Do We Already Have The Solutions?

Podcast: Introduction And Amateur Activism/Journalism

With so many issues and causes around I suppose it makes sense to gain understanding of the biggest picture in terms of how political will is exercised, and how power structure in global institutions is aligned with economic incentives. It makes little sense Persuing a cause without this perspective, and with social media its possible to broaden activism from the odd protest of hairy hippies and mask wearing maverick hackers to the common Joe who weilds only a keyboard and a bit of knowledge.

The basic method involves asking do we already have the solutions (dwahts)? Finding areas where social, technological or political solutions exist, and asking who stands to gain where the political will is not there to roll them out.

All music on podcasts is original or sequenced samples and available on request, composed, arranged on Flexbyte software, Groovemixer and Magix, not Licenced for commercial use.

You have to give credit once again to Peter Schiff, like 1999 and 2007, things are starting to unfold in an eerily similar way to his predations, and most importantly, for the REASONS he predicts them.

I've been following his podcasts for years doubting the Feds allusions to raising interest rates and being correct about delay tactic. Also, casting cynical doubt about the Feds promises to end Quantititve Easing, which is also starting to appear on the cards.

It follows logically that he will, in the end, be right in the long run about precious metals...

I can think of no rationale based in reason not to heed his advice.

Article

http://schiffgold.com/commentaries/financial-media-starting-to-agree-with-peter-schiff-qe4-is-coming/

Streaming

Podcasts (detailed)

The Myth Of Fractional Reserve Banking

Thanks to STEVE KEEN

The standard story about how banks create money, and how reserves work, is the "Money Multiplier Model”. Money creation starts with the government injecting "fiat money” into the economy – say by giving a welfare recipient $100 in cash. That recipient then deposits the cash in a bank, which hangs on to a government-mandated fraction of it (the "Reserve Requirement”) – say 10 per cent or $10 – and lends out the rest to a borrower. The borrower then deposits that $90 in another bank, which does the same thing – hangs onto 10 per cent of the $90 or $9, and lends out another $81 to another borrower.

The process repeats ad infinitum, and in the end a total of $1,000 is brought into existence: the original $100 in cash, plus $900 in credit money created by the private banking sector (matched, of course, by $900 in debt).

This alleged system, known as Fractional Reserve Banking, is seen as "fraud” by Austrian economists, and by many in the public. To inflationists, because Bernanke has hit the printing presses, dramatically increasing Base Money, and therefore money in circulation will soon explode, leading to hyperinflation.

Figure 1: US Money Base

To Neoclassical economists, it’s just the way banking works: bank lending is controlled by the Fed because, "even if banks hold no reserves”, Fed control over the currency means that private banks must do what the Fed wants.

And to anyone who’s done empirical research, it’s a myth.

The most recent proof of this is in an excellent discussion paper from Federal Reserve economists Carpenter and Demiralp, entitled "Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist?”. The first clue that it doesn’t exist is given by their abstract, which notes that, "before the financial crisis, reserve balances were roughly $20 billion”. If the textbook model were correct, the total stock of money in the USA would be $200 billion, versus the multi-trillion dollar level of even a narrow definition of the money stock. As the authors note, this makes a mockery of the textbook "Money Multiplier” model:

M2 averaged about $7.25 trillion in 2007 … bank loans for 2007 were about $6.25 trillion... if we consider the fact that reserve balances held at the Federal Reserve were about $15 billion and required reserves were about $43 billion, the tight link drawn in the textbook transmission mechanism from reserves to money and bank lending seems all the more tenuous.

I’ll stop there on trashing the conventional model – save to quote Carpenter and Demiralp’s conclusion that "the textbook treatment of money in the transmission mechanism can be rejected” – and get to the real issue: if the Money Multiplier model doesn’t really describe how money is created, and how reserves figure in this, what does?

The short answer is "endogenous money”: bank lending creates deposits, so the decisions of banks to provide loans determine the level of money, and reserves are largely irrelevant. But today I want to attempt a longer answer that actually puts reserves in the picture, so I’m going to model (take a swig of coffee) a system with 3 banks: a "Buyer Bank” where a Buyer has both a deposit account and a credit card (or line of credit); a "Seller Bank” where a Seller has a deposit account, and a Central Bank that keeps the Reserve Accounts of both banks.

It’s an incomplete and unrealistic model because the money flow goes only one way – from Buyer to Seller, and therefore from Buyer Bank to Seller Bank – and therefore Buyer Bank must ultimately run out of Reserves. But it’s still effective in showing the basics of a more complete model in which money flows both ways.

Starting at Buyer Bank, the Buyer can purchase goods either using cash – which means transferring money from his Deposit account to the Seller’s Deposit account – or by using his credit card. Breaking these processes down into discrete steps, the Cash purchase first of all involves money being taken out of the Buyer’s Deposit account (shown as +Card because, from the bank’s point of view, the Buyer’s Deposit is a liability of the banks and therefore recorded by it as a negative amount), which also reduces Buyer Bank’s Reserves (shown as a minus because Reserves are an asset of the bank, and they now fall). Notionally, the amount of money in circulation has fallen at this point (imagine that the amount of Cash is currently in the limbo of interbank settlements between Buyer Bank and Seller Bank).

How’s the coffee?

Next buying on credit is shown in two stages: firstly accessing the line of credit by the amount Card, which increases the Buyer’s Deposit account and increases the bank’s loans by the same amount. At this point, the amount of money in circulation has risen by Card. But then the purchase is acted upon, so the amount of Card is deducted from the Buyer’s Deposit account (yes it’s confusing showing it as a plus – it’s taken me a while to get used to this! – but it makes sure that all rows sum to zero) and also deducted from Buyer Bank’s Reserves. So by this point, the two transactions have reduced the amount of money in circulation by the amount of Cash.

Table 1: Account operations at Buyer bank

Buyer Bank
	Assets		Liabilities	Row Sum	Money Change
	Loans	Reserves	Buyer Deposit
Buy with cash		-Cash	+Cash	0	-Cash
Access credit	+Card		-Card	0	+Card
Buy with credit		-Card	+Card		-Card

Enter Seller Bank. The amounts Cash and Card are added to both the Seller’s Deposit account, and the bank’s Reserves. These actions increase the amount of money in circulation by the amount Cash+ Card. In total, the amount of money in circulation has increased by Card: money has been endogenously created.

Table 2: Account operations at Seller Bank

Seller Bank
	Assets	Liabilities	Row Sum	Money Creation
	Reserves	Seller Deposit
Deposit Cash Revenue	+Cash	-Cash	0	+Cash
Deposit Card Revenue	+Card	-Card	0	+Card

However, this creation of money has to be intermediated by the Central Bank. So how do these operations look on its Balance Sheet? From the Central Bank’s point of view, it simply has to affect a transfer of Reserves from Buyer Bank to Seller Bank, by debiting Buyer Bank’s Reserve account and crediting Seller Bank’s.

Table 3: Account operations at Central Bank

Central Bank
	Assets	Liabilities		Row Sum	Reserve Creation
	Loans	Buyer Bank Reserves	Seller Bank Reserves
Buy with Cash		Cash	-Cash	0	0
Buy with Card		Card	-Card	0	0

But what if Buyer Bank doesn’t have enough Reserves – if it’s at its Reserve Requirements limit already, or worse still, if its reserves are zero? Will the Central Bank refuse to transfer funds that Buyer Bank doesn’t really have?

I hope the answer to that question is now obvious: of course it won’t. The Central Bank will either give Buyer Bank time to find the Reserves, or lend them to it. To do otherwise – to refuse to transfer Reserves from Buyer Bank to Seller Bank – would void the purchase made by the Buyer from the Seller (and note that this could happen with the Cash purchase just as easily as with the Card one). The system of commerce would break down. We’d have an interesting social system the instant after the Central Bank did such a thing, but it wouldn’t be called capitalism.

I hope this also explains why, in every country in the world where Reserve Requirements exist (and that’s not every country – Australia, for one, doesn’t have them), they are backward-looking: they depend on the level of deposits existing in the previous reporting period "and thus after banks have extended the credit demanded by their customers”. It should also explain the comment made by Alan Holmes over half a century ago that the Fed has "little or no choice” about doing this:

In the real world, banks extend credit, creating deposits in the process, and look for the reserves later. The question then becomes one of whether and how the Federal Reserve will accommodate the demand for reserves. In the very short run, the Federal Reserve has little or no choice about accommodating that demand.
Finally, what about "looking for reserves later”? There are two obvious sources: Buyer Bank can either borrow them from Seller Bank, or from the Central Bank itself.

The Central Bank has an obvious motivation to lend: it doesn’t want to destroy capitalism. But why should Seller Bank lend to Buyer Bank in this case? Because it now has excess reserves relative to its Reserve Requirement: the transfer of funds from Buyer Bank increased its Reserves by precisely as much as Seller’s Deposit account rose, and since the Reserve Requirement is a fraction of deposits (10 per cent of household deposits only in the USA – there is no reserve requirement for corporate deposits), it now has a lot more Reserves than it needs. Better to lend them at the interbank rate to Buyer Bank than to get no return (or a very low return) on the Reserves themselves.

On the Buyer Bank’s accounts, the two operations look like this:

Seller Bank sees it this way:

And the Central Bank records the action this way:

Notice that I’m showing these reserve operations as not changing the amount of money, whereas the private bank operations did. That’s because money is the liabilities of the banking sector to the non-bank sectors of the economy.

Money could be created – and demand increased – if Buyer Bank decided to lend some of these liabilities to the Non-Bank public (or the government), as illustrated in Table 7 – and that’s why the Fed has been trying to cause inflation via its "printing press”.

But for that to actually happen, there have to be willing borrowers out there – and with the massively overindebted private sector we now have, willing borrowers are few and far between (as, for that matter, are willing lenders too – better to earn a few shekels from the Fed than risk losing money with the public). And that’s why those excess reserves are just sitting there.

Figure 2: Excess Reserves data from the St Louis FRED database

I am sure I will be told that actual bank operations are far more complex than this, and that is true. But at a very parsimonious level, I think this post captures the basic principles of how banks endogenously create money, why the Central Bank has no choice but to accommodate that behaviour, and why as a result it will be a cold day in Hell before Ben Bernanke’s printing press causes inflation.Other factors are far more likely to do that long before the Federal Reserve’s pushing on a string has any impact.

References

Carpenter, S. B. and S. Demiralp (2010). Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist? Finance and Economics Discussion Series. Washington, Federal Reserve Board.
ECB (2012). Monetary and Financial Developments. Monthly Bulletin May 2012. Brussels, European Central Bank.
Holmes, A. R. (1969). Operational Constraints on the Stabilization of Money Supply Growth. Controlling Monetary Aggregates. F. E. Morris. Nantucket Island, The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston: 65-77.
Krugman, P. (2012). "Banking Mysticism, Continued." The Conscience of a Liberal HYPERLINK "http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/banking-mysticism-continued/"http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/banking-mysticism-continued/.
O'Brien, Y.-Y. J. C. (2007). "Reserve Requirement Systems in OECD Countries."SSRN eLibrary.

Greece For Dummies

Don't get drawn into the fictitious oversimplified scenarios that those good dogs barking for their biscuits will have you buy into.

Think, use your brain, the whole "investors just drifted into lending naughty Greece money because of mommy EUs credit card" and "Greeks are Lazy" rubbish. Also, as media forgets, the Greek people have little to do with it, being asked to pay the debt with tax and pension, and pass it onto their grandchildren is criminal.

The ECB pays its failure and debt by printing €60 Billion per month in Fed style QE, bond buying which is free money when translated from beaurocrat, more than the Greek debt:
http://www.bloombergview.com/quicktake/europes-qe-quandary

and the IMF head calling for tax austerity PAYS NO TAX. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/9298501/Christine-Lagarde-attack-on-Greece-backfires-as-she-pays-no-tax.html

The IMF incidentally has made more profit from Greece just since 2010 that the Greek default instalments have bottlenecked to, around €2.5 billion.http://jubileedebt.org.uk/news/imf-made-e2-5-billion-profit-greece-loans

Let's make it simple:

1) The investment shepards troika IS THE EU, they are not the saviors. They are the European Commission, European Central Bank and those bastards over at the IMF.

2) The only excuse EU finance has is that someone else screwed them and Greece, you guessed it, those lovable usual suspect financial terrorists at Goldman Sachs made massive upfront money and ran in a derivative scheme parading as a loan to gleen monumental upfront profits and pass off criminally high interest onto innocents like Greeks and lenders, they did it by principally hiding true debt figures. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-06/goldman-secret-greece-loan-shows-two-sinners-as-client-unravels

3) One of few real journalists left in Mainstream Media, Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank economist, points out how none of the money actually went to Greece but to German and French banks, amongst other things.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/29/joseph-stiglitz-how-i-would-vote-in-the-greek-referendum

4) When the Globalization plot known as the EU, with its Fed style central bank in Brussels, rolled out in Europe, French banks knew that they could not make billions by competing in Germany, nor were German banks expecting to vanquish the French. They looked instead to a simpler and easier market to loan out the plentiful supply of cash they had – the poorer, mostly southern European states that had agreed to take part in the launch of a common currency called the Euro in 1999.

The logic was clear: In the mid-1990s, national interest rates in Greece and Spain, for example, hovered around 14 percent, and at a similar level in Ireland during the 1992–1993 currency crisis. So borrowers in these countries were eager to welcome the northern bankers with seemingly unlimited supplies of cheap cash at interest rates as low as one to four percent.

5) But there is a broader game afoot, and the best article I've seen on the internet Can be found here. By Alex Andreou. Without the bigger picture, without context, there can be no understanding.

Where to from here? A less forgiving article than mine explains quite well how the rest of Europe has a similar fate to contend with: http://www.hangthebankers.com/how-greece-was-robbed-by-the-bankers/

Bend Over So That We Can Stick Another 4th Of July Firecracker Up Your Arse, America. Kind Regards, The Elite.

Happy 4th of July US people, hope you get your country back soon, but don't panic just yet, Rumour has it that Nestle will sell your water back to you at reasonable ransom. I mean rates. Monsanto's sorry about the whole bee fiasco but will make it up to farmers by getting good rates on their repossessed farms from the banks to rent back to them and might even pay them a small salary as gene patented crops will be made available for all your benefit.
Thats right, you and I get to eat their property if we are lucky, they own the food even after we pay for it in a manner of speaking, ain't they swell?

To the unions and middle class, um, never mind...

To Detroit and the motor industry, we may witness a raise in McDonald's & Walmart min wages to provide you with new careers and keep boosting those jobs figures! Yay. Go team!

Of course we'll be docking multinationals taxes and upping yours so we can enrich our kind folk at the Military Industrial complex. Er, I mean guard against low Russian Gas prices, sorry I mean Russian aggression as their border moves towards our new Eastern European military bases with open hostility and stationary deceptiveness. Also, those coups in the old eastern block are expensive and our costly fracking shale gas costs a hell of a lot, because its flavored with pure environment, so its a superior product, by that I mean superior high costs at least.

Lets be realistic though guys, there may be the odd funding cut though, like in education and roadworks etc along with other low priority stuff. You can't have it all.

The poor banks keep failing and debt is tragically high, but don't panic, that's what pensions are for! Just kidding, ha ha, we won't use your pensions, they likely went already invested in AAA rated junk bonds to build our massive engineering legacy, the derivative Great Pyramid, the one with that market value figure so silly and high you probably realized we were making a little joke. Eleventy five bazillion gazillion shazallion dollars, those same dollars which go up in value against emerging market currencies whenever we print each new worthless one! In similar sorcery we reduce the gold price vs $ somehow as demand climbs! We use magic spells to defeat economics. Think of it as a nice party trick, for free. Lol kidding, there's a fee.

We got your backs! And balls. You may get them and other body parts we may come to posses, on financed terms at your friends neighborhood bank. Hurry, they will soon be owned by JP Morgan Chase.

Um also,...what else, oh yeah Welfare's broke , sorry to the poor and infirm but you understand of course there is only enough for bank bailouts, the banksters need their welfare more than you do, they don't waste it on food, they finance stuff, like their helicopters and yachts.

If you are really in a fix cheer yourself up with a loan. I say cheer because we can all have a little chuckle together because we won't really lend to money silly, we just invent it, we gave ourselves permission, but charge you interest and claim your mortgage surety if you default anyway.

You're welcome.

Don't forget to celebrate our puppets, I mean democracy, again next year, another fine election is lining up with much progress being made.

Choose ..Um,... Bush or Clinton, er, again...um,

Don't thank us yet, Putin may take it all away from you tomorrow. Or not. Got anything left? No? Then he will do it because he hates our freedom, which is now taxable by the way.

Gradual Consolidation & Eventual Takeover Of Banking. How 37 Banks Became 4 In Just 2 Decades.

Chart courtesy of Realities Watch.

If you were wondering how banks got “too big to fail,” here’s a good place to start. This chart shows us how, over the last couple of decades, 37 banks have became just 4 mega-banks. These same 4 mega-banks have, thus far, been immune to the consequences of any and all of their terrible decisions that places the entire world economy in jeopardy.

Why? Because we, the taxpayer provide government with the welfare they allocate to banks in the form of bailouts.

Our reward? Welfare cuts to the poor and tax breaks to big biz. Secret Deals like the TPP that kill entrepreneurs and ensure big corporations like Monsanto and Nestle will control food , land and water as farmers and real politicians that can't be bought become extinct. Hardly seems fair does it?

The four remaining banks are but an illusion, one ideologically aligned entity benifiting from the same circumstantial interests (therefore having almost identical agendas) working to create political positioning of key candidates, funding of key industries and creation of unions of centralized power and trade deals such as the alarming TPP which has cast such a menacing shadow of freedom and democracy in North America and Europe, which spills over into Asia, Russia, South America and Africa in military action designed to protect the resources so critical to their perpetuation, and to position their diplomats for geopolitical strategy.

Read more in detail about the connections in global finance in my related article HERE.

Gradual Consolidation & Eventual Takeover Of Mainstream Media. We Keep Hearing It, But What Does It Mean?

Its not just the complex shareholder arrangements that have allowed just 6 ideologically aligned corporations to exercise their influence over the entirety of western mainstream media, it goes deeper than than that. Find out some more recent developments and protect yourself from mind-policing in this far reaching and interesting article, published on that excellent Globalization Watchdog, Global Research.

You can find the article, which will open in a new window, HERE.

Censored blogger back online

Its always pleasing to see a blogger who brings well researched causes that don't receive extensive coverage, even in alternative media, win a groundless censorship battle against the inane front that seeks to suppress the most socially relevant cases of genuine injustice for reasons not always immediately apparent.

Cases like this are critical to such causes, I frequent Mohsen Abdeloumens wordpress blog regularly because he frames the relevance of his issues so well within the broader global context that you never get the sense you are dealing with an isolated issue, which makes for more satisfying reading.

Check it out here

Scandal in Kyrgyzstan After Protest Organizer caught colluding with US diplomat

Read the article and view the clip here:

Armenian Unrest Funded By The West. Is Naming & Shaming The NGOs Involved Possible?

A number of pro-Western NGOs in Armenia perform various functions, including the support of political processes and even overseeing foreign elections. Now, as protests against an electricity rate hike drag on, these groups are getting a second look.

Protesters, demanding the cancellation of a 17 percent electricity price hike that is set to take effect on August 1, have spent another night on the streets of Armenian capital. The demonstrators have refused to meet with Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan to discuss their grievances, opting instead to continue their street sit-in that began last Friday.

In the midst of these protests, and with the Ukrainian political crisis still smoldering on Russia's doorstep, attention is being given to some of the non-governmental organizations operating in the country. Many of these NGOs have been funded by the United States ever since Armenia voted for its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“The Choice is Yours” organization, for example, which is fully funded by Washington, actually performs in the election processes outside the territory of Armenia. In December 2004, during the third round of presidential elections in Ukraine, for example, over 100 independent observers from Armenia were sent to a province in Ukraine to monitor the elections. By the time the 2010 Ukrainian elections rolled around, the number of Armenian election monitors from this US-funded group appeared to more than triple.

An official from “The Choice is Yours” NGO told Armenpress that “450 short-term observers took part in the international observation mission in the Ukrainian presidential elections.”

However, proving that Washington is directly bankrolling NGOs lobbying on behalf of American interests in the political and socio-political sectors is “practically impossible,”writes Susanna Petrosyan, in Vestnik Kavkaza. “Armenian fiscal structures have information about the finances but they do not publish it.”

Meanwhile, other NGOs with an anti-Russian bias, such as the "Committee for Support of Ukraine," pop up like weeds for a short period of time and therefore are not registered at the Justice Ministry, Petrosyan says.

Mger Simonyan, the president of the Fund for Development of Eurasian Cooperation, believes that the number of pro-West NGOs grew significantly since Armenia joined the Russia-led Customs Union and the Eurasian Union.

“Russian and pro-Russian public organizations of Armenia are far behind their Western competitors. Armenia has 5-10 competent Russian organizations and about 200 Western ones,” says Simonyan.

Meanwhile, some observers are cautious about drawing parallels between the current Armenian unrest and the violent upheaval that occurred during last year's Maidan protests in Kiev, Ukraine, which ultimately forced out a democratically elected leader.

"If American NGOs were directly involved in the Armenian unrest we would be seeing a lot of crude street slogans talking about the need for 'good governance,' which is just another way of describing politicians supported by Washington," Dmitry Babich, a political analyst based in Moscow, told RT. "The protesters all seem to be holding homemade signs demanding economic justice, while there has been no overt blaming of Russia."

"Armenians understand that Russia is not the source of their problems," Babich said.

The No BS version of the update on MH17, let's be serious here!

Dr. Paul Craig Robert's remains my favorite journalist when it comes to penetrating the veneer of the globalisation machine, comming from the inside on the Reagan administration as the deputy secretary of the treasury and from the PR machine that supports it as associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, he takes the angles that best frame the context needed to understand any piece he chooses to write about. His valuable and still quite new website can be found here.

His article on the update on the downing of flight MH17 can be read on the Global Research website here.

GENOCIDE. Happening now against the Rohingyas in Myanmar

Muslims in whole of Buddhist governed Southeast Asian Myanmar face persecution but the Rohingya minority community is suffering the most. The radical Buddhists of Arakan State that are in majority have been involved in enormous atrocities against the minority Rohingya Muslims ever since 2003. They have been brutally murdering Muslims, including women and children and are doing all this barbarity with the backing and support of the Myanmar regime, political and religious leadership and the law enforcement agencies.

Leader of National League for Democratic movement Aung San Suu Kyi, who is Nobel peace prize winner, has so far failed to condemn the violence mainly because it is being carried out by the backbone of her own political network.

The Myanmar government has annulled the citizenship of more than four lakh Muslims. Having lived there for 7 centuries, Rohingyas have suddenly become stateless with no identity and are marooned and forsaken by the world. Rohingyas are among the most persecuted minorities in the world. The cruel subjugation of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar has crossed all the boundaries since 2012. The world and the UN are quietly watching the genocide and none is coming forward to stop the ethnic cleansing and provide succor to the 140,000 displaced Rohingyas.

Read the full Global Research article by Asia Harmon Raja, June 17, 2015, here.

Washington's coup in Macedonia thwarted! No rip off shale gas for Europe yet as Russian gas pipeline goes on.

With Albania and Bulgaria in Washington's pocket, Ukraine, and now Macedonia remain problematic as the US coup attempt in the latter fails.

Read the article here .

Before taking the link take time out for an insiders perspective to peruse the new website of former Reagan administration Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, also fmr associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

Why George Soros is playing chess with Ukraine

Why does Soros want more US weapons and war in Ukraine?

Video courtesy RPI