One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."
Sunday, May 05, 2013
A Reagan presidential appointee and former Wall Street Journal Editor finds hope in those who visit his blog, because they are looking for explanations of current events that unlike the mainstream media are not agenda-driven, are not BS, are not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. Case in point: The Boston "suspention of civil liberty is a greater threat than the bombing."
You Are The Hope — Paul Craig Roberts
May 1, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Dear Readers:
If there is hope, you are it. You are motivated to find truth. You can think outside the box. You can see through propaganda. You are the remnant with the common sense that once was a common American virtue. You come to this site, because you get explanations that are not agenda-driven, that are not BS, that are not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. You get explanations based on my lifetime of unique education and experience. Some of you are young enough to be equipped with the energy and courage to organize whatever resistance there may be to the Gestapo State that is descending on the United States of America. This is your site. Support it.
Until the George W. Bush Regime, I never thought that it could happen here. I could not imagine law professors and Department of Justice (sic) officials writing legal memos justifying, in the name of a hyped “war on terror,” the termination of civil rights for United States Citizens. We were the land of the free. The Constitution was our bedrock. Yet, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were easily taken away from the inattentive American people.
The Constitution did not protect native inhabitants and slaves who were not considered part of the American population, but the universal suppression in the US of non-whites’ rights produced in the end the civil rights movement that brought moral awareness of the wrongs and successfully hitched its cause to the founding documents of the country.
Where today is moral awareness as Washington bombs civilian populations around the globe? Where is the moral conscience of the the civil rights movement as the First Black President, the first member of the oppressed class to sit in the Oval Office, validates the Bush Regime’s assertion of the right of the unaccountable executive to ignore habeas corpus and due process? Not satisfied with this crime, Obama asserted the right of the executive branch to murder any citizen suspected, without proof being offered to a court, of undefined “support of terrorism.” Today all Americans have fewer rights than blacks had prior to the Civil Rights Act.
Anything, including a column critical of war and the police state, can be declared to be “in support of terrorism.” As the tyrant Bush put it: “You are with us, or you are against us.”
The print and TV media and many Internet sites got the message: Serve Washington’s agenda, and will you will prosper. Advertisers and the CIA will pump money into your coffers. Challenge us and you will be demonized and could face a military tribunal, indefinite detention, or assassination. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are being persecuted for telling the truth.
So far, Washington has convinced the public that Washington’s terror is mainly limited to Muslims, who are obligingly demonized by print, TV, and much of the Internet media. However, if Muslim American citizens lack civil liberty, so do all other American citizens. Those who are safe are those who ally with the tyrant and remain subservient.
To ally with the tyrant, a United States citizen must have no moral conscience, no sense of justice, no compassion for the innocent and dispossessed. These are the worst kind of Americans; yet, they are the only ones who can succeed in the present environment.
Every time I write a column that is the truth or the truth as I am able to discover it, instead of hawking the propaganda line, I move up on the list of those who are persona non grata in the Empire.
A writer can find himself demonized and declared a kook simply by reporting findings from distinguished scientists, high-rise architects, structural engineers, first responders, and an international collection of high government officials. Not too long ago a writer or reporter for the Huffington Post discovered to his surprise that Pat Buchanan and I disagreed with all the wars that had been launched to protect us from terrorism. He asked me for an interview, and I agreed.
An hour or so after the interview was posted on the Huffington Post, I received an emergency call or email. He had been criticized for interviewing me, “for giving you a forum when you are a 9/11 sceptic.” He was unsure that it was possible for a Reagan presidential appointee to be a 9/11 sceptic and asked if I was.
I replied that I had reported the findings of scientists, architects, engineers, and the public testimony of first responders, because I thought these were qualified people whose opinions at least ranked equally with the politicians on the 9/11 Commission and the talking heads on Fox “News” and CNN, none of whom could pass a high school test in the laws of physics, much less high-rise architecture and structural engineering.
The Huffington Post writer panicked. Instead of taking down the interview, he felt impelled to assure readers and his boss that he had been deceived. He wrote at the beginning and ending of the interview that he did not know he was interviewing someone about the Iraq War who had given ink to those conspiracy theorists who raised questions about the truthfulness of the US government. He wrote that my views on the wars should be disregarded, because I wrote that scientists, architects, engineers, and first responders provided evidence contrary to the government’s claims.
And there you have it.
The Huffington Post has far more readers than I do, and far more money. There is no limit on the ability of the Huffington Post to tell and sell the lies of the Agenda.
I can remember when I was a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, a Business Week columnist, a Scripps Howard News Service columnist and appeared regularly in the major mainstream print media and even from time to time on TV talking head programs. Today, the editor or producer who gave me a forum would be fired instantly, and they all know it.
It is discouraging that after so many transparent lies and orchestrations–weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes–the majority of Americans still believe the government. Americans are even buying into the line that Syria is ruled by a brutal dictator whose overthrow justifies Washington’s alliance with its 9/11 enemy, al-Qaeda, in order to overthrow a secular ruler who constrains al-Qaeda.
Washington has come full circle. Its enemy is now its ally. Washington wasted trillions of dollars and countless lives in eleven years of war and constructed a domestic police state all in order to combat al Qaeda with whom Washington is now allied against the Syrian government.
The public’s response to the Boston Marathon Bombing is even more discouraging. Not even King George and his Redcoats could achieve what Homeland Security just pulled off–locking down 100 square miles of Boston and its suburbs with heavily armed troops tramping through citizens’ homes barking harsh orders, all justified by a hunt for one 19-year old suspect. It was the Third Reich’s Gestapo in operation right here in “freedom and democracy” America. Ron Paul is correct that the suspension of civil liberty is a greater threat than the bombing. Note the government’s euphemism for martial law–”shelter-in-place.”
Two brothers have been convicted in the media and by the Obama Regime, including the president’s own words, of a bombing without the public ever being presented with any evidence except anonymous unattributed reports and a film of the alleged brothers walking with backpacks, which were ubiquitous.
I am old enough to remember when it was impermissible for government and media to convict a person prior to the jury’s verdict. Americans once lived in a free country governed by the rule of law in which a person was innocent until proven guilty.
What was the reason or evidence for naming the brothers suspects? Was any reason given, or was the film of the two walking with backpacks simply shown over and over, hour after hour, day after day, with the media reporting that these are the suspects. In other words, was it beat into your brain that they were suspects because there they are in the film? If not, why was the same film shown repeatedly? Fox “News” was still showing the film on April 26, eleven days after the bombing and might still be showing it. Did you experience: “Here are the suspects. See them. They have backpacks. See. We know that they are suspects, because, see, there they are.”
When is the last time the media investigated anything? A good candidate for investigation is the post-bombing rampage the brothers allegedly went on, robbing a 7/11 store (later contradicted by local police), killing a campus policeman, shooting a transit cop, high-jacking a SUV and releasing the owner.
Why would terrorists seeking to escape in order to strike again call attention to themselves in such outlandish ways and release a car-jacked owner to alert the police of the tag number? If the brothers were willing to kill police with gunfire and innocents with bombs, why release the guy whose vehicle they stole so he could inform the police of the license plate and make the brothers’ capture easier? What is the evidence, other than “reports from authorities,” that these events occurred or had any more connection to the brothers than the falsely reported 7/11 robbery that local police disavowed? Why does the US media simply accept whatever government authorities say?
Where is the evidence of a first shoot-out and a second shoot-out? The second shoot- out consisted of the authorities bombarding a motionless youth bleeding from wounds in a boat with multiple volleys of stun grenades and then multiple gunshots. The unconscious 19 year old was unarmed and unable to respond to the boat owner who discovered him. As he lies there, he is shot many times, including through the throat, and is on life support. But the very next day, according to the presstitute media, he is providing hand-written confessions.
Was the purpose of the reports of a murderous rampage to create fear among the population so that they would accept martial law and home invasions by armed troops ordering American citizens out of their homes with hands over their heads on the pretext that they might be harboring the Boston Marathon Bomber?
The videos of the street celebration in which Bostonians thank the police and of the two Boston families, if not scripted by actors, shows Americans who far from opposing the police state welcome it. A father says that he with his daughter in his arms was forced out of his home by troops pointing automatic rifles at their heads, but that he was thankful for the safety the police provided him by violating every civil right that the Constitution gave him. A woman says it was scary but that “the police are just doing their jobs.” Are Americans now so brainwashed that they attribute their safety to the presence of a Gestapo Police State?
Why have detention facilities been built? Why did Homeland Security purchase a billion or more rounds of ammunition? Why does Homeland Security have 2,700 tanks and a para-military force? Why aren’t these questions being investigated?
The US Constitution is the product of 900 years of human efforts to restrain brutal government and to make government subject to law. It only took Bush and Obama eleven years to get rid of it.
This is my quarterly appeal for your support. If you want this site to continue, donate. Unless it brings you more enlightenment than it brings grief to me, there is no reason for it to exist.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
ACE REPORTER BILL MOYERS, TWICE DRIVEN FROM PBS TV BY THE POWERS TO WHOM HE SPOKE THE TRUTH, IS NOW PRODUCING SPLENDID MUST-SEE PROGRAMS ON HIS WEB SITE. IN HIS MOST RECENT PRODUCTION, TWO HIGHLY QUALIFIED EXPERTS TELL US IN UNEQUIVOCAL TERMS "HOW THE BIG BANKS VICTIMIZE OUR DEMOCRACY" -- WITH THE HELP OF OUR GOVERNMENT. SO IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE TRUE CRIMINALITY OF THE GOVERNMENT/BANKSTER COMPLEX, IT'S TIME TO ABANDON THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IN FAVOR OF MOYERS AND COMPANY.
http://vimeo.com/44511301 Moyers & Company Show 124: How Big Banks Victimize Our Democracy from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Thursday, June 07, 2012
WISCONSIN'S RECALLED GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER ATTRIBUTED HIS VICTORY TO VOTERS PREFERING "LEADERS WHO STAND UP AND MAKE TOUGH DECISIONS." (LIKE CUTTING THEIR SALARIES AND BENEFITS AND FIRING THEIR CHILDREN'S TEACHERS?) EVEN MORE IRONIC, WALKER'S OPPONENT BARRETT CONCEDED WITH THE COMMENT "WE HAVE SEEN THIS DEMOCRACY COME ALIVE." (LIKE DEMOCRACY IS YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO THE POLLS THINKING YOU ARE "THROWING THE BUM OUT" AND THEN ACCEPTING THAT YOUR VOTE MAY HAVE BEEN MISCOUNTED?) THERE IS VOLUMINOUS EVIDENCE THAT U.S. ELECTIONS ARE ROUTINELY RIGGED ...THAT IS IF YOU HAVE OTHER SOURCES OF NEWS THAN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. YET THIS TIME EVEN LIBERAL NEWS SOURCES LIKE DEMOCRACY NOW ATTRIBUTE WALKER'S UNEXPECTED WIN TO HIS SPENDING 7 TIMES AS MUCH MONEY AS HIS OPPONENT. NOW LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT... IF I'M RECALLING A GOVERNOR BECAUSE HE IS SAVAGING MY STANDARD OF LIVING, AM I GOING TO BE SO DAZZLED BY HIS EXPENSIVE ATTACK ADS THAT I DECIDE TO KEEP HIM? TO ME WE HAVE JUST SEEN OUR DEMOCRACY *DIE*. DON'T THINK SO? READ BELOW AND WEEP.
← Conspiracy Theories and Mathematical Probabilities Go here for original
Wisconsin Recall: The adjusted Final Exit Poll was forced to match an unlikely recorded vote
Richard Charnin |
June 6, 2012
Why did the media not provide the actual unadjusted exit poll data (the “crosstabs”)? Was it because they knew that they would have to adjust the poll to match a bogus recorded vote and did not want the public to view the impossible “adjustments”?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjAk1JUWDMyRdDRwcWRPTUZoZk53YUlxOEVMT0FnX3c#gid=32
About Richard Charnin
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Paul Craig Roberts' farewell address to the American People was posted here before, but it somehow disappeared from my site. All the more reason to put it up again ...and encourage all of you to read it again!
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Paul Craig Roberts Farewell Address To The American People
Good-Bye
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.
Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”
And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”
The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.
And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.
Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.
Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.
I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.
When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.
As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.
Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.
Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.
Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.
Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.
I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”
For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.
For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.
The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.
America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.
These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.
With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.
The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Saturday, September 19, 2009
With big banks hitting taxpayers for $Trillions to pay their gambling debts, why is Congress jumping a tiny organization of relatively poor folks?
The answer to the title question is this: The big banks and other big-moneyed interests intend to tar ACORN with some of the very same election-related crimes that they themselves have been practicing ...and the Main Stream Media (owned by big-moneyed interests) have turned a blind eye to.
With regard to the recent (likely big-money sponsored) sting operation, which entangled only a very few of ACORN’s 700 employees, watch this DemocracyNow! segment:
Now let’s return to the “voter fraud” issue. The big-moneyed interests fear that if all of the “low- to moderate-income people across the United States” were to vote, candidates less deferential to the big-moneyed interests might be elected.
So, last fall ACORN was accused of registering voters who gave their names as “Mickey Mouse” or were registered in one state and falsely pretended to be an eligible voter in another.
But to the extent this may have been true, (1) such false registrations were clearly the faults of those who filled out the forms, (2) those folks who falsely filled out forms would be extremely unlikely to risk committing a felony double vote under the name Mickey Mouse and/or by traveling to another state to take this risk, (3) any conceivable culpability on the part of ACORN in such situations would not have been a felony, and...
(4) ACORN has never in fact been charged with “voter fraud.”
The same can’t be said of operatives sponsored by the big-moneyed interests.
Here’s what the MSM hasn’t told you: In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul and Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states. The group was run by Nathan Sproul, the former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party. And thanks to the sleuthing of John R. Brakey, Mark Crispin Miller, and Jared Irmas, it is known that Sproul’s voter registration services, “political consulting,” and certain unspecified post-election activities were paid for by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to the tune of $8,359,161(!) – making Sproul the eighth largest expenditure of the RNC’s 2004 campaign. (You can download a copy of this story here.)
Do you think the RNC lavished all this money on Sproul for honest election-related activities?
Well, in fact, back in the fall of 2004 Sproul’s firm was up to its corporate keister in dirty tricks THAT WERE FELONIES. Below I’ve extracted one paragraph from a much longer article entitled “Republican Dirty Tricks” by Max Blumenthal, posted on AlterNet October 15, 2004:
Sproul's dirty tricks may have finally caught up with him, though far from his stomping grounds in Arizona. In Oregon, Sproul's firm is being investigated by the state attorney general and could face a class-C felony, punishable by five years in jail, for allegedly altering and destroying voter registration forms. And in Nevada, state election officials have just launched an investigation into whether Sproul's Voters Outreach of America destroyed the registration forms of exclusively Democratic voters.
Did the MSM tell you about this? Well, they have been pretty mum on this subject, but CNN did put out this story. Still, there have been no news reports of any of Sproul’s people being convicted of felony destruction voter registration forms. But Sproul and Associates received as much as $2.3 million of their total $8.3 million in payments from the RNC after the 2004 Election. Could it be that much of this late-arriving money was a legal defense fund?
So let’s summarize.
Nathan Sproul and the groups he controlled were paid $8.3 million to commit (and perchance defend themselves against charges of) felony election fraud in 2004 ...and yet he appears to have gotten away scot-free.
ACORN, a group representing “low- to moderate-income people” (and thus unlikely to have a multi-million dollar defense fund) is falsely accused of doing what Sproul did ...and is now denounced by both houses of Congress for the indiscretions of likely no more than a dozen of its 700 low-paid employees caught in a sting operation (run by Sproul?).
Post Script:
US voter registration group under attack
By Tom Eley
21 September 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
THE CHINA SYNDROME: How the Melt Down Will Likely Go
Blogger’s Note: The following is an abridged version of an article in the Business Section of today’s New York Times ...with my comments interspersed.
April 13, 2009
China Slows Purchases of U.S. and Other Bonds
By KEITH BRADSHER
HONG KONG — Reversing its role as the world’s fastest-growing buyer of United States Treasuries and other foreign bonds, the Chinese government actually sold bonds heavily in January and February before resuming purchases in March, according to data released during the weekend by China’s central bank.
China’s foreign reserves grew in the first quarter of this year at the slowest pace in nearly eight years, edging up $7.7 billion, compared with a record increase of $153.9 billion in the same quarter last year.
China has lent vast sums to the United States — roughly two-thirds of the central bank’s $1.95 trillion in foreign reserves are believed to be in American securities. But the Chinese government now finances a dwindling percentage of new American mortgages and government borrowing.
This means China’s central bank currently owns about $1.3 trillion in American securities, which is a large investment to them but only about 17% of the current U.S. national debt (see below).
The main effect of slower bond purchases may be a weakening of Beijing’s influence in Washington as the Treasury becomes less reliant on purchases by the Chinese central bank.
Uhh... Less reliant? With the national debt practically doubling in the Bush years from $5.7 trillion to $10.0 trillion – and as of 7 April is standing at $11.2 trillion – one has to ask: Just who is going to step in and buy our ever mounting debt if the Chinese stop buying ...or worse, if they start selling? Answer: No one but suckers.
Asked about the balance of financial power between China and the United States, one of the Chinese government’s top monetary economists, Yu Yongding, replied that “I think it’s mainly in favor of the United States.”
He cited a saying attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.”
But if you are known to have squandered that million pounds and then gambled away couple million more on top of that, your bank manager realizes he is no longer at your mercy. In fact he is left with no choice but to write off his loan to you ...and turn his thoughts to the most merciless punishment he can legally lay on you!
Private investors from around the world, including the United States, have been buying more American bonds in search of a refuge from global financial troubles. This has made the Chinese government’s cash less necessary and kept interest rates low in the United States over the winter despite the Chinese pullback.
Uhh... How many savvy investors truly believe American bonds are “a refuge from global financial troubles”? The only way I can think of that the Chinese government’s cash has been made “less necessary” would be if the Fed is buying this stupendous debt with taxpayer money.
There have also been some signs that Americans may consume less and save more money in response to hard economic times. This would further decrease the American dependence on Chinese savings.
Just “some signs”? The U.S. unemployment rate has been rising exponentially for two full years. Of course, Americans must consume less now and try to save more. But the more Americans who lose their jobs, the fewer there will be who have anything to save. And the bloated ranks of job seekers will depress the wages of those still working. So it is totally dopy to think that Americans’ savings can even slightly compensate for the Chinese government pulling out of their “T-bill” investments.
Mr. Wen voiced concern on March 13 about China’s dependence on the United States: “We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.”
The main worry of Chinese officials has been that American efforts to fight the current economic downturn will result in inflation and erode the value of American bonds, Chinese economists said in interviews in Beijing on Thursday and Friday.
“They are quite nervous about the purchasing power of fixed-income assets,” said Yu Qiao, an economics professor at Tsinghua University.
The Chinese Premier and other officials are talking about what the mainstream media repeatedly refer to as “ultra safe” U.S. Treasury bonds. Why are we being told they are “ultra safe” when the Chinese Premier is “definitely a little worried” about them? Answer: if a single country (e.g., Korea or Brazil) should ever start seriously selling, then so must China and Japan and everyone else. It would be a panic that would swiftly drive down the dollar values of all classes T-bills, pushing the interest rates the other way, that is, skyward. And in that instant most of those invested in U.S. T-bills and/or any other interest-paying U.S. bonds will loose their shirts.
The abrupt slowdown in China’s accumulation of foreign reserves ... seems to suggest that investors were sending large sums of money out of mainland China early this year in response to worries about the country’s economic future and possibly its social stability in the face of rising unemployment.
My thought: When Americans finally understand that their unemployment rate has reached about 20% when calculated by more realistic methods, possibly there will be social instability in the U.S. too.
Evidence of such capital flight included a flood of cash into the Hong Kong dollar. Mainland tourists were even buying gold and diamonds during Chinese new year holidays here in late January.
Well, the gold and diamonds are excellent hedges against currency devaluations...
China’s reserves have soared in recent years as the People’s Bank bought dollars on a huge scale to prevent China’s currency from appreciating as money poured into the country from trade surpluses and heavy foreign investment. But China’s trade surpluses have narrowed slightly as exports have fallen, while foreign investment has slowed as multinationals have conserved their cash.
Heavy purchases of Hong Kong dollars by mainland Chinese residents early this year also have the indirect effect of helping the United States borrow money. The Hong Kong government pegs its currency to the American dollar, and stepped up its purchases of Treasury bonds this winter in response to strong demand for Hong Kong dollars.
Well, I don’t know to what extent Hong Kong has really been buying Treasury bonds. But I do have a hutch as to why mainland Chinese have been converting their greenbacks to Hong Kong dollars: When the American dollar ultimately crashes, you can count on Hong Kong to UNpeg their dollar from the freefalling greenback...





