Cheapo Groovo

Internet Sales Tax = GIANT GOVERNMENT REVENUES!

Senator Joe Donnelly propaganda below:

As you may know, S. 336, the Marketplace Fairness Act, was introduced on February 14, 2013. If enacted into law, this bill would establish the framework for states and localities to enforce sales taxes on Internet sales to level the playing field between local small businesses and retail stores and the online market. During the Senate budget process, amendments to implement the Marketplace Fairness Act were introduced. I joined with a bipartisan group of 75 Senators to support amendments that would level the playing the field for businesses and ensure that states and localities are able to enforce local sales taxes on remote Internet sellers.

The truth below:

Local small businesses and retail stores also have an online presence so what does he mean by "even the playing field"?

Indiana stands to gain $114 million if passed.

Mergers and Acquisitions Fuel Stocks But Not The Economy

You can follow all the illegal monopolistic/oligopolistic activity at these sites:

NY Times | Reuters

Individual companies are pursuing growth opportunites thru M & A. Since corporations have almost $2 trillion in cash, we are seeing unprecedented activity. The company being acquired often has a >10% rise in their stock price.

But the marginal social costs exceed marginal social benefits!

Consolidation forces the closure of plants and mass layoffs. This ruins both consumption and tax revenues at the local level. So we don't see an increase in GDP, rather, we see an increase in corporate profits.

Another Flash Crash

Should be the top news story. Rumor is truth and truth is rumor in this Chicken Little world.

The IRS is reading your email

Rockefeller Wealth

John D. Rockefeller's wealth was estimated at about $900million in 1913, equivalent to $189.6 billion in today's terms.

I bring this up because all day long the MSM talks about Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and George Soros. There combined riches are $130 billion!

I guess the Rockefeller family knows how to hide all their money. :-))

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

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.