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Thursday, February 2, 2012

What happens when monetary values replace notions of real wealth? Quotes from 2011

“The Fed can’t print oil.” [1]
"What’s most terrifying, we are having this discussion about the risk of recession at a time when unemployment is already too high, at a time when a quarter of homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, at a time then the fiscal deficit is at 9 percent and at a time when interest rates are at zero." [2]
“We’re on the verge of a great, great depression. The [Federal Reserve] knows it” [3]
Since China entered the WTO in 2001, the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown by an average of 18% per year. The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990. The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. [4]


So what is the downside here for the poor of the world? A crash of the USA and its economic camp followers would be the best thing possible for Africa, Asia, and South America, and especially for the world’s ecology. Destroy the USA and half the world’s military industries go belly up, oil consumption drops, and predatory trade policies collapse. These are the monsters who spread nuclear technology around the unstable Pacific rim, the ones who made usury into a way of life, the ones who intentionally set out to hook young people world wide on tobacco, while demonizing cannabis. These are the people who have bombed flat Southeast Asia in the name of freedom and are today making war on one Muslim country after another, because these people have the audacity to still pray, dress modestly, and live in families. When the USA crashes there should be dancing in the streets world-wide. [5]
Globally, if we’re not bldg houses, there aren’t enuf jobs & countries compete 4 them w/financial repression & currency depreciation. [6]
Gov’t is attempting to solve debt overhangs via financial repression/pocket picking, which takes the form of low real interest rates. [7]
"Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion." [8]
“Three billion people or nearly half the world’s population individually sustain themselves on less than two USD per day amidst an annual surge in the global price of food, which has increased by thirty seven percent since last year.” [9] [10] [11]
“The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.” [12]
“Are the derivatives regulated? No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes.” [13]
Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history. [14]
Low income jobs have steadily risen over the past 30 years and now account for 41% of all jobs in the US. [15]
When 2007 began, there were about 26 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are over 44 million on food stamps, and one out of every four American children is on food stamps. [16]
The percentage of millionaires in [the US] Congress is more than 50 times higher than the percentage of millionaires in the general population. [17]
There are 5.5 million Americans that are currently unemployed and yet are not receiving unemployment benefits. [18]
“The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades.” [19]
“The system has reached the stage that a bankrupt sovereign state is issuing debt to buy bonds in a vehicle that is tasked with buying debt from a bankrupt Sovereign state that is no longer able to go to market. Folks this is reaching the level of a Monty Python skit.” [20]
"Roughly speaking, the mess we are in is the worst since 17th century financial collapse. Comparisons with the 1930’s are ludicrous. We’ve gone far beyond that. And, alas, the courage & political will to recognize the mess & act wisely to reverse gears, is absent in U.S. leadership, where the problems were hatched & where the rot is by far the deepest." [21]
"Get some gold, beans, water, anything that Bernanke can’t destroy. Ron Paul is right. We’re entering a global monetary conflagration. If a sell-off of U.S. bonds starts, it will be an Armageddon." [22]
“There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs.” [23]
We have failed to muster the courage. We have allowed our government to chase the shadows of terrorist across Iraq, paw though our purses and briefcases in airports searching for explosive tubes of toothpaste, desecrate our most sacred documents by imprisoning people without habeas corpus, and convince us that criticizing our president was treasonous. We have accepted the idea that countries whose GDPs were a fraction of AIG’s losses were members of an “Evil Axis” while we have trashed laws that had protected us from rapacious financiers. We have supported operations that scoured Colombian jungles for terrorist but neglected to search the ledgers of companies with the power to destroy our economy. [24]
"Europe’s crisis is “starting to hurt growth everywhere, in countries as far away as China, Brazil and India, Korea. And they heard the same message from us they heard from everybody else, which is it’s time to move.” [25]
As far as I’m concerned, Bernanke is the monetary Darth Vader. He has destroyed the bond market. Because fundamentally, in a healthy capitalist system, the interest rate in the money market and in the longer-term capital market is the price of money and the price of capital. And if the pricing system isn’t working, if it’s been totally crushed, disabled, manipulated, rigged, medicated, everything that the Fed has done with QE1, QE2, zero interest rates, Operation Twist - all the rest of this insanity - then we’ve destroyed the ability of the capital market to function and we’re giving false signals in every direction. [26]
2011 – October 6th: "If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps 2 to 3 weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system. We are not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we are talking about the largest banks in the world, the largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France, that will spread to the United Kingdom, it will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected. All those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the United States, and in Britain, and in Japan, and around the world.
This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serious than the crisis in 2008.... What we don't know the state of credit default swaps held by banks against sovereign debt and against European banks, nor do we know the state of CDS held by British banks, nor are we certain of how certain the exposure of British banks is to the Ireland sovereign debt problems." [27]
In attempting to understand the complexities of what went wrong in the years leading to 2008, I've developed a rule: "In an unregulated world, the least-principled people rise to the top." And there are none who are less principled than corporate psychopaths. [28]

[1] Ben Bernanke quipped in his spring 2011 press conference, that "the FED can’t print oil.”
[2] Pimco’s El-Erian Says U.S. Economic Setting ‘Terrifying’
November 23, 2011, 9:01 AM EST
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-23/pimco-s-el-erian-says-u-s-economic-setting-terrifying-.html
As quoted at: Trouble, 27th November 2011
[3] The news that frequent CNBC guest Peter Yastrow of Yastrow Origer (and formerly with DT Trading) told CNBC that “We’re on the verge of a great, great depression. The [Federal Reserve] knows it” is going viral today.
As quoted in:
The Great Recession Of 2007 Never Ended – We Are In Fact In A Depression
Posted by George Washington - August 2, 2011 at 8:16 pm
[4] Leslie Garrett
July 11th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
[5] Rampant Unemployment = The Death Of The Middle Class - 40 Facts That Prove The Working Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out. 13th July 2011
[6] Gross (PIMCO): Globally, if we’re not bldg houses, there aren’t enuf jobs & countries compete 4 them w/financial repression & currency depreciation.
27 May via web
[7] Gross. 14 May via web
[8] Oxfam said in a report entitled "Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World”
Hunger crisis worsens, food system broken - Oxfam
Reuters, Tuesday May 31 2011
[9] Less than two dollars per day link: http://www.hopeinternational.org/site/PageServer?pagename=hms_poverty_statistics
[10] Price of food, which has increased by thirty seven percent since last year
[11] Complete Course in Food and Population Control as a Weapon -- Somalia -- Famine For Profit And The East African Food Crisis
Nile Bowie. Saturday, August 13, 2011
http://nilebowie.blogspot.com/2011/08/somalia-famine-for-profit-and-east.html
[12] 
 - Initiative for the United Nations ECO-92 EARTH CHARTER
As quoted in:
Complete Course in Food and Population Control as a Weapon -- Somalia -- Famine For Profit And The East African Food Crisis
Nile Bowie. Saturday, August 13, 2011
http://nilebowie.blogspot.com/2011/08/somalia-famine-for-profit-and-east.html
[13] Mobius Says Another Financial Crisis ‘Around The Corner’
By Kana Nishizawa - May 30, 2011 9:10 PM GMT+1000
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-30/mobius-says-fresh-financial-crisis-around-corner-amid-volatile-derivatives.html
[14] #24 Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.
50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy. 15th July 2011
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/50-things-every-american-should-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-economy
· Over the past 12 months the average price of gasoline in the United States has gone up by about 30%.
#17 Over the past 12 months the average price of gasoline in the United States has gone up by about 30%.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/gold-silver-and-oil-are-all-skyrocketing-and-that-is-bad-news-for-the-u-s-economy
50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy. 15th July 2011
[15] #13 The number of "low income jobs" in the U.S. has risen steadily over the past 30 years and they now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States.
50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy. 15th July 2011
[16] #22 When 2007 began, there were about 26 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are over 44 million on food stamps, and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
[17] #50 The percentage of millionaires in Congress is more than 50 times higher than the percentage of millionaires in the general population.
50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy. 15th July 2011
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/50-things-every-american-should-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-economy
[18] #3 According to the Wall Street Journal, there are 5.5 million Americans that are currently unemployed and yet are not receiving unemployment benefits.
50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy. 15th July 2011
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/50-things-every-american-should-know-about-the-collapse-of-the-economy
[19] Bees in freefall as study shows sharp US decline
Disease and low genetic diversity might have caused US bumblebee decline over the past few decades, say scientists * Alok Jha, science correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 January 2011 20.02 GMT
[20] Jack Barnes. 2011
[21] World famous investor Harry Schultz recently published the last issue of his legendary financial newsletter. After 45 years, the following is how Schultz summed up the economic collapse that we are now facing....
Nothing is Stable Anymore
[22] David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan was quoted by Schultz as saying the following about how desperate things are about to become....
Nothing is Stable Anymore
[23] —Chris Hedges, 2011
[25] John Perkins gives an eloquent synopsis of the current state of affairs in his recent masterpiece Hoodwinked:
As quoted at:
The Road To Oppression Is Paved With Bad Intentions
Ansel Adams - Japanese American Internment
Rick Gedeon
Activist Post
[24] Timothy Geithner
Geithner said on ABC’s “World News With Diane Sawyer” program.
As quoted in:
Geithner Tells Europe to ‘Get On With It’ After Global Chiding Over Crisis
By Ian Katz - Sep 27, 2011 1:24 PM GMT+1000
[26] David Stockman: Blame The Fed!
Friday, September 30, 2011, 11:07 am, by Adam
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/david-stockman-blame-fed/62981?utm_source=newsletter_2011-10-01&utm_medium=email_newsletter&utm_content=node_title_62981&utm_campaign=weekly_newsletter_38
[27] IMF advisor Robert Shapiro, in an interview on the BBC (via ZeroHedge).
As quoted in:
IMF Advisor: Could See Eurozone 'Meltdown' in 2 Or 3 Weeks
Simone Foxman | Oct. 6, 2011, 5:07 PM
http://www.businessinsider.com/imf-advisor-could-see-eurozone-meltdown-in-2-or-3-weeks-2011-10
NOTE: Aside from being an advisor to the IMF, Shapiro is the co-founder and chairman of Sonecon, LLC, and was formerly the U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard, among other degrees, oversaw the Census Bureau, and has been a Fellow at Harvard, Brookings, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
[28] Brian Basham: Beware corporate psychopaths – they are still occupying positions of power. 29th December 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/brian-basham-beware-corporate-psychopaths--they-are-still-occupying-positions-of-power-6282502.html
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