Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?
Posts tagged credit
A Political Problem-Not an Economic Problem-Catherine Austin Fitts
01 week ago
Source: http://wchildblog.com
A Political Problem-Not an Economic Problem-Catherine Austin Fitts
By Greg Hunter, USAWatchdog:
Investment banker Catherine Austin Fitts sums up the historic global financial problems by saying, “We have a group of people who have the power to act with impunity.
They are above the law. They are centralizing and consolidating economic and political power. We have a political problem. We don’t have an economic problem.” Fitts’ analysis shows, “We’ve been on a debt model, and now we’ve got to get the planet on an equity model. . . .You are going to do everything you can do to get people into equities. Slamming precious metals down helps do that.” But Fitts says that won’t stop the gold bull because China and the rest of the world are buying the yellow metal. Fitts contends, “What that means is there is going to be a much more broad-based bull market in gold. . . I think it’s going to more of a sound money system, and gold is going to be a part of that.” Not everybody wants to be brought into the so-called new world order. Fitts predicts, “Remember, to come out with a one world currency, you need everybody. There can be no leakage. There can be no exceptions. The Russians are determined to be the stinker at the party is what I think.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Catherine Austin Fitts, founder of The Solari Report.
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Basel III: How The Bank For International Settlements Is Going To Help Bring Down The Global Economy
Basel III: How The Bank For International Settlements Is Going To Help Bring Down The Global Economy
02 weeks ago
Source: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com
Basel III: How The Bank For International Settlements Is Going To Help Bring Down The Global Economy
A new set of regulations that most people have never even heard of that was developed by an immensely powerful central banking organization that most people do not even know exists is going to have a dramatic effect on the global financial system over the next several years. The new set of regulations is known as “Basel III”, and it was developed by the Bank for International Settlements. The Bank for International Settlements has been called “the central bank for central banks”, and it is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. 58 major central banks (including the Federal Reserve) belong to the Bank for International Settlements, and the decisions made in Basel often have more of an impact on the direction of the global economy than anything the president of the United States or the U.S. Congress are doing. All you have to do is to look back at the last financial crisis to see an example of this. Basel II and Basel 2.5 played a major role in precipitating the subprime mortgage meltdown.
Now a new set of regulations known as “Basel III” are being rolled out. The implementation of these new regulations is beginning this year, and they will be completely phased in by 2019. These new regulations dramatically increase capital requirements and significantly restrict the use of leverage. Those certainly sound like good goals, the problem is that the entire global financial system is based on credit at this point, and these new regulations are going to substantially reduce the flow of credit. The only way that the giant debt bubble that we are all living in can continue to persist is if it continues to expand. By restricting the flow of credit, these new regulations threaten to burst the debt bubble and bring down the entire global economy.
Not that the current global financial system is sustainable by any means. Anyone with half a brain can see that the global financial system is a pyramid scheme that is destined to collapse. But Basel III may cause it to collapse faster than it might otherwise have.
So precisely what is Basel III? The following is a definition from the official website of the Bank for International Settlements…
“Basel III” is a comprehensive set of reform measures, developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, to strengthen the regulation, supervision and risk management of the banking sector. These measures aim to:
- improve the banking sector’s ability to absorb shocks arising from financial and economic stress, whatever the source
- improve risk management and governance
- strengthen banks’ transparency and disclosures.
All of that looks good at first glance. But when you start looking into the details you start realizing what it is going to mean for the global financial system. Banks are going to be required to have higher reserve ratios and use less leverage. Banks are going to have to be more careful with their money, which is a good thing, but it is also going to mean that credit will not flow as freely. Unfortunately, the only way for a debt bubble to survive is if it keeps expanding. Anything that restricts the flow of easy money threatens to bring a debt bubble to an end.
These new regulations are going to be phased in between 2013 and 2019. You can see a chart which shows the implementation schedule for the Basel III regulations right here.
So why is bringing the debt bubble to an end a bad thing?
Well, because it will cause the false prosperity that we have been enjoying to disappear, and that will be an exceedingly painful adjustment.
Sadly, most people have no idea what is happening. Most people have never even heard of “Basel III” or “the Bank for International Settlements”. Most people just assume that the people they voted into office know what they are doing and have everything under control.
Unfortunately, that is not the case at all.
The truth is that an unelected, unaccountable body of central bankers is making decisions which deeply affect us all, and there is not much that we can do about it.
This unelected, unaccountable body of central bankers played a major role in bringing about the last financial crisis. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article posted on Before It’s News…
If you have any questions about the power of these Basel Banking Regulations you can also see the effects that Basel II and 2.5, mark to market accounting, had on the Housing Markets in the United States of America in 2008. There were many causes for that housing bubble, then housing crisis, but Basel II and 2.5 was most assuredly the pin that popped the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008-09.
But do most people know about this?
Of course not. Most people want to blame the Republicans or the Democrats or Bush or Obama, and they have no idea about the financial strings that are being pulled at the highest levels.
It is so important that we get people educated about how the global financial system actually works. The following is a summary of how the Bank for International Settlements works from one of my previous articles entitled “Who Controls The Money? An Unelected, Unaccountable Central Bank Of The World Secretly Does“…
An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.“ The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another “Global Economy Meeting”. During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.
Even though most people have never even heard of the BIS, the truth is that the global elite have had big plans for it for a very long time. In another article I included a quote from a book that Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley wrote many years ago entitled “Tragedy & Hope”…
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.
Today we have such a system, and most of the public does not even know that it exists.
And when the next great financial crisis strikes, there will probably be very little ever said about the Bank for International Settlements in the mainstream media.
But right now the BIS is helping set the stage for the great credit crunch that is coming.
Get prepared while you still can, because time is running out.
This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.
10 Signs We Live in a False Economy
16 months ago
Source: http://www.activistpost.com
Credit: http://www.economist.com/node/13527329
It’s time to admit that we live in a false economy. Smoke and mirrors are used to make us believe the economy is real, but it’s all an elaborate illusion.
Out of one side of the establishment’s mouth we hear excitement about “green shoots”, and out of the other side comes breathless warnings of fiscal cliffs and the urgent need for unlimited bailouts by the Fed.
We hear the people begging for jobs and the politicians promising them, but politicians can’t create jobs. We see people camped out to buy stuff on Black Friday indicating the consumer economy is seemingly thriving, only to find out everything was bought on credit.
The corporate media does their best to distract us from seeing anything real. We see the media glorify Kim Kardashian who got rich by being famous, and became famous merely by being rich. She got front page coverage on Huffington Post this week because her cat died. Enough said.
Meanwhile the financial media makes the economy seem complicated and they ban anyone who speaks truthfully about the economy from their airwaves.
Is it any wonder why people are angry and confused about the economy?
Well, hopefully these signs that we live in a false economy will help clear up some of that confusion.
Ron Paul has crazy economic ideas
01 year ago
Source: http://www.dailypaul.com
By mindwalker55
Show this post to anyone who thinks Ron Paul has crazy economic ideas
Ron Paul’s understanding of the economy is a matter of public record.
In 1983 he predicted the 1987 recession.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FmlsK_nJKU&feature=related
In 1998 he predicted the 2000 dot com crash.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4837NXWxpMA
In 2001 he predicted the housing bubble crash and what the Fed would do in response.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KONpt9a6HrI&feature=relmfu
And of course he has told us this year Mar. 2012 about the Bond Bubble currently forming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0c4QgpEpGM
In fact he has accurately predicted very single economic down turn in the last 3 decades, with an explanation of why he believes they will happen.
No other politician that I know of has this track record. In fact no member of the Federal Reserve has this track record. And most noteworthy there are very few people in the financial sector with this impressive record of accuracy.
To put our trust in the people that never saw these coming to fix the problems makes no sense, especially since their fix is doing more of what Dr. Paul has identified as the cause.
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[CIM]
The time is NOW to take back our personal liberties and freedoms!
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Ben Bernanke: Supreme Socialist
01 year ago
Source: http://www.forbes.com
By Steve Forbes
This article originally appeared int he Feb. 27, 2012 issue of Forbes magazine.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
You thought socialism was dead, other than in miserable countries such as North Korea and Cuba? Think again. It’s alive and well at the Federal Reserve, and we and the world are paying a price for it.
Our central bank tries to manipulate our economy in ways befitting a Soviet commissar. Take interest rates. Fixing the price of money is a form of price control, pure and simple. Until Ben Bernanke our central bank was content to fix short-term interest rates, which he announced would be kept at virtually zero through 2014. But in the aftermath of the financial crisis Bernanke is, in effect, dictating the price of all money, regardless of duration.
By owning so many long-term government bonds, Bernanke has created an artificial shortage of these financial instruments. Like a good central planner, Bernanke is using his policies to subsidize the still rapidly growing, gargantuan debt of the U.S. government. He also holds a huge stash of mortgages so that mortgage rates can be kept low in order to revive the battered housing industry. Big companies also find credit abnormally easy to get.
All of this means the government is picking winners and losers. And in this case the losers are savers. Bernanke & Co. want to effectively force Americans to put their cash in riskier assets, such as stocks.
Another category that’s hurting is small business. Bernanke pays a nominal interest rate on reserves that banks leave at the Fed—a totally risk-free return. On paper an institution would do well lending to a local restaurant or dry cleaner, where rates are significantly higher. But if it does, it had best be prepared to undergo a regulatory third degree.
Ben and his apologists say that one of the Fed’s mandates is to bring about full employment; therefore, it must engage in these statist actions. History, however, shows us that the best thing a central bank can do to create prosperity is to keep the currency stable in value. Whenever the dollar veers in value, as it’s done chronically since the link to gold was severed 40 years ago, market distortions result and capital is misallocated.
The Fed’s socialist tendencies, as one would expect, ride roughshod over property rights. If you sold a bottle of wine for five loaves of bread and Washington came along and confiscated two of those loaves, that would be “takings.” The Constitution guarantees that the government would have to pay you for that seized property. Yet the Federal Reserve routinely confiscates people’s property when it undermines the value of the dollar.
One inconvenient fact Bernanke and his acolytes ignore is that before the creation of the Fed the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 4%. Since then the average is just about 3%. But in this hyperactive Bernanke era we’ll be lucky to get a long-term average of 2%.
Over 50 thousand Visa and Mastercard credit card stolen this week
01 year ago
in Finance
Source: http://www.infowars.com
Meghan Kelly
Washington Post
March 31, 2012
Credit card data — enough to create counterfeit cards — has been stolen from Visa and Mastercard users, Visa confirmed today. The companies are doing damage control, alerting banks and affected card members.
According to security researcher, Brian Krebs, a group of individuals, have compromised the a payments processor, rumored to be Global Payments Inc. The group is believed to be New York-based, targeting the payment system in New York parking garages. Cyber criminals have gained access through the processor to “Track 1 and Track 2 data,” which gives them enough information to make fraudulent purchases on the compromised cards.
Visa and Mastercard have alerted a number of banks and credit unions associated with the cards, warning that they should be on the lookout for fraud.
“Visa has provided payment card issuers with the affected account numbers so they can take steps to protect consumers through independent fraud monitoring and, if needed, reissuing cards,” the company said in a statement, “As always, Visa encourages cardholders to regularly monitor their accounts and to notify their issuing financial institution promptly of any unusual activity.”
A Cashless Society May Be Closer Than Most People Would Ever Dare To Imagine
01 year ago
Source: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com
Most people think of a cashless society as something that is way off in the distant future. Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. The truth is that a cashless society is much closer than most people would ever dare to imagine. To a large degree, the transition to a cashless society is being done voluntarily. Today, only 7 percentof all transactions in the United States are done with cash, and most of those transactions involve very small amounts of money. Just think about it for a moment. Where do you still use cash these days? If you buy a burger or if you purchase something at a flea market you will still use cash, but for any mid-size or large transaction the vast majority of people out there will use another form of payment. Our financial system is dramatically changing, and cash is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. We live in a digital world, and national governments and big banks are both encouraging the move away from paper currency and coins. But what would a cashless society mean for our future? Are there any dangers to such a system?
Those are very important questions, but most of the time both sides of the issue are not presented in a balanced way in the mainstream media. Instead, most mainstream news articles tend to trash cash and talk about how wonderful digital currency is.
For example, a recent CBS News article declared that soon we may not need “that raggedy dollar bill” any longer and that the “greenback may soon be a goner”….
It’s what the wallet was invented for, to carry cash. After all, there was a time when we needed cash everywhere we went, from filling stations to pay phones. Even the tooth fairy dealt only in cash.
But money isn’t just physical anymore. It’s not only the pennies in your piggy bank, or that raggedy dollar bill.
Money is also digital – it’s zeros and ones stored in a computer, prompting some economists to predict the old-fashioned greenback may soon be a goner.
“There will be a time – I don’t know when, I can’t give you a date – when physical money is just going to cease to exist,” said economist Robert Reich.
So will we see a completely cashless society in the near future?
Of course not. It would be wildly unpopular for the governments of the world to force such a system upon us all at once.
Instead, the big banks and the governments of the industrialized world are doing all they can to get us to voluntarily transition to such a system. Once 98 or 99 percent of all transactions do not involve cash, eliminating the remaining 1 or 2 percent will only seem natural.
The big banks want a cashless society because it is much more profitable for them.
The big banks earn billions of dollars in fees from debit cards and they make absolutely enormous profits from credit cards.
Debt Slavery: 30 Facts About Debt In America That Will Blow Your Mind
01 year ago
in Finance
Source: http://endoftheamericandream.com
When most people think about America’s debt problem, they think of the debt of the federal government. But that is only part of the story. The sad truth is that debt slavery has become a way of life for tens of millions of American families. Over the past several decades, most Americans have willingly allowed themselves to become enslaved to debt. These days, most of us are busy either going into even more debt or paying off the debt that we have accumulated in the past. When your finances are dominated by debt, it makes it really hard to ever get ahead. Incredibly, 43 percent of all American families spend more than they earn each year. Even while median household income continues to decline (now less than $50,000 a year), median household debt continues to go up. According to the Federal Reserve, median household debt in America has risen to $75,600. Many Americans spend decades caught in the trap of debt slavery. Large numbers of them never even escape at all and die in debt. It can be a lot of fun to spend lots of money and go into lots of debt, but it can be absolutely soul crushing to toil and labor for years paying off those debts while making others wealthy in the process. Hopefully this article will inspire many people to try to escape the chains of debt slavery once and for all.
Because the truth is that the American people need a wake up call. Consumer borrowing rose by another $19.3 billion in December. Right now it is sitting at a grand total of $2.5 trillion according to the Federal Reserve.
Overall, consumer debt in America has increased by a whopping 1700% since 1971.
We always criticize the federal government for going into so much debt, but we rarely criticize ourselves for our own addiction to debt.
Debt slavery is destroying millions of lives all across this country, and it is imperative that we educate the American people about the dangers of all this debt.
The following are 30 facts about debt in America that will absolutely blow your mind….
Credit Card Debt
#1 Today, 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month.
#2 Overall, Americans are carrying a grand total of $798 billion in credit card debt.
#3 If you were alive when Jesus was born and you spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent $798 billion by now.
#4 Right now, there are more than 600 million active credit cards in the United States.
#5 For households that have credit card debt, the average amount of credit card debt is an astounding $15,799.
#6 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#7 The average interest rate on a credit card that is carrying a balance is now up to 13.10 percent.
#8 According to the credit card calculator on the Federal Reserve website, if you have a $10,000 credit card balance and you are being charged a rate of 13.10 percent and you only make the minimum payment each time, it will take you 27 years to pay it off and you will end up paying back a total of $21,271.
#9 There is one credit card company out there, First Premier, that charges interest rates of up to 49.9 percent. Amazingly, First Premier has 2.6 million customers.
Auto Loan Debt
#10 The length of auto loans in America just keeps getting longer and longer. If you can believe it, 45 percent of all new car loans being made today are for more than 6 years.
#11 Approximately 70 percent of all car purchases in the United States involve an auto loan.
#12 A subprime auto loan bubble is steadily building. Today, 45 percent of all auto loans are made to subprime borrowers. At some point that is going to be a massive problem.
Mortgage Debt
#13 Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.
#14 Mortgage debt as a percentage of GDP has more than tripled since 1955.
#15 According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, approximately 8 million Americans are at least one month behind on their mortgage payments.
#16 Historically, the percentage of residential mortgages in foreclosure in the United States has tended to hover between 1 and 1.5 percent. Today, it is up around 4.5 percent.
#17 According to Dylan Ratigan, 46 percent of all mortgaged properties in Florida are underwater, 50 percent of all mortgaged properties in Arizona are underwater and 63 percent of all mortgaged properties in Nevada are underwater.
#18 Overall, nearly 29 percent of all homes with a mortgage in the United States are underwater.
#19 If you can believe it, the mortgage lenders now have more equity in U.S. homes than the American people do.
Why I Have Backed Ron Paul For More Than 20 Years
01 year ago
Source: http://www.veteranstoday.com
Even an Oxymoron can understand this video montage that carries Ron Paul’s “Liberty” thread during the past two decades?
Ask where was the media? And you will see proof that the media, as well as our elected representatives are all “in on it.” In on what? In on the rape and pillage of the American dream is what!
Cong. Paul points it out so publicly in this video montage. Show it around and talk about it, even to brain dead friends, and we all have plenty of those.
I need not write a lot here, because the video says it all. Hell’s bells even Chris Matthews can understand this. There is no American dream; never really was—counterfeit money; fat cat speculators using it for war and bombs; accompanied by unpatriotic acts by Congress.
Also replacing information with propaganda for evil in the information age. Surely Americans suffer enmasse from the Stockholm syndrome. If there is a cure, it might be found in this video montage. My great hope is that this Ron Paul Truth telling will result in the destruction of the two party dialectic that has served the liars and moneychangers so well.
That may be the best result for the Ron Paul Revolution; any vote for Ron is a vote against the bastards that did this.
[CIM Comment]
Now more than every we need the Champion of the Constitution!
Please visit Ron Paul’s official campaign site by following the link below and donate today!
International Business Times: “Foreign Policy One of Paul’s Strongest Points”
01 year ago
Source: http://www.ronpaul2012.com
Writes International Business Times’ Joe Romaine:
Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential aspirations are hurt by his foreign policy stance. Or so say the polls.
The truth, however, is that foreign policy is one of Paul’s strongest points.
Paul is a non-interventionist. He wants to bring troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan and from all over the world. He wants the U.S. to stop policing the world, mind its own business and spend less money on defense.
This is in sharp contrast to the current state of U.S. foreign policy, which has the U.S. spending nearly five percent of its GDP on the military each year and stationing troops in over 150 countries (including heavy presences in friendly countries like Japan).
The U.S., in fact, accounts for 43 percent of the total global military spending in 2010, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute…
(T)he justifications for the U.S. to have massive military budgets in the past 70 years… are no longer valid.
In 2011, only one country — China — poses a credible threat to the U.S. The U.S. is not threatened by China’s military might; the Chinese military is woefully behind the U.S. military. However, the U.S. is threatened by China’s vast influence on the international stage.
China’s power comes from dangling access to its vast consumer market (i.e. the right to export to it) and its government’s staggering $3-trillion cash hoard. So far, it has used these powers to gain access to technology (from the West) and natural resources (from Asia, Latin America and Africa).
The primary fear of the U.S is that once the size of the Chinese economy exceeds that of the U.S. – which the IMF thinks can happen as soon as 2016 – China could marginalize the influence and national interest of the U.S. on the global stage.
A darker fear is the possibility that China will dump its holdings of U.S. Treasuries in the open market and engineer a financial crisis in the U.S…
These fears are not entirely unfounded. What is unfounded is the phantom threat the U.S. is fighting with its massive military budget. (While terrorism is a credible threat, an enormous spending on conventional military buildup is not the answer).
The same cannot be said about the standing of the U.S. on the international stage. The U.S. economy is stagnating, its industrial base is eroding, its technological edge is slipping and its national debt is swelling. (Washington, interestingly, also urged Americans to “cherish public credit” in his farewell address).
In response to these challenges, Paul proposes slashing the military budget and bringing back U.S. troops stationed abroad. He also wants to massively cut government spending.
While the merits of big spending cuts are debatable… there is little question that the general idea of reducing U.S. debt and cutting conventional military spending will bolster U.S.’s national security and address potential threats from China.
If nothing else, consider the fact that Paul has raised more money than of any other 2012 presidential candidates from members of the military. In fact, while contributions from members of the military topped Paul’s campaign, contributions from individuals associated with Goldman Sachs topped Mitt Romney’s campaign.
Military members, after all, know firsthand a thing or two about U.S. foreign policy.
[CIM Photo added to original article. Comment: Now more than every we need the Champion of the Constitution!]
Please visit Ron Paul’s official campaign site and donate today!
This is a work in progess, a self learning tool and fun little project. Please excuse the slow development as it seems the needed proper time is always lacking. It is my hope that the combination of content and links to other sources of information in this simple blog may help awaken a few of the sleeping masses and encourage and inspire others to initiate their own research, ultimately for each person to be a light to help awaken others. Opinions expressed belong to me, myself and I. Also, a big thank you to all that take the time to visit, it is appreciated :)
