Hyperinflation is certain, John Embry tells King World News   Imminent Big Bank Death Spiral By: Jim Willie CB Soc Gen's Albert Edwards: The US Public is About to Revolt

In 15 of Last 25 Months, The Treasury Needed to Borrow Money for Social Security Benefits


Pension Age Increases to Get Far Worse

Of Course He Will

Posted: Oct 27 2010     By: Jim Sinclair      Post Edited: October 27, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Filed under: General Editorial

Dear CIGAs,
How can anyone be so silly as to be riveted on "Will he QE" next week? Of course he will QE to infinity. The date he announced however does not mean a damn thing.
To throw away good gold anything on the madness of the trading crowd and algorithms is just plain STUPID.
Gold is going to $1650 and likely a great deal more. Don’t join the Lemming Society.
The scary actual U.S. government debt NEIL REYNOLDS
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is banrupt.”
Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”
This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.
Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.
“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”
He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.
One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.
Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.
Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.
More…

The Six Trillion Dollar Problem

Posted: Oct 27 2010     By: Greg Hunter      Post Edited: October 27, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Filed under: Greg Hunter, USAWatchdog.com
Courtesy of Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Dear CIGAs,
When I was an investigative reporter at the networks, the first question we would ask when trying to decide if we wanted to do a story was: How many?  How many people have been hurt by a defective product?  How many defective products of a certain kind were in use? How many dollars will it take to fix the problem?  In the case of the recent mortgage crisis – “Foreclosuregate,” the question of how many has been answered.It has been widely reported that there are a little more than 60 million home mortgages in the Mortgage Electronic Registry System (MERS).  If every one of the 60 million mortgages are worth $100,000, that would mean a total of at least $6 trillion in home mortgages that are electronically filed.  In MERS, there is no physical written record of a “Promissory Note.”  In almost all states, you need that original “Note” to prove ownership of a home.  That means in almost every single state, the banks cannot legally foreclose on your home without this document.  Some say the loan documents were lost on purpose because the bankers did not want their massive fraud to see the light of day.  Whether or not the “Notes” were lost on purpose or accident, the fact is the original “Notes” are nowhere to be found.  That is what the “Robo Signing” part of the story is all about.  It has been widely reported that “foreclosure mills” were creating massive amounts of counterfeit Promissory Notes so banks could legally foreclose on homeowners.
In the post I did earlier this week called “The Perfect No-Prosecution Crime,” I laid out several layers of fraud and white collar crime of mortgage and foreclosure fraud.  The lack of the Promissory Note is the biggest of all the problems in this chain of chicanery.  Here’s why.  A Promissory Note is a financial instrument.  It is in the same family as a Federal Reserve Note.  For example, if you copied a $100 bill and then tried to spend that copy in a store, because you lost the original, is it still money?–Of course not. You need the original financial instrument (in this case, $100 Federal Reserve Note) to make a legal transaction in a store.  The same is true for a Promissory Note. You need the original Promissory Note to legally complete a foreclosure.  A counterfeit, or copy, of a Promissory Note is not a financial instrument, just like a counterfeit or copy of a $100 bill is not a financial instrument!
Can you see how big this problem really is for the banks?  This is $6 trillion in real estate that fat cat bankers cannot legally prove they own. Likewise, that means trillions of mortgage-backed securities HAVE NO BACKING.   I think this is the biggest financial fraud in history.  This was not an accident made by someone pressing the wrong button or a few documents that weren’t handled properly, but fraud on a massive scale that took years and tens of thousands of people to pull off.  Ironically, this is all playing out against a backdrop of outrageous Wall Street pay.  This year the big banks are going to pay a record $144 billion!  (Click here for more on that story.)
One of my regular readers thinks Congress can simply pass a law and make all the crimes retroactively legal.  To that I said, “So Congress is going to change hundreds of years of real estate document law in each and every state? Along with IRS tax laws broken, trust laws broken, security laws broken and on top of that, make crimes retroactively not crimes anymore? That’s a lot even for Congress. I think the path of least resistance is more likely printing money to paper over the problem. . . . I hope you are wrong on Congress because if they do change all of these laws to comfort the criminal banksters, we might as well change the name of the country to the United States of Crime.”
More…