon-to-be most hated bank, and thought to myself “Johnny, now normally you have an economic and civil libertarian bent,but you also believe that when the market fails the gov’ steps in and vice versa.”  This got me thinking (the white russian helps), President Obama is pushing right now for that “public option” (yes, I know, Medicare for all, but so far that ain’t the deal we’re getting) for health care, maybe its time we look at one for banking?

To most people, it’s a recession, or even a depression.

To those with money, it’s a “buying opportunity”.  

For those who are financing the ridiculous debt this country is burying itself into, it might be a good time to cash out.

And by cashing out, I mean cashing out, as in getting out of cash and going for the hard stuff:  gold, and land.  And where better to buy the land, than in the country whose dollar is about to be utterly devalued, the good old United States of America.  

What a buying opportunity!

Chinese official urges buying of gold, U.S. land: report

Li Lianzhong, who is head of economics at the party’s policy research office, said the U.S. dollar is poised for a fall, making gold and land better investments for China’s $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the report said.

Why might “Change and Hope for American Indians start with Peltier’s Freedom?”

Writing in the the current print issue of Rolling Stone, journalist Matt Taibbi exposes Goldman Sachs, the “world’s most powerful investment bank”, for the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” that it truly is.

In “The Great American Bubble Machine”, Taibbi outlines how Goldman Sachs has either influenced, shaped, or simply created five market bubbles since 1929 and how now, the bankers are planning to use the greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade scheme as their penultimate bubble.

While I do not agree with some of the conclusions he makes, there is enough in his 9,700 word essay that can make the blood boil.

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere,” he begins. But, “any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything.”

The green shoots, the most wonderful propaganda onslaught since General Petraeus’s heroic, Reaganesque winning of the Iraq war through the ‘SURGE’ has failed. The stinking undead zombie that is the U.S. economy has not been resurrected through the massive infusions of taxpayer dollars, perhaps spent billions on public relations and lobbying and the changing of the mark to market rules only bought times for the financial predators. The wonderful government subsidized markets are tanking again, there are still no jobs, the housing market is not at all improving, the banks aren’t lending and by the way, there are truck bombs are going off in Baghdad again. While neocons and Repiglicans have their panties in a bunch over Barack Obama’s not getting behind their little Iranian PSYOP the real outcry should be from every taxpayer in Der Heimat beause they have just been bent over backwards and butt-fucked by Barack’s Wall Street Dream Team into funneling billions into the Ponzi schemes, getting nothing but pink slips and foreclosure notices in return and are about to have any hope of a national health care ripped away by the corrupt, on-the-take non-term limited cesspool dwellers in Congress.

And the myth of Ronald Reagan is just like the one about Santa Claus, only silliness for the credulous little children of lemming land. Horseshit, total horseshit.

The Bene Gesserit Littainy against Fear.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

Crosspsoted at daily kos

Top 5 Lobbyists for the First Quarter of 2009

1. Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A.: $9,996,000

2. Exxon Mobil: $9,320,000

3. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America: $6,910,000

4. Chevron U.S.A. Inc: $6,800,000

5. Lockheed Martin Corporation: $6,380,000

    No wonder there are so many alternatives to real reform and real change. If the buck stops in Washington the buck started in a lobbyists briefcase.

    Simply put, if they can afford to lobby, they can afford to change.

    This goes for every Special Interest and every Big Business. While they fight change and kick and scream we here in Real America are fucking dying. We are dying while fighting your wars, we are dying waiting for health care reform, we are going broke waiting for Wall St to clean up it’s act, to make a long point short, Americans know you have the money, and now it is time to ante up.

Want to know what an Ivy League education will get you?  

Apparently nobody at the Federal Reserve has any clue where the trillions of dollars that have come from the Fed’s expanded balance sheet have gone. Additionally, nobody there seems to have any idea what the losses on the Fed’s $2 trillion portfolio really are.

Here’s a question? Have you done anything or is it your job to just get in the fucking way? Have you ever just wanted to grab one of these SOB’s by the throat and just shake the truth out of them?

Sometimes a picture says more than words.

This was the FED’s balance sheet up until 2007.

This is what has happened to the FED’s balance sheet from 2008.

For all you defaltionists out there … this Bud’s for you.

Nuff said.  (:o)

I’ve been a fan of Chris Hedges ever since I first noticed him.  The guy is simply tuned in.

But this recent piece of his can leave you staring at the ceiling, wide awake, when you should be sleeping.  

The American Empire Is Bankrupt

Here’s a small sample:

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism … there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities-think Enron-for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

Buhdy is probably going to ban me sooner or later for lazy blogolalia (like echolalia, only blog-centric).  Peter Schiff, who predicted much of the economic whirlwind that Obama is intending to put back in Pandora’s box, showed up in comments asking WTF the proprietors at The Automatic Earth, Ilargi and Stoneleigh, ever predicted.  After all, he is Peter Schiff!

Stoneleigh responded, and because the TAE feel free to post articles whole, this will be one of the few times that I re-produce Stoneleigh’s part of the post in its entirety, fair use be damned (They can feel free to sue me for all my debt obligations, then put me to work as an indentured slave milking goats).  As a one-time practicing scientist, I would consider the predictions made to be of the “strong” variety.

With all the bullshit being broadcast, you would think that some green shoots would indeed be sprouting somewhere sooner of later, but somehow it’s not all that convincing.  Remember those “stress tests” used to determine the health of the banks spreadsheets under various scenarios of economic growth and unemployment?  Hot damn!  What a confidence booster.  The banks passed them after renegotiating their grades.  Even though the then-current economic conditions were already worse than the worst-case scenario envisioned.  We can attribute that to “lag time,” or something.  In defense of the Masters of the Universe, things really are moving faster than the speed of thought.

At least someone in charge is catching up after the fact.  The woman in charge of overseeing the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program–what a sweet-assed name for a broken apocolypse condom!), Elizabeth Warren, suggests that we need to re-run the stress tests “right now” based on current conditions, because:

We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment.

In other words, the stress test results are about as valuable as the paper in the bank vaults.  Less than not very much at all.  We have already “blown past” those sunnier scenarios.

I appreciate Warren’s candor, which is certainly at odds with what we’ve been hearing from Obama and the MoUs.