Fairy Tales of Recovery, Reality of More Failures
The Federal Reserve is desperate. They are appealing the Bloomberg directive to reveal who received funding to keep from going bankrupt from the Federal Reserve.
In addition HR 1207 will be brought up for a vote in the House this month. The question is in what form. No matter what happens they know we are hot on their trail. They have to do everything possible to end the recession, or go for broke.
Thus far there has been little recovery even with an official $23.7 trillion committed by the Treasury and the Fed. This number alone shows you how serious this situation is. The banking sector is still broke and is using TARP funds to buy out failing smaller banks. The residential TARP funds returned will go toward helping bail out the collapsing commercial real estate industry. Quantitative easing has not worked, nor has TARP and the endless stream of money from TALF. We are anxious to see if the FASB sticks to its guns and demands mark-to-market accounting. That will pull the cover off of the fraud known as mark-to-model, which really is mark to whatever you want it to be. As you can now see this is a much deeper problem than a subprime problem. That just triggered events. We are still facing a new wave of subprime loans written over the past year by FHA, Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, plus ALT-A, Option ARMS Pick-and-Pay Loans and the failure of prime loans that will stretch to 2013. On top of that we have commercial real estate loans now to deal with and credit card failure. This is what the banking crime syndicate has brought you in their lust for more power and riches. We must not forget as well, standing in the wings, are America’s creditors, especially the Chinese who are dumping $25 billion to $100 billion in dollar denominated assets monthly. Their goal is to be out of dollar paper in another 1-1/2 years. Then there are the other sellers. There are few buyers, so the Fed will have to monetize trillions of dollars in dollar denominated bonds, which they are doing secretly presently. It is no wonder they are terrified of an audit, which would not only uncover their illegal activities, but also expose their leadership and participation in the outrageous suppression of gold and silver prices. The status of foreign creditors could turn on a dime. Many predict they will abandon ship one at a time, as the dollar slips lower and lower. The Fed and the Treasury have tried over and over to keep the USDX, dollar index, over 80 for weeks and they have been totally unsuccessful. It settled this past Friday at 78.31, just ready to break to new lows. One must remember these countries are suffering the fallout of the actions that have been deliberately executed by these International bankers, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department and they are not happy about that. They are all suffering recession. It is only a matter of time before they too dump dollar denominated assets.
We would like to say for individuals caught up in this mess worldwide, other currencies are not the answer. Only gold and silver related assets will weather this coming storm. Remember that, for in the final analysis all currencies will fall in value versus gold and silver and there are no exceptions. We have been there before and seen that, so do not be deluded into going into other currencies, or shares in foreign markets denominated in other currencies, they are not the answer.
Then we hear the fairy tales of recovery in the US, Europe and Asia. If you spend enough money you can create a recovery albeit of short duration. No one is out of the woods. Europe, particularly the eurozone, has cut issuance of money and credit to 3.7% but they are maintaining interest rates at 1%, which is in reality ½%. The European recovery will be a parallel movement for a year and without more cheap money or an increase in money and credit it will die and wither away. Then there are the ongoing real estate collapses in the US, Ireland, Spain and in the Persian Gulf. There could be a bank panic or holiday in any of these regions. If a panic occurs the first liquid asset sold will be US Treasuries and Agencies and the US dollar. This would spread terror in Frankfurt, Paris, London and NYC. All these stock exchanges could collapse as well. The NYSE, FTSE, CAC and the DAX as countries in trouble sell everything not nailed down to simply survive. The world is about to find out that free trade and globalization has been a disaster. The millions of jobs lost in the US and Europe, so that transnational conglomerates could prosper is in the final stages of death. The redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor countries is about to end in a shattering smash-up. The myth of worldwide prosperity is about to end. Contrary to prevailing thought the biggest losers will be world exporters, such as China, which has already seen a 40% fall in exports. All the money and credit creation we have seen in China over the past seven months, some $1.9 trillion, isn’t going to work. They still face 30 million unemployed. Those jobs are not going to return for a long time if ever. Out of desperation there eventually will be tariffs, legislated in the US, Europe and in other countries and inflation will rise as a result.
In America the safety net of the FDIC doesn’t exist. It is virtually broke and that is why a few months ago unofficially the FDIC asked government for $500 billion. Putting this into perspective, about $700 billion would insure about 1% of all the qualifying deposits in the US.
The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR-1207, if passed, we will see our gold inventories. We’ll find out what toxic garbage the Fed has been buying from banks and what they have paid for it. We will find out every company that received funds and how they were spent. We will subpoena every piece of correspondence, fax, e-mail and phone calls the Fed has ever made. We will get a real balance sheet; not some version the GAO approved. Wait until the public sees how the Fed and its owners have looted the people for almost 100 years.
Two Republican lawmakers, Darrell Issa, (R-Ca) and Rep. Spencer Bachus, (R-OK), House Financial Services ranking members are seeking an audit of the trust that manages the government’s controlling stake in AIG.
Three more U.S. banks failed on Friday, bringing the total to 84 so far this year, over 400 banks remain on the FDIC's watch list and are in danger of failing in the next year. As the industry continues to grapple with deteriorating loans on their books. Regulators shuttered Affinity Bank of Ventura, California, Bradford Bank in Baltimore, and Mainstreet Bank of Forest Lake, Minnesota, which in total are expected to cost the government's deposit insurance fund about $446 million. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp on Thursday reported that the insurance fund's balance stood at $10.4 billion at the end of the second quarter. But the agency also noted that the figure was adjusted to account for $32 billion set aside for expected failures over the next year. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said this week that bank failures will remain elevated as banks go through the painful process of recognizing loan losses and cleaning up balance sheets. The total of 84 failures this year marks a sharp rise over the 25 last year, and the three failures in all of 2007.
Some predict somewhere between 3,400 and 4,200 banks would go under and the FDIC would spend trillions of dollars to cover the loses. A loss of 3,400 banks would lead to losses of over $33 trillion.
The FDIC now has foreign banks and private equity groups about to engorge themselves on failing US banks. Worse yet, rather than cash the FDIC is allowing these financial firms to use equity which is unprecedented. The use of non-cash collateral assets is being used because the purchasing banks are broke and without TARP not only could they not buy anything, but they’d probably be out of business. What Ms. Bair has done has been to expedite the takeover of banks by bigger banks and involved the use of foreign banks as well as private equity partnerships.
As a foreigner, you have to be deranged to buy dollar denominated assets with the massive monetization of agency securities, collateralized debt obligations and treasuries going on, never mind the underhanded secret deals the Fed is involved in to fund their markets. If we can understand what the fed is up too, so can these foreigners. That is what a more than $600 billion swap facility is all about, including suppression of foreign currencies in order to bolster the strength of the dollar.
This month, September, a great confusion will begin. The occupation of Iraq will continue; more troops will be sent to Afghanistan and Pakistan will become another major battleground. Terrorism will be used to continue to propagandize the American public, along with Cap & Trade and medical reform and the Swine Flu fiasco. These are all distractions to keep the publics’ eye off the continued failure of our financial system.
Deflation continues to eat away at assets, except for gold and silver, and the Fed creates money and credit to offset deflation’s savages.
The torrent of money and credit has pulled some nations at least temporarily out of the negative decline on GDP. Japan, France and Germany are examples. The question is when will their economies run out of stream? Probably when they attempt to raise interest rates. In the case of the eurozone the expansion of money and credit has already fallen 3.7%.
The global economic crisis, now more than two years old has allowed governments to run banking and financial systems in a usurpation of power over the individual and private property. What we are facing is perpetual crisis and intended government control. There will not be a return to normality. Next will come food shortages and rationing and one epidemic or pandemic after another. We wonder what will happen when the public finds out that all these problems were preplanned years ago. Then comes the control of all labor. Government is now spending 185% of tax receipts. The budget deficit will be between $1.6 and $2.00 trillion for fiscal 2009, ended on 9/30/09.
For those who hadn’t noticed, commercial real estate values fell 27% and are off 36% from their 10/07 peak. We may see a total drop of 70% to 75% from the highs, when all is said and done. Refinancing has to be found for $165 billion in properties by the end of the year, which is impossible, even with left over TARP funds.
Deflation has prices somewhere between minus 2% to plus 5% worldwide as imports and exports have fallen over 30%. As an example, Los Angeles, the busiest port in the US, imports have fallen 16.9%. It is the exporters who are getting hit the hardest and some have cut prices in the process.
The only thing that keeps a veneer of equilibrium is the massive creation of money and credit pumped out by central banks worldwide. It has been said we had entered depression this past February and as when we called the beginning of recession two years before, no one shared our opinion. If we are not in depression than what is the significance of 20.8% unemployment, a factory utilization level of 65% and continued massive foreclosures? As it's being said over and over again the Fed, Treasury, Wall Street and banking are in a box and they cannot get out. They deliberately created this horrible situation and there is no going back. It is impossible to reverse the process. We are in an economic and financial depression. The only offered solution is to spend our way out of the crisis with bigger budget deficits and credit expansion into infinity. We are going to see a replay of the 1970s. Inflation will catch up and overtake deflation one more time, but in the end deflation will prevail.
Fiscal spending is running wild and our president predicts a budget deficit of $9 trillion dollars over the next ten years. That estimate is based on a brisk economy expansion over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says spending has to be cut 8% permanently over the next several years. In July alone federal spending rose 26%, as revenues fell 6%. Corporate tax receipts fell 58%, as individual revenues fell 21%. The official economic contraction is the worst since the great depression. Can you imagine what it really is? 9.4% unemployment is front-page news, but you didn’t hear about the 4.7% loss in salaries and wages of for the 12 months ended in June. There are more government employees now than all those employed in manufacturing and construction. How is it that state employees now make 40% more than the average income in non-governmental jobs? What a perversion of government. It is no wonder that the US poverty rate is higher than in Mexico and Turkey.
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