Showing posts with label bond markets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bond markets. Show all posts

Wednesday 16 April 2014

Propaganda, Propaganda, Propaganda,


      A couple of things that recently got a lot of cover in that babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, one was Greece returning to the bond market, and the other, UK inflation dropping to 1.6%. These two pieces of information were meant to make us all feel a lot better, the propaganda machine was in full throttle. As for Greece entering the bond market, what this means is that the financial Mafia gambling cabal, had another casino in which to place their bets. They were prepared to loan the corrupt Greek state €3 billion at a nice healthy rate of interest of 4.75%, a mere drop in the bucket as far as Greek state debt is concerned. Does this mean that all is well in Greece and that the 27% unemployment, and 60% among the young, will suddenly evaporate? Does it mean that the trashed health service will, like magic, rise to the needs of the people? Will the abject poverty and deprivation be transformed into a land of milk and honey? Well perhaps a look at some of the figures might answer those questions. Greece's public debt in 2008, the date of the gambling casino collapse, was €263.3 billion, and the prediction for 2014 is €322 billion. The size of Greece's debt as a percentage of GDP in that 2008 bubble burst, was 112.9%, 2014's prediction is 175.9%. What Greece's re-entry to the bond market really means is that it is obvious gamblers can't stay away from the casino.
       The excited wetting of nickers among the millionaire cabal sitting in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, at the news the inflation in the UK has dropped for the sixth consecutive month to 1.6%, will not be transferred to the ordinary person on the street. According to a study by The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) mid-range household incomes between 2013 and 2014 were 6% below what they were before the gamblers crisis of 2008. Other interesting figures from the study state that between 2008 and 2013 inflation was 20%, energy prices rose by 60% and food prices by 30%. Where were incomes during this period? Did your income rise enough to cover that 60% rise in energy prices, or the 30% rise in food prices? It is all smoke and mirrors. The truth is that we as a people here in the UK are sliding down the shute to a sweatshop economy. Last year almost a million adults and children received emergency food parcels from food banks, a rise of 163% on the previous year. Irrespective of what the propaganda machine might say, more and more people are turning to food banks for survival. The Trussell trust has over 400 food banks and is opening two a week, compared to only three in 2012/13. Of course The Trussell trust is not the only organisation handing out food help to those in need, they are just the tip of the iceberg. What about those living in areas where there is no Trussell Trust, what about all those who just eat less and feed their kids less, perhaps too proud to seek help or unaware of where to get that help. The Trussell trust states that it is now expanding its services to include welfare advice and providing essentials such as washing powder, nappies and hygiene products, as more and more families are at breaking point and food is not their only problem. This is the true picture of Britain's low inflation figure

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Sunday 15 July 2012

RIGHTEOUS ANGER.


       When it comes to the media, that babbling brook of bullshit, reporting on the "CRISIS" in Europe, all they report is of the meetings of the financial Mafia and their servants, the political class. They will comment on how the rating agencies are shuffling their betting odds, and we will be told how the bond markets are screwing this country more than that country. Very rarely will it report what the "CRISIS" is actually doing to the ordinary people and what those people are doing to defend themselves against rape and plundering of their standard of living. All this reporting is a public relations exercise for those responsible for the "CRISIS", but never a word about those at the receiving end.
      Greece is in turmoil with poverty and deprivation rampant, and below is a glimpse at what is happening in Spain. As the financial Mafia continue with their assault on the public purse of the European people, we can expect to see more of this type of real resistance. Enjoy the ecstasy of your righteous anger.




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Saturday 10 December 2011

"SAVE THE BANKERS" CHARITY.

         As we all contribute to "Save the Bankers" charity by accepting savage cuts to our living standards and accepting the decimation of our kids education, while at the same time giving our pensions to the "Bankers Bonus Fund" we should not forget, it is going to hurt. The main effect of all the legislation being passed by the millionaire cabal will by to safeguard the financial sector and destroy the lives of vast swathes of ordinary people. There is no shortage of money, it is all up to the choices our millionaire public school thugs decide to make. All that money that is being stolen from the public sector is going somewhere, that's the choices they have to make. Do we take the taxpayers money and spend it on the welfare of the people, or do we give it to the bond markets? Do we spend it on health and education or spend it on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya etc.? Do we give people a decent civilised pension or do we replace our nuclear weapons of mass destruction and build status symbol massive aircraft carriers? To our millionaire political class that inhabit The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, it isn't a difficult decision, the former wins every time and screw the people. Big business must be helped, the people must pay, our parasite politicians see this as how to run a country. What's your idea of running a country?




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Wednesday 17 August 2011

JUST A WEE THOUGHT!!

           
   
           Just a wee thought. The American taxpayer bailed out the American financial sector to the tune of $700 billion, that's a lot of money. What can you do with $700 billion. Well for starters, you could fund the two illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, well almost, the total cost so far, to the American tax payers for these to brutal and inhumane wars is a staggering $750 billion, so you would need some more taxpayers petty cash. Or you could go a long way to sorting out the 850 million human beings who are starving in this world. Perhaps we could fix the 2.6 billion people who lack sewage services. Then of course there are those 800 million illiterate in the world, what would $700 billion do for that problem? Then in a loving way, we could sort out the problem of the 640 million children who lack adequate housing. The list could go on and on, there is so much we can do in this world to alleviate deprivation and suffering. If we add up the bail-outs across the developed world and threw it at the problems facing the deprived, what a wonderful change there would be, but no, we prefer to throw it at the bankers and the bond market, to try to unsure that they don't lose any of their billions that they have salted away. That's democracy for you!!
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Thursday 30 June 2011

     A CLASSY MAYFAIR FIRESALE!!!


     For those poor deluded souls who still think that "their" government is driving the fiscal policy in their respective countries, the extract below helps to clear the smoke from the bankers and bond markets smoke and mirrors illusion. Austerity cuts, as I keep spouting, have nothing to do with deficit reduction, it is all to do with flogging off everything in sight to the corporate world at "firesale" prices. Everything must go, ports, airports, land, anything that the corporate world can make money from will be handed to them on a plate, social services will be starved of funds letting the corporate world step in and sell the service to you at a price and profit to them, all of this at the dicate of the IMF and ECB. "Your" government is selling "your" country and the money raised will of course, not go to those who actually own these assets, the people, no, it will all go to the bankers and bond markets to cover their losses, and "your" government will comply, even if it decimates the living standards of the people, even if the people take to the streets in mass protests making it quite clear that they do not want this policy to continue. The state's minders will also be on the streets dealing out brutal repression with baton and tear gas, and if that doesn't work their is always the army. So much for democracy. 

     The short extract below was taken from from an article that appeared in The Guardian June 29 and was written by Aditya Chakrabortty and  titled, Greece crisis. As Athens erupts Mayfair hosts a classy firesale,.  The full article is well worth reading. The graphics are not The Guardian's.

     'At first, yesterday's meeting looked like a thousand other upmarket business events; suits gathered at Claridge's hotel in London's Mayfair for a day's discussion of how to reform Greece and its economy. But listening to the presentations from Greek ministers and officials about the airports, the ports, the land they were auctioning off to the highest bidder, the real purpose of the day came into sharp focus. Here in an art deco room with five chandeliers and too many mirrored surfaces to count, was the beginning of a classy firesale.

       The men from Athens were not calling it that, of course. “A professionally run privatisation plan” is how George Christodoulakis, the man in charge of Greece's asset sales preferred to describe it. But even he conceded that the pace and scale of the government's scheme to flog €50bn (£44.8bn) of assets within the next five years had been forced on it. “One can say; is this the best time to sell assets?” '
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Monday 20 June 2011

DEMOCRACY vs MYTHOLOGY:
THE BATTLE IN SYNTAGMA SQUARE.


        I have continually spouted that the deficit reduction has nothing to do with deficit reduction. It is all to do with saving the banks and the bond markets from losing any of their illgotten assets and rescue them from their gambling excesses. The billionaire playboys gambled massively and lost, so now they want the ordinary people of the world to pay for their greed. Living standards will be slashed, social services will be decimated, unemployment will rise, pensions will be plundered and all public assets will be sold off at bargain prices to those very billionaire gamblers.
      All this is happening not because your government wants to destroy the social fabric of the nation, but because they are being dictated to by foreign billionaires and as they are in the pay of those billionaires they obey for fear of losing their own wealth, power and privileges. It is an army of occupation taking over all the decision making in their target countries.
      It is explained excellently in the following extract from STURDYBLOG. Please take the time to read the article in full and spread the details as widely as possible. This is your battle, it is not just something that is happening over there in some foreign land. It is here, it is our struggle, it is your and your kids future.

     "I have never been more desperate to explain and more hopeful for your understanding of any single fact than this: The protests in Greece concern all of you directly.


        What is going on in Athens at the moment is resistance against an invasion; an invasion as brutal as that against Poland in 1939. The invading army wears suits instead of uniforms and holds laptops instead of guns, but make no mistake – the attack on our sovereignty is as violent and thorough. Private wealth interests are dictating policy to a sovereign nation, which is expressly and directly against its national interest. Ignore it at your peril. Say to yourselves, if you wish, that perhaps it will stop there. That perhaps the bailiffs will not go after the Portugal and Ireland next. And then Spain and the UK. But it is already beginning to happen. This is why you cannot afford to ignore these events.

      The powers that be have suggested that there is plenty to sell. Josef Schlarmann, a senior member of Angela Merkel’s party, recently made the helpful suggestion that we should sell some of our islands to private buyers in order to pay the interest on these loans, which have been forced on us to stabilise financial institutions and a failed currency experiment. (Of course, it is not a coincidence that recent studies have shown immense reserves of natural gas under the Aegean sea).


       China has waded in, because it holds vast currency reserves and more than a third are in Euros. Sites of historical interest like the Acropolis could be made private. If we do not do as we are told, the explicit threat is that foreign and more responsible politicians will do it by force. Let’s make the Parthenon and the ancient Agora a Disney park, where badly paid locals dress like Plato or Socrates and play out the fantasies of the rich.---"
 
       We have to admit that the world at this moment in time is owned by gambling billionaires, they buy governments and plunder the planet. We can continue in this fashion and leave a future of deprivation and corporate fascism to our grandchildren, or we can orgainse in solidarity with all the ordinary people of the world and change the way our world is run. We can create a world based on needs, mutual aid and sustainability, we have the resources, we have the ability, all we are lacking is the will to start that change.

Friday 3 June 2011

WHEN WILL WE EVER LEARN???

     
      Behind closed doors and long into the night they met. Then the announcement, Greece and its EU partners have agreed a deal to loan Greece more money. You would think that for the people of Greece that would be a good thing, after all the country is strapped for cash and the people are suffering.

      However this money will not go to make the lives of the Greek people any better, on the contrary, they will have to suffer more pain because of this loan. They will have to face higher taxes, cuts in services, and lower wages, add to that the fact that they will have to sell off all their assets to the corporate world, who at the moment are hovering over Greece like the proverbial vultures. You see, this money isn't really for the Greek people, it is to save the gambling casinos of the world, (the banks and bond markets) from suffering the effects of their excessive greedy gambles that went wrong.

     Over the last few years the banks and bond markets gambled like crazy and it all went wrong and they are virtually bust. So how do they save themselves? Why by getting the taxpayers of the world to fund their losses. The governments of the EU and across the world will slash the standard of living of all the people and the money saved can go to pay off the gamblers debts. Then those same governments will sell off all our public assets to their friends in the corporate greed machine and that should just about save the parasites in the banking and bond markets from losing too much of their unearned cash.

Why should we want to change things??
 
     Who devised such a wonderful scheme, if you have billions to play with and you lose, no problem, just take the people's money and let them grovel in misery, while you get back to playing with your billions. Oh when will we ever learn????

Tuesday 31 May 2011

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE GREEKS DEFAULT?


        The end is nigh, prepare for Armageddon, the banking world is in shit creek and the system is about to explode. Of course most people with any knowledge of capitalism know that it is unsustainable and will eventually collapse, the financial sector is just part and parcel of that same system. Our problem is not so much the collapse of the system, but how do we react to that  catastrophic event? Will we fight to get it back on the rails, so that we can get back to borrowing and getting ever bigger mortgages, back to a job with crap wages and an never ending struggle to get an increase that will help you survive? Or will we decide to take control ourselves and change the entire system to one free from the profit motive, bond holders and financial spivs? The following is an extract form a much longer and more detailed article HERE.

What Happens if the Greeks Default?

       Andrew Lilico, writing in the London Telegraph, gives us the answer to that question with a series of short bullet points. I might not agree with all of them, but he is looking in the right direction. (quoting from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/andrewlilico/100010332/what-happens-when-greece-defaults/)

       “It is when, not if. Financial markets merely aren’t sure whether it’ll be tomorrow, a month’s time, a year’s time, or two years’ time (it won’t be longer than that). Given that the ECB has played the “final card” it employed to force a bailout upon the Irish – threatening to bankrupt the country’s banking sector – presumably we will now see either another Greek bailout or default within days.

“What happens when Greece defaults. Here are a few things:
- Every bank in Greece will instantly go insolvent.
- The Greek government will nationalize every bank in Greece.
- The Greek government will forbid withdrawals from Greek banks.
- To prevent Greek depositors from rioting on the streets, Argentina-2002-style (when the Argentinian president had to flee by helicopter from the roof of the presidential palace to evade a mob of such depositors), the Greek government will declare a curfew, perhaps even general martial law.
- Greece will redenominate all its debts into “New Drachmas” or whatever it calls the new currency (this is a classic ploy of countries defaulting)
- The New Drachma will devalue by some 30-70 per cent (probably around 50 per cent, though perhaps more), effectively defaulting 0n 50 per cent or more of all Greek euro-denominated debts.
- The Irish will, within a few days, walk away from the debts of its banking system.
- The Portuguese government will wait to see whether there is chaos in Greece before deciding whether to default in turn.
- A number of French and German banks will make sufficient losses that they no longer meet regulatory capital adequacy requirements.
- The European Central Bank will become insolvent, given its very high exposure to Greek government debt, and to Greek banking sector and Irish banking sector debt.
- The French and German governments will meet to decide whether (a) to recapitalise the ECB, or (b) to allow the ECB to print money to restore its solvency. (Because the ECB has relatively little foreign currency-denominated exposure, it could in principle print its way out, but this is forbidden by its founding charter. On the other hand, the EU Treaty explicitly, and in terms, forbids the form of bailouts used for Greece, Portugal and Ireland, but a little thing like their being blatantly illegal hasn’t prevented that from happening, so it’s not intrinsically obvious that its being illegal for the ECB to print its way out will prove much of a hurdle.)
- They will recapitalise, and recapitalise their own banks, but declare an end to all bailouts.
- There will be carnage in the market for Spanish banking sector bonds, as bondholders anticipate imposed debt-equity swaps.
- This assumption will prove justified, as the Spaniards choose to over-ride the structure of current bond contracts in the Spanish banking sector, recapitalising a number of banks via debt-equity swaps.
- Bondholders will take the Spanish Banking Sector to the European Court of Human Rights (and probably other courts, also), claiming violations of property rights. These cases won’t be heard for years. By the time they are finally heard, no one will care.
- Attention will turn to the British banks. Then we shall see…”
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Monday 16 May 2011

DOMINIQUE SRAUSS-KAHN, "CAVIARE SOCIALIST"!!!

       
       What does the Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now former president of the IMF, affair say about the socialists in France? Here is a man who has the reputation of being a bit of a lecherous creep, a skirt chaser, and philanderer, this translates as disrespect for women in any true socialist's language. He is the head of one of the world's largest corporate capitalist organisations, a man who can spend £2,000 a night on hotel bills and has been called a “caviare socialist”. A man who wanders the world forcing countries to decimate the living standards of the ordinary people of those countries, just to make sure that the bond markets, i.e. the banks, don't lose any money on their dodgy gambles. A man that has seen the people of various countries shafted by his rigorous regulations to make sure the bankers don't lose, and the corporate world gains, and yet, the socialists of France see him as their saviour, the man to lead them to victory, the next socialist president of France. Did they honestly believe that this man wanted to join a socialist world, let alone a socialist France? Did they believe that he was going to change to a reputable, decent human being with full respect for all the people, including those women he allegedly pursued for his own selfish gratification and those people in the countries his organisation shafted, raped and plundered? That he would suddenly champion the cause of the people against the corporate banking world? Isn't it time that the “socialists” started being part of the people, seeking their answers among the ordinary people and moving in the direction the ordinary people want to move. Or do they just want power, power at any cost and to strut around the political stage showing off their rich and famous new “caviare socialist” president?