fraudulent 'credit crisis'?

friday, december 19th, 2008

doing the kind of investigative reporting we should expect from the major media, a financial research and consulting firm has released a major analysis of the "credit crisis" that concludes that the claims made by Treasury Department Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to justify a socialist takeover of the financial industry were demonstrably false.

The analysis, "Flawed Assumptions about the Credit Crisis: A Critical Examination of US Policymakers", concludes that the result of the unjustified massive federal intervention in the economy could be similar to the economic crisis in the (German) Weimar Republic of 1922, where disastrous hyperinflation made the currency worthless and threatened the nation’s political system and stability.

The analysis was released by Celent, a Boston-based firm that provides independent information and advice to financial services companies. The 30-page report, made available to Accuracy in Media, does not accuse Paulson and Bernanke of lying about the "credit crisis." But it does say that, "It is startling that many of Chairman Bernanke’s and Secretary Paulson’s remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead."

Using charts and graphs of data from the Federal Reserve and other agencies, the Celent study says that statements from Paulson and Bernanke about a "credit crisis" affecting businesses, real estate, banks, and state and local governments were just not true.

The report says there is "a contradiction" between what Paulson and Bernanke have said, and the reality of the situation as demonstrated in the official data. It calls these "discrepancies" and says that some of their "remarks are puzzling."

Asked for comment on why he was able to uncover this information while the major media have not, Octavio Marenzi, founder and CEO of Celent, told AIM, "What we need from the media is more skepticism and more engagement. Too frequently statements are taken at face value. Also, most journalists are under such tight time pressure that they do not have the time to reflect and to dig deeper. They are on a conveyor belt and just trying to keep up with the required level of output."

Paulson had claimed that, by mid-September, when he persuaded President Bush to go public with demands for Congress to approve a $700-billion bailout plan, the financial system had "seized-up," credit markets had "froze," and interbank lending had been "substantially reduced."

But none of this was true. "The freezing of the credit markets that Secretary Paulson cites is not visible" in the data, the Celent report shows.

Paulson also made the claim that blue chip industrial companies could not issue longer-term commercial paper. But this claim "finds no support" in the data, the report says.

Bernanke had claimed that businesses were "confronting diminished access to credit" when in fact "the opposite" was true, the study demonstrates.

The suggestion is made that Bernanke and Paulson were acting on behalf of "a particular set of businesses and financial institutions" and exaggerated the problem in order to justify "unprecedented levels of government intervention in the markets."

It is implied that these firms were certain big banks and companies. But while they may have been having problems raising funds, the credit market in general was "working well," the report said.

It declares, "Doubtlessly, a number of the leading financial institutions in the US are in serious trouble, as are a number of the leading industrial firms. However, credit difficulties surrounding a specific set of firms is not the same as a problem in the credit markets in the aggregate."

The study says that, "A clear and cogent analysis of the credit crisis has not been presented by policymakers, despite the fact that unprecedented levels of public funds are being deployed." As a result, the "massive injection of funds could well exacerbate the problem rather than help."

The report says the money supply "has recently increased at a pace never seen before in US history" and could signal a pending bout of hyperinflation. It says the increase is "a staggering 74% in only 84 days" and explains, "Previously, this kind of jump would be seen over the course of a decade or more."

It then concludes by suggesting that the real danger to the U.S. is not in a great depression like that of 1929 but a hyperinflationary period comparable to the (German) Weimar Republic in 1922.

While it is possible that Paulson and Bernanke have additional data supporting their hypothesis that there has been a general breakdown in credit markets, Celent says they have not shared this data with the public and there would have to be an explanation of why the data being released to the public is incorrect. Celent is skeptical that any kind of additional and therefore secret data exists.

The Celent study has gotten limited media attention, including a Reuters news agency report, and CEO Marenzi was interviewed on CNBC for about three-and-a-half minutes by a somewhat skeptical Larry Kudlow.

The minimal coverage is troubling because the Celent study suggests that the Bush Administration and Congress were panicked and stampeded into approving unprecedented socialist measures for the economy that were not justified by the evidence.

The "seizing-up" of the credit markets, as reported by the media at the time, has so far resulted in promises of more than $7.76 trillion of taxpayer money in order to "rescue" the financial system, according to the latest Bloomberg News estimate. The money amounts to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, Bloomberg reported.

Last week 83 members of Congress sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, asking for the CEOs of institutions receiving some of the Paulson bailout money to testify about what has happened to the funds.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times on Monday reported that Bush has nearly doubled the national debt during his eight years in the White House. Reporter David M. Dickson reports that "the number was $10.66 trillion at the end of November, and it has been rising at an astronomical rate." Today, foreigners hold more than 50 percent of U.S. publicly held debt, the story adds.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is quoted in the article as saying that the "next big bubble" to affect the economy could very well be a "government debt bubble."

©Family Security Matters, by Contributing Editor Cliff Kincaid, who is the Editor of Accuracy in Media.

Around The Garden Center™.

Last Thursday's/Friday's massive storm from the Gulf netted us 2½" of rain, 0" of snow and not much else, if the local flooding is excluded, from the overall equation. Much of New England got nailed by a massive ice storm, and 250,000 600,000 800,000 1,000,000 1,250,000+ have no power now, and won't for several days. Before I left on Thursday afternoon, I'd put another 30lbs of birdseed out, so all the "local nesters" had plenty to eat until I got into work. Around 8:30pm, the *Winter Storm Warning* had been downgraded to diddly-squat.

By 11am on Friday, the full storm front had passed up into New England, we were seeing the sun again, and starting to dry-out. I called Lee and invited him over for some Chinese take-out, from the Emerald Garden Restaurant, in Shrewsbury (PA). No, I don't eat sushi or sashimi, but their Chinese dim-sum — steamed pork dumplings, shrimp toast, beef egg rolls, scallion pancakes — is great, as is their Gen Tsao's Chicken, Orange Beef, egg drop soup, pork fried rice, etc. The owners are houseplant customers of mine, years ago when I sold houseplants, and I've been eating there for 8-9 years. Once every 8-10 weeks is just about right for me. Another slow day at work, and I closed down around 3:30pm, did a couple of errands on the way home, and brought home a large load of dishes/silverware to wash and take back in the morning. I have garbage to empty, a sink and toilet to clean, and floors to wet-mop, this week. My cleaning crew won't be back in for another 3-4 weeks.

Merry Christmas
& A Happy New Year!

Two weeks ago, I said that the gas price decreases might be bottoming-out, and that's apparently what's now happening in the York (PA) area. For the 2nd day in a row, gas prices at the pump have risen, but by only a few cents. Unleaded Regular (87oct) is now at $1.59/gal, Unleaded Premium (89oct) is at $1.69/gal, and Unleaded Super Premium (92oct) is now at $1.89/gal, with Diesel rising 2¢/gal, to $2.79/gal.

It's easy to tell that Christmas is just a few weeks away: evening and weekend shopping traffic is increasing exponentially, and the roads are getting more and more crowded by the day. I hate this time of year, for that reason alone. If I don't take backroads and shortcuts, it turns my 15-mile/ 25 minute, mid-afternoon trip home from the GC&N Complex, into a 2-hour nightmare. It's 10x worse around 5-7pm. I went food shopping on Sunday afternoon, after sleeping-in until almost 11:15am, and it was already very heavy traffic, just 1½ weeks before Christmas. It's going to get a whole lot worse in the coming 5-7 days.

Jeff stopped-by at 4pm on Sunday afternoon, to install the new mobo, the 4 new Hitachi 250GB HDs, reload Win-XP Pro, Win-TV and some other hardware, while I readied myself to reinstall mountains of software apps and transfer data files from the external WDC 1-TB HD. We're doing a "RAID 0 Array" this time — one Hitachi 250GB HD for the boot-up drive, while the other 3 form the "array" portion for storage — but wouldn't it happen that one of the brand new Hitachi GDs was bad! So we installed the one HD for boot-up and I'll only install bare bones software to use until the new ones (I ordered 2 spares) arrive and I return the faulty unit. Dammit.

Monday was in the mid-to-upper-60s, and it felt like Spring had come early. But it didn't last, as a *Winter Storm Watch* was issued aroun 3:30pm, to go into Wednesday morning, for heavy, wet snow, freezing sleet and ice. That changed early Tuesday morning to a *Winter Weather Advisory*.

"Noise" woke me at 3am Tuesday, and it was the driving rain on the condo's skylights, with thunder and lightening, as it was beginning to turn to sleet and freezing rain. The cats had burrowed under the covers to escape the noise. I was back-up to feed them around 4:30am, and then back to sleep until 8am. At only 35°F, it didn't take long to drop below freezing and the morning rain to turn to sleet and then to snow. From the time I got home around 3:45pm, until I went to bed at 10:30, we were in the snow/sleet/freezing rain's path, and only got ~2" of snow, plus >½" ice, yet people I talked to by phone, just a few miles south of me, were getting all rain. I was back-up at 1:30am to check on the multiple HDs' optimizing process, and by then the storm was over and moving northeastward. Back to sleep.

Everything, and I mean everything, was covered in ice on the way into work on Wednesday morning. There were plenty of tree branches down, a few powerlines and several trees. It was eerie-looking, but very beautiful, unless you were one of the homeowners who lost power overnight when limbs took down Met-Ed Co's lines. I wasn't, and marvelled at Nature's handiwork. The GC&N Complex was soon up-and-running in 20 minutes, temps soon reached 34°F and the ice was gone by 2pm. The forecast is calling for another *Major Ice Storm* on Thursday evening/Friday morning, and again on Saturday. Oh, joy. I wish it were just snow, but living right on the Mason-Dixon Line, we're too often subject to southern warmth/northern cold, and get way too many ice storms, instead.

I gave Christmas "cash gifts" to my 4 top, key employees and 2 remaining lscp crew who worked jobs late for me, this year and not "Christmas Bonuses", as I have done in previous years. With revenues down significantly due to the tanking economy and region, bonuses just weren't possible, this time around. Alan was in on Thursday, and we had a long talk about Spring 2009, what my business intentions are, and what we can "hopefully-expect" for 2009. It isn't encouraging, at this point-in-time, IMO. (sigh) I'll keep an eye on it, until mid-March, and make any decisions, from that point. Right now, I'm trying to be optimistic.

Things Which Make Your Eyes Bleed™.

So, CEO compensation increased 7.5% this past year? Hey, I'm a CEO, and I got far less than that kind of package, as I plowed my increase back into my company, to keep it afloat, and make sure that my Key Staff, Employees and their families were employed, dammit. What a load of crap, IMO, as those CEO's didn't "own the company"; they simply were "hires". I'm an owner, principal and majority stockholder, and 100% responsible for ***My Company***! Screw the CEO's whiny crap about their million-billion dollar salaries/bonuses/perks. I'm sick and tired of whiny assholes; let 'em get a "real job" and run a "real company", for once in their miserable, pathetic, stinking lives, dammit!

Lowlife, dirtbag, subhuman Greek punks fucking-up their cities? SHOOT AND KILL THEM ALL! What's the matter with those ***cowardly, so-called authorities***? HUH? SHOOT AND KILL THEM ALL! I would, without any hesitation, you Greek Cowards! Assholes! Scumbags!

Lowlife, Subhuman Filth™.

True to his corrupt, racist, bigoted, lowlife name, Chicago Rep Jesse Jackson Jr (RACIST-IL), offered Illinois Gov Rod Blagojevich up to $1 million to name him to the US Senate, his attorney confirmed. Now, the lowlife, criminal turd-polisher Jackson Jr, said that he was fighting to get "my name back" after he was identified as "Senate Candidate 5" in a criminal complaint against dirtbag, corrupt, white-trash scumbag, lowlife filth Illinois Gov Rod Blagojevich. Like his corrupt, blackmailing, hijacking, racist, bigoted old man, Jesse Sr, "little Jesse Jr" is a crook, a scumbag, dirtbag, liar, and should be prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned/ executed for his crimes. The Jacksons are filth, garbage, shit, trash and scum. BOTH YOUR NAMES ARE DOGSHIT, you subhuman, lowlife, dirtbag Jackscum sambo ASSHOLES!

Speaking of filth, garbage, shit, trash and scum, NY's dumb-fucking sambo, coke-addict, dirtbag idiot governor, David "Dumb-as-a-Rock" Paterson (Nigga-NY), got offended at a very funny "SNL Live" skit about him dorry ass, which struck too close to the truth, for him.

Fonts For You™.

Many Journal entries are best viewed in the Charrington Roughened and the Orlando typefaces. You may already have Century Gothic on your Windows-XP machine, and that's almost always used for the body copy or subheads, so grab it, if you don't already have it; you're reading it now. They're free from my website. Grab 'em! Save them to your HD, and install to C:/Windows/Fonts (folder), thru your WIN XP Control Panel > Fonts > File > Install New Font. Simple stuff; just takes a few minutes.

Here are a few others, which my Journal will be written in during the coming weeks: Papyrus and Acoustic Bass, and Caesar Regular and Carleton and Charrington Strewn and Catherine. Get and install them, and see how much nicer these pages are to view and read. Plus, they add to your repertoire of available fonts in MS-Word, as WIN-XP System Fonts, so you can use them for your daily documents etc.

The Global Warming Money Pit™.

Have you seen this video: "BBC: The Great Global Warming Swindle"? It was outright-banned from leftist, hate-filled, dirtbag lowlife scumbags, Google.com's and YouTube.com's websites, by the mentally-ill, left-wing, global warming idiot wackos, but I've preserved it, for posterity, aka you, me and *ours*. Watch, be informed and download it for others to see. It's on my corporate server, and will stay there, BTW.

Here's everything you need to know about Global Warming, and why it's a good thing.

The "Greenhouse Effect" is a natural and valuable phenomenon, without which, the planet would be uninhabitable. Global Warming, at least in recent times, is real. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor. Man's contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn't cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it. Solar Activity appears to be the principal driver for Climate Change. O2 is a useful trace gas in the atmosphere, and the planet would actually benefit by having more, not less of it, because it is not a driver for Global Warming and would enrich our vegetation, yielding better crops to feed the expanding population. CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. The cart is not pulling the donkey. Wake-up, folks.

Here's a listing of The Best Global Warming Videos on the Internet.

Hey, fat, shit-for-brains, bloated, liar, huckster, fraud, criminal, charlatan, scumbag, loser, disgraced ex-VP AlGoreBore (LIAR-TN), is back using $300 million of OPM (Other Peoples' Money) to promote his Global Warming Bullshit, after the worst Winter in over 100 years. Welcome back, fatso huckster asswipe, AlGoreBore!

CO2 bad? No; CO2 is good, and we need more of it, or we're in for a very cold period, very soon. Here are the facts about CO2.

Roger Revelle of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Harvard University and University of California San Diego, spits on the lying scumbag, AlGoreBore. My, my, oh my. (((snicker))) No, there's no consensus on Global-bullshit Warming, other than it's a LIE! Just ask Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, Richard S. Lindzen; he's eminently-qualified to call AlGoreBoreAsshole, a LIAR! As I am.

There's another "ice age" coming, not the AlGoreBoreLiar 'Glo-bull warming' crap.

Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica collapses in 2002 = Glo-bullshit Warming? Doubt it.

Read this Glo-bullshit Warming idiocy. Go ahead; I'll wait.

AlGoreBore's "hypocrisy"? See it right here!

You need to watch this 30 minute film; it's an eye-opener if you think that we're running out of crude oil, and that America has no reserves. We have more oil and natural gas in Alaska alone, than all the rest of the world's known reserves, COMBINED! Grab an adult beverage, and watch it.

Better get out your Winter coats, 'snuggies', wool socks and snow shovels, as it seems we've got an 80-year "Little Ice Age", on the way. Yawn; no biggie.

AlGoreBore's "Glo-bull Warming Bullshit" has spawned so-called 'cottage industries' around the world, worth hundreds of millions and probably billions of dollars, for green corporation validation, carbon credits, foundation & university climate studies, grants and a host of other BS-related crap to his lies and garbage. Global warming competes with cancer and competes with AIDS for a finite amount of money. This year's natural resurgence will surely see the global warmists, led by celebrity warmist, Gore, compete viscously for those US Taxpayers' hard-earned dollars. And I'm betting that the really important disease, cancer, loses to Glo-bullshit Warming and AIDS. Dammit.

F*ck all the "Glo-bullshit Warming Alarmists"! I say, FUCK-THEM-UP, and cleanse the planet, if they try to physically-intimidate and hurt anyone! I will; count on it! "Get in my face", assholes, and that'll be your last day on this Earth! If there are any "dissenting scientists" out there, who need protection, just get in-touch with me, and I'll guard you & yours. You can count upon that, folks!

Have you taken "The Global Warming Test"? If you have a sentient, functioning brain, and a simple knowledge of "the facts", you'll easily get a 10-of-10, as I did. Go ahead, and give it a try!

Read this article and pick-out "The WWF's Big Lie". If you chose this paragraph — "Summer sea ice is now forecasted to completely disappear in the summer months sometime between 2013 and 2040 — something which hasn't happened for over a million years." — you'd be right. There isn't, and never has been and ice on the earth dated at a million years old, and who the hell was around back then to begin recording it? The lying sacks-of-shit at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are typical lowlife, left-wing wacko scumbags, in-bed with the "Glo-Bull Warming" Crap, of asshole AlGoreBore and his phony, money-making scam. The oldest, and not reliably-dated ice cores are >160,000 years, and those are shaky in fact, at best. So where did the lying WWF pull the million year crap from? Their asses, of course!

Shit-for-brains, mentally-ill, fat, bloated liar, AlGoreBore's (LOWLIFE-TN) "ally", in NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by AlGoreBore's chief scientific ally/"asshole/butt-buddy"— Dr James "Moron-Cretin-Asshole" Hansen (DIRTBAG-NASA) — and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that "last month was the hottest October on record". Total, factual bullshit and lies. This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years. So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerized temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-skeptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. Read this article, and find out why both lying, corrupt, criminal, subhuman idiots, GoreBore & Hansen, should be stood against a wall, and shot, IMO. In fact, the pathetically-socialist, left-wing UK, has just begun to awaken to what the "Climate Change Bill" will do to destroy their nation, or what's left of it. IMO, it's probably too late now to save the UK, but at least some of the more Conservative people over there, will at least get the chance to flee to America (or elsewhere), before we also "go down the proverbial dumper", as they've already obviously done. Buh-bye, UK!

-27°F in Montana! Denver had -16°F! Hey, AlGoreBore, you ignorant, fat, bloated, mentally-ill, scamming asshole: FUCK YOU, YOU LYING, TWO-BIT DIRTBAG, LOWLIFE PIECE-OF-SHITSCUM!

Some People Just Need Killing™.

It's not my intention to be the judge here — that's God's "job" — but rather to "hasten the meeting" so that He can send the following subhuman filth to the "Fires of Hell", "River or Lake of Sulphur", or whatever He deems appropriate. I'd gladly/happily volunteer, at no cost to any of my Hard-Working, Fellow US Taxpayers, to gladly/gleefully/happily headshoot these murderous, lowlife dirtbags — their skin-color doesn't matter to me, at all — and rid American Society's innocents (especially our precious children and the elderly) of them, once-and-for-all. And yes, I'd rather see one innocent man convicted and executed, than 10 murderers/robbers/child rapists-murderers freed, to rob, rape and murder again. Hey; call me an "Old Fashioned Conservative"!

Architectural Wonders.

With this slideshow and accompanying article, "Business Week" presents a primer on the year's most cutting-edge architecture. Over the past 365 days, a stunning 32-foot-tall glass cube and a 46-story "wonder of green building" joined Manhattan's stable of structural marvels. England welcomed the globe's largest soccer arena, and China constructed the planet's longest over-sea bridge—a record destined to stand only until the Chinese best it themselves with an even longer bridge planned for 2008. In this brave new world, style and sustainability live together in harmony. A building in San Francisco "actively adjusts to weather changes." A house in Santa Monica "waters" and "powers itself". And a home in the suburbs of Boston uses discarded parts from the Big Dig, the city's notoriously botched urban development project. That a house as sleek and clever as this one could rise from a venture as mired in trouble as the Big Dig gives us all hope.

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