SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS
by ilene - September 26th, 2009 7:21 pm
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
As I ponder the implications of the Fed’s printing press and the potentially disastrous bank run rally I question the actions taken by our Central Bank. Reader Finn posted some excellent quotes the other day. Fortunately for the reader these quotes/thoughts are from men far more intelligent than I. To say that these comments have withstood the test of time is a great understatement:
“We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled governments in the civilized world – no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by a vole of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.
“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it”
- Woodrow Wilson“These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspaper and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
“I have two great enemies, the Southern Army front of me and the financial institution in the rear. Of the two, the one in my rear is my greatest foe.”
-Abraham Lincoln“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.”
– Andrew
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Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?
by ilene - September 9th, 2009 3:31 pm
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Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?
Courtesy of ELLEN BROWN at Web of Debt
A year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, questions still swirl around its collapse. Lawrence MacDonald, whose book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense came out in July 2009, maintains that the bank was not in substantially worse shape than other major Wall Street banks. He says Lehman was just “put to sleep. They put the pillow over the face of Lehman Brothers and they put her to sleep.” The question is, why?
The Lehman bankruptcy is widely considered to be the watershed event that changed the rules of the game for those Wall Street banks considered “too big to fail.” The bankruptcy option was ruled out once and for all. The taxpayers would have to keep throwing money at the banks, no matter how corrupt, ill-managed or undeserving. As Dean Baker noted in April 2009:
“Geithner has supposedly ruled out the bankruptcy option because when he, along with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, tried letting Lehman Brothers go under last fall, it didn’t turn out very well. Of course, it is not necessary to go the route of an uncontrolled bankruptcy that Geithner and Co. pursued with Lehman. . . . [But] the Geithner crew insists that there are no alternatives to his plan; we have to just keep giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks . . . , further enriching the bankers who wrecked the economy.”
Although Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Monday, September 15, 2008, it was actually “bombed” on September 11, when the biggest one-day drop in its stock and highest trading volume occurred before bankruptcy. Lehman CEO Richard Fuld maintained that the 158 year old bank was brought down by unsubstantiated rumors and illegal naked short selling. Although short selling (selling shares you don’t own) is legal, the short seller is required to have shares lined up to borrow and replace to cover the sale. Failure to buy the shares back in the next three trading days is called a “fail to deliver.” Christopher Cox, who was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2008, said in a July 2009 article that naked short selling “can allow manipulators to force…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.