FedUpUSA

Archive for February 9th, 2011

Now that Alan Grayson is no longer in Congress, Fed hearings have certainly lost that certain dose of panache which only a man, wearing a dollar sign tie, and cross examining the Fed’s General Counsel which grinning like a diabolical Tasmanian Devil, would bring to the table.

We managed to catch up with Grayson during today’s session of Radio Free Dylan, in which the traditionally opinionated Fed critic had some very choice words about the President. In essence, the former Florida Democrat said that it is none other than the President, who is the reason there have been no prosecutions on banks: ”

I am not only blaming the Obama administration, if the Bush administration had its head on straight they would have prevented a lot of these things from happening to start with. But the President Obama administration said at the beginning, we are going to look forward and not back and therefore in the process of making that decision basically let these crooks off the hook.” But that’s ok – see the SEC, which incidentally has to give a person by person org chart and job description of its 3,500 porn addicts before it receive one additional penny of funding, is about to catch one or two criminal masterminds who bought some NYX calls after the information of today’s merger, which was so badly leaked that virtually everyone knew about the deal ahead of the announcement, are about to spend some time in prison.

In the meantime, all those who knowingly and willfully committed crimes in the great housing pump and dump (up to and including misrepresenting underwriting documents), are about to get away scott-free. Thank you Mr. President. That’s some might fine change you got there.

More choice selections from the Ratigan-Taz interview.

On the complete lack of prosecutions and Obama’s responsibility:

DYLAN:  Couple of last questions and then I will let you go. One thing that came out in the FCIC report and Bill Greider did a great job of highlighting this — was the explicit introduction of known to be fraudulent mortgages.  They have been audited by Clayton Holdings which is one of the bigger auditing firms if not the biggest auditing firms of these documents.  They were knowingly and knowingly insofar as they had been reviewed by Clayton Holdings, then installed inside of investments and sold to pension funds, et cetera et cetera, where then the banks would go out and buy insurance on that that obviously paid a lot of money when the government stepped in to bail out AIG who was one of the big insurers.

How is it that after the Great Depression, there were blue sky laws that said it is illegal to sell a worthless piece of paper as if it is stock in the company if its just Alan Grayson and Dylan Ratigan have gone downtown with a piece of paper with their names on it and they are selling it for money even though there is actually no business.  We created laws to prevent people from doing that sort of thing. And yet we found here that mortgages that have been deemed by some official authority — an auditor in this case — as nonconforming, will not get paid back, noncompliant with illegal investment standards for you, American pension fund, for you American mortgage buyer, Fannie Freddie etcetera, and then the FCIC comes out, shows that these fraudulent mortgages were being packaged and sold by Goldman, Deutsche, Morgan, the list goes on and yet, we have yet to see a single meaningful fraud investigation. I mean these guys makes Bernie Madoff look like Romper Room.

REP. GRAYSON: Well that’s right, and what it comes down to is they have been protected by one thing and one thing only which is prosecutor discretion. There is no doubt in a situation like that that people committed crimes, but in order to prosecute them for that you need to have a prosecutor who is willing to do it. And that is something that seems to have eluded us in the past, I guess, three years now. I am not only blaming the Obama administration, if the Bush administration had its head on straight they would have prevented a lot of these things from happening to start with.

But the President Obama administration said at the beginning, we are going to look forward and not back and therefore in the process of making that decision basically let these crooks off the hook.

DYLAN: And what does that sort of decision make, I call Obama the “turn the page president” whether it is war crimes, banking crimes or anything else, is there a point where the decision not to prosecute blatant crimes that are destructive to society really starts to breach the public trust with the government just because the President doesn’t really want to deal with the mess?

REP. GRAYSON:  It’s actually worst than that. The same people who were committing fraud and crimes at Bear Stearns, they are now committing fraud and crimes at Bank of America, at Goldman Sachs and other institutions, because it turns out that crime does pay. It turns out that if you steal a large amount of money that leads to the collapse of your institutions, there’s jobs for you somewhere else.

On the auditing the Fed process, for which Grayson, alongside Paul, had a major contribution in getting at least some partial disclosure from Bernanke:

Tim Geithner said when it was time to finish the bill on financial reform, he told people that his highest priority was to make sure – and this is the bill that was supposed to save America — to keep us from having a bail out — make sure that we didn’t have a total collapse of the economic system.

He said that his highest priority was to make sure that there was no auditing of the Fed! (laughs) So, in the fact of that kind of resistance, we were able to win and win big.  I mean we have now the first independent audit and nothing really bad has happened so far. People were saying well if you audit the Fed, the economy will collapse. Hasn’t happened yet and I think that people are going to realize the Fed  should be a responsible government body just like every other government body. We need to look behind the curtain and find out exactly what’s going on.

DYLAN:  What do you think Tim Geithner is so afraid would be found?

REP. GRAYSON:  I don’t know but I am sure that Tim Geithner didn’t want the Fed audited because Tim Geithner didn’t want Tim Geithner audited, he worked for the New York Fed, led the New York Fed for years before he became Treasury Secretary — and frankly it sounded a bit self serving to me that he said that.
DYLAN:  And what do you and not just you but I’ll add Dr. Ron Paul to it — what do the two of you think was so important about auditing the Fed?

REP. GRAYSON:  Well, what I think we are going to find is something that we’ve already have a little taste of here and there, which is that the Fed has made an enormous deals with entities like Citibank on terms that were completely unfair to the taxpayers. We got a little shred of information about that because one of those deals happened to be one involving the treasury, it has to be a released to us and we found that the Fed had assumed $238 billion dollars of liability from Citibank on mortgage back securities in exchange for nothing. I think we are going to find more deals like that and people are going to scratch their heads and say why are we doing this? Why are we allowing our money to be used in the secret bailouts of three or four or five or six institutions without people even finding out about it except for the fact that we pass this legislation to help to find out. The fed has been out of control now for quite a while and helping its friends at the expense of the rest of us.

DYLAN:  And why are we doing that? Why are we – why have we accepted a system in your opinion that allows a relatively anonymous, highly secretive group of people to provide infinite access of money to people who not only create no apparent value but creates lots of apparent loss?

REP. GRAYSON:  Because the banking system and the bankers, the people in charge of the system have created this meme that the Fed can do no wrong and it has to remain independent of everybody and everything. It is almost as if they believe that the Chairman of the Fed is the Wizard of Oz and it’s not true. I mean the Fed has the authority to create money but it should not have the authority to make the kind of deals that we’ve been seeing where they create massive liability off the books of their favorites while small community banks and small businesses suffer and get nothing. At one point we demonstrated that they had – lent so much money to the Central Bank in New Zealand that it corresponds to $4,000 for every single person in New Zealand. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Feds can extend that kind of credit to Americans?

Full interview can be heard here.

ZeroHedge

In the shocking video you are about to watch, Howard Dean declares that it is the job of the government to redistribute our wealth.  Not only that, he says it in such a way that indicates that he believes that such a notion should be obvious to anyone with half a brain.  Well, while it is true that the United States has become a highly socialized nation, the reality is that this is not what the founding fathers intended.  The founders intended for us to live in a land where we would have enough freedom and enough liberty to be able to work hard and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  They did not intend for a gigantic federal government to take huge amounts of money from one group of people and give it to another group of people.  In any nation where a large scale redistribution of wealth is happening, the incentive to work goes right out the window.  Pretty soon you end up with an entire class of people that have learned how to “make a living” by being a parasite of the government, and that is not good for any economy.

If our founding fathers were alive today, they would be horrified by what we have turned into.  In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following….

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”

The sad truth is that democracy starts to break down once people start realizing that they can vote themselves money out of the national treasury.  In fact, that is a very large part of what politics in America is all about today.  Politicians are constantly promising what they are “going to do” for various groups of people.

Benjamin Franklin once stated the following….

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

Not that our founding fathers were against charity.  In fact, they believed in it very much.  It is just that they did not believe in repressive taxation by a huge national government and they did not believe in large scale redistributions of wealth.

With all of that in mind, watch this shocking video of Howard Dean declaring that it is the job of the government to redistribute our wealth….

Obviously Howard Dean envisions an “America” that is very different from the one that our founding fathers intended.

But does that mean that all government welfare programs are bad?

Of course not.

In fact, if we were to cut them all off today we would have millions of people starving in the streets.

A very large percentage of Americans today don’t even know how to take care of themselves.  If we pulled away all government support all of a sudden there would be chaos and anarchy in the streets.

The sad reality is that we have tens of millions of Americans that are now deeply dependent on the socialist system that we have established.

Unfortunately, this is what socialism does – it turns people into pets of the government.  Our society should be teaching people to be self-sufficient, but instead we are teaching people to allow the government to take care of them from the cradle to the grave.

So does that mean that our founding fathers would be in favor of the rampant corporate greed that we are witnessing today?

Of course not.

As I have written about previously, the founding fathers were against all large concentrations of power.  During the Boston Tea Party, it was the tea of perhaps the most powerful corporation in the entire world at the time (the East India Trading Company) that our founders dumped into the harbor.

If you study early American history, you soon come to realize that corporations were generally very limited in scope and size for many, many years.  The era of the giant corporation is relatively new, and our founding fathers never intended for our society to be dominated by gigantic international corporations.

So when the Democrats argue that we should give more power to the federal government and the Republicans argue that we should give more power to the big corporations they are both wrong.

Our founding fathers did not intend for our federal government to have nearly so much power and they did not intend for big, wealthy corporations to have so much power either.

Fortunately, many Americans today are getting back in touch with those principles.  There is a growing dissatisfaction with the size of government, and according to Gallup two-thirds of Americans are now dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations in America today.

However, it is one thing to discuss the finer points of political and economic philosophy, but it is another thing altogether to deal with the reality of tens of millions of people that cannot feed themselves.

As I have mentioned many times before, there are over 43 million Americans on food stamps today.

So what are we going to do with all of them?

Allow them to starve?

Almost 53 million Americans receive Social Security payments.

What are we going to do – cut off Social Security and watch millions of elderly and disabled people freeze to death in their own homes?

Of course not.

But we have got to start swinging the pendulum back in the other direction.  Right now one out of every six Americans is enrolled in some kind of anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

How many Americans being taken care of by the federal government will be too much?

One out of five?

One out of four?

One out of three?

Eventually the entire system crumbles when there are too few people still willing to work hard.

If you ever get the chance to visit a communist country you should.  You will notice that nobody really works very hard.  That is because there is no incentive to work hard.  Very little real wealth gets produced and everyone suffers for it.

So does that mean the U.S. system works?

Of course not.

What we have in the United States today is not real capitalism.  It is more aptly called “corporatism”.  The big corporations and the big financial institutions have accumulated an absolutely stunning amount of economic power and over the decades they have gotten the government to tilt all of the rules of the game in their favor.

In America today, it is really hard for the average person to start a successful business.  The big, powerful international corporations that dominate our economy are everywhere.

So most Americans today have to rely on working for an employer.  Unfortunately, the big employers have started to realize that they can make much larger profits by shipping our jobs overseas.  That is really bad news for the U.S. middle class.

Well, can’t we just tax all of these big corporations like crazy and even everything out?

Unfortunately it just does not work that way in today’s global society.

As I have written about previously, the ultra-wealthy and many of the biggest corporations have figured out how to “minimize” their tax burdens.  While you and I are being taxed into oblivion, the global elite have figured out how to move their money around to escape taxation as much as possible.  In fact, it is estimated that today approximately a third of all the wealth in the world is held in “offshore” tax havens.

Ultra-wealthy individuals and mega-powerful corporations can call just about anywhere “home” in today’s global economy.  That is just the way the world works now.

In order to “tax the rich”, you first must get legal jurisdiction over their money.

Our tax system has become entirely unfair and it simply does not work.  The whole thing needs to be scrapped.

But as we discuss tax policy, there are tens of millions of Americans that are living in poverty.

So what are we going to do about the growing number of Americans that cannot even feed themselves without government help?

Well, the truth is that what they really need is not more handouts.

If you give people handouts, they will just need more handouts tomorrow.

No, what all of these Americans really need are good jobs.

Unfortunately, there are a whole lot less good jobs in America today than there were ten years ago.

Our politicians have stood by as the giant corporations have moved thousands of facilities over to places such as China and India where they can legally pay people slave labor wages.

Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good, and that number is going to continue to increase unless someone stops it.

But nobody is.

Virtually all of our politicians are just standing off to the side with their hands in their pockets.

So now we have 19.3 percent of the workforce that is either unemployed or underemployed.

Our entire economic system is breaking down.  Millions of Americans families are scrambling to find some way to survive.  Over the past two years, U.S. consumers have withdrawn $311 billion more from savings and investment accounts than they have put into them.

Other Americans are going very deep into debt because they don’t have any other options.  When they finally can’t keep up with all the debt, many of these families are losing their cars and their homes.

We are in the middle of an economic nightmare that is absolutely unprecedented.  “Redistributing the wealth” would just be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point.  It would not fix a darn thing.

When our politicians promise that a little “change” here or a little “tweak” there will get our economy back to normal they are lying to you and most of them know it.

What we need is a comprehensive overhaul of our entire economy.  Basically what we need to do is to go back to the blueprint (the U.S. Constitution) and essentially start over.

But most Americans are not ready for that.  Most Americans are still enjoying the tremendous prosperity that the biggest debt binge in the history of the world has purchased for us.  Most Americans still do not believe that an economic collapse is really coming.

But a massive economic collapse is coming.  This whole thing is going to come crashing down and it is not going to be pretty.

The Economic Collapse

The American banking system has transformed the economy into one enormous speculative casino with bells and whistles and free cocktails for those that participate.  The problem of course is that most don’t have excess income to drop into the financial slot machines.  Now banking in better times should be seen as the lubricant of the economy.  It allocates capital to areas in the economy where actual real growth was occurring.  Today the financial sector operates as an incestuous industry funding growth in its own industry.  A snake swallowing its own tail but when the inevitable end comes, it is society that is forced to pick up the tab.  Ultimately profits have to come from something real and not just skimming imaginary profits from interest.  This banking welfare is largely a reason why our economy is faltering on the vine and Wall Street banking profits are soaring.  It is no coincidence that as debt pilfered the economy that financial profits soared.  We are living in era that can be dubbed the financialization of the American economy.

Debt leverage and banking profits go hand in hand

Source:      Peak Watch

The above chart really highlights the destruction of our economy in a rising debt era.  In a low debt era financial profits were held in check from the 1950s to the early 1980s.  Financial profits as a share of GDP hovered around one percent.  That all changed in the 1980s and finally reached an apex in our Great Recession.  The financial sector grew its profit margins at a time where more Americans were borrowing and going into debt to finance a lifestyle that was setup for a solid middle class.  Yet the middle class was not there and many used debt to play a game of pretend for a few decades.  All this was playing out during a time when the top 1 percent that were heavily vested in the banking sector were usurping wealth from the real economy.

It is no coincidence that during this time our workforce has shifted from manufacturing to finance:

Source:  Macromon

We have done a complete 180 turn here.  In 1947 the manufacturing sector contributed 25.6 percent to our entire GDP base while the FIRE sector made up 10.5 percent.  In 2009 FIRE makes up 21.5 percent while manufacturing is down to 11.2 percent.  Given the massive fraud, corruption, scandalous rent seeking behavior, and graft why should we be happy with all the bailouts given to this sector?  The financial industry has largely become one giant casino and the stock market no longer reflects the health of the US economy.  Most banking profits are now being made overseas as this nation’s bailouts are going to global banks that are now fueling the growth and speculation abroad.  This is what Americans get in exchange for trillions of dollars of bailouts to what are largely legalized loan sharks.

To further highlight how the financialization of America has harmed the economy we need only look at the stagnant wages of American families.  2000 to 2010 was the first decade where the median household income fell since the Great Depression era of the 1930s.  This all happened during a time of unrestrained financial speculation and growth.  What happened in the 1920s?  Rampant financial fraud by banks so it is no surprise that we ended up in the same place.  The only difference today is that after the crash nothing has changed.  We still have the same financial sector in full operation.  Half of American workers make $25,000 a year or less.  This is such an important point because it demonstrates how the quality of life for many has gone negative in the last ten years.  On this path the financialization of the country will continue to throw more off the middle class pedestal (or at least what remains of it).

To further demonstrate the casino like nature of our stock markets just look at the actual trading volume for various markets over the last 60 years:

Source:  BIS, Wikipedia

This is a fascinating look at how much stock markets have become like casinos.

“In 1956 for example total dollar volume traded on various markets amounted to $534 billion.  At the same time US GDP was $425 billion.  Most of the trading occurred in boring and safe government securities.  Fast forward to 2000.  $508 trillion is traded and US GDP is only $9.8 trillion!”

What is even more insane is the amount being traded on the foreign exchange markets.  $343 trillion was traded when global GDP is roughly $54 trillion.  How can this be?  The global stock markets are largely vacuums sucking the life and productivity from working class people all over the place.  Investment banks make their profits as rent seekers and leech onto productive sectors of the economy that actually make things.

The financialization of our country has led us to a situation where bailouts are handed out to investment banks without any oversight because so much wealth is aggregated in these few hands.  These industries have bought out our government and have laws and regulations that are stripped down to the point where all the above is allowed.  Maximum leverage and if things go bust the taxpayer will be forced by their bought out politicians to bailout these sectors.  Since the debt needs to be repaid, many in their local communities are witnessing rising taxes and cuts to local services.  This happens under the guise that people need to tighten up their belt.  Of course this happens at a time when global trading markets are leveraging their volume tenfold the amount of global GDP.  Don’t be fooled, the real culprits here are the banks and the financial sector.  There is graft in many areas of the economy but this is the nucleus of the mess.  If things keep going forward in this financialization phase there will be no middle class in the US in 10 to 20 years.

My Budget360

Below is a link to the video of the service of writ on a Deadbeat Bank for failure to pay attorney fees to a foreclosure defense attorney. The bank involved in this interesting event was Virtual Bank in Palm Beach Gardens FL.

Basically the background on this case is the bank was not able to prove it had the right to foreclose on the home, the case was dismissed and the court awarded the homeowner’s attorney his legal fees.

After months and months of unsuccessful attempts to collect, the homeowner’s attorney received an order from the court to seize the banks property since the Deadbeat Bank did not pay their bill.

Although the above video shows the writ being served, the property has not been seized as of yet but it’s definitely worth the watch.

It was pretty awesome to see all the undercover cars roll up to the front lobby and watch Police get out of their vehicles in full tactical gear and enter the bank.

Word on the foreclosure beat is that the bank caved and stroked a check to the Sheriff on behalf of the attorney for over $30,000 instead of having their property seized.

It is also rumored that shortly thereafter they fired their counsel.

Although we are a little disappointed that the banks property did not get seized, the attorney that represented the homeowner finally got paid. So all in all it was a victory.

Will post updates as we receive them. From what I understand, they owe the attorney more money so this may not be the last we see of this.

The Writ in the video included the items that were to be seized. The inventory was done before Christmas and included their Christmas tree. How fun would that have been if they got to take the tree!

We have more of these planned since it is not uncommon for the Deadbeat Banks not to pay their legal bills and will post them as they occur.

Any attorneys out there that would like assistance for similar events, with full video and media coverage of course, just let us know and we will assist in anyway we can.

Enjoy!

4closureFraud

Answer the question folks.

If you said with the consent of the governed, you’re correct.

Such truth does not cotton to this:

CAIRO — Vice President Omar Suleiman warned Tuesday that “we can’t put up with” continued protests in Tahrir for a long time, saying the crisis must be ended as soon as possible in a sharply worded sign of increasing regime impatience with 16 days of mass demonstrations.

Let me point out something you probably don’t want to hear, but you should understand: The effectiveness of protest only extends as far as does the implied threat of violence.

I know people will want to argue otherwise.  They’re wrong.

Witness Health Care, or TARP.  In both cases the majority of the population opposed passage.  In the case of TARP that opposition as recorded by Congressional Offices was one hundred to one or more.  The people favored telling the banks to piss off, even if it meant economic Depression would immediately ensue.

Incidentally, it is my considered opinion that had we done that, the economy would have undergone that depression but we’d be done with it by now.  There would be new banks where there were old banks.  Employment would truly be recovering, as would output.  But the banksters would all be bankrupt, there would have been prosecutions, maybe even public lynchings of the banksters that caused this mess.

Congress instead ignored the people, and we re-elected the vast majority of those who did the exact opposite of what we told them to do.

That is, we consented.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why whatever we tell Washington is ignored.  We consent.

Now consider that in Egypt the people have said “leave office now.”  The people have declared that the government no longer has their consent.  That’s the end of the discussion.

The government, just as it did here in the United States with TARP, has told the people to go screw.

Now we find out if the people have the stomach to enforce their demands.

In the end, a demand without the willingness to enforce it is just hot air.

Keep this in mind, because this dynamic will eventually come here.  As I write this I am listening to Bernanke bloviate about how we “can’t” default on the debt we’re taking on at the Federal government nor can we pull back on the stimulus today – we must look “in the medium term.”  Yet he also admits that there will be no return to full employment even under his unrealistically-rosy scenario that leaves us with high unemployment for years.

Well, guess what – we’re going to get forced to deal with this on the market’s terms, and not Bernanke’s or that of Congress.  Why?  Because we can’t support a government that is at the present size, nor can we support the debt that has been taken on.  The tax base necessary to do so doesn’t exist.

Supporting the current debt levels in government are mathematically impossible without monstrous cuts to entitlement programs, starting not in ten or twenty years but right now.

The promises made in the form of entitlements currently consume every single dollar of tax revenue.  Those revenues don’t even cover interest on the debt.  But interest has to be paid, or your ability to borrow instantly disappears.

You can cut the entire rest of the budget to zero and we still can’t balance the budget.

Interest rates are expected inflation + risk of default + a profit, and interest rates are rising, despite Bernanke’s claimed ability to “control” the market.

So consider this America.

Egypt’s government says it will neither leave or allow continued protest.  This means that Egyptians either have to nut up or shut up.  “Shut up” means that the government can and will then “deal with” those who protested, likely by either locking them up or murdering them.

The time for Egypt’s citizens to choose in an irrevocable form is rapidly approaching.  It appears that someone is going to commit violence in Egypt.  Unfortunately the only choice at this point appears to be who commits the violence.  It will either be the government upon the people, or the people upon the government.

America’s government also has to choose, and if we do not change course eventually Americans will have to choose in the same way Egyptians are faced with today.

The bloviating in Congress today is disgusting.  Bernanke says that we must “put forward a credible program” to reduce deficits over the medium and long term.  But he’s lying, because we don’t have ten, twenty or fifty years. 

We have spent the last two decades building a pyramid scheme with debt at all levels of society and Bernanke and Greenspan were not only complicit in it, they were fully supportive of this outright and outrageous scam, as was Congress and The Administrations – both Democrat and Republican.

Not only has the government doubled in size over the last ten years so has the total systemic debt.  That’s a fact. 

At the same time GDP has increased by 50%.

Now let’s look at some facts.  In 1990 total systemic debt was $13 trillion.  GDP was $5.7 trillion.

In 2000 total systemic debt was $25.8 trillion.  GDP was $9.7 trillion.  Debt doubled while GDP grew 67%.  That was unsustainable but we failed to learn a damn thing from it, and cranked down interest rates and blew another bubble.

Systemic debt today is $52.4 trillion.  GDP is $14.7 trillion.  Debt doubled again (103% actually) while GDP grew 52%. 

This means we didn’t pay for any of our alleged growth for 20 years with output. We bought it all with credit cards for the entire last twenty years, and we’re still doing it today.

This is unsustainable and we cannot take ten, twenty or fifty years to fix it. 

The interest and medical costs will bury us if we attempt that path.

Bernanke is lying outright. The “outlook” has not improved and the Congresscritters are lying through their teeth about ”recovery.”  We have instead blown $1,700 billion in federal money we did not have in a puerile and outrageous attempt to avoid facing the truth. Back that out of the “outlook” and GDP is down more than 10% sequentially. 

That’s the formal definition of Economic Depression.

Employment has increased by 1 million jobs over the last 12 months but the working-age population has increased by 1.7 million people, so in terms of percentage of workers, which is what matters when one cares about being able to cover debt service by government via taxation, we are not only not recovering we’re moving backward, and this new movement downward began with Benranke’s QE2 threat. 

He knows both of these facts are true but he won’t talk about either.

In point of fact all of these actions have been aimed at one and only one thing – bailing out the bankers who built massive pyramid schemes through naked credit emission which has the identical effect in the economy to counterfeiting the currency.  But we have no more margin to shove off onto the American public for the purpose of hiding all this un-payable debt. The entirety of marginal productivity and output has been consumed by excessive debt service.

That which cannot continue won’t.

Our choices are between taking our medicine in a controlled manner, and an uncontrolled collapse. 

Those are the only two choices.

If we as Americans won’t demand that Washington do #1, or if Washington believes they have consent to ignore our calls for #1 and will continue to receive that consent in the form of votes for Representatives and Senators, that is, there is no credible threat to remove those members from office, we will get #2 and you had better be prepared for it, because you will get little or no warning before it comes crashing into your life.

It’s clear that Washington intends to play games and not address the issues.  They’ve been doing the same thing for 20 years.  Why would they change now, absent an immediate uproar from the public?

What, if anything, do you in America intend to do about it?

If the answer is “nothing” then talking about ”investing” is a waste of time, as there will be no investment worth a nickel when – not if – this all comes apart.

The Market-Ticker