In case you didn’t see the news, here’s what Goldman Sachs is able to do thanks to your tax money, Hank Paulson’s $800 billion dollar extortion of Congress, and his money laundering operation also known as “The AIG Bailout.”
“Goldman Sachs will pay out record bonuses after an outstanding first half of the year, according to the Guardian newspaper…
Less competition and a jump in revenue from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products have boosted Goldman’s bottom line, the paper reported Sunday, sourcing Goldman insiders. London staff were recently briefed on the
firm’s prospects and told to expect big bonuses…”
Did you notice that phrase - “less competition.”
When resident Bankster-Gangster in Chief Hank Paulson let Bear Stearns & Lehman fail, he eliminated 40% of Goldman’s competition. Not to mention the profits generated by those who may have had inside information, and who profited on the bear raid - bank run that ultimately led to their demise.
And now Citi, an absolute bloated, bankrupt, black hole… sustained only by your tax dollars, a phony bank stress test, and now legalized Enron style accounting… is giving it’s key employees a big fat 50% pay raise!
June 24 (Bloomberg) — “Citigroup Inc., the U.S. bank that got $45 billion of government funds, will raise base salaries by as much as 50 percent to help compensate for a reduction in annual bonuses, a person familiar with the plan said.
The biggest increases will go to investment bankers and traders, said the person who declined to be identified. Workers in consumer banking, credit cards, legal and risk management will see smaller salary adjustments. The New York-based company also plans to award stock options to try to keep employees after Citigroup’s market value plummeted 84 percent in the past year.
Citigroup joins Morgan Stanley and UBS AG in boosting salaries for executives and employees. Morgan Stanley said last month it will increase base pay for many of the New York-based firm’s top executives and double the pay of Chief Financial Officer Colm Kelleher. “
These sons-a-bitches would be cashing in their 401K’s, trolling Monster.com 24/7, and in many cases, drawing unemployment if it wasn’t for our tax money bailing their asses out.
And don’t tell me about “brain drain.”
Let them try to sell their brownstones in Manhattan, dump the beach house in the Hamptons, and unload their stable of Maybachs and 911 Turbo Cabriolets and run to London. There’s no shortage of derivatives divas, toxic mortgage mavens, CDS shysters, or bankers of any size, shape, or color, anywhere in the world.
Can you imagine the outrage in Congress if GM and Chrysler suddenly gave key management a 50% pay raise, or paid out record bonuses?
Chrysler bond holders (including the Indiana Police & Teachers Pension Fund) got contract law and the capital structure shredded in their face, along with threats from Rhambo to turn the SEC and and the IRS on them if they didn’t roll over. And they got pennies on the dollar, while Goldman, private hedge funds, and offshore foreign banks got paid in full by Hank Paulson’s AIG Money Laundering Operation…
I knew this would happen the day the story broke about Senator Chris Dodd sneaking in the very loophole created by design, to allow this to happen. Chris Dodd is owned lock, stock and barrel by the Bankster-Gangsters, and he tried to sneak this loophole in during the dark of night. I wrote about it on my stock forum at Silicon Investor back in February…
He removed the cap on salaries. Geithner’s plan imposed a $500k salary cap. And Dodd removed it.
And it’s not just “what” he did, it’s “how” he did it.
He snuck his provision in, in the dead of night.
Here’s reality…
The public is raising holy hell, and screaming bloody murder about… “how dare the banksters pay themselves bonuses while they’re writing off billions in losses, and had to have the taxpayer bail them out?”
This anti-bonus mentality isn’t going to go away. These banks are not going to be able to pay top exec’s “bonuses” for a very long time. And with Geithner’s $500k salary cap, the banksters
needed a way to get around these limits, and Dodd just gave it to them.
Dodd didn’t crack down on anybody… he gave them an out.
The banks can now simply raise salaries.
And they can use the “brain drain” and bonus cap excuse to do so.”
The Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote a great article back in March titled “The Great Takeover” about this Bankster-Gangster Bailout being a literal coup d’état. The full article is no longer available (I highly recommend buying Rolling Stone Back Issue #1075, or the full transcript) but, you can read a brief introduction from the story here:
And you can watch an interview about the story with Matt Taibbi below:
I don’t think there’s any question about America being mad as hell. But, the question remains, how much longer is America going to continue to take it?
Did you happen to catch Mid South Bank President and CEO R.J. “Rusty” Clouthier on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning?
This 5 minute and 21 second clip may contain more practical wisdom about the roots of the banking crisis than would an entire semester at the Wharton School of Business.
Clouthier who served six years on the Fed’s board, said that unless we break up the big banks that pose systemic risk and get back to sound banking, we’re just going to re-live this again.
CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Clouthier if he had any of these esoteric mortgage, or derivative products and problems in his bank, and asked him if he saw this banking crisis coming?
Clouthier replied that he did not have any toxic mortgage products, and added that he knew the banking crisis was coming as soon as Gramm-Leach-Bliley was passed in 1999.
Clouthier went on to place much of the blame for this crisis squarely on the shoulders of Alan Greenspan. He went on to say that Greenspan actually approved the Citi - Travelers merger when it was illegal and told them to just go and get the law changed, which they did by repealing key components of Glass-Steagall with Gramm Leach Bliley.
Thank you Rusty Clouthier for speaking the truth.
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has also gone on record as citing the roots of the crisis with Gramm Leach Bliley. And another Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, went as far as to call Senator Phil Gramm “the father” of the financial crisis.
And let’s not forget the role that Wendy Gramm played in Gramm Leach Bliley. Here’s a great article on the “Mother of Enron” Wendy Gramm…
It amazes me that Alan Greenspan has not had to go into hiding in exile, or that another “Father” of the crisis - Hank “The Extortionist” Paulson hasn’t been run out of the country, all the way to China.
Paulson of course, was the architect and chief lobbyist while CEO at Goldman, in strong-arming the SEC to allow the investment banks to self-regulate and to lift the SEC’s limits on their leveraging of capital from 12:1 to 30-40-50:1.
You can thank Hank for the resulting failures of Lehman and Bear Stearns, the rescue of Merrill, and the bailout of Goldman and Morgan Stanley.
Here’s two excellent articles detailing Paulson’s role as one of the chief architechts of the financial crisis.
Break up the banks now too big to fail. Limit the leveraging of capital. Get rid of unregulated derivatives. And return to the sound banking principles of the Rusty Clouthier’s of the banking world.
Almost too simple isn’t it?
Of course it is. So now we’re turning over near “dictatorial” powers to the privately owned Federal Reserve, and expanding it’s powers outside the banking system.
Instead of sending the looters to prison and reforming the system, we’ve just handed them the keys to the entire US economy.
The GDX & GLD ETF’s are now sitting at a key technical area as they have both reached areas of strong prior technical support, and the classic pivot point of a 50% pullback of the prior move.
36.50 is a key pivot point for the GDX. And with this mornings negative open, that may be tested. I would not be surprised to see a strong intra-day reversal today, and if 36.50 holds, a break out above GDX 39 will trigger an new bullish uptrend leg for gold stocks.
I like this as an initial re-entry trade with tight stops.
Watch the large cap institutional fav’s like ABX, NEM and GG to lead the reversal.
I also like PUT “sales” at these levels and given the high volatility in the sector, there are some very rich premiums to be taken.
All eyes on the Dollar, and keep those stops tight.
Let’s see if we can generate a turn in the gold stocks today.
This week in precious metals was all about the US Treasury Bond auctions.
Would the Chinese and the Russians walk their recent negative talk? Would foreign buyers boycott the offering, holding out for higher rates? And would Ben Bernanke have to step in as a buyer of last resort?
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–Credit markets were warmed Thursday by a surprisingly well received auction in Treasurys amid investors’ increasing appetite for risk.
“People have been jumping into deals across the board,” said Mirko Mikelic, portfolio manager at Fifth Third Asset Management in Grand Rapids, Mich., in reference to increased demand for investment-grade corporate debt as well.
Another interesting dynamic was the rise of foreign investment, which understandably dried up amid last-year’s collapse. Both Treasury and Agency debt issues Thursday saw increasing demand from foreign investors, as the U.S. begins to look less risky despite daunting fundamental challenges ahead.”
Not the answer we hoped for…
Foreign buyers showed up. Coverage was strong. The US Dollar bounced. And the momentum traders that were long gold expecting negative Treasury results, are now exiting. And naturally, the hedgies are giving them a little nudge on the short side this morning.
So where does that leave gold?
Well, nothing has changed for the still very positive long term fundamentals underlying the gold price. Real rates are still negative. Both the Chinese and the Russians have announced allocation shifts in their reserve holdings, easing their US Dollar exposure. And in addition to the Fed — the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the ECB, and the Swiss Central Bank are all engaging in quantitative easing. And the Canadians are thinking about it.
Last week Kansas City Fed Governor Thomas Hoenig warned that the Fed needed to raise interest rates before inflation forced the Fed’s hand.
June 3 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig said policy makers should lift the benchmark U.S. interest rate before “inflation forces our hand,” resisting public pressure to keep it low.
“If we fail to bring policy into balance, we will have significant inflationary pressure,” Hoenig said in a speech today in Sheridan, Wyoming. Policy makers also need to heed rising Treasury yields, which are signaling the market’s concern that prices will rise, he said.
Hoenig’s comments contrast with remarks today made by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who told Congress that he expects inflation to remain low. The regional bank president supported the chairman’s view that the U.S. budget deficit threatens economic growth.
Deficits, along with accommodative monetary policy, are creating volatility in long-term Treasury markets, Hoenig said. Rising Treasury yields have complicated efforts by Fed policy makers to stimulate the economy by bringing down short-term borrowing costs.
“I suggest strongly that we need to be alert to the markets’ message and begin in earnest to bring monetary policy into better balance before inflation forces our hand,” said the 62-year-old regional bank chief, who does not vote on rates this year. “The markets won’t be fooled by artificially low rates for long.”
And perhaps more ominous (and bullish for gold) was the IMF’s warning to European central bankers. The IMF warned European banks to raise capital immediately while sentiment was still “optimistic”, and demanded greater transparency and disclosure of losses. And perhaps most importantly for gold — warned central banks to stand ready to use “all unconventional measures necessary” as a negative feedback loop could soon send Euro economies spiraling once again into deflation.
“To restore confidence, you need total disclosure of possible losses,” said Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s managing director. “Not only losses which are linked to the original sub-prime crisis, but also the losses linked to the slowdown in the economy, and impaired assets. There are lots of things that still have to be disclosed,” he said, adding that credit mechanism remained jammed.
The latest IMF report said the chance to raise fresh bank equity while optimism lasts should be “seized without delay” and demanded a “comprehensive review to assess capital needs and viability.”
The IMF says eurozone banks will need to raise a further $375bn (£235bn), compared to $250bn for US banks, and has called for a stress-test along the lines of the US Treasury probe.
There are widespread concerns that Germany in particular is hiding bank problems until after the September elections, using its “bad bank” scheme to keep “zombie institutions” alive.
The eurozone is not yet out of the woods, and risks sliding into a deeper downturn. “Adverse feedback loops between the financial and real sectors could trigger a protracted deflation,” said the IMF.
I found it particularly interesting how the IMF warned banks to raise additional capital “immediately” while investor sentiment was still optimistic. So much for those greenshoots they’ve been trying to sell the public.
This rally in the HUI Gold Bugs Index gave us a quick 130 point, +47% move in less than six weeks off the HUI 274 lows. The HUI Index has traded beautifully within it’s trading channel since the first of the year, and I’ve always been a believer in - “if it ain’t broke, don’t go trying to fix it.”
I took my first tranche of trading profits off at the top of the trading channel at 370. Another tranche at HUI 400 (expecting resistance at that big round number) and got stops triggered on the pullback from HUI 404…taking me back down to a core hold position.
The greatest benefit of technical analysis is that it removes every traders greatest enemy - emotion. And it also helps us identify discrepancies between price and risk - ie: Silver’s valuation gap to gold…
And silver delivered it’s largest one month gain in 22 years.
So where does that leave us now?
Fundamentally, nothing has changed. This pullback was due given the near +50% move in the HUI over the last 6 weeks, and the largest one month gain in twenty two years for silver.
And where I differ from many gold bugs, is I prefer to anticipate the smackdowns and interventions, rather than having to react to them. You must remember that this administration contains both Larry Summers and Paul Volcker.
Summers of course, was the co-architect along with Robert Rubin of the great gold leasing/price suppression scheme of the 1990’s. And we need to heed Paul Volckers “greatest regret” from his time as Fed Governor, that being — “losing control of the gold price.”
Until they lose control of the bond market, they are still “in” the gold price suppression game.
…please heed that.
While I think putting a trade on in front of this weeks Treasury auction was a prudent risk:reward play. Now, after a successful auction cover, we should probably be expecting a potential smackdown.
And the beauty of selling into strength, ahead of, and in anticipation of the market… is that you can now profitably buy the pullback. .
Here’s my updated trading channel & trend chart for the HUI. We’re still building on a series of higher lows and higher highs, and that’s always bullish.
On this present pullback, once again I’ll look to use put “sales” as my preferred initial re-entry trade on a 50%ish pullback and retracement of this most recent move. That would put our initial re-entry target around HUI 340ish.
The trading ranges on the HUI have been highly profitable, and technically stable over virtually this entire gold cycle since 2000. If it ain’t broke - don’t go trying to fix it.
Heed the warning the IMF just gave to the European central banks. There are two catalysts on the horizon that will propel gold to new record highs. Another round of quantitative easing by the Euro Bankers, and the Fed losing control of the US Treasury market,and having to step in as the buyer of last resort… which will of course, crater the US Dollar.
Until then, take what the market gives you — the trading channel trade.
Did you just see Dominion Energy CEO Tom Farrell on CNBC
this morning?
The poor guy looked like a puppy who just got neutered. I
felt embarrassed for the guy.
Farrell was clearly afraid to answer direct questions
on live television from Joe Kernen and the co-host about
the Obama policies on Cap & Trade.
It looks like America’s CEOs learned their lessons well from
the shake down of the Chrysler bond holders…
Go with the party line, or the government will use all it’s
resources to destroy you. The Bully Pulpit, the SEC, IRS,
FCC, EPA…
We have now reached a time and place where CEO’s are afraid
to speak out publicly against government policies.
Cap & Trade was a creation of the Club of Rome roundtable
group. Cap & Trade will be like spraying economic greenshoots
with “Agent Orange.” Jobs and industry will flee the US for
China and India.
This is thugonomics at it’s worst. Socialist agendas while
those selected elites profiteer from the new public-private
partnerships.
I’ll skip debunking the science behind Cap & Trade, let’s
cut right to following the money.
Just take a look who the profiteers behind Cap & Trade are…
“Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange–the rest of the story”
By Judi McLeod Wednesday, March 25, 2009
“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing
Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes.
In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity,
Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will
likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon
reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress
as president.”
The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of
directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in
two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and
launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which
now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system
for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and
projects worldwide.”
And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.
The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily
influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that
lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate
Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North
America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission
registry reduction system for emission sources and offset
projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys
his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment
Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed
partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and
Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding
partner. The Generation Investment Management business has
considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading
firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate
Exchange.
Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a
blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a
former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth
Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in
the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the
Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States.
That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he
has been working to make the communist country the world’s
next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the
big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of
the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.
Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of
Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should
go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence
Review (EIR).
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the
business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17,
1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth”
travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green
sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc.
(MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a
process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the
Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative
technology that can save the environment, and make money for
investors at the same time.
“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote
EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore
intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered
lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”
(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is
that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another
serpent comes slithering out).
“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development
grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on
a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive
another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point,
its only source of revenue.
“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card,
Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it
maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE
scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996,
corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was
about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and
October 1996, seven corporate officers–including Maurice
strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the
company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996–a Sunday–the
company issued a press release, announcing for the first time,
that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the
bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.
“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a
share. By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class
action suit against the company and its directors.
Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with
Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a
Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was
also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten
Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners
agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when
eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the
value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before
selling it off.
In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was
found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million
from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum
Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.
These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement,
who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to
become President of the United States of America.
If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the
funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a
professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching
constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a
year later in 2002.
It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate
Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of
cronyism.
The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs.
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The
Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money
for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives. John is the
brother of William Ayers.
What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from
Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political
career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist
Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of
the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah
Wright.
Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go
on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.
But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.
The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was
funded by Obama before he was POTUS.
Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-
generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the
controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through
Congress.
Obama was never the character he created for himself in the
fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”. He’s the agent
of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the
Chicago Climate Exchange.
The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming
fraud, and to borrow a line from children playing Hide and
Seek, Here they come, ready or not!
************************************************
When George H.W. Bush stood in front of the cameras and
talked about the “Thousand Points Of Light” when he
announced a New World Order, he was talking about the
Maurice Strong’s of the world. Those who wield the real
power. Those who give the Congress’ and Parliaments of
the world their policy marching orders from the various
Think Tanks, Roundtable Groups, and NGO fronts of the
globalist bankster gangsters.
We are witnessing an unprecedented, historic reshaping of
governments, culture, and economies by blunt force.
The world as we know it, will never be the same.
David Rockefeller said that millions would become cannon
fodder from that change. Bill Clinton’s former Deputy Secretary
Of State said this…
“In the 21st century, nations as we know them will be obsolete;
all states will recognize a single, global authority. National
sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
- Strobe Talbot, President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State,
as quoted in Time Magazine, July 20th, l992.
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about
George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order.”
Continue to smugly dismiss all these public comments from
the globalists as silly conspiracy theory nonsense, even
as virtually every single item of their agenda gets bum-
rushed through Congress.
Continue to focus on a DOW rally that was given to you,
and paid for by your TARP dollars, in order to keep you
distracted just long enough to ram-rod through cap & trade,
the nationalization of health care, the elimination of your
rights and liberties, and the looting of the US Treasury.
Continue to ignore their real agenda as you buy into their
carefully crafted and orchestrated “animal spirits” greenshoots
campaign… hoping that your home values will bounce back,
hoping that you’ll make back the halving of your 401K,
hoping that the exodus of jobs will stop, and hoping that
everything will return to the way it was.
Continue with your self-absorbed, self-indulgent, pseudo-
intellectual smuggness as America and the world as you know it,
is systematically dismantled, looted, and destroyed,
all in broad daylight, right under your noses.
And one day when your children, or grandchildren look you in
the eye and ask why? Why you let this happen? Why you did
nothing to stop it?
Please don’t lie to them and tell them you had no idea.
