But You Love Bailing Out Greece, Right?
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
You must.
The IMF’s piece of this thing is allegedly €220 billion, or about $286 billion as I type this.
Since the US is "required" to contribute 17% of the IMF’s funding, this means you, the taxpayer, have just been hit for $48.6 billion to cover the debts of nations who spend more than they make – and no, they’re not the United States (or the states IN The United States.)
It gets better. The Fed’s "swaplines" that have been reopened this evening could conceivably pay for part or all of the ECB’s foreign bond buying. Remember when Bernanke was asked about this in testimony and he said he had the authority to do this in unlimited amounts? This is no longer a hypothetical.
At the same time this blatant act of financial rape served upon you has come with a 4.18% increase in the price of oil (so far today), which I’m sure you will appreciate at the pump along with the ramp job that gasoline has taken in the last two weeks. At roughly $3 a gallon already, this should add another 12 cents or so to that in the coming days.
Oh, and uh, there’s supposed to be this little matter of an appropriation bill in the House of Representatives to fund that IMF "obligation" – before it’s incurred. There’s this quaint document called "The Constitution" that mandates this.
It, of course, is irrelevant to both Ben Bernanke and, it appears President Obama, who if stories are to be believed prodded the IMF and ECB into spending money he didn’t actually have the right to commit (for want of said appropriation bill.)
No matter America.
You’re good for it, right? After all, it’s not just our banks you have to bail out – we’re also required to bail out all the profligate spenders over in Europe too who also can’t manage to balance their budgets and, in fact, don’t even bother collecting taxes from 70% of the population (in Greece anyway.)
Oh, and there’s the matter of the ECB being legally unable to issue credit on its own, to bail anyone out or to directly help one another. To get around that inconvenient part of the founding documents of the ECB they defined a self-imposed fiscal problem caused by their own lies as an "act of God" similar to a hurricane or flood. In short they simply ignored that law too, just like The Fed has for the last two+ years and like Congress does when its members trade on inside information – an act that is legal for them and leads to jailtime for you.
Congratulations America. You’ve sat on your butts for a sufficient period of time, and allowed enough abuses and usurpations to take place without putting a stop to it that now you’ve just been ripped for tens of billions of additional dollars and a gas price hike coming down the pipe with both going to feed an organization that is violating its own laws – and is in a foreign land.
PS: That gut-wrenching crash (and yes it was) Thursday? Yeah, you couldn’t buy into the bottom of that – nobody except JP Morgan could. The NYSE was on "slow" and the only people routing 1 cent orders for Accenture were from the big banks – for the big banks. They made a fortune rigging the system – again The futures were being quoted at 10 handle spreads, making trading for ordinary humans impossible. Today, you’re going to wake up and be unable to buy too, as the DOW futures as I write this are up over 400 points and the S&P is flirting with lock-limit up at +54.75.
You cannot invest or trade in markets that behave this way; it is impossible to go to sleep with a position, either bullish or bearish, and not wake up to find it ridiculously underwater. This isn’t "stability" being demonstrated as the Euro folks and Bernanke claim, it is schizophrenia, it’s destructive and it’s impossible to be involved in a market that behaves this way without eventually waking up to all your money being gone.
It is time to give up folks and leave the machines to themselves.
