I got an e-mail the other day from a friend who knows I follow events in the U.S. with some fascination – especially the financial situation, which in my opinion is moving from dire to bleak. If you aren’t shocked and furious after reading the following editorial, I can’t imagine what would do it.
The Federal Reserve just created more money than ever in the history of the US, and gave it to for-profit banks, many of which aren’t American. How much? $16 trillion. You are reading that right. Trillion. The money went to US and foreign banks – Citigroup got $2.5 trillion, Goldman (which isn’t a bank in any sense) got $800 billion Banks in the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium… Everyone got hundreds of billions or trillions, bailouts which were never authorized by Congress or anyone but the Fed. Free money, from the American taxpayer, at unprecedented levels, for use however they felt like – and I’m guessing, it was to make big profits.
Here’s the eerie part. None of this was reported. The GAO report linked in the article was ignored. Or if it was, it was so low key as to be invisible. I spent an hour online scouring the news services and couldn’t find anything. No, instead I found the same blurb over and over – that the Fed was going to be handing the Treasury a check for $85 billion, the largest amount of interest ever. Apparently the US media didn’t think it was noteworthy to point out that $85 billion was pennies, whereas the banks it had passed the money to made 2%, 3% or more. It was a news blackout that would have made Stalin-era Russia proud.
To put it all into perspective, the US total GDP is roughly $14 trillion. That’s everything, including what companies like Microsoft, Apple, Ford, Amazon, Ebay, etc. all collectively generate. Every business in the US. Real estate. You name it. And the Fed created well over a year’s total GDP worth of money for the express benefit of its bank friends, at the direct cost to the US population. The country paid to keep Barclays and Credit Suisse and Goldman profiting while it struggles to make ends meet. And there was no coverage. It’s as though it never happened.
This is the biggest financial boondoggle in history. And it went unreported.
How scary is that, and what does it tell you about the media, as well as the government? Think long and hard.
The GAO report I have linked to below via the article says that the loans were repaid. Want to bet that means that the original term of the loan was repaid…with yet another loan from the Fed, but a “new” loan? That’s what crooks typically do in rigged games, where they limit audits – as the Fed did with the GAO. It’s Enron accounting – the “old” loan was “repaid” with the proceeds from a “new, different” loan. The boys on Wall Street invented dodgy tricks. Which is why they won’t allow a real audit. Simple. If you have something to hide, you bluster and obfuscate and deny access. Why anyone would believe that the Fed is any different is beyond me.
I write conspiracy thrillers where a flawed protagonist fights insurmountable odds, usually against a system run amok. They’re racing reads, but in the end we all know, or hope, that they’re fiction. How much is actually fiction I never disclose – I prefer to leave that to readers to decide. Like Robert Ludlum, the line between reality and fantasy is blurry. Deliberately so. But this isn’t a solicitation for you to buy my books. It’s an alarm. A wake up call.
Here is the article on the $16 trillion.
This is real. This is your future. And nobody is telling you. You’re being conned by the largest, most powerful, richest cartel the world has ever known – and you are paying for it. While most can’t keep their heads above water, and are effectively indentured servants for the government’s taxes, the mortgage bank, the car lender, and the insurance company, US and foreign banks were handed more money than anyone can reasonably imagine to use to make even more money.
If this sickens you, or if you didn’t know this, please hit the Stumbleupon button (little green one below) and e-mail this blog URL to everyone you know. It’s about time someone told you the truth, even if it hurts. Or do nothing, and wonder why your children will live in relative squalor.
Disclosure: I live in Mexico, a country with its own corruption problems, which are pervasive and non-trivial. But compared to what just happened with the Fed, Mexico is a Swiss bank in terms of integrity, and the Fed is a Moroccan rug merchant. No exaggeration. None required. So don’t attack me. I’m just alerting you to the biggest story of your lifetime, and your children’s lifetimes. What you do from here is up to you. Most will likely try to pretend it didn’t happen, or doesn’t matter. That didn’t work so well for the Romans.
Thanks for the must read alert Russell.
You’re welcome. I really feel strongly that this is something every American needs to at least read and be aware of. Every other issue being touted as important is a smokescreen for this theft of the nation’s wealth, and by extension, the world’s. It’s unprecedented and very scary.
You are remarkable! This has info that I failed to uncover in hundreds of hours of research. Thank you.
You have to know where to look. And yes, it is remarkable. That’s why I would appreciate it if everyone stumbleupon’s this blog and emails it to all their contacts. This must get out. If people understood what was being done to them, they’d go crazy. These cartels rely upon their ability to muzzle the media and keep a complacent population in the dark. Their ally is apathy. It’s time to get the word out.
While this is a thriller story to read, which it should be, don’t fool yourself or the public by expressing this as an alarm to the truth. You have not sourced anything that you’ve stated to be true; then again even if you did it still is not the truth , but rather someone else’s opinions. I know what you wrote is understandable as you said it would be, but the truth is you and I will never know. Why? Because you said it. Who owns the voting stock? If this perpetration was by highly connected and intelligent people don’t you think they are smart enough to bury the trail back to them? Also I would presume the people that set this up in the first place, if in fact they did, would be public shields to deflect the attention of the public away from the true perpetrators in the first place. As I said this is a well written clans story which can neither be proved or disproved. That’s why I don’t think as truth to many people would care about reading this. I did to encourage you to write a fiction book because fiction spreads virally because it entertains rather than induce fear. Nobody wants to believe this as truth. So give them a fiction book about it and they will be entertained while at the same time and at their pace will put some thought into it as it being possibly real. You have a best seller here. Now go do that.
Actually, Michael, it’s all verifiable, with the exception of the voting stock. That’s the only part that isn’t. It is also incidental. If you’re interested in verifying the rest of it, click on the links I provide, which will take you to the audit results. Unlike opinion, some things are in fact knowable. For instance, who won the 1999 world series. It’s not a matter of opinion. The fact is that the Fed did give $16 Trillion dollars to for-profit banks at zero percent effective interest. That’s not disputable. It’s in the report. Which I link. It’s pretty nuts and bolts, requiring not a whole lot of financial expertise. And it is verifiable as genuine. Whether the truth scares people, whether they “Can’t handle the truth,” is a different matter. But it is the truth, and a few minutes of research will prove it. Simple research.
I’ll delete the portion about the voting stock as it’s meaningless to the point, albeit interesting. The history of the fed can be found in an excellent book, “The Creature from Jekyll Island.”
If Americans aren’t disturbed by the fact that the fed just played God with the most massive inflationary bubble in world history, and handed the money to for-profit banks like UBS (Swiss), Goldman (investment bank and brokerage house), Morgan Stanly (IB and broker), Citigroup (international banking conglomerate), and banks from France, Germany, Belgium, etc etc etc then I don’t know what to say.
Read what Bernie Sanders had to say about it: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3
Cogent and NECESSARY, Russell. I am still reeling. Thank you for being a voice when there aren’t enough of us. Profoundly disturbing.
All too sadly true, my friend. Makes me very angry. Absolute power and all that…
For those of you who are interested in more details, here is some background on the Federal Reserve you might find interesting.
Let me preemptively state that my blog isn’t a political rant. All political parties are equally suspect, in my opinion. So it’s not a right or left editorial. It’s a factual description of how the US has been looted by its protectors and its central bank over the last 3 years.
The groups that got the $16 trillion are familiar names. Bank of America. Citigroup. Morgan. Goldman. UBS. Barclays. Credit Suisse. Deutschebank. The list goes on. Many aren’t real banks – they’re stock brokerage houses/investment banks that weaseled their way under the Fed umbrella so they could suck at the milk tit. All are tight with the Federal Reserve System, which you may not realize is a privately owned entity with a veneer of governmental authority (its board of governors is government appointed). As one wag says, it is no more Federal than Federal Express, has no reserves, and isn’t a system – it’s a monopolistic central bank created by bankers in 1913 – bankers like JP Morgan and the Rockefellers (Morgan Stanley got $2 trillion of the aforementioned money). The Fed site uses lawyerly highstepping to avoid directly answering the question of whether it’s a private entity, discussing how the common stock is distributed amongst the member banks, making it seem de-centralized. It says nothing about the preferred, voting stock issued when it was created, or who holds that. For good reason.
A historical account of the creation of the Fed is available to anyone interested in “The Creature From Jekyll Island,” a fascinating read. In a nutshell, a group of the most powerful NY and European banks in the world got together and drafted what would become the Federal Reserve Act. Then, the Fed was created by Rockefeller’s nephew, a congressman, in 1913, when Congress was out of session for Xmas, so it was only his nephew and his crony congressmen who voted the act into law. When Congress got back, the US had a central bank. There was a lot of scrabbling because there weren’t enough votes, but that got ironed out by the money after the fact. It’s also why tax protestors argue the IRS, which was created in the same bill (as a mechanism to suck the money just circulated by the new Fed back out of the system), isn’t legal. A flawed argument, but I digress.
JP Morgan had created a banking panic a few years earlier by circulating rumors that several NY banks were insolvent (shades of Bear Sterns), and then swooped in at the last minute to save the day by bailing them out. He used that as reasoning to push the agenda of a central bank, which was largely unpopular, but which the European and NY bankers had been trying to achieve for decades. Suffice it to say that it was a creature created by the most powerful bankers of its time, ostensibly to stabilize markets to prevent volatility – you know, like the Great Depression and all the recessions that occurred like clockwork once it was created, or the manic bubbles fueled by easy economic policy (like the dot com and real estate bubbles).
It’s pretty easy to make money if you have the inside scoop on when money is going to tighten or loosen. As an obvious observation. Another is that either the Fed is the worst entity in history at what it’s supposed to be doing, or its agenda isn’t really what it represents.
$16 trillion dollars. Think about that number. I remember a few years ago when the $800 billion TARP program was hotly contested – it was a massive bailout for the banks which had engineered and profited from the very collapse that required the bailout. But guess what? $800 billion was nothing. Per the report, Goldman Sachs alone got over $800 billion from the Fed – at effective zero interest. Citigroup got $2.5 trillion. You are reading this correctly. Trillion. A for-profit company got handed $2.5 trillion, that it could invest in, say, T-Bills at 3%, with zero risk, and whose cost of money was zero. Can everyone do the math on annual interest on $2.5 trillion at 3%, risk free? Oh. Wait. That would be about… $75 billion dollars of profit, guaranteed. On $850 billion that Goldman got, that would be about, oh, $25 billion. For a company like Goldman that is no more a bank than I am, and that has been alleged to be committing gross acts of financial fraud at every turn – think misrepresenting Greek debt so it could deceive bond holders, or selling junk mortgage securities to customers (represented as AAA, of course) while allowing a big hedge fund to hand-select the bonds that were guaranteed to blow up, so it, and Goldman, could make billions when they did. That’s the kind of for-profit company the Fed feels deserves nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer largesse.
On a related topic, one can’t consider central banking without considering the effect of money creation (money supply, or M3, stopped being published by the Fed in 2006) on the buying power of a dollar. The way inflation works is that the first person that gets all those new dollars gets 100% of the buying power. They can speculate, or buy land, businesses, debt, whatever, with 100 cent dollars. But the new holders of the dollars, who sold their real property or sold the speculative vehicles, now have dollars that aren’t worth 100 cents, because the news leaks that there’s so many more of them, so each unit has to decline in value proportionally to the amount of new ones that were created. So they get maybe 80 cents of purchasing power. That continues, until the guy getting a salary, sees his dollar worth 75% less than it was worth just a few years earlier. As is his savings in dollars. Sound far fetched? The US dollar lost 75% of its purchasing power since 2002. In one decade. Just look at the price of an ounce of gold, or silver. In 2002, a gold ounce was $350. Now it’s $1650. do the math. It now takes a lot more IOUs to buy that tangible item, which holds its value. If you are a for-profit bank in Belgium, then, and borrow $300 billion, you have the ability to generate windfall profits from that capital, and you just got a subsidy from the taxpayer that was never approved by either Congress or the American people.
I didn’t want to put all this in the blog, because it makes it too long to read. But the essence is that a cartel of banks, called the Federal Reserve System, just gave more money than ever envisioned in all recorded history…to its most powerful members, including the largest European banks, as free investment capital – even as Americans struggle to make their home and credit card payments.
Aside from the obviously disturbing social commentary I could launch, it’s time the population understood what was being done. A bunch of for-profit banks, many of which aren’t American, got handed the net worth of the nation to use as investment capital – a direct subsidy at taxpayer expense. I’m quite sure that most won’t believe what they can easily verify by clicking on the GAO report in the blog. That’s human nature, and it’s that apathy that all crooked systems rely on to keep stealing. We mock countries like Russia, where the government is run for the enrichment of the oligarchs (the mob), but our media also goes suspiciously silent when news that shows what’s really going on hits. If you think that’s accidental, I have several bridges for sale.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Please circulate the blog to everyone you know. Keeping this a secret is criminal, but that’s precisely what the US “free” media has done. If you aren’t concerned, you haven’t read anything I said.
Sorry to be the bearer of lousy news.
Those who are positioned to do so typically loot treasuries before a government implodes. These folks are so tricky that they’ve managed to find a way to do it by handing cash to the victims rather than carrying it off. Sure, it’s required a hundred years of manipulations, but what is that to the Jekyll Islandspawn? For the novel’s twist ending, we can find out that the real power behind all these central banks have been the Mayans. They vanished centuries ago so they could bury themselves behind the scenes to work their 2012 scheme. Diabolical bastards!
Your Blog is always great, Russell, 😀
I’m a Brit, and when the ‘crash’ of 08/09 happened, I didnt find it believable the the US economy, which I knew was about $13/14 trillion, could be damaged by
$800bn of bad mortgages, and the banks involved couldnt all have been rocked by those mortgages.
Thats when I discovered that the problem was the $62 TRILLION of gambling the banks did, via ‘exotic financial instruments’ in an unregulated market that grew off the back of the mortgages, that did the damage.
The various bailouts banks have received from governments -not just in the US- is really being used to try and plug the $62 trn black hole in their balances. Hence them being unwilling to lend to people and small businesses.
So yeah, the Fed has been printing money. The Bank of England has been printing money- over here, they’ve called it ‘quantative easing’.
What really hurts, is that a bunch os &#*!holes can damage the world’s financial system through reckless gambling, and no one goes to jail.
Instead, we give them MORE money!
And former colleagues have been warning that this would happen for the last 15 years- but no one was paying attention.
For example, Prof Frank Partnoy, formerly of Morgan Stanley, now a professor of law and finance, was warning as far back as 1997 that the size of the derivatives market then, was double the value of US stock, and more than 10 times that size of the US national debt. And he should know, seeing as between 1993-5 he and his team generated $1billion in fees, trading the things.
A number of people like him, got out of it, grew a conscience, and tried to bring what was happening to people’s attention. So that gentleman who said about you writing stuff that was ‘opinion’… needs to spend the next 6 months looking at the audits or published accounts of the banks and investment houses that collapsed.
And yeah, I’ll be spreading the word about the GAO report and the article.
There was a lot to the crash of 2008. Far more than I’m prepared to go into here. Let’s just say that, like the Great Depression, exactly zero of it was accidental. Then again, I’m a humble fiction writer, so what do I know?
Suffice it to say that I have plenty of material for my next 100 books.
Thanks for your insightful comments.
Good on you Russell. Write them!
Ultimately evil, but I’m not surprised. Anyone in a position of power is so. Nothing like a real conspiracy, eh?
It’s the history of mankind. Someone scheming to take through trickery and crookery what others worked hard for. Some things never change. This time, though, the gang is ripping off the whole world, given that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Or as I like to call it, the American Peso.
This is possibly why Barclays refused the offer of bail-out money from our Gov. in UK. It had a bucket full from US instead and didn’t need it.
I don’t expect we’ll ever see the tax-payer’s money they handed out, and still doing so, without asking, to prop up banks that are still getting high bonuses every year for the good job they’re doing. Give some back to the people it was filched from in the first place.
Thank you for writing this, Russell! I live in the US and this has been making me sick ever since I heard about it. About a year ago I was shown a video from the UK showing all the facts about this in a room of about 16 people, we were all outraged and wished we could do more. What else is new though, our country and our liberties are crumbling all around us here in the good ol’ US of A. The saddest part is that I don’t think even half the population cares. Wish I was in Mexico, I’d be surfing right now. Keep spreading that insight! We have to force it. Will share and stumble for sure, needs to be known.
A great piece and a joy to read.
Here’s another fact in a eurozone perspective: Greek debt liabilities = $350bn. Size of bazooka called for by Geithner & Lagarde = $2.3trillion.
If the idiot loans AND the idiot debt had been written off last July, there would not now be a ClubMed debt problem; we would not need a peashooter firing blanks, let alone a bazooka spraying tax euros.
This wasn’t done because money is required to save Franco-German banks, whose insurance and derivative multiple liabilities are at least 10 times what Greece owes.
We are ruled by greed-fuelled maniacs: but the hubris-fuelled pols play into their hands…..
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/revealed-angela-merkel-rigid-serial-conformist/
Good luck and stay in touch.
Russell
Exact parallel in eurozone today: eurobanks want another $trillion from the ECB….Draghi has set aside $325bn.