March 14, 2012

A Response from Goldman Sachs

From Chairman Lloyd Blankfein



NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – The following letter to Goldman Sachs’ worldwide clients was issued today by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein:

Dear Goldman Client:

By now, many of you have probably read the regrettable resignation letter published in today’s New York Times by former Goldman executive Greg Smith, explaining why he is leaving the firm after twelve years.

In the letter, in which he excoriates Goldman and his practices, Mr. Smith comes across as a man of conscience, ideals, and high moral standards.  And as you read his words, you no doubt asked yourself this troubling question: how could Goldman have hired such a person?

http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/03/14/a-response-from-goldman-sachs/

March 14, 2012

Orrin Hatch: My Last Campaign

(Salt Lake City, UT) - During a news conference on Utah’s public lands management Tuesday, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) announced that this would be his last campaign and his final term in the United States Senate.




Read more: KCSG Television - Senator Orrin Hatch Announces Last Term as Utah s Senator if Re Elected

March 13, 2012

Fed-Speak Day,

"the devotional time set aside to reassure us that all is well due to the god-like competence of the Federal Reserve

Next up, excess bank reserves parked at the Fed where it earns interest. You recall the scam, right? The Fed loans money to the insolvent TBTF banks at zero interest, and they turn around and park the cash in the Fed where it earns a nice rate of interest. Nice skim if you can get it.

The core idea of Central Planning was that all this new money would flow into the real economy and spark new investment, jobs etc. Instead, 80% of that new cash sits in the Fed as dead money. Yes, 80% of the Fed's massive money expansion is in the Fed earning interest--classic dead money doing nothing but bolstering the income of the banks.

the other $400 billion was "invested" in risk assets and carry trades--the Aussie dollar, Japanese yen, high-yield bonds, the oil complex--oops, that actually had a real-world consequence: oil prices rose, and now prices are squeezing the real economy hard.

As this chart shows (see link below), when the cost of oil per unit of GDP rises, GDP tanks--what we call recession. Now that the cost of oil per GDP has spiked again, what do you think will happen to GDP? Can the Fed central-manage everything in the economy? If it's so god-like and powerful, then why is it engineering another recession?"



http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2012/03/four-charts-of-interest-on-fed-speak.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+google%2FRzFQ+%28oftwominds%29

March 12, 2012

Attack of the Billionaires

By Jim Hightower

"It was a total lockdown. As jet after jet swept in surreptitiously with top brass and political decision-makers on board, every entrance to the site of the super-secret Coachella Valley planning summit was secured and patrolled by armed guards and helicopters.

This wasn't a clandestine gathering of America's allies in Afghanistan, but a pow-wow of some 300 über-rich corporate plutocrats and their political hirelings — all intent on obliterating President Barack Obama's re-election bid with an unprecedented deluge of viciously negative attack ads.

Hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers at the posh Renaissance Esmeralda golf resort in California's Palm Springs desert in early February, the confabulees were mobilizing and monetizing what Charles Koch called the "mother of all wars." That would be their self-proclaimed war to enthrone their ilk over workers, consumers, the environment, and democracy itself."

http://www.nationofchange.org/attack-billionaires-1331569452

March 12, 2012

A Point of View: Churchill and the birth of the special relationship

"In a few days' time, David Cameron will be journeying to Washington to visit Barack Obama, and according to a White House Statement, his visit will 'highlight the fundamental importance of the US-UK special relationship and the depth of friendship between the American people and the people of the United Kingdom'.

Perhaps it will, and I hope it does, but it's also likely to give rise to at least two challenging questions. Is America's relationship with Britain as special as it used to be? And is it genuinely more special than with any other country?"



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17272610

March 12, 2012

Money From Nothing: A Primer on Fake Wealth Creation and its Implications

"Only God can create… value out of nothing"—Justice Martin V. Mahoney in First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Jerome Daly.

&quot I’m) doing God’s work." – Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein

"Introduction:

What is fraud except creating “value” from nothing and passing it off as something?
Frauds interlink and grow upon each other. Our debt-based money system serves as the fraud foundation. In our debt-based money system, debt must grow in order to create money. 

Therefore, there is no way to pay off aggregate debt with available money. More money must be lent into the system to make the payments for old debts. This causes overall debt to expand as new money for actual people (vs. banks) always arrives at interest and compounds exponentially. This process is called financialization.

Financialization: The process of making money from nothing in which debt (i.e. poverty, lack) is paradoxically considered an asset (i.e. wealth, gain). In current financialized economies “wealth expansion” comes from the parasitic taxation of productivity in the form of interest on fiat lending. This interest over time consumes a greater and greater share of resources, assets, labor, and livelihood until nothing is left."

Much more at lnk. Smith writes simply and effectively.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2012/03/money-from-nothing-primer-on-fake.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+google%2FRzFQ+%28oftwominds%29

March 11, 2012

Tuning In to Dropping Out

Provocative article by an economics professor.

"Rick Scott, Florida's governor, created a firestorm recently when he suggested that Florida ought to focus more of its education spending on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and less on liberal arts. Scott got this one right: We should focus higher-education dollars on the fields most likely to benefit everyone, not just the students who earn the degrees. Scott, however, missed another part of the equation: We need to focus more attention on the students who are being left behind, the millions of college and high-school dropouts.

Over the past 25 years, the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in STEM subjects has remained more or less constant."

http://chronicle.com/article/Tuning-In-to-Dropping-Out/130967/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

March 11, 2012

Israel Faces an Army of the Ultra-Orthodox

By Charlotte Silver

"JERUSALEM, Mar 11, 2012 (IPS) - The High Court of Justice in Israel has annulled the 2002 Tal Law that had allowed Yeshiva students - scholars of Jewish religious texts - to avoid an otherwise mandatory service in the Israeli army. While politicians on the left and right welcome the court’s decision, the Haredim community considers it an assault on their way of life."

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107028

March 11, 2012

Voting on the Weekend? Democrats Eye a New Election Day

"Americans have long voted on Tuesdays, a tradition held over from the mid-1800s, when it was more convenient for farmers. But voting on Tuesday is more difficult in the 21st century, when people have longer commutes, jobs with odd hours, and generally faster-paced, more crammed lives.


Two top Democrats suggest it would be more convenient in these times to vote on the weekend instead. They want Saturday to be the new Election Day, and ideally for them, that would start in 2014.

Congressmen Steve Israel (N.Y.) and John Larson (Conn.) have announced legislation that would let Americans vote on the first full weekend in November instead of the first Tuesday, a change they say would drive up voter turnout by making it more convenient for people who work during the week to cast ballots."

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/03/voting-on-the-weekend-democrats-eye-a-new-election-day/

March 8, 2012

Our Financialized Economy

"What is financialization? Simply put, it is finance infecting and hollowing out all levels of an economy by incentivizing leverage, debt, opacity, speculation, financial fraud, collusion and the perfection of crony capitalism, i.e. financial Elites' ownership of the government's regulatory and legislative bodies. Here is another less pungent description via Wikipedia:"Financial leverage overrides capital (equity) and financial markets dominate traditional industrial economy and agricultural economics."

<snip>


Financialization is like the bubonic plague--it constantly needs new victims as it kills off its existing hosts. Housing? Dead, killed by financialization, aided, abetted and powered by the Federal Reserve. Now the Fed wants to "save" what it already killed via financialization--housing--by buying $1 trillion in plague-infested mortgages and brute-force efforts to keep interest rates below inflation, i.e. negative rates."



http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2012/03/our-lets-pretend-economy-lets-pretend_08.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+google%2FRzFQ+%28oftwominds%29