Posted on 12/08/2010 10:48:50 PM PST by Zakeet
Wow! You are a brave soul! Good for you!
They actually handled it suprisingly well. It was worth the time and effort. :)
500 or so Huffies down, 100 million more liberals to go ...
You go!!!
Even if it is not empty, it's pretty much acknowledged everywhere there can't be more than about $350 billion at current prices. BFD. Best case is about 2 months worth of the federal budget backed by gold. Might as well be empty for all the good it could do. Beyond laughable.
But I agree, I think FT Knox was looted some time ago.
Don't know if this news has been posted on FR, but it appears the gold fiasco may be getting a lot hotter:
Jim Rickards: At Least One Swiss Bank Has Started Refusing To Hand Over Physical Gold To Clients
http://www.businessinsider.com/jim-rickards-take-gold-out-of-the-bank-2010-12
Just like our monetary policy.
Every dollar of the federal budget is supposed to be "earmarked" per the constitution. You've apparently bought into the post-FDR "just give us a no-strings check" executive branch propaganda on the topic.
Do you like lifelong bureaucrats, of whom 90% are liberals, making the spending decisions for the fed gov?
Just always keep in mind that one of the factions that you deem part of Conservatism, was pretty much Bill Buckley's creation in 1952. Prior to that it was a faction of liberalism.
-J. K. Galbraith
>>Ron Paul is a monumental pain in the ass. I just hope he doesn’t get carried away, which he will, of course. Yet sometimes it takes a loose cannon when the opposition is so thoroughly entrenched.<<
You sound like a politician who is pissed that he is going to have to obey the Constitution. Yup, it is a monumental pain in the ass but I must admit I love it.
>>The socialist/feds have locked up vast tracts of land that are filled with gold, silver, copper, oil etc... <<
But, but you don’t understand that those lands are Biosphere Reservesthat are under the UN’s control, for the good of all peoples. Each of these Biosphere Reserves, and new reserves yet to be designated, are to be connected by corridors of wilderness, surrounded by “buffer zones,” which are surrounded by “zones of cooperation.” People are to be moved into “sustainable communities.”
>People are to be moved into “sustainable communities.”
“Sustainable communities” is another way of saying “concentration camp,” no?
Don't strain yourself now when taking such monumental leaps of logic. Ron Paul may follow the Constitution as he sees it but his grasp of it is sorely lacking.
Wait, you’re still posting here?!? I never really agreed with you on much, but I used to love your rants.
Odds are you haven’t heard of the monetary policy subcommittee. Officially known as the House Subcommittee for Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, it’s a subdivision of the House Financial Services Committee that has mostly occupied itself with pressing questions of issuing commemorative coins and whether or not to eliminate the penny.
That’s about to change.
Ron Paul, the Republican Congressman from Texas, is the ranking member of the monetary policy subcommittee, and when the next Congress takes over he’ll chair the subcommittee.
And Congressman Paul has some big plans. “I will approach that committee like no one has ever approached it because we’re living in times like no one has ever seen,” Paul said in an interview with NetNet.
Paul said his first priority will be to open up the books of the Federal Reserve to the American people. “We need to create transparency there. To see what it is they are buying and lending, and who it is they are dealing with,” Paul said.
Paul mentioned that he hoped to use subcommittee hearings to educate the public about the causes of business cycles—which he believes are mainly attributable to monetary manipulation by central bankers. Monetary reform is also on the agenda.
Paul is a noted advocate of the gold standard. “We will have to have monetary reform,” Paul said. “I think those on the other side of this issue are already planning. They are going to try to replace a bad system with an equally bad system.”
The Fed today released details identifying thousands of transactions including bonds bought under its mortgage purchase program and asset-backed commercial paper pledged under its Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money-Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility.
The central bank yesterday released data on 21,000 transactions from $3.3 trillion in emergency lending to stem the financial crisis. July’s Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to disclose the names of borrowers, the size and interest rates of loans, and “information identifying the types and amounts of collateral pledged or assets transferred.”
For three of the Fed’s six emergency facilities, the central bank released information on groups of collateral it accepted by asset type and rating, without specifying individual securities. Among them was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, created in March 2008 to provide loans to brokers as Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.
“This is a half-step,” said former Atlanta Fed research director Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. “If you were going to audit the facilities, then would this enable you to do an audit? The answer is ‘No,’ you would have to go in and look at the individual amounts of collateral and how it was broken down to do that. And that is the spirit of what the requirements were in Dodd-Frank.” Fed spokeswoman Susan Stawick in Washington declined to comment.
Public Disclosure The public disclosure of the lending data should have been prevented because it could spur runs on the banks listed, said Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University. “That’s a very destructive process,” he said. Still, with the data released, “if you’re justified in getting the information, then you’re justified to get enough information to judge the risk the Fed took,” he said.
Under its definition of the “ratings unavailable” category for collateral posted under the PDCF, the Fed said that “in some limited cases, ineligible collateral was pledged, but it was reviewed with the clearing banks for exclusion from future pledges.” The central bank didn’t elaborate.
The secrecy surrounding Fed bailouts led lawmakers to demand disclosure after the central bank approved aid dwarfing the federal government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Collateral Pledged The loans extended to primary dealers under the PDCF by the New York Fed were recourse loans, meaning the potential liability of borrowers who defaulted was greater than the value of the collateral pledged, according to the Fed.
Primary dealers are the firms authorized to deal in government securities directly with the Fed. At its peak, borrowing under the facility came to about $156 billion. It is “specifically impossible” to know how much risk taxpayers were taking by looking at pools of collateral grouped by asset class and rating, said Sylvain Raynes, a principal at R&R Consulting in New York and co-author of “Elements of Structured Finance,” published in May by Oxford University Press.
“I need to know the individual composition because a $2 billion pool can be one asset of $2 billion, which would be very risky, or 2,000 assets of $1 million each, and that’s not risky at all,” Raynes said. “The spirit of Dodd-Frank was not respected, and they used the vagueness in the wording of the law to weasel out of fulfilling their duty to the American people.”
Corporate Debt Over the life of the PDCF, $1.5 trillion of collateral with “ratings unavailable” was pledged, according to the Fed data. That’s larger than the $1.39 trillion of municipal debt pledged. Corporate debt posted totaled $2.35 trillion. A total of $8.95 trillion was lent over the life of the PDCF, backed by $9.67 trillion in collateral.
The Fed released details identifying thousands of transactions including bonds bought under its mortgage purchase program and asset-backed commercial paper pledged under its Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money-Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility. The central bank also omitted details on individual securities pledged as collateral under its Term Auction Facility and its Term Securities Lending Facility, which was announced on March 11, 2008, as the first program under which the Fed planned to lend to non-bank dealers.
The Fed authorized its New York branch to establish the PDCF on March 16, 2008, the same day it made commitments to convince JPMorgan Chase & Co. to buy troubled dealer Bear Stearns. A run on New York-based Bear Stearns was seen as threatening the stability of global markets, and the PDCF for the first time allowed dealers to borrow on a collateralized basis from the New York Fed.
Lehman Collapse In September that year, as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. was on the brink of filing for bankruptcy, the PDCF was expanded to accept all types of collateral pledged in tri-party repo deals, including high-yield, high-risk securities and equities. The previous program only accepted investment-grade debt securities.
The first peak of PDCF lending occurred in April 2008 at nearly $40 billion, according to the New York Fed. As financial markets improved, banks reduced their balance-sheet risk and the PDCF pricing became less attractive, usage of the facility fell off and stopped in mid-July that year. Borrowing then leapt to over $140 billion in mid-September 2008 from no activity the previous week, according to the New York Fed. The program ended Feb. 1 this year.
Under the TSLF, dealers could swap investment-grade securities, including mortgage bonds, for U.S. Treasuries for 28 days. Usage peaked at $235.5 billion in October 2008, and the program was also closed in February.
The secrecy surrounding Fed bailouts led lawmakers to demand disclosure after the central bank approved aid dwarfing the federal government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The $786B TARP Bailout is now being called, "A MASTERFUL DECEIT." Then-Secy Paulson may not have pulled a fast one when he testified in favor of the TARP before Congress----but Congress' phony outrage is a puzzlement. If HR 1424 was a 'MASTERFUL DECEIT' then CONGRESS didn't do its job.
TITLE I—TROUBLED ASSETS RELIEF PROGRAM (list of required 'Congressional Oversight' sections)
Sec. 101. Purchases of troubled assets.
Sec. 102. Insurance of troubled assets.
Sec. 103. Considerations.
Sec. 104. Financial Stability Oversight Board.
Sec. 105. Reports.
Sec. 107. Contracting procedures.
Sec. 108. Conflicts of interest.
Sec. 111. Executive compensation and corporate governance.
Sec. 116. Oversight and audits.
Sec. 118. Funding.
Sec. 119. Judicial review and related matters.
Sec. 121. Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Sec. 125. Congressional Oversight Panel.
Sec. 127. Cooperation with the FBI.
Sec. 129. Disclosures on exercise of loan authority.
ANALYSIS In HR 1424, there are enough rules, regs and CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT REQUIRED that not One Thin Dime should have been 'misspent.' So if anything crooked did go on Congress should look in a mirror. They dropped the ball -- again. Keep on mind that the same Gangster Government is running the trillion dollar O'care ripoff.
It’s Official: Ron Paul Is Head Of Monetary Policy Subcommittee!
All right! This is KEY. Total Military Victory!
Ron Paul wants to "audit the Fed and open its books" despite having that exact ability at least twice a year, during Semiannual Report on Monetary Policy by the Fed Chairman, formerly known as the Humphrey-Hawkins testimony (RIP, 1978-2000).
We have the most transparent Fed since its inception (e.g., Bernanke was telegraphing and explaining the reasons for QE2 for several months before announcing it) but some of the Fed's monetary operations in real time should remain secret - to protect weak links and the financial integrity of the U.S. and even world's financial system from potential attacks - yet Ron Paul's intent is on being an equivalent of walking, talking financial Wikileaks...
Making the Fed less independent and more "accountable" to political interests and politicians (or better yet, "abolish" the independent central bank) is the left's long-time dream (Socialist Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders is in the forefront of the attack on the Fed and an attempt to make the Fed and the monetary policy a scapegoat whenever it becomes obvious that fiscal and regulatory policy decisions and laws the politicians themselves enacted, have harmed the economy or the taxpayers. Central bank is an easy political target, especially in the country where it doesn't usually get much attention and its purpose and operations are little understood and where financial / economic "education" of the populace is very poor.
Specifically, for instance, new Dodd-Frank FinReg (another Full Employment Act for the U.S. lawyers) requires the Fed to disclose temporary loans - think about what it would do in the recent liquidity crisis / credit squeeze - it would expose the borrowers, the weakest large financial and non-financial institutions to the panic, attacks and raids.
For example, when the "news" headlines recently said that the Fed disclosed the details of $3.3T (or even $9T by some accounts) in PDCF "crisis loans" over two years (including a few foreign banks and non-financial U.S. entities), it created a wave of shock and awe... Imagine what kind of panic this kind of "news" would create if it happened in "real time" during the credit crunch.
Here is what headlines or most articles didn't mention about this Fed PDCF lending:
Did Fed Really Lend $9 Trillion Under Its Primary Dealer Credit Facility? - CNBC, by John Carney, 2010 December 01
Beginning in March of 2008, the Fed undertook 1,376 transactions under the facility, with loans ranging from a $10 million to nearly $48 billion. The largest single loan went to Barclays Capital on September 18, 2008 — the day after Barclays agreed to buy Lehman Brothers. The biggest borrowers were Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, each receiving loans that total more than $1 trillion. Although the total numbers appear very large, the Fed never had anywhere near $8.95 trillion of loans outstanding under the program. The loans made under the PDCF were overnight loans, which were rapidly repaid or rolled over into new loans. This inflates the total number because the Fed counts each roll-over as a new loan. ..... < snip > ..... The Fed's data includes details on more than 21,000 transactions with financial companies and foreign central banks. The Primary Dealer Credit Facility was created in March 2008 in the wake of the collapse of Bear Stearns. It was an overnight loan facility that provided funding to primary dealers in exchange for a wide range of eligible collateral. The facility was intended to relieve pressures in the "repo" market - the overnight collateralized debt market Wall Street firms use to finance their securities portfolio. ..... < snip > Although the Federal Reserve made loans totaling $8.95 trillion to primary dealers in exchange for a wide range of collateral under its Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the size of the facility was likely never more than a fraction of that amount.
For example, Barclays is listed as borrowing $14 billion on four different subsequent days, rolling it over daily starting on September 18 2008. Yet these loans are listed as four separate $14 billion transactions which total $56B and therefore cumulatively counted as $56B, while the short-term exposure never exceeded $14B. These loans were serial (cumulative), not parallel (simultaneous) with balances repaid almost immediately, with little credit risk and making a profit for the Fed.
Basically, the Fed has assumed and was conducting the commercial paper "repo" operations in a market that had the commercial credit frozen (especially after Lehman's bankruptcy and subsequent shutdown of Reserve Primary Fund as the result of the fund's "breaking a buck" - at the time, having more than $60B in "repo" market assets) and LIBOR borrowing rates shooting up to unaffordable levels, making "normal" credit market lending all but impossible. To Bernanke's great cedit he established the facility when he saw the credit markets starting to freeze after Bear Stearns debacle, due to uncertainty of rapidly deflating assets valuations.
Strains From Financial Crisis Were Worse Than Understood - CNBC, by John Carney, 2010 December 01
Moreover, just Six Banks Got Over 98% of the Fed's PDFC Money - CNBC, by Ash Bennington, 2010 December 03
But the concentration of the vast majority of PDFC funds was far narrower than that. Institutions that ultimately went on to become just six banks — Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan — received at total of about $8.78 trillion through the PDFC program. That $8.78 trillion figure represents over 98 percent of the funds lent by the PDFC program. While the numbers are dizzying, there are two important qualifications. First, PDFC lending totals represent the aggregate amount of overnight borrowing by the banks — not the amounts outstanding at any one time. ..... < snip > < snip > ..... Over the lifecycle of the PDCF program, The Federal Reserve lent a total of about $8.95 trillion to primary dealers of government securities. (This group is already a very small club: Currently, the New York Fed lists a total of 18 institutions authorized to perform this function.)
Goldman Sachs (GS) had 84 PDCF transactions with the largest being $18B in October 2008.
Morgan Stanley (MS) had 212 (largest transaction was $47B in September 2008).
Citigroup (C) used the facility almost daily until April 2009 (largest was almost $18B in November 2008).
Bank of America (BAC) used the facility more than 1000 times, almost daily until May 2009 (largest was $11B in October 2008).
J.P.Morgan (JPM) used PDCF only once in September 2008 and twice in October 2008, but it used the facility almost daily since acquisition of Bear Stearns from late March 2008 through June 2008.
If Ron Paul joins Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich and other politicians who want to politicize the institution of the Central Bank by "auditing" or "abolishing" the Fed (to make the accountability for the debt their own irresponsible fiscal policies, budgets and pork-laden bills create) then it's fair to ask - with friends like these who needs enemies?
If "sane" Ron Paul and the "Kings of pork" House committees chairmen become the faces of Republican Party in the new Congress, then GOP didn't learn anything about the responsibility of being in power and 2012 (and beyond) will be much more difficult than it needs to be...
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