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The Federal Reserve and Bank of America Initiate a Coup to Dump Billions of Dollars of Losses on the American Taxpayer Bloomberg reports that Bank of America is dumping derivatives onto a subsidiary which is insured by the government – i.e. taxpayers. Yves Smith notes: If you have any doubt that Bank of America is going down, this development should settle it …. Both [professor of economics and law, and former head S&L prosecutor] Bill Black (who I interviewed just now) and I see this as a desperate move by Bank of America’s management, a de facto admission that they...

The US dollar is getting perilously close to losing its status as the world’s reserve currency. Should it cross the line, the 2008 financial crisis could look like a summer storm. Yes, worries about insolvency in Europe dominate the headlines. Last week, Standard & Poor’s cut Spain’s bond rating to BBB+ — a clear sign that Europe’s financial crisis is far from over. But America’s escalating debt problem is far more likely to precipitate a truly global crisis, because the dollar has for decades played such a central role in the world economy. How bad is the US problem? Former...

HIZBOLLAH VICTIMS BRING HISTORIC CIVIL SUIT AGAINST MEGA-BANK May 12, 2008 For Immediate Release VICTIMS OF HIZBOLLAH MISSILE ATTACKS BRING HISTORIC CIVIL ACTION AGAINST UBS IN NEW YORK FEDERAL COURT A group of American victims of Iranian sponsored terror have filed a civil action in the United States District Court for the Southern District against the Swiss mega-bank, UBS AG. The plaintiffs, all of whom had family members injured or killed in Iranian-backed terror attacks, allege that UBS' unlawful eight year-long provision of financial services to the Islamic Republic at the time Iran was providing material support to terrorist organizations...

Chinese banks will be allowed to short sell dollars from April 16 onwards, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) said on Monday. The change comes into effect to coincide with the widening of the yuan's daily trading band to 1 percent, a landmark reform in the process to allow market forces a greater role in setting the value of the tightly-controlled Chinese currency that was announced on Saturday. The move to allow banks to have negative positions in settlement and sales of foreign exchange is designed to "promote price discovery of the yuan exchange rate", SAFE said in a...

The dollar has lost 85 percent of its purchasing power since the government scrapped the gold standard in the early 1970s, and it's up to Congress to obey the Constitution and bring the system back, says historian and investor Lewis E. Lehrman, author of the book "The True Gold Standard."

In the second half of the show, Max talks to Jim Rickards about a BRICS currency, gold and the fog of currency war.

The U.S. dollar has probably been the closest thing to a true global currency that the world has ever seen. For decades, the use of the U.S. dollar has been absolutely dominant in international trade. This has had tremendous benefits for the U.S. financial system and for U.S. consumers, and it has given the U.S. government tremendous power and influence around the globe. Today, more than 60 percent of all foreign currency reserves in the world are in U.S. dollars. But there are big changes on the horizon. The mainstream media in the United States has been strangely silent...

Iran may impose a blockade on oil exports that threaten the world’s economies as a reaction to new unprecedented sanctions, says its former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian. Belgium’s Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which handles most international bank transfers, has eliminated Iran from its services. The move is a “direct result of international and multilateral action to intensify financial sanctions against Iran," said SWIFT CEO Lazaro Campos. The embargo on Iran took effect Saturday and reduces Iran’s ability to use a secure network to receive payments. It also will affect Iranians wanting to receive money from relatives outside...

No matter how much President Obama protests, the simple fact is that he continues to oppose and mock and disparage oil and gas drilling. He is a prisoner of the environmental left, and he remains on the wrong side of energy history. And that’s exactly why he has a 59 percent negative rating on the economy, according to a recent poll, even though jobs and other indicators have actually picked up. It’s about $4 or higher gas at the pump. Polls overwhelmingly show that Americans want drilling in ANWR and offshore, and that they want hydraulic fracturing of shale for...

“Obama Defends Energy Policies” is the headline over a Reuters dispatch in respect of gasoline prices. It reports on the president’s launch of what the British wire service characterizes as “the most comprehensive defense to date of his energy policies.” It says the president is “pushing back against election-year attacks from Republicans” who say his energy policies “are to blame for high gas prices that are eroding his popularity with voters.” The problem with all this is that it’s not the energy policies that are driving up gasoline prices. It’s the monetary policies, and if the Republicans can’t manage to...

For anyone wondering how the abandonment of the dollar reserve status would look like we have a Hollow Men reference: not with a bang, but a whimper... Or in this case a whole series of bilateral agreements that quietly seeks to remove the US currency as an intermediate. Such as these: "World's Second (China) And Third Largest (Japan) Economies To Bypass Dollar, Engage In Direct Currency Trade", "China, Russia Drop Dollar In Bilateral Trade", "China And Iran To Bypass Dollar, Plan Oil Barter System", "India and Japan sign new $15bn currency swap agreement", and now this: "Iran, Russia Replace Dollar...

.........America’s economy is intrinsically aligned with fuel prices because the lifeblood of our economy is oil. Four-dollar-a-gallon gas will not just sting at the pump but also will put the squeeze on every American for milk and cookies at the grocery store and every product we purchase because they are all delivered to stores by truck. ...As gas prices continue to rise, consumer debt probably also will rise as American families, already strapped for cash, will use credit cards to pay for the increased fuel costs. Ultimately, higher gas prices put the squeeze on all things related to the economy,...

Panic is in the air as gasoline prices move above $4.00 per gallon. Politicians and pundits are rounding up the usual suspects, looking for someone or something to blame for this latest outrage to middle class family budgets. In a rare display of bipartisanship, President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner are both wringing their hands over the prospect of seeing their newly extended Social Security tax cut gobbled up by rising gasoline costs. Unfortunately, the talking heads that are trying to explain the reasons for high oil prices are missing one tiny detail. Oil prices aren’t high...

[...]Elsässer went on to point out that peace in Europe after world war II had democracy as its fundamental cause, not the European Union or the euro. Politicians and civil servants arguing the case of the euro and the supposed need to save it falsely equate the euro or the European Union with Europe as such, which is patently false. Further, he argued that direct democracy would be a solution to the crisis of confidence in the EU and the European political leadership, pointing to Switzerland as an example of how this can be used to keep power with the...

Out on the campaign trail, Fed head Ben Bernanke is an unpopular guy. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have both said they would replace Bernanke, not reappoint him. Rep. Ron Paul would swap the whole Federal Reserve monetary system for a gold-linked dollar, making the yellow metal legal tender. And it was Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, before he dropped out of the race, who said more quantitative easing by the Fed would be "almost treasonous." Republicans in Washington are equally unimpressed by Bernanke. Rep. Paul Ryan recently criticized the Fed for bankrolling our huge budget deficits and thereby accommodating...

Let's think about the kind of mess that we're in. Federal 2010 Medicare and Medicaid expenditures totaled $800 billion. The projected annual growth of both programs is about 7 percent. Social Security expenditures are more than $700 billion a year. According to the 2009 Social Security and Medicare trustees reports, by 2030, 49 percent of federal revenues will go for Social Security and Medicare payments. The unfunded liability of both programs is already $106 trillion.But not to worry. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it's possible to sustain today's level of federal spending and even achieve a balanced budget. All...

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) has made it official: After its latest two day meeting, it announced its goal to devalue the dollar by 33% over the next 20 years. The debauch of the dollar will be even greater if the Fed exceeds its goal of a 2 percent per year increase in the price level. An increase in the price level of 2% in any one year is barely noticeable. Under a gold standard, such an increase was uncommon, but not unknown. The difference is that when the dollar was as good as gold, the years of...

As is well known now, American Airlines filed for bankruptcy toward the end of last year. In one certain sense this shouldn’t surprise us given how its legacy competitors did much the same earlier in the new millennium. After that, the origins of our best-known and oldest air carriers perhaps foretold their modern problems in ways most don’t understand today. As T.A. Heppenheimer put it in his 1994 book Turbulent Skies, “Government actions brought forth the first air carriers in both Europe and the United States.” Rather than creations of the private sector, politicians formed notable carriers such as American...

[Background History on...] James G. Rickards is a writer, lawyer and economist with over 30 years experience in global capital markets. He is Senior Managing Director at Omnis, Inc., a consulting firm in McLean, VA and is the leading practitioner at the intersection of global capital markets and national security. His advice to clients from 2002 to 2006 included early warning of impending financial collapse, the rise of sovereign wealth funds, the decline of the dollar and the sharp rise in gold prices years in advance of these events. He has held senior executive positions at Citibank, Long-Term Capital Management...

Yesterday the Japanese Finance Ministry made a whopper of an announcement: in the year ending March 2013, total Japanese debt will surpass one quadrillion yen, or ¥1,086,000,000,000,000. This is roughly in line with the Zero Hedge expectations that by this March total Japanese debt would surpass one quadrillion yen. In USD terms, at today's exchange rate, this is precisely $14 trillion. And while smaller than America's $15.4 trillion (net of all post debt ceiling breach auctions), which was $14 trillion about a year ago, the GDP backing this notional amount of debt, which just so happens is greater than...

Geithner: I won't serve second termBy Peter Schroeder - 01/25/12 04:27 PM ET Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner does not anticipate serving a second term under President Obama. Geithner said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that he is "pretty confident" the president would not ask him to stay on if he is reelected. "I'm confident he'll be president. But I'm also confident he's going to have the privilege of having another secretary of the Treasury," he said, adding that he planned to do "something else." Geithner mulled leaving the administration this summer once a deal to raise the federal debt...

Canada needs to look beyond its southern neighbour for markets because the United States economy is unlikely to ever fully recover, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney said Sunday. In an interview with CTV's Question Period, Carney said that it is vital for Canada to look for new trading partners in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere to prevent the economy from being dragged down by the U.S. "It's going to take a number of years before they get back to the U.S. that we used to know - in fact, they are not, in our opinion, ultimately going to get...

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Newt Gingrich has moved to capture some Republican voters who lean toward Ron Paul and other Republicans who were Jack Kemp followers by naming two gold bugs to the Gingrich future team of advisers. The former House speaker says he intends to appoint investment banker Lewis E. Lehrman, famous in the Reagan era for his red suspenders and gold-standard advocacy, and Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, as President Gingrich’s Gold Commission - if and when of course Mr. Gingrich wins both the Republican nomination and the general election in November. Mr. Paul, a Texas...

...Therefore, this whole idea that we can live the high-life, be whatever we dream and never have to pay the consequences is simply dead wrong. The confusion that the Gold Standard advocates have created is this misconception that we print money and that is “fiat” that results in inflation. This is a far too simplistic view of finance. It presumes “printing” of actual dollars without restraint. Simply put, HAD WE PRINTED dollars instead of BORROWING DOLLARS, the national debt would be about 40% of its current size. Printing is MUCH LESS inflationary than borrowing. The reason, borrowing necessitates the creation...

The political and environmental debates swirling around the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas miss a crucial point, energy analysts say: The Canadian oil is needed to replace fast-dwindling production from two other major suppliers of oil Mexico and Venezuela. The United States remains the largest consumer of oil in the world, requiring more than 8 million barrels a day of fuel imports to feed its appetite, with nearly half of that coming from oil-rich neighbors in Latin America as recently as 2005. But oil production south of the border has fallen off dramatically, and Canadian...

Foreign individuals, pension funds and trusts will be able to subscribe to public offers of an Indian company. "Qualified foreign investors will be able to invest in initial public offers or follow-on public offers as well," a finance ministry official said. The issue of voting rights for QFIs is also under discussion with market regulator Sebi, which is expected to issue a detailed notification by January 15, the official said. India had on Sunday announced its decision to allow QFIs to directly invest in the Indian equity market. A QFI is an individual, group or association resident in a foreign...

At a meeting in London last month I listened with mild amusement as a senior sales executive discussed the rollout of a banking campaign to promote the rise of China’s renminbi as a global currency. Advertising in the U.S. would make little sense, as Americans aren’t ready to believe in — much less prepare for — the inevitable day when the Chinese currency overtakes the U.S. dollar as a major reserve currency, ran the strategy, detailed by the executive with the requisite cultural dig. It’s certainly just coincidence that the U.S. Dollar Index DXY is up more than 4% since...

Vice President Biden announced Tuesday that the U.S. Mint would discontinue production of presidential dollar coins. Stopping production of the coins is part of the Obama administration’s Campaign to Cut Waste. Biden’s announcement came at a Cabinet meeting focused on that campaign.

Gold has fallen about 6% over the past three months, amid macro conditions that would appear bullish for the metal. What's going on? Bespoke encourages a longer-term perspective - the yellow metal's still up about 20% this year, and doing just fine in comparison to its average 5-year and 30-year returns on a yearly basis: "relative to just about any other asset class this year, gold is still glistening." Robert Sinn adds a technician's take on the metal and its miners. With all the uncertainty from Europe, the market could rise sharply from here or drop another big leg down....

The U.S. Federal Reserve, acting with five other central banks, took steps Wednesday to boost the troubled global financial system by making it cheaper for banks to trade in U.S. dollars. The Fed -- along with central banks of the eurozone, England, Japan, Switzerland and Canada -- announced a coordinated plan to lower prices on dollar liquidity swaps beginning on December 5, and extending these swap arrangements to February 1, 2013.

ABOARD A US MILITARY AIRCRAFT - The top US military officer told Reuters on Wednesday he did not know whether Israel would alert the United States ahead of time if it decided to take military action against Iran. General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also acknowledged differences in perspective between the United States and Israel over the best way to handle Iran and its nuclear program. He said the United States was convinced that sanctions and diplomatic pressure was the right path to take on Iran, along with "the stated intent not to take any...

The large, deadly explosion at an Iran military base in Iran on Nov. 12, which Iranian authorities have called an accident that set back research work there by a few days, appears to have been far more devastating than their description suggested, according to an analysis of newly released commercial satellite images of the blast site. The images reveal vast destruction and chaotic disarray across a sprawling complex composed of more than a dozen buildings and large structures. The Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington, made the satellite images public Monday, along with an analysis...

PARIS, Nov 30 (KUNA) - The French Foreign Ministry on Wednesday summoned Iran's current senior envoy to Paris to hear a protest over the incidents and damage caused at the British embassy in Tehran Tuesday. French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero indicated that the Iranian Charge d'Affaires, Amir Miri, has been called in to the Ministry and was told that France "very firmly condemns the attack and unacceptable pillage" at the British mission. France had already condemned the apparently organized incident in the embassy, when a group of protesters ran amok, breaking furniture and throwing files and other items around...

LONDON (AP) — Britain's foreign secretary on Wednesday ordered all Iranian diplomats out of the U.K within 48 hours following attacks on the British embassy and a residential compound in Tehran.

Donald Trump doesn't simply believe that President Barack Obama was not born in this country - he thinks Obama will start a war to win reelection. Trump posted this ridiculous and baseless tweet a few minutes ago: In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.

Force is being used to attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. On Monday, an explosion rocked the city of Isfahan in western Iran, site of a conversion facility that prepares uranium for enrichment at other sites. Conflicting reports attributed the explosion to either an accident at a gas station or a military training incident, or they denied it even happened. The blast came two weeks after Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Gen. Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam and 20 other IRGC members were killed in a massive explosion at a base near the village of Bidganeh, southwest of Tehran. The base...

I received via email the following statement from the Confederation of Iranian Students and the Iranian Freedom Institute regarding the Basij-led attack (that's what they're calling it - the Iranians are calling the attackers 'students') on the British embassy in Tehran on Tuesday. As the U.S. and its European allies begin to impose effective sanctions on the Islamic Republic, the western democracies should anticipate that the regime will initiate more of these fully-authorized, staged incidents under the guise of a student movement. The so-called students, of course, are plain-clothed basiji following orders from the regime. Even Moussa Ghornani, a member...

Source, target of Isfahan blast unclear; satellite image shows extensive damage to missile base blown-up Nov. 12. A mysterious explosion rocked the Iranian city of Isfahan on Monday, home to a key facility in Tehran’s nuclear program. The source and target of the explosion were unclear. Some reports claimed that it took place in a military base and others claimed it was a gas explosion. Isfahan hosts a nuclear facility involved in processing uranium which is fed to the Natanz fuel enrichment facility. Two weeks ago, on November 12, an explosion hit an Iranian military base near the town of...

Following the failure of the supercommittee, the U.S. government’s AAA credit rating was placed on a “negative outlook” Monday by Fitch Ratings, indicating a more than 50 percent chance the country gets slapped with another downgrade in the next two years. “By postponing the difficult decisions on tax and spending until after forthcoming congressional and presidential elections, the scale and pace of required deficit reduction will consequently be greater,” Fitch said in a statement. “Conversely, failure to reach agreement in 2013 on a credible deficit reduction plan and a worsening of the economic and fiscal outlook would likely result in...

With fiscal time bombs ticking in both Europe and the United States, the pertinent question for now seems to be which will explode first. For much of the past few months it looked as if Europe was set to blow. But Angela Merkel's refusal to support a Federal Reserve style bailout of European sovereigns and her recent statement the she had no Hank Paulson style fiscal bazooka in her handbag, has lowered the heat. In contrast, the utter failure of the Congressional Super Committee in the United States to come up with any shred of success in addressing America's fiscal...

Nervous investors around the globe are accelerating their exit from the debt of European governments and banks, increasing the risk of a credit squeeze that could set off a downward spiral. Financial institutions are dumping their vast holdings of European government debt and spurning new bond issues by countries like Spain and Italy. And many have decided not to renew short-term loans to European banks, which are needed to finance day-to-day operations. If this trend continues, it risks creating a vicious cycle of rising borrowing costs, deeper spending cuts and slowing growth, which is hard to get out of, especially...

"President Obama is overseas on a nine-day Blame America First tour. He’s ostensibly spending time on the other side of the Pacific to explore ways the United States can work better with Asian economies. Instead, he’s using his time in the spotlight to criticize the nation he’s supposed to be leading."

U.S. Dollar Teetering On The Abyss Currencies / US Dollar Nov 15, 2011 - 03:01 AM By: Toby Connor We all better hope I'm wrong on this one, but I think the CRB just put in its three year cycle low in October. I'm also afraid that Bernanke has done irreparable damage to the dollar. If I'm right about both of those assumptions then we are on the brink of a historic inflationary period. I've marked the major three year cycle bottoms in both the CRB index and the dollar index on the chart below with blue arrows. (Actually the...

ALERT: Yen Plunges Big-Time After Japan Intervenes In The Market Joe Weisenthal Oct. 30, 2011, 9:50 PM After watching its currency hit new post-WWII high after post-WWII high against the dollar, finally Japan has moved to intervene. Here's a chart of the dollar vs. yen via FinViz. As you can see, the dollar has surged against the yen in the past few minutes. The super-strong yen has been a source of major consternation for Japanese exporters, for whom the strong yen has made business difficult. Nintendo, for example, blamed the super-strong yen for a quarterly loss.

Budget: Given all the hoopla, you'd think the deficit Supercommittee was hacking away at the size of government without mercy. In fact, even the $1.2 trillion in hoped-for cuts will do nothing to attack our long-term deficits. Sometimes it's worse to pretend to be doing something about a serious problem than it is to do nothing at all. That's where we are in our talks about our out-of-control spending. Just as the European Union did, we're going through two months of talks about what to do about long-term fiscal imbalances. Under the deal that kept the government from shutting down...

Federal Reserve officials are starting to build a case for a new program of buying mortgage-backed securities to boost the ailing economy, though they appear unlikely to move swiftly. The idea would be to target any new efforts by the central bank at the parts of the economy that are most severely impeding a recovery—the housing and mortgage markets—by working to push down mortgage rates. Lower mortgage rates, in turn, could encourage more home buying and mortgage-refinancing, and help the economy by freeing up cash for consumers to spend on other goods and services. Mortgage rates are already very low,...

<p>The number is out, and it's HOT!</p> <p>PPI hs jumped 0.8%, well above the 0.2% analysts had expected.</p> <p>Core PPI, which excludes food and energy, was only up 0.2%, which is still above the 0.1% that analysts had expected.</p> <p>The culprit? Blame food and energy.</p>

Since one can not get a downgrade of a bank during market hours for fears of springing who knows what circuit breakers, Fitch had to wait until just after the market close to release its latest market surprise which consisted of a "watch negative" announcement on the following banks Barclays, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman, Morgan Stanley; others it just slashed some by multiple notches, among which: Landesbank Berlin IDR downgraded to A+ from AA-; Lloyds Banking Group IDR downgraded to A from AA-; RBS IDR downgraded to A from AA-; and most importantly UBS IDR downgraded...

*FUBAR: A slang term originating in WWII, (broadly) meaning “suboptimal”. How many times in the past four years have you read the sentence, “This time, it’s different”? Well, in the case of the U.S. economy, this time it really is different. The most recent recession, which the NBER says started in January 2008 and ended in June 2009, was severe, but it was not that much worse than the downturn of 1981 – 1982. The recession that started in mid-1981 lasted almost as long as the 2008 – 2009 downturn (16 months vs. 18 months), and actually produced higher peak...

In China, Russia's Putin calls US a parasite AP– 8 hrs ago BEIJING (AP) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is likening the U.S. to a parasite following his meetings with Chinese leaders to push ahead energy deals and draw the once wary neighbors closer. In an interview with Chinese state media released Tuesday, Putin said that the U.S. itself is not a parasite for the world economy but that its dollar monopoly is. Putin said his criticism was meant to help find a solution to problems in the world economy.