Next to Jeff, Bill Buckner is one of my favorite persons who really gets it--He has a newsletter the "Privateer " which is excellent ..He predicted this financial mess years ago befor anyone did --Here is a little something from
from Bill Buckler, author of The Privateer

No Freedom - No Money - No Markets

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) became an unmistakable reality in July 2007 when Bear Stearns admitted that two of its sub prime hedge funds had lost nearly all of their value because of the rapid decline in the market for sub prime mortgages. At the end of June 2007, Treasury Secretary Paulson had this to say about the problem: “We have had a major housing correction in this country. I do believe we are at or near the bottom.” When asked specifically about Bear Stearns, he went on to say that any losses had been “largely contained” and anyway, “It doesn’t pose a risk to the economy overall.”

When Bear Stearns hit the wall, there was no talk of a federal government bailout because of what Mr Paulson had stated in public. The other US banks refused to lend because Bear Stearns had refused to participate in the bailout of LTCM in 1998. Bear Stearns was left with two options. It could sell the “assets” in the hedge funds or it could bail them out with its own capital. For the one and only time in the GFC so far, a money centre bank tried to sell Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) on an actual market. That attempt lasted hours. When the auction was closed, the bids were coming in at 30 percent of the face value of the paper. The jig was up, the valuation of the collateral underpinning the entire banking system was revealed as fictitious. Not much more than a year later, that collateral was transferred from the US banking SYSTEM to the Fed, which has maintained its fictitious “value” ever since. Europe dragged its feet, but at the end of 2011 it did the same thing in regard to its own banks.

Ever since that episode of mid 2007, the “market” for pretty well every kind of debt-based financial “asset” there is - up to and including the sovereign debt of governments - has been progressively falsified by governments and their “independent” central banks. Mr Bernanke has now been quoted as describing this procedure as “a work in progress”. It is indeed, and by this time its true nature should be clear to almost everyone. But still Mr Bernanke and all his counterparts in the seats of power all over the world bleat about a “recovery” which is just over an ever receding horizon. What the world needs to “recover” from is the increasingly desperate machinations of governments desperate to retain their power. What it needs to recover is freedom - money - and markets

Thanks for the post Rdisrael, as this immediately raises two themes - one from an earlier post this morning, and one as part of my regular writing.

First (and more recently) we have the Treasury Department CLAIMING that it is going to turn a profit from all of these hand-outs. Part of this is to HIDE the fact that this was a TOTAL PANIC - with the entire U.S. financial system HOURS away from going to zero.

www.bullionbullscanada.com/bulletin-boar...roduce-profits#17461

The other side of this illustrates an episode from history to which I have frequently referred: "Tulipmania" in Holland in the late 1500's.

For those who have never taken the time to read up on this ("U.S. Dollar is the new 'Tulip'"), at the peak of this insanity you could LITERALLY buy a house with ONE particularly prized tulip.

Then the market crashed (for the obvious reason that tulips are worthless) - "money doesn't grow on trees" OR in the ground.



The Tulip Economy crashed in a matter of days.

The U.S. economy was HOURS from the same fate. Understand that when Bear Stearns tried to SELL its paper (i.e. its "tulips") and within HOURS they had sunk to 30% of their face-value that by the next day they wouldn't have fallen to 20% of their value, but to 3% of their value (or less).

Thus the banksters FROZE all of the financial markets COMPLETELY - as the only panic measure which would/could prevent their ENTIRE paper empire from crashing to zero in a couple of DAYS.

And our economies are WEAKER today (much, much weaker). So when the NEXT "crisis" arrives we can expect a "bank holiday": our financial system is officially and totally CLOSED, and when (if) it ever opens again ordinarly paper-holders will find they have been "MF Global'ed".

By the way, this brings us to the SECOND reason for telling the lie that the hand-outs to the banksters will produce a profit - because they KNOW they are about to hand-out MORE TRILLIONS to these criminals...