Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Steven Jones 10 Part 9-11 Talk

Professor Steven Jones presenting his X-ray spectrometry evidence from samples taken at the WTC site. They dramatically show a PERFECT MATCH for the highly specialized compound "thermate" (used for cutting through steel) found in the WTC debris. (And no, thermate was NOT used during the clean up operation...this stuff was in the building, and ignited, prior to collapse.) If you're new to this information, you might want to check out "Molten Metal" and "Fire Initiated Collapse - Primary Arguments Against"


If you are short on time, start with the link marked pt.7 below.


**Note: The video quality isn't the best, we are still looking for a better version. Also, just to provide a heads up; most of the links below do not match the "title" that shows at YouTube. For instance, pt.7 will show up (on YouTube) as "Part 5".


Steven Jones Lecture:

  • pt.1
  • STEVEN JONES SPEAKS AT THE PNAC CONFERENCE IN AUSTIN. FIRST PART IS SPENT DISPROVING THE NIST CLAIM THAT THE MOLTEN METAL COMING FROM THE SOUTH TOWER WAS THE AIRPLANE MELTING.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDiL_q1m67k


  • pt.2

DR. JONES CHALLENGES NIST TO MAKE ALUMINUM GLOW ORANGE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45p19_-CS5I


  • pt.3
    DR. JONES FINISHES HIS NIST SEGMENT AND MOVES ONTO THE NEW EVIDENCE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0XSPPuxglI


  • pt.4

DR. JONES CONTINUES PRESENTATION REVEALING THERMATE FINGERPRINT IN WTC DUST SAMPLES.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGudMVKswVM


  • pt.5
    DR. JONES SPEAKS IN AUSTIN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggc0jT19Pj4


  • pt.6
    DR, JONES CONTINUES WITH HIS PRESENTATION. THIS THING IS NOT FAST OR VISUALLY STIMULATING, BUT HE DOES PROVE THAT EXPLOSIVES WERE USED IN THE WTC, AND THAT IS BIG.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ9jjZ8Fep4


  • pt.7
    PARTNERSHIP FOR A NEW AMERICAN CITIZEN CONFERENCE IN AUSTIN, TX.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsp3DPTmiN0


  • pt.8
    DR. JONES CONTINUES.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNGOqSVLgJw


  • pt.9
    pnac conference, austin, tx.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfh5S_FhR4s


  • pt.10
    THANK YOU STEVEN JONES. GOOD WORK!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkoTE3S5xKI

What silver and gold should you buy?

In the following video Mike Maloney of GoldSilver.com explains which types of silver and gold are the best to buy and he shows off some of the products in his company’s inventory. He also talks about some of the tax liability issues when selling silver and gold.

Part 1
Part 2

Secret Copyright Treaty Threatens Internet Freedom

Read the leaked document here

More resources:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2009/11/secret_internet_copyri...

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/leaked-acta-internet-provisions-thr...

http://www.eff.org/issues/acta

From Boing Boing:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

North and South Korea warships exchange fire

North and South Korean warships exchanged fire along a disputed sea border area off the west coast of the Korean Peninsular on Tuesday, just days before US President Barack Obama was due to embark on a crucial tour of Asia.

South Korean Navy patrol boats

The skirmish in the Yellow Sea – the first for seven years – left a North Korean patrol vessel "engulfed in flames" as it retreated back across the border under fire, according to the South Korean prime minister, Chung Un-Chan.

The clash came at a time when relations between the divided nations appeared to be thawing following increased tensions earlier this year caused by North Korea's decision to test a second nuclear device in defiance of UN sanctions.


South Korean analysts speculated that the apparent provocation by Pyongyang was an attempt to serve up a timely reminder of the volatility of the Korean Peninsular to Mr Obama who agreed on Monday to send an envoy to North Korea for direct talks.

Seoul said it had suffered no casualties from the exchange which took place after a South Korean patrol boat fired warning shots across the bow of the North Korean naval vessel that had crossed the disputed Northern Limit Line, 120 nautical miles west of Incheon.

"It wasn't a close-range battle. We fired heavily on the North Korean vessel," an unidentified navy official told South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

"It is our initial assessment that the North Korean boat suffered considerable damage."

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the North Korean patrol boat crossed the disputed western sea border around 11.27am (0227 GMT), drawing warning shots from a South Korean navy vessel after ignoring five warnings to turn back.

The North Korean boat then opened fire and the South's ship returned fire before the North's vessel sailed back toward its waters, the statement said.

North Korea's military, however, blamed South Korea, calling for it to apologise for a "grave armed provocation", and claiming that Seoul's ships had opened fire while its craft was still north of the disputed border.

The North added its boat "lost no time to deal a prompt retaliatory blow at the provokers".

North and South Korean navies fought deadly skirmishes along the western sea border in the Yellow Sea in 1999 and 2002, when six South Korean sailors were killed.

Last month the North's navy accused South Korea of sending warships across the border to stir tensions, warning that the "reckless military provocations" could trigger armed clashes.

North Korea has indicated it is prepared to return to stalled Six Party talks on its nuclear disarmament, but is seeking direct talks with the US as a precondition.

However in recent days Pyongyang announced it had produced more weapons-grade plutonium, in a move which analysts said was typical of the 'good-cop, bad-cop' diplomacy that the North uses to extract concessions from the international community.

"This might be an intentional clash aimed at heightening tension ahead of [President] Obama's trip," said Kim Yong-Hyun, a professor at Seoul's Dongguk University, "I believe North Korea is trying to show Obama the volatility of the peninsula."

A United Nations report published last month said that the North is feeling the severe impact of UN sanctions imposed last June after the second nuclear test, with some 8 million people, or a third of the population, suffering serious food shortages.

The South Korean won retreated on the news of the skirmish, however stock and bond markets held firm.

Goldman's Profits Come from Our Pockets: Why We Need a Tobin Tax

"The homeless in America have Goldman Sachs to thank for their homelessness and starvation right now. They took the money from their pockets, they put it in their bonuses for this year. . . . That's a financial terrorist crime."


-- Former stock trader Max Keiser in a France 24 interview

In the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs is having a banner year. According to an October 16 article by colin Barr on CNNMoney.com:

While Goldman churned out $3 billion in profits in the third quarter, the economy shed 768,000 jobs, and home foreclosures set a new record. More than a million Americans have filed for bankruptcy this year, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute.
Barr writes that Goldman's "eye-popping profit" resulted "as revenue from trading rose fourfold from a year ago." Really. Revenue from trading? Didn't we bail out Goldman and the other Wall Street banks so they could make loans, take deposits, and keep our money safe?


That is what banks used to do, but today the big Wall Street money comes from short-term speculation in currency transactions, commodities, stocks, and derivatives for the banks' own accounts. And here's the beauty of it: the Wall Street speculators have managed to trade in practically the only products left on the planet that are not subject to a sales tax. While parents in California are now paying 9% sales tax on their children's school bags and shoes, Goldman is paying zero tax to sustain its gambling habit. Race track winnings and other forms of gambling are taxed at up to 25%. But stock market trades get off scot free.

That helps explain Goldman's equally eye-popping tax bracket. What would you guess - 50%? 30%? Not even close. In 2008, Goldman Sachs paid a paltry 1% in taxes - less than clerks at WalMart.

Speeding Tickets to Slow Day Traders?

Wall Street bankers have been called today's "welfare queens," feeding at the public trough to the tune of trillions of dollars. The fact that their speculative trades remain untaxed suggests a tidy way that taxpayers could recover some of their bailout money. The idea of taxing speculative trades was first proposed by Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin in the 1970s. But he acknowledged that the tax was unlikely to be implemented because of the massive accounting problems involved. Today, however, modern technology has caught up to the challenge, and proposals for a "Tobin tax" are gaining traction. The proposals are very modest, ranging from .005% to 1% per trade, far less than you would pay in sales tax on a pair of shoes. For ordinary investors, who buy and sell stock only occasionally, the tax would hardly be felt. But high-speed speculative trades could be slowed up considerably. Wall Street traders compete to design trading programs that can move many shares in microseconds, allowing them to beat ordinary investors to the "buy" button and to manipulate markets for private gain.

Goldman Sachs admitted to this sort of market manipulation in a notorious incident last summer, in which the bank sued an ex-Goldman computer programmer for stealing its proprietary trading software. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti was quoted by Bloomberg as saying of the case:

The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.
The obvious implication was that Goldman has a program that allows it to manipulate markets in unfair ways. Bloomberg went on:
The proprietary code lets the firm do 'sophisticated, high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets,' prosecutors said in court papers. The trades generate 'many millions of dollars' each year.
Those many millions of dollars are coming from ordinary investors, who are being beaten to the punch by sophisticated computer programs. As one blogger mused:
Why do we have a financial system? I mean, much of its activity looks an awful lot like gambling, and gambling is not exactly a constructive endeavor. In fact, many people would call gambling destructive, which is why it is generally illegal....

What makes Goldman Sachs et. al. so evil is that they offer vast wealth to our society's best and brightest in exchange for spending their lives being non-productive. I want our geniuses to be proving theorems and curing cancer and developing fusion reactors, not designing algorithms to flip billions of shares in microseconds.

Gambling is an addiction, and the addicted need help. A tax on these microsecond trades could sober up Wall Street addicts and return them to productive labor. It could transform Wall Street from an out-of-control casino back into a place where investors pledge their capital for the development of useful products.

The Tobin Tax Gains Momentum

Various proposals for a Tobin tax have received renewed media attention in recent months. President Obama gave indirect support for the tax in a Press briefing on July 22, when he recommended that the government consider new fees on financial companies pursuing "far out transactions". Leaders from France, Germany, and the European Commission endorsed putting a speculation tax on the agenda at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in September. Brazil has now imposed what may be the first Tobin Tax on foreign investment inflows. A U.S. bill proposing to tax short-term speculation in certain securities, called "Let Wall Street Pay for Wall Street's Bailout Act of 2009", was introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) last February. A different bill to regulate derivative trades was approved by the Financial Services Committee in October.

Derivatives are essentially bets on whether the value of currencies, commodities, stocks, government bonds or virtually any other product will go up or down. Derivative bets can cause shifts in overall market size reaching $40 trillion in a single day. Just how destabilizing short-term speculation can be - and just how lucrative a tax on it could be - is evident from the mind-boggling size of the market: $743 trillion globally in 2008. Another arresting fact is that just five super-rich commercial banks control 97% of the U.S. derivatives market: JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co.

Pros and Cons

Promoters of international development have suggested that a mere .005% tax could raise between $30 billion and $60 billion per year, enough for the G7 countries to double international aid. But more than raising money, the tax could be an effective tool for slowing harmful speculative practices. According to a number of Nobel Prize economists, a downsized speculative market would go far towards creating a more sturdy financial system, helping to avoid the need for future bailouts. But if the tax is too small, it might not have the desired effect on speculation. The larger 1% tax originally proposed by James Tobin is therefore favored by some proponents. The much-needed income from a U.S. tax could be split between federal and state governments.

Opponents of the Tobin tax, led by the financial sector, argue that it would kill bank jobs, reduce liquidity, and drive business offshore. Supporters respond that Tobin tax profits could be used to create new jobs, and that the small size of the tax would hardly affect cash flows - although certainly the speculative market would shrink. Players in dice-rolling speculative operations have long claimed that their trades "stabilized" the system by enabling investors to hedge risk, but the recent financial crash has exposed that defense as being without clothes. Inflows of "hot money" are not good for a country. They create quick speculative bubbles that can collapse equally quickly when the money flows out again. Better for the country and its economy are the funds of prudent investors who intend to stick around for a while. A modest tax could even encourage these preferred investors, who will be more confident if their investments are not liable to collapse suddenly from hot money outflows.

Besides technical questions about how to implement the tax internationally, the offshore argument probably presents the most serious challenge. Should a Tobin tax pass in the U.S., investors would be likely to move to other markets beyond the reach of taxation. The U.S. could penalize traders for doing business abroad, but governments in major markets like Germany and London would no doubt need to endorse the tax for any meaningful shift to be seen. Some experts have argued that the Tobin tax would be best implemented by an international institution such as the United Nations, which would gain a large source of funding independent of donations from participating states.

That proposition sets off alarm bells for other observers, who see any international tax as a move toward further strengthening the power of the global financial oligarchs. However, the very fact that the United Nations, the G20, and the Bank for International Settlements are discussing this option suggests that we the people need to jump in and stake out our claim for national purposes, before we lose the tax money to international bodies controlled by the global bankers. We need to design the tax the way we want, before they design it the way they want. It needs to be collected by the U.S. Treasury and to go into the Treasury's coffers. It needs to bypass Wall Street and reach Main Street, where it can be used to stimulate local business and investment.

Officials from the International Monetary Fund insist that implementing a Tobin tax would be logistically impossible. But Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist and former World Bank leader, disagrees. In Istanbul in early October, he said that a Tobin tax was not only necessary but, thanks to modern technology, would be easier to implement than ever before. "The financial sector polluted the global economy with toxic assets," he said, "and now they ought to clean it out."

While Wall Street's welfare queens have been busy collecting generous government handouts, the 50 states have been left to fend for themselves. Some 48 states have faced budget crises in the past year, forcing them to cut libraries, schools, and police forces, and to raise taxes on income and sales. A sales tax on the exotic financial products responsible for precipitating the economic crisis is long overdue.

Government is top employer in southern Calif., report reveals

The most recent Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) from the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) reveals that the majority of jobs for the top principal employers in six counties are government jobs.

In the six southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Imperial, more than half of the top employers in those counties, on average, are government entities.

Table 13 on Page 96 of the 104 page document lists Principal Employers By County in the SCAG Region for 2008.

San Bernardino County tops the list of private employers with six out of ten of the top employers in the county being private; including Loma Linda University Medical Center, Stater Brothers Market,
United Parcel Service, Target Corporation, Barrett Business Services, and Wal-Mart Stores.

Eighteen of the 60 top employers for the 6 counties were public school districts, along with one community college. one 'office of education' and three University of California campuses, including UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UCLA.

Target Corportation makes the list of principal employers in three counties, including Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino, with Wal-Mart Stores making the list in only San Bernardino and Imperial Counties. San Bernardino County has Wal-Mart listed at number ten with 3218 employees, compared with Target Stores listed as number five, with 5031 employees

Disneyland is listed as the top principal employer in Orange County, with 13,211 employees (0.88%)followed by Boeing Company with 9973 (0.67%).

Ralphs Grocery Company made number 10 for L.A. County with 11,344 employees (0.28%). Pechanga Entertainment Center made number three on Riverside County list, with 4,325 employees (0.72%). United Parcel Service rated number four on San Bernardino County list with 5,304 employees (.0.80%). Stater Brothers Market, which started in Yucaipa in 1936 and is oft touted as one of the few grocery chains that does not require customers to use a club card, made the list twice, as number three in San Bernardino County with 6,036 employees(0.91%) and tenth in Riverside County 2829 (0.47%). Barrett Business Services made the list twice, number six in San Bernardino County and number eight in Ventura County. Home Depot was listed at number ten in Orange County with 4,531 employees (0.30%). Agricultural Imperial County, bordering Mexico the the south and Arizona to the east, lists J.L. Padilla & Son, EDCO Harvest and National Beef California in their top ten list of principal employers. Amgen, whose website describes the company as a "biotechnology pioneer", tops the list of Ventura County employers, with 7163 employees (2.27%). Topping the list of sixty employers with the greatest single number of employees in all counties was the Los Angeles Unified School District, with 97572 employees (2.38%). The STATE OF CA, which is listed in five out the six counties as one of the top ten principal employers, comprised 50,751 employees on the CAFR list.

Aside from the employer lists, The CAFR report noted that the total net assets for the Southern California Association of Governments was $3,848,973.00, up from from $3,165,194 in 2007.

The CAFR has been characterized as a conspiracy of sorts by some, with the Idaho Observer noting: "The data contained in CAFRs proves that the profit potential for corporate entities masquerading as governments increases based upon the volume of taxes levied, fines collected, properties stolen and the ability to pool those funds and grow them through expertly-managed modern investment strategies".

Alex Jones of Infowars.com produced a program titled CAFR EXPOSED, covering the topic.

---------------------------
SCAG Southern California Association of Governments Table 13 Principal Employers by County in the SCAG Region Current Year 2008
[See Page 96 of the report for full list of detailed numbers].

Los Angeles County
L.A. Unified School District
Los Angeles County
City of Los Angeles
UCLA
State of CA
USC
Target Corporation
Kaiser Foundation Hospitals
Long Beach Unified School District
Ralphs Grocery Company

Orange County
Disneyland
Boeing
County of Orange
State of CA
UC Irvice
Garden Grove Unified School District
Santa Ana Unified School District
Target Corporation
Capistrano Unified School District
Home Depot


Riverside County
Corona-Norco Unified School District
Riverside Unified School District
Pechanga entertainment center
UC Riverside
Moreno Valley Unified School District
Temecula Unified School District
State of CA
Desert Sands Unified School District
Target Corporation
Stater Brothers Market


San Bernardino County
State of CA
Loma Linda University Medical Center
Stater Brothers Market
United Parcel Service
Target Corporation
Barrett Business Services
Fontana Unified School District
Chino Unified School District
Rialto Unified School District
Wal-mart Stores

Ventura County
Amgen
Countrywide financial
Conejo Valley Unified School District
Blue Cross of California
Simi Valley Unified School District
Ventura Unified School District
Ventura County Community College
Barrett Business Services
Oxnard School District
Community Memorial Hospital

Imperial County
State of CA
Wal-mart Stores
Federal government
J.L. Padilla & Son
Calexico Unified School District
National Beef Californa
El Centro Regional Medical Center
Imperial Irrigation District
EDCO Harvest
Imperial County Office of Education

If You Thought the Housing Meltdown Was Bad…

…wait until you see what’s in the cards for commercial real estate.

That’s right, the next train wreck will be in commercial real estate. Couldn’t be worse than last year’s residential market crash? That remains to be seen. But it’s coming soon, probably as early as the second quarter of next year, and there’s nothing that can prevent it. The government will intervene, trying desperately to delay the day of reckoning, and may even succeed. For a while. But make no mistake about it, that train is going off the tracks no matter what.

Every part of the sector – from multifamily apartment buildings to retail shopping centers, suburban office buildings, industrial facilities, and hotels – has accumulated a huge amount of defaulted or nonperforming paper. It’s an impossible, swaying structure that cannot long stand.

Just ask Andy Miller.

Andy is one of the most knowledgeable people around when it comes to commercial real estate. Co-founder of the Miller Fishman Group of Denver, he has spent twenty years buying and developing apartment communities, shopping centers, office buildings, and warehouses throughout the country. He’s also worked extensively – especially lately – with asset managers and special servicers (those who handle commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS) from insurance companies, conduits, and the biggest banks in the U.S., advising them on default scenarios, helping them develop realistic pricing structures, and making hold or sell recommendations.

It isn’t easy. Commercial real estate sales are off a staggering 82% in 2009, compared with 2008, and last year was worse than ’07. No one is selling at depressed prices, but it hardly matters as there are no buyers, either because they’re afraid of the market or can’t meet more stringent loan requirements. Two years ago, the value of all commercial real estate in the U.S. was about $6.5 trillion. Against that was laid $3-3.5 trillion in loans. The latter figure hasn’t changed much. But the former has sunk like a bar of lead in the lake, so that now between half and two-thirds of those loans will have to be written down, Andy estimates.

“If the banks had to take that hit all at once, there wouldn’t be any banks,” he says.

And it’s actually worse than that. As even average citizens became aware during the subprime meltdown, loans in recent years were bundled into exotic financial vehicles that could be sold and resold, a class generically known as conduits. These commercial mortgage-backed securities, while less well known than their cousins built upon home loans, are nonetheless ubiquitous.

Three guesses who were among the significant buyers of CMBS. If you said banks, banks, and more banks, you got it. Thus these folks are sitting not only on their own malperforming loans, but on a whole lot of everyone else’s toxic junk, too.

This is how bad conduits are: A 3% default rate last year jumped to 6% in 2009 and is expected to double again, to 12%, in 2010. An entity that takes a 12% hit to its portfolio – and this includes countless banks, pension and annuity funds, international institutional investors, and others – is in deep, deep trouble.

The real tsunami is coming, probably in the second quarter of 2010, Andy estimates. Because that’s when banks will have to start preparing for the wave of mortgages that were written near the market top and are maturing in 2011-12. Unlike home loans, commercial loans tend to be relatively short-term in nature (average 5-7 years), because – outside of apartment building loans backed by Fannie or Freddie – there are no government programs to subsidize longer-term ones. These guys mature in bunches.

And
even that is not the end of it. There’s a second huge wave on the way in 2015-16.

Problem is, instead of trying to meet this inevitable challenge head on, asset managers have decided to believe in such phantoms as the tooth fairy, honesty at the Fed, and an economic turnaround powerful enough to bail them all out. De Nile is not just a river in Egypt.

To be fair, it’s difficult to envision what an intelligent, aggressive response would look like, given the breadth and depth of the crisis, and the lack of resources available to deal with it. Miller recently met with a group of asset managers from a number of different, prominent banks. They reported that they’re completely overwhelmed and can’t even begin to cope with the sheer volume of problem loans on their calendar. It’s so bad that they’re now dealing with some borrowers who haven’t paid a cent in a year and a half.

What do you do if, as Andy thinks is the case, 85-90% of the entire commercial real estate market is under water relative to its financing? What happens to a property when its value drops way below the loan, a seller can’t get enough money to get out, a buyer can’t raise enough money to get in, and the bank can’t afford to foreclose? Simple. It just sits there, carried along on the bank’s books at some inflated “mark to fantasy” price that makes the institution’s balance sheet look passable. The industry even has a catchphrase for the situation: “A rolling loan gathers no moss.”

In the case of a retail store, a bankrupt tenant walks away. Andy looked at just the part of Phoenix where his firm does business and found 90 vacant big box stores, with an aggregate floor space of 8 million square feet. If Christmas season is as lackluster as cash-strapped consumers are likely to make it, there will be many others to follow.

The hotel business is terrible. Overbuilding based upon travelers who went into debt to finance lavish vacations is taking its toll on tourist destinations. At the same time, business travel has seriously contracted. Flights into Las Vegas, which caters to both, have been slashed so much that even if every seat on every remaining flight were filled and visitors stayed for an average number of days, the hotels still couldn’t break even. In industry parlance, banks are now engaged in “extend and pretend,” i.e., giving hotels three- to six-month loan extensions in the hope that things will somehow improve in the near future.

Office space is doing okay in central business districts, but not faring well elsewhere. Some estimates tab the national office vacancy rate at over 16.5%, compared with 12.6% in January 2008. It exceeds 20% in parts of Atlanta and San Diego, and in many places in between.

Multifamily apartment buildings – and the very creaky Fannie and Freddie are carrying a load of them – may be the next to topple. As values deteriorate and landlords are faced with loans coming due, there is no incentive to fix whatever goes wrong. If, for example, you have a $10 million loan maturing in two years, and the property value has declined to $6 million, why would you spend half a million to fix leaky roofs? The question answers itself. Yet, as capital spending needs are not attended to, the apartments deteriorate. Which leads to working-class tenants replaced by meth labs. Which leads to even lower property values. And so on. In the end, when the banks are forced to take possession, they will be left with either expensive repair jobs, or the cost of demolition and a total write-off.

As the overall commercial real estate crisis escalates, the banks will do the same thing they did last year: run to the government, palms outstretched.

How will Washington respond? Good question. On the one hand, further bailouts will further infuriate the public. But on the other, the political sentiment will be that allowing the banks to fail will have even more dire consequences.

The Fed has already tried to let some of the relentlessly building pressure out of the balloon through TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility). But that hasn’t worked, because TALF only backs the most senior, creditworthy bonds in a CMBS pool. Those aren’t the problem. The problem is the junior notes no one wants.

In order to increase market liquidity and get conduits moving again, the government will likely be forced to create a guarantee program similar to the FHA, Miller thinks, whereby short-term money (on the order of 5-7 years) is made available. Will that just push our problems five to seven years down the road? Quite possibly. But what is being purchased is time, the only thing left to buy. The hope, of course, is that it’s enough time – for the real estate market to stabilize, prices to return to more“normal” levels, and the world to turn all hunky dory.

Rock, meet hard place. Let all the troubled banks fail, and the consequences will range from some excruciating but short-term pain, to a plunge into full-bore depression. Prop them up with yet more newly printed fiat money, and anything from high to hyperinflation will inevitably result, along with the possibility of extending the problem well into the next decade.

Both are frightening prospects. We don’t want either, but realistically, we’re going to get one or the other. Let’s be clear, it won’t be the end of the world. However, it will be the end of the world as we know it. That makes it imperative to prepare for the new one that’s coming.

The editors of The Casey Report, supported by real estate pro Andy Miller, have been warning of the coming commercial real estate debacle since September 2008. This one’s rather easy to time – because they know when the loans will come due. And as subscribers can testify, accurately predicting big trends is the forte of Doug Casey and his expert team. To learn how you can profit from making the trend your friend, click here.


By Doug Hornig, Senior Editor, Casey Research

What's In A Flu Shot

Click this link ...... http://bit.ly/2A7YKm

Germany's sovereignty restricted by US and allies?

Click this link ....... http://bit.ly/2N28jQ

Gold To 5K-Peter Schiff on Fox Business-11-9-09

click this link ...... http://bit.ly/2pXLGv