Defaulting banks - where will it stop?

[Peter Lemkin]

I have no idea how large this pan-European protest will be or if it will fizzle out...but we don't have long to wait:

December 7 is a planned run on the banks in Europe. It has received very little coverage in the MSM. However, thanks to the internet, what started on one small German blog, has now spread through Europe.

- Italien - Italy
- Deutschland - Germany
- Holland - Holland
- Grossbritannien - United Kingdom
- Griechenland - Greece
- Dänemark - Denmark
- Belgien - Belgium
- Tschechien - Czech Republic
- Portugal - Portugal
- Island - Iceland
- Albanien - Albania
- Schweiz - Switzerland
- Rumänien - Romania
- Spanien - Spain

Hier weiterlesen: All smoke and mirrors: Banque-Stop Action in Europe

http://alles-schallundrauch.blogspot.com...z163ou2hB4

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/t...T-5JyHr0vw

http://translate.google.com/translate?js...+und+Rauch)

Hat tip: Zerohedge

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/decembe...mutiny-day

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: Federal agents have raided the offices of three major hedge funds amidst news of a sweeping probe of insider trading at Wall Street firms. On Monday, the FBI seized documents at the offices of Level Global investors, Diamondback Capital Management and Loch Capital Management in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Collectively, the three firms manage nearly $10 billion in assets. The raids come days after news broke out the federal authorities are conducting what could be the largest insider-trading investigation in U.S. history. According to The Wall Street Journal, federal prosecutors in New York, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission are probing a network of alleged insider trading rings involving some three dozen companies. The probes could lead to charges against the Wall Street executives and traders but are unlikely to affect record payouts and soaring profits. According to the Journal, executive pay is set to break a record high for the second consecutive year. The top thirty-five financial firms are on pace to hand out $144 billion in compensation and benefits this year, a 4% increase from 2009.

Well, a new book has just been published that tries to explain the history of the financial crisis and how most of the underlying structures and key players behind it have emerged relatively unscathed. It’s called All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.

I am joined now by one of the book’s two co-authors, Joe Nocera, a business columnist for The New York Times, a contributor to NPR’s "Weekend Edition," and former executive editor of Fortune magazine. He co-wrote the book with Vanity Fair contributing editor Bethany McLean. Joe Nocera joins us in the studio. The hidden history of the financial crises – in the moments we have, explain it, what caused it and how they’ve come out on this side, what most people don’t understand.

JOE NOCERA: Well, our key point is that it took a lot of disparate things to make this happen. If you had only Wall Street’s venality and greed, you would have had a problem, but not a crisis. If you only had the predatory lending practices of the subprime companies, you would have a problem but not a crisis. If you only had Washington’s – well, this kind of enabled everything – Washington’s deregulatory emphasis under both Democrats and Republicans, let’s be clear here, you would have had a problem. But when you combine the three of them and you watch them interact with each other. You watch the way Wall Street gets the subprime people to make their loans worse and worse and worse and watch the way they take advantage of Wall Street to sell their loans upstream, and then you watch the way Wall Street takes advantage of investors to sell these crappy loans which are supposedly AAA and watch the government look the other way. When you put it all together, you have a really toxic stew. So, I think most people have looked at this as the sins of Wall Street and it is absolutely the sins of Wall Street, but required awful lot more and almost a societal-wide delusion about home prices and value and what home ownership actually meant.

AMY GOODMAN: Who are the main culprits? Name them.

JOE NOCERA: Ok, in terms of institutions, we think the single worst culprits are the rating agencies because they really had to really consciously sell their soul and debase themselves, debase their integrity. They knew there were doing it, as they were doing it, in order to give all these securities AAA. The thing about it is, if you do not have a AAA rating, all of these large institutions are not allowed to buy your securities. You had to have a AAA for this to be a widespread product. So institutionally, we think it was the rating agencies. Personally, we think it’s Alan Greenspan.

AMY GOODMAN: Ok, go further into that.

JOE NOCERA: Sure. The Fed has two jobs, monetary policy and oversight over bank holding companies and other regulatory responsibilities. Alan Greenspan, as a devotee of Ayn Rand and as a libertarian goes into office saying, “I don’t believe in regulation,” and saying, “I’m going to turn my back on that part of my job and let others do it.” But he’s powerful and he is so influential that his deregulatory emphasis becomes everybody’s deregulatory emphasis. When we get to the point in the mid-1990s when a very brave woman, named Brooks Lee Bourne, wants to of least look at the possibility of regulating derivatives, he leads the charge to beat her back and does so quite easily.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Greenspan’s famous admission before Congress.

JOE NOCERA: Well, he really didn’t say, “I was wrong,” so as much as he said, “People won Nobel Prizes for this research that led me to this belief system in the apparatus that was built up.” He – pressed by Henry Waxman, he apologized for what he had done – what had gone on in his watch. But actually, it was a halfhearted apology.

Quite recently, he’s taken to the convenient Republican line, which is to blame everything on Fannie and Freddie. As we point out in the book, Fannie and Freddie, guaranteed mortgages, which plays a hugely important role in home ownership in America and mortgages in America was, yes, they did a lot of dumb things, but the truth is, they did not lead the charge in the subprime, they followed into subprime. It’s basically a convenient excuse to blame it all on Fannie and Freddie. They did it because the Republicans are completely unwilling to say that the marketplace made mistakes too.

AMY GOODMAN: What about Obama’s record now? Where are we today?

JOE NOCERA: Ehhhhh…. ugh.

AMY GOODMAN: Any different than Bush?

JOE NOCERA: No, no, no. First of all, the creation the Consumer Protection Bureau is a big deal. On the margins, these regulations will help, that came out of the Dodd-Frank Bill. The problem is, that if you compare it to what happened in the 1930s, in the 1930s, they forced the banks to split in two and they created the SEC. We had, pretty much fifty years of no crises before financial innovation started to poke holes in the regulations and eventually rendered them moot. So, here we have a situation or no one is willing to take on Wall Street head-on and say, “We can’t allow certain practices to go on.” So, in fact, they’ve tried to do with these practices on the margin, but in general –

AMY GOODMAN: And won’t it get worse with elections coming up? Won’t Democrats and the Republicans want the money from there big money interests?

JOE NOCERA: What’s really going to happen over the next two years with the Republicans now in charge of the House is that many of the regulations have not been written that will enforce this new law. In fact, the law itself is kind of a punt to the regulators. That’s where the battle line is and the Republicans are going to do their best to make sure these regulations are as minimal as possible and the Democrats are going to try and make them tougher.

AMY GOODMAN: What surprised you most in your research for this book?

JOE NOCERA: Here’s what surprised me most, the extent to which Wall Street was dictating to the subprime companies about their lending practices and the extent to which Wall Street knew exactly how bad these loans were and yet encouraged them to make worse and worse loans.

I’ll give you one example, we actually have an e-mail or a memo in the book where a Wall Street guy goes to visit one of the big subprime companies and he says, “You stopped lending – you won’t lend below a 620 FICO Score, you know that’s a credit score for a person who wants to buy a house – your competitor down the street, their lending at 580 FICO scores. We want you to drop your standards forty more points to be as bad as them.”

AMY GOODMAN: These federal agents who have raided the offices of three major hedge funds amidst the news of a sweeping probe of insider trading, how significant is this?

JOE NOCERA: It really looks like the biggie, the big enchilada. The problem with the FCC insider-trading cases over the past ten—

AMY GOODMAN: Goldman also looks like it is involved?

JOE NOCERA: Potentially. Although – they really, what the truth is, what they’re trying to get at is some of the really big hedge funds. They think that this is really widespread in the hedge fund community. If they go after Goldman, it would be probably, my guess would be, Goldman’s hedge funds. I don’t know that for a fact. There’s a lot of things we don’t know. But the FEC insider-trading stuff has been so on the margins for so long, going after small fry, who are meaningless small fry, at least they’re going after big targets now.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, the title, "All the Devils Are Here". Are there any good guys?

JOE NOCERA: Yes. Not a lot, but there – one of the things we did was found a lot of people who were skeptical at the time. We found a lot of community activists, who in places like Cleveland, who were screaming to the federal government saying, “Stop this, stop this, stop this!”

We found a lot of state legislators that actually passed laws to try to get rid of some of the worst practices and the federal government basically came in and preempted those laws and that’s one of the real tragedies of this whole thing. People on the ground saw it happening and nobody in Washington would listen.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Nocera, thanks so much for coming in. All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis is his book, wrote along with Bethany McLean.

[Jan Klimkowski]

My emphasis in bold:

On Monday, the FBI seized documents at the offices of Level Global investors, Diamondback Capital Management and Loch Capital Management in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Collectively, the three firms manage nearly $10 billion in assets.

In hedge fund terms, $10 billion is minor.

These are sacrifices willingly offered up by Wall Street to appease popular anger.

They're not fooling me.

Indeed, knowing how the big global market players work, they've probably already concluded profitable trades in advance of the FBI raids.....

[Jan Klimkowski]

A typically excellent and important post from Golem XIV:

http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com/2010/...-east.html

[David Guyatt]

I'm copying a post Ed made from one of the Wikileaks threads to here for obvious reasons (hope that Okay Ed, but I think it needs airing here as well):

[quote][quote=Ed Jewett]The Wall Street Pentagon Papers: Biggest Scam In World History Exposed - Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?

Posted on Monday, December 6th, 2010 at 2:16 pm, Filed under Economy, Feature, Hot List, News, Politics & Government, Video . Follow post comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Click here to comment, or trackback.[size=12]admin

[/SIZE]

By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus
What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media didn’t cover it? Does that mean the scam could keep going? That’s what we are about to find out.
I understand the importance of the new WikiLeaks documents. However, we must not let them distract us from the new information the Federal Reserve was forced to release. Even if WikiLeaks reveals documents from inside a large American bank, as huge as that could be, it will most likely pale in comparison to what we just found out from the one-time peek we got into the inner-workings of the Federal Reserve. This is the Wall Street equivalent of the Pentagon Papers.
I’ve written many reports detailing the crimes of Wall Street during this crisis. The level of fraud, from top to bottom, has been staggering. The lack of accountability and the complete disregard for the rule of law have made me and many of my colleagues extremely cynical and jaded when it comes to new evidence to pile on top of the mountain that we have already gathered. But we must not let our cynicism cloud our vision on the details within this new information.
Just when I thought the banksters couldn’t possibly shock me anymore… they did.
We were finally granted the honor and privilege of finding out the specifics, a limited one-time Federal Reserve view, of a secret taxpayer funded “backdoor bailout” by a small group of unelected bankers. This data release reveals “emergency lending programs” that doled out $12.3 TRILLION in taxpayer money - $3.3 trillion in liquidity, $9 trillion in “other financial arrangements.”
Wait, what? Did you say $12.3 TRILLION tax dollars were thrown around in secrecy by unelected bankers… and Congress didn’t know any of the details?
Yes. The Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves. The original copy of the Constitution spontaneously burst into flames. The ghost of Tom Paine went running, stark raving mad screaming through the halls of Congress.
The Federal Reserve was secretly throwing around our money in unprecedented fashion, and it wasn’t just to the usual suspects like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, etc.; it was to the entire Global Banking Cartel. To central banks throughout the world: Australia, Denmark, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, England… To the Fed’s foreign primary dealers like Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Royal Bank of Scotland (U.K.), Barclays (U.K.), BNP Paribas (France)… All their Ponzi players were “gifted.” All the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations got their cut.
Talk about the ransacking and burning of Rome! Sayonara American middle class…
If you still had any question as to whether or not the United States is now the world’s preeminent banana republic, the final verdict was just delivered and the decision was unanimous. The ayes have it.
Any fairytale notions that we are living in a nation built on the rule of law and of the global economy being based on free market principles has now been exposed as just that, a fairytale. This moment is equivalent to everyone in Vatican City being told, by the Pope, that God is dead.
I’ve been arguing for years that the market is rigged and that the major Wall Street firms are elaborate Ponzi schemes, as have many other people who built their beliefs on rational thought, reasoned logic and evidence. We already came to this conclusion by doing the research and connecting the dots. But now, even our strongest skeptics and the most ardent Wall Street supporters have it all laid out in front of them, on FEDERAL RESERVE SPREADSHEETS.
Even the Financial Times, which named Lloyd Blankfein its 2009 person of the year, reacted by reporting this: “The initial reactions were shock at the breadth of lending, particularly to foreign firms. But the details paint a bleaker and even more disturbing picture.”
Yes, the emperor doesn’t have any clothes. God is, indeed, dead. But, for the moment at least, the illusion continues to hold power. How is this possible?
To start with, as always, the US television “news” media (propaganda) networks just glossed over the whole thing - nothing to see here, just move along, back after a message from our sponsors… Other than that obvious reason, I’ve come to the realization that the Federal Reserve’s crimes are so big, so huge in scale, it is very hard for people to even wrap their head around it and comprehend what has happened here.
Think about it. In just this one peek we got at its operations, we learned that the Fed doled out $12.3 trillion in near-zero interest loans, without Congressional input.
The audacity and absurdity of it all is mind boggling…
Based on many conversations I’ve had with people, it seems that the average person doesn’t comprehend how much a trillion dollars is, let alone 12.3 trillion. You might as well just say 12.3 gazillion, because people don’t grasp a number that large, nor do they understand what would be possible if that money was used in other ways.
Can you imagine what we could do to restructure society with $12.3 trillion? Think about that…
People also can’t grasp the colossal crime committed because they keep hearing the word “loans.” People think of the loans they get. You borrow money, you pay it back with interest, no big deal.
That’s not what happened here. The Fed doled out $12.3 trillion in near-zero interest loans, using the American people as collateral, demanding nothing in return, other than a bunch of toxic assets in some cases. They only gave this money to a select group of insiders, at a time when very few had any money because all these same insiders and speculators crashed the system.
Do you get that? The very people most responsible for crashing the system, were then rewarded with trillions of our dollars. This gave that select group of insiders unlimited power to seize control of assets and have unprecedented leverage over almost everything within their economies - crony capitalism on steroids.
This was a hostile world takeover orchestrated through economic attacks by a very small group of unelected global bankers. They paralyzed the system, then were given the power to recreate it according to their own desires. No free market, no democracy of any kind. All done in secrecy. In the process, they gave themselves all-time record-breaking bonuses and impoverished tens of millions of people - they have put into motion a system that will inevitably collapse again and utterly destroy the very existence of what is left of an economic middle class.
That is not hyperbole. That is what happened.
We are talking about trillions of dollars secretly pumped into global banks, handpicked by a small select group of bankers themselves. All for the benefit of those bankers, and at the expense of everyone else. People can’t even comprehend what that means and the severe consequences that it entails, which we have only just begun to experience.
Let me sum it up for you: The American Dream is O-V-E-R.
Welcome to the neo-feudal-fascist state.
People throughout the world who keep using the dollar are either A) Part of the scam; B) Oblivious to reality; C) Believe that US military power will be able to maintain the value of an otherwise worthless currency; D) All of the above.
No matter which way you look at it, we are all in serious trouble!
If you are an elected official, (I know at least 17 of you subscribe to my newsletter) and you believe in the oath you took upon taking office, you must immediately demand a full audit of the Federal Reserve and have Ben Bernanke and the entire Federal Reserve Board detained. If you are not going to do that, you deserve to have the words “Irrelevant Puppet” tattooed across your forehead.
Yes, those are obviously strong words, but they are the truth.
The Global Banking Cartel has now been so blatantly exposed, you cannot possibly get away with pretending that we live in a nation of law based on the Constitution. The jig is up.
It’s been over two years now; does anyone still seriously not understand why we are in this crisis? Our economy has been looted and burnt to the ground due to the strategic, deliberate decisions made by a small group of unelected global bankers at the Federal Reserve. Do people really not get the connection here? I mean, H.E.L.L.O. Our country is run by an unelected Global Banking Cartel.
I am constantly haunted by a quote from Harry Overstreet, who wrote the following in his 1925 groundbreaking study Influencing Human Behavior: “Giving people the facts as a strategy of influence” has been a failure, “an enterprise fraught with a surprising amount of disappointment.”
This crisis overwhelmingly proves Overstreet’s thesis to be true. Nonetheless, we solider on…
Here’s a roundup of reports on this BernankeLeaks:
Prepare to enter the theater of the absurd…
I’ll start with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). He was the senator who Bernanke blew off when he was asked for information on this heist during a congressional hearing. Sanders fought to get the amendment written into the financial “reform” bill that gave us this one-time peek into the Fed’s secret operations. (Remember, remember the 6th of May, HFT, flash crash and terrorism. “Hey, David, Homeland Security is on the phone! They want to ask you questions about some NYSE SLP program.”)
In an article entitled, “A Real Jaw-Dropper at the Federal Reserve,” Senator Sanders reveals some of the details:

At a Senate Budget Committee hearing in 2009, I asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to tell the American people the names of the financial institutions that received an unprecedented backdoor bailout from the Federal Reserve, how much they received, and the exact terms of this assistance. He refused. A year and a half later… we have begun to lift the veil of secrecy at the Fed…
After years of stonewalling by the Fed, the American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed’s multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America….
We have learned that the $700 billion Wall Street bailout… turned out to be pocket change compared to the trillions and trillions of dollars in near-zero interest loans and other financial arrangements the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution in this country.…
Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations including two European megabanks — Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse — which were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities….
Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?… [read Global Banking Cartel]
What this disclosure tells us, among many other things, is that despite this huge taxpayer bailout, the Fed did not make the appropriate demands on these institutions necessary to rebuild our economy and protect the needs of ordinary Americans….
What we are seeing is the incredible power of a small number of people who have incredible conflicts of interest getting incredible help from the taxpayers of this country while ignoring the needs of the people. [read more]

In an article entitled, “The Fed Lied About Wall Street,” Zach Carter sums it up this way:

The Federal Reserve audit is full of frightening revelations about U.S. economic policy and those who implement it… By denying the solvency crisis, major bank executives who had run their companies into the ground were allowed to keep their jobs, and shareholders who had placed bad bets on their firms were allowed to collect government largesse, as bloated bonuses began paying out soon after.
But the banks themselves still faced a capital shortage, and were only kept above those critical capital thresholds because federal regulators were willing to look the other way, letting banks account for obvious losses as if they were profitable assets.
So based on the Fed audit data, it’s hard to conclude that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was telling the truth when he told Congress on March 3, 2009, that there were no zombie banks in the United States.
“I don’t think that any major U.S. bank is currently a zombie institution,” Bernanke said.
As Bernanke spoke those words banks had been pledging junk bonds as collateral under Fed facilities for several months…
This is the heart of today’s foreclosure fraud crisis. Banks are foreclosing on untold numbers of families who have never missed a payment, because rushing to foreclosure generates lucrative fees for the banks, whatever the costs to families and investors. This is, in fact, far worse than what Paul Krugman predicted. Not only are zombie banks failing to support the economy, they are actively sabotaging it with fraud in order to make up for their capital shortages. Meanwhile, regulators are aggressively looking the other way.
The Fed had to fix liquidity in 2008. That was its job. But as major banks went insolvent, the Fed and Treasury had a responsibility to fix that solvency issue—even though that meant requiring shareholders and executives to live up to losses. Instead, as the Fed audit tells us, policymakers knowingly ignored the real problem, pushing losses onto the American middle class in the process.” [read more]

Even the Financial Times is jumping ship:

Sunlight Shows Cracks in Fed’s Rescue Story
It took two years, a hard-fought lawsuit, and an act of Congress, but finally… the Federal Reserve disclosed the details of its financial crisis lending programs. The initial reactions were shock at the breadth of lending, particularly to foreign firms. But the details paint a bleaker, earlier, and even more disturbing picture…. An even more troubling conclusion from the data is that… it is now apparent that the Fed took on far more risk, on less favorable terms, than most people have realized. [read more]

In true Fed fashion, they didn’t even fully comply with Congress. In a report entitled, “Fed Withholds Collateral Data for $885 Billion in Financial-Crisis Loans,” Bloomberg puts some icing on the cake:

For three of the Fed’s six emergency facilities, the central bank released information on groups of collateral it accepted by asset type and rating, without specifying individual securities. Among them was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, created in March 2008 to provide loans to brokers as Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.
“This is a half-step,” said former Atlanta Fed research director Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Sarasota, Florida. “If you were going to audit the facilities, then would this enable you to do an audit? The answer is ‘No,’ you would have to go in and look at the individual amounts of collateral and how it was broken down to do that. And that is the spirit of what the requirements were in Dodd-Frank.” [read more]

See also:
Fed Data Dump Reveals More Contradictions About its $1.25 Trillion MBS Purchase Program
Fed Created Conflicts in Improvising $3.3 Trillion Financial System Rescue
Meet The 35 Foreign Banks That Got Bailed Out By The Fed
Ben Bernanke’s Secret Global Bank
Here’s the only person on US TV “news” who actually covers and understands any of this, enter Dylan Ratigan, with his guest Chris Whalen from Institutional Risk Analytics. This quote from Whalen sums it up well: “The folks at the Fed have become so corrupt, so captured by the banking industry… the Fed is there to support the speculators and they let the real economy go to hell.”[/QUOTE]

[Magda Hassan]

A few trillion here a few trillion there and pretty soon you're talking big money. :marchmellow:

I can't even comprehend the numbers here. :damnmate:Looks like perpetual slavery for most of the world though.

[David Guyatt]

Sorry, I missed that.

I was busy watching a Christmas cooking programme on the TV, where the tosser "Chef" was cooking in NYC in the back of a stretch limo...

Or to put it another way.... "People are not wearing enough hats".

[David Guyatt]

Goldman Accused Over 'Killing' E-Mail:

Goldman Accused Over 'Killing' E-Mail
last updated: 10 December 2010

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations this week released details of e-mails sent by a senior Goldman executive which, according to Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, looked 'like trading abuse to me'.

The e-mails, sent by Michael Swenson, who ran the firm's asset-backed securities trading desk in 2007, allegedly instructed his fellow traders to 'start killing the (CDS) shorts in the streets (and) cause 'maximum pain....This will have people totally demoralised'.

A spokesperson for Goldman said: 'This type of language sounds awful and is very disappointing, but it does not reflect the reality of what happened. There was no short squeeze'.

Senator Levin is thought to be deciding whether the e-mails merit further investigation.

One trader told Here Is The City: 'This type of macho banter was typical in 2007. It was something senior traders would do to motivate the troops. And most of the time it was just hype. It shows, though, how times have changed - what seemed perfectly normal three years ago is now viewed in a very poor light'.

[Magda Hassan]

Goldman Accused Over 'Killing' E-Mail:

Goldman Accused Over 'Killing' E-Mail
last updated: 10 December 2010

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations this week released details of e-mails sent by a senior Goldman executive which, according to Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, looked 'like trading abuse to me'.

The e-mails, sent by Michael Swenson, who ran the firm's asset-backed securities trading desk in 2007, allegedly instructed his fellow traders to 'start killing the (CDS) shorts in the streets (and) cause 'maximum pain....This will have people totally demoralised'.

A spokesperson for Goldman said: 'This type of language sounds awful and is very disappointing, but it does not reflect the reality of what happened. There was no short squeeze'.

Senator Levin is thought to be deciding whether the e-mails merit further investigation.

One trader told Here Is The City: 'This type of macho banter was typical in 2007. It was something senior traders would do to motivate the troops. And most of the time it was just hype. It shows, though, how times have changed - what seemed perfectly normal three years ago is now viewed in a very poor light'.

Nope. Definitely not wearing enough hats.

[Peter Lemkin]

A few trillion here a few trillion there and pretty soon you're talking big money. :marchmellow:

I can't even comprehend the numbers here. :damnmate:Looks like perpetual slavery for most of the world though.

If I remember correctly, a trillion dollars in dollar bills stacked one on top of another would reach the moon.....i.e. It'll buy a nice meal at your local fine restaurant...and then some. As to the slavery or serfdom...coming right up!......ah, here it is now!.....:call2: