Shadow Government "Money" Supply Growth from ShadowStats

Chart of U.S. Money Supply Growth

20 December, 2012

"U" Now Stands for "Unlimited"; "S" is for "Serfdom"

Even the fellow's title is a little scary: "Civil Liberties Protection Officer".  Add to that his Master's information - "Office of the Director of National Intelligence" - and "the willlies" (sorry, Willie) run amok.
More disturbing is how I came to know that a ClePto exists (ok, klepto is spelled wrong, and it's a bit of a reach, but so are most of the acronyms our supposed servants use; like naming a bill "United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" (USA PATRIOT Act) just so they can call it "the Patriot Act", when it has nothing to do with patriotism). 
Seems that the guy in charge at the Department of Jus...(gets progressively harder to finish that phrase as time goes by, so I'll start again).
General Holder (has a kind of military ring, doesn't it?) issued an order "allowing" expansion of the completely anticonstitutional SURVEILLANCE of EVERYONE.
Described by Wired magazine a "a secret government agreement", this blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment (and arguably, the Fifth, in the context of the Right to Privacy - yes, Privacy is a Right, and was declared so by Congress in the Privacy Act) was, in Wired's words, "granted without approval or debate from lawmakers" (who could not, by the way, Constitutionally approve without an amendment) to the "National Counterterrorism Center".
"Oh, well," you say, "if it's to fight terrorism..."
Maybe you didn't catch what I said about SURVEILLANCE of EVERYONE.
The *beauty* of ignoring the contract that created "the government" is that any and all restrictions on the power conferred by that contract effectively disappear.  Can't tell us what to believe, say, print?  You haven't been paying attention.  Can't search without probable cause or a warrant?  You REALLY haven't been paying attention.  Due Process of Law?  Right to counsel? Right to jury trial? Protection against "cruel and unusual" punishment?  Stolen.  Pilfered.  Misappropriated.  Negated.
So, remember, when one of your more vocal friends, or family members, no longer calls, or returns yours...
YOU let this happen.

15 December, 2012

Just Us Prevails (Again)

Bloods.  Crips.  Eastside Thrillseekers.  Hell's Angels. Mongols.  Bandidos.  As diverse as these might appear, they all have one thing, if only one thing, in common:

They simply aren't big enough yet.

That's the only conclusion that can be reached.  It was curious enough that Forbes magazine published an opinion piece titled

"Is the Federal Reserve Using Money-Laundering Techniques To Cleanse Banks' Balance Sheets?" (http://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/10/29/are-federal-reserve-regulated-banks-laundering-dirty-money/

Granted, it wasn't Forbes' own, but a Forbes "contributor"'s opinion, that Forbes published.  But from a non-elite perspective, my observation was that one of "them" (see the subtitle of this blog) was "eating their own":
"Immediately after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Fed laundered more than $2 trillion in worthless assets held on the balance sheets of private banks. According to a watered-down 2011 audit of the Fed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), there have been $16 trillion in Fed bailouts to banks and corporations around the world since the financial meltdown in 2008. Since that report, Bloomberg has reported on an additional $9 trillion in secret, off-balance-sheet Fed transactions that the central bank refuses to discuss. Now, Ben Bernanke is ginning up assembly-line washing machines at the Fed with QE∞ to spin an opened-ended, $40-billion-monthly cleansing campaign to purchase worthless mortgage backed securities from banks at face value, which could run to an additional $1.3 trillion loan laundering accompanied by downscale resales."
But, in case you were wondering what "THE FED" has to do with the groups mentioned above, I bring you:

HSBC pays $1.9 billion to settle US probe

@CNNMoneyDecember 11, 2012: 2:25 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

Global banking giant HSBC will pay $1.92 billion in a record settlement with U.S. regulators to resolve money-laundering allegations.

The Department of Justice and U.S. Treasury said Tuesday that HSBC allowed the most notorious international drug cartels to launder billions of dollars across borders. In addition, the government said HSBC violated U.S. sanctions for years by illegally conducting transactions on behalf of customers in Iran, Libya, Cuba, Sudan and Burma.                                           
(fair use claimed under 17 U.S.C. § 107)

After a five-year investigation, involving 9,000,000 documents, and the outright admission (confession) of money laundering, there will be exactly 0 indictments. 

Oh, yes, HSBC will "pay" a LOT of counterfeit "money".  But not one bankster will see the insid of a courtroom, let alone a cell.

Which is where the bankster cartel differs from the groups named above .




 

10 December, 2012

"Will It Never End?!?" Goldfinger Laments

from the New York Times  ("fair use" authorized under 17 U.S.C. § 107):
"The nation’s largest banks are facing a fresh torrent of lawsuits asserting that they sold shoddy mortgage securities that imploded during the financial crisis, potentially adding significantly to the tens of billions of dollars the banks have already paid to settle other cases."
Apparently, investors take issue with being sold "securities" that weren't, well, "secured".

Who'da thunk? 

And they, along with "regulators" (Goldfinger personnel at SEC, etc., with whom this was all A-OK till the organic matter hit the rotating oscillator), prosecutors (ditto), and insurers (ditto, as long as they didn't have to actually pay out) are on the offensive, taking the TBTFs (BofA, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, et al) to court over more than $1,000,000,000,000.00 (that's what "1 trillion" looks like in actual numbers) in "securities" that were, supposedly, "backed by residential mortgages."

At that, NYT reports that "some in the banking industry" think that losing ALL of these lawsuits could result in "losses" of as mush as 300,000,000,000.00 (30%; gotta love the math!).  But at least one "mucky-muck" (a term that has reached a whole new level of meaning) at Tangent Capital Partners (italics are mine - but you just can't make this stuff up)  admits
“The real price tag is terrifying.” 
Seems that the 25 billion (see how different it looks in words?) that the cartel - um, industry - put up as a "settlement" awhile back just ain't gonna cut it.

In as classic a line as I've ever read, NYT paraphrases "several senior officials in the insustry" as saying "But in the most extreme situation, the litigation could empty even more well-stocked reserves and weigh down profits..." (emphases mine). 

Think about THAT for a moment.  If 1,000,000,000,000.00 will only "weigh down profits", I guess Goldfinger really is "Too Big To Fail".  Then again, the NYT article does overlook one facet of all this, saying,
"The banks are battling on three fronts: with prosecutors who accuse them of fraud, with regulators who claim that they duped investors into buying bad mortgage securities, and with investors seeking to force them to buy back the soured loans."
What NYT overlooks is that the momentum is building from a fourth "front":  the other side.  As time passes, more and more mortgagor-victims are prevailing in their own battles against foreclosure, based upon fraud of varying types.  One recent example is a property owner who had a "securitization audit" done, and obtained verification from SEC of these findings:

"Our search of EDGAR, the Commission’s electronic database of corporate filings, for the CWABS Asset-Backed Certificates Trust Series 2006-23 (http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001381999&owner=include&count=40&hidefilings=) produced no filings referencing the loan number you provided.  We also did not locate a pooling and servicing agreement attached as an exhibit to the Trust’s registration statement.  A Form 15 to terminate the Trust’s registration was filed in January 2007."

Which, if you've been paying attention, leads directly back to the securities-victims discussed above, who, it appears, invested in mortgage "pools" that Karl Denninger, at Market Ticker, calls "empty trusts".

Giddy-up!.










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