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The 12th Hour
by Georgi Stankov Posted on April 13, 2016
Georgi Stankov, April 13, 2016
www.stankovuniversallaw.com
We have entered the most turbulent phase in the End Time scenario when all signs indicate that the banking system is in a pre-infarct condition and the sudden infarct and death – the financial Apoptosis – can be expected any moment. I will try to present the picture as simple as possible as there are so many factors to consider and put in relation that even the best experts seem to be overwhelmed these days. At the same time I will, as always, give you the transcendental dimension that links all these catastrophic financial events to the ascension scenario. Because this is the only true explanation as to what is happening on this planet so that the Orion matrix can be collapsed once and for all and the new 4D worlds established.
In January and February we witnessed a big crash of all major equity markets. This triggered panic among the ruling cabal and their central banksters and they decided to introduce negative interest rates for the first time in the history of Orion capitalism and in full contradiction to its Draconian (Reptilian) predatory principles during their final Davos meeting. This was the last munition of the elite to prolong its demise. All companies in the equity indexes received unlimited amount of worthless money as bank loans to buyback their own equities. This propped up the charts in March and April and established the illusion that all is well in the US of Accounting Gimmicks and in the EU of Draghi’s helicopter money.
However, what really happened was that the banksters were hoisted by their own petard. The fiat toilet paper money lost any value for everyone to see and this eliminated the cognitive dissonance of the masses that has kept the financial system afloat in the past. Most of the sovereign (government) bonds became negative which means the banks and all other investors had to pay money to the state, or rather to the central banks, to buy them. Here is a chart that illustrates the dramatic increase of negative sovereign bonds in the west in the last two months since the Davos decision to introduce negative interest rates by the central banks.
Chart Of The Day: Map Of $7 Trillion Of Negative Yield Government Bonds
As governmental bonds was the only secure revenue of the banks, their financial situation deteriorated dramatically in March and April as discussed by Reggie Middleton in his interview in my latest article. All big banks started to lose a lot of money and this deepened their de facto bankruptcy since the 2008 crisis. Contrary to the other sectors and companies in the major stock markets that used this worthless money to buyback their own equities and prop up the indexes, the banks charts went south again in March and April. This crash of the banks’ stocks was parallel to the decrease of bonds interest rates as this chart clearly illustrates:
Currently all EU and US banks are on the verge of financial collapse and this triggered a flurry of hectic activities of the central banksters this week. I will publish a good overview below that highlights the panic of the Fed and the Bombama’s deep government who are now paralysed by the impending financial catastrophe like rabbits in front of a cobra. The events are unfolding now with the speed of light and quicker than I can write. While this article below appeared only yesterday evening, it is already history.
Today we read in the MSM:
‘Living Wills’ For Five Big Banks Fail U.S. Regulators’ Test. None of the eight systemically important banks, which the U.S. government considers “too big to fail,” fared well in the evaluations.
“Five out of eight of the biggest U.S. banks do not have credible plans for winding down operations during a crisis without the help of public money, federal regulators said on Wednesday, saying the institutions could face stricter oversight if they do not fix their plans.
The “living wills” that the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation jointly agreed were not credible came from Bank of America <BAC.N>, Bank of New York Mellon <BK.N>, J.P. Morgan Chase <JPM.N>, State Street <STT.N>, Wells Fargo <WFC.N>.
The requirement for a living will was part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation passed in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, when the U.S. government spent billions of dollars on bailouts to keep big banks from failing and wrecking the U.S. economy.”
Why do we learn this today when these stress tests for the banks were ordered and performed immediately after the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation passed in 2009 and since then stress tests for the banks were repeated every several years. Only until recently we were told by the MSM that only the EU banks, such as the Italian banks are in financial troubles and that the US banking system is the rock in the breakers.
Did I say that the US of Accounting Gimmicks is also a country of numerous debt gaps on all levels – governmental ($300 trillion fiscal gap, $3.6 trillion pension gap, student loans debt gap which Obama has just acknowledged today (It Begins: Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans), etc), corporate (massive bad loans used for buybacks and unproductive investments, such as in the oil and energy industry (Peabody, World’s Largest Coal Producer Files Bankruptcy; 8,300 Jobs In Jeopardy), etc)? And now the too-big-to-fail banks in the USA are also broke.
While everybody is expecting the abysmal Q1 reports of the banks beginning this week, we had already a double whammy this Wednesday: Business inventories slide and sales tumble.
Business inventory-to-sales ratio pushes to new deeply recessionary cycle highs at 1.41x…
while retail sales tumbled 0.4%.
mainly driven by auto sale plunge.
These latest data must have driven the Fed banksters into total panic so that they have lost their minds as ZeroHedge reports today (see also article below):
“Following today’s triple whammy of economic misses, in which first retail sales both declined and missed expectations, and then both business inventories and sales declined and missed from downward revised numbers, AtlantaFed watchers were certain that the keeper of the GDP Nowcast would cut its GDP estimate from 0.1% to zero or even negative. However, this did not happen. Perhaps due to another tap on the shoulder as a negative GDP print would be just too much to justify the relentless market rally, or as a result of the NY Fed’s own competing service now trying to steal the limelight with its own 1.1% GDP forecast, moments ago the Atlanta Fed stunned everyone when it announced that instead of revising its concurrent GDP tracker lower, it actually pushed it up from 0.1% to 0.3%.”
These are the terminal clinical and behavioristic signs of the cabal banksters that herald the imminent financial apoptosis of the Orion banking system.
This night I had a very vivid dream that we, the PAT, were performing the dress rehearsal for the final unfolding (final act) of all sweeping events as predicted in our End Time scenario of ascension. We came to the conclusions that the scene is well set for these events to commence when nobody can any longer control them. The beginning of these final events leading to the destruction of the Orion matrix was scheduled by us unanimously for May.
As we all know, there is no guarantee for the manifestation of this dream in this timeline as it might have been a reflection of another parallel timeline. But it is significant that I received this dream as a confirmation from my HS immediately after I decided yesterday evening to write this article today. Besides, all fearful activities of the ruling cabal this week indicate that something major is in the making as this article below elucidates:
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What in the World’s Going on with Banks this Week? Emergency Meetings, Summits, Crashing EU Banks…
By David Haggith, April 12, 2015
The Great Recession Blog
Just about every major banker and finance minister in the world is meeting in Washington, D.C., this week, following two rushed, secretive meetings of the Federal Reserve and another instantaneous and rare meeting between the Fed Chair and the president of the United States. These and other emergency bank meetings around the world cause one to wonder what is going down. Let’s start with a bullet list of the week’s big-bank events:
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors just held an “expedited special meeting” on Monday in closed-door session.
The White House made an immediate announcement that the president was going to meet with Fed Chair Janet Yellen right after Monday’s special meeting and that Vice President Biden would be joining them.
The Federal Reserve very shortly posted an announcement of another expedited closed-door meeting for Tuesday for the specific purpose of “bank supervision.”
A G-20 meeting of finance ministers and central-bank heads starts in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, too, and continues through Wednesday.
Then on Thursday the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meet in Washington.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta just revised US GDP growth for the first quarter to the precipice of recession at 0.1%.
US banks are expected this coming week to report their worst quarter financially since the start of the Great Recession.
The press stated that the German government will sue the European Central Bank if it launches a more aggressive and populist form of quantitative easing, often called “helicopter money.”
The European Union’s new “bail-in” procedures for failing banks were employed for the first time with Austrian bank Heta Asset Resolution AG.
Italy’s minister of finance called an emergency meeting of Italian bankers to engage “last resort” measures for dealing with 360-billion euros of bad loans in banks that have only 50 billion in capital.
President Obama’s meeting with Fed Chair Yellen
It is rare for presidents to meet with the chair of the Federal Reserve. The last time President Obama met with Janet Yellen was in November of 2014, a year and a half ago. It is even more rare for the vice president of the United States to join them. In fact, I’ve heard but haven’t verified that it has never happened in a suddenly called meeting with the Fed before.
For security reasons, the president and vice president don’t regularly attend the same events. There are, of course, many planning sessions or emergency meetings where they do get together, but not with the head of the Federal Reserve. Emergency meetings where the VP is included in the planning session would include situations related to dire national security in case the VP winds up having to take over.
(George Bush and Dick Cheney were exceptional to the point that everyone commented on how often the VP was included in meetings with the president, but I always figured that was because George Bush couldn’t think and speak without Cheney acting as the ventriloquist.)
In fact the meeting with the prez and vice prez is so rare that the White House is bending over backwards to assure the entire nation that the president is not meeting with Yellen to try to influence the Fed, which is required to act independently of politics (so they say).
According to the White House, President Obama is meeting with the Fed chair and Biden to discuss the nation’s “longer-term economic outlook,” even though Yellen just told the entire nation that the economy was strong and had arrived nearly back at “full health.” The president says they will be “comparing notes.” Do their notes about the nation’s outlook disagree?
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said both Obama and Yellen are focused on ways to expand economic opportunities for the U.S. middle class. He called the meeting an opportunity for the two to “trade notes” while emphasizing that Yellen makes decisions about monetary policy independently. (SFGate)
Either such meetings are, indeed, extremely rare, or the White House doth protest to much because they spent more time emphasize what the president was not going to do than what he was going to do in assuring us he will not try to influence Yellen.
“The president has been pleased with the way that she has fulfilled what is a critically important job,” Earnest said. He added that Obama has “the utmost respect for the independent nature of her role.”
Earnest also said that, “even in a confidential setting” Obama would not “have a conversation that would undermine” the Fed’s ability to make “critical financial decisions independently.”
If such meetings with the Fed are so rare they require careful explanation, why the sudden call of the meeting, oddly timed between two specially called, emergency meetings of the Fed — or, at least, “expedited” meetings of the Fed. It can’t just be that the president wants to plan what he will be saying at this week’s G-20 conference, if he’s to speak there. That kind of planning would happen in advance because one knows the conference is coming. One striking peculiarity of the presidents meeting with the Fed is that it appeared to have been called immediately after the Fed announced Monday’s “expedited” meeting of the Board of Governors.
We are in an election cycle, and I already speculated in my last article that, with the anti-establishment, Fed-hating candidates, Sanders and Trump doing so well in their bids for the presidency we could be sure the Administration would be doing all it can along with the Fed to put some accelerant on this economy and forestall the recession that I believe we have already begun.
A recession would prove Trump and Sander right in their statements about a coming recession or the failed actions of the Fed and Wall Street to bring true recovery. So, the Fed and the President have every reason to work together to make sure such an announcement never happens. That could be what “comparing notes” on the economy’s future means — how do we assure the economy doesn’t fall apart in the next few months before the election since we have that common interest?
That would explanation why the White House is saying, in advance of any accusations, that the president isn’t trying to influence the Fed. They want to get ahead of the story. Of course, it could just be that they recognize such rare meetings will lead to the kind of speculation I’m now doing.
Tuesday’s specially called meeting of the Board of Governors under “expedited procedures”
Here is the announcement the Fed posted at the end of last week for Monday’s meeting (italics mine):
Advanced Notice of a Meeting under Expedited Procedures
It is anticipated that the closed meeting of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at 11:30 AM on Monday, April 11, 2016, will be held under expedited procedures, as set forth in section 26lb.7 of the Board’s Rules Regarding Public Observation of Meetings, at the Board’s offices at 20th Street and C Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. The following items of official Board business are tentatively scheduled to be considered at that meeting.
Meeting Date: Monday, April 11, 2016
Matter(s) Considered
1. Review and determination by the Board of Governors of the advance and discount rates to be charged by the Federal Reserve Banks.
A final announcement of matters considered under expedited procedures will be available in the Board’s Freedom of Information and Public Affairs Offices and on the Board’s Web site following the closed meeting.
…Dated: April 7, 2016
The promised update after the meeting merely added,
Effective April 11, 2016, the meeting was closed to public observation by Order of the Board of Governors 1 because the matters fall under exemption(s) 9(A)(i) of the Government in the Sunshine Act (5 U.S.C. Section 552b(c)), and it was determined that the public interest did not require opening the meeting.
One day later, the Fed put out an announcement of another special meeting to be held on Tuesday, after the suddenly scheduled meeting with the president:
Advanced Notice of a Meeting under Expedited Procedures
It is anticipated that the closed meeting of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at 2:00 PM on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, will be held under expedited procedures, as set forth in section 26lb.7 of the Board’s Rules Regarding Public Observation of Meetings, at the Board’s offices at 20th Street and C Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. The following items of official Board business are tentatively scheduled to be considered at that meeting.
Meeting Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Matter(s) Considered
1. Bank Supervisory Matter
A final announcement of matters considered under expedited procedures will be available in the Board’s Freedom of Information and Public Affairs Offices and on the Board’s Web site following the closed meeting.
…Dated: April 8, 2016
O.K. Two expedited, closed meetings in a row with a meeting with the president and vice president in between that is so rare it required special White House defense as to what would not be happening in the meeting.
The first meeting was to talk about setting interest rates, which the FOMC will be meeting to consider again later this month, having just postponed their scheduled increase in March. The second meeting is more interesting. If you have served on board or worked with boards that go into closed session, you know they always use the most generic terminology possible when announcing the meeting for sharing in minutes what happened in the meeting.
The fact that it is a bank supervisory matter makes it sound like a particular concern, not a discussion about supervisory policy. Something is the mattersomewhere that requires an immediate meeting right after another immediate meeting … behind closed doors. That something regards bank supervision. Board hold closed meetings when they have to talk about specific institutions or individuals with details that they don’t want to go public. This all comes very close to sounding like some bank somewhere is in trouble, and the trouble is big enough to call a special meeting of the very august board of governors right after they just had a special meeting, and if you know these kinds of guys, they don’t like wasting their time in excessive meetings.
Naturally, I am as curious as you probably are about why so many last-minute meetings behind closed doors and with the president and vice president at a time when all central bank heads will be meeting with finance ministers in Washington, D.C. So, I cast about for some possible related stories as to what could be the matter, and I found several very hot ones going on this same week.
Atlanta Fed revises US GDP down AGAIN!
The president’s meeting with the Fed and the Fed’s meetings with the Fed were all called right after the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank revised the revisions of its previous revisements to say the US economy now looks like it will report in for the first quarter at 0.1% growth.
It seems I cannot write fast enough to keep up with the Federal Reserve’s downward revisions of anticipated GDP growth for the first quarter of 2016. No sooner did I click “publish” on my last article where I noted they have just revised their estimates of GDP down to a 0.4% annualized growth rate than I read an article stating they had revised it again down to 0.1%!
Isn’t this where I said this quarter was going? That is within a rounding error of going negative and is less their margin of error for their data. It was only back in February that the Fed anticipated a cruising speed of 2% growth for GDP in the first quarter. They have revised that number down every week.
Of course, the fact that the Fed and the President called an unscheduled, closed-door meetings to include the VP does not mean there is any connection between the events, and I certainly am not concluding even for myself that there is something dire happening here … but stay with me. There is more to perk the ears.
US banks to report worst quarter since Great Recession
That’s no small potatoes for a coincidence in timing. What if the numbers to be reported are even worse than has been anticipated, and the Fed is seeing bank trouble in some of those numbers and the President has received advanced information about some of those numbers. All speculation on my part, of course. What isn’t speculation on my part is that Wall Street is already predicting that this week’s quarterly bank reports are going to look something like the start of the Great Recession.
Analysts say it has been the worst start to the year since the financial crisis in 2007-2008 and expect poor first-quarter results when reporting begins this week…. Analysts forecast a 20 percent decline on average in earnings from the six biggest U.S. banks, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S data. Some banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), are expected to report the worst results in over ten years. (Reuters)
Whoa! That means, for Goldman, even worse than any time just prior to orduring the Great Recession. When you consider how bad the last decade has been, being worse than that is pretty bad. Moreover, the timing is considered unusually nasty:
This spells trouble for the financial sector more broadly, since banks typically generate at least a third of their annual revenue during the first three months of the year…. Bank executives have already warned investors to expect major declines…. Citigroup Inc (C.N) CFO John Gerspach said to expect trading revenue more broadly to drop 15 percent versus the first quarter of last year. JPMorgan Chase & Co’s (JPM.N) Daniel Pinto said to expect a 25 percent decline in investment banking. Several bank executives have warned about declining quality of energy sector loans.
“The first quarter is going to be ugly and we don’t think that necessarily gets recovered in the back half of the year,” said Jerry Braakman, chief investment officer of First American Trust, which owns shares of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Goldman. “There are a lot of challenges ahead.”
Yes, one of the biggest areas of bank troubles comes from defaults in the energy sector that I have been saying will play a major role in birthing this banking crisis. (Translate that primarily oil and gas.)
BofA’s Michael Contopoulos warned last week, it may be the worst default cycle in history with “cumulative losses over the length of the entire cycle could be worse than we’ve ever seen before.”
Over the weekend, the FT got the memo with a report that … said that “the global bond default rate by companies is running at its highest since 2009 with the US accounting for the vast majority, according to rating agency Standard & Poor’s. A further four defaults this week, with three coming from the troubled oil and gas sector, pushed the overall tally to 40 with a little over a quarter of 2016 done.” (Zero Hedge)
According to the Wall Street Journal, these defaults are from “massive energy loans that most investors didn’t even know about until recently.” Recovery of these bad debts is falling extremely fast.
The growth of the high-yield bond market allowed drillers to take on far more debt than in past booms, leaving them more vulnerable to default. The emergence of shale technology allowed companies to expand reserves and the loans backed by those properties. Some of those loans may now be underwater. (Bloomberg)
You can thank the Fed’s zero-interest policy for that easy credit bubble.
Is anyone starting to feel a little financial crisis deja vù? Last time it was declining housing-sector loans. This time, as I’ve been saying for the last few months we would soon see, it’s declining energy-sector loans. Looks like that is ready to materialize.
In code words, Wells Fargo tells us that their trench-worthy report has not even begun to fully write down the bad debts or move into foreclosures that would cause write-downs: (That is, at least, what I read in public bankerspeak.)
John Shrewsberry, Wells Fargo’s chief financial officer, said on a January call with analysts. “We were working with each customer to help them work through this. It doesn’t do us any good to accelerate an issue, or to end up as the holder of a number of oil leases as a bank.”
This week and next is the big-bank reporting season. So, we should know right away if this is the next leg down in the Epocalypse, but you will probably have some coded language to look through. Something as big as this would certainly merit a flash meeting with the president and vice president, multiple meetings of the board of directors, and a G-20 financial summit in Washington along with meetings with the IMF and World Bank.
Not saying that’s what it is. Just sniffing out the kinds of stories that could be related to all these meetings, some planned earlier, others suddenly and somewhat secretively called.
Austrian bank failure echoes Great Depression
Five and a half years ago, I wrote an article here that mentioned how the Great Depression took its second and deepest plunge in 1931 because of the failure of a private Austrian bank named Credit Anstalt.
In May 1931, a Viennese bank named Credit-Anstalt failed. Founded by the famous Rothschild banking family in 1855, Credit-Anstalt was one of the most important financial institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its failure came as a shock because it was considered impregnable…. The fall of Credit-Anstalt—and the dominoes it helped topple across Continental Europe and the confidence it shredded as far away as the U.S.—wasn’t just the failure of a bank: It was a failure of civilization.
Now, as I’ve been writing about the start of what I believe will be the the second and worst dip of the Great Recession, another Austrian bank is crumbling.
Austria created Heta Asset Resolution AG when it nationalized all the bad loans of Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International five years ago to rescue the bank and depositors by creating a “bad bank” to contain the problems. It went down something like this:
Hypo Alpe-Adria bank, when it was still owned by the small Austrian state of Carinthia, was a cesspool of corruption. It involved bankers, politicians, and powerbrokers in Austria and the Balkans. It was the perfect union of money and power. Investigators found 160 instances of suspected fraud….
Six of the bank’s former executives have been convicted of crimes.
“I’m not aware of a criminal case bigger than this one,” explained Christian Böhler, whose forensics team started investigating the bank in 2011. “It was a mix of greed, criminal energy, and utter chaos.” (Wolf Street)
Hypo’s troubles began, much as Credit Anstalt’s had before it, when it was required to adjust its books to reflect the true value of its collateral assets after the value of real estate in southeastern Europe collapsed. Everything fell apart upon the realization of how little it was actually worth.
Austria’s central bank governor Ewald Nowotny and his task force recommended that Hypo’s toxic assets of €17.8 billion should be put into a “bad bank.” But to stop the drag on public finances, the federal government should not guarantee Hypo’s bonds. At the time, Austrian taxpayers had already plowed €4.8 billion into Hypo to bail out these bondholders.
He then explained on TV to incredulous Austrians that this deal would nudge the budget deficit over the 3% limit set by the Maastricht Treaty and push the government’s debt from 74.4% of GDP to 80% of GDP. This one rotten, state-owned bank in Carinthia was causing this much damage to the country’s finances!
The government, at that point, set a one-year moratorium on all payments to the “bad bank’s” bondholders.
After burning through 5.5 billion euros of taxpayer money to no avail and discovering a 7.6-billion-euro hole in its balance sheet still remained to be filled, Finance Minister Hans Joerg Schelling ended support in March 2015. Surprise, surprise, the bad bank created by the government to put a fence around all the bad debts of the original bad bank became nothing but a black hole of debt, swallowing all money poured into it with nothing to show for the effort. That didn’t stop Schelling from claiming the nationalized bank was in good health in order to put a good face on things as leaders are inclined to do when dealing with really bad stuff in order to protect the public from a scare.
Yesterday, under the first application of Europe’s new forced “bail in” procedures, Austria ordered a haircut to the banks bondholders. Sighs. This is apparently what happens if your money is still locked up in a bank with “good health.”
It does, indeed, sound a tad bit like Credit Anstalt. Now the moratorium is up, and it’s time to start dishing out the bad news to the bondholders under Europe’s new rules:
Austria officially became the first European country to use a new law under the framework imposed by Bank the European Recovery and Resolution Directive to share losses of a failed bank with senior creditors as it slashed the value of debt owed by Heta Asset Resolution AG.
The highlights from the announcement…
a 100% bail-in for all subordinated liabilities,
a 53.98% bail-in, resulting in a 46.02% quota, for all eligible preferential liabilities,
the cancellation of all interest payments from 01.03.2015, when HETA was placed into resolution pursuant to BaSAG,
as well as a harmonisation of the maturities of all eligible liabilities to 31.12.2023. ((SuperStation95)
This is some much-needed relief from how things used to work:
Throughout the Financial Crisis, and since, there has been one rule: bank bondholders will always be bailed out at the expense of everyone else. The sanctity of bank bonds reigned supreme, no matter what government and central banks had to do to keep it that way. Bank bonds weren’t allowed to be judged by the capital markets. They were simply untouchable. Underpaid and overtaxed workers would have to bail out bank bondholders when these recklessly managed banks collapsed.
That was the rule in the US when the Fed, and to a lesser extent the federal government, bailed out the banks. And that was the rule during the debt crisis in Europe. (Wolf Street cont.)
Europe’s new rules were intended to make sure that depositors did not take all the loss and that tax payers don’t absorb all the loss. Heta, because it was a government created “bad bank,” apparently does not have depositors, as it was the creditors who were pooled into the “bad bank” who take the hit. The preferred creditors at the Austrian bank have been told they will have to take a 54% haircut, meaning the bonds they have purchased will recover forty-six cents on the euro.
The big-money (preferred) creditors of the bank, however, don’t like the new rules. They complained and are still holding out for ninety-two cents on the euro. That doesn’t bode well for anything being left for the smaller guys, whose money will, in the very least, be kept in a lockbox for seven years because payouts to the non-Majors don’t wind up until 2023. Major bond-holders demanding a smaller hit include Pimco, Commerzbank and the already deeply troubled Deutsche Bank. (Anybody see how things can quickly move down the line like dominoes when you consider the size of some of the worried creditors who are complaining that the hit will be too hard for them?)
The “subordinated liabilities,” as I understand the complex breakdown (for which I have been unable to find any clear definitions) appears to include bondholders who took a second position to the “preferred liabilities” in getting their money back and third-party investors in the bank. It also appears to include the partners in the bank. If so, then this is exactly how bank failures should happen. The investors are slated to lose 100% of their money first, allowing for the smaller loss by the bond holders.
It is the investors who elect the board that governs the bank and who fill the board positions and who make the decisions of who will be CEO; so, of course, they should lose all of their money before anyone else does. Creditors (bond holders) should be next, as they are often large institutions like PIMCO that have more than enough capacity to investigate risk before investing. Depositors should always be last, as most of them have no capacity whatsoever to investigate the real risk of banks and nowhere near enough money to put into a bank to make it worth a real investigation of risk. They are acting in trust … and particularly in trust that government regulators are doing their job.
Too bad the United States doesn’t operate this way!
What kind of spinoff can the settlement of Heta have to other institutions? Well, last month, the Association of German Banks had to bail out a small bank called Duesseldorfer Hypothekenbank AG because its hit as a creditor of Heta would have killed it. Though Duesseldorfer is a small bank, it was apparently deemed too big to fail because, once again, government bailouts went to the rescue.
Given that such an agreement happened on Sunday afternoon, and that central banks and regulatory bodies usually talk with other national bodies that may be affected, I have to wonder if the thought of how Europe might react on Monday had anything to do with Monday’s sudden meetings of the Fed.
Italian banks on final crash-landing approach
As if all that were not bad enough for the start of a week in banking news, Italy’s minister of finance called an emergency meeting over the past weekend of Italian bankers to engage “last resort” measures for dealing with 360-billion euros of bad loans in banks that have only 50 billion in capital.
Finance minister Pier Carlo Padoan has called a meeting in Rome on Monday with executives from Italy’s largest financial institutions to agree final details of a “last resort” bailout plan.
Yet on the eve of that gathering, concerns remain as to whether the plan will be sufficient to ringfence the weakest of Italy’s large banks….
Italian bank shares have lost almost half their value so far this year amid investor worries over a €360bn pile of non-performing loans — equivalent to about a fifth of GDP. (Contra Corner)
Could that have had anything to do with the flurry of bank meetings in the US. I have no idea, but I do have to wonder, with so much smoke everywhere in the banking industry, is there a fire we need to know about? You can be sure, we’ll be the last to know, and any announcement of what’s really going down will hit like Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers. One day, all the central bankers are talking like things are fine. The next day a major vertebrae is knocked out of the nation’s financial spine.
Or maybe presidents and central bankers are just making sure things generally hold together through the election cycle. Such a bad-news week for banks around the world certainly doesn’t sound like all is well as our smiling central bankers, president and V.P, say it is. I don’t know any top secrets to reveal, but the smoke is killing me. By David Haggith, The Great Recession Blog
And now suddenly, this is leaving ugly skid marks on the economy, banks, and investors. Read… US Commercial Bankruptcies Suddenly Soar
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Immediate Creation in the End Time » Stankov's Universal Law Press
Immediate Creation in the End Time
by Georgi Stankov Posted on April 14, 2016
Georgi Stankov, April 15, 2016
www.stankovuniversallaw.com
Since the opening of this website and especially during the last week I have been busy exposing the total fraud in the USA from various angles. At the end I concluded: “everywhere is fraud as far as the eye can see.” That this ubiquitous fraud exists is entirely the consequence of the cognitive dissonance of the people that prevents them, consciously or subconsciously, from seeing the fraud. Essentially they do not see the fraud because it makes all things so much more complicated that humans get lost in this maze of fraud, while eagerly participating in it and running after the carrot that the cabal is dangling in front of them in the form of illusory social success. That this kind of social success is simply a clandestine form of human enslavement has been very well explained by the renowned thinker Nassim Taleb in his recent article “How To Legally Own Another Person“.
I am already two-thirds of a century on this planet and have experienced this collective cognitive dissonance and the eagerness of the masses to participate in this fraud of creeping enslavement that manifests first and foremost as a total loss of common sense twice in my lifetime and these are the most painful periods in my life:
1) During the time of communism in the post-war era in Eastern Europe when the people were indoctrinated to such an extent that they even thanked their oppressors for the scarcity they were forced to live in and feared individual freedom like the devil the incense.
2) And since 9/11 in Western Europe and now in North America when the mission creep of the ruling cabal to install the NWO entered its last most obvious and socially devastating phase.
Anybody who was born in the West has no clue how the communist dictatorship based on utter fear and full economic control transformed the human species into utter zombies. The West is now slowly awakening to this same reality which the East has left behind. Unfortunately I had to make this ghastly experience in my youth and now again in old age. Then what is currently happening in North America and Western Europe is the repetition of the same dreadful experience the peoples in Eastern Europe and Asia had under the communist yoke for more than half a century.
The peoples in the West did not make this kind of NWO experience at that time for one single reason: during the Cold war there were powerful communist and left parties in the West that compelled the ruling cabal to obey some of the general rules of democracy and decency as not to trigger a revolution and be swallowed by the red pestilence.
With the fall of the Iron curtain, this external pressure upon the western ruling cabal to behave somewhat properly and decently disappeared and their berserk character flourished in a most despicable manner. That is why all the people who were raised in the West such as the Saker and write about Eastern Europe and the Anglo-Zionist Empire have such difficulties to understand the current final battle between light and darkness as they are missing the personal experience with this human evil – the former failed red NWO – in its worst existing form on this timeline.
By the way, this also holds true for all light workers who are not light warriors of the first and the last hour as the PAT and are not constantly confronted with the darkness of this world. They do not need to cleanse this dark goo at the expense of their personal health and well-being and as a famous Bulgarian saying says with respect to our past experience with the Turkish yoke: “two hundred whips on other person’s back are nothing compared to one whip on one’s own back”. It is the same difference as I observed as a dissident between me and the indoctrinated indolent masses in the East… and now in the West.
From that point of view, it is understandable why I have such a big head start compared to all the critical writers in the West and why even the most advanced light warriors in the West have no clue how the NWO really feels when it has taken full control of humanity. But they are coming closer and closer to this awful sensation.
One major aspect of their current awakening is that they, for the first time, begin to realize the inherent tendency of most incarnated humans to perpetuate the same disappointing and unyielding experiences again and again. But as Brian, the Dragon, correctly observes in his latest message, the driving force behind planetary and individual ascension is precisely the recognition at the soul level that the current repetition of the same dull and degrading experiences with this human society and dense 3D holographic model based on ubiquitous fraud is a dead-end. In the current End Time the incarnated souls begin to feel the urgent inner desire to change these experiences for the better:
“You are right when you all say things are complicated. You are not victims of the complication but instead all contribute to it either passively or actively. It makes the game more interesting. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with the game you are playing. Except when you are tired of playing it, and the majority of you on Earth are tired of playing it (Who knows this better than the PAT? Note, George). You’re not tired to the point that you will stop incarnating on Earth, but instead want to do something more constructive and exciting: you want to make a transformation. In the grand scheme of things, all that matters is that you will enjoy the transformation in whatever way you choose to enjoy it. God-all-that-is loves you, and your experience regardless of what you choose. However, with a bias towards love, there is a bias in the universe towards enjoying creation (whatever that means for you), even when it doesn’t seem that way sometimes experiencing a world of balance of polarity vs harmonic balance.”
The transpersonal, transcendental, unconditional love of all Logos Gods and Ascended Masters in human gestalt in the End Time of Ascension is the energetic bias that allows for immediate creation and transforms this world of polarity into a world of harmonious balance. This presupposes uncompromised frankness with oneself and the rest of the world which opens the eyes of the people for the fraud they have created and live in. Then one fact should be clearly stated at this place – the gargantuan fraud in the Empire of Evil was not created only by the cabal but also by the spontaneous support of the entire population as their accomplices.
Now that some of the US citizens begin to drop from this scam, there are good chances that their eyes wide shut in the past will begin to open to the dreadful reality they have created for themselves. They will embrace our ideas of a new world based on harmony, sovereignty of the individual, and the ability to love oneself in the first place before to claim loving the rest of humanity and All-That-Is as many insincere light workers pretend nowadays. And in order to be able to love oneself, one must get rid of all dark remnants of this Orion indoctrination that still shape the fraudulent personalities of most incarnated human beings.
This is the next step that such critical thinkers as the author below should make as to be able to ascend with us. But our educational efforts are already bearing, almost immediately, a rich harvest.
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The Entire Status Quo Is a Fraud
Charles Hugh Smith, April 13, 2016
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.ca/2016/04/the-entire-status-quo-is-fraud.html
Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences. This can’t be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
– The financial system is a fraud.
– The political system is a fraud.
– National Defense is a fraud.
– The healthcare system is a fraud.
– Higher education is a fraud.
– The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
– Culture–from high to pop–is a fraud.
(All these areas of fraud have been extensively and in great depth discussed on our website, especially the healthcare fraud, so that this is nothing new to us. But the important information from this article is that other people follow our footsteps and begin to see the things with the same eyes. From here to ascension is then a short journey. Note, George)
Need I go on? We have come to accept fraud as standard operating practice in America, to the detriment of everything that was once worthy. Why is this so?
One reason, which I outline in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All, is that centralized hierarchies select for fraud and incompetence. Now that virtually every system in America is centralized or regulated by centralized hierarchies, every system in America is fraudulent and incompetent. Nassim Taleb explains this further in his recent article How To Legally Own Another Person (via Lew G.)
The three ingredients of fraud are abundant: pressure (to get an A, to please your boss, to make your sales numbers, etc.), rationalization (everybody’s doing it) and opportunity.
Taleb explains why failure and fraud become the status quo: admitting error and changing course are risky, and everyone who accepts the servitude of working in a centralized hierarchy–by definition, obedience to authority is the #1 requirement– is averse to risk.
As I explain in my book, these systems select for risk aversion and the appearance of obedience to rules and authority while maximizing personal gain: in other words, fraud as a daily way of life.
Truth is a dangerous poison in centralized hierarchies: anyone caught telling the truth risks a tenner in bureaucratic Siberia. (In the Soviet Gulag ,a tenner meant a ten-year sentence to a labor camp in Siberia.)
And so the truth is buried, sent to a backwater for further study, obfuscated by jargon, imprisoned by a Top Secret stamp, or simply taken out and executed. Everyone in the system maximizes his/her personal gain by going along with the current trajectory, even if that trajectory is taking the nation off the cliff.
Consider the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a $1+ trillion failure. The aircraft is underpowered, under-armed, insanely overpriced, insanely over-budget and still riddled with bugs after seven years of fixes, making it an unaffordable maintenance nightmare that puts our service people and nation at risk.
But no one in a position of power will speak the truth about the F-35, because it is no longer a weapons system–it’s a jobs program. Defense contractors are careful to spread the work of assembling parts of the F-35 to 40+ states, so 80+ senators will support the program, no matter how much a failure it is as a weapons system, or how costly the failure is becoming.
A rational person in charge would immediately cancel it and start from scratch, with a program run outside the Pentagon and outside congressional meddling. But this is impossible in America: instead, we build failed, under-armored, under-powered, under-armed and unreliable ships (LCS) and failed under-powered, under-armed and unreliable fighters as the most expensive make-work programs in history.
As for our failed healthcare system, one anecdote will do. (You undoubtedly have dozens from your own experience.) A friend from Uruguay with a high-tech job in the U.S. recently flew home to Montevideo for a medical exam because 1) the cost of the flight was cheaper than the cost of the care in the U.S. and 2) she was seen the next day in Montevideo while it would have taken two months to get the same care in the U.S.
I’ve listed dozens of examples here over the years: $120,000 for a couple days in a hospital, no procedures performed; $20,000+ for a single emergency room visit, no procedures performed; several thousand dollars charged to Medicare for a few minutes in an “observation room” that was occupied by patients, no staff present–the list is endless.
We’ve habituated to fraud as a way of life because every system is fraudulent. Consider the costly scam known as higher education. The two essentials higher education should teach are: 1) how to learn anything you need to learn or want to learn on your own, and 2) how to think, behave, plan and function entrepreneurially (i.e. as an autonomous problem-solver and lifelong learner who cooperates and collaborates productively with others) as a way of life.
That higher education fails to do so is self-evident. We could create a highly effective system of higher education that costs 10% of the current corrupt system. I’ve described such a system (in essence, a directed apprenticeship as opposed to sitting in a chair for four years) in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
As for what passes as culture in the U.S.: the majority of what’s being sold as culture, both high and low, is derivative and forgettable. We suffer the dual frauds of absurd refinement (so only the elites can “appreciate” the art, music, food, wine, etc.) and base coarsening: instead of Tender (romantic love and sex) we have Tinder (flammable trash).
Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences. While everyone maximizes their personal gain in whatever system of skim, scam and fraud they inhabit, the nation rots from within. We’ve lost our way, and lost the ability to tell the truth, face problems directly, abandon what has failed and what is unaffordable, and accept personal risk as the essential element of successful adaptation.
Here’s a good place to start: require every politician to wear the logos of their top 10 contributors–just like NASCAR drivers and vehicles display the logos of their sponsors. The California Initiative to make this a reality is seeking signatures of registered California voters. Since politicians are owned, let’s make the ownership transparent.
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Not only Are All Balance Sheets Rigged in the Empire of Evil – Its Presidential Race is Also Rigged » Stankov's Universal Law Press
Not only Are All Balance Sheets Rigged in the Empire of Evil – Its Presidential Race is Also Rigged
by Georgi Stankov Posted on April 13, 2016
Georgi Stankov, April 13, 2016
www.stankovuniversallaw.com
Is there anything that is not fraud in the US of Accounting Gimmicks? The answer is an unequivocal No. I hope that the memory of the American people is not that much short as not to remember how Bush stole the presidency from Al Gore in Florida with 537 votes out of six million cast (and many more thousands of votes declared invalid, see Florida election recount fraud) with the help of his Mafia brother Jeb, who was governor of this state at that time. The same scoundrel who quit this presidential race as a hapless candidate beaten by Donald Trump. How can one talk of true representative democracy in this country of infinite debt gaps, the biggest and most important of all being the democracy gap, if Al Gore lost the elections although he had 2 million votes more than Bush?
This is the simple truth of this Evil Empire of Smoke and Mirrors which is now finding its way to the MSM in a dramatic reset of the collective mindset away from its cognitive dissonance. Even the bullhorn of the British-Reptilian propaganda cannot neglect this truth which strips away the last vestige of respectability of this dying empire of accounting gimmicks in finance, government, corporations and at the ballot stations. No truth – no democracy, no financial transparency – utter collapse, these are the facts on the ground in the End Time of Ascension which we now create as Logos Gods with astounding precision.
In its latest article the mouthpiece of the AAA-Axis (Anglo-American-Assholes-Axis), also known as the Anglo-Zionist Empire of the former Orion-Reptilian PTB, BBC has been forced to address the electoral fraud in the USA which proves that this country is in fact an oligarchic, plutocratic kleptocracy – in other words a failed Mafia state – the worst form of social and national order that always ends up with decay and destruction.
__________________________
Is the US presidential race ‘rigged’?
Anthony Zurcher, North American reporter, April 13, 2016
BBC
The United States “MAY” be a democracy, but the party presidential nomination process – upon closer inspection – is hardly a shining beacon of democratic light.
For most of US history, party nominees have been decided by political power brokers and deal-makers behind closed doors. Parties operate like private clubs – they make their own rules and are suspicious of outsiders.
Only in recent history has a more open system of primaries and caucuses been grafted onto the process to give the average American a say in who appears on the general election ballot.
In a close, contentious primary season, however, the veneer of accountability can rub off, exposing the sometimes unsightly gears that still power the US political system.
This has prompted objection from the supporters of two candidates in particular – Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – who feel that the party establishments are arrayed against their presidential quests.
But are their concerns valid? Here are answers to four pertinent questions as the nomination battles approach its final months.
Is Trump being cheated?
34 – Number of delegates Ted Cruz received in Colorado, which held conventions to pick delegates
743 Trump total delegate count
545 Cruz total delegate count
Mr Trump is leading the race for the Republican nomination, but it’s starting to feel like he’s not winning.
While he’s comfortably ahead, with 743 delegates to 545 for second-place Ted Cruz, there’s mounting evidence that he’s being outmanoeuvred in the behind-the-scenes political process that could come into play if he doesn’t reach the magic 1,237 delegate number necessary to secure the nomination outright.
In Colorado – which selected its delegates at party gatherings last week and not through primaries or caucuses – Mr Cruz walked away with all 34 delegates. Even in states that have held contests won by Mr Trump, Mr Cruz’s team has been working doggedly to ensure that their people become delegates.
While Mr Trump swept South Carolina’s 50 delegates, for instance, the state’s convention delegation will be riddled with Cruz supporters who, while bound to Mr Trump on the first few ballots, can switch to the Texas senator if there is a protracted convention battle.
It has Mr Trump and his people crying foul.
“This is happening all over our country – great people being disenfranchised by politicians,” Mr Trump tweeted on Monday. “Repub party is in trouble!”
Paul Manafort, Mr Trump’s new aide in charge of managing the delegate-selection process, accused the Cruz campaign of using “Gestapo tactics, scorched-earth tactics” in Colorado.
If, as Mr Trump asserted on Monday, the system is “rigged” and “crooked”, however, it isn’t always tilted in favour of Mr Trump’s opponents. Thanks to the Republican Party’s delegate-apportioning system, including Florida’s winner-take-all primary, Mr Trump has secured a larger share of the delegates so far (45%) than he has of the raw primary vote (37%).
If Mr Cruz manages to win the nomination at the Republican convention despite trailing Mr Trump in total delegates and share of the popular vote, Mr Trump may have reason to feel aggrieved.
But before he complains too loudly, he might want to heed some sage advice attributed (incorrectly) to Albert Einstein: “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”
Mr Trump should be familiar with the quote, since he tweeted it in October 2014.
Why isn’t Sanders catching up?
17
States Bernie Sanders has won
18
States Hillary Clinton has won
Mr Sanders has won five state contests in a row and seven of the last eight. If he were an American football team he’d be poised for the playoffs. If he were prize fighter, he’d be tuning up for a title bout.
Instead his pledged-delegate deficit to Mrs Clinton has gone from daunting to only fractionally less daunting. Over the course of his recent run, the Vermont Senator has picked up a net of just 91 delegates, despite winning Wisconsin 56% to 43%, Utah 79% to 20% and Washington 72% to 27%.
According to a New York Times calculation, the former secretary of state currently has 1,305 pledged delegates, while Sanders stands at 1,086. Add in the non-binding support of “super-delegates” – Democratic officeholders and party functionaries who also cast ballots for the nominee at the convention – and Mrs Clinton’s lead balloons to 1,774 to 1,117.
To secure the Democratic nomination without drama at the convention a candidate needs the backing of 2,383 delegates
The problem for Mr Sanders is that while he’s been posting sizeable wins over the past month, they’ve largely been in delegate-poor states, like Wyoming (14 delegates), Idaho (23) and Alaska (16). His successes pale when compared to Mrs Clinton’s massive earlier wins in populous southern states like Texas, Florida and Georgia, which alone netted her 184 delegates over Mr Sanders.
If Mrs Clinton performs as expected in the coming contests in New York (291 delegates), Maryland (118) and Pennsylvania (210), she’ll largely erase all the modest ground Mr Sanders made up over the past three weeks.
Does the popular vote even matter?
9,412,426
Votes for Hillary Clinton during primary season so far
7,034,997
Votes for Bernie Sanders during primary season so far
If delegate maths and selection rules make your head hurt, at least we can rely on the raw vote totals to get a feel for how popular the remaining candidates are, right?
Wrong.
According to current tabulations Hillary Clinton has received 9,412,426 votes during the primary season so far. Bernie Sanders has received 7,034,997. That 2.4m vote lead has been relentlessly touted by the former secretary of state and her supporters to counter the claims of Sanders faithful that their man is more popular than the delegate tallies indicate.
Some states that hold caucuses – like Iowa and Washington – aren’t included in that number, however, because they don’t report vote totals.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler tried to extrapolate numbers for the remaining states based on their total voter turnout and concluded that Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by 2.3m votes – still a significant margin.
Among the Republicans, who are better about providing full vote totals, Mr Trump leads with 8,256,309 votes. Mr Cruz is second (6,319,244), former candidate Marco Rubio is third (3,482,129), followed by Mr Kasich (2,979,379).
In the end the popular vote may give the leading candidates a claim of legitimacy as the people’s choice – but appearances can be deceiving.
“The media have created the perception that the voters choose the nomination. That’s the conflict here,” North Dakota delegate Curly Haugland told a television interviewer. “The rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at a convention. That’s just the way it is.”
Can Republican convention delegates be bribed?
If, as appears to be increasingly likely, the Republican primary season ends without Donald Trump securing the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination, the Republican National Convention could turn into a political free-for-all unrivalled in modern US political history.
After several rounds of deadlocked balloting, most convention delegates would be free to vote their conscience. But could that conscience be nudged by, say, a free weekend at a Donald Trump golf resort, a nice dinner with the Cruz family or even a choice spot in a John Kasich administration?
Maybe! While there are detailed anti-corruption laws governing the behaviour of public officeholders, convention delegates are private citizens. While government regulations prohibit them from taking money from corporations, labour unions, government contractors or foreign nationals, the law beyond that is much murkier.
Campaigns and their wealth donors could likely cover delegate travel expenses, no matter how lavish. Gold watches? Bags of small, unmarked bills? Who knows? State anti-bribery laws may apply, but there’s scant legal precedent.
Perhaps the greatest deterrent to untoward action by campaigns is the negative publicity such naked attempts at influence could have if they’re documented. But public perceptions and attitudes this political season has been difficult to predict, to say the least.
Although the national convention is still months away, accusations of dirty tricks have already started flying. On Sunday Mr Trump took to Twitter to accuse the Cruz campaign of misdeeds during the South Carolina state party convention – a charge Mr Cruz vehemently denied.
“I win a state in votes and then get non-representative delegates because they are offered all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign,” Mr Trump wrote. “Bad system!”
During a television interview that same morning, however, Trump adviser Paul Manafort appeared to acknowledge that his campaign won’t be shy in wooing delegates at the national convention, however.
“Well, there’s the law, and then there’s ethics, and then there’s getting votes,” he said. “I’m not going to get into what tactics are used. I happen to think the best way we’re going to get delegates is to have Donald Trump be exposed to delegates, let the delegates hear what he says.”
Another Trump adviser, Barry Bennett, said they wouldn’t be offering “seats on the Trump airplane or anything like that”.
“There’s obviously a big line – we’re not going to do anything immoral, illegal or unethical,” he said.
But when a presidential nomination is at stake, and it comes down to just a handful of delegates, that “big line” may end up looking awfully fuzzy.
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In January and February we witnessed a big crash of all major equity markets. This triggered panic among the ruling cabal and their central banksters and they decided to introduce negative interest rates for the first time in the history of Orion capitalism and in full contradiction to its Draconian (Reptilian) predatory principles during their final Davos meeting. This was the last munition of the elite to prolong its demise. All companies in the equity indexes received unlimited amount of worthless money as bank loans to buyback their own equities. This propped up the charts in March and April and established the illusion that all is well in the US of Accounting Gimmicks and in the EU of Draghi’s helicopter money.
However, what really happened was that the banksters were hoisted by their own petard. The fiat toilet paper money lost any value for everyone to see and this eliminated the cognitive dissonance of the masses that has kept the financial system afloat in the past. Most of the sovereign (government) bonds became negative which means the banks and all other investors had to pay money to the state, or rather to the central banks, to buy them. Here is a chart that illustrates the dramatic increase of negative sovereign bonds in the west in the last two months since the Davos decision to introduce negative interest rates by the central banks.
Chart Of The Day: Map Of $7 Trillion Of Negative Yield Government Bonds
As governmental bonds was the only secure revenue of the banks, their financial situation deteriorated dramatically in March and April as discussed by Reggie Middleton in his interview in my latest article. All big banks started to lose a lot of money and this deepened their de facto bankruptcy since the 2008 crisis. Contrary to the other sectors and companies in the major stock markets that used this worthless money to buyback their own equities and prop up the indexes, the banks charts went south again in March and April. This crash of the banks’ stocks was parallel to the decrease of bonds interest rates as this chart clearly illustrates:
Currently all EU and US banks are on the verge of financial collapse and this triggered a flurry of hectic activities of the central banksters this week. I will publish a good overview below that highlights the panic of the Fed and the Bombama’s deep government who are now paralysed by the impending financial catastrophe like rabbits in front of a cobra. The events are unfolding now with the speed of light and quicker than I can write. While this article below appeared only yesterday evening, it is already history.
Today we read in the MSM:
‘Living Wills’ For Five Big Banks Fail U.S. Regulators’ Test. None of the eight systemically important banks, which the U.S. government considers “too big to fail,” fared well in the evaluations.
“Five out of eight of the biggest U.S. banks do not have credible plans for winding down operations during a crisis without the help of public money, federal regulators said on Wednesday, saying the institutions could face stricter oversight if they do not fix their plans.
The “living wills” that the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation jointly agreed were not credible came from Bank of America <BAC.N>, Bank of New York Mellon <BK.N>, J.P. Morgan Chase <JPM.N>, State Street <STT.N>, Wells Fargo <WFC.N>.
The requirement for a living will was part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation passed in the wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, when the U.S. government spent billions of dollars on bailouts to keep big banks from failing and wrecking the U.S. economy.”
Why do we learn this today when these stress tests for the banks were ordered and performed immediately after the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation passed in 2009 and since then stress tests for the banks were repeated every several years. Only until recently we were told by the MSM that only the EU banks, such as the Italian banks are in financial troubles and that the US banking system is the rock in the breakers.
Did I say that the US of Accounting Gimmicks is also a country of numerous debt gaps on all levels – governmental ($300 trillion fiscal gap, $3.6 trillion pension gap, student loans debt gap which Obama has just acknowledged today (It Begins: Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans), etc), corporate (massive bad loans used for buybacks and unproductive investments, such as in the oil and energy industry (Peabody, World’s Largest Coal Producer Files Bankruptcy; 8,300 Jobs In Jeopardy), etc)? And now the too-big-to-fail banks in the USA are also broke.
While everybody is expecting the abysmal Q1 reports of the banks beginning this week, we had already a double whammy this Wednesday: Business inventories slide and sales tumble.
Business inventory-to-sales ratio pushes to new deeply recessionary cycle highs at 1.41x…
while retail sales tumbled 0.4%.
mainly driven by auto sale plunge.
These latest data must have driven the Fed banksters into total panic so that they have lost their minds as ZeroHedge reports today (see also article below):
“Following today’s triple whammy of economic misses, in which first retail sales both declined and missed expectations, and then both business inventories and sales declined and missed from downward revised numbers, AtlantaFed watchers were certain that the keeper of the GDP Nowcast would cut its GDP estimate from 0.1% to zero or even negative. However, this did not happen. Perhaps due to another tap on the shoulder as a negative GDP print would be just too much to justify the relentless market rally, or as a result of the NY Fed’s own competing service now trying to steal the limelight with its own 1.1% GDP forecast, moments ago the Atlanta Fed stunned everyone when it announced that instead of revising its concurrent GDP tracker lower, it actually pushed it up from 0.1% to 0.3%.”
These are the terminal clinical and behavioristic signs of the cabal banksters that herald the imminent financial apoptosis of the Orion banking system.
This night I had a very vivid dream that we, the PAT, were performing the dress rehearsal for the final unfolding (final act) of all sweeping events as predicted in our End Time scenario of ascension. We came to the conclusions that the scene is well set for these events to commence when nobody can any longer control them. The beginning of these final events leading to the destruction of the Orion matrix was scheduled by us unanimously for May.
As we all know, there is no guarantee for the manifestation of this dream in this timeline as it might have been a reflection of another parallel timeline. But it is significant that I received this dream as a confirmation from my HS immediately after I decided yesterday evening to write this article today. Besides, all fearful activities of the ruling cabal this week indicate that something major is in the making as this article below elucidates:
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What in the World’s Going on with Banks this Week? Emergency Meetings, Summits, Crashing EU Banks…
By David Haggith, April 12, 2015
The Great Recession Blog
Just about every major banker and finance minister in the world is meeting in Washington, D.C., this week, following two rushed, secretive meetings of the Federal Reserve and another instantaneous and rare meeting between the Fed Chair and the president of the United States. These and other emergency bank meetings around the world cause one to wonder what is going down. Let’s start with a bullet list of the week’s big-bank events:
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors just held an “expedited special meeting” on Monday in closed-door session.
The White House made an immediate announcement that the president was going to meet with Fed Chair Janet Yellen right after Monday’s special meeting and that Vice President Biden would be joining them.
The Federal Reserve very shortly posted an announcement of another expedited closed-door meeting for Tuesday for the specific purpose of “bank supervision.”
A G-20 meeting of finance ministers and central-bank heads starts in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, too, and continues through Wednesday.
Then on Thursday the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meet in Washington.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta just revised US GDP growth for the first quarter to the precipice of recession at 0.1%.
US banks are expected this coming week to report their worst quarter financially since the start of the Great Recession.
The press stated that the German government will sue the European Central Bank if it launches a more aggressive and populist form of quantitative easing, often called “helicopter money.”
The European Union’s new “bail-in” procedures for failing banks were employed for the first time with Austrian bank Heta Asset Resolution AG.
Italy’s minister of finance called an emergency meeting of Italian bankers to engage “last resort” measures for dealing with 360-billion euros of bad loans in banks that have only 50 billion in capital.
President Obama’s meeting with Fed Chair Yellen
It is rare for presidents to meet with the chair of the Federal Reserve. The last time President Obama met with Janet Yellen was in November of 2014, a year and a half ago. It is even more rare for the vice president of the United States to join them. In fact, I’ve heard but haven’t verified that it has never happened in a suddenly called meeting with the Fed before.
For security reasons, the president and vice president don’t regularly attend the same events. There are, of course, many planning sessions or emergency meetings where they do get together, but not with the head of the Federal Reserve. Emergency meetings where the VP is included in the planning session would include situations related to dire national security in case the VP winds up having to take over.
(George Bush and Dick Cheney were exceptional to the point that everyone commented on how often the VP was included in meetings with the president, but I always figured that was because George Bush couldn’t think and speak without Cheney acting as the ventriloquist.)
In fact the meeting with the prez and vice prez is so rare that the White House is bending over backwards to assure the entire nation that the president is not meeting with Yellen to try to influence the Fed, which is required to act independently of politics (so they say).
According to the White House, President Obama is meeting with the Fed chair and Biden to discuss the nation’s “longer-term economic outlook,” even though Yellen just told the entire nation that the economy was strong and had arrived nearly back at “full health.” The president says they will be “comparing notes.” Do their notes about the nation’s outlook disagree?
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said both Obama and Yellen are focused on ways to expand economic opportunities for the U.S. middle class. He called the meeting an opportunity for the two to “trade notes” while emphasizing that Yellen makes decisions about monetary policy independently. (SFGate)
Either such meetings are, indeed, extremely rare, or the White House doth protest to much because they spent more time emphasize what the president was not going to do than what he was going to do in assuring us he will not try to influence Yellen.
“The president has been pleased with the way that she has fulfilled what is a critically important job,” Earnest said. He added that Obama has “the utmost respect for the independent nature of her role.”
Earnest also said that, “even in a confidential setting” Obama would not “have a conversation that would undermine” the Fed’s ability to make “critical financial decisions independently.”
If such meetings with the Fed are so rare they require careful explanation, why the sudden call of the meeting, oddly timed between two specially called, emergency meetings of the Fed — or, at least, “expedited” meetings of the Fed. It can’t just be that the president wants to plan what he will be saying at this week’s G-20 conference, if he’s to speak there. That kind of planning would happen in advance because one knows the conference is coming. One striking peculiarity of the presidents meeting with the Fed is that it appeared to have been called immediately after the Fed announced Monday’s “expedited” meeting of the Board of Governors.
We are in an election cycle, and I already speculated in my last article that, with the anti-establishment, Fed-hating candidates, Sanders and Trump doing so well in their bids for the presidency we could be sure the Administration would be doing all it can along with the Fed to put some accelerant on this economy and forestall the recession that I believe we have already begun.
A recession would prove Trump and Sander right in their statements about a coming recession or the failed actions of the Fed and Wall Street to bring true recovery. So, the Fed and the President have every reason to work together to make sure such an announcement never happens. That could be what “comparing notes” on the economy’s future means — how do we assure the economy doesn’t fall apart in the next few months before the election since we have that common interest?
That would explanation why the White House is saying, in advance of any accusations, that the president isn’t trying to influence the Fed. They want to get ahead of the story. Of course, it could just be that they recognize such rare meetings will lead to the kind of speculation I’m now doing.
Tuesday’s specially called meeting of the Board of Governors under “expedited procedures”
Here is the announcement the Fed posted at the end of last week for Monday’s meeting (italics mine):
Advanced Notice of a Meeting under Expedited Procedures
It is anticipated that the closed meeting of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at 11:30 AM on Monday, April 11, 2016, will be held under expedited procedures, as set forth in section 26lb.7 of the Board’s Rules Regarding Public Observation of Meetings, at the Board’s offices at 20th Street and C Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. The following items of official Board business are tentatively scheduled to be considered at that meeting.
Meeting Date: Monday, April 11, 2016
Matter(s) Considered
1. Review and determination by the Board of Governors of the advance and discount rates to be charged by the Federal Reserve Banks.
A final announcement of matters considered under expedited procedures will be available in the Board’s Freedom of Information and Public Affairs Offices and on the Board’s Web site following the closed meeting.
…Dated: April 7, 2016
The promised update after the meeting merely added,
Effective April 11, 2016, the meeting was closed to public observation by Order of the Board of Governors 1 because the matters fall under exemption(s) 9(A)(i) of the Government in the Sunshine Act (5 U.S.C. Section 552b(c)), and it was determined that the public interest did not require opening the meeting.
One day later, the Fed put out an announcement of another special meeting to be held on Tuesday, after the suddenly scheduled meeting with the president:
Advanced Notice of a Meeting under Expedited Procedures
It is anticipated that the closed meeting of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at 2:00 PM on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, will be held under expedited procedures, as set forth in section 26lb.7 of the Board’s Rules Regarding Public Observation of Meetings, at the Board’s offices at 20th Street and C Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. The following items of official Board business are tentatively scheduled to be considered at that meeting.
Meeting Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Matter(s) Considered
1. Bank Supervisory Matter
A final announcement of matters considered under expedited procedures will be available in the Board’s Freedom of Information and Public Affairs Offices and on the Board’s Web site following the closed meeting.
…Dated: April 8, 2016
O.K. Two expedited, closed meetings in a row with a meeting with the president and vice president in between that is so rare it required special White House defense as to what would not be happening in the meeting.
The first meeting was to talk about setting interest rates, which the FOMC will be meeting to consider again later this month, having just postponed their scheduled increase in March. The second meeting is more interesting. If you have served on board or worked with boards that go into closed session, you know they always use the most generic terminology possible when announcing the meeting for sharing in minutes what happened in the meeting.
The fact that it is a bank supervisory matter makes it sound like a particular concern, not a discussion about supervisory policy. Something is the mattersomewhere that requires an immediate meeting right after another immediate meeting … behind closed doors. That something regards bank supervision. Board hold closed meetings when they have to talk about specific institutions or individuals with details that they don’t want to go public. This all comes very close to sounding like some bank somewhere is in trouble, and the trouble is big enough to call a special meeting of the very august board of governors right after they just had a special meeting, and if you know these kinds of guys, they don’t like wasting their time in excessive meetings.
Naturally, I am as curious as you probably are about why so many last-minute meetings behind closed doors and with the president and vice president at a time when all central bank heads will be meeting with finance ministers in Washington, D.C. So, I cast about for some possible related stories as to what could be the matter, and I found several very hot ones going on this same week.
Atlanta Fed revises US GDP down AGAIN!
The president’s meeting with the Fed and the Fed’s meetings with the Fed were all called right after the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank revised the revisions of its previous revisements to say the US economy now looks like it will report in for the first quarter at 0.1% growth.
It seems I cannot write fast enough to keep up with the Federal Reserve’s downward revisions of anticipated GDP growth for the first quarter of 2016. No sooner did I click “publish” on my last article where I noted they have just revised their estimates of GDP down to a 0.4% annualized growth rate than I read an article stating they had revised it again down to 0.1%!
Isn’t this where I said this quarter was going? That is within a rounding error of going negative and is less their margin of error for their data. It was only back in February that the Fed anticipated a cruising speed of 2% growth for GDP in the first quarter. They have revised that number down every week.
Of course, the fact that the Fed and the President called an unscheduled, closed-door meetings to include the VP does not mean there is any connection between the events, and I certainly am not concluding even for myself that there is something dire happening here … but stay with me. There is more to perk the ears.
US banks to report worst quarter since Great Recession
That’s no small potatoes for a coincidence in timing. What if the numbers to be reported are even worse than has been anticipated, and the Fed is seeing bank trouble in some of those numbers and the President has received advanced information about some of those numbers. All speculation on my part, of course. What isn’t speculation on my part is that Wall Street is already predicting that this week’s quarterly bank reports are going to look something like the start of the Great Recession.
Analysts say it has been the worst start to the year since the financial crisis in 2007-2008 and expect poor first-quarter results when reporting begins this week…. Analysts forecast a 20 percent decline on average in earnings from the six biggest U.S. banks, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S data. Some banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), are expected to report the worst results in over ten years. (Reuters)
Whoa! That means, for Goldman, even worse than any time just prior to orduring the Great Recession. When you consider how bad the last decade has been, being worse than that is pretty bad. Moreover, the timing is considered unusually nasty:
This spells trouble for the financial sector more broadly, since banks typically generate at least a third of their annual revenue during the first three months of the year…. Bank executives have already warned investors to expect major declines…. Citigroup Inc (C.N) CFO John Gerspach said to expect trading revenue more broadly to drop 15 percent versus the first quarter of last year. JPMorgan Chase & Co’s (JPM.N) Daniel Pinto said to expect a 25 percent decline in investment banking. Several bank executives have warned about declining quality of energy sector loans.
“The first quarter is going to be ugly and we don’t think that necessarily gets recovered in the back half of the year,” said Jerry Braakman, chief investment officer of First American Trust, which owns shares of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Goldman. “There are a lot of challenges ahead.”
Yes, one of the biggest areas of bank troubles comes from defaults in the energy sector that I have been saying will play a major role in birthing this banking crisis. (Translate that primarily oil and gas.)
BofA’s Michael Contopoulos warned last week, it may be the worst default cycle in history with “cumulative losses over the length of the entire cycle could be worse than we’ve ever seen before.”
Over the weekend, the FT got the memo with a report that … said that “the global bond default rate by companies is running at its highest since 2009 with the US accounting for the vast majority, according to rating agency Standard & Poor’s. A further four defaults this week, with three coming from the troubled oil and gas sector, pushed the overall tally to 40 with a little over a quarter of 2016 done.” (Zero Hedge)
According to the Wall Street Journal, these defaults are from “massive energy loans that most investors didn’t even know about until recently.” Recovery of these bad debts is falling extremely fast.
The growth of the high-yield bond market allowed drillers to take on far more debt than in past booms, leaving them more vulnerable to default. The emergence of shale technology allowed companies to expand reserves and the loans backed by those properties. Some of those loans may now be underwater. (Bloomberg)
You can thank the Fed’s zero-interest policy for that easy credit bubble.
Is anyone starting to feel a little financial crisis deja vù? Last time it was declining housing-sector loans. This time, as I’ve been saying for the last few months we would soon see, it’s declining energy-sector loans. Looks like that is ready to materialize.
In code words, Wells Fargo tells us that their trench-worthy report has not even begun to fully write down the bad debts or move into foreclosures that would cause write-downs: (That is, at least, what I read in public bankerspeak.)
John Shrewsberry, Wells Fargo’s chief financial officer, said on a January call with analysts. “We were working with each customer to help them work through this. It doesn’t do us any good to accelerate an issue, or to end up as the holder of a number of oil leases as a bank.”
This week and next is the big-bank reporting season. So, we should know right away if this is the next leg down in the Epocalypse, but you will probably have some coded language to look through. Something as big as this would certainly merit a flash meeting with the president and vice president, multiple meetings of the board of directors, and a G-20 financial summit in Washington along with meetings with the IMF and World Bank.
Not saying that’s what it is. Just sniffing out the kinds of stories that could be related to all these meetings, some planned earlier, others suddenly and somewhat secretively called.
Austrian bank failure echoes Great Depression
Five and a half years ago, I wrote an article here that mentioned how the Great Depression took its second and deepest plunge in 1931 because of the failure of a private Austrian bank named Credit Anstalt.
In May 1931, a Viennese bank named Credit-Anstalt failed. Founded by the famous Rothschild banking family in 1855, Credit-Anstalt was one of the most important financial institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its failure came as a shock because it was considered impregnable…. The fall of Credit-Anstalt—and the dominoes it helped topple across Continental Europe and the confidence it shredded as far away as the U.S.—wasn’t just the failure of a bank: It was a failure of civilization.
Now, as I’ve been writing about the start of what I believe will be the the second and worst dip of the Great Recession, another Austrian bank is crumbling.
Austria created Heta Asset Resolution AG when it nationalized all the bad loans of Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International five years ago to rescue the bank and depositors by creating a “bad bank” to contain the problems. It went down something like this:
Hypo Alpe-Adria bank, when it was still owned by the small Austrian state of Carinthia, was a cesspool of corruption. It involved bankers, politicians, and powerbrokers in Austria and the Balkans. It was the perfect union of money and power. Investigators found 160 instances of suspected fraud….
Six of the bank’s former executives have been convicted of crimes.
“I’m not aware of a criminal case bigger than this one,” explained Christian Böhler, whose forensics team started investigating the bank in 2011. “It was a mix of greed, criminal energy, and utter chaos.” (Wolf Street)
Hypo’s troubles began, much as Credit Anstalt’s had before it, when it was required to adjust its books to reflect the true value of its collateral assets after the value of real estate in southeastern Europe collapsed. Everything fell apart upon the realization of how little it was actually worth.
Austria’s central bank governor Ewald Nowotny and his task force recommended that Hypo’s toxic assets of €17.8 billion should be put into a “bad bank.” But to stop the drag on public finances, the federal government should not guarantee Hypo’s bonds. At the time, Austrian taxpayers had already plowed €4.8 billion into Hypo to bail out these bondholders.
He then explained on TV to incredulous Austrians that this deal would nudge the budget deficit over the 3% limit set by the Maastricht Treaty and push the government’s debt from 74.4% of GDP to 80% of GDP. This one rotten, state-owned bank in Carinthia was causing this much damage to the country’s finances!
The government, at that point, set a one-year moratorium on all payments to the “bad bank’s” bondholders.
After burning through 5.5 billion euros of taxpayer money to no avail and discovering a 7.6-billion-euro hole in its balance sheet still remained to be filled, Finance Minister Hans Joerg Schelling ended support in March 2015. Surprise, surprise, the bad bank created by the government to put a fence around all the bad debts of the original bad bank became nothing but a black hole of debt, swallowing all money poured into it with nothing to show for the effort. That didn’t stop Schelling from claiming the nationalized bank was in good health in order to put a good face on things as leaders are inclined to do when dealing with really bad stuff in order to protect the public from a scare.
Yesterday, under the first application of Europe’s new forced “bail in” procedures, Austria ordered a haircut to the banks bondholders. Sighs. This is apparently what happens if your money is still locked up in a bank with “good health.”
It does, indeed, sound a tad bit like Credit Anstalt. Now the moratorium is up, and it’s time to start dishing out the bad news to the bondholders under Europe’s new rules:
Austria officially became the first European country to use a new law under the framework imposed by Bank the European Recovery and Resolution Directive to share losses of a failed bank with senior creditors as it slashed the value of debt owed by Heta Asset Resolution AG.
The highlights from the announcement…
a 100% bail-in for all subordinated liabilities,
a 53.98% bail-in, resulting in a 46.02% quota, for all eligible preferential liabilities,
the cancellation of all interest payments from 01.03.2015, when HETA was placed into resolution pursuant to BaSAG,
as well as a harmonisation of the maturities of all eligible liabilities to 31.12.2023. ((SuperStation95)
This is some much-needed relief from how things used to work:
Throughout the Financial Crisis, and since, there has been one rule: bank bondholders will always be bailed out at the expense of everyone else. The sanctity of bank bonds reigned supreme, no matter what government and central banks had to do to keep it that way. Bank bonds weren’t allowed to be judged by the capital markets. They were simply untouchable. Underpaid and overtaxed workers would have to bail out bank bondholders when these recklessly managed banks collapsed.
That was the rule in the US when the Fed, and to a lesser extent the federal government, bailed out the banks. And that was the rule during the debt crisis in Europe. (Wolf Street cont.)
Europe’s new rules were intended to make sure that depositors did not take all the loss and that tax payers don’t absorb all the loss. Heta, because it was a government created “bad bank,” apparently does not have depositors, as it was the creditors who were pooled into the “bad bank” who take the hit. The preferred creditors at the Austrian bank have been told they will have to take a 54% haircut, meaning the bonds they have purchased will recover forty-six cents on the euro.
The big-money (preferred) creditors of the bank, however, don’t like the new rules. They complained and are still holding out for ninety-two cents on the euro. That doesn’t bode well for anything being left for the smaller guys, whose money will, in the very least, be kept in a lockbox for seven years because payouts to the non-Majors don’t wind up until 2023. Major bond-holders demanding a smaller hit include Pimco, Commerzbank and the already deeply troubled Deutsche Bank. (Anybody see how things can quickly move down the line like dominoes when you consider the size of some of the worried creditors who are complaining that the hit will be too hard for them?)
The “subordinated liabilities,” as I understand the complex breakdown (for which I have been unable to find any clear definitions) appears to include bondholders who took a second position to the “preferred liabilities” in getting their money back and third-party investors in the bank. It also appears to include the partners in the bank. If so, then this is exactly how bank failures should happen. The investors are slated to lose 100% of their money first, allowing for the smaller loss by the bond holders.
It is the investors who elect the board that governs the bank and who fill the board positions and who make the decisions of who will be CEO; so, of course, they should lose all of their money before anyone else does. Creditors (bond holders) should be next, as they are often large institutions like PIMCO that have more than enough capacity to investigate risk before investing. Depositors should always be last, as most of them have no capacity whatsoever to investigate the real risk of banks and nowhere near enough money to put into a bank to make it worth a real investigation of risk. They are acting in trust … and particularly in trust that government regulators are doing their job.
Too bad the United States doesn’t operate this way!
What kind of spinoff can the settlement of Heta have to other institutions? Well, last month, the Association of German Banks had to bail out a small bank called Duesseldorfer Hypothekenbank AG because its hit as a creditor of Heta would have killed it. Though Duesseldorfer is a small bank, it was apparently deemed too big to fail because, once again, government bailouts went to the rescue.
Given that such an agreement happened on Sunday afternoon, and that central banks and regulatory bodies usually talk with other national bodies that may be affected, I have to wonder if the thought of how Europe might react on Monday had anything to do with Monday’s sudden meetings of the Fed.
Italian banks on final crash-landing approach
As if all that were not bad enough for the start of a week in banking news, Italy’s minister of finance called an emergency meeting over the past weekend of Italian bankers to engage “last resort” measures for dealing with 360-billion euros of bad loans in banks that have only 50 billion in capital.
Finance minister Pier Carlo Padoan has called a meeting in Rome on Monday with executives from Italy’s largest financial institutions to agree final details of a “last resort” bailout plan.
Yet on the eve of that gathering, concerns remain as to whether the plan will be sufficient to ringfence the weakest of Italy’s large banks….
Italian bank shares have lost almost half their value so far this year amid investor worries over a €360bn pile of non-performing loans — equivalent to about a fifth of GDP. (Contra Corner)
Could that have had anything to do with the flurry of bank meetings in the US. I have no idea, but I do have to wonder, with so much smoke everywhere in the banking industry, is there a fire we need to know about? You can be sure, we’ll be the last to know, and any announcement of what’s really going down will hit like Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers. One day, all the central bankers are talking like things are fine. The next day a major vertebrae is knocked out of the nation’s financial spine.
Or maybe presidents and central bankers are just making sure things generally hold together through the election cycle. Such a bad-news week for banks around the world certainly doesn’t sound like all is well as our smiling central bankers, president and V.P, say it is. I don’t know any top secrets to reveal, but the smoke is killing me. By David Haggith, The Great Recession Blog
And now suddenly, this is leaving ugly skid marks on the economy, banks, and investors. Read… US Commercial Bankruptcies Suddenly Soar
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Immediate Creation in the End Time » Stankov's Universal Law Press
Immediate Creation in the End Time
by Georgi Stankov Posted on April 14, 2016
Georgi Stankov, April 15, 2016
www.stankovuniversallaw.com
Since the opening of this website and especially during the last week I have been busy exposing the total fraud in the USA from various angles. At the end I concluded: “everywhere is fraud as far as the eye can see.” That this ubiquitous fraud exists is entirely the consequence of the cognitive dissonance of the people that prevents them, consciously or subconsciously, from seeing the fraud. Essentially they do not see the fraud because it makes all things so much more complicated that humans get lost in this maze of fraud, while eagerly participating in it and running after the carrot that the cabal is dangling in front of them in the form of illusory social success. That this kind of social success is simply a clandestine form of human enslavement has been very well explained by the renowned thinker Nassim Taleb in his recent article “How To Legally Own Another Person“.
I am already two-thirds of a century on this planet and have experienced this collective cognitive dissonance and the eagerness of the masses to participate in this fraud of creeping enslavement that manifests first and foremost as a total loss of common sense twice in my lifetime and these are the most painful periods in my life:
1) During the time of communism in the post-war era in Eastern Europe when the people were indoctrinated to such an extent that they even thanked their oppressors for the scarcity they were forced to live in and feared individual freedom like the devil the incense.
2) And since 9/11 in Western Europe and now in North America when the mission creep of the ruling cabal to install the NWO entered its last most obvious and socially devastating phase.
Anybody who was born in the West has no clue how the communist dictatorship based on utter fear and full economic control transformed the human species into utter zombies. The West is now slowly awakening to this same reality which the East has left behind. Unfortunately I had to make this ghastly experience in my youth and now again in old age. Then what is currently happening in North America and Western Europe is the repetition of the same dreadful experience the peoples in Eastern Europe and Asia had under the communist yoke for more than half a century.
The peoples in the West did not make this kind of NWO experience at that time for one single reason: during the Cold war there were powerful communist and left parties in the West that compelled the ruling cabal to obey some of the general rules of democracy and decency as not to trigger a revolution and be swallowed by the red pestilence.
With the fall of the Iron curtain, this external pressure upon the western ruling cabal to behave somewhat properly and decently disappeared and their berserk character flourished in a most despicable manner. That is why all the people who were raised in the West such as the Saker and write about Eastern Europe and the Anglo-Zionist Empire have such difficulties to understand the current final battle between light and darkness as they are missing the personal experience with this human evil – the former failed red NWO – in its worst existing form on this timeline.
By the way, this also holds true for all light workers who are not light warriors of the first and the last hour as the PAT and are not constantly confronted with the darkness of this world. They do not need to cleanse this dark goo at the expense of their personal health and well-being and as a famous Bulgarian saying says with respect to our past experience with the Turkish yoke: “two hundred whips on other person’s back are nothing compared to one whip on one’s own back”. It is the same difference as I observed as a dissident between me and the indoctrinated indolent masses in the East… and now in the West.
From that point of view, it is understandable why I have such a big head start compared to all the critical writers in the West and why even the most advanced light warriors in the West have no clue how the NWO really feels when it has taken full control of humanity. But they are coming closer and closer to this awful sensation.
One major aspect of their current awakening is that they, for the first time, begin to realize the inherent tendency of most incarnated humans to perpetuate the same disappointing and unyielding experiences again and again. But as Brian, the Dragon, correctly observes in his latest message, the driving force behind planetary and individual ascension is precisely the recognition at the soul level that the current repetition of the same dull and degrading experiences with this human society and dense 3D holographic model based on ubiquitous fraud is a dead-end. In the current End Time the incarnated souls begin to feel the urgent inner desire to change these experiences for the better:
“You are right when you all say things are complicated. You are not victims of the complication but instead all contribute to it either passively or actively. It makes the game more interesting. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with the game you are playing. Except when you are tired of playing it, and the majority of you on Earth are tired of playing it (Who knows this better than the PAT? Note, George). You’re not tired to the point that you will stop incarnating on Earth, but instead want to do something more constructive and exciting: you want to make a transformation. In the grand scheme of things, all that matters is that you will enjoy the transformation in whatever way you choose to enjoy it. God-all-that-is loves you, and your experience regardless of what you choose. However, with a bias towards love, there is a bias in the universe towards enjoying creation (whatever that means for you), even when it doesn’t seem that way sometimes experiencing a world of balance of polarity vs harmonic balance.”
The transpersonal, transcendental, unconditional love of all Logos Gods and Ascended Masters in human gestalt in the End Time of Ascension is the energetic bias that allows for immediate creation and transforms this world of polarity into a world of harmonious balance. This presupposes uncompromised frankness with oneself and the rest of the world which opens the eyes of the people for the fraud they have created and live in. Then one fact should be clearly stated at this place – the gargantuan fraud in the Empire of Evil was not created only by the cabal but also by the spontaneous support of the entire population as their accomplices.
Now that some of the US citizens begin to drop from this scam, there are good chances that their eyes wide shut in the past will begin to open to the dreadful reality they have created for themselves. They will embrace our ideas of a new world based on harmony, sovereignty of the individual, and the ability to love oneself in the first place before to claim loving the rest of humanity and All-That-Is as many insincere light workers pretend nowadays. And in order to be able to love oneself, one must get rid of all dark remnants of this Orion indoctrination that still shape the fraudulent personalities of most incarnated human beings.
This is the next step that such critical thinkers as the author below should make as to be able to ascend with us. But our educational efforts are already bearing, almost immediately, a rich harvest.
____________________________
The Entire Status Quo Is a Fraud
Charles Hugh Smith, April 13, 2016
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.ca/2016/04/the-entire-status-quo-is-fraud.html
Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences. This can’t be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
– The financial system is a fraud.
– The political system is a fraud.
– National Defense is a fraud.
– The healthcare system is a fraud.
– Higher education is a fraud.
– The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
– Culture–from high to pop–is a fraud.
(All these areas of fraud have been extensively and in great depth discussed on our website, especially the healthcare fraud, so that this is nothing new to us. But the important information from this article is that other people follow our footsteps and begin to see the things with the same eyes. From here to ascension is then a short journey. Note, George)
Need I go on? We have come to accept fraud as standard operating practice in America, to the detriment of everything that was once worthy. Why is this so?
One reason, which I outline in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All, is that centralized hierarchies select for fraud and incompetence. Now that virtually every system in America is centralized or regulated by centralized hierarchies, every system in America is fraudulent and incompetent. Nassim Taleb explains this further in his recent article How To Legally Own Another Person (via Lew G.)
The three ingredients of fraud are abundant: pressure (to get an A, to please your boss, to make your sales numbers, etc.), rationalization (everybody’s doing it) and opportunity.
Taleb explains why failure and fraud become the status quo: admitting error and changing course are risky, and everyone who accepts the servitude of working in a centralized hierarchy–by definition, obedience to authority is the #1 requirement– is averse to risk.
As I explain in my book, these systems select for risk aversion and the appearance of obedience to rules and authority while maximizing personal gain: in other words, fraud as a daily way of life.
Truth is a dangerous poison in centralized hierarchies: anyone caught telling the truth risks a tenner in bureaucratic Siberia. (In the Soviet Gulag ,a tenner meant a ten-year sentence to a labor camp in Siberia.)
And so the truth is buried, sent to a backwater for further study, obfuscated by jargon, imprisoned by a Top Secret stamp, or simply taken out and executed. Everyone in the system maximizes his/her personal gain by going along with the current trajectory, even if that trajectory is taking the nation off the cliff.
Consider the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a $1+ trillion failure. The aircraft is underpowered, under-armed, insanely overpriced, insanely over-budget and still riddled with bugs after seven years of fixes, making it an unaffordable maintenance nightmare that puts our service people and nation at risk.
But no one in a position of power will speak the truth about the F-35, because it is no longer a weapons system–it’s a jobs program. Defense contractors are careful to spread the work of assembling parts of the F-35 to 40+ states, so 80+ senators will support the program, no matter how much a failure it is as a weapons system, or how costly the failure is becoming.
A rational person in charge would immediately cancel it and start from scratch, with a program run outside the Pentagon and outside congressional meddling. But this is impossible in America: instead, we build failed, under-armored, under-powered, under-armed and unreliable ships (LCS) and failed under-powered, under-armed and unreliable fighters as the most expensive make-work programs in history.
As for our failed healthcare system, one anecdote will do. (You undoubtedly have dozens from your own experience.) A friend from Uruguay with a high-tech job in the U.S. recently flew home to Montevideo for a medical exam because 1) the cost of the flight was cheaper than the cost of the care in the U.S. and 2) she was seen the next day in Montevideo while it would have taken two months to get the same care in the U.S.
I’ve listed dozens of examples here over the years: $120,000 for a couple days in a hospital, no procedures performed; $20,000+ for a single emergency room visit, no procedures performed; several thousand dollars charged to Medicare for a few minutes in an “observation room” that was occupied by patients, no staff present–the list is endless.
We’ve habituated to fraud as a way of life because every system is fraudulent. Consider the costly scam known as higher education. The two essentials higher education should teach are: 1) how to learn anything you need to learn or want to learn on your own, and 2) how to think, behave, plan and function entrepreneurially (i.e. as an autonomous problem-solver and lifelong learner who cooperates and collaborates productively with others) as a way of life.
That higher education fails to do so is self-evident. We could create a highly effective system of higher education that costs 10% of the current corrupt system. I’ve described such a system (in essence, a directed apprenticeship as opposed to sitting in a chair for four years) in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
As for what passes as culture in the U.S.: the majority of what’s being sold as culture, both high and low, is derivative and forgettable. We suffer the dual frauds of absurd refinement (so only the elites can “appreciate” the art, music, food, wine, etc.) and base coarsening: instead of Tender (romantic love and sex) we have Tinder (flammable trash).
Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences. While everyone maximizes their personal gain in whatever system of skim, scam and fraud they inhabit, the nation rots from within. We’ve lost our way, and lost the ability to tell the truth, face problems directly, abandon what has failed and what is unaffordable, and accept personal risk as the essential element of successful adaptation.
Here’s a good place to start: require every politician to wear the logos of their top 10 contributors–just like NASCAR drivers and vehicles display the logos of their sponsors. The California Initiative to make this a reality is seeking signatures of registered California voters. Since politicians are owned, let’s make the ownership transparent.
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Not only Are All Balance Sheets Rigged in the Empire of Evil – Its Presidential Race is Also Rigged » Stankov's Universal Law Press
Not only Are All Balance Sheets Rigged in the Empire of Evil – Its Presidential Race is Also Rigged
by Georgi Stankov Posted on April 13, 2016
Georgi Stankov, April 13, 2016
www.stankovuniversallaw.com
Is there anything that is not fraud in the US of Accounting Gimmicks? The answer is an unequivocal No. I hope that the memory of the American people is not that much short as not to remember how Bush stole the presidency from Al Gore in Florida with 537 votes out of six million cast (and many more thousands of votes declared invalid, see Florida election recount fraud) with the help of his Mafia brother Jeb, who was governor of this state at that time. The same scoundrel who quit this presidential race as a hapless candidate beaten by Donald Trump. How can one talk of true representative democracy in this country of infinite debt gaps, the biggest and most important of all being the democracy gap, if Al Gore lost the elections although he had 2 million votes more than Bush?
This is the simple truth of this Evil Empire of Smoke and Mirrors which is now finding its way to the MSM in a dramatic reset of the collective mindset away from its cognitive dissonance. Even the bullhorn of the British-Reptilian propaganda cannot neglect this truth which strips away the last vestige of respectability of this dying empire of accounting gimmicks in finance, government, corporations and at the ballot stations. No truth – no democracy, no financial transparency – utter collapse, these are the facts on the ground in the End Time of Ascension which we now create as Logos Gods with astounding precision.
In its latest article the mouthpiece of the AAA-Axis (Anglo-American-Assholes-Axis), also known as the Anglo-Zionist Empire of the former Orion-Reptilian PTB, BBC has been forced to address the electoral fraud in the USA which proves that this country is in fact an oligarchic, plutocratic kleptocracy – in other words a failed Mafia state – the worst form of social and national order that always ends up with decay and destruction.
__________________________
Is the US presidential race ‘rigged’?
Anthony Zurcher, North American reporter, April 13, 2016
BBC
The United States “MAY” be a democracy, but the party presidential nomination process – upon closer inspection – is hardly a shining beacon of democratic light.
For most of US history, party nominees have been decided by political power brokers and deal-makers behind closed doors. Parties operate like private clubs – they make their own rules and are suspicious of outsiders.
Only in recent history has a more open system of primaries and caucuses been grafted onto the process to give the average American a say in who appears on the general election ballot.
In a close, contentious primary season, however, the veneer of accountability can rub off, exposing the sometimes unsightly gears that still power the US political system.
This has prompted objection from the supporters of two candidates in particular – Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – who feel that the party establishments are arrayed against their presidential quests.
But are their concerns valid? Here are answers to four pertinent questions as the nomination battles approach its final months.
Is Trump being cheated?
34 – Number of delegates Ted Cruz received in Colorado, which held conventions to pick delegates
743 Trump total delegate count
545 Cruz total delegate count
Mr Trump is leading the race for the Republican nomination, but it’s starting to feel like he’s not winning.
While he’s comfortably ahead, with 743 delegates to 545 for second-place Ted Cruz, there’s mounting evidence that he’s being outmanoeuvred in the behind-the-scenes political process that could come into play if he doesn’t reach the magic 1,237 delegate number necessary to secure the nomination outright.
In Colorado – which selected its delegates at party gatherings last week and not through primaries or caucuses – Mr Cruz walked away with all 34 delegates. Even in states that have held contests won by Mr Trump, Mr Cruz’s team has been working doggedly to ensure that their people become delegates.
While Mr Trump swept South Carolina’s 50 delegates, for instance, the state’s convention delegation will be riddled with Cruz supporters who, while bound to Mr Trump on the first few ballots, can switch to the Texas senator if there is a protracted convention battle.
It has Mr Trump and his people crying foul.
“This is happening all over our country – great people being disenfranchised by politicians,” Mr Trump tweeted on Monday. “Repub party is in trouble!”
Paul Manafort, Mr Trump’s new aide in charge of managing the delegate-selection process, accused the Cruz campaign of using “Gestapo tactics, scorched-earth tactics” in Colorado.
If, as Mr Trump asserted on Monday, the system is “rigged” and “crooked”, however, it isn’t always tilted in favour of Mr Trump’s opponents. Thanks to the Republican Party’s delegate-apportioning system, including Florida’s winner-take-all primary, Mr Trump has secured a larger share of the delegates so far (45%) than he has of the raw primary vote (37%).
If Mr Cruz manages to win the nomination at the Republican convention despite trailing Mr Trump in total delegates and share of the popular vote, Mr Trump may have reason to feel aggrieved.
But before he complains too loudly, he might want to heed some sage advice attributed (incorrectly) to Albert Einstein: “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”
Mr Trump should be familiar with the quote, since he tweeted it in October 2014.
Why isn’t Sanders catching up?
17
States Bernie Sanders has won
18
States Hillary Clinton has won
Mr Sanders has won five state contests in a row and seven of the last eight. If he were an American football team he’d be poised for the playoffs. If he were prize fighter, he’d be tuning up for a title bout.
Instead his pledged-delegate deficit to Mrs Clinton has gone from daunting to only fractionally less daunting. Over the course of his recent run, the Vermont Senator has picked up a net of just 91 delegates, despite winning Wisconsin 56% to 43%, Utah 79% to 20% and Washington 72% to 27%.
According to a New York Times calculation, the former secretary of state currently has 1,305 pledged delegates, while Sanders stands at 1,086. Add in the non-binding support of “super-delegates” – Democratic officeholders and party functionaries who also cast ballots for the nominee at the convention – and Mrs Clinton’s lead balloons to 1,774 to 1,117.
To secure the Democratic nomination without drama at the convention a candidate needs the backing of 2,383 delegates
The problem for Mr Sanders is that while he’s been posting sizeable wins over the past month, they’ve largely been in delegate-poor states, like Wyoming (14 delegates), Idaho (23) and Alaska (16). His successes pale when compared to Mrs Clinton’s massive earlier wins in populous southern states like Texas, Florida and Georgia, which alone netted her 184 delegates over Mr Sanders.
If Mrs Clinton performs as expected in the coming contests in New York (291 delegates), Maryland (118) and Pennsylvania (210), she’ll largely erase all the modest ground Mr Sanders made up over the past three weeks.
Does the popular vote even matter?
9,412,426
Votes for Hillary Clinton during primary season so far
7,034,997
Votes for Bernie Sanders during primary season so far
If delegate maths and selection rules make your head hurt, at least we can rely on the raw vote totals to get a feel for how popular the remaining candidates are, right?
Wrong.
According to current tabulations Hillary Clinton has received 9,412,426 votes during the primary season so far. Bernie Sanders has received 7,034,997. That 2.4m vote lead has been relentlessly touted by the former secretary of state and her supporters to counter the claims of Sanders faithful that their man is more popular than the delegate tallies indicate.
Some states that hold caucuses – like Iowa and Washington – aren’t included in that number, however, because they don’t report vote totals.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler tried to extrapolate numbers for the remaining states based on their total voter turnout and concluded that Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by 2.3m votes – still a significant margin.
Among the Republicans, who are better about providing full vote totals, Mr Trump leads with 8,256,309 votes. Mr Cruz is second (6,319,244), former candidate Marco Rubio is third (3,482,129), followed by Mr Kasich (2,979,379).
In the end the popular vote may give the leading candidates a claim of legitimacy as the people’s choice – but appearances can be deceiving.
“The media have created the perception that the voters choose the nomination. That’s the conflict here,” North Dakota delegate Curly Haugland told a television interviewer. “The rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at a convention. That’s just the way it is.”
Can Republican convention delegates be bribed?
If, as appears to be increasingly likely, the Republican primary season ends without Donald Trump securing the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination, the Republican National Convention could turn into a political free-for-all unrivalled in modern US political history.
After several rounds of deadlocked balloting, most convention delegates would be free to vote their conscience. But could that conscience be nudged by, say, a free weekend at a Donald Trump golf resort, a nice dinner with the Cruz family or even a choice spot in a John Kasich administration?
Maybe! While there are detailed anti-corruption laws governing the behaviour of public officeholders, convention delegates are private citizens. While government regulations prohibit them from taking money from corporations, labour unions, government contractors or foreign nationals, the law beyond that is much murkier.
Campaigns and their wealth donors could likely cover delegate travel expenses, no matter how lavish. Gold watches? Bags of small, unmarked bills? Who knows? State anti-bribery laws may apply, but there’s scant legal precedent.
Perhaps the greatest deterrent to untoward action by campaigns is the negative publicity such naked attempts at influence could have if they’re documented. But public perceptions and attitudes this political season has been difficult to predict, to say the least.
Although the national convention is still months away, accusations of dirty tricks have already started flying. On Sunday Mr Trump took to Twitter to accuse the Cruz campaign of misdeeds during the South Carolina state party convention – a charge Mr Cruz vehemently denied.
“I win a state in votes and then get non-representative delegates because they are offered all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign,” Mr Trump wrote. “Bad system!”
During a television interview that same morning, however, Trump adviser Paul Manafort appeared to acknowledge that his campaign won’t be shy in wooing delegates at the national convention, however.
“Well, there’s the law, and then there’s ethics, and then there’s getting votes,” he said. “I’m not going to get into what tactics are used. I happen to think the best way we’re going to get delegates is to have Donald Trump be exposed to delegates, let the delegates hear what he says.”
Another Trump adviser, Barry Bennett, said they wouldn’t be offering “seats on the Trump airplane or anything like that”.
“There’s obviously a big line – we’re not going to do anything immoral, illegal or unethical,” he said.
But when a presidential nomination is at stake, and it comes down to just a handful of delegates, that “big line” may end up looking awfully fuzzy.
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