What’s a US Dollar Worth? : The Fed, Money as Debt

3-9-2010 Short Treasury Bonds T-Bills Short Term Market Call TMV

IRA Goes Off The Rails – Mark To Market

Posted by Karl Denninger

In what I can only describe as a self-serving piece for keeping banking “exactly as it is” (which is inherently unsustainable and thus can’t be) IRA tries to refute the value of mark-to-market with a stunning piece.

Finally, on April 2, 2009, FASB allowed banks to use “cash flow” to value bonds when the market was illiquid – exactly like Bernanke said last week. This fixed the immediate problems in the system, and the economy and financial markets have been on the mend ever since. In fact, the stock market bottomed on March 9, 2009 – the very day markets found out that Representatives Barney Frank and Paul Kanjorski would hold a hearing to force FASB to change the misguided accounting policy.

No it didn’t.

1. Remember FHLB Seattle again? Their “at market” losses on a portfolio of trash, er, loans was some $300 million.  They claimed that the real loss to be realized over time was in fact $12 million, using model-based accounting.  After all, these loans, while deeply underwater, weren’t really impaired.

Or so they told Congress.  I remember the testimony well.

But now, one year later, they are suing the banks that packaged up all this dog squeeze.  Among the pieces of trash being sued over are the very same securities against which they said that a model-based valuation system showed a tiny $12 million loss.

Are they suing for $12 million?

No.

That “tiny $12 million loss” in fact is some $311 million – almost exactly what the market price predicted it would be.

Soros, Goldman, Hedge Funds Attack Greece, Euro

Financial Warfare Exposed – Soros, Goldman Sachs,
Hedge Funds Attack Greece To Smash Euro

By Webster Tarpley
3-4-10

It has been evident for some time that the ongoing speculative attack on Greece, along with such other countries as Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, was not primarily a reflection of their economic fundamentals, nor yet a spontaneous movement of “the market,” but rather an orchestrated action of economic warfare. The dollar had been relentlessly falling through the late summer and autumn of 2009. It obviously occurred to various Anglo-American financiers that a diversionary attack on the euro, starting with some of the weaker Mediterranean or Southern European economies, would be an ideal means of relieving pressure on the battered US greenback. Since these degenerate elites are incapable of directly solving the problem of the dollar through increased production, full employment, and economic recovery, one of the few alternatives remaining to them is to create a situation in which the euro is collapsing faster, leaving the dollar as the beneficiary of some residual flight to quality or safe haven reflex.

Geithner accused of back door bailout…

By Richard Teitelbaum

Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — When a congressional panel convened a hearing on the government rescue of American International Group Inc. in January, the public scolding of Treasury SecretaryTimothy F. Geithner got the most attention.

Lawmakers said the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank had presided over a backdoor bailout of Wall Street firms and a coverup. Geithner countered that he had acted properly to avert the collapse of the financial system.

Smart Grid: The Implementation of Technocracy?‏

By Patrick Wood, Editor
March 2, 2010
Introduction

According to the United Nations Governing Council of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), “our dominant economic model may thus be termed a ‘brown economy.” UNEP’s clearly stated goal is to overturn the “brown economy” and replace it with a “green economy”:

“A green economy implies the decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth… These investments, both public and private, provide the mechanism for the reconfiguration of businesses, infrastructure and institutions, and for the adoption of sustainable consumption and production processes.” [p. 2]

Sustainable consumption? Reconfiguring businesses, infrastructure and institutions? What do these words mean? They do not mean merely reshuffling the existing order, but rather replacing it with a completely new economic system, one that has never before been seen or used in the history of the world.

This paper will demonstrate that the current crisis of capitalism is being used to implement a radical new economic system that will completely supplant it. This is not some new idea created in the bowels of the United Nations: It is a revitalized implementation of Technocracy that was thoroughly repudiated by the American public in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression.

The Technocrats have resurfaced, and they do not intend to fail a second time. Whether or not they succeed this time will depend upon the intended servants of Technocracy, the citizens of the world.

Indeed, the dark horse of the New World Order is not Communism, Socialism or Fascism. It is Technocracy.

Secretary Geithner has some explaining to do…

By David Yerushalmi

Letter to our Government…

Newborns’ blood used to build secret DNA database..knew this was coming

- Texas health officials secretly transferred hundreds of newborn babies‘ blood samples to the federal government to build a DNA database, a newspaper investigation has revealed. According to The Texas Tribune, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) routinely collected blood samples from newborns to screen for a variety of health conditions, before throwing the samples out. But beginning in 2002, the DSHS contracted Texas A&M University to store blood samples for potential use in medical research. These accumulated at rate of 800,000 per year. The DSHS did not obtain permission from parents, who sued the DSHS, which settled in November 2009.  Now the Tribune reveals that wasn’t the end of the matter. As it turns out, between 2003 and 2007, the DSHS also gave 800 anonymised blood samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database. This came to light after repeated open records requests filed by the Tribune turned up documents detailing the mtDNA programme. Apparently, these samples were part of a larger programme to build a national, perhaps international, DNA database that could be used to track down missing persons and solve cold cases. Jim Harrington, the civil rights attorney who filed the blood spot lawsuit (pdf) last year on behalf of five Texas parents and who directs the Texas Civil Rights Project, suggests to the Tribune that the DSHS settled with the parents to avoid risking a court case that might have revealed the DNA database. “This explains the mystery of why they gave up so fast,” he says.

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