Financial Crisis

The Truman Show US Economy: Real GDP Numbers Show -9% Annualized Drop

The average person is told all manner of things that are incorrect, wrong and falacious via the media and the government and think it is real.

One day soon, though, like in the movie, your average person in the US is going to have their boat run up into the falsely erected walls and realize that everything they believed about the US economy was a lie.

By then the US economy will be a smoldering crater, the US dollar will have collapsed and capital and travel controls will be fully in place.

Banks Will Take Deposits in the Coming Financial Meltdown, LIBOR Rate Rigging and More

Journalist Ellen Brown thinks one of the biggest banker frauds on the planet is the rate rigging of the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR. Hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of interest rates are set off of LIBOR globally. Many claim in court they were cheated, and that includes the FDIC. Brown says, “The FDIC suit is different from the others. Most of the previous suits were about anti-trust and RICO, which is racketeering and are federal claims. . . . It involves 16 of the world’s largest banks that Professor Bill Black called the largest cartel, and illegal cartel, in history . . . clearly a criminal conspiracy.”

Piketty’s Wealth Gap Wake Up

Michael: The problem with Piketty’s statistics are that it vastly understates how unequal the world really is and that’s because – you may know in Australia that our Queen of Mean, the hotel lady Leona Helmsley said “Only the little people pay taxes”. What she means is only the little people earn income. Rich people in America don’t earn income, they make capital gains and capital gains are not in everybody’s income statistics, they’re not in the statistics basically that are reported. And the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service of the United States, only conducts a study of capital gains once every ten years or so, and countries like England and many European countries don’t even have a tax on capital gains, so they’re not going to appear in the statistics.

Wall Street Greed: Not Too Big for a California Jury

The larger question is why our state and local governments continue to do business with a corrupt global banking cartel. There is an alternative. They could set up their own publicly-owned banks, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Fraud could be avoided, profits could be recaptured, and interest could become a much-needed source of public revenue. Credit could become a public utility, dispensed as needed to benefit local residents and local economies.

Chaos, misery and mass suffering? It’s only a Tube strike

Of all the complaints you hear about the Underground, one that crops up very little is, “I wish there weren’t so many ticket offices”
Boris Johnson says the new system will be an improvement for passengers, because it will “shift staff from behind the windows to where they can be seen”. But the plans are to cut 950 ticket office staff, and put only 200 extra staff round the stations. So when he says he’s going to put them “where they can be seen”, maybe he means on the next series of Benefits Street.

London tube strike enters second day

Under the new plans, aimed at saving about £50 million a year, more than 750 people will lose their jobs, all 260 tube ticket offices across the network will be closed, and a new 24-hour service will be running at weekends.

Prelude to a Crash

The Fed’s easy money policies have pushed margin debt on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to record levels laying the groundwork for a severe correction or another violent market crash.
Buying equities on margin, that is, with loads of borrowed cash, is a sign of excessive risk taking the likes of which invariably takes place whenever the Central Bank creates subsidies for speculation by keeping interest rates pegged below the rate of inflation or by pumping trillions of dollars into the bloated financial system through misguided liquidity programs like QE.

Enough Is Enough: Fraud-ridden Banks Are Not L.A.’s Only Option

Mega-banks might be too big to fail. According to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, they might even be too big to prosecute. But they are not too big to abandon as depositories for government funds.
If North Dakota can bypass Wall Street with its own bank and declare its financial independence, so can the City of Los Angeles. And so can the County. And so can the State of California.

Why Is The Fed Tapering?

Manipulation of the gold price is a foregone conclusion. The question is: why is the Fed tapering? The official reason is that the recovery is now strong enough not to need the stimulus. There are two problems with the official explanation. One is that the purpose of QE has always been to support the prices of the debt-related derivatives on the balance sheets of the banks too big to fail. The other is that the Fed has enough economists and statisticians to know that the recovery is a statistical artifact of deflating GDP with an understated measure of inflation. No other indicator–employment, labor force participation, real median family income, real retail sales, or new construction–indicates economic recovery.

How Economists and Policymakers Murdered Our Economy

If and when uncertainty spreads to the dollar, the real crisis will arrive, likely followed by high inflation, exchange controls, pension confiscations, and resurrected illegality of owning gold and silver. Capitalist greed aided and abetted by economists and policymakers will have destroyed America.