Archive for September, 2008

Chuck Baldwin
American Free Press

At the time of this writing, the U.S. House and Senate are poised to pass a $700 billion bailout to Wall Street. At the behest of President George W. Bush, the U.S. taxpayers are going to be on the hook for what can only be referred to as the biggest fraud in U.S. history.

President Andrew Jackson to the international bankers: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

Virtually our entire financial system is based on an illusion. We spend more than we earn, we consume more than we produce, we borrow more than we save, and we cling to the fantasy that this can go on forever. The glue that holds this crumbling scheme together is a fiat currency known as the Federal Reserve Note, which was created out of thin air by an international banking cartel called the Federal Reserve.

According to Congressman Ron Paul, in the last three years, the Federal Reserve has created over $4 trillion in new money. The result of all this “money-out-of-thin-air” fraud is never-ending inflation. And the more prices rise, the more the dollar collapses. Folks, this is not sustainable.

Already, Bear Stearns was awarded a $29 billion bailout, followed quickly by the bailout of Freddie and Fannie that will cost the taxpayers up to $200 billion. Then the Fed announced the bailout of AIG to the tune of $85 billion. Mind you, AIG is an enormous global entity with assets totaling more than $1.1 trillion. Moreover, the Feds agreed to pump $180 billion into global money markets. And the Treasury Department promised $50 billion to insure the holdings of money market mutual funds for a year. Now, taxpayers are being asked to provide $700 billion to Wall Street. (I hope readers are aware that, not only will American banks be bailed out, but foreign banks will also be bailed out. Then again, at least half of the Federal Reserve is comprised of foreign banks, anyway.) In other words, the Federal Reserve is preparing to spend upwards of $1 trillion or more. Remember again, this is fiat money, meaning it is money printed out of thin air.
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Americans have reached a point in history where they will be deciding whether they would like to give away their freedoms to the bankers or remain a free people. This proposed Paulson Bailout plan for Wall Street is, in our opinion, the single most important issue since the colonists decided to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Americans and their representatives in Congress will literally decide whether two hundred and thirty two years of freedom of the American individual will be abolished in the course of one week!

If the 110th Congress of these United States votes in favor of the Paulson plan the concept of individual liberty and freedom will be buried for generations to come! What hope does the rest of the world have if America gives up on liberty?

We should not forget what Sir Josiah Stamp (Director of the Bank of England in the 1920s) said about the system of Central Banking from which he personally benefited:

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”

We should also not forget what Thomas Jefferson said about banking institutions:

“I sincerely believe… that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

Let us hope that the 110th Congress votes for liberty.

From an honest member of congress.

by Darryl Robert Schoon

There is nothing more dangerous than when those responsible for a nation’s troubles are believed to be its savior.

The Wall Street Journal had one fact correct regarding Wall Street’s accelerating collapse when on September 20th they wrote: When government officials surveyed the failing American financial system this week, they didn’t see only a collapsed investment bank or the surrender of a giant insurance firm. They saw the circulatory system of the U.S. economy - credit markets - starting to fail.

The Wall Street Journal was correct in that the circulatory system of the US economy was failing. Because the Wall Street Journal is the house organ of Wall Street investment banks and their co-conspirators in government, the Wall Street Journal blamed deteriorating credit markets for America’s troubles, not those responsible - to wit, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and their cohorts at the Federal Reserve Banks.

ALAN GREENSPAN’S BASTARD SON

Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan’s surrogate successor at the Federal Reserve is using Greenspan’s discredited playbook to hopefully resuscitate America’s economy. But pouring more credit into America’s stalled economy will not restart the US economy anymore than pouring gasoline into a flooded engine will restart an engine.

Excessive credit caused the problem and more credit will only exacerbate it. The US central bank, the Federal Reserve, however is now backed into a corner, a corner from which there is no exit.

After credit markets contracted in August 2007, it was hoped that central bank intervention would reverse the deterioration of global markets that was then only beginning. A year ago, on October 1, 2007, I addressed that hope in my article, The Winter of Our Discontent:

As we collectively move towards the economic disaster awaiting us, the investment community is hoping the world’s central banks will be able to save them from the crisis set in motion by this summer’s [August 2007] credit collapse.

If the truth be known - and someday it will be - central banks are at the very center of today’s problems. Indeed, they caused them. Today’s disintegration of capital markets based on debt-based paper began in 1913 with the creation of the US Federal Reserve Bank, the central bank of the US.
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Why Fannie, Freddie and AIG All Had To Be Bailed Out

By Ellen Brown

“I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”

– Sir Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune in the South Sea bubble

Something extraordinary is going on with these government bailouts. In March 2008, the Federal Reserve extended a $55 billion loan to JPMorgan to “rescue” investment bank Bear Stearns from bankruptcy, a highly controversial move that tested the limits of the Federal Reserve Act. On September 7, 2008, the U.S. government seized private mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and imposed a conservatorship, a form of bankruptcy; but rather than let the bankruptcy court sort out the assets among the claimants, the Treasury extended an unlimited credit line to the insolvent corporations and said it would exercise its authority to buy their stock, effectively nationalizing them. Now the Federal Reserve has announced that it is giving an $85 billion loan to American International Group (AIG), the world’s largest insurance company, in exchange for a nearly 80% stake in the insurer . . . .

The Fed is buying an insurance company? Where exactly is that covered in the Federal Reserve Act? The Associated Press calls it a “government takeover,” but this is not your ordinary “nationalization” like the purchase of Fannie/Freddie stock by the U.S. Treasury. The Federal Reserve has the power to print the national money supply, but it is not actually a part of the U.S. government. It is a private banking corporation owned by a consortium of private banks. The banking industry just bought the world’s largest insurance company, and they used federal money to do it. Yahoo Finance reported on September 17:

“The Treasury is setting up a temporary financing program at the Fed’s request. The program will auction Treasury bills to raise cash for the Fed’s use. The initiative aims to help the Fed manage its balance sheet following its efforts to enhance its liquidity facilities over the previous few quarters.”

Treasury bills are the I.O.U.s of the federal government. We the taxpayers are on the hook for the Fed’s “enhanced liquidity facilities,” meaning the loans it has been making to everyone in sight, bank or non-bank, exercising obscure provisions in the Federal Reserve Act that may or may not say they can do it. What’s going on here? Why not let the free market work? Bankruptcy courts know how to sort out assets and reorganize companies so they can operate again. Why the extraordinary measures for Fannie, Freddie and AIG?

The answer may have less to do with saving the insurance business, the housing market, or the Chinese investors clamoring for a bailout than with the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, one that is holding up the entire private global banking system. What had to be saved at all costs was not housing or the dollar but the financial derivatives industry; and the precipice from which it had to be saved was an “event of default” that could have collapsed a quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble, a collapse that could take the entire global banking system down with it.
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By Bob Chapman
The International Forecaster
September 18, 2008

Losses and bankruptcies of the major banks that we predicted, trouble for the taxpayer who now shoulder a trillion in debt from bank failures, Why do we have to bail out Wall Street fraud? Lehman Brothers left to expire, We are watching our Zombie economy implode, Buy-outs are just throwing good money after bad, Toxic waste eats your equity capital, eats your stocks, your bonds, and eats your retirement funds. 1929 all over again.

The business end of Hanky Panky Paulson’s bazooka is glowing red hot as it continues to fire round after round of high explosive moral hazard contains an up to 85 billion dollar, two-year bridge loan from the Fed to the world’s largest insurer, AIG, to be guaranteed by the US taxpayer via the US Treasury.

Warrants convertible to up to 80% of the common stock of AIG will be pledged as collateral to secure the US Treasury’s loan guarantee to the Fed, with proceeds from the sale of AIG’s now virtually worthless assets being supposedly used to pay down the loan. It’s just Bear Stearns mixed with Fannie and Freddie. You have a loan from the Fed guaranteed by the US Treasury being used to bail out AIG directly instead of being used to facilitate the assassination of BS by a predatory lender (i.e. JP Morgan Chase), and you have what will be ultimate taxpayer ownership of AIG’s toxic waste by having common stock pledged as collateral instead of being purchased through equity injections, as with Fannie and Freddie.

The Treasury’s potential 80% ownership greatly dilutes the value of the existing common shareholders, and the Treasury has been given the right to stop dividend payments on both common and preferred stock of AIG shareholders, which means basically that they have both just been vaporized. The Fed’s Fascist Follies continue.

You, the US taxpayer, will now not only end up owning nearly worthless stock in these corporate cesspools, you have assumed all of their liabilities up to the amount of the loans/capital injections. Remember, the bondholders are still ahead of you!!! BS was $29 billion (plus), Fannie and Freddie are $300 billion just for openers, soon to grow into a loss in excess of one trillion, perhaps even as much as two trillion or more, and now we pour another 85 billion into the pot of boiling moral hazard for AIG. As we inhale the radioactive fumes from the detonation of this latest round of DU laced moral hazard, the stock markets and the dollar rally, while gold and silver decline, all thanks to the manipulation of markets that are rigged daily by the same scum who are bailing out the fraudsters. It is nothing short of surreal.
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By Darryl Robert Schoon

Last weekend started early for Timothy Geithner, President and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve. At 6 pm, Friday, Geithner called an emergency meeting to discuss the possible collapse of Wall Street investment bank, Lehman Bros.

The troubles of Lehman Bros had worsened during the previous week and the current Fed playbook dictated a solution be found on the weekend to calm financial markets opening Monday; but, this weekend, the Fed playbook came up empty, Lehman Bros. declared bankruptcy.

It’s official. The storm is here. In How To Survive The Crisis And Prosper In The Process, I predicted a global financial crisis would happen where real estate prices would fall 40-70%, stock markets would crash and a Great Depression would result.

Eighteen months later, the median price of housing in California is down 40 %, global stock markets are in disarray and although another depression has yet to begin, this weekend’s failure of Lehman Bros combined with the pressured sale of Merrill Lynch and the prospect of an AIG collapse are clear signs that we are now that much closer to the predicted end.

This is the end of a system. It is not a cyclical correction. It is not a market pullback and it is not a repricing of risk in an otherwise resilient marketplace. We are witness to the end of an economic system based on credit-based paper money that began 300 years ago in England. All beginnings have endings—and that we didn’t expect it to end doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t.

THE BANKERS’ BEGGING BOWL

Because Lehman Bros.’ CEO Richard Fuld received a $22 million bonus for his “work” in 2007 or perhaps because Fed officials had been openly criticized at their annual Jackson Hole soirée for their continuing bailouts of US investment banks, last weekend US officials unexpectedly informed Wall Street bankers that a government bailout of Lehman Bros. was not possible.

There is no political will for a Federal bailout…

Timothy Geithner, September 12, 2008

Geithner’s statement really means that Wall Street no longer possesses the requisite political muscle to extract more US dollars from a bankrupt electorate. Last weekend, Wall Street bankers finally understood that their privileged position in the welfare line of US government largesse had come to an end. This time, the banker’s begging bowl would remain empty.

With their co-conspirators in the US government no longer able or willing to provide additional US guarantees, the position of investment banks has now become increasingly fragile; and their newly hatched liquidity plan concocted by the bankers over the weekend is another indication of just how fragile their system is.
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