Money / Economy

Alice Schroeder
Bloomberg

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

Pham-Duy Nguyen and Nicholas Larkin
Bloomberg

Gold surged to a record for a second day as investors stepped up purchases to protect their wealth against fiat currencies. Silver also gained.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve mob boss, is running scared. He is deathly afraid an audit of his criminal organization.

“These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States,” Bernanke wrote in the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post.

Mac Slavo
SHTF Plan
November 24, 2009

SHTFplan contributors opined about the 2009 holiday retail season in The Recession in Pictures, with many coming to a similar conclusion to Alan Cohen, Chairman of Abacus Advisors.

From An Unbiased View of The Holiday Shopping Season:

Deep concern about both the credit crisis and cutbacks in consumer spending has translated into retail strategies marked by caution, Cohen noted. “Manufacturers produced less, and retailers ordered less. In the run-up to the 2009 holiday season, everybody was in a conservative mood.”

 

Jim Willie
The Golden Jackass

The rise in gold pre-sages a currency collapse, led by the USDollar. Gold vaults at commodity exchanges in New York and especially London are being drained by delivery demands. Gold demand is skyrocketing, as distrust for the USDollar is broadening and revolt against the US$ is deepening. The quintessential finance war is between the United States and China, with the battlefield being the US$ and Gold. The race over the $1000 price level came in the face of mammoth shorting by the same Usual Suspects on Wall Street, which do so with paper, but without the required collateral. The gold market is poised for a surprise upward move from a basic broken condition, as the Powerz are losing control. It would be a joy to watch except for the extreme hardship due to come to the betrayed American people.

 

StreetInsider

A key House panel approved the Paul-Grayson Amendment by an overwhelming 43-26 Thursday afternoon, which will give watchdogs new authority to audit the Federal Reserve.

Here is a summary of the Paul-Grayson Amendment:

Global financial body wants complete overhaul as soon as possible

Steve Watson
Infowars.net

The head of the International Monetary Fund has once again called for a new global currency to replace the Dollar, adding that the momentum to instigate such a system is fading.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn told a forum on Tuesday that he wishes to see an emboldened IMF pave the way for the emergence of a global currency based on the monetary body’s special drawing right (SDR).

Jason Mick
DailyTech

CEO at leading parts supplier: “Energy independence…ultimately means that fuel has to be more expensive”

It’s no secret that when gas prices dropped early in the year and with the recession in full swing, hybrid sales saw their first drop in years. Faced with tough new fuel economy restrictions, auto executives had come up with all sorts of unusual suggestions — such as cutting crash testing — but now had to puzzle over a new dilemma; what if consumers don’t want the higher-priced electric vehicles that they plan to start flooding the market with in less that a year?

Washington’s Blog

Guess who said the following:

Far from turning around the [George] Bush legacy of deficits and debt, [US president Barack] Obama has made it worse. It has got all the hallmarks of a financial collapse about to happen in America…

The US dollar is almost becoming like junk bonds.

Bob Chapman

The International Forecaster

The G-20 finance ministers meet in Scotland on November 6th and 7th, and they will all be bleating about the fall in the dollar. France started this week, and the others will follow. Their currencies are rising in value and they do not like it.

Consumer credit is falling fast. In July, consumer credit plunged by $19 billion, followed by an August drop of $12 billion, a 5.8 percent annual rate. Credit card spending decreased by nearly $10 billion in August, while non-revolving debt, including auto loans, fell by $2 billion.

Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute

Scary times ahead? Perhaps, if you take credence in what Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, says.

Paul, who had a strong grassroots following during the 2008 presidential election, explained on Glenn Beck’s Sept. 30 radio program that perilous times lie ahead due to the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy. Host Glenn Beck asked how an Israeli strike against Iran might trigger problems with the American financial system.
“What happens when Israel strikes Iran or Iran has the earth rays and we know that they now have a nuclear weapon, what happens to our financial system at that point?” Beck asked.

 

“A year ago,” said law professor Ross Buckley on Australia’s ABC News last week, “nobody wanted to know the International Monetary Fund. Now it’s the organiser for the international stimulus package which has been sold as a stimulus package for poor countries.”

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Bilderberg has had front-men call anew for creating a global currency and establishing major European Union-style regions for the administrative convenience of a planned world government. Both steps were taken in September, one by the new Bilderberg-crowned prime minister of Japan and one separately by the UN.

The Federal government, influenced by the United Nations, is stealing American land and resources as Agenda 21 Sustainable Development is implemented in all states. Sustainable Development seems appealing and desirable on the surface, but it is actually a plot to erase humans entirely from 50% of American land, with a ban on extraction of resources, like water!

There’s a popular video circulating on the ‘net right now about how to escape handcuffs without using a key. Americans are watching the video to bone up on essential skills that will soon be needed for health care reform, it seems, since the new laws that are about to be put in place call for Americans to be arrested and thrown in jail if they refuse to buy health insurance.

Let’s look at the Federal Reserve’s actual performance and determine how bad — or good — the Federal Reserve has really been for America.

The US dollar still retains a disproportionately large representation in international trade transactions, official reserves and exchange rate regimes.

This is largely due to the many institutional arrangements and incumbencies which remain from the Bretton Woods era of 1944 to 1971 when the gold-linked dollar provided the formal anchor for the world monetary system.

Congressman Ron Paul took some time at last week's Northeast Regional Conference to talk about the upcoming G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Campaign For Liberty

The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It is the driving force, and it has been shut down.

We’re in a bubble

he triage system will provide multiple levels of identification — the first will identify the agent as virus or non-virus, the second level will classify the virus and alert the user to the presence of pandemic threat viruses and the third level will identify the precise pathogen, VeriChip said in a white paper published May 7, 2009.

Silla Brush
The Hill

Rep. Ron Paul and Ben Bernanke are locked in a clash of titans.

Paul, the 74-year-old House libertarian from Texas with the high-pitched voice, has fought for decades to kill off the Federal Reserve.

Andrew Grice
The Independent

Labour’s strategy for tackling poverty has reached the end of the road and Britain risks a return to Victorian levels of inequality, according to a major two-year study seen by The Independent.

Chris Oliver
MarketWatch

China should use the shockwaves created by the Dubai crisis as an opportunity to buy gold and oil, a senior Chinese official who helps oversee some of the nation’s biggest enterprises was quoted as saying Monday.

Ji Xiaonan, chairman of the supervisory board for large firms at State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), said the purchases could be funded by China’s foreign exchange reserves, although it wasn’t clear how much prices for these commodities would be affected by the crisis.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph

Aaron Regent, president of the Canadian gold giant, said that global output has been falling by roughly 1m ounces a year since the start of the decade. Total mine supply has dropped by 10pc as ore quality erodes, implying that the roaring bull market of the last eight years may have further to run.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
London Telegraph

Global gold production is in terminal decline despite record prices and Herculean efforts by mining companies to discover fresh sources of ore in remote spots, according to the world’s top producer Barrick Gold.

Vocus/PRWEB

Best-selling author Daniel Estulin states that the key issue to be discussed this week at the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting, being held in St. Andrews, Scotland, is how to bring down the present world financial system through dumping the US dollar. Estulin first reported on this initiative as being deliberated at the most recent Bilderberg meeting held in Greece in May 2009. Estulin says that the success or failure of this callous plan hinges on the ability of the US and UK representatives to convince the Russian, the Chinese and other national governments to go along with their scheme.

Ron Paul

Forbes

Any number of pundits claim that we have now passed the worst of the recession. Green shoots of recovery are supposedly popping up all around the country, and the economy is expected to resume growing soon at an annual rate of 3% to 4%. Many of these are the same people who insisted that the economy would continue growing last year, even while it was clear that we were already in the beginning stages of a recession.

Bob Chapman

The International Forecaster

Early Friday morning, state and federal agents walked into the Bank of Elmwood and closed the failed 49-year-old independent bank after a year of struggling to improve a bleak financial situation, officials announced Friday.

Seeking Alpha

As I noted last week, the Fed is now the largest buyer of US debt (it bought more debt than the next three largest buyers combined in 2Q09). China and Japan are no one’s fools. And they’re not going to fund a monetary policy that is both profligate and likely to erode the value of their dollar holdings.

Bob Chapman

The International Forecaster

Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street firms, according to financial disclosure forms.

PETER S. GOODMAN
The New York Times

CLEVELAND — The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished houseplants on the floor. She used her backyard as a restroom.

Scott Thill
AlterNet

On Oct. 14, the Dow Jones Industrial Average barely passed the 10,000 mark for the first time in over a year.

Subprime Blogger

In February of 2009 Ron Paul warned of a US Dollar collapse when China stops buying out debt in this video (below). There are many good points that Mr. Paul points out in the video but none were more prophetic then calling for the dollar bubble to burst. When the video was recorded the US Dollar index was around 86. Today the US Dollar Index is currently at 75.5.

RIA Novosti

Russia is ready to consider using the Russian and Chinese national currencies instead of the dollar in bilateral oil and gas dealings, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.

 

When the economic collapse began a year ago, many Americans took comfort in the historical parallels with the Great Depression. As it had in 1929, the current crisis began under the clueless reign of a Republican, George W. Bush. Universally reviled since his non-response to Hurricane Katrina had exposed him and the men around him as both uncaring and incompetent — either one was forgivable, not both — Bush had reacted in the classic cold-blooded Republican form embodied by the president who gave his name to the Hoovervilles.

PAUL THARP
The New York Post

Ben Bernanke’s dollar crisis went into a wider mode yesterday as the greenback was shockingly upstaged by the euro and yen, both of which can lay claim to the world title as the currency favored by central banks as their reserve currency.

 

Thomas Palley
Financial Times

Over the past year the global economy has experienced a massive contraction, the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But this spring, economists started talking of “green shoots” of recovery and that optimistic assessment quickly spread to Wall Street. More recently, on the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers crash, Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, officially blessed this consensus by declaring the recession is “very likely over”.

 

It’s the biggest mystery in global finance right now: Who conducted a sneak attack on the U.S. dollar this week?

It began with a thinly sourced but highly explosive report Monday in a British newspaper: Arab oil sheiks are conspiring with the Russians and Chinese to quit using the dollar to set the value of oil trades — a direct threat to the global supremacy of the greenback.

New revelations about Tim Geithner’s phone records show an appallingly small Wall Street circle. With a probe likely, Simon Johnson says the Treasury secretary needs a bailout—from Larry Summers.

 

The sharp fall in the US dollar is giving ammunition to the critics of the Obama administration and fuelling broader concerns about the erosion of America’s reserve currency status.

Neil Barofsky’s supposed watch dog group of bureaucrats threw a girly soft ball today, according to MarketWatch.

New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini said stock markets may drop and billionaire George Soros warned the “bankrupt” U.S. banking system will hamper its economy, highlighting doubts about the sustainability of the global recovery.

In light of the ever-present and unyieldingly persistent exclamations of “an end” to the recession, a “solution” to the crisis, and a “recovery” of the economy; we must remember that we are being told this by the very same people and institutions which told us, in years past, that there was “nothing to worry about,” that “the fundamentals are fine,” and that there was “no danger” of an economic crisis.

For those market boosters who are prattling on about the possibility of a “jobless recovery,” I offer an invitation to join me for a breakfast of “fat-free bacon,” “eggless omelets,” and “no-carb bread.” As unappetizing as such a meal may sound, it would nevertheless offer more substance than the oxymoronic concept of an economic resurgence without job creation.

Global leaders will institutionalize the G20 as the world’s main economic governing council, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Thursday.

Editor’s note: Yet another reason to investigate and close down the Fed.

Few remember the dangers and hardships of World War II; fewer still remember the Great Depression. Few Americans know what it’s like to not have some sort of “supercenter” nearby with shelves stocked with every kind of food imaginable, twenty-four hours a day.

“Nothing good can come from the Federal Reserve,” writes Texas Congressman Ron Paul in his latest book hitting shelves this week, titled “End the Fed.”

To borrow from an old joke about politicians, we ask our subscribers if they know how to tell when Helicopter Ben Bernanke, the current Fed Head, is lying. Answer: Whenever his lips are moving.