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Bank Failure Update

3 failures so far in 2013. 51 failures in 2012. 92 failures in 2011.

Near as I can tell, all were smaller communtiy type banks. The mega-banks continue to get larger and put pressure on the whole system once again!

Study Reveals Consolidated Power & Control

A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

Based on their analysis, Glattfelder and Battiston identified the ten investment entities who are “big fish” in the most countries. The biggest fish was the Capital Group Companies , with major stakes in 36 of the 48 countries studied.

11/1/2011 Follow Up

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc  (this study done before the collapse)
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

Banks not lending, just investing in risky assets

There is a $2.1 trillion difference between deposits ($9.317 trillion) and bank loans ($7.237 trillion) in the US banking system. The amount of assets purchases by the Fed explains just where the incremental $2 trillion in money creation has come from.

We know that, as JPM has explicitly admitted, at least one bank has used the excess deposits over loans to engage in risky activity, and to trade on its own prop account, on at least one occasion, with a loss as large as $2 billion!

Full article

Credit Card Payment Calculator

Put a Credit Card Payment Calculator on your site!

Have a safe deposit box? READ THIS NOW!

Homeland Security and the IRS can force the bank to open it w/o your knowledge or consent. If there is a bank run and banks close, how do you get to your box? If something does go wrong, banks will pay 500 times the amount of your annual rental fee - read the agreement you signed!

 

How To Hide Your Cash

Derivative Danger Lurks in 2013

I wrote about this before, but my words have not been heeded! So let me remind you of the reality once again. $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement!

And instead of calling for justice, we are accepting austerity!

Numerous top economists say that the bank bailouts are the largest robbery and redistribution of wealth in history.

Why was this illegal?   Well, the top white collar fraud expert in the country says that the Bush and Obama administrations broke the law by failing to break up insolvent banks … instead of propping them up by bailing them out.

The Treasury Secretary lied to Congress regarding some fundamental aspects of Tarp – like pretending that the banks were healthy, when they were totally insolvent.  The Secretary also falsely told Congress that the bailouts would be used to dispose of toxic assets … but then used the money for something else entirely.  Making false statements to a federal official is illegal, pursuant to 18 United States Code Section 1001.

Taxpayers Lose $15 billion on GM bailout

Nanny government made almost $23 billion on the AIG bailout, but those gains will be offset by this big loss:

GM announced it would buyback 200MM shares from the US government at a price of $27.50. This implies a nearly 50% loss on the government's breakeven price of $54.

Full Article

Rigged Financial Markets

I covered this topic before here  here here and here. But is is always a good idea to remind blog readers that the global elite control everything and a true free market exists in concept only.

• Germany’s stocks market is up about 30 percent year-to-date.  Germany’s GDP is expected to grow less than one-percent this year!
• Back in September 2012 the SEC charged the NYSE with a violation of prop feeds to proprietary customers before it went to the public.  In other words, they were giving data to the big boys before the public was getting it.
• Knight Capital Group lost $440 million when it sold all the stocks it accidentally bought because a computer glitch.Now they are up for sale!
• The SEC wants high frequency traders.
• Companies simply increase their market share and stock prices around patent litigation. The outcome of which is completely unpredictible for stock investors.

AIG Bailout = All In Government's Hands

The U.S. Treasury Department said Tuesday that it has sold all its remaining shares of American International Group (AIG), moving to wrap up the government's biggest bailout of the 2008 financial crisis. With this sale, Treasury said the government has received $22.7 billion more than the $182 billion bailout it provided to support AIG.

Ok, let me try to wrap my head around this one. We pay taxes to the treasury, which then invests our money in failing firms. Hedge funds bid the stock back up because of the government backstop. The treasury makes a huge windfall profit, and the taxpayers see nothing from it!

Credit cards being used as ATMs

Americans cranked up their use of credit cards in the third quarter, racking up more debt than a year ago, while also being less diligent about making payments on time.  The average credit card debt per borrower in the U.S. grew 4.9 percent in the July-to-September period from a year earlier to $4,996, credit reporting agency TransUnion said Monday.  At the same time, the rate of credit card payments at least 90 days overdue hit 0.75 percent, up from 0.71 percent in the third quarter of last year, the firm said.

29.6% of the cards issued by lenders in the third quarter went to nonprime borrowers (poor credit score).

Now the real problem =>> US Average Hourly Earnings is at a current level of 23.58, down from 23.59 last month. This represents a monthly annualized growth rate of -0.51%, compared to a long term average annualized growth rate of 2.47%.

Debt is pilling up faster than income. Can you smell the next financial collapse?