Posts by MichaelBach:

Cash Holdings of Apple and Other Tech High Fliers Are A Massive Risk in This Debt Jubilee Era

May 27th, 2016

 By Jeff Berwick.

 



 

Throw every “norm” out the window.  This Keynesian, central banking world has everything so distorted that nothing makes sense anymore.

There are currently more than $7 trillion in bonds, worldwide, offering a negative interest rate. Wrap your head around that!  People are actually paying trillions of dollars to give their money to mostly bankrupt governments with the promise they will receive less at a later date.

Treasury Bonds used to be described as having a “risk-free return.”  Now they are “return-free risk”.

This system is so backwards, inside-out, manipulated and bankrupt that what once used to be seen as “prudent and sound” is very obviously risky.

For example, Moody’s reported last Friday that Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Cisco Systems and Oracle are sitting on $504 billion in cash and “cash equivalents.”

Moody’s Investor “Services” (and we put “Services” in the proverbial air quotes, because these are the same people who called bundles of mortgages loaned to dead and jobless people Triple-A) made this statement in their Friday report: “Corporate America’s rising pile of cash is becoming increasingly important to investors as profit growth and the stock market stalls.”

They are right that profit-growth is slowing.  The economy is stalling as we rest on the precipice of complete collapse.

In more normal times it would be prudent for companies to hold a large amount of cash to get through an economic downturn.  Not now!

Holding large amounts of cash – or even worse, cash “equivalents” (basically bankrupt government bonds paying a negative interest rate) is now increasingly unwise.

Consider currency risk.  A company like Apple, with subsidiaries worldwide, likely holds numerous currencies including euros and Japanese yen.

The Eurozone, as admitted by almost everyone, is on the verge of collapse.  And Japan too.

Both the euro and the yen may not even exist a few years from now.  And, even if they do, they’ll likely be so hyperinflated as to be on their way to becoming worthless.

The US dollar is in no better shape.  Countries around the world are moving away from using the dollar and the petrodollar system itself is failing.  The dollar could be quickly headed towards the dustbin of history.

And, Apple, meanwhile, has $215 billion in cash.  Much more  is actually in held in the debt of bankrupt governments (which is even worse)!

Apple’s market cap is currently about $500 billion. Nearly half of that is held in pieces of paper that could be valued at zero in just the next few years.

This, in fact, should be an investors biggest concern. You have nearly half the market cap of Apple being held in highly risky instruments. And then there is the  bonus risk of having 30% more being absconded by the Internal Rape Service (IRS) if Apple were to even repatriate that money to the US based parent company.

In other words, these large cash holdings are a major risk… and most people don’t even realize it.

If companies like Apple had any sense, they’d be diversifying out of fiat currencies into metals.  But, they are not… mostly because the CFOs of these companies went to Keynesian business schools. They watch CNBC, and think that the Federal Reserve is here to “help”.

And, to be fair, even if they did understand, most other people also have no idea what is going on. Apple and the others would likely receive a backlash from investors for “risking” their assets in barbarous relics like gold if they tried to make the transition.

Of course, when the hour comes, the entire economic fabric of Western civilization is going  to be ripped asunder. (We’ve documented that with our videos and White Papers. You can see our latest video HERE.) That’s the plan. That’s the intention of those at the very top of the economic structure. But try telling that to the average investor.

Gold rallied against the dollar by nearly 30 percent in the first four months of this year. And that would have provided quite a boost to Apple’s bottom line if the company had “cash” holdings in the yellow metal. It should have, but it didn’t.

Gold and silver are now the assets of choice for those who are awake to what is happening as we move further into Jubilee Year 2016. Billionaires like George Soros, Stanley Druckenmiller and Carl Icahn have all taken considerable positions in gold of late. We’ve reported on these moves and we understand exactly why they’ve taken place.

In fact, we’ve been ahead of the curve and sold (temporarily) quite a few of our positions just as Soros and others were buying.  TDV’s Senior Analyst, Ed Bugos, told subscribers to sell many of their positions just prior to the recent pullback in gold after making huge gains in the first quarter of this year.  He’ll be letting subscribers know when the best time is to get back in to even further profits.

I would suggest you subscribe to our TDV newsletter HERE so that you can get a sense of how to approach this type of defensive investing. The Fed has indicated rates might rise in June and that has strengthened the dollar against gold. But the stock market rally is seven years old. Sovereign, corporate and personal debt are scaling heights not seen since 2008.  And there are so many black swans out there that it is impossible to tell which ones will come home to roost.

Even the US government is beginning to prepare for calamity. Only a few days ago, Congress introduced the “No Bailouts for State, Territory, and Local Governments Act.” The new bill prohibits any federal agency from funding ANY bankrupt city, state, or territory. The bill also prohibits the Federal Reserve from “financially assisting State and Local governments.”

Congress is well aware of a massive wave of defaults about to hit cities and states. Puerto Rico is just the beginning.  We can see from this new bill that the federal government wants to make sure that every dime available ends up in its pockets. Nothing for cities or states.  But the US federal government is just as bankrupt as they are.

This coming collapse will be one for the history books and very few see it coming and even less know how to prepare.

Those invested with Apple and other large corporations may think they have insulated themselves from the worst of the volatility because of their large cash holdings. In fact, in a way, Apple is now mostly a money market fund and they may have just risked billions on a failing system.

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Pope Francis Calls For Worldwide Communist Government

May 13th, 2016

By Micheal bach.



 

In this Jubilee Year 2016, Pope Francis affirmed communism as the best structure for humankind and the European Union.

He did so upon receiving the Charlemagne Prize last week and made a speech that included the following comment: “We need to move from a liquid economy prepared to use corruption as a means of obtaining profits, to a social economy that guarantees access to land and lodging through labor.”

Read that quote carefully.  What is he proposing here?

He wants to move from a “liquid economy”… what does that mean?  My only guess is that he wants the economy to be less fluid… more controlled.  He then seems to imply that making profits (creating wealth, you know, the stuff that enables him to sit on his golden thrones in his massive militarized compound) is in some way corrupt.  He then wants to move to a “social economy”, which I presume means socialism/communism.  And through that he wants to “guarantee” access to land and lodging through labor.

You know who else received guaranteed access to lodging through labor?  African slaves in the 1800s.

For this Pope it seems a kind of slavery is best suited to the human condition. Everyone is entitled to the essentials and not much more. And in return, everyone “labors.”

In actual fact, your average American today is essentially a free-range slave.  Most data showing the average American’s expenditures show that nearly half of their income goes towards paying the plantation owner (the government), and then the rest goes to pay for “lodging” (rent or mortgage – and they don’t actually own the house even if paid off as they have to pay the plantation every year to live in it, called “property tax”), then food, then medical care (in order to keep them working), then transportation (which is mostly used to get to and back from their workplace).  After that, it is estimated, that your average American has less than 10% left for themselves.

The Pope, apparently, would like to see that 10% done away with and just supply housing and bare necessities to the slaves… sorry, citizens.

Some will scoff and say, “The Pope should just shut up when it comes to politics and economics.”  And they are right, of course.

But he plays a a large role in rolling out the New World Order, Agenda 2030, system.  More than 1 billion people around the world listen to him talk about Marxism.  He’s kind-of given up on the God and Jesus thing anyway.

Recently, he has been saying that individual choice supersedes the Word of God.  And he has been trying to combine all the world’s religions into one, whether it is with Jesus or not… Jesus is kind-of being pushed aside and forgotten.  Probably because Jesus was an anarchist who believed in the Golden Rule… that rule would not allow for a forced worldwide communist government.

This is part of the larger Jubilee alignment that we have been tracking here at TDV as an outgrowth of our Shemitah analysis.

As the year continues, we see more and more statements like the one that Pope Francis just made. The foundation of a further destruction of human culture in order to build a New World Order continues.

In the Pope’s case, much of his statement upon winning the Charlemagne Prize is based on UN agenda 21 and the subsequent Agenda 2030 that we recently wrote about HERE.

The UN Agenda 2030 is a blueprint for out-and-out slavery, a condition in which the boot will stamp down on the human face for eternity.

The ramifications are tremendous, though, as usual, the media either glosses over the Pope’s words and meaning or reinterprets his statements to make them sound sentimental and “religious.”

In his address during the Charlemagne awards ceremony, it becomes very clear that he is not talking about voluntarism, but coercion. He uses the word ”guarantee.”

Something that is guaranteed is not voluntary.

In fact, the Charlemagne Prize draws its inspiration from the eugenicist Count Richard Nicolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) who was a founder of the Pan-European Movement in the early 1920s.

Coudenhove-Kalergi believed strongly in a federal Europe without nationalities. The idea was to intermix and “cross-breed with Negroes and Asians” that would be introduced via immigration. This is of course exactly what’s happening today.

The Coudenhove-Kalergi perspective had to do with the outcome he expected – that so-called “mongrel races” would be easier to manipulate and control.

Charlemagne was the first “emperor” of Europe, a unifier of the entire region and this Coudenhove-Kalergi prize – called the Charlemagne Prize – celebrates European unification. Previous prize recipients include a who’s who of new world order spokespeople, including Angela Merkel and Bill Clinton.

 



PAPAL PROPHECY

 

There have been predictions made, centuries ago, that have said this would occur and that Pope Francis would be the final Pope as the New World Order is ushered in.

St. Malachy, a 12th century Roman Catholic, who was the Archbishop of Armagh wrote of 112 popes coming after his death – and in fact, Pope Benedict the XVI was the 111th Pope.

During the time of the 112th Pope, the Vatican itself, would be destroyed as God passed judgment on the world.

 

“In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The End.”

 

Nostradamus, a French doctor, also predicted that “Pope Francis I” would be the last pontiff.

His Quatrain II.46 states,  “The great star for seven days shall burn / So nakedly clear like two suns appearing / The large dog all night howling / While the great Pontiff shall change his territory.”

The bright light in the sky may be Comet Ison, which will be visible later this year, and may be even brighter than the moon.

Francis himself has made several allusions to his Papacy and his expectations that one way or another, he will not have more than three years as Pontiff – and two years have already passed.  Of incredible coincidence (or not!), is that the new Jesuit Superior is planned to be installed on the evening of October 2, 2016!  What is important about October 2nd?  It is the end day of the Jubilee year!  And the Jesuits have deep connections into this New World Order plan.

The worldwide communism that Francis is espousing with evermore vigor is echoed by top bureaucrats in the EU and in the US. John Kerry recently criticized Republican nominee Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda during a commencement speech at Northeastern University on Friday. Kerry indicated that the maintenance of international barriers are “nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of the past.”

He said, “The future demands from us something more than a nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of the past that did not really exist in any case. You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.”

We don’t think there should be borders either… but we don’t think there should be governments and central banks as well.  Our “dream” is a world free of oppressive control.  Their dream is a world of complete oppressive control under one government and one central bank.

We can see from both Kerry’s statements and Francis’s that the globalist rhetoric is growing more extreme as Jubilee 2016 continues. Between the UN’s recent Agenda 2030, Francis’s rhetoric and other statements by Western leaders, it’s obvious that globalist positioning is being expanded and sharpened.

We continue to track international and globalist developments in our TDV newsletter and have predicted their growth in 2015 and 2016. You can see our predictions in a viral TDV video on the Jubilee Year 2016.

The TDV newsletter is perhaps the best place to go for ongoing, timely coverage of the developments being driven by Francis, Kerry and others. We predicted both the early downturn in stocks in 2016 and the rise in gold relative to the dollar. Our subscribers have been enriched as a result  – and in fact that’s the whole point about understanding what’s taking place. You want to anticipate it to keep yourself and your family safe and if possible you want to take advantage of upcoming developments financially.

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Flip Flops Only Days After Saying He’d Default – Now Says He’ll Hyperinflate

May 11th, 2016

By Jeff Berwick.

 



 

 

It was just yesterday that we said that Donald Trump had chosen the best of the two available options for the US government.  The two, and only two, options are to default on the debt or to hyperinflate.  And the best option for almost everyone (except those who stupidly and immorally loaned the US government money to carry on its worldwide terrorism) is to default.  It would leave the US and world economy with at least some hope of rebuilding.

But, after he was admonished by the media for his “crazy” idea of not paying unpayable debts he showed the true politician in him and immediately flip-flopped.

On Monday, he recanted what he said last week. He assured us that default would “never happen” because the US can simply print money, echoing the party line of all policymakers these days.

Make no bones about it, what he is saying is that he will just continue to do what past presidents and Federal Reserve Chairmen have done… and that is to ignore the elephant in the room and just keep printing money until it is worthless.  “Make America great again by doing the same things that got it into this mess!” should be his slogan.

We have seen this idea by many names: liquidity, reflate, expanding credit, stimulus… and “quantitative easing” simply being the latest and most fashionable term to describe this age old destructive process.  It’s the same answer to the same problem caused by past money printing… print more!

The mainstream media didn’t even get the point of what just happened. Stories like one published by CNN mostly regurgitated the text of what he said without understanding the underlying implication.

If rates go up, and “The Donald” wants to buy bonds at a discount, he is prepared to use the Federal Reserve printing press to do so. You would think that isn’t his decision. After all, the Fed claims to be independent!  But, we all know the US federal government and the Federal Reserve are just two arms of the giant bankster octopus that rules them all.

What he said last Thursday, was that his solution to dealing with the $19 trillion-plus national debt involves a form of default such as repurchasing (or renegotiating) existing bonds at a discount.

 

After being severely criticized for his suggestion (by everyone but us), “The Donald” clarified his statements on Monday on CNN: “I said if we can buy back government debt at a discount, in other words, if interest rates go up and we can buy bonds back at a discount — if we are liquid enough as a country, we should do that.”

 

There is nothing different here than what the Fed has been doing for the last 8 years.  Our take is that Donald doesn’t really understand how the current monetary system works.  The self proclaimed “King of debt” seems to think he’ll negotiate some deals… but all he is saying is they’ll just print more money.

Yesterday we pointed out what would happen if the US government were to default on its debt: a potentially catastrophic worldwide depression, stock and bond markets falling 90% or higher, almost all Americans bankrupted by massively rising interest rates… and the potential of nothing left standing but a smoldering heap by the time it was all done.

And, that was the best case scenario!

Here’s what will happen if the US federal government and the Federal Reserve continue down the money printing path that leads to hyperinflation as Donald now says he would do:

Markets around the world will continue to go haywire, trillions in wealth will be lost by continued mis-allocations of capital, which will hollow out the entire capital (wealth) base of the economy… This will lead to continued market booms and busts that impoverish almost everyone (except the 0.0001%) that will eventually lead to a crisis in confidence of the US dollar (and all other fiat currencies which will also be forced to inflate by the Fed’s actions). And this will eventually lead to stagflation exponentially worse than the 1970s… Finally, a complete cessation of economic activity will occur as everyone becomes so impoverished and money becomes so worthless that the only transactions left will be black market food, cigarette, alcohol and drug transactions in exchange for silver, gold and bitcoin.

The reason those will be the only transactions still happening is because it will be what the people, so impoverished, will desire (food and a way to escape the reality of life).  And the reason they will be black market transactions is because by that point the government will have outlawed the use of gold, silver and bitcoin and blame the crash of the dollar on them… and the Chinese, we’re sure.

The government will come out in force to quell riots and to crack down on anyone dealing in currencies other than the US dollar, imprisoning or killing “enemies of the state.”  How do I know this?  Because this is what almost always happens during a hyperinflation.  I just visited Venezuela and saw it for myself.

There’s just one big difference.  In all past hyperinflations people were able to use foreign currencies to salvage some of their wealth or to use for transactions in the black market… like the US dollar is used, in back rooms, with shady characters, in Venezuela today.

When the US dollar goes into hyperinflation we will witness a worldwide nightmare that you can’t even begin to describe. It hasn’t yet, but it sounds like Trump is willing to help the process along.

People in Venezuela have now resorted to eating dogs, pigeons and rats as hyperinflation savages the economy.  That is where the US is headed if it continues down this path.

And Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders all have the exact same plan.  Worse, they all want to be in charge as it all happens, making them either stupid or psychopaths.

We’ve said since the beginning, here at TDV, that the US will choose the path of hyperinflation over default and, although for a few days last week we wondered if we’d be wrong, it’s clear that no one is willing (or able) to put a stop to the path towards hyperinflationary destruction in the US.

There are ways to save yourself, and even profit from, this inevitable path that we are already going down.  Subscribe to the TDV newsletter and join thousands of other dollar collapse survivors and profiteers as we watch the ship sink… and just hope it doesn’t take us all down with it.

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While Sheeple Lose Their Minds The TPP Is Passed

June 29th, 2015

 

 

By Michael Bach.

 



Whenever you see US citizens losing their minds over something as silly as a flag, I’ve learned to look at what’s being passed by Congress at the same time.

Statist flag worshipers were in a frenzy about a piece of colored cloth called the Confederate flag because a man with that flag on his bumper had killed nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina last week.

Apple removed any Civil War apps from their app store.  Walmart and many other retailers removed the flag from their inventory.  And heavily confused Amerikans who don’t even know that the Civil War was actually a fascist takeover of the country by racist Abraham Lincoln, took to the streets demanding their overseers use violent force to remove the flag from any location that flies it.

Forgetting for the moment that this has every trapping of being a false flag event down to the bizarre, easy going arrest of the alleged shooter…

What hardly anyone noticed was that yesterday the Senate voted to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

That’s typical. Create a mainstream media controversy in order to distract attention from serious, even traitorous, actions taking place in Congress.

For all you really need to know about the TPP watch this short video:

The TPP has been the most secretive document passed in US history.  It was so secret that if Senators wanted to read the phone book size “free” trade deal they had to enter into a highly secure and guarded room behind the doors below and be watched as they read it and promise to never mention what they read. Is this how a republic is supposed to conduct business?



The TPP is an international “free” trade agreement being negotiated by 12 countries: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Chile, Peru and Brunei.

But, here’s the thing:  A true free-trade agreement would be one sentence long and would read something like, “You can trade whatever you want between these countries”.

What the TPP is is a massive, fascist corporate takeover of those 12 countries in which corporate power supercedes national power.  Corporate officials who feel that they ‘ve lost some profit due to legislation imposed in a certain country will now have the right to sue the country for the lost profit.  Of course, when they sue the “country” they are actually suing the taxpayers of that country.

But shouldn’t taxpayers sue back? Aren’t modern corporations the twisted spawn of judicial decisions (questionable decisions enforced by the power of the state) including corporate personhood and intellectual property rights.

This is the reason corporations have grown so large and  powerful to begin with. Those running these titantic mutations are protected from their failures by corporate personhood. And those that have created something, no matter how trivial, can have it “protected” virtually forever by state power.

Thomas Jefferson and other founders were very worried about the ascension of corporate power in the US because of their experience with such “corporations” as the East India Company that was so large and powerful, it ended up running its own army.

“From 1700 onwards and for the next 160 years or so,”  royalmunsterfusiliers.org tells us, “the Honourable East India Company raised its own armed forces. The three administrative areas of India, the Presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal, each maintained their own army with its own commander-in-chief. ”

The initial US constitutional construct emphasized state control of corporations. And states duly bound corporate power with numerous legislative cords. It was only after the end of the Civil War that corporations began to assume the kinds of power that had so worried Jefferson.

Today, corporate power is once again a powerful legislative construction and has little to do with real capitalism – which would likely consist of entities far smaller and more flexible. But having built up this fiction of corporate-capitalism, the powers-that-be are now going to expand its footprint.

The TPP is one of the most heinous documents ever passed in the US perhaps only second to the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA).

Were you aware that the NDAA was recently passed in Congress again?  Probably not.  The Charleston shooting occurred on the evening of June 17th, while the nation’s media covered it like it was 9/11.  The NDAA was passed on June 18th.

It looks like they got through two massively anti-freedom bills for one false flag this time.  They’re getting really good at this!

I suppose practice makes perfect.

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The War On Cash: Governments Grabbing or Taxing Cash At Will Now

May 10th, 2015

 

 

By Michael Bach.

 



 

We have been warning for years that as bankrupt Western countries came closer to being completely insolvent that they would begin instituting capital controls, doing bank bail-ins, taxing cash and outright just stealing cash.

All of these things have come to pass now in one form or another.  Here are four examples of the countless that we could choose from.

THE USA – LAND OF THE FREE

The first is a heartbreaking story of spent a man who spent more than a decade running L&M Convenience Mart, a gas station, restaurant, and convenience store in rural Fairmont, North Carolina. Then, one year ago, without any warning, agents from the IRS seized his entire bank account, which was his entire life savings, totaling more than $107,000.

The reason?  They said he had been depositing money in small amounts (as a convenience store just might do) under the amount that would trigger a reporting requirement for the last decade.

That’s all they needed.  No charges, no arrest.  They just deemed that he had been depositing small amounts of money into the bank for years and that was reason enough to impoverish him.  What is a “big amount”, by the way?  It is anything over $2,000.  The Bank Secrecy Act (BS), which, like all cute regulatory names, requires banks to do the exact opposite of “secrecy” and to betray their customers’ financial secrets to the US government, mandates that anything over $2,000 is “suspicious” and must be reported.

And if you deposit anything under $2,000 regularly?  That is suspicious too, as that man found out.

The US government has stolen billions from Americans in just this way.

FRANCE – LAND OF THE COMMIE

France instituted some staggering capital controls.

• The limit on cash payments have been reduced from 3,000 euros to 1,000 euros.
• Tourists can pay no more than 10,000 euros in cash.  Heretofore it had been 5,000 euros.
• If a Frenchman wants to change money into another currency, they can only change 1,000 euros without presenting ID, whereas before it was 8,000.
• If a bank customer takes out more than 10,000 euros in a month from his account, the bank must report the transaction to the Money Laundering Authority TRACFIN.
• Banks must report all cargo transfers in the EU exceeding 10,000 euros. This regulation checks, pre-paid cards and even gold are affected.
• The control of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin will be drastically tightened.

AUSTRALIA – TAXING YOUR MONEY

Australia decided just to jump right into the deep end of the pool and tax all money in bank accounts! According to the 2015 Australian budget Australians must pay taxes on their savings. This will be quickly brought to Europe and North America if it does not meet resistance in Australia.

GREECE – ON A TAXING SPREE

Greece, on the verge of a complete collapse for about the tenth time in the last seven years, thought they’d try a different approach from the rest.

They are trying to institute a tax when you take money out of an ATM. While they need the tax revenue, they mostly also don’t want people taking money out of the bank at all.

CONCLUSION – RUN!

If you can’t see the big picture here then you may be watching too much CNBC or CNN for your own good. Western countries, around the world, are seizing, freezing, restricting or taxing cash.

To keep a sizeable amount of cash in a bank account in any of the above named countries is tantamount to leaving your porkchops in the doghouse… know that when you come back for it, it won’t be there.

If that poor man in North Carolina had paid any attention whatsoever he would have moved a sizeable amount of his life savings outside of the US.  If he had, the IRS would have no way to seize it and he’d still have his life savings.

Unfortunately, most don’t pay attention but if you are reading this right now it means you are.

Here is the good news.  It is incredibly easy, still (not for long we are sure), to open an offshore bank account in a tax-free jurisdiction, outside of the ability of seizure by your own government and in a country in no danger of going bankrupt and in banks much, much more well capitalized than banks in the US, Europe and Australia.

It’s all completely legal still (not for long we are sure) too.  And it can all be done from the comfort of your own home.

Why millions aren’t running to do it I don’t know.  But by the time millions realize what is happening it will be too late.  The doors will be shut.

Luckily, you are one-step ahead of them right now.  TDV Offshore (http://tdvoffshore.com) offers free consulting on your needs and what is right for you and can help you through the entire process.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

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The European Central Bank Commits Monetary Suicide

January 25th, 2015

 

By Michael Bach and Ed Burgos.

 



Yesterday the European Central Bank (ECB) announced an expanded 1.1 trillion euro (US$1.3 trillion) asset purchase program to start in March 2015 and continue through September 2016 (19 months) that will include the purchases of sovereign (national government) debt. It plans to purchase roughly 60 billion euros ($68 billion) worth of securities monthly, up from about 13 billion, with most of the additional purchases to be allocated to sovereign (national government) debt with a quarter expected to end up in scarce German bunds. The purchases will be restricted to investment grade issues, which would mean no purchases at all if the condition were applied diligently, and will include non investment grade issues like Greek bonds if they have an ongoing budget/spending agreement with the ECB-IMF in place.

The purchases will be limited to covered bonds, asset backed securities, and government debt (i.e., equity not included). A day prior, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) announced that it was going to continue its own asset purchase program (mainly JGB’s), forcing insurers and other institutions to seek yields abroad.

The ECB program is twice as large as expected and the governing council appeared to be on side, including the German reps, owing to Draghi’s apparently skilled diplomacy and risk sharing idea – where some portion of the losses would be born by the national central banks rather than the ECB.

The BOJ’s pledge to increase its monetary base at the same 80 trillion yen per year ($676 billion) pace that it has for the past couple of years seems like a bit of a let down though given their bullish rhetoric to increase monetary interventions in 2015 following the Fed’s final QE3 bond purchase.

Stock markets reacted positively around the globe, though gains were tempered (perhaps the news was a tad overly telegraphed!); bond yields ratcheted up a bit except in Germany and Switzerland where they have gone negative in some instances; the euro collapsed along with most currencies against the USD; the precious metals held up well; and the economically sensitive commodities fell.

A far more mixed day than I originally anticipated…but then, again, the moves were widely expected.

Fund managers and other institutions have been front-running this news for over a year.

Uh oh!

Ostensibly, the aim of the policy (intervention) is to combat deflation, or falling inflation, which the policymakers believe “reflects sluggish demand and can paralyze an already weak economy — a problem that has long afflicted Japan, the world’s third-largest economy” (click here for source).

It is aimed at boosting private sector investment and consumer confidence simultaneously, just like the Fed did in the U.S., proving, “the actual impulses for growth from sensible conditions must be created, and can be created, by politicians”, said Merkel. Indeed, one source says, “The US Federal Reserve launched three rounds of bond purchases that were credited with helping jump-start the US recovery.”

According to Bloomberg, “Global central banks are petrified of deflation,” said M&G’s Doyle, whose firm oversees the equivalent of about $389 billion. “The real effectiveness of QE is through the portfolio-rebalancing effect. The world is running out of positive-yielding government bonds.”

It is a sad day when crap like this fools people.

You think an idea has died but most people are too dull to recognize it in a different wardrobe.

Like every good Keynesian, Merkel believes that throwing fresh money at sovereign governments can “create” growth? But the myth that anyone can produce wealth this way has long been exploded; as has the myth that government can produce wealth. Government can’t create wealth because it cannot calculate whether what it is doing is efficient or economic, or whether it is wasteful. It can’t coordinate resources inter-temporally between the various stages of production without knowing the prices of capital goods or the natural rate of interest. Nor can governments create wealth by expanding money supply anymore than they can turn stone into bread just by reading enough interpretations of Keynes.

All of this is pure noise.

The True Aim of the Interest Rate Suppression

What has weighed on Japanese growth and Euro growth is the same thing as that which is now weighing on growth in the US: a malignant public sector bureaucracy and out of control public debts.

Falling prices do not plunge the economy into a debt-deflation spiral, they are the product of gains in productivity –i.e., true growth is basically an increase in the supply of goods, greater output per capita.

The debt-deflation that is apparently feared by central bankers is in the first place a risk that was caused by fractional reserve banking – a concept that isn’t broadly feasible in a free and unregulated market – and which is ultimately propped up by deposit guarantees, legal tender laws, taxpayer funded bailouts, and other monopoly legislation. The over use of the policy of suppressing interest rates has incentivized the accumulation of too much public debt everywhere. The real reason for the ECB’s QE policy, besides having built it into the market (leaving no choice but to follow through on expectations), is to obfuscate the insolvency of the “fiscal cripples” that form the EU, and kick the can down the road.

There are long-term reasons as well, like the continued centralization of banking across the euro zone.

But the fear of deflation is an irrational fear fanned by a western alliance of central bankers to hide the fact that they are really just holding out a lifeline to the world’s biggest and most insolvent governments.

For many months now in the TDV newsletter I have been writing about what has been happening in the US, and why it is not the same as growth. Now the ECB wants to do the same to the European economy.

The US economy is not growing faster, its asset markets are just being inflated faster.

Indeed, this fairy tale is part of what I believe is an even greater delusion.

The fact is that Europe (and Japan) has not inflated nearly as much as the rest of the world thinks, and not nearly as much as the Fed has, even in the latest year! The evidence strongly suggests that Japan and Switzerland sterilized their asset purchases while the US and UK did not.

And the verdict is out on whether the ECB plans the former or latter type of QE. This delusion is going to crush yen bears and dollar bulls in one fell swoop, and we warn you now to listen carefully.

Nobody owns the yen!

The Yen makes up the smallest allocation in everyone’s portfolio.

Central banks own just 4% as currency reserves. And same with Japanese Government Bonds: as of a 2011 IMF report foreign ownership of Japanese government bonds amounted to just 5%.

On the other end of the spectrum is the US dollar, which makes up 61% of central bank reserves (down from > 70% at the outset of the euro experiment 1999-2001), and where foreign ownership of Treasury securities approaches the 40% level. Unlike the US dollar, which is over-owned, over-printed, and probably lies in bundles under every hooker’s mattress, Yen is scarce, like Cesium! To boot, the Japanese money supply grew only 4% last year, despite all the rhetoric, compared to over 5% for Europe, and 7% in the US. It has grown just 22% in the past 5 years, cumulatively, compared to 33% for the Euro and over 70% for the USD!

Over the past ten years the BOJ has inflated money by just 32%! That compares to 102% for the Euro area and well over 100% in the US –the US has expanded money by 100% just since 2008- in roughly the same time period. The Swiss numbers for M1 are similar to the EU.

In almost every sense, the Fed has waged the most consistently aggressive monetary policy in the developed world, especially in the post 2008 period, where it has increasingly mirrored policies of countries like South Africa, Mexico, India, Indonesia, and Poland.

Even China has been pursuing a sounder money policy than the Fed since 2008.

Like we said, the US is not growing faster, it is inflating faster.

QE Not the Same as Sterilized Asset Purchases

I first highlighted this delusion months ago in order to point out how the US treasury market and USD were benefiting from the relative suppression of European yields. In my analysis, strength in both the US dollar and US Treasury bond reflects the fact that yields on euro government debt have disappeared. This trade then was the source of the dollar’s rally against the Euro.

If you listen to most media about this, you will come away with the idea the USD has been going up because the Fed has tapered and the US economy has gained traction while the Euro and Yen have been falling because their economies are relatively weak and their central banks have been printing money like mad. Indeed, the decline in the euro in response to the ECB’s press release today should have been more guarded in light of the opposite truth. The market has been wrong about who is really printing money and who is dancing the twist. It is deluded about most things that support the dollar.

In light of this plus the fact that this overly expected event won’t start for another month or two, and also because the Japanese central bank is lowballing its original promise there is risk of a hiccup.

Regardless, don’t be fooled into thinking that this policy is going to help the private economy.

Inflation is what these cats want, and inflation is what they are going to get, good and hard.

One day soon they will be begging for deflation.

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The College Education Bubble Is Coming To Its Logical End

January 7th, 2015

 

 

 

By Jeff Berwick, posted by Michael Bach.

 

This past weekend a grown, 30 year old man shot his father over unhappiness with his allowance according to reports in Associated Press as reported at ZeroHedge.

While we rarely believe what we hear in the media… if this report is even slightly close to the truth it is a sad commentary on how so many from the Millennial generation have been warped, indebted and destroyed by the very systems their father’s generation have been part of creating.

Tom Gilbert Jr., the son who reportedly shot his hedge fund managing father over his allowance, had an economics degree from Princeton where he graduated in 2009.

According to the reports he has since been jobless.  This makes sense because he wasted four years of his life, and likely went into a large amount of debt, to “learn” useless communist style Keynesian economics.

There really aren’t all that many jobs out there for a person who knows less-than-nothing about economics!  There are just a few jobs that require this level of ignorance of economics and those include Chairman of the Federal Reserve and lead economics writer of the New York Times.  Both of those positions, as point of interest are or were held by Princeton “trained” economists.  Ben Bernanke was the chairman of the Princeton economics department prior to selling his soul to the devil and Paul Krugman is the most well known “economist” currently at Princeton.

As a point of interest, even Ben Bernanke admitted to Congress in 2012 that his own son will graduate from college with $400,000 in student loan debt!  Luckily his son didn’t take Keynesian economics but a much more valuable line of study in medicine (although many occupations in medicine are as fascist drug dealers of toxic pharmaceuticals including dangerous antidepressants which Gilbert Jr. was reported to be on) and so there may be some job opportunities for him and he may eventually crawl out from under his debt.

The student loan debt bubble which has dragged millions of the younger generation into unabsolvable (it cannot be negated in bankruptcy) debt in order to get mostly worthless pieces of paper was largely funded and championed by people like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman.

Krugman, in 2002, called for a housing bubble when he said, “To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”

Of course, that happened and since the housing bubble collapsed the focus has been on the college bubble to get people to spend four years of their lives getting mostly useless pieces of paper and going deeply into debt to “save the economy”.  This has resulted in an explosion in student loan debt.



In fact, student loan debt, of which almost all of it, at now over $1.2 trillion, is held by the US federal government has far surpassed the mortgage debt held by the government.



Student loan debt has now surpassed mortgage debt at the peak of the housing bubble in 2008.

More scary, is that only 56% of student loan debters are currently making payments!  Compare that to less than 10% of mortgagees who were delinquent when the housing bubble collapsed and you can see this is a ticking timebomb.

 

GET OUT OF SCHOOL

It is bad enough that most people today waste twelve years of their youth in public indoctrination camps… but then to go and actually pay and go into debt for four more years is the height of ludicrosity for all but a small percentage of people who desire to work in certain specific and scientific fields (and even that is highly debatable as even places like M.I.T. offer all their courses online for free).

In today’s age of the internet, with all human knowledge literally in your pocket and freely accessible, there is absolutely no need for these anarchronistic multi-year schools where 90% of what most people “learn” (or better, memorize) is quickly forgotten as it is mostly useless.

Technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that many things learned in school will be outdated by the time you graduate.  Take, for example, journalism.  There is simply no need to go for years of college to learn to be a journalist and many of the things learned won’t be applicable by the time you finish.  I spoke with Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change and Dan Dicks of Press for Truth on these very topics.  They will be conducting a one-day seminar of Change Media University at Anarchapulco in February which cost $145 and will give you everything you need to know about being an investigate journalist and reporter in today’s digital age.

The entire concept of school is outdated.  Dayna Martin, a leading expert in unschooling will also be hosting a one day seminar on how to raise creative, entreprenurial and vibrant children by keeping them out of the school system altogether.

And also, recently, I spoke with Skinner Layne of Exosphere about how you never learn about being an entrepreneur in traditional schools.  We spoke about why getting an MBA is a complete waste of time and won’t teach you anything about business.

Skinner and I will be holding a two day Exobase workshop on entrepreneurialism at Anarchapulco where you can get more in two days than you would in two years of “business school” and for just a few hundred dollars.

Most of the great thinkers and minds of our time never went to traditional school and this is no accident.  People like Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare and Steve Jobs just to name a few.

Perhaps fifty years ago going to University and getting an MBA or a degree in Economics had some value.  But it simply does not anymore in today’s day and age.  And, especially after people like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman have been a part of destroying the economy through central bank money printing and fasco-communism.

Don’t end up like Ben Bernanke’s son with $400,000 in student loan debt or like 30 year old Tom Gilbert Jr. who wasted his time getting a degree in Economics at Princeton and ended up killing his father over a $400/month allowance that he felt entitled to.

Government intervention in the “higher education” sector has, like all government intervention, destroyed any value that it may have once had.  Don’t fall for the trap and educate yourself.  All information is now free… who would have thought that all information in the world would be free and people would still be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars and going into massive debt to get it?

To reverse paraphrase Mr. T, don’t be a fool, get out of traditional school.

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Mark Cuban Does Not Know What Communism is

December 12th, 2014

 

 

Posted by Michael Bach.   I’ve had fun at the expense of Mark Cuban before (calling him a brainwashed slave and a useless idiot)… but he just makes it so easy! He opened his mouth today on CNBC stating that Alibaba should not have been allowed into the US because it is based in a “communist country”.  It took me a moment to wrap my head around his words… and then I realized as I read on that he was referring to China.  I was confused because China is far less communist in many ways than the USSA. Perhaps Mark hasn’t noticed the changes in the last few decades since Mao has passed on?  Or didn’t notice that the new very capitalist China has surpassed the US as the largest economy on Earth? The Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA) was started out of Jack Ma’s apartment in Hangzhou, China in 1999 and is now worth over a quarter of a trillion dollars and serves more than 79 million members from more than 240 countries and territories.  That is staggering growth rarely seen anymore in the fasco-communist USSA due to all their central planning and regulations. Cuban stated that his biggest problem is that USSA centrally planned “insider trading” laws are hard to apply in capitalist China where they just don’t have a massive, centrally planned overseer of the securities market. “Insider Trading” laws, upheld by large bureaucratic organizations who wiretap and eavesdrop on people like Martha Stewart, are ridiculous to begin with.  The idea that big government should be watching over the markets to make sure that no one, ever, acts upon information they have is the height of big government and is typical of former-communist places like East Germany and Mao’s China.  Yet, Mark Cuban, seems to think the opposite. He went on to criticize China and its “gulags in Southern China”… yet again not noticing that the USSA has, by far, the largest amount of its own citizens in gulags… including for a time, Martha Stewart! The USSA has over 700 people per 100,000 in work camps compared to less  than 150 in China.  The “Civilian Inmate Labor Program” is a revision of the  regulation passed and signed by Bill Clinton in 1997. 210-35 is currently  valid and fully operative. The regulations specify that army personnel running the US prison camps  will prepare an “Inmate Labor Plan” that will comply with 18 U.S.C. 4125(a),  governing civilian inmate labor. That section of the US Code allows the U.S.  attorney general to make available to the heads of US departments,  including the Army, the services of US prisoners to engage in labor,  including “constructing or repairing roads, cleaning, maintaining and  reforesting public lands, building levees and constructing or repairing any  other public ways or works financed wholly or in major part by funds  appropriated by Congress.” It also often has people in prison camps in the US working for slave  labor wages for private companies. Cuban also doesn’t seem to have noticed that the USSA police state has  become so overtly oppressive, thieving and murderous that the Chinese  government felt a need to comment on recent events in Ferguson, stating,  “We have to improve the record of human rights and promote the cause of  human rights.”  CONCLUSION Many people in the US are still under the misguided belief that they live in a free and capitalist country when almost nothing can be further from the truth.  Is China perfect?  No, of course not.  Is China more free-market capitalist in many ways than the US today?  Absolutely.  The truth of the matter is that the US and China are both fasco-communist police states… but in many ways the US is now worse than China. The fact that Mark Cuban admonishes China over its lack of big government regulatory controls and much smaller prison camp populations, however, is just another one to add to Mark Cuban’s list of brainwashed slave quotations. Stick to dancing and watching basketball, Mark.

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A Message to Ferguson: You Are Fighting The Wrong Battle

November 26th, 2014

 

 

By Michael Bach.

 

Tensions in the US are high.  Hundreds of millions of people have been extorted and many have been kidnapped and beaten. People are frustrated and demanding answers, and to find them they are looking to…. authority figures?

They’ve been well-trained. But it is not with these authority figures true liberation lies. It would be better for us all, as individuals, to look deep inside ourselves and find an inner calm that runs in all living beings and recognize the true terrorists.

For now, it seems, we are not at that point, still obsessed with poking holes in each other with guns and burning and stealing other people’s stuff. Reason and calm, collected minds are needed in the US more than ever. Unfortunately, the people there have been under seige for decades and brainwashed in public indoctrination camps.

The “decision” was announced last night regarding the investigation into the shooting death of Michael Brown by a man on welfare, Ferguson police overseer Darren Wilson. According to St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, another man on welfare, “They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson, and returned a ‘No True Bill’ on each of the five indictments.”

Michael Brown’s parents stated, “We are profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequence of his actions. While we understand that many others share our pain, we ask that you channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change. We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen.”

A small tip: you can’t “fix” the “system”.  Either you bow to your enslavement or you rise up, mentally, and disavow anything to do with it.

The panel met for 70 hours, hearing from 60 witnesses and were ultimately “the only people who heard every witness … and every piece of evidence.”  As soon as the decision was made public, anger erupted.

Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama, pleaded for calm in the districts.  Still, “rioters overtook streets in the St. Louis suburb and cable TV broadcasts showed them setting fires and attacking police cars.” Obama said anger is an “understandable reaction” from people who think “the law is being applied in a discriminatory fashion.”

Of course, when you are upset and angry over being owned by sociopaths the natural reaction, if you’ve been indoctrinated into communism and fascism is to burn other decent people’s stuff.

“What we need to do is try to understand them,” el Presidente said. “There is no excuse for violence…Those who are only interested in violence and just want the problem to go away should realize that we have work to do here.”

Laughable from one of the most murderous people on Earth…

The events which unfolded overnight gave birth to numerous images from a new Amerika, very different from the America everyone has historically been told exists:



Some men in the street said the scene reminded them of a third world banana republic.



Many looters burned property, which surely had no chance of bringing justice or Michael Brown’s life back:



It was not merely cars they were burning:



Overnight, the drama increased. In Oakland highways and streets were closed:



Those who are partaking in any semblance of a debate are talking about rampant racism in the US… that’s what they want us to think.  The government isn’t the problem, it is people with different colored skin.

But what happened in Ferguson had a lot less to do with race than many think. Instead, it had to do with a different sort of “Ism” – statism. Statism does not care about whether you are black, a woman, a white male, a cat, it will kill you, steal from you, lie to you in a truly equal manner. In that way, the government is great at equality.

But without government it would be disorder and chaos… right?

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Bitcoin has changed everything

June 17th, 2014

 

By Michael Bach.



Its importance as an evolution in money and banking cannot be overstated. Notice I don’t use the word “revolution” here because I consider Bitcoin to be a complete “evolution” from the anachronistic money and banking systems that humanity has been using—and been forced by government dictate to use—for at least the last hundred years.

One of the biggest issues that newcomers to bitcoin have is that it is “shrouded in mystery”.  This is not totally true, as this important book shows. While the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto may never be known for certain— despite those like Dorian Nakamoto, whom the mainstream media say is Satoshi—what we do know, in very prolific and historical detail, are the underpinnings and design of bitcoin from its earliest days.

Very detailed conversations were held between top cryptographic and programming experts since the very first day bitcoin was introduced… a day that may go down in history and possibly be celebrated by generations to come. November 1, 2008.

The first words posted by Satoshi Nakamoto were eloquent in their simplicity as he announced his creation, which would go on to change the world, “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”

He then put a link to a white paper he had written on the subject.

The rest, as they say, is history.



These discussions, taking place publicly on the bitcointalk.org forum, went on until December 12th, 2010. After that, Satoshi went dark.

Amongst the Bitcoin community, these posts are well known, but your average person would need hours to scour through it all and make sense of it. In this important book, Phil Champagne has gone through each post and identified the most important ones… and given the context for the time of the post as to why it is important. This creates a logical timeline of Bitcoin’s evolution straight from the keyboard of Satoshi Nakamoto and could be described as Bitcoin’s autobiography.

As I write, in June 2014, bitcoin’s future is unknowable. It could go on to change the world dramatically, freeing us from the oppression of central banks and the gargantuan governments that feed off their free money. Or, it could go down in smoke and flames due to any number of possible events.

No matter what happens from here, however, the impact of Bitcoin is knowable. Its most core concept has and will change how we think about contracts, trust, and transactions no matter what happens to Bitcoin itself. Already thousands of applications have been built off the platform, and these have expanded it outside the world of financial transactions.

Phil Champagne has put into an easy-to-read format the fomenting of one of the most important technological innovations of our time…a completely decentralized platform to perform payment transaction without the need for a trusted third party. Its importance is only surpassed by the Internet itself as an evolution in communications. Chapter 2 provides readers unfamiliar with Bitcoin a great overview of its technological and philosophical foundation and of how it operates.

Decades from now many will look back at this innovation the way we currently look back at the Internet or the Gutenberg press as being epochal moments in the history of civilization. And this collection of Satoshi’s posts and correspondences forms a logical timeline and will be one of the easiest ways for future historians to understand just how it began and evolved.

[Editor’s note:  To reiterate, this is a very important book and a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the mindset of the person or persons involved in creating bitcoin.  And, not only that, it is incredibly interesting to see the creation of a new currency documented from the very first day! Be sure to check out the The Book of Satoshi, available now by clicking here.]

Join other Dollar Vigilantes today to discuss bitcoin, Satoshi and the evolution of banking.

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Capital Controls Rolling Into High Gear Under FATCA

May 29th, 2014

 

Capital Controls Rolling Into High Gear Under FATCA.

The traditional banking system was already bad enough but now, with banks around the world rushing to comply with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) it is beginning to reach extreme levels.  And it isn’t just affecting the most financially restricted people on Earth: US citizens… it is affecting everyone.

Take myself for example.  I operate numerous businesses worldwide.  I am a Canadian citizen as well as the citizen of a Caribbean country and our business operations are also operated out of a non-tax jurisdiction in the Caribbean.  On top of that we hold no bank accounts, whatsoever, in the US… instead, we have bank accounts all over the world.

Yet, in the last two months we have had our accounts or transactions frozen, denied or questioned in different jurisdictions at least ten times.  And we have had countless other problems over the last two years.

Here are just a list of the most recent:

We got FATCA’ED.  We received a FATCA notice from one of our banks in Eastern Europe.  They told us that we must comply and contact them immediately.  We contacted them and let them know that the company is not a US company and no US citizen is involved with the company nor the bank account.  They told us that one of the phone numbers they had on file for us was a US number and therefore they’d have to close our account.  We informed them that the number they had was a virtual Skype number, one of many we have, that forwarded to the property departments in our companies around the world.  We are still dealing with this issue.

Constant Inquiries.  At the same Eastern European bank a few weeks ago they demanded to see detailed contracts and information on a large number of our transactions.  We are still also dealing with that.

Wires Constantly Scrutinized.  At one of our bank accounts in Canada with which I have had a 20 year relationship in good standing they have blocked numerous of our recent wires and demanded to see information on who the money is going to and why.  In more than one instance, when sending funds to the Middle East, we were informed that any and all wires sent to the Middle East were under heavy scrutiny causing us numerous problems.

The Paypal Monster.  Paypal has frozen many of our numerous Paypal accounts that we have worldwide on an ongoing basis.  This shouldn’t come as news to any merchants who use Paypal as the company is notorious for constantly freezing funds and accounts for all manner of reasons.  In one instance, as part of operations in our hotel in Acapulco (Las Torres Gemelas Private Suites) they froze our account until we could show them proof of numerous very small denomination transfers.  The transactions were for room rentals that had occurred weeks or months prior and Paypal would demand that we show proof that the person had stayed with us and approved the transaction.  Often these were past guests who had just booked for a few nights, who we had no other relation with, that we would have to somehow try to contact afterwards and bother them to supply Paypal with their information and approval of the transaction!

No Cuba For You.  In another instance, just a few weeks ago, another Paypal account we had was frozen after we paid for a flight from Havana, Cuba (ironically I had just stopped there for one night because I wanted to avoid the pain and risk of flying through the US) via Paypal because it was nearly impossible to purchase a flight to or from Cuba by any other means.  Because we denoted the payment done was for a flight from “Havana” the account was frozen.  The total dollar amount was for just a few hundred dollars.

No Brokerage For You. Last year, a brokerage account I use in Luxembourg threatened to close my account.  When I asked why they said that the brokerage had recently been bought by a Canadian brokerage and there is a Canadian law that says that no Canadian can deal with a brokerage owned by a Canadian company outside of Canada.  Luckily they accepted my Caribbean residency and therefore let the account remain open.  US citizens are not so lucky.  The SEC has made it so hardly any brokerage outside of the US will accept US citizens effectively locking their accounts inside the US as a capital control.

And, we are most definitely not alone.  At TDV Offshore we hear dozens of stories per week from people scrambling to find a way to have international bank accounts after their accounts have suddenly been shuttered.  The great majority are US citizens who receive a notice that their accounts will be immediately closed due to FATCA.  FATCA is essentially creating capital controls for US citizens on banking making it harder and harder to hold funds outside of the US.

In short, it is getting more difficult all the time to transact in the traditional banking system.  And it seems to just get worse by the month.  There appears to be a worldwide effort underway to make it harder and harder just to transact financially.

THE OPTIONS

Luckily there is still options for getting around many of these issues but it isn’t cheap or easy… and not about to get any easier.

Passports.  For Americans the only way to really be able to internationalize your assets and get out from the unbelievably egregious US tax system is to get a foreign passport and then to renounce your US citizenship.  This may seem extreme to some but it seems like the most rational thing to do to us.  We foresee the US continuing to devolve, further capital controls to be erected and the US not being a place anyone will want to go for an extended period of time as it completely collapses… so why not get yourself and your capital out while you can?  The US government, as we have reported, has even gone to lengths to make it harder for US citizens to get foreign passports… which should be a big hint as to their intentions.  Just this month they have attacked probably the most arduous, respectable and legitimate “citizenship by investment” program in St. Kitts.  And the US government has pressured the Dominican Republic to increase the time to get a passport from an original two years to now eight years.  We foresee this continuing and by the time many do see the writing on the wall and want to get a second passport to get away from the US it will be too late.  The demand will be too overwhelming and the supply will continue to dwindle which will drive the cost through the roof… if it is even possible at all.  You can contact TDV Passports for a consultation on what your current options are.

Foreign Trusts.  Another option that is still available but may not be for much longer is to transfer your assets into an offshore trust thereby getting around FATCA rules and giving US citizens the ability to bank, have brokerage accounts and to do business internationally.  This is not easy or simple and our FATCA experts at TDV Wealth Management have a fulltime job trying to help US citizens to internationalize their assets.  Citizens of other countries may feel that they do not need to do something like this as their country does not currently have FATCA controls nor taxes them on worldwide income.  We expect this door to be closed very quickly as the Western countries all devolve into the Greater Depression and as tax revenue for their governments decline.

Bullion.  One of the best ways to retain your assets is to have them in hard assets like precious metals outside of the financial system and preferably geopolitically diversified to make it harder for any one government to seize.  This, also, is getting harder and harder but is still possible even though it is now nearly impossible for Americans to ship gold outside of the country and have it insured as we know of no companies that will now do that for US citizens.  There are many ways to international precious metals though and you can read more in the Getting Your Gold Out Of Dodge report.  As well, precious metals should rise tremendously as the modern banking and financial systems collapse during The End Of The Monetary System As We Know It (TEOTMSAWKI).

Bitcoin.  Bitcoin offers not only a safehaven from the financial system and ability to transact worldwide in seconds for free and with no chance of any government or bank freezing the transfer… but it also offers tremendous speculative upside.  I believe that as more people awaken to the serious capital controls and inability to transact internationally easily that more will move to bitcoin as a way to hold their assets as well as to transfer them easily.  This alone could see bitcoin go up 1,000% in the next 1-2 years in my opinion, if not more.  In fact, bitcoin has surpassed Western Union and is now close to surpassing Paypal in terms of transaction volume which is no surprise to us here at The Dollar Vigilante (where we have been following bitcoin since $7 in 2011 at The Dollar Vigilante newsletter) as it is a much easier, better, faster, safer, more private and cheaper way to transact.



MASSIVE CHANGES IN THE WORLD MONETARY AND BANKING SYSTEM

The perfect storm is developing and it is all going as we have predicted over the last five years.  The Western world will continue to inflate their currencies to keep the system alive as almost all governments are bankrupt.  Governments will continue to make it harder to get your assets outside of the country.  There will be further grabs on all manner of assets including retirement and pension funds and more bank bail-ins, like in Cyprus, as government bonds collapse and the currencies hyperinflate.

Luckily, as mentioned above, there are still options but the doors are closing at such a rapid pace now that if you haven’t begun to protect yourself from the coming collapse you had better start doing it yesterday.

 

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Credit Suisse Admits Guilt For Money Laundering

May 23rd, 2014

 

 

By Michael Bach and Jeff Berwick.

 

As Credit Suisse (CS) pled guilty for conspiring to aid US tax evasion and swallowed $2.6 billion in fines in federal court in Alexandria, Va., Eric Holder sensed the historic moment he oversaw – a new precedent for US extortion. UBS paid “only” $885 million when it misrepresented mortgage-backed bonds during the housing bubble. Surely, as CS swallows these new fines, banks the world over are shuddering.

What perhaps makes the situation more interesting than the exorbitant fine is the fact that a financial institution was forced to plead guilty of criminal acts. It took months to determine the penalty, which, against the bank’s will, includes a monitor henceforth placed on the bank’s operations. Credit Suisse is the largest financial company to plead guilty to the non-crime of “money laundering” in 20 years.

The plea marks the end of an era. One of the shell entities implicated,  according to the government, dated back a century – or just after the creation of the federal tax code and the income tax.

Of the $2.6 billion fine, The Department of Justice will receive $1.8 billion and New York State’s top financial regulator, Benjamin Lawsky, will receive $715 million of the stolen loot.

“This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law,” Eric Holder said. “A company’s profitability or market share can never and will never be used as a shield from prosecution or penalty.  And this action should put that misguided notion definitively to rest.”

With the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) coming into full effect on January 1, 2016, and the US government actively prosecuting banks,  only savvy Americans will be able to find financial institutions abroad to service them. We saw this coming at The Dollar Vigilante Blog, and have written about it extensively. Europe will not be a better place to be than the US, and not just because the US sees itself as the world’s police officer. The European Union wants to steal the savings of Europe, and are currently paving the way to make this possible, just like the US. Only the most astute of money managers will survive The End Of The Monetary System As We Know It (TEOTMSAWKI). That means being sensitive and open-minded to the changing economic climate and being very aware of all of the rapid changes descending upon the world banking system.

NOT THE FIRST VICTIM

Credit Suisse is not the first victim of the new US crusade to extort (tax) its citizens all over the planet.

In 2009 the Swiss bank UBS settled with the US government over similar accusations for $780 million and to hand over the names of Americans with secret bank accounts.

“For US taxpayers it is going to be impossible to hide money in Switzerland, and it is just a matter of time that this is the case also for Germans and Britons,” Asher Rubinstein, a partner at Rubinstein & Rubinstein LLP in New York, told Reuters at the time. “Switzerland will no longer be a tax haven.”

Switzerland’s oldest bank, Wegelin & Co., pled guilty to similar charges in 2013 and thereafter went out of business. A smaller Swiss bank with no US presence, Bank Frey, is in the process of shutting down for similar reasons, which is a perfect example of how government regulation forces smaller enterprises out of business, hurting the overall economy, while “too-big-to-fail” institutions remain in business.



SO LITTLE TIME TO FALL IN LINE

We now see that there is no hiding from the long arm of the US Extortion Racket.

Banks, scared of being taken out by the US government, are rushing to demonstrate compliance. Recently, forty-seven countries signed up to automatically share bank data, including key financial centers Singapore and Switzerland.

Signatories includes all 34 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),  Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and the British jurisdictions of Jersey and Guernsey, all of which have been considered safehavens in the past. The OECD also ensured the participation of 18 non-OECD nations, such as Singapore.

Being touted as a major step towards cracking down on global tax evasion, the agreements demonstrate how financial privacy is a thing of the past, and how nobody’s money is safe from over-reaching, tyrannical governments – unless they structure themselves properly with high level advice as does TDV Offshore and TDV Wealth Management.

The 47 countries have committed themselves to passing new domestic laws allowing them to collect information on all bank accounts and automatically exchange it with other participating countries.

GET STRUCTURED NOW

The Credit Suisse settlement demonstrates the hopeless task banks ensuring they will not be persecuted by the US government for alleged wrongdoing, possibly causing them to lose their license and ability to operate. Banking will become a dramatically consolidated industry in the next 2-5 years and the banks left standing will act like law enforcement authorities in many ways.

There is still many questions left to be answered about the Credit Suisse case. One of which is what will happen to all the American clients who were banking there?

“It is a mystery to me that the US government didn’t require as part of the agreement that the bank cough up some of the names of US clients with secret Swiss bank accounts,” said Carl Levin, a senator who headed the committee that had published the report on Credit Suisse. Over 22,000 accounts were held by Americans at CS. Most failed to provide tax authorities with required information. The settlement leaves “no accountability for taxes owed.”

If I were one of these Americans, I might be holding my breath.

Most countries will soon have entered into info-sharing agreements in the coming years,  and so you need to get structured now if you don’t want to fall under their dragnet even if you are not fortunate enough to not be an American. If you are from any Western country you can assume bank privacy is dead… the only way to keep some privacy and security for your assets is to Fatca proof yourself through offshore companies and trusts.

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Breaking FATCA News: A Semi-Stay of Execution for Americans Assets And The US Dollar

May 15th, 2014

 

 

By Michael Bach.

The Illegitimate Revenue Agency (IRS) has just announced that the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) has been postponed from July 1, 2014 until January 1, 2016.

This is good news in many ways for both those with assets that they wish to internationalize as well as for the dollar and US banking system itself but in many ways the damage has already been done.

FATCA, signed into law in 2010, ensures that, if you don’t tell the US government where your assets are and how much is there, your bank will no matter where that bank exists.  FATCA has been acknowledged as the death of the dollar by many experts including our own FATCA expert, Jim Karger, who recently stated such at our recent TDV Wealth Management Crisis Conference in both Panama and Mexico. Many foreign banks simply won’t comply. The cost and risk of complying outweighs the benefit of accepting American clients.



By requiring banks all over the world to become unpaid employees of the IRS and keep tabs on American citizens FATCA is perhaps the most egregious, overarching and draconian “law” put into effect by the US government crime organization to date.

We’ve heard story-after-story of banks all over the globe that are simply not taking on American clients. In many cases, they are telling their current American clients their accounts will soon be closed. The account holder’s crime? Being American.

But there has been some temporary reprieve for those who will be affected by the law.

The recent IRS guidelines regarding FATCA give many of the companies and financial institutions implementing FATCA another 18 months to be in compliance. Of course, as with all government laws it will be selectively enforced. Any banks not appearing to be doing their best to comply will likely find themselves in contention with the IRS. At any rate, what this effectively means is that if Uncle Sam doesn’t like you or wants your money he might come after you. Nothing new here…



A recent Thomson Reuters survey of 500 European and US tax professionals showed 74% believed there to be a lack of clarity in the IRS regulations for FATCA.  This would impede compliance, they predicted.

The notice from the IRS states:

“Calendar years 2014 and 2015 will be regarded as a transition period for purposes of IRS enforcement and administration of the due diligence, reporting, and withholding provisions…

With respect to this transition period, the IRS will take into account the extent to which a participating or deemed-compliant FFI, direct reporting NFFE, sponsoring entity, sponsored FFI, sponsored direct reporting NFFE, or withholding agent has made good faith efforts to comply with the requirements of the chapter 4 regulations and the temporary coordination regulations.

For example, the IRS will take into account whether a withholding agent has made reasonable efforts during the transition period to modify its account opening practices and procedures to document the chapter 4 status of payees, apply the standards of knowledge provided in chapter 4, and, in the absence of reliable documentation, apply the presumption rules of §1.1471-3(f).”



 

CAUSING CHAOS WORLDWIDE FOR AMERICANS

FATCA has already affected many Americans with accounts abroad.  They have seen their accounts closed at a moment’s notice, have been unable to open accounts and perhaps even worse hardly anyone even knows how to deal with the FATCA regulations even if they did want to deal with it.

I have just returned from the Cayman Islands where lawyers and accountants are running scared.  They are slowly figuring out what FATCA means to their American clients, many of whom have a large amount of assets in the Cayman Islands that they do not want to repatriate to the US or be reported to the IRS.  And, even if they wanted to adhere to all the rules under FATCA it is nearly impossible to understand and fraught with risk.

The lawyers in the Cayman Islands told me that company incorporation in the Cayman Islands is rock solid in terms of privacy and ease of setup (we will have more on that to subscribers soon) but the problem is banking in the Cayman Island.  They told me that if an American is even involved, in any way, with a company that has a bank account in the Cayman Islands they will report all information on that account to the IRS.

I informed them of a few things.

First, any American with substantial assets should be running, not walking, to get a second passport to protect against all of the capital controls coming out against Americans.  We have heard of some companies that have stopped working with Americans at all just because of the problems it causes them with their bank accounts.

Secondly, there are ways for Americans to have international structures and banking without falling under the FATCA legislation.  We enlightened dozens of people recently at our Crisis Conference on how to do this.  You can find out more by contacting TDV Wealth Management.

CONCLUSION

As you can see, the law will still go into effect…and January 1, 2016 is right around the corner. The IRS fines for FATCA non-compliance could result in fines or jailtime on individuals who fail to report. Already this coming July 1, 2014, foreign financial institutions risk being fined.

The next 18 months are merely a reprieve. Already foreigners are moving away from the dollar. The facade of the US government has fallen and the entire world recognizes that the US and the dollar is about to collapse because it cannot pay off its debts and printing money is the only way the game can continue on much longer. Countless movements are ongoing in Russia, China, the Middle East and more all moving away from the dollar and the US banking system… and this is exacerbated by FATCA.

If you were caught on your heels in the lead up to July 1, 2014, then don’t be in the lead up to the next FATCA deadline. The folks at TDV Wealth Management are ready to help you today with any questions you might have.

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Chicago dances on the edge of a fiscal cliff

May 5th, 2014

 

By Michael Bach.

It is the third largest city in the US with a population of 2,714,856 as of mid-2012. It is the economic engine of Illinois. If Chicago falls, especially into bankruptcy, then the entire state is likely to do so as well. Illinois won’t declare bankruptcy because federal law prohibits the option. But insolvency would raise many of the same questions as bankruptcy. For example, who gets paid first, or at all? And how much on the dollar? If other cities stumble, as they would, then whether Illinois officially declares bankruptcy may be a matter of semantics.

The fiscal land mine of Chicago  

In early March, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Chicago’s credit rating from A3 to Baa1. The rating is just three rungs above “junk-bond.” With the exception of Detroit, Chicago now has the worst credit rating of any large US city. The reason cited by Moody’s: unfunded pension liabilities for city employees.

A March 7^th Wall Street Journal article announced that Chicago’s 2015 balloon payment on its $19.4 billion pension debt will be $1.07 billion. The payment is one-third of Chicago’s entire operating budget. According to WSJ, “The pension payment could cover salaries for 4,300 police officers or the resurfacing of 16,000 blocks of roads in the city… Meantime, the required pension contribution for Chicago schools this year is tripling to $613 million… Chicago’s pension funds are only half as well-funded as even Detroit’s, if you can believe it, and could run dry by 2020.” The pension shortfall amounts to $7,100 per Chicagoan.

Moody’s is threatening another downgrade unless Chicago ‘fixes’ the pension fiasco; a lower rating would mean higher interest on the city’s debt. There are two ways out: cut expenses or raise revenues.

Cutting expenses means cutting jobs or reducing benefits, or both. The average city employee receives wages and benefits that the average private worker only dreams about. The watchdog Illinois Policy Institute reported that “teachers who retired between July 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012, after 30 or more years on the job could expect starting average annual benefit payments of $72,693… After 10 years of cost-of-living adjustments, this pension is $97,693 annually.”



Job and benefit reductions are rigidly opposed by public sector unions, especially by the power-wielding teachers’ union. Union support makes or breaks political careers in Illinois. That means the legislators who set the pensions through Illinois law are not likely to take the political risk of reducing them; they face an election in November and Democrats would like to maintain their current two house super-majority. It means Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel who could cut jobs is reluctant to do so; he is up for re-election in February. Politicians are more likely to bleed taxpayers and investors instead.

Raising revenues is what remains. On March 12^th, Breitbart ran the headline, “Mayor Rahm Emanuel Warns of Doubled Property Taxes to Fund Spiraling Pension Costs.” Emanuel added, “if something else isn’t done.”

A variety of “something else” has already been tried; the situation gets worse. For example, in February, Chicago’s city council approved a $500 million issuance of commercial paper and $900 million of general-obligation bonds. The WSJ article commented, “There’s little to stop politicians from pouring the proceeds into pensions – or later reneging on this unsecured debt if it were to file for bankruptcy.” There is precedent; Detroit intends to repay similar bonds at 20 cents on the dollar.

As Chicago goes, so goes Illinois

Chicago is only one of many cash-strapped cities in Illinois, which are choking on their pension liabilities. According to an Illinois Policy Institute report the capital city of Springfield now dedicates all property taxes to pay the pensions of police, teachers and other city workers; and that after slashing its police department by almost 15 percent. Other cities are raising taxes. Peoria, for example, added new water and utility taxes, and doubled its garbage fees.

Quite apart from the cities of Illinois, there is the state as a whole. A February 8^th, 2013 article in Business Insider explained, “Illinois’s five state-level pensions…report current accrued liabilities at $146 billion, but the state has set aside only $63 billion to cover future benefits… [T]he $83 billion shortfall in unfunded liabilities leaves the state’s pensions only 43% funded, on average. Unfortunately, the real numbers are far worse.”  (Note: those official estimates are a year old and the situation worsens daily.)

Moody’s recently adopted a new methodology by which to assess debt and risk. When it “discounts future liabilities using the more reasonable rate of return on high-grade corporate bonds (about 4% today), current accrued liabilities tally to more like $272 billion. These figures drop the official 43% funding ratio to only 24%.” This means  Illinois has the most underfunded pension system in America. Dividing the total liabilities by the number of Illinois residents, every person is liable for $22,294.

Illinois tops various other lists as the worst state in the Union, or close to it. Illinois’ dubious distinctions include:

• the fastest growth of any state in food stamp recipients ( June 2013);
• 5th in foreclosures. 1 in 811 housing units received a filing (Feb. 2014);
• 4 of its last 7 governors were convicted and imprisoned;
• it has the 3rd highest unemployment rate, 8.9 percent (Jan. 2014);
• it has the 4^th most regressive tax system (Jan. 2013);
• its sum total state corporate income tax is 9.5% (2013).

Illinois: Run Far, Run Fast

According to Forbes (Feb. 8, 2013), “Most of the top-10 states people are leaving are located in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, including Illinois (60%), New York (58%), Michigan (58%), Maine (56%), Connecticut (56%) and Wisconsin (55%).” Illinois is first in the raw numbers of people leaving and second to New Jersey in the ratio of those leaving to total population. This ranking occurred in 2012 as well.

Southern and western states are the most popular destinations for a variety of reasons including greater economic opportunity and personal freedom, lower taxes and better climate. But those leaving should ask themselves: is anywhere in the US far enough away from Chicago if the city and then the state collapse financially? Taxpayers United President Jim Tobin predicts, ““Illinois will be the first state to go bankrupt, unless pension reforms are implemented.” Only it cannot legally declare bankruptcy and escape its debts. Whatever will happen, Tobin believes will occur sometime about 2015.

Whatever the timing, whichever patches are slapped on the system, Chicago’s economic meltdown would effect not only Illinois but all of America. Chicago is also the economic engine of the MidWest. The federal government is unlikely to abandon an entire region, especially one dominated by Democrats. Obama is unlikely to abandon Chicago as long as Emanuel, his former White House Head of Staff and close friend, is mayor. What does “unlikely to abandon” mean in specific terms? Probably bailouts, in some form. The flood of money and legal privilege will be a further drag on those islands of opportunity to which economic refugees have fled. Other cities teetering on the same fiscal cliff will fall.

It is an exaggeration, but not an outrageous one, to say: as Chicago goes, so goes America.

In any case, if something else isn’t done, Mayor Emanuel is warning that he’ll have to double property taxes to fund the payment.

The municipal pension fund isn’t the only pension in failure in Chicago. The city’s teachers’ pensions are also widely understood to be one of the worst funded in the country. The teachers’ pension fund will require a tripling of its required contribution.

Michael Pagano, dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, though, warns that just raising taxes and cutting services won’t fix the problem.

“I don’t think either one is even a possibility. Everybody’s going to have to give something,” Pagano said in December.

Meanwhile, the State of Illinois already comes in at second place in the number of citizens moving out of state. Outward migration for The Land of Lincoln ranked second only to New Jersey in 2013.

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A New Cold War Means A New Record Price For This Precious Metal

April 20th, 2014

 

By Michael Bach. 

Palladium could be heading for a record. Here’s why:

Tensions in the Ukraine have turned investors’ attention towards precious metals.  In times of political conflict, especially military, precious metals generally do well. But some people might have been surprised just how the tensions have affected precious metals.

Palladium has risen to its highest level since 2011. Escalating tensions in Ukraine are the reason, in particular the supply of palladium from Russia, the world’s biggest producer, could be restricted. This is especially true if US politicians and “experts” continue mouthing off about how the US government should go after Russia’s banking and financial system. As if the US government is not in a precarious situation enough… In 1999-2000 palladium ran to $1,090. Could it be heading to its old high? There are lots of reason to believe so…and also to believe we are at the beginning of the next price run in the precious metals, including gold and silver. But for now palladium is the big story.

Palladium has already increased 13 percent this year. There is crisis in Ukraine, as well as in South Africa, the world’s second largest producer of palladium.

I have never seen such perfect conditions for the continued rise in the price of palladium. Demand has never been higher and the supply is volatile.

UKRAINE

The situation in Ukraine has caused a mess geopolitically. In the country itself, capital controls have already been instituted, which we have covered at The Dollar Vigilante continuously.

7 percent of deposits were withdrawn from Ukrainian banks in the week after the fall of Kiev. The Ukraine Central Bank’s early capital controls:

• Sets limits on foreign currency purchases.
• Limits purchasees to 15,000 Hryvnia per person per day ($1,300).
• Ukraine central bank limit purchases to 150,000 Hryvnia per person per month ($13,000).

The European Union and the US have been quick to aid Ukraine through the International Monetary Fund.  The US has also threatened sanctions, and some US banks have even moved in that direction, like JP Morgan.

But the Kremlin has taken a similar stance in response to (mainly) US antagonisms. A Kremlin economist, Sergei Glazyev, told RIA Novosti that this would lead to a crash of the US financial system.

“We would find a way not just to reduce our dependency on the United States to zero but to emerge from those sanctions with great benefits for ourselves,” said the Kremlin economic aide.

“We have wonderful economic and trade relations with our Southern and Eastern partners,” he said. “We will find a way not just to eliminate our dependence on the US but also profit from these sanctions.”

Obama has already ceased trade and energy talks with Russia. The State Department said: “At this point, we are not just considering sanctions. Given the actions Russia is taking, it is likely we will put those in place and we are preparing that.”

All this gives Russia reason to begin playing the game of geopolitical chess. Russia’s strength? It’s commodities and resources.

PALLADIUM TO RECORD LEVELS?

I don’t foresee tensions over Russia mellowing out. Of course there is room for a correction in the palladium price, but there is little reason why it should face any troubles overtaking the $1,090 mark should questions over supply remain.  Western companies reliant on palladium are now forced to stockpile. This puts them in a precarious situation as in 1999 Ford went long palladium at the top of the market, and lost a lot of money. You can see how palladium has responded in bitcoin terms:

 



Palladium is a volatile metal. But we feel that it belongs in a diversified and balanced precious metals portfolio. Especially considering its supply problems.

Our special report, Getting Your Gold Out Of Dodge, is 127 pages on how to internationalize your precious metals holdings, something which could prove to be more important than even owning precious metals in the first place. We analyze the hundreds of options investors have to store worldwide, with more actionable info of this kind than you’ll find anywhere else.

Our conference, The TDV Wealth Management Crisis Conference, can help sophisticated million dollar entrepreneurs and others make the changes to their savings plan to ensure they keep their wealth, something many people who don’t see the writing on the wall won’t have the luxury of.

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Social Security, Treasury Stealing Every Last Penny From Americans

April 16th, 2014

 

By Michael Bach.



All of a sudden the government lays claims to your savings. They can’t prove you owe them a dime, but you’re deprived due process. The legal bills become overwhelming, and so you let your money be stolen. You simply have no choice.

Sound outlandish? It’s not. Not in the “Land of the Free” at least.

For example, the US government began intercepting Mary Grice’s tax refunds without any warning this tax season. Grice was unaware of the situation until she got a letter stating that her refund had gone to satisfy old debt to the government. Very old debt…In fact, debt she didn’t even know about.

That debt stems back to 1960, when Grice was 4, around the time her father died, leaving her mother with five children to raise. Until the kids turned 18, her mother Sadie Grice got survivor benefits from Social Security to help feed and clothe them. But, according to Social Security, something went awry.

Social Security now claims it overpaid someone in the Grice family – though it is not sure whom – in 1977. After 37 years of silence, four years after Sadie Grice died, the government is coming after the daughter. She is not the only one. 

Hundreds of thousands of taxpayers will receive letters like the one Grice got. Because of some unknown debt they never even knew about, that might not have anything to do with them, the government is confiscating their money. They won’t have their day in court, in most cases, because they don’t have the money to fight.

Already in 2014, the US Treasury Department has “intercepted” $1.9 billion in tax refunds, $75 million of which has been delinquent for more than ten years. The effort to collect old debts was ratcheted up in the last three years, the result of a sentence tucked into the farm bill lifting the 10-year statute of limitations on old debts to Uncle Sam. Social Security, the Treasury Department and Congress have all denied seeking the change. Why now?

“We have an obligation to current and future Social Security beneficiaries to attempt to recoup money that people received when it was not due,” says Social Security spokeswoman Dorothy Clark.

Since the effort to collect old debts began in 2011, the Treasury Department has collected $424 million in debts that were over 10 years old. The Social Security Administration has found 400,000 taxpayers who collectively owe $714 million on debts over 10 years old. The agency expects to have begun proceedings against all of those people by the summer.

“It was a shock,” said Grice, 58. “What incenses me is the way they went about this. They gave me no notice, they can’t prove that I received any overpayment, and they use intimidation tactics, threatening to report this to the credit bureaus.”

Grice filed a suit against the Social Security Administration alleging they violated her right to due process by holding her responsible for the $2,996 debt supposedly incurred under her father’s Social Security number. On its website, The Federal Trade Commission states “family members typically are not obligated to pay the debts of a deceased relative from their own assets.”

But Social Security sees it differently. If a child indirectly receives funds from public money paid to the parent, the children’s money is fair game.

“The craziest part of this whole thing is the way the government seizes a child’s money to satisfy a debt that child never even knew about,” says Robert Vogel, Grice’s attorney. “They’ll say that somebody got paid for that child’s benefit, but the child had no control over the money and there’s no way to know if the parent ever used the money for the benefit of that kid…Can the government really bring back to life a case that was long dead? Can it really be right to seize a child’s money to satisfy a parent’s debt?”

Although Grice has a lawyer, most taxpayers whose refunds have been taken say they are unable to contest the confiscations because of the cost.

The Treasury initially held the full amount of Grice’s federal and state refunds, a total of $4,462. Last week, after The Washington Post inquired about Grice’s case, and then the government returned the part of her refund above the $2,996 owed on her father’s account.

But unless the feds can prove that she ever received any of the overpayment, Grice wants all of her money back.

“Look, I love a good fight, especially for principle,” she said. “My mom used to say, ‘This country is carried on the backs of the little people,’ and now I see what she meant. This is really sad.”

Does one need more evidence that the federal government is bankrupt? It’s grasping at every last penny it can get by inserting legislation deep inside bills that the House of Representatives doesn’t even read. One sentence is all that is needed for your savings to be confiscated. But don’t worry, it is all to pay down a trifling US government debt:



Of the hundreds of thousands who have claims by the Treasury or Social(ist) (In)Security against them only 10% win their cases and are absolved of forking over money. There is nothing you can do about bureaucracy once bureaucracy decides to come after you. In the future there will only be more of the same as government agencies seize funds, including the nationalization of IRAs and pensions.

The best way to protect yourself is to get your funds and assets outside of the US preferably not even in your personal name. That is where The TDV Wealth Management Conference comes in.  Only here will you learn the ins-and-outs of the new American system, and the options available to you, as an American, at the end of empire. Don’t miss out.

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US Moves To Restrict Travelers Taking International Flights

April 11th, 2014

 

By Michael Bach.

The US government is using the Malaysian Airlines flight 370 to tackle the “widespread lack of passport screening in all countries.” The US is stepping up their processes. Already each passport of incoming visitors to the US is screened through multiple databases. After flight 370 disappeared, the US has started this process for all outgoing passengers.

“Coupled with this information and the new abilities to act on that information definitely makes air travel a lot safer,” according to one government official.

.

Throughout the video it is hinted numerous times that the US government has new capabilities to screen passengers. Travel is about to get much harder for many US passengers, as bureaucratic red-tape stops them from travel. For many, to be sure, traveling in-or-out of the US has been a nightmare already.

The nightmares that await hundreds of travelers in-and-out of the US are palpable for those paying attention. For nearly any random reason an individual can be denied his or her right to travel by the US bureaucracy, and it happens way more than you think.

US CONTINUES HISTORY OF BURDENED TRAVEL FOR BRITISH CELEBRITIES

Take for example one British celebrity. On her way to the US, she encountered quite a problem, putting her career on the line.

Nigella Lawson was recently prevented from boarding a flight to the United States over a court confession that she took drugs, it has emerged.

Lawson, a celebrity chef, was stopped at a Heathrow boarding gate on her way to Los Angeles this month. She was prevented from boarding the flight to the US due to a drug confession that she has taken drugs. Should she be unable to travel to the US her television career would be effectively ended.

The 54-year-old star confessed that she had snorted cocaine and smoked cannabis in front of her children. Although Scotland Yard has yet to do a thing, the US has taken a stricter policy, outdoing a country which has recently banned drinking in front of your own children and said that act should be punishable by up to ten years in a cage.

It appears US authorities told British Airways not to allow her to travel to California, where she would have been refused entry anyway. The US can disallow certain visitors from entering, even if they haven’t ever been charged. To lift any ban could take months or years. In the spirit of transparency, the US Department of Homeland (In)Security’s custom and border protection department declined to comment.

We suspect Lawson was caught up in the requirement that airlines supply US security officials in advance with details regarding all passengers on flights to America in order to screen them against Washington’s ‘no fly list.’

Lawson had been allowed to travel to the US as recent as January, after her admission to taking drugs. It seems, as Telegraph notes, that US authorities have hardened since then. This is a harrowing trend which Americans best take note of now, before it is too late.

Every single day 366 people are “deemed inadmissable” and refused entry into the US, according to US government statistics, most of which are cooked. The information that Lawson had taken plants (a.k.a. drugs) came out during a bitter divorce trial.

She is far from the first British celebrity said to have found entry into the US difficult due to convictions or drug use.  Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss, Russell Brand and Oasis stars Noel and Liam Gallagher are all on that list.

“YOU’RE NOT FLYING ANYWHERE TODAY…THE JUDGE WANTS TO SEE YOU”

But her story is nothing compared to one American family’s in particular. Celebrities, and other people in the public spotlight, are far from the only ones who find it difficult to travel in or out of the US. Take Charles and Kathleen Barrett for example. On August 8, 2013 they were barred from leaving Colorado on their way back to where they lived in Cuenca, Ecuador. Charles settled into his seat in a waiting area at the airport and was surrounded by three men, one of whom was wearing a US marshal’s costume.

You’re not flying anywhere today,” one of the marshals told him. “The judge wants to see you.”

Charles was forced to turn over his passport and airline ticket and was kidnapped and led out of the airport in handcuffs.

Charles knew what the problem was. In 2007 he had received a large refund from the IRS he and his spouse were not entitled to, the result of a tax return filed without their signatures by their tax preparer. They ultimately testified against the tax preparer.

“When we found out about the mistake, we knew we needed to repay the IRS and had been working with the court to do it,” Charles said. “Based on an agreement, we had paid $5,000 a month for 2 1/2 years and had paid $226,000 in all, almost the total amount we originally owed the IRS.” The Barretts were also filing reports every six weeks with the court, providing documents as requested.

Once in court, Charles did not see the judge who had handled his case but another. It turns out the court had issed a writ of Ne Exeat Republica, ordering the Barretts to turn over their passports. The writ of Ne Exeat Republic is a virtually unknown judicial tool dating to the 18th century English royal court. Its original intention was to restrict travel for political reasons and is occasionally used in the US. It is almost always issued as a civil law action.

The IRS attorney insisted that Barrett go to jail or post bond of $253,000. The judge informed the attorney the writ did not authorize jailing, only the confiscation of passports and other travel documents. The IRS attorney insisted, and ultimately the judged relented. Charles was booked into jail, though no charges were filed.

Kathleen, who was leaving from Grand Junction, 200 miles west of Denver, was experiencing the same abuse. She was also booked into jail. It was two days before anyone knew where she was.

Kathleen and Charles saw each other for the first time in five days on Tuesday August, 13, at a hearing at the federal courthouse in Denver. Their new attorney demanded they be released. Judge Boland agreed, but the marshals refused to obey the judges orders based on the instructions of their superiors. Ultimately, the judge demanded the handcuffs and shackles be removed and they finally were.

Nearly eight months later, the Barretts are still unable to leave the US. Charles has lost the source of income that allowed him to make payments to the IRS.

The Barrett’s lawyers are arguing that the IRS has repeatedly misrepresented the facts and has perjured herself on numerous occassions. Since, Judge Boland has been removed from the case. In fact, the Barretts have dealt with three different judges during the process.

The Barretts remain in Colorado, living with Kathleen’s mother.

“We just want the nightmare to end,” says Charles.



CONCLUSION

Every single day hundreds of people are barred from entering or leaving the US, and many of these individuals are held because of some issue or another, whether or not they are guilty of any crime, with the IRS. As the Barrett’s case demonstrates, the IRS will do whatever it takes to make your life a living hell if they believe you have done something wrong, even if you haven’t.

Pretty much right off the bat bureaucratic processes take over and the entire situation is out of yours and everybody’s hands – even the government courts. The Barretts case shows that bureaucrats within the US government have no problem being in contempt of court, upholding the orders of their superiors before the rulings of the judge.

Getting one’s assets outside of the hands of the US government, a government that clearly has no problem stealing in broad daylight from its own citizens, is instrumental to living a near worry-free life. Why become one of the 366 people each day, who, in the process of traveling to the US, find themselves passport-less or thrown in jail? As a result, many of these people have their assets stolen from them, and what they have leftover goes to attorneys whose sole purpose was to prove their innocence. What a witchhunt…

And it is only getting worse. The US government is stepping up its controls on travelers to-and-from the US.

TDV WEALTH MANAGEMENT CRISIS CONFERENCE

Knowing how to keep your savings outside the strongarm of the US government is a must of any financial portfolio. Without this instrumental first step you risk losing everything. There can be no doubt about that. We have covered this time-and-time again in the TDV Blog, and it is a fundamental philosophy of TDV Wealth Management, where we work to help families setup multi-generational savings strategies.

The TDV Wealth Management Crisis Conference in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California, Mexico is designed to give attendees the tools they need to get their financial house in order – meaning outside the hands of government. It is not our first. We have already begun helping many of our readers, and others, to safeguard what is rightfully theirs, and we want to help you. These conferences are not for everybody. Only for individuals with substantial savings and cashflow and at least one million in savings, the TDV Wealth Management Crisis Conference could be the best decision you’ve made in terms of your wealth.

We have documented countless times about how the borders are closing for Americans… this is just the latest of a disturbing trend.

We believe there is no strategy more important than internationalizing your ass and assets so you are not left with nothing by this system. The most egregious act is the incoming FATCA legislation that are nothing but capital controls.  To learn more and register now, click here.

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An Open Letter To Canadians from Jim Karger

April 3rd, 2014

 

Posted by Michael Bach.

Dear Canadians,

Let me get to the bottom line before you get to the bottom of the bottle.

That evil bastard, Berwick, just wrote me and asked me to write on “the downsides of being an ‘accidental American.'” Hell, I can write for hours on the downsides of being any kind of American – intentional, negligent, reckless, syphilitic, and brain-dead.

But, no, he wants a screed limited to ‘accidental Americans,’ which is whiskey-prism talk for Canadians. You know, people like you and Berwick, who suffer from having been flash-frozen out of the womb and then making the rest of us suffer with your hideous disabilities and whining ever since.

But that is a story I will save for later.

What he is talking about, or wants me to talk about, are the Canadians who are about to be given a swirly by the 900-pound gorilla to the south because they had the misfortune of being born to one American parent in Canada, or were born in the US for no good or apparent reason before returning to Canada as children. They are, to their extreme disadvantage, American citizens, whether they know it or not. And, American citizens, voluntary, knowing, or otherwise, are required by the most dangerous criminal enterprise in the world to report and pay taxes on every thin dime they earn their entire miserable lifetimes regardless where in the world they earned them or where they live.

So what? So this:

Canada, being just another water-boy for the behemoth to the south, will turn over all its banking data on “US persons” to the United States Internal Revenue Service starting July 1 this year. Why? Because the gorilla with the bad attitude wants it and even passed a law threatening every nation in the world who doesn’t step and fetch it. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) will impact all these ‘accidental’ Americans who will begin receiving letters that go something like this:

“It seems you have failed to file your US income tax returns for the last 47 years, not to mention reports on your foreign bank accounts, about which we have total knowledge and access thanks to your pussy government who bent over for us just like they always do. By our calculations, you owe us everything you have ever earned plus penalties and interest, and that much again for not filing FBAR’s on your Canadian bank accounts. In short, you are fucked. And, if you don’t pay, you will be indicted and we will hunt you down like a rabid animal and cage you until death do us part.

Thanking you in advance for your cooperation,

The USSA”

Or words to that effect.

And, that’s not all.

Some of you ice-heads made the hideous mistake of marrying an American and co-mingling not only your bodily fluids, but your money, too. Oops. By doing that, you not only insured the American will go straight to tax hell, but the Canadian with them. Their accounts suddenly become reportable and likewise will be turned over to the Pit Bull on a gunpowder diet and you will be accused of such heinous crimes as failure to file your TD-90 forms on bank accounts (checking and savings), investment accounts, mutual funds, retirement and pension accounts, securities and other brokerage accounts, debit card and prepaid credit card accounts, and even life insurance and annuities having cash value. “The penalties are, more or less, the same as those meted out for first-degree child molestation, including a $10,000 fine per account, per violation, and 5 years in “pound-me-in-the-ass” prison. The ‘unintentional’ US person will naturally feel slighted at this revelation and divorce their evil American spouse or at least beat him to death with an Elk femur. The defense he had no idea will be about as effective as it will be with the IRS.



And, finally:

There are more than a few Canucks who wander across their southern border on a seal blubber high and stay too long snorting blow in Palm Beach or visiting family in Des Moines. For now, they can stay 6 months without violating US immigration laws and being summarily deported and prevented entry for the rest of this lifetime. There is an effort to have this extended for Canadians over 50 years old, but it is a trick that will capture more of them than ever in the US tax lair.

Here’s how:

Under US law, one is considered a US resident for tax purposes if they meet the ‘substantial presence’ test for “any calendar year which means they are physically present in the United States on at least 31 days during the current year, and 183 days during the 3-year period that includes the current year and the 2 years immediately before that, counting: All the days you were present in the current year, and 1/3 of the days you were present in the first year before the current year, and 1/6 of the days they were present in the second year before the current year.”

Whatever the fuck that means.

And what that means is the US will lure Canadians across the border to spend their money on good bourbon whiskey and hookers who don’t wear parkas just long enough to send them a letter, “Welcome, US resident! Please file your income tax return on your worldwide income and, by the way, let us know where you have every dime hidden. Or else.”

Bottom line? Threats, fines, imprisonment, and serious bodily harm.

And insanity, of course. The greater the coercion in any society, the greater the occurrence of mental illness. It explains why most Americans of the intentional variety are crazier than a shit house rat. Among indigenous cultures, that is those folks who walked barefooted, chewed roots, and more or less enjoyed themselves before we came in a mass-slaughtered them for getting in the way of progress, there was no insanity. They had no need to chew a handful of Prozac to make it through a day because no institutions of higher violence were threatening them.

But when you add modernity’s coercions not present in those simple, more or less anarchic, cultures, e.g., school, employment, and governments that take joy in fining and imprisoning their own populations, you end up with a society of blabbering, violent morons, one that is alienating, disengaging and no fun.

You end up in Canada.

After the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act goes into effect, coercion will be exponentially multiplied and Canadians, also known as ‘unintentional Americans,’ will pay a grim psychological price for their ignorance and many of your northern brethren will suffer until they die by their own hands just to stop the pain or be gnawed apart by some US bureaucrat with a serious grudge to settle because he got beat up by the bigger boys in gym class when he was in junior high school.

That’s the answer,

Jim Karger

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The Paradigm Shift In Financial Planning The Government Wont Tell You About

March 21st, 2014

 

By Jeff Berwick.

The financial markets have always been somewhat of a rigged game.  Having started Canada’s largest financial website, Stockhouse.com, even I never have seemed to make anywhere near as much as the numerous brokers I have had over the last two decades, many of whom have long retired to their offshore mansions… giving creedence to that old quip about a broker inviting one of his clients out on his yacht and the client asking, “So, where are all your client’s yachts?”

However, thanks to a perfect storm of technological innovation and, more importantly, large amounts of money printing, the late 80s through to the early 2000s were good times in general for your average investor.  Much of the money that was printed by central banks found its way into numerous asset classes including stocks and real estate.

In those days if you had a government registered “financial planner” and he had any sense at all you managed to do fairly well or even quite well.

Well, those days are gone.  Long gone.

Today, your average financial advisor could be the biggest risk to your financial future… aside from government, of course.

THE SHIFT

In decades past a financial advisor would usually tell you to “diversify” and recommend a certain percentage in general stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

The problem is, they still do!

The fact that those asset classes – with the exception of some precious metals and agriculture related stocks – are almost certain to lose money means your average financial advisor doesn’t even see the big picture of the massive changes happening throughout the financial, political and monetary world.

Most people that I speak to still seem to think that we live in the 90s.  Those times are long gone.

Today, the biggest risks are currency, bank collapse and seizure/taxation from your own government.  Barely 1 in 100 financial advisors even thinks that is possible much less knows how to protect you from it.

In fact, if your financial advisor isn’t at least helping to internationalize your assets and shelter them properly from taxes and other depredations of the government and banks then he/she may be of no use whatsoever.  Or even worse than useless as they leave your assets inside the US, your IRA inside the US, your stocks in American stocks on a US stock exchange at a US broker, invested in US government debt (Treasury Bills) and your funds in a US bank account.

In that case you can fully expect to lose most of your assets by the end of the decade.

How?  Let’s look at each.



Assets in the US.  By leaving your assets in the US in your own name you are opening yourself up to further taxation increases (which are baked in the cake), frivolous lawsuits which are epidemic (a lawsuit is filed every 2 seconds in the US), and to capital controls in the form of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) later this year. You will find that it will be harder and harder to remove those assets from those risks over time.

IRA Nationalization.  By leaving your IRA as a standard IRA it is a sitting duck for nationalization.  Barack Obama put out the first trial balloon, with MyRA recently, trying to lure people to voluntarily nationalize their IRAs.  But plans are in the works to completely nationalize IRAs as un-taxed retirement and pension funds are sitting ducks for a bankrupt government scavenging for funds.  Retirement funds have already been nationalized throughout many parts of Europe and Congress has had committees looking at the viability of nationalizing IRAs and putting them into T-Bills that pay between negative 5-9% per year currently when taking monetary inflation into account.

Stocks.  As stated above, the overall stock market is mostly rigged against the small players.  But, even if you are good enough to beat the market you will find that most of your nominal gains are taken away by inflation.  And what’s left is taken away by capital gains tax on those nominal gains.  Worse, in the coming years we will see most brokerage houses go under… and what many don’t know is that nearly all shares are held in “street form” which means that they never register the shares in your name.  So, when the brokerage goes under they take your shares down with you in bankruptcy.  You can guard against that by registering shares in your own name, however – and this is another thing your financial advisor won’t tell you or know about – through a process detailed in our report, Bulletproof Shares (free to TDV subscribers or $44.95).

Banks.  All banks in the western world are already insolvent just by the very nature of their fractional reserve system.  They don’t have enough funds to pay out all depositor’s should they all wish to withdraw at the same time.  In fact, most are so overleveraged that they would have collapsed in 2008 if it weren’t for the Federal Reserve bailout.  We have seen “bank bail-ins” in Cyprus and just today in the Ukraine.  Europe and Canada have already written “bank bail-ins” into legislation.



IGNORE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, GOVERNMENT AND MOST FINANCIAL ADVISORS

Your average person has no idea what is going on and what is coming.  Many people will get financially destroyed in the coming years as they are not aware of what is going on.

For the most part you have to find out these things for yourself because the media nor your government registered financial advisor either don’t know or won’t tell you.  Or, stay tuned to places like The Dollar Vigilante to get this information.

Or, attend our upcoming TDV Wealth Management Crisis Conference in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico from April 30th to May 4th (with an early bird special price if you book by April 2nd) to not only learn about all the risks but begin taking action immediately, on site, to secure and protect your assets.

This isn’t the end of the world… it is just the end of the world (and more specifically, the monetary system) as we currently know it.  Throughout human history there have been countless radical and dramatic shifts… and this is just one of them.  For that reason, at the Crisis Conference, we’ll be taking a lot of time just to enjoy ourselves also… There will be nightly cocktail parties and dinners, golf excursions and even a shopping excursion for the ladies…

The ship is sinking, but if you are well-prepared, you already have your lifeboat. You can continue drinking and dancing on the doomed ship. Most others remain completely unaware of what is to come and they too are drinking and dancing. They will lose most of their assets.

By the time they figure it out it will be mostly too late.  Always stay one step ahead of the crowd.

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The Best Case For Gold In Years: World War III

March 16th, 2014

 

By Michael Bach.

 

[The following post is by TDV editor-in-chief, Jeff Berwick. It appears in it’s entirety in this week’s edition of TDV Newsletter] The Ukraine is a cesspool of geo-political posturing, and it poses a great danger to our society. What is going on in the Ukraine is openly admitted by mainstream media to be largely helped along by US taxpayer money via government. This involvement by the US, on Russia’s border, is really an act of war. As The Guardian wrote in 2004: “[…]the campaign [Orange Revolution] is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes[…]The Democratic party’s National Democratic institution, the Republicn party’s International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soro’s open society institute.” The US-NATO military and intelligence chimera was not supposed to expand at the end of the Cold War. But it did. And this poses a problem for everybody, especially the children and unborn. The battle for the Ukraine leaves room for error and escalation, of this there can be absolutely no doubt. None. Of course, the worst case scenario is World War III. The Pentagon and NATO for sure does not see this as an “abstract concept,” as many researchers point out. What Might World War III look like? As the US prepared to invade Iraq, there was a famous exercise by NATO and the US named TIRANNT, standing for Theater Iran Near Term. At that point, the media was going haywire over the military threat of Iran, and threatening pre-emptive war. TIRANNT placed Russia, China and Iran and North Korea as the foes of the west. In other words, this is who the western military alliance saw as the theoretical military alliance against them in a theoretical World War III situation. That scenario was leaked to the Washington Post. Suffice it to say World War III wouldn’t be pretty. The Ukrainian Minister of Defense has been replaced as have key commanders of the Ukrainian forces, many of whom were dismissed. This seems like a classic coup. It must be said large sectors of the armed forces and the police there are loyal to President Yanukovych. These are the ingredients for a civil war, as many in the Crimea apparently feared from the beginning. And, of course, the purpose of the coup was to install puppets. Word of Neo-Nazi’s being placed in powerful positions is betokening of Brussels and the US desiring a political apparatus in the Ukraine which obeys orders. The impoverishment of the Ukrainian population via western creditors and the IMF is a sure thing. This is what the IMF means by offering aid to countries. The aid always comes with certain conditions – IMF reforms – and any aid offered to a country like Ukraine is typically needed right away to pay down debt. So, economically, Ukraine will be inheriting more debt is all. This debt will come with conditions such as frozen wages, austerity measures and the like. Economic collapse of the Ukraine is already underway. The Ukrainian people will be totally bankrupted. And passionate fascists are in power… Failing Diplomacy As I type this, diplomacy is failing over the Ukraine. Already the US Department of Energy has announced that it would sell crude from the US strategic petroleum reserve. This move is geared towards undermining Russia for which high energy prices are more important than the performance of the Russian stock market. Bloomberg also reported that the US, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “has claimed that in the case of an escalation of unrest in Crimea, the US Army is ready to back up Ukraine and its allies in Europe with military actions.” The Gold Factor Other strange news is coming out of the Ukraine as well. This story is specious at best, but interesting nonetheless. According to the pro-Russian newspaper Iskra, Ukraine’s gold reserves were loaded onboard an unmarked plane, which subsequently took the gold to the US. From the source: Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport. According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane’s appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the airport all with their license plates missing. Fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor stepped out, some armed with machine guns. These people loaded the plane with more than forty heavy boxes. After this, several mysterious men arrived and also entered the plane. The loading was carried out in a hurry. After unloading, the plateless cars immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis. Airport officials who saw this mysterious “special operation” immediately notified the administration of the airport, which however strongly advised them “not to meddle in other people’s business.” Later, the editors were called by one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Income and Fees, who reported that, according to him, tonight on the orders of one of the “new leaders” of Ukraine, all the gold reserves of the Ukraine were taken to the United States. The folks at GATA looked into this. They asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York about Ukraine’s gold, to which the Fed replied: “Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder. You may want to contact the National Bank of Ukraine to discuss this report.” What’s for sure is that tensions over the Ukraine have made the best case for gold in years. In fact, gold rose to a six month high on Thursday due to global economic concerns (slowdown in China) and of course worries about Russia and the US’s Ukraine standoff. Gold began to rise when Russia launched military exercises near its border with Ukraine, and data of US involvement in the Ukraine started surfacing. This trend hasn’t slowed.

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