Currency collpase inevitable?

Capital crimes

The U.S. is about to go broke and they’ll take us down with them [Macleans.ca]

America is about to go broke and every Western country, including Canada, will pay the price.

Abortive coup in the US ignored by media, hushed up by TPTB [Info Clearing House]

On the coming neo-feudalism [Animal Spirits]

FEMA’s National Level Exercise scheduled for late July is supposedly a counter-terrorism drill, but I would bet it involves practicing how to impose martial law.

What’s in your bug-out bag? [Chris Martenson.com]

You bought your neighbor a house, you paid off their credit cards, and now you get to buy them a car. Congratulations America, you have now gone full retard.

New, Hard Evidence of Continuing Debt Collapse! [Martin Weiss]

Goldman Sachs has “Self-Actualizing” information on Hyper-Inflation [Goldman Sachs Rules]

“The Greenspan era has nurtured a vast financial sector. All the people in this business need something to do. Since they invest other people’s money, they are biased toward bullish sentiment. Otherwise, if they say it’s all bad, their investors will take back the money, and they will lose their jobs. Governments know that, and create noise to give them excuses to be bullish.” -Andy Xie

The Treasury is really the nasty piece of work, so why does the Fed gets all the blame? [Market Skeptics]

Its a plan to crash our currencies, what comes nexts is special drawing rights, the 2009 name for the Bancor devised by john maynard keynes backed by 12 or so different commodities or the amero. However, it will have the same problems as the dollar, just on a global scale. We want sound money and money that is not issued by globalists. Wake up people there is a worldwide conspiracy going on to bring all of us further into global and regional government. We need currency competition and national soveriegnty all of us. US, Canada Mexico . -Bukkake-sake

Andy Xie: Tight Spot for Fed, Blind Spot for Investors [Caijing.com.cn]

“In the long run, all companies go bankrupt.” -Andy Xie

It’s Finished, It’s Over, The Fat Lady has Sung, rotsa ruck [London Review of Books]

De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire [Prof. Michael Hudson]

Devolution doesn’t threaten the Status Quo, so that’s why it is: Coming Soon! [Of Two Minds]

Middle class household(s) might actually respond with an anger deep and hot enough to become political if their middle-class lifestyle was taken away in one swoop. But devolution insures that the process is akin to the famous analogy of the boiled frog: if the temperature of the water is increased slowly enough, the frog never notices (or so the story goes) that he is being boiled alive.  [Charles Hugh Smith]

In hindsight, perhaps I should have hung on to that storage locker.

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Who regulates the regulators?

Gold 7:1 DJIA, FDIC is broke, Obama needs to man-up

Not what you want to hear, I know

***UPDATE***

Still, Lewis and Cohan [link to article in headline image below], critical as they may be, refuse to put into words what should be evident: the present administration has no intention whatsoever of opening up any book, or investigate who did what on Wall Street. The few executives who have been forced out are simply those who fell out of favor, not the most inept or suspicious figures. Bernie Madoff will be victimized and hung out to dry, but the extent of his crime and the names inside his network will be kept secret. The same will be true of Tangelo Mozilo, who could potentially drag down with him scores of financiers and politicians, but won’t be allowed to. In the end, Lewis and Cohan elect to lose themselves in what can only be called rhetorical propositions to provide clarity; rhetorical because they don’t (re-) present a chance in hell.

[-Ilargi The Automatic Earth]

– ***UPDATE***

Eating the Seed Corn

President Obama and his advisors, Treasury secretary and Fed chairman are gambling trillions of borrowed dollars that pouring the borrowed money into failed banks, insurance companies, auto manufacturers and assorted other sinkholes will somehow magically spark a renewal of those ephemeral “animal spirits” which cause consumers to run out and borrow stupendous sums and then squander it all on new stuff.

Would anyone care to guess how many American households are burning through their savings, withdrawing IRA funds or draining the last of their remaining credit just to get by? At least one of my friends is draining his retirement funds to live while some investment real estate sells and he launches a new enterprise. If the real estate fails to sell, he could run out of money despite being worth quite a lot on paper. I doubt he is the only one in this circumstance, or the only one eating the seed corn in hopes 2010 will be better.

Only a fool who perversely wants to lose money would give credit to an over-leveraged, over-indebted borrower with no collateral.

As interest rates on the trillions borrowed skyrocket then the interest payments alone will crowd out spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, etc., essentially impoverishing the American people who placidly stood by while the bet was placed (“$3 trillion on number 13, please”) and lost.

[Of Two Minds]

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Nightmare scenario – or realistic?

Or just a doomsayers wet dream?

Prediction seven. With their pension dreams squashed, and their salaries frozen or cut, olice and other local government workers will turn to wholesale corruption in order to survive. America’s ideal of honest, courteous, and impartial cops, teachers, and small-time local functionaries will have come to an end.

By 2012, there will be a general feeling that the nation is in immediate danger of blowing up or coming apart at the seams. This fear will be justified, given that the U.S. has always been held together by the promise of a continuously rising material standard of living—the famous “pursuit of happiness”—rather than any ethnic or religious ties. If that goes, so could everything else. We were lucky in the 1930s—we may not be so lucky again.

The Worst Case Scenario (Someone Has to Say It) [Seeking Alpha]

Bloomberg accuses Geithner of fraud and collusion

Turbo Timmeh Shitener (he of the extensively deficient resumé) is the ultimate scam artiste.

BB doesn’t come right out and say it (this is the MSM after all), but the implication is there in black and white:

“Compare that with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s latest proposal to help financial institutions remove unwanted loans and mortgage-backed securities from their balance sheets.

“Under the Treasury’s Public-Private Investment Program, the size of which could hit $1 trillion, the government plans to invest side-by-side with private investors who place bids on toxic assets that have plummeted in value. Those buyers, lured by federal loans and guarantees, might include affiliates of the same struggling banks and insurance companies the program is designed to assist.”

I suppose Ferdinand Pecora is rolling over in his grave. He never expected his report on the fraud and abuse that laed to GD1 would actually be used as a primer for .gov to game the markets.

“As with an old-fashioned pool, one of the public-private program’s biggest vulnerabilities is that it invites collusion. That was one of the points made in a report this week by the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s inspector general.”

Dark pools of mattter

“The Treasury program’s goal is to drive up prices and stimulate trading, so the financial institutions can minimize their losses and replenish their capital. Should the prices later collapse, taxpayers could end up with the vast majority of any losses.

As with an old-fashioned pool, one of the public-private program’s biggest vulnerabilities is that it invites collusion. That was one of the points made in a report this week by the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s inspector general.”

““In both the Legacy Loans Program and the Legacy Securities Program, the significant government-financed leverage presents a great incentive for collusion between the buyer and seller of the asset, or the buyer and other buyers, whereby, once again, the taxpayer takes a significant loss while others profit,” the report said.”

Turbo Taxcheat Timmeh looking out for his cronies friends. Expect him to be amply compensated.

“No Controls

“Similar collusion could occur in the program for mortgage- backed securities. Fund managers might agree to overpay for each other’s holdings, leaving taxpayers to bear the losses. So far, the report said, the Treasury Department hasn’t set up the systems it needs to ensure proper oversight, such as basic conflict-of-interest rules or disclosure requirements for the private-equity firms’ owners.”

In Turbo Tim’s world, every asset always appreciates. Always.

“The main premise of Geithner’s plan is that the banks’ toxic assets are now priced at artificially low levels. As the federal bailout program’s Congressional Oversight Panel wrote in an April 7 report, “Treasury has not explained its assumption that the proper values for these assets are their book values,” rather than the prices unsubsidized investors would pay for them.

” ‘If Treasury’s premise proves false, we may end up looking back on the Public-Private Investment Program as an elaborate pump-and-dump game. Only this time, unlike with the pools that sucked in gullible investors during the 1920s, the big losers would be taxpayers — who never had the choice of not playing.’ “

“It’s hard to imagine that Pecora would think any of this is a good idea.”

[BB]

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legerdemain
1 : sleight of hand
2 : a display of skill or adroitness

AIG Threatens World Meltdown If Denied More Money

AIG Threatens World Meltdown If Denied More Money

March 9 (Bloomberg) — American International Group Inc. appealed for its fourth U.S. rescue by telling regulators the company’s collapse could cripple money-market funds, force European banks to raise capital, cause competing life insurers to fail and wipe out the taxpayers’ stake in the firm.

AIG needed immediate help from the Federal Reserve and Treasury to prevent a “catastrophic” collapse that would be worse for markets than the demise last year of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., according to a 21-page draft AIG presentation dated Feb. 26, labeled as “strictly confidential” and circulated among federal and state regulators.

“What happens to AIG has the potential to trigger a cascading set of further failures which cannot be stopped except by extraordinary means,’’ said the presentation by New York- based AIG. “Insurance is the oxygen of the free enterprise system. Without the promise of protection against life’s adversities, the fundamentals of capitalism are undermined.’’

[BB]

Talk about throwing good money after bad!