Thursday, January 3, 2013

The Coming Isolation of US Dollar

Goldseek – by Jim Willie CB

 
 
The typical human reaction to any infection, vermin, danger, or toxicity is to stand back, to isolate the agent, to trap it, to prevent its further spread or release, then to remove it in a safe secure way if possible using trained professionals. Eventually decisions must be made on the level of acceptable risk on the removal, like what is willing to be lost or damaged or killed in the process. Risk analysis, cost trade-offs, and minimization decisions must be evaluated and executed. The toxic agent in global trade, global banking, and global bond market is the USDollar. In 2009, the Jackass began making a certain firm point. Those nations that depart from the entire USDollar system early will be the leading nations in the next chapter, with stronger foundations, richer solvency, emerging economies, healthier financial markets, efficient credit engines, growing wealth, stronger political helm activity, and better functioning systems generally. Imagine a contaminated blood system that infects, corrupts, and destroys all interior organs from the spread of the toxin. Those nations that stick with the crumbling USDollar system stubbornly will find a horrible fate with devastating effects, rampant economic damage, broken financial markets, sputtering credit engines, tremendous loss of wealth, wrecked supply lines, poverty spreading like wildfire, ruined political structures, social disorder, isolation from the rest of the world, and a fast ticket to the Third World. That is EXACTLY what is happening in the last several months. A division has begun, as the East has been busily installing the next generation platforms, as related to trade, banking, and commercial integration.

NEW ASIAN TRADE ZONE
The division between East and West actually accelerated when the extremely ill-advised decision for Iran sanctions was made by an increasingly desperate United States Govt and its handler on the Southern Med. The division continues, matures, and develops with each passing month. It has become a story, as the Eurasia trade zone concept has been born. It has a long way to go, but Asia however has made great strides lately in unifying commerce. The climax event of the Asian trade zone conference held in Vietnam could not have been more important, as they rejected the US-led plan. The Asians partners and players even rejected the United States from the entire Asian trade zone, but did include Australia and New Zealand. The incredibly stupid naive US-led plan, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, attempted to create a trade zone with Asia which would have blocked China.Imagine the incredibly obtuse blockheaded maneuver of trying to have all of Asia not conduct facilitated trade with China, its leading trade partner. Talk about shooting both legs and genital region with a double barreled shotgun! This is the signal flare of US political stupidity that has turned highly destructive for the USEconomy and its people. Such failed leadership and counter-productive initiatives will push the US into the Third World even faster than previously thought possible. The isolation is firming quickly. Most of Asia does not wish for strong trade ties with the United States, most likely since they do not see mutual benefit. They see a ravaging appetite to grab capital.
A Paradigm Shift is taking place, and the ASEAN-China summit gave proof positive in a seminal event of the vast changes in progress. The United States just suffered its worst humiliation ever as a nation on the Eastern global stage. It was exceeded only by the humiliation for a US president personally. The story went uncovered by the lapdog inept US press. The late November Asian summit meeting held in Phnom Penh included 15 Asian nations, which represent half the world’s population. They decided to form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership thatexcludes the United States. The Asians are pushing to isolate the United States. Regard it as punishment for hegemony, or a reaction to prevent further capital drainage, or to protect from central bank abuse, or to wall off continued bond fraud export, or to defend against military aggression. Regard it as confirmation that China is the regional leader in Asia, even for military security. Regard it as a response to banker criminality, or simply for being totally full to the brim of American corruption and arrogance and abuse of position, led by creation of the USDollar as an elaborate weapon and credit card whose balance is never to be repaid. Abuse of power and sponsored financial corruption will have extreme consequences in the reshaping of global commerce and banking. The US will be isolated, so as to protect the rest of the world from its fascist exhibitions and deep manifestations.

FLUSHED NATION
The shift is in progress, and the American people have no idea what is happening. They are too pre-occupied by the agency torture of the population, urgently needed to remove guns and to create the police state. Current events are heinous and genocide on large scale and small scale. Any comments will be limited on the orchestrated travesty, travails, and tragedy. They all have one traceable element, which connects to a certain Virginia suburb where an intelligent pillbox operates in the shadows with puppet strings to the press networks and maybe Hollywood. The security agencies turned to the dark side years ago, with full devotion to narcotics, money laundering, and collusion with the castle dwellers. When the Praetorian Guard plots to bring about a police state, the only words that come to mind are disaster, disorder, mayhem, betrayal, degradation, death. Their tools are psychotropic drugs, violent training, weather altering devices, and basic sabotage. Treason is the calling card unfortunately for much of the US leadership class, whether banking, politics, economics, pharmaceuticals, or news networks. Think Syndicate, as my work has described for several years. The United States with its harsh new visa policies, molestation at airports, heavily defended borders, sponsored gun running, has shown a vicious visible visceral fascist streak that has begun to bring memories of the national socialists of Central Europe 70 and 80 years ago. They are back, stronger than ever, not having been eliminated. They were instead assimilated within the banking and security organizations, able to plant seeds which germinated with the sons in offspring. Two sons became presidents.

DEUTSCHE MARK GONE
In the 1960 and 1970 and even 1980 decades, the favorite currencies off the standardized tables of commerce were the USDollar and DeutscheMark. At one time in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc of Eastern Europe, more USDollars and DMarks were in circulation than official Russian Rubles or Polish Zlotys or Hungarian Forints or whatever. Those years are long gone, as in long gone, all paper alternatives lousy.Under a strange bizarre compromise arranged to assimilate East Germany and to conceal the French sovereign debt, the Euro Monetary Union and the common Euro currency was born. It is now in the process of disintegrating. So the powerfully strong and stable German DMark went away. Back in those decades, only limited travel was done by the Jackass, confined to a honeymoon in France and Switzerland with a cold woman no longer inflicting her plague-like touch in my life. The Jackass deals exclusively in Latin currency of paper and human variety. No exposure to alternative currency held under the table was discovered in beach locations to the south or modest hotels in the green hills to the north. But friends reported stories. My older brother spent two months in Germany and Czechoslavakia, with ample stories of hoarded USDollars and DMarks. Store owners and wise families were eager to obtain USD and DM currency, even young kids. He and some ambitious friends heard stories of vast black market activity in Russia, where the US$100 bill was a favorite. In that era, Gold was not an item of pursuit or stored wealth. Times have changed radically, and Gold is the new store of value.
Times have changed with the sunset of the DMark and the toxicity of the USDollar. The people, the shop keepers, the business men, the small financial firms, they all have been turned upside down in recent years as they struggle to find a safe place to store wealth. Money has been corrupted. The purveyors of money have lost control by accelerating its supply by central banks, lost control of bank solvency, lost control of anything remotely acting like an honest tether to money itself. As a result, all those people, the shop keepers, the business men, the small financial firms, have been discovering Gold & Silver bars and coins. Their combined actions have resulted in an implicit isolation of the USDollar, even an isolation of the Southern European sovereign debt. Swiss havens have grown, in parallel with Gold havens. The toxic monetary plague has been identified, and its toxic sources too. They are the US Federal Reserve and the Euro Central Bank. They are ruining money, undermining wealth, and destabilizing the entire world related to wealth, banking, commerce, and economies. The armies of people, the shop keepers, the business men, the small financial firms, are working to isolate the USDollar as toxic agent in a demonstration of survival.

FREEDOM FROM DELUSION
Many bright people within the gold community cling to hope, harbor delusions, and maintain expectations, none of which have much value in the fast changing world of fascist entanglement and full integration. The Jackass has operated without delusions, firmly in belief that the corrupt systems would flourish. That viewpoint and operating principle has proved to be correct since 2004 when the Hat Trick Letter began to spout deeply disturbing forecasts. One after the other, most of the forecasts have indeed occurred, to the detriment of the nation and its systems and its society at large. No pleasure has come from forecasting a wrecked housing market (burdened by lax underwriting and bond fraud) or a broken insolvent banking system (from bond losses and dependent upon money laundering) or a desperate chronically USGovt budget (dragged down by adopted socialism and sacred war costs) or a spreading Southern European bond crisis (addressed only by higher subordinated toxic paper).
No pleasure is taken from seeing vast legions of struggling Americans, including a few close friends, who have lost jobs, lost homes, lost savings, lost pensions, and lost a valuable sense of security, as they continue to hang on. Many might actually find the warmth of the official camps, only to disappear later on. Argentina and Chile had their desaparecidos, and so will the United States. My ugly expectation is that before their bodies are incinerated, vital organs will be extracted for black market gains. Inoculations upon entry will assure them of good health and fully functioning organs. Later, vaccines will infect them, just like with the swine flu vaccine. By the way, in Costa Rica a brief story to enlighten on vaccines. In early 2008, the Jackass advised a couple families with numerous children and cousins in school to reject the swine flu vaccine that was promoted by the school authorities at the urging of US officials. They took my advice after their confidence was won on several other matters. Only one of about 20 children took the vaccine. She has been sick with a mysterious cerebral disease for over two years. My mention of searching for Guillain Barre symptoms has not helped. The mothers are grateful, as they did not understand at first my emotional outburst to discourage following the school advice. The official US camps will involve forced vaccines. Later on, false stories will be promulgated that the dead bodies were the result of already sick people entering the camps for quarantine purposes. In reality, the people would only have suffered from hunger and exposure and despair.
Hope is not part of my forecasts, but rather the reality of the corrupt human power game mindset. The US banking, economic, and political leaders can easily be expected to continue their corrupt games, with easy forward calls. No expectation of USGovt regulatory agencies is part of my forecasts, but rather the reality of their nearly perfect track record of big bank loyalty and fraud protection. The US regulators can easily be expected to continue their corrupt games, with easy forward calls.Clinging to precious metals mining stocks is not part of my forecasts, a decision made back in early 2008. They are bound in paper wealth, subject to inflation in share dilution just like the USDollar, vulnerable to jurisdictional confiscations, and at the mercy of labor unions whose production is increasingly halted. Unfortunately, too many fine people within the gold community, including GATA, hold firm on hope, regulators, and mining stocks. Not here! The major financial networks rely upon advertisement revenue from Wall Street, fund managers, an market exchanges. GATA has a business model that has one key vulnerability, with strong links to the mining firms. It has tainted their viewpoint sadly. My support of GATA is firm on challenge of USDollar legitimacy before the Supreme Court, on challenge of US regulators to enforce the law, on challenge of the big banks to prove their solvency, on challenge of the central bank to reveal their activity. But the Jackass does not expect the Supreme Court to ever rule the USDollar as illegal, nor the US regulators to ever enforce the law, nor the big banks to ever remove themselves from corruption, nor the central bank to ever conduct business in opposition to the biggest banks under supranational orders.

My personal background has taught me well that a corrupt system never corrects itself. Instead, it spins out of control with broken platforms, layered mechanisms to impose its servitude and influence, complete with side projects to illicitly support itself. See the theft of Iraq gold and theft of Libyan gold. Their people will never again see that wealth. The US system will remain broken until it collapses, never to be corrected until after its collapse.
The Jackass does not align with the expectation of mining stock rise. The stocks are paper wealth in a new era of paper wealth implosion, during which inflation of shares through dilution is rampant. My full expectation is for physical metal prices for Gold & Silver to rise, while mining stocks continue to fall in value from dilution and reduced metal output. The leverage is a mirage when large deposits are seized by desperate foreign governments in need of income. What on earth is complicated about understanding this point?? The leverage is a mirage when workers are the focal breakdown point for a higher cost of living. If workers cannot afford to feed their families and survive, mine output will suffer. What on earth is complicated about understanding this point?? The leverage is a mirage when rising mine operation costs must be handled, by the simple practice of share dilution. Combine with regular executive stock options, and the dilution on stock shares is huge. What on earth is complicated about understanding this point??

POWERFUL CORRUPTION INERTIA
Corruption Inertia is a principle firmly believed in when Jackass forecasts must be made. The corruption will continue with firm immutable momentum, without an external force acting as agent of change. At times, this is simple science. When colleagues introduce hope and what must be, the OFF button is engaged quickly here in my office. Their views are out of touch with reality. Corruption will persist as long as the Syndicate continues to hold power. It will remain the constant while the USDept Justice remains, while the USDept Treasury remains, while the US Regulators remain, even while the US debt rating agencies remain. They all support the current system. They are all subject to momentum pressures. Only an external force will result in change. When the USDollar is further isolated, that change will come. To expect change from the inside due to internal forces is lunatic, kind of like expecting an alcoholic to change on his own from an awakening. Al Capone was removed not from inside the Chicago crime boss conference of dons. He was brought down by external forces related to income tax. The world will similarly reject the USDollar for its tax on the system, unwanted, discarded as a toxic agent.

PROTECTION FROM THREAT TO WEALTH
Again, delusion works well when fashioning a creepy little shell of existence to protect oneself from the psychological damage of a predatory government syndicate or security agency apparatus. The Jackass mocks such defense mechanisms, since a guarantee for poverty and misery. The vast legions of Americans will soon awaken to find their jobs are hanging by threads, their wealth either vanished or converted to USTreasury Bonds by force, their liberties long gone, and their ability to seek out foreign lands for residence curtailed. In fact, one nation after another is actually banning acceptance of Americans for bank accounts. See Switzerland, Panama, and Hong Kong. The US subjects are seen as persona non grata not for their own characteristics, but for the passport they hold from the United States. The USGovt as lord acts like syndicate bullies, agents to abuse embassy privileges, with imposed extra legal paperwork like an extra burden. The isolation is not only of the United States, but of its citizens, whose business is not desired. Hence the Americans will increasingly be trapped in the US along with their money. The Jackass response to threat is not to embrace delusion, and not to seek a blanket to cover my head in the basement quarters. Instead, the response has been to head for the hills with pockets filled.
People, both clients and colleague, inquire when the Gold price will rise with vigor, when the mining stocks will rise with gusto. They remind that with all the central bank debasement of currency from Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing, the ultra-cheap, artificially cheap, desperate cheap money to finance USGovt debt should make the Gold price zoom upwards with each QE official announcement. My answer is quite simple. Each new QE program gives the dark forces more motivation to slam the gold price with naked shorts in sale of paper gold and paper silver. To be sure, the true value of Gold and the true value of Silver is higher, but it is not reflected in the COMEX price. That market is the epitome of corruption. If they were in charge of measuring fevers, they would place the thermometers on ice. Instead, a vast divergence comes between the paper Gold price and metal Gold price. Unless and until the Gold market is freed from corruption and freed from the shackles of Wall Street and London and Swiss influence, it will continue to be suppressed. My full expectation is not for the system to correct itself from within. Instead, the COMEX seeks out new sources of supply, like the GLD Exchange Traded Fund. It is probably far more gutted than publicly stated. It has been converted into a bullion bank central repository for easy raided inventory. The Gold price will not rise from internal forces to push up value, in response to central bank monetary policy or shortage of COMEX inventory. The Gold price will rise from external forces in USDollar isolation, along with isolation of the big banks in the US and London. Their gold inventory will be removed, returned, and drained. In time, the USDollar will widely be rejected in trade.

THE NEW ISOLATION HAS BEGUN
The process of isolation is not just now beginning. It is a process well along. In fact, it has been told that immediately following the Lehman Brothers death (a deliberate exploited execution) and the adoption of toxic vats by the USGovt in the form of Fannie Mae and AIG, the major foreign players located primarily in the East began to feverishly prepare for new platforms on trade and banking. They sought to develop an alternative. For the last 20 to 25 years, a backwards principal has been at work. It dictated that the USDollar would prevail in reserves management, actually the USTBond as vehicle. The rules for trade surplus recycle were constructed to lean toward usage of the USTBonds. Therefore, the global trade would be dominated by USDollars. In other words, banking would dictate trade settlement. That is backwards, and keenly exhibits the brute force of the USDollar hegemony. Also the crude oil payments have been standardized in USDollars, ever since the Saudis cut a major deal with the USGovt and UKGovt in the mid-1970 decade after the famous embargo. Protection came to the Saudi regime and Persian Gulf emirates, in return for exclusive USDollar payment on trade for oil. The Petro-Dollar defacto standard is the primary plank behind the USDollar global trade patterns shown for over three decades. It is coming to an end, a sunset.

IRAN SEMINAL EVENT
The Iranian sanctions put forth by the USGovt and adopted by the EuroZone nations have contributed more to unwinding the USDollar trade system than any event in decades. It sounded the death knell for the USDollar. It hastened numerous nations to seek a US$ alternative. It provided a fertile environment to fashion new trade settlement mechanisms. It pushed Turkey into acting as a gold bullion intermediary role in the provision of gold for usage in trade settlement. See their role with India and Iran, fully described in the December Hat Trick Letter. When an independent highly reliable gold trader source was asked to confirm the role of Turkey as a test case in developing gold based trade settlement, he gave a tacit confirmation. He has mentioned Turkey in past conversations over the last couple years frequently. Just as Turkey was a swing nation in the NATO alliance against the Soviet Union, Turkey will serve in my view as a critical swing nation in the movement to create a non-US$ trade settlement system. The new system will be decentralized, meaning not funneled through the major banks, not passing through the USFed as clearing house. Turkey will be essential in the formation of the Eurasia trade zone. First comes the Asian trade zone (the US excluded), and next comes the hand shake between the Asians and Europeans to create Eurasia. Some folks have expressed doubt toward the arrival of a vast trans-continental trade region. They seem painfully unaware of an incredible network of railway lines connecting Russia to Germany and China, and of a incredible network of liquified natural gas lines connecting Russia with all of Europe and Central Asia. Across the new trade zone and its diverse commerce, the USDollar will not be at the center. It is in fact being isolated, since it is a toxic agent. Everything US$-based is crumbling, from currencies to bonds to banks to credit lines to economies.

CHINESE YUAN BILATERAL CURRENCY SWAPS
The advent of barter has come. It has not been noticed by the incredibly distracted, misled, deceived, poorly trained, mentally challenged, and myopic American public. They read about a currency swap accord, give it no emphasis or importance, and then turn to the fund manager opinions on rotating stocks from one sector to the next. They read about a workaround to the Iran sanctions, express some puppet-like response of anger or disgust, and then turn to IPOs and stories on Google, Apple, and Facebook shares. They do not even read about the failed Trans Pacific Partnership, since it did not make it onto the financial pages. Sadly, the Jackass is slowly adopting a cold view that vast swaths of the US populace will suffer from a Darwinian event. Their home equity has vanished. Their job security has vanished, unless they work for defense contractors. Their pension funds have been damaged. Their wealth has been over 90% dedicated to paper securities in very obedient fashion. The great majority has dismissed the arguments for sound money or gold investments. Some have a pitifully small portion devoted to hard assets like perhaps some energy companies. Only those who adopt a Gold strategy will survive the powerful storm underway, as it intensifies. Great wealth is being destroyed, and only Gold & Silver will enable that survival by the construction of lifeboats. Paper wealth is being blown away, as only hard metal assets will prevail. Add energy and farmlands.
When people ask about the best allocation, my standard response is at least 90% precious metals, the rest to energy deposits, but not actually stocks, perhaps farmland if possible. The best diversification in my view is for laddering of silver purchases, starting at $10/oz and moving to $15/oz then $20/oz and finally to $25/oz with continued accumulation at $30/oz and above. Gold will win the monetary war, but Silver will take the greatest gains. Gold is fine for a more stable long-term protection against toxic paper wealth, but my ongoing objection is that the New York, London, and Swiss syndicate centers play too many games. Silver is subject to global shortages, vast industrial demand, non-replaceable usage, and a much more dangerous situation that the powerful dark forces cannot manage. Silver coins will be widely used in commerce, while Gold bars will thrive in banking transactions. Besides, killing werewolves is the zinger factor with silver bullets.
China has made numerous bilateral swap accords with other nations. As the label indicates, they are deals cut between China and another nation to freely use Chinese Yuan from a credited account that will retain equilibrium. So far many nations have signed up and even renewed deals. The list of nations includes Brazil, Russia, Japan, and India. One might be correct to include all of Asia on the list, as nations like South Korea and Taiwan and Vietnam freely trade in Yuan transactions. The first major signal that the bilateral swaps have taken hold sufficiently to undermine the USDollar through a new trade foundation will be the complete arena of Asian trade being conducted in Yuan transactions. They have no need for USDollars in trade. They see their USTBonds held in reserves under management as vulnerable to serious loss. They see their USTBonds held as subject to grand debasement from USFed central bank monetary policy itself. They see their USTBonds held as supported by Weimar machinery in hyper-drive. They see their USTBonds held as part of a corrupted Wall Street arena and its vast trappings. They see their USTBonds held as prisoner to the USGovt debt battles and a potential crush victim on a fall from the fiscal cliff.
The Chinese bilateral swap accords are actually barter deals. They often represent rather balanced trade, unlike with what the nations have set up with the United States. Unless nations purchase enormous lots of military hardware, they have little need for US products. Hence the end result is a bigger batch of toxic USTBonds to purchase in order to balance the accounts and to avoid the local foreign currency exchange rate from rising enough to damage their export trade. The bilateral swap accords work to create numerous two-way ties as part of a latticework that eventually will form a transnational fabric without the USDollar as nuclear cores in each connection weld. The bilateral swaps are barter without the name in a direct confrontation against the USDollar and its catbird seat. That seat, once a throne, is being dismantled. The latticework of bilateral swaps has created the critical mass of a global blanket with no centralized control room, no choke points with bank transactions, no SWIFT code ticket taker. The bilateral swap accords work to build a critical mass that isolates the USDollar from an entirely new foundation for trade. The USDollar is being isolated.

COMEX PRESSURE POINT
The COMEX is under constant unrelenting pressure. They must shift around ill-gotten precious metal inventory in order to avoid a default. That would be embarrassing. The main device for maintaining order at the COMEX continues to be naked shorting of futures contracts, a blatantly corrupt practice. The naked short ambushes occur with greater frequency in recent months. The arrival of Scotia Mocatta as a provider of gold supply and naked short commitments will kill them eventually, as they have made a deal with the devils. The overnight dispatch of silver from the US to London has grown enormous. One can only suspect that the raids of GLD gold inventory and SLV silver inventory is much greater than is estimated even by its most ardent critics. The illicit sources for COMEX precious metal are fast drying up.

The new wrinkle to render damage to the COMEX is the arrival of the Shanghai Gold Exchange. The graphic displays the differential, a basis for potential arbitrage. Complex arrangements can be constructed that take advantage of the differential, basically buying the gold metal in New York, finding a way to make it available in Shanghai, where it is sold at a $20 to $30 higher price. The end result of the arbitrage is high volume drainage of gold in New York. The snapshot below is taken from December 7th. Several other snapshots are available, with similar price spreads. Finally COMEX based in New York, a major nucleus of corrupt financial markets, has some competition. Expect the spread to widen, the opportunity for arbitrage to grow, and pressure to build for a breakdown.

Sadly for the evil camp, they are fast running out of sources. They stole the entire MF Global private accounts, denied the clients their legal right to receive silver in delivery, and received legal protection by the USGovt and Appellate courts, after changing the law applied to financial firm liquidation instead of brokerage firm liquidation. It was a blatant maneuver that has depleted the COMEX of a major slice of legitimate business. The subsequent similar raid on PFG-Best had an echo effect, adding to the removal of COMEX clientele. The end result is that the risk hedge trade is finding ways to conduct their business without use of the indescribably corrupt COMEX. So the COMEX is being isolated in risk hedging just like the USDollar in global trade.

PETRO-DOLLAR SUNSET
The upcoming Petro-Dollar sunset has very uncertain timing indications. The assassination of Prince Bandar in Saudi Arabia, followed by the potential incapacitation of King Abdullah could work to weaken the foundation of the Petro-Dollar itself. Back in April 2010, the Saudis and other main Persian Gulf nations struck a deal with Russia and China for protection in the gulf region. That accord was not given much emphasis anywhere, nor publicity. But to the Jackass, who had a source at the meeting, the event signaled the sunset of the Petro-Dollar defacto standard. The Saudis would turn to Asia for protection and security, at a time when their crude oil trade was growing with Eastern nations, and when the North American production was made more available for the US demand in markets. The day is nigh where the Saudis accept non-US$ payments for crude oil. They might first accept Chinese Yuan, then Japanese Yen, then Korean won, then Gold itself through big Turkish bazaars.The Petro-Dollar is being isolated for sunset, and will be a key event is the removal of the USDollar as center for global trade settlement. Also, the Saudi regime in my view does not have much longer to survive. Numerous companies and financial firms and export facilitators have exited from the United Arab Emirates in preparation for the fall of the House of Saud. The Saudi Arabian royals have unstable neighbors in every border, especially Bahrain, Iraq, and Yemen.

WILD CARD FACTORS
Numerous wild cards float on the global trade table. Bank strictures head the list, with imposed rules on account reporting abroad, with tax information requirements, and with capital controls. It is harder each month to move large amounts of funds. The forms to complete have become onerous and imposing, acting like implicit restrictions. It is harder each month to use simple bank cards at ATM machines. With a simple rule change, the banks cannot complete these transactions. The organized and patterned restrictions work to trap USDollars within the local US borders. Consider it an internal mechanism to assist the global isolation of the USDollar.

LOST GLOBAL RESERVE STATUS
The described isolation on numerous fronts, whether trade or COMEX or banks, all work toward the elimination of the toxic agent in the USDollar. The world wants a more just, more functional, more efficient, more equitable global trade system. The United States has abused its global reserve custodian position too long. The world is fighting vigorously to remove it. The usage of the USDollar as a credit card to finance its consumption binge without ability to pay will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as a device to enable powerful aggression in war to advance syndicate interests like vertically integrated narcotics will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as a banking monopoly device will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as an instrument for bond fraud will come to an end. The usage of the USDollar as a free lunch device to finance the USGovt deficit will come to an end. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the door to the Third World will be opened wide. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the supply lines will be interrupted to the USEconomy, giving off a prominent Third World stench. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the price inflation effect will become a national topic of grand debate and extreme anger. When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the United States as a nation will experience tremendous additional isolation and hardship, as most Third World nations do. The level of corruption within the USGovt and US banking corner offices is already far more entrenched than any Third World nation. The vote fraud for US national elections is equally prevalent, but more sophisticated.

When the USDollar is no longer the global reserve currency, the Gold Standard will be right around the corner, if not already in the implementation stage. The Gold price will react quickly to the removal of the USDollar from its prized perch of abuse. The center of the new trade settlement system will be GOLD, which is not even being discussed by the enlightened denizens of the gold community. It will be the basis of the Letters of Credit, in the form of gold trade notes. The short-term credit that facilitates trade will have a truly magnificent grand Gold core. The common agreement will be to make the Gold price at least $5000 per ounce, probably closer to $7000 per ounce. They will in the process dismiss, overrun, and put into oblivion the COMEX and the LBMA, rendering them to the scrap heap of irrelevance.

THE HAT TRICK LETTER PROFITS IN THE CURRENT CRISIS.
http://news.goldseek.com/GoldenJackass/1356642000.php

8 Huge Corporate Handouts in the Fiscal Cliff Bill

Alternet – by Matt Stoller
Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

The negotiations over the fiscal cliff involve more than the Democrats, Republicans, the middle class and the wealthy. The corporate sector is here in force as well. One of the core shifts in the Reagan era was the convergence of wealthy individuals who wanted to pay less in taxes – many from the growing South – with corporations that wanted tax breaks. Previously, these groups fought over the pie, because the idea of endless deficits did not make sense. Once Reagan figured out how to finance yawning deficits, the GOP was able to wield the corporate sector and the new sun state wealthy into one force, epitomized today by Grover Norquist. What Obama is (sort of) trying to do is split this coalition, and the extenders are the carrot he’s dangling in front of the corporate sector to do it.
Most tax credits drop straight to the bottom line – it’s why companies like Enron considered its tax compliance section a “profit center”. A few hundred billion dollars of tax expenditures is a major carrot to offer. Surely, a modest hike in income taxes for people who make more than $400k in income and stupid enough not to take that money in capital gain would be worth trading off for the few hundred billion dollars in corporate pork. This is what the fiscal cliff is about – who gets the money. And by leaving out the corporate sector, nearly anyone who talks about this debate is leaving out a key negotiating partner.
So without further ado, here are eight corporate subsidies in the fiscal cliff bill that you haven’t heard of.
1) Help out NASCAR - Sec 312 extends the “seven year recovery period for motorsports entertainment complex property”, which is to say it allows anyone who builds a racetrack and associated facilities to get tax breaks on it. This one was projected to cost $43 million over two years.
2) A hundred million or so for Railroads - Sec. 306 provides tax credits to certain railroads for maintaining their tracks. It’s unclear why private businesses should be compensated for their costs of doing business. This is worth roughly $165 million a year.
3) Disney’s Gotta Eat - Sec. 317 is “Extension of special expensing rules for certain film and television productions”. It’s a relatively straightforward subsidy to Hollywood studios, and according to the Joint Tax Committee, was projected to cost $150m for 2010 and 2011.
4) Help a brother mining company out – Sec. 307 and Sec. 316 offer tax incentives for miners to buy safety equipment and train their employees on mine safety. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to bribe mining companies to not kill their workers.
5) Subsidies for Goldman Sachs Headquarters – Sec. 328 extends “tax exempt financing for  York Liberty Zone,” which was a program to provide post-9/11 recovery funds. Rather than going to small businesses affected, however, this was, according to Bloomberg, “little more than a subsidy for fancy Manhattan apartments and office towers for Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Corp.” Michael Bloomberg himself actually thought the program was excessive, so that’s saying something. According to David Cay Johnston’s The Fine Print, Goldman got $1.6 billion in tax free financing for its new massive headquarters through Liberty Bonds.
6) $9B Off-shore financing loophole for banks – Sec. 322 is an “Extension of the Active Financing Exception to Subpart F.” Very few tax loopholes have a trade association, but this one does. This strangely worded provision basically allows American corporations such as banks and manufactures to engage in certain lending practices and not pay taxes on income earned from it. According to this Washington Post piece, supporters of the bill include GE, Caterpillar, and JP Morgan. Steve Elmendorf, super-lobbyist, has been paid $80,000 in 2012 alone to lobby on the “Active Financing Working Group.” 
7) Tax credits for foreign subsidiaries –  Sec. 323 is an extension of the “Look-through treatment of payments between related CFCs under foreign personal holding company income rules.” This gibberish sounding provision cost $1.5 billion from 2010 and 2011, and the US Chamber loves it. It’s a provision that allows US multinationals to not pay taxes on income earned by companies they own abroad.
8) Bonus Depreciation, R&D Tax Credit – These are well-known corporate boondoggles. The research tax credit was projected to cost $8B for 2010 and 2011, and the depreciation provisions were projected to cost about $110B for those two years, with some of that made up in later years.
Conveniently, the Joint Committee on Taxation in 2010 did an analysis of what many of these extenders cost. You can find that report here.

Matt Stoller is the former senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He blogs frequently for Naked Capitalism. He appears on the FX show “Brand X with Russel Brand.” Follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/8-huge-corporate-handouts-fiscal-cliff-bill?page=0%2C1&paging=off

Judge Napolitano: Republicans Did Opposite Of What They Were Elected For With Fiscal Cliff Bill

Judge Napolitano didn't mince words this morning as he reacted to the vote on Fox and Friends, saying that Republicans "caved" last night, an action that is "churning the acid in the stomach for a lot of us this morning who believe Republicans were elected to shrink government, reduce spending, stop borrowing and lower taxes."
"Yesterday, in a rush to join the stampede started by the Senate and continued by the president , they went along with raising taxes on the most productive and not getting any spending cuts in return," he said.
Napolitano continued, saying that House Republicans won on the promise that they'd do the opposite of what they did last night.
"When Republicans raise taxes they lose; when they cut taxes they win. They rejected that truism last night," he said.
January 2, 2012
Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Eduardo89rp

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Senate-Passed Deal Means Higher Tax on 77% of Households

 
How Does the Fiscal Cliff Deal Change Your Taxes?
The budget deal passed by the U.S. Senate today would raise taxes on 77.1 percent of U.S. households, mostly because of the expiration of a payroll tax cut, according to preliminary estimates from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.

More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes. Among the households facing higher taxes, the average increase would be $1,635, the policy center said. A 2 percent payroll tax cut, enacted during the economic slowdown, is being allowed to expire as of yesterday.
The heaviest new burdens in 2013, compared with 2012, would fall on top earners, who would face higher rates on income, capital gains, dividends and estates. The top 1 percent of taxpayers, or those with incomes over $506,210, would pay an average of $73,633 more in taxes.
Much of that burden is concentrated at the very top of the income scale.
The top 0.1 percent of taxpayers, those with incomes over about $2.7 million, would pay an average of $443,910 more, reducing their after-tax incomes by 8.4 percent. They would pay 26 percent of the additional taxes imposed by the legislation.
Among households with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million, taxes would go up by an average of $14,812.

Top Tax Rate

The bill, being discussed by House members today, would raise the top tax rate to 39.6 percent from 35 percent last year, starting with income over $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for married couples.
The top tax rates on capital gains and dividends would go up to 23.8 percent, from 15 percent last year. The new rate includes a 3.8 percent tax from the 2010 health-care law that took effect today.
The Tax Policy Center’s definition of income is a gross measure that includes items such as the employer’s share of payroll taxes, making it larger for many households than the adjusted gross income shown on tax returns.

Billy Ray Valentine learns commodities


 ”We think it’s a sad day for consumers of the metal.  We just think there will be less copper in the market, and we will see a significantly more volatile market.”
~Bob Kickham, senior vice president of procurement at Luvata, a copper-parts maker that had lobbied the SEC to block the ETF
Copper is a commodity, a finite resource that has a fairly short term supply over the next couple of decades.  There is a fierce global competition for this commodity but the SEC just approved the first exchange traded fund of its kind in the U.S.  J.P. Morgan and Blackrock just received approval to start a copper ETF that will allow speculators to bid on the price of copper; the big difference here is that both of these funds will purchase and warehouse up to 183,000 tons of copper.  Giving investment banks the ability to actually control the real supply of precious metals will lead to one thing – higher prices for consumers across the board.  The SEC just screwed Americans here.
Futures markets do not normally work this way.  Make no mistake – if investment banks can do this with copper – then they’ll be able to do it with most other precious metals and almost an endless supply of commodities.  Giving banks the ability to control the real supply of commodities gives them the ability not just to bet on the natural supply/demand of a commodity – it gives them the ability to control the natural supply/demand of a commodity.  This will allow banks to manipulate the price of copper and in the near future – whatever commodity they decide to follow the same model with.
“There’s no reason why banks won’t try this with grain and oil next.  As long as they can, why not? Right now, there’s free rein. It will only stop when regulators decide that allowing essential things to be hoarded for investment is misguided investment–and dangerous for the public.”
~Michael Masters, a hedge-fund manager based in New York
Warehousing metals and controlling the real supply of metals is one way to manipulate markets.  J.P. Morgan has been accused of warehousing gold and silver along with Goldman Sachs to manipulate the silver markets.  If you want to understand how that works – read this fascinating account HERE.  Remember – as with most other resources – the U.S. is in competition with China and India to get their first.  Many of America’s foreign policy decisions and imperial domination derives from the need to provide Americans with resources at cheap prices.
Salon finds this quote from a mining executive about the Copper trade HERE:
 “Globally, economic copper resources are being depleted with the equivalent production of three world-class copper mines being consumed annually; meanwhile, copper demand is increasing by more than 575,000 tons annually and accelerating.” Furthermore, “only 56 new copper discoveries have been made during the past three decades,” and “21 of the 28 largest copper mines in the world are not amenable to expansion, while many large copper mines will be exhausted between 2010 and 2015.”
There is a large supply of copper in the earth’s crust but presently – it’s not economically viable to extract this copper.  In time as prices go up – it could be worth it but that means consumers will be paying lots more.  Additionally – technological advances have yet to catch up with the world’s demand for copper.  The last report on copper supply showed Chile commanding 38% of the world’s copper supply (source).  Luckily Chile is currently very stable, prosperous and controlled by a Democratic government; were anything to change that – we could see a major spike in copper prices for global consumers.
The New Republic goes visceral about this decision HERE:
In practical terms, the SEC handed traders at J.P. Morgan control over 20 to 30 percent of the copper available for immediate delivery from the London Metals Exchange — the commercial market where companies that use copper go to procure last-minute supplies.
The investors purchasing shares in J.P. Morgan’s fund won’t be buying copper to use, but to store. The intricacies of the fund are complex, but its underlying rationale is straightforward: the more shares investors buy, the more copper is taken off the market. And the more copper that is taken off the market, theoretically the more valuable the copper and the shares become. The Sumitomo trader who cornered the market in the ’90s relied on the same essential strategy to artificially inflate worldwide copper prices.
Allowing financial interests to interfere with industrial activity is disruptive enough. More troubling is that the SEC’s decision collapses the distinction between precious metals traditionally used for investment, like gold and silver, and metals and other goods that we consume in large quantities, like copper and corn. It signals to bankers that all goods are fair game for financial play, no matter how vital to our economy or our well-being.
Nasdaq has this on the SEC’s decision HERE:
The SEC approval was the final hurdle in a 26-month slog for J.P. Morgan to list the ETF. The investment bank had amended its request at least five times to answer the SEC’s questions and address concerns by U.S. copper users.
Copper manufacturers and merchants wrote to the SEC to oppose the planned ETF, saying it would hurt the industry by locking up too much copper in investors’ hands. In the gold market, investors have hoarded record levels of the precious metal since gold-backed ETFs were started in 2006. This has made copper users apprehensive that a copper-linked product could disturb a delicately balanced market that has faced a production shortfall for three of the past four years.
Southwire Co., the largest U.S.-based copper-wire producer, and other copper-product makers said in a joint letter a copper ETF would create “forced scarcity” and make it “even harder for industrial users of copper to obtain the metal.” The group also said the fund could drive up the global price of the industrial metal. Copper is widely used in electrical wiring and pipes.
Bart Melek, senior commodity strategist with TD Securities, said the removal of any copper from the global market could disturb the balance between supply and demand, especially in the long run.
Reuters has more HERE:
The ETF would sell investors shares in a fund backed by physical metal as collateral. JPMorgan and BlackRock have said that would make it easier for smaller investors to get exposure to copper prices, which have more than doubled in seven years, lifted by demand from China, the world’s biggest copper consumer.
JPMorgan’s fund would store LME brand-approved copper valued at up to $499,761,150 – equivalent to about 62,000 tonnes based on a copper price of $8,000 per tonne. BlackRock’s iShares Copper Trust would use up to 121,200 tonnes of copper as guarantee against shares in its fund.
The two funds would equate to 70 percent of current copper stocks in LME-bonded warehouses.
“If you have a quarter of a million tonnes of copper in LME and an ETF that looks as though it will take a sum almost equivalent to the entire LME stocks, you can’t tell me it won’t have an effect,” Luvata’s Kickham said.

Bank of England’s Chief of Financial Stability: Internet Technology Will Break Up Big Bank Monopoly

money Bank of Englands Chief of Financial Stability: Internet Technology Will Break Up Big Bank Monopoly

Peer-to-Peer Lending and Crowd-Funding Have the Power to Change Finance

We don’t need giant banks.
As we noted in July, small banks do much more lending than big banks:
Do we need to keep the TBTFs to make sure that loans are made?
Nope.
USA Today points out:
Banks that received Federal assistance during the financial crisis reduced lending more aggressively and gave bigger pay raises to employees than institutions that didn’t get aid, a USA TODAY/American University review found.
***
The amount of loans outstanding to businesses and individuals fell 9.1% for the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2009, at banks that participated in TARP compared with a 6.2% drop at banks that didn’t.
Dennis Santiago – CEO and Managing Director of Institutional Risk Analytics (Chris Whalen’s company) – notes:
The really shocking numbers are in the unused line of credit commitments of banks to U.S. business. This is the canary number I like to look at because it is a direct expression of banking and finance confidence in Main Street industry. It’s gone from $92 billion in Dec -2007 to just $24 billion as of Sep-2010. More importantly, the vast majority of this contraction of credit availability to American industry has been by the larger banks, C&I LOC from $87B down to $18.8B by the institutions with assets over $10B. Poof!
Fortune reports that smaller banks are stepping in to fill the lending void left by the giant banks’ current hesitancy to make loans. Indeed, the article points out that the only reason that smaller banks haven’t been able to expand and thrive is that the too-big-to-fails have decreased competition:
Growth for the nation’s smaller banks represents a reversal of trends from the last twenty years, when the biggest banks got much bigger and many of the smallest players were gobbled up or driven under…
As big banks struggle to find a way forward and rising loan losses threaten to punish poorly run banks of all sizes, smaller but well capitalized institutions have a long-awaited chance to expand.
BusinessWeek notes:
As big banks struggle, community banks are stepping in to offer loans and lines of credit to small business owners…
At a congressional hearing on small business and the economic recovery earlier this month, economist Paul Merski, of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a Washington (D.C.) trade group, told lawmakers that community banks make 20% of all small-business loans, even though they represent only about 12% of all bank assets. Furthermore, he said that about 50% of all small-business loans under $100,000 are made by community banks…
Indeed, for the past two years, small-business lending among community banks has grown at a faster rate than from larger institutions, according to Aite Group, a Boston banking consultancy. “Community banks are quickly taking on more market share not only from the top five banks but from some of the regional banks,” says Christine Barry, Aite’s research director. “They are focusing more attention on small businesses than before. They are seeing revenue opportunities and deploying the right solutions in place to serve these customers.”
Fed Governor Daniel K. Tarullo said:
The importance of traditional financial intermediation services, and hence of the smaller banks that typically specialize in providing those services, tends to increase during times of financial stress. Indeed, the crisis has highlighted the important continuing role of community banks…
For example, while the number of credit unions has declined by 42 percent since 1989, credit union deposits have more than quadrupled, and credit unions have increased their share of national deposits from 4.7 percent to 8.5 percent. In addition, some credit unions have shifted from the traditional membership based on a common interest to membership that encompasses anyone who lives or works within one or more local banking markets. In the last few years, some credit unions have also moved beyond their traditional focus on consumer services to provide services to small businesses, increasing the extent to which they compete with community banks.
Thomas M. Hoenig pointed out in a speech at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce summit in Washington:
During the recent financial crisis, losses quickly depleted the capital of these large, over-leveraged companies. As expected, these firms were rescued using government funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The result was an immediate reduction in lending to Main Street, as the financial institutions tried to rebuild their capital. Although these institutions have raised substantial amounts of new capital, much of it has been used to repay the TARP funds instead of supporting new lending.
On the other hand, Hoenig pointed out:
In 2009, 45 percent of banks with assets under $1 billion increased their business lending.
45% is about 45% morethan the amount of increased lending by the too big to fails.
Indeed, some very smart people say that the big banks aren’t really focusing as much on the lending business as smaller banks.
Specifically since Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, the giant banks have made much of their money in trading assets, securities, derivatives and other speculative bets, the banks’ own paper and securities, and in other money-making activities which have nothing to do with traditional depository functions.
Now that the economy has crashed, the big banks are making very few loans to consumers or small businesses because they still have trillions in bad derivatives gambling debts to pay off, and so they are only loaning to the biggest players and those who don’t really need credit in the first place. See this and this.
So we don’t really need these giant gamblers. We don’t really need JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. What we need are dedicated lenders.
The Fortune article discussed above points out that the banking giants are not necessarily more efficient than smaller banks:
The largest banks often don’t show the greatest efficiency. This now seems unsurprising given the deep problems that the biggest institutions have faced over the past year.
“They actually experience diseconomies of scale,” Narter wrote of the biggest banks. “There are so many large autonomous divisions of the bank that the complexity of connecting them overwhelms the advantage of size.”
And Governor Tarullo points out some of the benefits of small community banks over the giant banks:
Many community banks have thrived, in large part because their local presence and personal interactions give them an advantage in meeting the financial needs of many households, small businesses, and agricultural firms. Their business model is based on an important economic explanation of the role of financial intermediaries–to develop and apply expertise that allows a lender to make better judgments about the creditworthiness of potential borrowers than could be made by a potential lender with less information about the borrowers.
A small, but growing, body of research suggests that the financial services provided by large banks are less-than-perfect substitutes for those provided by community banks.
It is simply not true that we need the mega-banks. In fact, as many top economists and financial analysts have said, the “too big to fails” are actually stifling competition from smaller lenders and credit unions, and dragging the entire economy down into a black hole.
As we pointed out last year in a post entitled “Do We Need Banks, Or Can We Cut Out the Middleman?”, the Internet may render all traditional banks unnecessary:
The big banks do very little traditional banking. Most of their business is from financial speculation. For example, less than 10% of Bank of America’s assets come from traditional banking deposits.
Time Magazine gave some historical perspective in 1993:
What would happen to the U.S. economy if all its commercial banks suddenly closed their doors? Throughout most of American history, the answer would have been a disaster of epic proportions, akin to the Depression wrought by the chain-reaction bank failures in the early 1930s. But [today] the startling answer is that a shutdown by banks might be far from cataclysmic.***

Who really needs banks these days? Hardly anyone, it turns out. While banks once dominated business lending, today nearly 80% of all such loans come from nonbank lenders like life insurers, brokerage firms and finance companies. Banks used to be the only source of money in town. Now businesses and individuals can write checks on their insurance companies, get a loan from a pension fund, and deposit paychecks in a money-market account with a brokerage firm. “It is possible for banks to die and still have a vibrant economy,” says Edward Furash, a Washington banks consultant.
Yahoo Finance says we don’t need banks since we have peer to peer capacity:
There was a time when banks were the obvious place to go if you needed a loan, whether as an individual or business. However, with the economic difficulties of the past few years, they have become increasingly reticent about handing over any of their cash, despite Government intervention.
Thankfully a new way of borrowing money has come to the fore — peer-to-peer lending — and it offers an opportunity for both borrowers and investors alike.
In 2007, Ode provided a great historical perspective of the issue:
Banks’ shortcomings have been recognized for centuries—and for centuries, groups of people have been organizing themselves to take advantage of alternatives. In the mid-19th century, a pair of German economists extended the growing idea of “co-operative societies” to credit. By 1864, a group of farmers had joined together to secure loans for livestock, seeds and farming equipment, forming one of the first credit unions, a co-operative, community-based banking model that still thrives.
More recently, in the last 30 years, the rise of microcredit has brought many small loans to people in poor countries and rural areas who had no access to traditional banks or could not present the kind of bona fides a bank requires. Microcredit has sparked a revolution in the international development community, proving the existence of plenty of credit-worthy people who are simply overlooked by traditional banks.
Combine the principles of microfinance and online social networking, and you get a new phenomenon: peer-to-peer lending, or social lending as it’s sometimes called. In the last two years, more than a dozen websites have been launched to connect borrowers and lenders—no banks required.
***
Peer-to-peer lending appeals to lots of people. Americans already lend more than $89 billion to friends and family every year, according to Federal Reserve estimates. Nearly 75 percent of Britons said they’d consider using a peer-to-peer website to borrow or lend, and some estimates suggest the global market for peer-to-peer lending will grow to more than $5 billion by 2010.
***
While cutting out the middleman may be instinctively attractive to many people, it can have an economic advantage too. Compared to credit cards, peer-to-peer lending offers borrowers really attractive interest rates—often half what they might expect to pay Visa or MasterCard.
And peer loans are often structured more fairly. A debt can be paid off in installments, unlike with credit cards, which can trap borrowers under debt that snowballs every month. For lenders too, these loans offer a higher rate of return than what they can earn on savings accounts. Interest is important, say small lenders.
***
It is that goal—getting capital to people who need it at reasonable rates—that creates a strong sense of purpose and community in social lending. The sites promote personal ties between lenders and borrowers. And with the global reach of the Internet, borrowers no longer need to know someone with money to secure a loan. By the same token, lenders often feel they’re helping a real person get through a bad patch or realize a dream.
Traditional bankers have a hard time seeing it that way. “They’re dumbfounded,” says George Hofheimer, chief research officer for the Filene Research Institute, a Wisconsin firm that studies consumer finance. “Why would anyone lend money to strangers?” The banking establishment, after all, considers itself expert at evaluating the risks involved in lending money. Social lenders concede that point. Lending is risky, and peer-to-peer sites often use the same tools—credit reports, income verification—to judge how stable a borrower is.
But banks also have a vested interest in remaining the middleman, and they’ve never been quick to adapt to change. Industry observers point to the success of the online bank ING Direct, which caught brick-and-mortar banks unprepared, and say peer-to-peer lenders may have a similar effect.
Open Democracy points outs the two main banking functions – which could hypothetically be provided by third parties:
A lot of people are busy trying to figure out how to make banks better. There is anger about what has gone on and puzzlement about the apparent inability of anyone to start doing something about it. [W]e seem to be frozen in a technical discussion of bank separation, capital adequacy, product authorisation, remuneration and incentives, or taxation. All worthwhile subjects in their way, but guaranteed to keep the sans-culottes at home.
So let’s ask another question. Why do we need banks – what are they for?
***
Loosely speaking, banks [through the Federal Reserve system] make money. Banks are not the only entities that do this, but they are the ones whose purpose it is to do this.
***
The other thing that banks (but again, not only banks) do, is to record and execute monetary transactions. In return for transaction fees, they hold and manipulate the data relating to people’s accounts with them. We are all either debtors or creditors of banks and we need to have accounts at banks because the trust system that banks represent is the required medium for nearly all financial transactions. When I transfer a sum of money to you, I simply instruct my bank to initiate a sequence of entries in its books and those of your bank.
In 1976 F.A. Hayek published a short book called Denationalisation of Money. It can be downloaded free from the link. Hayek conceived the essay as a response to the endemic debasement of currency by states addicted to inflation. He argued that legal tender laws should be abolished and that private institutions should be allowed to issue currencies in their own name.
***
Hayek understood that technology existed or would soon exist to price and complete even small everyday transactions real-time in several currencies at once and he expected that data on bank capital and money issuance could be gathered and disseminated without trouble.
But back in 1976 there was no alternative technical model of how monetary transactions might be carried out, and so whilst Hayek foresaw a world without central banks, it was impossible to conceive of one without banks. Nevertheless, it’s an elegant and in some ways compelling idea that addresses the problem of monetary discipline where states or central banks may be unwilling or unable to exercise control and private credit creators have every incentive to issue as much of this publicly guaranteed money as they can.
***
Which brings us to Bitcoin. Launched a couple of years ago and still in its infancy, it calls itself a peer-to-peer virtual currency. This means that instead of a bank, the collective network of users maintains a complete encrypted record of bitcoin (“BTC”) transactions and how many BTC each user has. Payments involve a public-private key exchange so that only valid identities can participate and each BTC can only be transmitted once. Because both parties have the complete data set, no external trust system is required. It’s a mechanism that removes the need for us to transact through banks.
At a macro level, the total number of BTCs in issue will approach a known fixed limit at a geometrically reducing rate (as in Zeno’s paradox, never quite reaching it) and expansion of the money supply takes place through the collective computation of the network. The advantages are claimed to be resilience, safety, absence of transaction costs, decentralisation, international acceptance, and no debasement. Because no physical currency is involved, arbitrarily small decimal units of BTC are possible. If convenient, BTC units could be subdivided or consolidated merely by a network-agreed software change. The monetary authority is therefore the network of users and their machines, which once it has reached a reasonable size becomes hard for even a super-computer user to dominate.
Even if we no longer need banks to store and handle our money, the BTC system, like any other currency, allows credit creation through fractional reserve banking. The BTC money supply could therefore exceed the number of BTCs in issue. However, without a BTC central bank, the imprudent lender may well go bust. It will be interesting to see how regulators deal with mainstream banks that acquire significant assets and liabilities in BTC. They might outlaw the BTC operations of regulated entities, but could they really close down an unregulated global user network?
It remains to be seen whether this is an advance of democratic self-determination. At this stage I would be optimistic, especially if Bitcoin’s proof-of-concept encourages others to develop distinct, communicating architectures that would create not just a digital currency but a digital currency exchange. There are some fascinating possibilities here:
  1. We may soon not need banks to carry out monetary transactions or keep our money. The benefit in terms of near-zero transaction costs, nearly immediate confirmation of payment (are you still waiting 4 days for your cheque?), reduced credit risk, security and resilience would be immense.
  2. Credit creation becomes an activity not linked to the transaction-handling franchise. It is also no longer underwritten by taxpayers. Inflationary behaviour requires public consent – not the taxpayer or voter public but the public that uses the particular currency.
  3. Because all transactions are peer-to-peer, people can switch their currency holdings at will and costlessly. How much people trade, if at all, depends only their beliefs about the riskiness of the currencies on offer.
  4. If peer-to-peer currency becomes mainstream, governments will have to decide whether to accept it and put the banks out of business, or refuse it and drive it underground. Either way, the relation of state and citizen in economic management is likely to be radically changed.
[Subsequently, serious allegations have been raised about the reliability and stability of Bitcoin. The question of whether or not Bitcoin is a good system is beyond the scope of this post.]
Venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg wrote in 2009:
Why do we need banks at all? If it sounds crazy – a world without banks – it is not.
We have become so used to storing money in banks and talking to our banks that we have forgotten what they do. Simply put, banks borrow money from you, and lend it out to borrowers at a higher rate than they pay you in interest. That is it: Banks are lenders. They provide credit. Everything else is window dressing.***
You think banks provide safety? Wrong. That is the government and FDIC…. So why do you go to a bank? Because your brain has been trained to believe that you can trust them. [WB: Is that why banks have such big, solid architecture ... to look solid and trustworthy?] Their brand means safety to you. You assume that their risk management is better than yours, and therefore will protect your money and enhance its value.
What if that assumption is wrong? What if we cannot trust banks to protect and enhance our assets? We would be left with one function for banks: lending money or providing credit. If we could replace that credit function, or if we believed that our own risk management was better than the bank’s, then we could do without banks (someone else will give you that free mousepad).
Technology and the internet is going to provide this.
Sound farfetched? It is not. In fact, the financial world has been evolving in this direction for a while. We just chose not to pay attention.
Today, you can open an E*Trade account and do all your brokerage online for less cost than going through a bank. You can transfer money using Paypal. You can trade currencies through endless online options from EasyForex and SaxoBank for experts to eToro for novices. Think you need advice on investments or consumption patterns and fees? Forget your banker and try Seeking Alpha or Mint.com (full disclosure: Benchmark companies).
Which brings us back to lending. There are numerous efforts around P2P lending from Zopa to Prosper (Benchmark company). There are other nascent efforts around commercial lending (which anyway the banks are not doing now). Essentially, startups can use the web to provide risk management tools and investment opportunities that disintermediate banks and thereby make credit available to borrowers.
One of the things that got banks in trouble with mortgages was that they were divorced from their borrowers. The FDIC has a long procedure around Know Your Customer regulations, but banks do not really know them or their customers’ creditworthiness. They were buying sliced and diced mortgage paper at a distance (which is why some community banks are in better shape – they really knew their customers).
Think ahead, and you can imagine a world where there are local social community lending tools that enable person to person or company to company lending where you can really know the borrower. Banks use technology for risk management and asset allocation. Why can’t we put those tools in consumers’ or business’ hands? Are banks really experts? Are they bigger experts than crowd-sourced wisdom on creditworthiness or risk management?
Here is the kicker: one of the other roles banks play is they intermediate between the government (Treasury) and consumers and businesses to keep liquidity flowing in a risk-managed way. In the age of the internet, why can’t consumers buy currencies directly from governments/central bank or currency trading platforms (answer: they already can) and access that liquidity directly? Businesses could as well. It is just a technology question. As always in creative destruction, it will happen from the bottom. Clunky tools like P2P lending will grow up and become full-fledged lending platforms with appropriate risk management that might disintermediate obsolete banks entirely.
[T]he banks have simply become a filter that robs consumers of 90% of their money.
And Reuters argues that prepaid cards can replace checking accounts:
Here’s a little bit of personal finance heresy: Maybe you don’t need a checking account at all.
“For basic monthly financial needs, there’s no difference between a checking account and a reloadable prepaid card,” said Michael Flores, the author of a study released Tuesday by the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association (NBPCA). “We see it as a financial products lifecycle. People in their 20s mainly need a transaction account.” Flores is president of Bretton Woods, Inc., the consulting company that performed the study. He said the average prepaid card holder is 27 years old.
Prepaid cards are reloadable cards similar to debit cards. They may be offered through banks or through independent companies. They are growing in popularity as many government benefits are being paid via prepaid card.
If we cut out the giant banks as financial middleman, we might have a much more efficient economy, pay less in interest, fees and penalties, and restore a functioning political system and the rule of law.
This view has now gained an unlikely ally:  Andy Haldane – Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England.
The Independent reports:
The days of the banking middlemen may be numbered as a technological revolution in business lending shakes the dominance of the UK’s biggest banks, a senior director of the Bank of England has said.
The rise of peer-to-peer lenders such as Zopa and Funding Circle – which directly match up firms in need of cash with investors – and so-called crowd-funding, where small amounts are raised from a large number of funders, will challenge the nation’s major financial institutions, according to Andrew Haldane, the Bank’s director of financial stability.
He told The Independent: “The mono-banking culture we have had since the 1990s is on its way out. Instead, we are seeing a much more diverse eco-system emerging with the growth of new non-bank groups offering peer-to peer lending and crowd-funding which are operating directly with a wider public.” [We've repeatedly noted that increasing diversity leads to improved financial stability.]
Mr Haldane also held out hopes that the fledgling revolution could tackle the crisis in business lending. This helped trigger the Bank’s “funding for lending” initiative in the summer to kick-start credit markets.
He said: “I see opportunity knocking for finance. Hopefully, the growth of peer-to-peer lenders and those involved in crowd-funding will help solve the problems we have with lending for small and medium enterprises … The banking middlemen may in time become surplus links in the chain.”
***
Mr Haldane said the rise of such lenders could bring down the costs of financial intermediation, adding: “IT has changed every other industry like film, music and even football clubs so why not finance? With open access to borrower information – which is held centrally and virtually – there is no reason why end-savers and end-investors cannot connect directly.
“Necessity is often the mother of invention. Now that the big banks are retreating from lending after the crash, these new methods of financing could help fill that gap.”
While the American government is hostile to any challenge to the hegemony of the big banks, the Independent notes that the UK is encouraging peer-to-peer lending:
The Government is also keen to encourage alternative finance and last week announced four peer-to-peer lenders will be given a total of £55m in taxpayers’ money, an amount to be matched from private sources. The £110m fund is part of the £1.5bn Business Finance Partnership, part of the Government’s drive to diversify sources of finance to business.
***
The sector will also have lending and borrowing activities overseen by the UK’s new market regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, from April 2014. The industry’s trade body, the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association, said regulation will help to bring credibility and stability to the fast-growing industry as there have been concerns that a high-profile failure in an unregulated market would see consumers lose their money and jeopardise growth.
And France has granted Bitcoin permission to act as a real bank.
photo by: 401(K) 2012

Max Keiser: 'Fiscal cliff' theater distracting from real problems

Keiser Report: Year of Banking Death Penalty (E387)

Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR

By Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism

Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.
The negotiations over the fiscal cliff involve more than the Democrats, Republicans, the middle class and the wealthy. The corporate sector is here in force as well. One of the core shifts in the Reagan era was the convergence of wealthy individuals who wanted to pay less in taxes – many from the growing South – with corporations that wanted tax breaks. Previously, these groups fought over the pie, because the idea of endless deficits did not make sense. Once Reagan figured out how to finance yawning deficits, the GOP was able to wield the corporate sector and the new sun state wealthy into one force, epitomized today by Grover Norquist. What Obama is (sort of) trying to do is split this coalition, and the extenders are the carrot he’s dangling in front of the corporate sector to do it.
Most tax credits drop straight to the bottom line – it’s why companies like Enron considered its tax compliance section a “profit center”. A few hundred billion dollars of tax expenditures is a major carrot to offer. Surely, a modest hike in income taxes for people who make more than $400k in income and stupid enough not to take that money in capital gain would be worth trading off for the few hundred billion dollars in corporate pork. This is what the fiscal cliff is about – who gets the money. And by leaving out the corporate sector, nearly anyone who talks about this debate is leaving out a key negotiating partner.
So without further ado, here are eight corporate subsidies in the fiscal cliff bill that you haven’t heard of.
1) Help out NASCAR - Sec 312 extends the “seven year recovery period for motorsports entertainment complex property”, which is to say it allows anyone who builds a racetrack and associated facilities to get tax breaks on it. This one was projected to cost $43 million over two years.
2) A hundred million or so for Railroads - Sec. 306 provides tax credits to certain railroads for maintaining their tracks. It’s unclear why private businesses should be compensated for their costs of doing business. This is worth roughly $165 million a year.
3) Disney’s Gotta Eat - Sec. 317 is “Extension of special expensing rules for certain film and television productions”. It’s a relatively straightforward subsidy to Hollywood studios, and according to the Joint Tax Committee, was projected to cost $150m for 2010 and 2011.
4) Help a brother mining company out – Sec. 307 and Sec. 316 offer tax incentives for miners to buy safety equipment and train their employees on mine safety. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to bribe mining companies to not kill their workers.
5) Subsidies for Goldman Sachs Headquarters – Sec. 328 extends “tax exempt financing for  York Liberty Zone,” which was a program to provide post-9/11 recovery funds. Rather than going to small businesses affected, however, this was, according to Bloomberg, “little more than a subsidy for fancy Manhattan apartments and office towers for Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Corp.” Michael Bloomberg himself actually thought the program was excessive, so that’s saying something. According to David Cay Johnston’s The Fine Print, Goldman got $1.6 billion in tax free financing for its new massive headquarters through Liberty Bonds.
6) $9B Off-shore financing loophole for banks – Sec. 322 is an “Extension of the Active Financing Exception to Subpart F.” Very few tax loopholes have a trade association, but this one does. This strangely worded provision basically allows American corporations such as banks and manufactures to engage in certain lending practices and not pay taxes on income earned from it. According to this Washington Post piece, supporters of the bill include GE, Caterpillar, and JP Morgan. Steve Elmendorf, super-lobbyist, has been paid $80,000 in 2012 alone to lobby on the “Active Financing Working Group.” 
7) Tax credits for foreign subsidiaries –  Sec. 323 is an extension of the “Look-through treatment of payments between related CFCs under foreign personal holding company income rules.” This gibberish sounding provision cost $1.5 billion from 2010 and 2011, and the US Chamber loves it. It’s a provision that allows US multinationals to not pay taxes on income earned by companies they own abroad.
8) Bonus Depreciation, R&D Tax Credit – These are well-known corporate boondoggles. The tax credit was projected to cost $8B for 2010 and 2011, and the depreciation provisions were projected to cost about $110B for those two years, with some of that made up in later years.
Conveniently, the Joint Committee on Taxation in 2010 did an analysis of what many of these extenders cost. You can find that report here.
Enjoy!