Sort of. Charlie Gasperino, author of Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance of Barack Obama and Wall St. explains:
You might also want to check out his book The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall St. Greed and Government Mismanagement destroyed the Global Financial System which I’m told is the best account of how we got into this mess out there.
This video is fairly left wing in it’s pretentious anti-Americanism and has a bit of the Falange about it but it does make a good point about the decadence of our society and how that will play out once dollar debasement and food scarcity really kicks in. I’m not sure, given the point about Americans being animals who will riot and loot when things go bad, why owning gold would protect your family (guns and food would be more useful) but I assume the creator has one of those gold selling ad sites.
Gold is a sucker’s bet for long term survival and is useful only if you think society won’t collapse. If you (as I frankly do) envision America sliding into third world status or you must re-think wealth and what it means:
Eggs, for example, are a kind of wealth. Many suburbanites have begun keeping their own hens for economic reasons (they save money on eggs) but we see more and more that a person with small flock of chickens is doing something most Americans have little experience with – producing actual wealth. Even survivalists often don’t fully understand this idea, explaining why people who think America is about to descend into a new dark age think one ounce gold coins (or worse, gold certificates) are going to pull them through while the rest of us starve. Gold and silver have their uses (one of which is enriching bloggers pre-collapse) but gold and silver represent wealth. They are not necessarily true wealth.
I’ll give you an example. I have two neighbors in the above worst of the worst case scenario. One has a veritable dragon’s hoard of one ounce gold coins each of which are now theoretically worth $10,000 in the new, desperate America. The other has a micro-farm consisting of a flock of chickens, a couple of milking goats and a large garden. Now let’s suppose that both want to get a couple of bowls of Rob Taylor’s famous five can chili or some homemade cough drops I mixed up in my spare time. What happens? Do I make change for a $10,000 gold coin? Or do I take a small basket of eggs for a batch of chili with a home made cough drop lagniappe? Sans a banking system to standardize currency bartering with precious metals is a risky proposition which is an idea I have put forward to before. This is not to say gold will be worthless, but it will be hard to trade with and if push comes to shove, harder to digest. Historically this has always been the case.
The first verse of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem reads:
Wealth is a comfort to all men;
yet must every man bestow it freely,
if he wish to gain honour in the sight of the Lord.This line references the rune Feoh which represents wealth in general but its name literally means “cattle†which was the the measure of wealth the ancient Northern Europeans used. Those who study runes for religious reasons point out this understanding of wealth, as practical goods like livestock and furs, provides both historical and spiritual insight into the runic tradition. For the survival minded of any religion it is instructive to note that people who lived in a harsh environment of low technology and scarcity of resources, livestock was how people measured wealth and was the currency that common people traded with.
But perhaps that’s a debate for another day.
Enjoy:
This excellent book is written by historical re-enactor Matt Wulff who is part of a “ranger” living history company. His in-depth analysis of the 28 Rules of Ranging issued by Captain Robert Rogers to his irregular troops during the French and India War gives insight into how lightly armed, highly mobile troops could survive in a warzone without external support.
Rogers’ Rangers are considered the precursor to the modern American Army’s Ranger regiments and the tactics outlined by Rogers are still viable today. Wulff not only gives each of the rules a thorough examination but illustrates their applications by using historical documents like journals and battlefield reports and even uses photos from modern re-enactments.
While a wonderful and informative text for the history buff, this book will also serve the small survivalist group well. For families or groups planning to bug out through potentially hostile terrain, or for small groups planning on defending a given area this discussion of old fashioned Ranger warfare, with an emphasis on primitive weapons and equipment, will help readers formulate the plans and logistics you’ll need to operate continuously with little hope for resupply aside from what your wits and hunting ability can gather. It will be especially helpful for those without military experience who will be in areas like the South West or near large cites where guerrilla warfare against armed gangs will become likely in even minor civil disruptions.
Wall street may be celebrating the economic news but Main street won’t be as this news collapses treasuries and the dollar even further.
From The Washington Post:
The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.
The Fed’s efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank’s aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.
The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world’s largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain’s Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.
The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before.
Not a surprise except in the scope of what the Fed was doing. Harley-Davidson? Really? And how much money are we talking?
Well, foreign banks alone got at least $330 billion that the Fed printed out of thin air:
Foreign banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the $3,300bn in emergency credit provided by the Federal Reserve during the crisis, according to new data on the extraordinary efforts of the US authorities to save the global financial system.
The revelation of the scale of overseas lenders’ borrowing underlines the global nature of the turmoil and the crucial role of the Fed as the lender of last resort for the world’s banking sector.
However, news that banks such as Barclays of the UK, Switzerland’s UBS and Dexia of Belgium borrowed billions of dollars at favourable terms from US authorities may further anger critics already enraged about the Fed’s rescue of Wall Street.
“We’re talking about huge sums of money going to bail out large foreign banks,†said Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont. “Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?â€
Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, the Fed on Wednesday detailed more than 21,000 transactions with banks carried out through half a dozen special financing programmes starting in 2007. They include the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) for overnight funding of investment banks and the Term Auction Facility (TAF) for one- to three-month loans.
Barclays was the biggest cumulative borrower from TAF. The UK bank, which bought the US operations of Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy in September 2008, borrowed a cumulative $232bn from the TAF through various subsidiaries.
Bank of Scotland and RBS of the UK, Société Générale of France, Dresdner Bank and Bayerische Landesbank of Germany, and Dexia of Belgium were all among the top 10 cumulative users of TAF. At any given time, these borrowers owed less than the total amount because the short-term loans were extended after they expired.
So America lost money on this deal, that’s nice. It should be noted that Bernie Sanders is a Socialist and even he is nervous about this Keynesianism on steroids. The Barclay’s revelation is most troubling because it reveals that the Fed basically paid for Lehman Brothers to be “rescued” with tax dollars given to a foreign bank that will not pay us all our money back.
How does this stabilize our economy?
And we don’t even know the half of it. The Fed is still withholding information that is probably even more shocking:
The Federal Reserve withheld details on individual securities pledged as collateral by recipients of $885 billion in central bank loans, denying taxpayers a measure of the risks they faced from its emergency aid.
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.â€
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.â€
Fed spokeswoman Susan Stawick in Washington declined to comment.
There isn’t much to say. The Fed is looting American wealth to prop up a global financial system that is run by people who want to collapse America and create a new financial world order. This is not just bad business, it’s treason.
But more importantly it’s madness that will lead to a further loss of wealth for America when we need to be figuring out ways to produce it. The dollar is collapsing and with it so is your quality of life but don’t worry, European banks and Harley-Davidson are still solvent.