"Who runs Bartertown?"

IMF Issue Working Paper on Eliminating Cash

"...While governments are pressing this using terrorism as the excuse, you do not eliminate the entire monetary system of the world to even catch 100 terrorists and their camels. This is all about the collapse in socialism and the desperate need to raise money."

"The IMF (International Monetary Fund) or as I like to call them – International Mafia Federation – is showing it’s true colors and proving beyond question this organization is nothing more than street-corner-thugs in high priced suits..."

***IMF De-Cashing – Soft-Selling Financial Enslavement

Sell everything whose value only exists as a result of confidence in central bank(ster)s.

***Global Debt Explodes At ‘Eye-Watering’ Pace To Hit £170 Trillion

“...Consider 0% and near-zero interest rates to be the economic equivalent of a defibrillator: the most-extreme, last-resort attempt to “stimulate” the human body when it is near death. Our economies have had this economic defibrillator attached to them for more than eight years – without the slightest glimmer of life...” ***The Great Western Economic Depression

***The banking industry abuses its customers worse than United Airlines 

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: Has Former Goldman Sachs President, Gary Cohn, Gone Rogue on Glass-Steagall?

"There are a few important things to know about Gary Cohn. Until Donald Trump tapped him to be the Director of the National Economic Council, he had worked at Goldman Sachs for a quarter century, rising to the position of President of the firm and second only to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein. Cohn walked out of Goldman in December with approximately $285 million, comprised mainly of Goldman stock, some of which had been granted early vesting. Since his exit from Goldman, Cohn has wasted no time in selling large chunks of his Goldman shares according to his financial disclosures. While this serves to reduce his conflicts of interest with Goldman, it also provides a face-saving means of exiting a massive position in a Wall Street bank without the appearance of panic or disloyalty.

Against this backdrop comes the widely reported news that on April 5 Cohn met with Senators serving on the Senate Banking Committee and expressed support for bringing back a modern-day version of the depression era Glass-Steagall Act – legislation which was passed as a result of the Wall Street collapse of 1929 to 1933, which erased 90 percent of the market’s value. (Yes, 90 percent.) That legislation created Federally-insured deposits and barred insured commercial banks from being affiliated with Wall Street investment banks. It protected the U.S. financial system for 66 years until its repeal in 1999 under the Bill Clinton administration. It took only nine years after its repeal for Wall Street to implode in the same epic fashion as the ’29 crash.

The only reason that Wall Street survived at all from 2008 to 2010 was that the Federal Reserve was secretly funneling a cumulative $16 trillion in almost zero rate loans to any Wall Street bank, foreign or domestic, that could fog a mirror and claim to be viable. On top of that, the Fed engaged in a toxic securities cleanup program benignly known as Quantitative Easing, where it bought up Wall Street’s dodgy mortgage-backed securities, putting the mess on its own balance sheet — where much of it remains to this day.

Theories abound as to why a long-tenured veteran of Goldman would want to earn the ire and backlash of his colleagues on Wall Street by taking on such an unpopular Wall Street position as breaking up the biggest banks on Wall Street and forcing them to shed their commercial banking operations. Goldman itself became a bank holding company at the peak of the financial crisis in 2008, allowing it to borrow with abandon from the Fed.

One theory is that Cohn is still talking his Goldman book. Patrick Jenkins of the Financial Times writes:
“But Glass-Steagall is not exactly anti-Wall Street. It is anti-universal bank. So while it would be a nightmare for Goldman Sachs’s big investment banking competitors, it would be a relative non-event for Goldman Sachs itself. In competitive terms, it could be a huge boost.”

It’s true that Goldman’s commercial banking operations are dwarfed by the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — all of which function as universal banks with investment banking, brokerage firms, and commercial banking under one bank holding company roof. But what people tend to forget is that Goldman Sachs has parked a mind-numbing amount of derivatives at its own commercial bank, Goldman Sachs Bank USA.

Wall Street On Parade reported the following on this matter in January:
“The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is the regulator of national banks. Each quarter it publishes a report on the derivative holdings of the biggest Wall Street banks and their holding companies. Its most recent report shows that as of September 30, 2016 Goldman Sachs Bank USA (a taxpayer-backstopped, FDIC insured bank where it holds its derivatives) had “credit exposure to risk-based capital” of 433 percent. That figure was more than double that of JPMorgan Chase (216 percent) and six times that of Bank of America (68 percent).

“There’s another big problem with Goldman Sachs: it has a miniscule asset base compared to the big guns on Wall Street but it’s attempting to play in the big leagues in terms of derivatives…Goldman Sachs is the third largest holder of derivatives on Wall Street with $45.48 trillion in notionals (face amount). (As of 2015, the entire GDP of the United States was only $18 trillion.) But Goldman only has $880 billion in assets. That ratio compares to JPMorgan Chase with $2.5 trillion in assets and $50.6 trillion in derivatives and Citigroup with $1.8 trillion in assets and $51.78 trillion in derivatives.”

The theory that has yet to gain traction is that there may be many more executives at Goldman who agree with Cohn on the point that the financial system remains on shaky footing and that holding high-risk derivatives in the trillions of dollars on the books of taxpayer-backstopped commercial banks is a lousy way to run a financial system — that it is simply courting the next financial disaster and taxpayer bailout from a nation that has yet to recover from the last one."

Fred & EntendanceInvestors Beach

***Hey Everyone! Don't You Dare Read This!

***Don't Get Hooked!

***The pursuit of Excellence *Inquiring minds only!

History Repeating. 5:30 Mark is Critical.

I have discovered the secret of the philosopher's stone; it is to make gold out of paper. -John Law 

"Goldman Sachs is on a shopping spree. Last week, it spent $500 million to buy 12 percent of Riverstone Holdings, a private equity firm focused on energy investments. This is part of a $2 billion private equity strategy for the vampire squid. Through a couple of subsidiary funds, Goldman has already acquired stakes in private equity players Littlejohn & Co. and ArcLight Capital Partners, and Accel-KKR, a firm specializing in tech companies.
There’s only one problem with these investments: They’re supposed to be illegal under the Dodd-Frank Act. But “the law” is only as good as the men and women willing to enforce it, as Goldman Sachs has discovered to its delight. Big banks have turned one key section of Dodd-Frank into mush, such that Goldman can flaunt its defiance openly without an ounce of fear. It makes me wonder why House Republicans are working so hard to repeal Wall Street reform when regulators have shown so much willingness to repeal by neglect..."

Who’s Watching Wall Street? The Feds Turn a Blind Eye to Goldman’s Game

***How to Stick It to Your Banker, the Federal Reserve, and the Whole Doggone Fiat Money System

Starve the banksters, starve the beast!

***Gold Is Alternative Money For The World’s Central Bankers

Sound and Honest Money: Fred & Entendance Gold & Silver Beach

 Gold is a wealth attractor, this according to Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, who uses the metal to boost his net worth. “If I want $10,000 a month, I hold $10,000 in gold; gold is an attractor and people need to understand that if you buy more gold, your income goes up,” he said in an interview with Kitco News. The entrepreneur said that besides being real money, he views gold as something spiritual. And while he has no gold forecasts, he pointed to another author, Jim Rickards of Currency Wars fame, for guidance. “Jim talks about $10,000 gold and his numbers work" he said.

VIDEO HERE

E. on twitter!

Who Controls All of Our Money?

***Bill Fleckenstein on Central Banks, Financial Bubbles and White Burgundy

H/T Tom from Florida

The Central banksters          

"...Memories of the devastating effects of Credit and asset Bubbles have faded from memory. The disastrous aftermath of the Fed aggressively stimulating mortgage Credit - as the centerpiece of its post-“tech” Bubble reflation strategy - has been wiped away by the cagey hand of historical revisionism. The consequences of loose financial conditions – i.e. speculation, malinvestment, maladjustment, deep structural economic impairment, financial system fragility, wealth redistribution – no longer even merit consideration. Instead, it’s accepted as fact that central bank stimulus has been a huge and undeniable success. With inflation so low, central banks “can press on the pedal as much as we want without it effecting the economy negatively.” “There doesn’t seem to be any risk to keeping rates low and lots of benefits to it.” This never has to end.

These folks are “charlatans” and “monetary quacks”, terminology pulled from analysis of the long and sordid history of monetary booms and busts. Today's central bankers are destroying the sanctity of money with no meaningful pushback. And while they risk calamity, pundits claim there’s little risk in zero rates and creating Trillions of new “money.” So long as securities prices are high, all must be well in the markets and with policy.

I am reminded of a parable coming out of the late-eighties commercial real estate boom and bust. A developer walks into a bank hoping for a loan to finance a wonderful new development idea. The loan officer thinks to herself, “This guy is a visionary and surely must know what he’s doing or he wouldn’t be here.” Sitting across the table from the loan officer, the developer is thinking “she’s a whiz with the numbers and wouldn’t think of lending me a dime if this plan doesn’t make financial sense.” So the relationship is cemented, the loan is made and everyone is happy – for a while.

These days, securities markets have raged on the notion of “enlightened” central bank monetary management. Meanwhile, central bankers have viewed robust markets as validation of the ingenuity of both their measures and overall policy frameworks. Everyone is happy - for now.

The crisis put the fear of God into Central bankers back in 2008/09 – and there have been a few unnerving reminders since. It’s difficult to believe most buy into the notion that low inflation ensures there’s little risk associated with sticking with extreme accommodation. Surely they’re familiar with the history of the late-twenties. And I believe there is a consensus view taking shape within the global central banker community that monetary policy should be moving in the direction of normalization. The Fed raised rates Wednesday, and the week was notable as well for less than dovish comments out of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada. And while the Bank of Japan left monetary policy unchanged, there has been a recent notable reduction in the quantity of bonds purchased. This week also saw Finance Minister Schaeuble (among other German officials) urging the ECB to prepare to reverse course.

I do think central bankers would prefer to remove some accommodation – and they won’t this time around be as disposed to flinch at the first sign of a market hissy fit. The Fed has now raised the fed funds rate four times, and financial conditions are as loose as ever. Securities markets have grown convinced that central bankers will not tighten policy to the point of meddling with the great bull market. Such market assurance then works to sustain loose financial conditions, a backdrop that will prod central bankers to move forward with accommodation removal.

I believe passionately in the moral and ethical grounds for sound money. It is a policy obligation at least commensurate with national defense. From my perspective, one can trace today’s disturbing social, political and geopolitical circumstance right back to the consequences of decades of unsound “money” and Credit. At this point, downplaying the risks of ultra-loose central bank policy measures is farcical.

Beyond morality and ethics, there are a more concrete practical issues that seems to escape conventional analysts. Desperate central bankers resorted to a massive “money printing” (central bank Credit) operation at the very heart of contemporary finance. Not surprisingly, years later they remain trapped in this inflationary gambit. They have manipulated interest rates, imposed zero rates on savings and forced savers into the risk markets. After nurturing a $3.0 TN hedge fund industry, monetary policymaking then promoted at $4.0 TN ETF complex. Near zero rates have accommodated an unprecedented expansion of global government and government-related debt. In China, ultra-loose global finance helped push a historic Bubble to unbelievable extremes.

History will look back at these measures as a most regrettable end game to a runaway multi-decade Credit and financial Bubble. When confidence wanes – in the moneyness of electronic central bank “money”; in the ability of central banks to manipulate market yields and returns; in the perception of money-like liquid and low-risk equities and corporate debt; in China – global policymakers will have lost the capacity to control financial and economic developments. It was a epic mistake to embark on almost a decade of central bank liquidity injections to reflate and then backstop global securities markets. To believe that structurally low consumer price inflation justifies ongoing aggressive monetary stimulus is foolhardy."

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences." -Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966

H/T Tom from Florida

***Per aspera sic itur ad astra***

***Gold and silver are the nemeses for the existence of all banksters and their fiat issues

July 2017:***Many European Banks Would Collapse Without Regulators’ Help: Fitch

***New York Times Runs Editorial Today on the Mega Banks: You Need to Pay Attention

<...Yellen then attempted to downplay the risk from derivatives, making a seriously misleading statement that suggested the risk from derivatives at the major U.S. banks has been reined in. Yellen said:
“We’ve also changed the system in how derivatives work. Now, most standardized derivatives are centrally cleared….”

Yellen’s statement does not capture the enormous risk still prevalent in derivatives at the largest Wall Street banks. According to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) most recent “Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities” for the quarter ending December 31, 2016 only “38.8 percent of the derivative market was centrally cleared.”

The most dangerous part of the derivatives market, the credit default swaps, remain largely uncleared. The OCC wrote in its most recent report that only “22.5 percent of investment grade and 15.5 percent of non-investment-grade transactions were centrally cleared” in credit derivatives.

OCC Report on Centrally Cleared Derivatives as of December 31, 2016
Yellen now follows firmly in the footsteps of former President Barack Obama in misleading the public on the derivative risks that remain at the mega Wall Street banks. As the OCC pointed out in its latest report, “A small group of large financial institutions continues to dominate derivative activity in the U.S. commercial banking system. During the fourth quarter of 2016, four large commercial banks represented 89.3 percent of the total banking industry notional amounts…” Those four banks are JPMorgan Chase with notional derivatives of $47.5 trillion; Citibank N.A. (the banking unit of Citigroup which received the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history in 2008) with notional derivatives of $43.9 trillion; Goldman Sachs Bank USA at $34.9 trillion; and Bank of America with $21.1 trillion.
Pretending that the U.S. has reined in the excesses of Wall Street and that the Federal regulators have a firm grasp of the situation is an illusion built on quicksand.>   ***Fed Chair Janet Yellen Seriously Misleads in London on U.S. Banking Reform

***The Federal Reserve Is A Saboteur - And The Experts Are Oblivious

 ***Italiani

***Central Bank Quantitative Interest Rate Repression Creates “Slaves”

***The All-Out War On Savers (aka Financial Repression)

***When We Can No Longer Tell the Truth...

***Indian Banksters Killings***

Fred & E. Beach: what you need to know about the***Pathological liars

Absolute fantasy predictions. That’s the only way left to sell their stories. They all want Greece back in ‘markets’ before the next bailout expires next year...***No surprises from IMF report on Greek debt

5 pages on Greece

 "...The old style honest banking is a thing of the past...

Banking was based on trust, personal relationships and high moral standards. Banks displayed total loyalty to their staff and employees did not fear for their jobs. Major deals were concluded with a minimum of legal interference and compliance hardly existed. And still there was very little deception or fraud.
Today the financial world in London and major parts of the world is dominated by the US investment banks, the US legal system and the US government. Trust and loyalty are gone. Handshakes are worth nothing. Lawyers and compliance officers dominate everything and contracts are now running to hundreds of pages. Staff fear for their jobs since the banks have no loyalty to them. The only thing that counts is short term performance. This makes staff totally disloyal too as they know they can be fired on a whim.
Investment bankers are now Masters of the Universe and as the former Goldman Sachs CEO said, “Doing god’s work”. Well, one thing is certain there is certainly no humility in the financial world today or as Michael Lewis said in his book “Liar’s Poker”, major parts of US investment banks are dominated by “Big swinging di–s”. (Bankers with very big egos.)..." More here

***The safest places in the world to store your gold your silver and your cash***

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"It was easy to miss, with the impending end of civilization burning up the headlines, but a beyond-belief financial story recently crept into public view.
A Bloomberg headline on the story was a notable achievement in the history of understatement. It read:
LIBOR'S UNCERTAIN FUTURE TRIGGERS $350 TRILLION SUCCESSION HEADACHE
The casual news reader will see the term "LIBOR" and assume this is just a postgame wrapup to the LIBOR scandal of a few years back, in which may of the world's biggest banks were caught manipulating interest rates.

It isn't. This is a new story, featuring twin bombshells from a leading British regulator – one about our past, the other our future. To wit:
1.Going back twenty years or more, the framework for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of financial transactions has been fictional.
2.We are zooming toward a legal and economic clusterfuck of galactic proportions – the "uncertain future" Bloomberg humorously referenced
LIBOR stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate. It measures the rate at which banks lend to each other. If you have any kind of consumer loan, it's a fair bet that it's based on LIBOR.
A 2009 study by the Cleveland Fed found that 60 percent of all mortgages in the U.S. were based on LIBOR. Buried somewhere in your home, you probably have a piece of paper that outlines the terms of your credit card, student loan, or auto loan, and if you peek in the fine print, you have a good chance of seeing that the rate you pay every month is based on LIBOR.
Years ago, we found out that the world's biggest banks were manipulating LIBOR. That sucked.
Now, the news is worse: LIBOR is made up..." ***Is LIBOR, Benchmark for Trillions of Dollars in Transactions, a Lie?

Meanwhile...Musk’s genius is primarily in the subsidy-seeking realm. By 2015, U.S. governments alone had given his companies US$5 billion through direct grants, tax breaks, cut-rate loans, tax credits and rebates...

Lawrence Solomon:***How Tesla’s Elon Musk became the master of fake business

H/T Tom from Florida

Sollte dir dieser Strand gefallen, dann kannst du deinen Freunden behilflich sein, indem du sie über Fred & EntendanceInvestors Beach informierst.
Lasst uns gemeinsam diesen Ort zu einen blühenden Club für Vortrefflichkeit, Bildung und Information machen!

If you like this beach, then you can help your friends locate it by letting them know about Fred & EntendanceInvestors Beach.
Let's all make this place a thriving sheltered Club for excellence, education and information!

***Sound and Honest Money: Fred & Entendance Gold & Silver Beach

Nomi Prins: "Since late 2007, the Federal Reserve has embarked on grand-scale collusion with other G-7 central banks to manufacture a massive amount of money. The scope and degree of this collusion are historically unprecedented and by admission of the perpetrators, unconventional in approach, and - depending on the speech - ineffective.
Central bank efforts to provide liquidity to the private banking system have been delivered amidst a plethora of grandiose phrases like “unlimited” and “by all means necessary.” Central bankers have played a game with no defined goalposts, no clock rundown, no max scores, and no true end in sight..."***A decade of G7 central bank collusion - and counting...

H/T Tom From Florida                        *** Nomi Prins

***Central banksters are ignoring their domestic housing bubbles again. And this time it's global

Aug 23, 2017 4:36:18 GMT -5 Entendance said:

***Banks Earn Record Profits in Q2, Savers Sacrificed: FDIC

Since the Senate hearings of the early 1930s, which examined the Wall Street practices and conspiracies that led to the 1929-1932 stock market collapse and Great Depression, there have been rumblings that Wall Street’s system for lending stock for traders to short is a viper’s nest of ripoffs. Now two major law firms, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Cohen Milstein are suing six of the largest Wall Street banks, alleging that they illegally colluded in this market. The defendants are the usual suspects: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, UBS and their stock lending units. (The only surprise here is that Citigroup is not named.)
***Wall Street Banks Sued Again for Conspiring to Control a Market

"...The time is coming when we will have to make a choice – stand by our values and fight the left the hard way, or abandon our values and serve the globalists by adopting their methods of government totalitarianism. It is my hope that enough of us will stand by the constitution and conscience in this schizophrenic era and disrupt the tides of madness before they erode our nation completely."

***Globalist Strategy: Use Crazy Leftists And Provocateurs To Enrage/Demonize Conservatives

Again on Swiss Central Bank: Swiss Central Bank Boosts Stakes in FAAMG Stocks by 77 Percent to $9.38 Billion

Jul 15, 2017 4:40:18 GMT -5 Entendance said:

What happens when markets don’t function. Manipulation is the name of the game.

***Big Banks Continue Winning Streak, With Street at Least

"The timing could not have been worse: just as Spain faces its biggest constitutional crisis in over 40 years with Catalonia’s independence vote, another bank has begun to wobble..."  ***The Next Spanish Bank Teeters, at Worst Possible Time

"Locking up the money of unsuspecting depositors to prop up collapsing banks..."  ***ECB Tightens Noose Around Bank Accounts

"...Who are these 8 big trading crooks that have dictated gold and silver prices to the rest of the world? Most are banks, led by JPMorgan and the Bank of Nova Scotia, among other household banking names. JPMorgan is in a crooked class of its own and has used its control over prices to accumulate the largest private stockpile of physical silver in history, some 650 million oz, over the past six and a half years. This epic physical accumulation has insured the bank against loss anytime the concentrated selling scam comes apart..."

***Eight Crooks Against The World

THE DEATH OF BEAR STEARNS: A Warning For Things To Come

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:***The Situation In The Markets Is Much Worse Than You Realize

<Until we start talking about how to create a financial system that really serves society, rather than just trying to stay ahead of the misdeeds of one that doesn’t, we’ll struggle in vain to bridge the gap between Wall Street and Main Street.>

"...Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, envisioned financial services (and I stress the word “service”) as an industry that didn’t exist as an end in itself, but rather as a helpmeet to other types of business. Yet lending to Main Street is now a minority of what the largest banks in the country do. In the 1970s, most of their financial flows, which of course come directly from our savings, would have been funneled into new business investment. Today, only about 15 percent of the money coming out of the largest financial institutions goes to that purpose. The rest exists in a closed loop of trading; institutions facilitate and engage in the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets that mainly enriches the 20 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of that asset base. This doesn’t help growth, but it does fuel the wealth gap.

This fundamental shift in the business model of finance is what we should really be talking about — rather than the technocratic details of liquidity ratios or capital levels or even how to punish specific banking misdeeds. The big problem is that our banking system would no longer be recognizable to Adam Smith, who believed that for markets to work, all players must have equal access to information, transparent prices and a shared moral framework. Good luck with that today.

While the largest banks can correctly claim that they have offloaded risky assets and bolstered the amount of cash on their balance sheets over the last decade, their business model has become fundamentally disconnected from the very people and entities it was designed to serve. Small community banks, which make up only 13 percent of all banking assets, do nearly half of all lending to small businesses. Big banks are about deal making. They serve mostly themselves, existing as the middle of the hourglass that is our economy, charging whatever rent they like for others to pass through. (Finance is one of the few industries in which fees have gone up as the sector as a whole has grown.) The financial industry, dominated by the biggest banks, provides only 4 percent of all jobs in the country, yet takes about a quarter of the corporate profit pie..."

***How Big Banks Became Our Masters