top of the heap to third world status in one generation

armedoldhippy · Mar 15, 2023

dramamine said:
A lot of it is "alleged" in this thread, right?

fixed it for you. you're welcome. :tiphat:

dramamine · Mar 15, 2023

Brother Nature said:
He doesn't know 'the plan', it's a victimatic excuse from weak minded follower type of people who idolize charismatic figures that speak to their egos. Mostly cause they can't come up with original ideas of their own.

It's a mentality that's allows them to place the blame on some sort of system that is against them, as opposed to grounding themselves in reality and taking responsibility for their own life and decisions. The reason they're not doing well isn't their poor choices and ineptitude but that the governmental system (composed of people exactly like them, but smarter) that's forcing this upon them.

It's weak and it's why they come on these types of sites to troll and gain some kind of ego satisfaction. It's sad and shouldn't even be engaged with, but since one of them recently became president, they seem to think it gives them legitimacy and so do a lot on opposite side. This isn't true, these people should not be given a platform, they shouldn't even be engaged with. Put these dumb ass ideas back on the fringe.

You're extrapolating a lot from a simple reference to US history and our foreign policies that enabled us to be the world superpower. That doesn't put me in the group you imagine it does. You sound rabid to do so, but you're barking up the wrong tree.

mean mr.mustard · Mar 15, 2023

dramamine said:
You're extrapolating a lot from a simple reference to US history and our foreign policies that enabled us to be the world superpower. That doesn't put me in the group you imagine it does. You sound rabid to do so, but you're barking up the wrong tree.

Resistance towards an economic system contrary to ours is somewhat of an understandable concept... within the confine of our borders.

mean mr.mustard · Mar 15, 2023

dramamine said:
Separating Taiwan from China was part of the US post-WW2 plan for world domination.

I see here that you claimed knowledge of a plan for world domination.

Are you suggesting that the Truman doctrine is the aforementioned plan?

Gry · Mar 15, 2023

Brother Nature · Mar 16, 2023

dramamine said:
You're extrapolating a lot from a simple reference to US history and our foreign policies that enabled us to be the world superpower. That doesn't put me in the group you imagine it does. You sound rabid to do so, but you're barking up the wrong tree.

So you're feeling a bit misunderstood? Perhaps a little marginalized? Maybe even pigeonholed? Interesting...

dramamine · Mar 16, 2023

Brother Nature said:
So you're feeling a bit misunderstood? Perhaps a little marginalized? Maybe even pigeonholed? Interesting...

What's wrong?

Gry · Mar 16, 2023

What is wrong ...
We live in an era when being straight about things appears not to be as significant as one might hope.

mean mr.mustard · Mar 16, 2023

It's good to see you Gry :tiphat:

dramamine · Mar 16, 2023

Gry said:
What is wrong ...
We live in an era when being straight about things appears not to be as significant as one might hope.

I assume you mean me?

I see the Truman Doctrine and the US fight against communism as having been a pretext for regime change and the installation of military bases around the world, enabling the resulting US hegemony. As opposed to a humanitarian effort. Much the same as the "War on Terror". Much the same as current concern over Taiwan.

Straight and concise as I can be.

And for Mr. Mustard: such things require a plan. I wasn't given a copy.

mean mr.mustard · Mar 16, 2023

Perceived hegemony in sovereign countries doesn't constitute global dominance.

I thought there were more steps in the plan.

I apologize for assuming.

dramamine · Mar 16, 2023

mean mr.mustard said:
Perceived hegemony in sovereign countries doesn't constitute global dominance.

I thought there were more steps in the plan.

I apologize for assuming.

More steps, sure. Forcing countries to buy oil in US dollars certainly allows global dominance. I assumed that was self-evident. Do you not think the US has global dominance, waning though it might be? Do you think that was a happy byproduct of our "spreading democracy"?

mean mr.mustard · Mar 16, 2023

dramamine said:
More steps, sure. Forcing countries to buy oil in US dollars certainly allows global dominance. I assumed that was self-evident. Do you not think the US has global dominance, waning though it might be? Do you think that was a happy byproduct of our "spreading democracy"?

OPEC still does not include the United States.

Which step was that?

We certainly don't have global dominance.

dramamine · Mar 16, 2023

mean mr.mustard said:
OPEC still does not include the United States.

Which step was that?

We certainly don't have global dominance.

We don't need to be an OPEC member to control the oil trade, as long as they have to use our dollars.

mean mr.mustard · Mar 16, 2023

So you think that Congress passes legislation on which currency OPEC decides they're going to trade in?

dramamine · Mar 16, 2023

mean mr.mustard said:
So you think that Congress passes legislation on which currency OPEC decides they're going to trade in?

No. I do think they approve massive military budgets to facilitate regime change or the threat thereof to those countries that don't wish to play ball. Sanctions are a big motivator as well. You might check into the Project For A New American Century.

armedoldhippy · Mar 16, 2023

dramamine said:
Forcing countries to buy oil in US dollars

i fail to see any evidence that we are "forcing" anyone to pay for their anything in dollars. is the dollar being used as a "benchmark" in financial markets? probably. does it matter, really? are you trying to say that any monetary unit (dollar, euro, peso) should be considered equivalent?

they pay in what they have, and there will always be higher value and lower-value versus any benchmark as well.

dramamine · Mar 16, 2023

armedoldhippy said:
i fail to see any evidence that we are "forcing" anyone to pay for their anything in dollars. is the dollar being used as a "benchmark" in financial markets? probably. does it matter, really? are you trying to say that any monetary unit (dollar, euro, peso) should be considered equivalent? they pay in what they have, and there will always be higher value and lower-value versus any benchmark as well.

Crude oil is certainly priced in US dollars. Figure out the ramifications for yourself. Or don't.

armedoldhippy · Mar 17, 2023

dramamine said:
Crude oil is certainly priced in US dollars. Figure out the ramifications for yourself. Or don't.

dollars are the benchmark, which you don't understand. other currencies are converted (not really, just for quantifying the transaction) and enumerated as dollar equivalents. something tells me you won't understand that, either. you gotta have an accepted unit from which to work from. a yen is not equal to a dinar is not as valuable as a GBP is more valuable than a peso or a fuckload of rubles... and you're pissed because they use dollars as the base unit. whose currency would you prefer? i don't GAFF...

moose eater · Mar 17, 2023

Anybody else remember Occupy Wall St.? I do.

The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2023 ~

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finds herself in a very dubious position. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. This increase in power came in response to the 2008 financial crisis – the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The legislation made the Treasury Secretary the Chair of the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose meetings include the heads of all of the federal agencies that supervise banks and trading on Wall Street. The legislation also required the Treasury Secretary’s authorization before the Federal Reserve could create any more of those $29 trillion emergency bailout programs for the mega banks – which had tethered themselves to casino trading on Wall Street since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

Yesterday, after the Swiss banking behemoth Credit Suisse had traded at an all-time low of less than two bucks; blown out its credit default swaps to unprecedented levels; and tanked the Dow Jones Industrial Average by more than 700 points intraday, Bloomberg News ran this headline at 12:54 p.m. – “US Treasury Reviewing US Banks’ Exposure to Credit Suisse.” By “exposure,” the Treasury really means how many billions of dollars of underwater derivatives are U.S. banks on the hook for as a counterparty to Credit Suisse. The Treasury also has to worry about U.S. banks’ exposure to Credit Suisse’s other major counterparties that U.S. banks do business with, even if the banks are not direct counterparties to Credit Suisse itself.

If the U.S. Treasury Secretary and her staff at F-SOC were just yesterday getting around to finding out which U.S. banks had counterparty exposure to Credit Suisse’s derivatives, we are all in very big trouble. The serious problems at Credit Suisse have been making headlines for two years, including here at Wall Street On Parade.

In July of 2021, the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison released a 165-page report on the internal investigation it had conducted for the Board of Credit Suisse into how the bank came to lose $5.5 billion conducting highly-leveraged and dodgy derivative trades for the family office hedge fund, Archegos Capital Management, which went belly-up in March of 2021. The Paul, Weiss lawyers wrote:

“The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS are the result of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS’s Investment Bank and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos’s voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning signals — including large, persistent limit breaches — indicating that Archegos’s concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from the in-business risk managers to the Global Head of Equities, as well as the risk function, failed to heed these signs, despite evidence that some individuals did raise concerns appropriately.”

Six months ago, Dennis Kelleher, President and CEO of the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, released a statement about the deteriorating condition of Credit Suisse, highlighting the following:

“As the financial condition of Credit Suisse continues to deteriorate, raising questions of whether it will collapse, the world and U.S. taxpayers should be deeply worried as multiple, simultaneous shocks shake the foundations of economies worldwide. Credit Suisse is a global, systemically significant, too-big-to-fail bank that operates in the U.S. and is deeply interconnected throughout the global financial system. Its failure would have widespread and largely unknown repercussions from the inconvenient to the possibly catastrophic.

“That is due, in part, to the failure of the Federal Reserve to properly regulate the activities of foreign banks that have U.S.-based operations. The U.S. has a largely ineffective regulatory framework with gaping loopholes that fail to include some of even the most basic safety and soundness requirements, which incentivizes regulatory arbitrage. As a result, the U.S. financial system and economy are needlessly threatened.

“An effective and appropriate regulatory framework for large foreign banks that covers all of their U.S.-based affiliates should have been established when the Fed set up so-called U.S.-based intermediate holding companies (‘IHCs’) that they regulate. Instead, U.S.-based branches of foreign banks (which are not consolidated within the IHC) face significantly weaker standards than the IHC, remarkably including no specific capital requirements in the U.S. Furthermore, the branches have significantly weaker liquidity requirements. This has resulted in many foreign banks – including in particular Credit Suisse – engaging in regulatory arbitrage by shifting large amounts of assets from their IHCs to their branches, entities that are entirely reliant on the resources of their foreign-based parent companies. The 2008 financial collapse proved that these resources are not available in periods of stress, which is why the U.S. bailed out so many foreign banks operating in the U.S. The Fed should have stopped that long ago.

“As is well-known, risks in the global financial system that materialize elsewhere easily end up becoming risks here in the U.S. and threaten our financial system and economy. Those risks are amplified by the unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies attempting to address the many unexpected shocks from the pandemic and war. The Fed must see Credit Suisse as a warning sign and improve the regulatory framework for large foreign banks and all banks to ensure that the American financial system and economy are properly protected.”

Credit Suisse’s reputation has taken more hits from its involvement in the Greensill Capital scandal and the infamous spy-gate scandal in 2019 where the bank spied on and followed various employees.
Nervousness about Credit Suisse reached a pivotal moment in the fall of last year. On November 30, its 5-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) blew out to 446 basis points. That was up from 55 basis points in January of 2022 and more than five times where CDS on its peer Swiss bank, UBS, were trading. The price of a Credit Default Swap reflects the cost to traders, or investors with exposure, to insuring themselves against a debt default by the bank.

If all of this didn’t awaken Secretary Yellen from her slumber about the contagion risks posed by a deteriorating Credit Suisse, she should have been jolted upright on December 5 of last year when researchers for the Bank for International Settlement (Claudio Borio, Robert McCauley and Patrick McGuire) released an astonishing report that found that foreign banks had secret derivative debt that is “10 times their capital.”

The report focused on the amount of derivative debt that was not being captured through regular statistical reporting because it is held off the banks’ balance sheets. The researchers refer to this exposure as “staggering” and note the potential for upsets to dollar swap lines to settle it as it comes due.
The report raises further alarm bells with this: “For banks headquartered outside the United States, dollar debt from these instruments is estimated at $39 trillion, more than double their on-balance sheet dollar debt and more than 10 times their capital.” Their on-balance sheet dollar debt is $15 trillion.

The most recent quarterly derivatives report from the U.S. regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), found that as of September 30, 2022 four U.S. mega banks held 88.6 percent of all notional amounts of derivatives in the U.S. banking system. The total notional amount for all banks was $195 trillion. JPMorgan Chase held $54.3 trillion of that; Goldman Sachs held $50.97 trillion; Citigroup’s Citibank held $46 trillion; and Bank of America held $21.6 trillion. Even though the Dodd-Frank legislation required that most of these derivative trades move to central clearing, as of September 30, 2022 the OCC report found that 58.3 percent of these derivatives were not being centrally-cleared, meaning they were over-the-counter (OTC) private contracts between counterparties, thus adding another layer of opacity to an unaccountable system.

For the role that Citigroup played in keeping these dangerous derivatives inside federally-insured banks, see our December 2014 report: Meet Your Newest Legislator: Citigroup.

top of the heap to third world status in one generation

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Anybody else remember Occupy Wall St.? I do.​

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The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives​

Anybody else remember Occupy Wall St.? I do.

The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives