Posts Tagged Debt
America, Please Wake Up! ~ Part One
Posted by Harley in The Economy on December 29, 2009
Have you noticed that the only sector of America that has grown exponentially during 2009 is government and they’re done it on the backs of us taxpayers? All the way from local government through state and on to Washington, these parasites are enjoying unprecedented prosperity while the rest of America’s free enterprise system is suffering.
In a recent analysis, USA Today analyzed 2M Federal workers tracked by the database of the Office of Personnel Management which excludes the White House, Congress, the Postal Service, Intelligence agencies and uniformed Military personnel. It found that 19% of Federal workers make more than $100,000 per year before overtime and bonuses compared to 14% when the recession began. The average Federal workers’ pay is much higher now than the average private sector worker’s pay. The leeches’ average $71,206/year versus the American free enterprise worker’s average of $40,331/year. If the excluded portion, not counting our great military, were added in, these figures would be even more outrageous.
In my own state of Colorado, the Governor added 4000 state government jobs while free enterprise lost jobs. My County government reneged on a senior property tax reduction so that the county could use it for the county government parasites.
I’m sure that if you look at your own state and counties you will find the same “stealing” by government on the backs of the taxpayers. We must take America back from these non-representative government bodies whose population is getting very close to out-numbering those of us in free enterprise who are working our tails off to satisfy the government’s appetite for our money. Please do your part to let these government parasites know that you will not take it any longer. It’s absolutely outrageous!
Our own government placates us with phony indexes manipulated to tell us things are better than we think. Food and energy costs are eliminated from the CPI – the consumer price index – so they can tell us prices have not increased due to much money chasing too few goods. How stupid do they think we are? Energy costs affect so many products, it’s not funny! Also, any time particular index items are susceptible to abrupt price movements, these items are eliminated from the computation for CPI so government can report a lower rate of inflation.
Then you have unemployment figures that do not include people who have stopped looking for work or part time workers who can’t find permanent work. By adding these people to the unemployed roles, total unemployment rises to 12%-15%, not the so-called 10% that is reported. Despite the Obama administration’s predictions that unemployment (which leaves out the 2 categories of workers above) would peak at 8% in 2009, unemployment has doubled since 1/1/08 thanks to wasteful boondoggle government bailouts and stimulus packages which will add even more people to the unemployed ranks.
The Federal government reports a debt of $12T. Total hogwash! That figure does not include off budget balance sheet liabilities such as unfunded pensions of $2T, state debt shortfalls $3.5T, current budget deficit $1.7T plus $1T more for the next 10 years, and, last but not least, those infamous entitlement programs of $60T. The real debt of the USA is more like $89T and rising to $100T. America is bankrupt! And yet, governments at all levels won’t stop spending and want to tax us even more, i.e.: health care, cap and trade, etc.. When will the people of the United States revolt?
This concludes Part One of “America, Please Wake Up!” the Conclusion is coming right behind it in a day or two. You don’t want to miss it!
All Is Not Well
Posted by Harley in The Economy on December 7, 2009
I try to give you plenty of value which includes posting other articles that substantiate my comments. Here’s another one to pay attention to. Also, I suggest you read Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse
Saturday, December 5, 2009
All is not well
Terence P. Jeffrey
When President Obama entered office in January, the greatest problem America faced was neither the war in Afghanistan nor the recession. It was the imminent crisis of the welfare state.
Not only has Mr. Obama failed to deal with this crisis, he is pursuing policies that will bankrupt America.
In March, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, led by former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, calculated the total value of the federal government's "unfunded liabilities" as they stood at the end of fiscal 2008. These liabilities include the publicly held portion of the national debt plus the amount the government must pay to cover all the entitlement benefits it has promised to living Americans through Social Security, Medicare and other welfare-state programs minus the tax revenue the government can expect to collect to pay for these entitlements under existing tax law.
The sum of these unfunded liabilities, the foundation discovered, stood at $56.4 trillion. That equals $435,000 for every full-time worker in the United States.
How did Mr. Obama respond to this problem?
First, he signed a $787 billion stimulus law. Mr. Obama repeatedly claimed this law - which not one member of Congress read in its entirety - was urgently needed to create jobs. In fact, most of the new spending it authorized was for longer-term projects, including creating a national system of electronic health records for every person in America in anticipation of Mr. Obama's plan to nationalize the health care system.
The Government Accountability Office reported last month that at the end of fiscal 2009, 78 percent of the stimulus money remained unspent. But don't worry: Mr. Obama will spend it eventually.
Then, Mr. Obama offered his first federal budget. In 2008, President Bush's last year in office, the federal government spent $2.983 trillion. Under Mr. Obama's plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office, annual federal spending will climb to $4.982 trillion by 2019. In 2008, the federal deficit was a record $459 billion. Over the next decade, Mr. Obama's plan would increase the national debt by a total of $7.137 trillion, running annual deficits averaging $713.7 billion per year.
CBO's estimate of Mr. Obama's new federal debt was based on optimistic assumptions. It assumed low inflation rates, low interest rates and a national economy that grows for 10 straight years after this year without dipping into another recession. It also assumed that the Bush tax cuts would expire as planned after 2010 and income tax rates would rise for middle-class Americans.
The CBO estimate of Mr. Obama's borrowing and spending was also made before Congress finalized drafts of the health care reform legislation that Mr. Obama has pushed as his signature policy proposal.
Mr. Obama has said he would not sign a health care bill that increases the national debt, and when the CBO released its analysis of the Senate health care bill last month it concluded that the bill would actually decrease federal deficits by $130 billion over 10 years.
But that was an illusion.
The key elements of the bill (including federal subsidies to buy health insurance for people making less than 400 percent of the poverty level) do not take effect until 2014 - after Mr. Obama runs for re-election in 2012. As a result, the bill's full cost is not exposed during the initial 10-year time frame that the CBO analyzes when making its official cost estimates.
In fact, according to CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the new entitlements in the bill will cost $0 in 2010 (when Congress is up for re-election), $1 billion in 2011, $4 billion in 2012 (when Mr. Obama and Congress are both up for re-election) and $4 billion in 2013. The cost will then balloon to $48 billion in 2014, before rising steadily to $196 billion per year by 2019.
Yet it doesn't end there. The cost of the new health care entitlements will be "growing at about 8 percent per year toward the end of the 10-year budget window," reported CBO. "As a rough approximation, CBO assumes continued growth at about that rate during the following decade."
Do the math: If the bill follows the spending trajectory predicted by the CBO, it will cost $423.13 billion in 2029 and its total 10-year cost from 2020 through 2029 will be $3.07 trillion. Obamacare will cost more in its second decade than the entire federal government cost the year Mr. Obama was elected.
At that price tag, it does not even accomplish the goal of universal health care. "By 2019, CBO and JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 31 million, leaving about 24 million nonelderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants)," says the CBO report.
But if Mr. Obama succeeds in enacting his health care reform, he will move on to his plan for a "comprehensive immigration reform" that will put illegal immigrants on a "pathway to citizenship" - making them eligible for the federal health care entitlement.
If Mr. Obama succeeds, get ready for the crash. It is coming.
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSnews.com.
Cold Turkey Thanksgiving 2009
11/24/09
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ), former professor of economics at Harvard, writing in Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975).
JK Galbraith’s statement that complexity is used by modern economics to confuse the truth about money is a fact. Simply put, bankers replaced money with credit and debt in order to profit by the indebting of others. It’s why bankers are now so rich. It is also why others are now so poor.
Understanding money is not rocket science. Modern currencies are a fraud, a fraud that has escaped detection much as did Bernard Madoff’s ponzi-scheme. Bernard Madoff’s scheme was based on the fraud that investor’s money was, in fact, invested. The fraud of modern economics, however, is that money isn’t actually money—and they don’t want you to know it.
MERRY OLD ENGLAND
THE MOTHER OF MODERN MONETARY FRAUD
From the time of Charlemagne until the 12th century, the silver currency of England was made from the highest purity silver available. Unfortunately there were drawbacks to minting currency of fine silver, notably the level of wear it suffered, and the ease with which coins could be “clipped”, or trimmed, by those dealing in the currency.
In the 12th century a new standard for English coinage was established by Henry II — the Sterling Silver standard of 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper. This was a harder-wearing alloy, yet it was still a rather high grade of silver.
It went some way towards discouraging the practice of “clipping”, though this practice was further discouraged and largely eliminated with the introduction of the milled edge we see on coins today.
By 1696 the currency had been seriously weakened by an increase in clipping during the Nine Years’ War to the extent that it was decided to recall and replace all hammered silver coinage in circulation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_pound_sterling
CLIPPING CURRENCY BIG TIME
THE INTRODUCTION OF PAPER BANKNOTES
The real clipping of money began in 1694 when the Bank of England was allowed to issue its paper banknotes to circulate alongside silver coins. Over the next three hundred years, the bankers’ debt-based notes would replace gold and silver; and, as a consequence, the entire world would eventually become in debt to the bankers.
The triumph of private bankers in replacing money with banknotes was to be universal as all nations would eventually succumb to the banker’s easy credit and inevitable debt. Today, the central ingredient of money is not gold or silver but confidence, confidence in banknotes no longer backed or convertible to anything of value.
Modern economics is a highly successful confidence game run by bankers. The following is from the Bank of England’s own website emphasizing its considerable efforts to maintain the necessary confidence in its on-going con game:
The Bank of England has been issuing banknotes for over 300 years…Gaining and maintaining public confidence in the currency is a key role of the Bank of England and one which is essential to the proper functioning of the economy. [bold mine]
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/
THE BANKERS CON GAME
The long-running and lucrative confidence game, however, is about to end. Its breakdown is now underway as constantly compounding consumer, business and government debt can no longer be carried and/or paid for by existing or future productivity, especially as economies are contracting, not expanding, and collective debt levels are skyrocketing to levels which can never be repaid.
We borrowed against tomorrow and tomorrow is here
The collapse of economies such as the US, the UK, and Japan etc, will eventually render the bankers’ IOUs and government currencies worthless; and when this happens, the three hundred year stranglehold of bankers over human endeavor will be over.
BANKERS REPENT
You who hold the scales
Of justice in the land
You who hold the power
That determines if a man
Will earn his daily bread
Or fall victim to your schemes
Broken and indebted
By the triumph of your dreams
Repent, repent, repent my friends
Repent if you would please
Repent, repent, repent my friends
From your selfishness disease
Your doors can’t hold forever
The storm now at the gate
You’ve chosen what will happen
You’ve chosen your own fate
Already we can hear
The changes coming near
Already we can smell
Your anger and your fear
Just when you thought you had it all
That fate would be your friend
It turned on you did it not
Perhaps this is your end
What’s happening to your power?
What happened to your greed?
What’s happening to your minions?
Who served your every need
History has turned on you
After being so kind
The public now is on to you
After being so blind
Repent, repent, repent my friends
Repent if you would please
Repent, repent, repent my friends
From your selfishness disease
Gold makes a run
Two powerful forces, paper money and gold, are now locked in mortal combat. The combatants, however, are proxies for far more fundamental forces. Paper money is a proxy for private banking and government power—and gold is a proxy for freedom.
Moving Through The Maelstrom Monthly Commentary November 2009
The complete breakdown of the global economy was necessary for people to understand what is happening. Economic elites had banished all inquiry into monetary issues that did not conform to their special interests. Keynes and Friedman were popularized not because they were right, but because their theories suited those in power. Truth was ignored. Today, its revenge is here. Popular theories supporting paper money will soon give way to economic realities exposing their failings.
Against the formidable opposition of central banks and Western governments, the price of gold has more than quadrupled in ten years. The forward selling of unmined gold by large gold mining companies in collusion with central bank gold leasing did much to constrain gold’s advance but the power of its intractable rise should be seen in the light of that opposition.
Currently, the fall of the US dollar is currently pushing gold to new highs. Tomorrow it will be the fall of the pound, the euro or the yen that will do so. The fraud of paper money is being exposed and it is only a matter of time until the global edifice of credit and debt it supports will collapse.
In The Great Wave (Oxford University Press 1996), Professor David Hackett Fisher, an economic historian, tells of the great waves that periodically destroy existing epochs to make way for the new and better eras that follow.
Such waves, Professor Fisher found, always culminate in total economic collapse. We are nearing the end of what Fisher believes is perhaps history’s greatest wave; and yet, the economy is still standing (though currently quite wobbly). Since great waves last from 80 to 120 years and this wave began in 1896, it means an economic collapse is imminent.
It does seem to be a possibility, doesn’t it?
THANKSGIVING AND THANKFULNESS
For those invested in gold and silver, their recent rise is cause for thanksgiving. But our thanksgiving for gold and silver’s rise must be tempered with what the rise of gold and silver signifies. Gold and silver are barometers of monetary turmoil and economic distress; and the higher they rise, the more severe and closer the collapse will be.
For the few who saw the collapse coming, it will be a vindication that the truth can and will triumph, that monetary fraud no matter how ubiquitous or long-standing cannot last forever, that gold and silver are money and that paper currencies are not.
Professor Antal Fekete said the day gold and silver explode upwards will be a sad day for humanity. He is right. The explosive ascent of gold and silver will be caused by the global collapse of paper assets and paper money. Suffering and loss will be the experience of most.
Although that day will be one of tragedy, it will also make way for the new and better world that is to come. Give thanks for that. Life is a miracle and we are a part of it. It is not done with us yet. That much is obvious.
Buy gold, buy silver, have faith.
U.S. Credit Card Trap
Posted by Harley in The Economy on August 18, 2009
by Jennifer Barry, GlobalAssetStrategist.com | August 13, 2009
With U.S. household net worth down US$14 trillion since the peak in 2007, Congress has belatedly started to act concerned about the financial condition of the American consumer. In May, legislators passed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act to great fanfare. The law does end some of the worst abuses, prohibiting an increase in interest rates if a customer is late paying a different company, disallowing most retroactive rate hikes, and banning fees if the bank neglects to credit a payment.
However, if you have revolving balances on your credit cards, this is no time to relax. The law does not take effect until February 2010, giving credit card issuers a window to jack up fees and interest rates. It also fails to set an upper limit on these charges at the federal level. As financial institutions can incorporate in states without legal limits, major credit issuers can continue to charge any rate they wish as long as they disclose it. This permits banks to borrow from the Federal Reserve at a fraction above 0%, paying ridiculously low yields on deposits, while charging their credit card customers many times that percentage. For example, Wells Fargo is currently paying a laughable 0.05% on savings accounts in my area, with a $300 minimum balance.
The newest proposal debated in Congress is the formation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would allegedly protect the public from unscrupulous lenders. Politicians claim that fraud and risky financial behavior “fell through the cracks” in the regulatory system, even though many of these same individuals advocated for fewer controls a decade ago. Why should citizens believe that the same bureaucrats who failed to stop Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme will act in their best interest?
It’s naïve to expect the U.S. government to take aggressive action against financial institutions, as both political parties receive ample campaign contributions from banks like Goldman Sachs. After all, Congress voted to make punitive changes to the bankruptcy laws in 2005, parroting the industry propaganda that many borrowers ran up their credit cards and then declared bankruptcy in order to avoid repaying their debts. In contrast, Elizabeth Warren’s data shows that 90% of bankruptcies are caused by family breakup from death or divorce, job loss, or health problems, not conspicuous consumption. The real gamers of the system were not borrowers, but the banks themselves.
The law, written by card issuer MBNA, made it more difficult and expensive to discharge debt, and limited the assets that could be protected from collection by unsecured creditors like – you guessed it – credit card companies. Sheltered by legislators, underwriting standards dropped on all sorts of consumer loans after the passage of this law. The banks were able to continue their pyramid scheme of packaging poor quality debt as AAA rated securities, selling it to trusting investors, and using that capital to make even more bad loans. Ratings agencies like Standard & Poors were complicit in the scheme, using the banks’ own models to evaluate these derivatives.
When this house of cards finally came tumbling down, it wasn’t the consumers who were helped, but rather the banks who cynically gambled with shareholders’ capital. Legislators allowed institutions to get “too big to fail” by eliminating protections like the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999, then threw trillions of dollars at these same banks when they later became insolvent. As Allan Sloan puts it, Wall Street’s attitude is “heads I win, tails I get bailed out.” Even sadder, the American taxpayer is still vulnerable to further “rescues,” as the mega-banks have not been chopped into manageable pieces, and they are still permitted to takeover their smaller insolvent rivals.
In reality, there is no need to create additional agencies or new burdensome regulation. There are plenty of laws against cheating and stealing on the books, just a lack of enforcement. For example, the FBI could have prosecuted financial crimes but much of the agency was diverted to fighting terrorism after 9/11. The CFTC pretends it doesn’t see the obvious manipulation in the precious metal markets, while the SEC has resisted prosecuting naked short sellers.
While Congress intervenes overtly in the credit markets, the Federal Reserve is acting as a debt pusher behind the scenes through the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF. As this initiative is administered by the Fed, it lacks even minimal Congressional oversight. When the credit markets froze last year, the Federal Reserve designed this program to give loans to investors who want to buy consumer debt instruments. The Fed’s intervention increases the moral hazard in the economy by creating an artificial market for these derivatives. If lenders did not have a market for consumer debt, they would have to cut credit lines and close accounts. This would force fiscal austerity even in people reluctant to slash discretionary spending. However, beneficiaries like Cabela’s, a sporting goods company, are now marketing additional credit to customers, backstopped by Federal Reserve guarantees.
Chairman Ben Bernanke claims that TALF and similar bailouts are “emergency programs” that will be terminated soon, but their influence is already warping the business environment. Subsidies choose winners and losers, swamping any competitive advantages. Large corporations have an advantage over smaller companies, as they can afford to fill out the paperwork and lobby for access to bailouts. This crushes new innovative businesses, dampening job creation.
Despite the Federal Reserve’s disastrous stewardship, Congress plans to convert it into a “super-regulator,” giving it even more control over the U.S. economy. The Fed already has few checks on its power, as it is a private entity, not part of the government as many believe. In addition to driving monetary policy, it would gain “sweeping new authority to regulate any company whose failure could endanger the U.S. economy and markets.” This change would “sidestep most jurisdictional disputes” and centralize the economy under the direction of an unelected non-governmental body run by the banks.
The Democratic leadership intends to push this through Congress quickly, in what I think is a reaction to Dr. Ron Paul’s successful Audit the Federal Reserve campaign. He already has enough co-sponsors to pass his bill in the House of Representatives if it were allowed to come to a vote, but party leaders have blocked it. If the Fed gets to captain the economy, it can refuse to account for its actions as a matter of national security.
For years, the American people have passively allowed the banks to rake in obscene profits on the backs of the taxpayer. Finally, we are seeing some grassroots resistance to this blatant favoritism, with “tea party” protests and angry constituents confronting their representatives at formerly placid town hall meetings.
Unfortunately, this awakening is too late to prevent the destruction of the U.S. dollar. The debt bubble has already burst, and the attempts by the Fed to reflate it have created an enormous burden on the U.S. taxpayer. Since I first detailed the bailouts last October, obligations have ballooned from approximately US$2 trillion to an incredible $23.7 trillion according to Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Don’t expect any government agency to protect you from the coming hyperinflationary depression in the U.S. Now is the time to reduce your debt, sell off unwanted assets, and live below your means. During times like these, paper assets have historically performed poorly, so move your savings into hard assets like the precious metals instead.
Copyright © 2009 Jennifer Barry
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Exploding Debt Threatens America
Posted by Harley in Financial Education on June 3, 2009
by John Taylor
Published: May 26 2009 20:48 | Last updated: May 26 2009 20:48
Standard and Poor’s decision to downgrade its outlook for British sovereign debt from “stable” to “negative” should be a wake-up call for the US Congress and administration. Let us hope they wake up.
Under President Barack Obama’s budget plan, the federal debt is exploding. To be precise, it is rising – and will continue to rise – much faster than gross domestic product, a measure of America’s ability to service it. The federal debt was equivalent to 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 2008; the Congressional Budget Office projects it will increase to 82 per cent of GDP in 10 years. With no change in policy, it could hit 100 per cent of GDP in just another five years.
“A government debt burden of that [100 per cent] level, if sustained, would in Standard & Poor’s view be incompatible with a triple A rating,” as the risk rating agency stated last week.
I believe the risk posed by this debt is systemic and could do more damage to the economy than the recent financial crisis. To understand the size of the risk, take a look at the numbers that Standard and Poor’s considers. The deficit in 2019 is expected by the CBO to be $1,200bn (€859bn, £754bn). Income tax revenues are expected to be about $2,000bn that year, so a permanent 60 per cent across-the-board tax increase would be required to balance the budget. Clearly this will not and should not happen. So how else can debt service payments be brought down as a share of GDP?
Inflation will do it. But how much? To bring the debt-to-GDP ratio down to the same level as at the end of 2008 would take a doubling of prices. That 100 per cent increase would make nominal GDP twice as high and thus cut the debt-to-GDP ratio in half, back to 41 from 82 per cent. A 100 per cent increase in the price level means about 10 per cent inflation for 10 years. But it would not be that smooth – probably more like the great inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s with boom followed by bust and recession every three or four years, and a successively higher inflation rate after each recession.
The fact that the Federal Reserve is now buying longer-term Treasuries in an effort to keep Treasury yields low adds credibility to this scary story, because it suggests that the debt will be monetised. That the Fed may have a difficult task reducing its own ballooning balance sheet to prevent inflation increases the risks considerably. And 100 per cent inflation would, of course, mean a 100 per cent depreciation of the dollar. Americans would have to pay $2.80 for a euro; the Japanese could buy a dollar for Y50; and gold would be $2,000 per ounce. This is not a forecast, because policy can change; rather it is an indication of how much systemic risk the government is now creating.
Why might Washington sleep through this wake-up call? You can already hear the excuses.
“We have an unprecedented financial crisis and we must run unprecedented deficits.” While there is debate about whether a large deficit today provides economic stimulus, there is no economic theory or evidence that shows that deficits in five or 10 years will help to get us out of this recession. Such thinking is irresponsible. If you believe deficits are good in bad times, then the responsible policy is to try to balance the budget in good times. The CBO projects that the economy will be back to delivering on its potential growth by 2014. A responsible budget would lay out proposals for balancing the budget by then rather than aim for trillion-dollar deficits.
“But we will cut the deficit in half.” CBO analysts project that the deficit will be the same in 2019 as the administration estimates for 2010, a zero per cent cut.
“We inherited this mess.” The debt was 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 1988, President Ronald Reagan’s last year in office, the same as at the end of 2008, President George W. Bush’s last year in office. If one thinks policies from Reagan to Bush were mistakes does it make any sense to double down on those mistakes, as with the 80 per cent debt-to-GDP level projected when Mr Obama leaves office?
The time for such excuses is over. They paint a picture of a government that is not working, one that creates risks rather than reduces them. Good government should be a nonpartisan issue. I have written that government actions and interventions in the past several years caused, prolonged and worsened the financial crisis. The problem is that policy is getting worse not better. Top government officials, including the heads of the US Treasury, the Fed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Securities and Exchange Commission are calling for the creation of a powerful systemic risk regulator to reign in systemic risk in the private sector. But their government is now the most serious source of systemic risk.
The good news is that it is not too late. There is time to wake up, to make a mid-course correction, to get back on track. Many blame the rating agencies for not telling us about systemic risks in the private sector that lead to this crisis. Let us not ignore them when they try to tell us about the risks in the government sector that will lead to the next one.
The writer, a professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of ‘Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis’
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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