by ilene - July 8th, 2010 5:06 pm
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
The con of the decade (Part I) involves the transfer of private debt to the public (the marks), who then pays interest forever to the con artists.
I’ve laid out the Con of the Decade (Part I) in outline form:

1. Enable trillions of dollars in mortgages guaranteed to default by packaging unlimited quantities of them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), creating umlimited demand for fraudulently originated loans.
2. Sell these MBS as "safe" to credulous investors, institutions, town councils in Norway, etc., i.e. "the bezzle" on a global scale.
3. Make huge "side bets" against these doomed mortgages so when they default then the short-side bets generate billions in profits.
4. Leverage each $1 of actual capital into $100 of high-risk bets.
5. Hide the utterly fraudulent bets offshore and/or off-balance sheet (not that the regulators you had muzzled would have noticed anyway).
6. When the longside bets go bad, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal guarantees, bailouts and backstops into the private hands which made the risky bets, either via direct payments or via proxies like AIG. Enable these private Power Elites to borrow hundreds of billions more from the Treasury/Fed at zero interest.
7. Deposit these funds at the Federal Reserve, where they earn 3-4%. Reap billions in guaranteed income by borrowing Federal money for free and getting paid interest by the Fed.
8. As profits pile up, start buying boatloads of short-term U.S. Treasuries. Now the taxpayers who absorbed the trillions in private losses and who transferred trillions in subsidies, backstops, guarantees, bailouts and loans to private banks and corporations, are now paying interest on the Treasuries their own money purchased for the banks/corporations.
9. Slowly acquire trillions of dollars in Treasuries--not difficult to do as the Federal government is borrowing $1.5 trillion a year.
10. Stop buying Treasuries and dump a boatload onto the market, forcing interest rates to rise as supply of new T-Bills exceeds demand (at least temporarily). Repeat as necessary to double and then triple interest rates paid on Treasuries.
11. Buy hundreds of billions in long-term Treasuries at high rates of interest. As interest rates rise, interest payments dwarf all other Federal spending, forcing extreme cuts in all other government spending.
12. Enjoy the hundreds of billions of…

Tags: AIG, bailouts, con of the decade, corporations, Financial System, Interest Rates, loans, Mortgages, Mortgages backed securities, private banks, private debt, privatized gains, profits, public debt, scam, socialized losses, taxpayers, the bezzle, the Federal Reserve, U.S. treasuries
Posted in Phil's Favorites | No Comments »
by ilene - November 23rd, 2009 2:15 pm
This is another must-read post by Mish on science vs. propaganda. Unfortunately it seems that propaganda trumps science, at least long enough to cause immense damage. - Ilene
Courtesy of Mish
I received a lot of emails in response to Beware The Ice Age Cometh: Hackers Prove Global Warming Is A Scam
Many were from religious zealots of global warming theory, and as you might surmise they were not printable.
A few common sense comments came my way suggesting that the hackers or insiders (I believe the latter) did not prove global warming was a scam, only that that there is proof scammers are involved in global warming.
I have to admit that is true. Apologies offered. That admission aside, even more damning data has surfaced in regards to data manipulation.
The site Watts Up With That? has this interview with Dr. Tim Ball
It seems Dr. Tim Ball was aware of the data manipulation but could not prove it. Here is a partial transcript but I assure you the video is worth listening to entirely.
"[The Emails] confirm suspicions that I have had in 30 years of working in climate science that I saw the hijacking of climate science particularly by computer modelers and then by a small group of people associated with the intergovernmental panel on climate change. The difficulty was that even though I sensed there was these thing going on, proving it is extremely difficult. But now with the exposure of these public files it is not only a smoking gun, it’s a battery of machine guns. … On A global scale it’s frightening. This group of people not only controlled the Hadley Center which controls the global data on temperatures, so that the global temperature record is in their hands, they also control the IPCC. … The IPCC is the basis in all governments for the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and so on. ….. The problem they had is they kept saying the 20th century and the latter part of it is the warmest ever. And of course skeptics like myself [and several other names] were saying it was warmer 1000 years ago when the Vikings were in Iceland and Greenland and that’s
…

Tags: Al Gore, Cap and Trade, Crusade, Global warming, Global Warming Religion, interview with Dr. Tim Ball, Propaganda, scam, science, Watts Up With That?
Posted in Phil's Favorites | No Comments »
by ilene - November 21st, 2009 3:54 pm
Courtesy of Mish
It’s now official. Much of the hype about global warming is nothing but a complete scam.
Thanks to hackers (or an insider) who broke into The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and downloaded 156 megaybytes of data including extremely damaging emails, we now know that data supporting the global warming thesis was completely fabricated.
Inquiring minds are reading Hacked: Hadley CRU FOI2009 Files on The Reference Frame by Luboš Motl, a physicist from the Czech Republic.
The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), usually working together with the Hadley center (recall HadCRUT3 global temperatures), has been hacked.
So far, the most interesting file I found in the "documents" directory is pdj_grant_since1990.xls (Google preview, click) which shows that since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants.
Phil Jones, the main criminal according to this correspondence, has personally confirmed that the website was hacked and that the documents are authentic. See Briefing Room.
He says that he "can’t remember" what he meant by "hiding the decline." Well, let me teach him some English. First, dictionaries say that hide means
1. to conceal from sight; prevent from being seen or discovered: Where did she hide her jewels?
2. to obstruct the view of; cover up: The sun was hidden by the clouds.
3. to conceal from knowledge or exposure; keep secret: to hide one’s feelings.
4. to conceal oneself; lie concealed: He hid in the closet.
5. British. a place of concealment for hunting or observing wildlife; hunting blind.
6. hide out, to go into or remain in hiding: After breaking out of jail, he hid out in a deserted farmhouse.
Here Are A Few Choice Emails
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@virginia.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk,t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
…

Tags: Cap and Trade, Global warming, hackers, Mish, scam
Posted in Phil's Favorites | 1 Comment »