Nervous Cypriots hit cash machines 16 March 2013 Lines formed at many ATMs as people scrambled to pull their money out after word that the 10 billion euro (£8.6bn) rescue package Cyprus agreed with its euro area partners and the International Monetary Fund included one-off levy on deposit, an unprecedented step in the eurozone crisis. The levy is expected to raise 5.8 billion euro. European officials said people with less than 100,000 euro in their accounts will have to pay a one-time tax of 6.75%, those owning more money will lose 9.9%. Cypriot bank officials said that depositors can access all their money except the amount set by the levy. But that hardly assuaged people who continued to withdraw cash from ATMs until the machines ran out, unsure what or how much would be taxed. The country's co-operative banks also shut their doors after depositors scurried in hopes of protecting their savings.
US Debt Ceiling Visualized: Stacked in $100 dollar bills @ $16.394 Trillion Dollars $122,100,000,000,000. - US unfunded liabilities by Dec 31, 2012. Abovet you can see the pillar of cold hard $100 bills that dwarfs the WTC & Empire State Building - both at one point world's tallest buildings. If you look carefully you can see the Statue of Liberty. The 122.1 Trillion dollar super-skyscraper wall is the amount of money the U.S. Government knows it does not have to fully fund the Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug Program, Social Security, Military and civil servant pensions. The unfunded liability is calculated on current tax and funding inputs, and future demographic shifts in US Population. Note: On the above 122.1T image the size of the bases of the money stacks are $10 billion, and 400 stories @ $4 trillion "It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. "This is when you need to remember that when a nation's economy collapses, the wealth of the nation doesn't disappear, it only changes hands." Everyone needs to see this.
Can the Internet Replace Big Banks? Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world By Debora Mackenzie and Andy Coghlan AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). “Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. The Zurich team can. The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). 1. (Data: PLoS One) economics
The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever | Politics News Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia Why? The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. "You name it," says Frenk.
On The Trail Of Dubai's Stolen Gold: A Robbed Client Breaks The Silence, And A Fascinating Detail Emerges On Christmas Day, 2015, we told our readers the fascinating tale about the Turkish-Iranian gold smuggling ring - perhaps the biggest and most brazen in history, one which lasted for years, which saw billions in gold transported out of Turkey and into Iran to allow Tehran to circumvent the western financial sanctions using gold as a medium for bater, and which was all made possible thanks to the tiny Emirate of Dubai. What made this particular instance of gold smuggling especially memorable is that it reached to the very political top in both Turkey, and Iran, and Dubai. Here, for those who missed it the first time, is the letter that Gold.A.E.'s stunned clients received in late December: Dear Client A group of minority shareholders of GOLD HOLDING suspected that there were questionable financial transactions being undertaken in Gold AE DMCC ("the Company"). But was Gold Holding involved in the smuggling of billions in gold out of Turkey and into Iran?
Germany's Bundesbank reveals plan to bring gold reserves home | Europe FRANKFURT— Germany’s Bundesbank plans to bring home some of its gold reserves stored in the United States’ and French central banks, bowing to government pressure to unwind a Cold War-era ploy that secured the national treasure. Germany amassed gold reserves in the post-war era thanks to rapid economic expansion that saw growing exports to the United States, where its dollar claims were turned into gold under the Bretton Woods agreement that Germany joined in 1952. As the Cold War set in, Germany kept its gold reserves put, keeping them out of reach of the Soviet empire. But government officials have grown uneasy about the storage set-up and have called for the Bundesbank to inspect the bars. The Bundesbank now wants to change the arrangement too, even though it has said it does not see a need to count the bars or check their gold content itself and considers written assurances from the other central banks as sufficient. "To hold gold as a central bank creates confidence," Mr Thiele said.
16 things germans do better: • Football • Beer… Two bombshell documents that Citigroup's lawyers try to suppress, describing in detail the rule of the first 1% "Are they real?" That's the question people usually ask when they hear for the first time of the "Citigroup Plutonomy Memos." The sad truth is: Yes, they are real, and instead of being discussed on mainstream media outlets all over America and beyond, Citigroup was surprisingly successful so far in suppressing these memos, using their lawyers to issue takedown-notices whenever these memos were being made available for download on the internet. So what are we talking about? So Citigroup did their duty and published two explosive memos, which should have become mainstream news, but eventually did not. Screenshot: The second memo is dated March 5, 2006 (18 pages) and is titled: "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer" A few years ago, two copies of these memos were leaked and were published on the internet. Examples of the reports deleted from "scribd.com" after Citigroup demanded their takedown (here and here): Little of this note should tally with conventional thinking. Quote: Quote:
Brazil, like Russia, under attack by Hybrid War — RT Op-Edge Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Color revolutions would never be enough; Exceptionalistan is always on the lookout for major strategic upgrades capable of ensuring perpetual Empire of Chaos hegemony. The ideological matrix and the modus operandi of color revolutions by now are a matter of public domain. UW was spelled out by the 2010 Special Forces Unconventional Warfare manual. “Hostile” powers are meant not only in a military sense; any state that dares to defy any significant plank of the Washington-centric world “order” – from Sudan to Argentina – may be branded “hostile”. Read more We need our own Saddam
Banks pay $8.5bn to settle home foreclosure review 7 January 2013Last updated at 16:51 ET Many people lost their home in the financial crisis, and they may get compensation Ten of the biggest banks have agreed to pay $8.5bn (£5.2bn) to settle a review of home foreclosures by US regulators. Banks and mortgage lenders including Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase will pay $3.3bn directly to eligible homeowners, regulators said. The lenders will also pay $5.2bn to modify and forgive loans. The investigation began in 2011, and looked into whether borrowers had unlawfully had their homes repossessed. The regulators were the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which is an independent bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and the US central bank, the Federal Reserve. The US mortgage market boomed in the middle of the last decade. The housing bubble collapsed in 2008, making many of the homes worthless and causing the loans and their derivatives to become toxic. 'Roadkill'
"A Total Game Changer" - From Over-Population To De-Population Submitted by Chris Hamilton via Hambone's Stuff blog, Strangely, the world is suffering from two seemingly opposite trends...overpopulation and depopulation in concert. The overpopulation is due to the increased longevity of elderly lifespans vs. depopulation of young populations due to collapsing birthrates. The depopulation is among most under 25yr old populations (except Africa) and among many under 45yr old populations. So, the old are living decades longer than a generation ago but their adult children are having far fewer children. The economics of this is a complete game changer and is unlike any time previously in the history of mankind. In a short yet economically valid manner, every person is a unit of consumption. The chart below is total annual population growth broken down by OECD nations (33 wealthiest nations...representing 1.3 billion people, OECD members), BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, S.
FactCheck Q&A: Where will Barclays’ fines go? “Under the previous government’s regime, fines paid to the FSA (Financial Services Authority) are used to reduce the annual levy other financial institutions are asked to pay…We are considering ammendments to the Financial Services Bill that will ensure that fines of this nature go to paying the taxpaying public, not the financial industry.” - Chancellor George Osborne, House of Commons, 28 June 2012 Barclays Bank has been ordered by US and British authorities to pay a record-breaking £290m in fines this week. Of that, the Financial Services Authority demanded £59.5m – the biggest fine it’s ever imposed in its 10-year history. But the sense of relief that Barclays has been brought to book will be shortlived when ordinary taxpayers learn that under current rules, they won’t see a penny. FactCheck’s been looking at how the financial services industry benefits when one of their own messes up. So what actually happens when the FSA fines one of their members? Not for that particular year.
Mutation of Medieval Feudalism Into Modern Corporate Capitalism: The Rise of Neofeudalism in Corporate Governance... Feudalism is still alive and well in today’s modern corporate world, in spirit and intent… Question: What is the most enduring and stable system of economic and social order the world has ever known? It’s not capitalism, or socialism, or dictatorship: It’s feudalism… Feudalism was primary political system of the Middle Ages (9th to 15th Centuries). The system came about, for the most part, because the reigning king had two major woes; he couldn’t keep the people from rebelling and he couldn’t take care of all his land. In the article Modern Feudal State? by Aglaya writes: Feudalism is the system whereby political and economic power is held by a relatively small group of capital owners who permit their capital to be worked or used by the large majority of landless people for their subsistence. The basic contract in the feudal state is the majority of the population will be content to remain relatively uneducated, unsophisticated, and unambitious. In the article Feudalism in America?