In a harbinger of what may be coming our way in the Fall of 2012, billionaire financier George Soros has sold all of his equity positions in major financial stocks according to a 13-F report filed with the SEC for the quarter ending June 30, 2012.
Soros, who manages funds through various accounts in the US and the Cayman Islands, has reportedly unloaded over one million shares of stock in financial companies and banks that include Citigroup (420,000 shares), JP Morgan (701,400 shares) and Goldman Sachs (120,000 shares). The total value of the stock sales amounts to nearly $50 million.
What’s equally as interesting as his sale of major financials is where Soros has shifted his money. At the same time he was selling bank stocks, he was acquiring some 884,000 shares (approx. $130 million) of Gold via the SPDR Gold Trust.
When a major global player with direct ties to the White House, Wall Street, and the banking system starts off-loading stocks and starts stacking gold, it suggests a very serious market move is set to happen.
While often lambasted for his calls to centralize global banking, increase government intervention in the economy and his support of what he has called an “emergence of the new world order,” if there’s anyone with an inside track of where things are headed next it’s Soros.
Soros, who has written extensively of a coming global paradigm shift in his book The Crash of 2008 and What It Means, calling the current economic and political model ”an end of an era,” hasrecently suggested that the financial and economic situation across the world is so serious that Europe could soon descend into chaos and conflict. He also notes that the world is entering “one of the most dangerous periods in modern history”, and foresees violent riots in America and a brutal clamp-down by the government that will dramatically curtail civil liberties.
This is an individual who not only predicted the collapse of 2008 and took action to insulate himself, he also proposed the various fixes that governments in Europe and the US would eventually implement in order to stave off a deflationary depression. In his aforementioned book he suggested that central banks infuse the system with massive amounts of monetary expansion, but also warned that not injecting enough money would simply extend the onset of deflation and printing too much could lead to hyperinflationary currency collapse.
Based on recent activity in Soros’ US held accounts, it seems that governments and central banks have failed at those efforts to stabilize the system. As such, Soros is getting out of those companies which are most at risk should the financial system buckle like it did in 2008 and he’s shifting his assets into what may be the only asset class left standing when it’s all said and done.
Earlier this month, Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke told senators the cartel has no intention of bailing out European banks. Bernanke told lawmakers that “he doesn’t have the intention or the authority” to bail out countries or banks.
Former Fed official Gerald O’Driscoll says Federal Reserve is covertly bailing out Europe.
Now we learn that the Fed is indeed in the business of bailing out European banks. It is secretly using a “temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement” with the ECB and the central banks of Canada, England, Switzerland and Japan.
“The Fed’s latest actions in cooperating with foreign central banks to undertake liquidity swaps of dollars for foreign currencies is another reason why Congress needs enhanced power to oversee and audit the Fed,” writes Ron Paul. “Under current law Congress cannot examine these types of agreements. Those who would argue that auditing the Fed or these agreements with central banks harms the Fed’s independence should reevaluate the Fed’s supposed independence when the Fed bails out Europe so soon after President Obama promised US assistance in resolving the Euro crisis.”
The Fed has a reputation for secrecy. Bloomberg News sued the cartel to obtain information on its emergency programs during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Bloomberg, however, excluded foreign-currency liquidity swaps because names of commercial banks that borrowed under the program were disclosed to the public.
The latest action by the Fed reveals that fiat money created out of thin air is the problem. “Fiat money caused this European crisis and the financial crisis before it. More fiat money is not the cure. The global fiat currency system has proven itself a failure, we need real monetary reform. We need sound money,” Ron Paul concludes.
Bernanke refuses to tell the American people where the money went:
We are getting so close to a financial collapse in Europe that you can almost hear the debt bubbles popping. All across the western world, governments and major banks are rapidly becoming insolvent. So far, the powers that be are keeping all of the balls in the air by throwing around lots of bailout money. But now the political will for more bailouts is drying up and the number of troubled entities seems to grow by the day. Right now the western world is facing a debt crisis that is absolutely unprecedented in world history. Europe has had a tremendously difficult time just trying to keep Greece afloat, and several much larger European countries are now on the verge of a major financial crisis. In addition, there is a growing number of very large financial institutions all over the western world that are also rapidly approaching a day of reckoning. The global financial system is a sea or red ink, and when we get to the point where there are hundreds of ships going under how is it going to be possible to bail all of them out? The quotes that you are about to read show that quite a few top financial and political insiders know that things cannot hold together much longer and that a horrific economic crisis is coming. We built the global financial system on a foundation of debt, leverage and risk and now this house of cards that we have created is about to come tumbling down.
A lot of people in politics and in the financial world know what is about to happen. Once in a while they will even be quite candid about it with the media.
As I have written about previously, Europe is on the verge of a financial collapse. If things go really badly, things could totally fall apart in a few weeks. But more likely it will be a few more months until the juggling act ends.
Right now, the banking system in Europe is coming apart at the seams. Because the global financial system is so interconnected today, when major European banks start to fail it is going to have a cascading effect across the United States and Asia as well.
The financial crisis of 2008 plunged us into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
The next financial crisis could potentially hit the world even harder.
The following are 12 shocking quotes from insiders that are warning about the horrific economic crisis that is almost here….
#1George Soros: “Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation.”
#2 PIMCO CEO Mohammed El-Erian: “These are all signs of an institutional run on French banks. If it persists, the banks would have no choice but to delever their balance sheets in a very drastic and disorderly fashion. Retail depositors would get edgy and be tempted to follow trading and institutional clients through the exit doors. Europe would thus be thrown into a full-blown banking crisis that aggravates the sovereign debt trap, renders certain another economic recession, and significantly worsens the outlook for the global economy.”
#3Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, global head of securities services at UniCredit SpA (Italy’s largest bank): “The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits.”
#4Stefan Homburg, the head of Germany’s Institute for Public Finance: “The euro is nearing its ugly end. A collapse of monetary union now appears unavoidable.”
#5 EU Parliament Member Nigel Farage: “I think the worst in the financial system is yet to come, a possible cataclysm and if that happens the gold price could go (higher) to a number that we simply cannot, at this moment, even imagine.”
#6Carl Weinberg, the chief economist at High Frequency Economics: “At this point, our base case is that Greece will default within weeks.”
#7 Goldman Sachs strategist Alan Brazil: “Solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. In the US, Treasury debt growth financed the US consumer but has not had enough of an impact on job growth. Can the US continue to depreciate the world’s base currency?”
#8 International Labour Organization director general Juan Somavia recently stated that total unemployment could “increase by some 20m to a total of 40m in G20 countries” by the end of 2012.
#9Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackerman: “It is an open secret that numerous European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking book at market levels.”
#10Alastair Newton, a strategist for Nomura Securities in London: “We believe that we are just about to enter a critical period for the eurozone and that the threat of some sort of break-up between now and year-end is greater than it has been at any time since the start of the crisis”
#11Ann Barnhardt, head of Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc.: “It’s over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch. And if you think that this collapse is going to play out without one hell of a big hot war, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.”
#12Lakshman Achuthan of ECRI: “When I call a recession…that means that process is starting to feed on itself, which means that you can yell and scream and you can write a big check, but it’s not going to stop.”
*****
In my opinion, the epicenter of the “next wave” of the financial collapse is going to be in Europe. But that does not mean that the United States is going to be okay. The reality is that the United States never recovered from the last recession and there are already a lot of signs that we are getting ready to enter another major recession. A major financial collapse in Europe would just accelerate our plunge into a new economic crisis.
If you want to read something that will really freak you out, you should check out what Dr. Philippa Malmgren is saying. Dr. Philippa Malmgren is the President and founder of Principalis Asset Management. She is also a former member of the Bush economic team. You can find her bio right here.
Malmgren is claiming that Germany is seriously considering bringing back the Deutschmark. In fact, she claims that Germany is very busy printing new currency up. In a list of things that we could see happen over the next few months, she included the following….
“The Germans announce they are re-introducing the Deutschmark. They have already ordered the new currency and asked that the printers hurry up.”
This is quite a claim for someone to be making. You would think that someone that used to work in the White House would not make such a claim unless it was based on something solid.
If Germany did decide to leave the euro, you would see an implosion of the euro that would be truly historic.
But as I have written about previously, it should not surprise anyone that theend of the euro is being talked about because the euro simply does not work.
The only way that the euro would have had a chance of working is if all of the governments using the euro would have kept debt levels very low.
Unfortunately, the financial systems of the western world are designed to push governments into high levels of debt.
The truth is that the euro was doomed from the very beginning.
Now we are approaching a day of reckoning. We have been living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, but the bubble is ending. There are several ways that the powers that be could handle this, but all of them will lead to greater financial instability.
In the end, we will see that the debt-fueled prosperity that the western world has been enjoying for decades was just an illusion.
Debt is a very cruel master. It will almost always bring more pain and suffering than you anticipated.
It is easy to get into debt, but it can be very difficult to get out of debt.
There is no way that the western world can unwind this debt spiral easily.
The only way that another massive economic crisis can be put off for even a little while would be for the powers that be to “kick the can down the road” a little farther by creating even more debt.
But in the end, you can never solve a debt problem with more debt.
The next several years are going to be an incredibly clear illustration of why debt is bad.
When the dominoes start to fall, we are going to witness a financial avalanche which is going to destroy the finances of millions of people.
You might want to try to get out of the way while you still can.
Two weeks ago we presented a chart that shows the uncanny correlation between the debt ceiling and the price of gold. Now that we know the final amount of the next debt ceiling hike, somewhere in the $2.5 trillion ballpark, it allows us to extrapolate where gold will end up as a result of the debt ceiling hike which will likely be voted into law at 7pm PDT.
A simple correlation rule of thumb allows us to predict that gold will be at $1,950 by the end of the year if it simply retains it close correlation to the debt ceiling. Should Bernanke announce that he will additionally need to monetize some or all of this incremental debt amount, we anticipate that gold will be well over $2,000 by the end of the year, courtesy of yet another round of accelerated dollar debasement, which also means that real gains in US stocks will be negated courtesy of the devaluation of the currency in which they are priced. The same, however, does not apply for gold, which with every passing day is priced in nothing but itself.
The Bloomberg chart of the day first presented on July 20.
And our revised version including the projected gold price.
The dollar fell against most major currencies on Wednesday after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the central bank could resort to more monetary stimulus if a sluggish U.S. economy weakens further.
That pushed the euro near $1.42, moving it further from the prior session’s four-month low beneath $1.39 and on track for its best day since mid-January.
Surprisingly swift Chinese growth data also helped divert attention, at least temporarily, from a worsening euro zone debt crisis after Fitch Ratings said an ambitious Italian deficit reduction plan would help stabilize its credit rating.
Simon Maughn, co-head of European equities at MF Global, has told CNBC that a third round of so-called quantitative easing is in the works. The private Federal Reserve will again become the marginal buyer of bonds.
The latest effort by the Fed to finance the government’s staggering deficit will end in June.
If the private Federal Reserve owned by offshore banksters stops this lending scheme, interest rates will rise significantly which in turn will exert tremendous pressure on the American public. If interest rates surge anytime soon, millions of indebted Americans may default on their debt, thereby bankrupting the American financial institutions, as Puru Saxena, founder of Puru Saxena Wealth Management, notes.
“The bond market is going in one direction which is up-falling yields which is telling you quite clearly the direction of economic travel is downwards. Downgrades. QE3 (a third round of quantitative easing) is coming,” Maughn told the business news network. “The bond markets are all smarter than us, and that’s exactly what the bond markets are telling me.”
“What’s interesting in the bond markets over the last couple of sessions is, you’ve seen human traders trying to step in and call this turn in the market the same way that equities have done … and they have just been mowed down by the quant funds which are all about leverage, all about momentum and are betting on bond prices going up,” Maughn said.
“One more big injection of cash into the bond market should take you through at least the summer season into the beginning of the fourth quarter.”
“That cash injection will have the normal inflationary knock-on impact, driving back up commodities, supporting industrial stocks, dragging the financials up with them… I think it’s all about the monetary injection trade,” Maughn told CNBC.
During his Bretton Woods II weekend conference, billionaire financier George Soros has issued many bold statements, not the least of which included claiming that the Dollar had already fallen as the world’s reserve currency, and is now reduced to sharing the role, in an interview with Bloomberg:
The big question is whether the U.S. dollar should be the reserve currency; it no longer is, it shares that role with the euro, other currencies, and commodities. But it’s not just gold being used as a substitute, but oil too, which is putting upward pressure on the market.
Soros has convened the Bretton Woods II event in hopes of leading financial reforms and formulating a replacement to the dollar on the world market. He has argued that the original Bretton Woods agreements, which also created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), have been outmoded and are in need of new arrangements.
Meanwhile, Soros prescribed more debt for the U.S., urging against calls to shrink the budget. “There is very a strong push to tighten the budget as a way to reduce government spending… In my opinion, the country could actually absorb some more debt in order to get the economy going,” he said.
“If you have a growing economy, you can tolerate a higher level of debt.”
Perhaps Soros’ comments reached Washington in time, as their budget cuts only amounted to a paltry $38 billion, a literal drop in the bucket to mounting national debt.
In other matters, Soros estimated that despite the risks of inflation in China, it had emerged as the the ‘big winner’ of the financial crisis. It had been largely immune to the collapse due to its ‘isolation,’ he indicated. Indeed, ‘China was the main beneficiary of globalization,’ Soros said.
Soros also commented on other matters, like the ECB interest rate hike. Further statements are expected to emerge from him and other figures attending the Bretton Woods II conference after it concludes.
David Andolfatto, Vice President in the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, makes one of the most ludicrous arguments against Ron Paul’s attack on the Fed that one could make. I mean even for a Fed apologist, it is off the wall.
He attacks this paragraph in Ron Paul’s book End the Fed:
One only needs to reflect on the dramatic decline in the value of the dollar that has taken place since the Fed was established in 1913. The goods and services you could buy for $1.00 in 1913 now cost nearly $21.00. Another way to look at this is from the perspective of the purchasing power of the dollar itself. It has fallen to less than $0.05 of its 1913 value. We might say that the government and its banking cartel have together stolen $0.95 of every dollar as they have pursued a relentlessly inflationary policy.
What are the details of the attack?
He starts out this way:
The guy can be a real pinhead at times. And this is never so evident as in his persistent “attacks” against the Fed…Now, of course, I work at the Fed, so maybe you think I’m just complaining for the sake of defending my employer. If you think that, I can understand why you do. It is because you do not know me.
There are legitimate arguments one could make against the Fed as an institution and/or about the conduct of Fed policy. And then there are the stupid arguments, for example, the one contained on pg. 25 of his book End the Fed
So what is at the heart of Andolfatto’s defense of the Fed destroying 95% of the value of the dollar and calling Ron Paul’s argument stupid? Here it is:
There is this old idea in monetary theory called money neutrality. Money neutrality means that larger quantities of money ultimately manifest themselves in the form of higher nominal prices (and wages), and not on real quantities. No serious economist disputes the idea of long-run money neutrality.
Yes, what cost $1 in 1913 now costs $20. But so what? Money neutrality states that if you were earning $1 per hour in 1913, you are now earning $20 per hour (and even more, if labor productivity is higher).
That’s it, the beginning and end of Andolfatto’s Fed defense of destroying 95% of the value of the dollar. It all works out in the end, says Andolfatto. But, please, Mr. Andolfatto explain to me how this works out for someone who has been a careful saver of his money and now sees the purchasing power of that money destroyed? Please explain to me how this works out for a retired person on a fixed income who sees the declining purchasing power of that income? Please explain to me how this works out for the rest of the country when Wall Street bankers are the first to get their hands on newly printed Fed money, so that they can bid up all kinds of prices, including rents on apartments, which makes it difficult for anyone but a Wall Streeter to afford to live in Manhattan?
These damages, Mr. Andolfatto, you somehow don’t see and even think Ron Paul is stupid and a pinhead for raising questions about them. I would say you are suffering from what I have seen a lot in those working for the government: delusion. Phil Swagel, who was the chief economic advisor to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, told me that he didn’t even know there was any major decline in money supply growth during the summer of 2008. To not watch money supply growth when you are the Deputy Treasury Secretary for economic affairs is simply bizzare to me.
That you can’t see how a destruction of 95% of the value of the dollar might hurt some people, falls right into that category. You guys really suffer from what Brad DeLong has admitted he has suffered from. It is what he calls, Greenspanism, the absurd belief that whatever the Fed does is right, even if logic suggests the exact opposite.
But, hey, if you think the destruction of a currency is no biggie, here’s a job tip for you, call Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. He really thinks the same way you do.
Starta en blogg!
Logga in
Registrera dig
Kontakt
Stefan
Inlägg - RSS 2.0
Kommentarer: 0
Kategorier:
Ekonomi
Media
Etiketter:
Infowars.com
pengar
ekonomi
guld
silver
dollar
George Soros
He attacks this paragraph in Ron Paul’s book 