The financial system established in England after 1688, based on usurious lending to the state by private bankers, is reaching its final blowout in the form of a series of devastating bubbles and a massive bailout of the financiers with public money. But the issuance of money doesn’t have to be in the hands of a private consortium: another credit system is possible.
Posted by seumasach on July 20, 2008
Or viewed from another perspective: what happens when you save the banks but everyone else goes under? What happens when consumption collapses, the pound tumbles and the state itself is bankrupt? With a dead stare, Britain looks into the abyss.
Edmund Conway
20th July, 2008
The Treasury may be planning to raise the limit on public borrowing in an effort to give it “room for manoeuvre” for a potential rescue operation for the banking system, a leading expert has suggested.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on July 20, 2008
Alternet.org
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on July 19, 2008, Printed on July 20, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/91927/
I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I’d hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we’d sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother’s dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I’d like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building… we are certainly a country in distress. — Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: western media | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on July 20, 2008
By Kate Burgess and Daniel Thomas
Published: July 19 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 19 2008 03:00
Pity the poor receivers and administrators sent in to restructure the labyrinthine collection of private companies, joint ventures and investments that makes up the crumbling business empire of Guy Naggar and Peter Klimt. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: debt, financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on July 19, 2008
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| Larry Edelson takes a closer look at the U.S. dollar and the reasons why it is headed for a meltdown. In this issue of Money and Markets, Mr. Edelson explains further why the rocky economy has affected the value of the dollar.
Jupiter, Fla. (PRWEB) July 19, 2008 — Larry Edelson takes a closer look at the U.S. dollar and the reasons why it is headed for a meltdown. Mr. Edelson explains further why the rocky economy has affected the value of the dollar. Read the rest of this entry » |
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: dollar collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 18, 2008
By Mike Whitney
18/07/08 “ICH” — – The Fed’s emergency rescue plan for the financial markets is hopelessly flawed. It’s a scattershot approach that doesn’t address the real source of the problem; an unregulated, unsustainable structured finance system that emerged in full-force after 2000 and spawned a shadow banking system that creates trillions of dollars of credit without sufficient capital reserves. This is the heart of the problem and it needs to be debated openly. The present system doesn’t work; it’s as simple as that. It makes no sense to provide trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to shore up a system that is essentially dysfunctional. It’s just throwing money down a rat-hole.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 18, 2008
“There is no such thing as a free bailout.”
Colby Cosh
18th July, 2008
Dammit, someone has to say it: Shouldn’t the first clue that something was wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Machave been their names? Surely a country has to be courting trouble when it lets its secondary mortgage market be captured by companies that sound like things your grandmother would say instead of cursing. “Oh, Freddie Mac! Looks like we’ll have to increase the money supply again, Paw.”
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 16, 2008
“No one who has wealth or assets in any form, in any currency, is safe – you might as well consider yourself as being at least knee-deep in the shark infested waters of the financial markets.”
By Julian Delasantellis
As he was winding down his days of dissoluteness and reprobation, the 4th century Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo, commonly referred to as St Augustine, begged for just a few more rounds of divinely sanctioned debauchery. “Lord,” he cried out to the heavens, “Give me chastity and continence, but not quite yet.”
Currently, as a result of the ever-worsening crises in US housing finance, a crisis being illustrated by the absolute devastation of the shares in the US government’s semi-private semi-public secondary market mortgage wholesalers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and in the government seizing control of mortgage lender IndyMac in one of the largest bank failures in American history, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke must be raising higaze to the heavens for a similar entreaty.
“Lord, give me credibility as, and the ability to be, an inflation fighter – but not quite yet.”
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 16, 2008
By F William Engdahl
17th July, 2008
The announcement by US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, together with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, that the US government will bail out the two largest guarantors of the country’s housing mortgage debt – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – far from calming financial markets has confirmed what we have said repeatedly in this space: the financial tsunami that began in August 2007 in the relatively small “subprime” high-risk mortgage securitization market, far from being over, is only gathering momentum.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 14, 2008
Ellen Brown, July 13th, 2008
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/bracing-storm.php
In an article in The San Francisco Chronicle in December 2007, attorney Sean Olender suggested that the real reason for the subprime bailout schemes being proposed by the U.S. Treasury Department was not to keep strapped borrowers in their homes so much as to stave off a spate of lawsuits against the banks. The plan then on the table was an interest rate freeze on a limited number of subprime loans. Olender wrote:
“The sole goal of the freeze is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value – right now almost 10 times their market worth. The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.
“. . . The catastrophic consequences of bond investors forcing originators to buy back loans at face value are beyond the current media discussion. The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest U.S. banks combined, and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest U.S. banks to fail, resulting in massive taxpayer-funded bailouts of Fannie and Freddie, and even FDIC . . . .
“What would be prudent and logical is for the banks that sold this toxic waste to buy it back and for a lot of people to go to prison. If they knew about the fraud, they should have to buy the bonds back.”1
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: litigation against banks | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on July 13, 2008
When the government took over Northern Rock, they took on its liabilities but left its assets, its mortgage book. Now the company is milking that for all its worth to pay back government money. The idea of effectively nationalising the housing stock which can’t be bought, makes perfect sense. Since their value to the bank after reposession is often very low or even zero, this doesn’t have to be too expensive. The implications, however, are far reaching: why would people then struggle to pay mortgages if they had this option. It takes us in the direction of the complete nationalisation of housing stock.
Gaby Hinsliff and Jamie Elliott
13th July, 2008
Homeowners struggling to meet their mortgage payments would be able to sell their homes to the local authority and rent them back as tenants under radical proposals being considered by the government to prevent the misery of repossession.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: nationalisation of housing stock | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on July 13, 2008
IndyMac Bank seized by federal regulators
Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times
IndyMac Bank customers in Pasadena encounter notices that the FDIC has closed the bank.
The Pasadena-based thrift’s failure is the second-biggest by a U.S. bank. Doors will reopen Monday.
By Kathy M. Kristof and Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 12, 2008
The federal government took control of Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank on Friday in what regulators called the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: IndyMac bank failure | 1 Comment »
In These New Times 