Central Bank “Wealth Effects” Doctrine At Work: Meet The $500K “Crap Shack” In Culver City CA

Submitted by David Stockman – The Contra Corner Blog

The purpose of central bank financial repression and ZIRP is to distort and inflate asset prices. Our monetary politburo even admits that it is in the monetary scam business via its self-serving doctrine called “wealth effects”.

The game here is to drive the stock market averages ever higher through massive liquidity injections into the Wall Street dealer markets. This purportedly causes people to feel richer and to spend and invest more, creating a virtuous circle of prosperity, world without end.

We know by now, however, that “wealth effects” money printing does not help the main street economy. And while it does produce awesome financial market gains—–these turn out to be unsustainable bubbles that inexorably crash. Since the turn of the century, most central banks have participated in this scam—either because they have embraced the Keynesian gospel or have joined the money printing party out of defensive necessity to protect against inflation of their own exchange rates. So the resulting financial bubbles have been global in scope.

The Only Way to Stop the Empire

Submitted by Dmitry Orlov  –  The ClubOrlov Blog

Dear friends,

The final days of US empire are fast approaching. Perhaps its end will pass slowly and gradually, or perhaps the event will unfold rapidly and catastrophically. Maybe chaos will break loose, or maybe its demise will be organized well and proceed smoothly. This nobody knows, but the end of empire is coming as surely as day follows night and sun follows rain. Overexpansion, overreach and over-indebtedness will take their toll—as all past empires have discovered. Empires are like bacteria in a Petrie dish; unthinking, unseeing, unfeeling, they expand until they run out of food or contaminate their environment with their waste, and then they die. They are automatons, and they just can’t help it: they are programmed to expand or die, expand or die, and, in the end, expand and die.

What does the empire feed on? It feeds on money and fear; your money and your fear, both obtained with your cooperation. It is bigger now than when it faced an actual adversary in the Soviet Union. Russia is no adversary; all it wants is to be a normal country, at peace with the world. But the empire won’t let it, will it? It must create enemies. Who are our enemies? According to the authors of endless war they are North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Islamic terrorists. Are any of them actually capable of threatening the US? Well, yes, but they are all quite easy to deter. But the plan of the authors of endless war is not to deter them; it is to back them into a corner with political instability and sanctions, while whipping up the population on both sides into fear-filled frenzy.

THE TAIL OF THE DRAGON

Submitted by JC Collins  –  philosophyofmetrics

In March of 2009 the People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan called for a reform of the international monetary system.  Among the initiatives called for by Zhou was the creation of an international reserve currency which would be disconnected from any individual nations currency, and would remain stable by removing the deficiencies inherit in using credit based national currencies.

Other factors called for by Governor Zhou was for part of the official reserves of member countries to come under the centralized management of the International Monetary Fund.  Special Drawing Rights, or SDR’s, of the IMF should be expanded as a means of payment, denomination of securities, commodity denomination, such as oil, and the denomination of the new international reserve currency mentioned above.

Along those lines the PBoC also called for a larger representation within the SDR basket composition for all major economies based on GDP.  This would presumably be a reference to adding the Chinese currency, the renminbi, to the SDR basket.

What Americans Celebrate On Thanksgiving Day

Submitted by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts – Institute for Public Economy

When Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, they don’t know what they are celebrating.

In American folklore, Thanksgiving is a holiday that originated in 1621 with the Pilgrims celebrating a good harvest. Some historians say that this event is poorly documented, and others believe that the Thanksgiving tradition travelled to the New World with the Pilgrims and Puritans who brought with them the English Days of Thanksgiving. Other historians think the Pilgrims associated their relief from hunger with their observance of the relief of the siege of Leiden.

The Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving, if it happened, might not have been the first in the New World. Historians say the Virginia colonial charter declared a Day of Thanksgiving in 1619, and other historians say the first Thanksgiving was observed by the Spanish in Florida in 1565.

Apparently, the different English colonies and later American states each had their own day of Thanksgiving, if they had one. Abraham Lincoln tried to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, but the country was divided by the War of Northern Aggression.

Thanksgiving became a national holiday with the completion of the Reconstruction of the South after the War of Northern Aggression and the extermination of the Plains Indians by the Union generals in the 1870s. This taints Thanksgiving as a celebration of the preservation and expansion of the American Empire and accurately reflects the goal of the political forces behind Lincoln.

Swiss Gold “Fire and Smoke” – “Sermons On the Mount” and “Sorcerers Apprentices”

Submitted by Mark O’Byrne  – Founding Partner of  GoldCore

Central bankers reached a new low overnight when Swiss National Bank President Thomas Jordan warned of “disastrous consequences” from a pulpit in a church on a historic hill in the town of Uster, Switzerland.

“The initiative is dangerous because it would weaken the SNB,” he said yesterday regarding proposals to increase theSwiss gold reserves, at a memorial service in a church which Bloomberg dubbed the ‘sermon on the hill.’

The separation of church and state was one of the great achievement of recent years. It looks like we need to see a proper separation of central banking from the state. States and sovereign nations should be in control of central banks, rather than the other way around.

Central bankers and their dogmatic Keynesian money printing creed would like to see themselves and their policies as infallible. Despite, such policies having an abysmal track record throughout history and indeed in recent years.

Central bankers seem to have forgotten that their primary role is to protect the purchasing power of their respective currencies and not to boost asset prices on behalf of corporations and the wealthy – thereby, debasing sovereign currencies.

In the words of the great Rage Against the Machine song, “Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long, they get hope from fire and smoke as they reach for the dawn.”