19-Sep-13 World View -- Fed surprises Wall Street

[John]

19-Sep-13 World View -- Fed surprises Wall Street by continuing massive money-printing


Anti-Golden Dawn protests across Greece turn violent

** 19-Sep-13 World View -- Fed surprises Wall Street by continuing massive money-printing
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e130919



Contents:
Fed surprises Wall Street by continuing massive money-printing
U.N. report contains calculations implicating Syria's regime
China steps up border incursions into India's Kashmir region
Anti-Golden Dawn protests across Greece turn violent


Keys:
Generational Dynamics, Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke,
Syria, Bashar al-Assad, sarin,
China, India, Kashmir, Jammu,
Greece, Golden Dawn

[Anon]

Another example of nihilism. Sold out the US for hookers and hotels. There are two others charged in the case, including an investigator who was apparently covering up, but it'll get bigger.

http://gazette.com/northern-command-off ... le/1506407

A Navy commander assigned to U.S. Northern Command was arrested in a bribery scheme that included trading classified information on ship movements for stays in luxury hotels and the services of prostitutes.

[NoOneImportant]

It is Bernanke's opinion that the enormous financial value deflated out of the economy - stock bubble, real estate bubble, and real estate mortgage backed securities fraud - of the 2008 financial crisis may be replaced, or re-injected, by the Fed without ill effect. His contention is that the missing value - whether it disappeared by fraud, or financial "reassessment" - may be replaced through gradual cash injections - quantitative easing - and thus in doing so it will restore economic health and prosperity to the American economy as if by magic; and that it may be done so as to not radically affect the purchasing power of the dollar - that is, stoke the fires of inflation. His rational is: so long as the Fed continues to recharges the economy, it will eventually hit some Nirvana net asset value, and it makes little difference whether that value is in cash/stocks/real estate/or fraudulent securities, or any other liquid, or relatively liquid asset, once the Nirvana point is reached economic prosperity must necessarily ensue - he hopes.

It bears mentioning that all value is perceived value. Perhaps I should I explain with a question: is gold worth $1365 (today's NY close)? The obvious answer is certainly, but that's not the complete answer. The gold prices at the NY close represent the price for which a willing buyer, and willing seller may be easily found to buy/sell an ounce of gold. But that's not the total answer. If one contends that an ounce of gold is indeed worth $1365, it might be a worthy exercise to examine just exactly where the intrinsic value resides within that ounce of gold. To elaborate, let's take for a moment the circumstances of a drowning man; of what value is a bag of gold to him? To him the monetary value of the commodity - gold - is of no rational concern as he has another more pressing problem; the gold, for him, simply represents ballast, and ballast is something that a drowning man isn't all that interested in. You may say that the example is just absurd, and in the day to day context of life it is, but it illustrates - starkly - the part perception plays in the concept of the "value" of... of, really, almost everything. It is just that we're not used to thinking in those terms.

To provide another example: let us say that we walk into a room. In that room there are two pieces of paper lying on the floor - one is a twenty dollar bill, the other a piece of trash. What do we immediately do? We, invariably, walk across the room to the two pieces of paper. Which piece do we invariably stoop to pick up? Always it's the twenty. But why? "... well the obvious answer is, because it's money, and it has value...." But does it really? Holding that twenty or any denomination of currency, I would be hard pressed to point to the aspect of, or within, that twenty that objectively contains it's intrinsic "value." It certainly isn't the paper on which it is printed, and it certainly isn't the ink with which it is printed either. So what is it that causes me to physically be moved to action; if not by any basic resident value within the bill itself, then what? We are physically moved, simply and purely, by belief - partially our belief, but mostly by the belief of others. I am moved to action, regarding the twenty, because of you; because you believe and accept my twenties, I have become convinced of its value; that is, I now believe in the value of currency by the routine exchange of currency for the conduct and needs of daily life - that is I believe, in my heart, that you will take my twenties for other stuff. Virtually any commodity may be acquired with sufficient quantities of "money", with the exception of life itself, and even life is routinely "rented." In point of fact we are moved to action, not by any intrinsic quality found in the bills themselves, but more properly, by what someone else perceives the piece of paper with ink all over to be... in short, belief transforms something that isn't into something that is; that is, a virtually worthless piece of paper - paper that really isn't suitable even for something as basic as note taking, as it has several colors of ink all over it - into something that has driven man to outrageous acts of good, but mostly monstrous acts of evil. In summary, in isolation the twenty has limited "value." It has, essentially no nutritional value, so it can't be eaten; if burned, the heat generated is inconsequential for the generation of warmth; and by itself the bill is not sufficiently durable to act as clothing. So taken in isolation we may have picked up the wrong piece of paper, as the other piece might at least be suitable for note taking. Yet it is the money we seek, with almost no understanding that it is simply belief that gives it "value," and it is belief that maintains that "value" - and the same might be said of virtually every purchasable commodity in our world - everything.

So why do we care? Because, in so far as value is concerned, perception is everything. Why is gold at $1365, and not the $300 of 10 or so years ago? Certainly the gold hasn't changed, so what makes it worth the $1365 of today instead of the $300 of the past? What has changed is not the gold, but insidiously the perceived health of the dollar. The gold is the same gold as the $300 gold, it hasn't changed, what has changed is the gold's price - and that price is simply a measure of the "sickness" of the dollar. Bernanke is gambling that the replacement cash - quantitative easing - of the lost stock/real estate/fraud values of the last 5 years, will not affect the perceived purchasing health of the dollar - as measured in terms of inflation. The stated purpose in creating the Fed was to protect the health of the purchasing power of the dollar and in so doing, the American banking system. What in fact Bernanke hopes to achieve is: to offset with cash the depressing - deflationary - economic effect of the collapse of stock values; destruction of real estate backed security values via fraud - acts for which no one has been prosecuted - and irrational real estate appreciation expectations for the ten year period prior to 2008 ( two bubbles, and a bunch of crimes). And he hops to do it without recreating a "new" bubble. Additionally he hopes to mask the destruction of individual initiative over the last five years by the socialization of America, and he hopes to offset the enormous increase in healthcare costs being realized in Obamacare - cash that comes directly out of discretionary spending. All investment funds are expected to come from this shrinking discretionary income pool. Regarding individual initiative and capitalism - Obama's contention that capitalism has failed aside - individual initiative is always the first victim of socialism; in this case, it is an initiative that has driven American prosperity since before the American Revolution, an initiative that is in evidence everywhere, as evidenced by North America not still being wilderness, desert, or wasteland. If Bernanke is correct America will find prosperity, as if by magic, having neither created nor manufactured anything new of value except lots of new paper currency. If he is wrong then we may expect some derivative of: http://www.goldonomic.com/When%20Money%20Dies.pdf

[Anon]

This book has a chapter called "the gold invention" that explains the matter and meaning of the value of money, whatever the standard, quite plainly.

http://mises.org/books/bubbleworld.pdf

Current money is based on the value of debt. This is true of both paper and nonphysical monies.

[NoOneImportant]

The chapter referenced above is both brilliant and clear. The message is that man cannot be trusted, regarding money, with anything that he himself can produce cheaply - for he will over time degrade its value until its value will ultimately be degraded to the point of manufactured cost.

Reagan is remembered for precipitating the fall of the Soviet Union, but his real contribution to America was the saving of the U.S. financial system - the dollar - and thus the world financial web.

[Guest]

What is the difference between far-right in Europe and far-right in America?

I don't believe in banning political parties or restricting free speech. Is banning Golden Dawn legal? How can a government ban the 3rd largest party in Greece? Could the Greek government get away with it? I think a civil war would erupt.

[John]

What is the difference between far-right in Europe and far-right in America?

The far right in Europe is Nazi. The far right in America is against government spending.

[Guest]

I still think Golden Dawn has a real chance to take over Greece. GD was a fringe political party without a single seat in parliament for decades, and now they are the 3rd largest political party in Greece. Hitler gained power with less than 40% of the vote. I know the EU would blow a pistion if this happened, but the Greeks are going hungry and living on the streets. Parties like this thrive in times of crisis. What could the EU really do in that situation? I think Greece would just turn towards Russia for support if the EU abandoned them. (Which I think would be even worse for the Greeks than what they have to deal with now).

I think any attempt to crush GD could lead to violent unrest, even civil war. Is Greece is an awakening period? Is civil war possible?

[NoOneImportant]

While GD is Greece's issue de jour, it in actuality, is not Greece's real problem. What we are seeing in Greece, a phenomenon that we will also soon see repeated in other socialist Utopian "experiments", is Greece's manifestation of what happens when socialist societies, as Ms Thatcher so elegantly put it "... when you run out of other people's money...." Greece, like the U.S., Spain, Italy, Ireland, and several others have been on a socialist spending bender, an irrational spending spree, created by politicians designed to feed the "something-for-nothing" mentality of their developmentally stunted electorate.

All something-for-nothing schemes require administrative theft; whether it is excessive direct taxation, the unified stealing of something from everyone via inflation, or the accrual of unsustainable public debt, matters not, and is not actually important. What is important here is that there is a significant group of "criminals" - politicians - who have come to believe that there is nothing wrong, so long as they keep nothing for themselves, with stealing from everyone to give to someone else what, in almost every case is to "buy" votes, what hasn't been earned. The deluded electorate convinces itself, over time, that so long as they are moral enough to refrain from the overt sealing of someone else's property themselves they have done nothing wrong. They just aren't quite moral enough not to take the stolen proceeds of what has been taken from someone else by a politician for their benefit.

When you run out of other people's money, and don't have the ability to print more, like the U.S. Fed, you get this enormous problem. Everyone in the mechanized theft extravaganza seeks to find out who is at fault for destroying the wonderful system that worked so well for so long - the collapsed Ponzi Scheme gone awry. So human nature being what it is, they immediately start to spend excessive amounts of time attempting to find out "what went wrong", and who is at fault, "...who caused what was so good for so long to fail." As each of the electorate members surely knows that they are not criminals for they have stolen nothing. So the witch hunt begins, stoked by the very same class who initiated the problem to begin with - self-seeking, self-absorbed, self-serving politicians. Politicians who purport themselves to be moral because they take nothing from the public coffers, but have no such compunction regarding taking political contributions numbered in the tens of millions from organization lined up at the public tough; a trough being continuously filled from political initiatives with public cash by the ship load. Politicians who again go to them now culpable, developmentally stunted electorate; politicians who then point to the most helpless in society and scream: "... they did it to us...." And that leads us to the irrational rise, in Greece's case, of Golden Dawn. And it happens because, to borrow an old mid 70s phrase, few are willing to either understand, believe, or accept that: "there is no free lunch."

[Marc]

While GD is Greece's issue de jour, it in actuality, is not Greece's real problem. What we are seeing in Greece, a phenomenon that we will also soon see repeated in other socialist Utopian "experiments", is Greece's manifestation of what happens when socialist societies, as Ms Thatcher so elegantly put it "... when you run out of other people's money...." Greece, like the U.S., Spain, Italy, Ireland, and several others have been on a socialist spending bender, an irrational spending spree, created by politicians designed to feed the "something-for-nothing" mentality of their developmentally stunted electorate.

All something-for-nothing schemes require administrative theft; whether it is excessive direct taxation, the unified stealing of something from everyone via inflation, or the accrual of unsustainable public debt, matters not, and is not actually important. What is important here is that there is a significant group of "criminals" - politicians - who have come to believe that there is nothing wrong, so long as they keep nothing for themselves, with stealing from everyone to give to someone else what, in almost every case is to "buy" votes, what hasn't been earned. The deluded electorate convinces itself, over time, that so long as they are moral enough to refrain from the overt sealing of someone else's property themselves they have done nothing wrong. They just aren't quite moral enough not to take the stolen proceeds of what has been taken from someone else by a politician for their benefit.

When you run out of other people's money, and don't have the ability to print more, like the U.S. Fed, you get this enormous problem. Everyone in the mechanized theft extravaganza seeks to find out who is at fault for destroying the wonderful system that worked so well for so long - the collapsed Ponzi Scheme gone awry. So human nature being what it is, they immediately start to spend excessive amounts of time attempting to find out "what went wrong", and who is at fault, "...who caused what was so good for so long to fail." As each of the electorate members surely knows that they are not criminals for they have stolen nothing. So the witch hunt begins, stoked by the very same class who initiated the problem to begin with - self-seeking, self-absorbed, self-serving politicians. Politicians who purport themselves to be moral because they take nothing from the public coffers, but have no such compunction regarding taking political contributions numbered in the tens of millions from organization lined up at the public tough; a trough being continuously filled from political initiatives with public cash by the ship load. Politicians who again go to them now culpable, developmentally stunted electorate; politicians who then point to the most helpless in society and scream: "... they did it to us...." And that leads us to the irrational rise, in Greece's case, of Golden Dawn. And it happens because, to borrow an old mid 70s phrase, few are willing to either understand, believe, or accept that: "there is no free lunch."

Interesting analysis, using Thatcher's famous quote regarding socialism. Yes, resources that can be taken from wealth redistribution or even via printing money are finite. I do respectfully think, however, that in a democracy, be it the USA or Greece or other democracies, that the politicians who are elected, while they can frequently be self-serving (including the propensity to take and encourage "legal kickbacks"), largely exist as elected politicians because the people want them to be their politicians, although you do allude to this fact.

Greece's problems not only stem from excessive demands from the public, but from rampant corruption, which affects the capacity for Greek entrepreneurship and competitiveness. And, while racism and xenophobia can certainly exist in the USA, I do think it has a propensity to exist to a greater extent in many European countries, due to more homogeneity and some longstanding feelings of ethnic tribalism within these countries. If America's economy turned into Greece's present economy, it would no doubt engender some strong populist movements, including heightened anti-immigrationism, anti-Semitism, etc., but probably not lead to a strong American neo-fascist movement. That's just my guess.

Maybe others have further opinions here. Thanks for sharing the cogent words. —Regards, Marc