FedUpUSA

Posts Tagged ‘Bankers’

For those who read the previous article on the topic of last minute chaos and confusion in Cyprus, and Europe, it will come as no surprise that the previously scheduled Monday bank holiday (akaGreen Monday) has been extended into Tuesday. So prepare to not be surprised.

From Kathimerini:

The Cypriot cabinet has declared Tuesday a bank holiday, for fear of capital flight, and this may even be stretched to Wednesday, as depositors are certain to withdraw huge sums from the Cypriot banks after the haircut imposed.

 

Nicosia postponed from Sunday to Monday the tabling in Parliament of the bill including the measures for the Cypriot bailout – including a bank account haircut and a tax hike on interest and corporate earnings – but the European Central Bank insists on a rapid voting because there are already signs a domino effect will follow across European lenders and markets from Monday.

 

There is genuine fear of market unrest on Monday morning when stocks may crumble in the eurozone and bank accounts in other southern European bank may suffer.

 

Skai radio reported on Sunday that the Bank of Greece has sent between 4 and 5 billion euros to Cyprus in order to help Cypriot banks respond to cash requirements by their clients.

So, if the official name of the March 18 holiday was “Green Monday“, will the March 19th ad hoc holiday be called “Red Tuesday“? Inquiring minds want to know.

Zero Hedge

Since it seems that Parliament can’t manage to muster the votes, perhaps something a bit more instructive is in order.  Like history and natural law, for example.  Let’s go down the (reasonably short) list:

1. Private property, including the privately-held funds of the people is, in fact, private.
2. Taxation for public good is an accepted and necessary part of living in a society.  However, putative “taxation” to bail out people who did irresponsible things, like gambling with other people’s money on Greek sovereign debt, is nothing other than theft to cover a bad marker at Vegas after someone loses.  This is in fact felony, not taxation, and those who solicit or commit such felony deserve to be tried for treason and punished according to their guilt thereof. 
3. No legitimate government has a right to cross the line between taxation and theft.
4. All legitimate governments obtain their power from the freely-given consent of the governed, and that consent may be withdrawn at any time.
   

If and when that consent is withdrawn those putative members of government have two choices — leave quietly and willingly to be replaced by those who will honor the four principles above or risk be deposed by force as the people always outnumber the government.  Further, the people cannot be compelled to effort at anything approaching a sufficient level of output to cover government’s expenses once it finds itself trying to bail out the irresponsible or criminal with other people’s money, so it is not necessary that the people shoot or otherwise engage in violence — a work stoppage is sufficient to guarantee the government’s collapse, should the people choose to maintain it for a sufficient time.

However, history also says that most of the time the people will choose to hang, burn, shoot or loot either in concert with or in place of a general work stoppage.

Thus ends our history lesson for today.

Let’s see whether today rhymes with the past 5,000 years of recorded human experience.

If there was ever a reason to hang some banksters from the nearest light pole, you’ve now seen it:

BRUSSELS—Depositors in Cypriot banks will be hit with a one-off tax on their savings, as part of a €10 billion ($12.96 billion) bailout for the Mediterranean island from the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund.

The deal, announced early Saturday, marks the first time in the euro zone’s five-year-old financial crisis that depositors in bloc’s banks will lose money. Accounts with more than €100,000 will be taxed at 9.9%, those with less at 6.75%, raising an expected €5.8 billion for the near-bankrupt nation.

Taxed?  Like hell that’s a tax.  That’s direct confiscation of the funds of people who did nothing wrong!

Oh, and if you think this is something you can get around?  Think again:

Mr. Sarris said the Cypriot Parliament would adopt the taxes over the weekend and the money would be extracted from accounts before banks take up business Tuesday. Monday is a public holiday.

They have blocked electronic transfers over the weekend too.

Now let’s see if the Cypriots go for it, or if there is an instant uprising.

The EU, of course, claims this is a “special situation.”  Like hell it is, never mind that this is basically imposed from the outside.

And they have the balls to call it a “contribution.”

I call it what it is — theft for the purpose of “making whole” those who did wrong, while they skate on their offenses.  Those who were in a regulatory role and should have put a stop to it (like Bernanke over here, or for that matter the OCC when it comes to the London Whale) while the people get screwed to the wall.

The argument for this “action” is that Cyprus, which is a whopping 0.2% of the Eurozone economy, is of “systemic importance” to the whole.  Therefore when someone (or a few someones) do something outrageously risky and blow up their banks, it is the people, not the malefactors, who take it up the chute.

Now we shall see if any of the following two things happen:

• Justice is imposed by the people so-assessed.

  and

• The people realize that this is not a “one-off” and it can happen to them — and they act in a protective fashion up front rather than take the risk (how do you spell “bank run”?)

Incidentally, everyone knows Spain (along with Italy) have a bunch of banks that are sitting on bad assets, right?  And that they’ve not been written down, right?  And they’re functionally insolvent, right?

Oh, and let us not forget that Cyprus just protected all the bondholders, who are allegedly behind depositors in terms of their protection in a bank’s capital structure and thus should have been wiped out before one Euro was lost by said depositors.

And what just happened in Cyprus would never happen in either of those places…. or anywhere else important, like here in the United States……. right?

PS: $100 bills in your hand have just been declared to be worth somewhere between 7-10% more than those “deposited” and “stored” in a bank.  May I ask the following pertinent and rather timely question: Where are yours?

That title is intentionally provocative.

But, if Bloomberg’s research is accurate, it is also true.

The top five banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – - account for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits (see tables for data on individual banks). In other words, the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry — with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy — would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.

There’s a problem with this, of course.

You didn’t consent to it.

The banks have effectively extorted this from you.  They have taken it with literal threats of “financial Armageddon” and “tanks in the streets” if they do not get this subsidy, year in and year out.

And more to the point they level an even-worse implicit threat on a daily basis at Congress and the Administration — the literal destruction of the government’s funding, immediately and permanently, which has come about because the government is borrowing more than one third of every dollar spent.

The so-called “Primary Dealers” are the reason for this perversity.  The Treasury Department and Administration, with the full knowledge and consent of Congress, has become a willing and intentional partner to this and you, the people of America, have and continue to take in the shorts.

Now $83 billion is, in the light of a $1 trillion annual deficit, not the biggest number out there.  But I remind you that the sequester, which Obama is now having an apoplexy over despite being the individual who proposed it, has an impact this fiscal year that is less than the amount stolen from you via this subsidy.

In other words, but for this forced transfer of your money to these banks, (1) they would not make a profit but would pretty-much break even, so they would not go out of business, and (2) the sequester would be completely balanced out — its net cost would be very close to zero!

There are two gigantic scams in this nation that are bleeding it dry, and which no American should tolerate.  This is one of them; in addition to the direct subsidy documented by Bloomberg there are indirect subsidies in the form of hundreds of billions in transaction volume that have passed through these firms under fraudulent pretense and yet which go unpunished, whether that be in the form of robosigning, money laundering or other crimes that you and I, the common man, would face indictment and prosecution over while these banksters simply pocket the loot.

The second, which I’ve been writing on for years in the Ticker in the “health-care system”, is now starting to poke its ugly head out in the mainstream media as well.

So here’s my question folks — where’s your threshold, politically and otherwise, for refusing to sit for these acts that, were you or I to engage in them, would land any of us in pound-you-in-the-butt federal prison?

Directed and written by Bill Still, Jekyll Island – The Truth About The Federal Reserve (still in production) will prove to be an in-depth, eye-opening documentary about the organization that controls the amount of money in our financial system. We look forward to its release, popcorn ready…

FedUpUSA

In this edition of The Keiser Report, Max Keiser, discusses US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s role in the plundering of our economy with Stacy Herbert, stating that, “Geithner was trafficking in inside information.”

Herbert and Keiser then discuss FedUpUSA’s own Karl Denninger, and his $30,000 loss at the outset of the market crash in 2007, and what Denninger thought had been the cause of his loss. Keiser states, “Karl Denninger is a keen observer of the market,” and “He’s an informed, sophisticated trader.” Making the point that if a guy like Denninger could be “bamboozled by insider trading by Geithner,” it should evoke a response of disgust. Keiser explains that this wasn’t merely about a guy trading on inside information, but that it is the Secretary of the US Treasury “throwing the country under the bus…” and that should disgust us all.

Could such insider trading, and back-stabbing by government officials, lead to a breakdown in the social contract the People have with their government? Keiser interviews Steven A. Ramirez, Professor of Law at Loyola, who states, “It’s not just the social contract in the United States that is at stake here. It is capitalism itself.” Ramirez goes on to explain that he believes we have a reality where a small cadre of individuals are above the law.

FedUpUSA