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Top Economist – Who Predicted the 2008 Crash – Confirms What Alternative Financial Sites Have Been Saying for a Decade

January 21, 2016

Top Economist – Who Predicted the 2008 Crash – Confirms What Alternative Financial Sites Have Been Saying for a Decade

And Wise People Have Been Saying for Thousands of Years

William White is one of the world’s top economists.

He was the head economist for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) – the world’s most prestigious financial institution, called the “central banks’ central bank – comprised of the world’s central banks. He is now the chief economist for OECD, made up of most of the world’s richest and most powerful countries.

As chief economist for BIS, White predicted the 2008 crash.

While the mainstream financial media like CNBC has been trumpeting fake, happy news for many years, White confirmed yesterday what the best alternative financial sites have said for a decade, telling the Telegraph (at the World Economic Forum in Davos):

The global financial system has become dangerously unstable [he’s right] and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability …. [Uh–huh]

“The situation is worse than it was in 2007. [Accurate] Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up” …. [True]

***

“Debts have continued to build up over the last eight years and they have reached such levels in every part of the world that they have become a potent cause for mischief,” he said. [Indeed]

“It will become obvious in the next recession that many of these debts will never be serviced or repaid, and this will be uncomfortable for a lot of people who think they own assets that are worth something” [Yup]

***

“The only question is whether we are able to look reality in the eye and face what is coming in an orderly fashion, or whether it will be disorderly. Debt jubilees have been going on for 5,000 years, as far back as the Sumerians.” [Exactly!]

***

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Austrians get (some) mainstream credibility

January 16, 2016

Austrians get (some) mainstream credibility

Well, well: who would have believed it. First the Bank for International Settlements comes out with a paper that links credit booms to the boom-bust business cycle, then Britain’s Adam Smith Institute publishes a paper by Anthony Evans that recommends the Bank of England should ditch its powers over monetary policy and move towards free banking.

Admittedly, the BIS paper hides its argument behind a mixture of statistical and mathematical analysis, and seems unaware of Austrian Business Cycle Theory, there being no mention of it, or even of Hayek. Is this ignorance, or a reluctance to be associated with loony free-marketeers? Not being a conspiracy theorist, I suspect ignorance.

The Adam Smith Institute’s paper is not so shy, and includes both “sound money” and “Austrian” in the title, though the first comment on the web version of the press release says talking about “Austrian” proposals is unhelpful. So prejudice against Austrian economics is still unfortunately alive and well, even though its conclusions are becoming less so. The Adam Smith Institute actually does some very good work debunking the mainstream neo-classical economics prevalent today, and is to be congratulated for publishing Evans’s paper.

The BIS paper will be the more influential of the two in policy circles, and this is not the first time the BIS has questioned the macroeconomic assumptions behind the actions of the major central banks. The BIS is regarded as the central bankers’ central bank, so just as we lesser mortals look up to the Fed, ECB, BoE or BoJ in the hope they know what they are doing, they presumably take note of the BIS. One wonders if the Fed’s new policy of raising interest rates was influenced by the BIS’s view that zero rates are not delivering a Keynesian recovery, and might only intensify the boom-bust syndrome.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Austrians Get (Some) Mainstream Credibility

January 16, 2016

AUSTRIANS GET (SOME) MAINSTREAM CREDIBILITY

Well, well: who would have believed it. First the Bank for International Settlements comes out with a paper that links credit booms to the boom-bust business cycle, then Britain’s Adam Smith Institute publishes a paper by Anthony Evans [Editor’s note: Anthony is a Founding Fellow of The Cobden Centre] that recommends the Bank of England should ditch its powers over monetary policy and move towards free banking.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Trouble With Financial Bubbles

October 20, 2015

The Trouble With Financial Bubbles

Very soon after the magnitude of the 2008 financial crisis became clear, a lively debate began about whether central banks and regulators could – and should – have done more to head it off. The traditional view, notably shared by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, is that any attempt to prick financial bubbles in advance is doomed to failure. The most central banks can do is to clean up the mess.

Bubble-pricking may indeed choke off growth unnecessarily – and at high social cost. But there is a counter-argument. Economists at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) have maintained that the costs of the crisis were so large, and the cleanup so long, that we should surely now look for ways to act pre-emptively when we again see a dangerous build-up of liquidity and credit.

Hence the fierce (albeit arcane and polite) dispute between the two sides at the International Monetary Fund’s recent meeting in Lima, Peru. For the literary-minded, it was reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver finds himself caught in a war between two tribes, one of which believes that a boiled egg should always be opened at the narrow end, while the other is fervent in its view that a spoon fits better into the bigger, rounded end.

It is fair to say that the debate has moved on a little since 2008. Most important, macroprudential regulation has been added to policymakers’ toolkit: simply put, it makes sense to vary banks’ capital requirements according to the financial cycle. When credit expansion is rapid, it may be appropriate to increase banks’ capital requirements as a hedge against the heightened risk of a subsequent contraction. This increase would be above what microprudential supervision – assessing the risks to individual institutions – might dictate. In this way, the new Basel rules allow for requiring banks to maintain a so-called countercyclical buffer of extra capital.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/central-bankers-financial-stability-debate-by-howard-davies-2015-10#fXsDH7ISW0ku2b5s.99

The Numbers Say That A Major Global Recession Has Already Begun

October 14, 2015

The Numbers Say That A Major Global Recession Has Already Begun

The biggest bank in the western world has just come out and declared that the global economy is “already in a recession”. According to British banking giant HSBC, global trade is down 8.4 percent so far this year, and global GDP expressed in U.S. dollars is down 3.4 percent. So those that are waiting for the next worldwide economic recession to begin can stop waiting. It is officially here. As you will see below, money is fleeing emerging markets at a blistering pace, major global banks are stuck with huge loans that will never be repaid, and it looks like a very significant worldwide credit crunch has begun. Just a few days ago, I explained that the IMF, the UN, the BIS And Citibank were all warning that a major economic crisis could be imminent. They aren’t just making this stuff up out of thin air, but most Americans still seem to believe that everything is going to be just fine. The level of blind faith in the system that most people are demonstrating right now is absolutely astounding.

The numbers say that the global economy has not been in this bad shape since the devastating recession that shook the world in 2008 and 2009. According to HSBC, “we are already in a dollar recession”…

Global trade is also declining at an alarming pace. According to the latest data available in June the year on year change is -8.4%. To find periods of equivalent declines we only really find recessionary periods. This is an interesting point. On one metric we are already in a recession. As can be seen in Chart 3 on the following page, global GDP expressed in US dollars is already negative to the tune of USD 1,37trn or -3.4%. That is, we are already in a dollar recession.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Are The IMF, The UN, The BIS And Citibank All Warning That An Economic Crisis Could Be Imminent?

October 9, 2015

Why Are The IMF, The UN, The BIS And Citibank All Warning That An Economic Crisis Could Be Imminent?

The warnings are getting louder. Is anybody listening? For months, I have been documenting on my website how the global financial system is absolutely primed for a crisis, and now some of the most important financial institutions in the entire world are warning about the exact same thing. For example, this week I was stunned to see that the Telegraph had published an article with the following ominous headline: “$3 trillion corporate credit crunch looms as debtors face day of reckoning, says IMF“. And actually what we are heading for would more accurately be described as a “credit freeze” or a “credit panic”, but a “credit crunch” will definitely work for now. The IMF is warning that the “dangerous over-leveraging” that we have been witnessing “threatens to unleash a wave of defaults” all across the globe…

Governments and central banks risk tipping the world into a fresh financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund has warned, as it called time on a corporate debt binge in the developing world.

Emerging market companies have “over-borrowed” by $3 trillion in the last decade, reflecting a quadrupling of private sector debt between 2004 and 2014, found the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report.

This dangerous over-leveraging now threatens to unleash a wave of defaults that will imperil an already weak global economy, said stark findings from the IMF’s twice yearly report.

The IMF is actually telling the truth in this instance. We are in the midst of the greatest debt bubble the world has ever seen, and it is a monumental threat to the global financial system.

But even though we know about this threat, that doesn’t mean that we can do anything about it at this point or stop what is about to happen.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As Economy Heads to Another Crash, BIS Acknowledges: We’re Failing

July 25, 2015

As Economy Heads to Another Crash, BIS Acknowledges: We’re Failing

http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2015/07/22/maechtigste-bank-der-welt-legt-mandat-zur-rettung-der-weltwirtschaft-zurueck/

World’s Most Powerful Bank Reverses Course, to Avoid a Global Depression

German Economic News, Translation (and closing Note) by Eric Zuesse | Published: 22:07:15 20:10 clock

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) acknowledges in its annual report that the policy of cheap money has failed. All the trillions in monetary stimulus have produced no growth in the real economy. Central banks cannot salvage the economy. Governments — fiscal stimulus — must now resolve the economic crisis. Political leadership is required.

In November 2008, the Federal Reserve in the US began to purchase many billions in securities, to stabilize the markets after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Later, the Fed bought also US Treasuries, and cut interest rates to a record low of zero to 0.25 percent. So, they set off a global devaluation race. As a result, between just January 1st and March 12th of 2015, one-fifth of all central banks lowered their key interest rates. China was last to join this currency war, but when they did, their easing of monetary policy helped spark a credit-driven bull market that now produces the biggest Chinese slump in 20 years.

The Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is considered the “central bank of central banks.” It was originally founded in 1930 to handle German reparations after the First World War. Today the BIS networks together central banks around the world, and manages on their behalf nations’ gold reserves. Its 85th Annual report analyzes the global financial system, seven years after the 2008 crisis. An entire chapter is devoted to shortcomings of the international monetary and financial system. It says that instead of promoting sustainable and balanced growth of the global economy, this system actually undermines growth long-term.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is The 505 Trillion Dollar Interest Rate Derivatives Bubble In Imminent Jeopardy?

May 26, 2015

Is The 505 Trillion Dollar Interest Rate Derivatives Bubble In Imminent Jeopardy?

All over the planet, large banks are massively overexposed to derivatives contracts. Interest rate derivatives account for the biggest chunk of these derivatives contracts. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the notional value of all interest rate derivatives contracts outstanding around the globe is a staggering 505 trillion dollars. Considering the fact that the U.S. national debt is only 18 trillion dollars, that is an amount of money that is almost incomprehensible. When this derivatives bubblefinally bursts, there won’t be enough money in the entire world to bail everyone out. The key to making sure that all of these interest rate bets do not start going bad is for interest rates to remain stable. That is why what is going on in Greece right now is so important. The Greek government has announced that it will default on a loan payment that it owes to the IMF on June 5th. If that default does indeed happen, Greek bond yields will soar into the stratosphere as panicked investors flee for the exits. But it won’t just be Greece. If Greece defaults despite years of intervention by the EU and the IMF, that will be a clear signal to the financial world that no nation in Europe is truly safe. Bond yields will start spiking in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and all over the rest of the continent. By the end of it, we could be faced with the greatest interest rate derivatives crisis that any of us have ever seen.

The number one thing that bond investors want is to get their money back. If a nation like Greece is actually allowed to default after so much time and so much effort has been expended to prop them up, that is really going to spook those that invest in bonds.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Central Banks Hate Physical, Love “Earmarked” Gold, And What Is The Difference

May 3, 2015

Why Central Banks Hate Physical, Love “Earmarked” Gold, And What Is The Difference

Several days ago we showed the dramatic conclusion of what happened to Czechoslovakia’s gold which had been placed at the Bank of England for safekeeping days after Germany annexed the central European republic ahead of the start of World War II. We hate the spoil the punchline for those who haven’t read the post yet, but the her it is: it was gone; it was all gone.

And all of this happened with the explicit assistance of the Bank of International Settlements which was formed in 1930 to promote the free flow of capital and global economic growth. Instead, time and again, what the BIS has proven its only mission to be, is to facilitate the spread of intangible assets and fiat currencies while it quietly confiscates, sequesters and aggregates (for a select group of individuals) he world’s physical assets. Mostly gold.

In fact, until the advent of the BIS, gold held by central banks came in one version. Physical.

It was only after the BIS arrived on the scene did gold’s macabre doppelganger, so-called paper, registered or “earmarked“, gold emerge for the first time.

Courtesy of Adam LeBor’s book exposing the history and inner workings of the BIS, “The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World“, below is a brief story of how earmarked gold came into being.

* * *

The Czechoslovak gold affair also highlighted how the bank’s increasingly sophisticated gold operations were growing in reach and importance. The BIS’s gold trades were a primitive forerunner of today’s globalized economy where vast sums instantly fly back and forth at the touch of a keyboard. The technology available in the 1930s was far more primitive, but the principle of buying and selling assets sight unseen and without taking physical possession is the same.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Happens When You Hand Over Your Gold To The Bank Of England For “Safekeeping”

May 2, 2015

What Happens When You Hand Over Your Gold To The Bank Of England For “Safekeeping”

“The Bank for International Settlements is the bank which sanctions the most notorious outrage of this generation— the rape of Czechoslovakia.”

— George Strauss, Labor MP, speaking in the House of Commons, May 1939

“the Bank for International Settlements should be liquidated before it
furnished any more sinews of war to Germany, and that the odd
relationship between the British government and the Bank of England
should be re-examined without delay.”

— “Sees British Hands Tied on Czech Gold,” New York Times, June 6, 1939

When Nazi Germany annexed the Czechoslovak border province of the Sudetenland in September 1938, it immediately absorbed a good part of the country’s banking system as well as most of Czechoslovakia’s strategic defenses. By then the country’s national bank had prudently transferred most of its gold abroad to two accounts at the Bank of England: one in the name of the BIS, and one in the name of the National Bank of Czechoslovakia itself. (Countries had deposited some of their gold reserves in a sub-account at the BIS account in London to ease gold sales and purchases.) Of the 94,772 kilograms of gold, only 6,337 kilograms remained in Prague. The security of the national gold was more than a monetary issue. The Czechoslovak reserves, like those of Republican Spain, were an expression of nationhood. Carved out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Czechoslovak Republic was a new and fragile nation. A good part of the gold had been donated by the public in the country’s early years. Josef Malik, the governor of the national bank, and his fellow Czechs believed that, even as the Nazis’ dismembered their homeland, if the national gold was safe, then something of the country’s independence would endure.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 5

April 18, 2015

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 5

Since I began writing analysis for the liberty movement more than eight years ago, I have always said that we will know when the endgame of the globalists is upon us when the criminals come out into the light of day and admit to their crimes. At that moment, it will be because they no longer fear either the repercussions or their plans being obstructed.

As I plan to show in this installment of my series on the hidden fiscal collapse of America, the endgame has indeed arrived. At the very least, the international elites seem to think success is within their grasp, for they now openly expose their own criminality. But they do so in a way that attempts to divert blame or to rationalize their actions as being for the “greater good.”

In Part 4 of this series, I discussed the reality of the false East/West paradigm and the fact that the “conflict” between Eastern and Western interests is nothing more than Kabuki theater constructed by globalists and designed to mesmerize the masses. You see, the problem with most people is that they tend to let their innate sense of tribalism drive them to take sides in war without understanding the fundamental root of that war. In most cases, they believe one side must be “good” and one side must be “bad.” Globalists understand this weakness of human collectivism, and they exploit it as often as possible. They create conflicts from out of the void, conflicts in which BOTH sides are controlled. Then, they let the masses fumble like idiots trying to set the noose around the other guy’s neck.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 4

April 11, 2015

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 4

In the first three installments of this series, we examined the realities behind supply and demand, unemployment and personal debt, and national debt. As has been proven in each consecutive article with ample evidence, mainstream establishment numbers are, for the most part, utter garbage. They are not legitimate. They are meaningless.

The figures and stats that do have some truth to them are so obscured from the public view and unreported by the media that they may as well be state secrets. The average person has no clue of their existence because his primary sources of information are establishment-dominated. Even MSM talking heads and economic “analysts” are so mesmerized by the false version of the economic world that they have no point of reference when suddenly confronted with singular facts. Some people call this catastrophic behavior a “positive feedback loop.” It is a mainstream echo chamber that has become a financial tomb.

Now that I have covered the lies within our economy that I can prove absolutely, it is time to move on to the lies that are more difficult to pin down. These lies often slip past our investigations because the hard data that could be used to expose them is simply not available to the general public. In fact, much of the data is not even available to government officials. I am, of course, talking about the hard data behind the activities of central banks across the globe — the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve in particular. In this installment, we will explore the purpose of these lies; to hide the imminent destruction of our currency — by hook, by crook and by fiat.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

BIS Slams The Fed: The Solution To Bubbles Is Not More Bubbles, It Is Avoiding Bubbles In The First Place

March 23, 2015

BIS Slams The Fed: The Solution To Bubbles Is Not More Bubbles, It Is Avoiding Bubbles In The First Place

On one hand there are hard-core Keynesians who will wave the flag of inflation as the only cure to a world drowning in debt, even after the mushroom cloud results of their policies going off around the globe “assure” GDP hits +? once every window in the world is shattered and has to be replaced…

… on the other, you have the BIS which with every passing day is becoming the citadel of Austrian thought, the latest example thanks to the BIS’ most recent quarterly review in which we read that not only is deflation not the “monster” the Bank of Japan and other Keynesian acolytes would like to make it appear…

The evidence from our long historical data set sheds new light on the costs of deflations.It raises questions about the prevailing view that goods and services price deflations, even if persistent, are always pernicious. It suggests that asset price deflations, and particularly house price deflations in the postwar era, have been more damaging. And it cautions against presuming that the interaction between debt and goods and services price deflation, as opposed to debt’s interaction with property price deflations, has played a significant role in past episodes of economic weakness.

… but more importantly and as Zero Hedge has said from day one, the BIS now says the solution to an asset bubble is not some incomprehensible jibberish of “macroprudential regulation” or a “bubble-busting” SWAT team at the Fed, not another asset bubble (especially not one which leads to house price deflation, the same that is slamming the Chinese economy at this moment), which by now has become clear to all is the only “tool” in a central banker’s aresnal, and the remedy to debt isnot even more debt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dollar Demand = Global Economy Has Skidded Over the Cliff (March 18, 2015)

March 18, 2015

Dollar Demand = Global Economy Has Skidded Over the Cliff

Borrowing in USD was risk-on; buying USD is risk-off.

There is a lively debate about the global demand for U.S. dollars:

Global finance faces $9 trillion stress test as dollar soars (Telegraph.co.uk)

Is There a US$ Shortage? Will it Sink the Global Economy? Again? (Mish)

The Dollar Squeeze – How Problematic Is It? (Acting Man)

The Global Dollar Funding Shortage Is Back With A Vengeance And “This Time It’s Different”(Zero Hedge), which references a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) paper: Global dollar credit: links to US monetary policy and leverage.

“Unless you enjoy multivariate regression analysis I suggest skimming the BIS working paper. Major points I got were:Correspondent Mark G. went through the BIS report and offered these insightful comments:

1. Almost all of the dollar denominated debt and bond growth since 2009 was generated by the global shadow banking system. Banks per se were smaller players in issuing this debt, and US-based banks (i.e. the ones in reach of Federal Reserve life preservers) were minor. Sovereign wealth funds are large players in this. When we think of huge sovereign wealth funds held by major hydrocarbon exporters then the pucker factor rises.

One implied result of the BIS paper is that it will be extremely difficult or impossible for Federal Reserve emergency liquidity operations to stem a panic, even if the Fed is inclined to do so. AEP in the Telegraph article stated this more directly. The real problem is that modern bailout operations have large fiscal components as well as monetary components. Looking at the Bundestag’s chronic heartburn with Greece and the EFSF is educational. Alternatively, consider how well proposals for a larger TARP type program aimed primarily at foreign entities would be received by the US Congress. And especially in 2016.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s a $9 Trillion Question

February 14, 2015

Here’s a $9 Trillion Question

(Bloomberg) — When Group of 20 finance ministers this week urged the Federal Reserve to “minimize negative spillovers” from potential interest-rate increases, they omitted a key figure: $9 trillion.

That’s the amount owed in dollars by non-bank borrowers outside the U.S., up 50 percent since the financial crisis, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Should the Fed raise interest rates as anticipated this year for the first time since 2006, higher borrowing costs for companies and governments, along with a stronger greenback, may add risks to an already-weak global recovery.

The dollar debt is just one example of how the Fed’s tightening would ripple through the world economy. From the housing markets in Canada and Hong Kong to capital flows into and out of China and Turkey, the question isn’t whether there will be spillovers — it’s how big they will be, and where they will hit the hardest.

“Liquidity conditions globally will start to tighten,” said Paul Sheard, chief global economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York. “Emerging markets won’t be the only game in town. You will have a U.S. economy that is growing more strongly and also offering rising interest rates and a return on capital that is starting to vie for new investment opportunities around the world.”

The broad trade-weighted dollar has strengthened 12.3 percent since June, and it’s forecast to advance further as the Fed tightens while the European Central Bank starts buying sovereign debt and Japan extends record stimulus. The stronger greenback will be the main channel through which the rest of the world feels the effects of a tighter Fed policy, according to Joseph Lupton, a senior global economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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