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We just handed the bankers 8.5 TRILLION so far to "free up lending and ease the credit crunch." Well guess what? We were LIED TO!! AGAIN!! None of this money is being used to help the American people. None of this money is being used to restructure mortgages so people can stay in their homes. And none of this money is going to be used to make lending available to the the American people. In fact, it's been announced today that the banks are going to dry up 2 TRILLION in consumer credit card accounts and jack up interest rates on accounts left open.
That's right folks, the bankers are going to make sure that none of us benefit from OUR BAILOUT MONEY! Money that WE have to pay back, at interest! They are going to make sure Americans are thrown right up against the wall by drying up what little wiggle room is left to people on their credit cards and plunge main street into utter desperation!
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The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said.
The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted.
"In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent."
Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co represent over half of the estimated U.S. card outstandings as of September 30, and each company has discussed reducing card exposure or slowing growth, Whitney said.
Closing millions of accounts, cutting credit lines and raising interest rates are just some of the moves credit card issuers are using to try to inoculate themselves from a tsunami of expected consumer defaults.
Monday, December 01 2008 @ 10:27 AM MST
Contributed by: BMcDonald
Views: 361
By Mike Adams
The U.S. government financial bailout effort has reached a mind-blowing $8.5 trillion. But where did all this money go, exactly?
A chart at SFGate.com tracks the bailout expenditures, revealing some disturbing facts about the failure of the bailout to solve the lending liquidity problem. For example, the Federal Reserve has already created and dumped $2.1 trillion into the money supply, and it has pledged to create another $3.4 trillion.
And yet, despite these astonishing numbers, the liquidity crisis remains as bad as ever. Even worse, the very idea of rescuing bad debt by creating yet more bad debt (which is what the Fed is doing) seems outrageously stupid to begin with. The Fed is only setting us up for even greater financial problems down the road.
Has anyone noticed that the only solutions being presented are those that hand mountains of OUR MONEY, which is created by the Federal Reserve though a process where they tell the Treasury to create it for the Fed so they can then lend it to the government AT INTEREST, so the government can hand that same money we are giving the Fed to banks who can then LEND IT AGAIN TO US AT INTEREST!? It's our friggin money!! And we are not getting any of it!
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By Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry
The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
Sunday, November 23 2008 @ 10:36 AM MST
Contributed by: BMcDonald
Views: 419
The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but is the government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. -- Abraham Lincoln
Most of what follows is the work of the extraordinary and admirable Stephen Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute. We have taken excerpts from various of his writings - including a 2003 speech to US Treasury staff - and blended it into one piece. Also included is an article we ran 1994 by Bob Blain and an excerpt from Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual, published by WW Norton in 1997.
Some history
Stephen Zarlenga, American Monetary Institute - The money system is society's greatest dispenser of justice or injustice. A good one functions fairly, helping create values for life. A bad, unjust one obstructs the creation of values; gives special privileges to some and disadvantage to others causing unfair concentrations of wealth and power; leading to social strife and eventually warfare and a thousand unforeseen bad consequences - physical and spiritual.
One reason economists have failed mankind so badly is their poor methodology - an over-reliance on theoretical reasoning. Alexander Del Mar the world's greatest monetary historian noted: "As a rule economists. . . don't take the trouble to study the history of money; it is much easier to imagine it and to deduce the principles of this imaginary knowledge.".
In England the struggle became the goldsmiths vs the monarchy representing society. Later it was the Bank of England vs. society. Until then England's money power was in the monarch's hands. But from that point, Bank of England credits would be substituted in place of public money. This promoted a confusion between credit and money to this day. But they are different things. Credit depends on the creditor remaining solvent. Real money does not promise to pay something else. Money is on a higher order than credit.
Those behind the Bank of England obscured the real source of the bank's power - its legal privilege. Its notes were accepted in payments to the government. Recovering the science of money for the private profit of a small group produced harmful results: 120 years of continuous warfare spawned an unpayable national debt leading to excessive taxation leading to horrors like the Irish potato famine.
Before then, when a nation's money system was used for taxation, the revenue generally aided the society. But the Bank of England concentrated society's resources in the wrong hands, crippling the possibility for government to function properly, leading to a growing contempt of government.
Today it's still the bankers versus the society. At base, the battle remains private money vs. public money. The outcome determines whether the money system operates to serve the few in control, or the whole society. . .
Thursday, November 20 2008 @ 11:53 AM MST
Contributed by: BMcDonald
Views: 473
By David Edwards and Muriel Kane
The Bush administration has already handed out almost half of the $700 billion in bank bailout money authorized by Congress but has not even filled the mandated oversight positions to review how it is being used.
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, has described the handling of the bailout as "borderline criminal" because of this and other problems. Klein spoke to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on Monday to explain her accusations.
"We were all reassured that there was going to be transparency, accountability, legality," Klein stated. "But now we’re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this. ... Essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, 'We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the Great Depression.'
Given the speed at which the federal government is throwing money at the financial crisis, the average taxpayer, never mind member of Congress, might not be faulted for losing track.
CNBC, however, has been paying very close attention and keeping a running tally of actual spending as well as the commitments involved.
Try $4.28 trillion dollars. That's $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources*.
Not only is it a astronomical amount of money, its' a complicated cocktail of budgeted dollars, actual spending, guarantees, loans, swaps and other market mechanisms by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other offices of government taken over roughly the last year, based on government data and news releases. Strictly speaking, not every cent is a direct result of what's called the financial crisis, but it is arguably related to it.
The October 2008 financial meltdown is not the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon. It is the deliberate result of US government policy instrumented through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.
This is the most serious economic crisis in World history.
The "bailout" proposed by the US Treasury does not constitute a "solution" to the crisis. In fact quite the opposite: it is the cause of further collapse. It triggers an unprecedented concentration of wealth, which in turn contributes to widening economic and social inequalities both within and between nations.
The levels of indebtedness have skyrocketed. Industrial corporations are driven into bankruptcy, taken over by the global financial institutions. Credit, namely the supply of loanable funds, which constitutes the lifeline of production and investment, is controlled by a handful of financial conglomerates.
Risky loans to foreign bankers could end up bringing down U.S. house of financial cards
By Christopher J. Petherick
For Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, it’s the stuff that dreams are made of. The Federal Reserve is now acting as the central bank to the world, loaning billions of U.S. dollars to foreign banks and propping up the entire global system of debt.
It’s no secret that bankers around the world meet periodically to coordinate their efforts and keep the private banking industry booming. Almost every month, high-level meetings take place under the cover of organizations such as the Aspen Institute, the Group of Seven, the World Bank and the Bilderberg Group.
In this time of severe economic turmoil, however, “the Fed” has been accused of putting the entire U.S. economy at risk by loaning billions of dollars to shaky foreign central banks in an effort to keep them solvent.
Monday, November 10 2008 @ 10:19 AM MST
Contributed by: BMcDonald
Views: 368
By Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry and Alison Fitzgerald
The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.
``The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that's a big problem,'' said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston- based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds. ``In a liquid market, this wouldn't matter, but we're not. The market is very nervous and very thin.
Saturday, November 08 2008 @ 11:59 AM MST
Contributed by: BMcDonald
Views: 266
By Sam Zuckerman
If you're a financial institution, it has become a little easier to borrow money. But for most of the rest of us, it's tougher than ever.
It was the freeze-up of the wholesale lending markets used by banks to fund day-to-day operations that caused the financial system to break down in September. That crisis has eased significantly, thanks to government intervention to guarantee loans and prop up financial institutions.
But the credit crunch hasn't gone away. It has just moved to Main Street, where businesses and consumers are hard-pressed to get loans. And the scarcity of credit is intensifying the economy's downward spiral.
"Lending standards on most forms of credit are now tighter than at any time in recent memory," Ryan Sweet, an economist with Moody's Economy.com, wrote in a recent report. "The reduction in credit availability threatens to lengthen and deepen the recession.
Most people don't know the Federal Reserve is controlled by the largest private banks. They are using their control of the Fed to destroy the dollar, our economy and wipe out the middle class so they can replace it with a system and currency they have even MORE control of. If we don't shut down the bankers, the Federal Reserve, this nation is history! The Congress can REPEAL THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACT and return control over our currency to "We The People." We have to take back control of Congress and DEMAND THIS HAPPEN in the upcoming election!
Be a courageous
The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The Bush administration has already handed out almost half of the $700 billion in bank bailout money authorized by Congress but has not even filled the mandated oversight positions to review how it is being used.
The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
