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Why aren’t banks lending to local businesses? The Fed’s decision to pay interest on $1.6 trillion in “excess” reserves is a chief suspect.
Where did all the jobs go? Small and medium-sized businesses are the major source of new job creation, and they are not hiring. Startup businesses, which contribute a fifth of the nation’s new jobs, often can’t even get off the ground. Why?
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On June 30, QE2 ended with a whimper. The Fed’s second round of “quantitative easing” involved $600 billion created with a computer keystroke for the purchase of long-term government bonds. But the government never actually got the money, which went straight into the reserve accounts of banks, where it still sits today. Worse, it went into the reserve accounts of FOREIGN banks, on which the Federal Reserve is now paying 0.25% interest.
Read the complete article here.
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Wall Street banks have cut back on small business lending… [by] more than double the cutback in overall lending.… [Small business] options just keep disappearing.
–Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel
The Wall Street bailout of 2008 has radically altered the banking business. The bailout was supposed to keep credit flowing to Main Street, but it has wound up having the opposite effect. Small and medium-sized businesses have traditionally been the main engines for increasing employment, and they need bank credit for their working capital; but today credit to local businesses has collapsed nearly everywhere.
That’s why so many states—the total is now fourteen—are considering turning to state-owned banks to get local credit flowing again.
Read more here.
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The military is the nation’s largest and most firmly entrenched entitlement program, one that takes half of every tax dollar.
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Countries everywhere are facing debt crises today, precipitated by the credit collapse of 2008. Public services are being slashed and public assets are being sold off, in a futile attempt to balance budgets that can’t be balanced because the money supply itself has shrunk. Governments usually get the blame for excessive spending, but governments did not initiate the crisis. The collapse was in the banking system, and in the credit that it is responsible for creating and sustaining . . . .
Read more here.
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Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRBB) released a report titled “The Bank of North Dakota: A Model for Massachusetts and Other States?” The report confirms that the Bank of North Dakota (BND) is a prudent, well-managed financial institution that serves in partnership with community banks as an effective economic backstop to credit contractions. . . .
Read more here.
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[T]hreatening to default should not be a partisan issue. In view of all the hazards it entails, one wonders why any responsible person would even flirt with the idea.
— Alan S. Blinder, Princeton professor of economics, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve
A game of Russian roulette is being played with the national debt ceiling. Fire the wrong chamber of the gun, and the result could be the second Great Depression. Continue reading
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California is the eighth largest economy in the world, and it has a debt burden to match. It has outstanding general obligation bonds and revenue bonds of $158 billion, largely incurred for infrastructure. Of this tab, $70 billion is just for interest. Over $7 billion of California’s annual budget goes to pay interest on the state’s debt.
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Debate continues to rage between the inflationists who say the money supply is increasing, dangerously devaluing the currency, and the deflationists who say we need more money in the economy to stimulate productivity. The debate is not just an academic one, since the Fed’s monetary policy turns on it and so does Congressional budget policy.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary | 26 Comments »
“Deficit terrorists” are gutting governments and forcing the privatization of public assets, all in the name of “deficit reduction.” But deficits aren’t actually a bad thing. In today’s monetary scheme, in which most money comes from debt, debt and deficits are actually necessary to have a stable money supply. The public debt is the people’s money.
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If the Gaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank joins the BIS, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors, and whether education and health care continue to be free.
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The Japanese government can afford its enormous debt because it owns the bank that is its principal creditor. But competitors are attempting to force the bank’s privatization. If they succeed, they could propel the country into debt servitude along with other credit-strapped nations.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary | 11 Comments »
Cut spending, raise taxes, sell off public assets – these are the unsatisfactory solutions being debated across the nation; but the budget crises now being suffered by nearly all the states did not arise from too much spending or too little taxation. They arose from a credit freeze on Wall Street. In the wake of the 2009 financial market collapse, banks curtailed their lending more sharply than in any year since 1942, driving massive unemployment and causing local tax revenues to plummet.
Filed under: Ellen Brown Articles/Commentary | 15 Comments »
Public sector man sitting in a bar: “They’re trying to take away our pensions.”
Private sector man: “What’s a pension?”
— Cartoon in the Houston Chronicle
As states struggle to meet their budgets, public pensions are on the chopping block, but they needn’t be. States can keep their pension funds intact while leveraging them into many times their worth in loans, just as Wall Street banks do. They can do this by forming their own public banks, following the lead of North Dakota—a state that currently has a budget surplus.
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Responding to an unfilled need for credit for local government, local businesses and consumers, three states in the last month have introduced bills for state-owned banks — Oregon, Washington and Maryland – joining Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts and Hawaii to bring the total number to seven.
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Underlying the sudden, volatile uprising in Egypt and Tunisia is a growing global crisis sparked by soaring food prices. But what caused the recent jump in food prices remains a matter of debate . . . .
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Bills were introduced on January 18 in both the House and Senate of the Washington State Legislature that add Washington to the growing number of states now actively moving to create public banking facilities.
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Read the interview here.
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PRN.FM Radio Show, 3pm EST Wednesdays. Click image for archives.
WEB OF DEBT BLOG 
Forget Compromise: The Debt Ceiling Is Unconstitutional
The debt ceiling crisis can be averted by enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment, which mandates the government to pay its debts already incurred, including pensions. That means Social Security, which IS an “entitlement,” in the original sense of the word. We’re entitled to it because we’ve paid for it with taxes.
The game of Russian roulette being played with the U.S. federal debt has been called a “grotesque political carnival” and political blackmail. The uproar stems from a statute that is unique to the United States and never did make much sense. First passed in 1917 and revised multiple times since, it imposes a dollar limit on the federal debt. What doesn’t make sense is that the same Congress that voted on the statute votes on the budget, which periodically exceeds the limit, requiring the statute to be revised. The debt ceiling has been raised 74 times since 1962, 10 of them since 2001. The most recent increase, to $14.294 trillion by H.J.Res. 45, was signed into law on February 12, 2010.
Taxes aren’t collected until after the annual budget is passed, so Congress can’t know in advance whether or how much additional borrowing will be required. Inevitably, there will be some years that the budget pushes the debt over the limit, requiring new legislation. And inevitably, now that this tactic has been discovered, there will be a costly battle over the increase, wasting congressional time, destabilizing markets, and rattling faith in the American financial and political systems. There will be continual blackmail, arm-twisting and concessions. The situation is untenable and cries out for a definitive resolution.
Fortunately, there is one . . .
Read more here.
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