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

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

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.

Central Banking Doesn’t Work – Just Ask the Fed!

By Thomas Mullen

http://thomasmullen.blogspot.com

It is still a tiny minority who understand that central banking is a collectivist institution that is completely hostile to liberty. It is, by definition, an instrument of theft that purports to stabilize economic conditions for the collective by controlling the supply of money and credit. The fact that its only means to do so is to steal from savers to finance well-connected borrowers is a seldom-mentioned detail. That people only use the central bank’s currency because they are forced to do so by legal tender laws is spoken of even less. In this late stage of the Age of Government, the rights to liberty and property are expendable as our rulers “get the work of the American people done.”

Hopefully, the question of whether there should be a Federal Reserve will be on the table soon. However, once one concedes the existence of the Fed, there is a further question to ask: Can it do what it purports to do?

What Do Oranges, Furnaces, and Your IRA Have in Common?

By Thomas Mullen

http://thomasmullen.blogspot.com

On Friday, an average American spent the entire day with the federal government without ever leaving his home. No, there was no knock on his door by some plain-clothes Gestapo. Neither was he treated to one of those infamous “no-knock raids” where a small army of thugs with various acronyms spelled out on their backs burst into the homes of the innocent and terrorize whomever happens to cross their paths. Nothing so dramatic happened that day. However, the long arm of the federal government made itself equally palpable nonetheless.

Links Related to Economic Warfare, Currency Devaluation and Worldwide Economic Default

Gerald Celente says It’s Beginning: Financial War is the First Stage of Global War

http://bit.ly/d0lCew

Foreign demand for US Treasury securities falls by record amount as China reduces holdings

http://bit.ly/d0NDfU

Pentagon preps for economic warfare

http://bit.ly/153Mz

The Truth Behind China’s Currency Peg

http://bit.ly/8jCRC5

Marc Faber Says that the United States AND Europe Are Destined for Default

http://bit.ly/9R1qIb

Shelby: When You Close Your Eyes You Cannot See

Shelby: “What were the root causes and how to prevent them in the future?”

That’s simple – it’s called willful blindness.

By you.  By Dodd.  By Frank.  By Bernanke.  By OTS.  By OCC.  By Paulson.  By Geithner.

Willful, intentional blindness to the outright scams that all of the above and more have been willfully and intentionally ignored over the space of more than two decades, including while Shelby was the Chair of The Banking Committee.

Never mind the outright lie that “prop trading didn’t take down any of these companies.”  Oh really? What was Merrill Lynch?  What was “Hvol4″?  That was a prop desk basis trade that blew up in Merrill’s face and literally killed the bank, forcing them into a shotgun marriage with a subsidized (by the taxpayer) Bank of America.  They weren’t alone either – Deutsche Bank took a huge loss on pretty much the same bet gone bad. The FT said this about the “final nail in the coffin” with regards to that prop trade that detonated:

The fiction that Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae are “private institutions”

The Fannie and Freddie “Secret”

By Bruce McQuain

QandO.net

The Obama administration and Democrats have consistently blamed the financial problems that the country has faced on Wall Street, banks and their greed. But it has just as consistently ignored the role and cost of two quasi-governmental agencies which were also in the center of the financial storm – Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. The Wall Street Journal points out that the cost to the government (and therefore the taxpayer) of these two institutions has been kept “off books” by the fiction that they’re “private institutions”. But, in fact, they’re really not:

As the CBO notes in a recent background paper, the standards for when to include government-sponsored entities in the budget go back to the 1960s, when a Presidential commission laid out a set of questions.

To wit: “Who owns the agency?” (In the case of Fan and Fred, taxpayers.) “Who supplies its capital?” (Taxpayers.) “Who selects its managers?” (The federal government.) And finally, “Do the Congress and the President have control over the agency’s program and budget, or are the agency’s policies the responsibility of the Congress or the President only in some broad ultimate sense?” (The feds have control in every sense.)

The point, of course, is the claim they’re “quasi-governmental” or “private” entities is fiction. They are, in every way, controlled by the federal government and were as involved in the financial melt down as any other institution. In fact, there’s an argument that they were the instututions which made the housing bubble possible and, through their policies, encouraged it.

The Government Bubble Heads for a Blow-Off Top

By Tom Mullen

I have a friend that tends to express his ideas about everything in the jargon of a securities trader. Of course, this is probably because he has been a very successful trader, both in bull and bear markets, for many years. “Every trend in history, even liberty, can be charted like a stock,” he has often observed. I tend to agree.