Honey I lost my nuke?

In a major and long term cover up, whose revelation has been so long in coming because of laws that would put whistleblowers in jail for life, the British government is scrambling to figure out whatever happened with their lost nukes, Yes, folks British nukes are missing. For more info read this article that appeared on the Intel Hub;

Did we the British public know that our current Prime Minister was instrumental in the loss of three illegal nuclear weapons?

Is the UK frantically trying to find out where they were sold on the “Black Market”?

We know something that you don’t…… but can’t talk about it Under the Nuclear Explosions Act otherwise we will all end up in gaol for life.

Chris McGreal of the Guardian newspaper published an article 24th of May 2010 revealing how Israeloffered to sell nukes to South Africa during the apartheid era.

What he failed to reveal was that Israel struck up a deal with South Africa to move its technicians down to the high-security weapons research and development facilities at Pelindaba.

It was at this location that the Israeli technicians managed to covertly give themselves nuclear weapons but also under the table gave South Africa its own nuclear capability but guess what?…….the US and UK knew all about the programme but the UN did not!!!…….what was even more amazing was the fact that the UN sent a team to South Africa where they were convinced that South Africa had curtailed its nuclear weapons programme when in actual fact it had not!!

It is fairly obvious why Israel is totally consumed in trying to find these stolen weapon and needless to say the US and British Governments are equally as concerned and yet are not in a position to admit to their loss as in doing so would incriminate past and current very senior politicians including our current Prime Minister David Cameron.

It always appear to be the case that your past always comes back to haunt you. So let’s just recall the history behind these weapons that were designed and commissioned all during the UN embargo years and who was allegedly involved.

I must also make it quite clear that many of the world leaders and senior members of government have been involved in these under the table deals which has resulted in many of them accumulating much wealth either for the party election funds or for their own personal gain.

When one further considers that these faceless individuals not only govern out country but are also directly responsible for the death of millions of people both military staff and civilians it is extremely hard to understand.

How can any government have such a flawed intelligence network and allow such things to take place without some sort of audit to see what is going on behind the scenes.

We have seen both the US, UK, EU and Israel transfer almost everything from chemical and biological weapons to nuclear part to countries which they have since called the “Axis of Evil.”………..that statement is not totally true because the “Axis of Evil” is right here in the heart of London!!

It was in the late 1970 when the South African nuclear programme started to go into full swing with the compliments of the Israeli scientists resulting in the first test and only test firing of a nuclear weapon.

The test took place on a moored vessel anchored off Prince Edward Island on the 22nd of September 1979 when a typical double flash was observed from a passing US satellite.

One has to understand that this was all under the radar of the United Nations with the full knowledge of selected members of the US and British Governments. The US immediately went on the defensive by creating their “False Flag” report known as the “Vela Incident” in which they explained the following:

The conclusions of the Presidential panel (the Ad Hoc Panel) were reassuring, as they suggested that the most likely explanation of the Vela detection was a meteoroid hitting the satellite – in part because of the discrepancy in bhangmeter readings Others who examined the data, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the national laboratories, and defense contractors reached a very different conclusion – that the data supported the conclusion that on 22 September 1979, Vela 6911 had detected a nuclear detonation.

What I find ironic here is the fact that several agencies confirmed it was a nuclear explosion but the US Government conveniently put it to bed.

I can assure you that through my own scientific contacts in the US this did actually happen and an internal memo at the Los Alamos nuclear research facility confirmed that it had been a nuclear explosion. One has to understand the high stakes involved in such programmes, especially when vast sums of money are being banded around senior political figures. This is truly corruption at its best!

The joint venture (Israel – South Africa) created 10 Battlefield Bombs and after the first test that left nine. The bombs were designed to be highly mobile and reasonably compact and could be carried by the British Canberra bomber or the Buccaneer.

It became apparent in later years that the supremacy of white power in South Africa was about to finish and so they had to open up discussion with the Americans and British as they feared these weapons getting into the hands of the blacks.

It was during this time that a decision was made to ship all nine bombs to Chicago for de commissioning. However, our dear “Iron Lady” Maggie Thatcher decided that it would be a good idea to maybe acquire a few of the weapons for possible use against Iraq in the event Saddam did not toe the line.

Thatcher then ordered her Page Boy, David Cameron, to go down to South Africa along with what was believed to be the only technical man available (non other than the now( Sir) Kenneth Warren).

Others also believed to be implicated was David Wilshire and many other senior members of government. In actual fact as we follow this charade up to the current time we could possible include other very senior person such as Lord McAlpine, Peter Lilley, Alan Clarke and Ken Clarke and others I have previously named in other articles. The late Dr. David Kelly was also involved.

We have to remember that this was almost a private sector deal with many political figures implicated some of whom became share holders in the illegal nuke purchase. We are talking here about an extremely high risk deal, with little security for the weapons themselves as everything had to be done in a low key covert way.

As we already know David Cameron was able to secure a deal for his lady mentor, Maggie Thatcher, and returned with a deal for three nuclear weapons.

They were shipped to Oman whereby they were put in private sector storage and eventually stolen by John Bredenkamp, the arms dealer who sold them to Britain and then stole them back to sell on the Black marketand the rest is now history.

We have to understand that British Tax Payers money was then placed in the Conservative Party Electoral Fund (£17.8m) which to this day has not been accounted for and other money was made available to Tony Blair (£1m) compliments of Bernie Ecclesone.

On top of this a slush fund was also developed to silence other third parties that knew of the deal and our dear Mr. Ken Clarke then implemented his gagging orders to those involved!!

I guess you do not believe this story……why don’t you check it out yourself it is written in Hansard 22nd June 1993, and starting at Col. 197 when Lord Doug Hoyle raised the issue in the House as follows:

“Mr Hoyle: If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I shall tell him what information is now given to us. We understand the expenditure and what Tory central office receives.

In 1992, central office received £20.7 million. When we asked about that and about company donations, the Tory party told us to look at company accounts. I repeat: in 1992, the Tories received £20.7 million. When the records were checked by Companies house, only £2.9 198million was shown in company accounts. That means that there is a deficit of £17.8 million. We want to know where that £17.8 million came from.

Mr Tim Smith: The hon. Gentleman has made the suggestion about the accounts of the Conservative party that was made by a member of the Select Committee last week: that no accounts had been published between 1979 and 1983. They were published, and I undertook to send copies to the Select Committee.

Mr Hoyle: I gave way to the hon. Gentleman because I expected him to tell me where the difference of £17.8 million came from. I shall give way again to him. I am told that he is a treasurer of the Conservative party.

I give way to him now so that he can stand up and tell us where the £17.8 million came from. Does the hon. Gentleman care to do that? I am waiting. I do not think that we shall get the information from the horse’s mouth. We certainly did not get it from the Secretary of State.”

I could write article after article on the many levels of corruption that occurred in both the US and the UK (not forgetting Israel) and the terrible consequences of this greed resulting in the death of many of our own troops and innocent civilians….all for their own pocket.

Solid evidence proves that over the period of 1982-90 Iraq was supplied by the US and UK with WMD, including biological cultures and chemical precursors of nerve gases etc.

7.7 Trillion…really?

As if TARP money wasn’t enough…7.7 trillion in loans to bail out the criminals that caused the problem? Really? Someone needs to go to Jail in my opinion! If you or I did such things it would be fraud or worse…

 

That these guys still can’t get it right, look at Europe and our Too Big To Fail Banks with tons of derivative risk guaranteeing all that debt prompting yet another round of free money!

 

Shameful…

 

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress

 

 

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

‘Change Their Votes’

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma — investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort — and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.

$7.77 Trillion

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.

‘Motivate Others’

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.

Howard Opinsky, a spokesman for JPMorgan (JPM), declined to comment about Dimon’s statement or the company’s Fed borrowings. Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesman for Bank of America, also declined to comment.

The Fed has been lending money to banks through its so- called discount window since just after its founding in 1913. Starting in August 2007, when confidence in banks began to wane, it created a variety of ways to bolster the financial system with cash or easily traded securities. By the end of 2008, the central bank had established or expanded 11 lending facilities catering to banks, securities firms and corporations that couldn’t get short-term loans from their usual sources.

‘Core Function’

“Supporting financial-market stability in times of extreme market stress is a core function of central banks,” says William B. English, director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs. “Our lending programs served to prevent a collapse of the financial system and to keep credit flowing to American families and businesses.”

The Fed has said that all loans were backed by appropriate collateral. That the central bank didn’t lose money should “lead to praise of the Fed, that they took this extraordinary step and they got it right,” says Phillip Swagel, a former assistant Treasury secretary under Henry M. Paulson and now a professor of international economic policy at the University of Maryland.

The Fed initially released lending data in aggregate form only. Information on which banks borrowed, when, how much and at what interest rate was kept from public view.

The secrecy extended even to members of President George W. Bush’s administration who managed TARP. Top aides to Paulson weren’t privy to Fed lending details during the creation of the program that provided crisis funding to more than 700 banks, say two former senior Treasury officials who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak.

Big Six

The Treasury Department relied on the recommendations of the Fed to decide which banks were healthy enough to get TARP money and how much, the former officials say. The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed, measured by peak daily debt calculated by Bloomberg using data obtained from the central bank. Paulson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The six — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley — accounted for 63 percent of the average daily debt to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers and investment- services firms, the data show. By comparison, they had about half of the industry’s assets before the bailout, which lasted from August 2007 through April 2010. The daily debt figure excludes cash that banks passed along to money-market funds.

Bank Supervision

While the emergency response prevented financial collapse, the Fed shouldn’t have allowed conditions to get to that point, says Joshua Rosner, a banking analyst with Graham Fisher & Co. in New York who predicted problems from lax mortgage underwriting as far back as 2001. The Fed, the primary supervisor for large financial companies, should have been more vigilant as the housing bubble formed, and the scale of its lending shows the “supervision of the banks prior to the crisis was far worse than we had imagined,” Rosner says.

Bernanke in an April 2009 speech said that the Fed provided emergency loans only to “sound institutions,” even though its internal assessments described at least one of the biggest borrowers, Citigroup, as “marginal.”

On Jan. 14, 2009, six days before the company’s central bank loans peaked, the New York Fed gave CEO Vikram Pandit a report declaring Citigroup’s financial strength to be “superficial,” bolstered largely by its $45 billion of Treasury funds. The document was released in early 2011 by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel empowered by Congress to probe the causes of the crisis.

‘Need Transparency’

Andrea Priest, a spokeswoman for the New York Fed, declined to comment, as did Jon Diat, a spokesman for Citigroup.

“I believe that the Fed should have independence in conducting highly technical monetary policy, but when they are putting taxpayer resources at risk, we need transparency and accountability,” says Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee.

Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire senator who was a lead Republican negotiator on TARP, and Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the House Financial Services Committee, both say they were kept in the dark.

“We didn’t know the specifics,” says Gregg, who’s now an adviser to Goldman Sachs.

“We were aware emergency efforts were going on,” Frank says. “We didn’t know the specifics.”

Disclose Lending

Frank co-sponsored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, billed as a fix for financial-industry excesses. Congress debated that legislation in 2010 without a full understanding of how deeply the banks had depended on the Fed for survival.

It would have been “totally appropriate” to disclose the lending data by mid-2009, says David Jones, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who has written four books about the central bank.

“The Fed is the second-most-important appointed body in the U.S., next to the Supreme Court, and we’re dealing with a democracy,” Jones says. “Our representatives in Congress deserve to have this kind of information so they can oversee the Fed.”

The Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to release details of some emergency-lending programs in December 2010. It also mandated disclosure of discount-window borrowers after a two- year lag.

Protecting TARP

TARP and the Fed lending programs went “hand in hand,” says Sherrill Shaffer, a banking professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and a former chief economist at the New York Fed. While the TARP money helped insulate the central bank from losses, the Fed’s willingness to supply seemingly unlimited financing to the banks assured they wouldn’t collapse, protecting the Treasury’s TARP investments, he says.

“Even though the Treasury was in the headlines, the Fed was really behind the scenes engineering it,” Shaffer says.

Congress, at the urging of Bernanke and Paulson, created TARP in October 2008 after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. made it difficult for financial institutions to get loans. Bank of America and New York-based Citigroup each received $45 billion from TARP. At the time, both were tapping the Fed. Citigroup hit its peak borrowing of $99.5 billion in January 2009, while Bank of America topped out in February 2009 at $91.4 billion.

No Clue

Lawmakers knew none of this.

They had no clue that one bank, New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS), took $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, enough to pay off one-tenth of the country’s delinquent mortgages. The firm’s peak borrowing occurred the same day Congress rejected the proposed TARP bill, triggering the biggest point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) The bill later passed, and Morgan Stanley got $10 billion of TARP funds, though Paulson said only “healthy institutions” were eligible.

Mark Lake, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment, as did spokesmen for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Had lawmakers known, it “could have changed the whole approach to reform legislation,” says Ted Kaufman, a former Democratic Senator from Delaware who, with Brown, introduced the bill to limit bank size.

Moral Hazard

Kaufman says some banks are so big that their failure could trigger a chain reaction in the financial system. The cost of borrowing for so-called too-big-to-fail banks is lower than that of smaller firms because lenders believe the government won’t let them go under. The perceived safety net creates what economists call moral hazard — the belief that bankers will take greater risks because they’ll enjoy any profits while shifting losses to taxpayers.

If Congress had been aware of the extent of the Fed rescue, Kaufman says, he would have been able to line up more support for breaking up the biggest banks.

Byron L. Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, says the knowledge might have helped pass legislation to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which for most of the last century separated customer deposits from the riskier practices of investment banking.

“Had people known about the hundreds of billions in loans to the biggest financial institutions, they would have demanded Congress take much more courageous actions to stop the practices that caused this near financial collapse,” says Dorgan, who retired in January.

Getting Bigger

Instead, the Fed and its secret financing helped America’s biggest financial firms get bigger and go on to pay employees as much as they did at the height of the housing bubble.

Total assets held by the six biggest U.S. banks increased 39 percent to $9.5 trillion on Sept. 30, 2011, from $6.8 trillion on the same day in 2006, according to Fed data.

For so few banks to hold so many assets is “un-American,” says Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “All of these gargantuan institutions are too big to regulate. I’m in favor of breaking them up and slimming them down.”

Employees at the six biggest banks made twice the average for all U.S. workers in 2010, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics hourly compensation cost data. The banks spent $146.3 billion on compensation in 2010, or an average of $126,342 per worker, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s up almost 20 percent from five years earlier compared with less than 15 percent for the average worker. Average pay at the banks in 2010 was about the same as in 2007, before the bailouts.

‘Wanted to Pretend’

“The pay levels came back so fast at some of these firms that it appeared they really wanted to pretend they hadn’t been bailed out,” says Anil Kashyap, a former Fed economist who’s now a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “They shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people find some of the stuff that happened totally outrageous.”

Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch & Co. at the urging of then-Treasury Secretary Paulson after buying the biggest U.S. home lender, Countrywide Financial Corp. When the Merrill Lynch purchase was announced on Sept. 15, 2008, Bank of America had $14.4 billion in emergency Fed loans and Merrill Lynch had $8.1 billion. By the end of the month, Bank of America’s loans had reached $25 billion and Merrill Lynch’s had exceeded $60 billion, helping both firms keep the deal on track.

Prevent Collapse

Wells Fargo bought Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest U.S. bank by deposits before the 2008 acquisition. Because depositors were pulling their money from Wachovia, the Fed channeled $50 billion in secret loans to the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank through two emergency-financing programs to prevent collapse before Wells Fargo could complete the purchase.

“These programs proved to be very successful at providing financial markets the additional liquidity and confidence they needed at a time of unprecedented uncertainty,” says Ancel Martinez, a spokesman for Wells Fargo.

JPMorgan absorbed the country’s largest savings and loan, Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc., and investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. The New York Fed, then headed by Timothy F. Geithner, who’s now Treasury secretary, helped JPMorgan complete the Bear Stearns deal by providing $29 billion of financing, which was disclosed at the time. The Fed also supplied Bear Stearns with $30 billion of secret loans to keep the company from failing before the acquisition closed, central bank data show. The loans were made through a program set up to provide emergency funding to brokerage firms.

‘Regulatory Discretion’

“Some might claim that the Fed was picking winners and losers, but what the Fed was doing was exercising its professional regulatory discretion,” says John Dearie, a former speechwriter at the New York Fed who’s now executive vice president for policy at the Financial Services Forum, a Washington-based group consisting of the CEOs of 20 of the world’s biggest financial firms. “The Fed clearly felt it had what it needed within the requirements of the law to continue to lend to Bear and Wachovia.”

The bill introduced by Brown and Kaufman in April 2010 would have mandated shrinking the six largest firms.

“When a few banks have advantages, the little guys get squeezed,” Brown says. “That, to me, is not what capitalism should be.”

Kaufman says he’s passionate about curbing too-big-to-fail banks because he fears another crisis.

‘Can We Survive?’

“The amount of pain that people, through no fault of their own, had to endure — and the prospect of putting them through it again — is appalling,” Kaufman says. “The public has no more appetite for bailouts. What would happen tomorrow if one of these big banks got in trouble? Can we survive that?”

Lobbying expenditures by the six banks that would have been affected by the legislation rose to $29.4 million in 2010 compared with $22.1 million in 2006, the last full year before credit markets seized up — a gain of 33 percent, according to OpenSecrets.org, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. Lobbying by the American Bankers Association, a trade organization, increased at about the same rate, OpenSecrets.org reported.

Lobbyists argued the virtues of bigger banks. They’re more stable, better able to serve large companies and more competitive internationally, and breaking them up would cost jobs and cause “long-term damage to the U.S. economy,” according to a Nov. 13, 2009, letter to members of Congress from the FSF.

The group’s website cites Nobel Prize-winning economist Oliver E. Williamson, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, for demonstrating the greater efficiency of large companies.

‘Serious Burden’

In an interview, Williamson says that the organization took his research out of context and that efficiency is only one factor in deciding whether to preserve too-big-to-fail banks.

“The banks that were too big got even bigger, and the problems that we had to begin with are magnified in the process,” Williamson says. “The big banks have incentives to take risks they wouldn’t take if they didn’t have government support. It’s a serious burden on the rest of the economy.”

Dearie says his group didn’t mean to imply that Williamson endorsed big banks.

Top officials in President Barack Obama’s administration sided with the FSF in arguing against legislative curbs on the size of banks.

Geithner, Kaufman

On May 4, 2010, Geithner visited Kaufman in his Capitol Hill office. As president of the New York Fed in 2007 and 2008, Geithner helped design and run the central bank’s lending programs. The New York Fed supervised four of the six biggest U.S. banks and, during the credit crunch, put together a daily confidential report on Wall Street’s financial condition. Geithner was copied on these reports, based on a sampling of e- mails released by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

At the meeting with Kaufman, Geithner argued that the issue of limiting bank size was too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions, Kaufman says. According to Kaufman, Geithner said he preferred that bank supervisors from around the world, meeting in Basel, Switzerland, make rules increasing the amount of money banks need to hold in reserve. Passing laws in the U.S. would undercut his efforts in Basel, Geithner said, according to Kaufman.

Anthony Coley, a spokesman for Geithner, declined to comment.

‘Punishing Success’

Lobbyists for the big banks made the winning case that forcing them to break up was “punishing success,” Brown says. Now that they can see how much the banks were borrowing from the Fed, senators might think differently, he says.

The Fed supported curbing too-big-to-fail banks, including giving regulators the power to close large financial firms and implementing tougher supervision for big banks, says Fed General Counsel Scott G. Alvarez. The Fed didn’t take a position on whether large banks should be dismantled before they get into trouble.

Dodd-Frank does provide a mechanism for regulators to break up the biggest banks. It established the Financial Stability Oversight Council that could order teetering banks to shut down in an orderly way. The council is headed by Geithner.

“Dodd-Frank does not solve the problem of too big to fail,” says Shelby, the Alabama Republican. “Moral hazard and taxpayer exposure still very much exist.”

Below Market

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, says banks “were either in bad shape or taking advantage of the Fed giving them a good deal. The former contradicts their public statements. The latter — getting loans at below-market rates during a financial crisis — is quite a gift.”

The Fed says it typically makes emergency loans more expensive than those available in the marketplace to discourage banks from abusing the privilege. During the crisis, Fed loans were among the cheapest around, with funding available for as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008, according to data from the central bank and money-market rates tracked by Bloomberg.

The Fed funds also benefited firms by allowing them to avoid selling assets to pay investors and depositors who pulled their money. So the assets stayed on the banks’ books, earning interest.

Banks report the difference between what they earn on loans and investments and their borrowing expenses. The figure, known as net interest margin, provides a clue to how much profit the firms turned on their Fed loans, the costs of which were included in those expenses. To calculate how much banks stood to make, Bloomberg multiplied their tax-adjusted net interest margins by their average Fed debt during reporting periods in which they took emergency loans.

Added Income

The 190 firms for which data were available would have produced income of $13 billion, assuming all of the bailout funds were invested at the margins reported, the data show.

The six biggest U.S. banks’ share of the estimated subsidy was $4.8 billion, or 23 percent of their combined net income during the time they were borrowing from the Fed. Citigroup would have taken in the most, with $1.8 billion.

“The net interest margin is an effective way of getting at the benefits that these large banks received from the Fed,” says Gerald A. Hanweck, a former Fed economist who’s now a finance professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

While the method isn’t perfect, it’s impossible to state the banks’ exact profits or savings from their Fed loans because the numbers aren’t disclosed and there isn’t enough publicly available data to figure it out.

Opinsky, the JPMorgan spokesman, says he doesn’t think the calculation is fair because “in all likelihood, such funds were likely invested in very short-term investments,” which typically bring lower returns.

Standing Access

Even without tapping the Fed, the banks get a subsidy by having standing access to the central bank’s money, says Viral Acharya, a New York University economics professor who has worked as an academic adviser to the New York Fed.

“Banks don’t give lines of credit to corporations for free,” he says. “Why should all these government guarantees and liquidity facilities be for free?”

In the September 2008 meeting at which Paulson and Bernanke briefed lawmakers on the need for TARP, Bernanke said that if nothing was done, “unemployment would rise — to 8 or 9 percent from the prevailing 6.1 percent,” Paulson wrote in “On the Brink” (Business Plus, 2010).

Occupy Wall Street

The U.S. jobless rate hasn’t dipped below 8.8 percent since March 2009, 3.6 million homes have been foreclosed since August 2007, according to data provider RealtyTrac Inc., and police have clashed with Occupy Wall Street protesters, who say government policies favor the wealthiest citizens, in New York, Boston, Seattle and Oakland, California.

The Tea Party, which supports a more limited role for government, has its roots in anger over the Wall Street bailouts, says Neil M. Barofsky, former TARP special inspector general and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor.

“The lack of transparency is not just frustrating; it really blocked accountability,” Barofsky says. “When people don’t know the details, they fill in the blanks. They believe in conspiracies.”

In the end, Geithner had his way. The Brown-Kaufman proposal to limit the size of banks was defeated, 60 to 31. Bank supervisors meeting in Switzerland did mandate minimum reserves that institutions will have to hold, with higher levels for the world’s largest banks, including the six biggest in the U.S. Those rules can be changed by individual countries.

They take full effect in 2019.

Meanwhile, Kaufman says, “we’re absolutely, totally, 100 percent not prepared for another financial crisis.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.net; Bradley Keoun in New York at bkeoun@bloomberg.net; Phil Kuntz in New York at pkuntz1@bloomberg.net.

 

This is very serious business folks and your ability to Survive and Thrive are on the line now!

How a Single Woman Transformed Her Urban Garden into a Productive, Organic, Tropical Paradise

Here is an inspiring story of how a single woman transformed her  home and yard into a tropical paradise. Never let anyone tell you you can not do it! Enjoy the article and video below. This article was featured on permaculture.org

You don’t have to know her street number to find Rosina Buckman’s place. All you need is the street name. Winner of the Edible Landscape Award from Australia’s Sunshine Coast Council in 2009, her garden spills out into the nature strip, bursting with plants.

Her driveway, once a barren front lawn, is now edged with strawberry runners, passionfruit vines, chilies and edible greens.

“Before we get started, I want to show you some­thing that saved my life!” exclaims Rosina.

In front of us are a wheelbarrow, a piece of timber and a rather imposing cleaver.

I wonder if one of her chickens is about to have a very bad day, but no, this is Rosina’s new movable workstation and mulching system. With terrifying dexterity, she holds a palm frond in her left hand and chops furiously with her right. Pieces of the dried frond fly everywhere.

Visitors giggle nervously at the dangerous procedure, but thankfully all her fingers are intact at the end, and we title her Queen Chop-Chop.

Recently Rosina covered any remaining lawn on her property with hay mulch. Now the front garden is just as productive as her back yard. A mini orchard is on the left, and her kitchen garden, complete with a raised garden bed, is on the right.

She relocated the corrugated iron bed from the back yard to take advantage of the northern sun, and has been rewarded for the strategic move with plentiful supplies of tomatoes, bok-choy, mustard, chard, eggplants and lettuce ever since.

The tour moves on into the orchard, passing the “Trespassers could be composted,” sign on the way.

We dodge a swinging pendulum hanging from the archway (the largest New Guinea Bean I’ve ever seen!) and find ourselves face to face with fruit trees. Here, planted in the front yard, are a tangelo, lime, orange, and lemon tree, growing happily where once was only grass.

Rosina’s garden is an inspiring example of how abundant, productive and diverse an urban permaculture system can be.

It’s incredible what she’s squeezed into her 670m2 block; a banana circle; orchard; worm farm; two compost bins; and two chooks nestled behind the 2 x 6 metre shade house.

The chook pen is her pride and joy as she spent considerable time figuring out a multipurpose design, finally settling on a system where she divides the long, narrow run into two areas. During summer, she allows the girls to have free reign in both, and in winter she closes off one end and plants out the fertile ground with veggies.

And with all these systems she still has room for a pool surrounded by potted pineapples and sweet potatoes.

We can see the evidence of clever design in her compact system. She harvests water from the roof and has rigged up a flexible hose direct from her down-pipes into her swimming pool.

“I haven’t had to top up the pool with town water since I’ve installed that system,” she explains.

She also has a metal rainwater tank on the western side of the house where she collects her drinking water.

“I can’t stand the taste of chlorinated water. I never want to drink town water again!” she says.

And what happened to all that mulch produced by Queen Chop Chop? She’s combined the small pieces of brown waste (carbon) and green clippings (nitrogen) to form a pile approximately one cubic metre in size.

It’s so hot Rosina dares us to put our hands in — and steam rises when someone moves the organic matter. Because of the extra surface area produced by chopping the waste, microbes have more to feed on, and the resulting compost is ready to use in a matter of weeks.

Rosina has a passion for permaculture. It’s evident in her generous teaching (she’s toured all the Sunshine coast libraries giving demonstrations and talks), in her infectious laugh and especially evident in her garden.

Thanks for sharing your passion and excellent examples with us Rosina. We love you. Please keep your eye on those fingers, Queen Chop-Chop!

Enjoy the video here below:

Note: As it happens, Rosina is selling her painstakingly developed urban site. If you’re looking for a well-established permaculture property, this might be just the thing….

Further Reading:

Rosina Buckman – Living Smart on the Sunshine Coast

The difference between fraud and economic cycles. The public’s mind manipulated.

I highly recommend watching this short video to get a good picture of what is going on economically before our very eyes with total impunity.

What really happens when a county goes broke?

Most of us lament what is happening in the world economy with it would seem one European country at a time falling to debt heavy burden. However few of us pause to consider what really happens when a county goes broke???

Watch this following video below to gain a better understanding!!! on you tube.

U.S. To Arm United Arab Emirates With Bunker Buster Bombs

In this video clip below you will see how we are moving closer to war with Iran. Why else would we arm the UAE with bombs that they do not have the aircraft to use. Warmongering has become the policy of our nation while our people go hungry, our classrooms have less teachers and our workers can not find jobs. Seems like a mess to me but at least we can still talk about it and make our voices heard. As always it is imperative to stay aware of what is going on.

Watch the video here on you tube

Europe gets worse…

Just when you start thinking the worst is behind them, it gets even more disturbing. The Bank of England issued some pretty dire warnings about the UK economy sending stocks worldwide down , dollar soaring and gold and silver down.

 

The worst is definitely not behind us. Spain is petitioning for a ‘broader’ range of assets to be included as capital. This means that they are running out of assets that have value as they lose money on their existing portfolios on a daily basis. With declining asset (read capital ratios) values they have to both deleverage (reduce loans) and sell assets to the extent they can. Herein lies the problem. Reduce liquidity (loans) to companies that produce goods and services and they will not hire, in fact they will fire people. This type activity will put the respective economies into deeper recessions/depressions.

 

The banks themselves if they can’t raise their capital ratios (what is required by the governments and financial regulators to cover losses from bad bets and loans) will eventually fail, as their assets are too low to cover debts, bad loans and bad bets etc. When the public is finally informed of the weakness in the system, you have bank runs and bank holidays and then nationalization of the entire systems…

 

Then you will see nationalization of any financial industry, pension companies, trust companies-basically anywhere that has cash and/or assets that the government can lay their hands on to support the broken companies/banks etc that they just had to nationalize. that my friends is one scenario that could very well happen…not a guarantee but certainly a possibility.

 

I suggest you have some precious metals on hand, some cash and a place to go in the event anything close to that scenario happens. People will just lose it when all their money is absconded with by the bandits in their respective governments. Most people will become completely reliant on the ‘State’ for just about everything…their daily bread, retirement, health care etc…truly enslaved to big brother.

France – Next victim?

In my opinion, France will soon become the next victim of the sovereign debt fall out amongst the EU countries. Let’s fact it, there is a HUGE crisis of confidence and trust in the financial system worldwide. While the leaders are focused on the numbers, mostly from the worst possible perspective-at least in my opinion, the people are seething.

 

How can anyone in their right mind think that these illustrious leaders are going to get it right this time after multiple failures starting with the Lehman debacle to the recent MF Global catastrophe and, last but certainly not least, the European Sovereign debt debacle? Of course, to be fair it all really started with very loose regulations coming from decades of official deregulation of financial industries and the advice given to our leaders by none other than the people most responsible for creating this mess!!!!

 

Realize that the sovereign debt is just the tip of the iceberg, and it is melting down pretty quickly at this point. No matter the words you hear, because the news is tightly controlled and ‘they’ don’t want you to hear the truth of it, this entire financial system is in meltdown.

 

The most immediate problem, not the only one by a long shot, is that all the holders of this toxic sovereign debt which would include just about every large and medium sized bank in the world have to write down a ton of this debt. With that write down the banks have less capital and to maintain the required capital to loan ration they must either raise more capital-hardly likely right now given the economic/political disarray in the U.S. and Europe-sell assets and reduce their loan exposure and/or borrow from the Central Banksters.

 

As I see it, they are borrowing from the Central Bank, which just creates money out of thin air, to shore up their capital which is in itself not a long term strategy but only a very quick and short term fix and selling assets to raise liquidity while at the same time reducing their loans portfolios-which of course will put the respective economies into a recession…Does all this sound familiar?

 

We have been replaying this scenario from coast to coast and continent to continent for the past 3 years, over and over again with much the same results-slowing economies, rising unemployment, more real estate woes as foreclosures rise and values fall which leads to further deterioration of existing loan portfolios (did anyone catch that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require more billions to cover losses last quarter?) and the need to raise even more capital.

 

Of course as the economies slow down companies-large and small- have a harder time servicing their debts and have to layoff more people in the face of declining sales. You get the idea of how vicious this cycle is? I think we will continue to see this scenario play out except now we have entire governments/countries falling under the sheer weight of debts they cannot possibly repay!

 

I have very little faith, as do most people now, that our illustrious leaders can pull yet another rabbit out of the hat! We are seeing the beginnings of a ‘bank run’ on the European banks as the larger money market funds pull out of the larger European banks (Deutche Bank lost over 6 billion in one single day last week from this reaction by just one money fund). In my opinion it is just a matter of time before the people start to ask for their cash!

 

Once the people lose faith then to see what might happen rewind to the Argentinian crisis of the last decade! Perhaps a look at the first Great Depression from a historical perspective would be in order as well!

 

I hope I am wrong about the outcome here as it will make things so difficult that we cannot imagine. Not only that but very few have the grit and determination to weather such a storm! Chaos could ensue and that folks is not a pretty thing.

 

The good news, from the ashes comes the Phoenix…the people will get another chance at this and I hope that they will be much better informed of the possibilities than most are now!

 

Stay tuned….

Do you want your tax dollars funding terror groups paid by the CIA?

I don’t know about you but I do not want my tax dollars funding terrorism of any kind. It is time for this military industrial complex to come to and end!!! In this article below by Paul Joseph Watson the cat is out of the bag again.

 

The U.S. Is Already Attacking Iran Through Terrorist Proxies

 

CIA admittedly finances groups blamed for bloody attacks aimed at destabilizing Tehran

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, November 11, 2011

Tehran’s contention that the United States is carrying out terror attacks inside Iran in an effort to destabilize the Ahmadinejad regime in preparation for a military assault was largely ignored by the establishment media, but it’s an admitted fact that the CIA uses terrorist proxies to do precisely that.

“Iran has irrefutable evidence that exposes the official involvement of the United States government in anti-Iran planning and the dispatching of elements to conduct acts of sabotage and terror in Iran and other regional countries,” secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalilisaid last week, promising to send evidence of “US state-sponsored terrorism” to the United Nations

“We possess one hundred pieces of irrefutable evidence that reveal the US role in directing terrorists for conducting acts of terror in Iran and the region,” Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei added.

Because the story was reported by Iranian state media, the western press received it with a collective shrug of the shoulders. The new IEAE report claiming Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon was afforded about a thousand times more coverage.

However, the fact that the United States is training and bankrolling terrorist groups to destabilize Iran through violence and other acts of subversion is admitted.

As former CIA veteran Robert Baer explained in the documentary Vanguard: America’s Secret War With Iran, the U.S. has been at war with Iran through its terrorist proxies for years, notably the Kurdish militant nationalist group PJAK, which has been blamed for numerous attacks in Iran.

As the London Telegraph, ABC News and numerous other mainstream outlets reported back in 2007, the U.S. is also using the Al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni terrorist group Jundullah to carry out suicide bombings and other destabilization attacks in Iran, a policy crafted by the Bush administration which has been continued under Obama.

“President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert “black” operations to achieve regime change in Iran, intelligence sources have revealed. Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs,” reported Telegraph.

Part of that destabilization campaign involved the the CIA “Giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan,” stated the report.

Jundullah is a Sunni Al-Qaeda offshoot organization that was formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In October 2009, Jundullah attacked the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at their headquarters in Pishin, near the border with Pakistan, killing 40 people.

The group has been blamed for a number of bombings inside Iran aimed at destabilizing Ahmadinejad’s government and is also active in Pakistan, having been fingered for its involvement in attacks on police stations and car bombings at the Pakistan-US Cultural Center in 2004.

In May 2008, ABC News reported on how Pakistan was threatening to turn over six members of Jundullah to Iran after they were taken into custody by Pakistani authorities.

“U.S. officials tell ABC News U.S. intelligence officers frequently meet and advise Jundullah leaders, and current and former intelligence officers are working to prevent the men from being sent to Iran,” reported ABC news, highlighting again the close relationship between the terror group and the CIA.

In July 2009, a Jundullah member admitted before a court in Zahedan Iran that the group was a proxy for the U.S. and Israel.

Abdolhamid Rigi, a senior member of the group and the brother of the group’s leader Abdolmalek Rigi, who was one of the six members of the organization extradited by Pakistan, told the court that Jundullah was being trained and financed by “the US and Zionists”. He also said that the group had been ordered by America and Israel to step up their attacks in Iran.

Jundullah is not the only anti-Iranian terror group that US government has been accused of funding in an attempt to pressure the Iranian government.

Multiple credible individuals including US intelligence whistleblowers and former military personnel have asserted that the U.S. is conducting covert military operations inside Iran using guerilla groups to carry out attacks on Iranian Revolution Guard units.

It is widely suspected that the well known right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, is now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and carrying out remote bombings in Iran.

After a bombing inside Iran in March 2007, the London Telegraph also reported on how a high ranking CIA official blew the whistle on the fact that America is secretly funding terrorist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear program.

A story entitled, US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran, reveals how funding for the attacks carried out by the terrorist groups “comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget,” a fact that is now “no great secret”, according to a former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

We must act against the FDA before it is too late; The Government Wants to Seize Your Vitamins

In this article by Chip Wood, he explains why we need to clamour hard to prevent the FDA from enforcing a policy that would mean most of your herbs and supplements would be taken off the market. We need to act now, firstly by making sure our representatives are aware of this FDA power grab and travesty. Read the article below!

The Government Wants to Seize Your Vitamins

No matter how many times you beat back a Federal power grab, it is almost impossible to kill the monster. Like the most terrifying villain in the worst horror movie you’ve ever seen, it keeps coming back to life and threatening the townspeople.

Consider the efforts by the Food and Drug Administration to make it impossible for you to buy the vitamins you want. The FDA first tried to make many supplements illegal in the early 1990s. But its overzealous persecution of vitamin makers (I was one of them) caused millions of consumers to demand that Congress block the FDA.

As a result, in 1994 Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). While the law was far from perfect (what Federal legislation ever is?), it did protect the right to take the supplements of our choice. The only way the FDA could intrude was if it could prove a supplement was unsafe. I don’t know of a single case in which that happened. So for 17 years, those of us who take vitamins to protect our health were safe from government meddlers.

Unfortunately, there was a dangerous loophole in that 1994 law. While supplements that existed at the time were protected by law, the FDA was given the authority to regulate any new ingredients that were introduced after Oct. 15, 1994.

What happened? At first, nothing did. For 17 years, the FDA took no action.

That’s been a good thing, because for 17 years the dietary supplement industry continued to innovate. It discovered new ingredients and formulations and found better ways to extract and concentrate the most effective natural ingredients. As a result, millions of consumers benefited. They protected their hearts and arteries, found relief from joint pain, improved their memory, protected their prostate and much more.

Meanwhile, some deadly dangers did exist. Pathogens like E. coli in food kill at least 2,000 people every year. Acetaminophen, the painkiller in Tylenol and other drugs, is known to kill hundreds more. An FDA researcher estimated that there may have been more than 27,000 deaths linked to the use of Vioxx before the FDA finally took the drug off the market.

Now, the FDA wants to act like the past 17 years never happened. The agency has drafted a proposal to regulate what it calls “new dietary ingredients.” If this proposal is implemented, some of the most effective nutrients you take will be pulled from the market. Nutrients like resveratrol, ubiquinol CoQ10, bacopa, strontium and more.

That’s not all. Under these guidelines, the FDA can define almost anything as a new dietary ingredient. For example:

• If a supplement includes more of an ingredient than was used 17 years ago (even something like vitamin C), it’s new.
• If an ingredient uses a different extraction process (like baking or fermentation), it’s new.
• If a supplement uses an ingredient at a different “life stage” (such as using ripe rather than non-ripe apples), it’s new.
• If a supplement duplicates an ingredient in a laboratory rather than extracting it from the food (even though it’s chemically identical), it’s new.
• And if a probiotic formula includes a strain of bacteria that wasn’t found in yogurt 17 years ago, it’s new.

What would happen to these “new” ingredients? The manufacturers would have to take them off the market until they could prove the ingredients are safe — even if those ingredients have been safely used for 17 years.

What kind of proof is the FDA demanding? According to the guidelines, many companies would have to conduct animal studies using a dosage that’s 1,000 times the typical dose.

I’m not kidding. The FDA wants vitamin makers to do studies for a full year, at 1,000 times the typical dose.

So a fish oil manufacturer would have to conduct a one-year study in which animals are force-fed the human equivalent of 240,000 milligrams of fish oil each and every day. Do you think this outrageous overdose might injure or kill its victim? Of course it could. And that would give the FDA all the excuse it needed to outlaw any product that contained it.

But wait, it gets even worse. If one fish oil manufacturer performed such a study and it passed, it doesn’t mean that other fish oil makers can use the same data. No, sir. They are still required to go out and do their own studies before they’re allowed to sell their product.

These studies are very expensive. A study like the one above typically costs $100,000 to $200,000 to perform. Multiply that by several ingredients in several products and you get an idea of the cost.

Say a company carries six products containing six ingredients each. It would cost between $3.6 million and $7.2 million in studies before that company could even offer the products for sale. For a larger company offering 50 products or more, the costs would be astronomical.

Even if the company did all of that, every penny of those new and higher costs would be passed on to you, the consumer.

Anyone on a tight budget (and that’s almost all of us these days) would find the supplements they rely on becoming prohibitively expensive — if they were even on the market anymore.

Few supplement makers will be able to afford these studies. Many of them will be forced out of business. The ones that remain would still be at the mercy of the FDA. That’s because there are no requirements for the FDA to approve anything. It can approve or reject anything it wants. In the past, it has rejected the majority of ingredients submitted to it.

That means most of the nutrients you buy today will be pulled from the market and never return. Those that do return will be a lot more expensive — or may be available only as prescription drugs.

This is a blatant abuse of power. What the FDA is doing is performing an end-run around the existing law. According to the law, the FDA has to prove a dietary supplement is unsafe for it to be taken off the market. These new guidelines turn that on its head. They are clearly not what Congress intended.

Fortunately, these FDA guidelines have not yet been finalized. All Federal agencies are required to give the public an opportunity to comment on a draft before it is made final. In this case, the FDA has given interested parties until Dec. 1 to comment on the draft. That means there’s a small window of opportunity for you to voice your disapproval.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bother commenting to the FDA. The process is deliberately cumbersome. Those unelected bureaucrats don’t care what you think, anyway.

Instead, please contact the people you do elect: your Congressman and your two U.S. Senators. They have the power to rein in the FDA, and they have done so before — when enough voters complained.

We may not be able to kill the monster, but we can drive it back into its cave. Whether we do is up to you.

Until next time, keep some powder dry.

–Chip Wood

 

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