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20 years

 

Beware_of_Banks-Hed

W160716atching the financial clock slowly tick down to what the bankers thought might well be the meltdown of the world's central banks in 2007, the princes of industry, barons of banking and the courtesans of commerce began to prepare for what they believed could be the disastrous collapse of the world's monetary system as we knew it in the first decade of the 21st century. And, the preparations of the global money barons to justify a new consumer bankruptcy law which would protect the debt owed to the barons of banking and courtesans of commerce by US citizens through changes in the the law to make sure consumers could not file bankruptcy and jettison old debt (although debt created prior to 2005 was theoretically exempt from the law).

The enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (Public Law 109—8, 119 Stat 23), aided and abetted by sufficiently bribed members of Congress who enjoyed larger than legal campaign donations, and signed into law by then president George W. Bush who was bullied by the courtesans of commerce to repeal the Uptick Rule to help avoid a global domino-affect currency collapse due to a double-barreled monetary crisis in Indonesia which would impact the banks in every heavily populated nation in the third world where the princes of industry were busy transferring over half of all of the industrial jobs in America. Repealing the Uptick rule would allow the hedge fund divisions of America's largest banks to short sell (sell stocks they didn't own and buy them after the stock prices collapsed and obscene profit taking was ripe for the plucking). Short selling would be stock fraud if you or I did it.

By 2005 several major US commercial and mortgage banks were in trouble over the amount of subprime mortgages they owned which were in default. In many instances, the too low income or welfare-income applicants who were approved for home mortgages they couldn't afford were given modified mortgage payments. For the first to fifth years, the mortgage holder would be obligated only to pay 50% or less of the actual principle and interest due, with the balance of the principle and interest due for current payments was quietly attached to the back end of the loan. Many subprime mortgages were sold with variable, not fixed, interest rates which means as inflation increases, the interest rates on existing variable APR contracts would raise as well, causing the low income or welfare-income homeowners to lose their homes. As subprime became the new banking norm, credit card companies followed suit, offering low income consumers low ceiling credit cards with high subprime interest rates to spur an economic recovery that was sputtering to a halt as fewer consumer jobs in the United States provided fewer paying customers for the goods now coming from US branded products being manufactured in third world sweat shops, reducing even more the available jobs in the United States as low paying retail and customer service jobs replaced industrial and technical employment in America.

Ninety-five percent of the 2005-2007 mortgage loan delinquencies came from consumers who bought toxic mortgages that allowed them get into homes they simply couldn't afford. Some of them were low-credit score buyers opting into the housing market through HUD-guaranteed mortgages, many times with modified rate mortgages and variable interest rates with 0% to 1% interest rates for the first year or two to qualify them for mortgage payments the sellers knew the home buyers couldn't afford when they applied for the loan. Others, who had good credit scores, simply over-bought inflated-priced homes because the mortgage companies, who planned to sell the notes for a quick profit before the ink was dry on the contracts, allowed them to overbuy because all of the toxic mortgages were insured by Fannie Mae which placed the burden of paying for them on the middle class taxpayers.

What provoked the mortgage industry collapse was the same problem that instigated it in the first place—the exportation of the US job market by the princes of industry to the third world. The courtesans of commerce saw that their financial future looked brighter in a world rich in the human capital which had nothing and needed everything —especially the US jobs which would provide them the income they needed to buy what every American has two or three of and the human capital of the third world has none because they lack a working wage which would allow them to buy what the most population-starved nations on Earth take for granted.

When greed cannot be sated, the inevitable always happens. The rich continue to print more worthless currency because they horde what they own until there is no longer enough money in circulation to keep the cogs of commerce well greased and the economy reasonably fluid.

The doomsday clock began ticking in overdrive with the media-ignored collapse, in 1997, of Indonesia's central bank, Bank Indonesia and the financial erosion of Bank Century, Indonesia's largest commercial bank in 2005 when Asian debtors lost 6.7 trillion rupiah ($720 million) playing in a high-stakes poker game with the western world financiers and industrialists. A year later, in 1998, the Indonesian banking system was taken over by a government bureaucracy, the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency.

Ultimately the loser became the largest banks in the United States which staked the Indonesia infrastructure-developers who failed to learn the rules of playing financial catch-as-catch-can by borrowing from the same bankers they were competing with to build a 21st century economy in Indonesia. Between 2005 and 2007 Indonesia's banking system was in free-fall and global bankers feared a domino-affect banking collapse would destroy the world's monetary system.

Feeling the brunt of the financial pain in the United States was America's behemoth "too-big-to-fail" banks: American International Group, Bank of America, Bear Sterns, IndyMac Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and Wells Fargo. One hundred twenty-six US banks closed their doors from Jan. 1, 2007 to Dec. 31, 2009. Thirty of them toppled due to the greed-created subprime industry. (The subprime industry was created by far-left social justice advocates in the US Congress and like minded minority street advocates like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama) who convinced Bill Clinton to amend Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 which obligated banks to make home loans in impoverished areas—like the slums of Detroit and Chicago. Only the Clinton amendment forced banks to accept blatantly credit-unworthy applicants who could use welfare income to qualify for a mortgage, with stiff fines assessed to banks which declined loans to poor-credit risk buyers—whose only income, in far too many cases, was that welfare check.

As President George W. Bush began his second term in 2005, the home construction industry (which accounted for a majority of the jobs growth in the United States) was in trouble. Thousands of subprime home owners who should never have been granted home loans began walking away from homes they couldn't afford, or were being evicted for non-payment of their mortgages, At the same time, Bank Indonesia defaulted on close to a billion dollars in debt to America's ten largest banks. The bankers looked up from the dwindling stacks of cash in their counting rooms and saw the proverbial handwriting on the wall. It was a mene, mene, tekel, upsharin moment. The bankers saw financial armageddon looming on the horizon. Their first thought, of course, was to protect their assets by making sure the American people could not bankrupt themselves out of debt.

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 did just that. It flipflopped American bankruptcy law by making it difficult and, in most cases, impossible, for US citizens to escape massive debt they should never had been able to amass in the first place. For that reason, colloquially speaking Public Law 109, was referred to, tongue-in-cheek on Capitol Hill, as the new bankruptcy protection law because it radically changed the nature of debt relief in America by virtually eliminating it while protecting the lending institution. It established new rules which obligated lenders to accommodate borrowers by reducing their loan payments and in court ordered settlements, reducing or suspending interest on those debts. But under almost no circumstance, were those debts ever forgiven.

As the US banks hemorrhaged greenbacks at home and abroad, the hedge fund divisions of the nation's largest banks—particularly those which had gambled on subprime mortgage funds, faltered. In 2005, President George W. Bush's Director of the Securities & Exchange Commission, William Donaldson reinstated the Uptick Rule, reining in the hedge fund brokers from short selling stocks because of what Donaldson called "stress in the subprime hedge funds." The bankers, particularly the JP Morgan-Chase bankers who played an important role in the political career of George HW Bush called in every favor they could from the Bush-43 White House to either repeal or temporarily suspend the Uptick Rule and reinstate the practice of short-selling stocks to refill those dwindling stacks of money in the bankers counting houses..

As the bankers leveraged Bush, Bush leveraged Donaldson, who would not budge. Finally, on Oct. 12, 2007 Bush fired Donaldson and replaced him with former Congressman Chris Cox [R-CA] who immediately rescinded the Uptick Rule, allowing short sellers to destroy the planned retirements of thousands of baby boomers by shorting the stocks in millions of working class Americans retirement IRAs or 401Ks. Many of the thousands of retiring Americans in 2007 discovered when they received their gold watch and their retirement income package of now worthless stock certificates would not provide them with any sense of security in their "golden years" ended up as part-time "greeters" at their local Walmart.

When the Uptick Rule was repealed by Cox, short sellers once again began a bear raid on working class investors, devastating the stock market and emptying the IRAs and 401Ks of scores of Baby Boomers who were just filing for the Social Security benefits that were supposed to supplement their company 401Ks (which were suddenly worth virtually nothing), and also by downsized workers whose jobs were exported to China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, Canada, South America and Africa—and whose 401Ks are now just about as worthless as the promises of rogue American-branded companies who assured the American people they would prosper from the draconian pipedream more commonly referred to as the global economy.

The merchants of global prosperity don't believe their utopian pipedream any more today than they did in the 1990s when the UN's World Bank redefined the nature of global wealth, ranking human capital as the most precious asset in the world because the products created by the world's courtesans of commerce are worthless without customers with jobs and discretionary income willing to buy them.

Like the "transparency" of chameleon politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the never-ending greed of the courtesans of commerce is becoming more visible while, at the same time, becoming even more duplicitously covert as the princes of industry and the barons of banking and business slowly change the social culture of the free enterprise economic centers of the world's socialist democracies by encouraging the "Occupy Movement" gimme stuff deadbeats to riot in the streets for more "free stuff," asserting it's their right since they never asked to be born. The problem with free stuff is that not only is it not free, it's the most expensive stuff in the world because the price for free stuff is the surrender of liberty and the loss of freedom.

Free rent. Free food. Free medical care. Free education (the most dangerous freebie of all because you have to surrender your right to think for yourself to receive it.) That's why so many of the IQ midgets graduating from our institutions of higher education believe socialism is so neat. Society owes you something for being a participant. Free everything. Free stuff is the mantra of social media—and it's now the mantra of the Madison Avenue advertising agencies that manage the corralling of the minds of the consumer public. "Free" works.

Have you nibbled on any of these freebies from America's biggest banks? • 0% percent interest for 12 to 24 billing cycles • 1.5% cash back with every purchase • 1.5% cash back on each payment you make • Get a $150 bonus after you spent $500 in your first 3-months of owning the card • Earn 5% cash back (up to a $1,500) in "bonus categories" each quarter • Security and fraud protection • No annual fees • Mobile banking • Access to thousands of ATMs • FICO updates sent to your email address or Smart phone monthly • And, of course, special savings on goods purchased from select merchants (which means the bank will sell those select merchants digital advertising and will spam your email address or Smart Phone).

Not a week goes by that I don't receive three, four, five, or more credit card offers from America's premiere credit card companies—even the credit card companies I currently use—offering me "free stuff" to surrender my ho-hum boring credit cards for an exciting credit card with all of the new bells and whistles. Without reading them, I generally shredded them. But, they just kept on coming. One week I decided to save them from the dreaded shredder and find out why the urgency. (I actually knew what I was going to find.)

When the economy tanks, bankers have to protect their potential losses—not just from you, the consumer, but from the princes of industry and barons of banking further up the financial food chain. When the economy tanks, the first thing that happens is that interest rates on everything suddenly spirals upward. If you are using fixed rate credit cards, they will renew as variable APR credit cards and the 8% or 9% fixed APR will become an 18% to 24% variable APR which will adjust upward as the economy tightens even more and the Prime Rate reaches Jimmy Carter-era levels of 30% or greater. (You can decline the interest rate hike by canceling the card. The only interest rate the credit card company can assess is what you were paying when the interest rate change notification was sent to you. If you wait until the first statement after the new interest rate goes into affect, and you discover your whole payment paid interest and no principle, it's too late.)

In one of the enticing freebie credit card offers I was amazed to find a fixed APR. But, in the small print that you never read, the bank held the option, if you're late in paying your bill, to convert the interest rate from fixed to variable. One small print offer seemed to give another bank the right to arbitrarily change their fixed rate to a variable rate at any time without notice based on applicable law. (But, I don't think they can do that without at least a 30-day notice to cancel the card without being penalized with a higher interest rate.)

Oh, and by the way, the ad agencies for the big credit card banks didn't jump on the Occupy "gimme free things" band wagon in Europe and the United States because Occupy is demanding free things. Believe me when I say this, no bank on Earth is going to give you free things because brainwashed liberal college students and societal dropouts think they are entitled to free things because they didn't ask to be born.

America's largest banks are preparing for a financial armageddon as they await the collapse of wealth as we know it. The unemployed in America are now in the neighborhood of 50% although the Obama Administration still insists that its under 8% (because only the recently unemployed—who are receiving unemployment benefits—are construed to be unemployed.) Those too old or unemployed too long to find work are now the invisible unemployed. Their lack of consumer spending is becoming a catastrophic conundrum which speaks volumes—not in words, but in the sucking sound that signals what's left of our personal wealth being sucked into the coffers of the princes of industry and the barons of banking who now virtually own the legislative lackeys on Capitol Hill, the zombies in the tombs of government and the socialist justices with lifetime jobs in the federal court system who were enthroned solely to erase a Constitution they cannot repeal.

One last link in a very important chain of thought: Over the last eight years America deliberately surrendered its role as the guardian of the world and the Christian caretaker of global liberty. Following the lead of the socialist European Union, Barack Obama invited the world's deadliest enemy to bring their foot soldiers to our shores, and with them, the destruction they promised from the days of the Amalekites. Who we are on Jan. 21, 2017, as a nation and as a People, will depend entirely on who we are, and where we stand, this November. If the American people surrender the helm of government to Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016, the Second Amendment will die first, followed by another sucking sound—the First Amendment and with it, the death of liberty in America. Remember this for all time: the Second Amendment protects the First.

 

Just Say No
Copyright © 2009 Jon Christian Ryter.
All rights reserved
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