Corruption

All you need to read.

Yet another whistleblower has stepped up, this time one already known to the general public, and one that Zero Hedge covered just over a month ago: we refer to the case of former CBO worker, Lan T. Pham, who, as the WSJ described in early February, "alleges she was terminated [by the CBO] after 2½ months for sharing pessimistic outlooks for the banking and housing sectors in 2010" and who "alleges supervisors stifled opinions that contradicted economic fixes endorsed by some on Wall Street, including research from a Morgan Stanley economist who served as a CBO adviser." As we observed in February, "what is most troubling is if indeed the CBO is nothing but merely another front for Wall Street to work its propaganda magic on the administration. Because at the core of every policy are numbers, usually with dollar signs in front of them, numbers which have to make sense and have to be projected into the future, no matter how grossly laughable the resultant hockeystick." As it turns out, somewhat expectedly, the WSJ version of events was incomplete. There is much more to this very important story, one which has major implications over "impartial" policy decisionmaking, and as a result, Ms. Pham has approached Zero Hedge to share her full story with the public.

Here is where the parasitic 1% have their problem. What they have “sold” the American public as the spirit of the nation is now in direct opposition to reality. In fact, it has become so obviously untrue that the population is waking in drove to the truth and the truth is that we have a utterly corrupt, sociopathic minority running the nation like a giant criminal syndicate for their own power and money. Therein lies their weakness however. They have no philosophy. These guys are actually so twisted that all they think about is how can they keep growing their money and power. Furthermore, they are operating under an exposed playbook of control. Just take a look at Obama’s approval ratings. They are plunging. They are plunging despite fabricated economic numbers and biblical stock market rigging to make things look good. They are plunging because people are waking up and seeing all of this for what it is. A gigantic scam. All the signs I see point to increasing desperation on their part and exponential awakening on the part of the meat of the bell curve. These guys are toast and what we should now be focusing most of our attention on is what kind of society we want when this one collapses. Hopefully the other side of the bell curve can influence the debate for the first times in five thousand years. That is my hope and my vision of the future.

What is fraud except creating “value” from nothing and passing it off as something? Frauds interlink and grow upon each other. Our debt-based money system serves as the fraud foundation. In our debt-based money system, debt must grow in order to create money. Therefore, there is no way to pay off aggregate debt with available money. More money must be lent into the system to make the payments for old debts. This causes overall debt to expand as new money for actual people (vs. banks) always arrives at interest and compounds exponentially. This process is called financialization. Financialization: The process of making money from nothing in which debt (i.e. poverty, lack) is paradoxically considered an asset (i.e. wealth, gain). In current financialized economies “wealth expansion” comes from the parasitic taxation of productivity in the form of interest on fiat lending. This interest over time consumes a greater and greater share of resources, assets, labor, and livelihood until nothing is left.

Injection will have its desired affect.

Welcome to the Crazy House, a rotting McMansion ruled by power-drunk megalomaniacs suffering from delusions of invulnerability and god-like powers. Why are we here, you ask? Because the drunks who run the household make it so darned easy: just keep quiet, listen politely to their ravings, and you get subsidized meals, free rent, a houseful of techno-gadgetry and nonstop entertainment--and that's not even counting the amusement value of their delusional, sloppy-drunk ramblings out by the rust-stained pool.

All you need to read.

While reading Advanced Trading today we stumbled across the following curious excerpt:

Advanced Trading: You mentioned regulators and politicians are ignorant ...

[ITG's Jamie] Selway: I would say that their knowledge is incomplete.

Advanced Trading: Is this causing HFT to be scape-goated?

[ITG'S Jamie] Selway: Yes, there's a mixture of that. I am fond of saying I am not a huge regulations guy but I am a fan of regulations at an appropriate level that boosts confidence. I for one would prefer to be regulated by the SEC and not by ZeroHedge. So we have a team of experts and multiple agencies that are expert in regulations and know the markets and have the resources.

Here is our response.

In the U.S. we now have the perfection of cloaked crony capitalism: corporate cartels use their vast concentrations of capital and revenue to buy the political leverage needed to write regulations specifically designed to eliminate competition. Recall that the most profitable business model is a monopoly or cartel protected from competition by the coercive Central State. Imposing complex regulations on small business competitors effectively cripples an entire class competitors, but does so in "stealth mode"--after all, more regulations are a "good thing" (especially to credulous Liberals) which "protect the public" (and every politico loves claiming his/her new raft of regulations will "protect the public.") This masks the key dynamic of crony capitalism: gaming the government is the most profitable business model. Where else can you "invest" a few hundred thousand dollars (to buy political "access" and lobbying) and "earn" a return in the millions of dollars, and eliminate potential competitors, too? No other "investment" even comes close.

And I thought securitization ment they where going to keep the loan docs in a safe place in some bank vault some where...

• U.S. Postal Service to Cut 35,000 Jobs as Plants Are Shut (BBG) -Expect one whopper of a seasonal adjustment to compensate
• European Banks May Tap ECB for $629 Billion Cash (Bloomberg) - EURUSD surging as all ECB easing now priced in; Fed is next
• Madrid presses EU to ease deficit targets (FT)
• Greek Parliament Approves Debt Write-Down (WSJ)
• Mentor of Central Bankers Fischer Rues Complacency as Economy Accelerates (Bloomberg)
• Draghi Takes Tough Line on Austerity (WSJ)
• European Banks Hit by Losses (WSJ)
• Moody's: won't take ratings action on Japan on Friday (Reuters)
• Athens told to change spending and taxes (FT)

If the last 12 years have revealed anything, they have shown beyond reasonable doubt that both Status Quo political parties in the U.S. are hopelessly, ruinously corrupt and thus beyond any reform or redemption. We all know why: it now takes millions of dollars to run costly mainstream media election campaigns, and the only source for contributions of that scale is the financial/corporate Elite. It doesn't matter how you arrange the taxonomy of the financial aristocracy that rules the nation or how you subdivide it--old money, new money, family money, corporate money, etc.-- the bottom line is these campaign contributions are viewed by the aristocratic donors as investments that yield gargantuan returns in tax breaks, subsidies, bailouts, sweetheart contracts, "get out of jail free" cards for the shadow banking system, and so on.

Let's put things back into perspective. Europe is lending money to Greece, which according to latest rumors will at least for the time being be in the form of the dreaded Escrow Account, which in turn means that the only recipients of bailout cash will be Greek creditors, whose claims will be senior to that of the government. In other words, it will be up to Greece, and specifically its own tax "collectors" to provide the actual funding needed to run the country as bailout or not bailout, Greek mandatory (forget discretionary) expenditures will not see one penny from Europe. As a reminder, the country is already €1 billion behind schedule in revenue collections which are down 7% Y/Y compared to an expectation of 9% rise. As a further reminder, the one defining characteristic of Greek tax collectors is that they are prone to striking. Virtually all the time. And that is assuming they even have the ink to print the required tax forms. Which last year they did not. So under what realistic assumptions are Greek tax collectors laboring in the current tax year? Why, nothing short of them having to be not 100%, but 200% more efficient. From Kathimerini: "Greece’s tax collectors were told over the weekend that they would have to do a much better job this year at gathering overdue taxes. How much better? Almost 200 percent." And this, unfortunately, is where the Greek bailout comes to a screeching halt, because while it is no secret that Greek "bailouts" do nothing for the country, but merely enforce ever more stringent austerity to mask the fact that all the cash is simply going from one banker pocket to another, it is the pandemic corruption embedded in generations of behavior that is at the root of all Greek evil. And there is no eradicating that. Now tomorrow, and not by 2020.

One thing is for certain, the litigation is beginning to shift from minor players to major players at the core of the Financial Crisis. Investors take note, this is a major shift and needs to be monitored as it will have major implications for market dynamics going forward.

Today, people who believe that gold is money think that one should hoard gold. They seek to take possession personally. Or when they have it stored professionally, they look for a private vault outside the banking system where they can (hopefully) trust their warehouse receipt. And why shouldn’t they avoid the banking system? Its corruption was always inevitable. The advent of the central banks before World War I ensured it. The theft (in the US) of the gold of the people in 1933 cemented it, along with the dollar devaluation. The treaty at Bretton Woods in 1944, in which the world agreed to treat the US dollar as if it were gold nailed it in place. The default on the US government’s gold obligations in 1971 by President Nixon set it in stone. Today, we have a corrupt central bank that centrally plans money, credit, discount, and interest. The regime of irredeemable paper money is going to collapse. Anyone who understands it should want to get out of it, and not be a creditor to insolvent banks. This is a rational personal response to an irrational system. But it is not necessarily a vision for how the world ought to be run, or how a banking system should be designed. Today, it is necessary to hunker down, trust no one, hide one’s gold, and take no unavoidable or unnecessary risk. Today, one is concerned with one’s stocks of gold. One has what one has, one tries to get a little more while one can, and then one hopes that after “it” happens, one will have enough.