Every year on July 4th we celebrate our “independence”, but is America really free? How could we possibly be free when “Big Brother” is constantly intruding in our lives in hundreds of different ways? And I am not just talking about NSA snooping. Sadly, the truth is that the United States is beginning to fully embrace a “police state” culture. We have learned that the government monitors and keeps a record of all of our cell phone calls, emails, Internet searches, credit card transactions, and every piece of mail that we send. But most Americans don’t seem to care. We are “encouraged” to report the “suspicious activity” of our neighbors to the authorities, we are told that having security thugs touch the private areas of our women and children at our airports is necessary “for our security”, and 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted each year in the United States. But the American people don’t seem to care. America was once a great country, but now it is being turned into a giant prison, and only a small minority of the citizens are raising their voices in objection. (Read More...)
Have Central Bankers Lost Control? Could The Bond Bubble Implode Even If There Is No Tapering?
Are the central banks of the world starting to lose control of the financial markets? Could we be facing a situation where the bond bubble is going to inevitably implode no matter what the central bankers do? For the past several years, the central bankers of the planet have been able to get markets to do exactly what they want them to do. Stock markets have soared to record highs, bond yields have plunged to record lows and investors have literally hung on every word uttered by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other prominent central bankers. In the United States, it has been remarkable what Bernanke has been able to accomplish. The U.S. government has been indulging in an unprecedented debt binge, the Fed has been wildly printing money, and the real rate of inflation has been hovering around 8 to 10 percent, and yet Bernanke has somehow convinced investors to lend gigantic piles of money to the U.S. government for next to nothing. But this irrational state of affairs is not going to last indefinitely. At some point, investors are going to wake up and start demanding higher returns. And we are already starting to see this happen in Japan. Wild money printing has actually caused bond yields to go up. What a concept! And that is what should happen – when central banks recklessly print money it should cause investors to demand a higher return. But if bond investors all over the globe start acting rationally, that is going to cause the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet to burst, and that will create utter devastation in the financial markets. (Read More...)
41 IMF Bailouts And Counting – How Long Before The Entire System Collapses?
Broke nations are bailing out other broke nations with borrowed money. Round and round we go – where we stop nobody knows. As of April, 41 different countries had active financial “arrangements” with the IMF. Sometimes they are called “bailouts” and sometimes they are called other things, but in every single case they involve loans. And most of the time, these loans come with very stringent conditions. It is a form of “global governance” that most people don’t even know about. For decades, the IMF has been able to use money as a way to force developing nations to do what it wants them to do. But up until fairly recently, this had mostly only been done with poor nations. But now an increasing number of wealthy nations are turning to the IMF for help. We have already seen Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus receive bailouts which were partly funded by the IMF, Spain has received a bailout for its banking sector, and as I noted yesterday, it is being projected that Italy will need a major bailout within six months. How long can this go on before the entire system collapses? (Read More...)
19 Reasons To Be Deeply Concerned About The Global Economy As We Enter The 2nd Half Of 2013
Is the global economic downturn going to accelerate as we roll into the second half of this year? There is turmoil in the Middle East, we are seeing things happen in the bond markets that we have not seen happen in more than 30 years, and much of Europe has already plunged into a full-blown economic depression. Sadly, most Americans will never understand what is happening until financial disaster strikes them personally. As long as they can go to work during the day and eat frozen pizza and watch reality television at night, most of them will consider everything to be just fine. Unfortunately, the truth is that everything is not fine. The world is becoming increasingly unstable, we are living in the terminal phase of the greatest debt bubble in the history of the planet and the global financial system is even more vulnerable than it was back in 2008. Unfortunately, most people seem to only have a 48 hour attention span at best these days. They don’t have the patience to watch long-term trends develop. And the coming economic collapse is not going to happen all at once. Rather, it is like watching a very, very slow-motion train wreck happen. The coming economic nightmare is going to unfold over a number of years. Yes, there will be moments of great panic, but mostly it will be a steady decline into economic oblivion. And there are a lot of indications that the second half of this year is not going to be as good as the first half was. The following are 19 reasons to be deeply concerned about the global economy as we head into the second half of 2013… (Read More...)
Wall Street Banks Extract Enormous Fees From The Paychecks Of Millions Of American Workers
Would you be angry if you had to pay a big Wall Street bank a fee before you could get the money that you worked so hard to earn? Unfortunately, that is exactly the situation that millions of American workers find themselves in today. An increasing number of U.S. companies are paying their workers using payroll cards that are issued by large financial institutions. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Walgreens and Taco Bell are just some of the well known employers that are doing this. Today, there are 4.6 million active payroll cards in the United States, and some of the largest banks in the country are issuing them. The list includes JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. The big problem with these cards is that there is often a fee for just about everything that you do with them. Do you want to use an ATM machine? You must pay a fee. Do you want to check your balance? You must pay a fee. Do you want a paper statement? You must pay a fee. Did you lose your card? You must pay a big fee. Has your card been inactive for a while? You must pay a huge fee. The big Wall Street banks are systematically extracting enormous fees from the working poor, and someone needs to do something to stop this. (Read More...)
The Federal Reserve Is Paying Banks NOT To Lend 1.8 Trillion Dollars To The American People
Did you know that U.S. banks have more than 1.8 trillion dollars parked at the Federal Reserve and that the Fed is actually paying them not to lend that money to us? We were always told that the goal of quantitative easing was to “help the economy”, but the truth is that the vast majority of the money that the Fed has created through quantitative easing has not even gotten into the system. Instead, most of it is sitting at the Fed slowly earning interest for the bankers. Back in October 2008, just as the last financial crisis was starting, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Federal Reserve would start paying interest on the reserves that banks keep at the Fed. This caused an absolute explosion in the size of these reserves. Back in 2008, U.S. banks had less than 2 billion dollars of excess reserves parked at the Fed. Today, they have more than 1.8 trillion. In less than five years, the pile of excess reserves has gotten nearly 1,000 times larger. This is utter insanity, and it will have very serious consequences down the road. (Read More...)
36 Hard Questions About The U.S. Economy That The Mainstream Media Should Be Asking
If the economy is improving, then why aren’t things getting better for most average Americans? They tell us that the unemployment rate is going down, but the percentage of Americans that are actually working is exactly the same it was three years ago. They tell us that American families are in better financial shape now, but real disposable income is falling rapidly. They tell us that inflation is low, but every time we go shopping at the grocery store the prices just seem to keep going up. They tell us that the economic crisis is over, and yet poverty and government dependence continue to explode to unprecedented heights. There seems to be a disconnect between what the government and the media are telling us and what is actually true. With each passing day the debt of the federal government grows larger, the financial world become even more unstable and more American families fall out of the middle class. The same long-term economic trends that have been eating away at our economy like cancer for decades continue to ruthlessly attack the foundations of our economic system. We are rapidly speeding toward an economic cataclysm, and yet the government and most of the media make it sound like happy days are here again. The American people deserve better than this. The American people deserve the truth. The following are 36 hard questions about the U.S. economy that the mainstream media should be asking… (Read More...)
Multiple Government Agencies Are Keeping Records Of Your Credit Card Transactions
Were you under the impression that your credit card transactions are private? If so, I am sorry to burst your bubble. As you will see below, there are actually multiple government agencies that are gathering and storing records of your credit card transactions. And in turn, those government agencies share that information with other government agencies that want it. So if you are making a purchase that you don’t want anyone to know about, don’t use a credit card. This is one of the reasons why the government hates cash so much. It is just so hard to track. In this day and age, the federal government seems to be absolutely obsessed with gathering as much information about all of us as it possibly can. But there is one big problem. What they are doing directly violates the U.S. Constitution. For those that are not familiar with it, the following is what the Fourth Amendment actually says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment is essentially dead at this point. The federal government is investigating all of us and gathering information on all of us all day, every day without end. (Read More...)