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Monday July 13, 2009 07:55 AM
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The Next 'Battle for Washington'
We begin this week with a note from a very savvy private investor that's worth sharing:
For several decades, the financial players have had a wonderful time playing the game of Three Card Monte. Instead of having just three cards on a sidewalk stand or three walnuts and pea, they've had a half dozen regulators and literally a hundred countries to hide in.
Why else would the AIG Financial Products operation be set up in London, allegedly supervised by the US Office of Thrift Supervision, and write private insurance contracts called Credit Default Swaps on US mortgage bonds issued by unregulated non-bank finance companies owned by Wall Street brokerages? Lots of walnuts, just one pea (the risk), and literally dozens of street corners where the pea could be hiding, that's why.
The new Agency proposed by Barney Frank would put a stop to the game of choosing the weakest regulator, and then hiding in some corner of the world that prizes financial secrecy. It would regulate activities, not institutions, and that would spoil the fun.
Imagine if we had regulated mortgage lending from a single authority, no matter who makes the loan? Perhaps the trigger to the meltdown, the subprime mortgage "business" and its evil derivative spawn (CDO and CDS) would not have turned into a threat to the entire world economy. After all, roughly 90% of the subprime mortgage bonds were issued by virtually unregulated entities controlled by Wall Street and a handful of "non-bank" finance companies like Ameriquest, New Century and Countrywide.
It's time to put aside the foolishness that blames banks for the subprime meltdown, since the entire banking industry had only about 10% of the business. While we're at it, forget blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, since they never guaranteed any subprime loans, and actually lost market share to the "private label" business in the crucial bubble years from 2003 - 2007. Finally, let's put a stake through the evil political heart that tries to blame the Community Reinvestment Act. Unlike subprime (or even prime) loans, those CRA loans performed BETTER than expected, because the banks that made those loans held onto them and kept the risk for the full thirty years of the loans. CRA mortgages are the kind of loans that so many conservative pundits think our entire banking system should make -- you know, where a local bank loan officer knows the borrower and the neighborhood, and makes a loan based on character, collateral and capacity to pay, and then takes 100% of the risk if the borrower can't or doesn't pay. It should be no surprise that CRA loans performed far better than subprime loans, and better even than some of the so-called "prime" loans that banks originated but then sold about thirty seconds later.
I don't care if you call yourself a bank, an insurance company, a mortgage bank, a Wall Street broker-dealer, or a marching band -- if you made residential mortgage loans, those loans will be subject to the mortgage regulations and examination by the mortgage regulator. If some hedge fund wants to claim they are really in Anguilla and not Connecticut, then they should be able to make all the mortgage loans they want to Anguillans, secured by Anguillan property. If they want to lend to people in the US secured by houses in the US, they should be subject to US mortgage rules, period.
If you write insurance policies in any of their forms, then the insurance regulators can look over your books. Calling the insurance contract a derivative CDS under the Commodities and Futures Modernization Act just doesn't cut it.
If you sell stocks and bonds to individuals, then the new consumer protection replacement for the SEC looks at your stock and bond operation. I imagine a few of Stanford's "Antiguan CD" buyers wish our SEC had made sure those bonds he was selling were legit. But the SEC is hopelessly compromised, given the professional career path every SEC employee hopes to follow. There is absolutely no personal professional future in protecting consumers from unbridled greed at financial institutions "regulated" by the SEC.
So now it's easy to understand why a multi-million dollar propaganda campaign is cranking up to keep the regulators balkanized, to preserve those cracks in the system that allowed short term profits to be created by virtually unregulated subsidiaries, offshore trusts, special purpose vehicles and private over-the-counter transactions. Credit is the lifeblood of capitalism, and the Vampire Class needs its pools of darkness to keep feeding on the sheeple.
Don't be surprised to hear your own elected representatives spouting slogans like "keep consumer choice" or repeating unsupported conclusions about how it will make credit more expensive for all of us. As if anything could be more expensive than several percentage points sucked out of our entire economy accounted as phantom bankster "profits", paying very real bankster bonuses like an unregulated, uncapped tax on breathing.
Bear in mind that political contributions are the trump cards of politics, and your vote means squat to a Congressman faced with the chance to buy enough TV time to buy thousands of your neighbor's votes, especially if all he has to do is resist the formation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Besides, it's proposed by a Congressman that millions love to hate, and it sounds like more Big Government. What could be easier? The banksters are gathering in Washington, and they brought their checkbooks to buy the best government they can afford.
OK, let's take a spin through media and see how the spinning is going in efforts to keep regulation and meaningful reform from happening. A few headlines from this morning:
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"Elitist Protection Consumers Don't Need" says a column in the Washington Post. Say, isn't this the same Washington Post that was headlined in the UK as the "Washington Post sorry for ethical lapse'?
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In fairness to the WaPo, they did report last week that "Industry takes aim at plan to create financial protection agency". Facts versus opinions...OK, I'm down with that.
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The Corpus Christi Caller-Times headlines that "Debate heats up on financial regulatory reform."
And my fave of the week so far on this? "Banks may lose $1b in penalty fees owing to new law" headlines TopNews.
Yeah...and the problem with that is what? 'Bout time consumers get out from playing bottoms all the time.
The Weak Ahead
Futures are pointing to a lower open for the week. While there's a lot more discussion in this week's ChartPack for Peoplenomics subscribers, the next stop should be the shoot-out at the 7,800 coral before we move either up for a last gasp (potentially violent) rally, or suck on down toward the 6,626 March lows.
Popcorn and watching from the sidelines is a dandy place to be.
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Producer Prices tomorrow along with retail numbers and then the CPI on Wednesday. That will be the most interesting to watch because the consensus is that CPI will be up 0.1% - which it might be if you weight housing prices collapsing just so, but pay particular attention to the core - food and energy which while I can't speak for where you live, around here, has been drifting up at a 5-6% annualized rate. We'll see...but put me into the pool for higher than consensus.
Attention Fiction Writers
The new Treasury Budget is due out this afternoon at 2 PM Eastern. Read and learn.
SupCo Nod Coming
Despite lots of rumor and innuendo on the net, looks like Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the supreme court bench is a done deal, at least in the MSM. No doubt the republicorps will try to blow something up, since they have their own problems like...
Cheney's What Squad?
Hitting at terrorists, or what? We may never know - the spin machine is past agitprop and now into full speed spinning... The NY Daily News has an interesting read on former veep Dick's 'secret counterterrorist program' that is causing an uproar. The part about '...but was it illegal?" is sounding oh so reminiscent of the Clintonista era "depends what you mean by sex..." kind of logic.
Summer of Hell Department
More rioting this weekend in China. More dead, too.
Oh, and remember when I told you months ago that we'd see the summer of hell entering into prime time when rioting came to France? (UK and US are to follow this temporal marker, so get ready...). Third night of rioting (in France) after death in custody..." This being a summer of hell, this should expand into much larger riots later on (maybe later this week/next weekend, if my read of the time posts is right).
And as Europe 'lights up' keep an eye on emotionally hot headlines like "Nazi Greek State: Night of Crystalls in Patras, Bullets in Athens, Torture in Simi." which seem likely to drive events, too.
Now this is the lead-in to the summer of hell meme I'm talking about....
Motorcycle Weather: Biker Notes
Been accumulating a few notes of interest to serious bike riders: "Third Hells Angel charged over fatal brawl" caught my eye in news out of Australia where bikers are called bikies.
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Efforts to outlaw the club in the Netherlands have failed...again.
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Other chapter news: "Hells Angels’ impending visit changes Spirit Valley Days" up in Duluth, Minnesota.
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The British Columbia club is seeing headlines like "Convictions could hinder gang: RCMP"
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And, while I haven't seen anything in the press about it, heard through friends that Smilin' Rick will be out in four after a sentencing appeal last week up in the PNW...
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Last, but not least, the summer uptick in bike accidents is now in full swing. Leathers, helmet, and lights on. Call me a wuss...but I'm still here. Figure I've cheated death enough, so I roll with the red car now and then when I feel the need for speed... If some Monday the column doesn't appear, that might be me being snagged by radar for 2X the speed limit, or some such...
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Coping: Trouble in the WuJo
Chill with me here, grasshopper. Here at the Complete Web Reality School's DoJo it's time for for a little deeper inquiry into the nature of time and what's to happen between now and 2012. This is all the fault of a reader who ventures into the lands of "WuWu" (a/k/a/ woo-woo) who asked me about time-line jumping. Hated to explain, but best I can reckon (after hanging with the time monks for nearly 10-years now) the concept of 'time lines' makes about as much sense as confusing shipping lines on a nautical chart expecting actual lines on an ocean. There are no 'time-lines' per se, any more than going down to the local marina you'd see 'chart lines' drawn neatly up the channel outside the marina. Things don't work that way.
Of course, the question may arise "If we're not jumping time-lines, what's going on?"
Here comes your ponder from Monday at the WuJo. For hundreds of thousands of years, people lived as tribes. The whole sphere of their consciousness didn't extend more than perhaps 35 miles - what a determined man could walk in one day. Write this down: tribal consciousness.
A little later, along come carts and then sailing ships and the expanse of knowledge - the boundaries of how people though, so to speak - got pushed back. Thus arose (write this down, too) Global consciousness.
As technology grew, and we started expanding our ability to see farther out including into the depths of space, along comes (write this one down, too) galactic consciousness. The Internet has been a key (or is that chi?) component facilitating this uniting of the global population (that which is GlobalPop in our modelspace) into a single emerging consciousness. Which (as you'd expect) just scares the hell out of the controllers and those who would retain power they used (and abused) during the earlier reign global not-yet-galactic consciousness.
Then as some point, we will get to where all signs point - if'n you know how to read them - which is what? (Pen ready?) Universal consciousness.
How here's the thing that's about to happen: The swings that impact the existing 'global consciousness' and 'galactic consciousness' are going to becoming progressively larger and more extreme as we get closer and closer to fall of 2011. It will become even more apparent as we get to a place (you'll see it in this upcoming ALTA report if I get Cliff to explain the mechanics - a fair bit of work, though) in 2010 through 2012 where events will occur that will be of such magnitude that they will have the emotional impact of years and years of emotion - all being released in a short number of weeks. And later, even days or hours. Maybe even seconds!
And as we go forward, although there will be pauses while various cycles 'synch up' the whole of the cloth is that groups of people will be moving from one level of consciousness to another, such that by late 2012 we will be at a place where events could be releasing centuries of emotion/karma not in weeks, but in minutes. Hard head-trip, that.
That stressing and straining seems to possibly be how 'universal consciousness' is given birth, and all the increasing intensity of the events and the related time compression is to consciousness what contractions are to a mother's contractions in labor. At some point you'll just have to 'let it all go' and return to the One.
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Still, the question persists about timelines, but these come from people who don't yet suffer from a condition called "hyperchroniac disease" - or the acute awareness of time to where even the smallest variations in its fabric are of note.
I don't claim to be 'special' in any regard, but the only real hyperchroniac event I've ever personally experienced was in May of 2001 when Elaine and I were living on our sailboat at Oyster Point marina in South San Francisco. We awoke one morning with clocks akimbo and a feeling that our experience of time had somehow become viscous and syrupy. Within hours, things were back to normal and a day or two later I had my answer to my questioning "Wow! So that is what just zinged by!"
Turned out to be the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory breaking a world record for the world's strongest magnet. I personally had an altered state experience at exactly that 'time' and so that's what I attribute it to.
And that's how I see all the pieces all fit: My fascination with things electric/electronic, being partial to m-wave antennas (as opposed to e-wave/Hertzian designs), the Philadelphia Experiment with high powered magnets, why some folks claim to see apparitions after & around MRI machines.
There's a common track here that involves energy and vibration and it's clearly NOT something you conjure up in the backyard. Might get it crossing the galactic ecliptic, or at a subtle level, it may drive people mad when they can't reconcile the rapidity of change coming at us, but it's not something you 'do' at a planetary level. Nonsense, although it may sell well.
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The hyperchroniac experience is tough to describe, but having experienced all of the following, it's somewhere between - to try and put a fence around the experience): a near-death experience (which I had with childhood asthma), an 'enlightenment moment' where you dissolve into Universe and become part of the great ocean of everythingness, along with a touch of delirium like you may have experienced with your worst-ever flu.
If I were to mix up a batch of the feeling, it would be 10-parts of the touching everythingness, one part NDE and 3 parts what delirium is like. That's what hyperchroniacs feel when time gets a bit 'loose' from it's moorings. Vibratory states move about.
And it may be a 'whole body' kind of experience, since a magnet in the area of my head doesn't seem to do much...which gets me to the next phase of my personal researches - where I work on placing multiple magnets so as to build a 'field' to see if I can create a local hyperchroniac 'hot spot' and do a little personal time twisting. Magnets and chakras are on the experiments like along with the quest for the zero-point energy, which would be the axis around which all vibrations work.
But claims by some that they've done doing planetary time twisting? ROF-LMAO Take it from me...t'ain't the case.
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And my credentials are what? Don't know if you read up on who my great great grandfather was on my dad's side. But besides being an apologist for the British factory-owning class, for his "Philosophie of Manufacturers" (a fine economics text) Andrew Ure was also reputedly the source of inspiration for Mary Shelley's book "Frankenstein". That's the downside of the family, Butcher of Glasgow stories and such. But. the upside is that our 'shocking experiments' were century-early precursors to defibrillators...if you're awake enough to follow.
So, you see, the nut falls not far from the tree, Grasshopper. This poking around at the edges of how the animation of humans works is hard-coded into my genes. And this much is clear to me: We vibrate - each at our own frequency because we each have our own destiny & karma to work on - and we don't all just 'jump'.
Yet.
You'll know we're close to a planetary change when you start to seeing people standing around drooling because what's going on 'outside' can't be reconciled with how firmly they hold to previous mental constructs of how things work. That level of change/reality-storming comes along every so often.
Yep. Frozen stock still and drooling...a pervasive sense of surreal - like walking around in a dream in a syrupy state of time becoming incongruous and warpy...should be an obvious enough clue, don'tcha think? And when it passes, we 'stick' to whatever plane we're ready for. Some folks even get to run 'time backward' from there, but that's another day under the lotus tree. Kinda graceful in a Big Cosmic Blender way. Like a planetary LSD trip but without the drugs. And where you come down is where you're ready to land and work the cycle through again.
Think commencement and school.
Oh Crop!
As long as we're stumbling around the WuJo, explaining the Great Mysteries and exposing sorcerers for what they are to the few magicians about...our cartoonista, Rebecca Price of www.tuen-republic.com will now reveal a complete explanation of crop circles!
Oh those orbs.... Now, suck up some coffee and let's get back to here, now, and actionable...
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Send comments to george@ure.net
The UrbanSurvival Mall:
Peoplenomics This Week: Some Grand Strategy for Average Folks
Yes, trying to figure out whether you should bail out of your 401(k) and pay off your home or your vacation property is a damn tough question. A far more complicated one, in fact, than most people will ever bother to think through. But in the interest of getting ahead in the long run, let's roll up our sleeves and consider it this week. Be warned though: This is real work and you'll want to go over this with your financial advisor because I am NOT a financial advisor...just a fellow with a little street sense and a fair to middling grasp of economics - and the future - which many advisors seem to lack. Remember who got this decline right? If your advisor had you putting money into stocks at the top in either late 1999 or mid 2007, you might want to hit the phone book, so to speak. Ready to get some work done?
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MyGroPonics
My commodity broker JB Slear has nailed a great solution for people who living in apartments and condos who want to become at least partially self-reliant when it comes to raising food: An ultra-high efficiency micro-hydroponics system using readily available local parts. 25-pages and plenty of pictures to turn you into a farmer no matter where you live (Great if you have back problems, too...)...or if you just want to fill up the back yard with MyGroPonics trees and feed the neighborhood... $10 bucks here...
Maxa-Cookie Manager
The newest version of Maxa-Tools Cookie Manager (MCM) is available. Existing users of MAXA Cookie Manager Pro use the update button in the about window, all others can download the Standard version here:
Once you try it out, click the upgrade button (!) on the upper right hand side for the $35 unlock to get it to remove even those pesky 'non-browser specific' cookies. Bonus: You computer may run faster. I took over 1,000 cookies off my son's machine that he swore was clean. It ran much faster.
Attn: Mac Drivers: MCM does support the Safari Browser, but that does not mean it is compatible with Mac OS. Maxa-Tools only support the Windows world.
