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Helicopter QE will never be reversed
” Columbia Professor Michael Woodford, the world’s most closely followed monetary theorist, says it is time to come clean and state openly that bond purchases are forever, and the sooner people understand this the better.
“All this talk of exit strategies is deeply negative,” he told a London Business School seminar on the merits of Helicopter money, or “overt monetary financing”.
He said the Bank of Japan made the mistake of reversing all its money creation from 2001 to 2006 once it thought the economy was safely out of the woods. But Japan crashed back into deeper deflation as soon the Lehman crisis hit.
“If we are going to scare the horses, let’s scare them properly. Let’s go further and eliminate government debt on the bloated balance sheet of central banks,” he said. This could done with a flick of the fingers. The debt would vanish. “
Via The Telegraph
We all know it is going to end badly
““We all know it’s going to end badly, but in the meantime we can make some money” – Jim Cramer 3/5/2013: Read that quote folks and burn it into your memory. He didn’t say that because he was being smart, he said it in response to Stanley Drukenmiller telling the morning crew on CNBC how bizarre things have gotten. Cramer had no intelligent bullish response and coughed up that line. Funny, it’s one of the few honest things he’s ever been forced to say.
Why Does It Still Go Up?
I was sitting with my 83 year old mom on Tuesday evening and the 6 pm evening news was just “agog” about the market putting in an all-time new high. My mom is old enough to remember some rough times. She was a depression era baby. She listened to the shouts of joy and turned to me and said “Why is the market going up? A lot of my friends at Bingo say their Grandkids are having a hard time.”
In the past week, quite a few people have asked that very same question. Considering that the economic reports are dismal at best and horrid at worst… how and why does the market move up? Well, pull up a chair because there’s a lot to chat about, and it all has big time consequences for each of you.”
Currency Wars – Race to the Bottom
“The alarmist media always seeks to sell papers or broadcast ratings built on the unswerving fear that following the financial meltdown the banking establishment profits from the debt liquidation panic. The lack of stability in fiscal confidence certainly abounds, but the schemes to paper over the mountain of liability obligations, develop at even a more rapid pace.
The implied result of a real currency war is that nations are acting or defending their own national interests. The truth is that fiat currencies, designed to depreciate, benefits the moneychangers as the loss of purchasing power penalizes taxpayers and consumers.The financial press spins the “so called” harmonious unity of the industrial nations, in a lame attempt to ease concerns that the money markets can be trusted. An example is the G20 summit to focus on ‘currency war’ threat to economy. “
Via Activist Post
21 Signs That This Could Be A Long, Hot, Crazy Summer For The Global Financial System
“The summer of 2012 is shaping up to be very similar to the summer of 2008. Things look incredibly bleak for the global economy right now. Economic activity and lending are slowing down all over the planet, and fear is starting to paralyze the entire global financial system. Things did not look this bad back in the summer of 2011 and things certainly did not look this bad back in the summer of 2010. It is almost as if a “perfect storm” is brewing. Today, the global financial system is a finely balanced pyramid of risk, debt and leverage. Such a system requires a high degree of confidence and stability. But when confidence disappears and fear and panic take over, the house of cards can literally start collapsing at any time. Right now we are watching a slow-motion train wreck unfold and nobody seems to know how to stop it. Unless some kind of a miracle happens, things are going to look much different when we reach the start of 2013 than they do today.”
Frackin’ Reserve – How Fractional Reserve Banking Creates Money and Why it is Fraudulent (3/6)
“To understand where the money appears, we need to walk through the cycle again. The most important thing to be aware of is the timeline of events.
Adam deposits $1,000. Now, the bank owes Adam $1,000. And the bank, by law, can give out $900 of Adam’s money to Anne. And that is it right there. That is how fractional reserve banking manufactures money in the form of debt. That is, it creates money as debt.“
Via Activist Post
Frackin’ Reserve – What is Money? (2/6)
“Money vs. Wealth
Money is an artificial thing. It doesn’t exist in reality. You can’t go out and find “money” anywhere in the physical, non-artificial world. That is to say, money doesn’t grow on trees. It comes out of the mind and is a purely artificial concept. Its only legitimate purpose is to facilitate trade and commerce, or in the words of Aristotle, “Money was intended to be used in exchange.”
Wealth on the other hand differs in that you can find “wealth” in the natural world. Wealth is something that you can touch. It has existence on its own with no reliance on the existence of humanity or any “ideas”.
Wealth has utility in and of itself, and is not reliant on any external acceptance of it for it to have utility.”
Via Activist Post
The Mechanics of Fractional Reserve Banking (1/6)
“Breaking the whole thing down into a simple ordered list, fractional reserve banking follows this pattern:
1. The government issues bonds to the bank.
2. The bank loans out 90% of the money.
3. The borrower spends the money.
4. The seller deposits the money into the bank.
5. Go to point 2 where the bank then lends out the money again.
Step 1 kick-starts the system the same way that you would kick-start a motorcycle. The government can always inject more money into the system, but every time it does, it starts this fractional reserve banking process over again with that money.
Step 2 is where the “magic” of fractional reserve banking happens. The legal requirement to keep only a small portion of a deposit gives the bank the “right” to print money out of nothing. This is explained in detail in Part 3.
Step 5 is nothing more than running through steps 2-4 again for the entire cycle to start over. This is the second “magic” of fractional reserve banking because it creates a an iterative feedback loop for money to multiply itself. Aristotle called the process of money multiplying itself “the most unnatural”. “
Via Activist Post
Police Urging Greeks To Stop Stuffing Mattresses
“We have spent a considerable amount of time in the last week or two explaining just why depositor withdrawals (or bank runs) are the death knell for the Euro experiment. We first described the ‘run on banks and governments’ on the basis of the potential for overnight loss of ‘fungibility’ back in December but the escalation last week in Greece (and the contagion to Spain’s Bankia) signals things are shifting to 11 on the amplifier of Euro-Fail. This evening brings new information from The Guardian that ‘Police are urging Greeks to keep their money in bank accounts rather than putting it at risk of theft, amid further uncertainty about whether the austerity-struck country will remain in the eurozone.’ “
Via Zero Hedge
How The U.S. Dollar Will Be Replaced
“After being immersed in the world of alternative economic analysis for several years, it sometimes becomes easy to forget that most people do not track forex markets, or debt to GDP ratio, or true unemployment, or hunch over IMF white-papers highlighting subsections which expose the trappings of the globalist ideology. Sometimes, you just assume the average person knows what the heck you are talking about. This is, of course, a mistake. However, it is a mistake that is borne from the inadequacy of our age and our culture, and is not necessarily a product of weak character, either of the analyst, or the casual reader.
The great frustration of being actively involved in the Liberty Movement is the fact that many people are rarely on the same page (or even the same book) during political and economic discussion. Where we see the nature of the false left/right paradigm, they see “free democracy”. Where we see a tidal wave of destructive debt, they see a “responsible government” printing and spending in order to protect our “best interests”. Where we see totalitarianism, they see “safety”. Where we see dollar devaluation, they see dollar strength and longevity. Ultimately, because the average unaware citizen is stricken by the disease of normalcy bias and living within the doldrums of a statistical fantasy world, they simply have no point of reference by which to grasp the truth when exposed to it. It’s like trying to explain the concept of ‘color’ to a man who has been blind since birth. “
Via Alt Market
Frackin’ Reserve! A Fractional Reserve Banking Simulator
“To help explain what the effects of fractional reserve banking are, and to illustrate just how evil it is, I’ve written a simple program that lets you simulate fractional reserve banking and the effects of compound interest.
The Frackin’ Reserve! program simulates what happens in fractional reserve banking, and lets you change the parameters for it. What this lets you do is simulate fractional reserve banking from a variety of perspectives, and see the results in real time.
It also lets you generate a report so you can view all the generated output in a linear time series of the iterations through fractional reserve banking. That was probably a mouthful, and may have sounded like so much balderdash to some people. But it will all become clearer later on, and in particular when I post a follow-up article about fractional reserve banking.”
Via Activist Post
