June 29th, 2008
Elaine Meinel Supkis
The most interesting thing about this epic meltdown of the US/UK New World Order's empire is how this collapse is exposing so many of the financial and social systems. We get to see the innermost workings of the normally hidden parts of 'capitalism'. Just like the communist push to take over the capitalist systems exposes the gears that make this system operate. Something very bad happened 35 years ago. The US/UK system collapsed and was replaced with the Floating Currency regime. It took a third of a century for all the weaknesses of this system to come to fruition. Today, we visit the older empire: England---to see how this works.
Will Hutton of the Guardian: As we suffer, City speculators are moving in for the kill
A spotlight has been shone on some very murky corners of the financial markets. There practices occur that challenge the very conception of what we consider a company to be, and the accompanying obligations of ownership. A multi-billion pound business has emerged in which shareholders lend their shares to hedge funds to be played with. For a tiny fee, a hedge fund will arrange to borrow shares from a great insurance company or pension fund which it proceeds to sell. Share-loans are believed to exceed a stunning £7.5 trillion.What then happens is the opposite of a bubble, a kind of financial black hole. The hedge funds sell the shares simultaneously, and the downward movement becomes self-reinforcing, with companies raising money during a rights issue particularly vulnerable. This is why the government forced disclosure. The hedgies reacted as if they were in Stalin's Russia; their freedom to kill a company stone dead was being challenged. Let's not mince words, that is the aim, and it gets ugly and personal. A senior official told me that in one case some hedge funds had allegedly warned the banks underwriting one rights issue to abandon it or face speculative attack - mafia practice.
There have been a series of very good articles in the press which seek to understand these 'dark pools' and other piratical matters in the financial markets. All of these wonderful articles inadvertently use the correct words to describe these things! This both amuses and amazes me. But these articles never go all the way and connect these things to what they really are.
This article is a fine example of the nature of opposites and how money is made from 'darkness' and how very, very tiny things can swell suddenly to very, very giant things when people 'open a portal to the Cave of Wealth and Death.' Let's look at this story through the prism of the Dream World: Why do shareholders lend their shares in the first place? These 'swaps' are now set in stone all over the financial landscape. Whether it be in commodities like gold and oil or in shares or ownership of properties, whatever, this 'game' of swapping stuff so one can own something but not own it at the same time is a great way to open a door to the Cave of Wealth. Namely, when we 'own' something, we are responsible for it from top to bottom. We must care for the things we own. We must protect and treasure what we own.
But we can't always make money off of owning things! Owning things often requires making SACRIFICES to keep owning things! There are LOSSES involved. But for a wise owner, these losses are offset by the ultimate gains of owning properties or slaves or whatever one owns. I would suggest that the history of capitalist banking is all about the transfer of the losses and headaches of ownership from the buyer to the banker who then exploits this to drain the property of all potential value. This is why modern capitalist banking systems create increasing DEBT and not increasing wealth!
By the 19th century, many smart people figured this out. They set out to begin building banking rules and regulations that would hinder this draining of all systems of value via bank lending. These barriers to the total drainage of all wealth via lending were set fairly high. Before 1850, the system set up was called 'debtor's prison.' People went to jail if they were enticed into going too far into debt. Before that, the system was even stranger: no one was allowed to bank at all and only infidels like the Jews could lend money to Christians. The Christians then corrected the system every time all the wealth drained from property and or wages or future tax revenues by the simple expedient of killing and looting the bankers.
England, for example, did this so totally, they expelled all the Jews, even the non-banking Jews. This was a catastrophe since English then had to go to Amsterdam to get loans from the expelled Jews! So bit by bit, the Jewish bankers were let in again.
The English article about this latest scam for making money is a classic. The hedge fund hell hounds came to the insurance company or pension fund [which are basically banks] and claimed that for tiny amount of money paid to these hellish creatures, the doors to infinite wealth would suddenly magically open wide! And through this opening, easy money with no labor would pour into the pockets of the fund managers and the insurers would make money and not worry about paying out damages.
Who can resist this offer? No one works and money is magically pouring in! So of course, they too the bait. How do traps work? They use BAIT. Con jobs are the same: they use this exact same sort of bait. Bait is TINY. It is much smaller than the thing the hunters wish to catch and kill. Bait conceals a HOOK. The hook is the painful part you can't get rid of. The more the victim struggles, the deeper the hook embeds itself.
The insurance companies and pension funds are being drained of all wealth by the hedge funds. They are on the hook and can't get off without bleeding to death. The hedge fund pirates tell these victims that if they disengage this process, they will all die. Note how the drainage of wealth is around $13 trillion. Amazing! This 'market' is gigantic. And it is, lo and behold, part of the hideous Derivatives Beast I keep trying to describe. All the elements of this creature are set up in such a way that if the wealth is drained out of all systems, the Beast suddenly becomes terribly visible! It doesn't take all that much to drain all the wealth out of anything. Namely, all we have to do is put everything into hock.
Will Hutton:
That is probably over the top, but there is a truth there. The price of petrol and the toughness of the credit crunch are being increased by the operation of hedge funds, as is the weakening of your job prospects as companies are forced into ever harsher behaviour. It doesn't have to be like this; the necessary changes in the markets and corporate ownership are fairly easy to make. They would make it harder for some very rich people to get even richer, but in the US and mainland Europe politicians are ready to contemplate that, partly to defend the legitimacy of capitalism itself. Only in Britain is nothing said, a sign, I think, not of our economic maturity, but political emasculation.
See how these poor fish struggle to get off the hook? But they are forced into 'ever harsher behavior.' All systems are forced to fire people, merge with other systems, sell off vital parts, dismember their systems. All the temptations of easy money if only they play various dark and mysterious games end up being the gutting of the organization that foolishly gives up control to outsiders whose sole goal is to enrich themselves as much as possible. The entire concept of 'hedging' is from the betting world: so that one doesn't lose one's own money, one plays games that insures one always wins. Casinos hedge all their bets this way so that they make a profit all the time no matter how much money is won by some players.
Stopping hedge funds from doing all of this is very important and stopping them is the only way to save our banking system and capitalism itself. But there are no rules or regulations that will work and not be circumvented if the fundamental basis of all banking is based on a hedging fraud called 'Floating Currencies' that are semi-controlled by central bankers who play all sorts of games trying to create free Funny Money™.
At least this writer in Britain understands that the very concept of capitalism is at stake here. And he understands that this whole business was a fraud designed to steal wealth.
The Independent: Buyouts plunge by 82% in wake of crunch
Private equity deals have continued to dry up in the wake of the credit crunch, with the value of buyouts worldwide tumbling to a four-year low during the last quarter.Global buyouts plunged to $62.1bn between April and June, down 83 per cent on the corresponding period in 2007, according to data provider Thomson Reuters. The decline marks the end of six years of growth.
Private equity groups thrived in the recent debt boom, buying companies and loading them up with debt to create instant returns. The British Venture Capital Association, the industry trade body, released a report yesterday that showed UK based private equity firms had invested £31.6bn last year, up from £21.9bn the previous year.
Here is yet another British article that sees the truth! The private equity groups boomed because they were frantically forcing every possible business on earth to load up with massive amounts of debt! This 'created instant returns'. Namely, the loans put on all businesses generated fat fees for the private equity groups. They, in turn, were in debt, too. In debt to the central bankers of Japan. As well as the sovereign wealth fund managers in the oil pumping nations. And those poor insurance and pension funds in the earlier story here.
Remember last summer? The Japanese carry trade collapsed suddenly. The US, EU and UK bankers went berserk. 'We need MORE LIQUIDITY', they yelled. The central banks worked hard to restart the wild build up of debt. Instead of seeing that we reached the point where debt could not suck out more wealth from systems, instead, the desire was for all of this to continue. The desire is for all systems to be over 100% in debt! The buyouts are still ridiculously high, by the way. Adding 'only' $62 billion a year is still unsupportable. This is going on only because there is still a few places on earth where all things are not totally, hopelessly deep in debt.
The Independent: UK savings rate sinks to 49-year low as growth falters
Britons are saving less money each month than at any time since 1959, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday, as it warned that economic growth was faltering.The ONS said UK households saved just 1.1 per cent of their income during the first quarter of the year, the lowest figure since the end of 1959. The statistics suggest the fall-off in savings has been very rapid, with the ratio falling from 3 per cent in the final quarter of last year and 6.3 per cent in the summer of 2006.
Like the US, the UK is seeing a huge loss of future wealth. Savings is collapsing even as the economy is shrinking. Let's back up a tad and look at the entire excuse for the central bankers to set interest rates: they supposedly set rates to prevent bubbles which then burst and cause depressions, etc. One tool for doing this is to attract money away from SPECULATIVE ventures and into SAVINGS. Speculative ventures in tulips or railroads or canals or Mississippi shares in the past caused tremendous bubbles to pop and destroyed whole governments, nations and industries. To prevent this, the wise bankers were supposed to take note of manias and strange financial schemes that involved too many debts and too many shares being sold and stop this via the nifty tool of raising the interest rates of the central bank and thus, the central banks ATTRACTS all the money and it comes back to the bank to be isolated and controlled!
This never happened of course. The central bankers are under tremendous political pressure to encourage bubbles and keep them alive as long as humanly possible. Besides, the first central banks like the one in England and France were set up by the rulers to create more loans for WARS! Within a year of the US central bank being launched, it was used to fund the English side of WWI, just for example.
Washington Post: Even in a Weak Economy, Some Shoppers' Compulsive Habits Can Take Over Their Lives
Shannon Hassemer went on a shopping spree when she got her first credit card in college. Tired of owning just one pair of tennis shoes, she quickly filled her closet with luxury items from designers such as Gucci, Coach and Louis Vuitton."I wanted to fit in," she said. "I was tired of looking like a boy."
It was a boost to her self-esteem, which she describes as particularly low. Over the years, shopping became a source of comfort. It was a daily habit. When she had children, she started buying them expensive clothing. Now at 36, shopping has become a source of pain. She has enrolled in a debt-consolidation program to pay down the $35,000 she owes on her credit cards, and she is getting therapy once a week.
Nearly all the sob stories about people in debt feature reckless life choices. If the credit is offered, people grab the bait and bite the hook. The more they struggle, the worse it gets. We live in this huge propaganda system begging us to buy now, pay later. The Christmas shopping mania which was launched a mere 100 years ago is now totally out of control. The entire economic system is geared to shoving everyone into this mad buying spree for a one day birthday party of a human god that has become totally unreligious. Indeed, a number of Christian cults are beginning to demand this Xmas mania cease. They hope to cut back on the celebration of buying stuff. And for good reason. It is totally Unchristian.
The Daily Mail: The Queen is said to be furious at being forced to live a 'patch and mend' existence as her palaces crumble around her.Aides say the rising cost of living means she cannot pay for long-overdue redecorating and rewiring in the state rooms at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
They have not been painted since she came to the throne 56 years ago and the electrics at the palace are untouched since 1948.
The queen has an easy solution for all her palaces: move out. Obviously, she can't afford to live there. I once lived in a mansion. It was a huge headache! Too much work. Too much money spent on repairs and upgrades! The Queen doesn't have to live in a palace. She is a human just like us. She can live like us in a normal house. Or maybe a doublewide trailer.
The Telegraph: Taxpayers left with £40m bill to fund royals last year
The Queen's case for increased funding was partly undermined by some of the eye-catching travel expenses racked up by Prince Charles. Accounts show that the Caribbean cruise last year enjoyed by the Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall cost the taxpayer £275,000, of which £210,000 went on chartering a yacht. It cost taxpayers a further £18,916 for Prince Charles to visit the Black Swan Pub, in Cumbria, on a trip intended to highlight the importance of rural communities.The total spent on royal travel rose to £6.2m up by £600,000 from last year. On the Queen's state visit to America last year to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement a plane was chartered at a cost of £381,813.
And it cost nearly £800,000 to send the Duke of York to several foreign destinations, including Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, as the UK's Special Representative for International Trade and Investment.
*snip*
[examples]
£40,513Cost of Prince Charles' use of the Royal Train on visit to Liverpool and Aberdeen on official engagements, April 22- 24, 2007
£700,000
Garden parties
This article shows that the Queen throws garden parties that are very expensive. When her trailer trash children lark about the place they travel very expensively. $70,000 to go to Liverpool? HAHAHA. Right! The Prince of Wails could go via coach by himself and carry his own luggage! US Presidents cost a pretty penny when they travel, too. They have to have snipers, soldiers, first class accommodations, an army of paper pushers, hanger-ons, servants and political advisors tagging along, too. This puts them in this bubble whereby they lose touch totally with real people and our real problems.
Alt-A Performance Gets Much Worse in May
The picture being painted for Alt-A is increasingly beginning to look a whole lot like subprime, as a result, even if peaking resets in the loan class aren’t expected until the middle of next year. In particular, loss severity continues to ratchet upward — a trend that portends some likely further reassessment of rating models at each of the major credit rating agencies, as they catch up with the data.Loss severity — the average amount lost relative to unpaid principal balance — reached 41.4 percent for all Alt-A first liens in REO during the most recent rolling six month period through May, Clayton said; that was up from a 37.6 percent rolling average one month earlier, and compares to a similar 49 percent loss severity average for subprime first liens liquidated in REO through May.
Since all the value of housing has been leeched out of the real estate markets by the simple fact that most of it is now deep in debt, the wealth inherent within owning land has pretty much vanished. And now people must default. It is obvious from day one, this will only get worse and worse. For it began collapsing back when there was still pretty good employment. Now that we go into the inevitable recession, employment is suffering. Since debt is lodged not against the property but FUTURE EARNINGS, as people give up on their assets that backed these loans, job losses are making this infinitely worse. The cheapest interest rates on earth are meaningless if the loans can't be paid at all due to loss of employment. The only route out is for the unemployed to sell their homes. And this is hard to do in recessions!
So this system of paying in the future is collapsing. It will continue until enough debt has been retired via bankruptcy so the system can restart again.
China's forex reserves hit 1.8 trillion dollars
(AFP) - China's foreign exchange reserves, by far the largest in the world, hit 1.80 trillion dollars at the end of May, state media reported Friday.The figure represents an increase of 40.3 billion dollars for the month, down from 74.5 billion dollars recorded in the previous month, the China Securities Journal reported.
China is holding more and more money for the West. The Chinese are trying to change the dynamics so they don't end up soaking up all the debts being generated by the West. The yen ceased getting weaker against the dollar and the euro. This might help. But I expect howls of rage in the West as the guys creating more and more debts are stopped due to lack of the carry trade business.
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