According to the Associated Press, federal negotiators are close to concluding a deal with major banks that would essentially forgive them of crimes committed in connection with the mortgage crisis. You can read the story here, and a critique of the proposed settlement here: Obama Is on the Brink of a Settlement With the Big Banks—and Progressives Are Furious.
Archive for the ‘Banking’ Category
Banks too big to fail; bankers too powerful to jail.
January 25, 2012Move Your Money
August 18, 2011The movement away from dependence upon mega-banks and political currencies is gaining momentum, not only amongst individuals and companies, but also amongst countries that have lost confidence in the international banking establishment.
The Associated Press reports today that Venezuela is recalling $11B in gold reserves. Here are some excerpts:
President Hugo Chavez announced Wednesday he is nationalizing Venezuela’s gold mining industry and intends to bring home $11 billion in gold reserves currently held in U.S. and European banks.
Central Bank president Nelson Merentes said on television that the decision to move the gold reserves was being taken out of “prudence.”
Venezuela has nearly $4.6 billion of its gold reserves in the Bank of England, according to a report by Finance Minister Jorge Giordani that was leaked to the news media Tuesday by an opposition lawmaker.
The report said additional Venezuelan gold reserves are held by the U.S. bank J.P. Morgan Chase, British banks Barclays, HSBC and Standard Chartered, France’s BNP Paribas and Canada’s Bank of Nova Scotia.
Giordani and Merentes, who appeared together on television Wednesday, said they proposed to Chavez that Venezuela’s nearly $6.3 billion in non-gold international reserves such as bank deposits and bonds should be reviewed and transferred from U.S. and European banks to countries they consider safer, including China, Russia and Brazil, among other countries in Asia and Latin America.
It makes sense for countries like Venezuela to hold their reserves in the currencies of countries that actually produce something and from whom they make substantial purchases. While the U.S. remains one of its main suppliers, Venezuela also imports significant amount from Colombia, China, Brazil and Mexico.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., there has been a growing grassroots movement in which savers are taking their money out of the large banking corporations and moving it into credit unions and locally owned banks. One significant development is the Move Your Money Project, “a nonprofit campaign that encourages individuals and institutions to divest from the nation’s largest Wall Street banks and move to local financial institutions.” Go here to find one near you.
In my May presentation to the Financial Planning Association, I provided a resource list that included financing alternatives for enterprises and options for savers and investors.
As a side note, you may be interested in viewing Dylan Ratigan’s recent rant on MSNBC, in which he complained that the “Banking system is corrupt and defrauding us.” You can see it here.—t.h.g.
The monumental Fed Rip-off
July 24, 2011We now have the results of the first-ever audit of the Federal Reserve. What it reveals is astounding and outrageous.
Senator Bernie calls it “socialism for the rich,” but it’s not merely “socialism for the rich,” it’s wholesale looting of our common wealth by the people who run the world. This blows sky high all arguments in favor of an “independent” central bank. Independence in this case means allowing an unelected self-serving elite to take what they want free from any effective oversight or control by the people or the people’s representatives.
The list of institutions that received the most money from the $16 trillion Federal Reserve bailout can be found on page 131 of the GAO Audit and are as follows..
Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
An excellent article on this story, from which the above list was obtained, can be found on Countercurrents.org.–t.h.g.
The Emergence of Self-Organizing Systems of Exchange
May 13, 2011Joseph Jaworski is the author of Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. In a message today from the publisher announcing the second edition of the book, I noted the reference to Jaworski’s “Four Principles to Access the Source of Innovation.” Although I’ve not yet read the book, I did take a look at the blog entry that describes the principles.
This is an excerpt of what it says:
At the heart of what Joseph Jaworski discovered during this fifteen-year journey as a way to understand and access the Source of wisdom and creativity – the place from which profound innovation flows – are these four principles:
1. There is an open and emergent quality to the universe; a group of simple components can suddenly re-emerge at a higher level of self-organization as a new entity with new properties.
2. The universe is a domain of undivided wholeness; both the material world and consciousness are parts of the same undivided whole.
3. There is a creative Source of infinite potential enfolded in the manifest universe; connection to this Source leads to the emergence of new realities.
4. Humans can learn to draw from the infinite potential of the Source by choosing to follow a disciplined path toward self-realization and love, the most powerful energy in the universe. The words of philosopher Pierre Telihard de Chardin speak well to this principle. “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Perhaps you own experience, like mine, will attest to the truth inherent in those principles.
I was particularly struck by the first principle and the statement that, a group of simple components can suddenly re-emerge at a higher level of self-organization as a new entity with new properties. This is highly relevant to the transition process that is currently underway in the world, especially the reinvention of money. In Chapter 17 of my book, The End of Money.., I describe the four basic elements required for A Complete Web-Based Trading Platform. These elements are:
1. A marketplace
2. A social network
3. A means of payment
4. A measure of value or pricing unit
These components are indeed “re-emerging” (based on our changing collective consciousness) “at a higher level of self-organization.” We are seeing more widespread recognition that:
- money is nothing but a systems of accounting for credits and debits,
- that it is the people’s collective credit that supports every national currency and payment medium,
- that the creation of money based on interest-bearing debt requires continual expansion of debt, which drives economic growth that has become dysfunctional and destructive,
- that we no longer need to depend upon banking wizardry to provide the monetary and financial means for exchanging goods and services and actualizing our productive capacity.
We now have many web-based marketplaces and social networks, numerous private currencies and payment systems that use direct credit clearing, and increasing recognition that there is an urgent need for a measure of value that is independent of any fiat currency or central bank.
As I pointed out in my chapter, there are a number of “disruptive technologies” that are emerging to completely change the nature of money and banking. These are:
- Direct credit-clearing among buyers and sellers
- The use of the Internet to create Web-based marketplaces
- Transparency in Web-based accounting, information, and exchange systems
- Strong identity verification
- Secure encryption of information over the Internet
- Social networking
- Reputation ratings of vendors and buyers that are continually updated and available on-demand
- The reemergence of mutual companies, co-responsibility, and localized Web-based markets
“It is not any of these individually but all of them in combination that will, I believe, result in structures that will provide superior performance in mediating the exchange process. Worsening economic and financial conditions, such as those experienced in 2007 and 2008, will create enhanced market opportunities for this sort of nonpolitical trading platform, and will assure their eventual implementation and wide acceptance.”
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Should every state own a bank of its own?
April 23, 2011A state owned bank can provide state economies with many advantages–if it is properly run. Here’s an article from Mother Jones about the Bank of North Dakota, the only state owned bank in the United States. It makes a pretty good case.–t.h.g.
How the Nation’s Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street
60 Minutes exposes banks’ massive mortgage fraud
April 19, 2011This is a truly astounding story about how major banks have routinely used falsified documents to foreclose on people who were lured into the housing bubble.
What IS the truth about Libya?
April 7, 2011There are a lot of things about the turmoil in the Middle-east and the current assault on Libya that don’t quite add up. Here is one version of the truth that seems plausible. We’re all aware by now of the competition amongst the major power to secure oil supplies, and that oil is the primary reason behind the American war against Iraq.
Could it be that the burgeoning growth of Islamic finance has something to do with the policies of the Western powers in the Arab and Islamic world? Based as it is on funding without interest/usury (riba), true Islamic finance is bound to eventually threaten the power of the banking establishment. –t.h.g.
By Stephen Goodson 4-1-11
Colonel Muammar Gadaffi is frequently referred to in the media as a “mad dictator” and “bloody tyrant”, but do these allegations accord with the facts?
Libya consists of over 15O tribes, with the two main groups, the Meghabra living in Tripolitania in the west and the Wafallah living in Cyrenaica in the east. Previous attempts to unite these tribes by the Turkish (1855-1911) and ltalian {1911-43) colonial rulers failed and the country was split in two for administrative purposes.
Oil was discovered in Libya in 1959, but King ldris of the Senussi tribe allowed most of the oil profits to be siphoned into the coffers of the oil companies. The coup d’etat on 1 September 1969 led by Colonel Gadaffi had countrywide support. He subsequently married a woman from the royal Barqa tribe and adroitly unified the nation.
By retaining Libya’s oil wealth for the benefit of all its people, Gadaffi had created a socialist paradise. There is no unemployment, Libya has the highest GDP in .Africa, less than 5% of the population is classified as poor and it has fewer people living below the poverty datum line than for example in Holland. Life expectancy is 75 years and is the highest in Africa and I0% above the world average.
With the exception of the nomadic Bedouin and Tuareg tribes, most Libyan families possess a house and a car. There is free health care and education and not surprisingly Libya has a literacy rate of 82%. Last year Gadaffi distributed $500 to each man, woman and child (population 6.5 million).
Libya has a tolerable human rights record and stands at 61 on the International Incarceration Index, comparable with countries in central Europe (the lower the rating, the lower the standing – the USA occupies the no.1 spot!). There is hardly any crime and only rebels and traitors are dealt with harshly.
Anyone who has read Gadaffi’s little Green Book will realize that he is a thoughtful and enlightened leader. Libya has been accused of having committed numerous acts of terrorism in the past, but many of these have been perpetrated by foreign intelligence agencies as false flag operations – the Lockerbie bombing being a prime example.
The CIA and MI6 and their frontmen have been stoking up dissent in the east of the country for almost 30 years. Libya produces exceptionally high quality light crude oil and its production cost of $1 a barrel, compared to the current price of $115, is the lowest in the world.
Riba (usury) is not permitted. The Central bank of Libya is a wholly-owned by the Libyan Government and is run as a state bank, issuing all government loans free of interest. This is in contrast to the exploitative fractional reserve banking system of the West. The no-fly zone and the bombing of Libya have nothing to do with the protection of civilians. It is an act of war a blatant and crude attempt by the oil corporations and international bankers to steal the wealth of Libya.
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Usury, Interest, and Islamic Banking
March 27, 2011One of the most popular posts on this site has been David Pidcock’s View on the State of Islamic Money, Banking, and Finance, which was posted in January of 2008. Over the past few years, these subjects have continued to draw increasing attention, and interest in interest-free financing has continued to grow in both the east and the west. It is not only on the basis of religious belief that the subject of usury is once again being debated (mainly in the Islamic world), but increasingly on account of the obvious and overwhelming expansion of debt throughout the world.
In November of last year (2010) the First World Conference on Riba was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (Riba is the Islamic term for usury). In recent correspondence from David, he argued that there still are no truly Islamic banks. He also sent along one of his papers that he presented at the Riba conference. Whatever your preconceived opinions about the subject might be, I think you will find his paper to be interesting and informative. I have made it a permanent part of this website, which can be found in the sidebar under Other Resources, or just click on the title here, Riba? Part 1.
–t.h.g.
Currency speculation and arbitrage
March 18, 2011For anyone who is confused about foreign exchange rates and speculation (which I think includes almost everyone), here is a clear explanation provided by Prof. Dr. Ahamed Kameel Mydin Meera of the International Islamic University of Malaysia. He explains it in relation to the 1997 East Asian Crisis that was brought on by speculative attacks (manipulation) on several Asian currencies.–t.h.g.
