Banking

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The Collapse of the Western Fiat Monetary System may have Begun. China, Russia and the Reemergence of Gold-Backed Currencies | Global Research

By Peter Koenig

On 19 April 2016, China was rolling out its new gold-backed yuan. Russia’s ruble has been fully supported by gold for the last couple of years. Nobody in the western media talks about it. Why would they? – A western reader may start wondering why he is constantly stressed by a US dollar based fiat monetary systems that is manipulated at will by a small elite of financial oligarchs for their benefit and to the detriment of the common people. 

In a recent Russia Insider article, Sergey Glaziev, one of Russia’s top economists and advisor to President Putin said about Russia’s currency, “The ruble Is the most gold-backed currency in the world”. He went on explaining that the amount of rubles circulating is covered by about twice the amount of gold in Russia’s Treasury.
In addition to a financial alliance, Russia and China also have developed in the past couple of years their own money transfer system, the China International Payment System, or the CIPS network which replaces the western transfer system, SWIFT, for Russian-Chinese internal trading. SWIFT, stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a network operating in 215 countries and territories and used by over 10,000 financial institutions.

Up until recently almost every international monetary transaction had to use SWIFT, a private institution, based in Belgium. ‘Private’ like in the US Federal Reserve Bank (FED), Wall Street banks and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS); all are involved in international monetary transfers and heavily influenced by the Rothschild family. No wonder that the ‘independent’ SWIFT plays along with Washington’s sanctions, for example, cutting off Iran from the international transfer system. Similarly, Washington used its arm-twisting with SWIFT to help Paul Singer’s New York Vulture Fund to extort more than 4 billion dollars from Argentina, by withholding Argentina’s regular debt payments as was agreed with 93% of all creditors. Eventually Argentina found other ways of making its payments, not to fall into disrepute and insolvency.

All of this changed for Argentina, when Mauricio Macri, the new neoliberal President put in place by Washington, appeared on the scene last December. He reopened the negotiations and is ready to pay a sizable junk of this illegal debt, despite a UN decision that a country that reaches a settlement agreement with the majority of the creditors is not to be pressured by non-conforming creditors. In the case of Argentina, the vulture lord bought the country’s default debt for a pittance and now that the nation’s economy had recovered he wants to make a fortune on the back of the population. This is how our western fraudulent monetary system functions.

China’s economy has surpassed that of the United States and this new eastern alliance is considered an existential threat to the fake western economy. CIPS, already used for trading and monetary exchange within China and Russia, is also applied by the remaining BRICS, Brazil, India and South Africa; and by the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), plus India, Pakistan and Iran, as well as the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU – Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan). It is said that CIPS is ready to be launched worldwide as early as September 2016. It would be a formidable alternative to the western dollar based monetary Ponzi scheme.

The new eastern monetary sovereignty is one of the major reasons why Washington tries so hard to destroy the BRICS, mainly China and Russia – and lately with a special effort of false accusations also Brazil through a Latin America type Color Revolution.

In addition, the Yuan late last year was accepted by the IMF in its SDR basket as the fifth reserve currency, the other four being the US dollar, the British pound, the euro and the Japanese yen. The SDR, or Special Drawing Right, functions like a virtual currency. It is made up of the weighted average of the five currencies and can be lent to countries at their request, as a way of reducing exchange risks. Being part of the SDR, the yuan has become an official reserve currency. In fact, in Asia the yuan is already heavily used in many countries’ treasuries, as an alternative to the ever more volatile US dollar.

It is no secret, the western dollar-led fiat monetary system is on its last leg – as eventually any Ponzi scheme will be. What does ‘fiat’ mean? It is money created out of thin air. It has no backing whatsoever; not gold, not even the economic output generated by the country or countries issuing the money, i.e. the United States of America and Europe. It is simply declared “legal tender’’ by Government decree.

No pyramid scheme is sustainable in the long run and eventually will collapse. It was invented and is used by a small invisible upper crest of elite making insane amounts of profit on the back of the 99% of us. Since these elitists are in control of the media with their lie propaganda, as well as the warmongering killing machine, US armed forces, NATO, combined with the international security and spy apparatus, CIA, MI6, Mossad, DGSE, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and more, we are powerless – but powerless only as long as we ignore what’s really going on behind the curtain.

Our western monetary system is based on debt has all the hallmarks of a failing global monster octopus. The US banking system was deregulated in the 1990’s by President Clinton. The European vassals followed suit in the early 2000’s. About 97% of all the money in circulation in the western world is ‘made’ by private banks by a mouse click in the form of ‘loans’ or debt. Every loan a private bank hands out is a liability on that bank’s books; a liability that bears interest, the key generator of the banks’ profits. Profit from thin air! No work, no production, no real added value to the economy.

If and when the banks within this web of debt begin recalling their outstanding liabilities, they may set a non-stoppable avalanche in motion – leading to a chaotic end of the system. This end-run may have just begun. We have seen a gradual build-up since the end of WWII with the armament of the Cold War farce, and a high point with the manufactured sub-prime crisis of 2007 / 2008 / 2009, prompting an artificial and endless global economic crisis which may come crashing down in 2016 / 2017.

The damage may be humongous, leaving behind chaos, poverty, famine, misery – death. With the invisible ruling elite having cashed in, remaining on top and being liable to start again from scratch. – If we let them. It always boils down to the same: An uninformed people can be manipulated at will and is left in awe when hit by unexpected events, like acts of terror by bombs or banks.

Let us be crystal clear – we are all uninformed as long as we listen to and believe in the mainstream media – which are controlled by six Anglo-Zionist media giants, feeding the western public with 90% of the information, the so-called ‘news’ that we consume so eagerly every day; the barrage of lies that repeat themselves in every western country every hour on the hour – and, thus, become the truth. Period.

We must get out of our comfortable armchairs, listen to that innermost spark in the back of our minds, telling us against all avalanches of lies that there is something wrong, that we are being fed deception. We have to dig for the truth. And it is there – on internet, on alternative media, like Global Research, Information Clearing House, VNN, The Saker, NEO, Russia Today, Sputnik News, PressTV, TeleSUR – and many more credible sources of truth-seekers.

Back to the impending collapse. – The ground rules for our pyramid monetary scheme have been laid in 1913 by the creation of the FED. Again, the FED is an entirely private, Rothschild dominated banking institution that serves as the US Central Bank. It is the omnipotent dollar making machine. It was fraudulently and secretly conceived in 1910 on Jekyll Island, Georgia, and described by Jekyll Island history (http://www.jekyllislandhistory.com/federalreserve.shtml ) as the “duck hunt” which

“included Senator Nelson Aldrich, his personal secretary Arthur Shelton, former Harvard University professor of economics Dr. A. Piatt Andrew, J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Henry P. Davison, National City Bank president Frank A. Vanderlip and Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. partner Paul M. Warburg. From the start the group proceeded covertly. They began by shunning the use of their last names and met quietly at Aldrich’s private railway car in New Jersey.”

The concoction of these secretive “duck hunters” became in 1913 the privately owned Rothschild dominated Federal Reserve System, the US central bank by deceit.

After signing the FED act into existence, President Woodrow Wilson declared,

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

The Anglo-Saxon system had a central bank in England since way back in 1694. It was then already controlled by the Rothschilds, as was the entire banking system. Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild once declared:

“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”

The Rothschild family’s fortune cannot be properly estimated, but it must be in the trillions. What Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild may have said some 300 years ago, still holds true to this day.

No wonder, breaking loose of this sham monetary scheme is number one priority of most countries that treasure sovereignty, autonomy and freedom, though they do not dare say so openly, lest the empire lashes out at them punishing them with the very financial terror they want to escape from. And lashing out at the unaligned world the empire does, like a dying beast, attempting to pull with it much of the living world into its own shoveled grave.

Is it therefore coincidence or a rather a purposefully planned convergence of several events as a last ditch effort first to ravage then to salvage as much as possible before the collapse?

On 10 April, Zero Hedge reports “Austria Just Announced A 54% Haircut of Senior Creditors in First “Bail In” Under New European Rules”. The Austrian “bad bank”, the failed Hypo Alpe Adria, that became Heta Asset Resolution AG after the government’s nationalization, found a US$ 8.5 billion hole in its balance sheet, enough to trigger the new European ‘bail-in’ rule. Is it coincidence that also in Austria a major bank failure triggered the Great Depression also on a 10th of April – in 1931? – This is a first in Europe. Be prepared for others to follow, as over-extension of European banks is estimated in excess of a trillion dollars.

On 15 April, the New York Times reported that – Five of Wall Street’s eight largest banks are in defiance of the US banking regulator. The FED and FDIC said that “JP Morgan, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York, all lacked ‘credible‘ plans to enter bankruptcy in the event of a financial crisis.” These banks have until October 2016 to comply. Under the new rules a tax-payer bail-out would be unlikely. Hence ‘bail-ins’ could affect millions of depositors and shareholders, their funds being stolen in order to self-rescue the too-big-to-fail banks. After all, non-compliance with the regulator’s requests, or insolvency, can easily be manufactured as a legal base for stealing common people’s savings. No worries, the TBTF banks will not go away, but your savings may.

The CIA released Panama Papers (for who still doubts about the CIA involvement in the release of the Panama Papers,

read here http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/09/the-panama-papers-the-people-deceived/),

aimed in a most rudimentary way at defaming the ‘usual suspects’, Presidents Putin and Assad, as well as Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, of course – and others. Strangely no notable EU or US citizens or corporations were on the list. Would anybody seriously believe that Mr. Putin, a former KGB agent, would be so ignorant as to putting his fortune (even if he had any to hide) into Panama, the epitome of a US puppet state, where you can’t flush a toilet without Washington knowing it?

Some token neocons appear in the published papers, like Argentina’s new ‘Washington appointed’ President Mauricio Macri, who is running amok ruining his country. Within less than four months he has rolled Argentina’s economy back by ten years, raising poverty from below 10% in November 2015 to 34% by the end March 2016. The Empire needs him to keep gradually turning Argentina into chaos, however not too quickly, lest he may be ‘deposed’ and replaced by a US adversary – that would not at all be appreciated in Washington. For the types of Macri that made it on the list, the Panama Papers are a warning signal to keep them in-check.

The publication of the Panama Papers may also be an incentive for US citizens and corporations to bring home trillions of undeclared dollar holdings stacked away in overseas tax havens into homeland financial shelters like those in Delaware, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nevada, thereby helping strengthen the gradually decaying dollar.

Simultaneously, some European countries and Japan introduced negative interest rates, so as to increase monetary liquidity, thereby hoping stimulating an ever stagnant economy. That’s the pretext. In reality however, negative interests are but a precursor to a wholly bank controlled financial system. Normally ‘bail-ins’ and negative interest would cause a run on the banks. This has not happened yet.

In Switzerland, one of the first countries to introduce negative interests, the Swiss National Bank reported that the demand of the 1,000 franc notes – one of the world’s highest value denominations (apparently to be maintained despite ECB Draghi’s call for elimination of high denomination bank notes) – increased by 17% (by CHF 4.7 billion – US$ 4.85 billion) in December 2014, the month following the introduction of negative interests. May it be an indication that the Swiss have quietly started hoarding big-denomination cash?

Future hoarding and runs on the banks will be countered by the introduction of a cashless society, i.e. all monetary transactions will gradually become electronic. The process has already begun. In Sweden and other parts of Europe, as well as Japan, cashless supermarkets and department stores claim big success, especially with the young consumers, who happily play along paying electronic cashiers by swiping their cell phones in front of an electronic eye.

The Young and Innocent – if they only knew that the banking oligarchs want to control their money and enslave them with a ‘fun gadget’, they may decide to resist.  But well know those who control the system that the young are the drivers of the future. We, the old resistance will eventually die out. Problem solved. – But we are not dead yet. The Times are A-Changing… (Bob Dylan, 1964).

The nefarious trio – ‘bail-ins’, negative interests, and a cash free society – will make living in the industrialized ‘first world’ a sheer nuisance, a stressful dance on toes, as the emperor’s proverbial Damocles Sword hangs intimidatingly above us.

Washington may have one last joker up its sleeve – reintroducing the ‘gold standard’, the very gold standard that Nixon abandoned in 1971. The US have also been accumulating huge amounts of gold over the past 25 years. A new US dollar gold standard would most likely be set at a ratio that would wipe out all US debt, including future ‘unmet obligations’ (GAO – General Accounting Office) of about US$ 125 trillion. It would attempt to keep the western industrialized world in Washington’s orbit, but might lose most of the developing world owning natural resources coveted by the west. These countries oppressed and colonized for centuries are likely to gravitate to the new China-Russia alliance – leaving the outsourced and outwitted west alone without workforce – and with a massive but outdated military power.

To counter the build-up of this criminal last ditch sham by the western Zionist banking czars, China and Russia have been preparing over the last few years an independent financial system, delinked from the US dollar and which now incorporates the BRICS, the SCO nations, as well as the Eurasian Economic Union. This association of countries and economies account for about half the world’s population and at least one third of the globe’s economic output; a fact totally ignored by the mainstream media, for obvious reasons. The Machiavellian sinking ship does not want its passengers to jump to safety.

The 19 April 2016, announcement by China of its gold-backed yuan, no longer convertible into dollars, may just trigger an economic shift into the ‘eastern camp’. Many countries are wary and tired of western exploitation, enslavement, threats of sanctions, oppression and an ever present danger of invasion by the killing machine. The decoupling of the dollar by a third of the world economy may indeed open new horizons, creating new alliances, new hope for a more equal and just world.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, CounterPunch, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

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The California County That’s Leading the Way in Cutting the Banks Out of Its Economy | Alternet

By Robert Reich

MoneyWhat exactly does it mean for a big Wall Street bank to plead guilty to a serious crime? Right now, practically nothing.

But it will if California’s Santa Cruz County has any say.

First, some background.

Five giant banks – including Wall Street behemoths JPMorgan Chase and Citicorp – recently pleaded guilty to criminal felony charges that they rigged the world’s foreign-currency market for their own profit.

This wasn’t a small heist. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions every day.

The banks altered currency prices long enough for the banks to make winning bets before the prices snapped back to what they should have been.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch called it a “brazen display of collusion” that harmed “countless consumers, investors and institutions around the globe — from pension funds to major corporations, and including the banks’ own customers.”

The penalty? The banks have agreed to pay $5.5 billion. That may sound like a big chunk of change, but for a giant bank it’s the cost of doing business. In fact, the banks are likely to deduct the fines from their taxes as business costs.

The banks sound contrite. After all, they can’t have the public believe they’re outright crooks.

It’s “an embarrassment to our firm, and stands in stark contrast to Citi’s values,“ says Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat.

Values? Citigroup’s main value is to make as much money as possible. Corbat himself raked in $13 million last year.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon calls it “a great disappointment to us,” and says “we demand and expect better of our people.”

Expect better? If recent history is any guide – think of the bank’s notorious “London Whale” a few years ago, and, before that, the wild bets leading to the 2008 bailout – JPMorgan expects exactly this kind of behavior from its people.

Which helped Dimon rake in $20 million last year, as well as a $7.4 million cash bonus.

When real people plead guilty to felonies, they go to jail. But big banks aren’t people despite what the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court say.

The executives who run these banks aren’t going to jail, either. Apologists say it’s not fair to jail bank executives because they don’t know what their rogue traders are up to.

Yet ex-convicts often suffer consequences beyond jail terms.

In many states they lose their right to vote. They can’t run for office or otherwise participate in the political process.

So why not take away the right of these convicted banks to participate in the political process, at least for some years? That would stop JPMorgan’s Dimon from lobbying Congress to roll back the Dodd-Frank act, as he’s been doing almost non-stop.

Why not also take away their right to pour money into politics? Wall Street banks have been among the biggest contributors to political campaigns. If they’re convicted of a felony, they should be barred from making any political contributions for at least ten years.

Real ex-convicts also have difficulty finding jobs. That’s because, rightly or wrongly, many people don’t want to hire them.

A strong case can be made that employers shouldn’t pay attention to criminal convictions of real people who need a fresh start, especially a job.

But giant banks that have committed felonies are something different. Why shouldn’t depositors and investors consider their past convictions?

Which brings us to Santa Cruz County.

The county’s board of supervisors just voted not to do business for five years with any of the five banks felons.

The county won’t use the banks’ investment services or buy their commercial paper, and will pull its money out of the banks to the extent it can.

“We have a sacred obligation to protect the public’s tax dollars and these banks can’t be trusted. Santa Cruz County should not be involved with those who rigged the world’s biggest financial markets,” says supervisor Ryan Coonerty.

The banks will hardly notice. Santa Cruz County’s portfolio is valued at about $650 million.

But what if every county, city, and state in America followed Santa Cruz County’s example, and held the big banks accountable for their felonies?

What if all of us taxpayers said, in effect, we’re not going to hire these convicted felons to handle our public finances? We don’t trust them.

That would hit these banks directly. They’d lose our business. Which might even cause them to clean up their acts.

There’s hope. Supervisor Coonerty says he’ll be contacting other local jurisdictions across the country, urging them to do what Santa Cruz County is doing.

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama’s transition advisory board. His latest book is “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future.” His homepage is www.robertreich.org.

Source: Alternet

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US government faces pressure after biggest leak in banking history | The Guardian

HSBC bank branchThe US government will come under intense pressure this week to explain what action it took after receiving a massive cache of leaked data that revealed how the Swiss banking arm of HSBC, the world’s second-largest bank, helped wealthy customers conceal billions of dollars of assets.

The leaked files, which reveal how HSBC advised some clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, were obtained through an international collaboration of news outlets, including the Guardian, the French daily Le Monde, CBS 60 Minutes and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The files reveal how HSBC’s Swiss private bank colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from domestic tax authorities across the world and provided services to international criminals and other high-risk individuals.

The disclosure amounts to one of the biggest banking leaks in history shedding light on some 30,000 accounts holding almost $120bn (£78bn) of assets. Of those, around 2,900 clients were connected to the US, providing the IRS with a trail of evidence of potential American taxpayers who may have been hiding assets in Geneva.

The data was leaked by a computer expert turned whistleblower working in HSBC’s Geneva office. French authorities later obtained the files and shared them with the US Internal Revenue Service in 2010. That year, amid growing scrutiny from US tax authorities, HSBC’s private bank in Switzerland stopped doing business with US residents entirely.

The US Department of Justice and IRS have been investigating HSBC’s Swiss banking operations ever since but the scale of those inquiries remain unclear.

Confronted by the Guardian’s evidence, HSBC admitted wrongdoing by its Geneva-based subsidiary. “We acknowledge and are accountable for past compliance and control failures,” the bank said in a statement. The Swiss arm, the statement said, had not been fully integrated into HSBC after its purchase in 1999, allowing “significantly lower” standards of compliance and due diligence to persist. Read more…

Source: The Guardian

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Nothing Is Ever As It Seems And No Respite For Precious Metals | Gold Eagle

By Michael Noonan

5StackedCoinsAn eminent collapse of the US fiat petrodollar? China and Russia, with their enormous build-up of physical gold over the last several years, waiting in the wings to lead a new gold-backed currency?  The growing BRICS alliance to unseat the elite’s Western NWO and its banking system?

A growing likelihood on the first question, and no and no to the latter two questions. In fact, the elites are probably doing more to destroy the fiat Federal Reserve “dollar” than any other group or alliance. There has been talk about the US destroying the dollar for at least the past four years. Kyle Bass even made the pronouncement whereby a senior Obama administration official told him, “We’re just going to kill the dollar.” That is exactly what is happening and coming from “inside information.”

What most people refuse to understand, if not even acknowledge, is the extent to which the elites have an utter stranglehold on the world’s financial system, and by world we do not mean just the Western world.  China and Russia are included. There is no single country that can exist without the machinations of the elite’s banking system. They have been running the world for a few hundred years and are masters at it.

Russia has enough gold to back its ruble in some way. Understand that the current price for gold does not represent a fair standard of value.  It is vastly undervalued, and one day, the reality of what should be a fair value for gold and silver will occur. They are both money and measures of value. Most people have reversed their thinking and measure the value of PMs by valueless fiat. This is a huge mistake and reflects how well the elites have successfully exercised mind control over the masses to maintain this false belief.

The agenda for a New World Order is at least 100 years old, when bankers and corporate presidents were all aiming to control every aspect of industry via financial manipulation, straight from the well-established Rothschild “game book,” as it were. This unabated zeal for world control is not something that has been in the works for just the past several decades. Knowledge of this does not come from an announcement in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal; rather, one has to diligently read through a myriad of source material and then see how the dots are connected.

In a nutshell, if the elites have their way, and to date they remain unopposed, the fiat Federal Reserve Note, aka the debt “dollar,” will be replaced with some form of a new international currency, or perhaps SDRs [Special Drawing Rights], an international basket of currencies. All money may exist as computer credits that can be readily tracked.  If anyone dare oppose the bankers, poof, your credits just disappeared, and you have nothing. Bankers rely on debt largesse and fear.

There will be no sovereign nations.  All countries will be held accountable to the new Wizard Of OZ bankers behind the curtain, much like the experiment called the European Union. The EU may fall apart, but the lessons learned will not be lost, and in fact they will be honed to format what is to come. The handful of banking elite that rule the Western economies will become “elite-er.”

What of China and Russia?  Both have advocated respect for the IMF with expressed desires to be participants in the system. The system will change, to be sure: no more Federal Reserve fiat “dollar” as the world’s reserve currency. Not a few hold out the errant belief that the BRICS nations, primarily China and Russia, will replace the elite’s banking system. Absolutely not! The elites are redesigning the next phase of their control over the financial world to include the BRICS, all eager to join the “club” for the first time and be major participants on the financial world stage.

The question is, will Russia make it before the Obama administration, under direct control of the elites, destroys the Russian economy? Perhaps a better question to ask is, CAN the elites take down Russia?    Just as the United States, as a physical country was replete with so many natural resources, which have all had their existence sucked out of them, Russia has the most natural resources of the entire world, and the bankers want control over them. There is one big obstacle: Vladimir Putin.

If Putin had his way, he would kick the Russian Central Bank out of Russia. It was created, designed and controlled by the Rothschilds, so Putin has little control over it. The Russian central banking elite have been getting wealthy from their arrangement, and they are not about to give up their Golden Goose.

If you want to understand why Obama has chosen to overthrow the sovereign Ukrainian government and replaced it with a puppet leader that has been conducting genocide against Russian loyalists in Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas area, it is a not-so-indirect [non]declaration of war. This has been followed up by another form of war via all the economic sanctions Obama has been strong-arming the EU to enforce against Russia to their own detriment. The US does not care, as long as it gets its way.

Western bankers will not allow Putin to remove the Russian central bank, as he is trying to do. The elites have a 3-pronged attack against Putin: 1. military threat, [Russia is more than up to the task], 2. economic sanctions, [mostly backfiring and costing the EU more], and 3. Russian banker oligarchs who will do anything to oppose Putin in order to preserve their banker-criminal enterprise.  With US history as a guide, presidential opposition, Lincoln, Garfield, Kennedy, and Reagan prove that assassinations have their effect and may not be out of the question.

It is interesting to see the West [really just Wall Street banks] attack the ruble causing it to lose about 60% of its value relative to the fiat “dollar.”***  Will it succeed, or is Putin allowing the attack to push down the value of the ruble, and at the bottom rush in to buy as much as he can, using the sale of over-valued Treasury holdings owned by Russia? In the process, flooding the market with US bonds will put pressure on the fiat “dollar,” and viola, a reverse financial coup by Putin.

***Russia has less than $700 million in debt, the US has over $18 trillion; Russian debt is about 15% of GDP, the US runs at over 100% of GDP; Russia runs a budget surplus, the US runs a burgeoning deficit; Russia has gold to back it currency, the US now only has the military to back its fiat and increasingly widely shunned “dollar;” Russia has the largest natural resources in the world, the US has depleted or ruined most of its natural resources. With which of these two countries does the rest of the world want to conduct business?

China is not in a position to have its renminbi become a world reserve currency, and that country has been announcing its support in becoming a stronger member in the IMF via participating in SDRs with its national currency.  For China, it becomes a major world player and participates in a remake of the financial COMPOSITION [not replacement] of the existing world banking system.

For the elites, it is a match made in heaven.  The US, as a spent nation, gets dumped and China becomes  a willing replacement in the pecking order. To what degree Russia is a participant remains to be seen.  While China and Russia have become stronger trading partners, China is not above seeing Russia weakened to China’s advantage. All is never as it seems.

2014 is ending unexpectedly for PMs, considerably weaker than what most thought would be sharply higher prices. Based on what the charts are conveying, at least the initial part of 2015 will not fare much better.  Supply and demand are not the driving factors. World financial dominance is. A number of PM “experts” are not focusing on this aspect.

If it has not yet become clear, seeing how the banking elites are attacking Russia, militarily and economically, willing to destroy that country, and seeing how the US is being used in its own self-destruction, willing to impose its military might and debt sabotaging of other nations, then those who cannot understand the process will never understand how gold and silver have become useful pawns in the service of the elite bankers and now how China is positioning itself to become the next United States as a world superpower. The role of Russia remains a question.  The role of gold and silver is also a burning question.

As to  substantially higher gold and silver prices in the “great reset” scheme, it makes no sense for the still-in-control elites to allow PMs to be dramatically revalued too high. Neither gold nor silver will ever be allowed to compete with their fiat monetary system. We have no clue how gold and silver will ultimately be re-priced, nor do we think does anyone else, despite all the numbers being bandied about.

What we know for sure is that the trend of any market is the most powerful and most influential force, and this week’s analysis of the PMs market is a simple fact-based one. It takes time and effort to change a trend. To whatever degree these market are being manipulated, even the manipulators eventually “show their hand” through price and volume activity. We see no change for prices remaining low, if not even making newer recent lows in the months ahead.

It does not alter the view and necessity for the ongoing accumulation of the physical metals, for having them will be essential when the big “reset” finally hits. Time remains on the side of the buyers, but low prices may give way to higher premiums in order to keep the game alive.

Last week, we wanted to see gold rally strongly on increased volume, taking out 1250 with ease. That did not happen and until it does, gold remains on the defensive and subject to staying at current levels. The longer gold stays at these levels, the greater the probability for another low. Chart comments provide the factual explanation. Read more…

Source: Gold Eagle

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Senator Professor Warren is Tired of Reasoning with You People | Esquire

By Charles P. Pierce

ElizabethWarrenIt may have escaped your attention, what with this week’s revelations that America’s foreign policy took a right turn at Torquemada and didn’t stop until it got to Vlad The Impaler — And it should be said, for the purposes of apt historical parallels, that Vlad used to impale his victims in the same manner in which the CIA apparently fed recalcitrant prisoners — but the Congress is preparing to give away the store. A “bipartisan” deal has been crafted to fund the government through next September. Please forgive any typos in this post, as it is difficult for me to type, having Krazy Glue’d my wallet to my hands.

“This bill fulfills our constitutional duty to fund the government, preventing damage from shutdown politics that are bad for the economy, cost jobs and hurt middle class families,” said Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat, and Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican, in a joint statement. “While not everyone got everything they wanted, such compromises must be made in a divided government. These are the tough choices that we must make to govern responsibly and do what the American people sent us here to do.”

Hang on. I’ll be back in a minute. I am now attaching the wallet to my palms with tenpenny nails.

This deal does a lot of things, many of them horrible. It is a veritable compost heap of Republican goodies. The IRS gets defunded, so that phony “social-welfare” political front groups no longer will be inconvenienced in their paperwork. The EPA takes a huge whack, so that conservative bundlers and the oligarchs whom they bundle no longer will be inconvenienced by people who wish to breathe, and who believe their water should be neither yellow nor flammable. But the real Saturday end of it is a provision that guts a key provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill that was passed so that it would be a little harder in the future for people to wreck most of the economy and then steal what’s left. Specifically, Congress is preparing to open the casino again.

At issue is the “swaps push-out” rule, which requires banks to move derivatives trading out of taxpayer-backed subsidiaries. Derivatives are risky financial instruments that contributed to the 2008 crash. Allowing banks to conduct those trades on the assumption that taxpayers would bail them out if the deals went sour was not only bad for taxpayers; it also raised the value of the trades and thus effectively acted as a subsidy for the banks. Financial institutions, obviously, weren’t thrilled with the new rule. In 2013, lobbyists for Citigroup gave lawmakers a proposal to exempt a wide array of derivatives, and it subsequently appeared in a bill approved by a House committee that year.

Derivatives are what nearly sank the whole thing the last time around. And now, the Congress has decided, in the same kind of “bipartisan” way that brought us the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Futures Trading Act during the Clinton Administration, to let these guys gamble with taxpayer money again. This is such a spectacularly bad idea that it’s hard to believe that its supporters didn’t sneak it into the bill the way they did just as a goof, to see what they could get away with, those scamps.

“Hey, Bob. Let’s see if we can get them to pass the Free Smack Subsidy next! Somebody call Luntz and have him think up a name for it. The Opiate Liberation And Personal Freedom Liberty Act Of 2014, or something.”

The arrangement is the result of a “bipartisan compromise” engineered by Mikulski by which Wall Street gets to oil up the roulette wheel again in exchange for increased funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to oversee things like derivatives training, and which the incoming, and more radical, Republican congressional majority surely will chloroform entirely the first chance it gets. Meanwhile, things are being arranged to put us all on the hook again for Wall Street’s gambling jones. And Senator Professor Warren, who can see a church by daylight, is having none of it.  She rose yesterday to excoriate the covert sellout and, by extension, the people in both parties who connived to bring it about. You want bipartisanship? This is bipartisanship.

“I come to the floor today to ask a fundamental question — who does Congress work for? Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers? Or does it work for all of us?”

I’m not entirely sure that she has the votes to stop this abomination. People want to go home for Christmas. Everybody’s drunk deeply of the egg nog in the rancid punchbowl of  “compromise” for its own sake.  Right now, she’s counting on the House to strip it from the bill, but a large portion of the House majority is crazy, and a large portion of the House minority is hiding behind the drapes, so I’m not optimistic. (Nancy Pelosi has gotten ferocious on the issue, though, so we’ll see.) It will be interesting to see if she exercises her right to talk the provision to death against what will be a well-organized counterattack by the Very Serious People who will sing in one voice the praises of “bipartisan” governance against this noisy obstructionist. Nothing in her career so far is as serious a gut check as this one is. The inserted provision strikes at the very heart of everything that made her a senator in the first place. It will be interesting to see how many people have her back.

And this is coming at the same time as her campaign against Antonio Weiss, the Lazard executive who’s the president’s nominee to be Undersecretary of The Treasury for Domestic Finance, something that has given severe agita to the financial press, especially Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, who’s carried so much water for some of these guys that you could fly him over a forest fire to help put it out. Part of Warren’s problem with Weiss is a going-away goodie he got from Lazard that surprised even my cynical mind. Lazard will pay Weiss a $21 million bonus just for taking the Treasury job, in which he’ll be intimately involved with the industry Weiss is now leaving, however temporarily. How does this not seem to be a form of pre-emptive bribery? Used to be you needed a quo for every quid. And both of these fights together are the best arguments I can think of for why MoveOn and Democracy For America, both of which are trying to dragoon Warren into a quixotic presidential run, should shut the fk up.

Even the shadow of the possibility of a presidential campaign makes it easier to characterize Warren’s positions here as political grandstanding. Oh, look. Here’s Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post to do that very thing.

Speeches like the one Warren gave Wednesday will just fuel chatter about why she should challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton in two years. And she knows it.

Yeah, it’s not that she’s ever been concerned about how the country’s fiscal policy is under the control of the forces that nearly demolished it, or that she understands what the reopening of the casino will mean. It’s all about the “chatter.” Stop it, all of you. She’s right where she belongs. You don’t put a lion in a horse race.

Source: Esquire

 

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Beyond Bernard von NotHaus & The American Liberty Currency Trial, Conviction & Sentencing | The New York Sun

ItShinesforAllCongratulations are in order to United States District Judge Richard Voorhees of North Carolina for the judiciousness of his decision in the case of Bernard von NotHaus. We weren’t personally present at the courthouse at Statesville, where von NotHaus had been ordered to appear Tuesday for sentencing on his conviction of uttering — introducing into circulation — his Liberty Dollars. But we were on tenterhooks, because von NotHaus, 70, was looking at the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.

The reason we’ve been watching the case is that von NotHaus’ demarche is one of the few direct challenges to what the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education likes to call “legal tender irredeemable electronic paper ticket money.” That refers to the scrip being issued by the Federal Reserve. Von NotHaus had designed and circulated a medallion made of pure silver, the same specie that was fixed on by the Founders of America as the basis of the constitutional dollar.

A jury found, among other things, that von NotHaus’ Liberty Dollar violated federal law against private coinage and was similar enough to American legal-tender coin that it constituted counterfeiting. “Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” the prosecutor, Anne Tompkins, said after von NotHaus was convicted. She suggested that such schemes “represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country.”

In the three and a half years since the jury reached its decision, Judge Voorhees allowed constitutional and procedural objections to be heard but in the end supported the jury. The government on Tuesday asked for a prison sentence of at least 14 years and as much as 17 ½ years. The government was also seeking forfeiture of some 16,000 pounds of Liberty Dollar coins and specie, which in 2011 it had valued at nearly $7 million.

Then spake the judge, sentencing von NotHaus to but six months of home detention, to run concurrently with three years of probation. He departed from non-binding guidelines because, he suggested, von NotHaus had been motivated not by criminal intent but by an intention to make a philosophical point. That is what these columns have been reporting for more than four years, and, while the Sun’s coverage played no part in the case, we are glad to discover that the judge is of a similar, if not identical, mind.

Von NotHaus is no doubt relieved that he doesn’t have to go to jail, but he has put out no statement. Our guess is that it is sinking in on him that he has been marked now as a felon, and his own dream of a parallel form of money, composed of constitutional specie, is gone. There may yet be surprises, but the sagacity of Judge Voorhees’s handling of this case lies in, among other elements, the fact that he has left no great incentive for either side to make an appeal. Read more…

Source: The New York Sun

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Tracking Global Changes | Thrive Together


ThriveTogether

By Kimberly & Foster Gamble

When I was in high school in the 1960s, I had this fabulous high school teacher who asked the students what period in history we wanted to study. We chose the Vietnam War because that was what was happening in our midst at that time. As a class, we invited in speakers from every possible perspective and we got magazines from every possible perspective. We looked at fascist, communist, socialist, left wing, right wing, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, Council on Foreign Relations/Foreign Affairs. We really would have a huge array of perspectives and then, as a class, we would discuss them. This experience opened up a world of learning to me and it especially opened up the world of tracking current events as they were unfolding, realizing that history is being made right now.

A big part of the motivation for ThriveTogether was to share that experience with our network, to help share the skills and the experience of tracking what’s going on right now in the world, whether it has to do with following the money or breakthrough technologies, or new solutions strategies, all kinds of alternative eco-communities around the world, education…any number of things. Everything is changing right now in really radical ways and we are tracking that and sharing what we’re learning with our network and learning from you.

That’s what’s happening and in our first ever live event this weekend we talked a little more about following the money and about some possible scenarios that we can imagine from our perspective. We don’t know what’s going to be happening, but we know that major global changes are going down right now, so I wanted to share some of them with you, our broader network, and to say if you can join the conversation through ThriveTogether, great! If you can’t, I highly encourage you to be tracking these things on your own because it’s really an amazing time in history and the ramifications are profound.

What’s going on right now? In 1944, after World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement established the IMF and the World Bank and it was soon after that that the U.S. dollar was established as the sole currency for international trade. Now, for the first time since then, countries all around the world, growing numbers (every few days new countries are joining in on this) are trading not using the dollar. It includes Canada, New Zealand, Paksitan, Russia, China, Australia, India. Every day someone new is joining in on that. It’s very significant.

I think between Russia and China, nearly a trillion dollars worth of deals have been done just since this summer. It’s now November, 2014. China opened a $4.2 trillion stock market to the world also in this month. That’s going to have major ramifications on the U.S stock market. In Toronto, Canada, it was just announced there’s going to be the first off-shore hub for Chinese currency, the renminbi, of which the yuan is the basic unit. Also, there was a G-20 meeting this November 15th and 16th. I’m actually going to read the communiqué that was official that came out of there, just to get a feel that big things are happening right now and I do encourage you to be tracking it because it’s very significant.

“The implementation of the 2010 reforms remains our highest priority for the IMF and we urge the United States to ratify them. If this has not happened by year-end, we ask the IMF to build on its existing work and stand ready with options for next steps.”

So what does this mean? The 2010 reforms basically have to do with countries becoming Basel III compliant. Basel III compliance means that banks agree to have a higher percentage of reserves in the bank. The intention is supposedly to keep a crash like what happened in 2008 from having dire global consequences. It creates a little bit of a buffer between countries. That’s the idea and the United States has not agreed to be compliant with that. Now, the G-20 is organizing to say that we’re going to do something if the U.S. doesn’t agree.

The point is that the role of the United States in global affairs is changing. The role of the dollar is changing. I’m going to offer here five possible scenarios that could be unfolding with the information that we have. Like I said, we don’t know, but I really do encourage you to be tracking it. I am fortunate enough to have grandchildren, but whether you do or not, I think of it that one of these days some young person is going to come up and say, “What were you doing during these times?” So much is going on now in what could be considered the greatest fascist takeover of all times and I encourage you to do what you can so you can answer that question by saying, “I was awake and I was doing everything that I could do to help create a thriving world for you.”

So, tune in and take care to participate in these amazing, unprecedented times and here are some possible scenarios. Thanks. Read more…

Source: THRIVE TOGETHER

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How a Century of Racist Policies Made Ferguson Into a Pocket of Concentrated Despair | Bill Moyers

By Joshua Holland

FergusonPovertyFerguson, Missouri, was a powder-keg waiting for a match long before August 9 and Michael Brown’s fateful encounter with Police Officer Darren Wilson. It is one of many predominantly black communities across the United States plagued by highly concentrated poverty, and all of the social problems that accompany it.

White America has come up with a number of rationales for these enduring pockets of despair. An elaborate mythology has developed that blames it on a “culture of poverty” — holding the poor culpable for their poverty and letting our political and economic systems off the hook. A somewhat more enlightened view holds that whites simply fled areas like Ferguson — which had a population that was 99 percent white as recently as 1970 — because of personal racial animus, leaving them as hollowed-out, predominantly black “ghettos.”

But a study by Richard Rothstein, a research fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, comes to a very different conclusion. In his report, “The Making of Ferguson,” Rothstein details how throughout the last century a series of intentionally discriminatory policies at the local, state and federal levels created the ghettos we see today. BillMoyers.com spoke with Rothstein about the report. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Joshua Holland: Most people believe that Ferguson became so racially polarized because of “white flight” — white people fled the area because of personal prejudice against African-Americans. In your report, you argue that this misses a crucial point. What are we overlooking?

Rothstein: The segregation that characterizes Ferguson, and that characterizes St. Louis, was the creation of purposeful public policy. We have a segregated nation by design.

The St. Louis metropolitan area was no different from most metropolitan areas of the country. The ghetto in the central city of St. Louis was redeveloped for universities, and for a number of other uses, and the African American population in the central city was shifted to inner ring suburbs like Ferguson.

It was done primarily with two policies: First, public housing was segregated, purposely, by the federal government, so that what were previously somewhat integrated neighborhoods in urban areas were separated into separate black and white public housing projects.

And then, in the 1950s, as suburbs came to be developed, the federal government subsidized white residents of St. Louis to move to the suburbs, but effectively prohibited black residents from doing so. The federal government subsidized the construction of many, many subdivisions by requiring that bank loans for the builders be made on the condition that no homes be sold to blacks.

Because black housing was so restrictive, there were so few places where African-Americans could live in St. Louis. So what was left of St. Louis’ African-American community became overcrowded. City services were not readily available. The city was zoned so that the industrial or commercial areas were placed in black neighborhoods but not in white neighborhoods. So the industrial areas, where African-Americans lived, became slums.

And then white residents in places like Ferguson came to associate slum conditions with African-Americans, not realizing that this was not a characteristic of the people themselves, but rather it was a creation of public policy.

This is a somewhat oversimplified description of a complex array of policies. But every policy that I described in this report can be found in every other metropolitan area throughout the country. These policies applied in the New York City area, and they applied in the liberal San Francisco area. It’s a story that characterizes the entire country, but you cannot understand what’s going on with Ferguson today without knowing this history.

Holland: Who was Adel Allen, and why is his story — which took place in nearby Kirkwood, Missouri — important for understanding how Ferguson came to be the city it is today?

Rothstein: Adel Allen was an African American engineer for the McDonnell Douglas Corporation. He was recruited from Kansas to work in the St. Louis metro area. When he got there, he couldn’t find housing anywhere in the suburban areas near the plant. He was about to move back to Kansas, because the only place he could find housing was in overcrowded conditions in the central St. Louis ghetto.

He finally got a white friend to buy a home for him in the town of Kirkwood. He moved into a block that was overwhelmingly white. There were 30 white families. Seven years later, there were 30 black families and two white families on that block. And this was largely because of practices in the real estate industry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Black vs. White Neighborhoods

Realtors engaged in a practice which came to be known as “blockbusting.” When a black family moved onto a block, like Adel Allen did in Kirkwood, the real estate agents would go door to door and try to panic their white neighbors into selling their homes at very reduced prices, with the idea that property values were going to be destroyed because African-Americans were moving into their neighborhood.

Those real estate agents then bought those properties at very low prices and resold them to African-Americans, who had to pay very high prices because they had no other housing options.

Now, this was something that was not considered unethical until the 1970s. In fact, licenses would be suspended by the state real estate commission if a real estate agent sold a home to a black family in a white neighborhood — until the first one sold, and then it was considered perfectly ethical for real estate agents to turn an entire block into an African-American block.

Once they moved into that block, all of a sudden, over the course of a few years, city services began to decline. Other parts of Kirkwood which were overwhelmingly white continued to get good services, but the African-American neighborhoods were denied. The rest of the city got sidewalks and curbs; the black blocks did not.

Holland: You also write, “State sponsored labor and employment discrimination reduced the incomes of African-Americans relative to whites in St. Louis.” So as a result, even absent these kinds of housing policies you describe, African-Americans would be hard-pressed to afford to live in a decent white suburb.

Rothstein: That’s right. In St. Louis, African-Americans were excluded from good-paying jobs for most of the 20th century. They opened up only beginning in the 1970s. For example, construction jobs during the enormous housing boom that created the suburbs in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s were completely closed to African-Americans because they could not be admitted to construction unions, and the federal government certified every one of those segregated unions as the exclusive agent for their trades in those construction sites. So it’s not simply the result of private discrimination by the unions. This was something that was sanctioned by the federal government. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the National Labor Relations Board first withdrew certification from a segregated union and the policy didn’t become widespread for at least another 10 years or so.

There are many other examples I could give you. During the enormous employment boom during World War II, St. Louis was a big center of arms manufacturing. Lots of workers flooded to St. Louis from the Ozarks and other areas, black workers as well as white workers. But the largest ammunition producer would not hire African-Americans until the war was almost over.

So all of those lost opportunities for employment created a situation where African-American incomes were much, much lower than white incomes.

Holland: I’m going to ask you to connect some dots. Many of the things you describe in the paper haven’t been legal for quite a bit of time. How does this legacy of institutional racism in the past set up the unrest that has played out in Ferguson after the shooting death of Michael Brown?

Rothstein: As we know from a lot of recent research, intergenerational income mobility in this country is quite low. If you’re born into a low-income family, the chances are very, very great that you yourself will have a low income. We don’t have nearly the kind of mobility that is mythical in this country.

So after a century of policies which denied African-Americans access to jobs that pay decent wages, the likelihood is that their children and their children’s children will still be paying the price for those policies that held their parents and grandparents behind for so long.

And then there are the housing policies. Let me take the example of the suburb of Kirkwood. In the 1950s, when Kirkwood was being developed, those homes were selling for about $8,000 dollars each, which was about two times the national median income at that time. Working families could afford to buy a home for twice median income, but only whites were permitted to buy into Kirkwood. Any white working family could’ve afforded to buy those homes, and very often, they were further subsidized by the federal government — veterans could buy with no down payment, and obtain loans at very low interest rates.

Those families then benefited from a half-century of equity appreciation in their homes. If they moved, they profited on the sale. And they were able to transmit that equity to their children. Their children were secure. Their children were able to go to college.

Today, those same homes that sold for $8,000 in the 1950s sell for $400,000, which is about six or seven times national median income. So today, working families, whether white or black, can’t afford to buy in Kirkwood. Fifty years ago, when whites similar to them in every other respect except their race were populating the suburbs, African-American families were not permitted to do so, so the legacy of that discrimination continues to this date. Poor African-Americans got crowded into ghettos — into all black, low-income neighborhoods like Ferguson.

And because the Federal Housing Administration refused to guarantee mortgages for African-Americans and would only guarantee mortgages for whites, black people who could afford to buy homes couldn’t get mortgages for them. So speculators sold those homes to them on contract, like on an installment plan. And if they were ever late with a payment, their house would be immediately repossessed and resold again on contract to someone else. In order to be able to make these contract payments, which were very high because the demand for housing was so great relative to the supply available to African-Americans, families doubled up, they subdivided their homes, they rented out parts of their homes. That’s a great example of how public policies led to the formation of slums.

This then became a multigenerational problem.

Source: Bill Moyers

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Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash | BillMoyers.com

CarmenSegarraBy Jake Bernstein

Barely a year removed from the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York faced a crossroads. Congress had set its sights on reform. The biggest banks in the nation had shown that their failure could threaten the entire financial system. Lawmakers wanted new safeguards.

The Federal Reserve, and, by dint of its location off Wall Street, the New York Fed, was the logical choice to head the effort. Except it had failed miserably in catching the meltdown.

New York Fed President William Dudley had to answer two questions quickly: Why had his institution blown it, and how could it do better? So he called in an outsider, a Columbia University finance professor named David Beim, and granted him unlimited access to investigate. In exchange, the results would remain secret.

After interviews with dozens of New York Fed employees, Beim learned something that surprised even him. The most daunting obstacle the New York Fed faced in overseeing the nation’s biggest financial institutions was its own culture. The New York Fed had become too risk-averse and deferential to the banks it supervised. Its examiners feared contradicting bosses, who too often forced their findings into an institutional consensus that watered down much of what they did.

The report didn’t only highlight problems. Beim provided a path forward. He urged the New York Fed to hire expert examiners who were unafraid to speak up and then encourage them to do so. It was essential, he said, to preventing the next crisis.

A year later, Congress gave the Federal Reserve even more oversight authority. And the New York Fed started hiring specialized examiners to station inside the too-big-to fail institutions, those that posed the most risk to the financial system.

One of the expert examiners it chose was Carmen Segarra.

Segarra appeared to be exactly what Beim ordered. Passionate and direct, schooled in the Ivy League and at the Sorbonne, she was a lawyer with more than 13 years of experience in compliance – the specialty of helping banks satisfy rules and regulations. The New York Fed placed her inside one of the biggest and, at the time, most controversial banks in the country, Goldman Sachs.

It did not go well. She was fired after only seven months.

As ProPublica reported last year, Segarra sued the New York Fed and her bosses, claiming she was retaliated against for refusing to back down from a negative finding about Goldman Sachs. A judge threw out the case this year without ruling on the merits, saying the facts didn’t fit the statute under which she sued.

At the bottom of a document filed in the case, however, her lawyer disclosed a stunning fact: Segarra had made a series of audio recordings while at the New York Fed. Worried about what she was witnessing, Segarra wanted a record in case events were disputed. So she had purchased a tiny recorder at the Spy Store and began capturing what took place at Goldman and with her bosses.

Segarra ultimately recorded about 46 hours of meetings and conversations with her colleagues. Many of these events document key moments leading to her firing. But against the backdrop of the Beim report, they also offer an intimate study of the New York Fed’s culture at a pivotal moment in its effort to become a more forceful financial supervisor. Fed deliberations, confidential by regulation, rarely become public.

The recordings make clear that some of the cultural obstacles Beim outlined in his report persisted almost three years after he handed his report to Dudley. They portray a New York Fed that is at times reluctant to push hard against Goldman and struggling to define its authority while integrating Segarra and a new corps of expert examiners into a reorganized supervisory scheme.

Segarra became a polarizing personality inside the New York Fed — and a problem for her bosses — in part because she was too outspoken and direct about the issues she saw at both Goldman and the Fed. Some colleagues found her abrasive and complained. Her unwillingness to conform set her on a collision course with higher-ups at the New York Fed and, ultimately, led to her undoing.

In a tense, 40-minute meeting recorded the week before she was fired, Segarra’s boss repeatedly tries to persuade her to change her conclusion that Goldman was missing a policy to handle conflicts of interest. Segarra offered to review her evidence with higher-ups and told her boss she would accept being overruled once her findings were submitted. It wasn’t enough.

“Why do you have to say there’s no policy?” her boss said near the end of the grueling session.

“Professionally,” Segarra responded, “I cannot agree.”

The New York Fed disputes Segarra’s claim that she was fired in retaliation.

“The decision to terminate Ms. Segarra’s employment with the New York Fed was based entirely on performance grounds, not because she raised concerns as a member of any examination team about any institution,” it said in a two-page statement responding to an extensive list of questions from ProPublica and This American Life.

The statement also defends the bank’s record as regulator, saying it has taken steps to incorporate Beim’s recommendations and “provides multiple venues and layers of recourse to help ensure that its employees freely express their views and concerns.”

“The New York Fed,” the statement says, “categorically rejects the allegations being made about the integrity of its supervision of financial institutions.” Read more…

Source: Bill Moyers

 

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Putin Is Doing the Complete Bidding of the Rothschilds | War is Crime

By Dave Hodges

PutinDollarBeing a former college basketball coach, I marvel at the skill of a good strategist who can carry out a game plan. Vladimir Putin would have been a great college basketball coach, a masterful poker player, a top used car salesman and he is an excellent leader of his country when it comes to foreign policy. Putin has made the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and our government look amateurish.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Putin has the potential to be one of the most despotic figures in all of history, I would be a fan of his cunning and his ability to carry out an agenda on multiple fronts with precision and skill.

However, there is one group that Putin does not outfox, out-strategize and out maneuver; that would be the forces controlling the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Putin is developing almost a cult following among some people in the alternative media. To them, he represents a man with the force of conviction to tell international banking to go to hell. To these well-intentioned, but misguided analysts, Putin has succeeded where other world leaders have lost their lives (e.g. JFK, Hussein, etc.). As romantic and appealing as a superhero may be who will ride in and save the world from the evil bankers, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to Putin. Whether Putin realizes it or not, he is doing the complete bidding of the big boys at the BIS and everything is moving right along according to plan.

This article explores the fact that Putin, although he may be, on the surface, resisting international banking on one level, he is very much under their control on another level. This article will also explore the implications for these events upon the American people.

The Starting Point

In the alternative media, many make the mistake of speaking about the “banksters” as if they were one entity all working towards the same goal which is the establishment of a singular economic system which controls the planet through rabid debt management. Generally, this is true. However, the process of international banking is compartmentalized and when goals are not met, we see divisions emerging and this is exactly what we are witnessing at the present moment.

Before we can effectively analyze how Putin is in the process of putting himself in charge of the world’s chessboard, we need to first take a very brief look at how international banking is organized.

Level One: The Bank for International Settlements

International banking has three major levels. The executive directors of this grand economic scheme, the Bank for International Settlements, from Basel, sit at the head of the table. The BIS sets global economic policy by manipulating currency exchange rates (e.g. IMF), establish lending rates, picking national winners and losers, etc. The singular mission of the BIS is to march the world’s central banks into the NWO that they control.

It can be said that the forces, both known and unknown, are the rulers of the planet.

Level Two: The Central Banks

The second level of power consists of the global central banks including the Federal Reserve which is an unelected cabal of private bankers who have wrestled the financial power of this country away from Congress and control the nation’s money. It is the same in every country. And of course, if an entity controls the money of a nation, they also control those who use their money through the establishment of a predatory debt enslavement system. You learned this principle of finance as a teenager when your parents told you, “For as long as you live under this house, you will do what I say.” The power of the purse determines who controls behavior. The world’s central banks take their marching orders from the Bank for International Settlements because the monetization of the fiat currency that each central bank controls is determined by the BIS.

It can be accurately stated that the central banks are rulers of nations and represent mid-level management in the hierarchy of the process. 

Level Three: The National Banking Industry

The third level of power in this unholy system are the financial institutions of a nation. In our case, this would be institutions such as Goldman Sachs, other lesser Wall Street investment houses as well as the megabanks (e.g. Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, etc.). Policies that are developed in Basel are implemented by these institutions.

The investment houses conduct the day to day management of the polices which flow downhill from the BIS.

Finally, there is everybody else and that would be the sheep of this country who know nothing of how any of this works. Don’t hold your breath on a sudden level of developing awareness, most of us are all too brainwashed by the system to achieve this level of awareness.

The Game Plan for Building a New World Order

Since the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement which established the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the US was made the de facto world policeman as a result, Americans have enjoyed economic dominance because in order to buy energy, the world needed to purchase dollars from our Federal Reserve. After the world departed from the gold standard for the fiat currency standard, the US is the only country that truly enjoyed a solvent currency and our standard of living has reflected this status.

Americans have been allowed to enjoy this most favored status because it became our task, on behalf of the BIS, to put together coalitions of central banks to force unwilling nations into this system. And when a nation, such as Libya and Iraq, attempted to swim upstream against the debt enslavement policies of these banks, the leaders were murdered and the people become indentured debt slaves. The cost to America is endless war, massive debt and a reputation for being the “Great Satan”.

Virtually, all nations have succumbed to this tyranny, with two notable exceptions, Russia and China. To a lesser extent, India has also become problematic for the BIS since they have joined Russia and China in using national currency and/or gold to conduct trade among each other rather than using the “required” dollar.

If the BIS is going to realize its dream of New World Order, Russia, China and the United States economies must all be crushed. For when the world lies in ruin, out of chaos will come order. Putin is the main driving force in making this a reality.

Putin Has Checkmated the Central Banks At Level Two

Putin is defeating the world’s central banks at two levels. One, he is spearheading an effort to move the world away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This is what the Syrian and Iranian crisis was all about (e.g. selling oil for gold rather than the Petrodollar) and Putin exposed Obama’s false flag event (i.e. gassing the Syrian rebels) for what it really was. Further, Putin now has the power to refuse to accept the dollar as payment for his gas flowing into Europe. If the Petrodollar dies, what will happen to the US economy? If this does happen, we will find out very quickly why DHS purchased 2.2 billion rounds of ammunition to go with its 2700 armored personnel carriers.

Second, Putin is threatening to become the main supplier of energy on the planet. With the consummation a recent gas deal between the Russians and the Chinese, Putin is undermining the control of energy that the central banks have enjoyed since the early days of the creation of Saudi Arabia to oversee oil production.

Putin is spitting in the face of the Federal Reserve and the other G7 central banks by encouraging Iran to sell its oil for gold. This is turning international finance on its head. Putin also has enough of a military presence, along with nuclear weapons, to stave a direct conventional invasion of his country. Putin has positioned himself to control the energy needs of Europe as the Europeans will be forced to choose between heating their homes or remaining a military ally of the US. This will eventually lead to a disintegration of NATO, thus enhancing Putin’s military power by comparison.

Has Putin Really Killed the New World Order?

The march of the G7 toward consolidating national power under the central banks has stopped dead in its tracks. Russia, China, India and to a lesser extent, Brazil and South Africa are now charting their own independent economic course. When Libya refused to regionalize and weaken its currency and they were adamant about avoiding the debt slavery, their leaders were murdered and their country was conquered by al-Qaeda proxy forces supported by the funds of the G7.

However, Russia and China are not Libya and Iraq. Both nations possess nuclear weapons and sizeable armies. For the moment, the dream of a New World Order appears to be dead. Or is it?

The BIS Employs the Sun Tzu Strategy of “Death’s Ground”

The G7 central banks are impotent against Putin as he has outmaneuvered them at every turn. But for the big boys at Basel, things are proceeding according to plan. If the BIS has to sacrifice some of its central banks to get what it wants, so be it. The BIS will also think nothing of fermenting the conditions for the next world war.

Over 2,000 years ago, Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, imparted a knowledge of military strategy which is still being taught in our service academies and in our war colleges. One of the primary principles of Sun Tzu consists of the concept of placing one’s soldiers on “death’s ground” if you want them to fight hard and achieve victory against all odds. The best military example that comes to mind is what happened to the WWII Normandy invasion force at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. These men were thrown onto a beach where there was no retreat and they were only going to leave the beach dead or victorious. The BIS has employed a Sun Tzu strategy of placing its second level of power, the central banks, on death’s ground. The G7 central banks will conquer Putin, or they will die. However, before rigor mortis sets in, the G7 nations will commence a world war based on economic survival. Again, out of chaos will come order.

World War III Is Inevitable

The failure of the central banks to corral and control Putin has made World War III a likely scenario. As Putin continues on the path of destroying the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, what will the Federal Reserve do? There will be a war to preserve the status quo. As China, Russia and the United States are drawn into a confrontation, the world’s economy will be obliterated along with billions of lives. In the aftermath of the coming global holocaust, the supreme financial rulers of the planet will be waiting to create order, the New World Order, out of chaos.

A willing pawn of the NWO, or not, Putin is no hero. He is doing exactly what is expected. Make no mistake about, the BIS controls the central banks, world finance and Putin. The New World Order is very much alive.

Source:  War is Crime