Articles by Ellen Brown
November 11th, 2009
A LITTLE POPULIST RETRIBUTION: MAKING WALL STREET PAY ITS FAIR SHARE
Wall Street's speculative traders have managed to trade in practically the only products left on the planet that are not subject to a sales tax. The fact that trades in “financial products” remain untaxed suggests a tidy way the public could recover some of its bailout money.
October 31st, 2009
CUT WALL STREET OUT! HOW STATES CAN FINANCE THEIR OWN RECOVERY
Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in.
October 11th, 2009
REVIVING THE LOCAL ECONOMY WITH PUBLICLY-OWNED BANKS
The credit crunch is getting worse on Main Street, despite a Wall Street bailout now in the trillions of dollars. The Fed may have played all its cards, but state and local governments still hold a few aces. Some local politicians are looking into the feasibility of opening their own publicly-owned banks, providing them with their own credit machines.
October 1st, 2009
THE IMF CATAPULTS FROM SHUNNED AGENCY TO GLOBAL CENTRAL BANK
“A year ago,” said law professor Ross Buckley on Australia’s ABC News last week, “nobody wanted to know the International Monetary Fund. Now it’s the organiser for the international stimulus package which has been sold as a stimulus package for poor countries.”
The IMF may have catapulted to a more exalted status than that. According to Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for scientific consulting firm Omnis, the unannounced purpose of last week’s G20 Summit in Pittsburgh was that “the IMF is being anointed as the global central bank.”
September 19th, 2009
LANDMARK DECISION PROMISES MASSIVE RELIEF FOR HOMEOWNERS AND TROUBLE FOR BANKS
A landmark ruling in a recent Kansas Supreme Court case may have given millions of distressed homeowners the legal wedge they need to avoid foreclosure. In Landmark National Bank v. Kesler, 2009 Kan. LEXIS 834, the Kansas Supreme Court held that a nominee company called MERS has no right or standing to bring an action for foreclosure. MERS is an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a private company that registers mortgages electronically and tracks changes in ownership. The significance of the holding is that if MERS has no standing to foreclose, then nobody has standing to foreclose – on 60 million mortgages...
September 7th, 2009
ECONOMIC 9-11: DID LEHMAN BROTHERS FALL OR WAS IT PUSHED
The disastrous collapse of Lehman Brothers on 9-11-08 was the catalyst that changed the rules of the game for the big Wall Street financial players. The banks would henceforth be bailed out by the taxpayers, no matter what the cost. Was the Lehman bankruptcy the result of "market forces" or was it engineered? If the bank was pushed over the brink by invisible hands, whose hands were they and what goal was being served?
August 30th, 2009
THE MERCURY MISCHIEF: AS OBAMA WARNS OF HAZARDS, THE FDA APPROVES MERCURY DENTAL FILLINGS
The government seems to be speaking out of both sides of its mouth, as the President preaches one thing and the FDA does another. If we are going to have “smarter medicine that really works,” we need to get politics, lobbies and cronyism out of science.
August 17th, 2009
THE SECRET OF CHINA’S MIRACLE ECONOMY:
THE GOVERNMENT OWNS THE BANKS RATHER
THAN THE REVERSE
While the U.S. spends trillions of dollars to bail out its banking system, leaving its economy to languish, China is being called a “miracle economy” that has decoupled from the rest of the world. As the rest of the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s, China has maintained a phenomenal 8% annual growth rate. Those are the reports, but commentators are dubious. They ask how that growth is possible, when other countries relying heavily on exports have suffered major downturns and remain in the doldrums.
August 5th, 2009
THE PUBLIC OPTION IN BANKING: HOW WE CAN BEAT WALL STREET AT ITS OWN GAME
President Obama has repeated his call for a public option in health care, in order to create some competition for the insurance companies and keep them honest. We the people need to call for a public option in banking, in order to create some competition for the private banks and keep them honest.
July 22nd, 2009
HOW CALIFORNIA COULD TURN ITS IOU’S INTO DOLLARS
California has over $17 billion on deposit in banks that have refused to honor its IOUs, forcing legislators to accept crippling budget cuts. These austerity measures are unnecessary. If the state were to deposit its money in its own state-owned bank, it could have enough credit to solve its budget crisis with funds to spare.
July 13th, 2009
FROM SUNSHINE STATE TO SUBPRIME STATE? THE SUN COULD SHINE AGAIN ON CALIFORNIA
Since Wall Street has failed to provide a functioning credit system, California would be totally justified in providing its own. The other choice is to accept debt peonage.
July 8th, 2009
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’: HOW THE STATE CAN BEAT ITS BUDGET WOES
“As goes California,” says the adage, “so goes the nation.” All eyes are therefore on the Golden State as it attempts to solve its $26 billion budget deficit. The world’s eighth largest economy is not going quietly into that pit of debt and devastation that has devoured Third World countries whole. The State’s voters have drawn a line in the sand against further tax hikes, while Democratic leaders have drawn a line at further cuts in services or selloff of public assets. State legislators are deadlocked, caught between the rock of tax ceilings and the hard place of debt limits.
June 30th, 2009
CALIFORNIA’S EMPTY WALLET: TURNING CRISIS INTO OPPORTUNITY
On June 25, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected a plan that would save the state $3 billion by cutting school spending, saying he would rather see the state issue IOUs than delay the funding problem with a piecemeal approach. The state’s total budget deficit is $24.3 billion. Meanwhile, other funding doors are slamming closed. The Obama administration has said it will not use federal stimulus money to prop up California; and Fitch Ratings, a bond rating agency, announced that it was downgrading the credit rating of the state, which already has the lowest in the nation. What to do? Perhaps California could take a lesson from the island state of Guernsey . . . .
June 22nd, 2009
BIG BROTHER IN BASEL: BIS FINANCIAL STABILITY BOARD UNDERMINES NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
Buried on page 83 of the 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the U.S. Administration on June 17 is a recommendation that the new Financial Stability Board strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. Financial stability is a worthy goal, but the devil is in the details. The new global Big Brother is based in the Bank for International Settlements, a controversial institution that raises red flags among the wary . . . .
June 18th, 2009
THE RETREAT OF THE SHADOW LENDERS: WHY DEFLATION, NOT INFLATION, IS THE ORDER OF THE DAY
While contrarians are screaming “hyperinflation!”, the money supply is actually shrinking. This is because most money today comes into existence as bank loans, and lending has shrunk substantially. That means the Fed needs to “monetize” debt just to fill the breach.
June 10th, 2009
OUT OF THE ASHES OF GM: THE PHOENIX OF RENEWABLE ENERGY
Prophetically, GM named one of its now-extinct brands the Firebird. Like the fabled Firebird, GM could be reborn as something else. We now own a car company. To finance its transformation into something better, we just need to own a bank.
May 26th, 2009
BUT GOVERNOR, YOU CAN CREATE MONEY! JUST FORM YOUR OWN BANK.
Christmas comes early, Governor. You CAN print your own money. Fiscally solvent North Dakota is doing it . . . and so can California. Now!!! Here's how . . . .
May 19th, 2009
TIME TO GET OUT THE WHEELBARROWS? ANOTHER LOOK AT THE WEIMAR HYPERINFLATION
Worried commentators are predicting a massive hyperinflation of the sort suffered by Weimar Germany in 1923, when a wheelbarrow full of paper money could barely buy a loaf of bread. But there is something puzzling in the data. The British government is already funding more of its budget by seigniorage than Weimar Germany did at the height of its massive hyperinflation. Yet the pound is still holding its own, under circumstances said to have driven the German mark to one-trillionth of its former value. Something else besides mere money-printing to meet the government’s budget must have been responsible for collapsing the German mark, but what? And are we threatened by the same risk today?
April 20th, 2009
Earlier this month, the G20 leaders agreed to inject $250 billion in SDRs or Special Drawing Rights into the economy. In an April 7 article titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote that “In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.” The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met last September, the Bank for International Settlements was suggested . . . .
April 7th, 2009
REVIVE LINCOLN’S MONETARY POLICY:
AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA
Dear President Obama:
The world was transfixed on that remarkable day in January when, to poetry,
song, and dance, you gazed upon Abraham Lincoln’s likeness at the Lincoln
Memorial and searched for wisdom to navigate these difficult times. Indeed,
you have so many things in common with that venerable President that one
might imagine you were his reincarnation in different dress. You are both
thin and wiry, brilliant speakers, appearing on the national stage at
pivotal times. Fertile imaginations could envision you coming back dressed
in that African heritage you freed, to help heal the great scar of slavery
and prove once and for all the proposition that all men are created equal
and can achieve great things if given a fighting chance. As Wordsworth said,
however, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; and if that is true, you
may have forgotten a more subtle form of slavery from which Lincoln tried
less successfully to free his countrymen.
March 30th, 2009
THINKING POSITIVELY:
HOW “QUANTITATIVE EASING” MAY BE HARNESSED FOR THE
PUBLIC GOOD
Nervous pundits are predicting the end of American life as we know it, after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke announced on March 18 that he would be dropping yet ANOTHER trillion dollars in helicopter money. The Fed now appears to be taking on the role of lender of last resort not just for its member banks but for consumers and businesses generally. Provisos and cautions aside, its new “quantitative easing” policy at least has the potential to be harnessed to serve the government and the people it represents; and that is a promising development . . . .
March 11th, 2009
Forty-six of fifty states are
now reported to be so insolvent that they could be filing Chapter 9
bankruptcy proceedings within the next two years.1 Of the four that are not
in that category, one is the isolated farming state of North Dakota. What
does it have that other states don’t? The answer seems to be: its own bank.
In fact, North Dakota has the only state-owned bank in the nation. It has
avoided the credit freeze caused by the derivative schemes of the Wall
Street bankers by creating its own credit, leading the nation in
establishing state economic sovereignty. . . .
[Shortened version of March 2nd article on the same subject.]
March 2nd, 2009
CASH-STARVED STATES NEED TO PLAY THE BANKING GAME:
NORTH DAKOTA SHOWS HOW
On February 19, 2009, California narrowly escaped bankruptcy, when Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger put on his Terminator hat and held the state senate in lockdown mode until they signed a very controversial budget. If the vote had failed, the state was going to be reduced to paying its employees in I.O.U.s. California avoided bankruptcy for the time being, but 46 of 50 states are insolvent and could be filing Chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings in the next two years. . . .
February 22nd, 2009
MONETIZE THIS!
A
BETTER WAY TO FUND THE STIMULUS PACKAGE
Funding the government's budget shortfall has usually been left to private lenders; but those loans are drying up, and servicing them is proving expensive. Both this interest burden and the need to continually attract new lenders could be avoided by tapping into the government's credit line at its own central bank . . . .
January 22nd, 2009
MYSTERY PRISON BUSES IN THE DESERT
The new Wackenhut operation is shrouded in mystery. It has been running its fleet of empty prison buses night and day, apparently logging miles on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract. Multiple buses can be seen driving all over town and even on remote desert back roads. Oddly, except for the driver and one escort guard seated in front, these buses appear to be empty. . . .
January 11th, 2009
CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE:
THE DIRECT WAY TO FIX THE CREDIT CRISIS
Last fall, Congress committed an unprecedented $700 billion in taxpayer money to reversing the credit crisis, and the Federal Reserve has already fanned that into $8.5 trillion in loans and commitments. But the bank bailout has proven to be no more than a boondoggle for a handful of lucky Wall Street banks, without getting credit flowing again. What went wrong and what WILL get credit flowing again? . . .
December 29th, 2008
BORROWING FROM PETER TO PAY PAUL:
THE WALL STREET PONZI SCHEME CALLED
FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING
Bernie Madoff showed us how it was done, but his Ponzi scheme was small compared to one that has been perpetrated for hundreds of years by the banking system itself. What distinguishes the legal scheme known as “fractional reserve” lending from the illegal schemes of Madoff and his ilk is that the bankers’ scheme is protected by government charter and backstopped with government funds. The sheer size of the bailout efforts today, however, indicates that the banking scheme has reached its mathematical limits and needs to be superseded by something more sustainable.
December 19th, 2008
GROUND ZERO ON WALL STREET:
FED FUNDS AND T-BILLS HIT 0% INTEREST
The federal funds rate and the interest on 3-month Treasury bills both just hit ZERO percent. This means banks and the government are borrowing money for free. Yet demand for the T-bills at auction was four times the available supply! Who is clamoring to buy the debt of the world's most insolvent debtor for no return at all, and why?
December 8th, 2008
SUSTAINABLE GOVERNMENT:
BANKING FOR A “NEW” NEW DEAL
As our 45th President prepares to enter the Oval Office, bank lending has seized up, some of the nation’s largest banks are on life support, and the big three automakers are bankrupt. Housing continues to crash, and so does the economy.
November 25th, 2008
“OOPS, WE MEANT $7 TRILLION!”
WHAT HANK AND BEN ARE UP TO AND HOW THEY PLAN TO PAY FOR IT ALL
The $700 billion that was arm-twisted from Congress in October was just the camel's nose under the tent. The Paulson/Bernanke team is now prepared to pay $7.76 trillion to rescue the financial system. Prepared to pay how? Congress has not raised its debt ceiling to that level, and the Fed doesn't have the funds on its books . . .
November 3rd, 2008
ALL IS WELL IN STEPFORDVILLE:
MORE ON THE PRE-ELECTION CHICANERY OF THE PLUNGE PROTECTION TEAM
It was another surreal week on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising a thousand points while the economy continued to sink into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression . . .
October 25th, 2008
THE NOT-SO-INVISIBLE HAND:
HOW THE PLUNGE PROTECTION TEAM KILLED THE FREE MARKET
October 24 marks the 79th anniversary of the October 1929 stock market crash. Many feared a repeat of this disaster on Friday, October 24, 2008; but remarkably, disaster was averted. How? Suspicious observers saw the hand of the Plunge Protection Team pulling strings behind the scenes . . .
October 16th, 2008
THE COLLAPSE OF A 300 YEAR PONZI SCHEME: THE REAL DEBATE IS CRONY SOCIALISM OR FINANCIAL SOVEREIGNTY
Last night, the Presidential candidates had their last debate before the election. They talked of the baleful state of the economy and the stock market; but omitted from the discussion was what actually caused the credit freeze, and whether the banks should be nationalized as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is now proceeding to do. The omission was probably excusable, since the financial landscape has been changing so fast that it is hard to keep up.
October 7th, 2008
THE FED NOW OWNS THE WORLD’S LARGEST
INSURANCE COMPANY --
BUT WHO OWNS THE FED?
The Federal Reserve (or Fed) has assumed sweeping new powers in the last year. In an unprecedented move in March 2008, the New York Fed advanced the funds for JPMorgan Chase Bank to buy investment bank Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar. The deal was particularly controversial because Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, sits on the board of the New York Fed and participated in the secret weekend negotiations. In September 2008, the Federal Reserve did something even more unprecedented, when it bought the world’s largest insurance company.
October 2nd, 2008
BAILOUT BEDLAM:
ROBBING THE TAXPAYERS TO SAVE THE BANKS
The bank bailout bill that just passed the Senate and is being deliberated in the House would turn the banks’ worst assets into good U.S. dollars. How many dollars? The figure was $700 billion a few days ago and has already climbed to $800 billion after the pork was added in. That’s nearly the cost of two Iraq wars, but it still won’t be enough, because the covered instruments eligible for conversion include the black hole of derivatives. Derivatives held by U.S. banks are now estimated at $180 trillion. . .
September 28th, 2008
THANKS BUT NO THANKS:WHAT LINCOLN WOULD HAVE SAID TO PAULSON’S $700 BILLION RANSOM
“These capitalists generally act
harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got
into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the
people’s money to settle the quarrel.”
– Abraham Lincoln, speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837
September 18th, 2008
IT’S THE DERIVATIVES, STUPID!
WHY FANNIE, FREDDIE AND AIG ALL HAD TO BE BAILED OUT
Why the extraordinary bailout measures for Fannie, Freddie and AIG? The answer may have less to do with saving the insurance business, the housing market, or the Chinese investors clamoring for a bailout than with the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, one that is holding up the entire private global banking system. What had to be saved at all costs was not housing or the dollar but the financial derivatives industry; and the precipice from which it had to be saved was an "event of default" that could have collapsed a quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble, a collapse that could take the entire global banking system down with it.
September 5th, 2008
TAKE A LOAD OFF FANNIE:
BAILOUT OR NATIONALIZATION FOR THE MORTGAGE GIANTS?
“Take a load off Fanny, take
a load for free;
Take a load off Fanny, and (and) (and)
You put the load right on me.” – The Band, “The Weight,” 1968
The U.S. Treasury recently
sought and was granted an unlimited credit line for Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac, along with the authority to buy their stock, effectively nationalizing
them; but this could mean $5 trillion more in liabilities for the federal
government, causing it to lose its own triple-A rating. What to do? There is
a solution that would salvage the mortgage giants and cost the taxpayers
nothing . . .
August 14th, 2008
WAG THE DOG:
HOW TO CONCEAL MASSIVE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
Last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had just announced record losses, and so had most reporting corporations. Unemployment was mounting, the foreclosure crisis was deepening, state budgets were in shambles, and massive bailouts were everywhere. Investors had every reason to expect the dollar and the stock market to plummet, and gold and oil to shoot up. Strangely, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 300 points, the dollar strengthened, and gold and oil were crushed. What happened?
August 8th, 2008
FANNIE AND FREDDIE:
GIVING AWAY THE FARM
Last week, Congress passed a housing bill that gave the Treasury Department a blank check to inject billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, snatching them from insolvency. To accommodate this blank check, Congress obligingly raised its debt ceiling by $800 billion. Ouch! That’s nearly a trillion dollars. Why was it necessary to incur this potentially crippling public debt to bail out two completely private, for-profit behemoths, which have run themselves into bankruptcy with their own risky investment schemes? Policymakers said it was essential to maintain the country’s creditworthiness with foreign lenders, which today hold about one-fifth of Fannie and Freddie securities. According to a July 21 report by Heather Timmons in The New York Times. . .
July 26th, 2008
PUTTING THE “FEDERAL”
BACK IN THE FEDERAL RESERVE
In a July 19 Wall Street Journal article titled “Why No Outrage?”, James Grant quoted Mary Lease, a 19th century Populist who urged farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” Grant notes that financial behavior that would have been met with outrage in the 19th century is now met with near-silence from a too-tolerant populace. For decades after the Civil War, monetary reform was a chief political issue, one around which whole political parties formed. Why is it hardly mentioned today? Grant suggests that the lack of outrage may be because the old 19th century Populists actually won . . .
July 13th, 2008
LET THE LAWSUITS BEGIN:
BANKS BRACE FOR A STORM OF LITIGATION
In an article in The San Francisco Chronicle in December 2007, attorney Sean Olender suggested that the real reason for the subprime bailout schemes being proposed by the U.S. Treasury Department was not to keep strapped borrowers in their homes so much as to stave off a spate of lawsuits against the banks. The plan then on the table was an interest rate freeze on a limited number of subprime loans.
June 26th, 2008
THE SUBPRIME TRUMP CARD:
STANDING UP TO THE BANKS
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin (1802)
June 14th, 2008
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEHMAN
BROTHERS AND BEAR STEARNS?
LEHMAN’S CEO SITS ON THE BOARD OF THE NY FED
An earlier article by this author (“The Secret Bailout of JP Morgan”) summarized evidence presented by John Olagues, an expert in options trading, suggesting that JPMorgan, far from “rescuing” Bear Stearns, was actually its nemesis. The faltering investment bank was brought down, not by “rumors,” but by insider trading based on a plan drawn up much earlier. The deal was a lucrative one for JPM, handing the Wall Street megabank $55 billion in loans from the Federal Reserve (meaning ultimately the U.S. taxpayer). So how did JPM get away with it? Olagues notes the highly suspicious fact that JPM’s CEO James Dimon sits on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve.
May 13th, 2008
THE SECRET BAILOUT OF JPMORGAN:
HOW INSIDER TRADING LOOTED BEAR STEARNS AND THE AMERICAN TAXPAYER
The mother of all insider trades was pulled off in 1815, when London financier Nathan Rothschild led British investors to believe that the Duke of Wellington had lost to Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. In a matter of hours, British government bond prices plummeted. Rothschild, who had advance information, then swiftly bought up the entire market in government bonds, acquiring a dominant holding in England’s debt for pennies on the pound.
April 28th, 2008
SPECULATING IN HUNGER:
ARE INVESTORS CONTRIBUTING TO THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS?
Investment newsletters are now featuring headlines like "How You Can Profit from the Global Food Crisis." The recommended investments include agribusiness stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that speculate in agricultural commodities. These investments will no doubt do very well in the global food crisis; but before you put your money down, you may want to explore whether you will be helping to alleviate the problem or contributing to it.
April 10th, 2008
CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS:
DERIVATIVE DISASTER DU JOUR
When the smartest guys in the room designed their credit default swaps, they forgot to ask one thing – what if the parties on the other side of the bet don't have the money to pay up? Credit default swaps (CDS) are insurance-like contracts that are sold as protection against default on loans, but CDS are not ordinary insurance. Insurance companies are regulated by the government, with reserve requirements, statutory limits, and examiners routinely showing up to check the books to make sure the money is there to cover potential claims. CDS are private bets...
March 30th, 2008
APRIL FOOLS:
THE FOX TO GUARD THE BANKING HENHOUSE
The Federal Reserve, which has been credited with creating the current housing bubble and bust just as it created the credit bubble of the Roaring Twenties and the bust of 1929, is now to be given vast new powers to oversee regulation of the banking industry and promote "financial market stability."
March 23rd, 2008
On March 13, 2008, Erik Sirri, director of the SEC's division of trading and markets, told Congress that the credit crisis has spread to municipal bond auctions. "There is no question that the recent dislocations in the municipal bond markets have created unanticipated hardships for municipal issuers and in some cases dramatically increased their borrowing costs," Sirri said.
March 15th, 2008
TODAY WE'RE ALL IRISH:
DEBT SERFDOM COMES TO AMERICA
March 17 is St. Patrick's Day, when people of all national origins raise a glass and declare, "Today we're all a bit Irish!" This may be truer than we know. The Irish were driven to America by debt, and they are leading the Western world in household debt today.
January 9th, 2008
WHY IS IRAN STILL IN THE CROSS-HAIRS?
CLUES FROM THE PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY
Despite a recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) finding that Iran is not engaged in a nuclear weapons program, the push for war continues. Before President George W. Bush left for a Middle East visit on January 8, he told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, "Part of the reason I'm going to the Middle East is to make it abundantly clear to nations in that part of the world that we view Iran as a threat, and that the NIE in no way lessens that threat."
November 13th, 2007
BEHIND THE DRUMS OF WAR WITH IRAN:
NUCLEAR WEAPONS OR COMPOUND INTEREST?
On October 25, 2007, the United States announced harsh new penalties on the Iranian military and its state-owned banking systems. Sanctions, bellicose rhetoric and the implicit threat of military action are goads for another war, one that critics fear is more likely to ignite a nuclear holocaust than prevent one...
November 5th, 2007
SUSTAINABLE ENERGY DEVELOPMENT:
HOW COSTS CAN BE CUT IN HALF
Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, stated in an October 15, 2007 address, "Climate change is a defining issue of our time. The science is clear. . . . We know what we have to do. We have affordable measures and technologies to do it."...
September 20th, 2007
BANK RUN OR STEALTH BAILOUT?
BETWEEN NORTHERN ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
In July 2007, the global credit crisis hit Wall Street. In September 2007, it hit Main Street, in what has been called the worst bank run since the 1970s. Northern Rock, Britain's fifth-largest mortgage lender, was besieged at branches across the country, as thousands of worried customers queued for hours in hopes of getting their money out before the doors closed. Bank officials feared that as much as half the bank's deposit base could be withdrawn before the run was over...
September 3rd, 2007
MARKET MELTDOWN:
THE END OF A 300 YEAR PONZI SCHEME
Panic struck on Wall Street, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged a thousand points between July and August, and commentators warned of a 1929-style crash. To prevent that dire result, the U.S. Federal Reserve, along with the central banks of Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan, stepped up to the plate and extended a 315 billion dollar lifeline to troubled banks and investment firms. The hemorrhage stopped, the markets turned around, and investors breathed a sigh of relief. All was well again in Stepfordville. Or was it? And if it was, at what cost?...
August 9th, 2007
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX:
HOW A BANKRUPT GERMANY SOLVED ITS
INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEMS
Guernsey wasn't the only government to solve its infrastructure problems by issuing its own money. (See E. Brown, "Waking Up on a Minnesota Bridge," www.webofdebt.com/articles, August 4, 2007.) A more notorious model is found in post-World War I Germany. When Hitler came to power, the country was completely, hopelessly broke. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed crushing reparations payments on the German people, who were expected to reimburse the costs of the war for all participants — costs totaling three times the value of all the property in the country...
August 4th, 2007
Only five confirmed deaths have so far resulted from the dramatic collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota on August 1, but in some ways the disaster was more of a shock and a wakeup call than the collapse of the New Orleans levees that took many more lives. After all, most of us will never be faced with a category 5 hurricane...
July 3rd, 2007
DOLLAR DECEPTION:
HOW BANKS SECRETLY CREATE MONEY
It has been called "the most astounding piece of sleight of hand ever invented." The creation of money has been privatized, usurped from Congress by a private banking cartel. Most people think money is issued by fiat by the government, but that is not the case. Except for coins, which compose only about one one-thousandth of the total U.S. money supply, all of our money is now created by banks. Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) are issued by the Federal Reserve, a private banking corporation, and lent to the government.1 Moreover, Federal Reserve Notes and coins together compose less than 3 percent of the money supply. The other 97 percent is created by commercial banks as loans.2...
June 21st, 2007
THE QUICK FIX:
A NON-INFLATIONARY SOLUTION TO THE
FEDERAL DEBT CRISIS
The U.S. federal debt has reached crisis proportions, approaching $9 trillion in 2007. U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker has warned that just the interest on the debt will soon be more than the taxpayers can afford to pay...
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