Global Economic Crisis

As the Dow Jones surpasses previous records, in nominal terms, the striking contrast between fantasies on Wall Street, subsidized  by the Federal Reserve, and what is transpiring in the real global economy is best demonstrated by the latest data emerging from Europe. The unemployment disaster in the Eurozone, a by-product of the Eurozone fiscal and debt crisis and austerity-driven policy prescriptions, continues to worsen. The official unemployment rate in the European monetary union countries has now reached 12 percent, a record level.

While discordant and asymmetrical records are being recorded on Wall Street and in Europe, the very fabric of European society is fraying. The 12 percent unemployment figure is, of course, uneven. It is much worse in countries that are most afflicted by the sovereign debt crisis, especially Spain and Greece. But the countries in the core of the Eurozone, in particular Germany, with more robust economies, cannot forever see their job markets immune. They are export dependent, and many of those exports are to countries in the Eurozone with legion of unemployed. Inevitably, export-driven economies in the Eurozone such as Germany will see a day of reckoning within their own job markets, as the economic, fiscal and debt crisis continues to ravage the Eurozone with reckless abandon, most recently witnessed with the banking catastrophe in Cyprus.

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

Uncategorized eurozone debt crisis, eurozone unemployment

Free Sex Murder Book Excerpt From “Wall Street Kills” (Erotic Snuff Movie Thriller)

Sex, murder, financial power and pathological greed come together in the explosive suspense thriller by Sheldon Filger, WALL STREET KILLS: A NOVEL ABOUT FINANCIAL POWER, VIOLENT SEX AND THE ULTIMATE SNUFF MOVIE.
This video provides a free audio reading from chapter one of “Wall Street Kills.” The scene depicted involves two characters from “Wall Street Kills” having a business conversation in a Los Angeles suburb. One character is Peter Hoffman, director of new business development for a secretive Wall Street hedge fund and private equity group. The other character is Daniel Iachino, president of a major independent film company specializing in “adult entertainment” for niche markets. Hoffman is on a mission to investigate if portraying unsimulated violent death in the form of entertainment would be a lucrative business investment. The conversation between the two men quickly focuses on the phenomenon of snuff movies.

 

 

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To view the YouTube video overview of “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

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For about two weeks, a seemingly spontaneous protest movement has evolved in the financial district of New York, dubbing itself the “Occupy Wall Street Movement.” Supposedly leaderless, there seems to be a core of ideologically committed individuals utilizing social media to empower a protest movement aimed squarely at the financial oligarchy that dominates the American political establishment, and particularly its economic and fiscal policymaking. The organizers of this self-described “leaderless” movement openly state that their methods are inspired by the protest movement of the Arab Spring.

On Saturday, October 1 more than 700 protesters were arrested by the New York Police Department. Previously, the NYPD had been accused by not only the protesters but media observers of engaging in brutality and unwarranted violence against peaceful protesters.  It is not likely that the mass arrests will attenuate these protests; the opposite actually seems to be the case.

Why is the “Occupy Wall Street Movement” protesting in Manhattan’s financial district? The website of the movement states:

“Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”

While it is too early to determine the future course of this movement, and whether or not it is a flash in the pan or a self-sustaining phenomenon that could lead to a full-scale national, revolutionary mass protest movement, I think the following observation is in order. The arrest of 700 plus protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in the brief period of an afternoon is not an everyday occurrence  in the United States. The fact that so many middle class and especially younger people are out on the streets openly railing against America’s financial oligarchy is at the very least a concrete manifestation that in the economic depression that has swept the land, the emerging generation of Americans has lost faith in the country’s politicians, feels alienated from the political culture and is increasingly hostile to those it perceives as the wire-pullers of the nation’s economic and political life and dispossessors of the future for the vast majority of Americans. Though the movement describes itself as leaderless, should a leadership emerge this movement has the potential to grow and morph into a revolutionary form of resistance to the ruling circles of contemporary America. If that happens, based on the police response to date, will those who dominate decision-making in America  unleash repression to suppress this movement? Time will tell, but as America’s economic situation grows worse and President Barack Obama’s mantra of hope and change becomes increasingly dysfunctional and irrelevant, the potential for massive social unrest in the United States grows and may eventually reach a point of critical mass, leading to unforeseen but potentially radical consequences.

Uncategorized brooklyn bridge, financial oligarchy, new york police department, occupy wall street, President Barack Obama

A few weeks before these antics a more sober assessment of America’s banking health was delivered at the National Press Club in Washington by Dr. Martin D. Weiss, the head of Weiss Research, a global investment research firm. Previously, Weiss had accurately forecast the demise of Bear Stearns and the implosion of the U.S. investment-banking sector. However, at the National Press Club he offered a more chilling prediction: 1,568 U.S. banks and thrifts risk failure. Included in that number are several of the largest American banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Sun Trust Bank and HSBC Bank USA. The numbers and depth of the banking problem highlighted by Dr. Weiss are far larger and much more ominous than has been portrayed by the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and FDIC. He backed up his dire analysis with documentation and precise mathematical modeling. For example, he refers to the government’s justification for a hideously expensive taxpayer bailout of AIG, based on the firm’s exposure to the fragile investment vehicles known as Credit Default Swaps, or CDS. The policymakers maintain that AIG’s $2 trillion in CDS exposure represented an unacceptable systemic risk, meaning AIG was “too big to fail.” However, Weiss points out that Citigroup alone holds a portfolio of $2.9 trillion in Credit Default Swaps, while J.P. Morgan Chase possesses a staggering $9.2 trillion of these toxic instruments, about five times the exposure that led AIG to demand that the government rescue it, or see the global financial system implode.

The essential point Dr. Weiss made at his press conference is that the degree of exposure U.S. banks have to a variety of toxic assets is beyond what the U.S. government and, by extension, the American taxpayer is financially capable of rescuing. Continued bailouts of insolvent banking institutions will not repair a broken financial order, but may very well cripple the overall economy.

Earlier, NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini had already gone on record as declaring that much of the U.S. banking sector was functionally insolvent, and that bailing out zombie financial institutions would only replicate the Japanese “lost decade” of the 1990s, when Tokyo’s preference for keeping alive insolvent banks instead of closing them down led to a prolonged L-shaped recession. Roubini and other critics of both Bush and Obama administration policies on bank bailouts have looked to the Swedish model for resolving a profound banking crisis, which involved temporary short-term nationalization, closing down insolvent banks, while those banks that can be salvaged are cleaned up of their toxic assets, recapitalized and then sold back to the private sector. “You have to take them over and you have to split them up into three or four national banks, rather than having a humongous monster that is too big to fail,” Nouriel Roubini has argued.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the global financial and economic crisis has already created more than $4 trillion in credit losses due to toxic assets. If nothing else, the IMF estimate on the scale of the economic and financial disaster thus far should compel the Washington political establishment to face the painful yet necessary truths regarding America’s precarious situation. However, it appears that fantasy is preferred over reality within the corridors of power.

The procrastination of policymakers in Washington in facing dark reality, and preference to avoid any public takeover of troubled banking institutions while simultaneously subsidizing these financial dead men walking with almost unlimited taxpayer funds, at the same time maintaining the fiction, as Timothy Geithner has just done, that all is basically fine with the “vast majority” of U.S. banks, is to insure the inevitability of a systemic banking collapse in the United States. The conglomeration of reckless, greed-induced banking practices by the oligarchs of finance and inept, reality-denying policymakers is sending much of the American banking sector on a Wagnerian death ride into a financial apocalypse. Many of the U.S. banks are in fact doomed to fail, and no contrived stress test or Geithner speech can alter that outcome. And that isn’t even the worst part. For when mass banking failures occur in the United States and overseas, a global economic depression will be an irreversible outcome.

Uncategorized banking crisis, credit default swaps, financial crisis, IMF, Martin D. Weiss, nouriel roubini, timothy geither, u.s. banks