S&P and the Bilderbergers
By Ellen Brown
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MH25Dj01.html
The downgrade of US Treasury bonds from AAA to AA+ by Standard &
Poor's on August 5 led to the worst single-day fall in US equity
prices since September 2008, and triggered weeks of market volatility
globally. On Monday, 8-8-11, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged
624 points. It rose or fell by at least 400 points for four straight
days that week, a stock market first.
The roller coaster actually began on Tuesday, August 2, the day after
the last-minute deal to raise the US debt ceiling - a deal that was
supposed to avoid the downgrade that happened anyway five days later.
The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions
after that, another first.
The volatility was unprecedented, leaving analysts at a loss to
explain it. High frequency program trading no doubt added to the wild
swings, but why the daily reversals? Why didn't the market head down
and just keep going, as it did in September 2008?
According to Der Spiegel, one of the most widely read periodicals in Europe:
Many economists have been pointing out that [the] panic resembled the
fear that swept financial markets after the collapse of US investment
bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Then as now, banks stopped
lending each other money. Then as now, banks' cash deposits at the
central bank doubled within days.
On Tuesday, August 9, however, the market gained more points from its
low than it lost on Monday. Why? A tug-of-war seemed to be going on
between two titanic forces, one bent on crashing the market, the
other on propping it up.
The dubious S&P downgrade
Many commentators questioned the validity of the downgrade that
threatened to collapse the market. Dean Baker, co-director of the
Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in a statement:
The Treasury Department revealed that S&P's decision was initially
based on a $2 trillion error in accounting. However, even after this
enormous error was corrected, S&P went ahead with the downgrade. This
suggests that S&P had made the decision to downgrade independent of
the evidence. [Emphasis added.]
Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, was also skeptical, stating:
[E]verything I've heard about S&P's demands suggests that it's
talking nonsense about the US fiscal situation. The agency has
suggested that the downgrade depended on the size of agreed deficit
reduction over the next decade, with $4 trillion apparently the magic
number. Yet US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the
near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a
fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs ...
In short, S&P is just making stuff up - and after the mortgage
debacle, they really don't have that right.
In an illuminating expose posted on Firedoglake on August 5, Jane
Hamsher concluded:
It's becoming more and more obvious that Standard and Poor's has a
political agenda riding on the notion that the US is at risk of
default on its debt based on some arbitrary limit to the debt-to-GDP
ratio. There is no sound basis for that limit, or for S&P's
insistence on at least a $4 trillion down payment on debt reduction,
any more than there is for the crackpot notion that a non-crazy US
can be forced to default on its debt ...
It's time the media and Congress started asking Standard and Poor's
what their political agenda is and whom it serves.
Who drove the S&P agenda?
Jason Schwarz shed light on this question in an article on Seeking
Alpha titled "The Rise of Financial Terrorism". He wrote:
[A]fter the market close on Friday August 5th, we received word that
S&P CEO Deven Sharma had taken control of the ratings agency and
personally led the push for a US downgrade. There is a lot of
evidence that he has deliberately tried to trash the US economy. Even
after discovering that the S&P debt calculations were off by $2
trillion, Sharma made the decision to go ahead with the unethical downgrade.
This is a guy who was a key contributor at the 2009 Bilderberg Summit
that organized 120 of the world's richest men and women to push for
an end to the dollar as the global reserve currency.
[T]hrough his writings on "competitive strategy" S&P CEO Sharma
considers the United States the PROBLEM in today's world, operating
with what he implies is an unfair and reckless advantage. The brutal
reality is that for "globalization" to succeed the United States must
be torn asunder ...
Also named by Schwarz as a suspect in the market manipulations was
Michel Barnier, the European Union commissioner for internal market
and services and head of European regulation. Frenchman Barnier
triggered an alarming 513-point drop in the Dow on August 4 when he
blocked the plan of Hans Hoogervorst, newly appointed chairman of the
International Accounting Standards Board, to save Europe by adopting
a new rule called IFRS 9. The rule would have eliminated
mark-to-market accounting of sovereign debt from European bank
balance sheets. Schwarz writes:
We all should be experts on the dangers of mark-to-market accounting
after observing the US banking crisis of 2008/2009 and the Great
Depression in the 1930s. Mark-to-market was repealed at 8:45 a.m on
April 2, 2009, which finally put a stop to the short term liquidity
crisis and at the same time ushered in a stock market recovery. Banks
no longer had to raise capital as long term stability was brought
back to the system. The exact same scenario would have happened in
2011 Europe under Hoogervorst's plan. Without the threat of failure
by those banks who hold high amounts of euro sovereign debt,
investors would be free to move on from the European crisis and the
stock market could resume its fundamental course.
Schwarz notes that Barnier, like Sharma, was a confirmed attendee at
past Bilderberger conferences. What, then, is the agenda of the Bilderbergers?
The one world company
Daniel Estulin, noted expert on the Bilderbergers, describes that
secretive globalist group as "a medium of bringing together financial
institutions which are the world's most powerful and most predatory
financial interests". Writing in June 2011, he said:
Bilderberg isn't a secret society. ... It's a meeting of people who
represent a certain ideology. ... Not OWG [One World Government] or
NWO [New World Order] as too many people mistakenly believe. Rather,
the ideology is of a ONE WORLD COMPANY LIMITED.
It seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world
than in owning the world. The "world company" was a term first used
at a Bilderberger meeting in Canada in 1968 by George Ball, US under
secretary of state for economic affairs and a managing director of
banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb.
The world company was to be a new form of colonialism, in which
global assets would be acquired by economic rather than military
coercion. The company would extend across national boundaries,
aggressively engaging in mergers and acquisitions until the assets of
the world were subsumed under one privately-owned corporation, with
nation-states subservient to a private international central banking system.
Estulin continues:
The idea behind each and every Bilderberg meeting is to create what
they themselves call THE ARISTOCRACY OF PURPOSE between European and
North American elites on the best way to manage the planet. In other
words, the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more
powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the
necessities of life of the rest of humanity.
... This explains what George Ball ... said back in 1968, at a
Bilderberg meeting in Canada: "Where does one find a legitimate base
for the power of corporate management to make decisions that can
profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments
they have only limited responsibility?"
That base of power was found in the private global banking system.
Estulin goes on:
The problem with today's system is that the world is run by monetary
systems, not by national credit systems. ... [Y]ou don't want a
monetary system to run the world. You want sovereign nation-states to
have their own credit systems, which is the system of their currency.
... [T]he possibility of productive, non-inflationary credit creation
by the state, which is firmly stated in the US Constitution, was
excluded by Maastricht [the Treaty of the European Union] as a method
of determining economic and financial policy.
The world company acquires assets by preventing governments from
issuing their own currencies and credit. Money is created instead by
banks as loans at interest. The debts inexorably grow, since more
money is always owed back than was created in the original loans.
(For more on this, see here.) If currencies are not allowed to expand
to meet increased costs and growth, the inevitable result is a wave
of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and sales of assets at firesale
prices. Sales to whom? To the "world company".
Battle of the Titans
If that was the plan behind the market assaults on August 4 and
August 8, however, it evidently failed. What turned the market
around, according to Der Spiegel, was the European Central Bank,
which saved the day by embarking on a program of buying Spanish and
Italian bonds. Sidestepping the Maastricht Treaty, the ECB said it
would engage in the equivalent of "quantitative easing", purchasing
bonds with money created with accounting entries on its books. It had
done this earlier with Greek and Irish sovereign debt but had
resisted doing it with Spanish and Italian bonds, which were much
larger obligations.
On Tuesday, August 16, the ECB announced that it was engaging in a
record $32 billion bond-buying spree in an attempt to appease the
markets and save the eurozone from collapse.
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was also expected to come
through with another round of quantitative easing, but his speech on
August 9 made no mention of QE3. As blogger Jesse Livermore
summarized the market's response:
... [T]he markets sold off rather rapidly as no announcement was made
about QE3 ... It wasn't until ... the last 75 min of market activity
[that] the DJIA gained 639 pts to close at a day high of 11,242. That
begs the question, where did that injection of capital come from? The
President's Working Group on Financial Markets? Or did the "policy
tools" to promote price stability by any chance include the next
round of Quantitative Easing unannounced?
Was that QE3 Incognito, Ben?
Titanic battle or insider trading?
There could be another explanation for the suspicious downgrade that
was announced despite the fact that the government had just made
major concessions to avoid default, and despite the embarrassing
revelation that S&P's figures were off by $2 trillion. On August 12,
MSN.Money reported that the downgrade "wasn't much of a surprise":
Wall Street had heard a rumor early on that the downgrade was coming.
News sites reported the rumor all day.
Unless it was all a huge coincidence, it's likely that someone in the
know leaked the information. The questions are who and whether the
leak led to early insider trading.
The Daily Mail had the story of someone placing an $850 million bet
in the futures market on the prospects of a US debt downgrade:
The latest bet was made on July 21 on trades of 5,370 ten-year
Treasury futures and 3,100 Treasury bond futures, reported ETF Daily News.
Now the investor's gamble seems to have paid off after Standard and
Poor's issued a credit rating downgrade from AAA to AA+ last Friday.
Whoever it is stands to earn a 1,000 per cent return on their money,
with the expectation that interest rates will be going up after the downgrade.
The Securities Exchange Commission announced on August 8 that it is
investigating the downgrade. According to the Financial Times, the
move is part of a preliminary examination into potential insider
trading. The downgrade was evidently Mr Sharma's parting shot. On
August 23, 2011, Standard & Poor's announced that he was being
replaced as president by Douglas Peterson, chief operating officer of
Citibank. According to the Financial Times:
People familiar with the matter said Mr Sharma's departure was
unrelated to the downgrade, or reports that S&P is being investigated
by the Justice Department in connection with its ratings of dozens of
mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis. ...
Sources close to the company said the search for Mr Sharma's
replacement has been going on for six months ...
S&P has been subject to intense criticism following its decision to
downgrade the rating on US sovereign debt to double A plus from triple A. ...
Company officials hope that Mr Peterson's appointment will help
repair relations with Washington.
Whatever was going on in the market in the first two weeks of August,
it was unprecedented, unnatural, and bears close observation.
Ellen Brown is president of the Public Banking Institute and the
author of eleven books. She developed her research skills as an
attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt,
she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the
money trust". Her websites are WebofDebt.com and PublicBankingInstitute.org.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MH25Dj01.html
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"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
www.abolishwar.org.uk
<http://www.elementary.org.uk>www.elementary.org.uk
www.public-interest.co.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
<http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which
alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
<https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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