More Legal Trouble For JP Morgan, Obama’s Brilliant Banker

The story just gets more surreal.    This is starting to share some resemblance to the last time we were told a firm that used unregulated, opaque, leveraged smoke-and-mirrors to hedge something or another.  They were also the smartest guys in the room.  A corporation that also had very close ties to a White House.  A corporation that used those ties to subvert sanity and the rule of law to rig the system in their favor to loot our society for their own delusions of grandeur, greed and arrogance.   That shouldn’t be a surprise.  As we have noted on here before, Enron was a creation of Wall Street.   Every large Wall Street firm involved paid massive fines for involvement in Enron’s collapse but never had to admit criminal wrongdoing.  Wall Street still is essentially running the Enron scam with their manipulation of energy markets with unregulated, opaque, leveraged smoke-and-mirrors.   

Jamie’s got $80 trillion of derivatives and countless more hundreds of billions of dollars in assets that are most certainly going to see their risk profiles change substantially in the future…..    I suspect it’s about time the corporate and political propagandists will start spouting plausible deniability; a favorite manipulation of the systemically-incompetent, dumbed-down corporate state.  How could we see this coming?  It’s a once in a life time crisis.  Of course.  How could you see this coming?  You don’t have the knowledge, ability or competence to be doing what you are doing.   Merit in our society is nearly dead.  Our government and corporations are run by dunces who got to their positions through cronyism, propaganda, endless money to create false images of reality and through the rigging of our economic and political system.

We will never have democratic capitalism or a democratic merit-based economy until democracy owns banking and money.   We need a public banking system and a democratic monetary system to fund it.  One that is protected from political toads and special interests. 

The Social Science Of Economics - Predation, Victimization and Violence Endorsed By The State - Part One, An Introduction.

Some recent events have unfolded that I want to talk about.  Because of these recent events, I’m going to take a detour and delay some economic and market posts and focus on the incredible violence that oftentimes reflects our social and economic values.    I haven’t decided if I will put up four or five or ten or twenty posts in this series.  But they will roll out over the coming  summer months.  I will continue to intersperse  more “mainstream” economic and market posts during this process.  You’ll recognize these future post because they will be titled as parts in a series.

One has to expand their point of view well beyond the mainstream to gain proper perspective of what ills face our economy and society.   Especially, when one listens to the simple-minded solutions presented by politicians.  Both political parties created this crisis.   Neither wants to embrace change because with the economic and social ills they have created comes unprecedented political control, power and wealth.   There is a finite amount of control and power in our society.  So, it is quite obvious that this control, power and wealth that politicians have granted themselves has come at the expense of our citizens.  As they take more, we have less.  And, that dynamic is a direct or indirect result of predation, victimization and violence endorsed by the state. 

We hear many who wish to see change make simpleton remarks like fractional reserve banking, as one example of many, is a major factor behind this crisis.   Fractional reserve banking is simply a tool.  There are proper applications of any tool and then there is the abuse of any tool.   The abuse of this tool, in particular, leads to an exponential function where a debt crisis is unavoidable.  But, fractional reserve banking, simply as a tool, most certainly does not need to be used in such a manner.  Fractional reserve banking can be a very powerful tool for democracy in the right hands; a public banking and monetary system.  

The ills in our society and economy are much more esoteric than these arguments that abolishing the Federal Reserve, ending fractional reserve banking and other equally simpleton arguments would spawn some miraculous sustainable recovery.   The abuse of any  institutions, tools or citizens is only possible by the dismantling of the rule of law.  Only politicians have that power.  Only we grant them that power.   The reality is that unless we deal with underlying sociological factors it doesn’t matter what institution or tool we think is going to solve our ills.  It simply won’t work.   Of course, there is a counter argument put forth by many that if we simply dismantle government, it will accomplish the same end result.  Well, that is essentially what we have been witnessing over the last thirty years; the dismantling of government.  The short answer is that this will not work.  It will also destroy our democratic institutions, it will permanently drown out those without a voice and it will turn our economy and our society into one of even greater lawlessness.  As a nation of laws, the radical right-wing answers are anything but.

Economics at its core is really nothing more than a social science.  Or, at least it was before it was destroyed.  Intellectual giants played a role in its founding and early sociology and psychology-based understandings of its principles.  Economics started as an outcropping of sociology and was actually taught in sociology curriculum before it became a full-fledged college program.  When it broke from being a social science to a stand alone science based on fuzzy math and unproven math-based theories, aka junk science, economics started its decent into massive failure.   That is where it is today.  In the modern world economics is generally practiced by intellectual midgets who don’t know what they don’t know.   Economics is a profession essentially created and embraced by the dumbed-down corporate state.   Economists find themselves in a paper bag of what is generally-accepted, failed economic dogma and can’t punch themselves out of that paper bag.  

As we have discussed before, part of the failure of economics starts at the very beginning of the learning process.  The wrong professors and the wrong students are attracted to economics.   The wrong people are attracted to economics because of the wrongness of its curriculum and its teachings.   That is, people who are less concerned and substantially less aware of sociology (including social anthropology) , associated psychology and the human condition and more concerned with the knobs and dials of data analysis and mathematical theories based on  unsubstantiated and oftentimes completely wrong quantitative factors.  

Knobs and dials are truly meaningless to gaining proper perspective without the application of quality.  Sociology, psychology and an appreciation for the human condition are the basis for that application of quality.  It is human factors that determine the sustainability of any economic factor.   It is also our social values that define our economic values.  To gain proper perspective on how to fix our economic ills, one must appreciate our social ills.   It is the social values embraced by our society’s leadership that determine the sustainability or lack thereof of both our society and our economy.   Our economic ills are, at their core, a reflection of ills that infect the leadership of our nation. 

I think we could very well be in the final years of economics as a profession and a college curriculum.  At least as it is taught today.  If nothing else, we have noted for half a dozen year that the economics profession is in a bubble - the mainstream economics community is literally clueless.  It was just 18 months or so ago that I highlighted a survey showing over 90% of economists believed there was no chance of a double dip recession.   Similar numbers were seen before the 2008 collapse.   Britain just announced it is already back in recession and the 2009 “recovery” is the worst in its recorded history.   The reality is we never  got a recovery off of the 2008 collapse, let alone be so lucky to have a double dip “recession”.    Without massive money printing for financial speculation, endless wars to keep the for-profit military industrial complex humming and a government spending 70% of national income,  (your income) true unemployment could easily be 50%.   Ditto for every major country around the world.  The extreme percentages of economists to always be wrong, all of the time, points to nothing short of systemic incompetence.  This highlights fundamental unsustainable flaws in the economics educational system and profession. 

Can you imagine if less than 10% of bridges were designed not to fail?   Or less than 10% of cars purchased actually worked?  That is the economics profession today.  This truly incompetent profession provides the primary policy input, generally useless might I add, into our political system, corporate system and our society.  I’m not exaggerating when I say the profession could be dying.  One of the first posts I wrote years ago is that any bureaucracy will first do what’s necessary to sustain itself.  ie, Self-interest.  It’s the same morally-bankrupt self-interest behind capitalism, the banking system and our political party system.  Economics as it is taught today only exists because the self-interested monopoly Federal Reserve funds the majority of economic research, economics positions and economics departments in universities.   Without the backing of the self-interested, incompetent Federal Reserve, it is debatable whether economics would actually have the critical mass to even justify a college degreed program.  Economics as it is taught and practiced today is not a merit-driven profession.  There is little, if any, measurable truth or value derived by society or our economy.  ie, Without this rigging of markets and the economics profession by the Federal Reserve, the profession would either adjust or die.  Most likely die for its systemic shortcomings and failure to serve democracy.

As we have discussed before, the world is truly qualitative.  It is the qualitative interpretation of  factors and data that separates truth from fiction. 

I’m going to leave the modern day world of quantitative finance and economics that has become the measuring stick of junk economics and go back to a time when the world was defined by quality.  In many instances that was further back than half a century and oftentimes even a century ago.    To essentially “unlearn” some of the uselessness of what has been learned.  To a reality that cannot be derived through a mathematical equation.  The qualitative world.  And with it we are going to look at many of the sociological and psychological dynamics that are killing our economy and destroying our society. 

While none of this is anything new on here, I want to clearly tie an upcoming series of posts on victimization, predation and social violence to a reality that isn’t discussed in politics, economics or finance.  That is, answers to our economic ills aren’t found in mathematical equations measuring nonfarm payroll or productivity or industrial production or the growth of M1 money.   The daily focus on these variables has proven and will continue to prove useless.   We hear politicians, Wall Street, economists and the Federal Reserve cite these factors over and over for the last thirty years while the poverty level in this country skyrocketed.   As discussed before, during these three decades government transfer payments have risen over 700%.  ie,  Our economy has been dying for over thirty years.   I submit to you it is dying because of predation, victimization and violence endorsed by the state. 

Economists, politicians, banksters and corporate bureaucrats seem to consistently miss such a simple point but people are not numbers.  Sociological and psychological factors cannot be defined by numbers.  And, the debasement of economics into a dehumanized numbers game of equations has ultimately led to the economics profession’s own crisis.   Essentially, that is what we are witnessing around the world.   The economics profession is failing.  And, because everything they believed is failing, the economic systems built around this junk science too are failing. 

Contrarily, it is quality that determines our social success.   By conclusion, it is quality that determines our economic success.   Without the interjection of the quality of timeless human values – compassion, kindness, acceptance, community, dignity, equality, respect and the like, what remains in a society and an economy?   Little, if anything of quality.  Little, if anything, worth saving.  And so it is.  

While violence, predation and victimization aren’t new topics on here, my goal in coming posts is to open the aperture of our line of sight just a little bit wider.  To raise a level of awareness to our conscious mind.  When we raise behavior, often unconscious, into our conscious mind, we become more aware of the world around us.  And, we become more aware of what must be transformed to create a better economy and society for all people.  Then, when we see similar dynamics in the future, we have a greater conscious appreciation for harmful social and economic dynamics and their consequences.    

In closing, these dynamics bring to mind one of my favorite modern day works of literary art that has been mentioned on here before. 

The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, (or economist – my interjections in red)  is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality.  This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. (Aka modern-day junk economics) It’s long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of these facts after they are "observed." (the mindless .. lacking quality .. measurement of knobs and dials of quantitative economic and financial factors.)  I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn’t destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice.

Our coming posts will be focused on a timeless world left behind by the creators of the Godless corporate state and the economists who seek to perpetuate its lack of quality; a dynamic their  profession has helped perpetuate for its own failed self-interest.

Commodity Index Re-enters Bear Market For First Time Since 2008 Collapse

In the last few weeks the CRB Index has fallen back into bear market territory for the first time since the 2008 global collapse.  A bear market is defined by a correction of 20% or more.  This is not a typical 10-20% correction to a bull market.  This decline has been underway for almost a year and a half.    I expect financial markets will try to put in a bottom within a few weeks and speculators will try to get some sort of low volume summer rally or stabilization.  But, with money already repatriated from Europe and emerging markets, without a new round of liquidity programs in the U.S. for financial speculators, markets should continue their downward trend later this year.  With no end in site to bankster-controlled austerity measures and the implosion of China's economy, we are witnessing a collapse in money supplies for the majority of economic participants in parts of Europe, the U.S. and Asia.  The bubble still hasn't popped for those benefiting from Social Darwinism and their policies of trickle down economics but it's just a matter of time.


Chart courtesy of the excellent StockCharts.com - Click To See A Larger View

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld And Their Lawyers Convicted For Torture And War Crimes.

The Real News, one of my favorite independent news sources, has an interesting video up today.   There is ample evidence that the Bush and Blair administrations are guilty of torture, if not more wide ranging war crimes, as defined by the U.S. signatory to the Geneva Conventions on torture.

Paul Jay seems rather skeptical, as he should be, during this interview.  This conviction has no international legitimacy under national or international law.  But, the process has begun and the enforcement of international law is being prosecuted.  I wouldn’t be so quick to discount that this won’t eventually lead to some sort of tribunal or prosecution, even if it is in absentia.  Quite frankly, we really don’t know if the Obama administration could  also be found to be complicit in any such proceedings.   We already know that in the last month or so Ron Paul and Walter Jones have  introduced impeachment proceedings against Obama for: 

“Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.”

On this Memorial Day, we should honor those, including the many who died and were maimed, in service to our country by ensuring that men and women acting outside of the law never subverts a government of laws in the unconstitutional projection of offensive force of their own desire.  Force that unnecessarily and illegally places our service people and our nation in harm’s way.

The Hidden Costs Of Endless Wars – Half Of All New Veterans Seek Disability

A timely reminder of the disposable society created by the Godless corporate state on this Memorial Day weekend.  We live in a society of violence endorsed by the state.  One of its many outcomes include disposable workers, disposable service people and disposable citizens.  

Politicians and bureaucrats in general are great at dissociation and detachment from the unintended consequences of their forever meddling and illegitimate projections of power and control over others – a founding principle of why we are a nation ruled by law rather than a nation ruled by men/women.   Unfortunately, the rule of law has been subverted and we are now a nation of men.  The whims of man now determine our actions.  The whims of man now determine what laws will be subverted and plundered. 

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve. But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." -- Frederic Bastiat

If said bureaucrats in thinkless think tanks, the military-industrial complex and politics were required to lead the charge on the field of battle, this psychotic and violent policy of proactive, endless war would end. 

Wall Street’s Endless Crimes Against Democracy Continue - Facebook CEO and Wall Street Underwriters Sued For Looting

While the hysteria was almost obscene on Wall Street and in the mainstream media about the most hyped IPO in the last decade, it was just days before the Facebook IPO we discussed on here that Facebook executives and investment bankers were using this IPO to loot society.  A far different reality.  That is exactly what they did.  The financial system is completely rotten.   Too many people want to pretend the issues of corruption our nation faces aren’t as deep and systemic as they really are.  Predation is and always has been the Wall Street game.   The art of the con is more systemic than ever.  Leading up to the IPO I had to snicker while watching a Bloomberg contributing editor who used a lot of large sounding words, you know, like delicatessen, to conclude that  Facebook would have a strong day on the IPO open.   We truly do have an economic system where cronyism and incompetence rises to the top.  That is very much a common factor in society’s run by Soviet-style bureaucracy rather than freedom and democracy.  Incompetence becomes the norm as paper-pushing bureaucrats squelch freedom of ideas and superior solutions vetted by civil discourse in favor of control.   

These lawsuits or a falling Facebook stock should really be no surprise.  Taking firms public in modern America is most often a guaranteed form of looting.   The entire business model of modern-day investment banking is a criminal racket.  Investment?  By the way, I could list a dozen hyped IPOs in the last two years that were high profile looting fests.  Groupon and LinkedIn being two that immediately come to mind.   Groupon?  Are you kidding me?  Talk about vaporware.  It’s already down 55% in five months.  LinkedIn will soon follow.  As we have noted ad nauseam, 2008 was not a housing crisis as was so widely reported.  This is the collapse of capitalism as it has been practiced since its inception.  And, it was a collapse of a fraudulent financial system that has been looting society blind for thirty years.  While I have remarked about pointed issues regarding  capitalism in the past, I’ll put up a detailed post on the technicalities behind my concerns at some point.  In other words, my perspective is not based on opinion.  There is substantial fact of concern with systemic, possibly unrecoverable crises that literally no one is talking about.  Obviously, none of this means we are doomed.  Wall Street may be doomed.  But all it means is the future will most certainly look nothing like today.  And, people who are hawking simple-minded solutions like gold money are likely to be very, very wrong.

Investors of means are suing Facebook and its underwriters: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc because they were left holding the bag.   All I can say after the Dotcom bubble is shame on you for trusting anyone in the Wall Street racket.  It is a racket as defined by the organized crime RICO statute. 

Alternatively, individual investors, who are generally as deluded by the Gamblers Anonymous dream of nailing at 20 bagger as institutional investors, don’t have a legion of lawyers and the financial means to protect themselves from Wall Street’s endless duping, looting, victimization and predation.  So they simply get to bend over and take it.  No kissing allowed.   That’s too personal for the Wall Street psychopath.  Depersonalization is a common trait of predators who victimize people.  Labeling those you are preying upon as Muppets most certainly fits the trait of depersonalization.  I don’t say any of this trivially or jokingly, as I appreciate the horrors of rape, murder and other violent and psychotic attacks against individuals, but the  depersonalization and victimization of a psychopath’s violent predation  comparative to Wall Street’s endless violent predation seems little different from a psychological profiling perspective.

If we had a public banking system that served democracy and a merit-based economy, be it capitalism or some other form of a market economy, and we truly had public capital markets,  the Facebook or Dotcom bubble or housing crisis or derivatives messes or commodities manipulation or other forms of looting would never happen.  Public finance would have an intent to serve democracy and human development of our citizens.   As far as public banking and Facebook, first of all, there would be a rule of law and hurdle regarding what companies qualified to receive public funding.   That would not be determined by for-profit investment bankers who use IPOs to loot democracy.  Secondly, the Facebook offering price would have been about $1 at the number of shares priced, that is, if they even qualified to receive public funding.  And, thirdly, the company’s executives wouldn’t be cashing out aka looting as they are under the current criminal financial racket.  The investment of public capital received by companies going public would have regulations on how it was spent.   ie For the benefit of democracy and the expansion of democracy’s economic opportunity.  Not so senior company executives could loot society by dumping overvalued shares with savers, pensions and retirement accounts.   When senior executives use public funds for private gain, it is essentially a form of corporate raiding - think Mitt Romney and private equity - and democracy is left holding the bag.   You are left holding the bag.   

Our pensions, retirement accounts and savings have been and continue to be looted by Wall Street as they have for decades.  Our society, our government, our public institutions, our social safety nets and much of the world has been and continues to be looted by Wall Street.   That was the whole dynamic behind the Dotcom Internet Bubble.   IT WAS NOTHING MORE.    Facebook is a reminder of that fact.  Facebook is priced at Dotcom levels. 

Every single technology company brought public in the mid to late 90s in the Dotcom bubble was a result of looting.  Bar none.  Thousands of IPOs.  Even the five or ten firms that eventually had something sustainable to offer were massively overpriced in their offering and were sold to the public at bag holder prices aka looting.  Just like Facebook.  Bringing an endless supply of worthless and marginally worthless companies public with no earnings and no chance of sustainability and dumping them onto retirement accounts, savers and pensions is looting.  The Dotcom bubble was a massive transfer of wealth from pensions, savers, retirement accounts, etc to the criminal financial racket of Wall Street, investment banking and IPO senior management.  That’s how investment bankers bribe corporate executives into coming public.  They reward them with riches to cash out and leave our retirement accounts, pensions and savings holding the bag.   It’s a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle of bribery and looting.

Remember, that all happened under Clinton.    Regulatory agencies under Clinton did nothing to stop the looting.  In fact, the taxes raised by the government as part of the massive profits minted by the Dotcom looting bubble were hailed by Clinton.  We still hear today that George Bush destroyed the balanced budget Clinton left him.   A balanced budget created through Wall Street’s looting and the destruction of our pensions, capital markets,  jobs base, etc.  One of the greatest political cons of my lifetime.   Bill Clinton left George Bush holding the bag.  Not that Bush then didn’t leave Obama holding an even bigger bag.  He most certainly did.

I would just about bet my life Facebook is going to lose 80% of its IPO value in the next five years.  I would bet your life that it could lose 97.5% of its value.  97.5% would take the price to about what it should have been at offering - $1.   Being priced at $40 as it was places it as 60-80x the average stock price in 1929; before the market fell 90+%.  $1 fair value is more than generous.   Most people will laugh at this next statement but then they laugh at everything that sounds preposterous, even if true.  And, mind you, this is a preposterous world ruled by preposterous people.  How many people would have laughed were someone to tell them in 2006 that just two years later,  the most successful 100 year old financial firms in our country would collapse and Wall Street would disappear were it not for a massive $20+ trillion bailout?   That is much less probable than  this next statement - I would bet both of our lives that Facebook is gone within a decade plus or minus a few years. 

There are three major factors Facebook will face in coming years that will make their road a rocky one.  The popping of the massive ad bubble that funds their entire existence, the slow death of PCs with our youth culture and a return to local economics that has been heretofore destroyed by the corporate state.   There are many, many more factors including new competitors, major advances in technology, changing social trends, etc but let’s focus on three. 

Youth in western cultures have more in common with Japanese culture than their parents in their use of technology.   In my experience, I was surprised how low the penetration rate of home PCs is in Japan.  Facebook’s penetration is a rounding error in Japan.  A major reason is that the internet in Japan is accessed by mobile devices.   Ads on mobile devices don’t work.  It’s not the technology.  It’s the user experience that doesn’t work.  Additionally, grandparents won’t be using Facebook to keep in touch as often.  Yes, that’s hyperbole and I mean people in general.  In the not too distant future we won’t be moving all over hell’s creation to fight for the small number of jobs that are available thanks to corporations controlling our money supply, subverting new business creation and destroying our economic determinism.  ie, Most people will once again start to live local to their upbringing as we start to rebuild the social fabric of our communities and our nation.  A fabric destroyed by the Godless corporate state and its rigging of economic markets.   We are already seeing this dynamic unfold in the more than half of college graduates living with their parents because there are no jobs.  And even more who didn’t go to college living with their parents because they can only find a job at Wal-mart for slave wages.

You may like Facebook.  You may derive great appreciation from Facebook.  But Facebook is a fad driven by exogenous and unsustainable factors coming together to create its temporary economic and social success.  It’s success belies the bubble economy of an unsustainable system run amok.  

I have talked before about how people foolishly investment in technology because they are always drawn to the next new thing.  Of hitting the home run of gambling.  It is gambling.  It most certainly is not investing.  Technology is an awful investment choice that investors only delude themselves into believing they understand.  Almost without exception, they don’t.  Facebook is no different.  And, not only do they not understand the technology, but they don’t understand how Wall Street uses IPOs to loot society.  But, gambling runs deep in the investor’s class’ veins because they still dream of a return of the once-in-a-one-hundred-year bubble that was the massively fraudulent Dotcom fiasco. 

The top 50 Nasdaq technology companies from the 1970s are all gone except for one.   The top 50 Nasdaq companies in 2000 are either gone or languishing 50-90% below their peak valuations with dim future prospects for growth.  Many are on their way to irrelevance.  Facebook won’t last long as a darling stock.  It’s business model is already obsolete at the IPO.    The chances it can be radically transformed are not good by any measurement.    Who knows.  Maybe Facebook will pull a rabbit out of the hat.  Not likely.  History and odds are not with them.  99.999999% of all future innovation will not be within the walls of Facebook.  It had a time and served a purpose.  That purpose was not to go public at $40 a share.

Would you like something to put in your bag?  Maybe you can take your bag on a picnic.  How about some fried chicken and coleslaw to put in your bag?  If you own Facebook, regardless of the daily gyrations, shares could rally in June and July, you most certainly are holding a bag.   Is this really any surprise.   The IPO of Facebook is just a small piece of the endless schemes used by Wall Street to bilk democracy.

Title link here.

Facebook IPO faces regulatory scrutiny here.

Jamie Dimon’s Personal Hedge Fund At JP Morgan Has Likely Become The Tipping Point In The Global Economic Storm

To summarize for new readers, we were very bearish on banks going into the 2008 collapse.  At the time I even wrote on here that I liquidated my family’s holdings in Wall Street firms at what later became evident was within a few percentage points of the banking index peak.  Then when Citi hit 99 cents, I said that I was no longer bearish on banks because exogenous factors would determine their future.  And, that the seeds of a rally were building.  Those exogenous factors turned out to be the attempted reliquification of these firms through various facilities including the allowance of predatory banking to continue its pillaging within the global economy.  ie, No meaningful reforms.  Then, again within literally a month, we top ticked the banking index again in 2010 and remarked that I was again bearish on banks.   That call has turned out to be the ultimate peak of the banking index off of the 2008 collapse.   It has been down ever since. 

Now let’s fast forward to 2012.   In February, I wrote that the coming week of March 19th was a disconcerting week ahead.  That week turned out to be the top in the European bond market.   And that very fact meant the week of March 19 was the tipping point for this JP Morgan crisis that is tied to deteriorating European bonds.  In fact, as I noted a little over a month ago, many market internals literally peaked the exact day of March 19.   As a point of reference, it was just five days before March 19 that JP Morgan upset the Federal Reserve by front-running a bank stress test announcement with its arrogant announcement of a dividend increase.  Do you think Jamie Dimon really knows what he is doing?  No one can manage a firm that large and it is his very delusions of self-importance that even allows him to remotely believe he can.   King Jamie’s empire was shifting beneath his feet at the very moment he was increasing his dividend and he didn’t have a clue.  Politicians and all bureaucracies around the globe should take note that their empires too are shifting beneath their feet and control is nothing more than an illusion.

I may not write about much of the detailed analysis on here, but I have a very, very firm grasp on money and banking in this country.  Our calls have been spot on for years.  It takes a lot of work but it’s not rocket science. 

As noted a month or so ago, I think it’s most likely that with the passage of March 2012, we have gone beyond the point of no return.  That we are now in the early stages of the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.  The back end of this economic storm I have been writing for years would make 2008 look like a picnic.  And, that means all of the outcomes we have been writing that haven’t yet come to pass could be just around the corner.   Some of those include the end of capitalism, globalization, global finance, a corrupt monetary and banking system, empire, the military-industrial complex, political parties, massive corporations, debt-based money’s economic slavery, the end of the stock market as we know it and possibly even the end of money, or money as we know it, as well as other dynamics we have written about.  Some of these are most certainly foregone conclusions and are already in the midst of coming to pass.   All of these and more are very real possibilities, if not probabilities.    Albeit, we most certainly won’t wake up one day to see the world completely different.  The world will likely change through a process of failure over many years or even a decade.   Time is a very difficult element to predict.  But I expect the next three years to reveal crises in much of what will eventually fail.  And, some remedies to coming crises will be attempted yet ultimately fail as well.  Mostly because they aren’t based on truth but instead attempts at maintaining control.  Just as Dodd-Frank and the Obama healthcare plan will most certainly fail based on simple math.  Both of these horrible pieces of legislation serve a primary intent of the status quo maintaining control over any form of truth.

This current situation at JP Morgan is EXACTLY what we wrote was going to happen at least a dozen times after the 2008 crash.  That Wall Street was still holding the bag on risky financial assets and risky bets and had traded counterparties out of financial markets.   And, that because the poker pot wasn’t being refilled, aka wealth creation, eventually crises in these bets would be exposed when the Federal Reserve’s pool of false liquidity started receding.  In other words, without a continuous monetary easing and rigging of markets to bail out the massively corrupt Federal Reserve broker dealers, 2008 was just the beginning of the end.  The opportunity to fix this mess and embrace truth has passed.  As we noted, Glass-Steagall is now too little, too late.  I think it’s rather telling on some level that we have been writing for years that Wall Street has won nothing.  Yet many felt substantial despair and helplessness at changing a system that persecutes and preys on innocent people.   In the end, this crisis is most certainly going to take care of itself if politicians and corporate leaders refuse to take care of it.

An FT article highlights an incredibly disturbing situation at JP Morgan.  (You might need a free signin but as I have noted before, it’s worth the two minutes to sign up for the FT.  Much more so than any other mainstream financial rag.)

…….The unit, the chief investment office (CIO), has been the biggest buyer of European mortgage-backed bonds and other complex debt securities such as collateralised loan obligations in all markets for three years, more than a dozen senior traders and credit experts have told the Financial Times……… But the CIO has also dominated market activity and built up huge positions in other, equally esoteric markets, according to leading traders…….’I can’t see how they could unwind these positions because no one can replace them in terms of size. It’s a bit of the same problem they face with the derivatives trade,’ said a credit trader at a rival bank. ‘They pretty much are the market.’

In other words, JP Morgan is holding the bag as it has come to dominate markets for financial derivatives and financial assets.   And, there is no counterparty large enough to offload the trade to.  Well, other than the taxpayers.  And, it isn’t just this current bad trade either.  It is in other “esoteric” markets as it noted in this article.    That is exactly what we said was going to happen for the last three/four years.   It’s a matter of simple math that it must happen.  As financial markets are rigged, the corrupt firms that rig them come to dominate exposure to them.  JP Morgan and other massive firms are now Lehman, Bear, MF Global, Merrill, Wachovia, etc.    And, as the pool of large firms get smaller, the concentration of bad bets becomes more severe.

This crisis points out another fact that isn’t being reported; how leveraged Wall Street is in financial markets and financial assets.  Just like in 2008.   JP Morgan is massively levered to Europe.  What is an American bank backed by American taxpayers, granted special privilege in its existence by our government doing placing bets in Europe?   They should have no legal right to even be operating in Europe.  Zero.  More on that in a future post.

The stress tests Geithner and regulators proudly told us that U.S. banks passed really tells us nothing.   They are a very simpleminded point-in-time analysis.  Geithner really had no idea what was going on inside of JP Morgan or any other firm or how the world is shifting underneath them.  Neither do regulators.  Remember it was just two months ago that JP Morgan arrogantly raised its dividend in front of a Federal Reserve banking stress test announcement.   JP Morgan is holding the bag on so many instruments that their financial position cannot be clearly appreciated.   These issues aren’t even tied to what is supposed to be their primary function of lending to create jobs in our society – something they do little of.  Wait till that core lending business that is their primary function starts tipping again.   As just one example, JP Morgan is ground zero for the predatory housing mess in this country.  In just one slice of its lending business, it has massive home equity lines of credit exposure have yet to hit their ten year grace period of interest-only payments.  Nearly the equivalent of 100% of tier one capital could be consumed by home equity issues.   And, the amount of those loans that are in trouble at this moment is already huge.    The global economy is now turning south again.  All the while Dimon has been siphoning off loss reserve capital to pad JP Morgan’s earnings.   

We really can’t draw any firm conclusions into this most recent crisis but we can most certainly conclude this particular crisis at JP Morgan is far from over.  I’m not sure that anyone has the transparency into what risky bets were made and to what degree those bets have been unwound or if they are still turning against JP Morgan.  Or what financial paper they actually hold.  We really don’t know what exactly is going on partly because banks have become repositories for opaque deception and partly because the gambling instruments they are using to deceive us are opaque and unregulated, also because of deception.  So, we really have no clue who is holding what bag or how big the bag is.  Obviously we now know Jamie Dimon is holding one hell of a big bag in bond and bond derivative markets.  Likely in commodities as well.  Who knows what else.  And, there is most certainly more.  But it most certainly is not just JP Morgan.  It’s all of these big Wall Street firms that are levered to the hilt.

I think it’s fair to now consider there may have been some attempts at deception and even possibly mistruths when Dimon first went into PR damage control involving this mess.   That is obviously why the FBI is now involved, although there most certainly won’t be any dung that lands on Dimon.   Federal Reserve broker-dealer CEOs are protected by the state.  Justice will not be served although some poor bastard in the trenches most certainly could be thrown under the bus.  In the weeks that have passed, we now are gaining a greater public appreciation for the systemic lack of competence across enormous chunks of JP Morgan’s business.  By the way, the chief investment office that made these blunders reported directly to Dimon.  So I think it’s fair to say he is personally responsible for this crisis and we can discount his whining of being a victim of other people’s poor decisions.    The chief investment office, under Dimon’s supervision or lack thereof, was essentially running an unregulated hedge fund making trillions of dollars in gambling bets using society’s money.  All for the self-interested greed and power of Jamie Dimon.   It surely wasn’t for democracy or society.  This is not the actions of a public servant (publicly traded bank and broker-dealer for the Fed)  who is granted special authority to protect society’s capital.   It seems more the actions of a megalomaniac.   The signs of an unstable perception of self were always there.  From the involvement in overturning Glass-Steagall to an insatiable desire for more and more power that led him to buy bank after bank in building his personal empire to his endless chaffing against doing what is in democracy’s interest in favor of serving his own vainglory and need for more.  This is why we don’t allow monopolies or oligopolies in our economy any more than we should allow concentrated power to go unchecked in our government.  Our founders fathers are rolling over in their graves with the likes of predatory Wall Street CEOs running amok over our society.  But, now we live in a society and economic system that rewards aggression, including against its own citizens so this type of behavior is exalted by the state.   Dimon is a capitalist hero in the Washington-Wall Street crowd, although he has never created anything.  He has simply taken more and more.

JP Morgan is clearly loaded up on European bonds and if they have  countless naked derivatives positions on top of those bonds, this could possibly turn into one hell of a massive mess.  We don’t yet know enough to draw any clear cut conclusions but it is conceivable this could be a Lehman type of mess coupled with a LTCM type of mess but only massively larger than both.  And, this is just one firm.  One of the fundamentally disturbing issues behind this most recent JP Morgan crisis that isn’t being reported is the ECB does not have any formal facilities like the Federal Reserve to truly stop a banking crisis.   Not only has JP Morgan made incredibly incompetent decisions, maybe more importantly, there is no backstop in Europe for the investments in its debt and derivatives that Dimon’s personal hedge fund has made bets on.   Without U.S. intervention again, it is conceivable JP Morgan could eventually fail because of this foolishness.  King Jamie, the financial genius, clearly should understand this very simple fact of ECB operations and monetary abilities.  He clearly didn’t and still doesn’t.  Instead he made incredibly foolish decisions that someone blogging in his underwear knew were foolish and never would have made.   One of the smartest bankers in our country re Obama’s comment?  Not even close.  One of the most incompetent, power mad and greedy.  That seems more likely.  It’s only been the endless money printing over the last twenty years that masked the corruption and incompetence that defines Wall Street.  Those days are over.  Over the last handful of years we are starting to see the rot.

Two things we know for certain.  Jamie Dimon has created a Frankenstein and the self-professed illusion of his own brilliance was nothing more than a complete work of fiction.   And, Obama’s rhetoric about the Dodd-Frankenstein bill saving us from this situation is also an illusion based on fiction.  Dodd-Frank would have not stopped this at all.   Jamie and his Wall Street cronies already took care of that - the best legislation money can buy.  

Early in the Obama presidency I wrote that his lack of leadership and lack of fortitude to transform Wall Street would eventually lead to future crises.  And, that could lead to a crisis of confidence in our government where all trust could be completely lost.  We could very well be close to this dynamic manifesting itself as early as this year or in the next few years.  Regardless of what happens in Washington from this day forward or whether Obama wins the 2012 elections, there could quite possibly be a crisis of confidence so large that makes it impossible for either party to govern.   And, it could come at any moment.   Without massive reform, this environment simply cannot be contained.  We most certainly could witness some manifestation of dynamics here in the U.S., similar to what we have seen in Iceland and quite a few European countries.   ie, The government loses its legitimacy to rule and is dissolved.  Just because it has never happened does not mean it cannot.

This all ties in very nicely into our long term theses that this cycle could be coined the end of big and the failure of institutions of the ego or institutions of control.  And, that global finance is dead…. and countless other outcomes we have written about.  It’s coming.   Over the last handful of years I have told quite a few people who work for JP Morgan that they should be prepared financially for the company to unwind, fail or both.   Every single person chuckled at those remarks.  They believed the deceit and lies that JP Morgan was a model bank that missed the 2008 crisis.  A myth created through the endless self-aggrandizing mouthing of Jamie Dimon.   JP Morgan was one of the most exposed banks in this country.  How ironic would it be that the back end of this economic storm were kicked off by the very person who was sure to let everyone else know he didn’t need a bailout in 2008.  That his firm was in great shape because of his brilliant leadership.  A lie based solely on ego and the delusions of his own self-importance..  That his empire of corruption and predation was doing just fine.  Karma is indeed a bitch.   

For the umpteenth time, the Federal Reserve cannot fix our economy.   This crisis was created by politicians.  Monetary policy isn’t going to fix it.   It most certainly could help ameliorate the crisis if used properly within the context of reform but that isn’t happening.   Instead, the Fed is simply reflated the same failed policies that have already collapsed.    That has made the bubble substantially larger.  That reflation is behind this new crisis at JP Morgan.  The Fed’s bailout of systemic incompetence in its broker-dealer network over the last handful of years is the only way JP Morgan could once again make even more bad bets in Europe – endless free money provided by the Federal Reserve for endless JP Morgan gambling.  The Fed simply enabled Dimon’s systemic incompetence that is behind these new flawed bets.   Without all of the free money granted JP Morgan by a corrupt Federal Reserve, this never would have happened.  Dimon and all of Wall Street’s executive teams should have been fired and the banks broken up back in 2008.  And proper reforms instituted immediately including investigations and prosecutions into wrongdoing.  Instead they were rewarded with an unlimited supply of taxpayer funded money by the Federal Reserve and Washington politicians.

Cramer Top Ticks The Market By Stating Facebook IPO Doesn’t Mean A Market Top

I really haven’t mentioned anything about my favorite tout TV lackey since the 2008 collapse.  At that point his credibility went to just about zero.  Cramer has proven himself time and again to be one of the best anecdotal contrary indicators.  In other words, he is presciently wrong at just the right time and consistently so.   His mouth literally becomes unhinged and seemingly he is unable to stop himself.

This is again no exception as the Facebook pigs slides again.

Facebook Shares Plunge

Wanna bet we see this company below $1 a share in the next five years or so?

House Passes $643 Billion Defense Bill

It’s good to see our politicians are diligently serving their masters.  As we have noted before, the total defense bill is most certainly near or above $1 trillion.  The massive bloat propping up the military-industrial complex is absolutely incredible.  The Democrats are no better.  Obama’s health care and financial reform bill are corporate welfare benefiting the medical bureaucracy and the Wall Street just as the bloated defense bill is for thousands of defense-security contractors. 

No money for Social Security, Medicare, energy independence, infrastructure or education but plenty of money for our corporate masters.   No money for democracy.  A public banking and new monetary system would put the brakes on all of this corruption.

Title link here.

Genetically-Modified Corn And Bee Populations

It has been a while since I have posted anything about colony collapse disorder.  This is worth posting.  Poland just banned Monsanto’s genetically-modified corn.   In the fascist corporate state it essentially comprises the entire population of industrial corn grown.   For now.

Title link here.

Update On The Lunacy Behind The Taibbi Story

You know, I remember half a dozen years ago when Wall Street took to smearing the CEO of Overstock.com as a lunatic.  It was common practice to bully and victimize this guy.  I can even remember reading where some in the criminal cabal tried to smear him because he was dealing with some emotional issues and was taking medication.  How anyone found that out or if it was true, who cares.   The point is how can anyone do something like that to another human being?  Even in your darkest moment of the human condition.  How can anyone brutalize and prey upon another person’s vulnerabilities?   That is truly psychotic.  It truly is evil defined.  And, I do mean evil.  Sonofabitches like that are no different than Adolph Hitler and I truly mean that in a purely pathological definition. 

And the capo lawyers who represent this type of behavior?   Talk about the self-rationalizing delusions of a false reality for self-interested greed, power and control.   The self does this only to absolve it of the moral dichotomy that exists between behavior and beliefs.   It is how the self rationalizes immoral behavior and allows the self to turn a blind eye to what is going on around it because it is benefiting from power, greed, money, control, status, vainglory, etc.   This is the behavior of a completely unstable perception of self.   Someone completely disconnected from their humanity and their core spiritual being.

This is simply representative of the absolutely morally-bankrupt culture of Wall Street and private, for-profit control of democracy’s capital.    I have noted before and I will say it again, I believe Wall Street as it is structured is the greatest evil in this world today.   As brutally frank as I can be , I don’t even write half of how they impact the world through the dollar reserve currency or how they use the control of capital to stoke racism, bigotry, hatred, violence, smearing of people who expose them, destroying democracy, etc.    We need to dismantle Wall Street and replace it once and for all with a democratic capital system.  As I have noted many times, I think we are in the early stages of dismantling the beast and replacing it with a totally different monetary and banking system once and for all.

A Bloomberg story and a remark from the CEO of Overstock have come to pass as a result of the Taibbi post.

Matt Taibbi On Accidentally Released Documents Exposing The Completely Systemic Criminogenic Culture Of Wall Street

Title link here.

……….Why do we keep trying to regulate Wall Street?  Private, for-profit banking is a criminal enterprise that has never served democracy.  We will never get the psychopaths and corruption out of a private, for-profit monopoly on capital.  Ditch the regulation and dismantle Wall Street.  It isn’t needed.  We need public banking owned by democracy, completely transparent with a mission of human development and service to democracy, and beyond the manipulation of politicians and private, for-profit interests. 

Bill Moyers & Simon Johnson Discuss The Culture Of Corruption At JP Morgan

I don’t know that much about Simon Johnson other than he used to be a chief economist at the IMF.  And I consider the IMF to be a criminal enterprise used by mostly American but also European interests to loot countries around the world.  That Johnson served there is nothing more than any other situation where countless millions of people serve a corrupt system that is corrupt unbeknownst to them or because out of necessity they need to feed their family or because they delude themselves into believing a false reality because it is convenient to absolve themselves of moral responsibility for what is going on around them.  I must say most forms are certainly the last scenario.  Almost no one is immune from this.  Present company included.

Moyers is really the person steering this conversation in the direction it should go.  This comment is prescient. 

Moyers: Should Jamie Dimon resign? I ask that because as you know and as we’ve discussed, Chase and other huge banks have been using their enormous wealth for years to in effect buy off our politicians and regulators. Chase just had to pay up almost three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone, that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama. It’s also paid out billions of dollars to settle other cases of perjury, forgery, fraud and sale of unregistered securities. And these charges were for actions that took place while Mr. Dimon was the CEO. Should he resign?

We have discussed ad nauseam these cases of corruption at JP Morgan and elsewhere.  As it pertains to Jefferson County and other municipalities, we put up a big post on swaps many years ago where we highlighted how Wall Street use opaque and complex instruments to loot our schools, municipalities, companies, states, etc.   Goldman even issued research that told clients to bet against the success of some of our states.  These firms are filled with predatory, violent psychopaths.  There are literally thousands upon thousands of these interest rate swap agreements that have gone the wrong way (ie, the opposite direction Wall Street told its customers the prevailing interest rate trend was headed.)  and are destroying our society and bilking our public institutions.   They almost always involve financial “consultants” that steer our public institutions in the way of some form of corrupt deal and then are paid a fee on the back end by Wall Street for providing their service to municipalities.  It’s the same dynamic as doctors prescribing medication and then receiving financial compensation from the drug companies.  There are many communities near where I live that are having to exit these interest rate swap agreements at massive expense to taxpayers. 

This recent mess at JP Morgan isn’t some isolated incident.  This is how business is done.  But, in the past, we saw very few of these smarmy deals because most of the time the counterparty holding the bag was a JP Morgan “customer” who was being screwed.   Then when customers oftentimes felt there was corruption, lying, misrepresentation and fraud involved, they filed lawsuits.  And, government officials, mostly in Washington or in state capitals, and the cabal of endlessly corrupt lawyers pressured out of court settlements that were sealed.  This secrecy allowed the looting to continue.   If the truth be told, I suspect thousands, if not tens of thousands of people would be behind bars right now were we to have a transparent, functioning legal system.   Those days of other counterparties getting screwed are over because as we have noted untold numbers of times now it’s Wall Street holding the bag on derivatives.  That is what happened with MF Global and now that is what is happening with JP Morgan.  I suspect there are trillions of dollars in losses that are being absorbed by our public institutions as these bets go bad.  Now these massive bets are concentrated in financial firms as they traded counterparties out of financial markets and are now the only major players remaining.  Now we see who is really corrupt and who is really systemically-incompetent.  It’s JP Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and other primary dealers for the Federal Reserve.   They have been shielded from their fraud and corruption and massive incompetence by a morally-bankrupt Federal Reserve and by Washington politicians.  

Dodd-Frank fixed nothing.  NOTHING.  It is 2500 pages of rigged legislation written by Wall Street.  As we noted the legislation it replaced was two dozen pages.  2500 pages of anything is full of loopholes.  The Volcker Rule is a scam filled with loopholes.  Dimon even remarked that this didn’t violate the Volcker Rule.  But then  Obama tried to intimate Dodd-Frank would have kept this from happening.  More deception.  More appeasement of evil.   

Huge legislative bills are full of loopholes and special interest bribes bought and paid for.  Dodd-Frank is the best legislation Wall Street could buy.  Not only is Wall Street holding the bag as we said they eventually would, but so is Obama, just as we said he would for appeasing evil.

While Resistance Remains Firmly Entrenched In The Drug Monopoly, “Good” Cholesterol Is Being Exposed As A Myth

It’s funny that the dissenting voice is a doctor doing trials into HDL raising drugs for drug companies.  You know, the companies that have sold you 300,000,000,000.00 worth of cholesterol medication. 

To celebrate, why not consider what what your human ancestors did for millions of years - go eat some eggs full of cholesterol.   Your body needs it to survive.  You know, that’s why the body MAKES it.   By the way, maybe some eggs from chickens that are allowed to eat what nature wants them to eat rather than being stuffed full of hormones, antibiotics and industrial goo. 

Title link here.

Does Sugar Make You Stupid?

Well, if it does, it appears that omega-3 plant and animal fat may be the antidote.    Just the opposite of what the medical bureaucracy told us in the last thirty years.

Celebrate.  Go out and have a big juicy grass-fed piece of red meat that has an omega-3 fat profile very similar to that of wild salmon.   Unfortunately, corn-fed beef and corn-fed raised salmon pumped full of antibiotics doesn’t have that same profile. 

The industrial food monopoly is killing us with their highly-processed industrial goo.

By the way, be sure to send your favorite politician a box of candy.  It’s obvious they are addicted to sugar.  How else do you explain their endless stupidity?   This is the same argument for anthropogenic global warming that Algore, a consummate political idiot, wants you to believe.  ie, Correlation equals causation.

Bankster Politics – Obama Can’t Knock The Hustle

When JP Morgan announced the latest financial crisis, and it is a crisis, Obama couldn’t wait to go on TV and publicly support his favorite bankster capo, Jamie Dimon.  

What does Obama, a far worse president than George Bush in my estimation, know about banking to be able to make those statements and do so credibly?  I would say just about zero.  Well, other than the personal education Dimon has given him through his large number of trips to the White House for secret meetings with Obama.  I’m sure political donations have nothing to do with those meetings.  Nor do any discussions about pandering and weak regulation.  I’m sure Dimon was invited because he’s a brilliant banker and they passed the time drinking tea and eating crumpets.  Obama has been given the best education on banking money can buy.  Lobbyist money.  Secret education.  Bankster education.

Obviously no one is perfect but I’m not really sure what kind of person can look into the camera and tell us that JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks and Jamie Dimon is one of the smartest bankers in our nation after the countless crises Dimon has created.  That includes the repeal of Glass Steagall that he most certainly helped his mentor jam through our political system with the help of a few hundred million dollars in lobbyist bribes.  

I tend to look at performance rather than political rhetoric when I want to determine the best CEOs in our banking system.   There are far fewer banks in our country than there used to be but I would guess if we add in credit unions, there are about 15-20,000 banking CEOs in our nation.  Let’s say 15,000 to give Dimon a chance to achieve a higher performance rating.  Out of 15,000 banking CEOs in this country, 14,997 of them never lost $5 billion.  The exceptions being Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and JP Morgan.  Out of those 15,000 only a handful needed a bailout by the Federal Reserve in 2008.  So, from a performance standpoint, Dimon is in the bottom two one hundredths of one percent of CEOs as far as performance.  But, his pay ranks him in the top one one hundredth of one percent of banking CEO compensation. 

Where I come from, which isn’t Harvard where both Obama and Dimon graduated into the world of clubby cronyism, and on Wall Street and Washington where systemic incompetence is rewarded through that cronyism, Dimon wears a dunce cap.  A gold-plated dunce cap.   He has proven himself to be one of the worst CEOs in our banking system.  Maybe one of the worst CEOs in the world.  Just the facts.  Not the rhetoric.

Dimon’s close ties to Obama, whom he knew well when both were based in Chicago, were at moments tested by Obama’s feints into populism, but fellow Chicagoans Daley and Rahm Emanuel, who preceded Daley as chief of staff, made it clear that disagreements between the White House and Dimon were merely rhetorical. How much more influence could Dimon have wanted than having his former lobbyist controlling the president’s schedule?
It was a charade: Dimon pretended to welcome some banking regulation and Obama responded with the weakest of reforms.

Police To Stand Trial For The Murder Of Kelly Thomas

I highlighted this story last year and used it as a basis for a lengthy post on aggression, violence and its associated reward in our society.  I’m about to start a new series of posts on violence in our society and by association violence in our economy.   This series of posts will be from a different angle than many of my other post on violence.

Indian Gold Demand Plunges

I have been writing that this is going to come to pass for years.  It’s finally here.  Gold demand around the globe is cratering and has been for some time.  It is going to get much worse if central bankers quit bailing out the  gold speculators as they have for years.  Just as we have been writing it would for years now.  Delusions of gold being a safe haven are exactly that.  Gold is a massive bubble created by the status quo.  

If you believe Ben Bernanke can save speculators and the status quo, you should own gold. 

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Vermont Bans Natural Gas Fracking

If you haven’t seen the documentary Gasland, you must watch it.  Netflix, HBO, wherever.  This is one of the best documentaries I have ever watched. 

The obfuscation used by corporations around fracking is criminal.  Those who believe there is no environmental impact are idiots or criminals. 

The massive government corruption that is exposed in this documentary is far worse than anything you believe you have even seen in the financial sector. 

Title link here.

JPMorgan’s Trading Loss Is Said to Rise at Least 50%

Since the 2009 bottom I wrote over and over and over that this was going to happen.  That Wall Street was holding the bag.  That their monopoly in capital markets ensured that they would eventually be on the wrong side of massive bad bets.  It’s simply a mathematical fact.  Jamie Dimon should be fired and his salary for the last ten years should be clawed back.  JP Morgan should be busted into at least 30 pieces.  This bullshit that the Federal Reserve made a profit on bailing out Wall Street is nonsense.  It’s the same drivel we heard in the housing bubble.  Wall Street minted billions and then eventually lost it and much more.   This is just another canary in the coal mine. 

As we have noted repeatedly, derivatives and any form of derivative hedging should be banned from regulated financial institutions.  

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Drugs, Terrorism And Medicare Fraud: HSBC's Messy Money Laundering Investigations

Unregulated capital has been a topic we have discussed a lot on here.   One of the consequences of unregulated capital is that politicians and bankers have given criminals an entree into legitimization.   They have given criminals a way to globalize their syndicates and the launder their money into legitimate investments.   So, rather than re-regulate capital and offend their banking masters, what do politicians do?   Simply increase the size of the police state to deal with the very problems the state created in the first place.   The economic and social violence that is so prevalent in our country is a reflection of the violent values of the state.  Our world has truly gone mad courtesy of political idiots.

I can assure you the future is going to be wildly different.  We are most certainly going to see a return to regulated capital flows.  Just as happened after the collapse of 1929.  Yes indeed.  Been there, done that.    Glass-Steagall is not the only financial regulation that has been destroyed.  Thirty years of criminal bankers dismantling financial regulation is at the core of this global economic bust. 

We need a public banking system.  One that is out of reach of political idiots and one that has a mission of serving democracy and human development rather than enriching a very few group of bureaucrats.

Title link here.

Tomorrow Facebook And Its Investment Bankers Loot The Treasury

Look, this has once again reached the level of insanity that a criminal banking system is capable of generating.  When Facebook IPO rumors starting flying about 18 months ago, I wrote that at the estimated $50 billion offer price, it was valued at 30-40 times what the average stock was valued in 1929.  Times.  Not percent. 

Now our criminal friends on Wall Street have successfully pumped the IPO value up to $100 billion.  It’s Facebook for God’s sake.  It’s not the cure for cancer.  The company generates revenues through the massive advertising bubble we have written about over the last six years.  

Once again, in today’s world companies seldom use public capital markets as they were intended.   That is, to raise capital from the public to invest in our nation.  Instead, they use capital markets to loot.  To steal from society and do so legally.   To manipulate public resources for private gain.  The vast majority of this pillage is going to be used to “cash out” Facebook executives and to enrich Wall Street criminals.   They’ll offload this massively overvalued pig to little old grandmothers, pension funds, savings in 401Ks, savings in mutual funds, people who ignorantly believe they know what they are doing, etc. 

Back in late 2010 I wrote that Facebook was riding an unsustainable wave and the Facebook phenomenon was likely peaking.  And, that not only the wave they were riding driven by unsustainable ad spending but also by dated technology that would come crashing down as new personalization technology gained traction.    We are almost certainly very close to that peak as reality sets in everywhere but Facebook, the investor class and Wall Street. 

I think I understand the ad space quite well from a macro perspective.  I spent a lot of my career in propaganda, err..  marketing, have been involved in brand management, etc.  And, I clearly understand the unsustainability of what is happening while people in the ad world are clueless to the shifting sand beneath their feet.  ie, The self-delusions and false reality they most certainly are experiencing about their own brilliance.  Henry Blodgett just penned a piece that is worth reading.  One major advertiser remarks that Facebook is “getting worse, not better” at helping advertisers.  GM, the country’s third largest advertiser, just pulled all of their Facebook ads because it said they don’t work.  That’s not a surprise.   As I wrote half a dozen years ago, the advertising bubble has created an environment where companies are literally throwing cash at the internet without any understanding of what the returns are.  Facebook and Google are benefiting from that dynamic.  Good luck with that in the new future that is unfolding.   New technology, personalization, targeted marketing around that new technology and the implosion of the ad bubble will all play a role in that unsustainability.

This is going to turn out very badly.  The public, investors in Facebook, are being looted.  They are going to be punished mercilessly as this economic crisis continues to unfold.

As Truth Trickles Out JP Morgan Was Arguably Out Of Control And Its Regulators Were Clueless

Control is nothing more than an illusion as Jamie Dimon is learning.  Title link here.

Systemic Incompetence: As One JPMorgan Trader Sold Risky Contracts (Gambling Bets), Another One Bought Them

We’ve been on this monopoly thing since starting this blog.  I’m not going to rehash it, but as I noted seven years ago, there is some substantial argument to be made that the Great Depression was substantially caused by monopoly.  Our country is dominated by monopoly and oligopoly in every single business segment. 

JP Morgan is clearly an unmanageable firm.   As someone who has managed a $40 million business segment, I can assure you, there is absolutely no way anyone can manage fifty, one hundred, two hundred or three hundred thousand people or any business associated with that many employees.  Jamie Dimon isn’t managing anything other than his ego. 

Dimon is clearly motivated by control.  Power.  More.    And, all of it he can possibly get.   Remember, the human mind has only two intents – to seek truth or to control.   Dimon went out and bought bank after bank after bank to build his own personal empire.  He didn’t do that to serve our nation -truth.  He did that for one reason -  his own demons that drive him to control more and more and more.  Once you understand this, you can appreciate that if Dimon thought he could take over the world’s entire banking system, he would most certainly try to do so and he would believe it is within his right and his abilities.   Jamie Dimon doesn’t give a shit about you or democracy.  If he did, he wouldn’t be out to create his own empire.  Make no mistake, Dimon doesn’t run a business.  He rules an empire.  And, he does so ruthlessly.   That includes using the force of the state to maintain his empire.    This is not a person who seeks truth.  Who exhibits leadership qualities.   This is not someone who exhibits the qualities of public service granted over a large segment of our democracy’s capital.  This is a person who seeks control.   Power.  More.  And we know that the only way to maintain any empire or any control is through force and violence.  Monopoly and oligopoly is achieved only through force and violence.  Force and violence are simply manifestations of control.

I can assure anyone without any doubts that were Dimon and JP Morgan have to compete on a level playing field with the same economic rules and the same access to society’s capital, his firm would collapse.   Empire is always incompetent, bumbling and feeble.  Empire, be it JP Morgan or any other economic empire only survives through the force of the state as I noted in my gaming theory post regarding the future of countless corporations in this country. 

Dimon pays himself $23 million a year to run his empire.  That money is your money.  Banking profits are a tax.  Taxes destroy wealth and capital creation.  He takes that money from our citizens and does so through the force of a state-mandated tax that pays his salary.   We can either fix the economy or it will fix itself.  That includes dismantling firms like JP Morgan who use force and control to subvert truth to maintain their existence.  

The United States uses major corporations to project its hegemony around the world financially, militarily and economically.  Massive corporations are creatures of the state and reflect the values of the state – violence and force.   The bigger they are, the harder they fall.  All empire eventually collapses. 

Capitalism is not democracy.  If capitalism or any economic model is not regulated to serve democracy, then our society is doomed to slavery and servitude of our corporate or economic masters.   To the violence of corporate empire and control.  Bush, Clinton, Obama….  they all serve their corporate masters over democracy by allowing this dynamic to continue.  They do so because it serves the values and desires of the state.

JP Morgan is clearly a systemically-incompetent enterprise that only exists because of brute force. 

Title link here.

China Beset By Moral Crisis, Widespread Corruption And Lawlessness Attempts To Kill Dalai Lama?

Of course the communists deny any such effort at orchestrated murder.  I’m sure we can believe an illegitimate bureaucracy that has conservatively killed 50 million of its own citizens and rules through force’s subversion of truth in lieu of an individual who espouses human virtues of kindness, compassion, acceptance and human dignity. 

Corruption and lawlessness here.

Attempted murder of Dalai Lama here.

Capitalists And Other Psychopaths

Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that an English professor wrote this absolutely excellent piece.  I do mean incredibly excellent.   One of the best editorials I have read in a long time.  Liberal arts are often denigrated as useless in the corporate state.  “Why are you wasting your money on a useless liberal arts degree?” is a very common mantra in our society.   But, they are anything but.  Liberal arts may be the most important forms of higher education in a free society.  Some day I will expand upon that. 

This article is a very cogent piece capturing so many variables we have discussed.   It’s quite hilarious how he mocks MBAs for what they are.  Useless Soviet-style administrators.  The author clearly understands the difference between corporate capitalism and what, over the years, I have coined as American-style capitalism; worker capitalism and entrepreneur capitalism.   You’ll seldom see the distinction because most people don’t really understand the incredible impacts created by either-or.  I have a post in the queue for this year where I will expand further upon our prior remarks on this dynamic.   He also clearly articulates that most wealthy are not entrepreneurs at all.  Nor are they of any type of superior intellect as Social Darwinism and trickle down economics would have us believe.  They are corporate bureaucrats who are focused on control over truth; the antithesis of entrepreneurs.  Bureaucrats who seek to stifle entrepreneurs, truth and competition for better ideas and solutions by rigging the economic game.  And, he tops it all off with the revelation of unbridled and unregulated capitalism is essentially the ultimate manifestation of the tyranny of the self. 

The rewards in our society are going to the wrong people.    That is because the wrong people are motivated by power, control, vainglory and greed.  So, they end up being able to destabilize the system in their favor.   The incentive system in our society is completely upside down as we have discussed.  That leads to an inverted wealth pyramid where dimwitted politicians and their corporate masters reap the majority of reward. 

Enjoy a wonderful piece of prose.    

Two Blind Men Fitted With Electronic Retinas

Pretty cool stuff for those with visual impairment.

Title story here.

New implant technology here.

As Neoliberal Global Economics Dies, Foreign Investment In China Continues To Drop

We noted early this year that China’s economy almost certainly started the process of implosion in December of 2011.   The data since is confirming quite substantially.  Foreign investment continues to fall as does China’s corporate earnings. 

The status quo believes foreign investment is necessary for an economy to grow.  What is often cited is that foreign direct investment is a method of increasing jobs in a particular country without increasing taxes.  Or, that it signifies economic openness.  Those are just about the most preposterous notions one can dream up to explain this nonsense.    As I have remarked before, the U.S. does not need foreign capital because we have been told we are bankrupt.  This is a nonsensical myth that has gained traction in the last few decades and now said myth is being used as a wedge to dismantle our government’s services. 

Foreign direct investment is oftentimes not democratic investment.  It is instead labor arbitraging of predatory corporate interests or other equally unsavory dynamics.  And because of that, political extortion, bribery and corruption almost always go hand in hand with foreign direct investment.  We saw this in spades with German companies being systemically involved in corruption cases with foreign officials in the EU.  We see this in the United States in the form of tax subsidies and other economic breaks for foreign firms, thus leaving domestic firms at a disadvantage.  Courtesy of political idiots, of course. 

Every nation on earth has an ability to be generally self-sufficient except when involving geographic or land mass issues possibly involving raw material shortages. 

Title link here.

Iceland’s Quiet Revolution

The changes in Iceland in the last few years have been nothing short of amazing.    Democracy works.  The incredible changes  in Iceland prove peaceful activism are the most effective method of taking down the status quo’s corruption and illegitimacy rather than attempting to play by their rules of violence, divisiveness, fear mongering and threats.  Were Wall Street CEOs living in Iceland, they very well could be watching the events of the world from behind bars.  

JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon Is The Neoliberal Poster Child For Self Delusion And Vainglory

Why  in God’s name is a taxpayer backed bank  allowed to gamble with OUR money?  NOT JP Morgan’s money.  NOT investors money.  DEMOCRACY’S money.  These are high crimes and misdemeanors against our nation.

Jamie Dimon might be the most arrogant sonofabitch on Wall Street.  It was just weeks ago that Dimon went on some 65 page rant on how government is ruining his company by trying to re-regulate it.  This guy is so full of himself he can’t even begin to take responsibility for what is going on at his firm or on Wall Street in general.   Its everyone's fault but poor ole Jamie.   The rest of us are told to suck it up and take responsibility for our lives yet the only people who I see that aren’t taking responsibility are people like Dimon.  Dimon is a poster child of how corporate power has destroyed our country.  Dimon doesn’t create jobs.  He destroys them.   Dimon doesn’t create businesses.  He destroys them.  And, instead of showing an ounce of humility and recognizing that derivatives aren’t hedges, and that his positions were naked bets, this whiney-assed punk, and he is nothing more than a punk in a suit, goes on the PR offensive to explain how he has billions more money and they’ll get it right without more regulation.  Dimon is consumed by the self.  Hey asshole.  You have billions more of our money.  It’s not your money.  You aren’t a king.  JP Morgan is not your empire, although you most certainly believe it is.  This is  our society’s money and you have been granted special privilege and special responsibilities to protect it as a bank.   

There is absolutely nothing wrong with our society and our economy except for one basic issue.  The wrong people are in positions of authority and public service.  There was once a time when people who continuously threatened the tribe were outcast.   In fact, that dynamic is still alive and well in Japan.  The last time I was in Japan, the CEO of a major corporation who threatened the public safety and the well-being of the company and its associates, committed suicide.   In America, the people who threaten the tribe rise to the levels of top authority in corporate power and politics.  That’s because we reward aggression and violence against human beings in our society.  That includes economic violence as practiced by Wall Street.  Narcissists, sociopaths, borderline personality disorders, psychopaths and the like exhibit the qualities that are rewarded in our hyper-violent society.   Nothing is more appreciated than aggression and desire to “get ahead” in corporate America.  Then, when these lunatics gain authority, their arrogant, greedy, power-mad delusions become problems for the rest of us.  

The tribe never would have tolerated this when survival was at stake.  It is only modern society that not only tolerates, but glorifies it.  Well, the tribe is out to fix the issues with granting unstable minds unprecedented power.  While Dimon whines about being a victim rather than taking responsibility for his incompetence, the worm is turning hard against him.  Except unlike in 2008, it’s the mainstream press that is turning.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me. 

I wrote on here ever since the 2008 crash absolutely nothing had changed, and we would again see horrific crises.  Not exactly an epiphany.  But, I also said that Obama’s own arrogance would come back to haunt him as he told society that the problems of Wall Street were fixed.  And, that meant eventually people would lose confidence in him for appeasing evil.  And, that is exactly where we are. 

We need to remove these Wall Street pricks from positions of authority in our nation. 

JP Morgan’s Rats in the Granary.

What Jamie Dimon Didn’t Tell You on Meet the Press

Jamie Dimon Points Fingers.  Nothing has changed on Wall Street.

How exactly did JP Morgan pass a Federal Reserve stress test?

Ronald Reagan’s Legacy: As Trickle Down Economics Forces Slavery Onto Spain, It’s IBEX Equity Index Pierces 2008 Crash Lows

Let me throw a quick post up here.  I didn’t expect to put this up so my reference to the next post in my last post isn’t this post but next week’s post.   Are you confused?  Good.  This graphic of the IBEX is a perfect comparative of monetary policies in the U.S. and Europe.  First, as a baseline, both continents are forcing austerity on their citizens, although the dynamic are much, much different.  Austerity in the U.S. has been a decades long dynamic.

The IBEX in Spain is falling because of one simple dynamic.  The Spanish money supply is being hammered by Germany.  Germany has essentially enslaved Spain under a gold standard and is forcing them into a depression.  They are denying Spanish citizens access to their own capital just as a gold standard does.  The dynamic has absolutely no difference.  You don’t need gold to create the massively corrupt monetary dynamics of being on a gold standard.  But this “hard money” dynamic in Spain is exactly what happened under the gold standard in the U.S. many times in history.  How do you like me now?  In Spain and other European countries money is being used as a tool to subvert economic determinism, democracy, job creation, new business creation, monetization of the economic creativity of Spain’s people.  The crisis in Spain is essentially an illusion created by control.   Did Spain build too many homes?  Sure they did.  Who cares?  That’s not the basis of 25% unemployment.   There is NO SUCH THING as a consumer-led recession or a consumer-red recover as we have discussed ad nauseam.  By the way, Spain built too many homes because of political bureaucrats who guided their economy in that direction because of Soviet-style political meddling in the economy.   Just like in the U.S.   While excessive home production, a consumption dynamic that is not the source of Spain’s economic disaster, is an issue, outsourcing of their economic sovereignty and economic determinism is.   Corruption is.   The European Union at its core is a tool of corruption and control created by elites, corporations and politicians.  It’s trickle down economic policy of unelected political toads. 

Contrarily, even though the U.S. hasn’t outsourced its monetary sovereignty as Spain has, it has completely outsourced its economic sovereignty and economic determinism.  Monetary and fiscal stimulus created in the U.S. is going directly to major banks, corporations and the pockets of the investor class.  Trickle down economics.  For those who think corporations create jobs, get a clue.  As we have noted before, people create jobs.  Corporations ultimately kill job creation and economic dynamism.   That is why stimulus is having no sustainable impact in our society.  That is why Obama’s absolutely ridiculous calls for multinational American corporations to hire American workers is a joke.  Large corporations haven’t hired a net new American worker in 40 years and that isn’t going to happen because Obama dreams of it.

Instead of disseminating U.S. stimulus for productive use as banks are supposed to do, banks are instead using it to speculate in financial markets for their own self-interest and that of the investor class and enabling more of Ponzi economics that was so popular before the 2008 crash.   That’s what happens when you bail out a failed economic system without reforms.  More failed economics.  (We need a public banking system whose goal is to serve democracy, democratic economics and human development.  So does Spain, Greece, etc.)  

This dynamic is one of many leading to forced austerity in the U.S.   Wall Street and corporations have slammed the brakes on the money supply.  Forget the nonsense you see in monetary aggregates.  People who cite those as skyrocketing have no idea what they are talking about or why they are skyrocketing.   As I have noted before, the U.S. economy is choking on its own vomit due to lack of money.  That lack of money creates lack of capital creation and eventual economic collapse.  Of course, we could surmise all of this before Bernanke started with the stimulus because, as we noted numerous times before the collapse, there is no demand for capital in this country.  Wall Street criminals are substantially responsible for this.  Not wholly.  There are many dynamics driving this.  All of the dynamics were enabled or created by politicians.    

The value of equities and financial assets in the U.S. are completely without reality.   We are flirting with new equity highs at massive valuations while Spain is flirting with new lows.  The U.S. economy most certainly is not in better shape than Spain.   Neither equity market would be rising with healthy economic policies.  There is a finite amount of money available in any economy and that would not be going into speculation were either country in a recovery. 

The difference between Spain and U.S. financial assets is the endless pumping up of said assets to save the investor class and trickle down economics in the U.S.   That may not be the intent of many politicians who are so dimwitted they don’t understand what they created or how to fix it but regardless politicians and the Federal Reserve are most certainly supporting existing policies they created.  Those policies are meant to reward the investor class and trickle down economics.   That is as it should be.  Who butters the bread of a for-profit government?  The investor class.  The Ponzi class. 

The issue with creating money for nothing in order to inflate assets is that there is no underlying sustainable economics or wealth creation to support it.  So, as we have noted numerous times, the Federal Reserve is now caught in a loop of needing to continually print in order to sustain artificially valued assets.  To feed the corrupt beast to save the investor class, corporatism and Frankenfinance.    The minute they quit, the system lacks fundamental demand because the economy is completely broken.  The system starts to unwind again and assets start their return to fair value, which on here has been and remains at 200-450 on the S&P.    This policy clearly isn’t the answer.

Printing money, as I have advocated since late 2008, can only have a lasting and sustainable impact if it is used to create capital.   Gold money advocates most certainly understand this about money created under our current structure.  But, what they don’t understand is printing money under a reformed monetary structure can and will create more capital and prosperity than a gold standard could ever dream of creating.   Gold money has no primacy as capital unless you are a neofeudal lord, robber baron or tyrant.  All gold does is create primacy for those who control the gold.  Not the primacy of self-determined economics and community.  As noted in three of the last four Labor Day posts, the only true source of capital is our citizens and our children.  Nothing could better define the lack of demand for capital in the U.S. than the lack of demand for the economic services of our citizens.   The true source of capital is not a new headquarters building for Goldman Sachs to launch predatory finance initiatives or a new spying headquarters for the NSA or a new Predator drone to murder people or endless money created by Wall Street criminals used to fund the political bubble in Washington.  Gold artificially limits our democracy access to their rights of capital and enslaves those who are denied it.  That being most people under the repression of gold.  

The quantity of money is important as a means to an end.  It is not the end.  And, there are most certainly distinctions that should be made in the overall quantity of money.  Money for consumption, mergers & acquisitions, investment banking, financial speculation, private equity and other Wall Street crimes against humanity have a substantially different impact than money created for capital investment.   The former has the effect of destroying both capital and money as we most certainly have witnessed for decades in our great nation and the great nations of Spain, Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy.   In some great bout of irony, the Federal Reserve actually understood this  eighty years ago but with now armed with the new economic mythology of the quantity of money and it has been forgotten.  How much has humanity forgotten from our past in favor of new myths, voodoo, trickle down economics and unsubstantiated beliefs?  How many lessons will be taught with the failure of these beliefs?

Inflate, slowdown, inflate, slowdown, inflate, slowdown.  Each time we have done this for the last thirty-odd years yields less and less results.  That is because each downturn  takes more of the economy down with it.  Reason being, for countless reasons of corruption and economic voodoo that I’m not going to get into here, we never produce capital to work our way out of those slowdowns.  We just produce more money.  In fact, that’s just about all we produce anymore.  Well, and war and politicians, economists and MBAs who serve the corporate state.  Friedman and the nonsensical interpretation by economists about his quantity of money nonsense has been used to bubble up our economy for thirty years.  So we never get a recovery in large segments of the economy that fail in each of these slowdowns.   Each printing exercise we call a recovery simply yields more money rather than more capital needed for recovery.  That leads to less and less participants in each recovery.  That leads to a greater and greater concentration of wealth in those who control the money.  

I’ve remarked numerous times on here that U.S. economic activity peaked around 1980 give or take a few years.  That was about the time Friedman became an economic advisor to Ronald Reagan and we started to see government policies based on monetarism.  I’ve also noted that we could actually see some asset prices return to price levels of that time.   I don’t believe that is going to happen but it really doesn’t matter what anyone believes.  It only matters what is going to happen.  

In other words, most Americans are essentially on a gold standard today and have been for decades.  Trickle down economics has the exact same impact on our economy as a gold standard does.  And, just like in 1929 and the endless examples of corruption surrounding gold money, those who are benefiting economically are those who control the gold.   Trickle down economics is Social Darwinism defined.  Rich people are somehow more qualified because they are rich.  Although most rich people actually became rich off of the ideas, creations and work of other people.  It’s just like 1929 in that regard.  A time when the U.S. was on the gold money standard.   And, it’s just like the English Empire in 1776.

If you want to see what the English Empire looked like in 1776, look at the U.S. today.  Systemic poverty, class economics, an investor class of elites investing in  massive state-backed corporations (trading companies, land title companies and other forms of pillage), said corporations using slave labor in “emerging markets” to loot global resources, and all of this backed by the force of the British navy and a brutally fascist government run by corporations, elites and self-granted authority of political whores.  Who was the major beneficiary in England?  Why of course, trickle down economics - the investor class.   The poor bastards not born into birthright title in England and “emerging markets” were employed as coolies serving their elite masters.  Just like trickle down economics today.  Ronald Reagan’s economic team was a disgrace.  Reagan’s true legacy is that you are now the coolie.  Reagan took trickle down economics mainstream and gave cover to elites, corporations and political toads  around the world to employ its practices.     

Monetarists are fucking up the system at an ever increasing rate with this ex post facto analysis of what went wrong in the Great Depression that is then used to enable elitist, corporate and political corruption in this country.    We have been operating under this nonsensical dogmatic position since Friedman won his Nobel Prize for voodoo economics and became an advisor to Ronald Reagan.   I’ve mocked both of these men as doofuses numerous times on here.   A far cry from their position of royalty within the looting class. 

There are some accurate observations that Friedman made in his analysis of the Great Depression but if the only tool you have is a hammer(money), every problem looks like a nail. (The quantity of money.)   The Federal Reserve thinks the answer to our economic crisis is more money without any distinctions.   Predatory private equity, corrupt Wall Street speculation and treasonous investment banking are granted a higher rung on the Social Darwinian trickle down ladder of economic corruption than is providing food, health care, shelter, economic determinism and education for our citizens.   That’s because private, for-profit banking and private capital in capitalism controls the gold.  Those who have the gold always make the rules.  Democracy needs to own the gold - a public banking system out of the control of political dunces and their corporate masters. 

We most certainly aren’t going back to any prior example of how the world operated.  So, what are the monetary and economic answers to get us out of this mess?    Something for you to think about.    The answers are really profoundly simple yet radically-transformative.  But, as with everything else, no one with a microphone is talking about them.  It’s all about control.  It’s all about getting the American economy back on track using tried and true economic voodoo taught in our most hallowed universities.  Universities that teach monetarism, trickle down economics, Soviet-style bureaucratic efficiency and the like.  Who then  graduate more students armed with beliefs that support the status quo. 

We will eventually see the S&P  join the IBEX in its downward draft as Harvard & Yale taught Nobel Prize-winning monetarism and economics in the U.S. eventually fails.