Meltdown: stock market in free fall

Mike Kosares: THE MORNING AFTER THE OPEN-ENDED BAILOUT (August 11, 2007)

This time it IS different.

In past financial bailouts, the destruction was limited to one or two institutions. A group was put together in the private sector, or the central bank stepped in, and the troubled entity was bailed out.

When the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and Bank of Japan moved last week to bail out the entire financial industry worldwide, they offered, as the Financial Times pointed out today, the equivalent of a credit card with no credit limit and subsidized rates 1 or 2 percent below what would have been the free-market rate had they not stepped in.

What’s more, it was done on a global basis to the tune of hundreds of billions in “liquidity.”

Thus the central banks have set a dangerous precedent . . . .

http://www.gata.org/node/5347

Iran wants yen, not dollars

Iran Wants Yen from Japan not the U.S. $ for Oil  

At the heart of the global monetary system lies the use of the U.S.$ as the currency used to pay for the globe’s oil. Any change in that role has a disproportionate impact on the importance of the $ as well as its value relative to the globe’s other currencies. . . . So when we heard that Iran asked the Japanese refiners to switch to the Yen to pay for all crude oil purchases, after Iran’s central bank said it is reducing its holdings of the U.S.$, we realized that this is an undermining blow to the $ and will also contribute to the current fall of the $ in exchange rate values, despite any short-term rally. . . .

http://news.goldseek.com/GoldForecaster/1185591600.php

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Iran Asks Japan to Pay Yen for Oil (7-13-07)

“Iran isn’t alone in wanting to drop the dollar for pricing oil. Russia has been examining plans to price the Urals oil export blend in rubles to curb currency risks . . . .”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=worldwide&sid=aLaColVYu5LA

Tax challenge

IRS Loses Challenge to Prove Tax Liability 

 by Bob Unruh, World Net Daily (July 26, 2007)

The IRS has lost a lawyer’s challenge in front of a jury to prove a constitutional foundation for the nation’s income tax, and the victorious attorney now is setting his sights higher. “I think now people are beginning to realize that this has got to be the largest fraud, backed up by intimidation and extortion and by the sheer force of taking peoples property and hard-earned money without any lawful authorization whatsoever,” lawyer Tom Cryer told WND just days after a jury in Louisiana acquitted him of two criminal tax counts . . . .

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56855

Bill Bonner, “Fed Speak for Dummies” (7-19-07)

“Money that is created ‘out of thin air’ – courtesy of central banks and financial firms – tends to go back from whence it came. For every genesis of wealth creation…there is an exodus of wealth destruction. Watch out for it…”

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Issues/2007/DR071907.html

Exposing the bugs beneath the rocks . . .

“Credit crunch will ‘shred investment portfolios to ribbons'” by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph U.K., July 2, 2007           

“The near collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds has lifted the rock on our 21st century mutant capitalism, exposing the bugs beneath to a rare shock of naked light. . . . If you think we are too clever now to let a full-blown slump occur, read the BIS report.   “Virtually nobody foresaw the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the crises which affected Japan and south-east Asia in the early and late 1990s. In fact, each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a ‘new era’ had arrived,” it said.. . . So the oldest and most venerable global watchdog is worried enough to evoke the dangers of depression. It will not happen. Fed chief Ben Bernanke . . . will slash rates to zero if necessary, and then – in his own words – drop cash from helicopters. But his solution is somebody else’s dollar crisis. . . . Perhaps governments should simply stop trying to rig the price of money in the first place.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/07/02/bcncrunch102.xml

Signs of collapse: in the news April & May ’07

Mike Whitney, “Housing Bubble Meltdown: Is It Too Late to Get Out?”,  April 28, 2007

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article882.html 

“The details of the meltdown are being downplayed in the media to prevent panic-selling among the public. But the Fed knows what’s going on. . . .

“Kenneth Heebner, manager of CGM Realty Fund (Capital Growth Management), provided a realistic forecast of what we can expect in the near future as defaults increase. . . . “I would expect that housing prices in 2007 will decline 20% in a lot of markets. What you are going to see is the greatest price decline in housing since the Great Depression . . . .

“Nearly 70% of subprimes have been securitized [sold as securities to hedge funds and institutional investors]. . . . In Henry C K Liu’s “Why the Subprime Bust will Spread” (Asia Times) the author states that the bursting housing bubble will trigger a major pension crisis. After all, who are the “institutional investors? They are mostly pension funds that manage the money the US working public depends on for retirement. . . .” (Liu)

“. . . Since nearly 50% of “securitized” mortgage debt is owned by foreign investors, the subprime meltdown is bound send tremors through the entire global financial system.”
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“The Housing Mess” by Terry Savage, The Street.com 5-13-07

http://www.thestreet.com/_iwon/newsanalysis/opinion/10356410.html?cf=WSIWON1111051500

Predicts a drop in home prices of 30 to 50 percent.  Other sources warn that a drop in home prices of 40 percent would collapse the economy of the United States.  (See Web of Debt, chapter  31.)  Collapsed mortgages and foreclosures shrink the supply of money-built-on-debt, shrinking the economy, in the sort of syndrome experienced in the Great Depression.

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“Venezuela Exits IMF and World Bank,” AlJazeera.net, May 1, 2007.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A9912111-2F84-46E8-AF39-5FFD33332E29.htm

Details how Venezuela and other countries are distancing themselves from international lenders.

Related article: “Chavez Threatens to Nationalize Banks, Steel Producer,” Associated Press (May 3, 2007)

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070503/venezuela_chavez.html?.v=19

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“Asia Will Start Its Own Currency Pool So It Can Dump IMF,” drawing on Bloomberg News Service article dated May 3, 2007.

http://www.gata.org/node/5042

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Emily Thornton, “Roads to Riches – Why investors are clamoring to take over America’s highways, bridges, and airports – and why the public should be nervous,” Business Week, May 7, 2007.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_19/b4033001.htm?chan=search

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