CALLY SQUIRES: TIS the season for the annual office Christmas
party. Never an event to miss, and especially so for the employees of
one particular City hedge fund, who will be pleasantly surprised when
they sit down to their Christmas lunch this year.
The founder of online bullion delivery company Bullion By Post, Rob
Halliday Stein, tells The Capitalist that he recently received a very
unusual gift request: “A manager of a well known hedge fund requested
‘something special’ to put in the crackers for his bank’s annual
Christmas bash this week”.
The answer? “I suggested 1g gold bars as they are about the size of a thumbnail,” said Halliday Stein.
Our generous hedge fund manager agreed to the golden gift suggestion,
and promptly ordered 50 gold bars, at a cost of £50 per bar.
The Capitalist wonders what the rest of the lunch will be like if
they are handing out gold bars in the crackers. Turkey covered in gold
leaf? Twenty-four carat cake?
Let’s just hope there is no scrambling under the table when those bars go flying. Source
By Michael Krieger: This article from Foreign Policy essentially proves what
many of us have already suspected. The ultimate in neo-feudalism is
when the corporate sector and the government sector converge, and sadly
in these United States this totalitarian marriage is what now dominates
the landscape. This is a very worrying trend. From Foreign Policy:
Since 9/11, a quiet intelligence revolution has been brewing
inside many of America’s leading companies. Hotel chains, cruise lines,
airlines, theme parks, banks, chemical companies, consumer products
manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and even tech giants have been
developing in-house intelligence units that look and act a lot like the
CIA.
These offices
are staffed with former CIA, FBI, and military professionals who have
close ties to the U.S. government and conduct global threat reporting by
working through formal channels and informal networks around the globe.
This is the privatization of American intelligence that you’ve never
heard of. And it’s part of the innovative and growing business of
political risk management.
The reputation of Britain's banksters took a fresh battering when the HSBC gang was slapped with a record £1.2bn fine by the Capo di tutti capi of American banksters, the so called 'US regulators' for 'money laundering and sanctions busting', the first arrests were made in the Libor-rigging
investigation, and nationalised Northern Rock handed the taxpayer a
£270m bill to compensate customers affected by a mistake in its
paperwork.
Jill Treanor: The US Department of Justice (DoJ) detailed how HSBC,
Britain's biggest bank, allowed drug traffickers to launder billions of
dollars in the US and billions more to be moved across borders to
countries facing sanctions, such as Burma, Cuba and Libya.
The
department spared HSBC a criminal prosecution only because it considered
the bank too big to prosecute. Listing a catalogue of mistakes by HSBC
over almost a decade, the DoJ admitted that "collateral consequences"
were a factor in its decision not to pursue criminal charges. Those
consequences, it said, could have included a ban on doing business in
the US, resulting in huge job losses.
The fine being paid by HSBC,
and a five-year deferred prosecution agreement which will keep the bank
under intense scrutiny and restrict top executive bonuses, was even
larger than the £940m HSBC had warned it might face to settle the
allegations in July.
HSBC's chief executive, Stuart Gulliver,
apologised for the events which included laundering $881m (£547m) for
two drug cartels in Mexico and Columbia and accepting $15bn in
unexplained "bulk cash", across the bank's counters in Mexico, Russia
and other countries.
Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert look at the latest BIS warning of a global credit bubble caused by zero percent interest rate policies meant to appease the angry hidden people in the shadow banking system. In the second half, Max Keiser talks to David Smith of GenevaBusinessInsider.blogspot.com about the Swiss currency peg, the global game of honesty limbo in the financial sector and hoping that midnight never comes for Alice in Switzer-land. Source
By Nora Claypool: Apparently Climategate
didn’t put global warming in a sufficiently unflattering light to
prevent Al Gore from digging that zombie up and reanimating it. In a
renewed effort to get a crack at those billions of dollars in carbon
taxes, he’s again beating the dead horse of Global Warming by dressing
it up as Climate Change.
Note: don’t forget to read Nora’s recent article, “The fiscal cliff a hoax: a ruse to rob us“
A scheming UN summit is finding member nation responses
understandably weak. Rising sea levels blamed on the melting ice chunks
in it result from manmade global warming, right? But at the same time,
there’s supposedly a water shortage?
Mere valid scientific evidence to the contrary must not be allowed to
screw this up for Al. Where did the water go, into outer space? And why
are there more icebergs than ever? Why has no one brought up fluid
displacement properties when talking about rising ocean levels? If the
Polar Cap all really did melt, which isn’t happening, the shorelines
wouldn’t move an inch. This Chicken Little drill has become passé.
Al’s now infamous video “An Inconvenient Truth,” which made the
rounds in America’s schools as if based on fact, is nothing more than
junk science to support carbon taxation and huge profits which depend on
it. As if that’s not bad enough, NASA has now jumped aboard
the carbon tax gravy train. NASA is also engaged in terrorizing
children who are brainwashed and psychologically manipulated into
thinking Earth is a goner, unless they turn informant and get actively
involved in a (mythical) fight to save it.
Press TV: Israeli regime forces have attacked the offices
of three Palestinian non-government organizations (NGOs) in the West
Bank, confiscating computers and other material, one of the groups said. Source
Submitted by Tyler Durden: The boost to GDP from the declining US trade
deficit is over. While the September trade deficit number was revised
further lower, to $40.3 billion from $41.5 previously, October saw a
pick up to $42.2 billion, slightly less than the expected $42.7 billion,
but a headwind to Q4 GDP already. As a result, expect a modest boost to
Q3 GDP in its final revision, even as Q4 GDP continues to contract
below its consensus of sub stall-speed ~1%. The reason for the decline: a
3.6% decline in exports of goods and services. This was the biggest
percent drop in exports since January 2009 as the traditional US import
partners are all wrapped in a major recession. What helped, however, was
the offsetting drop in imports by 2.1%, the lowest since April 2011, as
US businesses are likewise consumed by a concerns about the global
economy. And without global trade, whose nexus just happens to be
Europe, there can be no global or even regional recovery. So far, all
hopes of a pick up in global economy have been largely dashed. Yet one
country benefits from the ongoing US slump is China: imports from China -
consisting primarily of computers and toys, games, and sporting goods-
jumped 6.4% to a record $40.3 billion, offset be a modest rise in
exports - primarily soybeans - to $10.8 billion, bring the China deficit
to a record $29.5 billion from $29.1 billion in September.
Of course, one wouldn't get that impression looking at the Chinese side
of the ledger: the Chinese Customs department, reported a September and
October trade surplus with the US amounting to $21.1 and $21.7 billion.
One wonders, somewhat, where the over $16 billion difference has gone.
Submitted by Tyler Durden: The infamous debunker of most-things-classically-economic was recently asked to brief Congress on the fiscal cliff, and how the downturn of 1937 could be a foretaste of what will happen if the Cliff comes to pass. The paper, slides, and presentation - designed to be simple enough for Dennis Kucinich and his colleagues in Congress to comprehend
- provide another glimpse as Steve Keen argues that an attempt by the
government to reduce its debt now may trigger a renewed bout of
deleveraging by the private sector - and this is what appeared
to happen in 1937, when confidence that the worst of the Depression was
over led to the government reducing its deficit.
Private sector deleveraging, which had stopped in 1934-35, began once
more and unemployment rapidly rose from about 10 to almost 20 percent.
The main danger with the Fiscal Cliff is therefore not what the
reduction of government spending will do on its own, but that it might trigger a renewed bout of deleveraging from the $40 trillion overhang of private debt that Keen calls the "Rock of Damocles".
Alex talks with the former governor of Minnesota and host of truTV's
"Conspiracy Theory," Jesse Ventura about JFK and Bob Costas Call for a
total gun ban.
