U.S. banks are up to their eyeballs in financial derivatives…

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 Financial Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Top 25 US Banks Have 222 Trillion Dollars Derivatives Exposure             ZeroHedge, May 17, 2017  Excerpts:

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The recklessness of the “too big to fail” banks almost doomed them the last time around, but apparently they still haven’t learned from their past mistakes.  Today, the top 25 U.S. banks have 222 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives. 

As long as stock prices continue to rise and the U.S. economy stays fairly stable, these extremely risky financial weapons of mass destruction will probably not take down our entire financial system.  But someday another major crisis will inevitably happen, and when that day arrives the devastation that these financial instruments will cause will be absolutely unprecedented.

During the great financial crisis of 2008, derivatives played a starring role, and U.S. taxpayers were forced to step in and bail out companies such as AIG that were on the verge of collapse because the risks that they took were just too great.

The following numbers regarding exposure to derivatives contracts come directly from the OCC’s most recent quarterly report (see Table 2), and as you can see the level of recklessness that we are currently witnessing is more than just a little bit alarming…

Citigroup – Total Assets: $1,792,077,000,000 (slightly less than 1.8 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $47,092,584,000,000 (more than 47 trillion dollars)

JPMorgan Chase  – Total Assets: $2,490,972,000,000 (just under 2.5 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $46,992,293,000,000 (nearly 47 trillion dollars)

Goldman Sachs  – Total Assets: $860,185,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $41,227,878,000,000 (more than 41 trillion dollars)

Bank Of America  – Total Assets: $2,189,266,000,000 (a little bit more than 2.1 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $33,132,582,000,000 (more than 33 trillion dollars)

Morgan Stanley  – Total Assets: $814,949,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $28,569,553,000,000 (more than 28 trillion dollars)

Wells Fargo  – Total Assets: $1,930,115,000,000 (more than 1.9 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $7,098,952,000,000 (more than 7 trillion dollars)

Collectively, the top 25 banks have a total of 222 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.

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Note – The system is only as strong as the weakest link(s). And when one or more of the under-reserved counterparties fails, things can, and will, unravel.

And then Central Banks will again open up the liquidity transfusion channels for another massive bailout for the global financial industry. And ordinary ‘citizens’ across the globe will ultimately pay – for the inevitable degrading of the fiat currency system.

It is time to enact a preventative economic ‘back-fire’ event with a massive, ground-level debt elimination plan.  It is time to grant U.S. citizens the same direct access to liquidity that was provided to Wall Street’s financial sector during the last great financial crisis.

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2018 –  $75,000 per U.S. citizen

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2018 (2488)

U.S. taxpayer dollars have been used to support the IMF bail-out of Greece. The U.S. funded at least $780 million (17.09%) of the July $4.6 billion IMF transfer to Greece (purportedly funding interest payments to hedge funds which had speculated in purchasing the high-risk Greek debt).

U.S. taxpayers also funded approximately $2.9 trillion of a massive 2014 IMF loan to Ukraine to help Kiev pay off creditors including Western banks, Gazprom (the big Russian oil company), and previous IMF loan payment obligations).

The U.S. Treasury Department followed that up by guaranteeing a $1 billion Ukrainian bond issuance.

Trillions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds have been used to bail out the citizens of bankrupt foreign nations, and now U.S. citizens deserve the very same access to their own money that foreign citizens have been receiving in foreign assistance payments from the U.S.

It is time to activate America’s powerhouse economic acceleration plan – and to eliminate massive amounts of debt stress and restore financial health at the family level.

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The Leviticus 25 Plan 2018 –  $75,000 per U.S. citizen

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2018 (2483)

A brief review of the U.S. Federal Reserve free money handouts to foreign banks:

“How The Fed Is Handing Over Billions In “Profits” To Foreign Banks Each Year”   Zero Hedge 2/11/13 – Excerpts:

Fed QE flows over the past 4 years, dating back to March 2009, show that foreign banks have been the primary recipients of “cash generated by Fed excess reserves.”

Small domestic banks and large domestic bank cash reserves have been flat to modestly higher (a ‘steady’ $800 billion) over the 4-year period, while “Foreign Banks” have nearly doubled their cash reserves during that same time – from the newly created reserves.

This was confirmed by the Fed itself, which in a paper from November 2012, admitted just this when it said that “the recent unprecedented build-up of cash balances by [foreign banks] was almost entirely composed of excess reserves.”

And where does this “foreign bank” cash ‘park itself?’

Answer:  These foreign bank excess cash reserves are parked at “Reserve Banks” – currently about $954 billion, earning 0.25% interest (which the Fed decided to start paying out in December 2008).

The “Fed paid some $6 billion in interest to foreign banks, in the process subsidizing and keeping insolvent European and other foreign banks, in business and explicitly to the detriment of countless US-based banks who have to compete with Fed-funded foreign banks and who have to fire countless workers courtesy of this Fed subsidy to foreign workers.”

“From December 2008 through the last week of January [2013], the Fed has paid out some $6 billion in cash (red line) to European banks simply as interest on excess reserves:”

“But that’s just the beginning. If we are correct in assuming that QE3 will be a replica of QE2 when all the new reserves created ended up as cash on foreign bank balance sheets, it means that we can quite accurately forecast what the total foreign bank cash position will be on December 31, 2013 (as the Fed will certainly not end its open ended monetization of the US deficit before then, or likely, ever). The result: just under $2 trillion in cash held by foreign banks operating in the US, which also means that in calendar 2013, the Fed will fund and subsidize foreign banks a blended interest payment of $3.5 billion! This is entirely separate from the $2 trillion liquidity subsidy that Bernanke will also have handed out to keep these banks afloat, and is $3.5 billion that will flow right through the P&L and end up in the pockets of offshore shareholders who otherwise would very likely be wiped out had it not been for the Fed’s relentless efforts to bailout foreign banks.”

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U.S. citizens deserve nothing less than the same direct access to liquidity that the Federal Reserve provided to foreign banks during the financial crisis (2008-2013).

It is time for U.S. citizens themselves to step up to the head of the line and receive their own credit extensions direct from the Federal Reserve.

It is our money, and we deserve the same direct access to it – through a Citizens Credit Facility.

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The Leviticus 25 Plan 2018 –  $75,000 per U.S. citizen

The Leviticus 25 Plan 2018 (2471)

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), or “ObamaCare,” was signed into law on March 23, 2010, with most of its provisions going into effect on January 1, 2014.  Over the past three years, despite billions of dollars in back-end subsidies to the insurance industry, major insurers have been losing money on ACA plans and abandoning state exchanges. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that for ObamaCare’s second benefit year (2015), it would need to make “$7.8 billion in reinsurance payments to 497 of the 575 participating issuers nationwide,” due to contribution deficits versus payment requests within the industry (Kaiser Foundation Aug 17, 2016).

Insurance companies went on to lose approximately $2 billion on the exchanges in 2016.  United Healthcare, one of the largest insurers in America, anticipated an $850 million loss and announced plans to pull out of 27 of the 34 plans where it had been offering coverage.  Rivals Aetna, Anthem, and Humana each projected $300 million in ACA plan losses, with Aetna bailing out from 11 of 15 states (Bloomberg, Aug 17, 2016).

Cooperative health insurers like CoOportunity Health (Iowa, Nebraska), created with federal dollars under the ACA, began collapsing in 2015, rolling across the country from New York to Oregon. By August 2016, only seven of the original 23 co-ops were still operational (Forbes, Oct 29, 2015).

Healthcare premiums for consumers have been rising at double digit percentages for the past four years.  ObamaCare’s 2017 rate increases, finalized in October 2016, included an average cost increase of 25% nationally (Kaiser Family Foundation). The 10 hardest hit states are seeing premium increases average in at “62% while Arizona is officially the biggest loser with rates in Phoenix soaring 145%.”

Over a million middle class Americans have dropped coverage each of the past two years due to burdensome price increases and skyrocketing deductibles. “ObamaCare, according to the liberal New York Times (Oct 2, 2016), is “too expensive and inaccessible.”

Healthcare providers and institutions are being squeezed hard by ObamaCare penalties and reduced payment rates.  Physicians have been negatively impacted by reimbursement cuts, and ObamaCare’s non-clinical burdens and paperwork have forced many medical professionals into spending more of their precious time responding to the federal bureaucracy and less time with patients (CNN Jan 17, 2017).

A recent analysis by the Kaiser Foundation (Mar 10, 2017) estimated that 79% of hospitals in the U.S. will be hit with ObamaCare penalties totaling over a half billion dollars in fiscal 2017.

Finally, the sheer magnitude of ObamaCare’s administrative costs have been stunning.

Federal government data for establishing and operating the ACA exchanges included “costs to the federal government of operating the federally-run exchanges, federal grants to states to establish their own exchanges or for expenses relating to coordinating with a federally-run exchange, and CMS’ administrative costs related to those grants.”

In the ACA roll-out year, 2014, “The total federal cost for the ACA exchange program was $9.75 billion to enroll 6.34 million people,” a per capita administrative cost of “$1,539 for the federal government, excluding administrative costs to the insurers for enrolling and serving those individuals.” The federal administrative cost for “merely establishing the exchanges to obtain enrollees” was therefore “more than triple the total administrative cost ($414) to insurers of both enrolling and providing coverage for individuals prior to the establishment of ACA exchanges” (American Action Forum Dec 31, 2016).

Obamacare is further expected to add a massive “$273.6 billion in additional insurance overhead… an average of $1,375 per newly insured person, per year, from 2012 through 2022” (Health Affairs Blog, May 27, 2015). This overhead bonanza represents “a whopping 22.5 percent of the total estimated $2.76 trillion in all federal government spending” for the ACA during that period, according to the report’s authors.

ObamaCare is not sustainable. America needs a fresh new start in healthcare.

Congress must develop a ‘citizen-centered’ replacement model which maximizes quality and accessibility for the greatest number of Americans.  This model should redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted in administrative overhang into individual Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) for citizens to allocate directly for personal healthcare needs, specifically routine primary care and outpatient services.

The hundreds of millions of healthcare transactions each month for primary care, prescriptions, and other services should ‘not’ be run through a big-government, bloat-heavy, labyrinthine system.  Routine expenditures can, and should, appropriate ‘direct-pay’ corridors.

The U.S. Health Care Freedom Plan offers a comprehensive new dynamic to meet those ends.  It improves access and affordability and reestablishes genuine patient-provider relationships.

It comes with an added benefit:  “If you like your ObamaCare, you can keep your ObamaCare.”  Every other U.S. citizen will receive an ACA exemption and $25,000 in a qualified MSA.

The U.S. Health Care Freedom Plan honors the counsel of Buckminster Fuller:  “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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The U.S. Health Care Freedom Plan is the only comprehensive, citizen-centered health care plan in America.  It ‘resets’ the health care industry to present a clean, efficient and responsible system.  Most importantly, this plan restores individual freedom and liberty for all participating Americans.

ObamaCare … ‘on the ropes.’ The U.S. Health Care Freedom Plan – Clean, Affordable, and Ready to Launch