Monthly Archives: March 2009

US shanty towns spread like wildfire

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Encampments and shanty towns are increasing across the US with more people losing jobs and shelters on the back of a deepening recession.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” said homeless advocate Paul Stack, according to a New York Times article released on Thursday. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”

While Americans residing in big cities like Los Angeles and New York are already familiar with tent cities, the number of homeless is spreading like wildfire across the US.

“These are able-bodied folks that did day labor, at minimum wage or better, who were previously able to house themselves based on their income,” said Michael Stoops, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless — an advocacy group based in Washington.

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Money like a drug to the brain

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So let me get this straight; if to some people money is not just a means to an end but an actual drug than it follows that those who make their livelihood making more money than the can ever spend addicts.

Well, that explains a lot. Like for example the behaviour of rich people. The keep their dosh to themselves and that includes those who purport to do some charity with said dosh. It’s a bit like a junky who gives a little bit of his heroine to someone who wants to try it in order to make himself feel good while making damn sure he doesn’t run our of his precious drug.

And now after a 25 year earning spree with dizzying amounts of endorphine releasing money in their bank accounts, their habits grown out of all proportions and their lying about how addicted they really are becoming obvious to all who have seen them growing high on their drug of choice just a bit too often and too obvious are running scared because their ponzy schemes are falling apart.

The Wall street bankers junkies are approaching rock bottom.

Their lies are old and predictable and in their angst to finally have to face the piper they are pulling all of us who actually see money as a means to and end, as a way to be able to acquire articles we might need and in order to compensate our fellow human beings for effort they make on our behalf, with them.

And the new Zealand population in their MSM induced comatose ignorance elected a Wall street junky whose main adrenaline rush was to earn mega bucks gambling with huge amounts of money and with a $ 50 million habit to guard the hen house dealers stash.

And what does he propose to do in order to get us through the coming economic meltdown brought on by his Wall street junky palls? Borrow $ 40 billion more of that wonderful endorphin releasing drug to gamble our futures away with while giving his other junky mates wads of cash in tax cuts. It’s a junky’s paradise . Brilliant, New Zealand well done.

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Money works like a drug on the human brain – and even just the thought of earning a higher salary gives us a physical buzz, a study has found.

Scientists have discovered that thinking about cash stimulates the reward centres involved in pleasure and the higher the salary – even if it is just imagined – the greater the pleasure generated in the brain.

This may be no great surprise, but the most intriguing aspect of the research is that the findings hold true even if what we want to buy costs more, for example in times of high inflation, and our actual spending power drops.

The results of the study suggest that the human brain is innately susceptible to the illusion of wealth that money can bring. This is known in economics as “money illusion” – when people get fixated on the nominal value of money rather than on its actual purchasing power.

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Israel defends use of flesh-eating weapon

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What defence is there for the use of white phosphor on civilians? None absolutely no excuse whatsoever.

Tel Aviv hits back at a humanitarian report that suggests the Israeli army had ‘illegally’ shelled Gazans with white phosphorus shells.

The New York-headquartered Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that Israel’s indiscriminate and deliberate use of white phosphorus against Palestinian civilians amounts to war crimes.

“The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) repeatedly exploded white phosphorus munitions in the air over populated areas, killing and injuring civilians, and damaging civilian structures,” read the report.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Israeli officialdom had violated the international laws of warfare by using the controversial weapon — which burns flesh to the bone.

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Commander confirms Netanyahu war plans

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Israel is preparing for all-out war on multiple fronts that include Iran, Syria and Lebanon, a senior military commander claims.

Israeli army Home Front Command Major General Yair Golan said Sunday that Tel Aviv is preparing for “all possible scenarios”, indicating that one such scenario would be to fight a simultaneous war against Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

The confirmation comes as US President Barack Obama seeks “new beginnings” with its arch-rival Iran. The US offer has been met with world praise but with fury in Tel Aviv.

Israeli media outlets late on Sunday began propagating wild scenarios that Iran is using the Lebanese Hezbollah to recruit Palestinian fighters to carry out terror attacks on Israel.

Citing anonymous sources, the reports began to surface after Tel Aviv countered an alleged bombing attempt outside a shopping mall in the northern city of Haifa.

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USA has two options to save its economy: declare default or trigger off war

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The United States is the largest borrower in the world. The US national debt has already exceeded the level of 11 trillion dollars as of the beginning of 2009 and continues to grow like an avalanche. Experts say that the USA has only two ways to solve the problem: to either declare default or trigger off a war.

According to experts’ estimates, the probability of default on US treasury bonds is very high at the moment. The rumors are not new at all. Moreover, experts say that the USA has already started to work on an opportunity to refuse from the dollar in order to avoid debt payments.

Dmitry Abzalov, an expert with the Center for Russia ‘s Political Conjuncture, said that governments currently take on the debts of corporations. “The corporate debts crisis thus becomes the crisis of governmental debts. The US debt in the beginning of 2009 amounted to $10.6 trillion. Taking into consideration the current deficit budget of the United States , as well as the prospects for the deficit of the budget during the current year, it becomes clear that the US Treasury bond market is based on no alternative whatsoever. There is no other way for investors to invest their funds with treasury bonds being the only option,” the expert told Bigness.ru.

When the world economy recovers, investors will realize that there are plenty of other opportunities for investments, the European bonds, for example (if the European economy recovers from the crisis too, of course), or the bonds of developing countries.

“The pyramid of US bonds will collapse in this case. The debt percentage grows every day, which makes the USA borrow more and more on a daily basis. America will have no chances to pay off the debt,” the expert said.

Inga Foksha, an analyst with Aton Investment Company, agrees that the US default is quite possible, although she is certain that it will not happen unless the world finds an alternative to the US dollar. The dollar will collapse immediately in case of default, which is absolutely unacceptable, because 63 percent of world reserves are saved in dollars. Their collapse will trigger the global economic collapse.

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Finance crisis 'could lead to war', IMF warns

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Ah, the good old fashioned fear factor but also very true. WWII comes to mind as the outcome of the Great Depression. Made a lot of money incidentally for the selfsame assholes causing this recession.
In case you didn’t know about the Money Masters now would be a good time to watch the video.

The global financial crisis could lead to social unrest and even war, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned yesterday.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that the billions already pumped into the world economy risked disappearing into thin air unless there is massive reform of the financial sector.

And he dealt a severe blow to Gordon Brown’s plans for another debt-funded Budget giveaway by warning that the money might melt ‘like snow in the sun’.

At a meeting of the International Labour Organisation, Mr Strauss-Kahn warned that the global economic crisis is ‘dire’ with the threat of millions being pushed into poverty.

The managing director of the global financial watchdog went on to warn governments against ploughing yet more fiscal stimulus into their ailing economies. He said: ‘You can put in as much stimulus as you want.

‘It will just melt in the sun as snow if at the same time you are not able to have a generally smaller financial sector than before but a healthy financial sector at work.’

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How big a deal is the loss of the dollar's reserve status?

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As the dollar loses its reserves status, at least half of the world’s $5,385 billion dollar reserves will be sold off and replaced with other currencies (yuan, euro, khaleeji, gold, rand, etc…). The US, with its $71 foreign reserves, will not be able to do anything to counteract this mass exodus from the dollar. With outflows of this magnitude, the dollar’s value will collapse to a fraction of where it is now.

How about the total collapse of the US. Economic Armageddon, food riots, starvation and crime waves. How about the same for China, Japan, India and Europe. And that’s just for starters.

We may not have a lot here but we have a good distance from the helter skelter coming and we can grow our own food. Not bad.

In the last week we have learned that:

1) Fed is planning 15-fold increase in us monetary base
2) U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar
3) Zimbabwe has ditched the US dollar in favor of the rand
4) China and Russia rethinking the dollar’s status as world’s reserve currency

With the US monetary base expanding at a breathtaking pace and nations around the world worrying about the value of their US holdings, the dollar looks virtually guaranteed to lose its status as the international reserve currency. This begs the question: how big a deal is the loss of the dollar’s reserve status?

To answer this question, lets first calculate just how large are the dollar holdings of foreign governments. From the CIA’s world Factbook, below is a ranking of countries by reserves of foreign exchange.

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Chinese central bank backs Russian idea for new reserve currency

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Uh OOh. What will it mean for the world if the US $ looses it’s reserve status?

The chairman of the People’s Bank of China has spoken out in support of Russia’s proposal to create a new global reserve currency as an alternative to the U.S. dollar, Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.

Zhou Xiaochuan wrote in an essay posted on the bank’s website that the goal of the international monetary system is to “create an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.”

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Rainbow Warrior bombing agent dies in French plane crash

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Good riddens. Fernando Pereira who died in the attack lived in my neighbourhood in Amsterdam and was part of a much appreciated small Dutch Portugese community. That community which I knew was devastated after his death. I had friends in that community and I can only say good riddens to bad trash.

A member of the French Secret Service team that carried out the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985 has been killed in a plane crash in the French Alps.

Xavier Maniguet, 62, was one of four men aboard the yacht Ouvea that smuggled explosives used in “Operation Satanic”, which sank the Greenpeace flagship in a bid to stall protests against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.

Maniguet, a flying instructor, died with a 76-year-old pupil on Monday.

They had just dropped off a skier on the 3400-metre-high Etendard glacier near the resort of Saint-Sorlin-d’Arves, and were taking off again when a gust of wind hit their craft. Maniguet had been at the controls of the single-engine Jodel aeroplane when the accident happened.

China Offers No Fix for Global Slump

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Just in case you were hoping that China was going to stop New Zealand from going into depression.

Any prospect that China could be the growth engine to pull the world economy out of deep recession has been laid to rest by the latest World Bank forecast.

At the recently completed annual National Peoples Congress (NPC), Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao promised the regime’s policies would ensure 8 percent growth in 2009. The World Bank, however, cut its projection for this year to 6.5 percent, down from the previous 7.5 percent.

With the US, Europe and Japan all in recession, 6.5 percent sounds very positive. Reflecting the generally upbeat tone of the bank’s outlook, World Bank country director David Dollar, described China as “a relative bright spot in an otherwise gloomy global economy”.

The real situation and the scale of the economic slowdown in China, however, are underscored by the fact that 4.9 percentage points of the estimated growth will come from a massive government stimulus package. In other words, without the stimulus measures, the predicted growth rate would be just 1.6 percent—compared to 13 percent in 2007.

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