Monday, December 30, 2013

Lots of Year End News of Interest

YouTube - Meet The Press - Alan Greenspan: WE CAN ALWAYS PRINT MORE MONEY. The video is only 24 seconds, it is of Alan Greenspan, past head of the Federal Reserve, saying that it doesn't matter how much debt we have because we can just print money. Tell me how anyone could be that dumb. It would be like you or I saying that we can run up as much credit card debt as we want and just send checks to pay it even though we don't have any money in our bank accounts.

YouTube - HempCrete Strongest Building material in Nature. There is a lot of talk right now about legalizing Marijuana. Personally, I am 100% in favor of allowing cancer patients to have easy access to it; but, there is another product that is related to it called hemp that is also illegal. Hemp is not marijuana and it would take bags of the stuff to get anyone high; but, historically it has been used to make clothes, paper, boats, buildings and also can be used to produce oils. It is also illegal. I had some hemp soap once and the stuff was great on my skin. If you don't know anything about hemp, you should watch the video. If we used it instead of wood, we could save a lot of trees and it captures CO2.

Yahoo - Reuters - Miami loses bid to dismiss SEC fraud lawsuit
. Here is the short on it, municipalities funnel money to investors and others when they issue municipal bonds and some municipalities fudge the numbers to keep up their ratings. Awhile back I read an article about how a City was issuing bonds based upon the value of their streets. Basically saying that there streets were an asset of the City. I contacted one of the two lawyers who had created the bonds and asked them how they could use streets as an asset when they did not own the streets and only had an easement which the law prohibits them for charging people to use. The municipal bond market is just as rigged as the rest of wall street. When a municipality issues bonds, lots of insiders make money.

Yahoo - Reuters - Italy presses Monte Paschi to complete $4 billion cash call. Keep an eye on this one, how this bank is taken over may be an indication of things to come to other banks.

The Guardian - Mortgage rise will plunge a million homeowners into 'perilous debt'
. England, land of mass debt which is pushed by their own government. One of the last couple posts was on exactly this, their housing bubble.

Yahoo - Reuters - SEC pushes US insurers for details on 'captives': WSJ. More Wall Street dishonesty and cheating.

Yahoo - Reuters - NYC sues FedEx for illegally shipping cigarettes to homes. I bet New York wouldn't sue the Post Office because they cannot. This is really just putting responsibility for what private shippers like UPS and FedEx allow to be shipped, which will then mean that they will start inspecting more and more of your packages. Still sure you want to eliminate the US Postal Service, at least with the Post Office there are laws that protect you, your packages and your privacy.

Huffington Post - U.S. Population Grows At Slowest Rate Since The Great Depression. This is really dangerous on many levels. The long term effect will be that as our population ages, we will not have enough workers; but, equally important is the effect on culture and society. The growth rate is so low that no society has ever recovered from a rate this low, in history.

A Home Of Your Own and Help to Buy

At about 12 minutes and 31 seconds into the first video, you will see Ex-President George W. Bush talk about a program that took tax money and gave down payments for houses to people who couldn't afford the mortgages. He states that the program is "The American Dream Down payment Fund" the other name was "A Home of Your Own".

YouTube - Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis.

I want to make it clear that I am not recommending the video as a whole and disagree with many of the positions taken by some of the people interviewed. Even where I may agree on the positions, I may not agree on their solutions. In either case, here is why I bring this up.

Mark Carney, who is in charge of the Bank of England, is involved in a similar scheme to the ones that caused the housing bubble in America. He is keeping interest rates artificially low and Osborne has instituted a program called, "Help to Buy" which takes money from taxpayers in England to provide down payments for homes and is causing a bubble in the U.K. Why would you possibly want to duplicate something that went so incredibly wrong in the United States.

YouTube - Keiser Report: Housing Bubble Ponzi (E499).

I should also point out that Mr. Carney was in charge of the Bank of Canada, a nation which mostly missed the great recession and has decided to create an even bigger housing bubble than we did in the United States.

Now, I want to go back to the first video. It has a clip of our current head of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, being asked in 2005 what would happen if housing prices fell nation wide and he says that he doesn't buy the premise, that we have never had housing prices fall on a nation wide basis in history (it is at 16 minutes and 31 seconds into the first video). If you wish to believe that Greenspan, Paulson and Bernanke were all stupid or didn't see what was coming that is fine; but, why is it that 8 years later Mr. Carney and Mr. Osborne would duplicate in England the exact same programs that led to the bubble and housing crash that happened in the United States. I am pretty sure that they are aware of the financial crisis that hit us in late 2007 and 2008. Heck, we loaned money to the Bank of England. He cannot not know these things. When they hired him they had to have asked him what he thought caused the economic crash and what he thought he could do to improve the situation. Apparently his answer was to create another housing bubble in England.

Let me put this in real life, real business terms. Imagine that McDonalds decided that they were going to go all vegetarian menus. That McDonalds would no longer sell hamburgers made of beef; but, only vegi-burgers. They spent a lot of time investigating it and decided that it would be more profitable if people went along with it and that it was a healthier choice. I mean, they did it for all the right reasons. After adopting their new menu, sales crashed and all of their stores went bankrupt. Would you hire the guy that was responsible for the decision to be in charge of Burger King next and even more importantly, would you allow him to institute the exact same policy after watching McDonalds go bankrupt for instituting the policy?

The "alternative media" is just as controlled as the mainstream media. Ron Paul and Nigel Lafarge are just as big shills as any others. If they make their living off of lying to you and selling you garbage and lies, they are crooks and deceivers. The most popular alternative media darlings are nothing more than Judas Sheep. Those are sheep who are used to lead other sheep into the slaughterhouse. It is all deceit. The real alternative media is not any media, it is people like me who happen to understand certain industries and don't have a financial interest in getting you to believe anything. The problem is that few have the training or the experience or the time to keep an eye on all of these things unless it is our job. The only reason I have the time is because I do not have an outside life and I find it useful to follow the world events.