Markets hold breath as China's shadow banking grinds to a halt

Out of the shadows and into...a crash?

A slew of shockingly weak data from China and Japan has led to a sharp sell-off in Asian stock markets and the biggest one-day crash in iron ore prices since the Lehman crisis, calling into question the strength of the global recovery.

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Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse

A top financial advisor, worried that Obamacare, the NSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a “bug-out bag” that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.

David John Marotta, a Wall Street expert and financial advisor and Forbes contributor, said in a note to investors, “Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list. There are some terrible people in this world. And you are safer when your trusted neighbors have firearms.”

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I can only say: I'm sorry, America.

As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time. READ MORE

So why are all of these very prominent executives cashing out all of a sudden?

The Big Dogs On Wall Street Are Starting To Get Very Nervous

That is a very good question.

Meanwhile, some of the most respected names on Wall Street are warning that it is time to get out of the market.

The Milk Street Cafe: a proud day for OWS

This must be a proud day indeed for the Occupy movement. Not only do they manage to shut down the flow of goods from the ports to shopping centers during the Christmas buying season, but they succeed in closing down a start-up business that was providing nearly 100 jobs. That should really teach those investment bankers and stock brokers a thing or two, eh?

OWS manages to shut down a business...

OCCUPY CHECKLIST

Occupier movement stands for riot, assault, rape, vandalism, sexual harassment, public urination, public defecation and public masturbation...

PowerLine: And Barack Obama owns it lock, stock and barrel.

Six weeks after turning a small park into a fetid slum and spawning ratty imitations across the country, the socialist-inspired movement with a union face and bulging bank account is at a crossroads

Running a protest movement apparently involves a lot of dirty work and isn’t so much fun. Imagine how hard it will be to run the world!

‘Lord of Flies’ in Zuccotti Park

Trading Places

Uh oh: The kids want your money.

The Post & Email

IFLRY: We are the Young Liberals of the world...and we want your money!

As liberals and radicals we are in favour of a market economy operating within the limits of a fair distribution of wealth and ecological sustainability. To reach the goal of equal opportunities distribution of wealth has to take place within the states as well as between them.

The current incarnation of this cabal started in Denmark in 1979--but it really goes all the way back to 1947.

According to their Facebook page, they have "close to 100 Member Organizations all over the world, representing 2,5 million young liberals across the globe."

Wonder what happens to all the old hippies, er, IFLRYs? (Can't help remembering Logan's Run.)

BTW, what is happening on October 15th??? ("Occupy the World" -- check out the black stripes painted over the American flag.)

Interesting that any and all policies that would "distribute wealth" would have to come from a government big enough to enforce it. Since that is the opposite of what the Founding Fathers created here in America, any and all such movements that support distribution-of-wealth schemes are, by nature, anti-American.

Not only that, but the forced distribution of wealth requires the abolishment of property rights which is the foundation of all civilation. No one would ever invest in any type of development, invention, building, business or venture that did not give them ownership--period. That is why all primitive societies did not advance until those rights were possible.

But getting back to IFLRY...

They've made it clear that they are about the money. Specifically, YOUR money.

Talk about greed!

Their entire mission statement is about how to get other people's money. And they seem to feel morally entitled to it.

By what right?

It all comes down to violence which is always what the leeches of the world intend and intimate when they try to con you out of the fruits of YOUR labor.

Let's be clear (as faux President Obama tends to repeat): When they can't make you feel guilty enough to give them your money, they WILL find a way to take it from you.

When they go after your guns, you know they are getting impatient.

The organization (WFP) run by current White House political director Patrick Gaspard is paying far left activists to continue the protests against Wall Street

No wonder Barack Obama supports the far left protest movement!

Shocker. Obama’s Top Political Advisor Directly Linked to Occupy Wall Street Protests

Do we really want a president who helps pay for people to defecate on police cars?

DOWN WITH EVIL CORPORATIONS!

This is what good journalism looks like

Poor Colleen Long. She works for the Associated Press. And she just doesn't understand what's going on with that 'Occupy Wall Street' protest.

Occupy Wall Street Protests -- This Is What Stupidity Looks Like

Virus in the White House

It took a personal computer disaster for me to realize this analogy: President Obama is a virus (or trojan) in the seat of our government with all the corresponding problems, headaches, heartaches and loss that this situation entails.

I've been through these things before off and on, but never to the degree as I have during the last week. Even though I am vigilant about protection, some things slipped through the cracks and I was too busy to acknowledge many of the signs (although with this specific situation, that may not have changed the outcome).

I am going to be dealing with trying to reconstruct some things even though I do have a program that restored a lot (except for the programs). And I was just treading water with my emails which I didn't get to check for most of the week.

Anyway, I can't think of a better explanation of what this country is going through right now. It is just as destructive, time-killing, and so very unnecessary in the sense that all of us would be able to spend our time creating prosperity and building relationships instead of fighting off infection and trying to manage the destruction that follows in the wake of all such disasters.

Obama has infected the White House and will destroy the country if we don't vote him out. If the damage he and his ilk have created has gone too far, we may have to wipe the drive. That is called a crash. And no matter how many ignorant dolts pee in McDonald's so they can camp in New York City and protest in Wall Street, they WILL NOT like the results they are seeking.

"We’re on the verge of a great, great depression."

CNBC: "The [Federal Reserve] knows it."

Wall Street Baffled by Slowing Economy, Low Yields: Trader

If you still had any question as to whether or not the United States is now the world’s preeminent banana republic, the final verdict was just delivered and the decision was unanimous.

This was a hostile world takeover orchestrated through economic attacks by a very small group of unelected global bankers. They paralyzed the system, then were given the power to recreate it according to their own desires. No free market, no democracy of any kind. All done in secrecy. In the process, they gave themselves all-time record-breaking bonuses and impoverished tens of millions of people - they have put into motion a system that will inevitably collapse again and utterly destroy the very existence of what is left of an economic middle class.

That is not hyperbole. That is what happened.

The Wall Street Pentagon Papers: Biggest Scam In World History Exposed - Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?

Witness last week's land speed record for unintended consequences, as a liability provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform brought new issues to a screeching halt in the $1.4 trillion asset-backed securities market.

With geniuses like Ohio Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy running things, who needs enemies? Oh wait, I forgot: We have a failed community organizer and closet Muslim for a President...

Kilroy Was Here, Alas

By getting rid of limitations on leverage, Wall Street has raised the odds of another financial crisis.

The most crucial element in the re-regulation of Wall Street has been gutted. At least for now, there will be no limits on how much money Wall Street can borrow to do its business. It's an invitation to dare a new meltdown or financial crisis. The big banks' lobbyists have convinced Treasury and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, not to support Rep Barney Frank's, D-Mass., insistence on limiting the leverage Wall Street can use to trade securities.

Treasury, Dodd Sell Out To Wall Street

Investigation into Obama administration and Wall Street bailout of Chicago's Shorebank

Wow...Obama and Kenya (again)!

Writer Michelle Malkin points out a very close tie between Shorebank and Obama: a video of Obama visiting Kenya in 2006 in which Shorebank is depicted as a model for a program to make small loans to poor people in Kenya. In the video, Obama makes promises of U.S. economic help to Kenya. The video does not explain why Obama and his wife chose to visit Kenya at that time over all of the other poor African countries.

SMALL INSTITUTION BASED IN CHICAGO RECEIVES LAST-MINUTE HELP FROM GIANT WALL STREET LENDERS, BUT WHY?

What actually caused the financial crisis in the United States?

From a financial consultant to major corporations (who wishes to remain anonymous):

This was government driven from the start. The systemic risk was injected by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and fueled by the Fed. Congress continued to encourage the bad behavior by not reining in Fannie and Freddie and in many cases encouraged them to go further. Regulation also encouraged banks to load up on the hidden systemic risk.

Wall Street is primarily a symptom of the Governments off balance sheet social program financing scheme. It makes Enron look like child's play. Those in Government who are responsible are using the typical populist scapegoat ploy to avoid scrutiny.

The Fed provided the fuel in greater dollars. Fannie and Freddie were the conduit which incentivized the banks to increase loan originations. Fannie and Freddie fed the junk to Wall Street often misrepresenting subprime mortgages as prime, which were then packaged into opaque securities obscured through multiple parties and sheer numbers in a pool. The securities were then often mis-rated by S&P, Fitch, & Moody's (required by gov't regulation for bank investment) a defacto government oligopoly, which then affected the eventual under capitalization by the banks once the securities ratings were downgraded. Again banks were encouraged to invest in mortgage-backed securities by capital requirement regulations because they were perceived by regulators to be less risk than individual mortgages or typical securities such as bonds or commercial loans, etc.

Then Fannie was purchasing a large number of mortgage-backed securities essentially making the market and giving the market the impression these securities were more liquid than they really were, which increased the price. If these people were not in the government or in a Government Sponsored Entity, they would all be in jail today.

WSJ.com: The Lesson of Basel's Bean Counters
Decades of obsession with accounting standards couldn't overcome the perverse incentives created by 'too big to fail.'
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704508904575192534100550538.html
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WSJ.com: Angels Out of America
How the Dodd bill harms start-ups.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704671904575194483171910348.html

Mr. Dodd's bill would change all this for the worse. Most preposterously, it would require that start-ups seeking angel investments file with the Securities and Exchange Commission and endure a 120-day review. Rare is the new company that doesn't need immediate access to the capital it raises, and a four-month delay is the kind of rule popular in banana republics that create few new businesses.

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WSJ.com: An Economy of Liars
When government and business collude, it's called crony capitalism. Expect more of this from the financial reforms contemplated in Washington.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704508904575192430373566758.html

The idea that multiplying rules and statutes can protect consumers and investors is surely one of the great intellectual failures of the 20th century. Any static rule will be circumvented or manipulated to evade its application. Better than multiplying rules, financial accounting should be governed by the traditional principle that one has an affirmative duty to present the true condition fairly and accurately—not withstanding what any rule might otherwise allow. And financial institutions should have a duty of care to their customers. Lawyers tell me that would get us closer to the common law approach to fraud and bad dealing.

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WSJ.com: Staffer One Day, Opponent the Next
The revolving door can turn swiftly at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052702303450704575160043010579272.html
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WSJ.com: Fannie and Freddie Amnesia
Taxpayers are on the hook for about $400 billion, partly because Sen. Obama helped to block reform.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704671904575193910683111250.html

The date of the Senate Banking Committee's action is important. It was in 2005 that the GSEs—which had been acquiring increasing numbers of subprime and Alt-A loans for many years in order to meet their HUD-imposed affordable housing requirements—accelerated the purchases that led to their 2008 insolvency. If legislation along the lines of the Senate committee's bill had been enacted in that year, many if not all the losses that Fannie and Freddie have suffered, and will suffer in the future, might have been avoided.

Why was there no action in the full Senate? As most Americans know today, it takes 60 votes to cut off debate in the Senate, and the Republicans had only 55. To close debate and proceed to the enactment of the committee-passed bill, the Republicans needed five Democrats to vote with them. But in a 45 member Democratic caucus that included Barack Obama and the current Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), these votes could not be found.

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WSJ.com: The Dodd Bill and U.S. Competitiveness
Its new taxes and regulations will make the U.S. an unattractive jurisdiction for financial companies.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704117304575137980120672008.html
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WSJ.com: If You Liked Fannie and Freddie...
... You'll love Chris Dodd's latest reform proposal. It would make many more companies too big to fail and lead to far greater financial consolidation.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704743404575127541719271252.html

If passed in its current form, the bill would give the government control over the financial system in roughly the same way, and to the same extent, that ObamaCare would take over the nation's health care. There isn't a public option, exactly, but the private firms involved would be so heavily regulated that they would be effectively controlled by the government.

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WSJ.com: Most Pundits Are Wrong About the Bubble
The repeal of Glass-Steagall has helped us weather the storm.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122428270641246049.html

As for the evils of deregulation, exactly which measures are they referring to? Financial deregulation for the past three decades consisted of the removal of deposit interest-rate ceilings, the relaxation of branching powers, and allowing commercial banks to enter underwriting and insurance and other financial activities. Wasn't the ability for commercial and investment banks to merge (the result of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act) a major stabilizer to the financial system this past year? Indeed, it allowed Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch to be acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, and allowed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to convert to bank holding companies to help shore up their positions during the mid-September bear runs on their stocks.

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WSJ.com: "A Silver Lining to the Financial Crisis: A More Realistic View of Capitalism"
Two familiar scapegoats for the financial crisis---deregulation and bankers' bonuses--- don't appear to be responsible for the disaster.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704454304575081680480599148.html

But under the recourse rule, "well-capitalized" American commercial banks were required to spend 80 percent more capital on commercial loans, 80 percent more capital on corporate bonds, and 60 percent more capital on individual mortgages than they had to spend on asset-backed securities, including mortgage-backed bonds, as long as these bonds were rated AA or AAA or were issued by a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), such as Fannie or Freddie. Specifically, $2 in capital was required for every $100 in mortgage-backed bonds, compared to $5 for the same amount in mortgage loans and $10 for the same amount in commercial loans.

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WSJ.com: "The Price for Fannie and Freddie Keeps Going Up"
Barney Frank's decision to 'roll the dice' on subsidized housing is becoming an epic disaster for taxpayers.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624681873427574.html

There is more to this ugly situation. New research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A.

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WSJ.com: Let's Write the Rating Agencies Out of Our Law
By Robert Rosenkranz
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123086073738348053.html

Indeed, that is the entire raison d'être of the $6 trillion structured-finance business, which serves little economic function other than as a rating-agency arbitrage. Subprime mortgages (and all manner of other risky loans) held directly by financial institutions are questionable assets with high associated capital charges. Each one alone would deserve a "junk" rating. Structured finance simply piles such risky assets into bundles and slices the bundles into tranches. The rating agencies deemed some 85% of the tranches by value as AAA, and nearly 99% as investment grade -- thus turning dross into gold by a sort of ratings alchemy.

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AmericanThinker.com: Why the Mortgage Crisis Happened
By M. Jay Wells
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/what_really_happened_in_the_mo.html
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Video of the CSPAN congressional hearings on the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Accounting scandal which came to light in 2004.
see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs
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Clinton administration's "BANK AFFIRMATIVE ACTION"
Andrew Cuomo references a Federal Reserve Report that was later discredited.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivmL-lXNy64
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IBDeditorials.com: How the Fed, Media and Academia Aided and Abetted Lending Debacle
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=459798
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WSJ.com: A Mortgage Fable
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122204078161261183.html
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WSJ.com: The Fannie Mae Gang
By Paul A. Gigot
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121677050160675397.html
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WSJ.com: Information Haves and Have-Nots
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122203382068860947.html
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NationalReview.com: Inside Obama's ACORN
By Stanley Kurtz
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDZiMjkwMDczZWI5ODdjOWYxZTIzZGIyNzEyMjE0ODI=
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IBDeditorials.com: Congress Tries To Fix What It Broke
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=490605
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WSJ.com: Faith in Ratings
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212668589565225.html
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WSJ.com: The Moody's Blues
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120303641478270219.html
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WSJ.com: AAA Oligopoly
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120398754592392261.html
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WSJ.com: Another 'Deregulation' Myth
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122428201410246019.html
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WSJ.com: Spitzer and Sarbox Were Deregulation?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122541609109386729.html
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WSJ.com: The Ratings Racket
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121435051391301517.html
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WSJ.com: The Meltdown That Wasn't - A primer on credit default swaps, the latest Beltway scapegoat.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122670411909729683.html
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WSJ.com: Bad Accounting Rules Helped Sink AIG
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169320421449849.html
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NYTimes.com: Dear A.I.G., I Quit! http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html
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SeattlePI.com: Activists vent at AIG executives http://www.seattlepi.com/business/404117_aigbus22.html