The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused by the financial crisis. Continue reading →
Preparation for disaster, whether natural or man-made, should be as vital as any ideal found in the various practices of religion and spiritualism. Preparedness should be treated with reverence, discipline and duty. The drive for preparation should be seated in the very heart of humanity. As individuals and as a society, we should hold preparedness dear, for it is an expression of the desire for survival and the key to maintaining our inherent freedoms. Without self-sufficiency, we set ourselves up for endless failure and enslavement. Continue reading →
interview with Mark Boyle ‘The Moneyless Man’. Mark is an author and has lived without money for 3 years. They talk about the predictably collapsing money system which is literally killing people and the planet, being based on debt, short term greed and fear. They also talk about the urgency and emergency that people find a way to live without money and find a more sustainable way of living and being on the planet, before the negative consequences of decisions and actions made now become too overwhelming to reverse in the near future.
…Inflation doesn’t matter. Food stamps are a sign of prosperity. Down is up. Orwell would be proud of our financial press….
Click to go to original article at My Budget 360
The Dow has now reached a new peak. The media is prancing up and down like a giddy school girl as if this had a significant impact on the bottom line for most Americans. Don’t let the details out that many companies have increased their bottom line by squeezing wages and cutting worker benefits. Yet the mainstream press can’t even get one thing straight with inflation. The Dow is actually down 11 percent from where it was in 2000 adjusting for inflation. After all, a dollar is only worth as much as it can purchase in the economy. The US dollar has been hit over this period as well. Real household wages are back to levels last seen in the mid-1990s. So the Dow “peak” is really more symbolic and many Americans realize this. Let us take a look at where the stock market stands today through the lens of inflation.
Inflation erodes stock gains. The Dow really isn’t the best indicator of overall stock performance since it only follows a small number of companies. These are handpicked companies and the track record isn’t perfect. After all, they even had AIG and Citigroup until a few years ago. A better measure would be the S&P 500. The S&P 500 adjusting for inflation is down in real terms about 26 percent from the peak reached in 2000… via My Budget360…
“…Just like we are presented with the illusion of choice every four years, we’re also given various movements that appear to be supporting real change but in reality are supporting the status quo. Therefore, real successionism [sic] starts with the individual… ” via Silver For The People
Overview. The United States government has five interrelated motivations for destroying the value of the dollar:
Creating money out of thin air on a massive basis is all that stands between the current state of hidden depression, and overt depression with unemployment levels in excess of those seen in the US Great Depression of the 1930s.
It is the most effective way to meet not just current crushing debt levels, but to deal with the rapidly approaching massive generational crisis of paying for Boomer retirement promises.
It creates a lucratively profitable $500 billion a year hidden tax for the benefit of the US government which is not understood by voters or debated in elections.
It is the weapon of choice being used to wage currency war and reboot US economic growth; and
It is an essential component of political survival and enhanced power for incumbent politicians.In this article we will take a holistic approach to how individual short term, medium and long term pressures all come together to leave the government with effectively no choice but to create a substantial rate of inflation that will steadily destroy the value of the dollar…via FINANCIAL SENSE….
“… bankers are greedy and have been for 1000 years” and “nothing is going to change” unless there are criminal sanctions; to which he follows up – briefly silencing the interviewer, “If some people end up in jail, maybe that will teach a lesson to somebody – or somebody will hang in the streets“. The professor goes on to note that the EU “summit was a failure” since markets were expecting much more and warns that without full debt mutualization, debt monetization by the ECB, or a quadrupling of the EFSF/ESM ‘bazooka’; Italian and Spanish spreads will continue to blow out day after day – leading to a crisis “not in six months but in two weeks“. The only entity capable of stopping this is the ECB which needs to do outright unsterilized monetization in unlimited amounts which is ‘politically incorrect’ to talk about and claimed to be constitutionally illegal. 2013 will be a very difficult year to find shelter as policy-makers ability to kick-the-can runs out of steam as he sees the possibility of a ‘Global Perfect Storm’ of a euro-zone collapse, a US double-dip, a China & EM hard-landing, and a war in the Middle East. Dr. Doom is back.” via ZeroHedge
GE Note: You think we very behind this here in the US? Think again.
Capital Controls Hit Spain: Government Laws Prohibit Cash Transactions Over €2,500; Minimum Fine of €10,000 for Failure to Report Foreign Accounts
If Spain is seeking further instability, a new law on financial transactions is sure to do just that. Via Google Translate, Spain passes a law limiting cash payments to 2,500 euros.
Key Provisions
Minimum fine of €10,000 for taxpayers who do not report their foreign accounts.\
Fine of €5,000 for each additional account
Cash transactions greater than €2,500 prohibited
Cash transaction restrictions apply to individuals and businesses
The US requires reporting of foreign accounts as well, supposedly for the same reason, preventing tax fraud.
In Spain however, consumers and businesses are already very nervous (and rightfully so), of a Spain exit from the euro with a return to the Spanish peseta accompanied by an immediate devaluation.
In that context, these controls are only going to make consumers and businesses even more nervous, if not outright suspicious about what is going on.
The proprietor of the well-respected Survival Blog, James Rawles, is not one for overstatement. So it was doubled-down unsettling when he wrote the most chilling advice we’ve seen recently, a spare and direct statement which appeared in his Economics and Investing section:
As of today, Wednesday, June 13, 2012, I strongly urge all SurvivalBlog readers to immediately draw down their checking accounts and liquidate their CDs, passbook savings accounts and most of the their stocks to buy tangibles. Continue reading →
“Election ’12: In his most brazen act of pandering to date, President Obama has dangled de facto amnesty to 800,000 illegal immigrants in a shameless bid to win Latino votes. This is pure banana-republic electoral politics…” via Investors.com.
The normally-reserved Yves Smith asks whether Obama should be impeached over it. Democratic Senator Wyden – the head of the committee which is supposed to oversee it – is so furious about the lack of access that he has introduced legislation to force disclosure.
Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is so upset by it that he has leaked a document on his website to show what’s going on.
What is everyone so furious about?
An international treaty being negotiated in secret which would not only crack down on Internet privacy much more than SOPA or ACTA, but would actually destroy the sovereignty of the U.S. and all other signatories.
Can you manage your money? A personal finance quiz.
Are you financially literate enough to manage your own money? Teenagers say less than half of their families have had a discussion about money management, according to a 2011 Junior Achievement/Allstate Foundation survey. Another poll by Yahoo Finance found that 37 percent of adults have no retirement savings, and 38 percent plan to live off Social Security after retirement. When it comes to making good decisions about money, are you a beginner, a financial whiz, or somewhere in-between? Take the quiz to find out.
If Raoul Pal was some doomsday spouting windbag, writing in all caps, arbitrarily pasting together disparate charts to create 200 page slideshows, it would be easy to ignore him. He isn’t. The founder of Global Macro Investor “previously co-managed the GLG Global Macro Fund in London for GLG Partners, one of the largest hedge fund groups in the world. Raoul came to GLG from Goldman Sachs where he co-managed the hedge fund sales business in Equities and Equity Derivatives in Europe… Raoul Pal retired from managing client money in 2004 at the age of 36 and now lives on the Valencian coast of Spain, from where he writes.” It is his writing we are concerned about, and specifically his latest presentation, which is, for lack of a better word, the most disturbing and scary forecast of the future of the world we have ever seen….
…The dollar was a median step towards a newer and more corrupt ideal. Its time is nearly over. This is open, it is admitted, and it is being activated as you read this. The speed at which this disaster occurs is really dependent on the speed at which our government along with our central bank decides to expedite doubt. Doubt in a currency is a furious omen…
Alternate Inflation Charts. The CPI chart … reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living…
Preparation for disaster, whether natural or man-made, should be as vital as any ideal found in the various practices of religion and spiritualism. Preparedness should be treated with reverence, discipline and duty. The drive for preparation should be seated in the very heart of humanity. As individuals and as a society, we should hold preparedness dear, for it is an expression of the desire for survival and the key to maintaining our inherent freedoms. Without self-sufficiency, we set ourselves up for endless failure and enslavement. Continue reading 
“…Just like we are presented with the illusion of choice every four years, we’re also given various movements that appear to be supporting real change but in reality are supporting the status quo. Therefore, real successionism [sic] starts with the individual… ” via Silver For The People
The Grey Enigma 