Lars Schall of MMNews Germany has recently interviewed many outspoken critics of the inner workings of our global financial system including former Federal Housing Commissioner and Solari Inc. President Catherine Austin Fitts and Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC) William K. Black. Below is my recent interview with Mr. Schall.
“We Don’t Need Central Banks”, by Lars Schall, MMNews
Mr. Kim, in your point of view our current fiat money system does not only belong to the root causes for the financial/economic crisis we’re going through, but also that it is fraudulent per se. Why so?
Well, the reason I believe it’s fraudulent is because our current money system is a system that creates money as debt. If we had no debts in our global monetary system, no money could exist. That’s a fairly ludicrous concept if you think about it. It’s also a system in which central banks are allowed to print money — and when I say “print money” I use this term very loosely, because the predominant amount of money today is created as digital debits and credits. So when we think of fiat money, most people think of paper money, but in reality most paper money doesn’t even exist. It’s just digital credits credited from central bank to regional banks to commercial banks and then to the various creditors and debtors in the system. So there’s virtually zero labour that’s being performed and banks charge consumers interest on this absence of labour. Centuries ago, we used to call that usury and fraud. Today we just accept it as the way the system works.
Do you believe that a gold standard could have worked given the real economic growth?
I don’t see why not. The arguments against a gold standard are mostly propelled by bankers that want the status quo and fraud to continue. There’s nothing about a gold standard that would hold back economic growth. In my opinion a gold standard would keep money honest. If we look at some of the most prominent central bankers in the past, for example, Alan Greenspan — he said a gold standard would set interest rates in the economy on its own at a proper rate and regulate economic growth to contribute to steady growth without the boom-and-bust cycles that we experience every few years. I definitely believe that it could work.
Is actual the “fraudulent monetary system” the problem or rather the “fraudulent money men”?
That’s a very interesting question and I’ve heard arguments on both sides. There are people who say it doesn’t matter if money is sound or unsound if criminals run the system as they do today. I disagree with that. Under a sound monetary system, people will ultimately control the value of money. With the unsound system, that we have today, “the money masters”, “the money men” or whatever you want to call them, they control the value of money.
For example if people look to Bretton Woods and say that it is an example of the gold standard not working, that’s simply not true. Under Bretton Woods, a true gold standard never existed. That’s what happened: the bankers were basically lying to the people about maintaining a true gold standard. France called the US bankers’ bluff in not maintaining the gold standard and that’s why it fell apart. So this is an instance where we had a relatively sound monetary system and even though the bankers were committing fraudulent practices under this system, the people ultimately were still able to control the value of money. That’s why President Nixon had to close the gold window — because the people were forcing the bankers to lose money when they committed fraud. And that’s why the financial oligarchs do not want a sound monetary system because they lose control over the value of money.
Why do you think that central banks do “more harm than good”?
Because they prevent free-markets from operating. What they do is that they set interest rates at either artificially too high or artificially too low rates, to create booms or busts. In reality, a boom is not really a boom, but it’s a distortion of free-market prices above and beyond what the free-market would set. And then they create the busts which are not really busts, but just collapses of distorted prices returning to their free-market equilibrium.
Central banks create these booms and busts in part because commercial banks profit from them. The Goldman Sachses, the JP Morgans of the world, they make tremendous amounts of money on the upside and downside of the boom-bust cycles they help create. That’s why I say Central Banks do more harm than good. If they would just get out of the way and let free-markets operate, then the free-markets would set the interest rates. We don’t need central banks.
But the reason why the majority of people think that the absence of Central Banks would lead to chaos is because we’ve been taught this lie by bankers for hundreds of years. Did economies not function before we had Central Banks? Of course they did, and they would function with more stability without them.
What was/is the Federal Reserve’s contribution to this crisis?
I think everything, although of course the media and the Federal Reserve always state that they did not contribute to this crisis at all. But I think that the Federal Reserve — not just by itself, though it is the most powerful central bank of the world — but I would say that central banks contributed to this crisis.
In America in particular, the Federal Reserve helped to destroy the Glass-Steagall regulations. It was Alan Greenspan, who catered to the agents of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the behemoths of the banking world and allowed the creation of all kinds of financial derivative products that were not well understood. In the process, he destroyed almost all of the regulations that protected the consumer.
And in fact, Citigroup, which was the merger of the Traveler Group and Citicorp, was created before the entity was even legal. If you investigate how that happened, you will find out that Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill basically had access to a direct line to Alan Greenspan and he was assured that legislation would pass that would make Citigroup legal even as Sandy formed this new company during a time it was not. The Federal Reserve always says: “We protect the people.” But the whole creation of Citigroup is much more an act of Fascism than that of a Democracy or a Republic.
Are you supporting the House Resolution 1207 Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009?
One hundred per cent I support it, but I have extreme reservations of the potency of the final iteration of the bill if and when it finally passes. The bill still has to pass through the Senate as Senate bill 64, and Senate is much more closely aligned with bankers than the House of Representatives. It’s in the Senate where a lot of it will be destroyed. I would hope that it get passed in its original format but I have grave reservations that it will.
Do you believe that the current legislative initiative by President Obama and the Democrats are enough to prevent future crises? Or is it just the same as with the Audit the Fed bill?
Yes, I think it’s the same. It’s lip service. I mean, when you look at Obama’s cabinet, it is even more Wall Street than Bush’s. Almost everyone that occupies his cabinet and his Economic Advisory Council are from the highest echelons of Wall Street. In my opinion, when you look at history, when has government ever produced any real change? Real change, in my estimation, always comes from individuals like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Aung Sang Suu Kyi, but a government will always revert back to what it knows best, which is corruption. Corruption is the natural state of equilibrium for all governments. If we believe otherwise, we are not being cynical, but we are being self-delusional.
If the choice was yours, what would you do in order to prevent a deflationary collapse?
Actually, I don’t think that we’ll have a deflationary collapse. We’ll have deflation in the short-term when markets crash and derivative contracts have to be settled at their true market value, but long-term I believe that we’ll have severe inflation.
In the short-term we’ll probably experience the worst of both worlds, meaning devaluing currency and devaluing assets.If you look at what happened in the Weimar Republic, at the very beginning of this crisis in Germany, the top economists were arguing that a deflationary collapse was going to be the outcome of Germany’s economic policies. But eventually hyper-inflation arose.
If you look at the bailouts that Central Banks passed in response to the market crash on Thursday, May 6, you had almost a trillion euros pledged to the EU. I think that central banks have already shown the world that their plan is to devalue all major world currencies into oblivion. You can have a short-term deflationary collapse, but I think eventually a very significant inflation and much higher interest rates are in our future.
One part of the fraudulent environment in which finance / economics have to operate is since the Executive Order 12631 of March 18, 1988 the “Working Group on Financial Markets” a.k.a. the Plunge Protection Team (PPT). This order says that the main task of the PPT is to stabilize the financial markets — but not in a way that is obvious for everyone. Is the modus operandi of the PPT in general a kind of modified version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, Mr. Kim?
To my understanding the “invisible hand” always implied free-markets and that there were these invisible forces that would basically set the equilibrium between supply and demand for various goods and services by helping to set interest rates. However, as long as we have central banks, we cannot have free-markets. So in the absence of free-markets, I don’t believe we can have an “invisible hand.” To say that the PPT works as this “invisible hand” is only correct in the sense of the word “invisible” — that we don’t see its workings. But the PPT is manipulating supply and demand for various goods and services. The PPT, in fact, is un-American and against the very principles of a Republic in that it prevents the existence of free-markets.
You noted in an article from January 25, 2010 the following:
“Almost 100% of the gains in the US stock market since September 14th have been manufactured in after-hours trading with enormous purchase of market futures. Strong circumstantial evidence points to this large buyer’s identity as the Plunge Protection Team.”
I have asked investment manager Marshall Auerback (RAB Capital Plc) if he agrees on that observation. He replied:
“I certainly agree that the market has been subject to some very odd trading activity and that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest official manipulation.”
My question for you: how do this “circumstantial evidence” look like?
We could probably talk for an hour on this subject alone. It’s actually everywhere, you just have to dig to find it. At least in US-markets, we’ve had enormous rallies in finance stocks in the last ten minutes of trading on numerous days, enormous spikes in volume in the last half hour of trading when volume has been flat for the whole trading session, and so on. These types of actions indicate that someone wants to prime the marks higher for the following day.
During the rally of US markets for the first half of 2010, almost every single dip below technically important support points, which technical traders follow like the Bible, were bought to push indexes back above certain important technical points that would have triggered the black boxes and automatic selling. For the first six months of 2010, almost every single important failure in technical support levels were immediately reversed. I’ve never seen that happen before in 20 years of following the markets. Furthermore, at times during this rally, there were enormous amounts of S&P 500 futures contracts purchased by unknown entities after market close and before market open the next day. The only institution being capable of this kind of enormous buying is the Plunge Protection Team directed by the Fed and the US Treasury. Whether or not Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were involved in this activity remains unknown.
Even last year, between September 14, 2009 and January 2010, 100% of the gains of the US-market basically occurred in after hours trading when markets are illiquid and very easy to manipulate. I can also think of multiple days for multiple weeks on end when you would have 40% of the New York Stock Exchange composite volume comprised of just four stocks! From the top of my head, I believe these stocks were Citigroup, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and maybe Bank of America alternatively replacing one of those previous four at times. How can you have 40% of the composite volume of the New York Stock Exchange contain trading in just four stocks? That’s ludicrous! So I would say that this is very, very strong circumstantial evidence that markets are being manipulated.
Will the Plunge Protection Team soon reach the limits of its capability to manipulate the stock market?
Yes, I think it will, because these “recoveries” that are being sold to the world, in my estimation, are only a recovery of stock markets. For instance in the US you still have a very high rate of unemployment, you really don’t have any strong economic growth, job creation or manufacturing growth. What is happening is just a re-inflation of the stock market bubble. You had that pattern over decades — boom, bust, boom, bust — and every time it busts, the PPT will step in and re-inflate the bubble.
Each time it re-inflates it, it has less and less tools at its disposal to re-inflate it, because typically they cut interest rates to re-inflate it, so now, because interest rates are still next to zero in the United States, the only way they can re-inflate it is by injecting trillions and trillions of dollars into the system. But eventually it’s building to become the mother of all bubbles. When it bursts next time, I don’t think they will have the tools and mechanisms at their disposal to re-inflate it anymore.
What does the existence of the PPT and its kind of business mean in its inner core for the reality of the “free-markets”?
I really think there are no free-markets. That’s always been my contention that all markets are rigged – whether you look at commodity markets, currency markets, stock markets, and even real estate markets in some capacity because they depend on interest rates that central banks set and not the free-markets. Basically, I think until we get a sound monetary system in place and perhaps even dismantle central banks, that we will have no free-markets anywhere in the world.
Another “playground” for the PPT in combination with bullion banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and the Deutsche Bank is the gold market. Do you have any doubts that the gold price is highly manipulated since the mid-1990’s?
Again, all these things are very, very hard to prove. There are just Everest-sized mountains of very strong circumstantial evidence. But I would argue that the gold price has been highly manipulated even before the gold-window was closed in 1973, and even in the decades prior to the mid-1990’s, because gold has forever been the kryptonite of central bankers. As gold rises it’s a weathervane for inflation and an indicator of the lack of integrity of fiat currencies.
So central bankers always have had an interest to suppress the price of gold since bankers existed. One of their main mechanisms in the past was actually to sell-off physical gold reserves. But now since they’ve depleted much of their physical reserves, their main mechanism to manipulate gold and silver prices is through the futures-market and basic propaganda they plant in the media. They basically committed reversed alchemy: they turned physical gold and silver into paper on the futures-market.
Do you see a connection between the suppressed gold price and the “strong dollar policy”?
Yes, I know Tim Geithner and every Treasury Secretary before him says: “We have a strong dollar policy.” But it’s almost laughable. When he has gone to China, even university students in China laughed at him when he has mentioned the “strong dollar policy.” How can we have a “strong dollar policy”, when the dollar has lost 96% — 98% of its value since 1913? I think in that sense the bankers have learned from Hitler’s Propaganda-Minister Joseph Goebbels a good lesson as Goebbels said something to the effect of, “You tell a big enough lie often enough it becomes the truth.” That’s why people believe that the US has a “strong dollar policy.” We’ve never had a “strong dollar policy” since the birth of the Federal Reserve.
Is the manipulated gold price an immensely underrated feature of the current crisis?
Yes, I think it is. It is hard to predict where the gold and silver price will go but I think if U.S. regulators stepped in and said Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JPMorgan couldn’t participate in the gold and silver futures-market for three weeks — I really think you would see the gold and silver price more than double in that time. I mean, it’s immensely manipulated.
As you know, one organization that tries to expose the rigging of the gold market for years, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA), faces huge problems to get “air time” since its founding in 1999. Why do you think that especially the US and British media is so silent about what GATA has to say? Isn’t it an indicator among others that journalism itself is in a profound crisis of its own?
Yes, I believe it is. I believe that investigative journalism is almost dead. You have better investigative journalism regarding the financial markets on financial blogs today and in independent newspapers than you ever would receive in the mass media. I think that’s an indictment of how far mass media journalism has fallen from its once lofty perch.
I should know more about media outside the United States, but I know within in the United States, the bankers have always made an effort to control the media. I know that the Rockefellers, for example, have in the past thanked Time Magazine for its silence about some of their financial initiatives, stating had it not been for their silence, that they wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the vast majority of their financial objectives. And in the US, I do know as well that there are only a handful of companies that control 90% of all media -that’s all TV, radio and newspapers.
So I think either the truth is outright censored or there is actually a concept in journalism that is called self-censorship. Journalists learn by the pattern of promotion within the newspaper, the Radio station, or TV station they work for, what they can or cannot say. They actually self-censor themselves over time as well, which is a shame, but that’s just the way it is.
GATA claims the central banks have less than 15,000 tonnes of gold left in their vaults versus the gold establishment, which claims they have 30,000 tonnes. The point of Bill Murphy & Co. is none of them take the gold into the account fed into the physical market to suppress the price over the past 15 years. What do say to this?
I think it’s definitely less. To tell you the truth, I’m not aware of how GATA has come up with that figure of 15.000 tonnes, but I would agree that there is less than what the central banks say they posses. If we review the history of bankers, we have Alan Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, that said: “The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth.” So why anyone in their right mind would ever believe anything that bankers have to say, I have no idea.
Even when we look to China, in 2009, they announced that they virtually doubled their gold reserves from the figure they had given in 2003. So they basically lied to the world for six years regarding their gold reserves. There is a pattern here. In China’s instance it made sense for bankers to conceal the truth, because they didn’t want to reveal their gold purchases as this very revelation would have driven the price of their gold purchases higher.
On the opposite side of this equation, if you were trying to sustain a fraudulent monetary system in which you have the power to arbitrarily revalue everyone’s money at will, then would you lie about the amount of gold you really possessed? People have faith in the solvency of their governments because of the amount of gold they own. But what if these governments, under direction of their banker masters, sold this gold off over the past few decades to suppress the price of gold? Then would you lie about how much gold you had? Of course you would.
To understand these criminals, you have to think like a criminal. I would definitely say that there probably is less gold on hand than central banks claim they have or the IMF claims it has as well. If they have nothing to hide, let an independent auditor appointed by the people (not selected by them) audit their reserves. They could end all the controversy about their gold reserves with one simple independent audit.
GATA has its supporters and many critics. Yet GATA has been right about the direction of the gold price for TEN years while most of the gold establishment and the Wall Street analysts have been neutral to bearish – and still are. What do you make of that?
It’s easy to know why Wall Street is neutral to bearish most of the time, because they don’t make any money if people buy gold. These firms make their money primarily from fee based management, that’s what they direct their clients into — fee-based products. There are still old school wealth managers that still churn accounts to earn money from commissions, but either way they don’t make money when people just buy gold and it sits there.
That’s why HSBC ordered their smaller private clients to move their gold out of their vaults in New York at their own expense, because it’s not a profitable business for them though it’s very profitable for their owners. They want people to buy stocks and any assets the can charge an annual fee for. I think that’s why they are neutral to bearish and still are, even as the world’s major currencies move closer and closer to collapse.
Mr. Kim, I know that you follow closely GATA’s “battle royal” with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Why is this important?
To expose, I suppose, the whole fraud of the financial system from top to bottom. The financial system is corrupt at its core all the way through. When you look at the CFTC or any regulatory commission like the SEC, they have not just one huge glaring failure in protecting the consumer, but have suffered numerous huge failures. We’ve had the same fight with rating agencies that failed miserably to protect the consumer, like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s. Their battle is important just to expose corruption and just to expose the fact that our regulators are not really on the side of the consumers. It’s important for consumers to understand that. The fact that all of their failures have hardly resulted in any firings, let alone any jail time, just proves to the consumer, how collusive is the fraud of the financial industry.
One factor that let the gold price rise is that mining supply is decreasing. Do you think we’ve passed peak gold?
I would say that if any monster deposits are to be discovered in the future, that it will take a long time for those large discoveries to be mined out of the earth. I say this because it seems that all significant open pit gold deposits, the rich veins of gold that are easily accessible, have already been discovered. Even if there is a large discovery in the future, normally it will take, on average, about ten years for those deposits to move into production, because they’re so deep underground, in not easily accessible geographic locations, or in politically unstable regions. Any large discovery today is not going to increase the supply of gold overnight. And this will keep gold supplies very tight for a long while.
From peak gold to peak oil. What are your thoughts on this issue? Is peak oil real? And how does it influence your investment choices?
Whether peak oil is real or not to me is irrelevant. What I mean by that is trying to understand if peak oil is real or not is like trying to figure out who shot President Kennedy. We’ll probably never know, because we’re not in the category of “need to know”. Only a few people in the world fall into that category. Possibly all the leaders of the OPEC nations know if peak oil is real or not. But all I try to understand are how markets are rigged, whether those markets are oil, gold, silver, stock markets, etc.
If I can understand these rigging games, then I can understand if oil prices will move up or down regardless of whether peak oil is real or not. We can have all the reports about production levels in Mexico and other oil producing countries drastically falling, but the integrity of these reports are only as good as the people producing them. That’s what most people tend to forget. If you can’t really trust the people producing the reports, then you shouldn’t trust the reports. That’s all I need to understand. I don’t need to understand if peak oil is real or not to make money in the market.
Steven Kolpits, head of the New York office of Douglas-Westwood, gave last September the following percentage calculation for the U.S.:
”The US has experienced six recessions since 1972. At least five of these were associated with oil prices. In every case, when oil consumption in the US reached 4% percent of GDP, the US went into recession. Right now, 4% of GDP is $80 oil. So that’s my current view: If the oil price exceeds $80, then expect the US to fall back into recession.”
What are your thoughts on this, especially since the oil price is about to exceed $80? Will this be the end of “the road to recovery”?
The more important point to address in all of this is that I for one don’t really subscribe to these past historical equations like: 4% of GDP, then we go into recession or more than 200% of GDP in debt, then we have a currency crisis, etc. etc. Because when you really look at it you have to consider, “What is true GDP?” We know it’s certainly not the figures our governments tell us. Everyone knows that every government in the world lies about these statistics, they massage them, they manipulate them and they’re not the real statistics. When you try to measure something as a per cent of a lie, then you have to figure out how much or each statistic is a lie.
The fact is that if you look over time most governments have changed those equations for GDP, the components of what goes into GDP, the components of what goes into inflation. So you’re not comparing apples to apples anymore. You’re comparing apples to oranges. The key economic indicators and statistics produced by the government today are produced with equations that are vastly different than the equations used to determine them just 20 years ago. Thus, unless you take the time to revert to calculating these key economic indicators using the same equation, all of these comparisons ring false and are an utter waste of time.
I would ask instead: Have we recovered? Are we even out of recession? Well, that would be news to me. I think all government statistics are distorted, so you try to look at what the true statistics are. Are you familiar with Shadowstats?
Yes.
For instance in the U.S., Shadowstats will take the pre-Clinton years equation for inflation and then try to figure out what inflation really is today. That is more important, because when we start looking at percents and statistics, the equations have to be constant between differing time periods; otherwise, you’re not really comparing apples to apples.
But given that energy is the basis for growth it will be hard to make a recovery happen, isn’t it?
Yes, with rising energy prices any recovery will be difficult. But in the same aspect what is a large component of the price increases in energy, food and other costs of living? It’s the devaluation of currencies. So they go hand in hand.
Food production and prices are closely intertwined with oil and natural gas. What do you see coming in that respect?
If we see an extended period of collapses in stock markets and other financial markets, we’ll get a short period of deflation, but that will be replaced by inflation eventually as all governments try to inflate away their debt and print their currencies into oblivion. Eventually although you may see a deflation in food prices and energy if we get a stock market crash, down the road, I’m quite convinced that there will be an explosion higher in food prices.
Tensions between the U.S. and China are growing — not least because of the energy situation around the globe and their dependency on hydrocarbons. What can be done to end this collision course?
That’s a very good question. I don’t buy the fact that we can’t figure out an alternative to hydrocarbons and the internal combustion engine. We’ve been smart enough to send manned missions to the moon and maybe in the future even to Mars. I’m certain we can find alternative solutions to our energy crisis.
But I think the problem underlying everything is how corrupt even our political system is today. Politics are directly tied into the problem of the economic world, because lobbyists work so hard and they’re so well funded. For example, the lobbyists of the oil industry work hard to kill the introduction or development of technology that threatens the profits of the oil industry, even if those technologies will benefit society as a whole.
It’s such a massive problem. We have to restructure first of all how our political system works and hopefully try to install the principles of Republics instead of the current structure of empires and plutocracies, which is all we have today. And if we can restructure our political system, then perhaps we’ll rid ourselves of Machiavellian lobbyists and perhaps begin to reward innovation that benefits society instead of rewarding the greed of corporations.
Is the Chinese financial / economical system by now on an inevitable crash course — a ticking time bomb?
I think so, though you have a lot of people who still believe that Asia will be okay, even when the second phase of this crisis hits. When I look at it, I’m not an expert on China by any means, but when I look into their banking system, I see that their risk management is atrocious. There was a point not too long ago that Chinese banks were lending to nearly every and any business that asked for a loan. That’s not smart monetary policy. Sure there are profits to be made, but we saw the excesses of that type of greed in the US subprime mortgage market. The unwinding of this greed in China, when it happens, will not be a pretty exercise.
Furthermore, China’s banking system is based on fiat money just like every other monetary system in the world. They re-inflated their stock market bubble like everyone else. So certainly they’re not immune from the consequences of implementing unsound monetary policies, which they have. They’ve been selling the short-term results of this unsound monetary policy as growth and recovery just like every other government, when every single problem that created the first phase of this crisis has neither been addressed nor fixed.
May I also ask for your thoughts related to the crisis of the European monetary union? Is the euro already dead? And what would be the outcome of this agony?
The euro will either die or we’ll get massive inflation in the EU. But the same applies to the Japanese yen, the British pound sterling, and the US dollar. We have only the corrupt and the more corrupt running our countries. Though it’s a cliché, due to foolish, foolish monetary policies implemented by Central Bankers worldwide, all leading economies are between a rock and a hard place today. So what outcome can we choose? It’s only worse or worst.
One final question. Isn’t it true that one has to be a bit of a “conspiracy theorist“ these days in order to make good successful investments?
Not at all. I don’t engage in conspiracy theories. I would say that our modus operandi is rooted in fact, and that the “reality” that most people believe today is rooted in lies. This is how twisted the financial world has become. At my company, maalamalama, we dig deep to uncover facts that help us work our way through government deceit and the muck of the commercial investment industry. Then we draw intelligent deductions from these facts.
As I said, there is more deceit and falsehood out there than truth. By nature, when you start trying to propagate the truth, those in power will always be eager to discredit the truth by labelling them as conspiracy theories. These commercial investment firms, global banks and Wall Street cabals cannot make money if people know the truth. This is why they hire and delegate so much money to PR and to controlling media and image. They cannot afford to have people know the truth. Ignorance is the key to their profits.
But there’s nothing I have said or propagated that is not one- hundred percent logic, intelligent deduction, or rooted in fact.
Thank you very much for taking your time, Mr. Kim!
SOURCES:
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/english-news/5555-we-dont-need-central-banks – _ednref1compare J.S. Kim. “Central Banks: More Harm than Good?”, published at Seeking Alpha on September 24, 2009 under:
http://seekingalpha.com
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/english-news/5555-we-dont-need-central-banks – _ednref2Executive Order 12631 — Working Group on Financial Markets
By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, and in order to establish a Working Group on Financial Markets, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Establishment. (a) There is hereby established a Working Group on Financial Markets (Working Group). The Working Group shall be composed of:
(1) the Secretary of the Treasury, or his designee;
(2) the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or his designee;
(3) the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or his designee; and
(4) the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or her designee.
(b) The Secretary of the Treasury, or his designee, shall be the Chairman of the Working Group.
Sec. 2. Purposes and Functions. (a) Recognizing the goals of enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of our Nation’s financial markets and maintaining investor confidence, the Working Group shall identify and consider:
(1) the major issues raised by the numerous studies on the events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987, and any of those recommendations that have the potential to achieve the goals noted above; and
(2) the actions, including governmental actions under existing laws and regulations (such as policy coordination and contingency planning), that are appropriate to carry out these recommendations.
(b) The Working Group shall consult, as appropriate, with representatives of the various exchanges, clearinghouses, self-regulatory bodies, and with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible.
(c) The Working Group shall report to the President initially within 60 days (and periodically thereafter) on its progress and, if appropriate, its views on any recommended legislative changes.
Sec. 3. Administration. (a) The heads of Executive departments, agencies, and independent instrumentalities shall, to the extent permitted by law, provide the Working Group such information as it may require for the purpose of carrying out this Order.
(b) Members of the Working Group shall serve without additional compensation for their work on the Working Group.
(c) To the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of funds therefore, the Department of the Treasury shall provide the Working Group with such administrative and support services as may be necessary for the performance of its functions.
Ronald Reagan
The White House, March 18, 1988.
published on the website of the Presidential Library of Ronald Reagan under: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/english-news/5555-we-dont-need-central-banks – _ednref3J. S. Kim: “ The Second Phase of the Global Economic Crisis Is at Our Doorstep”, published at Seeking Alpha on January 25, 2010 under: http://seekingalpha.com/
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/english-news/5555-we-dont-need-central-banks – _ednref4compare Lars Schall: „Bis hierher lief’s noch ganz gut…“, published at MMNews on January 31, 2010 under: http://www.mmnews.de. See also Joe Weisenthal: “TrimTabs CEO Biderman: I Think The Government Is Buying Up The Stock Market, Though I Have No Evidence”, published at Business Insider on February 4, 2010 under: http://www.businessinsider.com/
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/english-news/5555-we-dont-need-central-banks – _ednref5Steve Andrews: “The first peak oil recession”, Interview with Steven Kopits, published at Energy Bulletin on September 14, 2009 under: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50109#
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/english-news/5555-we-dont-need-central-banks – _ednref6compare Dale Allen Pfeiffer: “Eating Fossil Fuels”, published at From the Wilderness on October 3 , 2003 under:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
