Thursday, January 19, 2012

OCCUPY WALL ST - Obama's Criminal Bankster Donors STILL LOOTING AND PILLAGING A NATION


O REPUBLICAN IN HISTORY HAS WORKED HARDER FOR WALL ST BANKSTERS THAN OBAMA! THEY HAVE FILLED HIS POCKETS WITH THANKS.

OTHER THAN BANKSTERS, ONLY ILLEGALS GET OBAMA’S ATTENTION MORE! HE IS THE FIRST LA RAZA SUPREMACIST PRESIDENT!

“In other words, despite the trillions of dollars handed out to the banks and financial institutions over the past three years by governments around the world, nothing has been resolved. The global economy could be plunged into a disaster at any time. This underscores the fact that the crisis of 2008 was not a conjunctural downturn, from which there would be a recovery, but the start of an ongoing breakdown in the world capitalist economy, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of billions of people.”
World economy set for another major downturn

By Nick Beams
19 January 2012

The World Bank has issued a grim forecast on the outlook for the world economy, with the potential for a crisis worse than that which followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The warning was contained in the Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report, issued yesterday.

These predictions were backed by a United Nations report. It said the world economy was “teetering on the brink of another major downturn,” with output growth slowing “considerably” in 2011 and only “anaemic growth” expected in 2012 and 2013.

The World Bank pointed to a significant worsening of economic prospects, beginning in August 2011 as the euro zone financial crisis started to deepen. This was having a major impact on so-called emerging markets where rates on credit default swaps (CDS)—an indication of fears of a debt default—had been rising.

However, this was by no means the only sign. “For developing countries, the contagion has been broadly based,” the report stated. “Developing-country markets have lost 8.5 percent of their value since July-end. This, combined with the 4.2 percent drop in high-income stock-market valuations, has translated into $6.5 trillion, or 9.5 percent of global GDP, in wealth losses.”

Even more significant was the sharp decline in capital flows to developing countries as investors withdrew money in the second half of last year. “Overall, gross capital flows to developing countries plunged to $170 billion in the second half of 2011, only 55 percent of the $309 billion received during the like period of 2010.”

According to the report, “the world economy has entered a dangerous period” as the financial turmoil in Europe spread to developing and other high-income countries that had previously been unaffected.

The World Bank’s forecasts of world economic growth had been “significantly downgraded” from its previous assessment six months ago. It now expected the global economy to expand by only 2.5 percent and 3.1 percent in 2012 and 2013, compared to the previous prediction of 3.6 percent for both years. Any rate below 3 percent is generally considered to be a recession for the world economy as a whole. Europe was now in a recession and growth in high-income countries was expected to be only 1.4 percent.

Even these weak results may not be achieved. “The downturn in Europe and the slow growth in developing countries could reinforce one another more than is anticipated,” resulting in even worse results and “further complicating efforts to restore market confidence.” At the same time, “the medium-term challenge represented by high debts and slow trend growth in other high-income countries has not been resolved and could trigger sudden adverse shocks.”

The consequences would be even greater than those of the breakdown of the global financial system after September 2008.

“While contained for the moment, the risk of a much broader freezing up of capital markets and a global crisis similar in magnitude to the Lehman crisis remains. In particular, the willingness of markets to finance the deficits and maturing debt of high-income countries cannot be assured. Should more countries find themselves denied such financing, a much wider financial crisis that could engulf private banks and other financial institutions on both sides of the Atlantic cannot be ruled out.”

In other words, despite the trillions of dollars handed out to the banks and financial institutions over the past three years by governments around the world, nothing has been resolved. The global economy could be plunged into a disaster at any time. This underscores the fact that the crisis of 2008 was not a conjunctural downturn, from which there would be a recovery, but the start of an ongoing breakdown in the world capitalist economy, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of billions of people.

The report stated: “In the event of a major crisis, the downturn may well be longer than in 2008/09 because high-income countries do not have the fiscal or monetary resources to bailout the banking system or stimulate demand to the same extent as in 2008/09. Although developing countries have some maneuverability on the monetary side, they could be forced to … cut spending—especially if financing for fiscal deficits dries up.”

The impact of the financial turmoil in Europe is expressed in world trade—always an indicator of the state of the global economy. The report noted that trade volumes had declined at an annualised pace of 8 percent during the three months ending in October 2011 “mainly reflecting a 17 percent annualised decline in European imports.”

Exports from so-called developing countries fell at an annualised rate of 1.7 percent in the third quarter of last year and continued to fall in November. The countries of South Asia were among the hardest hit, with sharp contractions, following rapid export growth in the first half of the year. Exports from East Asia were falling at double-digit annualised rates. While some of this decline was due to the impact of the floods in Thailand, it also expressed the contraction of markets in Europe and other high-income regions.

World Bank chief economist Justin Lifu Liu said China still remained a bright spot. Its growth rate, although down to a forecast of 8.4 percent for this year, compared to 9.1 percent last year, remained relatively high. “If China can maintain its growth, it’s good for the world, providing support for commodities markets and growth in other countries.” He warned that while China’s exports would be adversely affected by the worldwide downturn, the Chinese government was one of the least indebted in the world and had “relatively large room for manoeuvre to stimulate the economy.”

In view of recent reports from Beijing on the state of the Chinese economy and the mounting problems faced by government and monetary authorities, such comments can be likened to whistling past the graveyard.

This week, the Chinese government announced that the growth rate for the last quarter of 2011 was an annualised 8.9 percent, the lowest for 10 quarters. Overall growth for 2011 was 9.2 percent, the weakest since 2009 when China experienced the impact of the Lehman collapse.

A National Bureau of Statistics spokesman said 2012 would be a year of “complexity and challenges.” The Financial Times reported that his remarks were “laced with words such as ‘gloomy’, ‘complicated’ and ‘severe’.”

Huang Yiping, the chief economist at Barclays Bank, which has just completed a study of China’s real estate bubble, told the FT that the probability of a big stimulus package was much lower now because the government was still dealing with the effects of the last one. “China has very heavily indebted local governments and has seen an extraordinary credit expansion that contributed to large asset bubbles, particularly in housing, over the last few years. Over-investment is also a major concern and these are all problems that have contributed to collapse in other developing economies in the past,” he said.

A severe economic crisis in China will have major social and political consequences, with the government calculating that it needs at least 8 percent growth to maintain social stability and prevent a challenge to its rule. There will also be significant consequences for commodity exporting countries such as Canada, Australia and Brazil that have, to some extent, been insulated from the full impact of financial turbulence by high prices and volumes for their commodity exports to China.


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2009 - NOT A BANKSTER GOES TO PRISON!

 NEW YORK TIMES

 December 14, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Disaster and Denial


When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.

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WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW?

Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

BARACK OBAMA HAS COLLECTED NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS JOHN McCAIN

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL

DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

July 1st 2008

Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to Barack Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg

Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.

Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily News analysis of campaign records shows.

 "Wall Street wants change and wants a curtailment in spending. It wants someone who focuses on the domestic economy," said Jim Cramer, the boisterous host of CNBC's "Mad Money."
Cramer also does not discount nostalgia for the go-go 1990s, when Bill Clinton led the largest economic expansion in history.

 "It wants a Clinton like in 1992, but not a Hillary Clinton," he said. "That's Barack Obama."

For both candidates, Wall Street's investment and banking sectors have become among their portliest cash cows, contributing $9.5 million to Obama and $5.3 million to McCain so far.
It's a haul that is already raising concerns that, as the nation's faltering economy has become issue No. 1, the two candidates may have a hard time playing tough on issues like market regulation or corporate-tax loopholes.

 "No matter who wins in November, Wall Street will have a friend in the White House," said Massie Ritsch of the Center for Responsive Politics, which crunched the data for The News.

Wall Street's generosity toward Obama, in particular, would seem to run counter to its self-interests.
In addition to calling for corporate and capital gains tax hikes, Obama has proposed raising income taxes on those earning more than $250,000.

 But Wall Street is often motivated by something more than money - winning.

"In general, these are professional prognosticators," said Ritsch. "And they may be putting their money on the person they predict will win, not the candidate they hope will win."

Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

Obama's Wall Street haul is not the biggest ever. That distinction belongs to President Bush, who as an incumbent in 2004 raised $10,852,696 from Wall Street interests through April that year - about $1 million more than Obama.


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