General Electric Co., teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, has been laying off thousands of workers over the past year and shuttering manufacturing plants in the U.S. – this, despite the Fed’s $16.1 billion rescue package in the fall of 2008.

GE also has some interesting operational skeletons in its corporate closet…

GE Capital, along with several other very large, well-heeled fiduciary entities was charged and convicted in a major municipal bond bid-rigging scandal in 2012. GE Capital had been shaking down municipalities across America, and screwing the pants off hard-working U.S. citizens. On a large scale.

More from the trial… by Matt Taibbi, June 21, 2012                                                                 The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia | Rolling…                                               

“The state’s first witness, confusingly, was a CDR broker named Doug Goldberg… Right off the bat, in fact, Doug Goldberg explained that while at CDR, he had routinely helped the cream of Wall Street rig bids on municipal bonds by letting them take a peek at other bids:
Q: Who were some of the providers you gave last looks to?
A: There was a whole host of them, but GE Capital, FSA, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Société Générale, Lehman Brothers, Bear. There were others.
[snip]                                                                                                                           Goldberg went on to testify that he repeatedly rigged auctions with the three defendants. Sometimes he gave them “last looks” so they could shave basis points off their winning bids; other times he asked them to intentionally submit losing offers – called cover bids – to allow other firms to win.                                                                                                  …… The broker went on to detail how he had worked with the GE executives to manipulate a number of auctions.
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And several short years earlier, U.S. taxpayers were helping bail GE Capital out of a financial hole, courtesy of generous Federal Reserve emergency lending initiatives.

Excerpts from Bloomberg report: Bloomberg  Nov 28, 2011 :
General Electric Co.’s GE Capital finance unit was the biggest U.S. issuer of commercial paper in 2008. GE, the world’s largest maker of jet engines and locomotives, turned to the Federal Reserve for emergency liquidity after the market for commercial paper — bonds with maturities of less than 270 days — froze in late 2008.

GE Capital, which had $91.8 billion of CP outstanding at the end of September 2008, borrowed from the Fed’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility from October 2008 through February 2009, with a balance as high as $16.1 billion, data show. Initially, a GE spokesman said the company borrowed from the program “to demonstrate our support for what the Fed is doing.” In December, GE Treasurer Kathryn Cassidy said the company was using the CPFF “primarily as a liquidity backstop.” 

Peak amount of debt on 11/21/2008:  $16.1B

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If the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve can firehose liquidity out to criminal municipal ‘bid-riggers’ like General Electric Co, in its time of need….

…then shouldn’t honest, hard-working U.S. citizens also be granted the same direct access to liquidity to restore financial health, across the board, at ‘ground level’ in America?

Answer: Yes they should.

The Leviticus 25 Plan is a dynamic economic initiative providing direct liquidity benefits for American families, while at the same time scaling back the role of government in managing and controlling the affairs of citizens.  It is a comprehensive plan with long-term economic and social benefits for citizens and government.

The inspiration for this plan is based upon Biblical principles set forth in the Book of Leviticus, principles tendering direct economic liberties to the people.

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According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the International Monetary Fund’s Total Resources amount to” $661 billion in quota; $693 billion of additional pledged or committed resources.” The U.S. Financial Commitment to that quota amounts to $115 billion, and $39 billion to supplemental funds.

In other words, U.S. taxpayers are funding about 17.46% of the IMF’s loans to their “Largest Borrowers:Argentina, Ukraine, Greece, and Egypt.”

U.S. taxpayers therefore funded about $9.8 billion of the IMF’s $56 billion loan to economic basket case Argentina in 2018. That money is now, as they say, “down the drain.”

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Two Years After Handing It The Biggest Ever Bailout Loan, IMF Finds Argentina Debt Levels Are “Unsustainable”

ZeroHedge, Feb 19, 2020 – Excerpts:

Back in the summer of 2018, when the IMF handed Argentina an unprecedented $56 billion bailout loan, the largest in IMF history, some warned that this is a case of deja vu similar to the 2001/2002 precedent when Argentina eventually defaulted on its foreign creditors, while humiliating the IMF which had signed off on Argentina’s economic policies that ended up in bankruptcy court. The IMF, however, was confident that this time would be different, and rushed – under now-ECB head Christine Lagarde – to hand to Argentina the greatest amount of money the IMF had ever disbursed to a struggling nation.

It turned out that this time wasn’t different, and after completing a week of meetings in Argentine, the IMF – which so generously handed out other people’s money to prop up the crumbling, corrupt Latin American nation less than two years aqo – finally threw in the towel and admitted that Argentina’s debt load is unsustainable, paving the way for the government to ask private bondholders to take on losses as it prepares to renegotiate its obligations.

The last time IMF officials commented on Argentina’s debt was in the fourth review of the credit line in July 2019, when they called it “sustainable, but not with a high probability.”

[snip]

South America’s second-largest nation owes over $38.7 billion to bondholders just this year, and payments peak in May. There is no way it can make those payments without magic.

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If the U.S. government can see fit to flush billions of dollars out through the IMF money pipes to the likes of Argentina, Ukraine, Greece, Egypt, and others….

Then U.S. citizens deserve nothing less than that same direct access to liquidity provided by the most powerful economic acceleration plan in the world…….

The Leviticus 25 Plan is a dynamic economic initiative providing direct liquidity benefits for American families, while at the same time scaling back the role of government in managing and controlling the affairs of citizens.  It is a comprehensive plan with long-term economic and social benefits for citizens and government.

The inspiration for this plan is based upon Biblical principles set forth in the Book of Leviticus, principles tendering direct economic liberties to the people.

The Leviticus 25 Plan – An Economic Acceleration Plan for America

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February 2020 quote:                                                                                                    President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), the 7^th President of the U.S., left office in 1837 and spoke these words in his Farewell Address on March 4th: 

“You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number, and has chosen you as the guardians of freedom, to preserve it for the benefit of the human race. May He who holds in His hands the destinies of nations, make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enable you, with pure hearts and hands and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time, the great charge He has committed to your keeping.”  

Corporate bond quality is unraveling – trouble ahead.

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Guggenheim’s Minerd Warns Global Central Banks Are Fueling A Ponzi Market

ZeroHedge, Jan 21, 2020 – Excerpts:

Authored by Scott Minerd, Global CIO Guggenheim Investments,

One of the topics that I am focused on in Davos is the deterioration in the quality of the corporate bond markets. 

The disturbing trend is that despite the rally in risk assets in the prior year, the number of defaults rose by approximately 50 percent, according to data compiled by J.P. Morgan. Additionally, the number of distressed exchanges increased by 400 percent.

This correlates well with our observation that the number of idiosyncratic defaults has been increasing. Ultimately, markets will need to reprice for this rising risk with increased bond spreads relative to Treasury securities. However, that day of reckoning when spreads rise is being held off by the flood of central bank liquidity and international investors fleeing negative yields overseas. 

And let’s not forget downgrade risk of BBBs: today 50 percent of the investment-grade market is rated BBB, and in 2007 it was 35 percent. More specifically, about 8 percent of the investment-grade market was BBB- in 2007 and today it is 15 percent. It has more than quintupled in size outstanding, from $800 billion to $3.3 trillion. We expect 15–20 percent of BBBs to get downgraded to high yield in the next downgrade wave: This would equate to $500–660 billion and be the largest fallen angel volume on record—and would also swamp the high yield market.

Ultimately, we will reach a tipping point when investors will awaken to the rising tide of defaults and downgrades. The timing is hard to predict but this reminds me a lot of the lead-up to the 2001 and 2002 recession. 

The prolonged period of tight credit spreads experienced in the late 1990s lulled investors into unwittingly increasing risk at a time they should have been upgrading their portfolios.

This brings to mind the famous observation by economist Hyman Minsky, who stated that stability is inherently destabilizing. That is to say that long periods of relative stability in risk assets causes investors to keep upping the risk during a long period of calm.

Ultimately, this leads to what he called a Ponzi Market where the only reason investors keep adding to risk is the fear that prices will be higher tomorrow (or in the case of bonds, yields will be lower tomorrow).

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Central Banks are pumping up another ponzi scheme – with potentially disastrous consequences when the corporate default wave hits – and markets once again freeze up.

America needs ground level solution to eliminate debt and set the U.S. economy back on track for economic prosperity, sustainable growth, and sound money.

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