Max Keiser Blog: A Bad Case of Paralytic Debt Poisoning

Posted on April 1, 2009 by stacyherbert| 15 Comments

A red tide of toxic debt has poisoned the nation’s financial system. And the American taxpayers are paralyzed as the financial oligarchs brazenly plunder their Fed and Treasury pockets.

The collateralized debt obligations, the credit default swaps, the mortgage backed securities and other debt instruments were, of course, only able to bloom to toxic levels in an environment overly rich in the necessary nutrients (deregulation, lax oversight, etc.).

And we over-fed the debt markets because we had lost our real wealth and incomes since the end of the gold standard and the beginning of financial deregulation. And the subsequent explosion in personal debt has left us further unable to respond to the financial meltdown. Without the resources to survive on our own incomes, we had grown ever more dependent on the very debt choking off the oxygen to our real economy.

15 Responses to Max Keiser Blog: A Bad Case of Paralytic Debt Poisoning

felupe | April 7, 2009 at 9:23 am |

re: April 7th, 2009 by stacyherbert

Stacy Summary: The financial horror film gets gory as the zombie financial oligarchy begins sucking the lifeblood out of us with higher taxes and reduced spending to pay for their divine rights to bonuses on financial gore.
banksters led by the prophet motive heading for the promised land of GLOBAL CORPORATE FEUDALISM.
bzmoore | April 3, 2009 at 10:04 am |

StevenLV…..continuing the thought…by demonizing the bonuses/bonusees (small potatoes) the powers that be feed the mob and provide indirection.

If that isn’t working enough (and Bankers are thier friends after all, GM I guess isn’t) the second indirection is to demonize the unregulated bank accounts of the Swiss and now off shore bank accounts and finally GoldMoney. This is done so that the world can’t see thru the smoke that the is US pilfering pension funds which are the largest pool of capital left.

Every dictator from Gingas Khan to Bush needs an external threat to hide their dirty deeds. For the G20 (specifically Brittan and the US) the lack of control on banking is a threat. However I think they are wasting thier time as China must be laughing all the way to the gold bank. Didn’t Sun Tsu say that the way to win a war is not to fight but let the enemy distroy themselves?
StephenLV | April 3, 2009 at 4:53 am |

I think you are onto something Barney…did some digging myself and yes places like Jersey and Guernsey etc are what the G20 are referring to. I think this is all part of what Alex Jones calls the consolidation of Power under a One World Control Grid, a "prison planet".

Even things like Gold Money who operates in Jersey would probably be shutdown if they get their way. I suspect they will now move aggressively to shut down any operation legal or illegal they do not control. I do not think the Internet is off limits as the servers have to have a geographical home.
bzmoore | April 2, 2009 at 11:16 pm |

Damn I hate to be serious but ….
Very good synopsis of Simon Johnson views, not his words but his ideas. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9QEd_7NPy8 .

Points out that pandering to a small group of the richest is now required to get enough money to get elected.
Craig Harrington calls this cost the endless campaigning. Why a small group? Partly because the wealth base has gotten much narrower in recent times. I.e. the extinction of the middle class leads to Oligarchs, leads to further reinforcement of concentration of power leads to big F-ing mess.

….There ….Now I can go back to my real hobby, gold prospecting.
Barney | April 2, 2009 at 5:58 pm |

Charitable Trust Funds? ala Granite with Northern Rock. Perfectly legal in the UK evidently. Granite was a charitable trust fund set up in the Jersey Islands legally set up to help a small downs syndrome charity in Newcastle in the UK. It was of course a ruse, since the charity had never received a penny, let alone heard about Granite. Interesting how many hedge funds (iirc) are registered in the UK, madoff ran most of his empire from the UK office & AIG was running a lot of their business out of the UK branch.

More here:
http://www.thenorthernrock.com/2008/02/uk-denies-…
"Financial Times,London,UK, ft.com
Gordon Brown on Wednesday denied the government was nationalising “rubbish” mortgages at Northern Rock after it became clear that over a third of the bank’s assets will remain outside state control in Granite, its Jersey-based trust.
Conservatives claimed Granite’s assets of £45bn included some of the best quality Northern Rock mortgages, leaving the taxpayer exposed to more risky loans on the remainder of the bank’s £110bn balance sheet.
The exclusion of Granite, Northern Rock’s special purpose financing vehicle, from the nationalisation stunned many MPs and left the government scrabbling to explain the relationship between the nationalised Rock and its Jersey offshoot.
Mr Brown argues the government is not exposed to Granite, a separate legal entity, and denies the special vehicle has creamed off the best Northern Rock mortgages to raise finance on the bond market."
chalcedonite | April 2, 2009 at 7:05 am |

Everyone knew and knows how big this was and is but they like it and indulged in it.
chalcedonite | April 2, 2009 at 7:03 am |

"Dogberry" had it right!
StephenLV | April 2, 2009 at 6:27 am |

Great article!

Hey check out this article…http://tinyurl.com/cdhggn

What/Where are these Tax Havens they talk about?
marty | April 2, 2009 at 3:56 am |

So I guess what I'm saying is, that the actual debt in "real money" i.e. debt as measured in Gold, has actually shrunk from 1957 to present, job well done,,, Ben you reading this, keep printing,,,
Marty | April 2, 2009 at 3:51 am |

Well written article, but it's not REALLY that bad. We're talking around 2% growth in debt, since 1957. Now on the other hand, inflation has had about a 7% growth. It's all explained in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
Worth a watch.
Mep | April 2, 2009 at 3:01 am |

The red tide metaphor was very effective. Nicely done! I'll repeat part of the comment I left over at HuffPost: I think the paralysis of which you speak has as much to do with utter shock and horror as it does with many amongst us just not having a clue as to how big and bad this thing really is. I know people who have no idea that over $12 trillion has been allocated for the banksters. They don't see what's going on.

Sometimes the very thing that threatens us most alludes us because it is so huge and pervasive. Of course, the Paulson-Bernacke-Summers-Geithner new era of transparency is meant to be opaque. Hence the TARP.

A question that I have about the $250 Trillion in derivatives: what is the function of the ICE Trust supposed to be? Is it just supposed to be the central bank's central clearinghouse of derivatives where the Feds can keep track of what kind of stuff is out there? Or is there something else to it? I've read up about it here:

http://ir.theice.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=…

and on the Federal Reserve's site:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/or…

but I can't figure out what exactly the purpose is. The Fed's statement: "ICE Trust intends to provide central counterparty services for certain credit default swap contracts." sounds like it could mean anything. And since I don't trust the Fed, I'm primed to be suspicious.
FranG | April 2, 2009 at 2:03 am |

I often ask myself which is more dangerous, the "useful idiot" or the "apathetic intellectual." I'm still struggling with that question.
Ismael | April 2, 2009 at 12:10 am |

Excellent article! The sheeple have been asleep since before 1913 and the banksters have seized every opportunity to tighten their stranglehold on the economy. I hope it's not too late for people to break the chains of self-induced PDP and take back their country.
bzmoore | April 1, 2009 at 11:58 pm |

Your numbers seem overly optimistic. Reminds me of the old story.
If 20% of the people are retired and 20% are children and 10% are in the army and 10% are in jail and 10% are unemployed and 10% work for the government, and 10% work in financial and insurance services and 10% are on welfare, you'd better get to work buddy because I'm getting tired of carrying the load.
Max Power | April 1, 2009 at 11:20 pm |

== Your quote ==
And we over-fed the debt markets because we had lost our real wealth and incomes since the end of the gold standard and the beginning of financial deregulation. And the subsequent explosion in personal debt has left us further unable to respond to the financial meltdown. Without the resources to survive on our own incomes, we had grown ever more dependent on the very debt choking off the oxygen to our real economy.
== end quote ==

Sorry mate, you forgot about US "Total Cumulative Debt Per Person"
– http://hireme.geek.nz/US_Debt_Guesstimates.ods
– Canada, Australia, NZ and UK have been added but numbers are prototype "filler" numbers…
– I would love to add EU member states & Nordic Union and some EU-FTA states like Turkey.
– If you don't have Open Office here are the US results : http://hireme.geek.nz/wiki-spreadsheet.html
– Derivative debt is ignored as it is unclear under GAAP how to treat it.

Notes
– At 700,000 USD per person (the optimistic midrange value) I would say that the part of the US economy that has no contact with debt is extinct (but for how long this has been true I don't know).
– There is no way yet of tracking US Total Cumulative Debt Per Person, but it can be tracked with reasonable accuracy after 1975, however a dataset 1945 to Present is needed for historical comparison.