Wednesday
Dec122012
WATCH: JPMorgan's Disgusting Thanksgiving Commerical
When times get tough, we go to the Fed.
What? No mention of derivatives. Must have been an oversight.
Check out this JPMorgan ad that was in heavy rotation over the Thanksgiving holiday, especially during college and NFL games, selling the hallucination that Jamie Dimon's London Whale is the backbone of America, and tied to all iconic American dreams. Bleh.
Which is worse, this commercial or GM's nauseating Thanksgiving ad?
Dec 12, 2012 at 12:59 PM
Reader Comments (18)
http://dailybail.com/home/video-gms-annoying-new-tv-commercial-gives-thanks-to-taxpaye.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jBIT_Lmnscs
The model works about the same in every country, although the particulars vary between domestic and international agencies and the military and enforcement bureaucracies. Some call it the securitisation process. Some call it corporatisation. Some call it privatisation. Some call it globalisation. What this means in layman's terms is that the management of resources is centralised. This is done through a system of securitisation based on privilege and coercion rather than performance and the rule of law.
From the viewpoint of the neighbourhood there are six ways to centralise local capital:
First, you consolidate all retail sales into a few large corporations, including franchise operations, cutting out local small business.
Second, you outsource ("privatise") all local government functions to a few large corporations or subject them to such an overwhelming amount of federal regulation that they can be controlled and managed for the benefit of a few large corporations and their investors.
Third, you buy up all the land and real estate, or encumber them with mortgages in a way that is as profitable as possible and allows you to get control when you want it.
Fourth, you finance the entire process with the profits from narcotics and organised crime that you market into the neighbourhood. This enables you to finance your expansion in a manner that lowers your cost of capital in a way that conveniently lowers the initial price of your investment and/or weakens your competition. I buy your business and land with your money at a fraction of the cost. No one sells her home faster and cheaper than a mother trying to make bail or pay a lawyer to save her family from jail or death. That is why narcotics trafficking is the ultimate form of neighbourhood leveraged buyout.
Fifth, you leverage all of this with tax shelters, private tax-exempt bonds, municipal bonds, government guarantees, and government subsidies -- all protected with complex securities arrangements.
Sixth, you ensure that the only companies and mutual funds allowed meaningful access to capital are those run by syndicate-approved management teams. To raise significant campaign funds candidates for political office appoint syndicate-approved management teams. Investment syndicates define the boundaries of managed competition that cycle all capital back through their pipelines. That means the only local boys who can make good are those who play ball with the syndicate.
In this way the private equity in a community can be extracted at a near infinite rate of return to investors and a highly negative rate of return to taxpayers.
How the Money Works: Hardeman County, Tennessee
My home in rural Tennessee shows the pattern well. A few years ago, about thirty small businesses shut down within six months after the new Wal Mart opened with the blessings of local government. The result within a year was that we transferred substantial equity and employment from local to corporate control without asking for a percentage of the equity to be created. Now a majority of our retail purchases produce not a dime of knowledge or equity for us. The knowledge of how to build and run retail businesses is leaving our workforce. We have no access to the data on how our retail money works locally.
At about the same time, a national prison company based in Nashville, Correction Corporation of America (CCA) got the deal to build and operate two prisons down the road in Whiteville. Local and state government provided them with a package of zoning, infrastructure, contracts, tax-exempt bonds and assumption of risk that created lots of equity for CCA and its investors. Hardeman County, of course, got zero. After the deal was over, we had the risk, and they had the equity, although rumours abound about the local officials who got stock. A little later, a Tennessee paper reported that the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican state party sold his CCA stock for $17 million. Government, that is to say taxpayers, paid the ticket, and the private investors and management reaped the equity.
The numbers on the prison deal help to explain the War on Drugs and welfare reform. The American people who make about $36,000 per year on average will not support paying $55,000 per year for a woman and her 1.8 children to live in HUD housing on welfare and food stamps. So the game of using HUD housing subsidies and tax shelters to warehouse people in communities can be extended only long enough to refinance the equity out of or gentrify investor's current investments in HUD housing. The HUD development game is being replaced in part by a prison privatisation and development game that warehouses the same folks in prisons at a $154,000 all-in cost per person per year. The result is a rush of prison deals with government contracts, tax-exempt bond financing, and tax shelters combined with stock deals. Prisons have been sold to farming communities as "economic development." In the meantime, corporations have consolidated control of seeds, agricultural biotech farming, food processing and distribution here and abroad.
During the mid-90's, you could see it beginning inside the beltway in Washington. Mandatory sentencing legislation or an announcement to sell government prison facilities on a negotiated basis generates significant capital gains immediately. Who wants to work hard in the real world when one can make quick up-front profits on their prison stocks?
Drugs came to Hardeman County before I moved there. One of my friends is a farmer who said that she first noticed the drugs in 1986. Interesting. That coincides with activities at the airport in Mena, Arkansas -- allegedly a significant drugs and arms transhipment point used during the Iran Contra operation. Mena is only a puddle jump away from our local airport in Bolivar, the county seat. It makes sense that with so much coming through Mena in the early 1980's that the distribution routes would push into the surrounding states.
Fifteen years on, we are overwhelmed. Should you pass the airport late at night, very likely you would see a private plane landing. When a private plane lands at a rural municipal airport at 4am on Sunday morning, it does make you wonder. This summer, we have had a major drug bust at a farm half a mile down the road, robberies, and high-speed convoys of sheriff's cars with sirens wailing every day for the last few weeks. A man down the road could not get off crack and so, at the age of 30, drank a bottle of acid and died. Who is taking all these drugs? They say it is the kids. The only statistics that I can find indicate that marijuana is Tennessee's largest cash crop -- bigger than cotton and hardwood. This may be so, but where is it growing and who is growing it?
The money-laundering situation fits the picture. If you travel by car enough you notice how many fast food restaurants and gas station food marts are far from doing the total retail necessary to support overhead and capital investment. One night I drove ten miles to Bolivar to go through the car wash at the local Amoco station. I tried to pay for a three-dollar car wash with quarters. I was told they would not take coins. It was a policy. Counting coins was too much work, explained two attendants as they chatted with friends, with no other customer but me. So I got back in my car and drove ten miles home and washed the car with a hose and some paper towels. The symbolic economy is too busy processing the proceeds of crime to do the work necessary in the real economy. Indeed, it makes you wonder, which one is the real economy?
I don't mean to say that Hickory Valley is not wonderful. It is. The land is beautiful; we have wonderful churches and more than a few fine neighbours. The reality is, however, that too many people are making money by destroying what we have.
Took this from Cheyennes post from last week. Guys this to me is some really important stuff. Please read if you have not done so. DB, If this isn't cool to do let me know. Thanks.
Why the Senate Won’t Touch Jamie Dimon
http://www.globalresearch.ca/wall-street-s-protection-racket-of-covert-derivatives-jpmorgan-derivatives-prop-up-u-s-debt/31505
Details Of The $291 Trillion In Derivatives To Which American Taxpayers Are Exposed
http://seekingalpha.com/article/503761-details-of-the-291-trillion-in-derivatives-to-which-american-taxpayers-are-exposed
Must read
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/10/analyzing-jamie-dimons-bear-stearns.html
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2009/05/gov-shovels-more-cash-to-jpmorgan-chase.html
Beside's Jamie is O's favorite banker remember the cuff links
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2009/07/president-obamas-favorite-banker.html
JPMorgan Sued by Lehman Over $2.2 Billion Derivatives Claims
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-17/jpmorgan-sued-by-lehman-over-2-dot-2-billion-derivatives-claims
Credit derivatives were the brainchild of savvy bankers at JPMorgan in the 1990s
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d0ca4bae-9dda-11e1-9456-00144feabdc0.html
JPMorgan Chase loses big in derivatives gamble
http://www.dw.de/jpmorgan-chase-loses-big-in-derivatives-gamble/a-15943625
Oh this is sweet
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/05/oh-this-is-sweet-senate-banking.html
JPMorgan’s Mystery Number in Derivatives
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/jpmorgans-mystery-number-in-derivatives/
Derivatives: The Unregulated Global Casino for Banks Infographic
http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/derivatives/bank_exposure.html
They need more tax breaks don't ya know
Morgan Stanley CEO Pushes 'Fiscal Cliff' Bipartisanship As Bank Lobbies For Tax Breaks
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/morgan-stanley-ceo-fiscal-cliff_n_2205756.html
The Great American Retirement Scam: Why The Wealthiest CEO's In America Want To Take Away Your Social Security
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/11/28/the-great-american-retirement-scam-why-the-wealthiest-ceos-in-america-want-to-take-away-your-social-security/
Dimon lies about everything. I don't think he's capable of factual utterances at this point. His brain chemistry is addicted to lies.
Dimon lies about JP Morgan not needing bailout (it did), he lies about only borrowing from the Fed only at its urging, in order to encourage other banks to borrow (completely ridiculous), and he lied up and down about the London Whale trade ("It's a tempest in a teapot, it's only a $2 billion loss, it's..." another lie).
All of these statements from Dimon are demonstrably and unambiguously false, flatly refuted by publicly available information. Whenever you hear Dimon speak, know that lies are penetrating your brain, degrading it. The man is quite literally a public nuisance, and so is that ward of state that he runs as a criminal enterprise, JP Morgan.
The ad shamelessly advocates "free markets" and "free enterprise," either one of which--if not for unprecedented amounts of government welfare--would have meant the burial of JP Morgan.
It's about as convincing as OJ's campaign to find the real killers. How'd that turn out again?
Inside the Risky Bets of Central Banks
snip
Of late, these secret talks have focused on global economic troubles and the aggressive measures by central banks to manage their national economies. Since 2007, central banks have flooded the world financial system with more than $11 trillion. Faced with weak recoveries and Europe's churning economic problems, the effort has accelerated. The biggest central banks plan to pump billions more into government bonds, mortgages and business loans.
Their monetary strategy isn't found in standard textbooks. The central bankers are, in effect, conducting a high-stakes experiment, drawing in part on academic work by some of the men who studied and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s and 1980s.
While many national governments, including the U.S., have failed to agree on fiscal policy—how best to balance tax revenues with spending during slow growth—the central bankers have forged their own path, independent of voters and politicians, bound by frequent conversations and relationships stretching back to university days
Three of the world's most powerful central bankers launched their careers in a building known as "E52," home to the MIT economics department. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and ECB President Mario Draghi earned their Ph.D.s there in the late 1970s. Bank of England Governor Mervyn King taught briefly there in the 1980s, sharing an office with Mr. Bernanke.
The U.S. Federal Reserve now buys $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities each month and appears set at a meeting Wednesday to spend billions more on Treasury securities
The goal is to lower borrowing costs and stimulate stock markets to encourage spending and investment by households and business. But the method is untested on such a global scale, and central bankers have labored in behind-the-scenes meetings this year to size up the risks.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323717004578157152464486598.html
hahaha not found in standard text books they are using Marx's Theory of Reflexivity bernanke and most global bankers are fabian socialists
QE (quantitative easing) is essentially the printing of money and the addition of liquidity into the markets so that stock (and other asset) prices are given an artificial boost. Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke believes that by pulling up stocks, the masses will feel richer and spend more on consumer goods, thus lifting up the economy. This is based on Karl Marx's reflexivity theory (George Soros essentially paraphrased Marx) that states by turning the small wheel (stocks), you can turn the big wheel (economy), which in turn will come back and turn up the small wheel (stocks). Bernanke subscribes to such a theory, and he wants QE to lift up the small wheel (stocks), which he hopes will lift up the big wheel (the economy).
http://seekingalpha.com/article/747801-will-qe3-be-announced-in-august
Thank you SKINFLINT, excellent!
Now I am going to have a bottle of wine!
I mean, if seeing dots connected is really your thing, then allow me to present the work of one Eric deCarbonnel.
For the broader context behind the Fitts' neighborhoods story, check out this stunner (which expressly references Fitts' work):
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2010/10/why-deficits-stopped-mattering.html
After you get your head around that wheel, this post--quite possibly the grandaddy of all blog posts, as in EVER--reveals it as a wheel inside a wheel. It's so dense, so intense, that I've yet to make it through. In fact, it's so comprehensive that deCarbonnel basically said, "my job as a blogger is through."
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2011/06/the-esf-and-its-history.html
Oh, and by the way, Eric deCarbonnel is the great grandson of Frank Vanderlip.
That should be enough industrial strength weirdness for a year or two...