Tag Archives: Robert Rubin

The Kabuki of ‘Markets’ as History Unfolds

Posted on by Lan Pham   

Today marks the second day of the United States’s expedited meeting with China “as they work out ways for the U.S.-led world order to make room for a China that is fast accruing global influence and military power” (Associated Press. May 21, 2013).

 Historical Shifts

April-May, 2013: Orchestrated plunge in gold, silver. Stock “market” levitated. What the system does not have much of is gold, silver. Growing reports of shortage and major banks refusing to deliver physical gold belonging to clients; extended delivery delays; drainage of gold from London; ABN Ambro defaulted, refused to deliver gold but predicts a gold price collapse.

Consider a hyperinflation not in the traditional ways of the Weimars and Zimbabwes that printed currency with ink and paper, but in derivatives (a portion in above chart). Over $1,000 Trillion unprinted pretend ‘derivatives’ dollars that do not exist, mostly interest rate derivatives that hold together the interest rate structure. Inflation subdued? That depends on where asset prices would be (stock market – 401k-IRAs – bank balance sheets…) without suspending FASB’s accounting rule and printing money ‘QE’ 0-1-2-3∞ + ZIRP and multi-trillion dollar swaps.

Behind this kabuki theatre is history in the making. It is the U.S. dollar’s diminishing role as the international settlement currency for world trade (about $18 trillion merchandise trade in 2012) along with its implications. Since at least 2012, bilateral trade agreements among other nations have begun settling in non-U.S. dollars. Over the next few years, China’s economy will become the largest in the world, and with India (the people) and Russia lead the world in gold accumulation.

May 7, 2013: China announces aim of convertibility of the yuan in 2013.  [Yuan]

May 7-8, 2013: G-20 Meets in Turkey: “Reinventing Bretton Woods” [Reinventing the gold standard…]

Developing and emerging economies led by China, now hold two-thirds of foreign exchange reserves among world central banks.

May 10-11, 2013: Unscheduled Meeting of G-7 (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States) over the weekend in London. Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Bernanke absent. “ ‘It’s very rare for a G-7 to focus on financial regulation,’ one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity”.  Perhaps then, on the G-20’s meeting in Turkey which portends the re-entry of gold to anchor the new system. In the previous article, “Yes it is true: ‘Gold is dead.’” reports raise questions about how much gold, if any, is left at Fort Knox, which at its height vaulted about half of the gold holdings in the United States, half belonging to other countries.

May 21, 2013: : China’s President Xi to Meet with U.S. President earlier than expected, June rather than September

(AP). “The June 7-8 meeting at a retreat southeast of Los Angeles, announced Monday by the White House, underlines the importance of the relationship between the countries as they work out ways for the U.S.-led world order to make room for a China that is fast accruing global influence and military power.

President Xi has said China wants its rise to be peaceful…”

 

 

Preview to Last Section of Part II Subversion of the United States

“America will never be destroyed from the outside… it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”– Abraham Lincoln

To summarize, destroy its family, its traditions, and values – the foundations of its society. Why? Easier to control and condition the individual towards dependence and obedience to the supremacy of the state. These are the Communist International “Rules of Revolution” document found by the Allied forces in Dusseldorf, Germany after World War II. Yuri Bezmenov, Soviet KGB subversion ‘brainwashing’ expert-turned defector (Part I Ideological Subversion of the United States),  could not vouch for the authenticity of the document, but he confirmed they are near verbatim to Soviet ideological subversion in his 1984 book, Love Letter to America (26MB in parts 1, 2, 3 due to size limits). One of these rules is “Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible” (p. 17).

It raises an interesting question: Were the German people also subverted, ‘brainwashed’ to accept totalitarian-fascism as the wealth behind the U.S. foundations and investment banks financed the rise of Hitler? As the Telegraph reported, these were the same foundations that funded covert operations to corral nations into the European Union following the end of World War II as several generations in the United States had been successfully ‘brainwashed’ towards the same ideology by the 1960s. Incidentally around this time as we see in Part II some of the most famous experiments in psychology were conducted in the United States to assess the level of obedience of the adult population, findings that shocked the researchers…

In 1908 when the Carnegie Endowment began its operations, the Trustees discussed a specific question: “Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?” and concluded there was “no more known effective means than war”.  In 1909, the Endowment (Foundation) raised a second question: “How do we involve the United States in a war?” and concluded, “We must control the State Department.” 

During WWI, the Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment dispatched a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson cautioning him to see to it that the war did not end too quickly. These were uncovered in the minutes of the Carnegie Endowment meetings during the congressional investigation in the 1950s that was halted by the White House and both sides of Congress. The director of the congressional investigation stated the Dictaphone tapes of these Endowment memorandums and meeting notes are held in the archives of the U.S. House of Representatives and within the Carnegie’s archives.

(Confirmed communist spy Alger Hiss was president of the Carnegie Endowment and David Rockefeller joined the Board at Hiss’s “invitation”. Hiss was forced to step down due to the investigation, which takes us to Covington & Burling – Yes, the law firm that created the legal foundation for MERS that expedited mortgage securitization at the center of the 2008 collapse that led to the nationwide suspension in home foreclosures in 2010 as the major banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used forged and defective documents to foreclose raising questions of broken chain of title on homes across the nation from their MERS.)

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Robert S. Brookings to the War Industries Board (WIB) whose function was to connect business to government. President Wilson named Brookings chairman of the War Board’s Price Fixing Committee, which negotiated the maximum prices on raw industrial materials for producers during World War I. U.S. Major General Smedley Butler in his book War is a Racket (1935) cited U.S. Steel whose founder was J.P. Morgan as the leading beneficiary of World War I. J.P. Morgan combined U.S. Steel with the Carnegie Steel Company. U.S. Major General Butler wrote “War is a racket. It always has been… Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about…” and ‘the American soldier follows the flag’.

Robert S. Brookings founded the Brookings Institution in 1916, one of the oldest think tanks in Washington D.C. In the previous article, “The European Union (EU) ‘Dream’ Wasn’t Even European,” the largest contributors to the Brookings Institution are the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and John L. Thornton of Goldman Sachs.  Nearly a century later, the Brookings Institution is where Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers – with former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan – who were instrumental in the proliferation of derivatives that collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008, gather to promote economic growth and health care, the last area to be taken under centralized control. A correction may be required when 401k and retirement plans are nationalized.

In 1976, Congressman Larry P. McDonald wrote in the book introduction,

 “The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control. … Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”

On June 2, 1983  W.A. Harriman, elder statesman of the Democratic party, flew to Moscow as a private citizen taking along a State Department translator for a confidential chat with Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Sutton).  Not even the U.S. President or Vice-President had met with the new leader of the Soviet Union. Sutton noted the interesting timing as about three months later on September 1, 1983 Congressman McDonald was killed with 269 other passengers when Korean Airlines 747 was shot down by the Soviets.  Yuri Bezmenov believed Congressman McDonald was the target, premeditated at the highest levels (1983 video).

Yuri Bezmenov’s former boss was head of Soviet KGB Yuri Andropov who became General Secretary of the Soviet Union with whom W.A. Harriman held a private meeting. A few weeks after the downing of Korean Airlines 747, the New York Times reported former President Nixon denied the Soviet’s claims that he canceled his seat on the same flight that killed Congressman McDonald (“Moscow asserts Nixon canceled seat on Korean 747.” NYT Sept 25, 1983).  [Henry Kissinger was President Nixon’s national security advisor, whose order of importance at the White House was to respond first to calls from Nelson Rockefeller, then movie stars and celebrities, then the U.S. President (Woodward & Bernstein. (1976). The Final Days p.193). Kissinger-Rockefeller and the Iranian people’s billions are in Part II].

Who were the most vocal voices that assailed the communist hearings? The same W.A. Harriman, elder statesman of the Democratic party and partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., the oldest investment bank in the United States. Another was Senator Prescott S. Bush – patriarch of 41st and 43rd U.S. presidents – Harriman’s partner at the investment bank for over 40 years, both financiers of Hitler’s Third Reich. It does not end there…

Sutton (1986, updated 2002) identified Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., J.P. Morgan, and Covington & Burling among their conduits over the past century. There is a London counterpart…

These series of previews and excerpts are assembled in Part II Subversion of the United States. Consider what mosaic emerges. “Too big to bail”-“Too big to fail”-“Too big to jail” banks. Catchy, yes. Just overlook the mechanisms that maintain the interest rate structure, the Treasury bond market, stock market… Consider the top U.S. attorney general who refused to investigate mortgage fraud in 2008 and the new SEC head, as both shared the same revolving door that leads back to Standard Oil tankers being manned by Nazi officers.

In Part I, back in the 1930s Premier Mussolini praised “President Roosevelt’s new plan for coordination of industry follows precisely the lines of Fascist cooperation… Dictatorships are inevitable.” (“Mussolini Sees World Driven Toward Fascism.” New York Times June 4, 1933) what  America’s leading socialist, Norman Thomas described as “in effect what President Roosevelt has done has been to lay the foundation for an immense structure of State capitalism.” (“Is the New Deal Socialism? A Socialist Answers.” NYT June 18, 1933). What might this look like? The chart may remind some of the Hegelian dialectic over the left and right in the United States.

 

Bezmenov (1983 interview on subversion of the United States): “Situation is NOT under control. System is disgustingly out of control.”

 

The European Union EU “Dream” Wasn’t Even European, Bank Deposits Confiscation

Posted on by Lan Pham   

The European Union (EU) “Dream” Wasn’t Even European (More Preview to Part II Ideological Subversion of the United States)

Recently, European Commission President Barroso expressed concerns that the European “dream” was under threat from a “resurgence of populism and nationalism.” The “threat” of Italy, Poland, Spain… resurging as sovereign nations? To the EU creators, yes, because the European Union “dream” wasn’t even European.

In September 2000 about two years after the euro became the official currency of the Eurozone, the Telegraph foreign press (link) reported DECLASSIFIED U.S. government documents from the 1950s and 1960s showed U.S. intelligence ran a campaign to advance a ‘united’ Europe, exert pressure to push Britain into the European state. In 1948 the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE) was created that funded and directed the European federalist movement and covert operations in the European Youth Campaign (“Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs.” Telegraph Sept 19, 2000). One memorandum dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a European parliament, signed by General William J. Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

Another memo dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to secretly push for the monetary union and suppress debate until “adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable.” The ACUE that funded these activities was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation.This followed the end of World War II as it was the same wealth behind these Foundations that funded and unleashed Hitler and the “Master Race” upon Europe. Over 400,000 U.S. military men and women died in World War II; total estimated 60-80 million deaths including civilians. One U.S. attorney general at the time used the term “treason”.

For the sake of your nation leave the euro, EU.

In the interests of the United States? As a preview to Part II Ideological Subversion, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation together with the Carnegie Endowment were under congressional investigation for their funding subversion of the United States. Confirmed communist spy Alger Hiss was president of the Carnegie Endowment and David Rockefeller joined the Board at his “invitation”. One of the documents found at the Foundation in the early 1900s was their plan to take control of the U.S. State Department. The timing of the design to corral nations in Europe into the EU commenced as several generations in the United States had been deliberately “dumbed-down” and subverted by the 1960s to Marxism-Leninism, the ideology of communism with fascism at the top. In the upcoming Part II, consider who assailed and halted the investigations. Yuri Bezmenov (Part I Ideological Subversion) Soviet subversion expert-turned defector warned U.S. intelligence, politicians and the media and realized he was talking to people who wanted to prevent the American people from understanding the truth (video).

Consider the parallel plunder of the United States and the Eurozone countries in Run Cyprus! Leave the Euro. Consider that what was put forth to the people – the euro – as integration of the European economy was subverted to control.

“Who does what, who decides what, who controls whom and what? And where are we heading to?”—Barroso in earlier quote on April 23, 2013. It seems the answers to these question were designed some 60 years ago as its true intent leaks out from time to time. In 1992 Strobe Talbott, former President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State and current member of the Council on Foreign Relations and President of the Brookings Institution, wrote in Time Magazine: “Nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority…” (“America Abroad: The Birth of the Global Nation.” July 20, 1992).

There it is: Aspirations for the “One World” Order, the “single global authority” or as Bezmenov revealed “world domination”. No Mexico. No Spain. No Indonesia. No Australia. No Poland. No France. No Ukraine. No Italy. No Turkey. No India. No Pakistan. No Malaysia. No U.K. No Iran and so on…Nationhood obsolete. Just states asking permission from the ‘single global authority’ to retain some rights. Kissinger expounds on the virtues of this ‘single global authority’ in 2009.

No China? No Russia? It seems there was a minor miscalculation.

The largest contributors to the Brookings Institution are the same Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and John L. Thornton. Thornton is the Brookings Chair of the Board and former President and co-CEO of Goldman Sachs. The Brookings Institution is also where Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers – with former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan – who were instrumental in the proliferation of derivatives that collapsed the U.S. economy gather to promote economic growth.

Goldman Sachs is co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, Robert Rubin its co-chairman). Otmar Issing, co-creator of the euro is International Advisor of Goldman Sachs. Rubin, Summers, Greenspan, along with Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JP Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon, Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Grand Chessboard designs on Europe, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner congregate at the CFR with five Rockefellers (whose Chase acquired JP Morgan, shareholder-owner of the Federal Reserve Bank); also CFR members are former CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Daniel Mudd, Richard Syron respectively; Frank Raines of Fannie Mae) and Maurice “Hank” Greenberg of AIG – heads of three institutions at the heart of the 2008 collapse.

It appears the CFR has the greatest concentration of the worst failures in the history of the United States, the collapse of its financial system, or its most successful depending on the vantage point. In the previous article, “The Federal Reserve Bank is Naked,” consider in the 2009 QE I mortgage bond purchase program how it is possible that the Federal Reserve Bank paid a handful of its banks $57.7 billion for a $600 million mortgage bond from the 1980s and multiple other similar FRB bond purchases that totaled $1.25 trillion. U.S. State Department Secretary Clinton-U.S. presidential candidate expressed their fortunate proximity to the CFR building as that is where the Department obtains U.S. foreign policy (video), presumably with assistance from Henry Kissinger wielding U.S. military men as “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy (Woodward & Bernstein. (1976). The Final Days, p.194).

From their financing and buildup of the Soviet Union to Hitler’s Third Reich takes us to Bechtel’s build-up of China since the 1950s (see footnote on Hegelian dialectic below), that brings up a curious case at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the late 1990s. In Part II we look at their interests in Russian and Asian art and culture (with AIG’s CIA-esque Maurice “Hank” Greenburg), and an interesting battle over oil that revealed a rather epic Who’s Who of the “One World.” Much has been written about the revolving door between Wall Street and the SEC, the White House and the State Department but perhaps that should be extended to the CIA.

The Telegraph reported the World Gold Council advises Italy to hand over its gold reserves to force a change in EMU policy (“Italy should use its gold reserves to force a change in EMU policy.” Telegraph May 2, 2013).

In place of gold, are Italy, Portugal, Spain…perhaps dusting off those guillotines?

 

 

[Economics Professor Antony Sutton  (1976. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler) suggested 90% of the Council on Foreign Relations is an outer ring composed of “hangers-on and social climbers”, perhaps the equivalent to what Soviet KGB subversion expert Yuri Bezmenov calls “useful idiots” [Part I Ideological Subversion of the United States]. The CFR members include a Who’s Who of economic academia, whose American Economic Association was annexed to their creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, which Sutton observed has produced more “bootlickers” than researchers. For what Sutton uncovered in declassifying State Department records and research at Stanford University, he faced pressure from the White House, told by Glenn Campbell, President Reagan’s advisor over the CIA, that he was a “problem” and his academic career “you will not survive”.

Sutton traced their roots back to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher for State supremacy or Fascism, whose ideas inspired Hitler as well as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto. The enamored wealthy imported this to the United States and financed its propagation, which takes us to Part II…

Their Hegelian dialectic creates conflict, pits countries against the other while financing and controlling the process, and out of destruction and “crises” consolidate control. It is how conflict is created between the left and right in the United States to keep the masses preoccupied while controlling the parameters of conflict and thus the outcome, always towards more State control.

In Part II, consider which Ivy League university in the United States was the reputed “nursery for communism” that required naked photos of its freshmen from which a core of its establishment went on to create and fund ideas of the “Master Race” that led to the sterilization of 60,000 “defective” Americans even before Hitler’s gas chambers, to financing his Third Reich, subversion of the U.S., the creation of EU, initiated wars in Iraq, Afghanistan …. ]. The plunder…

 

Bank Deposits Confiscation in the United States  – The Cyprus Blueprint Implemented

Update to the previous article, Run Cyprus! Leave the Euro (April 1, 2013). The Telegraph foreign press reported on April 28, 2013 (link) that Bank of Cyprus has implemented the depositor “bail-in”:

“Bank of Cyprus said it had converted 37.5pc of deposits exceeding €100,000 into “class A” shares [In exchange for depositors not getting their money, depositors are given stocks of the bankrupt bank], with an additional 22.5pc held as a buffer for possible conversion in the future…Another 30pc would be temporarily frozen and held as deposits, the bank said [Depositor can not take money out].”

The Irish Times reported €4.2 billion in customer deposits was raided (link). The “bail-in” is along the lines outlined in a joint paper by the FDIC and Bank of England in December 2012 titled, “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions” and other documents that suggests several years in planning.

The U.S. media has remained rather silent on what is being planned for the American public. When the time comes, money left in the banks will be taken, as now bank depositors have become unsecured lenders to the banks; 401(k) and other retirement plans are in line. Take GDP and subtract the trillions in QE and The Black Hole reveals itself – it is not complicated. There is no solution to the debt and OTC derivative problems, assuming a solution is the objective.

 

 

Quantitative Easing 0-1-2-3∞ & The Federal Reserve’s Love Affair with its Banks and Mortgage Bonds: Levitating The Black Hole

Posted on by Lan Pham   

“A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping… Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that marks the point of no return.”—Wikipedia

When Did QE Stop?

To much frenzied media coverage, the Federal Reserve Bank announced a third round of quantitative easing “QE 3∞“ on September 13, 2012. The Federal Reserve will essentially print unlimited quantities of dollars to purchase agency mortgage bonds and maintain nominal interest rates targeted at 0% (“ZIRP”) to keep borrowing costs reasonable for its member banks, among others.

“QE 3∞” in 2012 is the unlimited version of “QE 1” in 2009 following the banking and financial system crisis in September 2008. What does this mean?

QE is simply the printing of dollars in paper or digital form by the quasi-private Federal Reserve Bank, as the Federal Reserve does not have this money. In QE 1 (web), the Federal Reserve Bank printed $1.25 trillion to purchase agency mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). Agency MBSs are mortgage bonds (akin to a mutual fund filled with mortgages, peoples’ homes) issued and guaranteed or held by the quasi-private Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

On a practical level this means the Federal Reserve Bank printed $1.25 trillion with a computer stroke and became the owner or recipient of homeowners’ mortgage payments.  The Federal Reserve will do this on an unlimited basis in QE 3 going forward, as it states ‘to foster maximum employment and price stability’.

What is it about the Federal Reserve Bank’s love affair with mortgage bonds that the media and the Federal Reserve will not speak of?

 I.  QE0: Insolvency of the Largest Banks in the Federal Reserve System

Let’s pause for a moment. The most significant QE was not even called QE. It was the suspension of the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) mark-to-market accounting rule 157 in April 2009. The rule required banks to value assets on their balance sheets at current market price or fair value, but since 2009, became what the banks hope it is worth or what they paid for it.

Doing so helps insolvent banks avoid the appearance of insolvency by not having to write-down the amount of losses on assets, such as mortgage bonds, assuming there is a willing buyer (There isn’t really). Private sector financing for the housing market through demand for private label MBSs, which are mortgage bonds backed by mostly subprime mortgages reincarnated as prime issued and sold by the largest banks, collapsed since fall 2008.

Let’s give this FASB suspension of mark-to-market accounting event a name, QE0 , to mark the point of no return in April 2009 about six months after the banking and financial collapse in September 2008.

Following the collapse, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives lined up to threaten FASB in a series of hearings to suspend mark-to-market accounting, as Representative Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.) warned FASB’s chairman in March 2009: “Do not make us tell you what you have to do.” (Transcript of the U.S. House of Representatives Mark-to-Market Hearing, March 12, 2009). The American Bankers Association, Citigroup, and the Bank of New York Mellon Corp., the world’s largest custodian of financial assets, also pressured for the rule change (web).

[On a side note:  MIT finance professor-CBO chief economist revised my memo to say that assets may already fully reflect market values. After I was fired I learned that MIT Professor Deborah Lucas called by the U.S. President to CBO in 2009 (web) has a CBO economist sit on FASB. This CBO economist and CBO Director Elmendorf are part of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Robert Rubin is the project’s founder and Dr. Lawrence Summers, once chief advisor to the U.S. President, sits on its Advisory Council to promote economic growth and health care. Former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers were instrumental in the proliferation of derivatives in the late 1990s. ]

Let’s look at a few simple charts. What does QE0 FASB look like for the largest banks?

Voodoo Assets and Liabilities Chart 1:U.S. Commercial Banks Net Worth: Assets minus Liabilities - Can you spot the banking and financial crisis?

From Voodoo Chart 1, was there a banking and financial crisis in 2008 that froze global markets? From the crisis in fall 2008 to 2009, there is no change between assets and liabilities! No change, for what has been considered the worst banking and financial crisis in a century (a few?). Continue reading →