http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/
As both Bill Black, in conversation with Bill Moyers, and Julian Delasantellis at Asia Times (no less interesting than Black) explain once more, at length, how insidious, widespread, and deeply embedded corruption and fraud have become in the White House-Wall Street revolving corridors over the past decade or two, we simultaneously learn that Larry Summers, one of the pivotal players in those corridors, has accepted $5.2 million from a hedge fund he is today supposed to regulate, as well as millions more in speaking engagements are the financial industry.
There were times when people like Summers were forced to step down in the face of such blatant potential conflicts of interest, but these days it’s hard to escape the feeling that these activities have become so all-pervasive that none of the actors see much difference between themselves and their peers and colleagues.
I have condemned Obama’s Rubin-Summers-Geithner team from the start, because it is made up of exactly the same people who under Cinton enforced and facilitated the erosion of those US laws that kept unbridled greed in check on Wall Street. They will never turn their back on those who gave them the power and status they presently enjoy. On the contrary, they will make sure more of the same is in the works. As long as they are in charge, there will never be any recovery in America, just more looting and pillaging. And no matter how popular Obama is today, he is very much to blame for allowing the plunder to continue.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/
As I read it, there are about $250 billion in outright grants, $500 billion in loans, and $250 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Given that none of the governments in question, except China, have that kind of money lying around, the $250 billion in grants and $500 billion in loans will have to be printed out of thin air.
More worryingly was the authorization to create $250 billion SDRs out of thin air. Usually described as a “synthetic currency,” they are nothing more than a type money created out of thin air, but one without any particular association to any given country.
Think about that for a minute. SDRs are being printed out of thin air by an institution that does not have any particular taxing power over the productive output of any particular nation.
What does this sort of money mean? What exactly is it?
It operates like central banking super-money and can be used as the primary fuel for massive pyramiding by the recipient bank. Think of it as the primary deposit into a banking system with a minuscule reserve ratio. It can be leveraged hundreds of times by central banks and then thousands of times further once those funds are disbursed into the next tier of the banking system.
For a world that should be mulling over lessons learned about the peril of thin-air money and excessive leverage, the reintroduction of SDRs are like a gigantic, blinking neon sign that reads, “We didn’t learn anything!!”
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/
What is this?
I could go through the derivation of how money supply works in a fractional reserve monetary system (any), but won’t, because most readers would have their eyes glaze over.
The important part of this graph is what it denotes. Bernanke has lost control of “N” (or velocity), which is the actual knob that he is trying to diddle when borrowing rates are changed (and in fact its the market that sets that, despite his protests.)
In fact the most useful tool in The Fed’s box in terms of influencing monetary policy is the soapbox, that is, jawboning (whether it be by cajoling or threatening.)
The problem with an M1 multiplier below one is that the effect of printing money is of course multiplied by the velocity. That is, if you print up $10 into the economy the impact it has on economic activity depends on how many times that $10 circulates in a given amount of time. The more it circulates the higher the impact and the more your efforts do for the economy.
The bad news is that when the multiplier is less than one the more money you spew into the economy the worse the impact, as you get less for each additional dollar.
Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/
This development has major implications for those of us that think about the future of warfare. The devolution of the US economic system into crony capitalism, replete with the parasitic predation of oligarchs, paints a picture of warfare punctuated by: rampant crime, rapidly declining military/government budgets, inopportune withdrawals from foreign adventures/development efforts (money for this dries up), corporate armies, deep urban decay, spot starvation/health crises, broad privatization of public goods (theft or fire-sale prices), widespread poverty, etc.
To think that a parasitic oligopoly (akin to Russia’s) can’t happen here, despite factual evidence to the contrary (trillions of $$ given away to bank/hedge funds/etc. without the slightest reform, hope for economic return, or accountability), is a failure of decision making due to doctrinal/ideological rigidity. However, if it’s true, a move to the primary loyalties of manufactured tribes (gang, clan, sect, etc.) by a large segment of the population will be almost inevitable. Many of these new groups will both defend and advance their interests through violence.
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/
Mr. Obama heads to Europe now where official hostility is rising against the Anglo-American method of pounding monetary sand down the rat-holes of “non-performing” debt, bankrupt enterprise, and bubble-levitated bonds. Our poised and charming Prez may escape personal obloquy from the quaint old-world street folk, but most of the other G-20 policy playerz take a dim view of the shell-and-pea games being played by the custodians of the world’s reserve currency, including front-end-loader bank bail-outs, the shuffling of worthless securities under TARPS and TARFS, the desperate efforts to prevent the sane re-pricing of real estate, the cannibalizing of treasuries by the Federal Reserve, the now-notorious hijacking of public “liquidity” injections by third parties like Goldman Sachs, and most generally the perceived sacrifice of everybody else’s greater good for the sake of maintaining Lloyd Blankfein’s cappuccino machine.
