How fast and how many times can you say "RipOff"...

[WhiskeyGirl]

Looting the National Treasury

By Alan Caruba

(AXcess News) S. Orange, NJ - In the November issue of The DeWeese Report, published by the American Policy Center, Tom DeWeese provides one of the most cogent explanations for the current financial crisis that you will read anywhere. You can read it online at http://www.americanpolicy.org/more/market.htm.

For a decade I was the Director of Communications for the Center and remain affiliated. ...

"We have in the country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the FED. The Fed has cheated the government of these United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the nation's debt... many times over."

In 1934, McFadden noted that "This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States, has bankrupted itself and has practically bankrupted our government." What we are witnessing, of course, is the devaluation of the U.S. dollar and this must be laid at the feet of the Fed, the institution that was created to protect its value.

"Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States government institutions," said McFadden. "They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers: foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders."

This is precisely why banking and investment institutions "bundled" and sold mortgage loans as alleged "assets" for which no value could be assigned, knowing that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were backed by the U.S. government. As Tom DeWeese says in his commentary, "These were worthless loans to satisfy politically correct motives, and worthless money to pay for it all."

...The nation is being run these days by Goldman Sachs.

The Fed is a quasi-government institution. It is a consortium of twelve regional banks that is presumed to be answerable to the federal government. Under the regime of Alan Greenspan, its former chairman, it permitted, indeed, encouraged this debacle to occur. It is time to end the reign of the Federal Reserve. It was time in 1934.

Americans are watching the plundering and looting of the U.S. Treasury for political and private gain. Apparently, there is nothing we can do about it.

http://www.axcessnews.com/index.php/articles/show/id/17069

 

[WhiskeyGirl]

 

Meanwhile, the most credible insurance company in the world, AIG, was making it all seem legitimate. ... Bank managers seeking away around the Basel rules to take advantage of the massive amounts of new mortgages being written, found a way through AIG.

AIG offered banks unregulated insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps. ...

As analyst Porter Stansberry reports, "Although AIG's credit default swaps were really insurance contracts, they weren't regulated. ... AIG could book the profit from a five year credit default swap as soon as the contract was sold, based on the expected default rate.

Since, throughout history, prior to this insanity, few loans had ever defaulted, ... and AIG was able to post hundreds of millions of dollars in profits that only existed on paper, while never having to post any collateral. Says Stansberry, "An enormous amount of capital was created out of thin air and tossed into global real estate markets."

Then the chickens came home to roost. ... Banks looked to AIG to honor its insurance policies. But AIG had no money to repair the damage. And so, AIG, the world's largest insurance company, was suddenly downgraded by all of the major credit-rating agencies. And AIG went bankrupt.

And, the AIG executives "party on" after bailout money - jmho

Such fraud was repeated by Goldman Sacs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and more. For sure these are greedy businessmen - but they could never have carried out such bad policy on their own. A free market never allows such corruption to exist without near instant exposure. Once government intervened in the market and set the rules, a partnership between the financial industry and government was born. It was all fueled by the Federal Reserve which continued to pump money into the straining system, putting the dollar in a free fall on world markets. These were worthless loans to satisfy politically correct motives, and worthless money to pay for it all.

Today, the pure free market, buried under this mass of government manipulation, is seeking to correct itself. It will fall until it hits a natural bottom and then begin anew.

The bottom line to the story is it wasn't free enterprise that caused the 1929 crash, and it wasn't free enterprise that caused today's meltdown. In both cases it was government intervention corrupting the pure world of free markets. We are not protected by government intervention - we are damaged by it. This is the second time the Fed created a collapse of the free market. To prevent a third there's only one logical action to take - abolish the Federal Reserve.

Lots more here -
http://www.americanpolicy.org/more/market.htm

Give every tax payer $1 million and a rubber raft!