Obama and his $6 trillion!!??

I am not sure whether the global bond market would be able to fund the $6 trillion of the Obama fiscal package. The world is indeed running out of capital.

Unless this capital is forthcoming, a clutch of countries will prove unable to roll over their debts at a bearable cost. Countries most at risk of default are those that cannot print money as they do not have a national currency (Euro nations), and those who have borrowed abroad (Eastern Europe).

Traders already whisper that some governments are buying their own debt through proxies at bond auctions to keep up illusions - not to be confused with transparent buying by central banks under quantitative easing. This cannot continue for long.

Commerzbank said every European bond auction is turning into an "event risk". Britain too finds itself some way down the AAA pecking order as it tries to sell 220 billion pounds of Gilts this year to irascible investors.

US hedge fund Hayman Advisers is betting on the biggest wave of state bankruptcies and restructurings since 1934. The worst profiles are almost all in Europe - the epicentre of leverage, and denial. As the IMF said last week, Europe's banks have written down 17% of their losses - American banks have swallowed half.

It looked easy for Western governments during the credit bubble, when China, Russia, emerging Asia and petro-powers were accumulating $1.3 trillion a year in reserves, recycling this wealth back into the US Treasuries.

The tap has been turned off. These countries have become net sellers. Central bank holdings have fallen by $248 billion to $6.7 trillion over the last 6 months. The Oil crash has forced both Russia and Venezuela to slash reserves by a third.

Japan’s $1.5 trillion state pension fund (World’s Biggest) dropped a bombshell this month. It will start selling holdings of Japanese state bonds this year to cover a $40 billion shortfall on its books. So how is the Ministry of Finance going to fund a sovereign debt expected to reach 200% of GDP by 2010 (also the World’s Biggest) even assuming that Japan’s industry recovers from its 38% crash?

Japan is the first country to face a shrinking workforce in absolute terms, crossing the dreaded line in 2005. Its army of pensioners is dipping into the collective coffers. Japan’s saving rate has fallen from 14% of GDP to 2% of GDP since 1990. Such a fate looms for Germany, Italy, South Korea, Eastern Europe and perhaps eventually China.

So where is the $6 trillion going to come from this year, and beyond? For now we must fall back on the Fed, the Bank of England, and various central banks, World Bank – nota-bene and rely on printed money (QE) to pay for education, infrastructure and administration. It is necessary (Alas!!) to stave off debt deflation. But it is also a slippery slope, as Fed hawks keep reminding us their chairman Ben Bernanke. One wonders if Mr. Bernanke regrets saying so blithely that Washington can create unlimited dollars “at essentially no cost”.

The crux of the problem is not sub-prime or mortgage loans or this and that bank but the government. Governments around the world allowed their banking system to grow unchecked, in some cases going into an untenable liability for the host country. A disturbing number of states look like Iceland once you dig into the entrails, and most are in Europe where liabilities average 4.2 times the GDP.

The G20 deal to triple the IMF’s fire fighting fund to $750 billion buys time for the likes of Ukraine and Argentina. But the deeper malaise is that so many of the IMF backers are themselves exhausting their credit lines and cultural reserves.

Great bankruptcies change the world. Spain’s default under Philip II ruined the Catholic banking dynasties of Italy and South Germany, Shifting the locus of financial power to Amsterdam. Anglo-Dutch forces were able to halt the Counter-Reformation, free Northern Europe from absolutism, and break into North America.

Who knows what revolution will come from this crisis if it ever reaches defaults.

Former astronaut: Man not alone in universe.

Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and other UFO enthusiasts are concerned.

Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mission, asserted that extraterrestrial life exists, and that the truth is being concealed by the U.S. and other governments.

He delivered his remarks during an appearance at the National Press Club following the conclusion of the fifth annual X-Conference, a meeting of UFO activists and researchers studying the possibility of alien life forms.

Mankind has long wondered if we're "alone in the universe. [But] only in our period do we really have evidence. No, we're not alone," Mitchell said.

"Our destiny, in my opinion, and we might as well get started with it, is [to] become a part of the planetary community. ... We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there."

Mitchell grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which some UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said residents of his hometown "had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience by military authorities." They had been warned of "dire consequences" if they did so.

But, he claimed, they "didn't want to go to the grave with their story. They wanted to tell somebody reliable. And being a local boy and having been to the moon, they considered me reliable enough to whisper in my ear their particular story."

Roughly 10 years ago, Mitchell claimed, he was finally given an appointment at Pentagon to discuss what he had been told.

An unnamed admiral working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to uncover the truth behind the Roswell story, Mitchell said. The stories of a UFO crash "were confirmed," but the admiral was then denied access when he "tried to get into the inner workings of that process."

The same admiral, Mitchell claimed, now denies the story.

"I urge those who are doubtful: Read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been going on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visited," he said.

"The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far-reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in time."

Severe Solar Storms Could Harm Power Grid, Navigational Systems and Spacecraft.

More than a billion people without power. The distribution of drinkable water disrupted. Transportation, communication and banking upset. Trillions of dollars in damage.

Hurricanes, blizzards and other earthly tempests aren't the only natural forces with the potential to sow catastrophe.

Severe weather in the sun's outer atmosphere could knock out much of the country's power grid, incapacitate navigational systems and jeopardize Spacecraft.

While the odds of a solar disaster are relatively small, scientists warn that we need to ramp up our defenses against solar storms, especially given our increasing dependence on technology that is so susceptible to radiation from sun.

'US Govt. urged silence about the losses' - Bank of America CEO

Bank of America Corp CEO Kenneth Lewis testified under oath that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pressured him to keep quiet about losses at Merrill Lynch & Co, which the bank was buying.

Testifying before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in February, Lewis said "it wasn't up to me" to reveal Merrill's fourth-quarter losses as they were becoming apparent in December, the newspaper said, citing a deposition transcript.

Shareholders of Merrill and Bank of America voted to approve the merger on December 5, and the transaction closed on January 1. Bank of America subsequently reported that Merrill lost $15.84 billion in the fourth quarter.

At Bank of America's April 29 annual meeting, shareholders will vote on whether to force Lewis to step down as chairman of the largest U.S. bank or leave its board, because of Merrill and a falling share price.

Many critics also want Lewis to give up the chief executive job, which he has held since 2001.

The Journal said Lewis testified that Bernanke and Paulson told him the merger needed to go through and that any failure would "impose a big risk to the financial system" of the United States.

Cuomo's office is expected to release the deposition transcript to federal regulators and overseers of bank bailout money today.

Bank of America shares have lost three-fourths of their value since the Merrill purchase was announced September 15.

Merrill's losses triggered a federal bailout of Bank of America, including $20 billion of new capital, in January.

US Government will Stage Terror, Declare Martial Law?

Former US presidential candidate Alan Keyes has given perhaps his most dire warning yet, saying that the Obama administration is preparing to stage terror attacks, declare martial law and cancel the 2012 elections, which is why they are demonizing their political enemies as criminals and terrorists.

Keyes is best known for his performance during the 2000 Republican Presedential debates, when he was accredited by many media outlets as being the clear winner during a series of debates with George W. Bush and John McCain.

“It’s obvious that they will stop at nothing,” Keyes told attendees of a reception in Fort Wayne, adding, “We may wake up one day and there’s a series of terrorist attacks, the economy is paralysed….martial law will be declared everywhere in the United States and it won’t end until the crisis ends.”

Keyes said that Americans should be thankful if they even see another election in 2012, stating, “If we don’t wake up and work to see that it happens, we will not see another election.”

“The minute they think they can get away with it, they will end this system of government and that is their intention,” added Keyes, noting that everyone acting as if the time we are in was just “business as usual” reminds him of the attitude of politicians in the Weimar Republic when Hitler was rising to power or eastern Europe when the Communists were taking over after the second world war.

A fraud that makes Madoff look small time

Since Bernard L. Madoff was handcuffed and taken from his office by FBI agents, we have been made well aware of the nature of Ponzi schemes, fraudulent investment opportunities that pay off early participants with money from newcomers, not from returns on legitimate stock or bond holdings. Mr. Madoff, once a highly respected member of the Wall Street establishment, has admitted to defrauding investors of as much as $50 billion in such a manner. When asked by the agents who arrested him if he could explain what he'd done, he reportedly said, "There is no innocent explanation."

According to the man who may be the leading expert on banking fraud, there is also no innocent explanation for the events leading to the current economic crisis. Last week on his PBS show, Bill Moyers interviewed William K. Black, the senior regulator during the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s. Mr. Black, who wrote a book based on his experiences and called it The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, said the fraud and deceit that resulted in the world banking system's dire distress makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker. In fact, says Mr. Black, who is the former director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, what we have experienced was caused by "calculated dishonesty" on the part of corporate CEOs, aided and abetted by politicians and regulators who tore down the barriers to financial shenanigans - perhaps the most important example being the repeal of the Great Depression-inspired Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial banking from investment banking. This cleared the stage for the fraudulent investments that made a lot of people very, very rich in what we can now see was an immense Ponzi scheme, many times the size and scope of the scam pulled off by Mr. Madoff.

Consider that one company, the now-defunct IndyMac - which specialized in making liar's loans - in a single year (2006) sold $80 billion of these toxic things to other companies. IndyMac lost more money than all the lending institutions involved in the S&L crisis of the 1980s. And those at the helm of this firm and the others we've heard so much about - A.I.G., Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, etc. - knew what they were doing. Mr. Black believes they dealt in investment instruments they knew were created fraudulently.

So, why haven't we seen the people responsible for this hauled off in handcuffs the way Bernie Madoff was? Or at the very least, how come the CEOs of the banks involved in this scheme haven't been made to walk the plank like Rick Wagoner of General Motors? Because, says Mr. Black, "We don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover-up."

When asked by Mr. Moyers whether he was alleging that Timothy F. Geithner and others in the administration, and the banks, are engaged in a cover-up to keep us from knowing what went wrong, Mr. Black said, "Absolutely." The rulers are frightened to admit that many of the large banks are insolvent. They have ignored the proven methods for dealing with bank fraud and have instead adopted what they used to laugh at when the Japanese did it: covering up bank losses by lying about them and injecting money into failed institutions. Even though it's working exactly as one would expect - just as it did in setting Japan into a long, deep recession - they don't know what else to do. To take effective action would reveal what they believe cannot be revealed. The lurid facts must be hidden.

So much for the vaunted transparency the new president promised us.

The Big Money Behind Geithner

A guy who can’t figure out his own taxes is supposed to fix the economy? This is the absurd rationale being offered by media after it was disclosed that he was a serial tax evader. He did his own taxes for a couple years and got into trouble. This guy is supposed to be so smart we can entrust him with managing the entire U.S. economy?

Anybody watching this bizarre spectacle unfold has to suspect there is something more to the story. Who is behind Geithner and why? And why does Obama want him? This is where the media fear to tread. Major media companies such as GE (parent of NBC News) and the Washington Post Company have their own connections to Geithner through their own officials and board members. They have a conflict of interest that will never be reported by the news organizations themselves.

The real story, which can only emerge through talk radio and alternative media, is that Geithner has very powerful political and financial connections, not only to the media but the banking interests and lobbies that try to orchestrate U.S. policy behind the scenes.

The President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the Chinese-speaking Geithner is an associate of Henry Kissinger who can be counted on to convince the Chinese Communists to continue to buy U.S. debt and finance Obama’s massive expansion of federal government power. That is why Obama and his fellow Democrats are putting so much faith in him.

As Henry Kissinger recently put it, when he was celebrating U.S.-China relations on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Obama’s mission is to usher in a “New World Order.” He forgot to mention, of course, that it is a China-dominated New World Order in which the U.S. has become a subsidiary of China Inc.

Kissinger did comment that Obama had “appointed an extraordinarily able group of people in both the international and financial fields.” He didn’t name names, but that obviously includes Geithner, who used to work for Kissinger Associates.

It also turns out that Geithner’s father, Peter F. Geithner, serves on the board with Kissinger of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. This is the group that rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, celebrating Chinese investments in the U.S. economy. In another interesting connection, it turns out that Peter F. Geithner was with the Ford Foundation and oversaw the work of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, developing what are called microfinance programs in Indonesia.

Based on what Obama has said about Geithner, and what the media have repeated ad nauseam, we are supposed to believe that he made some mistakes that were typical of an employee who had worked for an international organization, the International Monetary Fund. But this doesn’t hold up because he admits he was told by the IMF about the procedures and necessity of paying those taxes. So the failure to pay these taxes looks like a case of tax cheating. If it wasn’t cheating, then he didn’t understand the tax code or didn’t pay enough attention to get it done right. This doesn’t seem like a proper credential for the post of Treasury Secretary, with jurisdiction over the IRS.

There has to be something more to the rationale for confirming somebody who is this much of a conniver or this dumb to the post. What is it?

It doesn’t take much digging. For anybody in the dark about this, please consult and closely study his bio. Geithner is a wheeler-dealer for powerful special interests.

If you examine the nature of the “Group of Thirty,” an affiliation which appears at the bottom of his biography, right after his Council on Foreign Relations membership, you will quickly learn that the President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank is an associate of the governor of the Chinese central bank through this mysterious organization of bankers and other top current and former officials from various countries. You will notice that other Obama nominees and associates are members, including Paul Volcker and Lawrence Summers.

You will also learn that this organization has been funded by―surprise―some of the same financial institutions getting federal bailout money. These include American International Group, Goldman Sachs and Citi, among others. Because it has a website and publishes an annual report, all of this seems open and above board. But the fine print reveals that some of the meetings are by “invitation only.”

The entire list of “contributors and supporters” of the “Group of Thirty” is quite impressive. You will find not only U.S. financial institutions getting bailout money, but central banks around the world and Arab financial interests. In addition, you also find private financial interests, including the hedge fund operated by billionaire and Obama contributor George Soros.

But I can find no stories in the major U.S. media critically examining the history and purpose of this organization. Could it be because selected reporters are invited to its meetings on a deep background basis? And that they develop financial sources at these meetings that they swear to protect and defend?

Largest Landowners!!!

Queen Elizabeth II, head of state of the United Kingdom and of 31 other states and territories, is the legal owner of about 6,600 million acres of land, one sixth of the earth’s non ocean surface.

She is the only person on earth who owns whole countries, and who owns countries that are not her own domestic territory. This land ownership is separate from her role as head of state and is different from other monarchies where no such claim is made – Norway, Belgium, Denmark etc.

The value of her land holding. £17,600,000,000,000 (approx).

This makes her the richest individual on earth. However, there is no way easily to value her real estate. There is no current market in the land of entire countries. At a rough estimate of $5,000 an acre, and based on the sale of Alaska to the USA by the Tsar, and of Louisiana to the USA by France, the Queen’s land holding is worth a notional $33,000,000,000,000 (Thirty three trillion dollars or about £17,600,000,000,000). Her holding is based on the laws of the countries she owns and her land title is valid in all the countries she owns. Her main holdings are Canada, the 2nd largest country on earth, with 2,467 million acres, Australia, the 7th largest country on earth with 1,900 million acres, the Papua New Guinea with114 million acres, New Zealand with 66 million acres and the UK with 60 million acres.

She is the world’s largest landowner by a significant margin. The next largest landowner is the Russian state, with an overall ownership of 4,219 million acres, and a direct ownership comparable with the Queen’s land holding of 2,447 million acres. The 3rd largest landowner is the Chinese state, which claims all of Chinese land, about 2,365 million acres. The 4th largest landowner on earth is the Federal Government of the United States, which owns about one third of the land of the USA, 760 million acres. The fifth largest landowner on earth is the King of Saudi Arabia with 553 million acres

Largest five personal landowners on Earh

Queen Elizabeth II				6,600 million acres
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia				553 million acres
King Bhumibol of Thailand				126 million acres
King Mohammed IV of Morocco				113 million acres
Sultan Quaboos of Oman				76 million acres

List of Business Failures in March 2009.

The list of business failures in March of 2009 was slightly better that the previous two months average of 14.5. In March 09 there were 14 business failures.
The new avg is 14.33 about 14 closing shutters or filing for bankruptcy every month.

1. Babcock & Brown (AUS)
2. Denver Newspaper Agency (USA)
3. Fleetwood Enterprises (USA)
4. Idearc Media (USA)

5. Märklin (GER)
6. Magna Entertainment Corp. (USA)
7. Monaco Coach Corp. (USA)

8. Ritz Camera Centres (USA)
9. Silicon Graphics (USA)
10. Spansion Inc. (USA)
11. Strathfield (AUS)
12. Stylo (GBR)
13. Sun - Times Media Group (USA)
14. Viyella (GBR)