Global economic crisis 'linked to suicide rise'

The recent economic crisis could be to blame for an increase in suicide rates in Europe and America, say experts.

Their analysis in the British Medical Journal looked at data from 54 countries to assess the global impact of the financial problems triggered by the collapse of US credit and housing markets in 2008.
In the year after the crisis began, the male suicide rate rose by 3.3% overall.
This was largely in the countries where there were more reported job losses.
Unstable economy The researchers from the universities of Oxford and Bristol in the UK, along with colleagues from Hong Kong University, used data from the World Health Organization mortality database, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook database.
In 2009, there was a 37% rise in unemployment and 3% falls in GDP per capita, reflecting the onset of the economic crisis in 2008.

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A snapshot survey of calls to our branches in 2008, just before the current recession began, showed that one in 10 callers talked about financial difficulties”

The Samaritans

At the same time, male suicide rates began to climb.

There were nearly 5,000 'extra' suicides above the expected level for that year.
These were mainly seen in the 27 European countries and 18 countries in the Americas studied.
In Europe, suicides increased among 15-24-year-old men, while in America the rise was seen in the 45-64 age group.
Yet the suicide rate for women did not change in Europe and only increased slightly in America.
The researchers say the link they found is likely to be causal - meaning the suicides were related to the emotional stress of being in a recession - but they cannot prove it.
It is possible other factors may be at play, but mental health charities say their own experience would back up the researchers' theory.
A Samaritans spokesperson said: "It is no surprise to us to be told that suicides rise during recessions.
"A snapshot survey of calls to our branches in 2008, just before the current recession began, showed that one in 10 callers talked about financial difficulties. That had risen to one in six at the end of last year. Clearly this is a factor that governments need to keep in mind when planning for economic downturns."
A spokeswoman for the charity Mind said they too had been receiving more calls to their helpline from people distressed about money worries and unemployment.
The national UK charity PAPYRUS (Prevention of Young Suicide) said while it could not say that there had been any recent rise in calls from young people to its national helpline specifically naming the economic crisis as a direct cause of feeling suicidal, difficulty in finding work, managing finances and student debt were "consistent themes" from those seeking help.

99%’s slogan to end 1%’s Wars of Aggression: "Arrest the criminals!"

The brighter future we are all here to realize has a next OBVIOUS step: the 99%’s recognition of basic civic facts that anyone can verify:

• US Wars of Aggression are not even close to the legal limitation of self-defense from a nation’s government’s attack upon the US. These are OBVIOUS unlawful Wars of Aggression that all US military and other government officials are under Oath to resist, expose, and finally end the 1%’s lie-filled history. Our slogan to the public and among our specific circles: “Arrest the criminals!”

• US bankster looting is OBVIOUS criminal fraud because the Federal Reserve’s big-bank owners create debt that they call “money,” the US government creates national debt pushing $20 trillion that they pretend they can pay, and are fraudulently silent on obvious solutions for zero debt, full-employment, and the best infrastructure we can imagine. Our slogan to the public and among our professional/academic environments: “Arrest the criminals!”

• US 1% corporate media “cover” these OBVIOUS War Crimes that kill millions and harm billions, and OBVIOUS looting that annually transfers trillions (~$30 trillion 1% loot in offshore accounts) with equally OBVIOUS lies of omission and commission. All the 99%’s slogan for Truth in perhaps 100 critical areas: “Arrest the criminals!”

Think, speak, and act for arrests of obvious criminals in the most basic areas of American citizenship: unalienable right to our lives free from government war-murders, liberty of our own money, and pursuit of happiness empowered with basic truths.

What Both Sides Are Missing In The Debt Ceiling Debate

by WashingtonsBlog

It’s Not a Fiscal Cliff … It’s the Breakdown of the Rule of Law

Originally posted in July 2011. Re-posted in light of the debt ceiling drama.

The blood pressure of the patient in the emergency room drops precipitously.
The ER docs have already given 15 pints of blood over the course of many hours. But the patient is still on the verge of dying.
Medical rules and regulations say that more than 15 pints of blood should never be given, as too much transfusion can cause other fatal problems.
The “liberal” doctors want to give the patient more blood. After all, this is a life-or-death emergency … and if they can just buy more time, they might be able to figure out a way to save the patient.
The “conservative” doctors want to stop with the transfusions. After all, giving too much blood could kill the patient … and maybe he’ll be able to pull out of it on his own.
Who is right?
Well, the “liberal” and “conservative” doctors are so busy arguing their point of view that they haven’t noticed that one of the patient’s legs has been half chewed off. He’s bleeding out through the huge open wound.
Unless the doctors suture up the wound, the patient will bleed out no matter how much blood they give him.
I’ve previously explained this fact using water as an analogy:

“Deficit hawks” like top economic historian Niall Ferguson says that America’s debt will drive it into a debt crisis, and that any more quantitative easing will lead our creditors to pull the plug. See this, this and this. Indeed, PhD economist Michael Hudson says (starting around 4:00 into video):

If the problem that is grinding the economy to a halt is too much debt, and if no one in the government – in either party – is looking at solving the debt problem, then … we’re going to go into a depression as far as the eye can see.

Yet the U.S. hasn’t reined in its profligate spending … The U.S. is spending on guns andbutter.
As PhD economist Dean Baker points out, the IMF is cracking down on the once-proud America like a naughty third world developing country. (As I’ve repeatedly noted, the IMF performed a complete audit of the whole US financial system during Bush’s last term in office – something which they have only previously done to broke third world nations.)
Indeed, economics professor and former Senior Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers Laurence Kotlikoff wrote yesterday:

Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt.
***
Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy…. The IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt.
***
Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt.
***
This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight….
***
Bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece. [Update]

On the other hand, as I also pointed out last month, the government isn’t even stimulating in an effective way:

“Deficit doves” – i.e. Keynesians like Paul Krugman – say that unless we spend much more on stimulus, we’ll slide into a depression. And yet the government isn’t spending money on the types of stimulus that will have the most bang for the buck: like giving money to the states, extending unemployment benefits or buying more food stamps – let alone rebuilding America’s manufacturing base. See this, this and this.

(Yes, Congress has just thrown twenty billion dollars at jobs and the states, but it is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the many tens of trillions of dollars in handouts to the giant banks.)
***
Even if Keynesian stimulus could help in our climate of all-pervading debt, Washington has already shot America’s wad in propping up the big banks and other oligarchs.
More important still, Keynes implemented his New Deal stimulus at the same time that Glass-Steagall and many other measures were implemented to plug the holes in a corrupt financial system. The gaming of the financial system was decreased somewhat, the amount of funny business which the powers-that-be could engage in was reined in to some extent.
As such, the economy had a chance to recover (even with the massive stimulus of World War II, unless some basic level of trust had been restored in the economy, the economy would not have recovered).
Today, however, [politicians] haven’t fixed any of the major structural defects in the economy [update]. So even if Keynesianism were the answer, it cannot work without the implementation of structural reforms to the financial system.
A little extra water in the plumbing can’t fix pipes that have been corroded and are thoroughly rotten. The government hasn’t even tried to replace the leaking sections of pipe in our economy.
Quantitative easing can’t patch a financial system with giant holes in it.
(Note: If you’re sure that your side of the aisle is right and the other side is wrong, please read this.)
What are the giant holes?
Some of the biggest are:

• Rampant fraud [Indeed, this is not a fiscal cliff, but a descent into lawlessness]

• Worse-than-third-world inequality

• Insanely high levels of leverage

• Warping of the economy and the political process by a handful of monstrously bloated banks

• Focusing on policy objectives other than reducing unemployment (which has the net effect of actually increasing unemployment)

Of course, the loss of America’s manufacturing base, encouraging jobs to be shipped abroad, out of control derivatives and other shenanigans are giant holes as well. And the government has been throwing money at the big banks instead of the little guy, which – as Steve Keen as demonstrated – is not an effective way to stimulate the economy.
I’ve used a third analogy to describe these problems.
As I wrote in 2009 in a post called “Why the Patient Is Not Getting Better: Government is Strengthening the Parasite and Poisoning the Real Economy“:

Why isn’t the economy getting better, even though the government is pumping trillions of dollars into bailouts and stimulus packages and intervening in markets left and right?
Because the government is treating the wrong patient.
Let’s say you travel to the tropics and pick up a parasite. You go to your doctor who gives you very powerful drugs that make you sick. You go back to the doctor, he looks you over, and then adds more potent drugs to your prescription.
You go back a third time and say “Doctor, I’m getting sicker and sicker, why isn’t it working?”
He responds “Oh, I thought the parasite was the patient. The drugs are making it healthier”.
The Government is Strengthening the Parasite
The real economy is:

(1) People making things or providing real, useful services
(2) People saving money
and
(3) People investing the money they saved into productive businesses which will make more things or provide needed services.

According to top federal reserve officials and economists, the government’s actions will encourage big financial players to make even riskier gambles in the future.
Indeed, the government is in the process of giving hundreds of billions – if not trillions – of dollars and guarantees to hedge funds (hedge funds are some of the biggest speculators of all). Indeed, the various bailout programs are giving huge sums to companies that make money by pushing paper around without actually producing any useful goods or services.
The heads of the big banks and financial companies are also getting huge bonuses even though they have driven their companies so far into the ditch that they need government bailouts. Even Paul Volcker says the incentive system is broken. Indeed, the government is making the CEOs richer by giving them billions of dollars of bailout money with which to feather their own nests.
And credit derivatives [at least to the extent they are naked, unregulated and opaque] act as a parasite on the real economy: credit default swap buyers bet that the referenced company will go down the tubes (see this and this). And yet the government is allowing the credit default swap trades to increase, driving CDS spreads against many companies and governments to reach all-time highs.
The Government is Poisoning the Real Economy
Not only is the parasite being boosted by government actions, but the patient – the real economy – is being poisoned.
Manufacturing has been shipped out of America for decades, and the government is stillactively encouraging companies to move manufacturing abroad.
Taxpayers will be on the hook for trillions of dollars of obligations through taxes/or inflation (even Bernanke has admitted that inflation is a tax, because people have less money in their pockets after buying necessities). So Americans will be able to save less.
And government has not only failed to require that companies accurately report their finances – so that investors can know which companies are stable and productive – but it has actually thwarted such accuracy. For example:

• A government agency prevented the SEC from investigating multi-billion dollar Ponzi-schemer Stanford

• As of 2006:
  

  “President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar … broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.”

• One or more treasury department officials actively allowed banks to “cook their books”

The government has been strengthening the parasite and poisoning the real economy. No wonder the patient is getting worse.
I noted a couple of months later:

Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. He is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund.
Hudson has frequently described Wall Street as “parasitic”. For example, in a 2003 interview, Hudson said:

The problem with parasites is not merely that they siphon off the food and nourishment of their host, crippling its reproductive power, but that they take over the host’s brain as well. The parasite tricks the host into thinking that it is feeding itself.
Something like this is happening today as the financial sector is devouring the industrial sector. Finance capital pretends that its growth is that of industrial capital formation. That is why the financial bubble is called “wealth creation,” as if it were what progressive economic reformers envisioned a century ago. They condemned rent and monopoly profit, but never dreamed that the financiers would end up devouring landlord and industrialist alike. Emperors of Finance have trumped Barons of Property and Captains of Industry.

More recently, Hudson said:

You can think of the financial sector as being wrapped around the real economy, almost like a parasite, and that’s why it’s been called parasitic for so long. The financial sector extracts interest from the economy, the property sector extracts economic rent, as do monopolies. Now the key thing about parasites, is that it’s not simply that they extract nourishment from the host. The parasite takes over the host’s brain, to make it think it’s part of the economy, to make it think it’s part of the host’s own body, and, in fact, that’s it almost like a child of the host, to be protected. And that’s what the financial sector has done today.
You have Obama coming out and saying, “We have to save the banks in order to save the real economy”. The fact is, you can’t serve both the parasite and the host.

And see this.
On August 10th, Hudson went even further. Specifically, he said:

• The giant financial institutions have already killed their host – the real American economy

• Since they realize that the American economy is dead, they are trying to suck as much blood out of America as possible while the corpse is still warm

• Because the American economy is dead, their plan is to soon jump to another host. They will ship all of their money overseas

To come back to my original analogy, the dying patient has a horde of leeches inside the gaping wound in his leg, and the transfused blood has done nothing but fed the leeches. [Sorry for the gross analogy.]
The doctors have been helping the parasites, not the patient.
Unless the doctors clean out the parasites and close the gaping wound, the patient has no chance.
As Dennis Kucinich writes today:

We have to realize what this country’s economy has become. Our monetary policy, through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, privatized the money supply, gathers the wealth, puts it in the hands of the few while the Federal Reserve can create money out of nothing, give it to banks to park at the Fed while our small businesses are starving for capital.
Mark my words — Wall Street cashes in whether we have a default or not. And the same type of thinking that created billions in bailouts for Wall Street and more than $1 trillion in giveaways by the Federal Reserve today leaves 26 million Americans either underemployed or unemployed. And nine out of ten Americans over the age of 65 are facing cuts in their Social Security in order to pay for a debt which grew from tax cuts for the rich and for endless wars.
There is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to the hands of a few and it’s going on right now as America’s eyes are misdirected to the political theater of these histrionic debt negotiations, threats to shut down the government, and willingness to make the most Americans pay dearly for debts they did not create.
These are symptoms of a government which has lost its way, and they are a challenge to the legitimacy of the two-party system.

Marc Faber Warns “The Endgame Is A Total Collapse – But From A Higher Diving Board Now”

Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, stopped by Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart” today and told Trish Regan, Adam Johnson and Matt Miller that Janet Yellen would “make Mr. Bernanke look like a hawk.”
Faber also said, “When I look at the market action today, I would like to see the next few days, because it may be a one-day event. The markets are overbought. The Feds have already lost control of the bond market. The question is when will it lose control of the stock market.”
**BLOOMBERG TELEVISION**

Faber on the reaction that there’s going to be no taper for now:

“My view was that they would taper by about $10 billion to $15 billion, but I’m not surprised that they don’t do it for the simple reason that I think we are in QE unlimited. The people at the Fed are professors, academics. They never worked a single life in the business of ordinary people. And they don’t understand that if you print money, it benefits basically a handful of people maybe–not even 5% of the population, 3% of the population. And when you look today at the market action, ok, stocks are up 1%. Silver is up more than 6%, gold up more than 4%, copper 2.9%, crude oil 2.68%, and so forth. Crude oil, gasoline are things people need, ordinary people buy everyday. Thank you very much, the Fed boosts these items that people need to go to their work, to heat their homes, and so forth and at the same time, asset prices go up, but the majority of people do not own stocks. Only 11% of Americans own directly shares.”

On whether interest rates are held down when the Fed continues this type of policy:

“On September 14, 2012, when the Fed announced QE3, that was then extended into QE4, and now basically QE unlimited, the bond markets had peaked out. Interest rates had bottomed out on July 25, 2012–a year ago–at 1.43% on the 10-year Treasury note. Mr. Bernanke said at that time at a press conference, the objective of the Fed is to lower interest rates. Since then, they have doubled. Thank you very much. Great success.”

On what the endgame is:

“Well, the endgame is a total collapse, but from a higher diving board. The Fed will continue to print and if the stock market goes down 10%, they will print even more. And they don’t know anything else to do. And quite frankly, they have boxed themselves into a corner where they are now kind of desperate.”

On Janet Yellen:

“She will make Mr. Bernanke look like a hawk. She, in 2010, said if could vote for negative interest rates, in other words, you would have a deposit with the bank of $100,000 at the beginning of the year and at the end, you would only get $95,000 back, that she would be voting for that. And that basically her view will be to keep interest rates in real terms, in other words, inflation-adjusted. And don’t believe a minute the inflation figures published by the bureau of labor statistics. You live in New York. You should know very well how much costs of living are increasing every day. Now, the consequences of these monetary policies and artificially low interest rates is of course that the government becomes bigger and bigger and you have less and less freedom and you have people like Mr. De Blasio, who comes in and says let’s tax people who have high incomes more. And, of course, immediately, because in a democracy, there are more poor people than rich people, they all applaud and vote for him. That is the consequence.”

On where he sees gold heading:

“When I look at the market action today, I would like to see the next few days, because it may be a one-day event. The markets are overbought. The Feds have already lost control of the bond market. The question is when will it lose control of the stock market. So, I’m a little bit apprehensive. I would like to wait a few days to see how the markets react after the initial reaction.”

On whether the 10-year yield will float back up to where it was before 2pm today:

“I will confess to you, longer-term, I am of course, negative about government bonds and i think that yields will go up and that eventually there will be sovereign default. But in the last few days, when yields went to 2.9% and 3% on the 10-year for the first time in years i bought some treasuries because I have the view that they overshot and that they could ease down to around 2.2% to 2.5% because the economy is much weaker than people think…I think in the next three months or so.”

On gold prices:
“I always buy gold and I own gold. I don’t even value it. I regard it as an insurance policy. I think responsible citizens should own gold, period.”

Obama: 'Raising the Debt Ceiling...Does Not Increase Our Debt,' Though It Has 'Over 100 Times'

Raising the debt ceiling doesn't increase the nation's debt, Pres. Obama declared in a speech today.

In a speech at the Business Roundtable headquarters in Washington, D.C., Obama dismissed concerns about raising the debt ceiling by noting that it'd been done so many times in the past:
"Now, this debt ceiling -- I just want to remind people in case you haven't been keeping up -- raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.  All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you've already racked up, Congress.  It's a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved."
Obama went on to suggest that "the average person" mistakenly thinks that raising the debt ceiling means the U.S. is racking up more debt:
"It's always a tough vote because the average person thinks raising the debt ceiling must mean that we're running up our debt, so people don't like to vote on it, and, typically, there's some gamesmanship in terms of making the President's party shoulder the burden of raising the -- taking the vote."
But, isn't the fact that the U.S. has hit its debt ceiling "over a hundred times" - and, thus, has had to keep raising it - proof that raising the limit does, in fact, lead to increased debt?

Abby Martin’s Tribute to Occupy Wall Street | Call to Action

Abby Martin pays a personal tribute to Occupy, remarking on how the movement isn’t dead, because shifting the public consciousness is not something that ever goes away.

Ron Paul: We Ought To Face The Consequences Of Our Spending

Ron Paul on Gold, The Dollar, The Manipulation, The Fed and Taper

it is no secret that former texas congressman and presidential candidate ron paul has had some issues with the federal reserve. not surprisingly, paul has his own choice for his next chair of the fed. it