15 minutes ago
Friday, October 24, 2008
SLOW MOTION MELTDOWN?
What we are witnessing is the inevitable crash of the world markets,not unlike the crash of the great depression of 1929. The difference this time is the planning and resources that are being strategically applied to this one. A more refined and orderly mass robbery of the lower and middle class by the malevolent elite.In there wisdom they realize that they are sitting in the same boat as everyone else and that if they stuff their pockets too full too fast they could tip the boat or even sink it, sending them to the bottom along with the rest of us. They have very craftily placed the right people in the right places to pull and push the economic levers of the global economy to prevent that very thing. we should all feel lucky for this wisdom. Why just watch as Paulson and Bernanke use their nimble fingers to plug that dike, while never missing a royal pay check or celebration party. This is the age old game that has played out so many times in so many places. It is simply the money masters taking their profits from the harvest of the plantation. Some of us will be left with enough seeds for the next harvest, some will occupy brand new prison cells, many will die. Few will ever know the truth. BLESS YOU MASSA. GLENN NUNLEY. NORTH FLORIDA. P.S. AM I ANGRY?? JUST KEEP WATCHING!!
Thursday, October 23, 2008
THE DEVIL WE KNOW
'THE DEVIL WE KNOW' is the title of a new book recently out,written by retired CIA operative Bob Baur. In his book he describes many of the scenarios concerning Iran, that I have written about previously.One being, the taking out of the tanker traffic in the GULF OF HORMUZ in the event of an attack on their country by Israel or the United States. But as Mr. Baur points out in his book, a much more serious consequence would be the likelihood that the Iranian airforce would most certainly destroy the oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. They have the military capability to accomplish both of these objectives within a matter of minuets.If this did occur it would have the immediate effect of removing sixty five percent of the proven oil reserves and seventeen million barrels of oil per day from the world markets for at least two years.Life as we know it would cease and countries around the world would descend into chaos.... When a country has the ability to economically blackmail the world "They are a super power"and Iran is such a country. I suspect this is the reason the United States and the United Nations has not allowed Israel to push the Bush administration into this attack already. Much has changed in the thirty years since the Iranian revolution, which was directly precipitated by the CIA egineered overthrow in 1953 of Iran's popular leader, Muhammad Mossadeq, subsequently followed by the installation of a puppet dictator, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, that danced to whatever tune the United States government told him to, especially concerning the Iranian oil reserves. The CIA also trained an Iranian version of the SS secret police that set about the country killing, raping, torturing and incarcerating the people who exhibited the least bit of descent to this un-holy governance and theft of their liberty,national wealth, and most basic human rights. And now we know who the devil is!! If any reasonable person were to walk in the Iranian's shoes, and had the knowledge and memories of what has already been inflicted on them by the United States, there could be little doubt that, this country will not hesitate to act in any way it must to prevent their enslavement by the United States again. [Remember the American hostage crises] I believe everyone of them would rather die first,and I for one understand!! This idea of an "American dream" is fine, but if you have to destroy your neighbor in order to attain it, then I believe right after the dream you will discover that you have woke up in hell. GLENN NUNLEY. NORTH FLORIDA. "DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU"
Monday, October 20, 2008
FORGIVE MY HARSH APPROACH----I'M JUST TRYING TO SAVE THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN.
TRY REAL HARD--- TO PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS AND OPEN YOUR EARS!!! Ron Paul is once again doing his best to explain and expose the scam of the "federal reserve system/bank/board" and to preserve it in the congressional record for future generations.He is one of the few legislators in our congress who not only understands the inherent flaw,and unconstitutional nature of the illegal central bank,he also has the courage to speak out against it!!! The majority of the American people are un-educated and blissfully ignorant to the danger and certain enslavement through debt, that this illegal entity brings to the once free population of this country.Many people are now losing their homes ,cars,pensions,savings and jobs.And still we do not rise up and put an end to this insanity.I am often attacked by the very people who are most adversely affected by these circumstances as being un-patriotic or radical. I say to them, "I AM NOT UN-PATRIOTIC,QUITE THE OPPOSITE.I AM HOWEVER VERY RADICAL AND DAMN PROUD OF IT." GLENN NUNLEY. NORTH FLORIDA.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
REPLY TO A FRIEND ABOUT POLITICAL CHOICES
I am very glad to see your interest in the condition of our failed state,"THE UNITED STATES" Or I'm assuming that you might agree with me on that.But while I acknowledge and respect your right to your opinions, I am personally convinced that the central government is inherently corrupted by the federal reserve system and the mindless,inept legislators that have taken up homestead in Washington D. C. several of which you mentioned.I have personally sworn myself," to devote my life to it's destruction."And I will be voting against everyone of the incumbents no matter what party they are.I believe both presidential candidates are worthless and owned by the same special interest so I will not be voting for either one of them.I am including a reference to my blog page and I do hope you will take a look as it may help explain my attitude.And no matter if we agree on our government I do hope we will remain friends. Glenn. [ www.terrorpatriot.blogspot.com ] GLENN NUNLEY. NORTH FLORIDA
THE MOST CONCISE EXPLANATION OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS
“AT THE MALEFACTOR’S DIRECTION AND FOR THEIR BENEFIT”
Not Enough Money In The
World To Fix Things
The Real Monster In The Meltdown Closet
Written By Chris Floyd
10-15-8
The myth has quickly taken hold that the global financial crash was caused by bad mortgages. This has allowed rightwing hatemongers to blame the meltdown on the “liberal” programs that encouraged home ownership among a small percentage of lower-income people (a poisonous canard that parts of the mainstream media have actually done a fairly good job of knocking down), while “progressives” of various stripes have denounced banks and other financial institutions for pushing over-easy credit on people who couldn’t really afford it.
Unsustainable mortgages are a key factor in the global crash, of course. And many people (most of them white, by the way) did take out mortgages they would not be able to afford if the housing bubble ever burst, which it has, most spectacularly. And yes, it is undeniable that the financial services industry has been tempting people with easy credit like schoolyard pushers flashing reefers.
All of this was bound to end badly, and did. But this alone would not have been enough to threaten the destruction of the entire global financial system, nor cause the blind, screaming panic that has strangulated the financial markets, seized up the vital flow of money between banks, and caused the “free” market-worshipping governments of the Western world to carry out nationalizations and interventions that, in sheer numbers, dwarf anything ever seen following a Communist revolution. (As John Lancaster notes in the London Review of Books, the Bush Administration’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac alone was “was, by cash value, the biggest nationalisation in the history of the world.” And that was just the beginning.)
What has struck mortal fear in the heart of markets and governments is not bad mortgages, but the almost incomprehensibly huge and complex market for “derivatives,” based in part on mortgage debt — but also on a vast array of other sources that were “securitized,” turned into tradable if ghostly commodities then sold off in a bewildering variety of increasingly arcane forms. This was accompanied by the expansion of yet another vast market in insurance mechanisms designed to protect these derivatives — mechanisms which themselves became “securitized.”
At the same time, the financial services industry used its paid bagmen in governments around the world to loosen almost all restrictions not only on securitization and the trading of derivatives, but also on the amount of debt that institutions could take on in order to play around in these vastly expanded and deregulated markets. For example, as Lancaster points out, UK’s Barclays Bank had a debt-to-equity ratio of 63 to 1:
Imagine that for a moment translated to your own finances, so that you could stretch what you actually, unequivocally own to borrow more than sixty times the amount. (I’d have an island. What about you?)
The result of all this has been the construction of a gargantuan house of cards, based on next to nothing, and left alone in the shadow of building “perfect storm” of greed, deregulation and political corruption.
That storm has now struck. The house of cards has fallen down, and revealed a hole of derivatives-based debt that could not be filled, literally, by all the money in the world, much less by the mere trillions that national governments are frantically throwing at it today.
Yes, “mere” trillions. As Will Hutton explains in the Observer:
…the dark heart of the global financial system [is] the $55 trillion market in credit derivatives and, in particular, credit default swaps, the mechanisms routinely used to insure banks against losses on risky investments. This is a market more than twice the size of the combined GDP of the US, Japan and the EU. Until it is cleaned up and the toxic threat it poses is removed, the pandemic will continue. Even nationalised banks, and the countries standing behind them, could be overwhelmed by the scale of the losses now emerging.
Try to imagine that: a $55 trillion market now at risk of complete destruction. Even the derivative debt owed by individual institutions stands at nation-wrecking levels. For example, a single bank in Britain, Barclays again, holds more than $2.4 trillion in credit default swaps, the tradable “insurance” mechanism against securities default. This is more than the entire GDP of Great Britain. If all this paper goes bad, there are not enough assets in the entire country to pay it off. And that’s just one bank, in one country.
Hutton gives the details:
This market in credit derivatives has grown explosively over the last decade largely in response to the $10 trillion market in securitized assets - the packaging up of income from a huge variety of sources (office rents, port charges, mortgage payments, sport stadiums) and its subsequent sale as a ’security’ to be traded between banks.
Plainly, these securities are risky, so the markets invented a system of insurance. A buyer of a securitized bond can purchase what is in effect an insurance contract that will protect him or her against default - a credit default swap (CDS). But unlike the comprehensive insurance contract on your car which you have with one insurance company, these credit default contracts can be freely bought and sold. Complex mathematical models are continually assessing the risk and comparing it to market prices. If the risk falls, the CDSs are cheap; if the risk rises - because, say, a credit rating agency declares the issuing company is less solid - the price rises. Hedge funds speculate in them wildly.
Their purpose was a market solution to make securitization less risky; in fact, they make it more risky, as we are now witnessing. The collapse of Lehman Brothers - the refusal to bail it out has had cataclysmic consequences - means that it can no longer honour $110bn of bonds, nor $440bn of CDSs it had written. On Friday, the dud contracts were auctioned, with buyers paying a paltry eight cents for every dollar. Put another way, there is now a $414bn hole which somebody holding these contracts has to honour. And if your head is spinning now, add the three bust Icelandic banks. They can no longer honour more than $50bn of bonds, nor a mind-boggling $200bn of CDSs….
While every bank tries to pass the toxic parcel on to somebody else, the system has to find the money. So will compensation for the near valueless contracts and thus now uninsured debt ultimately be made - and by whom? And because nobody knows - not the regulators, banks or governments - who owns the swaps and whether they are credit-worthy, nobody can answer the question. Maybe holders of insurance policies will get the cash due to them, but will that weaken somebody else? The result - panic.
This is the ultra-dangerous downward vortex in which the system is locked. It is why share prices are plummeting. As recession deepens, there will be defaults on securitised bonds and the potential collapse of more banks outside the G7 ring-fence. Nobody knows what proportion of the $55 trillion of credit default contracts that have actually been written will be honoured and who might bear losses running into trillions of dollars.
This is the beast in the dark that is haunting the feckless leaders of the developed world: $55 trillion of unaccountable debt, and no way of knowing how much of it is even now being flushed down the toilet, taking the global economy with it.
The massive interventions we are seeing might stabilize the markets temporarily, or at least arrest their free fall long enough to come up with some kind of massive restructuring of the global financial system. Or they might not. For it is by no means certain that the wisdom, and the political courage, to come up with a more viable system can be found among the world’s political leaders — all of whom, as we noted here the other day, have risen within the present system and, to one degree or another, owe their own power and privilege to the “malefactors of great wealth” and the extremist cult of market fundamentalism. There is no indication anywhere that the circle of collusion and corruption between governments and Big Money has even lessened, much less been broken, by the economic catastrophe. All of the various bailout plans and “coordinated actions” still have as their chief aim the preservation of the malefactors in their current state of wealth, privilege and domination. As Jonathan Schwarz notes:
Still, U.S. elites will try to impose as much of a structural adjustment as they can get away with, in order to make the bottom 80% of America pay the price for the elites’ spectacular screw-ups. The Washington Post has already started writing about how the current crisis demonstrates that we must cut Social Security. Look for much more of this to come.
The only slim hope we have for any genuine reform — even an imperfect, conflicted, compromised reform, which is the only kind we will ever have in this world, until the lion lies down with the lamb — is that the sheer scale of the real problem — the $55 trillion beast, the very real potential for the complete destruction of the global economy, and the state power that depends upon it — might force some politicians to turn apostate, renounce the market cult, and bite the hands that have fed them for so long.
Absent this near-miraculous possibility, we will be left with yet another rickety house of cards, slapped together on the fly — largely at the malefactors’ direction and for their benefit — while the beast gapes wide his ponderous jaws, and prepares to swallow us whole.
Not Enough Money In The
World To Fix Things
The Real Monster In The Meltdown Closet
Written By Chris Floyd
10-15-8
The myth has quickly taken hold that the global financial crash was caused by bad mortgages. This has allowed rightwing hatemongers to blame the meltdown on the “liberal” programs that encouraged home ownership among a small percentage of lower-income people (a poisonous canard that parts of the mainstream media have actually done a fairly good job of knocking down), while “progressives” of various stripes have denounced banks and other financial institutions for pushing over-easy credit on people who couldn’t really afford it.
Unsustainable mortgages are a key factor in the global crash, of course. And many people (most of them white, by the way) did take out mortgages they would not be able to afford if the housing bubble ever burst, which it has, most spectacularly. And yes, it is undeniable that the financial services industry has been tempting people with easy credit like schoolyard pushers flashing reefers.
All of this was bound to end badly, and did. But this alone would not have been enough to threaten the destruction of the entire global financial system, nor cause the blind, screaming panic that has strangulated the financial markets, seized up the vital flow of money between banks, and caused the “free” market-worshipping governments of the Western world to carry out nationalizations and interventions that, in sheer numbers, dwarf anything ever seen following a Communist revolution. (As John Lancaster notes in the London Review of Books, the Bush Administration’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac alone was “was, by cash value, the biggest nationalisation in the history of the world.” And that was just the beginning.)
What has struck mortal fear in the heart of markets and governments is not bad mortgages, but the almost incomprehensibly huge and complex market for “derivatives,” based in part on mortgage debt — but also on a vast array of other sources that were “securitized,” turned into tradable if ghostly commodities then sold off in a bewildering variety of increasingly arcane forms. This was accompanied by the expansion of yet another vast market in insurance mechanisms designed to protect these derivatives — mechanisms which themselves became “securitized.”
At the same time, the financial services industry used its paid bagmen in governments around the world to loosen almost all restrictions not only on securitization and the trading of derivatives, but also on the amount of debt that institutions could take on in order to play around in these vastly expanded and deregulated markets. For example, as Lancaster points out, UK’s Barclays Bank had a debt-to-equity ratio of 63 to 1:
Imagine that for a moment translated to your own finances, so that you could stretch what you actually, unequivocally own to borrow more than sixty times the amount. (I’d have an island. What about you?)
The result of all this has been the construction of a gargantuan house of cards, based on next to nothing, and left alone in the shadow of building “perfect storm” of greed, deregulation and political corruption.
That storm has now struck. The house of cards has fallen down, and revealed a hole of derivatives-based debt that could not be filled, literally, by all the money in the world, much less by the mere trillions that national governments are frantically throwing at it today.
Yes, “mere” trillions. As Will Hutton explains in the Observer:
…the dark heart of the global financial system [is] the $55 trillion market in credit derivatives and, in particular, credit default swaps, the mechanisms routinely used to insure banks against losses on risky investments. This is a market more than twice the size of the combined GDP of the US, Japan and the EU. Until it is cleaned up and the toxic threat it poses is removed, the pandemic will continue. Even nationalised banks, and the countries standing behind them, could be overwhelmed by the scale of the losses now emerging.
Try to imagine that: a $55 trillion market now at risk of complete destruction. Even the derivative debt owed by individual institutions stands at nation-wrecking levels. For example, a single bank in Britain, Barclays again, holds more than $2.4 trillion in credit default swaps, the tradable “insurance” mechanism against securities default. This is more than the entire GDP of Great Britain. If all this paper goes bad, there are not enough assets in the entire country to pay it off. And that’s just one bank, in one country.
Hutton gives the details:
This market in credit derivatives has grown explosively over the last decade largely in response to the $10 trillion market in securitized assets - the packaging up of income from a huge variety of sources (office rents, port charges, mortgage payments, sport stadiums) and its subsequent sale as a ’security’ to be traded between banks.
Plainly, these securities are risky, so the markets invented a system of insurance. A buyer of a securitized bond can purchase what is in effect an insurance contract that will protect him or her against default - a credit default swap (CDS). But unlike the comprehensive insurance contract on your car which you have with one insurance company, these credit default contracts can be freely bought and sold. Complex mathematical models are continually assessing the risk and comparing it to market prices. If the risk falls, the CDSs are cheap; if the risk rises - because, say, a credit rating agency declares the issuing company is less solid - the price rises. Hedge funds speculate in them wildly.
Their purpose was a market solution to make securitization less risky; in fact, they make it more risky, as we are now witnessing. The collapse of Lehman Brothers - the refusal to bail it out has had cataclysmic consequences - means that it can no longer honour $110bn of bonds, nor $440bn of CDSs it had written. On Friday, the dud contracts were auctioned, with buyers paying a paltry eight cents for every dollar. Put another way, there is now a $414bn hole which somebody holding these contracts has to honour. And if your head is spinning now, add the three bust Icelandic banks. They can no longer honour more than $50bn of bonds, nor a mind-boggling $200bn of CDSs….
While every bank tries to pass the toxic parcel on to somebody else, the system has to find the money. So will compensation for the near valueless contracts and thus now uninsured debt ultimately be made - and by whom? And because nobody knows - not the regulators, banks or governments - who owns the swaps and whether they are credit-worthy, nobody can answer the question. Maybe holders of insurance policies will get the cash due to them, but will that weaken somebody else? The result - panic.
This is the ultra-dangerous downward vortex in which the system is locked. It is why share prices are plummeting. As recession deepens, there will be defaults on securitised bonds and the potential collapse of more banks outside the G7 ring-fence. Nobody knows what proportion of the $55 trillion of credit default contracts that have actually been written will be honoured and who might bear losses running into trillions of dollars.
This is the beast in the dark that is haunting the feckless leaders of the developed world: $55 trillion of unaccountable debt, and no way of knowing how much of it is even now being flushed down the toilet, taking the global economy with it.
The massive interventions we are seeing might stabilize the markets temporarily, or at least arrest their free fall long enough to come up with some kind of massive restructuring of the global financial system. Or they might not. For it is by no means certain that the wisdom, and the political courage, to come up with a more viable system can be found among the world’s political leaders — all of whom, as we noted here the other day, have risen within the present system and, to one degree or another, owe their own power and privilege to the “malefactors of great wealth” and the extremist cult of market fundamentalism. There is no indication anywhere that the circle of collusion and corruption between governments and Big Money has even lessened, much less been broken, by the economic catastrophe. All of the various bailout plans and “coordinated actions” still have as their chief aim the preservation of the malefactors in their current state of wealth, privilege and domination. As Jonathan Schwarz notes:
Still, U.S. elites will try to impose as much of a structural adjustment as they can get away with, in order to make the bottom 80% of America pay the price for the elites’ spectacular screw-ups. The Washington Post has already started writing about how the current crisis demonstrates that we must cut Social Security. Look for much more of this to come.
The only slim hope we have for any genuine reform — even an imperfect, conflicted, compromised reform, which is the only kind we will ever have in this world, until the lion lies down with the lamb — is that the sheer scale of the real problem — the $55 trillion beast, the very real potential for the complete destruction of the global economy, and the state power that depends upon it — might force some politicians to turn apostate, renounce the market cult, and bite the hands that have fed them for so long.
Absent this near-miraculous possibility, we will be left with yet another rickety house of cards, slapped together on the fly — largely at the malefactors’ direction and for their benefit — while the beast gapes wide his ponderous jaws, and prepares to swallow us whole.
Friday, October 17, 2008
"WHEN YOU GET IN BED WITH DOGS YOU CAN EXPECT TO GET FLEAS"
EXCLUSIVE TO THE AUSTRO-ATHENIAN EMPIRE:
In the wake of Sarah Palin’s taking Barack Obama to task for his ties to 1960s Weather Underground member and unrepentant bomber William Ayers, our investigators have uncovered evidence linking Palin herself to controversial political figure John McCain. McCain is a former member of a shadowy organisation called the “Navy of the United State” which during the 1960s planned and conducted bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia on what early reports indicate may have been an even larger scale than the Weather Underground’s; according to some of our sources, McCain himself appears to have carried out some of these bombings personally prior to his arrest in 1967. Far from expressing repentance, McCain has indicated his willingness to engage in further terrorist acts if given the opportunity, ghoulishly chanting “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” In light of these emerging revelations, observers are speculating as to whether Palin will now distance herself from McCain. The"TerrorPatriot"can only conclude that there is no difference in public bombing and private bombing or private sponsored terrorism as apposed to state sponsored terrorism. They both employ violence as a means of achieving a political end. I would just remind SARAH PALIN that, "when you are in bed with dogs you can expect to get fleas." GLENN NUNLEY. NORTH FLORIDA.
In the wake of Sarah Palin’s taking Barack Obama to task for his ties to 1960s Weather Underground member and unrepentant bomber William Ayers, our investigators have uncovered evidence linking Palin herself to controversial political figure John McCain. McCain is a former member of a shadowy organisation called the “Navy of the United State” which during the 1960s planned and conducted bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia on what early reports indicate may have been an even larger scale than the Weather Underground’s; according to some of our sources, McCain himself appears to have carried out some of these bombings personally prior to his arrest in 1967. Far from expressing repentance, McCain has indicated his willingness to engage in further terrorist acts if given the opportunity, ghoulishly chanting “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” In light of these emerging revelations, observers are speculating as to whether Palin will now distance herself from McCain. The"TerrorPatriot"can only conclude that there is no difference in public bombing and private bombing or private sponsored terrorism as apposed to state sponsored terrorism. They both employ violence as a means of achieving a political end. I would just remind SARAH PALIN that, "when you are in bed with dogs you can expect to get fleas." GLENN NUNLEY. NORTH FLORIDA.
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