Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

The Sad Truth About the State of the Financial System Today
ZeroHedge | author | 08/10/15

For six years, the world has operated under a complete delusion that Central Banks somehow fixed the 2008 Crisis. All of the arguments claiming this defied common sense. A 5th grader would tell you that you cannot solve a debt problem by issuing more debt. If the below chart was a problem BEFORE 2008... there is no way that things are better now. After all, we've just added another $10 trillion in debt to the US system.

1. The REAL problem for the financial system is the bond bubble. In 2008 when the crisis hit it was $80 trillion. It has since grown to over $100 trillion.
2. The derivatives market that uses this bond bubble as collateral is over $555 trillion in size.
3. Many of the large multinational corporations, sovereign governments, and even municipalities have used derivatives to fake earnings and hide debt. NO ONE knows to what degree this has been the case, but given that 20% of corporate CFOs have admitted to faking earnings in the past, it's likely a significant amount.
4. Corporations today are more leveraged than they were in 2007. As Stanley Druckenmiller noted recently, in 2007 corporate bonds were $3.5 trillion... today they are $7 trillion: an amount equal to nearly 50% of US GDP.
5. The Central Banks are now all leveraged at levels greater than or equal to where Lehman Brothers was when it imploded. The Fed is leveraged at 78 to 1. The ECB is leveraged at over 26 to 1. Lehman Brothers was leveraged at 30 to 1.
6. The Central Banks have no idea how to exit their strategies. Fed minutes released from 2009 show Janet Yellen was worried about how to exit when the Fed's balance sheet was $1.3 trillion (back in 2009). Today it's over $4.5 trillion.

A Stunned Wall Street Reacts To China's Currency Devaluation
magazine | author | date

There is much stunned confusion among Wall Street's "best and brightest" following China's historic Yuan devaluation overnight which was predicted by exactly zero of said best and brightest, just like nobody expected the SNB to give up its own peg to the EUR in January.

The problem as the WSJ puts it, is that a devaluation for China is both good, and very bad. Good because it will help the struggling export sector, which has stalled amid weak global demand. Exports in July, for example, sank more than 8% and they were down nearly 1% for the first seven months of the year.

At the same time, it was essential for the People's Bank of China not to alarm domestic and foreign investors to avoid triggering a wave of capital outflows. Investors tend to dump a weakening currency and move their assets into other currencies. Thus, the PBOC said the move was a one-time reform effort to bring the yuan more in line with the markets.

That, of course, is a lie: the Fed's first QE was a "one-time" abnormal monetary intervention which has since become the de facto standard of every single central bank. ... Read more

After Marathon Talks, Greece And International Lenders Clinch Multi-Billion Euro Bailout Deal
Reuters & HP | author | 08/11/15

Greece and its international lenders reached a multi-billion euro bailout agreement on Tuesday after talking through the night, officials said, potentially saving the country from financial ruin.

The agreement, reached after a 23-hour session of talks, must still be adopted by Greece's parliament and euro zone countries. The single currency bloc's finance ministers are due to meet on Friday, giving time to finalize the deal before a major debt repayment next week. ... Read more

Robert Reich: Has America Finally Figured Out a Way to Rein in the Shocking Sums We Pays CEOs?
AlterNet | Robert Reich | 08/10/15

The Securities and Exchange Commission just ruled that large publicly held corporations must disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers... About time.

... Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America's largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers. Now, the ratio is over 300 to 1. ... Read more