by Editor » Sat Nov 07, 2009 8:47 am
Personal bankruptcies soar in Britain
Individual bankruptcies in Britain have jumped to a 49-year record high in the three months prior to the end of September, a government agency says.
US regulators shut 4 more banks
Four more US banks have been closed by regulators, increasing the number of bank failures since January to 119.
by Editor » Sat Nov 07, 2009 10:24 am
US jobless rate hits 26-year high
Obama signs extension to benefit entitlements as 16 million Americans search for employment.
by tio » Sat Nov 07, 2009 10:25 am
But like Goldman, I have been perplexed and surprised by how long this recession has dragged on for. I don’t think I could ever be accused of optimism throughout this crisis, but I did think that the fall in the pound and the immense amount of monetary easing carried out by the Bank of England would have helped more than it has done so far. Perhaps there is a lag and the UK will bounce back (at the risk of high inflation and another bubble) in due course; perhaps the scale of the economic catastrophe in the UK is worse than any of us had thought, making our problems all the more intractable. But none of this is made any easier when you don’t even know whether you can rely on the figures. But, hey, that’s economics.
Responding to questions suggesting that the enormous weight of information supplied by RBS – its statement reached 120 pages – was being used to obscure useful information, a favoured tactic of Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey Appleby, Mr Hester said: "It's not my job to make anyone else's easy. Disclosure is generally seen as a good thing."
The Financial Services Authority has recently voiced concerns about the increasing length of banks' financial reports being used for this purpose.
Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, the head of the independent watchdog charged with reforming MPs’ expenses and restoring public trust in Parliament, is a close friend of Alastair Campbell...Sir Ian has close links to Tony Blair’s former official spokesman, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
It has emerged that Sir Ian plans to rip up the proposed reforms to the discredited system of Commons allowances put forward earlier this week by Sir Christopher Kelly.
If we truly want to win the war in Afghanistan, we need to challenge its opponents much more fiercely.
Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,” and the utter fools would believe the lie.
“If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, its about energy, it’s not about democracy.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e23906.htm
Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan’s and Turkmenistan’s natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed “president” of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.
Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.
Earthlings are all convinced that a financial crisis of cosmic proportions befell the planet last fall. Had the authorities failed to act with determination and speed, it would have been the end of the world. In the popular mind the politicians have saved capitalism from its own excesses.
Our views are different, but not extraterrestrial. Once upon a time, not so long ago, they were even respectable. The gist of our message two weeks ago was that debt is dangerous. It feels good at first. But give a society too much debt - either in its private sector or the public sphere - and someone’s going to get killed. That’s why the present situation is such a delight to serious economists; it offers more data points. We get to see how much straw the feds can add before the poor camel’s back breaks.
The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future.
Dear Germany: welcome to the US free trade system. You will now be deindustrialized. And the US will assist in this destruction. That is, why should Germans have jobs if the US isn’t going to have jobs? The US has no obligation to give Germans jobs, after all, we don’t give ourselves jobs! The present status quo system happens to be be very destructive and it enables and encourages super rich men like Buffett to decimate jobs and treat humans as chattel or disposable trash.
Unlike the US, the Germans and others are very, very aware of what happens next: violent revolutions, wars and coups. The US is blissfully unaware of this particular abyss that is right at our own feet. The US wealthy think that they can do as they please and nothing will happen. Perhaps they are fooled by the divisions within our own culture with American workers hating each other over frivolous or even stupid things.
Rahm Emanuel famously said: Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before.
Let me repeat that: "These risks could affect several market participants and potentially threaten the stability of the markets."
In their wildly optimistic view, the banking industry is solvent and always has been. All that was needed to ‘solve’ than banking crisis was a lot of liquidity, government backstops and, most importantly, time. This blinkered view sees a looting of taxpayer money to bailout the banking industry as necessary to save banks whose credit is the ‘lifeblood of our economy.’
They are wrong. The banks did not need to bailed out. The banking industry industry needed to made solvent again. There is a big difference between those two sentences (banks versus banking industry and liquidity versus solvency) that goes to the core of the captured and politically damaging world view we have seen on display by the Obama Administration.
One sometimes wonders why the idiots in Washington have still not bailed out the private equity industry. After all, for the low, low price of about $100 billion (which is about how much keeping Fannie on life support will cost US taxpayers in the first quarter of 2010 alone), Congress can ensure that thousands of PE associates, VPs and MDs can once again frequent Hustler Club, order dozens of bottles of Cristal at Lotus, and eat sushi straight off geisha bodies at Bar Masa
.. stripping off the barnacles ..
Of more than 5,000 complaints against squad, less than 0.18% were upheld
by Red Dawn » Sat Nov 07, 2009 4:36 pm
by tio » Sun Nov 08, 2009 9:32 am
Apocalypse (Greek: Apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil" or "revelation") is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind.
IF subscribers are people who have taken the red pill. We are happy to show them how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
Amid the ongoing financial regulation overhaul, the banking industry is hoping to pull off a quiet power grab that has eluded its grasp since the Great Depression, by stripping the independence of the board that sets financial accounting standards.
In 1360, a Barcelona banker was executed in front of his failed bank, presumably as a way of discouraging generations of future bankers from excessive risk-taking…
It is no secret that the US economy is being propped up by massive fiscal and monetary stimulus.
The comments by Robert Khuzami — the SEC’s head of enforcement — are the strongest (on record) indication yet that Galleon was only the beginning
Analysts expect Barclays Capital to pay out £5bn in salaries and bonuses this year
John Varley, Barclays' chief executive, wants to demonstrate that he has heard the public outcry and will show "restraint".
Andy Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, said bankers were using taxpayer guarantees to "game the state". Billions of pounds of cheap funding has been provided to banks such as Barclays and HSBC to prevent the financial system collapsing.
by tio » Sun Nov 08, 2009 11:13 am
Uploaded to youtube with permission from Associate Professor Steve Keen.Canberra, October 2009. Speaking at the Per Capita annual conference Policy Exchange 09, economist Steve Keen looks at the rising national debts in Australia and the United States, paying particular attention to their historical relationship with recessions, growth and unemployment. He suggests that the levels of debt in both countries have reached a point which virtually guarantees a very difficult economic road ahead in the long term.
Canberra, October 2009
by Editor » Sun Nov 08, 2009 6:49 pm
tio wrote:I actually think this is important .. even a blind squirrel eh?
Steve Keen on debt and the economy: How do we pay for all of this? Oct 09 ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0YC2PLnWRA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGnRIgKbKE0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl2rSXaaIaoUploaded to youtube with permission from Associate Professor Steve Keen.Canberra, October 2009. Speaking at the Per Capita annual conference Policy Exchange 09, economist Steve Keen looks at the rising national debts in Australia and the United States, paying particular attention to their historical relationship with recessions, growth and unemployment. He suggests that the levels of debt in both countries have reached a point which virtually guarantees a very difficult economic road ahead in the long term.
Canberra, October 2009
by tio » Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:12 am
Mr Blankfein, the son of a Brooklyn postal worker, believes that banks serve a "social purpose" and argues that the return of big profits and bonuses should be welcomed as proof the economy is recovering.
“I’m sorry,” Reed, 70, said in an interview yesterday. “These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it’s not easy to see what’s happened.”
by tio » Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:09 pm
So our auto industry died due to being crummy. German cars cost more but are better cars, for example. The US concentrated on being ever-cheaper while Germany, THE WORLD’S #1 EXPORT POWER did the exact opposite. The US killed its unions, Germany STRENGTHENED its unions. The US refused socialism, Germany INVENTED socialism! And has it still.
Germany is reunited and this is the anniversary of this reunion. And Germany sits in the center of Europe and is patiently rebuilding the New Holy Roman Empire, ie, this is Der Vierte Reich. And it is based on a strong industrial foundation! Not vapid paper money games. Germany was dragged into the ZIRP system, complaining all the way and anxious to exit it.
The Germans know that all the raw commodity materials they buy are CHEAP thanks to a strong euro. They then transform this into manufactured goods. This is classic capitalism coupled with classic socialism! Imagine that. A rule of thumb in reality life: You copy successful systems, not failed systems. The US should send over teams to Germany (Ja, ich kann dass tun!) and study the German system and COPY it!!!
These are hardly stories steeped in recovery. More like stories replete with desperation, brokenness, insolvency, and failure. We are witnessing a global failure of the entire central bank franchise model system, and breakdown in the currency system itself.
This altered world correlates in many ways to the US economy today as millions of people are realizing that nothing our government says seems to be real, and the rules we thought applied, don’t any more.
As the last of his severance pay dwindled away in March, Brad Cleghorn of northwest suburban Marengo cashed out his 401(k) plan in order to pay his mortgage and feed his family.
Cleghorn is not alone. A Hewitt Associates study shows that 46 percent of workers with 401(k) plans who lost or switched jobs cashed the plans in, a trend that could lead to serious problems when younger generations of people working today reach retirement.
That's not the real problem folks.
Let me make this crystal clear:
Your 401k or IRA has near-absolute protection in a personal bankruptcy. As a qualified retirement plan it cannot be seized by creditors if you file a Chapter 7 or Chapter 13.
The absolutely worst thing you can do is to cash out those plans.
Six out of 10 employees in their 20s took the money, compared with one-third of those in their 50s, according to the study.
Six out of ten?!
This is a freaking disaster folks.
Yes, you've been bamboozled! Hoodwinked! You're being taken for suckers that not only can't count, but whose memories have been washed away by threats of swine flu and reality TV shows. Do not fret, though. What I have is PROOF of the great Banking Bamboozle, for all to see.
As Zero Hedge speculated recently, the latest participant on the gold bandwagon is now officially Russia, which last month was said to be considering a sale of up to 25 tons of gold. That posturing did not last too long.
The IMF forecast that the increase in interest charges would be equal to the transport budget. While the government has not published its estimate of the annual cost of debt servicing, it has said that debt servicing charges in 2013-14 will be a massive £58 billion. When interest rates rise, the charge will be even higher, underlining the very real concerns about Britain’s creditworthiness and even solvency.
The IMF said it would take spending cuts and tax rises equal to about 8 percent of GDP to bring down the debt to GDP ratio to the 60 percent ratio that has been the average in the G20 nations as a whole. This translates into a massive 20 percent cut in government spending.
Guess who the real winners are? Surprise, surprise, it’s the banks, whether they are acting as intermediaries between the different arms of government in the execution of QE or trading into the anticipated government intervention, the banks are raking it in – it wasn’t rocket science for the banks to work out that if the government was buying gilts, yields would fall, and yield-hungry investors would pile into high-yield bonds and equities – and to position themselves accordingly. This is one of the main reasons that recent investment banking results have been so strong, so it is a bit rich when these results are then presented as proof that the business is solid.
The state is still excessively exposed to the banking sector; until that is changed, it is a safe bet that banks will find ways to take advantage.
After so much genuine drama in banking over the past two years, the commotion about this week’s announcements was contrived.
–adjective 1. domineering in a haughty manner; dictatorial; overbearing:
It is ludicrous for ANC politician Mkhangeli Matomela to allege that our Lord Jesus Christ was a communist.
The economic crisis revealed late-capitalism's central offense: Human beings are being transparently treated if they were mere transactions. And they're going postal over it.
I don’t want to go too deep down the Fort Hood Rabbit Hole Of Weirdness, so I’m just going to get off my chest some of the incredibly weird shit that’s being thrown around in the media to confuse us or throw us off. It’s looking pretty clearly like there’s a cover-up in progress, and not a very professional cover-up either. But the sad thing is that all the confusion and bullshit thrown our way will probably succeed in its goal of steering the public away from whatever it is the military doesn’t want us to find out about the shooting massacre.
It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all the time, it’s just that we’re a nation of amnesiacs who forget all the unpleasantries, and refuse to learn the valuable lessons.
Rickards remarked: "When you own gold you're fighting every central bank in the world."
by Editor » Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:08 am
NI enduring "worst ever" slowdown
A report on the economy indicates that Northern Ireland is in the midst of its worst ever slowdown.
The report, by accountants Ernst and Young, claims the all-island economy will shrink by 7% this year.
It adds that Northern Ireland and the Republic could still be twelve months to two years away from economic growth.
One of the report's authors says that while there are some signs of recovery, there is a possibility of a "double-dip" recession.
A "double-dip" recession occurs when the economy contracts after a quarter or two of economic growth.
If that does happen, it is sometimes a sign of a deeper and more prolonged recession.
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