By LearnLiberty: One common claim is that capitalism
exploits the masses for the benefit of the few. Many people who think
capitalism exploits workers advocate increasing government power over
the economy. Professor Matt Zwolinski suggests, however, that government
power may be more exploitative than free-market capitalism.
17 Jul 2012
'West invented Al-Qaeda, monster turned on master' George Galloway
How Bernanke will cause the next crash before 2014
By Paul B. Farrell: “Massive wealth destruction
coming,” warns Hong Kong economist Marc Faber, one of many “Dr. Dooms”
we’ve featured over the years. Faber warned in a recent interview on CNBC:
The Super-Rich “may lose up to 50 percent of their total wealth.”
The Super-Rich “may lose up to 50 percent of their total wealth.”
How? “Somewhere down the line we will have a massive wealth destruction.
That usually happens either through very high inflation or through
social unrest or through war or credit-market collapse.” And as if to
punctuate his message, in Barron’s recent “Midyear Roundup,” Faber was
asked, “Will things get worse before they get better?”
Answer: “Yes, possibly much worse,” adding “most markets peaked in May
2011.” He expects “further weakness in the second half of the year.
Corporate profits will disappoint … stock markets are oversold. The U.S.
government-bond market is overbought. The U.S. dollar is overbought,
and gold is oversold near term.” Worse, he’s “very negative about the
outlook longer term.”
In spite of his doom and gloom about America and the world economy, when
pressed Faber did recommend some China REITs. And waffled a bit on
America: “It is safest to buy U.S. Treasurys because the U.S. can print
money” and “pay the interest. But you are earning only 1.6%, and the
cost of living is increasing by about 5% a year around the world. You
are getting a negative real return.”
Not very promising in today’s uncertain world, where the American
elections are unlikely to solve the economy’s core jobs problem, no
matter who wins in November.
So when comes the change? “Down the line.” “The breaking point could be
three, four, five years away. The world is heading toward a major
crisis.”
OK, he hedges his bet on timing. But he’s very clear on how and why: The
collapse will be “caused by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and
the Federal Reserve’s continuous printing of new money.”
Hugh Hendry: “Bad things are going to happen and I still think the closest analogy is the 1930s.”
Submitted by Tyler Durden: There are various reasons why not only we at
Zero Hedge are big fans of Hugh Hendry. One of them of course is his
uncanny ability to not only tell the truth, but to bash his competitors
faces into it (as Joseph Stiglitz so vividly
recalls), even if it means running squarely against the consensus. The
other reason are self-aware statements such as this one via the FT
today: "What I found was that when I speak in person, and
especially when it’s television and timing is so acute, it gives the
impression that I am cavalier and, if you will, full of myself,”
says Mr Hendry, speaking by phone from his office in Bayswater, central
London." Hendry was obviously discussing his self-imposed media
blackout which unlike other prominent financiers is not being used for
book sales promotion purposes but appears quite genuine. It also means
he won't get to collect $200/appearance fees as a guest contributor on
CNBC but we digress. "The danger when people look at that from a
distance is that they try to align that with the guy that they’ve just
given $50m or $75m to and it’s not the same person." iI is sad that none
of the other talking muppet heads and "daily pundits" who appear on
financial comedy TV to merely blow smoke up assorted holes and talk
their books, don't share Hendry's revelations a little more often.
Still, what Hendry says and thinks influences many. So here is where he stands right now
Cotton Candy Fraud - Max Keiser with Chris Cook
It is now official: The Eurozone’s monetary transmission system is broken - Yanis Varoufakis
'This is what a monetary union on the verge
of collapse looks like.'
Under normal conditions, the
interest rates that you and I must pay on a home loan, a car loan, our
credit card, a business loan are pegged onto two crucial rates. One is
the rate that banks charge one another in order to borrow from each
other. The other is the Central Bank’s overnight rate. Alas, neither of
these interest rates matter during this Crisis. While such ‘official’
rates are tending to zero (as Central Banks try to squeeze the costs of
borrowing to nothing), the interest rates people and firms pay are much,
much higher and track indices of fear and subjective estimates of the
Eurozone’s disintegration.
Following the Crash of 2008, banks
stopped lending to each other, fearful that they will never get their
money back (as most banks became, in effect, insolvent). Thus, the
interest rate at which they lend to one another simply ceased being a
meaningful price (just like the prices of CDOs, following Lehman’s
collapse, lost their meaning as no one bought or sold those pieces of
paper). The truly scandalous aspect of the Libor scandal of recent weeks
is that banks continued to use (and ‘fix’) an estimate of the interest
rate at which they lent to each other (for the purposes of fixing all
other interest rates; e.g. mortgage and credit card rates) when they did
not lend to each other any more…
The demise of Libor and other measures
of inter-bank lending interest rates left us with the official interest
rate of Central Banks, like the European Central Bank. Recently, in an
acknowledgment of past errors and of the strength of the European
austerity-induced recession, the ECB lowered its key interest rate to
0.75% – the lowest level since the euro’s inception. At the same time,
the ECB did something else that is extraordinary by its own standards:
it reduced to zero the interest rate it paid private banks for
depositing money with the ECB.
Under normal conditions, such an
aggressive interest rate reduction would drag downward all interest
rates: with private banks being able to borrow at a pitiful 0.75% from
the ECB to lend on to the private sector, and having no incentive
whatsoever to park their idle capital with the ECB, one might have hoped
(as the ECB’s President, Mr Mario Draghi, clearly did) that banks would
be more willing to lend and at a lower interest rate. However, such
hopes would have been baseless. Indeed, the interest rates p[aid by
households and companies remained high, the banks’ funding costs even
increased, and the normal ‘monetary transmission mechanism’ (i.e. the
system that converts lower official Central Bank interest rates into an
increase in the supply of money) proved to be broken and beyond repair.
The question is: Why?
Occupy Bohemian Grove: Secret 1% getaway revealed
Criminal Inquiry Shifts To JPMorgan's Mispricing Of Hundreds Of Billions In CDS: Is Dimon The Next Diamond?
Submitted by Tyler Durden: On the last day of May, when we first learned
via Bloomberg that there was even the scantest likelihood that JPM may
have been massaging its CDS marks within the (London-based of course)
CIO organization - the backbone of hundreds of billions in notional
exposure, and thus a huge counterfeited benefit to trader bonuses and corporate earnings - we wrote, "The Second Act Of The JPM CIO Fiasco Has Arrived - Mismarking Hundreds Of Billions In Credit Default Swaps" in which we explained precisely how this activity would and did take place, precisely why other traders caught doing the same are on the verge of being thrown in jail, precisely why everyone else does it, and precisely why
the biggest CDS self-reporting and client/banker owned-organization
(this is where images of Libor should appear), MarkIt, may well be
implicated in everything - very much in the same way that the BBA is the
heart of Lie-borgate. Because unlike all other allegations of
impropriety, most of which rely on Level 2 and Level 3 assets whose
valuations are in the eye of the oh so very sophisticated beholder (in
this case JPM) who has complex DCFs and speaks confidently when
explaining marks to naive, stupid outsiders (in other words baffles with bullshit),
when it comes to one of the last places where Mark to Market is still
applicable and used: the OTC CDS market, and where daily P&L records
are kept, it will take any regulator, enforcer, or criminal
investigator precisely 1 minute to find out if there was fraud, or
gambling, going on here.68-year-old car buyer mistaken for terrorist due to credit report
By Madison Ruppert:
Sandra Cortez got a lot more than she bargained for when she went to buy a new car and within an hour was threatened with calls to the FBI by the staff at the Denver dealership she went to.
Cortez’s ludicrous encounter is far from the first and will almost certainly not be the last case of someone being confused with a terrorist or international criminal simply due to a similar or shared name and then being treated as such.
In this instance, Cortez was unlucky enough to happen to share her
name with someone on a government list including fine company like
suspected terrorists, international drug traffickers and even people
associated with weapons of mass destruction.
The 68-year-old grandmother and accountant clearly is none of those
things, but it didn’t stop her from being forced to struggle over the
mistake from 2005 to 2010.
Anti-Drone Terminator Countermesasures with Mike Adams
Today across America, we're witnessing an explosion in the planned
deployment of spy drones, military drones and surveillance drones, both
for law enforcement use and military use. The FAA has granted permission
for tens of thousands of drones to be flown in the skies of America,
and companies like Raytheon are working on tiny munitions (missiles)
that can be carried by single-shot drones. What follows is my personal
analysis of near-future drone capabilities and countermeasures,
extrapolated from information found in public articles as well as my
personal knowledge of military and law enforcement tactics and mission
profiles.
Drones are now being weaponized in America.
Drones are now being weaponized in America.
Paul C. Roberts on "the REAL LIBOR scandal" and "Bond Market Armageddon!"
Today we survey the Wall Street hijinks. From potential big bank
criminal wrongdoing in the Libor scandal reported by the Justice
Department, to regulators answering for the money laundering probe at
HSBC, to a former Citigroup banker accused of misleading clients in a
CDO deal. Does this continue because of the lack of senior executive
level convictions for financial crimes? We hear from Charles Ferguson,
director of Inside Job and author of Predator Nation who wrote about
that on the Huffington Post today. After all of the work he's done, he
tells us the price he's paid personally for shining the light Wall
Street's underbelly.
And returning to the issue of LIBOR, and the scandal there, the current picture painted is one that shows banks benefiting from borrowing at low rates through interest rate manipulation. But our guest, former assistant Treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, argues that this is too simplistic and that it functions as a diversion from the deeper, darker scandal.
And returning to the issue of LIBOR, and the scandal there, the current picture painted is one that shows banks benefiting from borrowing at low rates through interest rate manipulation. But our guest, former assistant Treasury secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, argues that this is too simplistic and that it functions as a diversion from the deeper, darker scandal.
