Another Top Banker arrested

Monte Paschi former finance chief held in Italy

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/14/us-montepaschi-arrest-idUSBRE91D0FG20130214
By Silvia Ognibene Manuela D'Alessandro

SIENA/MILAN | Thu Feb 14, 2013 7:51am EST

SIENA/MILAN (Reuters) - Italian police arrested on Thursday the former head of Monte dei Paschi's finance department, who is at the center of a probe into alleged fraud and bribery at Italy's third largest bank, prosecutors said.
...

Babylon(today's too big to fail tyranical system) is getting judged more and more from all directions. Only the Lord can make things happen as such. I hear that the month of March is going to be hot. Watch the news especially on wall street.

Greek Former Mayor Gets Life for Embezzlement

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/world/...ement.html?_r=0

ATHENS — "The former mayor of Greece’s second city, Salonika, and two of his top aides were sentenced to life in jail on Wednesday after being found guilty of embezzling almost 18 million euros, or $23.5 million, in state funds — a rare conviction in a case involving the political corruption that has contributed to the country’s dysfunction and economic decline.

A court in Salonika, a northern port city also known as Thessaloniki, found that the local authorities had set up an “embezzlement machine” and that Vassilis Papageorgopoulos, a prominent conservative who served two terms as mayor from 1999 to 2010, had been “aware of the whole plan but had stayed on the sidelines, feigning ignorance.” The scheme was conceived by Michalis Lemousias, a general secretary of the city administration, who operated with Panagiotis Saxonis, the city’s treasurer, the court found.

Two other former treasury officials were given terms of 15 and 10 years, and 13 other former employees were acquitted after a five-month trial that began after an estimated shortfall of $68 million was found in the city’s coffers. The court said there was proof that of that sum, $23.5 million had been swindled. In trial testimony last month, Mr. Saxonis admitted that the cash transactions had taken place in his office in “flimsy carrier bags” and said he had been taking orders from his superiors.

Mr. Papageorgopoulos, 65, is a prominent member of the conservative New Democracy party, which leads Greece’s current fragile coalition government. He insisted that he had had nothing to do with the embezzlement, and he and his former aides are expected to appeal. “I am sure that certain people will die feeling remorse,” he said after hearing the verdict, prompting the presiding judge to remark, “At any rate, that won’t be us.”

Mr. Papageorgopoulos, a former sprinter and medical student nicknamed the Flying Doctor, was succeeded as mayor in December 2010 by Yiannis Boutaris, a left-leaning winemaker who has shaken up Salonika with a drive for reform. On coming to power, Mr. Boutaris accused his predecessor of providing inaccurate financial figures.

The convictions on Wednesday prompted a frenzied response in the media and on blogs, where many hailed the unusually severe sentences.

Few politicians have faced prosecution for graft and other financial crimes in Greece, and convictions are extremely rare. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s governing coalition has pledged to crack down on the deep-rooted corruption among the political and business elite that has angered a public reeling from nearly three years of austerity.

In September, the Greek authorities began investigating the bank accounts of more than 30 Greek politicians to determine whether they should be charged with tax evasion and other financial crimes. That inquiry has yet to yield any prosecutions, but last month, Greek lawmakers began an inquiry into George Papaconstantinou, a former Socialist finance minister, over his handling of a list of wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts, a potential source of tax revenue that was never used by the authorities. That investigation began after prosecutors said the names of three of the former minister’s relatives had been removed from the list."

Vitter and Brown Oppose Too Big To Fail . . . too little, too late?
Senater Sherrod Brown speech to the US President that we need to emmediatly fix the wall street Too Big to Fail Banking system problem that is destroying the country. Very good speech with lots of data and quotes from leading people.



Here's Sen. David Vitter who also delivered a speech opposing the Too Big to Fail Banking System.



-----

Also Elizabeth Warren has scared the Wall Street Bankers and its regulators this past few weeks ...

Elizabeth Warren Scares Bankers
"his video of Senator Elizabeth Warren putting the hurt on a bunch of regulators in her first hearing on the Senate Banking Committee is pretty amusing. I’m a big fan of the clip that starts at about 2:30, when Warren asks Tom Curry, who heads a little regulatory agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, why the OCC hasn’t taken more Wall Street banks to trial, rather than settling out of court and getting them to pay a penalty when they break the law, and Curry hems and haws and can’t really answer, so he basically goes full Milton from Office Space and then just kind of trails off and sulks.


?Even though Wall Street bankers weren’t the target of Warren’s interrogation yesterday – the regulators who oversee them were – the financial industry is apparently freaking out about the hearing, on the theory that it augurs a tough road for them ahead in dealing with Warren as a senator. Ben White got some quotes from scared financial industry executives who called her performance “shameless grandstanding” and accused her of competing with Ted Cruz for the title of “most extreme fringe freshman senator.”

Which raises the question: Are these people kidding?

Elizabeth Warren did not end up in the Senate despite taking a hard-line approach to Wall Street; she was elected almost entirely because of it. I’d wager that people outside Massachusetts who donated money to Warren’s campaign or otherwise supported her run for office can’t tell you anything about her political platform except that she is tough on Wall Street.

Sure, there was always the possibility that she would mellow out once elected. Keep her head down, be a workhorse instead of a show pony, and all of that. But that was always wishful thinking from the financial industry and its lobbyists. As any web editor with access to traffic stats could tell you, people love when Warren squares off on Wall Street. It delights them, the sight of a bespectacled middle-aged professor absolutely hammering suit-clad financiers, refusing to slip into the numbing jargon of the industry (note, in the video, how she translates Tom Curry’s “enforcement actions” back into “settlements,” a concept more normal people can immediately understand), and generally being possessed of enough specific industry knowledge that she is impossible to steamroll with technicalities.

Yes, Warren is a populist. Yes, some of her views seem reflexive and could be harmful if implemented. (Charging banks with lots of crimes, for example, would likely have the unintended consumer-unfriendly result of putting a lot of them out of business.) And yes, she sometimes misfires – aiming her wrath at, say, a panel of regulators who can only bring civil suits in the first place, rather than officials in the Justice Department likeLanny Breuer, who could actually have pressed criminal charges against banks but chose not to.

But she is also talking to Wall Street in a way it’s not used to hearing from elected officials, and it’s making her a rising star in the Democratic Party. Bankers should probably stop griping, and start getting used to it.

----
SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA) GRILLS CHAIRMAN OF THE FED BEN BERNANKE


Published on Feb 26, 2013

Clipped from:
Monetary Policy and the Economy
Feb 26, 2013
From CSPAN.org. Feb 26, 2013. Ben Bernanke testified on the U.S. economic outlook for the year and the future of economic growth. In his remarks he defended the U.S. central bank’s bond-buying stimulus, urged lawmakers to avoid sharp spending cuts set to go into effect by the end of the week, and spoke about successful efforts to curb inflation to stimulate the economy. Clip includes Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Questioning Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, over “Too Big To Fail Banks”.

Eric Holder Admits Some Banks Are Just Too Big To Prosecute
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/eric-holder-banks-too-big_n_2821741.html

Senate Banking Committee Hearing - Bank Money Laundering .



Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Q&A at the March 7, 2013 Banking Committee hearing entitled “Patterns of Abuse: Assessing Bank Secrecy Act Compliance and Enforcement.” Witnesses were: David Cohen, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, United States Department of the Treasury; Thomas Curry, Comptroller, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; and Jerome H. Powell, Governor, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Live-Blogging Senate Hearing Tomorrow, When J.P. Morgan Chase Will Be Torn a New One

Posted March 14
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blo...4#ixzz2Ni5GuUND

"Beginning at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow, I'm going to be live-blogging a hearing held by Senator Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations – the best crew of high-end detectives this side of The Wire, in my opinion – who will be grilling J.P. Morgan Chase executives and high-ranking federal regulators in a get-together entitled, "J.P. Morgan Chase "Whale" Trades: A Case History Of Derivatives Risks And Abuses." This follows this afternoon's release of a brutal 301-page report commissioned by Levin and Republican John McCain by the same name.

The Subcommittee investigators, largely the same crew who unraveled financial scandals surrounding infamous Goldman Sachs trades like Abacus and Timberwolf, and also took on HSBC's trans-global money-laundering activities in an extraordinarily detailed report issued last summer, have now taken aim at the heart of the Too-Big-To-Fail issue through its examination of the much-publicized catastrophic derivative trades made by its amusingly-nicknamed "London Whale" trader, Bruno Iksil, last year.

Most ordinary people dimly remember the London Whale episode now, and even at the time struggled to understand even the vaguest contours of the story while mainstream reporters (including people like myself) were trying with all their might to make sense of it from afar. What most people got out of that story was that J.P. Morgan Chase somehow lost buttloads of money through some sort of impossibly complex derivative trade – billions, though nobody could ever settle on an exact number – and that this was somehow a very bad thing that required the attention of the federal government, although even that part of it was a bit of a mystery to most ordinary people.

Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail

Why should we care if a private bank, or more to the point a private banker like Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, loses a few billion here and there? What business is it of ours? And why did we have to have congressional hearings about it last year? The whole thing certainly seemed a big mystery to Dimon himself, who dragged himself to Washington and spent the entire time rolling his eyes and snorting at Senators' questions, clearly put out that he even had to be there.

This new report by the Permanent Subcommittee answers the question of why the public needed to be involved in that episode. What the report describes is an epic breakdown in the supervision of so-called "Too Big to Fail" banks. The report confirms everyone's worst fears about what goes on behind closed doors at such companies, in the various financial sausage-factories that comprise their profit-making operations.

If the information in the report is correct, Chase followed the behavioral model of every corrupt/failing hedge fund this side of Bernie Madoff and Sam Israel, only it did it on a much more enormous scale and did it with federally-insured deposits. The fund used (in part) federally-insured money to create, in essence, a kind of super high-risk hedge fund that gambled on credit derivatives, and just like Sam Israel did with his Bayou fund, when it got in trouble, it resorted to fudging its numbers in order to disguise the fact that it was losing money hand over fist.

Chase for years hid the very existence of this operation from banking regulators and lied about the purpose of the fund (saying it was purely a hedging operation when it stopped being a hedge and instead became a wild directional gamble), and it also changed the way it calculated the fund's value once it started to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Even worse, the bank's own internal auditors signed off on the phoney-baloney accounting of this Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP), at one point allowing it to claim $719 million in losses when the real number was closer to $1.2 billion.

How did they do this? In the years leading up to January of 2012, Chase used a standard, plain-vanilla method to price the derivative instruments in its portfolio. The method was known as "mid-market pricing": if on any given day you had a range of offers for a certain instrument – the "bid-ask" range – "mid-market pricing" just meant splitting the difference and calling the value the numerical middle in that range.

But in the beginning of 2012, Chase started to lose lots of money on the derivatives in its SCP, and just decided to change its valuations, that they weren't in the business of doing "mids" anymore. One executive thought the "market was irrational." As the Subcommittee concluded:

Quote:

By the end of January, the CIO had stopped valuing two sets of credit index instruments on the SCP's books, the CDX IG9 7-year and the CDX IG9 10-year, near the midpoint price and had substituted instead noticeably more favorable prices.

If you can fight through the jargon, what this basically means is that Chase decided to go into the fiction business and invent a new way to value its crazy-ass derivative bets, using, among other things, a computerized model the company designed itself called "P&L predict" which subjectively calculated the value of the entire fund toward the end of every business day.

If this all sounds familiar, it's because it's the same story we've heard over and over again in the financial-scandal era, from Enron to WorldCom to Lehman Brothers – when the going gets tough, and huge companies start to lose money, they change their own accounting methodologies to hide their screw-ups, passing the buck over and over again until the mess explodes into the public's lap. The difference is that Chase is a much bigger and more dangerous company to be engaging in this kind of behavior.

An even scarier section of the report regards the reaction of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, the primary government regulator of Chase. The report exposes two huge problems here. One, Chase consistently hid crucial information from the OCC, including the sort of massive increases in risk the OCC was created precisely to monitor. Two, even when the bank didn't hide stuff, the OCC was either too slow or too disinterested to take notice of potential problems. From the report:

During 2011, for example, the notional size of the SCP grew tenfold from about $4 billion to $51 billion, but the bank never informed the OCC of the increase. At the same time, the bank did file risk reports

Quote:

with the OCC disclosing that the CIO repeatedly breached the its stress limits in the first half of 2011, triggering them eight times, on occasion for weeks at a stretch, but the OCC failed to follow up with the bank.

In other words, Chase added nearly $50 billion in risk and failed to mention the fact to the OCC – but the OCC also failed to bat an eyelid when Chase breached its stress limits eight times in a space of six months, often for weeks at a time. Do you feel safer now?

This episode proves what everyone already implicitly understands about these gigantic banking institutions: that their accounting is often little more than a monstrous black box within which any sort of mischief can and probably is being hidden from shareholders, counterparties, and the public, which has a direct interest in the health of these banks because (a) their enormous size makes them systemically important, i.e. we'd all be screwed if any of them collapsed, and (b) they are the supposedly cautious and conservative guardians of billions in federally-insured deposits.

The Senate investigators highlighted a frightening metaphor to explain what they found out about Chase's response to its burgeoning accounting disaster last winter and spring:

The head of the CIO's London office, Achilles Macris, once compared managing the Synthetic Credit Portfolio, with its massive, complex, moving parts, to flying an airplane. The OCC Examiner-in-Charge at JPMorgan Chase told the Subcommittee that if the Synthetic Credit Portfolio were an airplane, then the risk metrics were the flight instruments. In the first quarter of 2012, those flight instruments began flashing red and sounding alarms, but rather than change course, JPMorgan Chase personnel disregarded, discounted, or questioned the accuracy of the instruments instead.

Investigators took note of this and then, sensibly, wondered if Chase was the only bank ignoring all those flashy lights:

The bank's actions not only exposed the many risk management deficiencies at JPMorgan Chase, but also raise systemic concerns about how many other financial institutions may be disregarding risk indicators and manipulating models to artificially lower risk results and capital requirements.

Anyway, officials from Chase and the OCC are being dragged in tomorrow to answer some heavy questions about all of this. Expect a lot of double-talk, sweaty foreheads, pompous "You just don't understand because you don't make enough money" excuses, and other sordid behaviors. Tune in here for updates.

In the meantime, kudos to Senator Levin and to his Republican partner in this investigation, John McCain, for taking on this topic. Increasingly, key voices in the upper chamber like these two, plus Ohio's Sherrod Brown, Iowa's Chuck Grassley, Oregon's Jeff Merkley, Vermont's Bernie Sanders and others are starting to act genuinely worried about the Too Big to Fail issue. Their determination to keep it in the public eye is, to me, a signal that a consensus is forming behind the scenes on the Hill."

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-too-crooked-to-fail-20120314

By Matt Taibbi
March 14, 2012 10:55 AM ET

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some [censored] again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they'd be beneath your average street thug. Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, "robo-signed" evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn't ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.

But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It controls more than 12 percent of America's bank deposits (skirting a federal law designed to prohibit any firm from controlling more than 10 percent), as well as 17 percent of all American home mortgages. By looking the other way and rewarding the bank's bad behavior with a massive government bailout, we actually allowed a huge financial company to not just grow so big that its collapse would imperil the whole economy, but to get away with any and all crimes it might commit. Too Big to Fail is one thing; it's also far too corrupt to survive.

All the government bailouts succeeded in doing was to make the bank even more prone to catastrophic failure – and now that catastrophe might finally be at hand. Bank of America's share price has plunged into the single digits, and the bank faces battles in courtrooms all over America to avoid paying back the hundreds of billions it stole from everyone in sight. Its credit rating, already downgraded to a few rungs above junk status, could plummet with the next bad analyst report, causing a frenzied rush to the exits by creditors, investors and stockholders – an institutional run on the bank.

They're in deep trouble, but they won't die, because our current president, like the last one, apparently believes it's better to project a false image of financial soundness than to allow one of our oligarchic banks to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Last year, the Federal Reserve allowed Bank of America to move a huge portfolio of dangerous bets into a side of the company that happens to be FDIC-insured, putting all of us on the hook for as much as $55 trillion in irresponsible gambles. Then, in February, the Justice Department's so-called foreclosure settlement, which will supposedly provide $26 billion in relief for ripped-off homeowners, actually rewarded the bank with a legal waiver that will allow it to escape untold billions in lawsuits. And this month the Fed will release the results of its annual stress test, in which the bank will once again be permitted to perpetuate its fiction of solvency by grossly overrating the mountains of toxic loans on its books. At this point, the rescue effort is so sweeping and elaborate that it goes far beyond simply gouging the tax dollars of millions of struggling families, many of whom have already been ripped off by the bank – it's making the government, and by extension all of us, full-blown accomplices to the fraud.

Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the way Bank of America does business. It comes down to this: These guys are some of the very biggest assholes on Earth. They lie, cheat and steal as reflexively as addicts, they laugh at people who are suffering and don't have money, they pay themselves huge salaries with money stolen from old people and taxpayers – and on top of it all, they completely suck at banking. And yet the state won't let them go out of business, no matter how much they deserve it, and it won't slap them in jail, no matter what crimes they commit. That makes them not bankers or capitalists, but a class of person that was never supposed to exist in America: royalty.

Self-appointed royalty, it's true – but just as dumb and inbred as the real thing, and every bit as expensive to support. Like all royals, they reached their position in society by being relentlessly dedicated to the cause of Bigness, Unaccountability and the Worthlessness of Others. And just like royals, they spend most of their lives getting deeper in debt, and laughing every year when our taxes go to covering their whist markers. Two and a half centuries after we kicked out the British, it's really come to this?

Bank of America started out in San Francisco in 1904 as an emblem of American capitalism. Founded by a first-generation Italian-American named Amadeo Giannini – it was even originally called the Bank of Italy – the bank set out to serve immigrants denied credit by other banks, and it was instrumental in helping to rebuild the city after the devastating earthquake of 1906.

But like many of the truly bad ideas in history, the present-day version of Bank of America was the product of a testosterone overdose. The concept of an overmassive, acquiring-everything-in-sight, bicoastal megabank was hatched in the terminal inferiority complex of a greed-sick asshole – actually two greed-sick assholes, both of them CEOs of Southern regional banks, who launched a cartoonish arms race of bank acquisitions that would ultimately turn the American business world upside down.

related article : Secrets and Lies of the Bailouts

Greenspan Discusses the End of the Fed ... What Comes Next?

By Anthony Wile

An interesting article in Forbes entitled "If Alan Greenspan Wants To 'End The Fed', Times Must Be Changing," informs us that the predictions we made long ago about the Federal Reserve are coming true. The author of the article is Nathan Lewis, an economist, former strategist for institutional investors and author of a best-selling book Gold, the Once and Future Money.

Our predictions regarding the Fed were first published in May 2009, and were related to a congressional hearing that showed Fed representatives to be woefully unprepared. This was the first inkling we had that the institution itself was in perhaps terminal trouble. Here's what we wrote at the time in an article entited, "Beginning of the End? Fed Cannot Account for $9 Trillion"...

We saw the interview with Elizabeth Coleman on TV and then again and again and again on youtube.com. It is entitled "Is Anyone Minding the Store at the Federal Reserve?" and it is one of the single most astonishing moments (or minutes) ever manifested or preserved in this already-amazing digital era. A century ago, when the powers-that-be pushed through the act that set up the American Federal Reserve – which basically kicked off the central banking era in America and abroad – the kind of technological ubiquity offered by the Internet would certainly have been seen as a major and alarming challenge. Well, it is.

The Grayson/Coleman confrontation has to be seen to be believed, and even then it may not seem quite believable. How could the Fed, in all its monied majesty, offer up someone so unprepared to answer the questions of a single quiet and persevering congressman? Grayson is a liberal, socialist-oriented legislator – a good government type who is fast making a reputation for taking on government corruption. He is pro-regulation but has not been shy about confronting high profile institutions. He may not want to shut down the Federal Reserve but he certainly wants to make it operate under additional scrutiny. And he makes it clear he believes the Fed needs it. And now Coleman knows it.


... read more : http://www.thedailybell.com/28836/Anthon...What-Comes-Next

The Cyprus bailout includes bank robbery
March 17, 2013 at 11:15 AM
by Stephen Jones

"We knew for many months that Cyprus (like Greece) was in big economic trouble and would soon be in need of a bailout or a Jubilee. It seems that they have chosen the bailout route. Today the politicians decided to tax the people's savings accounts. Those who have savings of $100,000 or more will pay 9.9% tax. Those who have less will pay only 6.7%.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53818?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=f74a21fcba-Call_to_Champions&utm_med

This new tactic, approved by the IMF, sets a precedent for any and all countries that may ask for a bailout. Up to now, countries have been known to take retirement funds--or force those funds to "buy" government bonds, which just replaces those funds with IOU's that may never be repaid. That is what our own government has been doing. But to impose a direct tax on savings is something new. Most of those savings accounts in Cyprus are owned by people who have already paid high taxes. Their savings accounts are what was left over after paying tax. So in effect, the government has raised taxes retroactively.

Banks are closed, and Monday is a holiday in Cyprus. People can't get their money out of the banks, except in a very limited way, where they might find an ATM machine.

If anyone thought that people didn't trust banks before, the level of mistrust has just become universal. It is likely that this action will cause bank runs next week in Cyprus, and then the whole banking system there will be in trouble.

This will also cause people in every other country to look more closely at their own bank, especially in countries that are in financial trouble, such as France and Spain. Yes, America, too, although we have not yet reached the critical point. Those who think long-term will start making changes necessary to protect their money from government confiscation.

Jim Sinclair has commented on the Cyprus situation, showing how Russia could react.

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/3/16_Sinclair_-_One_Of_The_Most_Important_Events_In_History_%26_Gold.html


Sinclair makes the case for a rise in gold prices if Russia decides to punish the West for its theft of their funds in Cyprus.

Much news came out regarding Cyprus all week. The Banks remained closed as they know the people will withdraw all their money if they do reopen. This will result in a banking collapse in Cyprus.

Here's Stephen Jones latest comment on this:

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Will panic begin Monday or Tuesday?

http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.net/d...day-or-tuesday/

March 22, 2013 at 9:45 PM
The IMF's theft of Russian money seems to be getting a strong reaction, if the report (below) is true. Russia appears to be taking the IMF action personally as a declaration of financial war against them. This crisis has suddenly uncovered the fact that Cyprus is the financial capital of that part of the world, as its banking assets are 100 times larger than Cyprus' entire Gross National Product. Cyprus is like the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, or Dubai in the Middle East, or Singapore in the Far East.

Russia has done most of its international trade through Cyprus, and now the banks are closed while the government figures out if it wants to proceed with the grand theft on behalf of the IMF and Western banks. It looks like the trade wars have now broken out in an all-out banking war. Russia got caught in the middle, because it looks both East and West. This theft will certainly push them to the East, further reducing the influence and power of Mystery Babylon in the West.

The financial cold war has just turned hot. Russia will now do all they can to punish Europe financially, even as the Cypriots punish their banks and government for stealing their funds. The people of Cyprus have tremendous power right now, believe it or not. They have the power to collapse their own banks by removing their money or by refusing to deposit any cash in those banks. I see one of two scenarios: either the banks will never reopen, or, when they do reopen, the people will remove all their cash and destroy the banks that have robbed them. Either way, God has made His move on March 18, and said, "Check Mate."

We can now be thankful that our government has a Plunge Protection Team propping up the stock market. They are postponing the collapse of the big banks here so that we have some time to prepare for it. In other words, the market manipulators are now our best friends, ironically enough. Yet we seem to be near the same kind of crisis as in October of 2006...I said then that if anyone had money in the stock market, they should consider other options within the coming year (to the end of 2007).

That was then. Now is now. ... We might see some turmoil before the Father intervenes and provides the means to do the work ahead. At some point this crisis is probably going to hit the stock markets, which have reached new highs this month.


http://investmentwatchblog.com/russian-w...ns-immediately/


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My Comments : If there is a major panic Monday or Tuesday, just like Nigel Farage warns that it will be a domino effect that will first extend to Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc... and collapse the Eurozone. Then it will hit the US. In the past renown economist had said, that a Eurozone collapse would take 2 weeks to hit the US. Don't know if it will then take a week after to hit Canada. Whatever will happen it will be in the Lord's timing.

So this could be the last chance to move your savings or paper assets to something that will retain its value. I do believe just withdrawing your cash is also a good step and it will retain its value for some time after a collapse. Like Nigel says, just keep enough in the bank to pay your bills.

If anyone wants to buy precious metals and never have done this before, you can contact me and I'll send you links and info. Actually I can also provide it soon here in this discussion if it's ok with Daryl that I do so. Actually that would be more convenient for all of us as you would maintain your privacy.