Infinite Unknown

- Deutsche Bank: “We Fully Understand Why The Authorities Wouldn’t Want Free Markets To Operate Today” (ZeroHedge, May 9, 2013):

A brief stroke of brilliance from Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid: Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of Japan, Banking, Deutsche Bank, ECB, Economy, EU, Europe, Global News, Government, Greece, Jim Reid, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Society, U.S.

- Godfrey Bloom of UKIP: Central Bankers Should be Arraigned as “War Criminals” (Liberty Blitzkrieg, May 7, 2013):

Coming off the heels of a fantastic performance in recent local elections, the UKIP under the leadership of Nigel Farage continues to make waves in both the UK and the Continent itself. In this case, I refer to a recent powerful performance at the European Parliament courtesy of Godfrey Bloom (UKIP), member of the European Parliament.

For many years, I have stated that Ben Bernanke was and is committing crimes against humanity, and would one day stand trial much like the war criminals at Nuremberg. It appears I am no longer alone in echoing such sentiments, as Mr. Bloom has just done so before the European Parliament.

I once said that Nigel Farage is Category 5 political hurricane.  That hurricane has landed.

Tags: Bank of England, Banking, Central Bank, Cyprus, Economy, EU, Euro, Europe, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Godfrey Bloom, Government, Mario Draghi, Neuroscience, Nigel Farage, Politics, Quantitative Easing, U.K., UKIP

- This Is The S&P With And Without QE (ZeroHedge, May 6, 2013):

…

One final point: for all those who say the Fed’s QE has “been successful”, or the stock market is sufficiently strong and does not need any more forced liquidity injections, here is a simple suggestion: just end it.

…

Tags: Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Quantitative Easing, S&P 500, Stock Market

YouTube Added: 03.05.2013

Tags: Banking, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Bonds, Central Bank, Collapse, Debt, Dollar, ECB, Economy, EU, Europe, Fed, Federal Reserve, Gerald Celente, Global News, Government, Inflation, Ireland, Jean-Claude Trichet, Mario Draghi, Obama administration, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Retailers, Society, U.S., Unemployment

- Federal Reserve Blows More Bubbles (The Free Foundation, by Ron Paul):

Last week at its regular policy-setting meeting, the Federal Reserve announced it would double down on the policies that have failed to produce anything but a stagnant economy. It was a disappointing, but not surprising, move.

The Fed affirmed that it is prepared to increase its monthly purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities if things don’t start looking up. But actually the Fed has already been buying more than the announced $85 billion per month. Between February and March, the Fed’s securities holdings increased $95 billion. From March to April, they increased $100 billion. In all, the Fed has pumped more than a half trillion dollars into the economy since announcing its latest round of “quantitative easing” (QE3) in September 2012.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Bonds, Bubble, Collapse, Debt, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Government, Great Depression, Obama administration, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Ron Paul, U.S., Unemployment

YouTube Added: 29.04.2013

Commentary:

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
- Alan Greenspan

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
- John Maynard Keynes

Quantitative easing = printing money = creating money out of thin air = increasing the money supply = inflation = hidden tax on monetary assets = theft!

Tags: Bank of England, Ben Bernanke, ECB, Economy, EU, Europe, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, Quantitative Easing, U.S.

- Everyone’s Missing the Bigger Picture in the Reinhart-Rogoff Debate (ZeroHedge, April 27, 2013)

Tags: Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, GDP, Global News, Government, Greece, IMF, Italy, Joseph Stiglitz, Obama administration, Politics, Quantitative Easing, U.S.

- Worth Over $500,000? Then QE Has Worked For You; Everyone Else Better Luck Next Time (ZeroHedge, April 23, 2013):

Not supremely confident despite the stock market being at all-time highs? Unsure of the future and feeling poorer than in the past? You are not alone. In fact, you are among the 93% majority. As the Pew Research Center finds, during the first two years of the US economic ‘recovery’, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%. As they explain, affluent households typically have their assets concentrated in stocks and other financial holdings, while less affluent households typically have their wealth more heavily concentrated in the value of their home. Due to these differences, wealth inequality increased during the first two years of the recovery. The upper 7% of households saw their aggregate share of the nation’s overall household wealth pie rise to 63% in 2011, up from 56% in 2009, with the mean wealth of affluent households now 24x the less affluent group (up from 18x in 2009). So the next time you see some talking-head on TV devoutly proclaiming his faith in the Fed’s QE policies, perhaps it’s worth considering in which cohort he and his clients sit.

Source: Pew Research Center

Tags: Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Quantitative Easing, Society, U.S.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

- Assault On Gold Update — Paul Craig Roberts (April 13, 2013):

NOTE: Gold weights are based on metric tons and Troy ounces. 500 metric tons of gold would be 16,075,000 troy ounces. This changes the arithmetic slightly but not the point

I was the first to point out that the Federal Reserve was rigging all markets, not merely bond prices and interest rates, and that the Fed is rigging the bullion market in order to protect the US dollar’s exchange value, which is threatened by the Fed’s quantitative easing. With the Fed adding to the supply of dollars faster than the demand for dollars is increasing, the price or exchange value of the dollar is set up to fall.

A fall in the dollar’s exchange rate would push up import prices and, thereby, domestic inflation, and the Fed would lose control over interest rates. The bond market would collapse and with it the values of debt-related derivatives on the “banks too big too fail” balance sheets. The financial system would be in turmoil, and panic would reign.

Rapidly rising bullion prices were an indication of loss of confidence in the dollar and were signaling a drop in the dollar’s exchange rate. The Fed used naked shorts in the paper gold market to offset the price effect of a rising demand for bullion possession. Short sales that drive down the price trigger stop-loss orders that automatically lead to individual sales of bullion holdings once their loss limits are reached.

According to Andrew Maguire, on Friday, April 12, the Fed’s agents hit the market with 500 tons of naked shorts. Normally, a short is when an investor thinks the price of a stock or commodity is going to fall. He wants to sell the item in advance of the fall, pocket the money, and then buy the item back after it falls in price, thus making money on the short sale. If he doesn’t have the item, he borrows it from someone who does, putting up cash collateral equal to the current market price. Then he sells the item, waits for it to fall in price, buys it back at the lower price and returns it to the owner who returns his collateral. If enough shorts are sold, the result can be to drive down the market price.

A naked short is when the short seller does not have or borrow the item that he shorts, but sells shorts regardless. In the paper gold market, the participants are betting on gold prices and are content with the monetary payment. Therefore, generally, as participants are not interested in taking delivery of the gold, naked shorts do not need to be covered with the physical metal.

In other words, with naked shorts, no physical metal is actually sold.

People ask me how I know that the Fed is rigging the bullion price and seem surprised that anyone would think the Fed and its bullion bank agents would do such a thing, despite the public knowledge that the Fed is rigging the bond market and the banks with the Fed’s knowledge rigged the Libor rate. The answer is that the circumstantial evidence is powerful.

Consider the 500 tons of paper gold sold on Friday. Begin with the question, how many ounces is 500 tons? There are 2,000 pounds to one ton. 500 tons equal 1,000,000 pounds. There are 16 ounces to one pound, which comes to 16 million ounces of short sales on Friday.

Who has 16 million ounces of gold? At the beginning gold price that day of about $1,550, that comes to $24,800,000,000. Who has that kind of money?

What happens when 500 tons of gold sales are dumped on the market at one time or on one day? Correct, it drives the price down. Investors who want to get out of large positions would spread sales out over time so as not to lower their sales proceeds. The sale took gold down by about $73 per ounce. That means the seller or sellers lost up to $73 dollars 16 million times, or $1,168,000,000.

Who can afford to lose that kind of money? Only a central bank that can print it.

I believe that the authorities would like to drive the gold price down further and will, if they can, hit the gold market twice more next week and put gold at $1,400 per ounce or lower. The successive declines could perhaps spook individual holders of physical gold and result in actual net sales of physical gold as people reduced their holdings of the metal.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Bonds, Collapse, Debt, Dollar, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Gold, Government, Obama administration, Paul Craig Roberts, Politics, Quantitative Easing, U.S.

Don’t miss!

- Ex-Soros Advisor Sells “Almost All” Japan Holdings, Shorts Bonds; Sees Market Crash, Default And Hyperinflation (ZeroHedge, April 14, 2013):

Previously, we have pointed out why Japan’s attempt at reincarnating its economy, geared solely at generating a stock market-based “wealth effect”, and far less focused on boosting the country’s trade surplus or current account, is doomed to failure, namely due the drastically lower equity participation by the general population and financial institutions in the country’s stock market. Sure, foreign investors will come and go renting each rally for a period of time, but unless the local population participates in the “reflation attempt” (which has already sent the price of luxury goods, energy and food through the rood), or in other words change the behavioral patterns of two generations of Japanese in under two years, the inflationary shock will simply leads to a loss of faith in the government and ultimately Abe’s second untimely demise. Not surprisingly, 4 months after Japan set off on the most ludicrous economic experiment in history, and one week after the BOJ announced its plans to double its balance sheet, Abe’s approval rating has already begun sliding with a poll by Asahi just reporting that popular support of Abe’s cabinet is already down to 60%, down from 71% a month ago. Continue reading »

Tags: Bank of Japan, Bonds, Collapse, Debt, Economy, George Soros, Goldman Sachs, Government, Japan, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Shinzo Abe, Stock Market