IMF bailouts: first Greece ($39 billion in 2010) … and now Ukraine ($17 billion in 2014)…. U.S. taxpayers foot 17%

The U.S. supports the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the tune of 17.1% of its funding. That is the U.S. “quota” percentage. But the true amount may actually be slightly more than that, due to something called “usable resources” (Zimbabwean dollars and Venezuelan pesos are not “usable” in terms of IMF lending)

Greece
When the IMF bailed out Greece with a $39 billion package in 2010, the U.S. portion of that bailout amounted to $6.669 billion. Thank you, American taxpayers.

Ukraine
The IMF just announced a $17.1 billion bailout package ($3.2 billion to be extended immediately to forestall defaults). The U.S. taxpayers ‘kick-in” amounted to $2.924 billion.

A significant amount of the IMF bailouts will be used to pay off gas debts owed to Russia.
But first… (again, thank you, American taxpayers)…:

ZeroHedge 5-6-14:  “Kiev will use the first portion of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan for augmenting its gold and currency reserves in order to stabilize the financial situation in the country, National Bank Chairman Stepan Kubiv said on Monday, May 5.

Over $1 billion from the first portion of the loan will go into the gold and currency reserves of Ukraine, which will strengthen the financial system of the country. The remainder will go to the budget to stabilize the macroeconomic and financial situation in Ukraine,” he said.
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To recap – The U.S. government funds 17% of the IMF budget, of which billions have flowed to, through the IMF, to Greece and Ukraine to help them pay off debts to the likes of hedge funds and Russia’s Putin.
And to provide funding to Ukraine to purchase gold and currency reserves “in order to stabilize the financial situation there.”

Novel idea:  What if U.S. citizens were also provided with the same access to their own money that the citizens of Greece and Ukraine have received, courtesy of our own U.S. government and the IMF…?

Greece and Ukraine have used U.S. funds to pay down debts and purchase gold.
Allow U.S. citizens to access credit, through a Citizens Credit Facility, to pay down our own debts and stabilize family finances.  And to purchase gold, as a hedge against a U.S. Dollar that has been losing purchasing power at a steady rate since the opening round of QE in March 2009.

It is time to level the playing field for U.S. citizens first – and time to restore economic liberty in America.

It is time now for The Leviticus 25 Plan.

 

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U.S. taxpayer dollars – ‘to Russia with love’…..

“Ukraine reached a preliminary deal with the International Monetary Fund to unlock $27 billion in international aid as U.S. lawmakers passed bills imposing more sanctions on Russians linked to Crimea’s annexation.”  Source: Bloomberg, Mar 27, 2014

$18 billion of that aid package is being anted up by the International Monetary Fund.

Note 1:  The U.S. finances 17.7% of the IMF budget, so U.S. taxpayers are kicking in a cool $3.2 billion in the deal – to ‘bail out’ Ukraine.

It was also announced (NY Times, March 27, 2014):  Congress Approves $1 Billion of Aid for Ukraine

WASHINGTON — The House and the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to approve a $1 billion aid package for Ukraine….

Total from the U.S. – about $4.2 billion

Note 2:  A significant $2.2 billion from these bailout packages will actually go to pay off some Ukrainian debt to……. Russian natural gas giant, Gazprom.

Gazprom has been playing some ‘hard-ball’ lately when it nearly “doubled the gas price for Ukraine to $485 per 1,000 cubic metres, compared to the $370-$380 it charges Europe on average. Ukraine says the new price is unacceptable and is politically motivated.”  Source:  Ukraine fails to pay for gas on time, debt stands at $2.2-billion: Russia’s Gazprom

U.S. taxpayers to the rescue.  Money to Ukraine.Money to Russia.

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And this raises the question:  How is it that our government will authorize billions of dollars in bailouts to Ukraine to help relieve their Russian debt, while at the same time our government will not consider credit extensions to our own U.S. citizens, providing equally important debt relief for American families?

Wake up, America.

The Leviticus 25 Plan – the equal opportunity plan for American families.

Big government – $4.4 billion in administrative costs just to “operationalize” state healthcare websites…

The U.S. healthcare system needs one simple fix – a citizen-based allocation of resources, rather than big-government central planning.

Our politicians have created a lumbering, red-tape laden healthcare monstrosity with bureaucrats, analysts, programmers, regulators, monitors, enforcers, healthcare coaches, and NFL advertisers all involved in the chain of players.

Website work alone reached an eye-popping $4 billion. It was recently announced that the government has spent $4.4 billion on ramping up state healthcare websites in “several waves of grants.”  In addition, last month Kathleen Sebelius testified on Capitol Hill that “the federal website has so far cost $174 million, including $56 million in technological support with more still owed to contractors.”

We need to refocus on the patient and the providers.  We need to decentralize.    We need to return to a cash basis.

Direct the Federal Reserve to electronically deposit $16,000 in to the Medical Savings Account (MSA) of every participating U.S. citizen.  Reverse the individual mandate to bring the private insurers back onto the playing field, and let families purchase high-deductible major medical policies with precisely the types of coverage they desire.

This would allow Americans to keep their major medical plans, keep their doctors and keep their pharmacists.

For a period of 5 years. participating U.S. citizens concurrently enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, VA, TriCare, and FEHB (approximately 121 million people) would not lose coverage in these programs, but would be responsible for covering a $3,000 annual deductible (all covered by the newly-available MSA funds).

This would allow for American families themselves to allocate $363 billion of their healthcare expenditures each year during the 5 year period – instead of running it through big government programs.

This “Citizens Plan” would have a wonderful, cleansing effect.  It would cut out the dead wood (millions of middlemen) and restore individual freedom of choice for choosing one’s own providers and services.  And all citizens would have resources for their basic day-to-day healthcare needs.

Doors are closing fast in the healthcare field.  We need a rescue plan. Cash paying customers would reopen a lot of doors.  America needs that.

America needs The Leviticus 25 Plan.

 

Economic meltdown Fall 2008: Fed and Treasury run “secret liquidity lifelines” to the big dogs of finance (Bloomberg)

As the banking crisis intensified in the Fall of 2008, with major banking institutions assuming (or on the verge of assuming) ‘underwater’ status, the Federal Reserve ran quickly to the rescue with secret liquidity lifelines” (Bloomberg 8-22-11).

The Fed substantially eased some important collateral rules for banks, “meaning that banks that could once borrow only against sound collateral, like Treasury bills or AAA-rated corporate bonds, could now borrow against pretty much anything – including some of the mortgage-backed sewage that got us into this mess in the first place….  ‘All of a sudden, banks were allowed to post absolute [expletive deleted] to the Fed’s balance sheet,’ [according to] the manager of the prominent hedge fund.” (Source: Bailout Hustle, Matt Taibbi).

The Federal Reserve invented various “facilities” to fire-hose liquidity out to the big banks and big brokerage firms, including these:

Primary Dealers’ Credit Facility                                            

Term Securities Lending Facility                                                          

Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program                                      

Commercial Paper Funding Facility                                               

Term Auction Facility                                                              

Public Private Investment Program

And, here we go – from the top:

Top recipient – Morgan Stanley                                                 

Morgan Stanley, facing a crisis of confidence after the fall of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., got a $9 billion injection from Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and agreed to take a $10 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury to shore up capital. As hedge-fund customers pulled funds out of the New York-based firm, it plugged the hole with $107.3 billion of secret loans from the Federal Reserve’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility and Term Securities Lending Facility, set up earlier in the year to supply brokerage firms with emergency financing.”

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The Leviticus 25 Plan does not seek to ‘interrupt’ or reverse any of the special relationships that have developed in the Fed’s financial sphere.  It only seeks to level the playing field – by providing U.S. citizens the same access to direct liquidity flows that  the big banks enjoyed ‘in their time of need.’

The Leviticus 25 Plan proposes one additional upgrade to the Fed’s liquidity lines:   U.S. Citizens Credit Facility.

U.S. citizens should demand nothing less. We need it now.

 

 

 

 

Big government central-planning and the strange case of REOs… And why America needs a new plan. The Leviticus 25 Plan.

Millions of home loans have fallen into “distressed status” over the past 5 years, as the economy began shriveling up and American families began losing income and falling behind on their mortgage payments.

At a certain point in time lenders (banks, government agencies / loan insurers) file  foreclosure notices on these distressed properties.  A significant number of days may then pass before the process moves on to the next step. The delinquent homeowner may request a short-sale – which the lender may or may not allow.  Or the lender may proceed on to a foreclosure auction.

The “foreclosing beneficiary” (the ‘lender) will set the opening bid for the amount owed on the loan (or the ‘outstanding loan amount’).  And if there are no interested parties willing to bid at that ‘set’ price, then the foreclosing beneficiary comes to legally repossess the property.

These lender-owned properties are known as Real Estate Owned (REO) properties, and are listed on their books as non-performing assets.

RealtyTrac forecasts 500,000 REOs for 2013.  That’s an average of over 1360 “lender repossessions” per day, for each and every day of the year.  That’s over 1360 families daily – losing their homes to banks and government agencies.

And now some big firms like the hedgefund, Blackstone, have been stepping in to buy up these ‘lender-owned’ properties, in mass, in certain markets like Phoenix and Tampa, with support from an “ongoing government-subsidized, GSE/FHFA endorsed REO-to-Rent initiative.”  (ZeroHedge 3-14-13)

Blackstone’s plan is to get the properties fixed up and rented out — with rent-paying tenants in place.

And then they plan to securitize these tranches – similar to the good old mortgage securitizations (MBSs) that were so popular during the housing bubble (the one that ‘popped’ in the Fall of 2008 and pushed the banks underwater and sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin).

So… here is a quick summary.  Homeowners in America (500,000 this year alone) will ‘exit’ their homes as those homes are legally repossessed by lenders (the ‘foreclosing beneficiary’) – banks and government agencies.  The U.S. government then enters the scene to subsidize (yes, SUBSIDIZE) the sale of these homes from the repossessing lender to a hedgefund to turn into rentals for eventual securitization and sale as an  income-producing investment vehicle.

This scheme is a “government-subsidized, GSE/FHFA endorsed REO-to-Rent initiative, through which large asset managers have been encouraged to take advantage of government funded, risk-free financing and purchase foreclosed properties in bulk, with the intention of converting them into rental properties. The REO-To-Rent has traditionally been open to the biggest of financial companies, or at least those who don’t have the stigma of legacy mortgage origination resulting in billions in litigation reserves, which means mostly hedge funds and PE firms.” (ZeroHedge 3-14-13)

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The Leviticus 25 Plan offers a preferred alternative.

Instead of the U.S. government again bailing out the banks by subsidizing the sale of these non-performing assets to investment companies, The Leviticus 25 Plan keeps American families in their homes, so the problem doesn’t develop in the first place.

It is unconscionable that the U.S. government offers no mechanism to provide liquidity to financially distressed American families, but it will provide liquidity to distressed banks to move distressed properties off their books – and into the hands of hedgefunds for ‘grooming’ as securitized investments.

There is only one plan in America that will re-ignite real economic growth, pay for itself over a 10-15 year period, and deliver substantial ‘ground-level’ benefits to Americans.

The Leviticus 25 Plan.

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how it works (one of the aspects of Fed ‘liquidity funneling’ to the Primary Dealers)…

When the Fed auctions off various financial securities each month (to raise funds to cover monthly deficits), each of those securities is identified by a specific Identification number.  This unique number is called a “CUSIP.” This acronym stands for the “Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures.”

Note this more complete definition:  Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures  –  A board that assigns a nine-digit number to every stock and registered bond that trades in the United States. CUSIP is owned by the American Bankers Association and is operated by S&P. A CUSIP number facilitates trade and settlement by making each security unique from every other of the same class. CUSIP numbers are recorded in each trade. 

Well… on February 14, 2013, the Fed auctioned off some 30-year Bonds (note the CUSIP – “912810QZ4”):

TREASURY AUCTION RESULTS                                                                              

Term and Type of Security 30-Year Bond                                                            

CUSIP Number 912810QZ4                                                                                      

Series Bonds of February 2043

The auction bidders typically include the Primary Dealers, the direct (non-Primary Dealer) bidders and the Indirect Bidders (Central Banks).

The Primary Dealers enjoy a practically conjugal relationship with the Fed, and they are obligated, in accordance with that special to ‘take’ or ‘buy’ whatever portion of the debt auction not bid/purchased by the other bidders.  And that is generally substantial.  According the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the “primary dealers alone account for 70.9 percent of Treasu8ry securities sold to the public, on average.

Immediately following the Valentine’s Day auction this year (5 days later, on February 19, 2013), the Fed ‘bought back’ the majority of that very same 2-14-13 CUSIP ($39 billion worth – see below) from the Primary Dealers (who were unable to ‘move’ that paper to their clients and did not wish, themselves, to ‘sit on it’).

The Fed repurchases this ‘paper’ in Permanent Open Market Operations (POMOs) and the paper then ‘sits’ in the Fed’s System Open Market Account (SOMA).   The Government then ‘pays interest to itself on money that it borrowed from itself.”

And, guess who gets paid a healthy commission to ‘take’ the paper, and then shuffle it back to the Fed…?

That’s right —  the Primary Dealers (see who they are here).

This would be the equivalent of making a purchase at a Wal-mart, then then returning the product, and being paid a commission to boot.  Here is the 2-19-13 POMO summary (note the same CUSIP “912810QZ4” for $39 billion):

And… the Fed ‘funnels’ a lot of money through the Primary Dealers. Note the blue line (2009-2013) on this chart – courtesy of The Wall Street Examiner:

Fed Cash to Primary Dealers 7/17/13 - Click to enlarge

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The Fed’s ‘liquidity funneling’ maneuvers have been weakening the Dollar (vs hard assets) over the past 4 years (inflation).  And very little of the ‘liquidity’ benefits are reaching American families.

It is time for a change.

 The Leviticus 25 Plan.

Federal Reserve, Part 2: “Infinite fiat” – promoting the concentration of wealth in the coffers of big banks, power brokers and the super-wealthy…

An inside look at the Fed – continued.
 
Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Courtesy of ZeroHedge 7-11-13 / Excerpts:
The Fed has infinite fiat, though they try to disguise that fact. It takes no more effort for them to loan a trillion dollars than a million dollars. They will never run out of zeros in their computer system. The zero keys on their keyboards will always function. No matter how much they can print, they always have available an infinitely greater amount of fiat that they can still print. Printing money requires nearly zero effort and zero cost on their part. They don’t get worn out from printing money.
This whole concept of infinite fiat is hard for people to grasp; it is something outside of their experience. People’s lifelong experience with money is that it is a limited resource. It is hard to conceive of a group of people who have unlimited, infinite money. Yet the Federal Reserve has just that. The Fed is not like a doctor who prescribes a short-term stimulus for a patient who is feeling run down. The Fed is not like a parent who temporarily puts training wheels on a bike until the kid learns how to ride it. These metaphors make people think that the Fed’s fiat printing is temporary and limited. It is not.
Its money printing abilities are permanent and unlimited. The Fed also puts on a show about agonizing over the decision of whether to print money. That make it seem like they are agonizing over whether to pull a sum of carefully saved cash out of their vault. But when they lend to Uncle Sam, they do not pull cash out of a vault that has a finite amount of cash in it. They instead get it from a computer that has the capability of printing unlimited zeros.
Summary: The Fed has infinite fiat. It is not limited by any conceivable shortage, or because of Keynesian stimulus theory, or because the Fed has the role of a doctor, or because the Fed’s role is to put training wheels on the economy from time to time, or because it is hard for it to print fiat and there are only so many hours in a day. They have infinite fiat. Their printing is limited only by how much they think they can get away with and their calculations of how they will benefit from it.
So that brings up the final question I shall deal with today. That is, “How does printing money benefit the Fed? Is it better from their point of view to print or not to print?”
The first point in response to this is that they want the government hooked on their printing. They want to be indispensable to the government. A government that balances it budget or reduces the national debt to zero (as the Jackson administration did) is the opposite of what they want.
The Fed’s power over government is similar to the power a drug pusher has over a junkie. As long as the junkie is doing what the pusher wants, the supply of drugs is uninterrupted. If the junkie does not pay, the supply is cut off. If the pusher wants to jack up the price at any time, he can do so. If the junkie objects, his supply is cut off. So here we see it is in the Fed’s interest usually to maintain the supply, but the supply may also be cut off from time to time in order to ratchet up its power over its victim.”
 
The big banks always benefit from more printing. They profit from it. To the extent that they are cut off from it, they lose money. So from the standpoint of the big banks, the bias is always to print. Note that the Fed can maintain its supply to the banks while cutting off the government. The Fed’s owners must always be served; the government is instead to be manipulated, enslaved and controlled under the guise of serving.
Any active defiance of the Fed is a danger signal for investors. The Fed can cut off the government at any time, thus precipitating economic chaos so as to quash rebellion. At present I do not see any serious defiance of the Fed anywhere.
http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2013/Fed-assets6-13.png
 
The Fed’s main goal is to increase the profits of the big banks. That goal is consistent with increased profits for all firms and prosperity in general, so long as the banks and the elites grab the largest share of the profits.
But that goal is also served in the long run by boom-and-bust cycles that have a ratcheting effect of concentrating wealth in the hands of the wealthy. The clued-in super-wealthy can profit both as bulls and as bears, and can purchase prized assets cheaply at the bottom of the cycle (on easy credit from their friends at the Fed).
It is a Clausewitzian principle that individuals, organizations and nations will expand their power until some superior or equal power effectively opposes them and stops them. Because the Fed’s power has no equal, we can expect the Fed’s power to continue to increase indefinitely.
 
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That “superior power,” to halt the grinding advance of debt enslavement in America, is American people.  And the plan for change is currently available – with direct credit extensions for American citizens.
The Leviticus 25 Plan.

The Federal Reserve, Part 1: Promoting ‘debt enslavement’ for America…

 
Excerpts from Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Courtesy of ZeroHedge 7-11-13                                                                                                          
“…The essence of the Fed and … why the financial Status Quo is doomed.
People are confused about the Fed, and I think it would be better if everybody had a clear understanding of what the Federal Reserve is and what it is not.
First of all, the Federal government thinks of the Federal Reserve as a service bureau, whose function it is to print money that the government can spend. As long as the Federal Reserve performs that function–reliably printing, let’s say, a trillion or more each year to top off the Federal budget–then Congress will be happy with the Federal Reserve (their rainmaker) and will follow its advice and try to keep it happy.
http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2013/federal-debt1-13.png
It should be emphasized here that the whole Keynesian smokescreen and sideshow has very little to do with the reality of the relationship here. The Federal Reserve’s job is not just to lend Uncle Sam some money during a recession so as to provide temporary stimulus. The Fed is a milk cow for Uncle Sam. Its job is to give milk all the time.
So to summarize this first point, the Fed is a service bureau for the Federal government whose job it is to provide the government with freshly printed fiat every year [in the form of selling ‘Treasury bonds to fund Federal deficits, but it does not “print money” in the sense of adding money to the nation’s money supply. It borrows money by selling newly issued U.S. Treasury bonds.’].
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The Fed is also a service bureau to the big banks that own it. Its job is to give unfair advantage to those banks, either by granting them low-interest loans that can be rolled over into infinity, or by buying their bad debts and disposing of them properly, or by doing any number of other special favors for them that increase their profits and executive bonuses. The Fed is not independent in the sense that it is self-governing. It must provide service to the banks who own it and to the Federal government, which controls its legal environment. Big banks have owned and controlled the Fed since its inception in 1913.
Summary: The Fed is also a service bureau to the big banks. It is not as independent as it proclaims itself to be; it provides services for its owners. Its owners have a profit motive.
 
The Fed also has its own institutional agenda. It wants to expand and increase its own power. It wants to operate in a safe and predictable environment. It wants to eliminate threats. The Fed advances its own agenda by printing or withholding money. As time goes on, the Fed has asserted more and more control over government. The Federal government is now addicted to freshly printed debt-money. This gives the Fed enormous power over the government.
The big banks who own the Fed also dominate Congress and the Obama administration due to the massive bribes they deliver each year. Thus over time the Federal Reserve has become more and more the master: what it wants it gets, what it doesn’t want doesn’t happen.
Summary: The Fed is also a selfish, power-seeking institution.
Some people think the Fed prints money, but when you ask Ben B. about it, he says, “The Fed does not print money. We lend money.” Printing money is easy to visualize and understand. Lending money is also easy to understand; it’s what banks do. But what the Fed does is somewhat more difficult to understand. To put it into one phrase, “they print debt-money.” They print money, but each dollar they print has the chains of debt attached to it. Each dollar they print represents a debt that somebody owes.
A Federal Reserve note is an IOU from the Fed that says “we owe you one dollar.” There does exist in the world paper money that is not debt-money, but the Fed does not traffic in that. As the Fed prints more debt-money, they tighten the chains of debt enslaving the government and the people.
A national debt of $1 trillion is manageable. It might be paid off in a few years. But a debt of $17 trillion is permanently enslaving (unless it is defaulted upon).  Ben’s printing press, then, is also an enslaving press. If Americans were to try to default on $17 trillion of debt, The Powers That Be would unleash their full wrath on the American people.
Summary: Ben B. runs a printing press that is also a debt-enslaving press. We are wrong to focus just on the inflationary effects of his money printing. We should also be alarmed by the enslaving effects.
Full article:  ZeroHedge 7-11-13
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Note:  As bad as the debt numbers are, the real U.S. debt / deficit numbers are not even referenced.  The U.S. Net Present Value (NPV) of unfunded liabilities puts the total debt up in the range of $80-100 trillion
The U.S. has averaged over $5 trillion in annual deficits for each of the past 5 years (on an NPV basis). As economist/statistician John Williams notes:  At $5 trillion per year, you could take all of the money earned by all Americans, and you’d still have a deficit.
The debt is “beyond containment.”
America needs to change course.
The Leviticus 25 Plan.

Stockman: Fed has been “relentlessly pumping freshly minted cash into the bank accounts” of the 21 Primary Dealers. After 5 years: little effect beyond camouflaging “the failing internals of the American economy.”

David Stockman – “The Great Deformation”                                                          Accessed from ZeroHedge                                                                                     [Excerpts]

The Wall Street meltdown of September 2008 accelerated the recessionary forces already in motion, causing a total job loss of 7.3 million between the December 2007 peak and the end of the recession in June 2009. That the Fed’s bubble finance had camouflaged the failing internals of the American economy then became starkly apparent. Nearly three-fourths of this reduction was accounted for by the above mentioned loss of 5.6 million breadwinner jobs; that is, nearly 8 percent of their pre-recession total.

That devastating hit left the nation with only 66.2 million prime jobs and set the clock back to the level of early 1998. This is an astonishing fact:  before any of the Greenspan-Bernanke maneuvers to coddle Wall Street and pump up the wealth effects elixir—that is, the 1998 LTCM bailout, the 2001–2003 rate-cutting panic, the August 2007 Bernanke Put, and the Fed’s post-Lehman tripling of its balance sheet – there were more breadwinner jobs than there are today. Since the BlackBerry Panic the Fed has relentlessly pumped freshly minted cash into the bank accounts of the twenty-one government bond dealers. Not surprisingly, therefore, there has been a jarringly divergent outcome between Wall Street and Main Street.

By September 2012, the S&P 500 was up by 115 percent from its recession lows and had recovered all of its losses from the peak of the second Greenspan bubble. By contrast, only 200,000 of the 5.6 million lost breadwinner jobs had been recovered by that same point in time. To be sure, the Fed’s Wall Street shills breathlessly reported the improved jobs “print” every month, picking and choosing starting and ending points and using continuously revised and seasonally maladjusted data to support that illusion. Yet the fundamentals with respect to breadwinner jobs could not be obfuscated.

On the eve of the 2012 election, for example, there were 18.3 million jobs in the goods-producing sectors: manufacturing, mining, and construction. These core sectors of the productive economy had taken a beating during the Great Recession, shedding 3.5 million jobs, or 15 percent. Yet after three and a half years of so-called recovery, the jobs count in the goods-producing sectors had not rebounded in the slightest; it had actually declined slightly from the 18.5 million jobs recorded at the end of the recession in June 2009.

Likewise, there were 7.8 million jobs in finance, insurance, and real estate, meaning virtually no gain from the 7.7 million jobs at the end of the recession.

In short, after forty months of “recovery” there was virtually no change in every category of breadwinner jobs that had been slammed by the Great Recession.

Thus, there had been 130.8 million total jobs in January 2000, and this figure had reached 138.0 million by the December 2007 peak. The Great Recession sent the jobs count tumbling all the way back to the starting point, actually dipping slightly lower to 130.6 million by June 2009. Then, after forty months of “recovery,” the BLS reported 133.5 million nonfarm payroll jobs for September 2012. The Bernanke bubble had thus “recreated” only 40 percent of the jobs that had been “created” by the Greenspan bubble the first time around.”

Full report – accessed from ZeroHedge

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The Leviticus 25 Plan initiates economic recovery at ‘ground level’ in America.  It provides direct credit extensions to American citizens for the express purpose of eliminating debt at the family level.

Big government central planning has been a dismal failure.

It is time for a fresh start – one that advances the cause of economic liberty in America.

The Leviticus 25 Plan.

Bloomberg: major banks have been ‘rigging’ $4.7 trillion-per-day currency markets

Some of the very banks that received trillions of dollars in cash transfusions and loan guarantees from the Federal Reserve and U.S. government – at tax-payer expense, directly or indirectly – are now “manipulating benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to a Bloomberg investigation.”

ZeroHedge 6-12-2013:                                                                                               Banks Rig $4.7 Trillion A Day Currency Markets To Profit Off Clients                        [Excerpts]

“Employees have been front-running client orders and rigging WM/Reuters rates by pushing through trades before and during the 60-second windows when the benchmarks are set, said five current and former traders, who requested anonymity because the practice is controversial.

Dealers colluded with counterparts to boost chances of moving the rates, said two of the people, who worked in the industry for a total of more than 20 years.

The behavior occurred daily in the spot foreign-exchange market and has been going on for at least a decade, affecting the value of funds and derivatives and all investments.

The Financial Conduct Authority, Britain’s markets supervisor, is considering opening a probe into potential manipulation of the rates, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Informed observers have long warned that the global $4.7-trillion-a-day foreign exchange market, the biggest in the financial system has all the hallmarks of a casino.

The inherent conflict banks face between executing client orders and profiting from their own trades is exacerbated because most currency trading takes place away from exchanges.

“The price mechanism is the anchor of our entire economic system,” said Tom Kirchmaier, a fellow in the financial-markets group at the London School of Economics. “Any rigging of the price mechanism leads to a misallocation of capital and is extremely costly to society.”

……………..

The traders interviewed by Bloomberg News declined to identify which banks engaged in manipulative practices and didn’t specifically allege that any of the top four firms were involved. Spokesmen for Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Barclays and UBS declined to comment.

It is becoming increasingly evident that many key financial markets are being rigged and manipulated by banks and central banks today. Some of the manipulation is overt, some is covert.

The world’s largest banks are fixing prices in many key markets and benchmarks which is affecting the value of money itself and will ultimately leading to the value of money in your pocket becoming worth much less.”   Full article

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And the key question remains… “If America chooses to continue transfusing billions-trillions of dollars to major banks (which continue ton engage in “overt” or “covert” criminal activity –  according to Bloomberg) – at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and others around the world, then shouldn’t honest American citizens also be granted the provision of direct credit extensions to resolve financial stresses at ‘ground level’ in America?

Answer:  Yes.

The Leviticus 25 Plan.