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On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country and its bankruptcy was the second largest in U.S. history, following Washington Mutual in 2008. Despite its size, SVB was not a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI) as defined in the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires insolvent SIFIs to “bail in” the money of their creditors to recapitalize themselves.
Technically, the cutoff for SIFIs is $250 billion in assets. However, the reason they are called “systemically important” is not their asset size but the fact that their failure could bring down the whole financial system. That designation comes chiefly from their exposure to derivatives, the global casino that is so highly interconnected that it is a “house of cards.” Pull out one card and the whole house collapses. SVB held $27.7 billion in derivatives, no small sum, but it is only .05% of the $55,387 billion ($55.387 trillion) held by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. derivatives bank.
SVB could be the canary in the coal mine foreshadowing the fate of other over-extended banks, but its collapse is not the sort of “systemic risk” predicted to trigger “contagion.” As reported by CNN:
Despite initial panic on Wall Street, analysts said SVB’s collapse is unlikely to set off the kind of domino effect that gripped the banking industry during the financial crisis.
“The system is as well-capitalized and liquid as it has ever been,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi said. “The banks that are now in trouble are much too small to be a meaningful threat to the broader system.”
No later than Monday morning, all insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits, according to the FDIC. It will pay uninsured depositors an “advance dividend within the next week.”
The FDIC, Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury have now agreed on an interim fix that will the subject of another article. Meanwhile, this column focuses on derivatives and is a followup to my Feb. 23 column on the “bail in” provisions of the 2010 Dodd Frank Act, which eliminated taxpayer bailouts by requiring insolvent SIFIs to recapitalize themselves with the funds of their creditors. “Creditors” are defined to include depositors, but deposits under $250,000 are protected by FDIC insurance. However, the FDIC fund is sufficient to cover only about 2% of the $9.6 trillion in U.S. insured deposits. A nationwide crisis triggering bank runs across the country, as happened in the early 1930s, would wipe out the fund. Today, some financial pundits are predicting a crisis of that magnitude in the quadrillion dollar-plus derivatives market, due to rapidly rising interest rates. This column looks at how likely that is and what can be done either to prevent it or dodge out of the way.
“Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction”
In 2002, mega-investor Warren Buffett wrote that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction.” At that time, their total “notional” value (the value of the underlying assets from which the “derivatives” were “derived”) was estimated at $56 trillion. Investopedia reported in May 2022 that the derivatives bubble had reached an estimated $600 trillion according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and that the total is often estimated at over $1 quadrillion. No one knows for sure, because most of the trades are done privately.
As of the third quarter of 2022, according to the “Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities” of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (the federal bank regulator), a total of 1,211 insured U.S. national and state commercial banks and savings associations held derivatives, but 88.6% of these were concentrated in only four large banks: J.P. Morgan Chase ($54.3 trillion), Goldman Sachs ($51 trillion), Citibank ($46 trillion), Bank of America ($21.6 trillion), followed by Wells Fargo ($12.2 trillion). A full list is here. Unlike in 2008-09, when the big derivative concerns were mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, today the largest and riskiest category is interest rate products.
The original purpose of derivatives was to help farmers and other producers manage the risks of dramatic changes in the markets for raw materials. But in recent times they have exploded into powerful vehicles for leveraged speculation (borrowing to gamble). In their basic form, derivatives are just bets – a giant casino in which players hedge against a variety of changes in market conditions (interest rates, exchange rates, defaults, etc.). They are sold as insurance against risk, which is passed off to the counterparty to the bet. But the risk is still there, and if the counterparty can’t pay, both parties lose. In “systemically important” situations, the government winds up footing the bill.
Like at a race track, players can bet although they have no interest in the underlying asset (the horse). This has allowed derivative bets to grow to many times global GDP and has added another element of risk: if you don’t own the barn on which you are betting, the temptation is there to burn down the barn to get the insurance. The financial entities taking these bets typically hedge by betting both ways, and they are highly interconnected. If counterparties don’t get paid, they can’t pay their own counterparties, and the whole system can go down very quickly, a systemic risk called “the domino effect.”
That is why insolvent SIFIs had to be bailed out in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-09, first with $700 billion of taxpayer money and then by the Federal Reserve with “quantitative easing.” Derivatives were at the heart of that crisis. Lehman Brothers was one of the derivative entities with bets across the system. So was insurance company AIG, which managed to survive due to a whopping $182 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury; but Lehman was considered too weakly collateralized to salvage. It went down, and the Great Recession followed.
Risks Hidden in the Shadows
Derivatives are largely a creation of the “shadow banking” system, a group of financial intermediaries that facilitates the creation of credit globally but whose members are not subject to regulatory oversight. The shadow banking system also includes unregulated activities by regulated institutions. It includes the repo market, which evolved as a sort of pawn shop for large institutional investors with more than $250,000 to deposit. The repo market is a safe place for these lenders, including pension funds and the U.S. Treasury, to park their money and earn a bit of interest. But its safety is insured not by the FDIC but by sound collateral posted by the borrowers, preferably in the form of federal securities.
As explained by Prof. Gary Gorton:
This banking system (the “shadow” or “parallel” banking system) – repo based on securitization – is a genuine banking system, as large as the traditional, regulated banking system. It is of critical importance to the economy because it is the funding basis for the traditional banking system. Without it, traditional banks will not lend and credit, which is essential for job creation, will not be created.
While it is true that banks create the money they lend simply by writing loans into the accounts of their borrowers, they still need liquidity to clear withdrawals; and for that they largely rely on the repo market, which has a daily turnover just in the U.S. of over $1 trillion. British financial commentator Alasdair MacLeod observes that the derivatives market was built on cheap repo credit. But interest rates have shot up and credit is no longer cheap, even for financial institutions.
According to a December 2022 report by the BIS, $80 trillion in foreign exchange derivatives that are off-balance-sheet (documented only in the footnotes of bank reports) are about to reset (roll over at higher interest rates). Financial commentator George Gammon discusses the threat this poses in a podcast he calls, “BIS Warns of 2023 Black Swan – A Derivatives Time Bomb.”
Another time bomb in the news is Credit Suisse, a giant Swiss derivatives bank that was hit with an $88 billion run on its deposits by large institutional investors late in 2022. The bank was bailed out by the Swiss National Bank through swap lines with the U.S. Federal Reserve at 3.33% interest.
The Perverse Incentives Created by “Safe Harbor” in Bankruptcy
In The New Financial Deal: Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and Its (Unintended) Consequences, Prof. David Skeel refutes what he calls the “Lehman myth”—the widespread belief that Lehman’s collapse resulted from the decision to allow it to fail. He blames the 2005 safe harbor amendment to the bankruptcy law, which says that the collateral posted by insolvent borrowers for both repo loans and derivatives has “safe harbor” status exempting it from recovery by the bankruptcy court. When Lehman appeared to be in trouble, the repo and derivatives traders all rushed to claim the collateral before it ran out, and the court had no power to stop them.
So why not repeal the amendment? In a 2014 article titled “The Roots of Shadow Banking,” Prof. Enrico Perotti of the University of Amsterdam explained that the safe harbor exemption is a critical feature of the shadow banking system, one it needs to function. Like traditional banks, shadow banks create credit in the form of loans backed by “demandable debt”—short-term loans or deposits that can be recalled on demand. In the traditional banking system, the promise that the depositor can get his money back on demand is made credible by government-backed deposit insurance and access to central bank funding. The shadow banks needed their own variant of “demandable debt,” and they got it through the privilege of “super-priority” in bankruptcy. Perotti wrote:
Safe harbor status grants the privilege of being excluded from mandatory stay, and basically all other restrictions. Safe harbor lenders, which at present include repos and derivative margins, can immediately repossess and resell pledged collateral.
This gives repos and derivatives extraordinary super-priority over all other claims, including tax and wage claims, deposits, real secured credit and insurance claims. [Emphasis added.]
The dilemma of our current banking system is that lenders won’t advance the short-term liquidity needed to fund repo loans without an ironclad guarantee; but the guarantee that makes the lender’s money safe makes the system itself very risky. When a debtor appears to be on shaky ground, there will be a predictable stampede by favored creditors to grab the collateral, in a rush for the exits that can propel an otherwise-viable debtor into bankruptcy; and that is what happened to Lehman Brothers.
Derivatives were granted “safe harbor” because allowing them to fail was also considered a systemic risk. It could trigger the “domino effect,” taking the whole system down. The error, says Prof. Skeel, was in passage of the 2005 safe harbor amendment. But the problem with repealing it now is that we will get the domino effect, in the collapse of both the quadrillion dollar derivatives market and the more than trillion dollars traded daily in the repo market.
The Interest Rate Shock
Interest rate derivatives are particularly vulnerable in today’s high interest rate environment. From March 2022 to February 2023, the prime rate (the rate banks charge their best customers) shot up from 3.5% to 7.75%, a radical jump. Market analyst Stephanie Pomboy calls it an “interest rate shock.” It won’t really hit the market until variable-rate contracts reset, but $1 trillion in U.S. corporate contracts are due to reset this year, another trillion next year, and another trillion the year after that.
A few bank bankruptcies are manageable, but an interest rate shock to the massive derivatives market could take down the whole economy. As Michael Snyder wrote in a 2013 article titled “A Chilling Warning About Interest Rate Derivatives:”
Will rapidly rising interest rates rip through the U.S. financial system like a giant lawnmower blade? Yes, the U.S. economy survived much higher interest rates in the past, but at that time there were not hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of interest rate derivatives hanging over our financial system like a Sword of Damocles.
… [R]ising interest rates could burst the derivatives bubble and cause “massive bankruptcies around the globe” [quoting Mexican billionaire Hugo Salinas Price]. Of course there are a whole lot of people out there that would be quite glad to see the “too big to fail” banks go bankrupt, but the truth is that if they go down, our entire economy will go down with them. … Our entire economic system is based on credit, and just like we saw back in 2008, if the big banks start failing, credit freezes up and suddenly nobody can get any money for anything.
There are safer ways to design the banking system, but they are not likely to be in place before the quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble bursts. Snyder was writing 10 years ago, and it hasn’t burst yet; but this was chiefly because the Fed came through with the “Fed Put” – the presumption that it would backstop “the market” in any sort of financial crisis. It has performed as expected until now, but the Fed Put has stripped it of its “independence” and its ability to perform its legislated duties. This is a complicated subject, but two excellent books on it are Nik Bhatia’s Layered Money (2021) and Lev Menand’s The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis (2022).
Today the Fed appears to be regaining its independence by intentionally killing the Fed Put, with its push to raise interest rates. (See my earlier article here.) It is still backstopping the offshore dollar market with “swap lines,” arrangements between central banks of two countries to keep currency available for member banks, but the latest swap line rate for the European Central Bank is a pricey 4.83%. No more “free lunch” for the banks.
Alternative Solutions
Alternatives that have been proposed for unwinding the massive derivatives bubble include repealing the safe harbor amendment and imposing a financial transaction tax, typically a 0.1% tax on all financial trades. But those proposals have been around for years and Congress has not taken up the call. Rather than waiting for Congress to act, many commentators say we need to form our own parallel alternative monetary systems.
Crypto proponents see promise in Bitcoin; but as Alastair MacLeod observes, Bitcoin’s price is too volatile for it to serve as a national or global reserve currency, and it does not have the status of enforceable legal tender. MacLeod’s preferred alternative is a gold-backed currency, not of the 19th century variety that led to bank runs when the banks ran out of gold, but of the sort now being proposed by Sergey Glazyev for the Eurasian Economic Union. The price of gold would be a yardstick for valuing national currencies, and physical gold could be used as a settlement medium to clear trade balances.
Lev Menand, author of The Fed Unbound, is an Associate Professor at Columbia Law School who has worked at the New York Fed and the U.S. Treasury. Addressing the problem of the out-of-control unregulated shadow banking system, he stated in a July 2022 interview with The Hill, “I think that one of the great possible reforms is the public banking movement and the replication of successful public bank enterprises that we have now in some places, or that we’ve had in the past.”
Certainly, for our local government deposits, public banks are an important solution. State and local governments typically have far more than $250,000 deposited in SIFI banks, but local legislators consider them protected because they are “collateralized.” In California, for example, banks taking state deposits must back them with collateral equal to 110% of the deposits themselves. The problem is that derivative and repo claimants with “supra-priority” can wipe out the entirety of a bankrupt bank’s collateral before other “secured” depositors have access to it.
Our tax dollars should be working for us in our own communities, not capitalizing failing SIFIs on Wall Street. Our stellar (and only) state-owned model is the Bank of North Dakota, which carried North Dakota through the 2008-09 financial crisis with flying colors. Post-GFC (the Global Financial Crisis of ’07-’09), it earned record profits reinvesting the state’s revenues in the state, while big commercial banks lost billions in the speculative markets. Several state legislatures currently have bills on their books following the North Dakota precedent.
For a federal workaround, we could follow the lead of Jesse Jones’ Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which funded the New Deal that pulled the country out of the Great Depression. A bill for a national investment bank currently in Congress that has widespread support is based on that very effective model, avoiding the need to increase taxes or the federal debt.
All those alternatives, however, depend on legislation, which may be too late. Meanwhile, self-sufficient “intentional” communities are growing in popularity, if that option is available to you. Community currencies, including digital currencies, can be used for trade. They can be “Labor Dollars” or “Food Dollars” backed by the goods and services for which the community has agreed to accept them. (See my earlier article here.) The technology now exists to form a network of community cryptocurrencies that are asset-backed and privacy-protected, but that is a subject for another column.
The current financial system is fragile, volatile and vulnerable to systemic shocks. It is due for a reset, but we need to ensure that the system is changed in a way that works for the people whose labor and credit support it. Our hard-earned deposits are now the banks’ only source of cheap liquidity. We can leverage that power by collaborating in a way that serves the public interest.
This article was first posted on ScheerPost. Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.
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the american people and their government are so stupid, they could never figure out how to manage money and economies, math is hard. thank god our superior, oligarchic, bankers decided out of the goodness of their heart, to help us slow witted morons manage our financial systems. fortunately the federal reserve (strange name for a private bank) dual mandate, has stabilized prices and maintenance maximum employment for us and has kept the value of the dollar rock solid since 1913……hey, wait a minute….
“‘Warren Buffett stated that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction.’”
How about following Dr. Hudson’s advice based on his studies of ancient civilizations:
Cancel ALL DEBTS as they did back then?
Meaning, cancel all the DEBTS of derivatives, bank debts, financial debt, AND cancel ALL debts that American citizens have accrued over the years.
If that is impossible to do in the US, then there must be a reason WHY these Big New York Banks continue to carry those debts in the form of Derivatives.
Meaning, there must be profit earned from those Derivatives in the Big New York Banks.
Burning it all down better.
Yes we can!
Forward…to the next Brandon disaster and groundhog day.
“Cancel ALL DEBTS”
Japan has $1.08 trillion in U.S. Treasurys; China $870 billion; the U.K. $645.8 billion.
To liquidate debts that large would have serious consequences.
Periodically cancelling debts was an established custom of ancient civilizations, so lenders and borrowers knew exactly what they were letting themselves in for.
Earlier this morning I saw this remark at Andrei Martyanov’s Blog:
So why has the US allowed the “trust” in US money to be frittered away? Dumb question – I might also ask why the US allowed “Capitalists” to ship US manufacturing overseas to China for their personal profit.
I’ve been careful to stay away from banks with any “derivatives” exposure, but what good will that do me if my life savings evaporate away to the point that they won’t buy a single postage stamp?
I appreciate this essay by Ellen Brown, for it has raised my knowledge of “derivatives” from Zero to maybe the barest glimmering of understanding.
Israel to weigh action after Silicon Valley Bank collapse
https://apnews.com/article/israel-economy-startup-silicon-valley-bank-6249e35821a884ce502576988cce22de
A person has to wonder about the degree of involvement of the pissant state with the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank. Somehow I doubt if this is a case of “innocent bystanders”.
To have an honest economy you must first have honest money. And honest banking. No fiat, no fractional reserve. Otherwise you get what we have, a casino economy where it’s dog eat dog at every scale.
Money is an organic creation of a free market. Letting governments pigeonhole us into their currencies is the biggest mistake we have ever made. One that I don’t fully know how to correct. But a good start would be to amap (asmuchaspossible) withdraw from the consumer economy. Stop buying the latest, greatest & repair, repurpose, recycle, reuse. Amap grow your own veggies & herbs, hunt/trap/fish &/or buy from locals who do. Amap save silver/gold, firearms, ammo & durable goods, and a decent collection of hand tools, jic (justincase). Network with others of the same mind. Try amap to be happy & live free.
Derivatives, aka “futures contracts”, date back to Babylonia – or earlier. They are necessary. But not what they have derived into. After Glass-Stegall was scrapped, “Hello Casino”. It and Dodd-Fragg need to be repealed.
This MBA, who never onwed a biz w/ more than 13 employees, did use heating oil & gasoline futures (Esso Jobber) to hedge back in the 1980s, despite my father in law’s opinions (I was GM). They saved his biz in 1986, when crude dropped to $10/bbl. He believed in keeping a full inventory (600K), despite crashing prices.
The biz did OK, only making $60K (0.8% ROI EBTIDA). Hedging made him $360K. I received ZERO bonus. His daughter dumped me a year later. Good riddance.
They went broke 3 years later.
And this passes for wisdom these days. “Shadow banking” is a lie, it is a money market, but without government regulations. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the “traditional banking”, except the entities in the Shadow “Banking” also have bank accounts to transact their business, just like petty thieves, mafiosi and Columbian drug lords also have bank accounts. “Without it, traditional banks will not lend and credit, which is essential for job creation, will not be created” is a bald-faced lie. Does it mean the “traditional banks” are dependent on the deposits of these shadow entities for issuing loans? This is a lie, because the Bank of England in 2014 has confessed that banks can lend money without having matching deposits first.
What this “wise” man tries to obfuscate is that the “traditional” banks have put all their money in this casino of Shadow banking, and therefore are dependent on its outcome.
Whenever this subject comes up, Twitter floods with people saying “Heh, tell me you don’t understand derivatives without telling me you don’t understand derivatives.” When pressed they say “derivatives cancel each other out.” Never seems to get any further than that.
Now to be honest I can understand basic economics, but these financial instruments I really don’t understand and probably never will. Here’s one thing I do understand though: there’s no such thing as a quadrillion dollars.
Silicon Valley Bank.
50/50 Partners w/ Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (China).
Video Link
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Pudong_Development_Bank
We have a banking crisis caused by our benevolent and competent FedGov overlords. And what does Ms. Brown propose? To further concentrate power over money and banking in the hands of our benevolent and competent FedGov overlords.
The collapse of SVB was due to its assets being long bonds the value of which were hammered by the massive and necessary increases in interest rates and its liabilities being demand deposits.
Who raised interest rates and why? The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in order to attempt to suppress inflation.
What caused inflation? Money printing by the Federal Reserve since the Dot-com bubble collapse in 2000 eventually translated into price inflation, triggered by the U.S. response to the Ukraine war (confiscating Russian bank deposits, sanctions triggering shifts away from the petrodollar, etc.).
So we have a banking crisis the proximate and ultimate causes of which are actions by the concentrated power of the Leviathan U.S. FedGov and its irresponsible and incompetent actions.
And Ms. Brown wants to concentrate power in the Leviathan FedGov further. This is madness.
Weren’t we taught to never drink and derive?
This article makes me feel rather stupid because I don’t understand any of it, not much anyway.� One of the quotes is especially opaque, with its giant ripping lawnmower blade, hanging sword, bursting soap bubble, economies going down instead of up or sideways.� It’s so much gobbledegook.
Yes, I like Ellen Brown.
As far as the banks — I do not have one iota of responsibility for the hole I hope they fall in.
It was they who allowed unlimited funds for wars since the start of this century, with one of the most expensive being the current proxy war against Russia via Ukraine.
It was they who used what WAS a sound Social Security System as a slush fund and general cash dispenser when G. W. Bush saw the forever wars after 911 were not going to be free.
It was they who bought off on the lunatic notion of continuing the Cold War bases overseas when it was clear they were no longer needed.
The hell with them. Better we start digging up the roads and plant potatoes than bail out those brats one more time.
A “derivative” is a bet, as Ellen Brown notes. But it does not reflect a real-world economic entity (good or service). It is loosely “derived” from a real entity. They are based (loosely) on the insurance model. Suppose a person takes out an insurance policy on their house. If the house burns down they collect the insurance and replace the house. If not, they have the house. It’s an insurance bet with a solid commodity behind it. Betting on the future price of wheat, which a wheat farmer might do, also has a solid commodity behind it. These kinds of bets are used as safety hedges for unfortunate developments.
But suppose all the neighbors of the house owner could bet on whether his house burns down. In this situation they will never have possession of the house. They are merely bettors on the side. Their bet is “derived” from the potential event, but the bettors have no actual involvement with the house, or the wheat shipments. It has the economic relevance of betting on a dog race.
And let’s suppose the casino issuing these bets can handle an unlimited number of side bets on whether John’s house burns down. All these bets have no more real economic value than all the betting stubs at a dog track. And let’s suppose the casino issuing a vast number of these bets is a bank, such as JP Morgan, which also holds depositors real money . Then our practical, necessary banking system gets enmeshed in the gambling business of JP Morgan’s casino. And when JP Morgan fucks up its casino business and loses a ton of money, they claim that if the Federal government does not cover their bad gambling debts that will wreck the real economy for everybody else.
It’s relevant that our banking system is owned and controlled at its center by financial pirates. (Their resulting vast wealth enables them to own our press and politicians.) Over time they have created a multi-tentacled system, including major corporations and shell companies to carry out their vast rip-offs. This is explained in the first section of the article linked below. It also includes with some solution ideas in the last section, and references the work of Ellen Brown and Michael Hudson.
War Profiteers and Israel’s Bank
https://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com/p/war-profiteers-and-israels-bank.html
“A person has to wonder about the degree of involvement of the pissant state with the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank.”
Israel was financed by the Rothschild Bank, a mega European bank with stealth tentacles in America. For a reference see my reply to your comment #5.
Also, there’s a very interesting, well-done video discussing svb bank connections to Israel and Jeffrey Epstein (among others), posted by lone feral cat in comment #2 here.
https://www.unz.com/aanglin/meatball-ron-says-to-stop-war-against-russia-attack-china/
Large numbers are the result of immense greed, the problem is that in the end it must be paid for with the sweat of those who have less.
Great article – Thanks ! This is not only a test of the Financial system, even though we’ve been here before – it’s more a test for the people of the USA, Europe and others that are going to get the shaft from these Swindlers – Again.
Another big test will be how the incompetent USG will handle all the Social Programs that people rely on for staying alive – maybe Phyzer will introduce a new Freedom Vax, that has that FDA thing called the – Final Solution. However, the only place we need a Final Solution is in the corrupt banking system and most of the Washington Agencies.
I think a Cancellation of all Domestic debt would alleviate much of the problem but those rich rich folks would rather eat their children than lose money. So, Cancel the debt and let the people of the USA start the Final Solution in Washington.
So the debts owed by banks to their depositors would be cancelled. That would work wonders.
Do you know, I suspect you haven’t a clue.
Similar articles about a Derivative Armageddon have been appearing regularly since 2008 — yet somehow the disaster always fails to materialize.
This is because creation of fiat dollars papers over (literally) the problems — for example:
Federal Reserve Board announces it will make available additional funding to eligible depository institutions to help assure banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors
After many years of extremely low interest rates, no doubt many financial institutions are now caught holding huge quantities of interest rate sensitive assets that are now significantly underwater as rates have risen and are still rising — the next step will be for the Federal Reserve to allow these institutions to offload these assets at par — you may hear more talk about the ‘balance sheet’ of the Federal Reserve, but in a fiat regime that’s a phony issue (like the ‘debt ceiling’) — no one cares.
So far, the worldwide financial sphere has shown an amazing ability to absorb these fiat dollars.
Clearly, this corruption will continue as long as it can, meaning as long as other nations allow and tolerate it — the only solution is for the rest of the world, led by BRIC nations, to create a credible, widely accepted alternative to the USD.
Agree, but “brats” is way to forgiving of a characterization.
All Jewish money magic. Let this gay modern slave system collapse. Only White fury can absolve this world. Burn it all to ashes.
‘Certainly, for our local government deposits, public banks are an important solution.’ — Ellen Brown
*rolls eyes*
As I noted in a comment to Ellen Brown’s previous post on this subject, she has an ax to grind — and, here comes the anticipated flakery, as she steers into the weeds with her ‘public banks’ canard.
Public banks hold an infinitesimal share of the US market, and could not possibly be expanded fast enough to exert the slightest effect on the ‘quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble’ which so exercises Ms Brown.
Indeed, public banks would be obliged to use interest rate derivatives to hedge their exposures to changing rates, just as publicly-traded banks do. One can’t effectively manage a fractionally-reserved institution without them.
Besides that, public banks essentially would substitute direct, unlimited government deposit insurance for capped FDIC insurance. That’s what’s just transpired with the new BTFP facility. So what’s the difference?
Earth to Ellen: today’s collapsing Superbubble was inflated by the Federal Reserve’s reckless, successive quantitative easing campaigns over the past dozen years.
To stop destructive Bubbles, QE must be outlawed. Requiring even 40% gold backing for US dollars — as the US did decades ago — would stop QE in its tracks, as that much gold does not exist.
Tim Geithner famously said they could print money to infinity.
Printing money is the small hat solution to every problem.
This is exactly wrong.
You want all your money in banks with massive derivatives exposure.
Why?
Because if they fail they bring down the entire financial system–they are “too big to fail”.
Smaller financial institutions can be sacrificed.
If the big banks fail the world will go back to a barter economy–and then it won’t matter anyway.
It’s good to be the king
SHEKEL SHUFFLE: JANET YELLEN’S SVB BAILOUT WAS FOR ISRAELI TECH FIRMS
Video Link
Something roughly similar happened to the Soviet Union (USSR).
We have a fundamentally unworkable system — it’s called “global industrialization”. Meadows modeled it a long time ago, 1970s, and his “business as usual” set of parameters turned out to be highly predictive.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-02-24/the-limits-to-growth-at-50-from-scenarios-to-unfolding-reality/
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/jay-forrester-shock-to-the-system/
https://donellameadows.org/the-limits-to-growth-now-available-to-read-online/
The severe problems that Meadows pointed out are structural: the coupled differential equations that constitute the model describe a process that requires strong adaptive control even to postpone crashes, and eventually even that control fails. The degree of control required is beyond that achieved by any human society in all history or anthropology. It is not available to any contemporary government (yes, not even to the People’s Republic of China).
Politically, this means that any government that tries to face and solve these problems will fail, and will fall from power.
That’s what happened in the USSR. The Bolsheviks failed badly, Stalin realized that central State power is only effective in wartime and replaced them with a State that bet everything on Soviet annexation of Russia after a repetition of WW I, lost badly and was saved by luck and US lend lease (where FDR had been doing something similar to Stalin’s bet on war). Then came Khrushchev, who tried to upgrade Soviet industry to 1950s levels rather than the heavy industries and unproductive agriculture that then dominated Russia, and he also failed and was dismissed. After that, USSR leaders were figureheads, often in their 80s (like Biden), who let the Soviet system run on as they could do no other. The USSR ended in ~1990, victim of a system that it could not change and could not live with.
And that is what is happening in the US today. Meadow’s work and its success over 5 decades shows that US problems are not solvable by government.
Further, Turchin’s work ( http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-science-behind-my-forecast-for-2020/, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7ahqn/ ) suggested that in the 2020s US popular unrest would insist that these problems be solved — whether they could be solved or not.
When politicians cannot solve a problem, they defer it (“kick the can down the road”). If there are too many cans, then the pile of cans falls on them and they are no more. The US financial system is in trouble because it is becoming less productive (as above) because resources are increasingly harder to get and in demand by an increasing number of people . Gasoline prices are an obvious example of that. People are losing their livelihoods (tech firings, GM firing 50% of its workforce) because there are not longer the resources to pay them. Some half million people live in US tent cities!!!
The US Federal Government (USFG) has tried to continuing to expand world trade (“globalization”) and has failed badly in MENA and the Ukraine. Blowback has been so severe that the USFG may well lose control of Europe, and DoD has trouble recruiting. USFG currency issuance/borrowing has been so excessive that it has caused bank failures (by requiring a 4% interest rate to take back the money it printed) in the productive part of the US economy. Even that is an epiphenomenon, as the bank’s strategy of making profitable investments with depositors’ money is unworkable when the entire physical economy is contracting.
The US tried to promote fundamental industrial invention in the 1980s. I was part of that, but it turned out that the US industrial/academic/governments were (in practice) staunchly opposed to the threat of change. Instead of fundamentals, we got endless versions of what we already had: mail order catalogs were replaced by computer mail order catalogs, verbal gossip replaced by computer gossip, books by Google.
When all serious attempts to solve a problem have failed, governments become totalitarian, and the US is doing that (Gurri, _The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium_,2018. Gurri depicts an elite that has an almost theological belief in itself and its right to rule, with valid elections as any election that confirms this right). The totalitarian governments feature an ideology that is complete fantasy, that changes rapidly so that those fooled by the ideology can be distinguished from those that do not, and that justifies a totalitarian government. The current ESG and DIE programs do that, and also raise revenue (“We wouldn’t want word to get around that you have not DIEd and your ESG is flat, would we?”).
Eventually the public says “no more excuses”, and that changes the politics.
Schiedel, _Escape from Rome_, 2019, presents a strong case that empires are only interested in security and political tranquility, hence present yield and social stasis. This has certainly been the case for the America empire. The profitable changes of the past 7 decades have been towards devolution to smaller organizations, and that will continue.
The only way out of the present failure is a reversion to smaller and competing States. Only under dire necessity will States permit or even encourage fundamental innovation, and this appears to be cross-cultural, at least outside of sub-Saharan Africa. The problem with this solution (neglecting the people hurt and killed by such a breakup) is that weapons have become more destructive and cheaper per unit destruction. North Korea, an obvious example of a poor and ideology crippled State, can afford two guided missile submarines. The Russian Federation, a resource selling government, can afford nuclear weapons delivery systems that outmatch US systems. Afghani tribesmen can seize Afghanistan with out even one F-16, which Biden recently said was necessary to fight the US. The USFG has apparently tried to stabilize its internal politics by framing a large assembly of Republicans as “insurrectionists” while preventing any any inquiry into the 2020 national elections.
So- I’d suggest that the current problems will worsen, that Europe will loosely bind to the Russian Federation, and that the US, under Trump of DeSantis (or an Obama puppet?), will separate into regions, each with its own government, and quite possibly without admitting that it has done so. The rest of the BRICs will find that they aren’t as unified as they say, and will also fission (Will India submit to Chinese hegemony? Will Brazil form an unshakable alliance with anybody? etc.)
Africa will find itself in serious trouble, as nobody else will have the resources to support the African population.
Historically, such situations take about 30 years to reach bottom, with a new system formed by the desperate survivors who will do anything to stop the poverty and starvation. That would be ~2050.
So don’t bet the farm on large organizations solving contemporary problems. To endure: Decouple, don’t believe any rumor unless it has been officially denied, assume that any large organization is a starving beast that is looking to gobble you up, at least try not to lead with your chin, and try to have kids as you will need them when you get old.
Oh, yes — and don’t get paranoid about the whole thing. “let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”
Why does anyone believe a thing the Fed says anymore? It’s understood that as hikes increase, there will be negative effects and over leveraged businesses and banks will be casualties. This is all part of the natural business cycle. However, what’s the point in hiking, if when the first thing breaks, the Fed rushes in and backstops it? That essentially nullifies the process of hiking!
The Fed has all but nationalized the banks over the past couple days by backstopping all depositors, insured and uninsured. First off, what gives them the authority to do this? Secondly, where the hell is all this money coming from?? I understand we can print to infinity… but the laws of mathematics and physics still apply! How the hell can any of this keep going, what will we be saying 6 months from now?
The whole damn collapsing contraption is nothing but make-believe. Of-course the actual everyday consequences of people behaving based on the thing’s supposed “rules,” are every bit as painful as feared. Even so, the “technical” aspects of this entire discussion are of the “angels-dancing-on-pinheads” variety. Something like what Ms Brown here calls “intentional communities,” without the make-believe “money” part, are going to be about all there remains of possibly-viable Human social arrangements when the really big bubble bursts….which might be just about an Day now.
Somebody above brought up the old “honest money” argument as panacea for “The Problem.” The thing about even the so-called “honest money” is that honest people (which is the only possible real cure for what ails “civilized” society) neither need nor want that, either. That is because the thing about money of any ilk, is that it is in its essential nature toxic, corrosive, and habit-forming….always and everywhere.
What all this is really about is the impending advent of conditions in which the muddled masses of domesticated Humans presently languishing in a state of enforced arrested-development, will finally have to either grow-up or perish. It’s just Basic Biology. All of the fever-dream delusions are about to be forever GWTW….and good riddance!
Would love to peep at the books [if the holy ledger does exist] @Federal Reserve or elsewhere. …as it turns out there is no accounting done, which is most obvious to me, then rewriting the narrative without deflating the power of the global elites versus man-meat, could as well be contracted to J. K. Rowling as a next block-buster. She has a Jewish manager and is an insider to finance-joozing as well. Harry Potter is done as a major text book, she must be available. Janet could be supporting actor, the acting is paid for anyhow. A fat face as Buffet can then oracle other warnings whilst participating in the orgy. Reality is better then any of the Hollywood fiction.
The bad guys [raped and hollowed as they were before their conversion to dragons, Putin and Xi] not playing along any longer have decided the fate of the Western Cabal in large part. Deflating the bubble only affects the “rich and powerful” luckily. Ripping out the pages of a non-existing ledger cannot be that hard, as they experienced. There is always Elon Musk as best supporting actor.
As to man-meat, it is no longer an issue but how to contain their hunger [not anger]. The scraps of global looting will no longer “trickle down”, “jobs” [sense-less jobs] can no longer be afforded [a peep in the J. K. Rowling first draft]. The quest for the “holy grail” by stumped low-launders and mountain goats. To keep things medicated, the question left is will they [Man-Meat] adapt to lesser status, and they will! The amnesia that helps Haitians eating dirt, will be the greater!
The hard problem is how to interact with Russia and China for our Cabal. We live in times of elite infighting, their numbers have bulged and the sanitation is done at the top. Nothing much to see on the pavement. Somehow our and anybody’s elites will arrive at a novel status quo, take the rest of the century.
Time to address the real currency: population, populations in numbers, population density where we left off [covid, vaxxing, industrial food, pollution, et al.]. May the real Jew stand up.
Private bankers keep all their profits, but if asshole bankers lose, taxpayers bail them out.
It is good to be a banker.
Asshole bankers are complete f-uck-ups, but the government, using taxpayer dollars, keeps bailing out these pricks, regardless of what the law says.
The playbook: Bankers funnel a large percentage of the money back to the politicians for all the money the bankers get.
It is a big club, and you are not in it.
America and the West will undergo JUDGMENT for perpetuating
the Greatest Injustice of the 20th Century.
http://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/the-greatest-injustice-of-the-20th-century/
For the vast majority of people on Earth, the single most important determinant-in-fact of their quality-of-life is money.
Yet paradoxically, and near inconceivably, most people do not know the first and most important thing about money, and that is that there is no money.
Everything that people are habituated to think of as money is in fact a derivative-of-money. There are promises-to-pay money, there are orders-to-pay money, there are various kinds of evidence (exchangeable-evidence-of-debt) that one party owes money to another party, and all of the accounts are denominated in money. But there is no money.
Just as we could have a fully functional otherwise duplicate of the existing system but denominated in unicorn-horns instead of dollars, euros, yen, rubles and yuan. There are no unicorn-horns in fact, but that does not matter because there doesn’t have to be.
The real problems start when the public is deliberately and systematically induced to believe otherwise, and when law or government-policy provides for it to make a difference depending on who you are.
What is usury?
If your answer is interest, then you are experiencing cognitive-dyslexia.
Usury is the pure exploitation of another’s necessity, and its most substantive and significant manifestation in credit and finance is everything that is not the interest.
“A man shall not have interest for his money and a collateral advantage besides for the loan of it…” – Jennings v. Ward [1705] 2 Vern. 520, 18 R.C. 365.
“Every benefit taken indirectly by a creditor, for the granting of which no impulsive cause appears but the money lent, will be voided as extorted.”(Principles of equity: Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 1696-1782).
If, for example, a money-lender would agree to loan £100 to the headmaster of a private school with interest at, say, 5% per annum, provided that the headmaster will also admit the money-lender’s son to the school even though he does not otherwise qualify, then that condition-of-access is the usury, while the interest-called-interest is not, even though the interest-called-interest can still itself be characterized as a less-concentrated-form of usury or background-radiation-like-usury).
A promissory-note is more properly and accurately a usury-note, because as a condition of access you must first unconditionally and gratuitously agree that you owe the named amount as “principal” to the bank, plus interest, and that you will pay the bank the same amount again on the named maturity date, all as a constructive or de facto application / entry-fee, before the bank / banker will even consider giving you anything in return.
Signing and delivering the promissory-note / usury-note, and giving-over-possession and legal-ownership of all of the real and financial assets so attached, to the bank, is an act and ritual of submission and subservience, and also the bank’s direct source of funds / secured-credit for the subsequent pretended-loan. It is a variation (and cross-leveraged-extension) of what the ancient Romans called paying-tribute to Caesar.
What then is the difference between or among a promissory-note, a usury-note, and a tribute-note?
The label promissory-note allows the serf to normalize bowing-down before Caesar as a procedural-virtue, so as to perpetuate such servitude as a natural state of being, which in turn avoids other more overt and violent forms of repression and plunder.
Forensically, the business marketed to the public as banking-post-1913 (at the latest) has been and remains credit-reinsurance, compounded and leveraged by 100%-plus access-fees / tribute-payments.
It is not like racketeering. It is racketeering.
…
Not money-lenders
Banks are not what you think they are. They are not money-lenders – they are credit-reinsurers, and they are asset-sinks. When you sign and deliver a promissory-note and mortgage you are underwriting and advancing real-estate-secured-credit to the bank.
The bank / banker strips-off and retains the financial and real-estate security as a premium for itself, and then returns or reinsures unsecured-credit back to you as an unsecured-deposit-credit that does not cost the bank anything material to produce.
The money / credit for the alleged or pretended loan does not even exist unless and until you underwrite it by accepting the liability for it by agreeing that you owe it, normally under the promissory note / usury-note that is secured by the mortgage (and whether by separate-instrument or embedded in the nominal mortgage itself).
You then have to add or issue the same amount again in the form of a signed check / cheque (drawn on the bank, and which upon delivery becomes a financial / money asset of the bank)) to the seller of the real estate, who has to co-sign / endorse it and deliver it back to the bank as a ratification of the otherwise recoverable-loss of their property and legal-title to the bank in exchange for an unsecured deposit credit. Then the bank agrees that it owes the principal amount (selling price) to the seller instead of to you.
The nominal mortgage is a combination bill-of-sale that transfers all right, title, and interest in the property to the bank, plus an embedded repurchase-option that allows you to buy the property back from the bank by paying it all of the money (discharging all of the liabilities) required under all of the securities. When a bank forecloses it is not foreclosing on the house, because it already owns the house. The foreclosure is of the repurchase-option – sometimes referred to as a right of redemption (and another example of cognitive-dyslexia).
The pretended-banker arrives at the transaction with metaphoric empty-pockets, and leaves with all of the financial securities from the income-pre-qualified lead-underwriter / pretended-borrower in one hand, and the legal-title to the market-value-pre-qualified-real-estate property (and the endorsed check) from the seller in the other.
From the nominal bankers’ perspective there is only one material reality, and that is that pre-qualified-real-equity / secured-assets come in, and only unsecured-liabilities go out. They are real-asset-sinks, and they are unsecured-liability-kiters. The penultimate in balanced-and-leveraged feedback-loops.
___
See: http://werex.org/a-general-theory-of-financial-relativity/ for a detailed exposition.
Now you really know why the Kabal is on a mission to reset.
Not your fault I think, it’s simply a poorly written, confusing article.
The author did not mention that many economists think that the notional value of the derivatives population of contracts is a grossly exaggerated quantity, that the market value (and therefore true credit risk) could be less than 5% of the notional ‘quadrillion’, still a lot but not a ‘quadrillion’ by far.
Also, I didn’t understand why the article devotes so much effort to speak about derivatives in connection with the collapse of the SVB. SVB’s exposure to bonds was what brought that thing down.
Typo:
“Stalin realized that central State power is only effective in wartime and replaced them with a State that bet everything on Soviet annexation of Russia after a repetition of WW I,”
should read:
Stalin realized that central State power is only effective in wartime and replaced them with a State that bet everything on Soviet annexation of Western Europe after a repetition of WW I had left Western Europe exhausted.
Typo:
” The USFG has apparently tried to stabilize its internal politics by framing a large assembly of Republicans as “insurrectionists” while preventing any any inquiry into the 2020 national elections.”
” The USFG has apparently tried to stabilize its internal politics by framing a large assembly of Republicans as “insurrectionists” while simultaneously preventing the Republicans from establishing any base for an inquiry into the 2020 national elections ( https://www.wnd.com/2023/03/dems-escaped-threat-2020-vote-count-emergency-rules/ ).”
Wich “smart” people do you come from, you arrogant deck hand.
“So was insurance company AIG, which managed to survive due to a whopping $182 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury; but Lehman was considered too weakly collateralized to salvage. It went down, and the Great Recession followed.”
I beg to differ from your assessment: the reason AIG got bailed out and not Lehman Brothers was that one of the Jew (Little Maurice Greenberg) was more important to Judea and its future than the other Jew at Lehman. It was a fcuk fest to screw the Gentiles, as usual!
I axed my local drug dealer, Pimp and aspiring Rappa what he thought of banks going bust, and this is what he said.
Thanks Demetrius, you the man.
Burly Turley the useless cuck won’t name the Jewish Power. Without JQ, none of this makes any sense. It’s not just about the ‘Democrats’ but the Jews and Zionists.
DEMS JUST GOT CAUGHT IN MASSIVE BANKING SCANDAL
Video Link
Trust in US dollars is gone because the US has not used the “Trust” in a way to promote positive Global development. Over the decades, American actions have exposed itself to be one sided and unfair. To be clear, the USA has not been a “Nation State” which serves it’s own entire population. Something we call “International Finance Capital (IFC)” centered in the City of London has wrapped it’s parasitic tentacles around most of the Earth and taken over Nation States. IFC has no borders and just aims to “control” everything (land, labor, resources etc..) through Finance; this includes education (neo-liberal economics). IFC is essentially contemporary Imperialism; canons and muskets replaced by International Finance (Private Central Banks, Reserve Currency, Sanctions etc..). Captured Nation States serve IFC. Any Nation State that defies the will of IFC runs the risk of blowback; i.e. capital flight from a Nation, and hence the insolvency of its economy. The U.S., being the leading capitalist State, plays the primary role in promoting and protecting the interests of IFC to the detriment of it’s own population and country. America funding and leading wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine etc. are examples. Another example is US manufacturing being moved overseas (by Wall Street) to gain “wage arbitrage” at the detriment of US workers and it’s future. For historical context, Britain was the former leading capitalist State which is why the pound Sterling was the former World Reserve Currency. Presently, we are seeing “Nation States” like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria etc…pushing back at IFC. These countries want “true” Sovereignty (i.e. a real Nation State that serves it’s own people).
It’s kind of ironic that a bank so wrapped up in Technology and Crypto was ultimately taken under by USTs; the safest asset in the world!
Can you please carry the analogy further to help explain derivatives? As another commenter noted, there’s no such thing as a quadrillion dollars, and it must be the case that most of the derivatives cancel each other out.
For example, if the bank/casino received a lot of bets that the house would burn down, then wouldn’t it then bet its own money on the house not burning down? The insurance company might bet that the house burned down, so that its expected value associated with the event was zero (or slightly positive accounting for the insurance premiums). The market, in the form of pricing of such bets, would reach an equilibrium to prevent a disproportionate amount of action being on one side of any proposition.
So there must be significant cancelling-out effects of derivatives. What’s the real exposure? Impossible to say, I guess. What’s the sum total of all of the vigs on one quadrillion dollars worth of derivatives?
Of course there’s a basic point about systemic failure. If all of the bank’s insured houses burned down at the same time, then somewhere in the derivative chain there would real winners and losers.
“The technology now exists to form a network of community cryptocurrencies that are asset-backed and privacy-protected, but that is a subject for another column.”
I eagerly await that future essay…
I feel that there’s way too much focus on Bitcoin which has severe technical limitations. Please look into Epic Cash and the Epicenter ecosystem as a possible alternative to Bitcoin:
https://epic.tech
EPIC is way more ambitious than Bitcoin and probably 99% of other crypto currencies out there. Their “ecosystem” includes the following 3 components:
EPIC: Confidential, censorship resistant store of value
ECR: Algorithmic Central Bank
EUSD: Soft-pegged Cryptodollar
From their white paper:
So far Bitcoin only satisfies the need for a store of value. They say Epic Cash and the ecosystem they are working on can meet all 3 requirements.
Also check out their “Epicenter” site: https://epicenter.epic.tech/what-is-epicenter/
I’ve been very skeptical about crypto but the threat of CBDC’s being thrust upon us has made me reconsider. But we need something better than Bitcoin. I don’t know why everyone keeps focusing on it.
“If all of the bank’s insured houses burned down at the same time, then somewhere in the derivative chain there would real winners and losers.”
…on paper.
That is why accounting is so useless in this discussion:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/top-audit-firm-defends-giving-clean-bill-health-svb-signature-bank-weeks-failure
What causes businesses, banks etc to collapse is that they run out of cash.
Derivatives create exposure for individual firms which can cause them to lose liquidity. That means they can’t pay their bills, which means their vendors can’t pay their bills, etc.
The losers really close their doors–the winners have gains on paper that they cannot collect (except pennies on the dollar after months or even years in bankruptcy court).
That is how derivatives create “systemic risk”.
Mar 14, 2023 Are We Heading Towards A 2008-Type Of Financial Collapse? Steve Forbes Responds To Bank Chaos
Reacting to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and fears about the banking system on “Forbes Newsroom,” Steve Forbes looked to history to gauge whether we are facing another 2008-like financial collapse.
Video Link
June 05, 1933 FDR takes United States off gold standard
On June 5, 1933, the United States went off the gold standard, a monetary system in which currency is backed by gold, when Congress enacted a joint resolution nullifying the right of creditors to demand payment in gold. The United States had been on a gold standard since 1879, except for an embargo on gold exports during World War I, but bank failures during the Great Depression of the 1930s frightened the public into hoarding gold, making the policy untenable.
https://www.history.com/.amp/this-day-in-history/fdr-takes-united-states-off-gold-standard
The Global Debt Clock
Our interactive overview of government debt across the planet. The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt.
http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock
Great video – I wrote a comment but maybe it was intercepted – thanks F C.
do you mean which or witch, you ignorant dick head?
You’re assuming that bankers are as smart as bookies. Probably not the case.
According to @tomgoldsteincs on Twitter in fact the corporate media story about blaming low yield Treasury Bonds is not an accurate analysis.
Instead, look at where all the recent money from the depositers went: into Mortgage Backed Securities MBS
So they used the scamdemic to break small/mid businesses, and now will use SVB to break small/mid banks…
People don’t seem to be wising up to the shenanigans enriching the club members while screwing the national public. Its why they censor the thinking public and promote their inbred parrots repeating things till nobody remembers what was said before.
Till accountability shows up, DISOBEY UNACCOUNTABLE AUTHORITY!
excellent explanation and i’d like to add that the real difference between derivatives and insurance is that insurance companies are required to hold a percentage of their funds in trust to be able to pay catastrophic loses on a large scale, not so with these fake ponzi derivatives. there isn’t enough money in the world to cover a quadrillion dollar exposure.
too bad for the russians, as they won’t be able to participate in this coming clusterfuck, sanctions and all, you know.
Couldn’t agree more. Full disclosure: I can’t get my head around what a derivative even is.
Can somebody, anybody, define/explain derivatives IN LAYMAN’S LANGUAGE.
Dore predicts a complete collapse of the Banking System.
Brown predicts a Banking/Capitalist “Tsunami.”
Dore gets his point across in a clearer fashion.
If it happens, do we fight? [We allowed them to assassinate our last Constitutional President & Coup D’état -overthrow- our Republic- without a response from our citizens]. When do we fight?
I don’t know the asset mix owned by SVB — perhaps ultimately it doesn’t matter, nor will the full truth ever be known — but it appears SVB owned a lot of what used to be called ‘distressed assets’ (recall the ‘mark to market’ controversy about those), whether they were treasuries, MBS, or something else — and when they had to sell some of them to satisfy extraordinary cash flow needs, for high levels of withdrawals or whatever, SVB incurred unsustainable losses, and rumors and realities made it impossible for them to raise additional capital.
It’s interesting to speculate on why SVB was allowed to fail (which it clearly was), because there are established mechanisms, e.g. via the Federal Reserve, to provide liquidity (maybe via some back channel) — it seems in any such crisis, which could probably hit a number of financial institutions at any particular time (more at one time than another, depending on market conditions), there are always sacrificial lambs: some are allowed to go under, while others are saved — obviously, there’s no shortage of fiat money: they could all be saved.
Thank you, Ellen Brown.
The most disturbing feature is that this unstable “system “exists.
Casino, race track, Hall of mirrors …
Battle Waterloo … sellsellsell … panic … buybuybuy …
South Sea Bubble … Bank of Rothschild …
As the west fades, many nations will repudiate usurial debt.
The system is going to collapse anyway, derivatives or whatever.
Start now with debt forgiveness.
It’s a slight and slim chance …
But then do you want the system to survive …
Given the types of “people” that own and run it ?
In reality it doesnt have to be our problem, per se, though obviously making effort on real life is required, so, theres the cons fake solutions and attacks and ongoing death, or, can be our force of future, though not if people sit. The image of debt is image, supposed paper money, we can see its been a con of false ‘value, and was always a con scheme. They claim debt as if ‘our problem, but where are the predator drones, mine, where is it, where is my share of the bogus corporations they fraudulently ‘bail out’, where are the deeds to falsely ‘foreclosed’ houses they continue taking.
They claim ‘debt same time ‘pay themselves and schemes, state cons, court cons, police cons, skool cons, immigration, corporations cons, for their schemes. We weren’t taught real first priorities. We don’t ‘own what we can’t defend, so, priority should have been what, not fake work, not breeding, not fake skool, should be small group tribalism and weapons and making effort for real future.
They want people under false limits of thinking, instead of think natural law and close down con cystems or take back everything stolen centuries. Feel free to look at a ‘dolar, bogus masonic symbols ‘seeing eye’, jew face ‘washington, and ‘in god we trust’ slapped on it. Obvious conjob. Paper money, paper scribble ‘laws’, fakery, because fail to push back, focus future where we live.
The con phrase ‘counterfeit money’ is an oxymoron.
The article shows grossness, so on that aspect appreciate the time.
Another terrific article by Ellen.
Thank you.
Financial Derivatives Going Belly Up Will Destroy Filthy Globalized Central Banker Scam?
GOOD!
The monetary extremist horse has been let out of the barn by the evil and demonic JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire and White Core America must hoist the ruling class turds with their own petard by calling for the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank to be NATIONALIZED and the currency doled out like ale close to the end of happy hour.
This Is The End by the admiral’s son Jim Morrison was fifty years too early, but we are soon to break on through to the other side of monetary madness in a binge of debt that will implode the dollar and all other currencies and it will render all debt and the proceeds derived from that debt null and void.
White Core America will call for the immediate implementation of a Guaranteed Federal Reserve Bank Monthly Income to dole out the loot and the swag and eligibility will be the key to the whole patriotic plan. All of the foreigner invader interlopers of the last hundred years or so and their spawn will be ineligible to get their conjured up loot from the Fed.
ELIGIBILITY for the swag cuts out the foreigner interloper invaders and it sets the stage for the political decapitation of the evil and treasonous JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire.
UBI or the Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP) is about raw power and who has it. A UBI or PCLP will allow the historic American nation or the European Christian ancestral core the ability to dislodge from power the evil and treasonous JEW/WASP Ruling Class from power.
The Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion(PCLP) will pay each American who has all blood ancestry born in colonial America or the USA before 1924 a cool ten thousand dollars a month. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank shall work together to conjure up the cash out of thin air, just like the ruling class is doing now.
Sam Francis said it’s all about the ruling classes and Sam was right. A UBI or PCLP will create the conditions whereby tens of trillions of dollars and land and property and licenses and other assets can be severed from the ownership and control of the current corrupt and illegitimate JEW/WASP Ruling Class members of the American Empire and doled out to the patriotic and honorable old stocker members of the European Christian ancestral core.
UBI or PCLP is about raw political power; it’s not about economics.
The ability to control the central bank is the true power and it must be contested by the old stocker members of the historic American nation.
The Federal Reserve Bank must be nationalized and the JEW/WASP Ruling Class and its minions must be financially liquidated and its members must be forcibly exiled to a hot and humid and nasty part of sub-Saharan Africa. All this must be done legally, of course.
William the Conqueror thought he got screwed out of his rightful inheritance, and the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire is screwing over the decent and patriotic members of the old stocker historic American nation. Of course, horrible treasonous sleazebag old stockers like those in the Bush Organized Crime Syndicate are examples of old stocker evil globalizer treasonite ruling class nation-wreckers.
Repudiate All Debt and Financially Liquidate The Plutocrats And Their Stooges.
GOD BLESS AMERICA!
‘Can somebody, anybody, define/explain derivatives IN LAYMAN’S LANGUAGE.’ — ricpic
How about an example? Here is a quote on the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) 10-year Treasury futures — a contract for a nominal $100,000 face value of T-notes:
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/us-treasury/10-year-us-treasury-note.quotes.html
It is a derivative, because its price derives from the price of cash-traded Treasury notes, but the futures contract is not itself a T-note. You can buy or sell the June 2023 contract by putting up a $2,250 margin deposit.
Over the past volatile week, the price of the 10-year T-note contract shot up drastically, from 110.92 on March 8 to 115.28 today, as the yield on cash-traded Treasuries plummeted. Chart:
https://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/us-10-yr-t-note-streaming-chart
At $1,000 a point, that’s gain of 4.36 points = $4,360 for those long the contract, and a loss of $4,360 for those who sold it. For all participants, gains equal losses — a so-called zero-sum game.
Note also that this unusually large one-week move of $4,360 was nowhere near the $100,000 nominal value of the contract. In fact, it was only 4.36% of it.
In a nutshell: (1) actual exposures are far below nominal exposures; (2) the winner’s gain equals the loser’s loss; (3) many financial market participants, such as mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, literally could not operate without the ability to hedge against interest rate changes with derivatives, including Treasury futures.
All new US printed dollars should replace “In God We Trust” with “In Jews We Trust”, cuz they’re the only ones who control its value, circulation and printing.
(((See FED Yellen and every robber Baron bankster known and unknown)))
A derivative is a contract between two parties that specifies the conditions under which payments will be made between the parties.
For example, one type of derivative is a “future”, in which A agrees to buy something from B at a future date for a price that is specified now, e.g. in March 2023, A signs a contract with B to buy 1,000 barrels of West Texas Intermediate crude oil for delivery by 30 September 2023 to Cushing, Oklahoma at a particular price, with the payment to B due on 30 September 2023.
Another type of derivative is an “option”, in which C acquires the right, but not the requirement, to buy (in a “call” option) or sell (in a “put” option) a particular asset from/to D on a specific date at a price specified now. For example, in March 2023, C might purchase the right to sell a “Good Delivery” (400 troy ounce / 12.44 kg) gold bar to D at a certain price (the “strike” price) on 15 March 2024. If the market price of a Good Delivery gold bar on 15 March 2024 is well above the strike price, then C would probably not exercise his option to sell his bar at the strike price. If the market price of a gold bar on 15 March 2024 is well below the strike price, then C would probably exercise his option to sell his bar at the strike price. If C exercises his option, then his counterparty D is obligated to buy C’s gold bar at the strike price, even if D would lose money on the transaction.
Other types of derivative exist; the common factor between all of them is that the contract’s value is derived from the conditions of the contract.
I haven’t been paying attention for some years. If memory serves me, one of the biggest problem during the 2008 crisis was that trust in the interbank market dried up.
Investopia:
Say for example small banks seeking finance and some constantly rolling over debt in this market. Borrowing from large commercial banks. When the banking crisis started derivatives (for example credit default swaps) got triggered. But because the derivative market is not transparent the banks operating in this market didn’t know who was holding bad bets (derivatives) on it’s books. So this market froze stiff because trust dried up. This was a big problem for the central banks because the arteries supposed to circulate the liquidity they provided were clogged deepening the banking crisis.
Another systemic risk.
What is this? These idiots try to hide their extremism behind generalities and platitudes.
1. What does DeSantis have to do with health care(mentioned in association of the sick dolls)? Why even throw this in when he never brought up the issue? Since when does Florida ban discussion of the sick or validity of ‘universal healthcare’? Did DeSantis say he will lock people up for proposing higher spending on medicine?
2. Why would DeSantis be against diversity when Florida is one of the most diverse states, also one where many Cubans/Hispanics are Republican? But then, why did the New World become diverse? Because of imperialism and importation of blacks as slaves. And because the immigrant groups wiped out the indigenous Indians. Diversity itself has a dark history.
3. But it also mentions the poor American Indians. If American Doll company is so sensitive about the indigenous issue, why is it celebrating Diversity that led to the erasure of the indigenous who were replaced by diverse groups from the Old World? Do these people understand logic?
Anyway, I don’t recall DeSantis pissing on the American Indian community? Why even bring that up?
4. As for the black slavery experience, two things. US history has long taught about it, and history everywhere has been violent and cruel. The problem with CRT isn’t the subject of race and slavery but fixing ALL the blame on whites when, in fact, slavery was a universal thing(and still exists in parts of the non-West). Blacks in Africa practiced slavery forever, and if it mostly ended there, it owed white imperialism, which spread Enlightenment Ideas along with plunder and exploitation. Those pushing CRT pretend as if they’re the FIRST ones to mention the dark side of US history, but US history has long taught the tragic side. CRT sucks because it turns history and society into cartoons of simple saints/heroes and demons/villains. Even without CRT, remembrance of US history was NOT white-washed.
5. A book on ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ is pure CRT because it pretends those factors are(and will always be) pervasive and explain all the failures of nonwhites, especially blacks.
Also, it conflates legitimate white interests and fears as ‘white supremacy’. Segregation in the South wasn’t only about white privilege over blacks but white defense against black thuggery as blacks are naturally more muscular and aggressive. Indeed, the ‘liberal North’ is no less segregated than the South due to white flight and Jew Flew from black-heavy crime-ridden areas.
Did white dominance exist in the past? Yes, but the US would be inconceivable without it. Without whites at the top and at the helm, the American Project couldn’t have been fulfilled because only the Europeans, especially the Anglos and Northern Europeans(much more so than the Latin-Europeans who settled South America), had the right combination of ideas, values, and abilities to see it through.
6. A book on non-toxic masculinity? That would assume that masculinity is innately toxic and has to be detoxified. Into what? Pussy boy dorkiness? This is rather odd because the very people who bitch about TOXIC masculinity have no problem with black masculinity which is the most thuggish, violent, and pathological. If there is indeed out-of-control masculinity, it’s in rap music and black sports gangsta culture. But is it even mentioned on the topic of Toxic Masculinity?
7. A book on Working Class women? ROTFL. Most so-called ‘progressives’ are globalists and support policies that outsourced tons of working class jobs, for men and for women, to other countries. And why complain about Starbucks to DeSantis? Starbucks is totally run by Democrats who fund ‘woke’ garbage. If anything, the fact that Starbucks workers are trying to unionize goes to show that ‘wokeness’ has really been super-capitalist ploy to control leftism by filling it with ‘woke’ nonsense, like the idiocy on display in the Tiktok video.
8. Women in non-traditional roles. True, women are capable of lots of things, but what happens when men’s jobs are taken by women? Does anyone think of the consequences? Fewer men with good jobs means fewer marriage prospects who can support a family.
9. “As well as Jews…”, the video ends. This is the biggest ROFTL of them all. DeSantis is one of the biggest whores of Zion. His inauguration was in Israel. If there’s any speech he’s tried to suppress, it’s BDS or justice for Palestinians. Jews, more than the Cubans, own and control Florida. It’s like a second Israel, and DeSantis will do anything to appease Zion. But the idiot video pretends that DeSantis ignores Jews. How about American Doll company offering a book that shows how Jews commit genocide against Palestinians, support ISIS terrorists in Syria(which has also been bombed endlessly by Tel Aviv), threaten the world with illegally acquired nukes, and ally with sub-nazi lunatics in Ukraine.
and The USA treasury Secretary YELLEN just announced another $20BILLIONS for UCRAINE
I’ll give it a try:
A derivative is a bet.
You bet on whether the price of something will go up or down. For example the price of oil.
You bet the price of oil will go up and put your $ 1.000 stake on the table. If it goes up then you win and (for example) $ 200 could be added to your stake. $ 1.000 + $200 = $ 1.200.
If the price of oil goes down then you lose and (for example) $ 200 could be subtracted from you stake. $ 1.000 – $200 = $ 800.
You can play the game for a specified period. Often 1 month. Any time on that month you can take your stake off the table. Obviously, if your stake goes down to zero you have to exit the game (or put up a new stake).
If you’re finding the game a bit slow and unexciting you can pep it up by applying a multiplier to your winnings and loses. So, for example, instead of winning $200 you win $400 and instead of losing $200 you lose $400.
The relevance at the present time, is that a whole lot of investment is dependent on low interest rates. If interest rates rise then the investors will lose out badly. So they buy “derivates” (place bets) that interest rates will rise. So if interest rates rise and their investments go south then their losses are offset by the payoff on their derivative bet.
Good video. Note the certainty of this teenage (?) girl. None of this is negotiable and is fully validated by her peer group.
Thanks for that additional distinction between derivatives and insurance.
And not just the Russians. The whole of Eurasia and the Global South are probably thinking, “Gee, why can’t we have the Zionist banking mafia looting our banking system too?”
“it must be the case that most of the derivatives cancel each other out.”
I believe that’s the theory. The bank will create a custom derivative bet for client A, and then find somebody else to buy the opposite side of the bet. Back in the 2008 crisis Goldman Sachs emails revealed they were knowingly selling / pushing such bets which they considered to be trash.
Some years before the 2008 recession there was a Wall Street scheme that suddenly went bust. They thought they had a fool-proof, computerized system. Then an unexpected economic development blew up their plans and they crashed. Complex systems are vulnerable to unexpected events.
People who are striving to get richer and richer, and who don’t care if they sacrifice other people, may jump to conclusions about the perfection of their scheme. They may even willfully avoid looking at certain possibilities so they can go forward. Their caution extends only to themselves not getting caught. But even then, greed creates carelessness.
House burning down is a poor example. A better one would be to protect against the value of the house dropping.
For example: a person buys a house for $1,000,000 dollars, and has a $800,000 loan. After a while they are concerned that they become concerned the market may drop significantly over the next year, and making them vulnerable. They would like to guarantee someone will buy their house for at least what they owe on it (800k).
With derivatives they can do that. This is called buying a put option. Someone else may be interested in buying a house in that neighborhood for 800k. They can sell that option to the first person and collect a little bit of money for the risk they incur.
That’s the basic idea.
The cancellation of debt is the origin of the word Jubilee
Lamont—greed is one vicious vice. You warranted a loving spouse and appreciative father in law rather than a BIG goose egg and an ex-wife ( ungrateful and —in my opinion a bad decision).
All this greed and lack of principles –Arthur Andersen comes to mind ( shred the evidence at Enron) and set up entangled webs of companies and subsidiaries—the paper shuffle needing the saged advice of Lawyers and Accountants and later a layer of Hedge Fund Managers.
Later – I hope your former in laws meet another misfortune—an Invitation to DC and an interview with Nikki Haley on Fox News or the other outfit —CNN.
Once again my hero Ezra Pound calls from the grave:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54319/canto-xlv
Last of them Bohicans:
http://brothernathanaelfoundation.org/news/635-brother-nathanael
But I thought y’all were the smart race? “We build civilizations” “them dindoos can’t build nothing for themselves” and let’s not forget the number one excuse; “the hebes!”
Y’all yt’s used to be kangs what happened?
Hard times make hard men. Hard men make soft times. Soft times make soft people. Soft people make hard times.
It does in a sense that one becomes a winner ,the other party loses. Nothing else happens. Its like wagering between 2 persons . We can call it cancelling out .
But it gets complicated when few people bet on things that they dont own . These bets can be sold by one or more banks . These bets or options will have maturity dates . Peopel have to pay or make a killing —gaining or losing.
Now some one else can step into and buy all these bets and divide them into tranches and sell to another party . Depending on different date of payments ,buyers can expect monthly or half yearly or yearly payment, or incur losses .
Banks can use these as collateral depending on the stregnth or ratings . It can even sell them to govern,ent in times of insolvency . But the complexity incarses the face value exponentially whsoe underlying value is zero . In a best case scenario , it is just a wealth trasnfer but in the derivates exposure,the banks are involved with this its more complex,more unstable and responsive to many unrelated developments .
You don’t have to be a broken clock to understand the endgame here: stripping whitey and redirecting funds to the purported downtrodden.
I can’t connect every dot, but this is a game with ONLY a pair of them, actually. And what’s “more worser” is nobody is getting robbed blind anymore.
So, let’s take to the internet and win debates.
Ellen Brown is a greenbacker. She simply wants to give the same power the fed has now
to even more incompetent .gov managers. Yes madness.
laughing.
There should be a ban against highering physicists to engage in creating derivative formula for anyone in finance.
Really ? I have no understanding what point you’re trying to make with that absurd statement, and I’m not at all sure why I’m having to type this out for you, but if you REALLY don’t understand basic arithmetic perhaps you’re reading the wrong website:
10 X 100 = 1,000 (ten times one hundred equals one thousand)
1,000 X 1,000 = 1,000,000 (one thousand times one thousand equals one million)
1,000 X 1,000,000 = 1,000, 000,000 (one thousand times one million equals one billion)
1,000 X 1,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000 (one thousand times one billion equals one trillion)
1,000 X 1,000,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one thousand times one trillion equals one quadrillion)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quadrillion
A perfect comment, a masterful clean, simple explanation – and a finely chosen set of analogies. Thank you so much.
Not in the least. In fact, ((( their ))) immense greed for their timeless blood-soaked god, Mammon, and their immeasurable, immoral, relentless nation-wrecking evil will eventually be paid for instead by the simple expedient of ropes from lampposts. Their absolute financial control of the whole world and it’s businesses, systems and societal structures will then end forever.
It’s just that, as so often in the past with ((( their ))) absolute existential inability to learn from bitter experience, they haven’t quite figured that final stage of the game out yet.
Absolute nonsense, this bunkum has singlely been promoted by Michael Hudson and his mindless followers. Jubilee was a forgiveness of one’s transgressions, not of debt.
see, Five Myths about Jubilee by Art Lindsley
Myth #1: Jubilee meant a forgiveness of debt.
Myth #2: Jubilee involves a redistribution of wealth (land).
Myth #3: Jubilee shows the relative nature (relativization) of private property.
Myth #4: Jubilee leads to income equality.
Myth #5: Jubilee is a universally applicable
principle (applies to all people).
https://tifwe.org/resource/five-myths-about-jubilee/
Ellen is a cook who in 2007 stole the fictional works of school teacher Henry Littlefield which she based as The Web of Debt, Ellen Brown misrepresented L. Frank Baum’s intentions for writing the Wizard of Oz, and twisted Baum’s own politicial views to support her own.
Baum supported the Gold Standard and William McKinley (R), Ellen as Baum has supporting William Bryan Jennings (D) and the supposed Greenbacks, the complete 180 opposite.
Her book The Web of Debt also contains fictional quotes and stories stolen from mathematician Mike Montague on the founding fathers. Ellen is known as an author of cooking books, and a passing lawyer who represented solely fringe medicine.
Remember FTX, the scam that enabled and logistized the theft of 2020.
@dearieme,
Most people do not know the legal definition of a ‘depositor’ like myself until recently. I learned that when I make a deposit at a bank, I become the lender and the bankers become the debtors. ‘Forgive the debts’ would benefit the bankers predominantly since the commercial bank deposits in the US are about $ 20 trillion. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DPSACBW027SBOG
The economist Richard Werner’s interview is highly educational and someone actually transcribed it to share with the public.
https://www.educatedinlaw.org/2017/03/banks-dont-take-deposits-banks-dont-lend-money/
“Banks are being thought of intermediaries, but this not really what’s happening. Banks are creators of the money supply.
I produced the first empirical studies to prove that [banks create money out of thin air].
Banks are thought of as deposit-taking institutions that lend money. The legal reality is banks don’t take deposits and banks don’t lend money.
So what is a deposit? A deposit is not actually a deposit. It’s not a bailment. And it’s not held in custody.
At law, the word deposit is meaningless. The law courts and various judgements have made it very clear if you give your money to a bank even though it’s called a deposit, this money is simply a loan to the bank. So there is no such thing as deposit. It’s a loan at a bank.
So banks borrow from the public. So that much we’ve established.
What about lending? Surely they’re lending money. Umm. No, they don’t. Banks don’t lend money. Banks again, at law, it’s very clear. They’re in the business of purchasing securities. That’s it.”
The ruling global parasites are not going to cancel the debt-they are going to cancel the populace.
“Meaning, cancel all the DEBTS of derivatives, bank debts, financial debt, AND cancel ALL debts that American citizens have accrued over the years.”
This part of your comment needs the numbers to see who comes out on top if Cancel ALL DEBT is in place.
American citizens with student loans (about$1.6 trillion), mortgages (about $12 trillion), auto loans (about $1.25 trillion), credit cards (about $1 trillion), and private loans (about 1.7 trillion) which amount to a grand total of less than $20 trillion.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-student-loan-debt-trends-economic-impact
Commercial bankers are owed=borrowed=debted to the depositors about $17-18 trillion.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=11sqn
Derivative markets -“Top 25 holding companies with assets $18 trillion with $260 trillion in derivatives. See p21/49
https://www.occ.gov/publications-and-resources/publications/quarterly-report-on-bank-trading-and-derivatives-activities/files/pub-derivatives-quarterly-qtr3-2022.pdf
Clearly, the bankers come out on top ($260 trillion) vs American citizens ($20 trillion). In addition, the savers would lose their savings.
For the second part of your statement-
“If that is impossible to do in the US, then there must be a reason WHY these Big New York Banks continue to carry those debts in the form of Derivatives.” I can offer you a link below to see if it makes sense or not.
https://theconversation.com/why-central-banks-are-too-powerful-and-have-created-our-inflation-crisis-by-the-banking-expert-who-pioneered-quantitative-easing-201158
Listen up you fucking literary nerds who can’t see the forest for the trees…
BITCOIN is the answer. Period.
As far as this fool trying to shill his shitcoin “epic cash” :
“What classifies a project as real and feasible or fraudulent? There is no precise definition, there are always exceptions to the general rules, but there are some things to pay attention to.
1. The team behind each project.
The main factor for the success of a project are the developers behind it! People with a real identity, with a history in the field of cryptocurrencies and programming, people with an impeccable reputation! While history knows anonymous developers in the early days of the crypto, modern projects, especially projects with ambition, must clearly determine who is behind them. People responsible for the successes and failures of the project !. In this respect, EPIC CASH is conceived in a sin !. First red flag.
2. Developer skills.
People can usually be judged by their business cards, with real people it is quite easy to predict what you could expect from them. In the case of EPIC CASH, we have a gang of losers who failed to deliver even a perfectly working wallet in 15 months. Everything good related to programming was done by a single person who is not part of the project, as well as with the help of the developers of the only three mining pools (after 15 months of life!?!). Their incompetence is so great that they even went so far as to promise to snapshot the network for this anonymous coin, in which they themselves promised not to record any data about transactions and addresses. Second red flag.
3. Transparency.
The presence of a self-moderated topic in bitcointalk, the rude censorship in the telegram group, the outright lies of the Project leader, the misleading of users with fake news in order to manipulate the price are such a red flag, so there is nowhere else …
It got to the point where a user was blocked due to a requested audit of development funds, something quite natural in such projects! This could easily be diverted or postponed by a reasonable person, but feeling that they are losing ground under their feet, fraudsters are prone to harsh measures. Third red flag!
I can go on and I will probably do it, but today I’m bored, it’s holidays …
Here is some additional information ..
https://www.coincurb.com/deadcoin/epic-cash/”
See http://www.LetJusticePrevailThoughTheHeavensFall.com and scroll down for a proposed Constitutional Amendment which WRESTS control of our monetary system from the vile financier class.
IMO, there is no alternative but to thoroughly revamp our currency in a ‘scientific’ and mathematical fashion. A corrupt money corrupts EVERYTHING it touches!