by Bob Chapman (pictured)
Publisher of The International Forecaster.
THE CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE, Ben Bernanke, would have us believe that if it were not for QE1, unemployment would have been considerably higher. Since QE2 began in June, U6 has only improved by ¼%. Perhaps better numbers are on the way, but that has not been an auspicious start. If we remember correctly almost all the funds in QE1 and now in QE2 have been lent to financial firms in the US and Europe, transnational conglomerates and governments and central banks. Most of those funds have been held on balance sheets to fain solvency. Very little has reached the public or to reduce unemployment. All we have to show for 2-1/2 years is a financial sector hanging on by a thread and more massive debt in the trillions.
What should be permanently stamped in your minds is that the financial carnage we have experienced is the fault of the Fed and the financial sector and that same Fed bailed out the crooks and left the public high and dry with 22-3/8% unemployment and a shattered residential and commercial real estate sector that is still two years from the bottom and perhaps 30 years away from appreciation.
It is despicable for Mr. Bernanke to have insinuated he helped avert higher unemployment when it was the policy of the owners of the Fed and Wall Street and banking, which was the cause of the worst depression since the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. It should be noted that the end of the damage is nowhere in sight. Throwing trillions of dollars at a problem doesn’t solve it, and in this case will only make it get worse. In addition, trillions of dollars in wealth were destroyed and as a reward for their greed the Fed, which allowed the public to pay for the Ponzi scheme, protected the financial sector.
As far as we know the Fed has already purchased with taxpayer funds about $1.5 trillion in MBS, known as toxic waste, which was created by the financial sector. The question is how much more has been purchased by the Fed and are they going to purchase more to bail out financial institutions and others? One of the things that is never mentioned is restitution for all the money these crooks stole. In a civil action concerning $5 billion in bogus MBS and other derivative products, Goldman Sachs, neither admitted or denied, and was found guilty of civil fraud, and paid a fine of $500 million. They got to keep the other $4.5 billion – another sweetheart deal to permanently protect them of criminal charges. Michael Milkin stole $3 billion, gave $1 billion back and kept $2 billion after doing 1-1/2 years in a prison country club. Then there was Warren Buffet’s, Berkshire Hathaway, which defrauded the government of $300 million. His firm paid a $100 million fine and kept the rest. Milkin was the exception, no one else since has been incarcerated. As you can see, it pays to be an elitist crook in America.
Now banking and Wall Street gets interest-free money, but the public does not. What is wrong with the public? Don’t they realize what is going on? What has happened to our representatives and senators and our courts? We’ll tell you what has happened; the NYC-Washington crime syndicate is paying almost all of them off. Americans have lost control of their government and if the slight improvements in the past elections are indicators, the situation is going to get worse.
As a result the Fed is monetizing debt in order to bail out government, banking and Wall Street, and to offset the persistent undertow of deflationary depression. All we can say is what is wrong with the American people? Can’t they see what is going on? If they do not wake up soon we could have a revolution on our hands.
America is facing almost zero interest rates. If those rates are raised the bottom will fall out of the economy and the financial structure will collapse. Any talk about higher rates is just that — talk. The only way out now is for the elitists to have another war as they did in 1941. How much longer can corporations keep two sets of books? What you have seen just didn’t happen, it was planned that way to force Americans and Europeans to accept world government.
Due to the current power of the Fed and other interconnected central banks, all other factors take a back seat to credit creation and their creation of money supply. Under mercantilist Keynesianism, which we prefer to call an economic plan for corporatist fascism, the greater the distortions the deeper the depression. This is the method of perpetual political and social control, which in one way or another has been successful over the centuries. These are the same people who have deliberately created economic cycles, which are extremely profitable, and when things are not going as planned they simply have another war. None of what you have seen has happened by chance, it has been planned that way.
As George Wallace said, “there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference in either party.” He was right. What he should have said was both parties are almost totally owned by Wall Street, banking, insurance, big Pharma and transnational conglomerates. The criminal deals that have and continue to exist in Washington are far worse than anything the Mafia ever did. Our government is operated just like any criminal syndicate.
What is becoming evident to us is that all is not going well for the Titans of Wall Street. Investors have been fleeing the stock and bond markets in hordes, although their owned rubber stamp is still in place. In fact, some of the higher placed elitist players are questioning whether they can again pull off a deflationary depression and war and still survive? As you can see they still have more than 50% of the electorate buffaloed, but as any student of history knows revolutions are led by 5% to 15% of the citizens. The rest are split along the sidelines.
Oddly enough what has suited both Democrats and Republicans has been a big loser for Americans, because the elitists almost in total control both parties. As a result, major Wall Street firms, which have for years owned the SEC and the CFTC now have virtually no regulatory oversight. Essentially Wall Street has a license to steal and they take full advantage of it.
The big question is can Ron Paul disarm or perhaps even eliminate the privately owned Fed? The answer to that question we should have over the next two years. Will it take a constitutional amendment or a monetary collapse? Again we will have to wait and see. It should be noted that after China and Japan the Fed now holds third place among those holding Treasury and Agency bonds. More than 60% of Americans want to dump the Fed and Wall Street, which owns the Fed, owns Congress, thus it will have to change by other means.
The greed of transnational conglomerates just never ends. Readers you are soon going to witness another great scam pulled off by America’s elitist corporations to further enrich themselves at your expense.
In a secret meeting on December 15th, business executives met in the White House requesting that the President declare a tax holiday, so that they could repatriate as much as $1.9 trillion from offshore subsidiaries in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands. Instead of going through Congress as they had to do six years ago, these crooks want an executive order. We were wondering how long it would take them to be back at the trough.
To make it simpler, participants recommended a reprise of a 2004 tax holiday that allowed these multinational conglomerates to return profits to the US at a tax rate of 5-1/4%, not the regular 35%. That piece of largess allowed these crooks to move $362 billion virtually tax free back into the US by declaring they will use the funds to create jobs for Americans. Needless to say, very few jobs were created. That money laundering operation and this new proposed operation would move part of $1.9 trillion into the US stock market, as was done before, to buy the shares of these US blue chips, which in turn buoys the stock market. The shares would rise in value as they did six years ago, and the executives would cash in their stock options making themselves billions of dollars. This is what this was all about last time and it is what it is all about this time. If under normal circumstances these companies paid the 35% tax they would owe the American people $665 billion. At a 5-1/4% tax rate that figure would be just under $100 billion. Is it any wonder that our government is broke?
In addition to this new caper in banditry these multinationals are already finding legal ways to avoid taxes. We won’t go into the details here but believe us their actions of the last five years have cost taxpayers billions of dollars. These US companies are very sophisticated and are routinely repatriating hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign earnings.
This is one of the main reasons tariff walls were torn down and why today we have free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing. This not only enabled these crooks to pile up profits in tax havens, but it has hastened the demise of the American economy, so that Americans will be forced to accept world government, something these fascist monopolists want to take place in order to impose a new world order. This is really what this is all about. This is much more than meets the eye if you know what to look for.
Needless to say, there is a very simple solution to this financial treachery. All we have to do is re-impose tariffs of 25% to 40% and then there would be no reason to hold earnings offshore. This exercise over the past ten years has cost America 42,000 lost businesses, which were shipped overseas as well as 8.5 million high paying jobs. You ask yourself how could this happen? The answer is your House and Senate are bought and paid for and whatever these elitists want they get. If tariffs are not soon implemented there will be no way back for the US and European economies.
The answer by these transnational conglomerates is America is uncompetitive due to its tax structure. They convinced Congress of this some time ago and that is why they are allowed to keep profits offshore. The problem is when they bring those profits back to the US it is at 5-1/4% and these profits end up in the stock market for reasons we’ve explained. Thus, they get enormous tax benefits but in the process they destroy the underpinnings of society. In 1967, we wrote an article in a leading journal stating that this was where the elitists were headed and the article has proven prophetic. The American Mercury‘s legacy lives on. Such tax breaks for the mega rich holds no water. These are the same corporations that in part are already sitting on another $1.9 trillion in cash in the US. This has nothing to do with investment or job creation and everything to do with corporate greed. This infusion of offshore funds onto the active US balance sheet has a tremendous levering effect as well on earnings.
We have all the dirty details but we’ll spare you homework. It is the way we say it is. Let’s see if they try to end run Congress on this issue and perhaps in the interim we can find out how much the President is being paid for ramming through such a grand venture. Why do you think such meetings are secret?
If you are wondering why your country is broke, one of the reasons is the antics of these elitists, when great profits are never enough.
First it was Argentina two years ago, then Hungary and France and now it is Poland. Argentina took over pensions and the others are using pension funds. Poland wants to limit transfers to private pension accounts to plug a widening budget deficit.
Poland faces an excessive debt, in part a result of pension contributions. Legislators want to limit transfers not temporarily but permanently. That being the case this move is not to solve a short-term problem, but a new policy to cut off retirees from their benefits and to spend the funds elsewhere. Politicians being what they are won’t reduce the deficit appreciably. The idea is to cut pensions from 7.3% of salaries to 2%. Just to give you an idea as to how efficiently government has been run since 2007, the deficit went from 1.9% to 7.9% of GDP. The pension flow demand is 40% of GDP. As you can see worldwide everything is on the table and America will be no exception.
Even though Ben Bernanke may end up being recognized as a disaster for the American economy, he is particularly popular on Wall Street and in banking. He supplies the liquidity for financial institutions to increase profits hopefully exponentially. Simultaneously, via the “President’s Working Group on Financial markets,” he directs the manipulation of markets. The results are known as the Bernanke put. There simply cannot be market and bond declines except for gold and silver. The latter have been restrained, but only on a temporary basis, because that is what they now are only capable of.
As we wrote this past January, the effect of stimulus would end in April and in May some sort of effort had to be put forward to help a sagging economy. That came in the form of aid from the Fed in the bond market and via swaps. This proved an important event because we could then see that the Fed had to get more accommodative and allowed us to predict QE2. Thus, there is the Bernanke put. You can be sure he guaranteed Wall Street, before he was ever appointed, that he would do exactly as they instructed. No one has ever had that job that didn’t do so, and those orders come from JPMorgan Chase, which is the ringleader and always has been. Why do you think we have quantitative easing and zero interest rates? Those are Morgan’s orders. From Ben’s utterances we believe there will be a QE3 and more as we move toward hyperinflation and we predicted that last May. We also see indefinite low interest rates. He and they are not really concerned about the dollar. They have influenced many other nations to do the same thing, so its bad currency versus bad currencies. This way they can lay off their inflation on everyone else. That is why they have suppressed gold and silver because versus all currencies they are the only alternative. In that process they will make those who understand what the Fed is up to, essentially the Fed’s enemies, wealthy, an unavoidable fallout the elitists will have to live with to retain control of the system.
Mr. Bernanke arrogantly tells us he saved the system. What he should have said is that “I saved the finance houses and moneylenders at your expense; it is the way we have done it for the last 1,000 years.”
* * *
We at The American Mercury are honored and pleased to welcome back to our pages Mr. Bob Chapman, an international economic expert and distinguished writer who was part of the print Mercury in the pre-Internet era.
Read the full article at The International Forecaster