Category Archives: Max Keiser Blog

Max Blog: Pumping and Dumping the 401(k) Crowd

Posted on April 29, 2009 by stacyherbert| 47 Comments

This is what we know: The fractional-reserve-banking-enabled, Fiat-currency-assisted credit derivatives bubble that grew 10 times larger than Earth’s GDP has popped.

And the collapse of this greatest global Ponzi scheme since the South Sea Bubble has taken world markets with it. It has destroyed pension funds and wiped out banks across the planet. Economies have screeched to a standstill. Trade has collapsed. Fifty million have lost their jobs. A hundred million have been pushed into hunger.

This is what we don’t know: when, or if, the banking bailouts, money printing and other wealth transfer schemes will stop.

In America, the people are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore. Or that’s what you would think if you tuned in to any cable channel spewing the new populism.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting, however, that all that televised “populism” is a whole lot of hot air: “Today’s populism has created no large scale protests in the US.”

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Tagged 401(k), huffingtonpost, max keiser, pump and dump

Max Keiser blog: Revisiting boycott & hedge fund campaign against Coke

Posted on April 19, 2009 by maxkeiser| 8 Comments

As we gear up to make a fresh assault on the copyright cartel and expand the public domain with PirateMyFilm, it is worth taking a look at this campaign we ran in The Ecologist magazine a few years back.

Boycott Coca Cola

The campaign tried to help activists, environmentalists, etc. expand the public domain by first cleaning up the toxic slick in financial markets. The right wing tried to shut this campaign down, of course, by smearing it in the press; falsely accusing us of instigating market manipulation. But they ended up with egg on their face as Continue reading →

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Tagged boycott coke, ecologist, max keiser, rigged markets

Max Keiser Blog: Lehman got whacked

Posted on April 17, 2009 by maxkeiser| 14 Comments

Headline: Yellen signals letting Lehman collapse was a mistake

American entrepreneuralism, as exemplified by innovators like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, could not have been possible without an equally innovative, creative, engineering marvel known as America’s capital system HQ’d on the corner of Broad St. and Nassau St; home of the NYSE.

Over the decades the home of fast growing capital migrated to the multi dealer network known as NASDAQ. Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), raised billions fast on NASDAQ from investors all over the country and all over the world who got calls from stock brokers anxious to get shares of ‘the next big thing’ into their accounts fast, before prices doubled, or tripled and in some cases rose 1,000 or even 2,000 percent.

Starting in the 1970′s, and taking off with the bull market of the 1980′s, the home of the fast talking, street smart Wall Street broker was Lehman Brothers. Shoe shine boys became million dollar producers at Lehman. Initial Public Offerings (IPO’s) rolled out of their investment banking division in a marvelous parade of ideas brought to life with the plasma of a public offering. But Lehman is gone. Taken out back by its competitors and shot in the head when they willfully opened the trap door of credit denial.

Lehman got whacked. Some speculate that it was Goldman Sachs who ordered the hit as a way to get some loans off their balance sheet they didn’t feel like paying back. I have no reason to believe this was not the case. Some may say, well, business is tough, ‘survival of the fittest,’ and if you can’t compete you deserve to go the way of the dodo. In Lehman’s case we lost something special. Lehman was the goose laying the golden eggs that drove the NASDAQ to 5,000. Now it’s gone and the regulators are only beginning to figure out that it was a contract killing by the company’s enemies. But it’s too late now, the turf war is over and the zombie, wealth-eating banks won.

The next wealth machine on the scale of Lehman, where any ‘Joe the Plumber’ could walk in off the street and make a million bucks, will probably pop up in Asia somewhere. Lehman Bros. RIP

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Tagged blog, lehman, max keiser

Max Keiser mini-blog: The Pirate Bay are guilty?

Posted on April 17, 2009 by maxkeiser| 14 Comments

The court’s decision has been leaked: ThePirateBay are guilty?

Watch the press conference live here at 1pm Sweden time

Update: Verdict read: Guilty

This is the battle we’re in. This is the battle all Americans, especially, should be in. Right now.

Before election reform, environmental protection, equal rights, gay rights, gun rights, we all need the right to connect with our collective heritage and imagination without corporate taxation via gulag copyright laws. This is the battle. Don’t buy corporate copyrighted intellectual property. Make your own. Drain copyright luddites like Newscorp, Disney, and Microsoft. Use the Creative Commons. Support the Swedish Pirate Party and The Pirate Bay.

Join PirateMyfilm.

Emancipate yourself!

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Tagged pirate my film, piratebay, sweden, the pirate bay

Max Keiser Blog – The Old Lady keeping the poor poor, the rich rich

Posted on April 16, 2009 by maxkeiser| 17 Comments

In the US, the rhetoric damning the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington D.C. is well known to anyone who listens to Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff and the rest of the ‘hard money’ crowd that are enlisted by Bloomberg TV to point out the blindingly obvious to the deaf and dumb masses.

But where is the outcry against the Bank of England? Started in 1694 as a clawback of power by England’s aristocracy after having lost the Divine Right of Kings clause when Charles the 1st was beheaded, the BoE, the ‘Old Lady of Threadneedle Street’ is the mother of all central banks. From her loins springs the sum and in-substance of fiat fantasies fanning the flames of a monetary foolhardiness guaranteed to keep the poor poor and the rich rich.

Social mobility in Britain is restricted due to the 300 yrs of corrupt and insidious machinations of the Old Lady. We are seeing this play out today as millions of home owners sink back into poverty after having been victimized by ponzi scheme wielding bankers in the City and by the largesse of easy student loans that are now the blight of millions of students in the UK. This next generation will graduate with onerous debts that got piled high on top of the innocent sounding ‘top up fees’ introduced not too long ago when ‘growth’ was eternal and students weren’t forced to take relatively high paying jobs in defense or surveillance as the only way to stay ahead of banking reapers.

Protesters in the US can complain about Ben Bernanke and the Fed all they want, but until we see some solidarity with London, the primary source of the globe’s financial derangement, the Bank of England, will continue to pump class war, cronyism and fiat money into the British and world economy with the shameless glee of an invisible arsonist.

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Tagged bank of england, blog, federal reserve, max keiser, old lady of threadneedle street, ponzi scheme

Max Keiser Mini-Blog: The British pound is doomed

Posted on April 15, 2009 by maxkeiser| 10 Comments

The British Pound is doomed. Three years ago, while doing our ResonanceFM 104.4 show, “The Truth About Markets,” Stacy and I commented on news that Bradford & Bingley was offering customers 120% mortgages. At the time we pointed out that this was guaranteed to bankrupt B&B and the entire banking sector if they were allowed to continue locking in negative equity deals for customers who were clearly being victimized by predatory lending and banking abuse. Sure enough B&B needed a bailout and that extra 20% on top of the 100% mortgage that the UK tax payer is paying for – is now providing leverage for short sellers to continue to attack the British Pound. The remedy? Halifax just announced 120% re-mortgages for home owners in negative equity. More debt to get out of debt. Reminds me of the woman in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” who plastic surgeried herself to death. The British pound, after its recent ‘dead cat bounce’ is a one way bet down as banks are permitted, without any government intervention, to hollow out Britain’s economy unchallenged by law or common sense.

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Tagged blog, bradford & bingley, halifax, max keiser, negative equity

Max Keiser blog: Germany bans Monsanto GM corn

Posted on April 14, 2009 by maxkeiser| 12 Comments

Headline: Germany bans cultivation of GM corn

My comments: Monsanto is as much of copyright abuser as Disney. Monsanto, as I’ve written many times before, uses abusive copyright and patent laws to monopolize seeds; introducing ‘terminator seeds’ that are eunuchs incapable of reproduction along with other equally destructive products. This means prices for food go up. Way up. Are they helping farmers and poor people? About as much as Visa and Master Card and predatory pay check lenders. Monsanto treats seeds like a currency that can be manipulated. Do you really want Monsanto and Goldman sachs running seed banks? The last time I wrote about Monsanto, their PR machine smeared me within 24 hours.. I’ll keep you posted.

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Tagged germany, gm corn, mon 810, monsanto

Max Keiser PirateMyFilm Pre-Beta Blog: US dollar is a virtual currency

Posted on April 14, 2009 by maxkeiser| 3 Comments

This Cory Doctorow column in the Guardian about gaming and currencies is a nice update to a trend I’ve been tracking since 1996 and the launch of Hollywood Stock Exchange.

At the time, when I was running HSX I insisted on allowing users to convert Hollywood Dollars into U.S. dollars at a fixed exchange rate of 1 million to 1. The profit to us was pretty good because by the time a user on HSX made 1 million Hollywood dollars clicking around our site, we had served more than 1 dollar in ads. The NYT called the Hollywood Dollar the first virtual currency in existence in a story from around that time.

What’s interesting to me today, is not that virtual currencies are just now being understood as a viable piece of the overall economy but how supposedly smart people, like America’s favorite economist Paul Krugman, fail to understand, or have decided not to inform Americans that the Federal Reserve Bank and U.S. Treasury issuing U.S. dollars is no different than online game currencies.

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Tagged cory doctorow, fiat currencies, hollywood stock exchange, hsx, max keiser, virtual currencies

The Max Keiser PirateMyFilm Pre-Beta Blog: Copyright ‘term extension’ cancer

Posted on April 13, 2009 by maxkeiser| 9 Comments

I pulled the following comments from recent posts:

Max: On the one hand you’re talking about “de-commercialization of art” and on the other you’re saying there are “revenue streams” for PMF.
So which is it?
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

And:

Max, Nature is the ultimate creative force, who does it pay? It pays itself, it feeds back into itself, creating more diversity through better design. Nature, as culture, is selfishly unselfish, it is a system of favours, a system of mutual appreciation and ultimately a matrix of a trillion trillion trillion moments of piracy.

These two comments sum up the interesting interplay between the economy and the ecology. The economy should mirror the ecology more than not. Even Adam Smith hints at this in his famous works written during the time economic liberalism’s creation during the period of the Enlightenment. What most people equate with a ‘fast growing economy’ is nothing of the sort. Any economy or any component of an economy that is growing faster than the host economy or host political system or country has to be considered more cancerous than organic.

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Tagged copyright, max keiser, PirateMyFilm

Max Keiser Blog #4 Pre-Beta – The self-expression in price discovery

Posted on April 11, 2009 by maxkeiser| 9 Comments

Micah M. White has a new blog up on AdBusters; “Support Online Piracy”

He says:

“There is no swifter way to bring about the de-commercialization of art than to undercut the profit motive. Likewise, there is no better way to promote a blackspot culture than to actively copy and distribute the cultural productions that speak to us and the future we’d like to build. If we pirate everything, how will the artists get paid? That is precisely the point: piracy opens up the possibility of imagining new ways of being and new ways of supporting the potential of art to change the world.”

To the extent that I am correctly (or incorrectly) interpreting White’s comments, I agree that de-commercialization is necessary as a means to reinvigorate our public spaces and our public discourse. I see the current media and commerce market as a zero sum game where every dollar, inch, and minute gobbled up by private interests means a commensurate loss of the public’s interest. I agree that the artists will create art regardless of any profit motive. The overwhelming majority of art and culture that has been created by humans has been done so for little or no money. I agree that by draining the entire economic system as it currently exists will exert downward economic pressure on everyone, including artists. They are, however, able to keep producing premium, insightful, highly valued artifacts no matter what’s going on in the economy.

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Tagged copyright, max keiser, PirateMyFilm, price discovery

Max Keiser Blog: Hollywood Luddites & Subsidized Corn

Posted on April 10, 2009 by maxkeiser| 19 Comments

As the US dollar continues to be challenged as the world’s reserve currency many sacred US institutions are also being knocked from their perch. Hollywood and America’s huge intellectual property export market, one of America’s biggest exports after military hardware and state subsidized (read: communist) corn, will sink just like the US dollar.

In reference to PirateMyFilm, my new micro-payment indie film finance site, the effect of this site on Hollywood will be interesting. Anyone who’s been involved in the movie business in Los Angeles knows, the business adheres to a strict hierarchical model with the three main talent agencies at the top controlling the ‘A’ list stars whose bankability or ‘star power’ is monopolized to drive prices higher.

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Tagged blog, copyright, max keiser, PirateMyFilm

Max Keiser Blog #2 Pre-Beta – The copyright reform movement

Posted on April 9, 2009 by stacyherbert| 48 Comments

I saw this in the comments:

supporting one cause over another cause does not cancel out supporting anything, it simply leaves us all free to do what ever we can to make things better

Glad you brought this up, and I vehemently disagree. I’ve had this conversation many times with activists from NGOs in countries all over the world. There are approximately 10,000 NGOs and approximately 2 million people who work for them who together control approximately 1 trillion dollars worth of the global GDP. The reason why NGOs in the green movement, the social justice movement, the free software movement and others have not had the success one would have imagined given the passion and intelligence of those involved is because they lack economies of scale. To successfully push back against corporate and political oligopolies requires a force that is equal or grater than the forces aligned against these movements. I have said many times before that the reason Greenpeace is not making more progress for environmental justice is because they insist on showing up to gun fight with a knife.

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Tagged activists, economies of scale, max keiser, ngo, PirateMyFilm

Max Blog: PirateMyFilm, Day 3 pre-Beta

Posted on April 8, 2009 by stacyherbert| 21 Comments

Somebody wrote to me and said they love the PirateMyFilm idea but were surprised I was not doing something that addressed environmental issues instead of the issue of the government’s copyright abuse. In fact, my biggest progressive issue has always been reform of copyright law. Without access to the ideas, art and culture currently locked up on corporate balance sheets thanks to the draconian DMCA laws put in place by President Clinton, progress is restricted.

Before we can figure out how to solve the environmental degradation issues we need to be free to innovate. We need to be reconnected to our own intellectual heritage and be able to freely make use of our collective genius as humans without penalty from insidious copyright kleptocrats. We need to empower and enrich individuals ahead of the narrow minded oligarchy of the current copyright cartel choking both our creative community and our ability to innovate.

To me, this is the most important progressive issue of our time.

Keep the emails coming. If you wish to subscribe to our PirateMyFilm info newsletter, send us an email at info [at] piratemyfilm.com with “subscribe” in the subject line.

In the meantime, make sure to follow us on Twitter.com/piratemyfilm where I will be posting several times per day with PirateMyFilm and copyright related items.

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Tagged copyright, max keiser, PirateMyFilm

Max Keiser Pitches PirateMyFilm.com

Posted on April 7, 2009 by stacyherbert| 17 Comments

Stacy Summary: This is a clip from a radio interview last night. This part is Max Keiser talking about PirateMyFilm. Piracy, breaking copyright cartels and innovation arising from freeing copyright.

Listen to Max Keiser talk about PirateMyFilm

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Tagged copyright cartel, max keiser, movie piracy, PirateMyFilm