The Illusion of Choice 

...... What about letting profligate institutions go broke? What about adhering to the market principle of Too Stupid to Succeed rather than capitulating to The State’s self-serving version: Too Big to Fail? Where might the economy be if the weak hands had been eliminated from the market, ceding what remaining value they had on the books to institutions that had exercised prudence and good judgment while future bailout recipients busily indulged in excessive risk-taking and reckless profligacy?

Known variously as the either-or fallacy, the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses or, more colloquially, plain ol’ black and white thinking, the false dilemma is both deceptive and destructive. First, because it lures unsuspecting listeners into a misguided belief that their choices are limited to those offered by the speaker and, second, because it attacks the creative process by which new ideas come to “market” by slamming the door closed on alternative possibilities....

Nowhere is a free market alternative presented. And it’s little wonder why. At the precise point the free market ends, the tyranny of The State begins. Nowhere do the two overlap. (Crony capitalism, mixed market economies and the rest are NOT free markets.) Clearly, therefore, it is in The State’s best interest to see that free market activity is marginalized as far as possible in order that The State itself might occupy ever more space in people’s minds and, by extension, in the economies they are “allowed” to build.

Indeed, some confused people even contend that, were we to ignore the iron-fisted directives of The State, we would promptly descend into a Mad Max-style dystopia, in which a collection of unchecked territorial monopolies would roam the planet, stealing and damaging property at whim and torturing, imprisoning and killing whomever they so wished.

“Spontaneous order is a system which has developed not through the central direction or patronage of one or a few individuals but through the unintended consequences of the decisions of myriad individuals each pursuing their own interests through voluntary exchange, cooperation and trial and error.”

 By Joel Bowman

Market-Rigging and Price-Fixing

“Markets are so rigged by policymakers that I have no meaningful insights to offer.”....

It’s starting to feel like the financial markets are all rigging and no ship....

“It now seems obvious that in response to the financial crisis that has been with us for five years and counting, we are being told to double up on these same policy decisions [that have failed]. The crisis was caused by central bankers mispricing the cost of capital, which forced a misallocation of capital, driven by debt/leverage, which was ultimately exposed as a hideous asset bubble which then collapsed, destroying the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of relatively innocent people.”



LIBOR, which stands for London Interbank Offered Rate.... determine the pricing of trillions of dollars’ worth of credit lines and credit derivatives.....According to recent press reports, only three of the 16 banks that establish the LIBOR rate have admitted — or sort of admitted — to posting fraudulent LIBOR rates between 2005 and 2008. But very few filthy kitchens contain just three cockroaches.

Price-fixing and market-rigging are a perversion — destructive corruptions of the market-based signals that facilitate capitalistic enterprise. The more the market-riggers and price-fixers have their way, the less the free markets can nurture entrepreneurial dynamism. And yet, tragically, the more the riggers have their way, the more they argue the need for even more pervasive and extreme market-rigging.

Indeed, our illusory wealth is already vaporizing. As reported previously in this space, “The median net worth of families plunged by 39% in just three years from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,000 in 2010. According to the Fed, the financial crisis, which began in 2007, wiped out nearly two decades of wealth — with middle class families bearing the brunt of the decline. This puts Americans roughly in the financial position they were in 1992.”

Janjuah feels very certain that this story will end badly. He continues to reiterate this February warning:

“When looking for where the bubbles may be, realize this: in this current cycle, where central bank balance sheets are at the core, the bubble is everywhere — in stocks, in bonds, in growth expectation, in credit spreads, in currencies, in commodity prices, in most real asset prices — you name it! This is why I think that this current bubble, if it is allowed to fester and develop into 2013, will have such widespread consequences when it bursts that it will make 2008 feel, relatively speaking, like a bull market… When this bubble bursts, I don’t think there is an easy way out. Who will be the bailout provider?”

By Eric Fry

Retirement: Surely You Jest

by Gary North

Tea Party Economist

A 90% cogent article in The New York Times discusses the utter absence of any contact with reality in most Americans' retirement plans. The numbers do not come close to adding up. The article is here.

Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day...

This means that a majority of Americans have not taken seriously the economics of retirement. They have not saved. They have been faithful Keynesians. They have spent. They have borrowed to finance this spending. They have been grasshoppers, not ants.....To maintain living standards into old age we need roughly 20 times our annual income in financial wealth. ...Most people are politically naive. ....I was warned in 1959 that the government would default on its Social Security promises. My high school civics teacher ran the numbers for us. The program would go bankrupt. It did: in 2010. The general fund is now bailing it out....

The confidence that people have in the future is based on ignorance, procrastination, and naivete. The voters do not understand how close the U.S. government is to bankruptcy. I define "bankruptcy" as follows: "the inability of the Treasury to borrow money at rates low enough to keep from producing Great Depression II, but without relying on the Federal Reserve System to lend at these low rates."

Beginning with Lyndon Johnson, the government has cooked the books. It has counted the Social Security's trust fund full of nonmarketable IOUs from the government as if these funds were investments. Then it relegated these IOUs to off-budget expenses. It counted the surplus from Social Security as income, and used this money to reduce the official deficit.
 

Gary North

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - A War On Silver and Gold

"I believe the origins of the manipulation can be traced to collusive and concentrated short selling for profit by large financial institutions, starting with Drexel Burnham, then on to AIG Trading, Bear Stearns and finally to JPMorgan. These were the firms at war with higher silver prices, which the US Government subsequently joined...

"The war has been waged against all silver market participants by a few well-connected financial firms and banks for the purpose of price control. This price control enables JPMorgan and others to capture profits on a variety of derivatives transactions, including COMEX futures and options contracts. This is exactly the same motive that caused Barclays to manipulate LIBOR; interest rates were manipulated for mostly short-term payoffs on derivatives contracts."
Ted Butler, The War On Silver

But we know what they know and greatly fear, that their success is not based on hard work and true excellence but on deceit, on a fraud, and a mass of falsely valued paper holdings.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum. Let justice be done....When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall....

jessecrossroadscafe

The Careerists

Illustration: Mr Fish

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions....

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers.“Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.” These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions....They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness....

By Chris Hedges 

Who Really Runs the World? Conspiracies, Hidden Agendas and the Plan for World Government

So, who runs the world? It’s a question that people have struggled with since people began to struggle. It’s certainly a question with many interpretations, and incites answers of many varied perspectives....

Historical Understanding of Power

We must examine the globe as a whole, and the power structures of the global political economy... The greatest position of power within the global capitalist system lies in the authority of money-creation: the central banking system. The central banking system, originating in 1694 in England, consists of an international network of central banks that are privately owned by wealthy shareholders and are granted governmental authority to print and issue a nation’s currency, and set interest rates, collecting revenue and making profit through the interest charged. Central banks give loans to both governments and industries, controlling both simultaneously. The ultimate centre of power in the central banking system is at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in Basle, Switzerland; which is the central bank to the world’s central banks, and is also a private bank owned by the world’s central banks.

The central banks, and thus the central banking system as a whole, is a privately owned system in which the major shareholders are powerful international banking houses. These international banking houses emerged in tandem with the evolution of the central banking system. The central banking system first emerged in London, and expanded across Europe with time. With that expansion, the European banking houses also rose and expanded across the continent.

The French Revolution resulted with Napoleon coming to power, who granted the French bankers a central bank of France, which they privately controlled. It was also out of the French Revolution that one of the major banking houses of the world emerged, the Rothschilds. Emerging out of a European Jewish ghetto, the Rothschilds quickly rose to the forefront in banking, and established banking houses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples, allowing them to profit off of all sides in the Napoleonic wars..... in the United States, we saw the emergence of a powerful group of bankers and industrialists, such as the Morgans, Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies, and they created massive industrial monopolies and oligopolies throughout the 19th century. These banking interests were very close to and allied with the powerful European banking houses.

...bankers set out to undertake a project of establishing think tanks to organise elites from politics, economics, academia, media, and the military into a generally cohesive and controllable ideology.

Constructing a Ruling Class: Rise of the Think Tanks.... 

....In 1954, the Bilderberg Group was founded in the Netherlands. Every year since then the group holds a secretive meeting, drawing roughly 130 of the political-financial-military-academic-media elites from North America and Western Europe as “an informal network of influential people who could consult each other privately and confidentially.” Regular participants include the CEOs or Chairmen of some of the largest corporations in the world, oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and Total SA, as well as various European monarchs, international bankers such as David Rockefeller, major politicians, presidents, prime ministers, and central bankers of the world.22 The Bilderberg Group acts as a “secretive global think-tank,” with an original intent “to link governments and economies in Europe and North America amid the Cold War.”... think tanks have effectively socially constructed an ideologically cohesive ruling class in each nation and fostered the expansion of international ideological alignment among national elites, allowing for the development of a transnational ruling class sharing a dominant ideology. These same interests, controlled by the international banking houses, had to socially construct society itself. To do this, they created a massive network of tax-exempt foundations and non-profit organisations, which shaped civil society according to their designs. Among the most prominent of these are the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

At the top of the list of those who run the world, we have the major international banking houses, which control the global central banking system. From there, these dynastic banking families created an international network of think tanks, which socialised the ruling elites of each nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive transnational elite class.....

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Obama's Rhetoric

Barack Obama's great rhetorical gifts include the ability to make the absurd sound not only plausible, but inspiring and profound.

The whole point of the collectivist mindset is to concentrate power in the hands of the collectivists - which is to say, to take away our freedom. They do this in stages, starting with some group that others envy or resent – Jews in Nazi Germany, capitalists in the Soviet Union, foreign investors in Third World countries that confiscate their investments and call this theft "nationalization."

Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone.

What about the workers that businesses hire, whose education is usually created in government-financed schools? The government doesn't have any wealth of its own, except what it takes from taxpayers, whether individuals or businesses. They have already paid for that education. It is not a gift that they have to "give back" by letting politicians take more of their money and freedom.

One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience's attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about "giving back" distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom....

By Thomas Sowell

Economic Collapse, We Still Don’t Get It

As the world collectively muddles through 2012, it is has become increasingly apparent that we still don’t get it. Even after the collapse of 2008 and the completely fabricated and bogus ‘recovery’ that the lapdog presscorps still insists is ongoing, plus the various financial and economic ‘accidents’ that have happened along the way since, such as MFGlobal and PFGBest, plus the annexing of entire countries by the banking syndicate (Greece and Italy for starters), we still don’t get it. We are Rome. Obsessed with bread and circuses such as government handout programs and the Olympics and NASCAR, we’ve taken all that is abhorred by productive societies and made a center stage spectacle of it.

...In the same country where you have families living in cars and tent cities because of job losses, foreclosures, and other manifestations of a system gone awry, you’ve got areas where people are living the good life and spending money like there is no tomorrow. Much of it is borrowed, but that is of little significance to a generation that has been schooled and brainwashed into believing that debt doesn’t matter. Utopia is available for easy monthly payments. Paying back the loans is never really an issue or even something to be contemplated. If the government can do it so can we, right? We still don’t get it.

We’re not alone in our near complete lack of understanding either. Europe, the poster child for greed and avarice, is further along in the game. Their currency has, for all intents and purposes, collapsed. As one country after another succumbs to consequences of its misunderstanding, the global banking syndicate stands ready with open arms to offer the bailout money in exchange for what amounts to indentured servitude. On a global scale, we are returning to Feudalism, and anyone who actually takes the time to do a little research will quickly conclude that Feudalism and the concept of the American circumstance as was envisioned by our founding fathers are incompatible.And the Feudalism is becoming built into the American psyche at younger and younger ages. The biggest crisis in this country right now in my opinion is the student loan crisis and nobody is talking about it. Making monthly payments has become a part of the formative years for most of our young people these days. Sure Bernanke went on television and ensured us that all is well and that our kids owing over a trillion bucks to banks is quite all right even though beyond waiting tables there are precious few opportunities for many of them.

Sadly, America will fall just as Europe is falling. In many ways we’ve already fallen. Our sovereignty has been ceded to a banking cartel that creates its bingo chips from nothing, charges us to use them, and requires us to expend land, labor, capital, and scarce resources in order to make our monthly payments as a nation. Yet we sleep, totally unaware of the pillaging of the past 100 years. There is not a better example of the frog and the hot water analogy made so popular by those who have attempted to wake people up from this fatal slumber. We still don’t get it.

Let’s take this a step further. Just in 2008 alone, we had the Fannie/Freddie mess, AIG, Lehman, Wamu, Wachovia, Bear Stearns and several other notable failures. To date there has not been a single arrest made, yet Bernie Madoff and John Sanford went down for kiddie-sized Ponzi schemes by comparison while the real felons continue to do business as usual, even stooping to rubbing our faces in it much in the way Jamie Dimon smirked his way through JP Morgan’s PR stunt when he went on ‘Meet the Press’ and talked about how the bank would still make a pile of money despite its ‘mistake’ that cost untold billions.

These are bank robberies perpetrated by bankers. They make Butch Cassidy and John Dillinger look like amateur petty thieves. Pure and simple. There is a clear blueprint right here for stealing every single fiat dollar from every single American. And when you think of the nearly 1,000 trillion in notional value of cancerous OTC derivatives, which is enough to wipe out every IRA and pension in this country roughly 120 times. We’re dealing with this identical situation with derivatives. They aren’t even weapons of mass financial destruction; they’re weapons of total financial and economic disintegration.

Today’s bankers are little more than casino operators and loan sharks. But the funny thing is that while the bankers wage a public relations war on precious metals and call them barbaric relics, they themselves are accumulating them like crazy. Again, are we dealing with incompetence or psychopathic behavior?

The various new taxes that have now been deemed ‘legal’ by the supreme court (an institution that ignores its mandates does not deserve proper noun status) are a way for the fed to be repaid with the government collecting the payment as ‘taxes’ and ‘penalties’. Distilling this, what is really happening is that more and more of our productive capacity is going to need to be dedicated to paying off the bankers. Just like Europe. You can certainly bet that when the next banking crisis hits that our government, which is nothing more than a collection agency for the bankers, will be more than happy to commit We the People to another generation of indentured servitude to the bankers. Just like Europe. When the Euro is ‘officially’ pronounced dead, the countdown clock on the US Dollar will begin and the next domino will fall.

We still don’t get it.

By Andy Sutton

Central Banks, The Veil Of Secrecy, A Hotbed of Corruption, And Now Another One Got Ensnared

Central banks are designed to be “independent,” and they shroud themselves in secrecy. But they have formidable and, when it comes to money, “unlimited” powers that they harness for the benefit of their clientele, banks. And hiding behind their veil of secrecy are shenanigans that rarely seep to the surface, but when they do, they just get worse and worse. And the latest is a sordid bribery and kickback scandal at the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) that appeared to be neatly contained to two subsidiaries, until now.

Central banks are special creatures, and investigating them turns out to be the hardest thing in the world. While pressures have been rising for an independent inquiry, Parliament voted against it last year, and may do so again.

But the RBA is not alone. Similarly sordid allegations have entangled Ewald Nowotny, Governor of the Austrian National Bank and member of the ECB’s Governing Council [read... Austrian Central Bank: Bribery, Kickbacks, Money Laundering]. At the Swiss National Bank, an insider trading scandal caused its chairman, Philipp Hildebrand, to resign. And in the US, an audit of the Federal Reserve System by the Government Accountability Office shed some light on the dizzying conflicts of interests and cronyism at the New York Fed when it decided who got which billions during its multi-trillion-dollar bailout mania [read.... The GAO Audit of the Fed Doesn’t Call It ‘Corruption’ but it Should].

Piercing the veil of secrecy surrounding central banks is tough. While Ron Paul [His Legacy, A Complete Fed Audit?] and others have long pushed for regular Fed audits, not much has been accomplished beyond the GAO audit. Inspector General Neil Barofsky was looking after TARP to prevent fraud and abuse, though it was handing out peanuts compared to the trillions the Fed was handing out—secretly and unobserved. Read.... All Heck Breaks Loose on CNBC, TARP Gets Sanctified, Bank Bailouts Get Whitewashed, And The Fed Escapes Scot-Free.

And here’s a central-planning debacle skidding towards its endgame: to stave off another collapse, the government in Argentina is imposing ever more trade barriers and capital restrictions. Read.... Argentina’s Creeping State Control, by stilettos-on-the-ground economist Bianca Fernet.

By testesterone pit

The Quantum of Quantitative Easing Inflation is Coming!

First we saw the US dig out and focus on 4 year old LIBOR manipulation stories centred around the cesspit that goes by the name of Barclays Bank that looks set to devastate all of UK's biggest banks, with the UK tax payer ultimately footing the bailout bill. I have covered this story at length that illustrate that everyone knew about LIBOR manipulation but now pretend that they only found out relatively recently - more here - RBS Chaos and Barclays Libor Cesspit Prompts Slow Motion Run on British Banks

...we have seen more convenient revelations out of the US dating back to 2007 that HSBC, Britain's biggest bank that forces ordinary citizens to jump through hoops to transfer small amounts of currency abroad has been engaged in systematic money laundering for the Mexican drug cartels to the tune $7 billion with potentially far worse across the world as HSBC affiliates apparently did business with rogue nations and terror organisations.The truth is that BOTH stories could equally apply to major U.S. Banks but U.S. politicians are choosing not to investigate / hold them to account.... One possible answer may be found in the records of campaign donations??

So now in the UK, HSBC takes the lead from Barclays as Britains most criminal banking institution, the question is will Barclays fight back for the lead with something even worse? Off course Britain's banks are just a few amongst many that is the global banking mafia crime family. The truth will belatedly come out though the price paid will probably wholly be by tax payers.

Now whilst you should by now be agreeing fully with me that the global banking system is fraudulent and possibly even start to see that the central banks are party to this fraud by evidence of their actions as illustrated by money printing, the whole of which has been effectively funneled into the back pockets of the Bankster elite where in the UK this stands to the tune of £375 billion over 3 years, all aided by pure propaganda that central banks are pumping money into the economy which I have repeatedly illustrated as being a PURE LIE because it has NOT been pumped into the the economy as politicians continually state but into the banks.

The Only Solution Governments have is Inflationary Debt and Money Printing
If the Government / Bank of England wanted to boost the economy then they would have handed over at least some of the money that has been stuffed into the bankster banks to the people of Britain by means of tax refunds. The only reason why they have not done so is because it will be highly inflationary, after all Britain being an economy in depression for the past 4 years has still suffered Inflation of 15% as illustrated by the Inflation Mega-trend graph below -



The inflation mega-trend is something that the mainstream press never mentions ...

The QQE Secret of How to Print Money Without Increasing Debt

This is taking place right now, completely out of the focus of the public and the mainstream press....

QQE is taking place by means of the interest earned on government debt bought by the Bank of England

I am sure this is one secret that the Bank of England wants to keep hidden away for as long as possible for it implies that the ramping up of the Inflation Mega-trend is already underway with approx 1/3rd of Government debt having been effectively cancelled to date! As effectively 1/3rd of the interest the government pays on it's debts is going back to itself! And meamtime about 12% of the value of the debt has been wiped out by inflation (£132 billion) over the past 3.5 years)

This is the magic of the electronic money printing presses and inflation, as one minute the government had £1.1 trillion of debt and then the next minute POOF, it is all gone! A bit like Verbal Kint turning into Kaiser Sozer!

By Nadeem Walayat