A Bank With $49 Trillion In Derivatives Exposure Is Melting Down Before Our Eyes

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse blog

Could it be possible that we are on the verge of the next “Lehman Brothers moment”?  

Deutsche Bank is the most important bank in all of Europe, it has 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives, and most of the largest “too big to fail banks” in the United States have very deep financial connections to the bank.  In other words, the global financial system simply cannot afford for Deutsche Bank to fail, and right now it is literally melting down right in front of our eyes.  For years I have been warning that this day would come, and even though it has been hit by scandal after scandal, somehow Deutsche Bank was able to survive until now.  But after what we have witnessed in recent days, many now believe that the end is near for Deutsche Bank.  On July 7th, they really shook up investors all over the globe when they laid off 18,000 employees and announced that they would be completely exiting their global equities trading business…

It takes a lot to rattle Wall Street.
But Deutsche Bank managed to. The beleaguered German giant announced on July 7 that it is laying off 18,000 employees—roughly one-fifth of its global workforce—and pursuing a vast restructuring plan that most notably includes shutting down its global equities trading business.
Though Deutsche’s Bloody Sunday seemed to come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a years-long—some would say decades-long—descent into unprofitability and scandal for the bank, which in the early 1990s set out to make itself into a universal banking powerhouse to rival the behemoths of Wall Street.

These moves may delay Deutsche Bank’s inexorable march into oblivion, but not by much. 

Read more

Bank Run: Deutsche Bank Clients Are Pulling $1 Billion A Day

Zero Hedge

There is a reason James Simons' RenTec is the world's best performing hedge fund - it spots trends (even if they are glaringly obvious) well ahead of almost everyone else, and certainly long before the consensus.

That's what happened with Deutsche Bank, when as we reported two weeks ago, the quant fund pulled its cash from Deutsche Bank as a result of soaring counterparty risk, just days before the full - and to many, devastating - extent of the German lender's historic restructuring was disclosed, and would result in a bank that is radically different from what Deutsche Bank was previously (see "The Deutsche Bank As You Know It Is No More").

In any case, now that RenTec is long gone, and questions about the viability of Deutsche Bank are swirling - yes, it won't be insolvent overnight, but like the world's biggest melting ice cube, there is simply no equity value there any more - everyone else has decided to cut their counterparty risk with the bank with the €45 trillion in derivatives, and according to Bloomberg Deutsche Bank clients, mostly hedge funds, have started a "bank run" which has culminated with about $1 billion per day being pulled from the bank.

As a result of the modern version of this "bank run", where it's not depositors but counterparties that are pulling their liquid exposure from DB on fears another Lehman-style lock up could freeze their funds indefinitely, Deutsche Bank is considering how to transfer some €150 billion ($168 billion) of balances held in it prime-brokerage unit - along with technology and potentially hundreds of staff - to French banking giant BNP Paribas.

Read more

Money Laundering Scandals Bring Court Charges and Record Job Cuts to Euro Banks

Lubomir Tassev
Activist Post
 
The international financial establishment is known to express concern about the risks of money laundering when the crypto space is mentioned. A string of scandals indicates, however, that traditional banks are not only susceptible to the phenomenon but sometimes complicit, whether knowingly or inadvertently. New chapters have been added to the saga over the last few months that are hurting banks, bankers and their clients.

Deutsche Bank Prepares to Lay Off 20,000 Employees

 

Deutsche Bank, one of the biggest names associated with money laundering accusations, has been dogged by many problems during the past year. The leading German financial institution is now preparing for a major reorganization that may include the sacking of up to 20,000 employees, if the plan is approved at the end of this week.

The changes come after a failed merger with Germany’s Commerzbank a couple of months ago, which was eventually deemed too risky by the teams of both banks. It did not materialize, despite the support of the federal government in Berlin.

Many of the layoffs are expected to affect Deutsche Bank’s investment banking offices in London and New York. According to a BBC report, the German bank has 8,000 employees in the British capital. And the 20,000 jobs that are likely to be cut represent a fifth of the institution’s global staff.

Besides persistent problems with its investment business and unsatisfactory financial results, the banking giant has been suffering from its involvement in money laundering scandals. In November, 2018 its headquarters and other offices in Frankfurt were raided by law enforcement officers and representatives of the German tax authority.

During the operation, government agents, including prosecutors, were trying to establish whether Deutsche Bank employees assisted clients in setting up offshore accounts used to transfer illicit funds. The bank was connected to the big money laundering scandal at Danske Bank last year, which revealed that around €200 billion (around $230 billion) has flowed through its Estonian branch from suspicious accounts from the former Soviet space. 

Read more

The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire (Documentary)

Independent POV

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance. 

 

The Spider's Web was written, directed and produced by Michael Oswald, you can sponsor his future films on Liberapay (supports one time donations) and Patreon: https://liberapay.com/IndependentPOV https://www.patreon.com/independentdo... 

 

Share this documentary with your friends, and ask sites to feature it:  

https://twitter.com/spiderswebfilm  

 

https://www.facebook.com/Spiderswebfilm/  

 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6483026/ 

 

The Spider's Web was substantially inspired by Nicholas Shaxson's book Treasure Islands you can read an extract of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardi... 

 

Translate this documentary here on youtube or contact us for the .srt file 

 

contact@independentpov.org 

 

For those interested to learn more about tax justice and financial secrecy, read about the Tax Justice Network's campaigning and regular blogs - become part of the movement for change and listen to the Tax Justice Network's monthly podcast/radio show the Taxcast https://www.taxjustice.net/taxcast/ 

 

Review on Filmotomy: https://filmotomy.com/the-spiders-web... 

 

Review on Open Democracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/open... 

 

Website: www.spiderswebfilm.com 

 

German Version: https://youtu.be/1ZZR8vBKqwc 

Spanish Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85dsT... 

French Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hizj_... 

Italian Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwmvX... 

 

Subtitles: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Korean, Hungarian, English, Turkish, Portugese.

Insider Says Israel Poised to Stage False Flag Attack Against U.S. Targets to Start War with Iran

The Millennium Report

U.S. Military fighting yet another war to advance the Greater Israel project

If there is one cataclysmic train wreck happening in slow motion on the global geopolitical chessboard, it’s the Neocon-instigated war being waged by the Trump administration against Iran.  The financial terrorism and economic sabotage already inflicted on Iran by the U.S. have themselves been egregious acts of war.

Trump Administration Goes All Out to Wreck Iranian Economy

 

Truly, it does not get any more serious than this colossal foreign policy fiasco.

Once again, the apartheid state of Israel has successfully hijacked the U.S. Military, State Department and Intelligence Community in order to wage an unprovoked war of naked aggression against a sovereign state in the Middle East.

It’s of paramount importance to understand that this war-in-the-making is the culmination of a covert plan to advance the Greater Israel project.  As follows:

General Wesley Clark: “The US will attack 7 countries in 5 years” (Video)

 

Only with this critical understanding will such a transparently illegal, reckless and catastrophic war make any sense.  Catastrophic because such misguided  warmongering by the Neocons is guaranteed to trigger the hot phase of World War III.  Of course, the New World Order cabal is counting on exactly that eventuality.  See: The Only Remaining Option for the NWO Globalist Cabal is: World War III

The global crime syndicate known as the International Banking Cartel, which runs the perpetual war economy across the planet, knows that the end is very near for them.  The entire Global Economic & Financial System is teetering on the precipice of a total and final collapse.  Their only way out is war—a Third World War with which to implement the last stage of the NWO agenda—the establishment of a totalitarian One World Government.

Iran is the lynchpin in this insane scheme to plunge the world community of nations into chaos out of which the NWO cabal will fabricate a draconian communist order not too unlike the 20th century’s Soviet Union.  This is precisely why President Trump was ordered by his Neocon Zionist masters to form his stone-cold war cabinet of Bolton, Pompeo, Pence, Haspel, Abrams and Shanahan.  Each inveterate warmonger was hand-picked by Israel to develop and implement the war plans necessary to conquer Iran.

Read more

Money laundering - Why the UK does not prosecute it

"Despite the UK’s rhetoric about wanting a “world-leading reputation for integrity” as a financial centre, it has never prosecuted a single company or bank for money laundering."

True Publica

A study by the CCP Research Foundation – which analyses banks’ so-called ‘conduct costs’ – revealed that the biggest 20 banks worldwide, including the biggest four in Britain, had paid or set aside £264 billion for fines in the five years to 2017. Britain’s biggest banks have paid out £71 billion for misconduct in the decade since the financial crisis. Much of these fines have related to money laundering but they were not prosecuted in the UK.

Lloyds is the bank that has suffered the heaviest penalties with at least £23.4 billion in conduct-related costs and write-offs since 2008.  RBS is second on the list. Its conduct and litigation costs since 2008, including amounts it has earmarked but not yet used, add up to £20.6 billion. The bailed-out bank also agreed to pay £3.6 billion to settle an investigation by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) for misselling mortgage-backed securities – the bonds at the heart of the 2008 crisis in America.

RBS and Lloyds were bailed out when the financial crisis broke out to the tune of £45.5 billion and £20.3 billion respectively.

Barclays avoided a UK state bailout – but only by taking £12 billion what looks like illegal emergency funding from the state of Qatar. The Serious Fraud Office is involved.

HSBC has forked out nearly £10 billion in fines and other costs for its conduct since 2008.
In the last few weeks – Standard Chartered, the British bank has been ordered to pay $1.1bn (£842m) by US and UK authorities to settle allegations for breaching sanctions against countries including Iran.

But it doesn’t end there does it – it just keeps on going.

In 2019 alone, leaving aside Standard Chartered, the Financial Conduct Authority has dished out fines to the financial services sector at the rate of more than one a month. In total, to the 9th April, they have fined the industry or people in it collectively to the tune of £272,487,887.

What is interesting here is the missing link. British banks are world leaders in shovelling trillions into tax havens, most of it to evade taxation but a very good chunk of it is pure money laundering. 

Tyrants, despots, mass murderers, terrorists, traffickers – they are just as good a customer as any as far as the banks are concerned. Here, the British government and its toothless Financial Conduct Authority fail in every sense of the word. Money laundering through British tax haven islands and crown dependencies is something the state approves of – hence the lack of fines or punishment dished out for it.

Donald Toon, director at the National Crime Agency, admitted that money laundering in the UK was “a very big problem” and estimated that the amount of money laundered here each year has now risen to a staggering £150 billion. I would think that is on the light side.

Susan Hawley is Policy Director of Corruption Watch. She worked for six years at the Corner House on corruption issues, having previously worked in the policy team at Christian Aid on ethics and corruption issues. Here is her take, (originally published a year ago), on money laundering by British banks.

Read more

Countries Around The World Are Bringing Gold Home

Zero Hedge

European Central Bank’s President Mario Draghi recently announced that the ECB would be required to approve any management of gold reserves within the euro zone countries. The statement was specifically directed at two Italian members.

Why was Italy singled out? According to the Wall Street Journal, Italian citizens are preparing to take control of Italy’s gold reserves. During the past few years, a multitude of small investors lost billions of dollars due to the failure of several Italian banks. The Bank of Italy is seen as an elitist, inefficient entity indifferent to the needs of ordinary people. Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio is leading the attack against Italy’s central bank, along with the “5 Star Movement” and the nationalist “League,” all of whom blame the countries financial woes on the incompetence of the central bank.

The 5 Star Movement is asking Italy’s Parliament to approve measures that would allow private banks to sell their share in The Bank of Italy at 1930’s prices. Taking it a step further, they are also demanding that ownership of the Bank of Italy’s 2,451.8 tons of gold be taken over by the country’s citizens and spent on populist policies. The current value of these gold reserves is $102 billion.

If these laws are passed, investors would be able to sell gold and greatly deplete the central bank’s reserves. As Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy states, “The gold belongs to the Italians, not the bankers.” 

Read more

Death of Free Speech: Criticizing Israel Will Land You in Prison

Kurt Nimmo

Soon, this blog will be illegal.

No, I’m not selling drugs or peddling child pornography. I write about America’s wars and the primary objective of those illegal and immoral wars—to make Israel the hegemon of the Middle East along with Saudi Arabia. All US foreign policy in that region centers on those two nations.

The following may soon be classified as hate speech and anti-semitism (as increasingly criticism of the Jewish state and its Zionist political ideology are considered crimes). 

Jewish neocons found their way into the Reagan administration and later the Bush Junior White House and Pentagon. Huddled under the wing of Vice President Dick Cheney, they plotted to attack and destroy Israel’s enemies. Neocon ideologues strategized and published papers on these manufactured wars, most notably a paper presented to then Israeli president Bibi Netanyahu. It called for taking out Iraq and Syria. Israeli academics have written on this subject for decades. The nation’s early leaders engineered border provocations and false flag attacks (the Lavon Affair) to destabilize the region. Southern Lebanon is considered a valuable asset primarily for its water resources (e.g. “Operation Litani”) and the Golan Heights in Syria was occupied for its strategic value. 

Israel, of course, is unable to destroy its enemies, so that task is left to America and its neocons. The American people were lied into a war on Iraq. Both Israel and the US knew Saddam Hussein didn’t have the capability to threaten Israel militarily. Beyond its oil, Iraq held little strategic value for the US and its corporatocracy. However, it did have the ability to cause trouble, especially in regard to the Palestinians. 

Syria’s relationship with its Lebanese neighbor and its stubborn refusal to simply handover the occupied Golan to the Israelis is also a problem. It was one of several objectives behind a manufactured color revolution in Syria under the aegis of the “Arab Spring,” an objective that has thus far resulted in the murder of around 600,000 Syrians. 

The Bush era neocons (including John Bolton, now national security adviser, and Elliot Abrams, a key Bush coconspirator) had an ambitious laundry list of nations to be destroyed—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and importantly Iran, the only serious challenger to Israel. The Obama administration added Libya and began covert operations in Africa. 

Trump took the baton from Obama after he told us he wasn’t into “nation-building” and was a populist “America First” noninterventionist. The American people were lied to again, but then this is now normal behavior. 

After 9/11 and years of aggressive war propaganda, it is now common for the American people to believe these lies. Meanwhile, endless diversion in the form of super-hyper and potentially violent partisanship between factions of the establishment political class keep most Americans distracted from larger issues—war and the bankster-rigged economy. It should be noted that criticism of central banks and monetary policy are also considered hateful antisemitism. 

In short, US foreign policy, directed by high-level neocons, is not conducted in the interest of the American people. It benefits Israel, which also takes billions every year from the American taxpayer.

Read more

Against All Odds, Libyans Fight to Regain Their Freedom From Western Occupation

Libyan War The Truth

In 2011, an evil scheme by the Western Mafia of Khazarian Zionists (UN, NATO, US, UK, France, Qatar), began a false flag titled "Arab Spring". This scheme was developed to destroy one sovereign country - Libya. The reason behind this was many fold but mainly, Ghadafi had started a gold currency for Africa called the gold dinar. This gold backed currency was already started in the Comoro Islands and all Arab countries has signed up along with more than half of Africa. This dinar would have caused the demise of the toilet paper bankers who control most of the world with their vacant petro dollar. 

The entire premise of "Protecting the Innocents" from an oppressive regime used in 2011 to foment the invasion and destruction of Libya was a complete and utter lie. 

Let's put this in perspective:

A huge invasionary force professing to protect the Libyan people causes one sixth of their population to be dead or missing, Two million Libyans must live in exile to preserve their lives. The entire infrastructure of the country is destroyed with 100's of thousands of bombs dropped on the country. Destroyed were Power plant's, water treatment plants, hospitals, universities, roads, agricultural areas, homes, etc. Total destruction in Libya will run into the trillion dollar range. The occupational force of 250,000 terrorist mercenaries that were brought into Libya in 2011 by the CIA, Mossad, Mi6, etc.,were left in Libya to enjoy all the spoils and continue the destabilization of the country. These occupying forces enjoyed full support of weapons, money and training for the past 8 years by the US,UN, NATO, UK, Italy, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.

The Libyan people's right to vote was ignored or taken from them. A non elected UN puppet government was installed (GNA or Government of National Accord) with no basis in law and given access to the Libyan people's 500 billion dollars which was held in the US Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Bank of Japan. With this huge amount of monetary resources, nothing has been done to aid and assist the beleaguered Libyan people. There are now however, many billionaires in the ranks of the terrorists, phony politicians and many,many influential foreigners.

The Libyan people have suffered such oppression for the last 8 years that lesser beings would have folded and given up. But Libya is an ancient culture of Tribes who have strong family units and great love of their country. Since 2011, the Libyan people have told us that the truth and their God will free them from the oppressors, now they are teaching the world how a country, oppressed by western ogres, can take back their sovereignty and their freedom.

We believe that the real "Libyan Model" is how every country can take back their sovereignty after years of oppression. 

Read more

Research Study on Ongoing Crime Spree by Wall Street Mega Banks Gets News Blackout: Here’s Why

Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall St. On Parade
 
One day before Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee held an historic grilling of the CEOs of the mega banks on Wall Street, the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, released an in-depth research report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” The report detailed facts, figures and this inescapable conclusion:

“[Six Wall Street mega banks] have engaged in—and continue to engage in—a crime spree that spans the violation of almost every law and rule imaginable. Taking the breadth and depth of their illegal conduct as a whole, the six biggest banks in the country look like criminal enterprises with RAP sheets that would make most career criminals green with envy. That was the case not just before the 2008 crash, but also during and after the crash and their lifesaving bailouts…In fact, the number of cases against the banks has actually increased relative to the pre-crash era.”

The six mega banks profiled in the report are: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.

A reliable source tells us that all major business media received the report on Tuesday, April 9. We know that Politico had the report by 8:00 a.m. because its “Morning Money” column provided a small news nugget at that time announcing that the report was out. Politico did not follow up, however, with any detailed coverage of the shocking revelations in the report.

Wall Street On Parade, after carefully reading and digesting the report, published an article on its contents the next morning, April 10. Then we began to hear from our outraged readers, who wanted to know why they weren’t reading about this report at major business media outlets. We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)

We know that the Wall Street Journal was aware of the report because Lalita Clozel, a banking regulation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Tweeted on April 10 that Democrats in the House Financial Services Committee room were handing out the report to journalists while the Chair of the Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, was introducing the bank CEOs.

There are four words in this outstanding report from Better Markets that rendered it unpalatable to corporate business media: “rap sheets” and “criminal enterprise.” We searched Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times back to 2004 to see if at any time they had used the words “rap sheet” to describe the unprecedented serial crime sprees of these Wall Street mega banks. They had not. 

Read more

Media Blackout as Israel’s Largest Banks Pay Over $1 Billion in Fines for US Tax Evasion Schemes

Mint Press News 

WASHINGTON — Israel’s three largest banks — Hapoalim Bank, Leumi Bank and Mizrahi Tefahot Bank — have all been ordered to pay record fines, which collectively are set to total over $1 billion, to the U.S. government after the banks were found to have actively colluded with thousands of wealthy Americans in massive tax-evasion schemes.

The scandal, though it has been reported on in Israeli media, has garnered little attention in the United States. The media black-out has been so surprising it was even directly mentioned by the Times of Israel, given that similar revelations about other banks and offshore tax-evasion schemes — such as those contained within the Panama Papers — led to global protests and even the resignations of some world leaders.

The settlements are the end result of a series of Department of Justice (DOJ) probes that were related to the DOJ’s 2007 investigation targeting UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank. The focus of the probe turned to Israel a few years later in 2011, when it was determined that the Swiss subsidiaries of several of Israel’s largest banks had actively aided Americans seeking to launder their money.

As the probes advanced, the DOJ found that the three banks — Israel’s largest when ranked by net income and total assets — had a history of collaborating with wealthy Americans in tax evasion schemes, not just in their Swiss subsidiaries but in Israel as well. Most of those wealthy Americans were Jewish Americans or dual U.S.-Israeli citizens who hid their U.S. citizenship from the Israeli banks.

A year after the probes into Leumi, Hapoalim and Mizrahi Tefahot were made public, the U.S. State Department notably listed Israel as a “major money laundering country… whose financial institutions engage in currency transactions involving significant amounts of proceeds from international narcotics trafficking … or other serious crime.”

Read more

The OTHER Debt Bubbles: How Private Sector Debt Could Trigger the Next Financial Crisis

Activist Post

The $22 trillion official national debt is a much discussed problem, even as politicians exhibit zero motivation to do anything about it. But as big an economic overhang as it is, government debt isn’t likely to trigger the next financial crisis.

Yes, servicing the growing federal debt bubble will depress GDP growth, cause the value of the dollar to drop, and raise inflation risks. But the bubble itself won’t necessarily burst – not anytime soon.

As long as politicians face no political consequences for deficit spending, and as long as the Federal Reserve keeps the Treasury bond market propped up… then many more trillions can be added to the national debt.

Meanwhile, more fragile debt bubbles exist in the private sector. Unlike government debt – which carries the implicit backing of the Fed’s unlimited printing press – debts incurred by corporations, investors, consumers, and students can default.

 

Globally, there exists $250 trillion in debt against economic assets of around $100 trillion. The notional value of all derivatives now approaches a quadrillion dollars.

It’s been called the “everything bubble”… and it could soon lead to the “everything bust.”
U.S. household debt rose to a record $13.5 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2018. Mortgages, student loans, car loans, and credit cards represent enormous burdens even during a good economy. These burdens will prove unbearable for millions of Americans in the years ahead.

For many the financial crisis is already here:

• Pending home sales have fallen on a year over year basis for 13 consecutive months.
• Farm loan delinquencies recently hit their highest level in 9 years.
• More than 7 million Americans are delinquent on their auto loan payments – an all-time record.
• Some 5.1 million people are in default on their student loans.

Read more

HSBC Bank To Staff Branches With Humanoid Robots

Aaron Kesel
Activist Post

HSBC, will test robots created by SoftBank Robotics, in the lobby of their Fifth Avenue branch in midtown Manhattan, CNBC reported.

The robots are not only designed to interact with customers but also take selfies, dance and tell jokes. Pepper, one of the robots equipped with a tablet on its chest at the HSBC Manhattan branch, danced to a techno beat in a demonstration according to CNBC.

This marks the second known test of robots for banking; the first being a bank in China, Construction Bank (CCB), that opened a Shanghai branch run entirely by robots in a testing phase for finance with little to no human involvement, Activist Post reported.

Robots are beginning to take over every aspect of society.  They are also headed for retail businesses delivering freight and eliminating truckers. But, again, robots malfunction. In fact, it sounds quite dangerous allowing a freight truck to drive itself; if the sensors break down on a big rig truck going  60-70 MPH, that’s potentially 40 tons barreling down the highway unattended except by artificial intelligence. As Activist Post reported back in March, Uber had to halt nationwide testing of its A.I. vehicles following the death of a pedestrian in Arizona. And that was a car actually attended by a human back-up operator.

Automation clearly isn’t a foolproof technology, and it can also be exploited by hackers for malicious purposes that could even include programming a bot to kill an individual.

Not even journalists are safe from robot replacements.

Read more

Gold Joins The Global "Death Cross" Procession

Zero Hedge

While US mega-tech stocks support the belief that all is well for many Americans, a glance around the world and the shit is seriously hitting the fan...

Downtrends are everywhere and 'death crosses' are popping up in asset classes from Chinese stocks to global Systemically-Important Banks and most recently gold...

The crossing of the 50-day moving average below the 200-day moving average has been long used a signal of trend change and more euphemistically is known as the "death cross."

Gold is now suffering...

Read more

Argentina Just Made History With Biggest IMF Bailout Loan Ever

Zero Hedge

Just a few weeks after Argentina became ground zero for the coming Emerging Market crisis, when its currency suddenly collapsed at the end of April amid soaring inflation, exploding capital outflows and a central bank that was far behind the curve (as in “13% of rate hikes in a week” behind)…

… the IMF has officially bailed out the country – again – this time with a $50 billion, 36-month stand-by loan, and coming in about $10 billion more than rumored earlier in the week, it was the largest ever bailout loan in IMF history, meant to help restore investor confidence in a nation that, between its soaring external debt and current account deficit, prompted JPMorgan to suggest that along with Turkey, Argentina is in effect, doomed.

Read more

Argentina Is Suddenly on the Verge of ANOTHER Economic Collapse

Daisy Luther
Activist Post

The economic collapse of Argentina in 2001 is the stuff of prepper legends. For years, it was the example that we pointed to when trying to convince others that, yes, it really can happen. (Now, of course, that example has been replaced by the dramatic fall of Venezuela.) There’s even a fantastic book about the Argentinian collapse with survival lessons that has fueled many a prepper to get stocked up, in which Fernando Aguirre, also known as FerFal, shared the inside story.

And now, sadly, it looks like just as hopeful Argentinians believed the country was getting back on its feet, another collapse could be imminent.

President Mauricio Macri, a business tycoon who vowed to reincorporate Argentina into the global economy, has asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a hefty credit line of at least $19.7 billion to see the country through the rest of his term, which ends in 2019.

When the IMF gets involved, it tends to be the beginning of the end, as we saw in Greece, whose crisis was at its peak between 2009 and 2016.

What happened during the previous Argentinian collapse

Back in the late 1990s, Argentina was suffering. Wages were decreasing, unemployment was increasing, and the government was getting deeper and deeper into debt. This all came to a head in 2001 when the Argentinian government defaulted on a whopping 100 billion dollars of that debt.

Overnight, interest rates skyrocketed and there was a run on the banks. The government froze all the accounts and allowed patrons a small trickle of money only once per week. The banks converted all dollar accounts into pesos at the previous exchange rate (pre-default) and suddenly everyone with a deposit account lost 3/4s of their wealth, just like that.

This, of course, resulted in social unrest, riots, and rage against the government and the banking system. What followed was several years of extreme poverty and desperation for the Argentinian people.

Read more

A Central Banking Insider Just Revealed the Blueprint For When the Next Crisis Hits

Zero Hedge

If you’re looking for insights into what Central Banks have planned when The Everything Bubble bursts, on Monday one of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) top bankers provided a blueprint.

Benoît Cœuré, has been a member of the Executive Board of the ECB since 2011. As such is one of SIX individuals who have dictated ECB policy during that time.
This means he’s been involved in:

• The second and third Greek bailouts.
• The Spain bailout.
• The Portugal bailout.
• The second and third Romania bailouts.
• The Cyprus bail-ins.

Cœuré has operated at the highest level of monetary/ financial policy during a period in which numerous financial/banking systems were experiencing systemic risk.
Put simply, there are fewer than 100 people on the planet who are as familiar with how Central Banks perceive the risks in today’s financial system as well as the policies said Central Banks will unleash when the next crisis hits.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what he had to say regarding both in the speech he gave titled The Future of Central Bank Money at the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies in Geneva yesterday.

In my remarks this evening I would like to share some more general thoughts on the role of the central bank’s balance sheet in the economy. My focus will be on central bank liabilities – that is, money created by central banks to be used as a means of payment and store of value…
What distinguishes the discussion today from previous discussions, however, are three new facts: 
The first is that we are seeing a dramatic decline in the demand for cash in some countries, in particular Sweden and Norway.
The second is that central banks today could make use of new technologies that would enable the introduction of what is widely referred to as a “token-based” currency – one based on a distributed ledger technology (DLT) or comparable cryptographic technology.
And the third “new” fact, at least from a long-term perspective, relates to the role of central banks in setting monetary policy, and more recently to the emergence of negative rates as a policy instrument and the consequences for the transmission of monetary policy.
Source: ECB

Read more

Nomi Prins: Collusion! How central bankers rigged the world

Adam Taggert
Peak Prosperity

Nomi Prins, Wall Street veteran turned financial industry reformist returns to the podcast this week to explain the findings within her new book Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged The World. 

Nomi has put together a timeline of exactly when and how the central banks have plundered the wealth of the masses since 2008, either directly or indirectly through the loss of purchasing power of the currencies they control:

The relationship between the Central Banks, the major ones — the Fed, Europe Central Bank, Bank of Japan — all the larger Central Banks in the world and their private banks was effectively, and is effectively, kept secret. The relationships they have with each other, a lot of it is secret; so you have to really dig in to it to find out what’s really going on.

What I did was dig into the documents that I could find and create a timeline. That’s why each chapter in each region starts in 2008. It works with Mexico, Brazil, Japan, China and Europe and juxtaposes that with what the Fed was doing at that time to see how that collusive behavior wound up happening. The secret-ness is in the relationships of the banks, where that money that was fabricated by these institutions actually went, and when — or if — it’s coming back.

The ‘cheat and deceiving’ part of that definition is also apparent: people have been cheated out of their futures from the standpoint of the central banks’ strategies. So when the Feds creates cheap money, companies and banks and countries borrow more from the future because it is so cheap and easy. This deceives many people into thinking that the economy is somehow therefore being helped by this strategy, which is in acutality an emergency strategy. It’s an emergency that’s gone on now for ten years.

Yes there have been some tweaks here and there — interest rates have gone up a little bit in the United States — but all in all, rates are still pretty much 0% on average globally and quantitative easing still exists. The books of the major Central Banks are as big as they were at their heights through this last ten-year period…and they’re still growing. Just look at Europe and Japan.

Look at the stock market. The stock market is really high right now in a lot of different places. Why is it so high? Because a lot of this money went into debt which was borrowed to buy corporate stock, to buy the stock of banks, or to buy the banks themselves. That’s a major form of manipulation and deception as well.

Why is JP Morgan’s stock going up? Is it just because JP Morgan is such a great bank and so helping? Well, no. It’s because it received a lot of help from the Federal Reserve. It funneled that help into its own shares, and it has continued to pay settlements and be fined on egregious activity against its own clients, which are many because it’s the largest bank in the United States among the largest banks in the world.

There are multiple points of cheating and deception that have been enabled or that occur because of Central Banks policies. Some of those policies are secret; but a lot of them are public. You just have to piece the documents and the timelines together.

Read more

Missile manufacturer Raytheon's value rose by $2.5 billion immediately following the Syria strikes.

Blacklisted News

‘Maybe we’ll help the Saudis send some troops of their own to offset the influence of Iran and Russia’, speculated Jim Cramer on his CNBC show Mad Money. ‘That’s good news for these arms dealers, plus defense is the one place that Congress is going to spend lots and lots of money.’

It seemed as though Cramer had accidentally stumbled upon a foul cornerstone of the US economy whilst presenting another episode of his light-hearted investing tips program that has been running since 2005: that certain corporations make an absolute killing on US foreign interventions and the stock market reflects this.

He noted the missile manufacturer Raytheon as the most bullish in the group of US defense giants. ‘Raytheon could have a lot more room to run because it just broke out above a rising triangle pattern’, he claimed.

In fact, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company saw its market capitalisation rise by roughly $2.5 billion in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Syria. This caps a few years of impressively solid growth for Raytheon, whose stock price has risen roughly 30% since the start of Saudi Arabia’s carpet-bombing of Yemen using their American-made smart missiles.

Ultimately, Cramer’s assertion that ‘political worries can boost top defense stocks’ is a well-evidenced paradigm that consistently demonstrates its own validity whenever a US-led intervention occurs. However, to chalk it off as some kind of coincidence rather than a creature of political design is incredibly naive.

To look at the movement of executives between the Pentagon and military-industrial giants like Raytheon enabled by lax to non-existent conflict of interest regulations paints an incredibly clear picture – the US is governed by ‘experts’ who have made a career out of military profiteering.

Take William H. Swanson for example, the CEO of Raytheon from 2004 to 2014. He holds a keycard to the Pentagon as a member of the Secretary of the Air Force Advisory Board, who were naturally intimately involved in the recent Syria strikes. No regulations prohibit Swanson from also serving on various military advocacy groups such as the Association of the United States Army, the Navy League, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the National Defense Industrial Association and the Aerospace Industries Association.

In 2014 Swanson held 0.23% of Raytheon’s stock – well over the 0.10% industry average for CEOs – that at the time was worth about $41.9 million. There are no regulations in place that would force Swanson to part with his stake in the company or recuse himself in order to sit on the Air Force Advisory Board, and there is no indication that he did this.

Read more

"They Know What's Going To Happen" - Governments, Big Banks Are Stockpiling Gold

Marc Slavo
SHTF.com 

The writing is on the wall and major financial institutions across the world are warning about the economic disaster to come. Unabated money printing, tariff trade wars, rising interest rates and retail slowdowns point to one result, and it’s going to be brutal. Big banks and governments know what’s coming and they are preparing for this eventuality by stockpiling huge amounts of “real money” ahead of the crisis.

According to Keith Neumeyer, the CEO of the world’s top primary silver producer First Majestic Silver and chairman of First Mining Gold, the cartels he’s previously reported to the CFTC have continued to manipulate the prices of precious metals while loading up their own vaults with gold and silver. The answer to why they’re doing it is simple, as Neumeyer highlights in a recent interview with SGT Report:

The verdict is still out on whether we’re going into a dis-inflationary or inflationary environment… gold can do well in both environments… the fact of the matter is governments are printing extraordinary amounts of fiat currencies and that is not going to change…
The stage is set for higher gold prices due to the amount of money being printed… I am of the belief a major reset is coming where the governments of the world will need to get rid of their debt by fixing everything to the price of gold… and that’s why governments like China and Russia and other governments around the world are accumulating gold… it’s because they know what’s going to happen over the next several years…

Read more