Both the Government and the Market are Irrational

Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts
Activist Post

One of the great economic myths is that markets are rational. Not a day passes without this myth being disproved scores of times, but the myth persists.

For example, today (March 14) Bank of America/Merrill Lynch reported that “yesterday US markets started the day off with a strong rally after the solid retail sales report. . . . tailwinds are helping boost global equity markets today.”

The "solid retail sales report" for February consists of 1% nominal gain. That is, the increase is not deflated by the month's inflation rate, which will be released on March 16. In other words, if very much of the 1%nominal gain in retail sales is due to higher prices, the inflation adjusted gain will not be statistically significant. The "rational market" took off without waiting to find out whether the gain was real.

Moreover, as statistician John Williams has established, the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) understates inflation. If an honest measure of inflation was used, retail sales could be in negative territory.

The “rational market” loves deception as long as it provides an excuse for equities to rise. The Federal Reserve’s focus on “core inflation,” which does not include rising food and energy prices, allows Federal Reserve officials to maintain that the inflation rate remains below target. By pretending that there is no inflation, the Federal Reserve continues to support banks with near zero interest rates while depriving savers and retirees of interest income. With no income from savings, people are forced to consume their capital. Thus, the Federal Reserve’s policy makes bankers richer and the country poorer.

 Meanwhile, those whose old age security is based on pensions are confronting insecurity. Many with private pensions were harmed by the financial crisis. Those dependent on Social Security and Medicare are finding that these programs are being blamed for budget deficits caused by multi-trillion dollar wars of choice. Those expecting pensions from state and local governments are finding that governments are unable to make good on underfunded pension benefits.

State and local governments counted on a growing economy and rising consumer incomes to provide the tax base to make good on underfunded pensions. These governments did not foresee that US corporations would destroy their tax base by moving manufacturing, engineering, IT, research and design jobs overseas. The absence of growth in real incomes for the vast majority of the people and the capture of productivity gains by capital at the expense of labor have added to the budget woes of most state and local governments.

John Rauh at Northwestern University estimates that the unfunded obligations of state and local governments amounts to $4,400,000,000,000, an amount that is within the ballpark of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes’ estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Money that could have saved Americans’ pensions instead was allocated to profits for armament corporations and to advance Israel’s territorial hegemony.

When the Occupy Wall Street movement says that Washington rules for the benefit of the 1%, OWS is not far off the mark.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts' new website Institute For Political Economy.  Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

How would you feel if you worked for a state or local government for 20 or 30 years only to have your pension slashed dramatically or taken away entirely?

Broken Promises: Pensions All Over America Are Being Savagely Cut Or Are Vanishing Completely

The Economic Collapse
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
How would you feel if you worked for a state or local government for 20 or 30 years only to have your pension slashed dramatically or taken away entirely? Well, this exact scenario is playing out from coast to coast and in the years ahead millions of elderly Americans are going to be affected by broken promises and vanishing pensions.

In the old days, things were much different. You would get hired by a big company or a government institution and you knew that the retirement benefits that they were promising you would be there when you retired in a few decades. Unfortunately, we have now arrived at a time when government institutions and big companies have promised far more than they are able to deliver, and “pension reform” has become one of the hot button issues all over the nation. Many Americans that have been basing their financial futures on their pensions are waking up one day and finding that their pensions are either gone or have been cut back dramatically. According to Northwestern University Professor John Rauh, the latest estimate of the total amount of unfunded pension and healthcare obligations for state and local governments across the United States is 4.4 trillion dollars. America is continually becoming a poorer nation and all of that money is simply not going to magically materialize somehow. So where is that 4.4 trillion dollars going to come from? Well, either pension benefits are going to have to be cut a lot more all over America or taxes will need to be raised dramatically. Either way, we are all going to feel the pain of these broken promises.
There simply is not enough money out there to keep all of the pension commitments that have been made. Something has got to give. In the end, millions of elderly Americans will likely be plunged into poverty as pensions disappear.
Some local governments around the nation are already declaring bankruptcy and are either eliminating pensions or are cutting them very deeply. Just check out what just happened in Central Falls, Rhode Island….

For years, city officials promised robust union contracts and pensions without raising revenue to pay for them. Last August, the math caught up with them. Central Falls was broke, its pension fund short $46 million. It declared bankruptcy.
“My daughters grew up here, went to school here. It’s all gone,” said Mike Geoffroy, a retired firefighter.
He said he could not make the payments on his house after his pension was cut by $1,100 a month.

When will the math catch up with the city where you are living?
For years and years most of our state and local politicians have been ignoring this problem. But eventually a day comes when you simply cannot ignore it any longer.
Check out what Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward said about the situation in his city recently….

“When our annual pension liability is more than our yearly property tax revenues, we have to do something”

Keep in mind that taxpayers don’t get any new services for money spent on pensions. It is money that goes straight into the pockets of retired workers. State and local governments are desperately trying to pay retired workers what they are owed and fund ongoing government functions at the same time, but many have reached the breaking point.
All over the country, state and local governments are going broke. The following is from a recent article by Duff McDonald….

Alabama’s Jefferson County has actually gone bankrupt. Stockton, California is all but ready to do the same. And all you have to do is look to Detroit—or any of the nearby auto towns named after a Buick model of one sort or another—and you see fiscal crisis playing out right now. Look in your own backyard—or at the potholes on your neighborhood roads—and you will likely find the same.

Things are so bad in Stockton, California that they are actually skipping debt payments….

The city of 290,000 that rode the wave of the housing boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s now finds itself littered with foreclosed homes, saddled with pension, health care and other obligations it can’t afford, and unable to pay its bills.
The City Council voted last month to suspend $2 million in bond payments and begin negotiations with bond holders, creditors and unions.

And did you notice what is being blamed for the financial problems in Stockton?
Pension and healthcare benefits.
Sadly, we are seeing pension nightmares erupt all over the nation right now.
For example, check out what is happening to the Public School Employees’ Retirement System and State Employees’ Retirement System in Pennsylvania….

PSERS had an accrued unfunded liability of nearly $26.5 billion, the amount of money the fund is short to cover existing retirement benefits. That hole is expected to grow to $43 billion by 2019. SERS is $12.5 billion in the red, and that shortfall is expected to climb to nearly $18 billion by 2018. Unless the stock market makes giant sustained gains, taxpayers will have to refill those funds.

That doesn’t sound good at all.
In California, the Orange County Employees Retirement System is estimated to have a 10 billion dollar unfunded pension liability.
How in the world can a single county be facing a 10 billion dollar hole?
This is madness.
The state of Illinois is facing an unfunded pension liability of more than 77 billion dollars. Considering the fact that the state of Illinois is flat broke and on the verge of default, it is inevitable that a lot of those pension obligations will never be paid.
In fact, there are going to be a whole lot of broken promises all over the country.
Pension consultant Girard Miller told California’s Little Hoover Commission that state and local government bodies in the state of California have $325 billion in combined unfunded pension liabilities.
That comes to about $22,000 for every single working adult in the state of California.
So where is all of that money going to come from?
But at least most state and local government employees are still covered by pension plans, even if they are failing.
In the private sector, pension plans are vanishing at lightning speed.
According to the Boston College Center for Retirement Research, the percentage of workers in America covered by a traditional pension plan fell from 62 percent in 1983 to 17 percent in 2007.
That isn’t just a trend.
That is a tidal wave.
And many of the private pension plans that still exist are massively underfunded. For example, Verizon’s pension plan is underfunded by 3.4 billion dollars.
So what should Americans do in light of all this?
Well, the number one thing to realize is that the pension plan you have been counting on could disappear at any time.
We live in an economic environment that is extremely unstable, and about the only thing you can count on in this environment is rapid and dramatic change.
Do not plan your financial future around a pension plan. If you do, you are likely to be bitterly disappointed.
Americans that plan to retire in the coming years should do their best to try to fund their own retirements.
Unfortunately, most Americans are not putting away much of anything for retirement. As I have written about previously, one study found that American workers are $6.6 trillion short of what they need to retire comfortably.
Ouch.
Over the next 20 years approximately 10,000 Baby Boomers will be retiring every single day.
A lot of them are going to be blindsided by empty pension funds and broken promises.
We are facing a retirement crisis of unprecedented magnitude, and there is not much hope in sight.
And if there is a maor stock market crash, things are going to be much, much worse.
Most pension funds and retirement plans are heavily invested in the stock market. If we were to see a major financial crisis like we saw back in 2008 it would be absolutely devastating. Millions of Americans could see their retirement plans wiped out in short order.
Once again, please do not place your faith in the system.
If you do, you are likely to end up holding a bag of broken promises.
A gigantic tsunami of unfunded pension obligations is coming. A lot of state and local governments are going to go broke. A lot of promises are going to be broken.
If you hope to retire any time soon, you better plan on being able to take care of yourself.

Secret "Occult Economy" Coming Out of the Shadows?

Dees Illustration

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post

During December 2011 and January 2012, I wrote two articles dealing with the announcement of two different lawsuits being filed in U.S. District Courts regarding astronomical amounts of money in the forms of U.S. Bonds, Federal Reserve Notes, foreign government-issued bonds, and other financial instruments.

The first article, entitled, “Unprecedented Lawsuit Reveals Bizarre Worldwide Banking Connections,” deals with a lawsuit filed by Neil Keenan, an acting representative of the Dragon Family of Asia, that contains a list of plaintiffs including individuals, governments, private institutions, and secret societies that spans the entire globe. Keenan is alleging that a trillion dollars worth of Federal Reserve Notes, Kennedy Bonds, and Japanese Government Bonds were stolen from himself and the Dragon Family by a worldwide cartel network.

The second article, entitled, “Massive New Lawsuit Filed Against U.S. Federal Government in Bond Theft Scheme,” deals with a similar situation. In this lawsuit, plaintiff Joseph Riad alleges that $15 billion worth of Federal Reserve bonds were stolen from him by similar criminal cartel network involving many agencies of the U.S. Federal Government such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Public Debt.

 

 

In the latter incident, the bonds are supposedly dated back to 1934. However, the facts surrounding both of these lawsuits are quite difficult to decipher. With such an interconnected web of players including very secretive persons and institutions, as well as historical questions and connotations, it will likely be some time before the convoluted inter-workings of these incidents are unraveled -- if indeed they ever are.

Add to this the seizure of $6 trillion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds by Italian prosecutors and one might begin to see a trend developing. In this instance, according to the Italian prosecutors, the bonds had been hidden in makeshift compartments in three different safety deposit boxes in Zurich. The investigation, dubbed “Operation Vulcanica,” resulted in the arrest of eight individuals who were allegedly planning to buy plutonium from Nigerian sources. Interestingly enough, the bonds were sealed in crates labeled as property of the Chicago Federal Reserve System – Treaty of Versailles Mother Boxes to be exact.  In this case, as in the case of the Joseph Riad lawsuit, the bonds were dated back to 1934.

Although the bonds are alleged to have been fake, at this time we cannot confirm that this is really the case.

The claim that these bonds are fake, of course, might very well be true. However, there is also a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

As I have mentioned in a previous article, the sheer number of U.S. bonds involved is so large that it presents one argument against the theory of a rogue counterfeiter. U.S. bonds are intentionally made incredibly difficult to forge and, considering the technology required to do so, the odds of such technology residing in the possession of a rogue network of underground counterfeiters is highly unlikely. If the bonds had indeed been faked, then it would be much more reasonable to assume that the counterfeiting operation was undertaken by a State – the only type of institution that would have had the infrastructure to oversee such a massive operation.

That being the case, the question would then become “Who?” and, necessarily, “Why?”

Yet, if the bonds were indeed counterfeited, it also seems that the counterfeiters took the long way around as they were produced inside sealed boxes thus indicating that the boxes themselves had been counterfeited. As Madison Ruppert of End The Lie points out:

If these bonds were indeed forgeries, it implies that the box itself might be fake as well, which raises the question: why would counterfeiters go through the effort of not only faking $6 trillion in $1 billion bonds but also go through the effort of creating  a fake Treaty of Versailles Mother Box?

When I try to imagine the mindset of a thief, I cannot bring myself to understand why I would counterfeit two things instead of just one, thus doubling my chances of forgeries being detected.

Furthermore, why hide the bonds in makeshift compartments within the Mother Box? It all just makes so little sense I’m not sure what to think at this point.

Of course, this argument is not concrete enough to prove whether or not these bonds are real. Indeed, it is important to point out that this writer is not declaring judgment one way or the other. Clearly, the situation continues to develop and more information will hopefully come to light. Whatever one may suspect regarding this issue, it would be wise not to rush to judgment until a significantly larger amount of facts emerge. 

 

 

Regardless, a suggestion made by many in the “fake bond” camp is that the amount of money is too great to be real. The argument here is that this much money simply does not exist within the Federal Reserve/U.S. Treasury bond system. Furthermore, there are questions as to how so many of these bonds found their way into Asian hands, particularly those bonds dated around the 1930s.

It is true that interest has accrued on the initial value of many of these bonds and financial instruments over time, particularly those instruments which have been held for a long period of time. However, many might point that the number of bonds/instruments that would have been required to be issued in the first place would have been enormous. Not only that, but there is no popular record of such massive financial exchanges having taken place involving the issuing of such instruments as Federal Reserve/U.S. Treasury bonds. That is, at least transactions that number in the “many thousands of trillions” of dollars that the Neil Keenan lawsuit alludes to.

However, one must remember that the world of banking, particularly privately administered, international, government-based financial instruments of which the Federal Reserve specializes in, is not an industry in which transparency is the order of the day.

After all, it was only recently revealed that the Federal Reserve had loaned a whopping $16 trillion dollars to major banks as a result of the current American bailout culture. There was no public announcement of these transactions, and acknowledgement only came after a watered-down and quite narrow audit provision was passed by Congress. If massive transactions made by the Federal Reserve such as the one mentioned above have only recently been uncovered, one is clearly justified in wondering how many other enormous financial transactions have taken place in the past between similar institutions? 

Indeed, such transactions cannot be considered abnormal in the upper reaches of the international banking cartel.

Nevertheless, some clues have appeared that might explain the nature of some of the bonds at issue (if they are real) as well as the reason why the 1930s keep popping up as the birth year of so many of them.

At this point, I would like to encourage the reader to take a look at David Wilcock’s series FINANCIAL TYRANNY: The Final Sections. Wilcock has been sounding the alarm on many of these banking issues such as the stolen bonds and lawsuits for some time and, should his information pan out, deserves much credit for his work on this issue. There is a great deal of information collected in Wilcock’s series so make of it what you will.

One of the questions central to this entire issue is whether or not these types of bonds have ever been issued in this first place and, if they have been issued, whether or not they have been issued in such large quantities. In searching for an answer to this question, we find ourselves as far away as China and as far back as the early 1930s.

During the 1930s Chiang Kai-Shek was facing war on two fronts – from Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist insurgency and from the Imperial Japanese. As a result, China was incredibly unstable and, likewise, Chinese gold held by Kai-Shek’s China was in danger of being seized by one or both of its enemies. In an effort to protect this gold in the event of a successful push from either of the usurpers, an arrangement was made for the gold’s safekeeping inside the United States under the care of the U.S. Federal Government in the form of the Federal Reserve as well as the BIS (Bank of International Settlements). This was a plan that was apparently deemed acceptable by both Kai-Shek and the United States government, although the public was not notified of its existence.

The CIA, around 1948, played a major role in the physical removal of much of this gold as Tse-tung marched successfully through China. As Professor Richard Aldrich of Nottingham University and co-editor of the Journal Intelligence and National Security reveals, the CIA used their cover operation known as the Civilian Air Transport (CAT) to fly large shipments of Chinese gold to the United States.

But that was in 1948. “What about the 1930s?” you might ask. “Is the 1948 shipment all of the gold brought to the U.S.?”

Evidently not.

Source

As David Wilcock states in his article, news reports from The New York Times give us a glimpse into the gold shipments taking place from China to the United States in the 1930s. Indeed, Wilcock includes the photo of six reports published in the newspaper from 1934 to 1938 clearly indicating the receipt of Chinese gold. Bringing all of these reports into perspective, he writes;

The last newspaper article we just read, from December 1, 1934, reveals a total excess of $222 million, 385 thousand and 270 dollars' worth of 'imported' gold to the US between 1929 -- when the BIS was officially founded -- and 1934.

At the stated 'new price' of $35 an ounce, this adds up to roughly 6,540,743.23 troy ounces, or 203.43 metric tons of gold.

As we can see, this process continued well after 1934. Our first article revealed that $6,120,500 in gold was taken in by the Federal Reserve in a single day -- on February 19, 1937.

Chiang Kai-Shek supposedly sent 125,000 metric tons of gold to the US in 1938. This is obviously much higher than the publicly-reported 203.43 metric tons that had been taken in from various countries between 1929 and 1934.

However, let's not forget that we now have documented proof that secret gold shipments were conducted from China to the US in 1938.

Japan intercepted 2.488 metric tons of gold, bound for the Federal Reserve, on October 24, 1938. It is very likely that many other shipments occurred and were not intercepted -- just as we have been told -- and Federal Reserve bonds were issued.

Special attention should be paid to the last statement because the reports that Wilcock produces are only from The New York Times and most do not mention U.S. receipt of gold as anything other than a footnote. If we were able to examine all of the leading newspapers during this time period, or even a more detailed search of The New York Times itself, there might turn up even more reports of gold shipments. Not only that, but we certainly can’t count out the fact that many of these shipments might have been kept secret from the very beginning. If this is the case, it would stand to reason that there would be no reports published about them.

Regardless, Wilcock claims that these bonds were used to create what he calls the “Occult economy,” where loans are made based on the value of the secret gold stockpiles and transactions between private individuals and central banks are made in secret.

Not only that, but because “operational loss” of bonds/notes was to be expected there would necessarily have been more of the bonds/notes created than the exact number needed by the Chinese.

Furthermore, as Professor Aldrich states, “Regional banks receiving FRNs [Federal Reserve Notes] in return for their gold were aware that the FRNs were likely to be redeemable for only a proportion of their face value. Therefore a much larger value in FRNs would have been required than the total value of the gold that the Americans and Chinese nationalists were trying to extract from China.”

 

 Some might even argue that printing so many bonds essentially under the table would be done with very little concern since the CIA, with its high level of intelligence, would have foreseen that Kai-Shek would soon be in no position to cash the bonds in any event. In short, the money changers could have provided the Chinese with the bonds with no intention of ever honoring them. Likewise, there would be no concern of ever finding themselves in the position of having to do so.

But for all the questions surrounding the bonds, Federal Reserve Notes and other financial instruments seized or mentioned in the various lawsuits recently filed, there are documented instances of fake bonds surfacing in cases very similar to those mentioned at the start of this article.

For instance, in 2003,* two men – a Canadian and a Korean living in Japan – tried to use $25 million worth of US Treasury bonds in order to secure a line of credit from the Imperial Bank of Commerce. The bonds presented by the men were easily spotted as fake and the men, along with Graham Halksworth – a 69-year-old British man and his associate, Michael Slamaj, a former Yugoslav spy -- were arrested and charged.

The story behind the acquirement of the bonds provided by Halksworth and Slamaj directly coincided with the chronology of events as recorded in the files of the Foreign Office.

Yet, although the bonds/notes in the Halksworth case were demonstrably false, they did reveal some rather startling information – that fake bonds were often included amongst large quantities of real bonds so as to preclude the holder from ever being able to cash them.

Indeed, when questioned by the police as to his role in the fake bond scandal, Halksworth responded by telling police that “Deliberate mistakes were often made in such bonds as a security device; ask the CIA.” When the police pointed out that the mistakes were so obvious it looked like a child had made them, Halksworth responded, “Exactly.”

Halksworth might be in some position to speak on the matter considering his background. He was a forensic specialist and a member of the Forensic Science Society who helped develop a fingerprinting system for Scotland Yard in 1967. He also worked for a company that provided forensic equipment for many foreign governments as well as authenticated historical documents for the Chinese and German governments. He helped issue bonds from both commercial banks and the Bank of England. He also authenticated and approved U.S. Federal Reserve bonds for churches, Saudi princes, and Native American tribes. With a career history such as this, Halksworth is likely to know whereof he speaks.

In addition, David Wilcock claims that he has inside information that Halksworth’s assertions are indeed true. That is, at least his assertions about deliberate mistakes being added to real bonds and other financial instruments of a high value and secretive nature. Wilcock claims that his insider explained to him that for every box of real bonds created, four boxes of fake bonds are created along with it. According to Wilcock, the source also claims that even the real boxes contain up to 20 percent fake bonds.

This is designed, Wilcock suggests, in order to prevent the bonds from ever being cashed and endangering either the “Occult economy” or the real economy that is now made up of derivatives and private central banks. If anyone ever comes into possession of these bonds, they will be “caught” with the forgeries, arrested, their bonds will be seized, and the Secret Service or other relevant agency will escape with the real financial instruments.

Unfortunately, at this point, it is still impossible to make a final judgment about the Riad/Keenan lawsuits, seized bonds, or even many of the claims made by David Wilcock. However, by taking a look at each of these cases while keeping in mind the big picture, it is possible that some light may be shed on the shadowy edges of international finance and worldwide banking cartels.

Throughout this saga, if the information we have received so far can be believed, we are approaching great revelation into the tunneled spider web of the global control system that, up until this point, has remained well hidden.

*NOTE: The original article from the UK Independent has apparently been scrubbed from the Internet. It is, however, preserved in the archives on Rense.com. 

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Mullins, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor's Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of three books, Codex Alimentarius -- The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, and Five Sense Solutions. Turbeville has published over one hundred articles dealing with a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville is available for podcast, radio, and TV interviews. Please contact us at activistpost (at) gmail.com.

Egypt is looted, and the U.S. press calls it ‘reform’

by James North  at mondoweiss.net

Joseph Stiglitz

One of the more annoying and dishonest features of the mainstream American media over the past couple of decades has been its use of the word “reform,” without quotation marks, as shorthand for a set of controversial economic policies the United States and global institutions like the International Monetary Fund have imposed on the poor nations in the global south.

The word “reform” is biased; no right-thinking person could be against it. If the New York Times and the Washington Post had followed their own rules about objectivity, they would have instead used neutral terms, like “neoliberalism,” or “the Washington Consensus,” and they would have pointed out that distinguished economists like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, along with large, vocal masses of people in the poor countries themselves, have warned for years that the “reform” policies are a slow-motion disaster.

The latest evidence for the failure of neoliberalism comes from Egypt, and even the mainstream press is finally recognizing it. In the Washington Post recently, Stephen Glain blamed the U.S government, the IMF and the World Bank for pushing policies that severely damaged Egyptian agriculture, to the point where the country now has to waste precious foreign exchange to import nearly all of the wheat it needs for bread, the staple food.

An earlier Post article showed how the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) funded a Cairo think tank that vigorously promoted the “privatization” of state-run companies, public resources, and lands. Privatization, one of the tenets of the neoliberal orthodoxy, is supposed to foster competition, efficiency and economic growth.

In fact, the privatizations were rigged by Gamal Mubarak, the deposed dictator’s son, and his cronies, who gained control of companies worth billions of dollars at fractions of their true value. (The Post reported that the Chicago-based international law firm Baker & McKenzie arranged many of the deals.) The biggest of Gamal’s shady partners, Ahmed Ezz, inherited a state-owned steel company, which he turned into an inefficient monopoly.

Instead of wasting $10 million on their think tank, U.S. AID could have simply stopped any adult Egyptian in the street and asked them how privatizations conducted by the Mubarak regime would turn out.

Professor Joe Stiglitz uses the terms “market Bolsheviks,” or “market fundamentalists,” to describe the zealots who have imposed neoliberalism across the global south. His choice of words is brilliant. The unelected apparatchiks at U.S. AID or the IMF who have pressured the governments of Egypt or Bolivia or Zambia over the past 20 years or so, without caring about or even knowing the reality in those places, are the spiritual descendants of the Soviet central planners who coldly treated human beings as statistics.

Meanwhile, a small group of thieves stole billions of dollars of public property that had been built up by the Egyptian people. At the very least, the mainstream press should stop calling this colossal robbery “reform.”

Scan business cards into Outlook with CogniCard

If you are using Microsoft Outlook as your Personal Information Manager you probably already receive all your E-Mails with Outlook, manage your appointments and calendar and also organize all your contacts with the software. Outlook has clearly become on of the most popular Tools for Personal Information Management and it is therefore that we have to take a closer look at the application how it can do even more.
CogniCard is such an extension for Outlook that allows you to scan business cards into Outlook. This is very straightforward and works with your smartphone, your webcam and your flatbed scanner. CogniCard is a business card scanner in the cloud, this means you can access it very easily from every computer. If there is a webcam installed you can just start scanning your business cards.
The unique differentiator of CogniCard to other solutions to scan business cards is that it is e-Mail based, that means it is possible to scan business cards and the cards are returned as VCF attachments in an email that can be easily imported in every Personal Information Manager and of course also into Microsoft Outlook.
The following image shows you how CogniCard works and how the images are then send to your account.

Now the main question is: Why should you use CogniCard instead of another solution on a smartphone or with an additional device. First of all, I am sure you don’t want to buy another hardware device if you already have several devices. Hardware based business card scanners usually costs several hundred dollars. With CogniCard you can start just by spending $9 USD to get started with scanning your business cards.
The other option are smartphones with a special software to scan your cards. You can use CogniCard also on your smartphone, you just take a picture of a business card and send it to CogniCard and the transcribed business card is returned to you again. If you use a specialized application you can scan business cards but the truth is that scanning usually takes around 1-2 minutes including recognition. If you then have to correct some mistakes, it takes easily around 3 minutes to scan one business card.

Don’t trust us, try it yourself!

But of course we are not completely unbiased, therefore we suggest that you sign up with CogniCard and start with the free trial and you can experience yourself how the solution works and how you can benefit from this solution.

Fed States JPM Might Lose 0.0000043% Under Worst Case Scenario

Bloomberg reports that JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs had an estimated $27.7 billion and $27.1 billion in projected trading losses under the stress test scenarios, leading all 19 firms 'tested'. 
With $61.53 TRILLION in OTC swap derivatives, who in their right mind can possibly believe that JP Morgan's trading losses under the worst possible scenario would be a mere $27.7 billion!?!
$27.7 billion in losses on an OTC swap position of $61.53 TRILLION is 0.0000043%!  The Fed expects us to believe that a 0.0000043% trading loss is the worst possible outcome JP Morgan might face!?!
JP Morgan's maximum trading losses are estimated by Bernanke to be $27.1 billion when The Morgue requires $71 billion in bonds DAILY simply to hedge its IR swap book!?!


JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), which produced the most trading revenue among Wall Street firms last year, had the highest trading and counter-party losses of the biggest U.S. banks under the Federal Reserve’s stress scenario.
JPMorgan had an estimated $27.7 billion in projected losses from mark-to-market changes, credit valuation adjustments and counterparty default losses, according to the Fed results released yesterday. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) had an estimated $27.1 billion of such losses in the testing.
The Fed is requiring the nation’s largest lenders to show they have credible plans for maintaining capital and continuing lending in an economic downturn. The six largest U.S. banks had a projected $116 billion in trading and counter-party losses, larger than the 19 banks subjected to Fed’s stress tests had in any lending area.
“The relative size of losses across firms depends not on nominal portfolio size, but rather on the specific risk characteristics of each BHC’s trading positions, inclusive of hedges,” the Fed said in the report. BHC stands for bank holding company.

Gerald Celente - An Economic 9/11 Is Coming!

http://www.revolutionarypolitics.tv/video/viewVideo.php?video_id=18156&title=gerald-celente---an-economic-9-11-is-coming