Tag Archives: Money/Economy/Taxes

FED Refuses to Honor FOIA Request about $2 Trillion in loans

“As Bloomberg reports today, the Federal Reserve has refused “to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.” On November 7, Bloomberg filed a Freedom of Information request to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of “emergency loans” from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral, but the private banker syndicate has told Congress and the American people to go fish.

Bloomberg notes that the Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and the public. However, the Fed is not a federal agency, it is a cartel of private bankers. It is a consortium of twelve private banks which are not part of the United States government and does not answer to it. The Fed controls our monetary system and acts at the behest of large national and international private banks. 100% of its shareholders are private banks and none of its stock is owned by the government.” (Read more from infowars.com)

See also: “Congressman: Fed “Bamboozling” Americans The Fed is refusing to disclose the recipients of $2 trillion dollars in loans, even after Bloomberg sued under the Freedom of Information Act to get the information. . . . Trade secret law? Trade secret law protects things like valuable business methods. What’s the banks’ secret business method here – making stupid decisions, going bankrupt and then becoming the recipient of socialist government handouts? What’s next? Will the government argue that it can’t disclose the details of its torture program because it needs to protect the trade secrets of the companies that make the electro-shock machines and the waterboarding platforms?” (from George Washington’s blog)

Also, watch this video about the Fed:

Profiles in Panic

This is a great read from Vanity Fair – the financial melt-down as seen by the financial elite. Hard to feel sorry for them. Maybe that’s why I like it.

“With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs and assets, even many of the wealthiest players are retrenching. Others, like the Lehman Brothers bankers who borrowed against their millions in stock, have lost everything. Hedge-fund managers try to sell their luxury homes, while trophy wives are hocking their jewelry. The pain is being felt on St. Barth’s and at Sotheby’s, on benefit-gala committees and at the East Hampton Airport, as the world of the Big Rich collapses, its culture in shock and its values in question.” (Read more from vanityfair.com)

The Economy – Predictions of Gloom and Doom

– Worst job losses in almost three decades expected (from marketwatch.com)

– Marc Faber: I advise every American to hold his gold outside of the United States
Executive Order 6102 signed on 5 April 1933 right after Franklin Roosevelt came to office and it forbade all Americans from owning physical gold assets. Quoting Wikipedia: It required all persons to deliver on or before May 1, 1933 all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act of October 6, 1917, as amended on March 9, 1933, violation of Executive Order 6102 was punishable by fine up to $10,000 ($166,640 if adjusted for inflation as of 2008) or up to ten years in prison, or both. (from creditwritedowns.com)

– Financial Disaster Will Lead to Civil Disorder in 2009 or 2010, Says Secret Citibank Memo. “The world is not going back to normal after the magnitude of what they have done. When the dust settles this will either work, and the money they have pushed into the system will feed through into an inflation shock,” wrote Tom Fitzpatrick, Citibank’s chief technical strategist. He goes on to explain that the massive money creation efforts by the Federal Reserve and other central banks will end with one of two things: A resurgence of inflation, or a fall into “depression, civil disorder and possibly wars.” (from prisonplanet.com)

– Leading Economist Warns of Food Riots. When top trend forecaster Gerald Calente predicted riots and revolution, many people shrugged and thought, “he’s gone off the deep end”. But leading economist Nouriel Roubini is also now warning of food riots, and blaming it on the Fed and Treasury’s policies and bank priorities. (from George Washington’s Blog)

– Russian Analyst Says U.S. Will Decline, Dissolve (from NewsRoomAmerica.com)

– Health Ranger Offers Thirty-One Predictions for 2009
1. Big Pharma will begin to implode
3. Brankruptcies will bring down retailers, malls
4. 20-40% inflation on food before 2010
6. Three US cities and states will announce bankruptcy
7. More taxes
(from naturalnews.com)

Person-to-Person Lending and the Money Mafia

In 19th century American literature, like Faulkner’s “The Hamlet,” I occasionally encounter one character writing a debit slip for another, selling debit slips, etc. What ever happened to this practice, I wonder?

I kind of like the idea of it. It give me freedom both as a borrower and lender. I also like that individuals must lend actual money, as opposed to banks who create loan money out of thin air.

This series of articles doesn’t fully answer my questions, but they shed light on a modern-day manifestation of this ancient practice.

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Person-to-Person Loans
“Online networks have emerged in recent years that allow people to find loans or make them, the same way they might exchange music or bid on collectibles on eBay. The sites that are leading the trend — Prosper.com and Zopa.com — say they have noticed a spike in activity since traditional lenders began restricting second mortgages and home equity lines of credit. . . .

Prosper’s users register with the site, permit the company to pull their credit data, and then post a loan request along with an upper limit for the amount of interest they are willing to pay. Loans, which are typically financed by several people seeking to spread their risk, amortize over three years at a fixed rate, with no prepayment penalty.

Lenders review requests individually or let Prosper offer loans to borrowers who meet the lenders’ specified criteria, like credit scores or group affiliation.

Borrowers pay Prosper a fee of 1 to 3 percent of the loan, then receive a check within four days. They make monthly payments to Prosper, based in San Francisco.

The average interest rate in May for a $20,000 loan given to borrowers with excellent credit was about 14 percent, and 9.5 percent for an $8,000 loan. These rates are generally higher than what borrowers would pay with a true home equity loan, but lower than credit card interest rates. ” (Read more from nytimes.com)

Me: Feedom baby!

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Virgin Money Overview
“Overview: Virgin Money is a person to person lending service that allows you to structure formal loans with people you know. Through person to person lending, you skip the bank and borrow from an individual (or group of individuals). This page is an overview of Virgin Money and the various person to person lending options there. Virgin Money was previously CircleLending.
Interest Rate: You and your lender agree on a rate, and Virgin Money uses that rate.
Repayment Schedule and Terms: Again, you and your lender decide when repayment begins and how it happens. Virgin Money allows flexibility that you might not find elsewhere (you don’t have to start repayment immediately, for example, or you might use a seasonal repayment schedule so that you can pay when your income is higher).” (Read more from about.com)

Me: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Does this mean the market is capable of setting an interest rate based on risk, without the help of our Central Planning Committees in Washington? Holy Moly, imagine that!

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Prosper.com creates person-to-person loan site, but can it work?
“Q: How did you come up with the idea behind Prosper.com?
The original idea behind Prosper was from our CEO, Chris Larsen. He had founded E-LOAN so he knew quite a bit about credit. And like all ideas he started with the most basic question: “Why?” Why is credit so expensive? Why is it so inflexible? Why is it so hard? And it just went from the” (Read more from intuitive.com)
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The Money Mafia
“A post by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch today really got me riled up: The SEC has shut down Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending site. This was up in the air until yesterday:
Yesterday, the SEC issued its formal cease-and-desist letter . . . outlining its reasoning for characterizing Prosper as a seller of investment, something prosper had vigorously resisted in the past by arguing that it was merely a marketplace matching lenders and borrowers. But the SEC is having none of that.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is an exact rerun of what happened with the original Napster and the music industry, only worse in my opinion.

The key here is that Prosper itself was not lending or borrowing, it was simply matching up willing borrowers and willing lenders. It also provided additional services such as collection and tracking. The HORROR.

The real fact is, if private citizens were allowed to freely lend to one another, the private banking cartel that is our central banking system would lose the little control they have over the economy. The free market would freely set interest rates and people and businesses would be free to do an end-run around our corrupt and bloated financial system. The financial engineering that has allowed Wall Street to siphon off trillions of dollars in profit at our expense would be crippled. The SEC is simply acting as the enforcement arm of our private national banking cartel.” (Read more from jasonkolb.com)

Me: In fairness to the SEC, some of the comments on jasonkolb.com w.r.t. this post say that Prosper is actually holding loans for a short period of time before reselling them. That makes it a lender. There’s more to be said about whether this is an exertion of the money mafia.

Auto Industry Headlines & Excerpts

– GM’s new propaganda video “GM (GM) says we still don’t get it. If we don’t save them, they’re gonna nuke the economy to all hell. In case dire warnings of billions and billions in losses aren’t enough to freak you out, the company has posted a scare-video on YouTube, complete with ominous music and the kind of overwrought imagery you might got during a preview for 60 Minutes.”

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– Chrysler leaders get millions “As Detroit’s crumbling auto industry asks Congress for a bailout, Chrysler is in the awkward position of paying about $30 million in retention bonuses to keep top executives while the company cuts thousands of jobs. Chrysler owes the bonuses under its contracts with about 50 executives, based on a retention incentive plan crafted early last year by former German parent DaimlerChrysler, when it was preparing to sell the Chrysler unit.”

– What Toyota knows that GM doesn’t “Do you know how many hourly jobs GM has laid off from 2006 to July 2008? . . . . 34,000 . . . And now, they’re talking about another 5,500 . . . . they’re asking you and your government for a bailout to end their troubled, outdated, low quality, wasteful production system. . . . OK, here’s a better question. How many hourly jobs has Toyota’s American production system laid off in the same time frame? Zero. That’s right. ZERO. . . . Toyota has halted production at its Texas and Indiana plants for the past 3 months. But the 4,500 people who work at those plants have not been laid off. . . . Toyota has a special culture, deep-rooted values, and respect for their workforce. Toyota’s tradition is to NOT lay off employees during hard times. This tradition hasn’t really been put to the test until now. And Toyota has stuck to its guns and its values.”

– Auto Workers Union Rules Out Concessions To Help Detroit Bailout “With the House of Representatives pledging an aid package for the auto industry, the United Auto Workers (UWA) union fanned the flames a bit by refusing to grant any concessions in a bailout of the big 3 Detroit automakers. UAW president Ron Gettelfinger adamantly stated that the auto industry’s woes could be laid at the feet of the stumbling U.S. economy overall: The US United Auto Workers (UAW) union has ruled out concessions – at least for the time being – to help rescue the ailing Detroit-based car industry.”

– GM and Ford To Get Rid of Some Private Planes They Don’t Like Totally Need…Maybe “Even though GM CEO Rick Wagoner and Ford CEO Alan Mulally are required by their companies to fly by private aircraft for security reasons, they think they may be able to part with their private jets. Of course this has nothing to do with their recent excursion to Washington to beg for money. Wilkinson said the decision to return the leased corporate jets was made before this week’s hearings and that the company in September returned two other of the seven jets it had at the beginning of the year.”

– Video: Fords Super-Advanced new assembly plant (in Brazil)

– America’s Other Auto Industry “There is such a thing as a profitable car maker in this country. . . . These are the 12 ‘foreign,’ or so-called transplant, producers making cars across America’s South and Midwest. Toyota, BMW, Kia and others now make 54% of the cars Americans buy. The internationals also employ some 113,000 Americans, compared with 239,000 at U.S.-owned carmakers, and several times that number indirectly.”

– U.S. Auto Sales down 30-50% from last year “U.S. auto makers continued to post sharp sales declines in November as General Motors Corp. reported a 41% plunge and lowered its fourth-quarter production forecast, underscoring why the struggling auto maker and its Detroit rivals are seeking federal assistance to help them through the current environment. . . . The dour numbers, coming on the back of October’s moribund results, also saw Ford Motor Co. post a 31% decline and Toyota Motor Corp. report a 34% decrease. Chrysler LLC, a private company controlled by private-equity group Cerberus Capital Management LP, saw its sales skid 47%.”

Court Case Reveals Fed’s Status as a Private Institution

Plaintiff, who was injured by vehicle owned and operated by a federal reserve bank, brought action alleging jurisdiction under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The United States District Court for the Central District of California, David W. Williams, J., dismissed holding that federal reserve bank was not a federal agency within meaning of Act and that the court therefore lacked subject-matter jurisdiction. Appeal was taken. The Court of Appeals, Poole, Circuit Judge, held that federal reserve banks are not federal instrumentalities for purposes of the Act, but are independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations. (Read more from save-a-patriot.org)

Good evidence in support of the obvious: The monetary supply of the United States (home of the free & land of the brave) is controlled by a secretive private institution, hardly more federal than Federal Express.

Tax Resistor Irwin Shiff

He offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could name the law which requires us to pay income tax.

Click here to see his website. It seems he’s imprisoned again and appealing the decisions.

I wonder what the charges were. Am I the only one completely astounded that there can be so many people asking, “what law requires us to pay income tax?” and no one answering. Is it a hoax? And if it’s a hoax, then: What law requires us to pay income tax?

The Strange Case of Jerome Daly’s Mortgage (1968)

It is little known and long practiced that banks create money out of thin air based only on your promise to pay it back. (Click here for a quick lesson on where money comes from.)

Here’s a surprising story about a mortgage nullified based on this concept:

“I first stumbled across the very curious case of Jerome Daly through an article by Ellen Brown, author of the book Web of Debt. It concerns a foreclosure case in Minnesota in 1968 that has yet to be overturned, and the issues go straight to the heart of the sleight of hand that the banking system is built upon. The case also presents an optimistic view of how individuals can take back the power to create money from the private banks.

Jerome Daly was a homeowner living in Minnesota who stopped paying his mortgage. The lender, First National Bank of Montgomery, of course, sued the man for foreclosure. Daly presented his argument before a jury as to why he did not owe the bank anything.

Essentially, he argued that the bank had not provided any consideration for Daly’s promise to pay back the loan. Consideration is one of the requirements for a valid contract, and without it, a contract is void. Daly was arguing that the mortgage contract was void and did not need to be repaid because the bank had not actually given him any money. The lender had created the money out of thin air in response to the promise to repay the loan.

This credit, argued Daly, was not real money that counted as consideration and therefore did not need to be paid back. Without valid consideration, the mortgage contract was null and void and nothing was owed to the bank. Astoundingly enough, the jury agreed with him and declared that the mortgage was not a valid contract.” (Read more from ezinearticles.com)

SEE ALSO:

Are you an idiot to keep paying your mortgage?
Should you keep paying your mortgage? If you have significant equity in your home, absolutely.

If you don’t, it’s getting harder to answer that question, especially when our government keeps giving people who owe more than their homes are worth so many reasons not to pay.

Last week, the government announced a program that will substantially lower payments for many homeowners who have little or no equity, but only if they are at least 90 days delinquent.

Critics say the plan, which applies to loans owned or guaranteed by government wards Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac among others, could encourage people to suspend payments.

But what about the moral obligation to pay off a debt?

Elected officials have been chipping away at that by blaming the foreclosure crisis largely on predatory lenders. In a campaign fact sheet, President-elect Barack Obama says he “recognizes that the real victims in the subprime mortgage crisis are not the lenders, but the millions of borrowers who followed the rules and whose only crime was taking out mortgages that lenders told them they could afford.” (Read more from sfgate.com)

The Maestro vs. the Market

Alan Greenspan claims that the free market failed to prevent the financial crisis and that he is “shocked” that his professed “free-market ideology” turned out to contain a “flaw.”

But why should we take him seriously? Greenspan, while once associated with laissez-faire philosopher Ayn Rand, hasn’t advocated genuinely free markets for decades. Remember, this is a man who for two decades reveled in being, as The New York Times put it, “the infallible maestro of the financial system.”

Free markets don’t have “infallible maestros.” They liberate us from such “maestros” — the central planners who have time and again falsely claimed the ability and the right to orchestrate millions of economic lives. . . .

Observe Greenspan’s 1966 analysis of the boom preceding the 1929 crash: “The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market — triggering a fantastic speculative boom.”

Sound familiar?

What would that Greenspan identify as the cause of the speculative housing boom at the center of today’s crisis, the market or the maestro?

Greenspan is entitled to change his mind, of course. But it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that the market he manipulated for 20 years was genuinely free. And those questioning Greenspan’s actions as Fed chief should not be asking him what he didn’t do to prevent the financial crisis; they should be asking what he did do to cause the crisis by using his enormous power to reward irrational behavior. (Read more from pittsburghlive.com)

It is very important we win this debate. The crisis has NOT been cause by free markets. It was caused by government interference.

The Last Act of Any Government is to Loot the Treasury

The Wall Street Journal reports, as was rumored on Friday, that AIG appears on the verge of approving a considerably enlarged and sweetened rescue package from the government.

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For all the fury over Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion emergency economic relief fund, it seems downright puny when compared to the running total of the government’s response to the credit crisis. According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system.
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Lobbyists Swarm the Treasury for Piece of Bailout Pie

The Economy & NPR’s Shameful Coverage (those fucking bastards)

I’ve had it. God Damn, Mother fucking NPR. Backstabbing, propagandist mother fuckers……

So there I was – driving from NYC to Iowa. (I’m blogging from a hotel in Ohio right now.) I tune to NPR. Those fucking, fucking, fucking, propagandist bastards. Traitors. How the fuck do you call Bernanke a free-marketer??????? Bernanke’s job has been to SET THE INTEREST RATE AT WHICH BANKS BORROW. His job is to say, ‘let’s create an economic bubble and set a low interest rate,’ or ‘lets flood the economy with cash,’ or ‘lets slow the economy by tighten up the money supply.’ This is the OPPOSITE of a free market.

Typical of Big Media coverage, they focus on one tree in the forest and use it to say Bernanke is a free-marketer – he didn’t regulate derivative markets and people acted irresponsibly. This is such BULLSHIT!!!! It makes me furious because it’s so deceptive – there’s just a hint of truth in it – enough to make my liberal friends believe and obey. They’ll drop their pants and open their wallets and say: “Please save us, dear Government. Government, only you can help. Save us from these evil capitalists. More government. More!!! More!!! Take my money and save me! Please, Government. We’ll do anything you ask!!!”

The hint of truth is that banks and traders indeed behaved irresponsibly. So What? That doesn’t make Bernanke a free-marketer for not reeling them in.

If we had free markets, interest rates would be set by banks negotiating with each other over how risky the loans are.
If we had free markets, there wouldn’t be a FED.
If we had free markets, Bernanke would be out of a job.
If we had free markets, government wouldn’t have warped investment in favor of super-risky housing loans.
If we had free markets, we wouldn’t have been riding the bubble of a bullshit economy for the past few decades.
If we had free markets, the bubble wouldn’t be popping – it would never have existed.
If we had free markets, all those incompetent (by some measures, corrupt) bankers whom Bernanke failed to reel in would have put their banks out of business several times over.
If we had free markets, we wouldn’t have bailed out the incompetent banks with the competent people’s money.
If we had free markets, the incompetent banks would be bought up by the competent ones for whatever the competent ones negotiated.
If we had free markets, government wouldn’t overpay for worthless bank assets with OUR MONEY.
If we had free markets, we might even have competing currencies, so we sound money believers could do our own thing as the government destroys our dollar in pursuit of global hegemony.

This crisis was caused BY GOVERNMENT. Now they’re blaming free markets and proposing MORE GOVERNMENT as a solution. The fucking nerve of these people. They cited today’s (November 10th’s) market fluctuations as evidence that free markets don’t work. WTF!??!?!? Not only did we just take $700 billion dollars away from the competent people, and give it to the incompetent, but the fuckers at NPR go on to blame the ensuing confusion and fluctuation on free markets!!! HA! You can’t make this stuff up.

They had a discussion as if the failure of free market economics was a given – the axiom from which all thesis must now derive. They said Milton Friedman has been refuted and economists are now “working behind closed doors,” to come up with more accurate theories.

The evidence??? Some dickhead talked about how markets behave “irrationally,” like when there’s a car accident on one side of the road, and traffic in both directions slows down. First of all, both directions of traffic slowing down for an accident is completely rational. Human curiosity? People wanting to understand the dangers of the world? Second of all, what the fuck does this example have to do with anything?????!!!!!

At that point my soul was in such agony, I had to switch off the radio. Those God damn, bastards.

This isn’t news. It’s psychological operations targeting the American people.