Gold to Outshine Dollar?

As the price of gold has gone up fivefold over the past 10 years, why would one buy it at today’s prices? A key reason to hold gold today might be to prepare for the crisis tomorrow.

When I wrote the book ‘Sustainable Wealth: Achieve Financial Security in a Volatile World of Debt and Consumption’ in early 2009, my editors wanted me to talk about the financial crisis in the past tense. I balked, arguing that the crisis will be far from over by the time the book would be published later that year. The crisis has long been in the making and may be far from over.

Just about anywhere in the world, politicians running for office promise to cut wasteful spending. The definition of wasteful spending tends to be what “the other party” spends money on; in turn, when elected, the politician will redirect resources to more productive projects. Of course, those other projects are similarly considered wasteful spending by their political opponents.

The presidential hopeful has already committed to continue subsidizing student loans and to keep up defense spending.....By the way, when politicians refer to “reducing the deficit”, they typically mean reducing such deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), rather than in absolute terms.... as we have seen in Europe, austerity is not a popular policy.... Different from the Eurozone, however, the U.S. has a substantial current account deficit..... In our analysis, currencies of countries with a current account deficit are more vulnerable, because such countries are dependent on inflows from foreigners to finance the current account... markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent....

          ............... Axel Merk

Draghi – We Will Continue to Fight Until Everyone is Dead


Spain’s problem is its competitiveness. The domestic economy will never recover without a currency devaluation (and debt restructuring). If Mario has his way, Spain will suffer from a decade of recessions with unemployment over 20%.



Bond buys? Rate cuts? New LTRO? That’s Draghi’s bazooka? These things have been tried in the past and have failed. These steps might buy the EU a few weeks (or hours?) of market relief, but they have no chance of turning the EU around.


There is still a market-based system that exists in the world of central bank manipulation. In the end, market forces always prevail. The outcome for the Euro will be no different. Draghi thinks he has the power to thwart the markets. He does not have that power. Draghi is either bluffing or lying, that or he is a blind as a bat.
                          ................ Bruce Krasting
.

The great deleveraging – US households see access to debt diminish. Housing affordability and reversion to the home price to family income ratio.

Households in the US continue to face a painfully slow process of austerity via debt deleveraging. In a debt based system like the one we live in access to debt is viewed by many as access to money. With the markets reaching a peak debt situation households have been in a major process of deleveraging since 2007. In fact, household debt obligations are now back to levels last seen in the early 1990s and similar to levels of the mid-1980s. Most of this debt removal has occurred via the painful process of millions of mortgage foreclosures.

Household debt to disposable income levels are now back to levels seen three decades ago....Many households are unable to access debt in the current markets. Many have shaky incomes and jobs that have very little security. Many younger Americans burdened by the only large growing class of debt, student loans ... Household wages have been weak and falling and many have no money saved and live paycheck to paycheck.... The only group continuing to leverage up are younger Americans going into massive student loan debt with the running higher education bubble.

                                               ......................... Mybudget360

The Mysterious 2012 London Olympics 

The mascots for the 2012 Games are far from cuddly and instead quite scary, the lights adorning the main Olympic Stadium bear a striking resemblance to the Illuminati pyramid featured on U.S. dollar bills, and the logo itself is, well....puzzling. Conspiracy theorists draw a compelling and passionate connection between these mysterious Olympic icons and the allegedly, London-based secret organizations including the Freemasons, Illuminati and even the British Royal Family.

Olympic Mascots

 According to Springmeier and Icke, the Illuminati first took shape under the direction of Mayer Amshel Rothschild, and a covert ring of 13 European aristocratic families, back in 1776. Their base of operations was London's Inner City district, which today due to global banks and other businesses, is reported to be the wealthiest real estate on earth. Wealthy families with names such as DuPont, Oppenheimer, Schiff, Warburg and, of course, Rothschild initiated a master plan for world dominance and financial control. Citing work by Icke and Springmeier, the blessing of the British Royal Family was given to this sinister band of the well-to-do, and that cooperation continues on even to this day.....Icke, Springmeier and other Illuminati scholars point out that as of the mid-20th Century, the global elitists had established three worldwide power bases encompassing religious (Vatican), military (Washington, D.C.) and financial (London's Inner City) control..... Interestingly enough, all three of these alleged power hubs do actually exist as separate entities, cocooned within city-states. These bases operate autonomously from the countries they lay within; complete with their own flags, laws and minimal taxation.

An example of this power would be NM Rothschild and Sons, tucked in London's Inner City. It is one of the largest and most influential banks in the world, and reportedly manages the vast trillions of pounds in assets maintained by the British Royal Family. The Oppenheimer, Schiff and Warburg families' names also dominate the realm of global, 21st Century finance. One recent manifestation of this fact is that Peter Oppenheimer currently sits as Apple Corporation's Chief Financial Officer.

With respect to the Rothschild banking dynasty, one illustration of their tentacles is the fact that from September, 1919 until June of 2004, worldwide gold prices were set daily at the offices of NM Rothschild and Sons in London. The chairmanship of the gold panel was held by a family member up until recently; now that position rotates annually outside of the Rothschild tree. London's Barclays Bank, heavily influenced by the Rothschilds, now oversees the gold market pricing.The Rothschilds also assist in running the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and probably the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Thoughts from the Frontline 

....Energy prices are down and do not yet seem to have found a bottom. Oil is down 25%, which will soon show up in savings at the pump....everyone the equivalent of a small tax break (which, unless you own an oil well or energy shares, is not bad news). Ditto for a whole host of commodities, even including gold of late. Don’t get me wrong, I am still buying gold every month. If it goes down I am happy, because that means I get more of those shiny little coins for the same amount of my paper money.Copper is at its six-month low, and Chinese stocks of the metal are said to be at all-time highs. There are reports from serious sources that Chinese commodity buyers (of coal, etc.) have lost their financing for long-term contracts at higher prices. Supposedly, there are some 30 large ships full of coal, sitting out of port waiting for the money to clear.

My last observation about Fed interest-rate policy is that it is punishing those who have worked and saved all their lives and had hoped to retire and be able to clip coupons. Unless you have a large amount of money, you can’t live off the interest income you get on what used to be the standard bond portfolio that was recommended for those who were either retired or close to retirement.

And it is killing pension funds....


Part of the reason the Fed cut rates was to stimulate the economy. Lower rates mean lower mortgages and credit-card and car payments. They give businesses access to cheaper capital and hopefully spurs profits and thus hiring. This puts more money into the hands of consumers.But low rates punish savers and leave them with less money, so that hurts retirees’ final consumer demand – or that is the view from the cheap seats where I sit. And retiree income and spending is a growing portion of the economy. Hurt that, and it’s a sector big enough to have consequences. I know that economists can argue that the trade-off is positive, but it seems to me we are defrauding a generation or two of hard-working savers. You did what you were supposed to do, and your reward is a ten-year bond at 1.5%. Since you paid off your mortgage a long time
ago, the lower rates don’t help you either! So you either cut back or move out the risk curve.

While better yields can be had with some serious research and homework, it is not easy. The Fed is not going to change its policy to help retirees and pension funds, so you are left to fend for yourselves. Sadly, the recent vote by the citizens of San Jose to dramatically cut their fire and police pension benefits, which they felt was necessary because their city council had for years promised more than the tax base could afford, is going to become normal over the next few years.

                                                    .............. John Mauldin

Panic in the New World Order

There are not many of them. In his book, Superclass, author David Rothkopf estimates that there are only about 6000 people at the top of the pyramid of world power and influence. They are mostly males, and at least a third of them have attended America's most prestigious universities. Most of the others have attended comparable universities in Europe.

Today, the entire banking system of Europe is at risk. The banks are highly leveraged, and they have made enormous investments at low-interest rates in bonds issued by governments that are technically insolvent.
There is no possibility that any of these bonds will ever be repaid. They were never designed to be repaid. They were designed to keep the taxpayers of all European countries in permanent bondage to the banking system.

So, on the one hand, investors have to pony up the money to lend to the governments, and the governments need the money to recapitalize the banks in their own borders. This leads to the next problem: in order for the lenders to lend money to a government, they have to write checks on their bank accounts. What happens if their banks should go under? Who will lend money to the governments?
First, there is a day of reckoning in the PIIGS countries, when depositors withdraw funds. The second day of reckoning is going to be imposed by the insolvent governments who have been borrowing hundreds of billions of euros from the banks......the system is stretched to the limits....

The politicians have always understood that the central bank would bail them out of their crisis, merely by creating new money and buying the IOUs of the government...

                .............. Lew  Rockwell

Can Americans escape the deception?

......21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the “war on terror.”....

As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction.

As in tyrannies, US citizens can be executed at the sole discretion of the despot in the Oval Office, who sits there drawing up lists of people to be murdered.

Whistleblowers who report the government’s crimes are prosecuted despite the statute that protects them....Peace activists in several states had their homes invaded by FBI, computers and personal records taken,.....Currently, Washington has wars underway, or occupations, or is violating the sovereignty of countries with drones and/or troops in seven Muslim countries, and is arming rebels in Syria.In short, in “freedom and democracy” america, the people have no voice and no rights and no representatives.

Washington’s account of 9/11 is the wildest conspiracy theory known to mankind....

Do watch: “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out,” At the end of the powerful film, psychologists explain why the majority of a population lacks the mental and emotional strength to confront highly disturbing facts. A government that so thoroughly spies on its population as Washington does obviously knows its population’s profile and sees nothing but weakness and fear that can be manipulated.
 ....................... Paul Craig Roberts

Between a Rock and a Hard PlaceThe Tragic Decline of Gibraltar's Spanish Neighbor

Many places in Spain are suffering as a result of the euro crisis, but few have been hit as hard as La Línea, a Spanish town which neighbors the prosperous British overseas territory of Gibraltar. With the city on the verge of bankruptcy, many residents have turned to smuggling to earn money.
The residents of La Línea de la Concepción are leaving, like rats deserting a sinking ship... They all want to get out of Spain, if only for a few hours. A "crisis tsunami" has reached La Línea, says Araujo, and the situation is more serious than ever before. "Our city isn't bankrupt, but it's close."....
The city hasn't been able to pay its employees eight of their last nine monthly salaries. On this morning, the mayor found a sign posted opposite her office door with an unmistakable demand: "Pay or resign." Her house was pelted with eggs and besieged by protesters, and the mob set fire to her secretary's car..... La Línea already made headlines under Araujo's Socialist predecessors in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was dubbed a "ciudad sin ley," or lawless city...

Dozens of police officers, 24 attorneys and eight psychologists, as well as expensive consultants and loyal friends, were all given jobs. According to certain records, some city employees were making up to €90,000 ($112,000) a year in second jobs. Within 15 years, the city had increased its debt by more than a hundredfold...

A city was looted in broad daylight, and now no one is willing to accept responsibility....

...the city administration in La Línea is no longer able to pay salaries. La Línea, a city of 65,000 people, now has a per-capita debt of close to €3,000 -- the highest in Spain, after Madrid...

Unemployment in La Línea is around 40 percent. By comparison, the official unemployment figure in Germany is 6.7 percent, while the average rate for all of Europe...


Caritas already provides regular assistance to 500 families in La Línea, and the numbers are still growing. They also include city employees. In some cases, Caritas even pays for rent and electricity bills...

                                     ..................Walter Mayr

Live or Die by the QE sword

In a most perverse manner, (perverse is about the only word that I can find to express the sickness that pervades the financial system), the worse the economic data has become, the better the stock markets of the world seem to do....

My own personal belief is that the additional QE will do absolutely NOTHING to impact the LONG TERM PROBLEMS that beset the current global economy. The problem is not that money is not cheap enough - the problem is that there simply too much debt. That however will not stop these Central Banks from pushing the accelerator on the liquidity car nor will it stop these SHORT TERM inflationary outbursts that result as this liquidity finds its way into both equities and commodities. At some point the debt has to clear. What we get however is short term bursts where the VELOCITY OF MONEY increases only to then drop off a cliff as the impact of the QE subsides. In a very real sense, the entire global financial system has now evolved to the point where it truly does either live or die by the QE sword.....

                                         ....................... Trader Dan

Government by the Banks, for the Banks: The ESM Coup D’Etat in Europe
                                                                      
Anselm Rothschild famously said, “Give me the power to issue a nation’s money; then I do not care who makes the law.” ....

Ellen Brown of Webofdebt.com has written an excellent post on what is really taking place in the ongoing banking bailout of the Eurozone. Get this, the bankers over there have given themselves immunity from just about every law that can be broken....

The ESM is now a permanent bailout fund for private banks, a sort of permanent “welfare for the rich.” There is no ceiling set on the obligations to be underwritten by the taxpayers, no room to negotiate, and no recourse in court. Its daunting provisions were summarized in a December 2011 youtube video originally posted in German, titled “The shocking truth of the pending EU collapse!”:

The treaty establishes a new intergovernmental organization to which we are required to transfer unlimited assets within seven days if it so requests, an organization that can sue us but is immune from all forms of prosecution and whose managers enjoy the same immunity. There are no independent reviewers and no existing laws apply. Governments cannot take action against it


Here are some of the ESM’s key provisions:
[Article 8] “The authorised capital stock shall be EUR 700 000 [700 billion Euros].”
[Article 32, paragraph 3]: “The ESM, its property, funding, and assets . . . shall enjoy immunity from every form of judicial process . . . .”

                                       ................. Ellen Brown,  Webofdebt.com 

One-To-One with Gerald Celente
Gerald Celente thinks, “The banks are taking over the world.” That’s what is really happening in Europe with the sovereign debt crisis...
Celente says, “America has already turned into pre-World War II Germany,” and “A war with Iran will be the beginning of World War III.” Celente is predicting America will not fare well in this conflict. Celente lost money in the MF Global bankruptcy and says the lesson learned is “You don’t own your money unless you have it in your possession.”

                                         Click here to listen to the full interview:
                                     

                                         ...................  By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

Libor: The Largest Insider Trading Scandal Ever

Among other things, the Libor scandal is the largest insider trading scandal of all time.

It also shows that the big banks are literally rotten to the core.

UC Berkeley economics professor and former Secretary of Labor – Robert Reich – explains today:

What’s the most basic service banks provide? Borrow money and lend it out. You put your savings in a bank to hold in trust, and the bank agrees to pay you interest on it. Or you borrow money from the bank and you agree to pay the bank interest.

How is this interest rate determined? We trust that the banking system is setting today’s rate based on its best guess about the future worth of the money. And we assume that guess is based, in turn, on the cumulative market predictions of countless lenders and borrowers all over the world about the future supply and demand for the dough.

But suppose our assumption is wrong. Suppose the bankers are manipulating the interest rate so they can place bets with the money you lend or repay them – bets that will pay off big for them because they have inside information on what the market is really predicting, which they’re not sharing with you.

That would be a mammoth violation of public trust. And it would amount to a rip-off of almost cosmic proportion – trillions of dollars that you and I and other average people would otherwise have received or saved on our lending and borrowing that have been going instead to the bankers. It would make the other abuses of trust we’ve witnessed look like child’s play by comparison.

Sad to say, there’s reason to believe this has been going on, or something very much like it. This is what the emerging scandal over “Libor” (short for “London interbank offered rate”) is all about.

***

This is insider trading on a gigantic scale. It makes the bankers winners and the rest of us – whose money they’ve used for to make their bets – losers and chumps.

The fact that the big banks have committed insider trading on their core function – setting rates based upon market demand for loans – is particularly damning given that traditional deposits and loans have become such a small part of their business.

The big banks no longer do very much traditional banking. Most of their business is from financial speculation. For example, less than 10% of Bank of America’s assets come from traditional banking deposits. Instead, they are mainly engaged in financial speculation and derivatives. (and see this)......

                                                .................... George Washington

Government by the Banks, for the Banks: The ESM Coup D’Etat in Europe


Besides easing the conditions under which bailouts would be given, the concessions included an agreement that funds intended for indebted governments could be funneled directly to stressed banks....

The ESM is now a permanent bailout fund for private banks, a sort of permanent "welfare for the rich." There is no ceiling set on the obligations to be underwritten by the taxpayers, no room to negotiate, and no recourse in court. Its daunting provisions were summarized in a December 2011 youtube video originally posted in German, titled "The shocking truth of the pending EU collapse!":

The treaty establishes a new intergovernmental organization to which we are required to transfer unlimited assets within seven days if it so requests, an organization that can sue us but is immune from all forms of prosecution and whose managers enjoy the same immunity. There are no independent reviewers and no existing laws apply. Governments cannot take action against it. Europe's national budgets [are] in the hands of one single unelected intergovernmental organization.

Here are some of the ESM's key provisions:

[Article 10]: "The Board of Governors . . . may decide to change the authorised capital and amend Article 8 . . . accordingly."

[Article 32, paragraph 4]: "The property, funding and assets of the ESM shall . . . be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation, or any other form of seizure, taking or foreclosure by executive, judicial, administrative or legislative action." ...

The Italian Coup D'Etat
There is reason to suspect that "Super Mario" Monti may be representing interests other than those of his country. He rose to power in Italy last November in what critics called a "'coup d'etat' engineered by bankers and the European Union." He was not elected but stepped in after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned under duress...Monti is not only an "international advisor" to Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful financial firms in the world, but a leader in the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission.....

Implementing the Shock Doctrine
The European Stability Mechanism quickly followed. It was a permanent rescue facility intended to replace certain temporary facilities as soon as the member states had ratified it, slated to occur by July 1, 2012. The ESM came to an initial vote in January 2012, when it was passed in the dead of night with barely a mention in the press.....
                                                      ............................ By Ellen Brown

Can the World Survive Washington's Hubris?

....The neoconservative lie behind Washington’s wars of hegemony is that the US is bringing democracy to the invaded and bombed countries. To paraphrase Mao, “democracy comes out of the barrel of a gun.” However, the Arab Spring has come up short on democracy, as have Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries “liberated” by US democratic invasions.

What the US is bringing is civil wars and the breakup of countries, as President Bill Clinton’s regime achieved in former Yugoslavia. The more countries can be torn into pieces and dissolved into rival factions, the more powerful is Washington.....

The US Navy is reallocating fleets to the Pacific Ocean and constructing a new naval base on a South Korean island. US Marines are now based in Australia and are being reallocated from Japan to other Asian countries. The Chinese are not stupid. They understand that Washington is attempting to corral China....

For a country incapable of occupying Iraq after 8 years and incapable of occupying Afghanistan after 11 years, to simultaneously take on two nuclear powers is an act of insanity. The hubris in Washington, fed daily by the crazed neocons, despite extraordinary failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now targeted formidable powers–Russia and China. The world has never in its entire history witnessed such idiocy.

The psychopaths, sociopaths, and morons who prevail in Washington are leading the world to destruction.
           .......................By Paul Craig Roberts 

Chief Justice Roberts, Economic Fascist

In upholding Obamacare, which is in fact Pelosicare, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He indulged in some lawyer-like deception, as lawyers are paid to do. The law specifically says that the mandatory payment for not buying insurance is a penalty, not a tax. He determined that this penalty would be unconstitutional if it were a penalty (commerce clause), so, lo and behold, it's a tax!

Roberts has at long last legalized open economic fascism to America. Of course, it has been alive and well ever since the New Deal, and really since the First Bank of the United States (1791 to 1811). But now it has been placed under the judicial umbrella of a Supreme Court decision..... A tax in America prior to last week was a payment by the citizen or legal entity to an agency of civil government. Not so in the new, improved American fascism, as articulated by Chief Justice Roberts. In fascism, a compulsory payment to a private, profit-seeking entity is considered a tax. You can pay it to an insurance company, or you can pay a fine to the federal government. Take your pick. They are both taxes...

CENTRAL BANKING

The first fascist agency in post-Constitution history was the First Bank of the United States. It went out of existence in 1811. The Second Bank of the United States created a replacement: 1816 to 1836. In the historic case, McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall announced that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." The argument of Maryland is never discussed in the textbooks. This is one of those crucial facts in history that has gone down Orwell's memory hole. Marshall's creation of tax immunity for the Bank established the central legal principle of central banking. This is the cornerstone of the Federal Reserve System. It is sacrosanct. This is why any reference to Maryland's case against the Bank is not discussed...

I have provided extracts from Maryland's presentation here.

That decision handed over the nation to private central planners. The central bank has the power over the central institution of the free market: money. Marshall gave America economic fascism at the center of the economy: money. Jackson and Congress removed it. He let the Second Bank's charter lapse in 1836. (Note: the following year, 1837, was the only year in U.S. history in which the U.S. government had no debt.)

                                         ............... By Gary North

Why is Nobody Freaking Out About the LIBOR Banking Scandal?
The LIBOR manipulation story has exploded into a major scandal overseas. The CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, has resigned in disgrace; his was the first of what will undoubtedly be many major banks to walk the regulatory plank for fixing the interbank exchange rate. The Labor party is demanding a sweeping criminal investigation....

The furor is over revelations that Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and other banks were monkeying with at least $10 trillion in loans (The Wall Street Journal is calculating that that LIBOR affects $800 trillion worth of contracts).
Barclays traders badgering the LIBOR submitters to "push down" rates in order to fatten their immediate bottom lines, depending on what they were trading or holding that day.... rigged LIBOR downward in order to produce a general appearance of better health...the bank had carte blanche to rig LIBOR downward in order to help allay spiraling public fears about the banks’ poor financial health....

If Bob Diamond and Paul Tucker were having these talks about LIBOR, is it fair to wonder what else Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein were talking about in the 24 discussions they had in the six days following the AIG disaster? When Paulson had a secret meeting with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in, of all places, his hotel suite in Moscow, in June of 2008? Or what other material nonpublic information was exchanged when Paulson met with a gang of hedge fund chiefs at the offices of Eton Park management in July 2008, and laid out for them a possible scenario for putting Fannie and Freddie into receivership?....

                                           ................. www.rollingstone.com

The FT's Martin Wolf Shoots the 'Naturally Efficient Markets' Hypothesis in the Head

In the absence of effective regulatory oversight and objective restraint, the financial insiders rigged the market, not incidentally, but systemically and flagrantly over a long period of time.Market manipulation is no obscure theory, not some secular transgression committed on the periphery by rogue traders, but a pervasive feature of the Anglo-American banking system that stubbornly resists reform through the accumulated power of a credibility trap.... 

A credibilty trap is a situation where the regulatory, political and informational functions of a society have been thoroughly taken in by a corrupting influence and a fraud so that one cannot even begin to discuss the situation honestly without implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure and the status quo who at least tolerated it, if not profited directly from it. Who will reform the reformers?....

...change is hard to do. And we have several decades of the free-market follies running at a higher tide then normal now, with the utopian notion that we must knock down or cripple all the laws regulating the markets in order to be free. Free of the government, but naked and defenseless against private rapaciousness and the organized plunder of increasingly powerful supra-national corporations...

Martin Wolf: "My interpretation of the Libor scandal is the obvious one: banks, as presently constituted and managed, cannot be trusted to perform any publicly important function, against the perceived interests of their staff. Today’s banks represent the incarnation of profit-seeking behaviour taken to its logical limits, in which the only question asked by senior staff is not what is their duty or their responsibility, but what can they get away with....It is difficult to know how to restore not just the reality, but the perception, of trustworthiness, to this industry. But part of the answer must be a separation of the self-interested trading culture of today’s investment banking from the service-oriented culture of old-fashioned commercial banking.... "
                                      ............................ JessesCrossRoadsCafe

The Next Great Failure

...The same day Nixon ended the link between the USDollar and gold, he also imposed a series of price and wage controls thinking that enforcing such an action would maintain the social status quo....Despite the fact that America was on a gold standard from 1913 through 1971, the fed had already managed to destroy around 25% of the dollar’s purchasing power.....To understand why all of this took place, it is essential to first understand the desired outcome, which was and has always been a worthless dollar. Think about it as a slow-motion bank robbery. If you have an extremely wealthy country, as the US was post WWII, you can’t just go in and re-possess everything; that would raise the ire of the citizenry. But what you can do is impose incremental changes that over the course of decades slowly rob the citizenry of its wealth. ...Even under the auspices of a (weak) gold standard, the fed was able to steal 25% of the dollar’s purchasing power between 1913 and 1971. Compare that with today and you’ll find that the fed has now managed to steal 95.4% of the dollar’s purchasing power compared to 1913. That is a pretty crafty theft, no? And if you really think about it, public awareness of this robbery was near zero until just a couple of years ago.....

New Modus Operandi for a New Paradigm
printing more dollars makes existing ones worth less..and eventually worthless...the value of each new fiat dollar that goes into circulation is worth just a little less than the one before it...

The Emergence of Consumer Credit
It took this nation over 200 years to accumulate its first trillion in national debt and barely 25 years to accumulate another $15 trillion, not to mention the underlying unfunded liabilities..Debt loads were (and still are) way too high and when your economy is 70% depending on consumer spending for its growth, you’ve got a problem when that spending slows down... Whether it is the TARP debacle, the ‘shovel-ready’ jobs stimulus of 2009, something of a bailout for homeowners who were burned by purchasing at the top of the market, Fannie, Freddie, or any number of other absurdities, the motive should now be apparent. They are attacking aggregate demand as a means of hiding the destruction of the dollar. The ridiculous dollar index doesn’t help either, as every time a new phase of the Eurozone crisis kicks off, the USDollar appears to gain ‘strength’.

                                ...................By Andy Sutton

Barclays Libor scandal: how can we change banking culture?

Barclays boss Bob Diamond … the scale of the Libor scandal is jawdropping Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

Each man, woman and child in Britain has already handed over £19,271. And our money has gone to the banks... In just a few months, and with barely any public debate, every household subbed £46,774 to the City....There ought to be a verb for this kind of involuntary donation. For true accuracy, it should only come in the passive voice. We could call it: to be bankered. "What happened to the British in the early 21st century?", a future historian will ask. "Poor sods," her colleague might reply. "I'm afraid they got totally bankered"....

Where they are obviously right is in recognising that what's come out in the last few days really is a scandal. Through tampering with lending rates, financiers at Barclays and elsewhere distorted everything from how much home-owners paid on their tracker mortgages to the deals struck by pension funds purely to pump up bank profit margins and their own bonuses. The lawsuits for Barclays alone are likely to cost billions.

Against that, the punishment meted out to Bob Diamond's company barely figures. The £290m fine slapped on it by regulators is tax-deductible, making it equivalent to just 13 days' profit. In any case, the bill will be paid by shareholders, rather than traders or senior management.... market manipulation is only the most jaw-dropping example of the corporate rampaging that caused the financial crisis.....

Yet more than enough evidence shows that what bankers want is either no use to the rest of us, or positively harmful.

After the Great Complacence, the taxes paid by finance between 2002 and 2008, during the boomiest boom in human history, came to only £193bn – and were immediately wiped out by the upfront costs of the banking bail-out....There's the revolving door between government and the City, which enables Tony Blair to leave No 10 and be chauffeured straight into a £2.5m a year part-time job with JP Morgan.

                            .......................... Aditya Chakrabortty