Bob Chapman | July 8, 2009

The Obama administration may start its program to spur purchases of mortgage-backed securities from banks with about $20 billion in public and private money, down from as much as $100 billion when the effort was announced in March, sources said. The Treasury Department will pro vide about $1.1 billion in capital to eight to 10 money managers it will select for its Public-Private Investment Program.

[It is interesting that no mention is made of the fact that the Fed is creating (monetization) $3 trillion to purchase US Treasuries, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds and CDO toxic waste from banks. The Fed will not tell us what they are paying for the CDOs and part of the game is that the banks rotate the money into Treasuries, a sweet little daisy chain. As you can see, the Treasury might get an additional $20 billion into CDOs. We don’t see it happening. The private interests don’t want to get involved. Bob]

US consumers made 675,351 bankruptcy filings in the first half of 2009, a 36.5 percent increase from a year ago, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. June filings by consumers totaled 116,365, up 40.6 percent from the same period in 2008, the ABI said.

Oracle plans to cut as many as 1,000 jobs in Europe, the CFDT labor union said on its Internet site. Of the total, about 250 jobs will be lost in France, equivalent to 16 percent of the company's workforce there.

British authorities have started an investigation into millions of dollars of payments from the operations of the convicted money manager Bernard L. Madoff to companies linked to the Austrian banker Sonja Kohn, an Austrian official confirmed yesterday.

The Serious Fraud Office had asked Austrian prosecutors in May for help in investigating payments made by Madoff’s London office for research reports by Bank Medici, which was majority-owned by Kohn, who also served as its chairman.

“We’re closely cooperating with the SFO and the US Justice Department in that case,’’ the official, Gerhard Jarosch, a senior public prosecutor in Austria, said yesterday. A separate investigation by the Austrian prosecutor into whether Kohn and Bank Medici were involved with Madoff is continuing, he said.

Prosecutors are looking into whether Madoff paid more than $40 million to Kohn in exchange for turning three Bank Medici funds into feeder funds for his business, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing affidavits filed by prosecutors in the United States and Britain. The Austrian daily Der Standard reported last week that Kohn received about $11.5 million, for research reports for which prosecutors were unable to find receipts.

U.S. service industries from retailers to homebuilders contracted last month at the slowest pace in nine months, as measures of new orders and employment improved.

The Institute for Supply Management’s index of non- manufacturing businesses, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy, rose to 47 -- higher than forecast -- from 44 in May, according to data from the Tempe, Arizona-based group. Readings less than 50 signal contraction.

Our President favors torture just like his predecessor did. He threatens other governments if they expose what his administration is up too. He blocks any and all exposure of government activities, a culture of non-disclosure. In addition, there is a large list of dissidents, such as myself and other publishers and radio personalities of every political persuasion. Anyone who exposes what the Illuminists are up too is an enemy of the state. We wish George Orwell were here to see this.

Last week we filled you in on the scandal that could envelope and crush the administration. That is the illegal arbitrary dismissal of Investigator General Gerald Walpin who tried to get criminal charges brought against Barry’s close friend and Mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson who misappropriated some $500,000. The AG later layed a $73,000 payback on Johnson. As you can see, crime pays. More blatant corruption. We have done scores of programs on the mainline media regarding the scandal, something the kept media themselves refuses to do.

Sir Alan Greenspan was a disaster for America. His latest lying, idiotic comment was, “I don’t think it is an economic problem – it is a political problem.”

What we have is a monetary and fiscal problem that translates into an economic problem. The American engine of growth has grounded to a halt over the past two years as a result and has taken the entire world economy with it. Today’s problems are very much an out growth of Greenspan’s terribly flawed monetary management, followed by an equally incompetent Ben Bernanke.

What else would you call non-financial growth in the early nineties, which averaged $565 billion annually that peaked at $3.545 trillion in 2007? Does that sound like monetary sanity? This was the massive system of credit that inflated asset prices, incomes, corporate profits and government revenues. This caused the wild orgy of consumption, services, including de-industrialization and massive imports spawned by free trade, globalization, offshorting and outsourcing. Those horrendous events will take decades to reverse. Who can call prudent or reasonable the creation of those combined Treasury, GSE and MBS obligations surging $1.949 trillion, or 15.3% in 2008 to $14.709 trillion? This is called Ponzi finance dynamics. The word is bubble and that bubble is still being sustained. How does Sir Alan justify Total Mortgage Debt growth from the 90s averaging $269 billion to $1 trillion by 2003 and $1.390 trillion in 2006? ABC, asset backed securities, went from $200 billion in 2003 and beyond $800 billion in 2006. MBS doubled in four years to $4.5 trillion by the end of 2007.

That was the bad news; unfortunately there is worse news on the way. Today’s credit crisis finance bubble will make the residential and commercial bubble look like a joke. Multiply by 5 or 10. Who knows where this can end up? The bomb is in the air and hasn’t even hit yet. The quality of Treasury, GSE (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), CDO and ABS falls every day. The debt is massive and it is not producing real economic wealth creation. This is a tremendous drag on the system. Wage increases are miniscule, inflation grows as purchasing power falls as does general confidence. There is major misallocation of assets and a maladjusted economic structure that can only end in dire inflationary consequences.

The private creation of real jobs has generated about 100,000 jobs a year and the public sector more than double that, or 240,000 a year. Most jobs created over the past ten years have been low paying. 290,000 have been created in healthcare, 157,000 in food and drinking establishments and 139,000 in government education. Declining jobs, free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing, have decimated living standards and have caused a massive transfer of wealth to BRICs; OPEC and slave labor countries that cheapen their currencies by manipulating them and by subsidizing their industries. In just the first quarter GDP fell 5.5% due to a decline in inventories and trade. The 37.3% decline in business investment and inventories was a record. The greatest decline since 1947 when records began. The 38.8% decline in homebuilding is the largest contraction since 1980.

Next comes the planned reduction of Fed market support programs, including swap lines with 14 international central banks, due to expire in October to February. The Fed says it will reduce the maximum size of its term securities lending facilities, TSLF, from $200 billion plus options, and the maximum size of its term auction facility, TAF, to $500 billion from $600 billion. This is part of the Fed’s glide path to normalization. This rhetoric can’t happen unless the Fed has finally decided to allow deflation to take over and we do not see that happening.

On of the more instigators of our current credit crisis, Goldman Sachs, are now recording record bonuses in the greatest financial crisis in almost 80 years.

This success by Goldman is not shared throughout the industry. The walls of capitalism are falling and Goldman is making a fortune. We ask how? The answer is inside information and that they are even more corrupt than Washington is. Goldman is part of a triumvirate that rules America although few Americans are aware of their power – a power that sucks the very lifeblood out of our country and has for at least the last 100 years. These people and others have controlled our country for a long time. It is a marriage made in hell. Many country’s politicians and Wall Street and bankers control money and in turn control almost every nation today.

This past April we saw tax reductions and increased benefits of $121 billion on an annualized basis. As a result consumer spending increased by a paltry $1 billion. In May, stimulus was $163 billion and consumer spending only increased by $25 billion. As a result personal savings jumped from 4.3% in March, 5.6% in April and 6.9% in May.

This result needless to say is not what the Frankenstein elitists in Washington had in mind. The next step, of course, is to force consumers to spend, otherwise the consumer cycle won’t work. The public is spending $0.08 of every stimulus dollar and the rest is being used to pay down debt or is going into savings. We predicted 90% would not be spent and again we were right, that means as a percentage of GDP only 70% is coming from the consumer, down from 72% at the peak.

The stimulus package did another thing and that is distort income in the second quarter resulting in income gains of 1.4% in May. The year-on-year trend is still -1.1%.

This year 5% of workers took unpaid leave and 15% had to accept a pay cut. Ten percent had to take an extra job last year and 20% of 45 to 54-year olds took second jobs.

Between now and 2013, $5 trillion in wealth will have to be liquidated. A good part of that will occur over the next 3-1/2 years. That means continued monetization and depression and an ever-depreciating dollar. This depression will last 8 to 20 years.

The workweek has fallen to 33.1 hours. We see that number below 30 next year.

Probably more than 50% of workers will stop funding 401(k)’s, IRA’s and Roth’s. Twenty-five percent of companies are suspending 401(k)’s and that number will grow. That will have a devastating affect on the stock and bond markets. Again, get out of all stocks except gold and silver shares and Canadian Treasuries. Get out of corporate bonds. Interest rates will rise over the next two years. Get rid of cash value life insurance policies and annuities. No CDs of any kind. Unemployment has doubled in seven months from 7 to 14 million. In the previous eight years, due to free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing, we lost 5 million jobs. We are calling U6 unemployment at 20.5%. Officially it is 16.5%. Even the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University says real unemployment is 18.2%.

Our President is just realizing that he is presiding over the bankruptcy of the US. In order to bring this to a halt he would have to cut mandatory programs that underline the welfare state, which makes up 60% of the budget. We see no chance of that happening. That means in the next three years the Treasury will go broke. Once the insolvency occurs welfare, Social Security and Medicare will end along with many other programs. Imperial America will cease to exist. Those occupations in Japan, South Korea, Europe, Iraq, Afghanistan and hundreds of other bases, will end, unable to be financed. The burden will be too much to any longer bare.

How can any national government expect to survive fiscally as tax revenue falls 18% and spending increases 18%? All the players know this, so the only conclusion we can come to is that they want our government to collapse. Worse yet, spending won’t be the official $1.84 trillion, but $2 to $2.5 trillion. Corporate tax revenues have fallen 61% and individual returns are off 22% as of May. The US government and the Fed are committed to spend $12.8 trillion, but if we add in further Fed monetization declared to be created by 9/30/09, that figure will be closer to $15.8 trillion. This is much greater than our entire GDP for last year. As a result the 30-year bond is off almost 30% this year, and the 10-year note has lost 11%. Overall all Treasuries are off more than 6% and that is while the Fed has been manipulating the bond market. While all this has transpired the dollar has fallen from 89.5 on the USDX to 79.9 - that is close to 10%. Thus, if you owned 10-year T-notes you have lost 20% of your capital, plus the inflation loss of 9%. You are a net loser of some 30%. Two types of investors buy T-bills, or bank CD’s, they are either dumb or they have a vested interest in not seeing the system collapse.

Buyers of treasuries and Agencies cannot absorb these losses indefinitely. This has been going on for 9 years. From this level we believe losses could be the intrinsic value of all the funds invested. One is certainly looking at in excess of a 60% loss in purchasing power. The average foreign nation holds 64.5% of their reserves in US dollars. That should break just about everyone.