Showing posts with label banksters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banksters. Show all posts

Saturday, March 18, 2023

"SVB + FTX + SBF = WTF?" by James Howard Kunstler

 

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Source: Clusterfuck Nation

SVB + FTX + SBF = WTF?

“Deny, deflect, minimise & mock your enemies questions. Don’t engage them in good faith, they’re attacking you with a view to undermining you. Don’t fall for it. Don’t give them an inch.” — Aimee Terese on Twitter

     The net effect of all the lying propaganda laid on the public by the people running things lo these many recent years is a peculiar inertia that makes us seemingly impervious to gross political shocks. Momentous things happen and almost instantly get swallowed up by time, as by some voracious cosmic amoeba that thrives on human malignancy. Case in point: the multiple suicide of several giant banks just days ago that prompted “Joe Biden” to nationalize the US banking system.

     As if all the operations around finance in this land were not already unsound and degenerate enough, the alleged president just cancelled moral hazard altogether. It’s now official: from here forward there will be no consequences for banking fraud, poor decision-making, fiduciary recklessness, self-dealing, or any of the other risks attendant to the handling of other people’s money. Bailing out the Silicon Valley Bank and Barney Frank’s deluxe Signature Bank means that the government will now have to bail out every bank every time something goes wrong.

     The trouble, of course, is that the government doesn’t have the means to bail out every bank. Its only resort is to ask the Federal Reserve to summon new money from a magic ether where the illusion of wealth is conjured to paper-over ever greater fissures in the splintering matrix of racketeering that America has become. That will quickly translate into US dollars losing value, that is, accelerating inflation, which is how nature punishes you when your government lies and pretends that it has a bad situation well-in-hand.

     Be advised: the situation is not in-hand and is going to get a whole lot worse as new and subsidiary shocks thunder through the weeks and months ahead, until the whole wicked business blows. Likewise, the reactions of our government will only get more tragi-comically pathetic. The harder this gang of feckless, wannabe control freaks pretends to control events, the faster events spin out of control.

     Money dies when it loses its direct connection to the generation of wealth from the real things of this earth: fuels, crops, metals, materials, labor, and the value-added products made from them. Since that divorce has already happened, the need arises for something else that can function as money (a store of wealth, an index of value, and a medium of exchange). The government will pretend that a Central Bank Digital Currency is that something else. Since banking is now nationalized by the Federal Reserve backstopping everything and everybody, then theoretically all the wealth of the nation is under its command. That would be another illusion.

    This CBDC would not be “money” representing wealth because America’s wealth is going, going, gone, pissed away, falling apart, de-laminating, oxidizing, rusting in the rain, going up in a vapor. Think of all those mortgaged cars on the road racking up the mileage until they’re worthless and all those mortgaged suburban houses built out of particle-board and vinyl smeared all over the landscape, decomposing into their constituent chemicals — over time, a dead loss. And that’s what’s left of our American Dream: coldcocked by entropy and, by extension, the laws of the universe. The CBDC would just be a computerized tracking apparatus for zombies lurching pointlessly around that dead zone… a final insult. The CBDC is already DOA, only the CB doesn’t know it.

     One big mistake so many commentators and observers are making takes us back to the matter of cancelled moral hazard, and of consequence in general: it is the failure to appreciate how much disorder will manifest from the farrago of mindfuckery and misconduct we’ve been subjected to. By which I mean things stop working, including the elemental things like your ability to get food, fix whatever breaks, and keep the lights on.

      The potential disorder is why our government will probably not be able to fix itself. The disorder may go on for quite a while, but eventually the survivors will synergetically fix their circumstances themselves working in-step with the emergent mandates of reality. Having lived through a reality-optional period of history, it will come as an ecstatic shock to learn that the world requires us to pay attention to what is really happening and to act accordingly. We’ll find ways to get food, make some things work, and shine some lights in the darkness, if perhaps not by means we’re familiar with now.

     In the meantime, expect more disordering tragi-comedy from the “Joe Biden” led psychotic regime ruling over us with its drag queen commissars, lawless Lawfare vandals, race hustlers, agents provocateurs, informers, censors, prosecutors, inquisitors, jailers, and propagandists — the worst collection of imbeciles, grifters, and villains ever assembled into political party.

Friday, January 27, 2023

"Tempting the Banksters: Zelensky Courts US Companies" by Binoy Kampmark

  

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Tempting the Banksters: Zelensky Courts US Companies

The transformation of Ukraine into untarnished, saintly victim, symbol of democracy and civil society savaged by brutish Russia, has been nothing less than remarkable. The endemic corruption of a state captured by oligarchic tendencies and its own breed of kleptocrats has somehow gone by the wayside, only interrupted by the occasional symbolic purge by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Lo, before us, the Athenian project writ large in eastern Europe, deserving of protection.

Each arms shipment is made and justified on the basis of Ukraine’s civilizational imperative, proclaimed as not merely European but global. It is a spectacular refit verging on pantomime. But occasionally, a few cracks in the show appear. For one, Zelensky’s desperate effort to make his impoverished and war ravaged country appealing to investors, and who that message is being sold to, is telling.

In his January 23 address to the National Association of State Chambers, the Ukrainian President rubs and massages the US ego with stretchy analogies. He links the creation of a business with defending Ukraine. It seems that fighting and dying in the Ukraine War “is like starting your own business and working day from morning till night, every day, so that one day you can see how your dream is becoming true – when you finally have your own operating business.” (Someone really ought to furnish him with Arthur Miller’s sober corrective Death of a Salesman.)

Ukraine is held out as a receptacle awaiting the joyful stuffing of cash and capital. “We have already managed to attract attention and have cooperation with such giants of the international financial and investment world as Black Rock, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Such American brands as Starlink or Westinghouse have already become part of our, Ukrainian, way.”

Zelensky does little to differentiate civilian and military enterprises, though it is clear he would, at this point, prefer the immediate reward of weapons rather than US banking and financial services. These are all part of that anti-democratic continuum that is the military industrial complex. “Your brilliant defence systems – such as HIMARS or Bradleys – are already uniting our history of freedom with your enterprises. We are waiting for Patriots. We are looking closely at Abrams.”

While he calls the Russian effort predatory in nature, he ignores the predatory corporate nature of those companies he praises and embraces. Goldman Sachs has an extensive record of undermining civil society in a number of countries, leaving a trail of unaccountable financial devastation. It remains, to use Matt Taibbi’s famous description, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.

Most recently, its lengthy involvement in the looting of the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (IMDB) led to the conviction of one single junior partner, a lamentable effort suggesting that white collar crime not only pays but pays handsomely.

Dennis M. Kelleher, President and Chief Executive Office of Better Markets, offers a summary that cannot be bettered. “Without Goldman’s imprimatur and management of the private placement of $6.5 billion of bonds in three offerings in less than a year, there would have been no money to launder or loot, no money to bribe, buy votes and corrupt democracy and justice, and no murder of a prosecutor investigating those activities.”

Of that amount, the then Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his cronies were most grateful, reportedly making off with half the stash. Goldman’s own reward for engineering the entire, jaw dropping steal: $600 million.

These are warnings best heeded in the corridors of Kyiv. But Zelensky is no mood for lessons in US corporate history and its extensive record of global pillaging. Last October, he held a meeting with representatives of the Great Vampire Squid. Goldman Sachs Executive Vice President John Rogers and Co-Head of the Office of Applied Innovation and President of Global Affairs Jared Cohen were on hand to smell out opportunities, blood funnel at the ready. Gullibly, the president told them of his appreciation “when such people are not afraid and come to Ukraine to support us.” Such companies would “bring something new and create jobs for Ukrainians. That is what we need.”

Charmingly, Zelensky wished to convince both Rogers and Cohen that measures were needed to counter the spread of disinformation. Perhaps this was not the strangest briefing: the investment bank is infamous for its own brand of disinformation in cooking the books.

In his National Association of State Chambers address, the Ukrainian president insists that “everyone can become a big business by working with Ukraine”, covering “all sectors – from weapons and defence to construction, from communications to agriculture, from transport to IT, from banks to medicine.” A country weakened and depleted by war is a potential bankster’s playground, offering a chance for cheap pickings, low-cost investment efforts for high returns and minimum regulations to police abuse. And a few lucky politicians can get wealthy along the way too.

Names such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, far from being paragons of democracy, malign it. The boardroom member and shareholder are not electors of political representatives, even if they manipulate electoral outcomes and the decisions of governments. Many Ukrainians are in for a nasty surprise.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.comRead other articles by Binoy.

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