European Central Bank

Natural News ~ Five Ways to Help Stop the Plundering of Our World

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

Mike Adams (Natural News) | RS_News
December 7 2011

The economic plundering of our world is well under way, with the Goldman Sachs “white shoe boyz” taking over entire national economies as they confiscate the wealth of the working class. They aren’t the only evildoers wreaking havoc across the world, of course: A cabal of powerful and criminally-insane corporations are destroying the future of food, plotting to keep citizens suffering from disease, and even perpetuating war so they can earn obscene profits from selling more bullets, bombs and missiles.

You can help resist this economic imperialism by taking simple actions that protect your wealth and pull it out of the hands of the globalists who are actively destroying our world. Here are five of the most powerful action steps to take that can turn the tables and restore economic sovereignty at every level – household, community, state, nation and the entire globe.

#1) Shop at local farmers’ markets, food co-ops and local grocers

Stop buying Tyson chicken. Stop buying Monsanto-engineered GMO foods at the grocery store. Stop giving your money to food industry globalists such as ADM, Cargill and PepsiCo. Every time you buy a can of brand-name soda, a carton of genetically modified soy milk, or a bag of popular snack chips, you are financially supporting a system of global agricultural poverty and food domination that destroys life and liberty.

If you shop based solely on price and not ethics, you are take part in the economic destruction of our world. Shop local, buy organic and avoid all the corporate food giants and their deceptive, dishonest packaged foods.

Remember: If the food you eat comes in a box, your family and friends will eventually find YOU in a box, too.

#2) Pull your money out of the big banks and put it in local credit unions

When you deposit $1,000 in a globalist bank, they can turn around and, through a series of fractional reserve banking transactions, turn that into $9,000 in loans that earn them interest. Inversely, by pulling $1,000 out of a globalist bank (JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, etc.), you denythem the ability to make $9,000 in loans, thus shrinking their profits by a significant factor.

Continue reading →

Bankers have seized Europe: Goldman Sachs Has Taken Over

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

Paul Craig Roberts | Global Research
November 25 2011

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. The private banks want to avoid any losses either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB’s charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.

Obviously, the German government got the message from the orchestrated failed bond auction. As I wrote at the time, there is no reason for Germany, with its relatively low debt to GDP ratio compared to the troubled countries, not to be able to sell its bonds.

If Germany’s creditworthiness is in doubt, how can Germany be expected to bail out other countries? Evidence that Germany’s failed bond auction was orchestrated is provided by troubled Italy’s successful bond auction two days later.

Strange, isn’t it. Italy, the largest EU country that requires a bailout of its debt, can still sell its bonds, but Germany, which requires no bailout and which is expected to bear a disproportionate cost of Italy’s, Greece’s and Spain’s bailout, could not sell its bonds.

In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt.

My opinion is based on the following facts. Goldman Sachs and US banks have guaranteed perhaps one trillion dollars or more of European sovereign debt by selling swaps or insurance against which they have not reserved. The fees the US banks received for guaranteeing the values of European sovereign debt instruments simply went into profits and executive bonuses. This, of course, is what ruined the American insurance giant, AIG, leading to the TARP bailout at US taxpayer expense and Goldman Sachs’ enormous profits.

Continue reading →

Central Banks’ Latest Move Shows Desperation ~ This isn’t a financial crisis. It’s a bank robbery.

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

Washington’s Blog | Global Research
December 1 2011

Bank of EnglandThe coordinated swap line bailout by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Swiss National Bank- and China’s reduction of reserve requirements by .5% – shows desperation.

The Street notes:

Don’t get flustered by the terminology of “dollar swap lines” above. Here’s a more simple explanation: Central banks around the globe have acted in desperation to boost liquidity in the system, which has sparked a rally in equities.

In a separate article, The Street points out:

What’s great for the banks isn’t so good for everyone else, though. Investment strategists already are noting the desperation of the move, adding that flooding the banking system with liquidity doesn’t do anything to solve the real problem of ballooning, unmanageable debt levels.

Ron Paul said today:

The Fed’s latest actions in cooperating with foreign central banks to undertake liquidity swaps of dollars for foreign currencies is another reason why Congress needs enhanced power to oversee and audit the Fed. Under current law Congress cannot examine these types of agreements. Those who would argue that auditing the Fed or these agreements with central banks harms the Fed’s independence should reevaluate the Fed’s supposed independence when the Fed bails out Europe so soon after President Obama promised US assistance in resolving the Euro crisis.

Rather than calming markets, these arrangements should indicate just how frightened governments around the world are about the European financial crisis. Central banks are grasping at straws, hoping that flooding the world with money created out of thin air will somehow resolve a crisis caused by uncontrolled government spending and irresponsible debt issuance. Congress should not permit this type of open-ended commitment on the part of the Fed, a commitment which could easily run into the trillions of dollars. These dollar swaps are purely inflationary and will harm American consumers as much as any form of quantitative easing.

The Fed is behaving much as it did during the 2008 financial crisis, only this time instead of bailing out politically well-connected too-big-to-fail firms it is bailing out profligate government spending. Citizens the world over deserve better than this. They deserve sound money that cannot be manipulated and created out of thin air by central planners who promise printed prosperity. Fiat money caused this European crisis and the financial crisis before it. More fiat money is not the cure. The global fiat currency system has proven itself a failure, we need real monetary reform. We need sound money.

As I noted last year:

Ron Paul points out that the Fed opening its swap lines to Europe violated its promise to Congress not to do so. Paul also says the bailout will help lead to the destruction of all fiat paper currencies, ensuring that “gold will rule the roost”.

Many have predicted that it is only a short-term measure to kick the can down the road. But the numbers themselves show that the bailout might not even be having a sufficient short-term effect.

For example, as the following Euro to Dollar chart shows (courtesy of Finviz), the Euro rallied, and then sunk back almost all the way to it’s pre-bailout level today:

Central Banks Latest Move Shows Desperation

(The Euro’s rally against the Japanese Yen didn’t last very long, either. And Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Hull thinks any rally in the Euro will be short-lived, anyway.)

As Bloomberg notes, bank swap and libor rates show that the bailout might not be enough to stem the sovereign default crisis:

Money markets and the cost of protecting bank bonds from losses show investors are concerned the almost $1 trillion rescue plan announced by European leaders may not be enough to contain the region’s sovereign debt crisis.

A credit-default swaps index linked to European banks that usually trades tighter than an investment-grade benchmark is 30 basis points higher, according to CMA DataVision. A measure of banks’ reluctance to lend remained three times higher than it was in March.

Continue reading →

The European Central Bank Fiddles While Rome Burns

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

Ellen Brown | Global Research
December 1 2011

“To some people, the European Central Bank seems like a fire department that is letting the house burn down to teach the children not to play with matches.”

So wrote Jack Ewing in the New York Times last week.  He went on:

“The E.C.B. has a fire hose — its ability to print money. But the bank is refusing to train it on the euro zone’s debt crisis.

“The flames climbed higher Friday after the Italian Treasury had to pay an interest rate of 6.5 percent on a new issue of six-month bills . . . the highest interest rate Italy has had to pay to sell such debt since August 1997 . . . .

“But there is no sign the E.C.B. plans a major response, like buying large quantities of the country’s bonds to bring down its borrowing costs.”  

Why not?  According to the November 28th Wall Street Journal, “The ECB has long worried that buying government bonds in big enough amounts to bring down countries’ borrowing costs would make it easier for national politicians to delay the budget austerity and economic overhauls that are needed.”

As with the manufactured debt ceiling crisis in the United States, the E.C.B. is withholding relief in order to extort austerity measures from member governments—and the threat seems to be working.  The same authors write:

“Euro-zone leaders are negotiating a potentially groundbreaking fiscal pact . . . [that] would make budget discipline legally binding and enforceable by European authorities. . . . European officials hope a new agreement, which would aim to shrink the excessive public debt that helped spark the crisis, would persuade the European Central Bank to undertake more drastic action to reverse the recent selloff in euro-zone debt markets.”

The Eurozone appears to be in the process of being “structurally readjusted” – the same process imposed earlier by the IMF on Third World countries.  Structural demands routinely include harsh austerity measures, government cutbacks, privatization, and the disempowerment of national central banks, so that there is no national entity capable of creating and controlling the money supply on behalf of the people.  The latter result has officially been achieved in the Eurozone, which is now dependent on the E.C.B. as the sole lender of last resort and printer of new euros.

The E.C.B. Serves Banks, Not Governments

The legal justification for the E.C.B.’s inaction in the sovereign debt crisis is Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty, signed by EU members in 2007.  As Jens Eidmann, President of the Bundesbank and a member of the E.C.B. Governing Council, stated in a November 14 interview:

Continue reading →