Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Global Debt Hits 325% Of World GDP, Rises To Record $217 Trillion
ZeroHedge | author | 01/06/17

While we eagerly await the next installment of the McKinsey study on global releveraging, we noticed that in the latest report from the Institute for International Finance released on Wednesday, total debt as of Q3 2016 once again rose sharply, increasing by $11 trillion in the first 9 months of the year, hitting a new all time high of $217 trillion. As a result, late in 2016, global debt levels are now roughly 325% of the world's gross domestic product.

In terms of composition, emerging market debt rose substantially, as government bond and syndicated loan issuance in 2016 grew to almost three times its 2015 level. And, as has traditionally been the case, China accounted for the lion's share of the new debt, providing $710 million of the total $855 billion in new issuance during the year, the IIF reported. ... Read more
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Bank Of England Blog Warns Of Devastating Bond Market Rout, "Worse Than 1994 Massacre"
ZeroHedge | author | 01/06/17

First it was Goldman Sachs, which accurately warned last summer that a sharp spike in interest rates would lead to trillions in bond market losses, as observed over the past two months after the Trump election. Then it was Ray Dalio's turn to warn NY Fed staffers that "it would only take a 100 basis point rise in Treasury bond yields to trigger the worst price decline in bonds since the 1981 bond market crash." Now, it's the turn of the Bank of England, which writes in its blog, Bank Underground, that once the latest bond market bubble bursts, "it leave investors worse off than the 1994 'bond massacre'," when global bonds suffered the biggest annual loss on record.

The blog post author, Paul Schmelzing, a PhD candidate at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the Bank of England, has little cheer for bond bulls, and writes that "as rates reached their lowest level ever in 2016, investors rather worried about the "biggest bond market bubble in history" coming to a violent end. The sharp sell-off in global bonds following the US election seems to confirm their fears. Looking back over eight centuries of data, I find that the 2016 bull market was indeed one of the largest ever recorded. History suggests this reversal will be driven by inflation fundamentals, and leave investors worse off than the 1994 "bond massacre". Read more

How Bad Will the "Bond Massacre" Get?
wolfstreet.com | Wolf Richter | 01/04/17

Worse "than the 1994 'Bond Massacre,'" with "sustained double-digit losses on bonds, subpar growth in developed markets, and balance sheet risks for banking systems...."

When Will the U.S. Confront Its Role in Fueling Terror Attacks Across the Planet?
AlterNet | Vijay Prashad | 01/04/17

Stories upon stories pile up about what appears to be senseless violence at an Istanbul (Turkey) nightclub or a market in eastern Baghdad (Iraq), on the streets of Tripoli (Libya) or in a mosque in Kabul (Afghanistan). Some in the West turn away from this news, eager to shut it off or to blame it somehow on the failings of Eastern societies. Have they not always been like that? Will they not always kill each other? Others in the West look, but all they feel is great sorrow and then, gratefulness for their own security. It is always the leaden eyes of children in war that move people. Accumulations of such stories are never enough. The voices of the grieving make no sense. It is one thing to feel sympathy for someone in war, but hard, very hard to feel empathy -- their suffering is so alien to the comforts of those in the West, too alien to expect a person to enter the shattered lives of others.

... News comes from the United Nations that 6,878 civilians were killed in Iraq during 2016. These are official numbers. The unofficial numbers are likely much higher. Since the illegal American war on Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands if not a million people have been killed before their natural lives ended. It is one of the great criminal acts of contemporary history, and yet no one has been called to account for it (although The People's Tribunal on the Iraq War hopes to make noise in the silence). The immensity of the tragedy of Iraq -- the cause of great destabilization in West Asia and North Africa -- has been utterly forgotten. It is easy to see the Associated Press article on these numbers, to even read about the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq's hard work to establish these figures, and yet to forget that the prime mover here is not Eastern culture or human nature, but a war driven by Washington, DC based entirely on lies. ... Read more