Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
It is a cosmic crime. It is the assignment of power to a very few people, to determine the value of all capital and labor in the world. It's an affront to decency, it's an affront to democracy.
Perhaps the largest case of “buyer’s denial,” at least in terms of alleged damages, is in the fraud involving a tiny company known as CMKM Diamonds, which purported to have valuable diamond mining claims. In reality, what it had was a publicity machine, including the sponsorship of a car at “funny car” races around the country.
Several shareholders in CMKM — some of whom kept buying shares after the government exposed the fraud — want 10 current and former commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay them $3.87 trillion, an amount equal to about half the United States government debt in public hands. You might think that would be enough, but the suit claims those are merely compensatory damages. They also want punitive damages, but do not cite a figure.
That is an impressive amount for a company whose last published balance sheet showed total assets of $344. That is dollars, not millions.
The tale the shareholders tell, in a lawsuit filed in January in federal district court in Santa Ana, Calif., is of a conspiracy involving not just the S.E.C., but also the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
nathan28 wrote:
vig, you say above no one wants to get caught holding bonds--maybe (i mean, right now is a good time not to have any paper wealth), but look at GM. Senior bondholders are getting paid out, everyone else's contracts, shares, pensions are getting trashed. At what point does regular bankruptcy become flat-out looting? That rumbling about a sales tax sounds like it'd fit, too--what better way to pay senior bondholders than to institute regressive taxes that hit the people who buy bonds the least hard?
vigilant wrote:
OLD MCDONALD HAD A FARM, EEII EEII OHHHHH
nathan28 I know that you personally don't need a response of this magnitude because you understand the game. But considering that its been a while since I have written anything financially related I decided to do an in depth explanation in answer to your question for forum readers that need and appreciate the 'finance for dummies' or 'cliff note' version. What I wrote is not complicated by financial jargon. Its written in alley language that we can all understand.
Very salient points, and what is happening at GM is looting. GM isn't going bankrupt, its being taken over by the biggest players on the block, and you know they will get paid no matter what they have to take from whomever. These people are big enough in the game, and control enough of the game, that they can direct these bailout funds to a "first in first out" status.
Regardless of what "should be", as you astutely know, these (sic) bailout investments can be tiered in any way the big players see fit, much like preferred and common stock. Preferred stock gets honored first, and the pension holders with common stock will get screwed if there isn't enough money left in the game. These people have no intention of putting themselves in a position to lose a single dime because they simply don't have to.
Looting was the intention from the beginning, and looting they have been doing from the first note of the first dance. They fully intend to load their books with every industry and business they want, such as GM, and have the bill paid by our future labor, us taxpayers.
The problem that could still arise for some of the players is the possibility that the biggest players are not through screwing the smaller players, the bag holders, the chumps, the Bernie Madoff's in the game. Every time a Bernie gets chumped, it directly extrapolates itself into the common man's pocket too through pension funds, stock holdings, municipal bonds that institutions were holding, etc...whatever...But it isn't the common man that is my focus of these thoughts in this writing.
A lot of people got burned when they pimped Bernie Madoff, because Bernie had pimped a lot of people out of their money under false pretenses. I haven't checked it diligently, but it appears that most of the people that got pimped by Bernie were still smaller players that were bilking the public through the ownership of charities, and other dubious enterprises.
Some were simply regular citizens with enough money to give Bernie, but it seems that the bulk may have been people that are not in a position to complain too loudly, like the people that were skimming charities. Its sort of like stealing money from a drug dealer, knowing that he can't complain too loudly, because if he does, the people that looted him will bust him and put him in jail.
Bernie was considered a 'new rich pest' that had no blue blood. Search Bloomburg Financial's site for an article that includes both Madoff and Rothschild. Read the touted esteemed write up of Rothschild's glowing 250 year history, as they compare it to Bernie's piker short term little piggy ass. The jest of the article is, over and over, "Bernie is a new rich slug with no bloodline, and Rothschild is an esteemed family of hundreds of years history that funded the Battle of Waterloo, etc..." Gives you a perspective of how this game is played.
Bernie was the guy at the parties, that had enough money to get in the door, but that nobody wanted to stand around and talk to because he was irritating. He had the right clothes and shoes, but you could just tell that he had tried too hard. Too trendy, and didn't have that old blood dignity, so to speak. He spent too much time hamming it up talking about "how we wealthy people do things"...blah...blah...blah...He tried too hard to fit in and equate himself with the true blue blood wealth instead of being quiet and humble, and in subtle manner letting the blue bloods know that he was inferior to them, and thanking them for letting him participate. He was the guy at the party that the truly wealthy blue bloods would say about, "i'll be damn glad when the bag he's holding hits the floor so we can get rid of his irritating ass because he is on my last nerve"...
As far as the shaky feelings for bond holders goes, the reason I alluded to that is because the yield curve has been close to having its back broken. The bond market was choking on that last load of bonds they were unloading. We have seen the biggest gap in the bond market in history. Too much too quick. This heist is unprecedented in all of history and some of the smaller "investors" also known as looters, in the chain are scared, and rightly so. This is a once in a hundred year reloading, and when that happens, anybody's fan can get hit with shit if they are not the biggest shark in the tank.
I use the word "smaller" as if 100 billion isn't a lot of money but we know it is. Maybe 'control" would be a better word. Smaller players have no control, and if they get chumped its OVER FOR THEIR ASS IN A BIG WAY. Not only are they broke, but since they were so easily disregarded and used up, they have to fear getting busted and end up in jail too. If the control guys are willing to bankrupt them, obviously they are only unrespected griss for the mill, and have no certainty that they won't end up in the worst possible position, if the game also needs a fall guy.
They realize that this situation has been pushed to its limit. Essentially, its all about selling the future labor and productivity of 'us' the taxpayer to whomever will buy the debt. These bankers only own and control the world by loaning a "promise that the mules in the field will produce", and generate a certain Gross Domestic Product. In the U.S. the bankers have approximately 300 million mules in the field. These mules, according to average statistics, will each generate X amount of dollars in X amount of time. Were they standing around talking, the conversation would be such as...literally too. We're "plowshares", and the incentive we receive, whether we know from whence the pain comes or not, is called the "sword"...
"What have you been up to lately?"
"not much, just driving swords into plow shares, you know how it is"
"which section of the herd are you going to buy next?"
"not sure yet, but I have some cowpokes checking the stock"
Owning debt is the most coveted place in the financial hierarchy. The more you own, the more interest on the debt that comes your way. Even more valuable, are the taxes that will be collected through the labor this debt represents. Taxes equal labor credits, energy, force, work, in practically endless supply. For the biggest players, its free money, because they are not loaning anything at all of value that they own, other than our labor. They can sell this future labor to buyers for a lump sum right now. These buyers are mostly buying this future labor with "nothing" too, because the Chinese Government is printing money too, its only paper. It literally is a 'slave trade' and nothing more.
We enter into it voluntarily because we need food, so we need those bank note dollars. It is legal to pay workers with "money" but a man just got arrested for doing so. Legally these bank notes we carry around are not money. Gold and silver coin are indeed money, and the man that got busted paid his workers in gold coin, real money. He paid them at the rate of the face value of the coin, which is of course worth a lot more than face value, and according to the constitution that is legal money.
The grocery business, like the car and housing industries, is being bought by the same people. Large independent farmers were paid not to grow food. Remember Willie Nelson and farm aid? Now it is down to the small yard plot gardener growing a few veggies in his back yard. They just passed laws to regulate that too, because of course, you're too dumb to grow food and might hurt yourself with it, so it needs to be inspected. If you transport it, even a basket of tomatoes that you are taking to your Aunt, it is subject to reporting, tracking, and inspection. Slowly, the requirements to even grow a tomato plant will become so stringent, and the seed cost so high, they plan to drive the backyard gardener out of business too. You won't be able to save seeds from last years plants because seeds are being rendered "ungerminable" before shipment. So...seeds will become scarce.
A lot of our asses are now working for the Chinese, Russians, French, or whoever will fork over something of value to get their hands on our future labor. Instead of being put on a ship and taken overseas like the old days, electronic transactions and transfers of items of real value are used due to the fact that we now have cargo planes to collect the ransom for our labor quickly. Slave traders get to keep the slaves, sell their labor, while also making them buy their goods from the company store, which increases the value of a slave to its owner. Anything the slave can be enticed or forced to buy or borrow is extra revenue. The old days of having to buy from the "Company Store" are just around the corner...again.
Some of these guys have gotten so big, that the U.S. is only one pasture in a much bigger farm. This makes the game much more dangerous if you have no control because it makes it much harder to understand how much debt has been sold from the farm. Pastures are countries, and there are farms with several pastures tended by the same farmer (banker, or small group of bankers) Rothschild's wife didn't allude to him as a "gentlemen farmer" for nothing ya know. Farmer of men...Old McDonald had a farm, eeii eeii ohhhh. Means more than ya think. Fe Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman...means more than ya think.
These deals are structured in all kinds of crazy ways, and the words "bond market" covers it for the most part, and aside from, and in addition to that, the sorts of deals they swing that we never know about are as many and as creative as they can think up. They might take a goldmine in trade for our asses. Just like all those CDO's that stand as an untraceable front for the hidden companies behind them that are buying the GM's, and etc...We never know. This future labor is being sold off, and the bulk of it is being kept by our owners for themselves, because it is their lifeblood, and without it, the whole house of cards falls tomorrow. They are forcing us to borrow money, and also forcing us to work our asses off to pay the interest on what we borrow, and forcing us to pay taxes on the worthless paper they run through our hands.
This paper, to these bankers, only represents one thing, and that is a "labor credit". If they can get us to work for these pieces of paper, and then force us to give a lot of it back to them, they can in turn give it back to us, and have us do whatever they want us to do for them. We have to have it, for one reason, and that is because that is what the bankers demand that we pay taxes with. Since it is what we have to pay taxes with, we must scramble around and get us some of it. That is what makes it valuable as a trading unit between us, the common folk, too. If we didn't need it for taxes, we would barter and trade amongst ourselves, because we wouldn't need their little pieces of paper. We might use a lot of it, but we wouldn't have to have it.
Each dollar represents a certain amount of labor from a school teacher, plumber, engineer, etc...THE TRUE BEAUTY IS, THAT THEY CAN STORE THESE LABOR CREDITS, INDEFINITELY, AND THEY CAN BE CONVERTED INTO ANYTHING THESE BANKERS LITTLE HEARTS DESIRE. ]
A plumber pays taxes, but right now they don't need plumbing done. No problem. They store his labor in a jar or a piggy bank. In a couple of days they need a soldier to go kill some folks that wear turbons. No problem, they take the plumbers labor, simply convert it into a soldier, by giving the soldier the plumbers labor, in the form of his tax money. A teacher's labor can be magically converted into an airplane, or the services of an engineer. These labor credits don't spoil, and like true magic, they become whatever these people desire. Now thats magic...
If they shove too many trillions in taxpayer debt down our throats, more than we can work off in a reasonable amount of time, the people that fork over something of value to buy it, and expect a return, will get screwed because too much debt was sold, and there are not enough of our little mulie asses to work it off. These people that get screwed could be anybody from hedgefunds run by rich kids that inherited a trust fund, to some foreign government, but it damn well won't be the international bankers that own us and run this side of the show.
Anything that gets left holding the bag, if it squeaks and causes trouble, will be eaten. Plain and simple....
Question is, truly, how much debt have they sold? How much do they plan to keep for themselves? Are they selling way too much, with full intention of eating some squeakers, because they know they can screw them out of some valuables in the process?
Probably...Folks that have enough money to play this game could end up with that little Troll Doll you win at the carnival, with long blue wooly hair in trade for their valuables. Some already have...
I'm not sure if that is what these rumors of a run on the Comex Gold Exchange are about or not. Of course Comex doesn't have the bullion to back the worthless paper receipts they have written. They have sold tons upon tons of gold that does not exist, also known as "paper gold". John Brown buys gold from Comex, but of course most of the time John Brown does not take physical delivery of the gold. Like a stock purchase, he accepts a piece of paper that says, "John Brown own 1 million in gold".
This is the oldest game in town, and is how fractional reserve banking was initially born. Just like the fictional money we think we have in the bank, that is not there, neither is the gold in the Comex Gold Exchange. Like a bank seldom if ever suffers a rush of people wanting their money all at once, call a "run", neither does the Comex suffer a "run" from people all suddenly showing up demanding their gold.
The biggest players are not stupid, and they don't buy paper gold. If they buy gold, they have it delivered to the doorstep COD. The rest of the people that buy gold, almost never take physical delivery of it. The people that do are usually the incredibly small buyers that think its nifty to have two gold coins under the bed, or the smart people. Most people are not smart enough to demand physical delivery.
Comex has a lots of folks goodies held at ransom though...
on bonds
Quote:
What's happening in bond land? The latest US govt bond auction was for $110 billion. Two years ago the average monthly bond auction total was $5 billion, $10 billion, numbers like that. The US govt finances its debt with bonds. A $2 trillion deficit means $2 trillion in new bonds needs to be issued. Approx. $200 billion a month.
While that action may be in the pipeline, as of today the ACTIONS taken in the bond market by the players are what is important. And those actions, believe it or not, are to buy bonds. Money is starting to come out of general equities, aka the stock market, and into bonds. Money is not coming out of bonds, it's going in. This is what the chartists don't understand. Money isn't just trickling in, it's pouring in. But it's not enough to meet the govt's skyrocketing demand for money!
http://www.greenenergyinvestors.com/ind ... 0&p=110721
on the COMEX and precious metals
Quote:
My reaction: The strange activity in precious metals includes:
1) A surprisingly small amount of gold contracts were delivered, especially when compared to silver. Only 16% of June gold contracts standing for delivery on Thursday were delivered compared to 94% of June silver contracts.
2) The open interest numbers for Friday's big up day in both gold and silver unexpectedly/unexplainably fell. If shorts had actually been covering their positions, Friday's price activity would have been much more spectacular to the upside. This suggest that perhaps there were more deliveries than reported.
3) There has been record breaking volume of contracts traded in both gold and silver in the last few weeks.
4) There have been large strange fluctuation in COMEX’s reported silver inventories.
My Suspicions:
Delivery requests are being understated. There is only one thing that can make open interest go up: someone sells new contracts to short gold. However, there are two things that can cause open interest to decrease:
1) Short covering—Shorts buy back contracts they sold.
2) Deliveries—Shorts delivery gold to settle contracts.
I believe open interest for gold fell on Friday because of deliveries that were, for some reason, not reported. As for what is happening with COMEX’s silver inventory or the eye-popping volumes being traded, I have no idea, but it is strange.
Any nation or large investment group seeking to rapidly acquire physical metal in large quantities WILL upset the market in a big way. If the Chinese can stablize their own economy and undermine those of the West at the same time by making LARGE BIDS for gold and silver on the Comex and LBMA and insisting on delivery they can shut down the exchanges and raise the price of the metal very fast. Being that the chinese are still trying to obtain as much gold and silver by stealth as they can they will not do this yet, however, if they are denied in their bids on physical metal and told to accept cash equivilent instead they have nothing to lose by crashing the London and New York price fixing scam on the metals. Doing so will vastly raise the prices that Chinese mines obtain for their production, and being a large producer it will greatly benefit their ability to build up their capital reserves and back their currency for long term stability. It wil also give them the ability to influence the price of the metal more themselves.
link
madeupname452 wrote:or is this fraud bigger?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/business/12norris.htmlPerhaps the largest case of “buyer’s denial,” at least in terms of alleged damages, is in the fraud involving a tiny company known as CMKM Diamonds, which purported to have valuable diamond mining claims. In reality, what it had was a publicity machine, including the sponsorship of a car at “funny car” races around the country.
Several shareholders in CMKM — some of whom kept buying shares after the government exposed the fraud — want 10 current and former commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay them $3.87 trillion, an amount equal to about half the United States government debt in public hands. You might think that would be enough, but the suit claims those are merely compensatory damages. They also want punitive damages, but do not cite a figure.
That is an impressive amount for a company whose last published balance sheet showed total assets of $344. That is dollars, not millions.
The tale the shareholders tell, in a lawsuit filed in January in federal district court in Santa Ana, Calif., is of a conspiracy involving not just the S.E.C., but also the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
I dont know but it is a strange murky tale.
FWIW Christopher Story has a unique and difficult to read take on it here
CMKM/CMKX $3.87 TRILLION LAWSUIT GOES 'MAINSTREAM'
MacCruiskeen wrote:I do'n't understand this. Can someone explain?
Continuing on the trail of exposing what is rapidly becoming one of the largest frauds in commodity markets history is the most recent interview by Eric King with GATA’s Adrian Douglas, Harvey Orgen (who recently testified before the CFTC hearing) and his son, Lenny, in which the two discuss their visit to the only bullion bank vault in Canada, that of ScotiaMocatta, located at 40 King Street West in Toronto, and find the vault is practically empty. This is a relevant segue to a class action lawsuit filed against Morgan Stanley, which was settled out of court, in which it was alleged that Morgan Stanley told clients it was selling them precious metals that they would own in full and that the company would store, yet even despite charging storage fees was not in actual possession of the bullion. It appears that this kind of lack of physical holdings by all who claim to have gold in storage, is pervasive as the actual gold globally is held primarily in paper or electronic form. Lenny Organ who was the person to enter the vault of ScotiaMocatta, says “What shocked me was how little gold and silver they actually had.” Lenny describes exactly how much (or little as the case may be) silver was available – roughly 60,000 ounces. As for gold – 210 400 oz bars, 4,000 maples, 500 eagles, 10 kilo bars, 10 one kilogram pieces of gold nugget form, which Adrian Douglas calculates as being $100 million worth, which is just one tenth of what the Royal Mint of Canada sold in 2008, or over $1 billion worth of gold. As Orgen concludes: “The game ends when the people who own all these paper obligations say enough and take physical delivery, and that’s when the mess will occur.”
Also note the interesting detour into what Stephan Spicer of the Central Fund Of Canada, said regarding his friend at a major bank, who wanted access to his 15,000 oz of silver, and had to wait 6-8 weeks for its to be flown in from Hong Kong.
It is funny that central bankers thought they could take the ponzi mentality of infinite dilution of all assets coupled with infinite debt issuance, as they have done to fiat money, and apply it to gold, in essence piling leverage upon leverage. They underestimated gold holders’ willingness to be diluted into perpetuity – when the realization that gold owned is just 1% of what is physically deliverable, you will see the biggest bank run in history.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a history of popular folly by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. The book chronicles its subjects in three parts: "National Delusions", "Peculiar Follies", and "Philosophical Delusions".
The subjects of Mackay's debunking include economic bubbles, alchemy, crusades, witch-hunts, prophecies, fortune-telling, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), shape of hair and beard (influence of politics and religion on), murder through poisoning, haunted houses, popular follies of great cities, popular admiration of great thieves, duels, and relics. Present day writers on economics, such as Andrew Tobias and Michael Lewis, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles.[1]
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 169 guests