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Frontrunning: June 22
- Iran launches aid ship to Gaza on Sunday (AP)
- Furious Obama summons McChrystal to explain comments (Politico, Bloomberg)
- Goodbye Keynes, hello Hoover (Nation)
- Cancelled mortgage modifications surge 55% in May (eCreditDaily)
- UK's Osborne cuts 2010, 2011 forecasts (Reuters)
- Wall Street's invisible gorilla is killing America's soul (MarketWatch)
- Misguided housing subsidies promote unfairness, bailouts (USA Today)
- Quanto swaps show 9% euro drop on Greek default, Citigroup says (Bloomberg)
- Central banks show Euro losing reserve status as Loonie gains (Bloomberg)
- Cliffhanger (Hussman Funds)
- BP shares touch 13 year low (Reuters)
- Why Wall Street's Q2 earnings are going to stink (WSJ)
- Obama seeks more than $100 million for laid off oil rig workers (Bloomberg)
- Funny - Japan targets balanced budget... by 2020 (Bloomberg)
- We need from China than a flexible renminbi (FT)
- Is Illinois the new California? (RCM)
- Is Paul Krugman depressed? (Fundmastery)
»
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From "Wall Street's invisible gorilla is killing America's soul":
"We're Americans. Don't confuse us with the facts, with reality. We're the greatest in history, a legend in our own minds. And a rapidly mutating virus is spreading this lethal pandemic far beyond the shores of Lake Wobegon. Yes, folks, the "Lake Wobegon Effect" is hard-wired in America's brain, an illusion of superiority, a smug arrogance where each knows we are the best, the chosen ones."
Ha! Great stuff. This one is worth the read.
Rusty, I had a different take on this one.
I found it manifestly insulting that Americans are given equal share for the fault of a criminal financial system occupied and controlled by a handful of criminals using a financial media to cover their crimes. To blame and implicate Main Street for these developments is a crime in itself, IMO.
Farrell is a Wall Street tool, IMO, another spreader of Wall Street manure to cover the high stakes larceny of the oligarchs. The tip off of this obfuscation was when he described all investors (“Main Street America's 95 million irrational and self-sabotaging investors”) down to the smallest 401(k) as somehow a single entity. That’s what you really call spreading the blame. What about those 50% of adults who aren’t investors, do they get to walk scott free? And the children whose parents don’t have anything in the market? Do they get to walk?
In other words, he’s still connected to Morgan Stanley, IMO, and he’s still covering for them…another in a long line of criminal spinners.
That's how it hit me.
It is a very lonely view to depict Main Street, work a day America as opposite to Wall Street.
I saw people dancing on the streets for certain special events on Wall Street.
Wall Street is the lungs of the US. Wall Street is loved by Main Street.
I want some of what you're smoking.
Agreed JR.
Farrell is a tool.
nuff said.
Don't get me wrong. He's part of the problem and I usually despise his stuff. I just liked the particular arrangement of words and concepts in this piece.
Thanks for the additional message; that's what makes a horse race! :)
McChrystal and another "furious" Obongo...Orszag quit...
Looks like cracks are starting to appear in the team as more wheels fall off...rage and desperation are sure signs the end is approaching
Obama's been unprepared for just about everything.
I'd like to witness that meeting. Somebody should remind Obama that a military officer allegiance is to the Constitution, *not* to the president.
[I was never fired for rightly criticizing a manager, even as a consultant. How petty, small-minded this president is.]
Odummo may be a skuzball but to actually say the US military is protecting the constitution is beyond laughable. The US military's #1 mission is to be the muscle for our corporate Kleptocracy. The government and the military do what their corporate masters tell them to do. McChrystal is angry he was given an unwinnable job by people he does not respect. Won't look good in the history books. I'm guessing we are seeing the next Teabagger darling cum candidate.
Hmm, Anarchist attacking the constitution, the military and the corporations with a touch of straw man for flavor in a short paragraph. You get cookie points for composition and consistency even if I disagree completely :)
If Obamatron could simply "Care Enough", these problems would ALL be solved (NOT!)
"Furious Obama summons McChrystal to explain comments ..."
Obummer: "I'm outraged!"
Put a sock it in Barry... We've all heard that lame BS before. It you are so outraged, get off your incompetent ass and do something... for once.
And I don't mean Wall Street puppet and corporate shill bills Barry O'Bitch.
Well, after 2 years of a constant peg and a giant housing bubble combined with a big inflation one it appears that foreign investors and the Chinese that are able to take their money where starting to loose patience.
In an article published on April 29 Vice President of Shenzhen Development bank mentioned that deposits in banks were decreasing since many investors were rushing into the property market.
In a June 21 article their was a report that the major banks in China have been suffering from significant decreases of RMB deposits in the last c two months. The article also mentions that their was an even larger decrease of foreign exchange deposits.
An older article confirms this news and states that new RMB deposits fell dramatically in the major Chinese banks. It also quoted one of the Chinese bank officials mentioning that it is time to let the Yuan float more freely in order to attract foreign capital.
That is the reason why as reported at Zero Hedge China 1 Month Inter Bank Rate Was At A Multi Year High.
So foreign capital is rushing once again into China to get a quick return on capital. It seems to be a no risk bet. But there is no such think as a capital gain with no risk associated with it, and when the world discovers the risks associated with investing in China they will be in for a nasty surprise.
Source:
The End of The Yuan peg- China is Desperately Trying to Attract Foreign Capital in Order to Prevent a Banking Crisis
Great post! Thanks.
hooray for great depression 2.0, maybe the third time around the noble scholars will realize you need to go austrian first and then keynes, not the other way around.
Are We There Yet?
The international order has thus returned to the Kaiser's world of multiple states, high tariff barriers and unfair trade competition. Small countries will have no alternative but to seek protection in the spheres of influence of their larger neighbors. Participants in the protectionist new world order will be a diminished United States, a sclerotic and inward-looking EU, projecting its power no further than the Balkans, one or possibly two left-leaning Latin American blocs led by Brazil and Venezuela (which may or may not combine), a resource-rich and oppressive bloc led by Russia, a highly unstable Middle East dominated by Turkey and Iran, and an impoverished and unstable south Asian bloc led by India.
By far the most powerful and successful bloc will be led by China, which will include much of Southeast Asia and large parts of Africa. There will remain a few substantial independent states: an isolationist Japan, an unstable Indonesia, perhaps a modestly prosperous Australia. However, overall the world will geopolitically look like that of the aggressively competitive 1890s or, if we are unlucky, the haunted 1930s.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/LF23Dj01.html
Umentioned in the article was the overseas colonies of many of the players. The loss of colonies or access to resources was a bigger threat than Tariffs.
Goodbye Keynes, hello Hoover
I'm really getting sick of this crap. This guy's more of an idiot than Krugman.
"Is Paul Krugman depressed?"
Classic!
Any one who constantly stares in the rear view mirror... reminiscing about the good ol' days of his completely discredited academic field...
Put Another Way
What if you woke up tomorrow to discover the field in which you spent 10 years or more of academic study and made it your profession...
Was proven to be an idiotic fallacy ridden fraud.... which you remind every one with your logically invalid asinine articles everyday...
Wouldn't you be depressed?
Chinese Checkers
(Reuters) - China pulled back the veil on its new currency regime a little further on Tuesday, appearing to engineer a fall in the yuan to make clear its vow of flexibility did not include one-way bets for appreciation.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65I11B20100622
As long as the dollar is the reserve currency China will not deviate much from it's winning strategy. Now when the US forces all it's debt holders to take a haircut, you will see China make major changes in it's strategy.
Well Stanley McChrystal Meth is a traitor to our country. He might as well be flying the union jack. He was putting Obama on notice that he is not to try the 'queen' in her opium war.
How about we get some generals who are interested in America, and not the bottom line of England's monarchy.
Oh Obama, you've been used like douche by the Queen, and yet still support her malthusian ways. Gee I wonder why the Queen doesn't want to end Afghan, because it gives her 1 trillion a year, which means 40 trillion for the markets with leverage, every year.
You should've let the crap hit the fan for your predecessor's idiotic decisions, but nope, you had to double down on the idiocy. In war, in economics, in everything.
Now you're tied to BP, tied to the wars, tied to the economic mess, and none of these, were supposedly your philosophies. But you did and do them anyways. Whoops, because this IS your presidency. What a waste.
The "Queen" should be a bit player in your soap opera. The main targets of our military bases in the Mideast and our little incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan are China and India. It also doesn't hurt that those who want to starve the beast will achieve their goals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
a new Damon Vrabel...
Corporate charity, Billionaire charity, Will the Real JP Morgan Chase Please Stand Up?
PR vs. Truth: Corporate Charity and the Billionaire’s Ruse by Damon Vrabel | June 21, 2010
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are acting as if they’ve discovered the fountain of youth as they are now telling other billionaires they don’t need to spend their lives addictively pursuing and hoarding wealth. On the surface this is noble, even though most people learned such things from their pet as a kid. They’re inspiring other billionaires to follow their lead. So we’re supposed to cheer right? Many people are cheering. The comments range from “thank you!” and “bless you Warren!” to the more worshipful “you are a hero!” and “this proves Microsoft’s commitment to humanity!”
Wow—the power of corporate PR. It’s unfortunate that snake oil has always been a bestseller. So rather than cheer, I’ll give a different perspective on what this billionaire PR campaign might be all about.
The real reason Gates and Buffett are doing this in the media now is because they’re still doing what they’ve done their whole adult lives—serving their bosses, the moneyed establishment behind Wall Street. While the exponential growth machine was inflating, the establishment wanted them addictively pursuing EPS and share growth, and they dutifully did so better than most. But now that the machine is shutting down, the fact is that billionaires won’t be able to pursue wealth—the game is over for a while. And now that we’re headed for a major dose of deflation that will cause a lot of pain for a lot of people, the establishment wants Gates and Buffett on TV talking about charity. Why?
Among other things, it’s a preemptive strike against the rage of the lower classes that will result from the final reckoning with our broken monetary system and the fact that the corporate system has shifted American jobs and production offshore. This is an orchestrated billionaire PR campaign, kicked off at a dinner with David Rockefeller himself, “lord” of the US banking establishment. Gates and Buffett are providing strategic marketing through CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) mouthpiece Charlie Rose and other major media arms of the establishment, then companies and smaller billionaires are following their lead and giving away money in return for more PR effect. Two examples:
Again beyond the PR, this is part of an organized campaign being run by the corporate ruling class. While the most powerful folks at JPM Chase know the truth, the non-profit team inside the bank and an individual like Marc genuinely believe in what they are doing. They’re decent people. They just don’t realize how their compartmentalization within the mega corporate structure keeps them from seeing the truth of the debt-based corporate empire they’re serving. So what’s the truth?
Will the Real JP Morgan Chase Please Stand Up?Let’s start with JP Morgan Chase. It is a voracious institution driven by ruthless usury putting people, towns, counties, states, and countries in debt. It has fed the multi-generational billionaire families that have controlled the bank through history (the merger of JP Morgan interests and Rockefeller interests behind Chase) while making a few of its operating officers like Jamie Dimon billionaires as well. It has done so by being the most powerful member of the Federal Reserve cartel that puts the US government in servitude and forces all of us to borrow and pay interest in order to have money, i.e. in order to survive. So the bank effectively controls the rest of us in an economic structure similar to the old days of feudalism.
Some specific examples are useful to help understand the true character of this institution. The bank, sometimes through foreign surrogates, has a track record of being involved in the financial crises that put foreign governments under even more debt from the Anglo-American banking establishment and give western corporations more power and control over natural resources and other assets. The bank helps drive smaller levels of government into insolvency, with Jefferson County Alabama being the most obvious current example. The bank has been accused of insider market manipulation, most recently in the silver market. The bank has participated in the general banking attack on much of the world having blown indebtedness, and therefore asset bubbles, to such stratospheric heights that major “discontinuous adjustment” is guaranteed, to use an innocuous Greenspan phrase for “unprecedented catastrophe.” And the bank showed how ruthless its operating officers can be in the aftermath of the collapse of 2008 when they had no problem jacking up credit card rates and kicking people out of their homes as Jamie Dimon went on CNBC to tell Americans they better pay up so his team can keep pocketing millions. At the same time, the powers behind the bank were extorting the government to put the nation in even more debt, transfer billions to them, and hand them valuable assets like WAMU.
This should reveal the truth behind Jamie Dimon’s claim that Chase “serves its communities.” That is PR spin straight out of Orwell’s 1984 where corporate propaganda from a smooth Harvard billionaire replaces truth. I also hope this helps put in perspective a $5 million charity handout designed to give them PR value. $5 million isn’t even pocket change to Chase. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean of money that has been stripped from the population in the first place through usury. So a helpful analogy to this Chase charity stunt might be a viciously abusive husband who gives his wife a Reese’s peanut butter cup after 10 years of broken bones, hospital visits, and psychological horror. Don’t be a sucker.
Marc Benioff and the Truth of the Tech BoomIn Marc’s case, the story is far less severe. He’s not in the dark usury business. He’s not evil. But the gap between truth and PR is still wide. He became a billionaire in the 2nd phase of the tech boom in which the establishment chose Web 2.0 technologies for its corporate empire vs. the old client/server architecture from the 1st tech boom. At the micro level, people inside his company think they’re benevolently serving human progress. But the macro perspective reveals that salesforce.com is just one small component of the overall new world economic order being built by the financial empire that rules much of the world. His product helps the corporate system go global and turn away from national and community loyalties. So salesforce.com’s gain is, for example, the industrial midwest’s ruin—so much for the idea that he loves community. As a few comfy employees in the company have gotten rich IN the tech bubble, manufacturing towns have been destroyed BY the tech bubble. His product also puts data in the “cloud computing” architecture on the internet beyond corporate firewalls and national borders so the banking establishment can further consolidate power and control. This explains why a CFR lawyer was a top officer at the company for a few years and why a public CFR representative like Colin Powell would speak at a Benioff conference for techies, not typically a venue where one sees national leaders who have more important things to do.
What’s really sad about the tech billionaires is that their wealth was driven by putting the rest of the world in massive debt. They don’t understand this. They think they really are “self-made” billionaires as described by establishment rags like Forbes. But as Teddy Roosevelt said, business elites don’t know much outside their own business, so they don’t realize the true mechanism that funneled so much wealth into the tech industry and their personal bank accounts. As a result of Greenspan and team driving the real estate debt boom and the US government massively increasing its debt at the same time, the Wall Street cartel had new unprecedented levels of liquidity to funnel into the corporate empire system. This gave corporations billions to allocate to new capital projects, and since Wall Street governs the corporate system, it dictated how that money would be spent. So guys like Marc saw their share prices shoot to the stratosphere as corporations funneled to them billions in funny money backed by the debt that would soon drown millions of people.
Truth vs. Corporate PRThis is the truth of the corporate system, our supposed captains of industry, and the tech billionaires we admire for entrepreneurial efforts. This is the truth that more and more Americans are waking up to. And this is therefore likely the reason the CFR corporate establishment is encouraging guys like Marc to dole out money in a coordinated campaign designed to make people admire billionaires and the corporate system that rules them. If they can buyoff enough of the population with charity PR, they might avoid the reckoning that would otherwise be coming their way. They will be able to stay peacefully in their billionaire enclaves separate from real communities as the rest of the population suffers in the next phase of deflationary decline coming our way.
So Warren, Bill, Jamie, Marc, am I glad some of the money that was sucked into your accounts by the debt system is being given back to the community? Absolutely. But will you go further? Will you learn the truths this article discusses? Will you actually get out in your communities, meet real people, learn about how their indebtedness is directly proportional to your wealth, and work with them to change the system rather than writing a check, hiding behind PR professionals, and serving the CFR agenda?
The people are awake to the truth now. The system is reverting back to reality. The PR matrix is coming down. You should move beyond the fake PR facades as well. Warren, you said the dinner with Lord Rockefeller was almost like a therapy session. I promise you’ll feel even better if you simply choose truth over PR. As opposed to the narcissists that Rothkopf calls the “superclass” which surrounds you, most people are forgiving by nature. You don’t have to hide behind PR any longer.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/24501