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Documents are largely from what is referenced by interesting films, Prison Planet/Infowars and the Corbett Report. This database is a quick reference and for your analysis, more independent from others' interpretations. The database includes almost all source documents and articles from these films: Loose Change (Final Cut & 2nd Edition), Fabled Enemies, The Obama Deception, End Game, Martial Law 9/11, American Dictators, Matrix of Evil, Zeitgeist: Addendum, Who Killed The Electric Car?, The World According To Monsanto, Mind The Gap, and 7/7 Ripple Effect.
Why the Dollar's Reign Is Near an End For decades the dollar has served as the world's main reserve currency, but, argues Barry Eichengreen, it will soon have to share that role. Here's why--and what it will mean for international markets and companies.
The single most astonishing fact about foreign exchange is not the high volume of transactions, as incredible as that growth has been. Nor is it the volatility of currency rates, as wild as the markets are these days.
Instead, it's the extent to which the market remains dollar-centric.
Consider this: When a South Korean wine wholesaler wants to import Chilean cabernet, the Korean importer buys U.S. dollars, not pesos, with which to pay the Chilean exporter. Indeed, the dollar is virtually the exclusive vehicle for foreign-exchange transactions between Chile and Korea, despite the fact that less than 20% of the merchandise trade of both countries is with the U.S.
Chile and Korea are hardly an anomaly: Fully 85% of foreign-exchange transactions world-wide are trades of other currencies for dollars. What's more, what is true of foreign-exchange transactions is true of other international business. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries sets the price of oil in dollars. The dollar is the currency of denomination of half of all international debt securities. More than 60% of the foreign reserves of central banks and governments are in dollars. (Wall Street Journal)
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? Financial crooks brought down the world's economy -- but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them By Matt Taibbi. Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
"You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once." (Rolling Stone)
David Rosenberg: You Know You Are In A Depression When... Congress moved to extend jobless benefits seven times, as has been the case
over the past two years, at a time when almost half of the ranks of the
unemployed have been looking for at least a half year.
The unemployment rate for adult males (25-54 years) hit a post-WWII this cycle
and is still above the 1982 recession peak, and the youth unemployment rate is
stuck near 25%. These developments will have profound long-term
consequences – social, economic and political.
The fiscal costs of the depression continue to mount, with the White House on
Friday raising its deficit projection for 2011 to $1.4 trillion from $1.267 trillion.
That gap in the forecast – $133 billion – was close to the size of the entire
budget deficit back in 2002. Amazing.
You also know it is a depression when you find out on the weekend that the FDIC
seized and shuttered another seven banks, making it 103 closures for the year.
What a recovery!
You also know it's a depression when a year into a statistical recovery, the
central bank is still openly contemplating ways to stimulate growth. The Fed was
supposed to have already started the process of shrinking its pregnant balance
sheet four months ago and is now instead thinking of restarting Quantitative
Easing. Of course, we are in this bizarre environment where bank credit
continues to contract – last week alone, bank wide consumer credit outstanding
fell $2.2 billion; real estate lending contracted $9.2 billion; and commercial &
industrial loans slid $5.1 billion.
What did the banks do this past week? They replaced cash with government
securities – the $47.5 billion net buying was the second largest in the past three
years. As the banks find few opportunities to lend – households are either not
creditworthy enough to lend to or are busy paying off debts and companies that
do have any expansion plans have enough cash on their balance sheet to
finance their initiatives – they are likely to use their $1 trillion in excess reserves
buying government and related securities, especially with the yield curve so
steep and the Fed ensuring that it has no intention of taking the 'carry' away for
a long, long time. (Business Insider)
Citigroup Warns Customers It May Refuse To Allow Withdrawals "Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change," Citigroup said on statements received by customers all over the country. (Business Insider)
The Great American Bubble Machine From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they're about to do it again
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. (Rolling Stone)
The Federal Reserve, already arguably the most powerful agency in the U.S. government, will get sweeping new authority to regulate any company whose failure could endanger the U.S. economy and markets under the Obama administration's regulatory overhaul plan (Washington Times)
Details Set for Remake of Financial Regulations At the center of the plan, which administration officials are referring to as a "white paper," is a move to remake powers of the Federal Reserve to oversee the biggest financial players, give the government the power to unwind and break up systemically important companies -- much like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. does with failed banks -- and create a new regulator for consumer-oriented financial products (Wall Street Journal)
Citigroup Stuck With Bernanke Offer Rival Banks Plan to Refuse When financial stocks slumped in February to the lowest level in at least 17 years, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told Congress the government might end up owning "substantial" stakes in the country’s biggest banks (Bloomberg)
Fed’s Role in AIG May Be First Target of GAO Audit Congressional auditors may soon examine the Federal Reserve’s role in the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc. after gaining authority to review Fed documents under a law that took force last week (Bloomberg)
Goldman Sachs's $100 Million Trading Days Hit Record Goldman Sachs’s trading results reflected the firm’s willingness to take on more risk during the period. Value-at- risk, an estimate of how much the firm could lose in any given day, surged to an average of $240 million in the first quarter from $157 million in the first quarter of 2008 (Bloomberg)
FASB Eases Fair-Value Rules Amid Lawmaker Pressure The Financial Accounting Standards Board, pressured by U.S. lawmakers and financial companies, voted to relax fair-value accounting rules that Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. say don’t work when markets are inactive (Bloomberg)
U.S. Taxpayers Risk $9.7 Trillion on Bailout Programs, would've paid for 90% of all mortgages The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.
The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. The Senate is to vote this week on an economic-stimulus measure of at least $780 billion. It would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.
Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed.
“We’ve seen money go out the back door of this government unlike any time in the history of our country,” Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said on the Senate floor Feb. 3. “Nobody knows what went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom and for what purpose. How much from the FDIC? How much from TARP? When? Why?” (Bloomberg)
Bank of America to receive additional $20 billion But the need for fresh government support to grapple with the newly revealed losses at Merrill Lynch, the brokerage firm he snapped up in a rapid-fire arrangement at the height of the financial crisis in September, raises questions about whether the bank has gone a deal too far (New York Times)
Government bailout hits $8.5 trillion The federal government committed an additional $800 billion to two new loan programs on Tuesday, bringing its cumulative commitment to financial rescue initiatives to a staggering $8.5 trillion, according to Bloomberg News (San Francisco Chronicle)
There is a growing consensus among Treasury and other federal officials that allowing healthy banks to use the money to acquire banks in jeopardy of failing could stabilize the economy and bolster confidence in banks. (Washington Post)
Democrats Mull $300 Billion Stimulus House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is mulling recommendations from several economists that Congress act on an economic-recovery package that would cost taxpayers $300 billion, according to congressional aides, equivalent to about 2% of the country's gross domestic product (Wall Street Journal)
Rep. Brad Sherman threatened with Martial Law if bank bailout did not pass House of Representatives. Congressman Brad Sherman [D-CA] asks: "But why are we bailing out the Bank of China? Why are we bailing out the Saudi royal family?... The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and by sustaining a panic atmosphere... A few Members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted 'no'. (CSPAN)
Pelosi and Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic Caucus chairman, were among leaders patrolling the House floor for support. (Bloomberg)
Taking unprecedented steps, the Fed and other major central banks on Monday poured hundreds of billions of dollars of added liquidity into money markets left paralyzed by fears of further bank failures in the United States and Europe. (Wall Street Journal)
The sell off is the largest percentage drop for the S&P 500 since Oct. 26, 1987. It also translates into a $700 billion loss for the day for the S&P, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at Standard & Poor's. (CBS, Market Watch)
WaMu is largest U.S. bank failure Washington Mutual Inc was closed by the U.S. government in by far the largest failure of a U.S. bank, and its banking assets were sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co for $1.9 billion (Reuters)
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