Thursday, April 14, 2011

World's largest bond fund bets against U.S. debt

The world's largest bond fund began betting against U.S. government debt last month on the expectation that shaky finances will jolt interest rates higher.

PIMCO, through its outspoken co-chief investment officer, Bill Gross, have been raising alarms about a lack of buyers for Treasuries once the Federal Reserve ends its own bond purchase program, also known as QE2, in June.

In February Gross revealed his ultra-bearish view on the United States by dumping all of his fund's U.S. government-related debt holdings.

The portion of PIMCO's $236 billion Total Return Fund held in long-term U.S. government debt, including U.S. Treasuries, declined to "minus 3" percent in March from zero in February and 12 percent in January.

In a short position, an investor sells a borrowed security on a bet it can buy the bond back later at a lower price.

Cash equivalents, including Treasury bills and other debt with maturities of less than a year, rose to 31 percent of the fund's assets from 24 percent in February.

PIMCO also expects the lingering U.S. budget deficit and the Fed's easy monetary policy will fuel faster inflation and hurt the dollar.

PIMCO's vote on the state of U.S. finances comes just as Washington narrowly averted a government shutdown on Saturday after Democrats and Republicans agreed on cutting $38 billion in spending for the fiscal year.

The 11th hour compromise probably had little impact on the investment strategies of Gross, who said in an April newsletter that the U.S. government was "out-Greeking the Greeks," a reference to the out-sized government debt in Greece that forced the country to ask for a bailout.

"We are smelling $1 trillion deficits as far as the nose can sniff," if the government fails to address the biggest entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, Gross said in his outlook.

PIMCO's move mirrors a broader dislike of U.S. Treasuries. Some exchange-traded funds that bet against the Treasury market have seen a jump in volume lately. Volume in the ProShares Short 20+ year Treasury , which shorts the Barclays Capital U.S. 20+ Year Treasury Bond Index, on Thursday of last week had its most active session since February 24.

And speculators went net short on Treasuries for the first time in six weeks as of April 5, according to the latest data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

U.S. Treasury yields have moved higher since the Fed began purchases of the securities in its second quantitative easing program in November. Yields on 10-year Treasury notes have risen 80 basis points since then to 3.59 percent.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Inflation Actually Near 10% Using Older Measure

After former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was appointed in 1979, the consumer price index surged into the double digits, causing the now revered Fed Chief to double the benchmark interest rate in order to break the back of inflation. Using the methodology in place at that time puts the CPI back near those levels.

Shoppers in crosswalk
Getty Images

Inflation, using the reporting methodologies in place before 1980, hit an annual rate of 9.6 percent in February, according to the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter.

Since 1980, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates the CPI in order to account for the substitution of products, improvements in quality (i.e. iPad 2 costing the same as original iPad) and other things. Backing out more methods implemented in 1990 by the BLS still puts inflation at a 5.5 percent rate and getting worse, according to the calculations by the newsletter’s web site, Shadowstats.com.

“Near-term circumstances generally have continued to deteriorate,” said John Williams, creator of the site, in a new note out Tuesday. “Though not yet commonly recognized, there is both an intensifying double-dip recession and a rapidly escalating inflation problem. Until such time as financial-market expectations catch up with underlying reality, reporting generally will continue to show higher-than-expected inflation and weaker-than-expected economic results in the month and months ahead.”

The pay-site and newsletter by Williams, an economic consultant for the last 30 years to companies, has gained a cult following among bloggers hungry to criticize Bernanke these days. The mission statement of the newsletter, according to the site, is to expose and analyze “flaws in current U.S. government economic data and reporting…net of financial-market and political hype.”

Investors are anxiously awaiting the release of March’s CPI reading on Friday. The consensus estimate from economists is for an annual inflation rate of 2.6 percent.

“Given ongoing inflation problems with food and the spreading impact of higher oil-related costs in the broad economy, reporting risk is to the upside of consensus expectation,” said Williams, citing a 10 percent jump in gasoline prices in March, in the note.

“While the federal government would have us believe the numbers are rather tame, our own personal gauge leads us to believe inflation is running between 5 percent to 6 percent annually,” wrote Alan Newman in his latest Crosscurrents newsletter that refers to Williams’ statistics.

Newman uses recent comments from Walmart CEO Bill Simon that inflation is going to be “serious” to back up the much higher CPI figures from him and Williams.

Beyond the money

“Given Walmart’s [WMT 53.63 0.11 (+0.21%) ] sales of $422 billion, we think Mr. Simon has a good idea of what’s in the pipeline,” said Newman.

To be sure, the BLS argues that the changes it has made over the last three decades more accurately reflect a true change in the cost of living. For example, in response to its hedonic adjustments, the BLS web site states, “to measure price change accurately, the CPI must be able to distinguish the portion of price change due to this quality change.

Still, going by recent strong comments from Federal Reserve officials, even members of the central bank must believe inflation is being underreported. Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher said in a speech last week that the central bank was reaching a “tipping point” as far as changing its policy so it can react to inflation. Maybe Fisher stumbled across Shadowstats.com. The voting member did, after all, mention Volcker in the same speech.

“The need to break the back of that (budgetary debt) spiral is as dire now as was the need for Paul Volcker to break the back of inflation in the 1980s,” said Fisher on April 8th. “As a result of his steadfast determination to press on with exorcising inflation, Mr. Volcker is today among the most respected living Americans and widely considered an exemplar for public servants worldwide.”


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Paul Ryan Dodges Question On Whether GOP Budget Will End Corporate Welfare

Video - Paul Ryan - Apr. 3, 2011

Source - Raw Story

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said Sunday that the GOP 2012 budget will exceed even the $4 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade recommended by President Barack Obama's debt commission.

But Ryan wouldn't commit that his new budget would follow the debt commission's lead and end corporate welfare for oil and gas companies.

"Widely reported that your budget will cut spending by $2 trillion over the next decade. True?" Fox News Chris Wallace asked Ryan during their Sunday interview.

"Well, it's more than that," Ryan said. "Quite a bit more than that."

"$4 trillion?" Wallace wondered.

"Looking at more than that right now. We're fine-tuning the numbers. Congressional Budget Office literally today, over the weekend. We'll cut more than that," Ryan explained.

"We will be exceeding the goals that were put out in the president's debt commission," he added.

Franklin Raines: "Our assets are so riskless that it doesn't matter if we're levered up 80-1"

Watch pols (mostly Democrats) make asses of themselves defending the GSE's, plus watch Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines claim that "these assets are so riskless" that it doesn't matter if we're levered up 80-1. Gotta love the internet for keeping this footage around forever. We might not get them all tossed in jail, but we can sure ruin their reputations by pointing out their hypocrisy. Again and again and again.

Related:

Franklin Raines On Foreclosure Fraud (CNBC)

Donald Duck Income Tax Propaganda From 1943

Video - The Spirit of '43

IRS Open Season

Chris Whalen With Dylan Ratigan: Which Banks & How Much - Surprises From Bernanke's Forced Disclosure

Video - Whalen with Dylan Ratigan

An anti-Fed tour de force.

  • "Goldman would have failed without the bailout. No question."
  • "Spain is MUCH worse than Ireland."
  • "The Fed took care of the speculators and let the real economy go to hell."

Here's an idea - make Chris Whalen Fed Chairman, and Josh Rosner Treasury Secretary. Then send Bernanke back to Princeton as a custodial engineer, and give Geithner a job on the set of CBS Survivor cleaning latrines. As much shit as they've shoveled since 2008, the transition for both should go smoothly.

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Senator's Husband’s Firm Cashes In On Crisis

Take 2 minutes and read the whole thing at the source. Just another day among the entrails in the bowel of the American dream. This one pushes the limits. Flashback to 2009.

Source - Washington Times

On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments - not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE) - the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman - had won the competitive bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited from failed banks.

Read the rate list for the FDIC contract from CB Richard Ellis, the firm Sen. Feinstein’s husband heads as board chairman.(downloads 4-page pdf)

Read the correspondence between Sen. Feinstein and FDIC chairman Sheila Bair (downloads 5-page pdf)

About the same time of the contract award, Mr. Blum’s private investment firm reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it and related affiliates had purchased more than 10 million new shares in CBRE. The shares were purchased for the going price of $3.77; CBRE’s stock closed Monday at $5.14.

Spokesmen for the FDIC, Mrs. Feinstein and Mr. Blum’s firm told The Times that there was no connection between the legislation and the contract signed Nov. 13, and that the couple didn’t even know about CBRE’s business with FDIC until after it was awarded.

Continue reading...

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Video - Feinstein - April, 2009

Radiation caught on tape: RT talks to Fukushima zone stalker

THE LAW THAT NEVER WAS - 16th Amendment and taxes

On January 10, 2008, the Federal District Court in Chicago issued a permanent injunction against me on the grounds that I was falsely telling people the 16th Amendment was not ratified. The Court refused to look at the evidence of the non-ratification of the 16th Amendment, deciding that the facts necessary to prove my statement was true were "irrelevant," What has America come to when the government can accuse you of lying and prohibit you from presenting a defense in a so called court of law? My attorney, Jeffrey A. Dickstein, will be filing an appeal to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. I urge you to review the pleadings filed in this case so you can see for yourself the tyranny being practiced in our courts.

The Premise

The authority of the federal government to collect its income tax depends upon the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the federal income tax amendment, which was allegedly ratified in 1913. After a year of extensive research, Bill Benson discovered that the 16th Amendment was not ratified by the required 3/4 of the states, but nevertheless Secretary of State Philander Knox fraudulently announced ratification.

Watch the Benson Video


Text of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."


Bill BensonBill would like to thank those who've contributed or shown support in the fight against fraudulent taxation. Click here to help.


Lesa Benson, daughter of Bill and Lorraine Benson, has passed away at the age of fifty six. She lived in the city of St. George, Utah with her husband Robert Berger and their four Chihuahua dogs. She had retired from her position as an office manager for the City of Bellingham, Washington; Robert is a retired artist after twenty nine years with Fox Studios. She had a daughter Jenai and three grandchildren Bryson, Sophia, and Avah. Lesa and Jenai assisted Bill at several of his speaking engagements in and out of the country. She was the fourth daughter of the 'Benson Five.'

Your family will miss you greatly, Lesa. Rest well our child, for you are in God's hands and house now.

Bill and Lorraine Benson


READ ABOUT THE FRAUDULENT 17TH AMENDMENT AND THE RELATED DOCUMENTS' DISAPPEARANCE FROM THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES.
Devvy Kidd travels to Washington D.C. Click here.

SHERRY JACKSON CONVICTED, UNDER WHAT LAW?
Sherry Jackson convicted, click here for the full story.

CHECK OUT ALL THESE TAX CHEATS!
Talk about tax cheats and tax protestors! Here they are—read and ask questions, write to these departments to find out why they believe that they are above the law. Click here for the list.


The Discovery

Article V of the U.S. Constitution specifies the ratification process, and requires 3/4 of the States to ratify any amendment proposed by Congress. There were 48 States in the American Union in 1913, meaning that affirmative action of 36 states was required for ratification. In February, 1913, Secretary of State Philander Knox issued a proclamation claiming that 38 states had ratified the amendment.

In 1984, William J. Benson began a research project, never before performed, to investigate the process of ratification of the 16th Amendment. After traveling to the capitols of the New England states, and reviewing the journals of the state legislative bodies, he saw that many states had not ratified the Amendment. Continuing his research at the National Archives in Washington, DC, Bill Benson discovered his Golden Key. This damning piece of evidence is a 16 page memorandum from the Solicitor of the Department of State, whose duty is the provision of legal opinions for the use of the Secretary of State. In this memorandum sent to the Secretary of State, the Solicitor of the Department of State lists the many errors he found in the ratification process!

The 4 states listed below are among the 38 states from which Philander Knox claimed ratification.

  • The Kentucky Senate voted upon the resolution, but rejected it by a vote of 9 in favor and 22 opposed.
  • The Oklahoma Senate amended the language of the 16th Amendment to have a precisely opposite meaning.
  • The California legislative assembly never recorded any vote upon any proposal to adopt the amendment proposed by Congress.
  • The State of Minnesota sent nothing to the Secretary of State in Washington.

When his year long project was finished at the end of 1984, Bill had visited every state capitol and knew that not a single state had actually and legally ratified the proposal to amend the Constitution. 33 states engaged in the unauthorized activity of amending the language of the amendment proposed by congress, a power the states do not possess. Since 36 states were needed for ratification, the failure of 13 to ratify would be fatal to the amendment, and this occurs within the major (first three) defects tabulated in Defects in Ratification of the 16th Amendment. Even if we were to ignore defects of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, we would still have only 2 states which successfully ratified.

Zionism Undone Part II

To continue my explanation of why I believe Zionism is losing its grip on America I would like to discuss where their storytelling has been most egregious which is to say the Holocaust.

After World War II, we were told that six million Jews had been killed in concentration camps in Germany, Poland and elsewhere. Confessions derived under torture were used as evidence. Then we were told that there were no death camps in Germany but that the total was the same. Then the Polish authorities revised the estimated number of deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau down from 4,000,000 to 1,500,000, but the total number of Jewish deaths was still claimed to be six million. In fact you can be imprisoned in Europe for questioning the six million figure.

It is not well known but the International Red Cross was granted monthly access to all German camps including Auschwitz. Neither Bush nor Obama has granted access to America’s secret prisons where Bush freely admitted torture is practiced. The Red Cross had inside men in the camps. Not one gave any details of gas chambers prior to the end of the war.

There were 150 British soldiers who were engineers and held at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were forced to work maintaining the plants there that made gasoline from coal using a Russian patent developed in 1915. Nobody has ever asked any of these 150 British engineers if they had seen any gas chambers.

The total number of deaths at the camps was estimated by the International Red Cross to have been 300,000 but this figure included non-Jews. The 1950 World Almanac said there were 800,000 more Jews alive in 1950 than in 1940.

By comparison, half a million German civilians died in 14 hours of bombing at Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945 after Germany had largely ceased to function. The allies built bombers prior to the war which were designed to kill civilians. This is a war crime.

Major General JFC Fuller in his book World War II questioned the allied bombing campaign. He made weekly recommendations to the Bombing Committee to take out specific targets, such as, the plant that made starters for submarines and the only plant making a high octane additive. Yet none of these high value targets were ever bombed though 25 German cities were destroyed. It is well known that the allied bombers avoided bombing American owned properties. England had to compensate Henry Ford for bombing a Ford truck plant in France in the early days of the war.

I have said before that I used to work in an Ivy League medical research facility. 11 of the 12 Jewish doctors and medical researchers there told me they didn’t believe in the Holocaust.

The Jewish people were largely in charge of the Soviet Union when sixty million human beings were brutally exterminated. The Jewish people are in charge of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem where war crimes have become routine. There is no moral or philosophical reason why Jewish people today can claim the right to persecute Palestinians for whatever might or might not have happened 65 years ago.

I have long held that the Holocaust was a way for Jewish people to say, “I didn’t do that. He did that” (in reference to war crimes.) I also believe that the Holocaust is a way for Jewish people to say that their suffering is unique (because they are human and you are not.)

For my next topic I would like to draw upon the works of the untranslated French author Herve Ryssen. Fortunately there is a series of translated interviews here: HTTP://www.toqonline.com/tag/herve-ryssen/

Ryssen tells us that Jewish people have been campaigning for open borders and the destruction of white culture to create a One World state to be run by ethnically pure Jews. We can see the results of that philosophy in California. But I see another and darker purpose to their destruction of American culture.

Suppose you were a banker in New York who receives annual salaries and bonuses in excess of a hundred million dollars. You are worried that any day now the mobs will get sick of paying for your Bailouts and come looking for you especially after the nationwide food riots begin. If someone applied the lessons learned from the Mideast to America, you might want to get the natives to fight each other rather than come looking for you with a rope.

What would happen to America if someone set off a bomb in Los Angeles that killed 22 Mexican school children and injured dozens more? Would Americans be capable of functioning as a cohesive force? Suppose instead of being a wealthy Jewish banker you were a store owner in Los Angeles. You had changed your name from Jonathan Goldschmidt to John Smith years ago and not one of your mostly non-white customers knew you were Jewish. If you heard over the radio that a bomb had just killed 22 Mexican children less than ten miles from your store, would you be worried because you were Jewish? Or would it be sufficient to be a white man in LA to be worried? Suppose a Jewish leader asked you if it was a good idea to set off a bomb, blame the whites for killing Mexican children and start a race war to protect the bankers, would you have voted yes ?

But you see that is the problem with Judaism. Nobody in the leadership asks the people down below their opinions. I have described to many Jewish people how Jewish leaders are selected. I said, “whoever launders the most heroin and cocaine money and hires the most assassins, appoints himself Jewish leader.” To date no Jewish person has successfully disputed my thesis.

I always point out to Jewish people that the Rothschilds owned the Bank of England in 1935 when the decision was made to loan Hitler 1.75 billion dollars (equal to 50,000,000 ounces of gold) to buy guns for his army and to reorganize Farben chemicals. This is according to Howard Katz in his book The Warmongers. I also point out that according to Churchill’s memoirs the German General Staff and Admiral Canaris sent two officers to London to discuss the possibility of arresting Hitler and stopping World War II. 58,000,000 people died after the Rothschilds bought weapons for Hitler and the Zionist controlled British government refused to allow the Germans to surrender.

In the past we have paid dearly for allowing all decisions to be made out of our sight and of our reach. We can no longer afford to do that.

My final topic is the Zionist drive for World War III. As my regular readers know, I believe the Jewish leaders want America to lose World War III.

NAFTA and the WTO were passed in 1994. In that same year China devalued the yuan and pegged it to a fixed rate against the dollar. More than 43,000 manufacturing plants were closed sending jobs by the millions overseas. There was no means of paying for imported food and oil. The housing market was deliberately overheated using fraudulently induced mortgages. Paper money was produced by the truck load first to pay for the imports and the wars. And of late to expand the wars and to buy back fraudulent mortgage securities by the trillions.

When America is asked to launch World War III by attacking Iran, we will soon discover our supply lines all involve buying everything on credit from the Chinese and the Muslims. Not a formula for a successful war.

Currently, America admits to having troops stationed in 135 nations. 136 if you count Pakistan. 137 if you count Libya. We have active combat troops in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yes, we have US Marines in Baluchistan province Pakistan. I do not watch CNN but a reliable source said that Wolf Blitzer, the Israeli citizen, was extolling the virtues of the Libyan war when he showed his audience a map of the Mideast with two arrows indicating our next targets, Syria and Iran.

I have not explained the folly of attacking Iran for some time. Let me repeat myself: Iran ha no ability to make nuclear weapons according to the US National Intelligence Estimate which draws information from 16 American intelligence agencies that cost us 82 billion dollars a year to fund.

An Iranian general said if Iran were attacked they would fire 12,000 missiles and artillery shells in the first minute. They have rocket artillery with a range of 93.2 miles ( 150 kilometers.) They have Russian made SS-N-22 Sunburn and SS-N-26X Yakhonts anti-ship missiles which were designed to kill American aircraft carriers. They also have NATO and Chinese anti-ship missiles plus their rocket artillery to throw into the mix. Iran has Chinese HQ-9 anti-aircraft missiles which combines technology from Russia’s S-300, America’s Patriot missile and Israeli advances made on the Patriot. That is why Iran was emboldened to claim they have begun production of an S-300 variant of their own making. Russia’s President Medvedev is Jewish and bowed to Israeli pressure to cancel a proposed sale of the S-300.

The Iranians could sink the US Persian Gulf fleet in minutes. They could cut off all Persian Gulf oil which would send the price of crude oil to $400 or $500 a barrel or at least beyond the ability of pauper nations like America to buy on credit.

Currently, the US is paying up to $400 to deliver one gallon of gasoline to our troops in Afghanistan. So if Iran armed tens of thousands of men with automatic weapons, IEDs and shoulder fired anti-aircraft weapons, what do you think would happen to our helicopters and supply trucks? What would happen to our troops after their supplies were cut off and local Muslims attacked them?

You might not know that Tim Geithner’s first job out of college was at Kissinger Associates. He was hired in part because he speaks Chinese. He could call up the Chinese President the day after World War III starts and beg for a two trillion dollar loan so we could run a deficit for six months, buy imported oil at $500 a barrel, buy imported food to stop the food riots and pay for World War III. Of course the Chinese will laugh at him and the nation he represents before hanging up the phone.

At some point within 90 days after the US attacked Iran, the American economy would cease to function and grind to a complete halt. America will have to surrender to the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. Since the latter two agencies are controlled by former Goldman Sachs VPs, we will have surrendered in effect to the Zionist bankers so I would not expect any criminal investigations of banking crimes.

The IMF will restore order to the American currency after they have cut pensions, closed hospitals and schools, raised taxes, cut the minimum wage and cut real after tax wages in half. They will also sell off American infrastructure to the Chinese and to Zionist bankers incorporated in Europe. These are all things the IMF has done to Third World nations over the last five decades and to Europeans for the past year. They will do this to America if we we attack Iran.

The US will have fulfilled its role for Israel when it uses its nuclear weapons to exterminate the Muslims making it safe for Israel to seize the oil and become a world class Super Power. Having exterminated the Muslims, America will be of no use to Israel and will function as a UN colony whose chief export will be mercenary armies of occupation for the Zionist bankers. The latter will own the new world government. You will be reduced to slavery if you are allowed to continue breathing.

If you do not want to lose World War III and become a UN colony and if you are fed up with banker Bailouts, you will have to win the information war.

To win that war hammer these points home:

Israel did 911.

The bankers want America to lose World War III.

The bankers want to reduce us to slavery because they do not want us to be able to demand the return of the 27 trillion dollars they stole from us.

Daniel Hannan: Bailing Out Portugal Is Illegal

Video - European Parliament - April 7, 2011

Classic comment at the end of the clip about EU bailures Ireland and Greece helping to rescue Portugal.