As Ted "Theodore" Logan so eloquently says in one of my favorite movie quotes ...
"Strange things are afoot at the Circle K."
Last September, American citizens were blind-sided by warnings of imminent financial doom ... that is, if the government didn't immediately step-in and spend trillions of taxpayer dollars.
Personally, I'm still wondering where the "proof" of this "crisis" is ...
Hey, I'm no "expert" ... I'm just a regular Joe ... but I was a stockbroker for over a decade prior to taking a senior position at a large national bank. In other words ... I must have some idea of how the financial world works, right?
I bring this up, because I'm here to tell you ... something very fishy is going on in America right now.
Again ... a mere few months after President Bush's prophecy of doom, we have President Obama engaging in the same politics of fear, preaching an apocalyptic prophecy of his own - that if the federal government doesn't crank-up the printing presses, flooding government agencies and pet projects with piles of cash, we will witness the financial ruin of the greatest, most prosperous nation in history.
I say, PROVE IT!
Man up Obama! Stop the clamor of doomsday prophecy, and make a detailed case.
If you're sincere, that is.
Strange days indeed ...
We know last fall that the Federal Reserve loaned some $2 trillion to somebody and refused to disclose who this was. We also know that there was a major run on a money-market fund during this same time-frame. As USA Today reported:
A money-market mutual fund that "broke the buck" amid a rush of orders to pull out cash has begun returning an initial $26 billion to investors who had been unable to access their money for more than a month.
The first in an unspecified number of distributions from the Reserve Primary Fund began Thursday with checks being mailed to retail-direct shareholders, Reserve Management Co. said ...
Each investor is getting about half their current account balance ...
The fund had total assets of about $51 billion as of Sept. 30. It held $64 billion in assets on Sept. 12, before a soured investment in Lehman Brothers debt triggered a rush of institutional investors pulling out cash.
On Sept. 16, the rapid sell-off of assets caused the value of fund assets to fall to 97 cents for each investor dollar put in - the first instance in 14 years of a money-market mutual fund "breaking the buck," or having its per-share value fall below $1.
Reserve Management froze redemption orders. That led institutional investors to pull out cash from that fund and others, creating fears about the safety of the $3.4 trillion in assets held in money-market funds ...
A video has surfaced, in which Representative Paul Kanjorski (D) is talking about what happened during this situation. The following quote is Kanjorski, speaking about the money-market run (in the video). You can watch the whole thing at the end of this post.
On Thursday at about 11 o'clock in the morning the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in a matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help. It pumped $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide; we were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic out there.
If they had not done that, their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it. We're really no better off today than we were three months ago because we've had a decrease in the equity positions of banks because other assets are going sour by the moment.
Obviously, part of Kanjorski's intended purpose here, is to increase public panic so the Obama Administration can pass their so-called "stimulus" bill (which in reality is designed to change the American form of government).
Also, while I'm sure the initial $550 billion run can be traced, the claim of complete world collapse, within 24 hours, is wild speculation at best - again, designed to create fear.
This particular chapter, in the bizarre last 6 months of our lives, certainly begs many questions, some of which are:
- Who was withdrawing the money? Soros, Stryker, Buffett, Gates, and/or their other billionaire socialist friends? Or was it China, Russia, Venezuela ... our communist enemies? Who is set to gain the most from this?
- Why don't "we the people" know who got the $2 trillion? If it was sooo important, why hide the recipients? What aren't "we the people" being told?
- Has the central bank, aided by the government, sent the American economy into a tail-spin that will make the Great Depression look like a vacation?
- Why is it again ... that I shouldn't start taking the conspiracy theorists more seriously?
I know one thing ... that everyone of you out there (including myself), that have laughed and laughed at those "Paultards" over the years ... I'm sorry to say ... but the joke's on us, isn't it?
Representative Ron Paul (R), U.S. House of Representatives, testimony before the Financial Services Committee, July 17, 2002:
Welcome, Chairman Greenspan. I've listened carefully to your testimony but I get the sense I may be listening to the Chairman of the Board of Central Economic planning rather than the chairman of a board that has been entrusted with protecting the value of the dollar.
I have for quite a few years now expressed concern about the value of the dollar which I think we neglect here in the Congress, here in the committee and I do not think that the Federal Reserve has done a good job in protecting the value of the dollar. And it seems that maybe others are coming around to this viewpoint because I see that the head of the IMF this week, Mr. Koehler, has expressed a concern and made a suggestion that all the central bankers of the world need to lay plans in the near future to possibly prop up the dollar. So others have this same concern.
You have in your testimony expressed concern about the greed factor ... But I believe where you have come up short is in failing to explain why we have financial bubbles. I think when you have fiat money and excessive credit you create financial bubbles and you also undermine the value of the dollar and now we are facing that consequence. We see the disintegration of some of these markets. At the same time we have potential real depreciation of the value of our dollar. And we have pursued rampant inflation of the money supply. Since you have been Chairman of the Federal Reserve we have literally created $4.7 trillion worth of new money in M-3 ... You can't have anything but lower value of that unit of account if you keep printing and creating new money.
Now I would like to bring us back to sound money. And I would like to quote an eminent economist by the name of Alan Greenspan who gives me some credibility on what I am interested in. A time ago you said, 'In the absence of the gold standard there is no way to protect savings from the confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value without gold. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process that stands as a protector of property rights.'
But gold has always had to be undermined if fiat money is to work and there has to be an illusion of trust for paper to work. And I think this has been happening for thousands of years. At one time the kings clipped coins. Then they debased the metals. Then we learned how to print money. Even as recently as the 1960's for us to perpetuate a myth about our monetary system, we dumped 2/3 of our gold, or 500 million ounces of gold at $35 per ounce in order to try to convince people to trust the money ...
I have a bill that would say that our government, our Treasury could not deal in gold and could not be involved in the gold market unless the Congress knows about it. Now that to me seems like such a reasonable approach and reasonable request. But they say they don't use it (gold) so we don't need the bill. But if they are not trading in gold, what would be the harm in the Congress knowing about handling and dealing about this asset, gold?
Yeah ... that guy is nuts! Good thing we didn't listen to him, uh?
And if you don't sense my sarcasm, I don't care what time of day it is, go drink another cup of coffee and wake-up!
Michael Steele may be a great man, and even the guy to bring conservatism back from the dead ... but "we the people" are running out of time ... we've got to take things into our own hands.
