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Quantitative Easing 101

Posted by Dr. Keith C. Westbrook Ph.D. on March 21, 2012 at 1:30pm

Devaluing Our Currency: why you are paying $4.00 for a gallon of gas and $5.00 for a lb. of hamburger!

In trying to explain what the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke have been doing to our money I realized that 75% of the citizens of this Republic are uninformed to what Quantitative Easing is, well lets first look at the origins of the words they use to describe their actions. Quantitative: meaning the measuring of an amount, in this case the amount is money. Easing:Â to move, shift, or be moved or be shifted with great care or in this case to move money into the market with a specific goal.

The goal of this easing or shifting of a measured amount of dollars into the currency pool is to expand economic growth or in the case of our latest "financial crisis" to purchase the toxic Mortgage Backed Securities. The reasons for the toxic assets is a discussion for a later date but in 2008 when the market imploded because of the over-estimated values of these pieces of paper the banks that held them and the investors who owned them realized they were worthless because their collective value was based on the promise of the payer paying his debt. So the Federal Reserve in conjunction with the Treasury Dept. came up with a plan to rescue the economy by purchasing all of these worthless pieces of paper but there was one very significant problem with their plan they had to print the money to buy the assets.

Quantitative Easing:

Now why is this a problem?

Quantitative Easing involves the creation of a significant amount of new base money by a central bank for the buying of assets that it usually does not buy. Usually, a central bank will conduct open market operations by buying short-term government bonds or foreign currency. However, during a financial crisis, the central bank may buy other types of financial assets as well. The central bank may buy long-term government bonds, company bonds, asset backed securities, stocks, or even extend commercial loans. The intent is to stimulate the economy by increasing liquidity and promoting bank lending, even when interest rates cannot be pushed any lower.

Quantitative easing increases reserves in the banking system (i.e. deposits of commercial banks at the central bank), giving depository institutions the ability to make new loans. Quantitative easing is usually used when lowering the discount rate is no longer effective because interest rates are already close to or at zero. In such a case, normal monetary policy cannot further lower interest rates, and the economy is in a liquidity trap.

Asset based Currency:

For many years before most of us were born our dollars had a value, they were guaranteed to be worth something because they were backed (pegged) by a "hard asset" first silver and then gold. The US adopted a silver standard based on the Spanish milled dollar in 1785. This was codified in the 1792 Mint and Coinage Act, and by the Federal Government's use of the "Bank of the United States" to hold its reserves, as well as establishing a fixed ratio of gold to the US dollar. This was, in effect, a derivative silver standard, since the bank was not required to keep silver to back all of its currency.This began a long series of attempts for America to create a bi-metallic standard for the US Dollar, which would continue until the 1920s. Gold and silver coins were legal tender, including the Spanish real, a silver coin struck in the Western Hemisphere. Because of the huge debt taken on by the US Federal Government to finance the Revolutionary War, silver coins struck by the government left circulation, and in 1806 President Jefferson suspended the minting of silver coins.The US Treasury was put on a strict hard-money standard, doing business only in gold or silver coin as part of the Independent Treasury Act of 1848, which legally separated the accounts of the Federal Government from the banking system. However the fixed rate of gold to silver overvalued silver in relation to the demand for gold to trade or borrow from England. The drain of gold in favor of silver led to the search for gold, including the California Gold Rush of 1849. Following Gresham's law, silver poured into the US, which traded with other silver nations, and gold moved out. In 1853, the US reduced the silver weight of coins, to keep them in circulation, and in 1857 removed legal tender status from foreign coinage.In 1857 the final crisis of the free banking era of international finance began, as American banks suspended payment in silver, rippling through the very young international financial system of central banks. In 1861 the US government suspended payment in gold and silver, effectively ending the attempts to form a silver standard basis for the dollar.Towards the end of the 19th century, some of the remaining silver standard countries began to peg their silver coin units to the gold standards of the United Kingdom or the USA. For 86 years after this we used silver certificates as the backing asset for our legal tender. Silver Certificates are a type of representative money printed from 1878 to 1964 in the United States as part of its circulation of paper currency. They were produced in response to silver agitation by citizens who were angered by the Fourth Coinage Act, which had effectively placed the United States on a gold standard. The certificates were initially redeemable in the same face value of silver dollar coins, and later in raw silver bullion. Since 1968 they have been redeemable only in Federal Reserve Notes and are thus obsolete, but are still valid legal tender.

The whole time during this period and up until August 15, 1971 we used the "gold standard" to set the value of the dollar to other world currencies.

The gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. There are distinct kinds of gold standard. First, the gold specie standard is a system in which the monetary unit is associated with circulating gold coins, or with the unit of value defined in terms of one particular circulating gold coin in conjunction with subsidiary coinage made from a lesser valuable metal.

Gold certificates were used as paper currency in the United States from 1882 to 1933. These certificates were freely convertible into gold coins.

No country currently uses the gold standard as the basis of their monetary system, although several hold substantial gold reserves.

What makes this significant is all countries that used the gold standard were limited to the amount of money they could print to the amount of gold they owned. It limited what the Federal Reserve Bank could do in controlling the national economy and had been falsely blamed for several economic downturns and the "Great Depression", "in my opinion and research falsely".

So in 1971 we started basing the value of our money on the Gross Domestic Product of our country.

Gross domestic product:

(GDP) refers to the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period. It determines the circulation of dollars and helps project the government revenue (taxes) that will be available each year to run the country. But it also lets the federal reserve monitor how money is being used to buy those goods and services and allows them to step in when the reserve liquidity tightens. Without getting too technical reserves are just that like the extra players on sports teams or the extra products you store at home when they run low or run out they need to be refilled, if a player gets hurt while playing another player needs to replace them. Same with the dollars if a bank or lending institution runs low on money part of the federal reserves job is to replace it by sending them dollars. So in 2008 when all of the banks started asking the Federal Reserve for extra dollars to pay for the bad debts they bought, the only way they could do this was to print it.

And there lies part of the reason you are now paying between 30%-100%Â more for everything in the past 3 years, the dollars being used to buy these assets are not related to the value of the goods and services they represent. The GDP has been stagnant with no real significant growth since 2008 with an annual average of 13 Trillion dollars.

usgs_line.php?title=US%20Real%20GDP%20Chart&year=2008_2014&sname=US&units=k&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&col=c&spending0=13100_12773.9_12615_12982_13351_13727

But the amount of money printed and circulated, saved and invested worldwide has grown and it is known as the "monetary supply" of the United States.

The Monetary Supply:

In 2008 the monetary supply which is all the money in our system in every bank, pocket, business etc. where ever there is a dollar it is part of the monetary supply was 8.448 trillion dollars or 64.9% of the GDP. That number includes the original TARP monies of 848 billion injected in the market that year.

The current monetary supply as of March 13, 2012 is 9.578 trillion or 73.6% of GDP. And what is worse is their latest round of cash infusion has not only deflated the value of yours and my dollars but raised the costs of everything we buy by not allowing the exchanges to reset themselves to reflect the actual economic climate. Since the start of Quantitative Easing by the Federal Reserve, everything has almost doubled in cost because of the doubling effect of both market and monetary policy manipulation.

So the Federal Reserve has been printing more dollars but the engine to make those dollars worth more is stalled so in car speak the Fed has flooded the engine. They have not only placed more dollars into the economy making the dollars that were already there worth less but by purchasing stocks, bonds and other hard assets and commodities they have raised the cost of everything related to their purchases. Yes you know about QE1 which bought 1.25 trillion dollars of debt, QE2 which purchased 900 billion dollars of long term Treasury notes. But since the end of QE2, QE3 where the Fed has been quietly injecting more money into the stock market to "prop it up" there latest balance sheet from March, 15, 2012 shows the new assets on their books.

And in the 3 plus years of this fiscal policy the effects are hurting everyone.

Gold in 12/2008 = $850.00 per once / 03/20/2012 $1640.00 per ounce

Oil in 12/2008 = $38.00 per barrel / 03/20/2012 %107.00 per barrel

Gas in 12/2008 = $1.05 per gallon futures exchange and $1.72 at the pump nationally / 03/20/2012 $ 3.09 per gallon on the futures exchange $3.89 a gallon at the pump.

Milk in 12/2008 = $2.79 per gallon / 03/20/2012 $3.89 per gallon.

Beef in 12/2008 = $ 2.89 per lb. 80/20 ground chuck / 03/20/2012 $4.59 per lb.

Not all of the current financial hardship's we face are due to Quantitative Easing but it has not been by any means the panacea it was touted to be for the economy and the other shoe is yet to drop. The Federal Reserve currently holds over 2.7 trillion dollars in debt obligations from lenders and banks. That is more than the GDP of 90% of the countries on this planet. When you falsely base the value of anything and then try to sell it, it will only be worth what the buyer is willing to pay for it. Now just as I am writing this the Fed just released their 2011 earnings stating they made 77 billion dollars but the data is not yet up on their website. We will wait to analyze the statements.

But their fiscal policy has us on the road that has been well traveled.

This has happened before:

After the end of WW1 the German Republic owed reparations to half of Europe for damages and penalties for their invasions of France, Poland and most of the Western European continent. You see Germany had gone off the gold standard in 1914, and could not effectively return to it as Germany had lost much of its remaining gold reserves in reparations. The German central bank issued un-backed marks virtually without limit to buy foreign currency for further reparations and to support workers during the Occupation of the Ruhr finally leading to hyperinflation in the 1920s.

The growing postwar economic crisis was a result of lost pre-war industrial exports, the loss of supplies in raw materials and foodstuffs from Alsace-Lorraine, Polish districts and the colonies, along with worsening debt balances, but above all, the result of an exorbitant issue of promissory notes raising money to pay for the war. Military-industrial activity had almost ceased, although controlled demobilization kept unemployment at around one million. The fact that the Allies continued to blockade Germany until after the Treaty of Versailles did not help matters, either. The allies permitted only low import levels of goods that most Germans could not afford. In its 14 years, the Weimar Republic was faced with numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremists on the left and the right and their paramilitaries, and hostility from the victors of World War I, who tried twice to restructure Germany's reparations payments through the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. However, it overcame many of the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles(Germany eventually repaid a reduced amount of the reparations required of the treaty with the last payment being made on 3 October 2010).

The 1920s German inflation started when Germany had no goods to trade. The government printed money to deal with the crisis; this meant payments within Germany were made with worthless paper money, and helped formerly great industrialists to pay back their own loans. This also led to pay raises for workers and for businessmen who wanted to profit from it. Circulation of money rocketed, and soon banknotes were being overprinted to a thousand times their nominal value and every town produced its own promissory notes.

The value of the Papiermark had declined from 4.2 per U.S. dollar at the outbreak of World War I to 1 million per dollar by August 1923. This led to further criticism of the Republic. On 15 November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced at the rate of 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) Papiermark for one Rentenmark, an action known as a monetary reset.

In Summary:

We have not yet had to go through that here in this country but it is not far off, under the current economic polices we have been down-graded for the first time in our history and we are facing the possibility that the dollar will stop being used as the "world currency" for trading on the exchanges. One of the benefits of being one of the last countries to come off the gold standard was that the U.S. dollar by default became the preferred currency when commodities such as gold, oil, silver, corn, wheat etc. are traded or sold their value is set in U.S. dollars. If you think it is bad now, what if the world stopped taking our money or stopped lending to us or devaluing our dollar to the levels that we devalued Germany's less than 100 years ago?

The methodology of Quantitative Easing or printing more money when you need it does not fix more than it delays the inevitable and increases the net effect when you add in the additional inflationary factors that it creates by the lessening of the current value of the purchasing power of our dollars. The inflationary costs by making the dollars in your pocket worth less because there are more of them with nothing to make them worth more and the fact that those extra dollars are not purchasing anything but time to delay what should have occurred already and allowed to reform based on real economic metrics.Â

"Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" Lord Campbell

We have to take responsibility for our elected officials fiscal malfeasance and dangerous policymaking if we are to recover from what has already been implemented. We must retract the dollar pool, require a full accounting of the Federal Reserve and then make them answerable to Congress. We must demand that laws and policies that have made for a devalued dollar be immediately rescinded and evaluation of a return to a base standard of currency backing be considered. We must demand a balanced budget both in our own homes and in Washington. We must allow market mechanics to dictate the survival of companies, not the political maneuverings of one party to use Federal dollars to purchase union votes. Â

There is only one thing that is too big to fail and it is this last bastion of freedom on Earth and her name is The United States of America!

But She is disappearing fast!

Dr. Keith C. Westbrook Ph.D.

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Rajjpuut's Folly: Forget 9/11, Pearl Harbor, 1929: Danger Most Dire Coming Next

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on September 17, 2011 at 12:00pm


          “Our Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Obama have united on policies that saw the printing of new dollars to the tune of 15.1 X our 2008 circulating currency; and then later doubled that amount by running the money printing presses non-stop. In an ordinary country operating by ordinary rules, America would be beset by hyper-inflation and the 2011 dollar would be worth about 3.2 pennies-worth of the 2008 dollar. We’ve been saved by the fact that the American dollar is the world’s reserve currency . . . that lucky saving situation will soon change . . . the day of reckoning is upon us.”

 

“. . . the American Dollar will be yesterday’s news and those holding dollars and any American paper instruments (like bonds) will be up a certain infamous creek without locomotion. The price of everything in dollars would then jump spectacularly. Gas might reach $16 or $17 per gallon. Eggs? Maybe about the same.  Overnight the standard of living of all Americans would drop to about the 1930’s level as the cost of necessities would become prohibitive and luxuries would be . . . well, rare luxuries again.”
 
American Dollar to Go
The Way of the Dinosaurs?
 
                The seedy little bearded men with wild-eyes carrying signs reading “The End is Near” have stepped out of the magazine cartoons and will soon surround us.  The apocalyptic event foreseen long ago, conceived in progressivism and dedicated to the socialist dream is now approaching her “due date.”   The gold dollar is long dead, long-live the Obama B.S. paper dollar worth 1/3 of a cent in 1913 money.  Hail the new AmeriKa!**
For all but 27 of the last 98 years, progressive politicians have owned the Oval Office. For 93 of those years they have controlled at least one and usually both chambers of Congress (the House and Senate). America in the next fifteen months, probably sooner, will receive an ugly slap across the face; forced to pay for those sad voting truths as our Keynesian chickens get swallowed alive by the voracious hawks of economic reality. Are we talking about the end of the American Way of Life? Short of a miraculous and virtually instantaneous return to original principles and virtues (meaning fiscal-conservativism; Constitutional-conservativism; simple common sense; and drastically reduced government size and scope and interference), that is precisely what we mean: the end of America and the beginning of AmeriKa, the decadent banana-republic socialist state we’ll all come to know and despise. Let’s return very briefly to the beginning of our woes . . . .
With the assassination of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the presidency. There was no Oval Office then; his successor William Howard Taft was the first to occupy that room. TR was a believer in progressivism (the doctrine that we must progress beyond and abandon the “outdated and ill-conceived U.S. Constitution” if we are to make progress toward our earthly Utopia). What does that mean in real life, your life? What’s progressivism about? Roosevelt did some powerful things that certainly in retrospect seem like they well needed doing. He began the National Park system; he created the Panama Canal; he dramatically expanded and modernized the nation’s armed forces especially the Navy which he sent out upon an ostentatious world tour to flex our muscle while sailing “quietly but carrying a big stick.”
TR is now one of the four faces on Mt. Rushmore and regarded as one of our greatest presidents. So what’s so bad about progressivism? It wasn’t particularly what he did, but more HOW he did it. Teddy commandeered part of a larger country then known as Colombia by creating a revolution there and next removed part of Colombia. He then named the resulting isthmus-nation “Panama” and began dredging a canal there which was owned by the United States. His expansions of the military and creation of the national park system were largely a product of TR’s powerful personality side-stepping and by-passing Congress and the Constitution. It was a benevolent progressivism for the most part, but progressivism nonetheless.
Our first truly progressive and ugly-progressive President was Woodrow Wilson and since the 1913 creation of the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve Banking System and Wilson’s dramatic expansion of government reach and largesse we’ve largely been a progressive nation ever since. The wages of Wilson’s sins added to those of ultra-progressives Hoover, FDR, Johnson, Carter, and Obama(36 years so-far and Obama’s seeking re-election); and several semi-progressive presidents; and a virtual unending list of progressive Congresses and we’ve now as a predictable result piled up a national debt of $15 TRillion. We’ve played fast and loose with UNfunded liabilities of $112+ TRillion (Social Security, Medicare, and the federal side of Medicaid – not to mention all the welfare state which isn’t even included in that figure) for a total of ($127+ TRillion) 2.2 X the entire planet’s gross domestic product. 
Since March, 2009, our Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Obama have united on policies that saw the printing of new dollars to the tune of 15.1 X our 2008 circulating currency; and then later doubled that amount by running the money printing presses non-stop. In an ordinary country operating by ordinary rules, America would be beset by hyper-inflation and the 2011 dollar would be worth about 3.2 pennies-worth of the 2008 dollar causing immense consternation at the grocery store, gas pump . . . everywhere. We’ve been saved by the grace that the American dollar is the world’s reserve currency . . . a lucky saving situation that will soon sadly change . . . the day of reckoning is upon us.
Understand this: we’re NOT talking about the 2007-to-present financial crisis, but referring to a situation that’s related to it, but infinitely worse. We’re talking about 98 years worth of Keynesian chickens come home to roost. We’re talking about the Bernanke-Obama inflationary epoch coming home to roost; we’re talking about the collapse of the American dollar. In case you don’t understand the word “Keynesian,” let’s quickly clear that up: the Brit John Maynard Keynes’ back in the teens and 1920’s came up with theories that totally defied the collected economic wisdom of the centuries and specifically Adam Smith’s massive tome The Wealth of Nations. In line with the Fabian Society of England (the progressive British fathers of American Progressivism) Keynes said that government spending was an unmitigated GOOD that could create prosperity at will.  Government spending was the key to Utopia. Every semi-totalitarian state gained carte blanche from Keynes to spend whatever it took to make the powers that be happy.  Every democracy gave progressives the power to promise the people anything and everything to keep their sick policies; and sick leaders in office perpetually.  Even though Keynes later in his life recanted and admitted that Smith was correct and his own theories dead wrong, most governments around the world and here in the United States have been enveloped in a binge of government spending ever since.
Around 1949 those policies cost England, Keynes’ homeland, its ownership of the world’s reserve currency the British Pound Sterling after  it had held that lofty position for over two hundred years . . . since then England has been shrouded in one financial disaster after another . . . after being THE global military super-power pretty much since 1588 and owning the most trusted money on the planet for roughly 2 ¼ centuries. A far worse fate awaits the United States barring an extraordinary miracle because America under Bernanke and especially under Obama has abused the laws of economics far worse than the Brits ever did. What precisely are we talking about?
The nation is now past the point where a long predictable “economic rebalancing” is overdue. Recently our nation’s credit ranking was dropped for the first time in our history. The point where that should have happened was actually reached in 1973 when Richard Nixon let the dollar “float” against gold and against other countries’ money and refused to honor our country’s fiduciary promises to people who bought American Treasury bonds. Things have gotten much, much worse for foreign-holders of American currency since 1973 and much, much, much, much, much worse for American holders of dollars ever since. 
Here’s one very quick example of why this happened. Besides all the foolish government spending of borrowed money (we were the world’s greatest creditor nation two generations ago and are now the world’s largest DEBTOR), the government also stepped into the free markets and told banks and businesses how they must run their operations. Progressive Jimmy Carter and his progressive Congress in 1977 passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA ’77) which for the first time required (FORCED) mortgage lenders to knowingly make bad loans to unqualified home loan applicants. Since that time the rate of suspect loans (with 3% down payment or less) has risen from 0.24% in 1977 to 34.25% of all mortgages in 2007 when our financial crisis (the sub-prime loan crisis) began. 
That amounted to a 1,425% multiplication of the rate of suspect loans. Worse, instead of giving 3%-down loans to ex-Army officers enrolled in college under the GI Bill (as they were back in 1975), under the 4th Bill Clinton expansion of CRA ’77 (his 1998 “steroid version” expansion) 0%-down loans were being granted to people without jobs; without good credit; whose only “income” was food stamps; and even to illegal aliens. Many of these people were put into $400,000 homes on the belief that home prices could only rise and they could later sell out and make a profit: a monstrously stupid progressive spread-the-wealth scheme. This was all pure Keynesian prosperity according to the progressive manifesto. The result is history, sad, sad history. Today our woes are so bad that even if all Americans were taxed 100% of our earnings we could NOT repay the national debt ($15 TRillion and growing). As far as the nation’s UNfunded liabilities ($112 TRillion+ and growing) and the welfare state (who knows what the cost of the welfare state is since under Obama just SNAP -- the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program commonly called “food stamps” --recipients have reached well over 40 million souls), so your guess on the full size of all these government spending and government interference boondoggles is every bit as good as my guess might be . . . .
The bottom line? Expect (unless miracles occur) the world to change back to the gold standard; or possibly a combination gold standard and a shift to gold-back currencies like the Swiss Franc or the Kruggerand; or most likely a digital-based gold standard for conducting the world’s international trade. That is, the American Dollar will be yesterday’s news and those holding dollars and any American paper instruments (like bonds) will be up a certain infamous creek without locomotion. The price of everything in dollars would then jump spectacularly. Gas might reach $15 or $16 or even $20 per gallon; eggs, maybe about the same. Overnight the standard of living of all Americans would drop to about the 1930’s level as the cost of necessities would become prohibitive and luxuries would be . . . well, rare luxuries again . . . You know those problems with pensions some people have had recently . . . those problems will soon seem like a pimple under Miss America’s evening gown: Bad day at Black Rock.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
**            What can you do; what SHOULD you do to avoid AmeriKa becoming your own new lifestyle? The question is TOO BROAD and encompasses your safety (expect food riots in big cities) and perhaps even your nationality . . . wealthy Americans will exit in droves taking their job-creation abilities with them probably mostly to Canada and Australia and the U.K. Here’s the minimum you should consider: if you can afford it, GOLD would be a great idea.  Gold could see $12,000-$15,000 an ounce soon.  But every thinking American ought now to invest in “junk silver.” Either the 40% (1965-1970) or 90% (1964 and earlier) silver coins will do nicely. Silver has risen faster than gold this last decade and has, according to experts still a greater upside than gold. Silver is also much cheaper and far for convenient for every-day transactions. Won’t it be nice to be able to pay for a decent meal with a 40% silver quarter or a 90% silver dime rather than huge amounts of paper currency . . . however, Gresham’s Law (“Bad money drives good money out of circulation.”) would remind you that prudently you should spend your paper before you use any silver at all. The government would smarten up eventually and forbid flight from the country . . . with gold, palladium, platinum or silver or even numismatic coins . . . and even seek to “inspect” people’s safe deposit boxes as a Brave New World ushers in . . .  by the way while this reality is galloping toward us, MSNBC's Chris Mathews on his Hardball show (which only throws marshmallow questions to progressive politicians) is accusing the TEA Party of turning the Senate and House into zombies by "body-snatching."  So the only sane ideas in politics are being likened to horror flicks . . .  my, my . . . .
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Hypocritical Bernanke and FED attack German Bank

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on May 9, 2011 at 11:08am


 

Greenspan, Bernanke
Exacerbate Meltdown Problems
 
 
The leaders of the United States Federal Reserve banking system have trotted out the enormous chutzpah required to actually sue the leading German bank for doing a tiny part of what our Federal Reserve allowed and even encouraged here in this country. Putting the matter into the simplest terms, the Fed would like Deutsche Bank to repay a few Billion dollars because they claim that the FED lost money when DB didn’t pay enough attention to whether people receiving home loans in Germany actually had jobs or not.
 We say “chutzpah” (what the British call “cheek”) in describing our Fed Banking because meanwhile, here in the United States the Fed completely ignored for over thirty years far worse banking practices which nearly brought about the complete collapse of the American financial system and that today threatens to give the country stagflation and eventually run-away inflation.  Fed Chief Alan “Don’t-you-dare-tie-me-to-the-meltdown” Greenspan even went so far as to lead the cheerleading for the tricky straw that broke the camel’s back: unregulated derivative investment. To be specific, the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke has for years given a wink and a nod to and ignored the impact of . . . .
A)   The Jimmy Carter 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA ’77) and five expansions of it (four by Clinton; one by Bush, Sr.) between 1992 and 1998 that created the sub-prime lending crisis by forcing banks and mortgage companies to knowingly make very ill-advised home loans.
B)   The activities of ACORN in browbeating and shaking down mortgage lenders and banks to accelerate the evils of CRA ’77 and the sub-prime lending crisis.
C)   The shift in mortgage banking from 1975 when one in every four hundred-four loans was “suspect” (administered at 3% down payment or less); to 1985 when one in every one hundred-ninety-six such loans was suspect; to 1995 when one in just seven loans was suspect; to 2005 when worse than one in three such loans (34%) was highly suspect, granted often without any down payment at all.
D) The final Clinton steroid version expansion of CRA legislation in 1998 which made it easier for ACORN to get unqualified loan-seekers into $450,000 homes in 1999 than it had been to get such people into $110,000 to $120,000 homes a decade earlier.
E)   The final ACORN assault on the nation’s home mortgage industry by abusing the CRA laws to get houses for people . . . .
1)     Without jobs
2)    Without good credit ratings
3)    Without rental histories
4)    With only food stamps to list as “income”
5)    Enrolled in other welfare programs
       6)    and even for Illegal aliens 
 
 
F. Fed Chief Alan Greenspan heartily approved the onslaught of derivative investments saying they “held the key to eliminating financial downturns in the future.” Of course, it was derivatives of lumped-together junk mortgages that proved to be the final nail in the financial melt-down coffin which collapsed so many large financial institutes . . . you’re a great man, Alan, a truly great man.
G.    Once retired from his post as Fed Chief, Greenspan worked as a special consultant to . . . wait for it . . . Deutsche Bank . . . that’s right . . . .
H.     In a speech in February, 2004, Greenspan suggested that more home-seekers should take out ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) after he’d deliberately held the nation’s interest rates artificially low for a decade . . . in effect, sabotaging the individual lenders almost as much as the CRA laws were sabotaging the nation
I.           According to Wikipedia,  in referring to the part Greenspan played in allowing the financial-meltdown, Matt Taibbi called Greenspan a vain "classic con man" and a undistinguished economist who, through political savvy, "flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attention of Wall Street for 20 consecutive years." Taibbi said Greenspan had "established himself as an infallible oracle, and a lot of it had to do with his ability to seduce key media figures, sometimes literally." Taibbi reported a Wall Street term called the "Greenspan put" which "meant that every time the banks blew up a speculative bubble, they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent, and then start the game all over", thereby making it "almost impossible" for the banks to lose money. The chapter Taibbi dedicated to Greenspan in his book Griftopia bore the title The Biggest A__hole in the Universe.
J.  Even now as the nation seeks to fight its way back to prosperity, present Fed Chief Ben Bernanke is inflating the currency and denying at every juncture that he’s doing so. The rising price of gas and food is 95% Bumbling Ben’s fault and only 5% due to other extraneous factors.
In fairness to Greenspan it must be said that for the first ten years of CRA ’77 legislation he was not the Fed Chief, Paul Volcker was. In fairness to Volcker, none-zero-nada-zip-not one of the five CRA ’77 expansions to come was law when Volcker was in office . . . and ACORN in those days was largely confined to Clinton’s Arkansas (It began life in 1977, as the “Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now”) so the percent of suspect loans in the entire country only doubled in the first decade vs. multiplying by 28-fold under Greenspan. Greenspan never once notified the nation of the immense danger from this cancerous assault upon the nation’s mortgage system or reminded progressive lawmakers of the harm they were doing. Ronald Reagan deserves huge censure for putting a man of such monumental incompetence into such a power seat.
Credit Default Swaps and other derivatives were praised on several occasions by Greenspan as valuable instruments that would make severe financial downturns impossible. In March, 1999, he said, “ . . . I am quite confident that market participants will continue to increase their reliance on derivatives to unbundle risks and thereby enhance the process of wealth creation.” In another speech he opined that “derivatives have increased the standard of living globally.” How could such an idiot get any job in the financial industry? Just about any asinine investment works in a wide-open bull market; the key to understanding dangers is to see what happens in a severe downturn when everybody wants to sell and get out all at once.
The ultimate Greenspan lunacy was uttered in 2004 when he summed up the value of derivatives for protecting the financial markets: “Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.”
So now our FED has the ironic gall to criticize and bring suit against a German bank for a sin perhaps 1/10,000 the size of our own failings which brought the entire world to the brink of financial cataclysm. Good job, Bernanke, good job.
 
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Chinese Economic Hegemony Locksteps onto the World Stage

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on April 26, 2011 at 4:28am


 

 
 
“PAX Americana” to Go
the Way of the Greenback??
 
 
            The American progressive-left may have its fondest wish coming true according to a recent projection of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicting that the Red Chinese economy will surpass America’s sometime in 2016, just five years from now. Under an evaluation system known as PPP or Purchasing Power Parities, the IMF compared economies in “real terms” and their comparison shows the Chinese economy expanding to $19 TRillion by 2016 from its present $11.2 TRillion (while the American Economy rises from $15.2 TRillion to $18.8 TRillion) so that China overtakes America’s share of the world economy as it slips down to 17.7% while China’s cut of the pie climbs to 18% and rising. For perspective, ten years ago the American economy was ten times the size of China’s.
 
            Is this latest IMF projection accurate? There are three good reasons to doubt its veracity in Rajjpuut’s not-so-humble opinion:   
 
1)    The dominant influence of the scoundrel George Soros upon the activities and emphases of the IMF . . . .
2)   The overt proclivity of China to fudge and adulterate the figures when it comes to their money which has been artificially propped up rather than allowed to float free against other currencies. 
3)    It’s unprecedented in history for an already large and booming economy to undergo a 70% productivity increase within a five-year period.
 
Speaking to the first issue, multi-billionaire Soros has been seeking to destroy the American Dollar for roughly seven years now and the so-called “great philanthropist” (a.k.a. “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” and “The International Man of MISERY”) who has made his fortune destroying currencies in Europe, Eurasia and Southeast Asia has had all fifty-two of his progressive American foundations funding the rise of his favorite Marxist, Barack Obama, for the last five years . . . his man “on the inside.” In other words the puppet Obama has no interest in becoming a real boy when those strings feel so good. 
 
On the second issue . . . anyone could take any figures whatsoever from the Chinese and work them any way they wanted and you’d be no closer to the truth than a snowball is to a glacier. And the third figure seems like it’s come from smoke and mirrors and wishful thinking . . . all of which doesn’t say it’s impossible, only that it’s highly unlikely.
 
For the sake of argument let’s be ultra-conservative and conced that the semi-slave economy in China has the U.S.A by the short hairs because something pretty rotten is going on in Washington, D.C. and whatever that something is . . .  it’s weighing down the American economy so heavily that the IMF figures are 100% accurate . . . it does not take a crystal ball or tea leaves to understand that 100% of Obama’s economic policies have failed on the side of dollar-destruction rather than shoring up the American economy . . . and since Rajjpuut’s antipathy for our Neo-Marxist president is so very high . . . your blog-writer might be allowing his feelings to color the situation. However, given all the available facts, it seems unfortunately that the IMF report if not at least very close to accurate is certainly leaning in the proper direction    . . . which makes it, potentially “a blessing in disguise” or what any sensible patriot would call an “immediate fire alarm” for our so-called “leaders” in Washington, particularly Obama, Geithner, Bernanke, and Harry Reid.
 
            Unless immediate and significant spending cuts; a balanced-budget amendment; an elimination of about 20% of the government’s activities; and business-friendly environment are created within the next year, the IMF projection is likely to come true within ten or twelve years in any case and then . . . the world will become a very different place. Consider the historical precedents: the United States first eased ahead of Great Britain economically about 1890. Both the United States and Germany were economically more powerful about 1914 when the First World War sprang up. Even before the end of World War II, in mid-1945, when the Labour Party ousted Winston Churchill and began instituting its progressive and highly-inflationary “reforms” the British Pound Sterling (which had been the World’s Reserve Currency (WRC) for roughly 220 years) shifted into deeply-troubled waters. By 1950 the American Dollar had become the new WRC.
 
            While the Imperial British had some gross failings (as our own colonial experience reminds us) the world with Britain as the greatest military and economic power was a relatively benign place. As long as the Brits got their cut from their own colonies, anything short of the Mau-Mau Rebellion was not going to provoke too much agitation from the London powers-that-be. This situation was continued with the rise of America and the American Dollar . . . except for mistakes borne of ignorance (all too common, unfortunately) the Yanks ran a pretty orderly shop. With America as the world’s dominant economic and military power, generally speaking, things were downright friendly. Consider this almost three-hundred year period of Anglo-Saxon hegemony . . . and most particularly the last 60-odd years of PAX Americana (a generally peaceful time all around a planet dominated by the United States).
 
            For example, can you imagine Adolf Hitler in charge of an Empire against which Mohandas K. Gandhi is agitating for Indian Independence? Khrushchev ever giving the Panama Canal back to Panamanians? The Spanish Empire that preceded the Brits facing down Martin Luther King’s demonstrations; the rise of Nelson Mandela’s government amidst a minority government of a different race in South Africa under China’s rule?
 
            How much charitable good has the United States dropped upon the world’s people via its Navy and Air Force? How beneficial has our model of free markets and democratic-republicanism been for the emerging countries of the world as the age of colonialism slips behind us? How much forthright protection has the U.S. military provided against rogue states during the last three score years? Ah, but it appears the “king is dying, long live the new Chinese king.”
 
How much different will the world be under dominance of a Communist Chinese government that forces sterilization; forces abortion; limits the number of children; fires upon demonstrators in Tiananmen Square; and is among the leaders in human rights violations performed upon its own citizens? Statism; communism, collectivism and fascism have killed nearly 204 million people in the last 75 years (since Spain’s Civil War in 1936) even though those totalitarian cultures never rose to the absolutely dominant level that Britain and the United States have. The implication is easily made that chaos will be the result if and when China becomes the “Mu Gai PanKock of the Walk.” It’s supposed that the hard left in this country will rejoice as one of their own takes center stage but the song (sung to the tune of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) might become:
 
 
We’ve cried cap’lists should
Be removed for good
Barack, of course, agreed
And he took the lead . . . .
 
 
Now----
There’s a firing squad
Busy in the yard
We just smile and say
As our lovely friends die
Marx, he, told us lies ------
 
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 

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Rajjpuut's Folly: Is Obama-led American Economy Already at the Cliff's Edge?

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on April 25, 2011 at 11:30am


 http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=25965F12-6D1A-11E0-8CAB-00212804637C
 

 
Only government can take a perfectly useful commodity such as paper, print a few numbers on it and make it worthless . . .
 
 
American Economy Facing
Death by 10,000 Cuts
 
 
It's too early to calculate if the recent International Monetary Fund's projection (see link above) that the "Age of America" will end in five years when the Chinese Economy surpasses America's is accurate.  However, you don’t have to be a gypsy fortune-teller to read-between-the-lines well enough to see that the American economy is dying the death by ten thousand cuts. Of course, many (if not most) of our fearless leaders in Congress and the White House are proclaiming an ongoing recovery. We’re not talking the Mississippi here, but de-Nile, deep, deep denial. Until we’re willing to face up to the truth, no solutions are possible. The progressive leadership in this country over the last forty-eight years (only Ronald Reagan is exempt among presidents and both chambers of every single congress has been guilty with the verdict still out on our present House of Representatives) have destroyed the greatest economic machinery the world has ever known and substantially weakened and corrupted the greatest and freest society ever known. 
Except for producing reality TV series and useless TV networks, we almost don’t create or build anything any more . . . we certainly don’t create jobs. The American Dollar whose original symbol was a capital “U” with a capital “S” atop it has been led to a slow death. Thanks to our leaders we are almost literally drowning in debt: $14.3 TRillion officially; plus $115 TRillion in UNfunded liabilities (Social Security; Medicare; the federal side of Medicaid) or a total of almost $130 TRillion we purposefully ignore discussing; plus, oh yes, that Welfare State that just got Obamacare added onto it . . . .

www.prisonplanet.com/24-signs-of-economic-decline-in-america.html
In a recent article the Prison Planet website told a sad story . . . when we’re through examining their cataloging of the situation . . . besides some parenthetical comments you’ll see immediately after each item, Rajjpuut has three shocking insights to add to the picture, Prison Planet said . . . .

The Economic Collapse: 24 signs of economic decline in America
 
#1 Standard & Poor’s just altered its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and warned the U.S. that it could very soon lose its AAA rating (the last time this happened was during the three months following the December 7, 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor).

#2 China has announced that they are going to reduce their holdings of U.S. dollars (China, Brazil, Russia, and several other countries have openly called for elimination of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and China, Russia, Brazil and India have been moving out of Greenbacks into gold and silver).

#3 Hedge fund manager Dennis Gartman says that “panic dollar selling is setting in” and that the U.S. dollar could be in for a huge decline (the dollar has lost 24% of its value this last decade).

#4 The biggest bond fund in the world, PIMCO, is now short-selling U.S. government bonds.

#5 This cruel economy is causing “ghost towns” and “ghost neighborhoods” to appear all across the United States. There are quite a few counties across the nation that now have home vacancy rates of over 50% (Las Vegas, Nevada has one of the highest home vacancy rates in the nation . . . it’s so bad there that there’s a mini-construction “boom” going on . . . what? why? because rather than clients moving into the ghost neighborhoods for a bargain price they prefer to get into whole new sub-divisions with other people nearby rather than a seedy area over-run by kangaroo rats).

#6 There are now about 7.25 million fewer jobs in America than when the recession began back in October, 2007.

#7 The average American family is having a really tough time right now. Only 45.4% of Americans had a job during 2010. The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.

#8 Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

#9 The average large company’s CEO made 343 times more money than the average American worker did last year.

#10 Gas prices reached five dollars per gallon at a gas station in Washington, DC on April 19th, 2011. Could we see $6 gas soon?

#11 Over the past 12 months the average price of gasoline in the United States has gone up by about 30%.

#12 Due to rising fuel prices, American Airlines lost a staggering $436 million during the first quarter of 2011.

#13 U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

#14 Approximately one out of every four dollars that the U.S. government borrows goes to pay the interest on the national debt.

#15 Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.

#16 Total credit card debt in the United States is now more than 8 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.

#17 Average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income. In China, average household debt is only 17% of average household income (1/8 as high a percentage on a lot less earnings).

#18 The average American now spends approximately 23 percent of his or her income on just two items food and gasoline (forty years ago that number was about 7%).

#19 In a recent survey conducted by Deloitte Consulting, 74 percent of Americans said that they planned to slow down their spending in coming months due to rising prices.


#20 Over 59 percent of all Americans now receive money from the federal government in one form or another.

#21 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average length of UNemployment in the U.S. is now an all-time record 39 weeks.

#22 As the economy continues to collapse, frustration among young people will continue to grow and we will see more seemingly “random acts of violence”. One shocking example of this happened on a Metropolitan Atlanta Mass Transit Area (MARTA) vehicle recently. The following is how a local Atlanta newspaper described the attack . . . .
 
               Roughly two dozen teens, chanting the name of a well-known Atlanta gang, brought mob rule to
MARTA early Sunday morning, overwhelming nervous passengers and assaulting two Delta flight attendants.
 
#23 Some Americans have become so desperate for cash that they are literally popping the gold teeth right out of their mouths and selling them to pawn shops.

#24 As the economy has declined, the American people have been gobbling up larger and larger amounts of antidepressants and other prescription drugs. In fact, the American people spent 60 billion dollars more on prescription drugs in 2010 than they did in 2005.

            To understand the full picture, consider this: Barack Obama’s puppet-master, George Soros (the “man who broke the Bank of England” and owner of some 52 progressive-foundations that have been working to undermine the U.S. economy for the last nine years as well as funding Barack Obama’s campaigns) is openly calling for the Chinese Yuan to replace the Dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Soros, who has been called responsible for the destruction of at least six other currencies, is now heavily invested in the Dollar’s destruction. Every day that we refuse to emulate the British and adopt severe austerity measures, the closer Mr. Soros gets to adding another few hundred billion dollars worth of profit to his net worth. However, it’s not likely that Barack Obama will cut his own strings and act for the good of the American people against George Soros.
Real money, such as gold or silver, does not change in value over time although because of supply and demand considerations and new inventions, etc. it may be used to buy more or buy less of certain commodities. Paper money which is NOT backed by gold or silver (fiat money) always becomes worth less over time and eventually worthless. Right now Americans are shocked that the dollar has officially lost 24% of its value in a decade . . . but that’s only the official figure. The Federal Reserve Bankers under Fed Chief Ben Bernanke have not so much been “printing money” but merely creating it electronically. If the official figures took into account all Mr. Bernanke’s shenanigans and the world valued the Dollar accordingly then the 2011 dollar would be worth between 3-4 pennies from the 2001 DOLLAR.  Leave it to government to take a perfectly useful commodity such as paper, print a few numbers on it and make it absolutely worthless . . . by the way, gold prices have risen 45% in the last eighteen months; silver has risen 58% in the last four months as people and nations are abandoning paper currencies like the Dollar, Euro and Yen. 
            The combined U.S. National Debt and UNfunded liabilities and Welfare responsibilities of the American government right now is equal to about three and one-half times the Gross Domestic Product ($57 TRillion) of the entire world . . . and yet the highly visible film-maker Michael Moore, all the unions, and the Progressives in congress from both parties claim there is “plenty of money” and refuse to cut spending and are debating when and how and how much to increase the debt ceiling right now. They’re counting on higher taxes upon “the rich” (those married couples earning a combined $250,000 or more who create all our small business jobs) to solve all our problems while continuing to create higher deficits, the one thing NOT on their agenda: spending cutbacks.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Stagflation Rears Ugly Head as George Soros Cheers

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on April 9, 2011 at 11:55pm

 

 
“Soros, you see is making a great BLUFF and his multi-billions are now at risk . . . .”
 
 
 
Are Ben ‘n Barack Deliberately
Undermining Economy for Soros
 
 
            Multi-billionaire supposed philanthropist~~ George Soros has now stepped out into the open. The man with the self-acknowledged “God complex” has pulled off the kid gloves and is moving in for the kill. Declaring that the dollar as we’ve known it is dead, not in so many words – but yes, in fact, Soros claimed at a recent conference at Bretton-Woods, New Hampshire that the American Dollar was no longer the world’s reserve currency. The “Man who Broke the Bank of England” (1992) a.k.a “The International Man of Misery,” infamous for preparing and profiting from the destruction of numerous nations’ currencies -- Soros laughingly talked about the badly-weakened Dollar now sharing duty with the Euro, the Yen and several other currencies. For those in the know, that highly gross insult wasn’t lost upon us . . . .
 
Soros knows as do we that 1) in the wake of bailing out Greece, Ireland and Portugal and preparing to bail out Italy, Spain and possibly Hungary . . . the Euro is a horrifically threatened currency and also that  2) the Japanese Yen has been devastated by the monster earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactor problems and thirty huge aftershocks (the latest this week measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale) . . . in short the Dollar (if indeed it’s only on a par with the Yen and Euro), as George suggests, is dead as a doornail. 
 
George didn’t have his billions back in the late 40’s when the British Pound Sterling gave up its two-century old position as the world’s reserve currency to the United States’ greenback, so he wasn’t able to profit from that terrific misery . . . but “Spooky Dude” definitely knows his history. Because of that, Soros said that efforts to attack the American DEBT were short-sighted and the only way for our economy to survive was to risk incurring a lot more debt to get the economy humming. He put it this way, “The big question is not whether the U.S. Dollar should be the world’s reserve currency. It no longer is. That role is shared with the Euro, Yen and other currencies and commodities such as gold, oil . . . .”
 
Acting as if he, King George, was the acknowledged leader of the entire world, Soros set up his economic conference on the site of the famous Bretton-Woods economic conference which charted the monetary future of the planet as the end of World War II approached. That first Bretton Woods agreement established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world’s major industrial states in the mid-20th Century.  In planning the rebuilding of the international economic system as the European and Pacific Wars still raged, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton-Woods, N.H. and after proper deliberation signed the Bretton-Woods Agreements during the first three weeks of July 1944. Soros at his Bretton-Woods meetings has called for the renunciation of the American Dollar right here on American soil in a particularly grandiose and self-serving manner.
 
All that not being enough for Spooky George, he tried his hand at straightforward sabotage as well. In his prescription to rush the fall of the Buck once and for all, Soros pretended he was offering good economic advice designed to save the currency as he pooh-poohed calls for strengthening the dollar by dealing with the debt (such as Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan has made with his proposed 2012 budget) saying, “There is very a strong push to tighten the budget as a way to reduce government spending… In my opinion, the country could actually absorb some more debt in order to get the economy going. If you have a growing economy, you can tolerate a higher level of debt.” Soros, you see is making a great BLUFF and his multi-billions are now at risk . . . . 
 
That’s right, Soros who has twice before made a play to bring the United States’ fiscal house down around us was NOT counting on the fiscal-conservative backlash that has dominated the U.S. political scene since mid-2010 and sent so many progressive big-spending politicians’ (88% of them progressive Democrats) packing in the most recent elections.  As a result his “bets” against America are deeply at risk. He is heavily invested in futures positions based upon the collapse of our currency . . . thus preparing to once again repeat the successful currency forays that made him a multi-billionaire while helping wreck the economies of Britain (a second time), Russia, Malaysia, etc., etc. ad nauseum.   Next to the radical jihadist element of Islam, no one hates the United States nearly so much as George Soros does. He made his first big play to cut the country down to size, by pouring billions into the Kerry election campaign in 2004 and into anti-George W. Bush propaganda. Bush #2 was not our wisest president, no doubt . . . but he was patriotic enough and wise enough NOT to get under George Soros’s thumb (something that Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama cannot say) and wise enough NOT to consider printing money as a satisfactory answer to any sort of problem. Barack Obama, by comparison, is a George Soros puppet.
 
Speaking of “the great man who’s now along with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) already spent over $1.2 million to prevent efforts to find his birth certificate” -- less than a week ago President Obama became the first to throw his hat officially into the ring as a declared candidate for the presidency in 2012 . . . now he and his campaign are officially prepared to receive all the millions that Soros and his fifty progressive foundations can pour his way.   If the policies of Barack Obama have been seemingly impossible to understand, one has only to ask three questions to clear up the matter completely. A) What would the international communists and America’s labor leaders want him to do to undermine the United States?  B) What would George Soros prefer? And C) How can he best disguise his loyalties to Georgie S. and his Red Friends.  Usually the first two questions generate the same answer and Barack’s duty is clear. When there is conflict between the two positions, Obama is forced to think for himself and his trademark “dithering” becomes apparent as he seeks to chart Path C.
 
Whether or not Barack proves to be a one-term president will likely depend upon the economy and/or his ability to sell Americans on his contention that the economy belongs 100% to his predecessor – always has, always will.   With the liberal media on his side, it won’t necessarily be a hard sell.   Surprisingly, 34% of voters still give him good or excellent marks on running the economy although only 14% believe their taxes will go down due to Obama’s governing; only 30% now see their own financial picture as good or excellent; and 69% of American voters call themselves “at least somewhat angry” about the policies of the government. With the unending help of the media, Obama will likely be made a hero by the media for the passage of the 2011 budget with two more challenges ahead: the status of the national debt (he wants to raise the Debt Ceiling up well past $15 TRillion) and the 2012 budget drafted by Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan (which cuts $6.2 TRillion from the debt over the next decade; compared to Mr. Obama’s budget which increased spending 4% and ratchet up the deficits and debt as well.
 
Obama’s unwitting^^ partner in crime in making King George’s dreams come true is Ben Bernanke, Chief of the Federal Reserve Banking System. The stagnation the country has felt economically is now being compounded by Bernanke-created inflation. At present the ceaseless physical and electronic creation of money by Mr. Bernanke has made the 2011 U.S. dollar technically worth only 3.2 pennies worth if the late 2008 greenback. The treasury department has hidden our current inflation by A) insisting that food and fuel costs don’t count and B) by overweighting the cost of housing in the current inflation statistics.  Since we don’t buy houses everyday and since we do need food and fuel every day, in reality we are now paying 16% more for the everyday necessities than we did when George W. Bush was president. While the civilized world has been ostentatiously tightening its belt Bernanke, Barack, Soros & other Sons of B______ have been seriously counterfeiting the American Dollar. 
 
You need look no further than the Euro . . . this abysmally weak currency is now trading very strong about 1 4/9 as valuable as the Buck. All over the globe folks are noticing and buying gold, silver, oil, or other currencies with their dollars. Few are eager to embrace dollars unless they’re given bonus amounts. The debt and the inflation scare are two sides of the same coin with Barack, Ben and Soros the edge of that coin . . . trying to sell the world and Americans on the notion that stagflation is a great step on the road to repairing the American economy.   Surprisingly, George Soros might be even more over-extended than the American economy is. If his bluff doesn’t work and doesn’t help rush the American economy into absolute bankruptcy, King George might just find himself a mere hundred millionaire again, more’s the pity. 
 
Besides that potential problem: 1) George’s funding for ACORN has now proven a major liability 2) Soros, Gore, Obama, Raines, Rogers, Strong, both Clintons, several Goldman Sach’s bigwigs and at least 54 other top progressives already lost their shirts when their little cap and trade scheme backfired and they had to sell out their holdings in the CCX (Chicago Climate eXchange) after neither legislative bullying nor Obama-ordered EPA regulatory bullying proved sufficient to move the nation toward full carbon-trading. Instead of hundreds of billions of profits they wound up collectively losing millions. Al Gore just missed becoming the first “Green Billionaire” and Soros’ foundations suffered mightily. Bottom line, Barack Obama badly owes his puppet-master . . . do not expect him to cave in on the Ryan budget in any way, shape or form. Unlike the first ACORN president who delivered the Motor-Voter Act and four separate expansions** of CRA ’77 to ACORN in payment for their corrupt backing . . . the totally incompetent “Anointed One” Barack Obama has failed to deliver much of anything to his handlers. The Deficit-Ceiling votes and the Ryan Budget Package will undoubtedly be his last hurrah unless he finds unmitigated success . . . which the G.O.P. can hand him or deny.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
 
~~          Philanthropist is a euphemism used by progressives to describe King George Soros. Like all euphemisms, this is a LIE to hide truth that’s harsh, offensive or blunt.
According to Canada Free Press, “George Soros is a ‘philanthropist’ if by ‘philanthropist’ we mean one who creates chaos, destruction and financial ruin for his own personal gain, it’s a perfect fit.  Calling Soros a philanthropist is rather like referring to the Nazi block wardens as Neighborhood Watch.” They go on . . . .
“Soros certainly gives lots of money away.  But a philanthropist acts to improve the human condition.  Soros acts solely to improve the Soros condition.  Despite the lofty sounding rhetoric about an Open Society, Soros’ objective is to wreck the United States.  Actually Soros never really defines his Open Society.  The concept arose in the 1930s with the notion of a moral code based on “universal principles”.  After tweaking the concept to suit his own purposes, Soros adopted his own version of an Open Society which would be one in which the US has no power. 
“Soros was born in Hungary in 1930 to non-practicing Jewish parents.  His father, a lawyer was able to hide their identities and young George was recruited by the Nazi’s Judenrat to hand out flyers deceptively directing Jews to turn themselves in for deportation to the death camps.  Soros later said he found the work exhilarating.  Later passing himself as an official’s godson, he accompanied his benefactor confiscating valuables from innocent Jews.  Soros would later tell Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes that he had ‘no remorse’ about what he had done.
“In fact, Soros doesn’t have remorse for much, if anything.  In The Shadow Party (David Horowitz and Richard Poe, 2006), Soros is quoted as saying that ‘conscience clouds an investor’s judgment.’”
Additionally, our philanthropist Mr. Soros has been accused several times of illegal currency manipulation and also was convicted in France of insider trading . . . certainly he has no compassion for the victims of his monetary shenanigans.
 
^^Bernanke is a self-mis-directed-would-be patriot who mistakenly believes he and only he correctly understands American economic history. Big Ben has written several scholarly papers on the Great Depression. He actually believes that by and large Hoover on the one hand and FDR and his administration on the other did a relatively good job and that a huge amount of the blame for the depth and duration of the Great Depression were caused by unenlightened Federal Reserve policies and too-tight monetary$$ policies. The Fed was undoubtedly at fault somewhat, but the anti-capitalistic actions of Hoover and FDR are the root cause. When he’s not allowed to read his own writing, Bernanke makes a lot more sense. Indeed, at times he sounds like he’s got his finger on the pulse of things when he says he favors
a)     “Reducing the U.S. budget deficit by reform of the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs”
b)      Accomplished by cutting spending, or entitlement payments or raising taxes or some combination of those three actions. 
He notably does not account for the debilitating effect of raising taxes on prosperity . . . .
$$ No one seems to know, much less take advantage of the great historical lesson known as the “Invisible Depression” wherein Woodrow Wilson’s (much more acute recession than the 1929 market crash brought about) severe recession was tamed in fifteen months by President Warren G. Harding’s combination of cutting spending by 49%; cutting taxes by 48% and paying down the debt 30%. FDR, while calling Hoover “a socialist” promised to repeat the Harding formula, but, of course, did exactly the opposite and extended the depression into a 12.5 year Great Depression.
 
** CRA ’77 was the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 passed by Jimmy Carter and progressive politicians (about 86% of them Democrats). This was the greatest government interference in the free market ever conceived. Banks and mortgage companies were required to knowingly make abysmally bad loans to unqualified would-be home owners. In 1976, 0.24% of home loans were considered ‘suspect.’ Thanks to ACORN (then the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now) working almost totally in Arkansas under Governor Bill Clinton, that rate for the entire nation doubled to 0.51% suspect loans by 1986. When Clinton took office in 1993 he repaid ACORN (become the Associations of Community Organizations for Reform Now) with the Motor-Voter Act and a huge regulatory expansion of CRA ’77 almost immediately. In 1995 he twice legislatively expanded CRA ’77. By 1996, 14.08% of all home loans in the country were suspect. In 1998, Clinton passed the steroid-version expansion of CRA legislation. By 2000, the housing bubble was underway and the sub-prime lending crisis was a fact of life by 2005 when 34% of all home loans were suspect . . . but the situation was much worse than the numbers showed: instead of a tiny amount of loans at 3% down payment for $80,000 and $120,000 homes we had a huge amount of 0% loans on homes in the $320,000 to $480,000 range. Instead of “iffy” loans to former military officers attending college on the GI Bill (0.24% in 1976); we now had horrifically bad loans at 0% to people without jobs; with horrible credit ratings; without even rental histories; whose only “income” was food stamps; and even to illegal aliens. If you’re confused by all this and why the word “deliberately” was deliberately used in the headline to his blog: here’s some information on the progressives’ Cloward-Piven Strategy published in 1966, which deliberately bankrupted New York City in 1975 requiring a federal bailout . . . .
 
 
 
 
 

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Rajjpuut's Folly: What Do the Chinese Know (and Do) That We Don’t?

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on March 15, 2011 at 10:38pm

 

Is Trickle-Up Poverty the New Prosperity?

 

           While being assaulted on all sides with Barack Obama’s “trickle-up poverty” and other progressive government boondoggles like Obamacare on top of trillion-dollar national deficits as far as the eye can see and well beyond . . . a strange new phenomenon has emerged to further muddy the waters already obscuring our future hopes. China is now selling off American debt and ridding itself of dollars so that now the largest holder of American debt is . . . drum roll, please, Maestro! . . . the United States Federal Reserve Banking System. Yes, you read that correctly. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is now in the voodoo economics business all the way up to his fuzzy skull.  

           Over the last three months, China has sold roughly $19 billion in treasury bonds and other U.S. debt instruments. China, in other words, has become concerned about the sheer size of the U.S. overall debt and the high probability that the Federal Reserve’s unceasing money printing for the last twenty-nine months has debased and devalued the world’s reserve currency for ‘lo these last 60+ years: the American Dollar. Looking back in history that’s exactly what happened to the British Pound Sterling which had been the World’s Reserve Currency for over two hundred years until the Brits ousted Winston Churchill with World War II still not entirely won and brought in their Labour (progressive-liberal) Party to run the show. Labour inflated their once proud currency so much that the citizens and nations of the world began dumping the Pound and fleeing for gold, silver, the gold-backed Swiss Franc and most commonly for the American Dollar.

            The American Federal Reserve now standing as the largest holder of U.S. Treasury debt means that financing Obama’s third trillion-dollar federal budget deficit in succession has become something the rest of the world has begun to shy away from. China is still the largest foreign-holder of American debt, but the Chinese seem determined to remove their names from the top of that dubious list (other top foreign holders of U.S. debt instruments include: Japan, Russia, Brazil, India, Korea, England, France, Germany and Saudi Arabia). It also suggests that faith and trust in the “Almighty Buck” may be reaching a low-ebb.

            Unlike hard money (gold and silver) and all hard-money backed currencies such as the Swiss Franc and the Kruggerand-backed South African money . . . paper money has zero intrinsic value . . . it only exists and continues to serve so long as people trust the government issuing the paper bills (and that goes double for a nation’s paper debt instruments).    Bernanke has run the printing pressings so long that on a sheer mathematical basis the dollar of today is technically worth only as much as 3.4 pennies compared to the dollar of late 2008 when the financial crisis reached its low spot and the U.S. government started stepping in. What’s going on here? Why is Bernanke printing so much money?

            Bernanke is a well-known student of the Great Depression and has written numerous articles suggesting that the reason the Great Depression turned from a “little-d depression” into a “capital-G/capital-D Great Depression” is because there was never sufficient money in circulation to head off relentless deflation. That is, he believes a vicious-circle of deflation was created and that the continuous dropping of prices fed off itself and destroyed jobs which destroyed buying power which destroyed businesses which destroyed more jobs, etc., etc. 

            There is some truth to what Mr. Bernanke suggests . . . but it’s a lot like yanking your starting pitcher off the mound with the score going from 2-1 in the 6th to 8-1 against you in the 8th . . . once so much damage has been done . . . almost nothing will work. Perhaps the twirler should have been sent to the showers when he looked tired after 120 pitches before the start of the 7th?  Or after he’d allowed a home run and walked the next two batters with no outs in the 7th? Poor decisions early in a process can make finding good decisions later . . . very, very difficult.

            Rajjpuut suggests a different reading of history is more accurate.    Almost precisely a full decade before the infamous 1929 stock market crash we had a depression start-up that 98% of Americans never heard about. Progressive Woodrow Wilson’s so-called “Invisible Depression” started in late 1919 and was full-blown by the time Warren G. Harding was elected in November, 1920; and much worse when Harding took office in March of 1921 (they had a four-month Lame-Duck session in those days). Production had already dropped nation-wide by 26%. Ignoring the suggestions of his Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover for immediate implementation of numerous government aid programs and other subsidies . . . Harding did only four things:

 

1.       Cut government spending by 48%

2.      Cut taxes by 49%

3.      Paid down the nation’s debt by 30%

4.       Slashed government regulatory interference across the board

 

            In fifteen months the economy had rebounded mightily (just a couple months later,  Harding died in office so he barely got to enjoy his success). The United States was now well into the “Roaring Twenties” the most single prosperous rebound of any economy in the recorded history of the planet. Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s vice-president continued the Harding policies faithfully, but chose “not to run” in 1928.   One of the most popular men in America and a famous philanthropist and author, Herbert Hoover ran for the presidency for the Republicans and won in a landslide over Democrat Al Smith.  Only three men in history have become president of the U.S. without extensive military or business executive or elected experience: Taft, Obama and Hoover.

            Hoover was a famous geologist and mining engineer who married the daughter of a rich banker.  He believed mightily in the “Efficiency Movement” (if you’ve read Cheaper by the Dozen, the father, Frank Gilbreth, was founder of the Efficiency Movement) and believed that the economy was riddled with waste and inefficiency which could be dramatically improved by “experts” like him once they identified the problems and solved them. Hoover became, according to the New York Times “one of the Ten Most Important Living Americans” for his charitable and humanitarian work during World War I.  

            Hoover administered distribution of over two and one-half million tons of food to nine million war victims and was later named head of the brand new U.S. Food administration by Woodrow Wilson when the country entered the War. A member of the Supreme Economic Council after the war, as well as head of the American Relief Administration he continued organizing shipments to millions of starving people in Central Europe.  A well-known philanthropist, Hoover like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson was like them a self-described “Progressive and Reformer.”

             He came to be known as “Wonder-Boy” during the Harding-Coolidge administrations for his notorious and comical lust for expanding portions of everybody else’s bailiwicks into new roles for the Commerce Department. The reporters of his day called Hoover, "the Secretary of Commerce... and Under-Secretary of Everything Else!" Long before he had entered politics he had abandoned laissez-faire economic thinking. Outside of engineering and charitable work he was a terrible micro-manager always on the look out to fix what wasn’t broken.  History shows that Hoover did one very important thing as Commerce Secretary:  he codified and standardized traffic lights across the nation. 

              As soon as he was elected president Hoover set about planning the undoing of much of the good work created by Coolidge and Harding.   He raised government spending and taxes and debt.  He initiated numerous “eleemosynary” style federal activities (reminiscent of his charitable work in World War I) to protect workers and farmers and businesses from the natural vicissitudes of the free market economy. His biggest mistake was instituting a huge tariff designed to protect American farm workers from foreign competition but remove such protections from business; the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was to cause great consternation in the business world. The agricultural tariff increase was the second highest in U.S. history and put a lot of people out of work. Overall, once the stock market crashed in 1929, Hoover instituted the biggest big-government policies the nation had ever seen.

             Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had once praised Hoover in 1919 and tried to get him to run as the Democratic presidential candidate) and his v-p running mate Garner accused Hoover of being a socialist and promised that when elected they would:

 

1.      Cut government spending severely

2.      Cut taxes dramatically

3.      Pay down the nation’s debt

4.       Slashed government regulatory interference across the board and eliminate many of the socialistic programs of Hoover

 

          Since these amounted to little more than promises to do what Harding had succeeded with in 1921, people embraced FDR and he won in a landslide taking office in March 1933. History shows that the bottom of the Great Depression was reached in July, 1933, and the bottom of our own “Great Recession” was reached in March, 2009, in each case shortly after the new president took office. Ordinarily the expectation is that after the bottom is reached, prosperity begins to return within six months. In both FDR’s and Barack Obama’s cases, however, government interference made things much, much worse.

          FDR, of course, did exactly the opposite of what he promised. He dramatically raised taxes and government spending and debt and deficits. He expanded all of Hoover’s social and economic programs and added 40 of his own (just one law in 2010, Obamacare, created 384 new government agencies, so FDR was a piker compared to Barack) and made big government a way of life. He also confiscated gold coinage and then instituted an overnight inflation of 69% by pegging the dollar to gold at $35 per ounce (he’d given the citizens just $20.76) impoverishing the taxpayers while enriching the government. Of course doing what Harding did and avoiding what Hoover and FDR did is just common sense . . . something seemingly beyond Obama and Bernanke . . . .

          In June, 2009, when the full-folly of the Obama policies began to outline themselves in sharp contrast to common sense . . . the Chinese held $896 billion in American debt; today they hold $764 billion a 15% reduction in greenback holdings. Since an outright flooding of the market with U.S. debt notes would destroy China as well as the U.S., it seems the Chinese are now buying up gold and silver in large quantities and making an orderly retreat from the dollar – leaving our suspect currency in the hands of less astute nations and of Ben Bernanke. Since the American trade deficit with China alone reached a record $273.1 Billion in 2010, the Chinese are going to have to work awfully hard to keep lowering their dollar holdings . . . so one suspects that gold and silver will continue to rise quickly.

          Bernanke’s monetary policy, known as “Quantitative Easing” a.k.a. “irresponsibly printing money,” has seen the Federal Reserve recently buy up $600 billion worth of Treasury debt. Big Ben’s plan is to hold down interest rates and thus help lower the cost of federal government borrowing (to cover the Obama deficits) and incidentally increase inflation which he believes will stimulate economic growth and create jobs. This is a very Keynesian economic philosophy. In the months prior to his death in 1946, John Maynard Keynes (as the ending of the British Pound Sterling’s  200- year reign as the world’s reserve currency approached) who had long preached against the classical economic wisdom of Adam Smith and Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace,” like an atheist seeking God at the last hour repented . . . .

          As Britain’s economic hole under the progressive Labor Party deepened, and his own death drew near, Keynes told Henry Clay of the Bank of England of his hopes that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” would somehow save the English economy and yank Britain out of the economic swamp it found itself in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the ‘invisible hand’ which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago." The inflation destroyed the Pound Sterling as the Labor Party continued with government largesse and Keynes’ deathbed conversion went to naught.

          Here in America recent spikes in food prices and energy costs are a direct consequence of Bernanke’s unofficial devaluation of the dollar. The government continues under-reporting of inflation assisted by the Labor Statistics Bureau’s refusal to include fluctuations in prices of food and energy. Bernanke, however, believes that deflation is still the rule and continues to inflate the currency to avoid a second Great Depression. Since job creation by the private sector is the key, perhaps the government ought to try: cutting spending; cutting taxes; eliminating debt; and getting the government out of the way of the free market . . . oops, that’s been mentioned before . . . .

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

 

 
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Bernanke, Obama Inflationary Policy Aims to Solve Economy

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on March 12, 2011 at 12:29am

 

 
“You can always fool every one of the people who feel that your lies encompass their pre-conceived foolish notions and presumed (but irrational) best interests.” Rajjpuut
 
"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state without an ounce of gold behind it." - Adolf Hitler
 
"I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the “invisible hand” which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago." John Maynard Keynes (nearing his death) in 1946
 
 
Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama
Inflating Our Dollars in Hopes
of Avoiding Double-Dip Recession
 
          It’s a monstrous game of “Hot Potato.” The winner of the “Biggest Fool Trophy” for economics’ “bigger fool theory of market crashes and bubbles” is right now being fought out among three extraordinary combatants . . . a) the Chinese and other nations’ government officials hoping to avoid collapse of their own economies b) Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats and c) the American public.   All parties, though they may not yet realize it, are faced with the disaster of being the last one holding more and more worth less and eventually worthless American dollars. Let’s examine the battlefield they’re contesting upon.  
The history is brief but poignant: the oldest continuing currency in the world is the British Pound Sterling (BPS) first minted in 775 A.D when "sterlings" or silver pennies were the main currency; 240 sterlings or “pence” weighed one pound.  Silver is relatively heavy so you can imagine how small these sterlings were:  just 1/15 of an ounce each. Their earliest common use was to bribe the Viking invaders  with so-called danegeld and that money became the currency of many 
Scandanavian nations as well as England.  
For over two hundred years between the early 18th and middle 20th Centuries, the BPS was esteemed as the world’s reserve currency (a currency from one country held in substantial quantities by a significant amount of the world’s other nations whose leaders believe this “hoarding” of the originating country's currency as a “reserve” was in the best interests of their countries and the  leaders themselves). 
Before World War I the BPS was clearly and easily the most important international currency with London the world's most important financial hub.  Over 60% of global trade was financed, invoiced and settled in sterling, and the largest proportion of official reserves owned by the world’s nations, apart from silver and gold, was found in BPS notes. Although not even all the territories within the British Empire itself used the BPS as their local currency, most of those that did NOT, pegged their local currency at a fixed rate to sterling, as did many foreign countries outside the Empire including virtually every advanced and important country in the world.   But this two-century old revered status for the BPS was soon to end . . . .
After World War I, the two greatest economies of the planet (America and Britain) had long based their economic thoughts and actions on the hero of the Scottish Enlightenment Adam Smith, author of  . . . the Wealth of Nations (1776) a long-titled book that profoundly motivated our American Founding Fathers when they started drawing up a Constitution eleven years later. Smith who had referred to the idea of “the invisible hand” in his books History of Astronomy and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eventually found his real niche and talked about “the invisible hand” of the marketplace; and laissez-faire capitalism as the foundation of sound economics.  And England and America as a result of common sense and listening to Adam Smith found themselves prospering mightily. Smiths' fundamental tenet was this:   free market economies are more productive and beneficial to their societies and both England and America largely practiced what Smith preached and prospered mightily over the next century and a half.  But something new was very rotten in England . . . .
England’s own John Maynard Keynes became one of the world’s most trusted economists and Keynes believed that gold and silver and currencies pegged to precious metals were holding back economic growth around the world. Keynes’s  two-volume economic idiocy* Treatise on Money, was published in 1930** and Britain left the gold standard in 1931^^, and many foolish countries that had pegged their currencies to gold and kept reserves in the BPS went along with the nonsense, most especially those countries within the British Commonwealth of Nations.  These countries and others around the world became known as the "sterling bloc".
After World War II ended, the ungrateful British citizens ousted Winston Churchill and welcomed in the progressives (the Labor Party) who began to immediately and seriously inflate the British Pound.  In response most countries outside the Commonwealth quickly began jettisoning the pound in droves. The world faced economic chaos. The natural action of the wise countries was to put their reserves in gold or silver; but they also wanted a more flexible currency as part of their reserves. Since that time, the American Dollar has been the world’s reserve currency and has dominated the international scene for over sixty years.
However, all has not been peachy keen for dollar holders . . . .
1) Richard Nixon in the midst of a pervasive and lengthy American stock market crash (it ran from 1969 with a brief hiatus in ’70-’71 to become a full-fledged meltdown in 1973-74) sabotaged many of them when he let the dollar float against gold.  Nixon's and his second vice- president Gerald Ford's and especially the actions of President Jimmy Carter (inflation briefly reached 21% near the end of his single-term presidency) caused much consternation among dollar-holders.
2) About late 1998, many worldwide holders of the dollars again began to feel serious misgivings about the effect of sub-prime home lending policies festering in America and began ridding themselves of dollars. In the decade between 1999 and 2009, many began putting their reserves into other currencies (most notably the Euro). The peak dollar holdings in 1999 at 70.9% plunged to 62.2% in 2009; while the Euro became the 2nd favorite reserve currency going from 17.9% to 27.3% holdings. Since mid-2009, serious discussions have been taking place about replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and now the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has made a recommendation to that effect while countries like China and Russia and Brazil and India are exploring conducting trade among themselves in their native currencies (Yuan, Ruble, Real and Rupee), while buying gold and silver and lowering their dollar holdings.
Dollar holders face another serious threat in the Obama era.  Neither the IMF nor the many foreigners and foreign nations holding American Dollars already . . . and especially not those foreign governments most-willing in the past to loan money to Americans (by buying our Treasury Notes and other debt instruments)  . . . are enthused by the deliberate and egregious inflationary actions of Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
C) Bernanke has been running the money printing presses full-time for over thirty months right now.  Currently, if mathematics alone (and not pure trust and tradition) were the telling factor in how much the 2011 American dollar should be worth, it would weigh in   about 1/30 of the value of the October, 2008 American Dollar.
D. In February, 2011, President Barack Obama’s feeble attempt at a national budget showed willful refusal to deal with  our nation's and the world's "dollar problem."  Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the vast majority of Democrats and Union leaders and Michael Moore go so far as to deny any debt crisis exists.   It seems you can always fool every one of the people who feel that your lies encompass their pre-conceived notions and presumed (but irrational) best interests.  Obama and the progressive are now threatening even greater American deficits and national debt. This shows the world that unless the Republican House of Representatives can change the nation’s direction . . . loaning America money and holding American dollars is one of the stupidest actions anyone can make. This brings us back to paragraph one above, where we (presuming that the Republican efforts to eliminate the debt and balance the budget fall short of success) said:
It’s a monstrous game of “Hot Potato.” The winner of the “Biggest Fool Trophy” for economics’ “bigger fool theory of market crashes and bubbles” is right now being fought out among three extraordinary combatants . . . a) the Chinese and other nations’ government officials hoping to avoid collapse of their own economies b) Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats and c) the American public.   Who will be the sucker left holding the American Dollar?
            Unless the G.O.P. can work a miracle . . .  who will be the biggest fool of all still holding onto American dollars rather than using them as toilet paper by 2013?  One world famous economic theorist once said, “"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state without an ounce of gold behind it." On the theory that you can’t go too far wrong doing precisely the opposite of whatever Adolf Hitler would recommend, a lot of the “contestants” will undoubtedly opt-out of the contest and buy gold and silver. Another man finally wised up at the very end . . . "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago," said John Maynard Keynes nearing his death in 1946 just before the BPS lost its place as the world’s reserve currency.
            Isn’t it funny how the wisest words spoken by some of the world’s most influential progressives are totally ignored? FDR and labor leader George Meany and Jimmy Carter, for example, all agreed that allowing labor unions among government employees is a horrible idea. The founder of Keynesian economics, John Maynard Keynes himself, admitted that Adam Smith had been right and he’d been mistaken . . . but the progressives remember only their nonsense and, indeed, come to worship it.   In all this talk about “millions” as “chump change” and “billions” as “insignificant,” let’s examine what they really mean. Politicians love the public’s inability to deal with large amounts of money, since it frees them to do just about whatever they please . . . think of this: we are currently $14.1 TRillion in debt so paying off the debt at $1 per second means that . . .
1 million seconds = approximately 12 days to pay off $1 million
1 billion seconds = 32 years to pay off $1 Billion
1 trillion seconds = 32,000 years to pay off $1 Trillion
14.1 trillion seconds = 451,000 years to pay off $14.1 TRillion
             Now let’s get back to that game of Hot Potato. Rajjpuut encourages you NOT to be the last one holding dollars in serious quantities when inflation rears its ugly head. Good luck!
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
^^ Influenced also by Keynes, FDR confiscated all non-numismatic American gold in 1933 giving the holders of the coins $20.76 per ounce of gold. He then pegged the value of gold at $35.00 an ounce thus within months inflating American paper currency by 68.6% and robbing the people, to enrich the federal government – a move that turned the depression with a little ‘d’ into the 12.5 year long Great Depression.   Compare the dealings of progressive presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR to Harding (and his vice president Calvin Coolidge who succeeded Harding when he died in office) in dealing with the “Invisible Depression,”(see the next footnote) should you ever get confused about what’s best for the people and how the purported best-interests of the nation almost always amount to out-and-out theft from hard-working and thrifty individuals.
** Keynes’ “thinking” in 1930 deliberately ignored the fact that the American resurgence (“The Roaring 20’s”) from the “Invisible Depression of 1920” came almost immediately on the heels of the policies of President Warren G. Harding who cut government spending by 48%; cut federal taxes by 49% and paid down the national debt by 30% ending Woodrow Wilson's depression in fifteen months.  Perhaps Keynes believed that the progressive policies of Wilson that created the debacle were responsible for the greatest single-decade jump in prosperity the world has ever known? In any case like many English Fabian-Socialists, Keynes embraced and encouraged progressivism. His ideas fitting right in with the demands of totalitarian states and wannabes everywhere have been thunderously applauded for 80 years but never once worked satisfactorily . . . hmmmm.
 
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Your Survival During Dollar Disintegration is NOT Obama's Concern

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on February 6, 2011 at 2:00pm

 

 
 
Saving Your Butt as Monetary System Collapses
        
       
 
 
 

            Hopefully, the politicians will regain their senses in the next couple or three months and the survival information in this little blog will never have to be used . . . call the odds on that happening 200/1 since the tax and spend Democrats still control the senate and Barack Obama still wields the veto pen in the Oval Office. The last time an American President showed courage and wisdom in the face of a severe monetary crisis was 1921 (Harding slashed government spending 48%; taxes 49%; and paid down the National Debt 30% in turning the depression left him by Woodrow Wilson into the "Invisible Depression" within fifteen months).  Unfortunately,Barack Obama won't join with the Republicans to save your butt; indeed he's still suggesting mad policies (in the State of the Union speech) that guarantee the grand-daddy of all fiscal meltdowns.  Either kiss your butt goodbye, or take matters into your own hands because your survival in the coming meltdown depends upon you.

Rajjpuut began advising readers in early 2004 of the dangers represented by the sub-prime lending crisis to our economy and to their wealth. You know how that turned out . . . . Since roughly April, 2009, he’s been warning of a complete fiscal meltdown in America associated with the U.S. Dollar’s collapse (when the greenback is no longer accepted as the World’s Reserve Currency) and hyper-inflation attacks our way of life . . . since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been busy at the money printing presses and electronically creating dollars as well, the 2011 dollar is technically worth 3.4 pennies of a late 2008 greenback.  Our National Debt stands at 95% of our GDP even though Ben Bernanke put the figure at 64% in a National Press Club speech three days ago (he did not include the $4.6 TRillion we've stolen from Social Security and Medicare "lockboxes" which moves the debt from $9.5 TRillion to $14.1 TRillion).  Our UNfunded liabilities stand at $113 TRillion.  We will soon be able to tax every citizen 100% on their earnings and not be able to fund the profligate Obama budget.  The nations of the world individually and the leaders of the world's monetary foundations are in agreement the American Dollar as the world's reserve currency is no longer acceptable; the system stands on the verge of disintegration and you are innocently sitting on the couch watching "reality TV" and playing video games?

To fight against this growing present threat, even more than gold, Rajjpuut has been advising readers to consider buying so-called “junk silver.” Junk silver needs a new name because purchase of a $100-face value bag of American silver coins (pre-1965 dimes, quarters, half-dollars with 90% silver content) now costs -- depending on the price of silver on a given day -- between $1,850 and $1,950 dollars. Few people realize that as an investment, silver has outperformed gold in the 21st Century. Yes, yes, gold has risen roughly 300% (quadrupled in value since the original 100% is added in) but silver has risen 521% over the same period or gone up to 621% of its original value.

One other little thing: people don’t realize is that silver is now more rare than gold. While virtually every ounce of gold that’s ever been mined is still with us today; approximately 96% of all the silver that’s ever been mined is believed lost forever. Silver has a huge present day demand and  has long dominated the industrial markets: it’s still used in photography; and is the preferred metal for electronics, pollution control, tableware and utensils; chemical catalysis; medical use; and in some countries it’s still used in coins . . . but let’s get back to the junk silver we were talking about, when silver reaches $33 per ounce, each silver dime will be worth $2.00. If hyper- inflation hits silver will be in far greater demand than that, for the price of a single silver dime, it’s likely that you’ll be able to buy enough to feed a person three-squares as merchants desperate to trade their wares for something of intrinsic/real value look to silver as their own best investment. These same merchants might NOT accept $4,000 paper dollars for the same food under the same circumstances.

Does that sound far-fetched?   At the end of the Weimar Republic’s savage hyper-inflation, German citizens in late 1923 insisted upon being paid three times daily and having splurge-breaks to run off and buy anything just so their money wouldn’t lose all its value before they could spend it. Eric Maria Remarque, famous author of All Quiet on the Western Front, displayed these facts quite graphically in his stark novel The Black Obelisk as 26 TRillion Deutsch Marks traded for one American dollar. Rajjpuut’s stamp collection contains Weimar Republic German stamps with printed prices cancelled out and new prices overprinted . . . in short, hyper-inflation is a mess you’d prefer not to deal with, but one it’s best to prepare for . . . .

However, while silver coins are a great idea, there is one truly great investment that trumps virtually everything else imaginable: farmland. Yes, real hold-in-your-hand coins are absolutely necessary, but the best investment of all over the last 40 years has been American farmland which easily outpaced bonds; stocks; gold and even silver. Farmland was about twelve times more lucrative than the Standard and Poors stock index; and more than four times better than gold during those 40 years. 

While the land appreciates in value, it can also be rented out or farmed by you in case of the utter end of civilization, and NO, farmland did not fall in price during even one quarter during our recent meltdown. Investments in the stock market in 1970 (adjusted for inflation) returned only 16% and the stock market can’t save your family in a serious crisis. Just as physical silver is a great idea, owning a farmable plot of land has its great attractions as well. If that’s impossible, you can invest in private Argentine farmland for about $7 an acre; the well-respected Stansberry Report even suggests buying Argentine farm property management via NASDAQ whenever such stocks sell for below book value. To get the full (it's a long presentation) picture, visit:

http://www.stansberryresearch.com/pro/1011PSISBBVD/EPSIM218/PRo=267094&s=269843&u=49822167&l=215636&r=Milo

 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

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Rajjpuut's Folly: Bernanke, Jobs, Housing, Debt and the Whole Sordid Mess

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on February 4, 2011 at 5:00pm


 

   
We now have FEWER people working in AMERICA than we've at any time had SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration.  We also have more people working for the government than at any time in history outside of war.
Bernanke Sobers Up, Comes Clean, Sort of
 
            Ben Bernanke had a National Press Club audience laughing while doling out some super-serious information yesterday. For example, he reminded them that the country’s projected deficit and debt level are actually not only unsustainable but impossible . . . because the nation’s creditors at some point in the future would wise up and refuse to continue financing our country’s spending.
            ALERT:   Before going further with the blog itself . . . the nation’s latest jobless numbers came out earlier today: 9.0% unemployment sounds like an improvement over the recent 9.4%  . . . unfortunately, the fact is that virtually all of the “drop” in unemployment can be traced to unemployed persons who have stopped reporting in to the nation’s Workforce Centers and therefore “fell off” the statistical data base. True unemployment now stands at just a tad below 20% if all the unemployed; and  forcible part-time workers are included . . . not to mention all the grossly under-employed who lost better jobs and are working at stop-gap situations.  Only 36,000 jobs were created last month, almost 110,000 short of the projected 145,000.  1.4 million people gave up looking for jobs through official channels last month:  1.4 million!  We now have FEWER JOBS in AMERICA than we've seen at any time SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration. The situation is getting so hopeless that more than half of the unemployed are no longer using the official Workforce procedures . . . these fictitious unemployment numbers just prove that when it comes to statistics, garbage in = garbage out. Now let’s get back to Ben Bernanke . . . . 
            “By definition, the unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debt (outlined by the Congressional Budget Office, CBO) cannot actually happen because creditors would never be willing to lend to a government whose debt . . . is rising without limit.” Currently the National Debt is stated at about 60% of the economy or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) officially; but in reality the figure is much closer to 95% than 60%. More on this soon . . . Bernanke said that the 90% threshold is projected by 2020 and debt would be 150% of GDP by 2030. But Bernanke’s citing of $9.5 trillion in national debt was sinfully inaccurate because it omitted the $4.6 trillion owed by the government to trust funds for things such as Social Security and Medicare, which have paid out cash to the Treasury in exchange for promissory notes. The full national debt – when both forms of debt are included is roughly $14.6 trillion.   
Mr. Bernanke also failed to acknowledge the 180-ton blue whale splashing about in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the fact that not including all our welfare programs and barring deliberately infecting all our nation’s elders simultaneous with ebola . . . the federal government is already obligated for roughly $113 TRillion in services via Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid. He also was less than forthcoming about the fact that Obamacare is now shifting a huge burden in Medicaid from the Feds onto the unwilling states which will presumably bankrupt every single state by 2026 (2023 in some less optimistic projections). To emphasize the point he was semi-obscuring, Bernanke quoted economist Herbert Stein, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop” to exceedingly nervous Press Club laughter.
The Fed chairman strongly admonished Congress to act soon to cut spending or increase revenues (taxes), or some mix of the two,  because otherwise the U.S. economy will suffer a severe correction. “One way or the other, fiscal adjustments sufficient to stabilize the federal budget must occur at some point,” he said. Bernanke avoided predicting when the U.S. might experience a debt crisis similar to what Greece and other European countries have experienced. Bernanke suggested lawmakers should forget politics and not use the debt and debt ceiling as “bargaining chips” or resort to playing political “chicken.” He also seemingly assured Republicans that their understanding was correct,   “Under current law, if the debt limit is not extended, for a time, the Treasury has various resources that it can use to make payments on our national debt,” he said, “but beyond a certain point, (our federal government) would not have those resources and the United States could conceivably — I think this is very remote, but it’s not something you want to play around with — the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt,” he said. “And the implications of that for our financial system, for our fiscal policy, for our economy would be catastrophic.”
The twin drivers of this unsustainable national path toward debt (and he did not mention, but also toward UNfunded liabilities), according to Bernanke is the double barrel impact of rising health care costs and exploding baby boomer retirements on entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. “Our ability to control health care costs, while still providing high-quality care to those who need it, will be critical for bringing the federal budget onto a more sustainable path.”   He tempered pessimism with a slightly optimistic look at the overall economy citing “increased evidence that a self-sustaining recovery in consumer and business spending may be taking hold,” but immediately slipped back into pessimism saying the economy “does look to be growing more quickly, but is still in a deep hole, is still very far from where we’d like it to be.”
Coupled with Bernanke’s speech the Senate Budget Committee heard from numerous “experts” about the most serious threats facing the hoped for economic recovery: the housing crisis; state, local and federal budget shortfalls; unrest in Egypt and its possible effects on shipping via the Suez Canal and on the price of oil; and the continuing European debt crisis. Home prices are expected to fall another 5% this year and 14-17 million Americans are currently “underwater” on their homes (owing more than their homes are worth now, not to mention after a further 5% drop in prices). Overall this amounts to an expected total average home price drop of 35% between 2007 and the end of this year possibly igniting another round of the vicious cycle of default, foreclosure and greater downward pressure on home prices.
The pressure is not all at the federal level either.   Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governor’s Association said that the Obamacare mandated explosion in Medicaid enrollment (coupled with other demands on the states shifted from the federal government) was the “700 pound gorilla” in the room as it increased costs to the states by 190 million by 2019. If the recession (which has been officially “ended” for over nineteen months now . . . you and I know better, any time home prices are down over 1/3 of their value in four years: that’s a recession!) continues, Rajjpuut concludes that the Obamacare-created meltdown of the states will happen sooner (2023) rather than later (2026). As far as bailouts, several of the witnesses at the senate hearing implied that there was no appetite for state bailouts.   Going back to Bernanke, he failed to mention that the Federal Reserve Banks under his command had been busy printing paper money and creating electronic money for the better part of twenty-seven months and there was, believe it or not, some obscure chance that the nation’s major creditors (such as China, Russia, India, Brazil, Japan and others) might not only notice but also object to his willful policy of inflation. Since technically the math says that the current dollar is worth 3.4 pennies worth of the late 2008 dollar . . . this could also be a problem, eh?
In short, Mr. Bernanke seems to be sobering up, but he’s still not admitting his drunken money-creation, so overall the prognosis for the patient is very, very, bad.
 
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
 
PS remember this:  We now have FEWER people working in AMERICA than we've known at any time SINCE 1981 during the early days of the Reagan administration.  We also have more people working for the government than at any time in history outside of war.  At a projected cost of 2 - 3.5 real jobs lost in the real economy for every government job created, is it any wonder?
Here's a chart of the eleven recessions the country's suffered through since World War II.   Notice the "V" shape typical of recession recovery is not present now thanks to government interference . . . .
 
chart-of-the-day-scariest-jobs-ever-feb-2011.jpeg 


 
 
 
 
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Rajjpuut's Folly: Meet the Man Every American Must Know; and Other Fiends

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on November 17, 2010 at 3:03am

Charlie Rangel, Guilty of Parenticide,

Seeks Mercy as a ‘Poor Orphan’

The times they are a changing for the ridiculous, the shadowy or much worse . . . .

ITEM: It now seems indisputable that Barack Obama’s BOSSMAN (or, just so you can call me a racist, let’s call him: Barack’s “MASSA”) is George Soros, the world’s 37th richest man and the #1 BUSYBODY on the planet. One of the more shocking reads available is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Party-Hillary-Radicals-Democratic/dp/1595550445

Multi-Billionaire currency-wrecker George Soros heads up or funds a group of American progressive foundations linked together within the Open Societies Initiative. By 2008 they had created a shadow government populated by such leaders as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and well-known names like Al Gore, etc. as well as numerous sixties and seventies radicals such as Bill Ayers, the bomber. Their purposes? Control of the government by progressives; destroying and then rewriting the U.S. Constitution and “revamping” the American lifestyle so that it’s “more coherent” and more “in line with the economic and environmental realities that the planet as a whole now faces.”

Soros made most of his vast fortune by collapsing currencies (his nickname is “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England”) such as the British Pound Sterling and the Hong Kong Dollar; and even (he says) collapsing evil regimes. Without proof, Soros claims that he personally drove the Soviet Union into financial collapse and ruin (his attack on Russian currency occurred well after the Soviet Collapse about a decade later in 1999 and while it earned him some money was inconclusive as far even as “destroying the entire economy” of that post-Soviet nation which Soros claimed he did). While that’s clearly a dubious claim, Soros’ raids on the money of Georgia (the former Soviet Socialist Republic), Slovakia, Thailand, England, Hong Kong, and Malaysia truly upset the apple carts in those countries but we’d like to know which of them he regards as an “evil regime.” Currently Soros is seeking to collapse the dollar and getting a lot of help from Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve’s monetizing of the American Debt and the Obama administration’s reckless spending policies.

They (the progressives who seek to “progress beyond the outdated and severely flawed U.S. Constitution) have via Soros’ network of interlocking (money-laundering) progressive institutes and foundations donated almost $2 Billion to progressives politicians and causes. Beneficiaries of Soros’ largess include Republicans (like John McCain) and a whole slew of Democrats over the last eleven years including over $300 million in an effort to unseat George Bush in 2004. Soros now controls roughly 95% of the Democratic Party’s message and people. Just as Obama and Hillary and McCain all hid their agenda behind a mask of moderatism in 2008, Soros’ people and organizations conceal their radical agenda behind good sounding rhetoric and fine-sounding institutional names such as “Open Societies” and the Tides Foundation, the Chicago Climate Exchange, the Joyce Foundation, The Apollo Alliance, Northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Enterprise Community Partners, Emerald Cities Collaborative, ACORN, Institute for Policy Studies, Center for American Progress, Green for All Group, Alliance for Climate Protection, Equal Justice Society, Council on Environmental Quality, etc., etc. at least two dozen more shadowy groups. Mr. Soros’ single most recycled quote is this one, “The main obstacle to world STABILITY is the United States.”

One of the most surprising things about Soros is that both his father and he were “fluent in Esperanto,” a fact that George is reportedly highly likely to brag of to this very day. What is Esperanto? An artificial language that folks in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s tried to force upon the world in order that we might all be united in peace and understanding. In other words, today when the most frequent words exiting George Soros’ mouth are “global,” “globalism,” “global initiatives,” “global governance,” “global banking” and “new global world order”: George wants to create a whole new planetary order of things with him at the center pulling everyone’s strings and piling up more dough-re-mi in the process . . . sweet, sweet fellow, even though that evil Glenn Beck calls Soros, “Spooky Dude.”

ITEM: After 40 year as U.S. Representative from N.Y.C., N.Y. Charlie Rangel stormed out of an ethics hearings on Monday and was later found guilty of 11 ethical violations, he claimed he’d been denied due process because he hadn’t even been present for the procedure. This harkens back to the criminal convicted of killing his parents who sought the court’s mercy “for a poor orphan.”

ITEM: Perhaps there’s something in a name? Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes fame and infamy appears to have reached his nodding dotage akin to Andy Griffith’s apparent rapidly advancing senility. Mr. Rooney took umbrage with a poll which reported that President Obama’s job performance approval rating was 46%. Rooney claimed to have done a personal poll (nine persons) and found the president’s approval was actually 89%. Rooney opined that Obama was doing the best he could and that was good enough for him. Funny, did Mr. Rooney ever show anything like the same concern or courtesy for Mr. Obama’s predecessor?

ITEM: After once again making an economic-trip to the Orient and returning absolutely empty handed, once again Barack Obama claimed that great advancements had been made in “understanding” with the South Koreans, Chinese and Japanese. Actually what happened is that when Obama asked for consensus against the Chinese for currency manipulations on their Yuan, the other G-20 economic group members pointed out that the United States had twice in the last three months engaged in “Quantitative Easing” which threatened all Dollar-holders with severe decline in our currency’s buying power . . . a huge threat to all those countries that have been funding American’s deficit spending debacle by purchasing American treasury notes. Could this be a case of the Wok calling the Kettle black?

ITEM: Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the rest of the Democratic Party leadership, and even (according to a recent poll) a large amount of Washington’s bureaucratic insiders are in denial about the meaning of the resounding defeat handed the Democrats in the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 2nd. Their interpretation? “UNtargeted voter anger” indiscriminately attacking incumbents. Pelosi, therefore, feels justified in seeking to continue on as her party’s minority leader which must make Conservatives everywhere feel a thrill up their legs.

ITEM: Any truth to the rumor that claims of TEA Party ‘racism’ were actually well-founded? An independent study has sent forth the proposition that complaints against the Democratic Party and Obama, Pelosi etc. attributed to “racism” were actually protests by the Dems against perceived unfair treatment of immoral, unintelligent, incompetent, and craven politicians? A study of sequential posters from TEA Party activities of over 25,000 such placards revealed that less than 1% could be interpreted as racist in any way. Closer examinations showed that calling signs protesting “A black day for the Constitution” and the like really had no racist intent. Could it be that “Functionally-Incompetent” politicians are the newest minority group that the Dems need to protect?

ITEM: Multi-Billionaire currency-collapser George Soros who called 1944 “the best year of my life” repeatedly since then, served as a capo for the Nazis during the epoch when half a million fellow Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers is still not slowing down in his efforts to bring order and sense to today’s world. Here’s part of an interview with Sixty Minutes that Soros took part in as Steve Kroft asked Soros about his “best year”:

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from your fellow Jews, friends and neighbors.

SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

SOROS: Not, not at all. Not at all, I rather enjoyed it.

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

SOROS: No, only feelings of absolute power.

George took time off from trying to destroy the American Dollar (aren’t our politicians doing a good enough job of it for you, Mr. Soros?) recently to invest $1.8 million in Media Matters (the leftwing group permanently recording Glenn Beck’s every word and permanently researching Beck’s past looking for indiscretions with the largest online data base on all things Glen Beck in the known universe . . . a search on their mediamatters.com website for “Glen Beck” yielded over 5440 articles) and to donate $1 million to National Public Radio (who promptly fired their only Black commentator Juan Williams for saying that when seeing Muslims in traditional garb on an airplane his immediate reaction was fear) to fund hiring 100 new “journalists.” Soros’ Tides Foundation has also funded a boycott effort via several (highly radical) environmental groups of TLC’s new series Sarah Palin’s Alaska which premiered to large viewership Monday night. More and more busy-body activities at every turn by (deep voice here) “Spooky-Dude” George. Rajjpuut himself has researched into the 80-year old Mr. Soros’ birth data and discovered that his name at birth in Hungary on August 12, 1930, was Andrew George Schwartz to a Jewish family with an anti-Semite mother . . . hmmm Andrew Schwartz, Andy Rooney, Andy Griffith, maybe there is something in a name after all? In any case serving as a capo for the Nazis as a 14 year old boy is justification for any weirdness manifested later in life, we love you and forgive you, Andy, ooops, and we mean, Georgie.

ITEM: Ben Bernanke, who on at least three public occasions since May of 2009 has said unequivocally, “We will NOT monetize the debt” meaning we will not usher in a wave of inflation by ‘quantitative easing’ (willy-nilly use of the money printing presses by his Federal Reserve) had by April of 2009 A) already printed bills amounting to nearly fifteen times the amount of circulating currency in the country in October, 2008 meaning the dollar potentially became 1/16 as valuable as it was on that date or potentially equal to 6.25 pennies B) in August bought large amounts of the treasury department’s bond sales with a QE1 printing of more money and C) this month repeated his sinning with QE2 printing of yet more funny-money. Well then again, perhaps it’s not “funny-money” after all; it all sounds very sad and playing right into the hands of Mr. Soros and his currency collapsing crew. By the way, Georgie, how can you create an Open Society Initiative and 33 other progressive funds to launder your money through and then speak extensively about “Shadow Governments” and their use in destroying currencies? Does that give you “a feeling of absolute power?”

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

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Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama Deficit-Commission Enters Public-Masturbation Mode

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on November 10, 2010 at 10:30pm

President Obama’s latest dog and pony show, the highly ballyhooed Deficit Commission, today did everything possible to dramatically heighten public suspicion of government; and to increase business’ uncertainty in the country. In particular public dissatisfaction (with the idea that the home mortgage interest deduction on income taxes should be eliminated) will probably amount to open mutiny. More importantly, NO real mention of inciting a return to prosperity comes up in the revelations released today as “Chapter 1” of their proposed deficit-reduction package. Those two, prosperity and deficit cutting, MUST go hand in hand.

In a phrase, the Commission recommends gutting the Pentagon; raising taxes; and infuriating the business community and homeowners; oh, and clearly it won’t work! Let Rajjpuut remind you what does work:

1) Cut taxes. Extend all the Bush tax cuts for fifteen years and permanently establish the Bush Estate Tax as the law of the land.2) Establish a six-month income tax embargo on all business and personal income for 2011 to jump-start the economy.
3) Cut, nay SLASH, government spending 20% across the board and 25% for non-defense spending and hold that level of spending for as long as necessary until the current National debt is reduced and surplus is achieved.4) Require a balanced budget, by creating an amendment to the Constitution, and within that budget require a full new funding and gradual refunding of the lock boxes for Social Security, Medicare and both the state and federal branches of Medicaid.
5) Cut all federal salaries by 25%. Maintain those levels of government salaries and wages for fifteen years while cutting government employment by 10% in year one; 6% in year two; 5% in year three; 4% in year four; 3% in year five; 2% in year six; and 1% in year seven.6) Raise the retirement age for government workers to 68 years old immediately for all persons now aged 58 or younger.
7) Require all government workers to abide with retirement equal to social security levels. Any surpluses to be put in the social security lock-box.8) Raise the Retirement age for others to 67 years old for all persons now aged 55 and younger; and in 2019 for all persons then aged 55 and younger to 68 years old.
9) Repeal and/or defund Obamacare and start over for a real health care reform addressing costs in a realistic fashion.10) Create an intelligent bi-partisan commission without any academic personalities involved but solely made up of politicians, business people and health experts to discuss successfully cutting unfunded liabilities (Social Security, Medicare and both the state and federal side of Medicaid) with a reporting date of 2013.
11) Establish an “all of the above” energy policy and encourage the building of new refineries and nuclear power plants.12) Require all legal bills to reference the U.S. Constitution and prove the bill is justified as Constitutional.

13) Eliminate Federal Reserve Banking and make inflationary spending above 4% at any time illegal. To prevent inflation, abandon Bernanke’s evil idea of “quantitative easing” by the Fed; and abandon the artificially low interest rates Ben Bernanke has established as a means to continue the corrupt idea of “too big to fail” by which (0.25% rates) he has protected five irresponsible banks (J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC with an overall derivative exposure of roughly $210 Trillion; including $188 Trillion in interest-rate derivative exposure). Patriotism is not about protecting stupid banks but protecting the American citizens.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

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Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama Puppetmaster Soros: ‘U.S. Main Obstacle to World Stability’

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on November 9, 2010 at 8:30pm

Is “Judgment Day” tomorrow? The foolishness of our Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke and the excesses of five “too big to fail banks” now places the entire future of America at risk . . . .

George Soros Seeks America’s Ruin

to Advance His New World Order

In the narrative that follows, two important men (George Soros and Ben Bernanke) are discussed. In fairness to Soros, he appears to be an utter scumbag who has already, via his connections to the Clintons and ACORN, helped set up America’s recent financial meltdown and potentially the upcoming one as well. That’s as fair as Rajjpuut can be. In fairness to Bernanke, he probably sees his ongoing decision as avoiding “death by saber” in preference to death by a million paper cuts. Rajjpuut would remind him that no company and no bank is literally “too big to fail” and if he were strong enough to allow five big banks to fail, that’ll probably be the best thing for the American people and the nation they love . . . let us now return to scumbag George . . . .

Billionaire currency speculator George Soros (a self-claimed ‘philanthropist’ sometimes called ‘the man who broke the bank of England’) has been quoted thusly from time to time, “Sometimes I do feel more than a little bit like God . . . it is very important for the USA to find its proper place in the New World Order . . . as things stand, the main obstacle to world stability is the United States.”

When George Soros was a 13-year old boy in Budapest, Hungary, he was a capo, a Jew set up by the Nazis to help them control other Jews. His specific job was to deliver notifications at first to Jewish farmers and businessmen and lawyers and then later to just ordinary citizens saying, they were to report to the Nazis at such and such a place, at such and such a time (to be deported to a concentration camp). George, who calls himself an atheist these days, says he feels no guilt from his collaboration but just did what he had to do to survive.

Besides making a fortune on the collapse of the British pound-sterling in 1992, George is famous as well for bringing down currencies in Slovakia, Georgia (the former Soviet SSR) and Malaysia and reportedly a few other countries where his connections are a little bit “iffy” to prove. His modus Operandi has been by using radical personalities to form a “shadow government” within the nations he targets. In our case, that Shadow Government is the ultra-progressive left of the Democratic Party.

Thanks to conspiring with Bill Clinton, ACORN, Barack Obama, and progressive American politicians everywhere, Soros seems poised to win another huge currency bet and in the case of the United States, he hopes to collect twice . . . winning tens of billions of dollars when the dollar collapses and then the ruin of the United States would bring about a giant leap forward for Soros’ New World Order led in America’s absence from the top rungs by the Chinese government’s state-capitalist/communists. Hmmmm.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/debt-bubble-chronicles-does-bernanke-really-think-qe-will-boost-home-prices%E2%80%A6-or-he-simply-tr

Soros’ unwitting (we think?) benefactor in all this is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Ben’s policy of “Quantitative Easing” (monetizing the U.S. debt by having his Federal Reserve Bank buy up treasury issues) is designed to keep interests rates as low as they’ve been in a generation . . . or even take them lower. But, but, isn’t that (combined with Bernanke’s earlier multiplying of circulating currency in the country to 15 times the September, 2008, levels) a recipe for runaway inflation and perhaps even hyper-inflation? What’s going on? Interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in 30+ years supposedly controlled by Bernanke to maintain the housing market’s fluidity and spur business investments.

The two years this policy of near-zero interest rates have been in effect; plus the nation’s massive home-buyers’ tax credit . . . business has stayed very flat and at best, housing prices have almost stabilized. Is Bernanke even less competent economically than Obama? Or could he have an ulterior motive?

Looking at business we’re not seeing capital expenditure increases or increased hiring of employees . . . just ain’t happening. Instead businesses are buying back their own stock. Why? Because the mortgage industry and the business world are both on the same page . . . the page where it reads: “This is a phony recovery.”

Compared to the spring of 2008, revenues at S&P 500 companies are 12% lower today. Expansion would be foolish under those circumstances. Businesses don’t often buy back their own stock except when a) they think the share prices are too depressed or b) they’ve got nothing better to do with the money or c) both a) and b) above are true . . . but since corporate insiders are dumping their own personal shares like rats leaving sinking rowboats . . . (insider selling/insider buying ratio during October, 2010, ranged from 210/1 up to 2000/1) implies that they believe their companies’ stock shares are way over-valued and not a bargain purchase at all, is it possible that conditions a) and c) above don’t apply here and now? And, therefore, the corporations don’t have anything better to do with their money (condition b)?

That means that Bernanke’s stated purposes are presumably a genuine crock of B.S. Why does he wish to keep interest rates so abnormally low? We return to the never-never land of derivatives and too damn big to fail. The five banks** that Bernanke and Obama have been shoring up since January, 2009 are in deep, deep, deep doo-doo. We are NOT talking chump change here . . . nominally . . .

J.P. Morgan holds derivative exposure of $73 TRillion.

Bank of America holds derivative exposure of $47.5 TRillion

Citibank holds derivative exposure of $44 TRillion

Goldman Sachs holds derivative exposure of $41 TRillion

HSBC holds derivative exposure of $2.6 TRillion

Overall, of their total derivative exposure, $188 TRillion in interest- rate derivatives is held by these five banks. Bernanke is allowing them to profit for exposing themselves to those derivatives without any risk of failure because if they fail . . . America comes close to total implosion. The recklessness of these five banks especially the first four named is absolutely intolerable. The Federal Reserve Bank’s actions have aided and abetted the worst financial malfeasance in world history. Their interest rate derivative exposure is the equivalent of allowing a terrorist to buy a lottery ticket for the opportunity to destroy the entire banking system of the world . . . yeah, you’re probably not going to lose and you get to keep his buck, but, what happens if he rolls a natural?

Banks are NOT supposed to gamble with depositors’’ money! That $188 TRillion is 13.5 times the United States’ gross domestic product and 4.2 times the GDP of the entire world. Bernanke is not protecting you; not protecting the country; definitely not protecting the dollar; and not protecting the world economy. He is protecting profit and preventing ruin for the Goldman Sachs etc. of the world who are “too big to fail” . . . in doing so, he is making tens of billions of dollars for George Soros to collect when runaway inflation hits the country and the dollar stops being the world’s reserve currency.

Is “Judgment Day” tomorrow? The foolishness of our Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke and the excesses of five “too big to fail banks” now places the entire future of America at risk. George Soros, who is guilty of helping the progressive wing of the Democratic Party bring about the financial meltdown, is now exploiting the foolishness of Bernanke and perhaps giving a little tweak here and there by selling dollars short on the currency exchanges . . . and the big loser: you and the American Dream.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

**According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities for the Second Quarter 2010 (our most recent), the notional value of derivatives held by U.S. commercial banks is around $223.4 TRILLION. The five banks mentioned above account for 94% of those holdings.

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Rajjpuut's Folly: Are You Prepared for the Dollar's Collapse?

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on November 8, 2010 at 9:30pm

As Ben Bernanke Deliberately Collapses

the American Dollar, George Soros Chortles

For lack of a better name, call it the OJCP, "Obama Jobs Creation^^ Program": your money is deliberately being made worth less or worthless to spur jobs creation. The plan is that foreigners will want to get rid of dollars and buy American goods, thus creating jobs. Foreign goods will become too expensive for Americans who will decide to buy American goods instead, presto, again more jobs created here. Doesn't that sound wonderful? The chief architect of all this with Mr. Obama is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke who is also initiating something called "quantitative easing."

The reserve currency of the entire world for lo’ these many years has been the American dollar. Within the last couple years George “The Puppet Master” Soros (the world’s 35th richest man and its single greatest megalomaniacal communist who already has thrice profited fantastically by bringing about the collapse of some nation’s currency) told the world press that a controlled devaluation of the American dollar was necessary for the good of the world community. The interview was not widely covered in this country, but his comment sent ripples throughout the world especially among those foreign governments who hold U.S. dollars. The legendary Mr. Soros who bankrolls a good ten non-profit groups involved in getting the United States into the shark-filled Cap and Trade waters, by the way, is advocating Cap and Trade** legislation as a way out of our present crisis.

Within the last 18 months, both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Bank Chief Ben Bernanke swore that America would never devaluate the dollar, would never resort to inflation as a way to deal with our incredible debt, would never sabotage the American people and those who hold debt instruments from the American treasury . . . . Yep, they lied. The terms “Q1” and “Q2” are now becoming familiar to Americans who do other things than watch sitcoms and “reality” shows on TV. “Quantitative easing” has taken place in both of the last two fiscal quarters.

The Quantitative Easing which Mr. Bernanke is taking us through is a polite way to say that the government is deliberately making toilet paper of your savings, pension funds, etc. That’s what the government is doing. Rajjpuut first mentioned the German Weimar Republic back in a blog in early 2004. The astute Mr. Glen Beck of the Fox News cable network has this very month said that America is now heading for a “Weimar Moment.” The Weimar Republic was the government forced upon Germany when they lost World War I. The infamous Treaty of Versailles also forced upon Germany an impossible set of reparations payments. In order to deal with the demands from the victorious French, the Germans had to inflate their currency. The Deutsch Mark which was worth 25 cents (four DM to the dollar) in 1917 deteriorated so rapidly that in November, 1923; it took 26 Billion Deutsch Marks to equal a dollar. You may also remember November, 1923, as the time when Adolf Hitler led a group of dissatisfied individuals in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch (coup d’état) trying to usurp the government of Bavaria. The resulting trial for treason made Hitler a household name across Germany. Such are the benefits of state-sponsored inflation . . . .

In October of 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, Mr. Bernanke took it upon himself (there are virtually no limits to the power of a Federal Reserve chief’s to inflict intended or unintended pain) to begin printing up money. When he was done he’d printed up 14 times as many new bills as there were dollars previously in circulation so in total: 15 times as much money was circulating as before. In effect, the potential effect on the dollar was that the 20o9 dollar was worth 6.7 cents worth of 2008 money . . . NICE!

In the summer of 2010 when it became difficult to sell American debt instruments because foreign governments were reluctant to risk buying up dollar instruments without a much higher interest rate, the federal government in the form of Mr. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve Bank began printing again and bought up some of the Treasury instruments that were on sale, about one-third of them. This is called “monetizing debt” something you’ll recall from the top of this blog that Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke promised would never happen. That didn’t seem to have cured the problems so now Ben’s busy again with the printing presses and monetizing more debt a.k.a. quantitative easing . . . Q1 earlier; Q2 now. Back when Q1 was going on you might recall, Rajjpuut telling Americans to buy gold or silver because paper dollars were becoming worth less and eventually might prove worthless. Now Rajjpuut says that Americans should buy things of value like gold or silver, etc. because “worthless” is the watchword for the dollar. Of course, in ignorance the stock market investors believe Q2 is a good idea and the stock market is shooting up . . . dance while you can, boys, the bill’s coming due. Aren’t you glad “they” are looking out for us in Washington?

Here is the straight skinny and Rajjpuut crosses his heart while typing this: The crisis in the world’s finances comes down to one thing and one thing only . . . a crisis in the American dollar. The U.S. National Debt is almost $14 TRillion. Unfunded liabilities (owed by the country to the citizens) amounts to roughly $110 TRillion. We are by far the greatest debtor nation the world has ever known. While scarfing down junk food and watching American Idol a few other simple facts have escaped the good citizens . . . .

ITEM: Americans are not aware that the U.S. (private controlled central bank) Federal Reserve Bank, creates money out of thin air, is the primary cause of inflation in America, abets the politicians in their horrendous spending, and abets the creation of financial bubbles in the stock market and real estate.

ITEM: The American mainstream media (MSM) are largely “controlled” by their allegiance to the progressive elements in the Democratic and Republican parties. The MSM which did not report on Climategate when it happened one year ago, has also kept the American people ignorant of the coming crisis. Call it “mind control,” if you choose. Just five or six major corporations run the largest of the media outlets. When it comes to the broadcast media: Disney owns ABC, CBS is owned by Viacom, GE owns NBC all of whom are in bed with the progressive agenda in Washington and have a vested interest in keeping Americans entertained, dumb and happy rather than informed about the truth behind Cap and Trade and the value of their dollars.

ITEM: Not only have ultra-progressive George Soros’ words and activities gone unreported, but the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank, both have already said the dollar will be devalued. However, this has never been reported in the US media.

ITEM: President Clinton’s former economic adviser Robert Reich recently told Canadians that the U.S. dollar will collapse. Again, NOT reported.

ITEM: Collapse or “devaluation” of the dollar means a decline in the dollar’s purchasing power and a huge decline in Americans’ living standard. No one wants to hold a currency declining in value so they must demand higher prices for their goods and services and can use the dollars they receive to bid up the cost of whatever they buy from America in order to get rid of the dollars they hold as quickly as p0ssible.

Item: Today, Barack Obama made several monetary deals with India. Overtly we were told it was “a natural union between the world’s two most populous democracies.” In reality, Obama seeing that China is becoming reluctant to buy dollars was looking for a trade-partner who would be more or less forced by the agreement to keep the dollar respectfully in its hallowed place as a “reserve currency” . . . thus he hopes easing some of the pain the decline will bring to Americans by sharing that turmoil with India.

Item: The world will flee to gold, silver and other precious metals; to the Swiss Franc; and even to the recently despised Euro. Commodities of all kinds can be expected to rise in price FAST.

Ultimately what can we expect? For one thing the rest of the world understands our own crisis far more than our own leaders have informed us about it. So . . . expect a run to get out of the dollar . . . call it “hot potato economics.” People are going to be eager to discard the almighty buck and to buy whatever they can with it, rather than being the last one holding it. Of course that will happen among highly aware foreigners like the Chinese government, or the governments of Russsia, Brazil, Japan and India(?) long before the man in the street in America figures it all out. So expect a brief boom in America. And expect prices of our American products especially foodstuffs to go through the roof . . . so besides gold or silver, it might be nice to have a supply of canned and packaged and non-perishable food on hand while prices are comparatively cheap . . . as a result of these sad truths, expect huge amounts of unrest in the inner cities; expect huge amounts of problems for senior citizens and others living on fixed incomes. Expect George Soros to chortle all the way to the bank . . . .

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut
^^Barack’s OJCP based upon devaluing the dollar is an immensely poor idea for three reasons:

#1 Inflation is tricky and can become devastating runaway inflation and even hyper-inflation destroying a civilization.

#2 When a currency as important as the dollar starts to devalue, no other country wants to import our joblessness, so you can expect demoralizing “currency wars” where dozens of nations seek to devalue their currencies and save jobs. Japan and China have received much criticism for devaluing their currencies but their money is NOT the world’s reserve currency . . . . world chaos would ensue if serious dollar deflation was allowed.

#3 Success at devaluation is close akin to success at swallowing thumb tacks and sure to “get you in the end.” Money is a storehouse of value (some call it “frozen work”) so why not attack your brand new car with a sledgehammer? The effect is the same . . . taking something of value and making it worth less or even worthless. Even if the only effect was upon imports and exports, that would be a tragic result. 19% of the U.S. economy is tied up with imports, drop the value of the dollar and 19% of what we buy becomes much more expensive.

In effect, the OJCP Obama Jobs Creation Program is just making us all much poorer. It’s not exactly sawing a lady in half to create jobs by making the country poorer . . . the magic comes from creating jobs by making us all wealthier like Donald Trump and Bill Gates do . . . not only making themselves richer; but making their stockholders richer; and their workers richer; and providing deep value to their customers. That’s the magic of capitalism which Barack so hates. Remove the minimum wage; remove health care and all benefits; make everyone on unemployment work for $5 daily and you’d have full employment in a month . . . and a much poorer nation as well for at least the three years it would take for a booming capitalism to regenerate our prosperity.

Everyone knows the following discussion is the truth . . . think of it as you ponder what you’ve learned already about the evils of devaluing the dollar:

Many have had to settle for lower wages to keep their jobs.

Many have had to settle for lower hours to keep their jobs.

Many have had to settle for part-time work to keep their jobs.

Many on part-time schedules have found themselves ineligible for the benefits they’ve formerly received.

Many have lost their jobs.

Many have lost higher paying jobs and now work elsewhere for less.

Or they've lost higher paying jobs and can only find work that pays less for mandatory unpaid overtime.

Many have had to take two or three jobs to survive working up to 90-100 hours weekly.

Many lost co-pays, deductibles, or seen eligibility times soar on their health insurance.

Many find that employers can longer match their401(k) contributions.

Many older workers have found themselves dispensible.

Many have lost their pensions.

Some workplaces where experienced older workers are valued have instituted two-tier wage systems. New hires get far lower wages and far less benefits.

Wage-freezes attack many workers in the long run as inflation eats into their present constant wage.

What does this mean? It means that anyone can create jobs by making everyone poorer, no struggle at all. The magic comes from capitalism creating not only more jobs, but better and more valuable jobs. The goal isn't just more jobs, Mr. Obama. It's about creating more jobs that pay enough to improve our living standards. Using a dramatically weakened dollar to create more jobs doesn't really help us.

** if we had Cap and Trade laws in effect right now, the immediate effect would be 67% inflation on average and inflation on food, electricity and gasoline and other necessities closer to 100%. Where does that 67% inflation figure come from? Founder and President of the Chicago Climate Exchange Richard Sandor (other influentials involved include Obama, Franklin Raines, Joel Rogers, John Ayers, Valerie Jarret, etc. and the Chicago ShoreBank supported by Hillary and Bill Clinton as well as ten or more progressive foundations financed by George Soros) put the value of Cap and Trade as an industry at $10 TRillion. In good times the real U.S. economy amounts to $15 TRillion. On paper, that means that selling blue-sky nothingness (that’s what Cap and Trade basically does) is “worth” 67% of the real U.S. economy. So in a $25 TRillion economy including Cap and Trade . . . 40% of the economy is literally “nothing” and that 40% is being stolen from the real economy by the crooks running the CCX. Note: Obama said directly in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that his energy plan would “bankrupt the coal industry” and “necessarily make electricity prices skyrocket.” So it’s actually far more likely in reality that the whole U.S. economy would amount to $20 TRillion and half of that economy would be Cap and Trade not only running prices up 100% but reducing the standard of living by 33% at least.

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Rajjpuut's Folly: Obama Aims to Imitate Spanish Green-Economy Model

Posted by Bob VanDeHey on June 4, 2010 at 5:30pm


"SIGH-PIE-B" R Us? Euro in Big Trouble
Take a closer look at the economies of eight European countries since the Greek bailout by the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund** (IMF). Specifically examining, Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Ireland, England and Belgium -- the lot of which can be abbreviated “SIGH-PIE-B” – gives one a sad, sad view. Belgium and Hungary are the latest to disappoint and still have hopes. England also could make it and avoid bankruptcy and fiscal collapse, if they get out of the European Union (and their currency is still separate). But let NOT Americans get too complacent.
The Debt/GDP ratio (Gross Domestic Product) which we Americans are burdened under is worse than seven of these eight troubled nations (all but Greece). Additionally, our Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has inflated our circulating currency to a level fifteen times where it stood in September 2008. Since our president is also willfully adopting policies far worse than any of these countries now have in place and is confounding and obstructing our economy’s chances at recovery by leaps and bounds when will we here in the United States suffer their fate?
If we didn’t have an extremely resilient capitalist economy as our foundation and a relatively low level of unionized labor, we’d already be feeling much of the pain Greece has suffered, but Barack Obama’s moving quickly to cure us of those impediments to financial Armageddon . . . .
Right now one of the great anomalies, and the only thing keeping the Obamunistic American economy afloat is the fact that 98% of people who look at investing in the dollar see a mysteriously rising currency . . . more fools they. Because conventionally people only compare the Dollar to the Euro and vice-versa . . . investors worldwide are not seeing the obvious and clear collapse of the once mighty dollar right befor our eyes but only an artificial bull-market in the buck which is all that’s keeping us afloat. And where, pray tell, should they be looking? They'll undoubtedly soon look at gold, look at platinum, look at palladium, look at silver, look at copper and pretty soon start looking at the prices of ALL commodities such as food, gas, electricity, electronic goods, etc.
When the true nature of the inflating dollar and the weakness of the American economy starts to become obvious, say about September . . . the Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Indian and Brazillian investors holding rapidly devaluing greenbacks will sooner or later come to their senses and start buying up hard currency, oil and precious metals with dollars and the Obama daydream will vanish into thin air as funds loaned to us by other countries will become very expensive (say at 10-12% interest). Not satisfied with this state of affairs, however, Obama is seeking to inflict the coup de gras upon our troubled economy with “America’s Power Act,” a slimy euphemism for cap and trade or cap and tax legislation.
The quickest collapse in Europe happened to Spain, which was the poster boy for European economic-soundness around ten or eleven years ago with a booming economy and a miniscule 3% unemployment rate. Spain then, however, adopted a green-jobs^^ economic policy and now has 21% unemployment and is rapidly moving toward Greece’s level of unsoundness. Just two days ago, Barack Obama praised the green economy of Spain and said he intends to “break our dependence upon oil once and for all" (not foreign oil – but all oil). Yep, SIGH-PIE-B R us!
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
** $70 Billion from American Taxpayers went into the Greek bailout fiasco
^^subsidizing each green job cost $677,000 in dollars on average and cost 2.2 real jobs from the wider economy; most were temporary; only 10% proved permanent; pay typically ran from $10-$14 per hour . . . . The sad end result : 22 real permanent jobs were lost for every permanent government-created green job and green-tech is actually marginally better in Spain than it is here in America. Green jobs killed Spain. The current Spanish slang term for curse words is not “4-letter words” as Americans say it, but “palabras verdes” . . . green words.
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