Some cycles due in 2015

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Thundering Heard

So you can be prepared, if you wish, here are some cycles due in 2015. One of them is gigantically important to both the political and financial worlds, so I hope my exposition is clear.

The first cycle is very easy to understand: something economically important really hits the fan every seven years. Going in reverse from here, seven years at a time:

2008, start of the Great Recession, first real estate debt bubble pop;
2001, recession begins as part of 2000-2002 internet/tech stock bubble pop;
1994, worst year for bond markets in modern history;
1987, the famed stock market Crash of ’87;
1980, inflation, the “Misery Index”, start of a major recession that doesn’t go away for three years;
1973, Arab Oil embargo, start of a major recession;
[…] you get the idea.

The article at this link talks more about this cycle, including the note that the years in this seven-year cycle that coincided with an Autumn solar eclipse (1931 and 1987) had particularly strong events; and 2015 does have two solar eclipses. Again, from the article at the link:

In 1931, a solar eclipse took place on Sept. 12…Eight days later, England abandoned the gold standard, setting off market crashes and bank failures around the world. It also ushered in the greatest monthlong stock market percentage crash in Wall Street history.

In 1987, a solar eclipse took place Sept. 23…Less than 30 days later came “Black Monday” the greatest percentage crash in Wall Street history.

Some great forecasters think that March is a strong candidate for significant financial turbulence in 2015, and there is a total solar eclipse on March 20. And there is a partial solar eclipse on September 13, a better calendar correspondence with the events referenced in the quote above. So maybe we’ll get two strong events this year.

For those of you who believe what you read in the US media, perhaps you are wondering how we could get major financial problems when things are allegedly so “awesome.” Well, sorry to tell you, but even Goldman “doing God’s work” Sachs just admitted that the world economy has gone into contraction:

It’s Official: Global Economy Back In Contraction For First Time Since 2012 According To Goldman

(As a side note, Al Jazeera did a great video on true nature of Goldman Sachs. The link is here, but, if you are in the USA, the censors won’t allow you to view the video in the “Land of the Free” US, it’s only playable outside the US. A lot of that type of thing is going on these days. It’s a small part of what has dropped the US down to 49th globally in press freedom; see World Press Freedom Index Plunges – USA Now Ranked #49 Globally.)

If this seven-year cycle repeats in 2015, then I think we can easily predict what the authorities will do since it seems to be the only thing they know how to do when there’s trouble: print more money by creating more debt! But as explained in The deflationary wave intensifies, this strategy has become counter-productive and is locking the world economy in a deadly stranglehold.

Some realize all this and some do not. But this brings us to our second cycle: Martin Armstrong’s Sovereign Debt Big Bang. Here is a slide of Armstrong’s forecasts from a conference in early 1998:

(Source, from Martin Armstrong’s blog)

These major forecasts all came true. The only one left to go (2015.75 = September 30, 2015) is the Sovereign Debt Big Bang. What it says in that the tide will monumentally shift away from confidence in government bonds starting on September 30, 2015. Currently, confidence in government bonds is so high that people are buying them even with negative interest rates. The easiest way to understand interest rates is that they are the rental charge for lending someone money. So you rent someone $100 and you hope to get back maybe $103, the original $100 plus $3 of rent. But people are now buying government bonds even though they get back less money than what they lent to some government in the first place. They are paying governments to lend them money!

16% Of Global Government Bonds Now Have A Negative Yield: Here Is Who’s Buying It

That was a few weeks back, at which point JP Morgan calculated that $3.6 Trillion worth of government bonds were paying negative interest rates. Some of the countries involved were Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. In Denmark, because interest rates went negative, some adjustable rate mortgages are now paying interest to the people who took out the mortgage!

In Denmark You Are Now Paid To Take Out A Mortgage

Now you might say: Why would anyone buy a government bond with a negative interest rate?!?! When I first said we should expect negative interest rates in More shackles readied for deployment, I did get a few e-mails politely suggesting that I might want to get checked for dementia. Here’s what was said:

The policy is that savers will soon be hit with negative interest rates…So people would have to pay the bank interest on their own savings. So if the negative interest rate were -3%, if you had $100 in your account, you’d have to pay the bank $3 in interest.

This is crazy. Most people alive today think governments never default on their debt. But that’s just plain wrong. Here is a chart showing country debt defaults going back to 1800. And this chart only shows those countries that have defaulted at least four times, the rest are not shown. Note that the list includes supposed stalwarts like Germany:

(Chart source, from The Economist.)

What Armstrong is saying–and he has been saying it since the 1990’s and has strong mathematical/historical models backing up his forecast–is that, near the end of this year, the world at large is finally going to wake up and understand the insanity of all this government borrowing. Not all at once, but relentlessly. They will see that most if not all countries are not going to pay back what they borrowed. They can’t. They don’t have the money. Greece is the first country to forthrightly admit it. One of the pompous Eurocrats threatened Greece last week, saying “If you don’t do what we say, Greece will go bankrupt.” To which the Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis replied, “Greece is already bankrupt.” (Straight truth! From a politician! Finally! Maybe that will become a trend!)

So what will this do to those who own all these government bonds? Who does own them anyway? For one, most of what is called capital at banks is government bonds. So there go the banks: no capital, insolvent. (Watch out for the upcoming bail-ins if you still keep money in banks.) Insurance companies and both government and private pension funds are huge holders of government bonds. So there goes insurance, and pensions. A well-placed German friend says that several European insurance companies are on the verge of bankruptcy. All of the assets of the US Social Security system, for example, are US government bonds: that’s all they own!

And somehow, the financial system has come to accept government bonds as collateral for other loans and bets. The $1 Quadrillion (that’s 1,000 Trillions) world derivatives casino market floats on a thin veneer of government bonds as “collateral” for these bets. Before the US defaulted on its debts in 1971 when Nixon said they were no longer payable in currency backed by gold, as previously promised, but now were backed by promises alone, collateral meant something real. For example, when you have a mortgage, your house is the collateral. A car is the collateral for an auto loan. But now in the financial world, someone’s promise to pay back a loan that they can never repay counts as collateral for even more loans. This is insane. Starting later in the year, a lot more people will start to understand that. That’s the nature of this Big Bang cycle. And there will be major repercussions. We talked about the demise of banks, pensions, and insurance. The derivatives collapse will take down all the brokerages and investment banks. So where will people get money?

Governments love to hide the truth about their historical defaults on their debt. Thus everyone is taught that the “cause of the Great Depression” of the 1930’s was the 1929 stock market crash. Total BS. The stock market crash wiped out stock speculators. That wasn’t a truly big deal. What took down thousands of banks were defaults on government bonds they and their customers were holding. Let’s look at that government bond default chart again. This time there is a red box around the worldwide wave of country debt defaults in the early 1930’s that wiped out thousands of banks and millions of savers:

Get it? That’s what’s coming up again, only this time it will be worse. Way worse. There’s been far more borrowing, far more leverage, and all of it is floating on paper and electronic currencies and promises. The link to reality–gold–was removed in 1971.

World-Debts

Now some people say all this unpayable debt can be wiped off the books in a debt jubilee, like they used to do in Old Testament times. Well that’s true. It can. The problem is that anyone who put money in a bank account needs to realize that they have loaned that money to the bank. It’s a debt of the bank, they owe you money. And your deposit is backed by government debt, not by actual cash. So, if there were a debt jubilee, no one would have any money in their bank account anymore. Same for businesses, so no business would be able to write a paycheck to anyone. ATM’s would not be able to dispense any cash. Credit cards would no longer work. All of the money in the world is someone’s debt to someone else. So a debt jubilee would mean there was no money.

So now, do you want a debt jubilee? Of course not. But we are going to get one anyway. Not on purpose. By accident. Starting in a big way later this year.

Why can anyone be confident that this is true? Well first, go back and look at the rest of the predictions on Armstrong’s slide from 1998. Second, it’s already starting to happen. Greece, Argentina, Puerto Rico–the dominoes are starting to fall. Japan is a financial basket case, there is no way they can repay their debts, and they have the second largest pile of government debt on the planet. The whole world has gone wild for debt!

Which brings us to a third “cycle of interest’ for 2015. What else floats on a sea of debt? Real estate prices! This cycle was described before here:

As examples, due to his real estate cycle work for the US, he was telling clients–in the 1990’s to give them ample time to act–to be out of all US real estate investments by February, 2007; that real estate prices would then fall from 2007 into 2012, then rise into 2015 in a snapback rally that would sucker a lot of people back into real estate, and then fall again through 2033.

Well here we are in the snapback real estate rally into 2015. So many have forgotten the 9 million US foreclosures and the 7 million US households that are still “under water” on their mortgages. All the signs of a bubble are back, though now some are already starting to dissipate as real estate prices in some of the bubbliest areas roll over:

Southern California home sale volume for January slowest since 2008: The stalemate accelerates with Orange County seeing a monthly median price drop of $28,500.

The bubble is stronger than ever in countries like Canada, Australia, and the UK. Unless people request it by sending me e-mails saying they want it, I’m not going to do a detailed post on real estate. I doubt it will change anyone’s mind, so it probably isn’t worth it. But when the biggest debt bubble the world–and perhaps the galaxy–has ever known pops, and governments are falling left and right, real estate prices will be hammered. And those falling governments will be desperately raising property taxes to try to stay afloat.

And anyone who agrees with people who say that “debt doesn’t matter,” like Dick Cheney from the right or Paul Krugman from the left, is going to get quite an education over the next few years. Actually, we all will. Which is good, in my view. Humanity badly needs to understand which actions have real value and which do not.

Currency Balloons

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Thundering Heard

Given the state of most media reporting, it’s sometimes tough to know whether to laugh or cry. Here’s a story from last week about a surge in gold bullion purchasing in Germany in August and September:

German Bullion Dealers Report Major Increase in Sales

Christian Brenner, Chief Executive of Philoro Edelmetalle GmbH: “Already in August we noticed an increase on orders compared to the previous months, but September… September beats it all. From a German viewpoint it’s the strongest month of 2014.”. At their head office in Austria they also register an “overproportional high level” of revenue.

At the end of the article, there is a stumbling attempt to explain the recent surge with no mention of its real reason. Here’s a chart of the Euro showing it losing over 7% of its “value” in August and September, in the context of a 10% loss since May:

It would seem clear that at least some people in Germany and Austria noticed that someone was letting the air out of their Euros and decided to convert to real money.

It was the same for the Japanese in August and September, but much worse overall since the Japanese government has been hellbent on devaluing the Yen for two years. Here’s a chart showing the loss in “value” of the yen of more than 31% in the last three years:

Since these losses in “value” are measured against the biggest balloon of them all, the US Dollar, this is the source of what you may have been hearing lately about the “strong Dollar”! In other words, the “strong Dollar” is simply the result of other major governments succeeding in intentionally letting air out of the balloons known as their currencies.

They are doing this in an attempt to create inflation! Unlike regular people, who like it when prices drop and they can get good deals, governments, being the largest debtors on the planet, want inflation so that their debts can be repaid in cheaper and cheaper currency as time passes. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s a form of grand theft: I’ll borrow money from you today, and pay it back with cheaper money later.

Well so what, you might say. If they are all doing that, what’s the big deal? Continue reading →

A major change, Part 1

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Thundering Heard

A significant change has taken place. A pressure seems to have been lifted from members of the so-called Elites. This can be seen by two effects:

1. Some of these System Controllers are taking a look around and are none too pleased with what they see.

2. Some of them realize they can now speak more freely.

Here are some examples. The first is a set of quotes from the Chief Investment Officer of Allianz, by some metrics Europe’s largest insurer, and the third largest insurance company in the world:

The fundamental problems are not solved and everybody knows it.

Let’s hear that again:

The fundamental problems are not solved and everybody knows it.

Wow, for the last five years, one had to peruse surly blogs to hear that truth, but this is from Maximilian Zimmerer, the guy in charge of the assets for one of the 20 largest corporations in the world. He also stated that the “euro crisis is not over.” With that latter quote, he just told us that all those Euro-pols running around saying the “euro crisis is over” and “Europe has been fixed” are very mistaken and/or very full of it.

Next, someone let the Wall St Journal know that the US Federal Reserve has been railing about extreme problems at Germany’s top bank, Deutsche Bank:

In a letter to Deutsche Bank executives last December, a senior official with the New York Fed wrote that financial reports produced by some of the bank’s U.S. arms “are of low quality, inaccurate and unreliable.”

It said examiners found “material errors and poor data integrity”…The shortcomings amount to a “systemic breakdown” and “expose the firm to significant operational risk…”

So what’s the US central bank doing castigating Germany’s largest commercial bank? DB has large US operations; we showed here that half of the Fed’s money printing went to European banks, so DB probably has a lot of that cash, that is, from the Fed’s point of view, they had to bail out DB before, they don’t want to have to do it again; and, drumroll please, DB has the largest exposure to derivatives of any bank in the world. Again, what are derivatives? They are highly leveraged bets on every imaginable financial price movement. Here’s what ZeroHedge says about DB and derivatives:

Recall that as we have shown for two years in a row, Deutsche has a total derivative exposure that amounts to €55 trillion or just about $75 trillion. That’s a trillion with a T, and is about 100 times greater than the €522 billion in deposits the bank has. It is also 5x greater than the GDP of Europe and more or less the same as the GDP of… the world.

And here is that text in chart format:

So that’s Germany’s total economy in green on the left; Europe’s economy in blue in the center; and Deutsche Bank’s derivative bets in red on the right. So when it becomes clear that DB has a serious problem, it will be way too big for Germany to handle; probably way to big for Europe to handle; and possibly way too big for anyone to handle, that is, it could be game over, system down, everyone start from scratch. What the US Fed is saying is that DB’s recordkeeping and reporting is so bad that it results in “significant operational risk.” We likely won’t know till after DB goes down the tubes whether this was error or intentional obfuscation on their part. My guess is it’s probably a lot of both: their business is so huge, they have little understanding of many of its parts, some of which likely have twenty-something rogue traders putting on huge derivative bets; and they have plenty to hide.

Next, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has overtly questioned the sanity of just about all central banks and just about everyone participating in the financial markets. So why should anyone care? Perhaps you’ve been blessed during this lifetime and have never heard of the BIS. It is the organization that was described as follows on Bloomberg:

It was especially useful to the Nazis.

Though headed by an American during World War II, the BIS adhered to a priestly neutrality…in order to continue dealing with all sides in the conflict. Unfortunately, this put the institution squarely in the position of abetting Nazi terror.

The BIS accepted plundered gold and made it possible for Germany to acquire desperately needed war materiel. It even permitted Germany, once it had invaded Czechoslovakia, to confiscate that nation’s gold reserves.

I can just hear you saying: “Oh that BIS.” Anyway, from such disgusting beginnings, the BIS has continued its traditions and thereby has risen to be the central bank above all other central banks, that is, if you are the head of a major central bank in the world, you get a seat at the table at the BIS. Here it is, what some call the Tower of Basel, such a friendly-looking ~~nuclear plant cooling tower~~ place:

I’m told that if you’ve got a war to finance or a lot of drug money to launder, the BIS is your one-stop-shopping place. But I digress. In this article:

BIS Slams “Market Euphoria”, Finds “Puzzling Disconnect” Between Economy And Market

you can find the Financial Times summary of the latest BIS Annual Report:

The Bank for International Settlements has warned that “euphoric” financial markets have become detached from the reality of a lingering post-crisis malaise, as it called for governments to ditch policies that risk stoking unsustainable asset booms.

While the global economy is struggling to escape the shadow of the crisis of 2007-09, capital markets are “extraordinarily buoyant”, the Basel-based bank said, in part because of the ultra-low-rate monetary policy being pursued around the world…calling for policy makers to halt the steady rise in debt burdens around the world and embark on reforms to boost productivity.

In its annual report, the BIS also warned of the risks brewing in emerging markets, setting out early warning indicators of possible banking crises in a number of jurisdictions, including most notably China.

So there you have it, the ultimate insider organization saying what the surly blogs have been saying for years: stock and bond markets are wildly detached from economic reality, central banks are keeping interest rates too low and printing too much money, expect banks to fail all over the world, especially in places like China, etc.

Next, speaking of bank failures, the EU, US, and UK (I think an appropriate pronounceable acronym for this particular axis of evil is EUUSUK) have decided to “show us their feelings” about bank bailouts and have come clean about their attempt to get all countries to go along with their scheme to replace bank bailouts with bail-ins, through which, if you have money in a bank that fails, they are going to steal a bunch of your money to save the bank, like they did in the test case, Cyprus:

Bank Of England Leads Push For Deposit Confiscation – Japan, China, Russia Against Bail-Ins

They are pushing all major countries to go along with this plan for an obvious reason: Let’s say you are a global corporation or a gazillionaire and can place your money in whatever countries you choose. Why would you keep your money in countries where you could lose a lot of money in a bail-in? You wouldn’t be such a fool, of course, you’d move that money to safer countries, or into safer forms such as gold. However, the EUUSUK axis is being brutally honest here about their intent. Perhaps people living within the axis will be helped by the reluctance of the Asians and Russians to go along with this draconian plan to continue saving reckless banks by theft from regular people; but I doubt it.

Let’s call it a day and save more of this new-found realism and truth-telling for Part 2.

What’s up with the metals? Part 2

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Thundering Heard

Someone asked me whether I “was still in favor of gold.” The answer is an unqualified Yes. One easy reason is that almost every country on the planet is trying to drive down the value of their paper currency. So if you live in the US, it looks like this, and this is based on the US Government’s statistics for price inflation and we all know that they have every reason to play games to make this number look a lot lower than it really is, so you can safely increase each of these number by 50%:

The first column, CPI, says plenty: That if you live in the US, since the year 2000, the purchasing power of your money, of your salary, has lost 39%. And this is during a period that they claim has had “low inflation”! And the US Federal Reserve is currently on record as saying they are trying to create more inflation. So when you own US Dollars, or items denominated in Dollars such as US stocks and bonds, or items in currencies pegged to the US Dollar, realize that this is only going to get worse. The same is true for the purchasing power of the other currencies.

* * *

The post What’s up with the metals? Part 1 showed that some notable gold bears had turned bullish and that unprecedented demand for physical gold continued. Despite the strong demand, gold then had the bargain price of $1,237 per ounce, having just bounced up from $1,181 on the last day of 2013. Price went to $1,355 Monday and has pulled back to $1,338 today.

The strong demand for physical bullion, coins, and jewelry, documented in Part 1, has continued. Despite record-breaking demand in 2013, Chinese demand year-to-date is 51% higher than demand to this point in 2013. Mints around the world are working overtime:

U.K. Royal Mint Runs Out of Sovereign Gold Coins on Demand

The U.K.’s Royal Mint, which traces its history back more than 1,000 years, ran out of 2014 Sovereign gold coins as prices near a six-month low led to “exceptional demand.”

Gold Mint Runs Overtime in Race to Meet World Coin Demand

Austria’s mint is running 24 hours a day as global mints from the U.S. to Australia report climbing demand for gold coins…

Austria’s Muenze Oesterreich AG mint hired extra employees and added a third eight-hour shift to the day in a bid to keep up with demand. Purchases of bullion coins at Australia’s Perth Mint rose 20 percent this year through Jan. 20 from a year earlier. Sales by the U.S. Mint are set for the best month since April, when the metal plunged into a bear market.

Global mints are manufacturing as fast as they can…“The market is very busy,” Lang said. “We can’t meet the demand, even if we work overtime.”

So, if demand for physical gold is so strong, how could there possibly be such a price drop as happened in 2013? The answer is simple really. They have created a paper gold market that is hundreds of times larger than the physical gold market. By larger I mean in terms of the dollar value of trading in these two markets. People trade paper that has more or less of a connection with gold (sometimes none at all), and it is in these large markets that the price of gold is set. Most of the participants in these paper gold markets believe that they could, if they wished, convert these pieces of paper into physical gold, that the pieces of paper are claims on real gold. But in reality, only a tiny fraction of them could succeed in converting their claims into real metal. There just isn’t enough metal to go around.

If you think I exaggerate, check this chart, which I’ll explain below. It describes the action at the COMEX, the primary gold price-setting exchange in the US:

The key phrase on the chart is “Owners Per Ounce,” which for the COMEX is now at 111 owners per ounce of gold in the vault! That is, for each ounce of gold in the COMEX vaults (the blue line in the upper section of the chart), 111 contracts exist that allow the owners of those contracts to demand delivery of that single ounce of gold. We all understand that banks operate with only a little cash on hand for all the deposits they’ve taken, called a fractional reserve system. The COMEX is the same, worse actually: percentagewise, they keep a lot less gold around than the banks keep cash on hand.

(Please skip this paragraph if you already understand what 111 owners per ounce means!) Let me explain: The COMEX is a futures trading exchange where people trade gold and other commodities. Futures exchanges were created to be a meeting place between producers of a commodity and its end users. In January of any year, for example, a producer of wheat can agree to sell wheat in the future, in September, at a specified price to a cereal company. Both the wheat farmer and the cereal company know that they can make a reasonable profit on their operations if the farmer supplies, and the cereal maker takes delivery of, wheat at the pre-arranged price when that wheat is ready in September, so they make the deal. That’s called a futures contract. It promises both delivery and payment in the future at set price, and that’s great. But the futures exchanges are now dominated by big money speculators who have no intention of producing or taking delivery of anything. The chart above reflects this reality. The COMEX vault is supposed to have gold to back up the gold trading that takes place on that exchange. As you can see in the upper panel of the chart, back in 2006 they had over 5 million ounces backing up the contracts. Now that amount has fallen by 93% to only 370,000 ounces as more people realize that they better stop trading paper and get their hands on the real stuff. Currently, for all the futures contracts to buy and sell gold on the exchange, they only have 1 ounce for every 111 contracts in existence. These contracts are paper gold, a huge synthetic supply of fake gold. If everyone decided to make their claim for real gold (similar to a run on bank), only 1 ounce would be available for every 111 claims. Such an attempt would drive the price of physical gold into the stratosphere. On a typical day last week, 55,000 of these paper contracts traded hands. That represents 5,500,000 ounces of paper gold traded each day just at the COMEX. That trading sets the price for gold in the US. But it’s possible that no one demanded delivery of gold from the COMEX on that same day. So the trading that sets the price is really for cash, not for gold. And this paper trading involves a lot of borrowing, that is, leverage. One can easily prove this crazy situation by contacting a futures broker and creating an account with $8,000 in that account. One could then buy or sell (they call it selling short) a futures contract for 100 ounces of gold. At today’s price of $1,338 per ounce, 100 ounces of gold is worth $133,800. So as far as COMEX is concerned, you are using your $8,000 gambling stake to control $133,800 worth of gold. And this “gold” can be sold, driving down the price. Seems crazy, but it’s literally true.

So if you or I can control 100 ounces for $8,000, imagine what JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs can control with the many billions of printed money they receive from the Federal Reserve, printed money that has not been lent out to boost the economy but is being used as collateral for trading. They can push markets in whatever direction they want. The same is true for central banks, but on an even greater scale: They have no limit on the amount of cash they can print up, so they can overwhelm any market anytime they wish.

The COMEX sets the price in the US. In London, it’s the LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) which is more than 7 times larger than the COMEX in terms of the dollar value of daily paper gold trading. The LBMA admitted a couple of years ago that, like the COMEX today, their leverage ratio was over 100 to 1. And the gold market in Switzerland is just as large as the LBMA, but it is run privately by the Swiss banks, so they publish no statistics. All told there are 40 futures exchanges in the world for trading paper gold.

Another form of paper gold is certificates for gold accounts with banks. Several of these banks have been caught charging people fees for storing gold when they are actually storing nothing at all. The banks figured they could quickly meet any claims for the gold, but when the claims came in, it took them weeks to procure the gold in the open market.

And there are stocks that hold gold, options on both those stocks and on the futures described above, gold leases, and swaps contracts. The latter are private contracts and they may actually dwarf all of the rest of the paper gold claims in terms of their stated dollar value (their “notional value,” as it is called) because the central banks, like the US Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements, often use swaps for their trading. What, central banks trading gold? In September, the French Central Bank admitted:

We are still active in the gold market for our own account…meaning that we are in the market nearly on a daily basis.

In that same paper, the Bank of France said they owned 2,500 tons of physical gold and that they had no plans to sell it. So what are they trading daily? Paper gold, for profit.

Sometimes people go way too far with these contracts. People thought that Bear Stearns went bankrupt in 2008 because of the mortgage market. But the astute article What Really Happened to Bear Stearns by Ted Butler explains that it was actually bad trading in gold and silver that took them down: they had massive bets that the prices of gold and silver would go down, but instead the prices shot up by a lot over a few months instead.

The chart above is the price of gold from 2004-2008. Notice how the price was moving up strongly prior to the collapse of Bear Stearns. Guess who picked up all of the assets and trading positions of Bear Stearns as it went bankrupt. Why our “good friends” at the company implicated in, and fined for, manipulating just about every market around since then: JP Morgan. They picked up Bear’s assets for about 6 cents on the dollar. Notice the smashdown of the gold price as soon as Morgan was in charge. The price smashdown was even worse in silver. Here’s the chart from 2004-2008 for silver:

It sure makes one wonder whether JP Morgan was involved in both moving the price up to bankrupt Bear Stearns, and then smashing it down once they had taken over Bear and inherited all those bets that the prices of gold and silver would drop.

Getting back to our discussion. All of these contracts taken together are called derivatives because they derive their value from the underlying value of gold. Guess who owns most of them now:

Market Cornered: JPMorgan Owns Over 60% Notional Of All Gold Derivatives

What? Isn’t it illegal to corner a market? Don’t the regulators come down hard on anyone trying to corner a market? Yes, but as long as it isn’t gold or silver. JP Morgan is allowed to corner gold and silver because it serves the interests of those who still want the US Dollar to dominate the world so that the US can continue to exercise its “exorbitant privilege” of printing paper to trade for the real goods of other countries. So if someone like Morgan and the central banks weren’t suppressing the prices of gold and silver, it would make the Dollar and the other paper currencies look bad, and those in charge won’t allow that.

To show you how off base these government people and economists are, when Nixon took the world off of what remained of the gold standard in 1971, his chief economist was the “great” Milton Friedman. Friedman told Nixon and others that gold was deriving its value from the US Dollar, not the other way around, and that as soon as Nixon severed the link between gold and the Dollar, that the price of gold would actually fall quite a lot. He was entirely wrong, as government economists so often are, as gold never looked back again at its then-current price of $35 per ounce.

These government types have always hated gold for one reason: it inhibits their ability to wage war. We’ve covered it before: governments started going off the very-successful gold and silver standards in order to fight World War 1. That war would have been over in a few months, but that wasn’t good enough for the warmongers, they had to kill off millions of people over four years to serve their greed.

We’ll talk more about governments and gold later, including their failed attempts to suppress gold in the past, in Part 3. But you know that comment above about the gold price going into the stratosphere when people with all these paper contracts rush to convert them to physical gold? That will happen. It’s inevitable, as more and more people lose confidence in governments, banks, and the blizzard of paper claims they have created. That COMEX chart above–where it shows that the physical gold backing up the paper trading is down by 93%–says that the process is already well underway. Best to get your gold and silver before all those folks with the paper contracts try to get some because, at that point, it will be tough to find real gold at any price.

It’s Bail-In time

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Thundering Heard

The posts Upcoming Thefts by Big Money and Update on Metals, Deposit Confiscation, and Capital Controls explained how the authorities have made is perfectly clear that their new Bail-In regimen would confiscate deposits from regular folks in an attempt–which will ultimately fail–to keep the bankrupt banks and bankrupt governments afloat. I enter as evidence the bankruptcy of the City of Detroit. Ellen Brown has written an excellent post on the topic that everyone should read, especially anyone who tends to think the current financial/legal/political system is a trustworthy custodian.

What’s happening is this: in the Detroit bankruptcy, the banks have been ruled to have “super-seniority,” that is, the banks get taken care of first, everyone else comes after that. Why? Because the banks sold Detroit derivatives and the banks got Congress to pass a law in 2005 that derivatives have seniority over all other obligations. So Detroit’s pensioners–the retired firefighters, police, water workers, garbage collectors, etc.–will get whatever crumbs might or might not be left after the super-senior derivative sellers and senior bondholders get their take. The first proposal had pensions being cut to ten cents on the dollar.

The banks convinced Congress that derivatives are “systemically important” so that’s how they got this super-seniority scam in place. Since there are over $700 trillion worth of derivatives out there in the world and that’s more than 10 times larger than then entire world economy, that means the banks will ultimately get all of everything before anyone else gets any of anything every time there is trouble. And there will be a lot of trouble. Particularly if they start a big war. Think about it: we have a system where money is debt and almost all countries and banks have way too much debt and the banking and government debt system is cross-linked to all financial institutions and pension funds and insurance companies across the globe. What will that look like when institutions in one country decide to not pay the institutions in another country because the two are at war, or since no one will be sure which countries will be left standing at the end of the war, everyone will gets suspicious about the value of everyone else’s currency? Trouble will take on entirely new dimensions. And we’ve all been told who has seniority in terms of dibs on assets, and that “who” is not you and me.

Or from another vantage point, please consider this: it has taken over a year for the bankruptcy trustee for MF Global, which stole $1.6 billion from its depositors, to even figure out where the money is. And he has only been able to figure out where 80% of it is. Not because anyone was hiding it, but because assets now get lent to someone who lends them to someone else who lends them to someone else…and so forth. This is how complicated the financial system has become. Think about what this will look like when the amounts are literally millions of times larger than MF Global and spread across the globe in countries which are no longer on speaking terms.

And as a friend just pointed out to me in an e-mail, it’s really now in the banks’ best interest to have cities like Detroit go bankrupt so that the banks can get all of their money from derivatives right away.

I wonder if that’s why Detroit isn’t getting a bailout from the State or Federal governments–that the banks want their money now.

And the City of Detroit gets relief from its debts. So government and banks bail in (steal!) the money from regular folks, game set and match. Ah, the public-private partnership in action!

It’s dangerous out there folks. Please take action accordingly. Soon!

From Ellen’s post, The Detroit Bail-In Template: Fleecing Pensioners to Save the Banks:

In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks.

Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG have been given priority over other bankruptcy claimants, meaning chiefly the pensioners, for payments due on interest rate swaps they entered into with the city. Interest rate swaps – the exchange of interest rate payments between counterparties – are sold by Wall Street banks as a form of insurance, something municipal governments “should” do to protect their loans from an unanticipated increase in rates. Unlike ordinary insurance, however, swaps are actually just bets; and if the municipality loses the bet, it can owe the house, and owe big. The swap casino is almost entirely unregulated, and it is a rigged game that the house virtually always wins. Interest rate swaps are based on the LIBOR rate, which has now been proven to be manipulated by the rate-setting banks; and they were a major contributor to Detroit’s bankruptcy.

Derivative claims are considered “secured” because the players must post collateral to play. They get not just priority but “super-priority” in bankruptcy, meaning they go first before all others, a deal pushed through by Wall Street in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Meanwhile, the municipal workers, whose pensions are theoretically protected under the Michigan Constitution, are classified as “unsecured” claimants who will get the scraps after the secured creditors put in their claims. The banking casino, it seems, trumps even the state constitution. The banks win and the workers lose once again.

Ellen’s full post is here.

Upcoming Thefts by Big Money

Posted on June 22, 2013 by Thundering Heard

The insatiable banking/corporate/political crony network that has stolen so much from people in the past has some new schemes in store. First on the docket is the bail-in, where reckless banks with huge losses will be kept afloat not by the general base of taxpayers, but by those who have lent them money. And as mentioned in Update on Metals, Deposit Confiscation, and Capital Controls, depositors are definitely grouped into the class of those who have “lent” money to these banks. As in Cyprus, if a bank fails and the regulators decide that depositor money will be confiscated, the depositors receive some stock in the bank in exchange for their money. We’ll see later in this post just how well that is working out for people in Cyprus. But first, let’s establish that bail-ins are definitely the new thing:

It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors

Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds…

Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.” The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price?…

No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive.

Wealthy bank depositors to suffer losses in EU law

A draft European Union law voted on Monday would shield small depositors from losing their savings in bank rescues, but customers with over 100,000 euros in savings when a bank failed could suffer losses.

Asmussen clarifies EU Parliament: savers must bleed for bank rescue

Japan to adopt ‘bail-ins,’ force bank losses on investors if needed, Nikkei says

Land Of The Rising Bail In: Deposit Confiscation Coming To Japan Next

Other countries have hopped on the bail-in bandwagon, but you get the idea.

To absolutely confirm that bail-ins are coming, the next story is about an organization called ISDA preparing for how to handle bail-ins. Why is this important? Because the following is a list of the voting members of the ISDA Determinations Committee:

Bank of America N.A.
Barclays Bank plc
BNP Paribas
Citibank, N.A.
Credit Suisse International
Deutsche Bank AG
Goldman Sachs International
JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.
Morgan Stanley & Co. International plc
UBS AG

That is the rogues gallery of derivatives trading on this planet. And what is this Determinations Committee determining? Who gets what on all of the derivative bets placed with respect to any bank that gets a bail-in. In other words, there will be bets that the bank will fail, bets that the bank will survive, bets on the bank’s bonds, etc. etc., and these guys are now setting the rules for who gets what after a bail-in. If these folks think it’s necessary to protect themselves relating to bail-ins, then gee, I wonder if everyone else ought to do the same?:

New CDS trigger event proposed to tackle bail-in

ISDA is consulting on a proposal to add another credit event for financial credit default swaps in order to adapt to sweeping changes in regulation that will give supervisory authorities the power to bail-in the debt of floundering institutions.

For further proof, those who are well-connected are already working to make sure that they are exempt from the torture of a bail-in:

EACH wants CCP exemption from bail-ins

Rest assured that there will be bank failures because the big ones have gone back to the methods that precipitated the financial crisis on the first place. They are again selling CDOs, one of the primary culprits in 2008:

‘Frankenstein’ CDOs twitch back to life

And they are once again granting what are called “covenant-lite” loans.

And in new depths of scum-sucking bottom-feeding, banks are so desperate for capital and profits and bonuses that they are now pursuing people upon whom they foreclosed to make up the difference between the mortgage loan amount and the price the banks were able to get for the house when they sold that house after foreclosure:

Lenders seek court actions against homeowners years after foreclosure

For Jose Santos Benavides, the ordeal of losing his home was over.

The Salvadoran immigrant had worked for years as a self-employed landscaper to make a $15,000 down payment on a four-bedroom house in Rockville. He had achieved a portion of the American dream, earning nearly six figures.

Then the economy soured, and lean paychecks turned into late mortgage payments. On Aug. 20, 2008, one year after he bought his dream home for $469,000, the bank’s threat to take his house became real via a letter in the mail. Just four days before the bank seized the property, he moved out, along with his wife and their two young children.

That wasn’t the worst of it.

In November, more than three years after the foreclosure, he was stunned to learn he still owed $115,000 — with the interest alone growing at a rate high enough to lease a luxury car.

“I’m scared, you know,” Benavides said. “I can’t pay.”

The 42-year-old is among the many homeowners being taken to court by their lenders long after their houses were taken in foreclosure. Lenders are filing new motions in old foreclosure lawsuits and hiring debt collectors to pursue leftover debt, plus court fees, attorneys’ fees and tens of thousands in interest that had been accruing for years.

From that Washington Post article, here is a chart that shows that, in some states of the US, the banks have 40 or more years after the foreclosure to go after former “homeowners” upon whom they foreclosed:

So the banks engaged for years in seriously questionable lending practices, packaged up mortgages they knew would fail into “securities” that they sold all over the world, created fake documents and had them robo-signed to accomplish foreclosures, and now they can hound people for decades for what the banks say are their losses on these mortgages. With interest. And attorneys fees. I wonder who created such a legal system. As Bank of America employees reported:

‘We were told to lie’ – Bank of America employees open up about foreclosure practices

Employees of Bank of America say they were encouraged to lie to customers and were even rewarded for foreclosing on homes, staffers of the financial giant claim in new court documents…

“To justify the denials, employees produced fictitious reasons, for instance saying the homeowner had not sent in the required documents, when in actuality, they had,” William Wilson, Jr., a former underwriter for the bank, wrote in his statement.

As a side note on Europe, rumor has it that the infamous EU Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsellbloem, the one who correctly stated in public that the Cyprus bank action was a template for future bank resolutions, is pressing EU officials to try to preemptively resolve the problem of insolvent EU banks via deposit confiscation. And he wants to do that soon. So far, all attempts to fix EU bank problems have been band-aids that temporarily covered over the real problems; none have come close to a real solution, and we’ll get to the reason for that below. But if you have any notion that EU banks are solvent, then read this comment about Deutsche Bank by a former US Federal Reserve Bank President:

Deutsche Bank “Is Horribly Undercapitalized… It’s Ridiculous” Says Former Fed President Hoenig

A top U.S. banking regulator called Deutsche Bank’s capital levels “horrible” and said it is the worst on a list of global banks based on one measurement of leverage ratios. “It’s horrible, I mean they’re horribly undercapitalized,” said Federal Deposit Insurance Corp Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig in an interview. “They have no margin of error.” Deutsche’s leverage ratio stood at 1.63 percent, according to Hoenig’s numbers, which are based on European IFRS accounting rules as of the end of 2012.

Deutsche Bank is the biggest player in the world in the risk-laden derivatives market. At last count, they had $73 trillion in derivatives outstanding, which is over twenty times the size of the German GDP, so if Deutsche Bank has a derivatives blow up, it’s unlikely that Germany or anyone else would be able to afford to make good on their losses. After all, $73 trillion is larger than the entire world GDP.

And why is it that, as stated above, there have been no attempts to really solve EU bank problems? It’s very simple: too much debt was issued to buy assets (e.g., real estate), pushing up the price of those assets to unrealistic levels. There are real losses that need to be taken, and no one wants to take the losses. All involved prefer to pretend that there are no such losses, so they use near-zero-interest bridge loans, accounting lies, and round robin I’ll-lend-your-bank-money-to-buy-your-government-debt-and-you-use-the-proceeds-to-bail-out-your-bank games to mask the truth. With non-performing loans at EU banks at record highs and growing by the day, good luck with that.

But here is the problem with bail-ins, the latest and great “fix” for the financial system: so far, they don’t work. Let’s look at the infamous Cyprus case: they stole a lot of deposits and in return, gave people stock in the bank. But few want to keep their money in that bank anymore. Even with strong limits on daily withdrawals from the Cyprus banks, people are persistently removing their money from those banks:

Cyprus Bank Deposits Plunge By Most Ever During “Capital Controls” Month

Here’s what the trend of withdrawals from the Cyprus banks look like:

That’s more than $6 billion being withdrawn in April, after the March bail-in. So that bank stock that people received in return for their “expropriated” deposits? Must be worth a fortune. If people still received stock certificates as a matter of course, at least these could be framed as memorabilia, yet another testament to the financial follies of humanity. But it’s all just electronic entries these days. Switch a few bits and bytes and then who owns what?

And the whole Cyprus action is breaking down anyway:

The Cyprus Bail-In Blows Up: President Urges Complete Bailout Overhaul

Cyprus’ President Nicos Anastasiades has realized (as we warned), too late it seems for the thousands of domestic and foreign depositors who were sacrificed at the alter of monetary union, that the TROIKA’s terms are “too onerous.” Anastasiades has asked EU lenders to unwind the complex restructuring and partial merger of its two largest banks…

Not that the bail-outs actually worked either. Despite the fact that the EU leaders touted each of the first three Greek bailouts as the final fix, Greece now needs a fourth:

Greece Has One Month To Plug A €1.2 Billion Healthcare Budget Hole

Think Cyprus is the only country that will need a repeat bailout (as the FT reported earlier)? Think again. Cause heeeeere’s Greece… again…. where as Kathimerini reports, a brand new, massive budget hole for €1.2 billion has just been “discovered.

And here’s another nice theft tactic. Well, nice if you are the bank. The Bank of Ireland just doubled the interest rate on existing floating rate mortgages where the fine print allowed them to do so:

Bank Of Ireland Doubles Mortgage Rates, Homeowners Fear More To Come

And expect to hear a good deal more about wealth taxes in the coming months:

German ‘Wise Men’ push for wealth seizure

Professors Lars Feld and Peter Bofinger said states in trouble must pay more for their own salvation, arguing that there is enough wealth in homes and private assets across the Mediterranean to cover bail-out costs. “The rich must give up part of their wealth over the next ten years,” said Prof Bofinger.

And last but not least, you know all that money sitting in retirements accounts? Multiple countries have nationalized such accounts in recent years. People like former Republican Administration insider Catherine Austin Fitts have been warning people that US politicians salivate when they contemplate getting their hands on that pool of $18 trillion.

OK, just three final (brief!) comments:

1. You’ve heard the old saying about someone who “wants your money in their pocket.” The problem here is most people’s money is already stored in “their pocket,” that is, it’s already being held by the institutions that want to grab it.

2. That thing about the banks going after people for more money after they have already foreclosed on them? Too bad we don’t have a Charles Dickens around to dramatize this type of behavior, maybe then people would get the depth of depravity in this system.

3. Tread carefully out there, folks, it looks like acceleration spares nothing, so I think you want to be real careful about “wait and see.” You know my view: banks are for transaction accounts, not savings.

Next time we’ll cover another big pile of electronic money, brokerage accounts.

Accelerating Truth

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Thundering Heard

Most people have been trained to internalize only those ideas that come from honchos, that is, political and religious big shots, “experts,” very rich people, celebrities, etc. The powermongers capitalize on this when faced with criticism of the system by often resorting to what the logicians call ad hominem attacks, that is, they deflect attention from the criticism by attacking the person delivering it, attempting to undermine that person’s credibility. They characterize the malcontents as crazy, unpatriotic, uninformed, uneducated, or as crackpots, charlatans, imbeciles, demons, and so forth, while never addressing the issue at hand.

So for a more general public understanding of the nature of our system, it helps when people considered to be honchos start publicly discussing what is in fact going on. Other honchos are less likely to try to pull the ad hominem attack on one of their own. In other words, truth about the nature of our system needs to emerge from the blogosphere and into the mainstream. This process is accelerating.

Below is a link to an amazing video showing Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs speaking to a conference organized by the US Federal Reserve:

Columbia Economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs speaks candidly on monetary reform

He begins by reporting that he was just at a meeting with foreign ambassadors at the UN who were asking:

“Why are we taking advice from the people who have managed the financial system so badly?”

He goes on to say that while people expect economists to talk about statistics and monetary issues, that the real problem with the system is as follows:

We have a mountain of criminal and fraudulent behavior…The amount of utter criminality and financial fraud is absolutely enormous…This is what’s called the American financial system at the moment. It’s an unregulated essentially lawless environment…

This is a profound failure of government…

I regard the moral environment as pathological…

We have a corrupt politics to the core. Both parties are up to their necks in this. It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing. The corruption, as far as I can see, is everywhere.

Sachs follows that by saying that he meets with the top Wall St CEOs on a regular basis and the common feature he observes is that these people believe they can do anything they want, legal or not, with impunity. And that given their takeover of the politicians and regulators, they are correct!

Now this isn’t coming from MIT’s Prof. Noam Chomsky–who, let’s face it, was decades ahead of all of us in pointing out the criminality of the corporate/political system–it’s coming from a highly respected Columbia professor.

For a few years now, the money printing central banks such as the US Federal Reserve (the central banks have directly printed at least $16 trillion and counting) have been told by bloggers that this money is not supporting jobs and the economy, but rather that it is going to the rich who are bidding for financial assets and causing bubbles in multiple asset markets including stocks, bonds, and real estate. People like Ben Bernanke, his henchman, and academic and Wall St economists have denied this.

But now we find out, from a Freedom of Information Request by Bloomberg and from a leaked Fed document, that the banking insiders who advise the Fed are finally saying the same thing that the continuously-discredited bloggers have been saying all along: that the money printing is creating bubbles in farmland prices and student loans, and:

There is also concern about “an unsustainable bubble in equity and fixed-income markets given current prices.”

And for years, bloggers have said that the central banks cannot possibly stop printing more and more money or the whole edifice will crumble, another charge that is roundly derided. The Fed has claimed repeatedly that it has the tools to undo all the money printing so that it will never cause a problem. But now their own banker advisory panel says that if the Fed stops printing, it “may be painful for consumers and businesses…” and that “the Fed may now be perceived as integral to the housing finance system.” In other words, if the Fed stops printing, the “housing finance system” will collapse. Which it would. In a heartbeat.

People like Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone have been stalwart in documenting the ongoing manipulations in the interest rate, municipal bond, derivatives, and oil markets. And others have offered very strong evidence of manipulation of the stock market and precious metals markets. Taibbi recently wrote that “everything is rigged.” The US Bond market, the largest in the world, is certainly rigged: the Federal Reserve itself buys 75% of the bonds issued by the US Treasury. And the Fed announces, at the start of each month, which days it will be buying bonds through the Wall St firms in the coming month. The stock market always rises on those days. Always. Why? Because the Wall St firms take that money, leverage it up by further borrowing, and buy stocks. The Fed wants exactly that: they believe that a rising stock market makes people feel a “wealth effect” and therefore they will go out and spend more money in the real economy.

So finally, along comes one the largest banks in the world, Deutsche Bank, saying:

We would stress that we fully understand why the authorities wouldn’t want free markets to operate today as the risk of a huge global default and unemployment cycle would still be very high.

And a recent member of the Federal Reserve Board, Kevin Warsh, said that their money printing is not working and they are losing credibility:

…over the last several years, [the Fed] has over-promised and under-delivered, and the bank’s most important asset – credibility – is under attack.

One would think that, if their strategy isn’t working, that they have other tools they can bring to bear. That’s what they tell us. But Warsh says, “There is no Plan B.”

Bloggers have been warning that European banks are insolvent and getting worse all the time. Now the European Central Bank itself admits that the “euro zone’s slumping economy and a surge in problem loans were raising the risk of a renewed banking crisis.”

Here is an interview with the President of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, that place where they trade paper and electronic instruments that have an increasingly tenuous connection with physical things like gold, silver, copper, oil, etc. From the interview:

What’s interesting about gold, when we had that big break two weeks ago we saw all the gold stocks trade down significantly, we saw all the gold products (ed: futures) trade down significantly, but one thing that did not trade down, was gold coins, tangible real gold. That’s going to show you, people don’t want certificates, they don’t want anything else. They want the real product.

Then there is the supposed eternal juggernaut of the Chinese economy that will keep all the other floundering countries afloat. Much of that juggernaut has been propelled by debts taken on by local governments to promote the economy in their areas. But now the Financial Times reports this:

A senior Chinese auditor has warned that local government debt is “out of control” and could spark a bigger financial crisis than the US housing market crash.

Zhang Ke said his accounting firm, ShineWing, had all but stopped signing off on bond sales by local governments as a result of his concerns.

Last but not least, an insider is finally speaking up about nuclear power plants in the NY Times:

All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday…

The position of the former chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, is not unusual in that various anti-nuclear groups take the same stance. But it is highly unusual for a former head of the nuclear commission to so bluntly criticize an industry whose safety he was previously in charge of ensuring.

This system is coming apart at the seams. Insiders and whistlebowers are finally describing the details. The US Government realizes this and is desperately trying to keep whistleblowers from telling the truth by filing charges against them and trying to ruin their lives. Ultimately, it won’t work. I just hope that everyone reading here takes those actions they need to take. By the time the collapse is on the television Nightly News and Page 1 of the newspapers, with the system honchos all claiming “No one could have seen this coming,” it will be too late.

Update on Metals, Deposit Confiscation, and Capital Controls

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Thundering Heard

…one goal is to get to the point where all market participants understand with certainty that if a large SIFI (systemically important financial institution) were to fail, the losses would fall on its shareholders and creditors…
–Governor Jeremy C. Stein, US Federal Reserve Board, Regulating Large Financial Institutions, speech at a conference sponsored by the International Monetary Fund, April 17, 2013

* * *

“Bank creditors,” as it happens, is a class of people that includes bank depositors. Everything about the rhetoric of banking is designed to obscure this. You deposit money in your bank account…But what you’ve really done is loaned the money to the bank…
—Slate.com

A big price drop in the precious metals. So let’s see, on Thursday, April 11:

CEOs of biggest U.S. banks to meet with Obama on Thursday

and the big selling in metals took place on Friday, April 12 and Monday, April 15. No chance of any causation in that correlation. Nah. Move along. As Leslie Nielsen said, “Nothing to see here.”

Anyway, with all that selling, there must be lots of inventory of coins around. That’s what they teach in Econ 101, right? That if a price is plunging, it’s because people are dumping large quantities of that item onto the market.

But there isn’t lots of inventory. Inventory is very tight, sold out in many cases. Delivery lead times are out to five or six weeks, and that’s if you can even place an order for what you want. Big-volume dealers like Tulving.com are entirely out of one-ounce silver coins minted by any country, and they have been since April 15. You can scroll down this page at their web site to see how many items they normally sell are currently sold out.

And these people make a living buying and selling lots of coins. They really want to do a lot of business. And they are happy to buy right now, but they can’t sell lots of items because there aren’t any available.

This scramble to buy physical bullion coins is going on worldwide.

In Australia:

Golden times for Perth Mint

The volume of business that we’re putting through is way in excess of double what we did last week,” Treasurer Nigel Moffatt said, without giving precise figures. “There’s been people running through the gate.”

In Japan:

As global price slumps, “Abenomics” risks drive Japan gold bugs

But on Tuesday, buyers outnumbered sellers by a wide margin. At Ginza Tanaka, the headquarters shop of Tanaka Holdings, gold buyers waited for as long as three hours for a chance to complete a transaction.

In India:

India’s Response To The Gold Sell Off: A Massive Buying Frenzy

In China:

Chinese Gold & Silver Exchange Society Runs Out of Gold…Importing from Switzerland and London

Now we discover that the Chinese Gold & Silver Exchange Society has essentially sold out of gold bullion, and must wait until Wednesday for shipments to arrive from Switzerland and London.

Gold Buying Frenzy Continues: China, Japan, And Australia Scramble For Physical

In the US:

US Mint Sells Record 63,500 Ounces Of Gold In One Day

According to today’s data from the US Mint, a record 63,500 ounces, or a whopping 2 tons, of gold were reported sold on April 17th alone, bringing the total sales for the month to a whopping 147,000 ounces or more than the previous two months combined with just half of the month gone.

Bullion Shortages Develop As Retail Demand Skyrockets

…on Monday there was such chaos in the markets that some of the larger wholesale dealers had to shut down at various times because of the massive demand on the buy side… Gold and silver buyers are still outpacing sellers by a stunning 50 to 1. There were premium increases on everything bullion related. The wholesalers are now telling us four to six weeks on silver maple leafs, and wholesalers quit taking orders on one ounce silver rounds.

In Canada and Europe:

Massive Run On Physical Gold & Silver At UBS & Scotiabank

At the Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto the gold window has been absolutely swamped. I have confirmed there were people lined up in droves recently for multiple-hours at a time to buy gold and silver bars and coins….

“I then confirmed with UBS today in Zurich, Switzerland, that they are experiencing exactly the same thing. They told me people are waiting in long lines for bullion related bars and coins. The physical market is incredibly tight…

In Switzerland:

Refiners Can’t Keep Up With Massive Global Gold Demand

If you look at our company, as just one example, we did not have one single seller in the last few weeks.

So during this takedown in gold and silver there wasn’t one single seller, only buyers….

If we turn to the Swiss refiners, Eric, the premium over spot for physical gold is rocketing. Swiss refiners are unable to keep up with the demand for immediate delivery. They are working flat out, including the weekend, and still can’t keep up.

The Swiss refiners are seeing global demand coming in from everywhere, especially from the Middle-East and the Far-East. So, again, this proves that the artificial manipulation of paper gold has nothing to do with the physical market.
–Egon von Greyerz, Matterhorn Asset Management

So, with all that buying interest in real physical gold and silver, why has the price been falling? Because the two largest trading venues on the planet for metals, the LBMA (London Bullion Market Assoc.) and the COMEX in the US, are the places where the price of gold is currently set. And 99% or more of the trades there that are said to be related to gold are not for the physical metal, they are futures contracts that are traded for cash, not physical gold. In other words, these are very large trading casinos. But like the banks, they are fractional reserve systems. In other words, if everyone who had a futures contract for gold actually wanted physical gold for their contract, there would not be anywhere near enough gold to go around. Even supporters of the LBMA admit there is maybe 1% physical gold backing all these contracts. So that’s even more leverage than is used at most banks. A lot more.

Monday, April 15 was a good example. Andrew Maguire–an LBMA trader and whistleblower who the Powers That Be ran down, but did not kill, with a car in 2011 right after Andrew gave testimony on silver price manipulation to the authorities—reported that on Monday, there was a period during which 155 tons of gold was sold on the LBMA in one hour. I can tell you for sure that no one who owned or was the custodian for 155 tons of physical gold would sell it in a panic into a falling market. This was selling of futures contracts that will be settled in cash. They have little or nothing to do with physical gold. People in charge of 155 tons of real gold do not sell in a panic. If they wanted to sell—and such a thing would be quite unusual these days when even central banks are net buyers of physical gold—they would do so carefully, trying to get the best price. They would sell on days when the price was rising, not falling. This is the way anyone with a strong profit motive sells, they hire good traders to sell over time when they can get the best price. They do not panic dump their holdings regardless of price.

In fact, Maguire reports that central banks picked up 55 tons of physical gold during that one hour period when 155 tons worth of paper gold contracts were sold.

Here are Maguire’s comments about Monday, April 15.

At some point, this charade will fall apart. The price of physical gold will separate from the price quoted in these paper instruments. This is already visible when one needs to buy coins at a premium above the spot price of the metal. During these smashdown selloffs (we’ve seen these before in 2006 and 2008), the premium above the quoted spot price for physical gold and silver rises, sometimes to as much as 50% above the spot price if you want prompt delivery. During those periods, the price for physical coins is not the quoted spot price, it is the spot price plus the premium, and that price can be substantially higher. These are the indications of the separation of the paper and physical gold and silver prices to come.

The press duly reported nearly the same quote from representatives of all of the banks. Yes, reps from those same banks that met with Obama on April 11. “Gold has lost its safe haven status. “ “Gold is no safe haven.” And on and on. They should have dressed them up in silly costumes and they could have danced and sang together, at least that would have been entertaining.

So why do they want to scare you out of, or away from, gold and silver? Two main reasons:

First, so that you cough up your goods so they can buy them on the cheap.

Second, when they go to “Cyprus” your accounts, that is, when they want to confiscate some of your money, they want it easily available with a few keystrokes. Confiscating gold and silver coins would be inconvenient at best, dangerous at worst.

Do you think “they’ll never do that here”? Here is the overall order of events in Cyprus:

1. On Feb 10, the Financial Times published the plan for the confiscation of depositor money in Cyprus called Radical rescue proposed for Cyprus.

2. On Feb 11, the Central Bank of Cyprus posted a letter shown at this link saying that the Financial Times article was incorrect, that confiscating depositor money was against the constitution, etc.

3. In mid-March, the confiscation of depositor money was announced.

4. The Cyprus parliament voted against it.

5. The central bank of the EU overruled the Parliament of Cyprus and went ahead with the confiscation. So democracy and the constitution were thrown out the window along with the promises.

On the day after the confiscation, the new head of the EU finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsellbloem, gave not one, but two interviews in the mainstream press in which he said the Cyprus bank resolution was a new template for such actions. From Reuters:

A rescue programme agreed for Cyprus on Monday represents a new template for resolving euro zone banking problems and other countries may have to restructure their banking sectors, the head of the region’s finance ministers said.

The rest of the EU and IMF politicians nearly had a baby on the public stage. For the next three weeks, all they would say was that Cyprus was not a template. We should have put them in a chorus line too. Even Dijsellbloem tweeted that he didn’t say what he said.

But then a member of the US Federal Reserve Board, Governor Jeremy C. Stein, said that if a Too Big to Fail bank failed, that private investors and creditors would have to bear the losses. His speech was on April 17, well after the Cyprus event wherein depositors were ruled as “creditors” of the bank. These people choose their words carefully. I hope everyone out there listens to them carefully.

And it’s worth remembering this: In the US, for example, the bank insurance fund held by the FDIC has $25 billion. That’s the amount insuring $9 trillion worth of deposits. So that’s 370 times more deposits than the amount in the insurance fund. And the insured banks have an additional $297 trillion in exposure to derivatives. So that’s almost 12,000 times more than the amount in the insurance fund. Very safe and sound, eh? Now you know why the authorities have just hinted that banks won’t be simply bailed out anymore; people’s deposits will be bailed in. Just remember, they’ve put you on notice now that you need to determine whether or not your bank is safe. People who spend their whole lives trying to do that can’t figure out which banks are truly safe anymore, but so what, you are now supposed to be able to do that. You can see a chart of the FDIC situation here. And you can find out a little about the safety of any US bank at the Safe and Sound section here. I am not aware of what is available publicly available for bank analysis in other countries.

Also part of the Cyprus event were strong restrictions on how much money a person could take out of Cyprus, the dreaded capital controls. This is also part of the template. When that happens, people are stuck in their own currency even if it tumbles mercilessly in value. When people tried to switch their money into the electronic currency Bitcoins because it recognizes no borders, it doubled the price of Bitcoins in a few weeks. TPTB then smashed down the price of Bitcoins as well, to show people that there is “no safe haven.”

Throughout history, currency devaluations, capital controls, and asset confiscations are denied until after they have happened. Governments typically say, “Sorry, we didn’t want to do that, but we had no choice.” You need to either anticipate them or be a connected government crony. Here’s a chart of monthly deposits into and withdrawals from the Cypriot banking system. The large withdrawals in January and February show the strong likelihood that some people were given advance notice:

Most people were not given advance notice; if the time comes, you and I will be in that group.

Lots of people are showing that they understand. As the stories above show, people were waiting in line for metals at these prices across the globe. We have seen this play before. Sometimes the elites smash down the prices of metals. Did I see it coming? Nope. Can they do it again? Yep. But as the rising price of gold over the last 12 years proves, they can’t push it down too far. If they do, the Asians and regular people will end up owning all of the gold. And the banksters won’t like that at all since they know the financial (per)version of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Lots of regular people on the planet take these price smashes as a gift. I think these people are smart.

Here is Jim Sinclair’s latest comment on the topic: The US Will Be Cyprused & We Will See $50,000 Gold.

And the recently-released video The Secret World of Gold, while not perfect, has Andrew Maguire briefly explaining how gold and silver prices are manipulated, and brings up the interesting question of whether there is any real gold (and not just gold-plated tungsten bars) at the US gold depository at Ft Knox. Channeled information agrees that Ft Knox is empty of real gold. It will be a very interesting day when the world finds out about that.

What is the Transition? Conclusion

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Thundering Heard

Now you can’t say that no one ever told you.
–David Daniels

In Part 7, I promised predictions for this installment. And there will be predictions. The important question is: predictions based on what? The web and the media present piles of predictions, most of which turn out to be wrong.

So based on what? Evidence; and a model of how things work. Most predictions go awry because they aren’t based on either. Or if they are said to be based on models, the models are flawed.

Evidence is what Part 1 through Part 7 were all about. And all of us, consciously or not, operate from models of what the world is like. If we walk into a dark room and flip a light switch, we are operating from a model of the world where electricity is flowing into a building with wires connected to lights controlled by switches, and flicking a switch–that often sits precisely where we expect it to be even if we’ve never entered that room–lights one or more light bulbs. We have all sorts of such models in our heads having to do with gravity, internal combustion engines, computers, shoelaces, banks, the properties of water, etc. When correct, these models have predictive abilities that make our interactions with the world relatively easy and efficient compared to operating without such models.

So these models lead to predictions about the future, and when correct, they yield excellent results. When we turn the key in a vehicle ignition, we expect the engine to start, and typically we aren’t disappointed. Thus we made a prediction about the future, one that has generally turned out to be true. Perhaps not every time. Once in awhile, the car might not start. But the results are good enough, the model reliable enough, that we rarely “give it a second thought.”

In my view, this scales up to the major aspects of our lives. Though it does seem that, the larger the scale, the greater the disagreements people have on the topic. Yet I contend that getting large-scale models right is important and possible. When we get the large scale models wrong, life can be unnecessarily confusing and difficult; when we get them right, the results can be profound.

Bias, the bringer of difficulty

We all like to think we aren’t biased, but on this planet at this time, that is a rare achievement. It runs deeper than we like to admit. Were that not true, the mystics would not have to advise us to pierce the veil. Without bias, we would likely see that there is no veil.

Let’s look at a good example of why people have a tough time getting large scale models right. This is one where, were it a multiple-choice question on a standardized test, most highschoolers would get it right. But on this one, the “masters of Wall St” got it wrong. Big time.

Several decades ago, one researcher pointed out that the economy of the USA operates on a roughly 25 year recession/depression cycle, that is, roughly every 25 years, there is either a recession or depression. Yes, there could be recessions at other times, but you could rely on the idea that one would happen roughly every 25 years. This cycle has been active since early in the 1800s and predicted that there would be a recession or depression starting ideally in December, 2007. I told a number of people about this ahead of time, and few thought the idea had merit despite the historical track record, part of which looked like this at the time:

9/1857: very serious recession 6/1857-12/1858 (18 months contraction)
2/1882: depression 3/1882-5/1885 (38 months contraction)
7/1906: serious recession 5/1907-6/1908 (13 months contraction)
10/1932: serious depression 8/1929-3/1933 (43 months contraction)
7/1958: recession 8/1957-4/1958 (8 months contraction)
12/1981: very serious recession 7/1981-11/1982 (16 months contraction)
12/2007:

Every August, George Soros has a meeting at his Long Island estate for the biggest movers and shakers on Wall St. By August 2007, the sub-prime mortgage market was already falling to pieces. Soros asked his 21 guests, people who have the money to buy the purportedly best research on the planet, whether the current situation would lead to a recession in the US. Twenty of twenty-one said no recession. But right on schedule for the 25 year cycle, a recession started in December 2007. Some say we are still in the depression that started then, and there is good evidence for that.

So how come people would ignore such a prescient cycle with a long and excellent track record? First, because while most people are well aware of being surrounded by cycles such as heartbeats, breathing, night and day, moon phases, ocean tides, the seasons, years, birth and death, to name just a few cycles to which we are subject, they believe that such cycles couldn’t possibly apply to an economy, that such thinking is equivalent to voodoo. Second, the researcher who was the first to publish about this cycle was Edgar Cayce, and to most hard-nosed Wall St people who think they are operating by logic and science, how could Edgar Cayce possibly be right about anything. What they think of as hard-nosed is actually thick-skulled because Cayce was right about plenty of things. But he doesn’t fit their constrained view of “logic and science,” so out goes Cayce and anyone like him. While it would be fun to say “too bad for them,” when their firms failed in 2008, it was the rest of us who got stuck with the bill for bailing them out so they could keep their bonuses, stock options, and corporate jets.

So as we all know, in 2008 we got a humdinger (serious academic term) of a recession despite the bad models being used by the Wall St mavens and people like Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke that said we would not get a recession. So why did the masters of Wall St and most others dismiss such information? Probably because, if they heard the source of the prediction, most would discount something from Edgar Cayce because it was information channeled from the other side. And “everyone knows” that stuff is only for new age goofballs. So the real answer is: bias. People would rather hang onto their bias than admit that correct information is useful if they despise the source.

Oddly, another researcher, Manfred Zimmel of www.amanita.at, later figured out the basis for Cayce’s information. OK, check your biases. For some of you, this is about to get worse. Here’s that same recession/depression series from above exactly as I first saw it, presented by Manfred, in 2006:

Ø conjunction 9/1857: very serious recession 6/1857-12/1858 (18 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 2/1882: depression 3/1882-5/1885 (38 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 7/1906: serious recession 5/1907-6/1908 (13 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 10/1932: serious depression 8/1929-3/1933 (43 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 7/1958: recession 8/1957-4/1958 (8 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 12/1981: very serious recession 7/1981-11/1982 (16 months contraction) – last deep recession
Ø conjunction 12/2007:

Yep, you guessed it (heh), the cycle is actually the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction cycle. So an astrological model has reared it head! Yikes, so if the Wall Streeters had heeded either the channeled or the astrological model for this cycle, they could have saved their firms tens of billions in losses and turned 2008 into a year of tens of billions in profits by aligning their trading with the idea that a recession was very likely. This is not a stretch since there were hedge funds that did make billions from the financial collapse in 2008.

If a model is clearly working in significant ways, it is useful to ask whether allegiance to one’s biases is more important than being on the right side of major trends on this planet. One of the worst things a person can do in this rapidly-evolving environment is get in front of a major negative trend and stay put thinking that trend is not important. Millions have gone bankrupt in recent years doing just that. In the markets, they call it picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer. Sometimes having a good or bad model is a matter of life or death, for example, a bad model about the nature of the Nazi party brought horrific suffering and the deaths of many millions. (Side note: Thundering-Heard.com exists because I think understanding and heeding good models versus bad ones could very well be a matter of life or death over the next few years, or perhaps even months.)

Handling predictions

One more brief topic, and then on to predictions about the Transition: What is a person supposed to do when they hear a prediction about the world? Assuming that they want to do anything at all, here is an approach from some people whose livelihood depends on their expert handling of predictions. When you hear a prediction:

1. Put aside the natural human propensity for wanting to know immediately whether the prediction is correct. This is emotion coming to the fore. All of the remaining steps are about eliminating emotion from this process so that rationality, research, and observation can take their rightful place.

2. Consider the prediction a script about how the future will unfold.

3. After giving it some thought, assign a rating, say from 1 to 100, on whether you think the predicted event can possibly emerge from current conditions. If it has any chance of emerging, write down the script and place it in your script pile wherein scripts about the future are sorted by your numeric ranking. If there is no chance that the event can arise from current conditions, then throw it out.

4. If the outcome of a script would be important to you, do research on the topic and, if it is appropriate based on your research, adjust your numeric ranking for the prediction in the future script pile. If there is a way to investigate the track record of the person making the prediction, and on the internet there often is, this can help a lot in rating a prediction. People with a bad track record are typically operating from a narrow or faulty model and usually continue doing so. Few people, especially people who have achieved some fame using one model, will admit their errors and find a better model.

5. Watch as evidence about all of your scripts unfolds and adjust your script pile accordingly, tossing out scripts where emerging events show a script to be faulty, and upwardly adjusting the numeric rankings of those scripts where the evidence is pointing to the idea that they might be right.

Through this process, predictions that are false are discarded and those that are true rise to the top of the pile. Emotions are kept at bay, biases fall as evidence accumulates, observation and logic guide the process. And you learn a lot about how the world works.

The Evidence

So what have we observed?

1. Acceleration, evident in a wide variety of ways, including:

2. Weather extremes and wildness, including floods, windstorms, typhoons/hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, droughts, superstorms, etc. The insurance industry reports a greater than tripling of “loss-related weather events” since 1980. (Part 1)

3. Earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater up more than 50% since 1990. (Part 1)

4. Tsunamis up fivefold in this century versus the last. (Part 1)

5. Volcanic eruptions clearly on the rise. (Part 1)

6. Magnetic poles on an accelerating shift accompanied by hemispheric temperature changes . (Part 2)

7. Sea level rise. (Part 3)

8. Species extinction rising exponentially along with rising human population. (Part 3)

9. Sinkholes increasing rapidly enough to go from obscurity to the mainstream media. (Part 4)

10. Asteroid encounters appear to be on the rise. (Part 4)

11. Nuclear plants compromised by the increasing earth and weather changes causing problems for people. (Part 4)

12. People’s perception of time as speeding up. (Part 5)

13. An exponential rise in the price/performance of technology. (Part 5)

14. Exponential growth in money, debt, and unemployment. (Part 5)

15. Exponential growth in the amassing of physical gold by those, such as China and the oil sheikdoms, who supply real goods for all this printed money. (Part 5)

16. Relentless growth in the prices of real goods such as food and fossil fuels in response to the massive influx of printed money.

17. Despite an exponential increase in money printing, borrowing, and spending by governments to simulate economies, these same economies remain moribund and these tactics clearly show diminishing returns. (Part 5)

18. The “age of truth” brings increasing revelations of lies and truth. (Part 6)

And with people, acceleration is bringing increases in (Part 7):

19. Communication/connectedness.

20. Inner work.

21. Insistence on knowledge over belief.

22. Group consciousness.

23. A changing attitude toward the physical sciences.

And increasing exploration of (Part 7):

24. Healing methods.

25. The energetic nature of everything.

26. That energy is different at different locations on the planet.

27. The multi-plane nature of life.

28. Interaction with nature intelligences.

29. People changing from “what can I get” to “what can I do to help.”

And accelerating (Part 7):

30. General insanity.

31. Use of legal and illegal drugs and of alcohol to cope with acceleration.

Predictions

OK, so where will this lead us? Does anyone have a model that accounts for accelerating change in most if not all aspects of life on this planet? A model which we might then be able to look to for guidance about the future, from which we could actually expect some reliability?

Surprisingly, yes. In early 2007, I was fortunate enough to run into such a model described in a book published in 2003. It went into my script pile at the time. Given that the book had been published four years earlier, I was able to evaluate whether a portion of its predictions were coming true or not, and they definitely were. I was already convinced prior to reading the book that we were likely to experience an all-out collapse of the financial system within 5 to 7 years. The book entirely agreed with that perspective, but it took things way beyond the financial world and covered the topic of the Transition from historical, geologic, meteorological, political, educational, occult, and cosmological perspectives, to name a few. And this wasn’t a book of vague wishy-washy predictions that could be interpreted several ways. It was exceedingly specific. Here is what it said—and this was in 2003, before the explosive growth of sub-prime mortgages being sold to anyone who could fog a mirror, with those mortgages being packaged up and sold to institutions across the world as blue-ribbon, good-as-gold, AAA-rated securities—about the real estate bubble. And this was when almost all people considered real estate a perfect investment, something whose price could never go down, something that was definitely not a bubble at all:

Many who pulled their money out of the stock market…rushed to invest these funds in real estate, but again this mad rush created yet another bubble of inflated real estate. Finance companies, mortgage brokers, and banks readily accorded mortgage loans to these buyers. Once they obtained the signature of the borrower on the loans papers, they sold the mortgages to non-bank secondary mortgage companies. In order to purchase these mortgages, these secondary mortgage companies borrowed money by issuing bonds and derivatives on these bonds.

In essence, though this convoluted maze of borrowing, these non-bank financial institutions…own indirectly most properties purchased with a mortgage…

As the world economy deflates, more and more people will lose their jobs, they will default on their house mortgage payments, and be thrown out into the streets. The sinister secondary mortgage companies will take possession of the property.

When mortgage defaults reach a critical mass, the secondary mortgage companies will collapse leaving a wasteland of properties. This will spell the end of the financial grip the Dark Forces hold on the world, and the towers of finance they have spent centuries to build will fall one by one like dominoes.

So what we have here is an exceedingly accurate description of the work-in-progress that is the real estate bubble and its associated derivatives taking down the financial system. Lots of “dominoes” have already fallen. In 2007, Wall St had five big investment banks. The sub-prime mortgage collapse took three of them to insolvency—Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Bros—which were either broken up or absorbed into other companies, and it would have taken down the last two, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, but the government temporarily stabilized them by saying the they were now backed by FDIC deposit insurance even though they had never before paid a penny into the FDIC insurance program. In fact, they had shunned the FDIC program because they wanted less regulation.

As tracked by the Mortgage Lender Implod-o-Meter, 388 US and 13 non-US mortgage lenders have gone belly up so far. This includes giants such as “secondary mortgage companies” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and lenders such Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia Mortgage. (The full list is here.) And now with sinister companies like Blackrock rushing in to buy foreclosed houses, the game is not completely over, but it won’t be long before the dominoes have all fallen.

Anyway, back to this book I’ve been speaking of. Of the 31 trends identified above, this book covered 26 of them, and for all I know, I may have forgotten references to the other five.

The book is The Sanctus Germanus Prophecies, Volume 1 by Michael Mau. It was followed by Volume 2 in 2006, and Volume 3 in 2009. The books can be purchased here or here.

There are a lot of books out there these days that are really highly-padded versions of what could be a five or ten page article. Mau’s books are not in that category, as demonstrated by the quote above, that is, the real estate crisis was discussed in detail on one page and that was it, the author moved on to other topics. So an attempt to summarize the vast array of information in these books will do them serious injustice, but I will make the attempt anyway as a conclusion to this series of posts. The best advice, of course, is to read the books:

We are living in a period of transition during which much that impedes humanity’s evolution—warmongering, the manipulation/exploitation for power and profit of the many by a very few, the intentional distraction of people from their higher self, and so forth–will be cleared away. Energetic acceleration and earth changes will assure that this clearing/cleansing process takes place. The transition is a normal period of relative rest in the vast multi-billion year evolutionary cycle of our solar system called the manvantara in which people evolve through hundreds and even thousands of incarnations. Many people, called lightbearers in these books, incarnated now with the intention of helping people through this turbulent process and preserving, through the period of the transition, that which is conducive to people’s true evolution. The overall goal of the transition is to place humanity in a new golden age in which people can pursue soul liberation with excellent support and without interference. Getting to that golden age requires the dissolution of those organizations that serve the interests of those who seek to control everyone else for their own power and for material acquisition far beyond what any person would need during a lifetime. Since these organizations are not going quietly, we are dealing with increasing turbulence during which all people will have to decide where they stand with respect to war and the array of slaveries that permeate civilization. The degree of turbulence that can be expected is strongly related to whether or not people wake up and stand on the side of freedom and conscious evolution.

Volume 2 lists twelve regions on the planet that are called spiritual regions, higher elevation areas away from the coasts that, while not immune to the earth changes, are relatively safe with respect them, and which are conducive to lightbearers retrieving those abilities they cultivated in prior incarnations.

Here are some highlights from the timetable at the back of Volume 2:

2005-2012:

Severe worldwide economic and financial crisis
World economy hits bottom and stays there, all conventional efforts to revive it fail
Water-related catastrophes: tsunamis, hurricanes, rise in sea level, floods of lowlands and coastal areas
Spiritual Regions on higher ground begin to develop: initial preparations

2013-2020:

Water-related catastrophes multiply making more and more low-lying areas uninhabitable
Massive population displacements to higher ground
Spiritual Regions take hold as lightbearers find their way there
Period of Reconstruction: Transitional societies begin to consolidate in the Spiritual Regions

2021-2080

Indications of major continental shifts, rifts, and movements begin to perturb the earth’s surface

There is a lot more to these books that what I’ve summarized here. They place the Transition in a perspective that ranges from the innermost to the cosmic. They say that, far from being over, that we are early in many of the accelerating trends identified above. These books have risen to the top of my “script pile.” They have become a stable platform from which to view the changes and turbulence in the world, and have given me confidence that life on this planet can and will be changed, and vastly for the better, and that this goal is way beyond worth working for. These days, when I hear a prediction–and I do seek out a lot of them–if it clearly conflicts with the information in these books, I relegate it to the category of “very unlikely,” and that repeatedly works very well.

One of the main reasons that so many predictions go awry is because they are drawn from experience of a small slice of life. We hear predictions all the time about finance, politics, weather, health, the use of energy, the environment, social trends, and now even meteors and comets. I contend that so many of those predictions go awry because they work from a narrow band and fail to take into account the larger context. Most would relate to maybe one or a few of the 31 trends identified above. Mau’s books place almost all of these individual trends in the context of a much larger one.

And seeing all of these trends in their larger context is precisely what we need right now as change permeates, well, just about everything! A narrowly focused model has no chance of accounting for across-the-board acceleration in, for example, finance, earth changes, mass shootings, and the emergence of truth.

So what’s a person to do about all this?

It is truly up to each person.

What would I do? I will provide a detailed post about that soon where I will contend that a wait-and-see attitude about these changes is no longer appropriate. Life is, as usual, being very kind by giving us a preview of exactly how this will all unfold by not bringing change all at once, but by ramping up all of these trends. But it’s up to us to read the signs and take action.

In the mean time, if you haven’t done so already, you may want to do your own research on these topics. If you come to some understandings, an action plan may naturally emerge from what you learn.

One piece of advice I would give is to never underestimate the power of an accelerating trend. As trends become obviously exponential, they can be quite breathtaking in their speed, power, and scope. As a friend from Cyprus told me: “On Friday night, when we went to sleep, everything was normal. On Saturday, we were told that the banks were closed and that we would have very restricted access to our bank accounts and that we might lose a lot of our the money.” When things change these days, they can change radically and quickly.

There are suggestions for dealing with the collapse of the financial system in the post What then can we do?.

And I leave you with outstanding comments on this topic from Gandhi: View the Forces of Nature bringing Earth Changes as Opportunity to Change the World.

Thanks very much for reading this long series and this long post.

The financial system is based on twelve promises that are lies, Part 2

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Thundering Heard

In yesterday’s Part 1, we covered these lies:

Lie #1: Real estate always goes up.

Lie #2: It’s best to use Other People’s Money.

Lie #3: We can buy cheap goods from countries with cheap labor, and yet keep our much-higher salaries and benefits.

Lie #4: Government pension and medical programs will deliver on their promises.

Lie #5: Your money is in the bank

Lie #6: Your money is in your brokerage account.

Lie #7: It is OK for financial institutions to use huge leverage.

Lie #8: The government guarantees it.

Today, we’ll cover the final four:

Lie #9: Government bonds are safe.

Most people are told, and believe, that the big culprit in the Great Depression of the 1930s was the stock market crash. This is an intentional re-writing of history. At least 10 times more money was lost when governments defaulted on their bonds in the early 1930s. These defaults were the source of thousands of bank failures, which led to untold numbers of farm, business, and personal financial failures, so the actual losses were far larger than the “10 times” cited above.

Who re-wrote that history and why? Governments, and the academic henchmen they support through direct employment or research grants. Governments and these hired academics conveniently ignore these government bond defaults because they want you to have full trust in government bills and bonds. Again, why? Because these bonds underpin the entire financial regime. When a bank claims to have capital, much of that capital is in the form of government bills and bonds. Same for insurance companies, pension funds, brokerages, etc.

And why did governments default on their bonds in the 1930s? Because they borrowed more than they could pay back. Sound familiar? Let’s forget about the incomprehensible trillions for now. Let’s just treat the US government like a household.

Monthly Income: $1,900.
Monthly Expenses: $3,000.

Monthly Borrowing to meet current expenses: $1,100.

So if this household went to their bank and said, “Look, I know I’ve been borrowing 60% more than I make each month to meet my expenses, and that I’m adding $1,100 to what I owe you each and every month, but you know, I really need that money.” How long do you think the bank would keep lending them a new $1,100 each month? Money that gets spent as soon as it has been borrowed.

Convert those hundreds to trillions and you have a good picture of US fiscal finances. Japan is doing far worse. The UK is similar to the US. Despite the evidence of history, people treat governments as if they are eternal, as if they will never fall. That they’ll pay back what they owe someday. History looks askance at that idea as well, as we have seen from the 1930s.

And for those who think that the alleged economic recovery is going to make these numbers better for the US, that this “recovery” is real, think again: The borrowing that the US has been doing for the last three years is equal to almost 10% of GDP, that is, it’s almost 10% of all the spending on goods and services that happens in the US each year. And they are claiming that the economy is growing at about 2% per year, which is itself an over-estimate. So what would happen if they stopped this borrowing and spending of 10% of the economy? The math is easy, and it’s called a severe depression, with the economy shrinking big time every year and so the government would have lower income from taxes and higher expenses for unemployment, food stamps, etc., putting them even further in the hole.

So, aren’t the people who usually buy treasury bills and bonds getting antsy about all this? Some clearly are, including “small players” like China. So the US, Japanese, and UK governments are doing what they call quantitative easing. Since this is a system steeped in lies, they don’t just say “printing money,” they have to come up with a BS term for it. (And they aren’t entirely stupid about that. Ask a few people what quantitative easing is. Most don’t know.) So the central bank of each country prints up money to buy the bonds and bills issued by the treasury when the treasury needs to borrow more money. The US Federal Reserve bought about two-thirds of the bonds sold by the US Treasury in 2011, so they covered two-thirds of the borrowing with newly printed money. If our household above had done that, its inhabitants would soon be in jail for counterfeiting, but that’s a topic for another day.

And one might think that governments can simply raise taxes to pay for these gargantuan debts. That might be true if the people weren’t already up to their eyeballs in debt. Historically, when all the debt in a country gets near three times their Gross Domestic Product, the country groans under this unsustainable debt load and has events like the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to Lacy Hunt, former member of the Federal Reserve Board (and I only cite that credential so you don’t think these numbers come from some deranged blogger), that total debt ratio is now 3.6 times GDP in the US, after peaking at 3.8x in 2009. Think the Eurozone is any better? They are at 4.5x! The UK is at 4.7x. And Japan is at 5x! (From Strategic Investment Conference – Dr. Lacy Hunt)

According to Boston University Prof. Kotlikoff, a guy who is enough of an insider that his work is sometimes published by the US Federal Reserve, when you consider all the future spending commitments of the US Government: “US government liabilities (official debt plus the present value of projected future non-interest spending) exceed government assets (the present value of projected future taxes) by $211 trillion, roughly 14 times GDP.” (From Shattering the American dream: The US government’s Ponzi scheme) In other words, unpayable doesn’t even begin to describe the situation.

So, it is clear that government bonds are a fraud. At some point, the holders of these bonds will not get back their capital and their expected interest payments, as the buyers of Greek government bonds recently found out. The only way these bonds are being kept afloat is by newly printed money. It’s a scheme, a Ponzi scheme, where new money has to be brought in to satisfy earlier investors. Such schemes always fail. This one will as well. You can take that to the bank. But as I think you can tell, we don’t recommend that. Taking it to the bank, that is. Because the bank–at least if it’s a large one–is part of the scheme. And so are your insurance companies, pension plans, etc. Take action accordingly.

Lie #10: Derivatives reduce risk in the system

Derivatives, famously called “weapons of financial mass destruction,” are a big topic, but it’s an important topic to understand because, when the derivatives implode, the whole financial regime will implode. We will do our best to keep it simple and sort of brief. If the description of this lie makes your mind fog, move on to Lies #11 and #12. They are easier to understand, and not to be missed.

A derivative is a financial instrument, a contract, whose value is derived from the value of some underlying asset. Examples of derivatives that have functioned well for years are agricultural futures, where a farmer and a grain buyer agree in the Spring on the price of a railroad car of oats for delivery in December. Both enter the contract to make their pricing in December predictable, removing some of the risk of running their businesses.

But the banksters couldn’t leave it alone. They created derivatives to insure against just about every conceivable financial eventuality. But they sell this insurance without setting aside the reserves typically required for writing insurance policies. Such reserves are normally required to cover the flow of insurance claims that inevitably arise. They sell these instruments to entities who are trying to reduce some financial risk they face, like currency movements, interest rate changes, a default on some bonds they own, etc. Some of the modern derivatives are so complex that, when the parties to a derivative contract have ended up in court, the court ruled that the 600-page contract that defined the derivative didn’t sufficiently cover all the contingencies! These derivatives are sold by the big banks and insurance companies to all sorts of financial entities from corporations to school systems to hedge funds. The school systems are trying to reduce risk; the hedge funds use derivatives as a casino bet. Since the instruments are complex, the banks charge big fees for access to these contracts.

This is now so out of hand that there are over $700 trillion worth of derivative contracts out there in the world. Yes, that’s more than 10 times the size of the world economy. These are insurance policies that obviously cannot be paid if the claims come in. And when the claims come in, the big writers of these insurance policies, the big banks, will be understood, for yet another reason, to be entirely bankrupt. And that money everyone thought they had in the bank will be gone, vaporized. When all that money is vaporized, there will be no money coming from your ATM, no ability to withdraw some from the bank, no paychecks (the checks will bounce), no ability to pay bills, no tax payments going to governments, etc.

So instead of derivatives reducing risk, which is what their proponents claim that they do, derivatives have concentrated risk in the very large banks, which puts the entire system at risk for the sake of large bankster profits.

So why is it inevitable that the derivative market will implode? After all, while no one denies that there are over $700 trillion of derivatives, and no one claims to have anywhere near that amount of money available, the banksters claim they will never have to pay up on that insurance. Here’s their reasoning:

The things they write insurance for won’t ever happen, at least not to any extent that will have a big impact on anyone. And how do they know this? Because they have based their insurance on mathematical models designed by very fancy mathematicians and physicists. But the problem is this: their models are based on data from a small sampling of history. The data rarely even includes data from the era of the Great Depression. So here’s what happened in 2007-2009: some derivatives were based on pools of mortgages. These models assumed, because that’s what they saw in the historical data, that real estate prices always go up. As soon as real estate prices started going down in mid-2006, the payments on these mortgage-backed derivatives came due. And the banksters didn’t have the money to pay up. We all know how it ended, some failed, and the governments bailed out the rest. So when just one very small slice of the derivative payments came due, payments the banks and our beloved central banks said would never come due, the entire system was threatened. The rest of the derivatives in the world are based on similarly inadequate models. They will prove especially inadequate as the world faces the accelerating change that is apparent to so many of us. It is impossible that these mathematical models can account for events that have never happened on the planet before, or that only happen once every several thousand years.
The banksters claim that, even though they may have written contracts for $100 trillion, their book of contracts is balanced, that it is hedged. By this, they mean that, if Spain defaults on its debts, that they have contracts that say that it will and contracts that say that it won’t. They will lose money on one set of contracts and make an equal amount of money on the other contracts. While multiple cases have shown this claim of being hedged to be an outright lie, it has a deeper underlying problem. Let’s say JP Morgue has a bunch of customers who want to buy insurance against a default by Spain. That would be a very unbalanced position for the Morgue. So they go to Bankrupt of America and buy protection against Spain defaulting. Now they think they are hedged, balanced. But there are less than a dozen banks in the world handling the vast majority of this $700 trillion in insurance. Remember AIG in 2008? They were a big writer of mortgage-pool-related insurance in 2007. They were not hedged. They were unable to pay. That inability to pay would have taken down several other institutions who thought they were covered because of insurance they had purchased from AIG. AIG needed a government bailout of $185 billion or the other banks would have gone under. So all it takes is one of those banks to make an error, to not be hedged, to not be able to pay up, and suddenly each of the others is also going under. This is where the concept of the Too Big To Fail banks has come in. All of them are so interconnected that if one fails, they all fail.

So then you might say, well won’t there just be another bank bailout by the governments? Two problems with that. First, no one can come up with anywhere near $700 trillion to fix a cascading failure of the mega-banks. If they printed that much money, the money you currently have would be seen by all to be worthless. Think wheelbarrows of money, hyper-inflation. Second, as we have seen, people have less and less trust in government finances. A large part of the temporary system fixes done in 2008-2009 were not the actual printing of money, they were guarantees. But if everyone understands that a government providing a guarantee is broke, then what is that guarantee worth? Bupkas. Nada. Nothing.

But this is, in fact, what the TBTF banks are counting on: they have a gun to the head of the governments, saying “you have to cover our backs on this huge and very profitable game or we’ll take down your system.”

So when the derivatives implode, all the electronic money in the world will be known to be either gone (fully imploded system) or worthless (tens or hundreds of trillions gets printed up, making all currency worth a tiny fraction of their current purchasing power).

Lie #11: Central banks protect the interests of their country and its citizens

Let’s just get right to the truth about this lie: Central banks protect the interests of large commercial banks. And not all banks. Just the really large ones. The central banks we are speaking of are the international ones, namely the Bank for International Settlements and the European Central Bank; and the national central banks such as the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, etc.

Whenever you find it difficult to understand an action by a central bank, apply the principle in the previous paragraph and that action almost invariably makes complete sense. Everything else that central banks say and do is window dressing, secondary at best to their prime directive. Central banks were founded to protect the interests of the large banks, to keep the game of those banks going, and that is what they do.

And what is that game? Being able to create money from thin air and charge for the privilege.

So are central bankers, people like Ben Bernanke, liars? Or have they drunk the Kool Aid so deeply that they believe their own nonsense? The evidence points to the idea that both are true.

This topic is covered in great detail by many on the web, so I won’t recap it here. Please e-mail if you would like more detailed information on this.

Lie #12: Your paper/electronic currency is a reliable store of value.

For most people in the industrialized world, money means two things: a little bit of physical cash on hand, and more money than that in one or more accounts with financial institutions. This reflects the reports on world money supply: maybe as much as 1% of money is actual physical bills and coins, the rest is stored electronically.

This has a big implication, one not readily recognized by most. Every electronic representation of money is a promise by someone to pay up if that money is requested for possession or use. In other words, that money is owed to you. While you may consider it to be cash in your account, it is actually a debt, owed by the bank or money market fund, to you.

Everyone knows that, in the 19th Century, for example, money was backed by gold or silver. You could go to a bank and convert national paper currency for gold or silver coins. Because this restricted the ability of countries to wage war, that right was persistently eroded starting with world War I until it was abolished entirely in 1971.

So what backs up the money now? It is the ability and willingness of those who owe you money to pay up on demand. And the confidence of all who use the currency that they can exchange that currency for goods and services of real value.

Ability and willingness to pay: If the party who owes you money goes belly up or is unwilling to pay you, you are out of luck. That money you thought you had? Well, you don’t have it. In the case of complete bankruptcy, the money no longer exists, it went to money heaven. In the case of a bank, there is a government guarantee that, up to a certain amount, even if the bank goes under, the government will make good up to that guaranteed amount. Such guarantees were put in place in the 1930s after million lost their money due to bank failures.

Confidence: Everyone has heard of situations where people lost confidence in a national currency. The poster child is the Weimer Republic in Germany, with it infamous photos of people carting around wheelbarrows full of currency. And there have been such losses of confidence in Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Zimbabwe, Viet Nam, and many others. In these cases, governments printed so much currency that it became a “hot potato,” where people wanted to exchange currency for something real as soon as possible because the currency was known to be losing value by the hour.

People can also lose confidence in a currency when a government is known to be going under, perhaps because they are losing a war.

People say that such fiat money, that is, money by the command of a government, is a medium of exchange and a store of value. It certainly is a medium of exchange for goods and services. Until it isn’t. And it isn’t when people lose all confidence in that fiat money as a store of value. Then it becomes that “hot potato.”

And it is somewhat surprising that people still regard it as a store of value. Since the inception of the US Federal Reserve in 1913, the US Dollar has lost, by the US government’s own statistics, 95% to 99% of its value, depending on what method is used for that calculation. People think that a loss of value over that much time is meaningless to them, allowing them to think, for example, that they were real estate geniuses for owning a house in the USA from 1971 to 1997, during which time that real estate “went up so much” in value. Most of that apparent gain was from currency debasement. People hear stories of how their great grandparents paid five cents for a loaf of bread and think that price increases for bread over time are normal. They are not! When money was backed by metals, prices for goods often stayed stable over many decades, with price fluctuations reflecting real changes in supply and demand in the economy, not politician-supplied increases in the supply of fiat currency.

Why have people come to accept increases in the money supply as necessary, and price inflation of 2% to 3% per year as normal, even as “low inflation”? Because it is key to the functioning of a financial regime where money is debt. When all money is debt, the borrower typically has to pay interest to the lender. On most of the money out there, namely that 99% of it that is stored in electronic accounts, people want some payback, interest payments, on their deposits. So let’s just say that, on average, 3% interest is due on all of the money out there. So every borrower, think banks as an example, who are borrowing from you because you have deposited money with them, has to come up with at least 3% more money every year to keep paying interest owed. So what happens if the economy doesn’t grow by at least 3% and there isn’t an increase of the money supply by 3%? It means that some borrowers will not be able to pay the interest they owe. And some of them will go bankrupt. Meaning that the money deposited with them might go to money heaven, disappear, subtracting a lot of money from the system. And this is a system where the amount of money in circulation must grow by that 3% every year or the system starts to go in reverse: instead of the supply of money growing, it starts contracting because of bankruptcies.

So now, do you see why those who run the financial regime go into a complete panic when the economy doesn’t grow? Why they start printing more money every time the economy and, thus the supply of money, shrinks? This is a crucial concept. An economy based on money that is debt must grow. Always. Infinitely. This is why politicians and central bankers repeat the word growth like a mantra. But ultimately, economies are based, at least for now, on finite resources. So how can they grow to infinity? This is the fatal flaw in a system where money equals debt: it must always grow. Which means it must always, as our economies are currently configured, consume more physical resources, especially fossil fuel energy. A steady-state economy is not acceptable when money is debt. It must grow and gobble up more of the resources of the planet. Forever. Which of course is impossible, at least until alchemy is a common skill. But the politicians like to ignore this and just keep chanting growth, growth, growth.

And all things economic obey the Law of Cycles. Things are created, they flourish, and then they pass away, making room for the new. To retain their power, the entrenched elite are trying to subvert that law.

WHY ARE THINGS THIS WAY?

Simply, for the guaranteed profit of a few at the expense of the many. This too is a topic for another day, but that’s the accurate and brief description that fits the facts.

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

We could go on and on about other fatal flaws of this financial regime that threaten its existence. The coming disruption from the US Dollar’s loss of reserve currency status. The unfairness of bailing out and supporting the banksters who are engaged, by any human standard, in blatant criminal activity. The subversion of the rule of law as government and its agencies are purchased by the banksters. About the accounting lies that allow financial feces to be counted on corporate balance sheets as shining light.

And you may not agree that the chickens will come home to roost on all twelve lies above. But recall that the financial regime almost fell from the demise of just one of its minor lies, the lie that real estate always goes up in value. Other lies above are for more fundamental to the regime, much more foundational in nature.

And it is because of the foundational nature of the lies that reform of the current system is impossible. Tweaking the rules will not address fundamental flaws.

So what then must we do? We will address that topic in our next article.

Many thanks.
Thundering Heard

Thundering Heard

Toward Clarity in this Time of Major Transition

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