DID YOU KNOW ABOUT:
Money-masters’ meetings later this week of the International Monetary Fund and between Group of 20 nations [World Bank, et al] in Washington’s District of Corruption?
- G20 finance ministers to discuss IMF reform delayed by U.S. –nets247.com
- Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam is scheduled to visit U.S. Washington D.C. from Wednesday to Sunday 9-13 April 2014 –news.xinhuanet.com…
- Associate Minister of Finance Jonathan Coleman departs New Zealand today for Washington to attend this week’s G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting. –National.org.nz
- Australia joined its third annual meeting with members of the Commonwealth and La Francophonie in Washington to further deepen dialogue and engagement on the G20’s development agenda… –4-traders.com
- CIGI: IMF and World Bank Group Meetings –cigionline.org/activity
Reform of the quota system of the International Monetary Fund and the situation in countries with developing economies will be on top of the agenda at meetings of the finance ministers and heads of the central banks of G20 that will be held in Washington D.C. on April 9-11.
A source in the Russian delegation told reporters that the settlement of the IMF reform issue cannot be delayed any further. “Many countries are unlikely to agree once again with the suggestions to wait a little longer to give the American partners an opportunity to decide something at their level,” he said. “It’s obvious that now, taking into account the unsuccessful attempt to include the amendment in the latest bill (on IMF reform), the U.S. administration will not have another opportunity to raise this issue earlier than November,” TASS reports.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_04_08/G20-finance-ministers-to-discuss-IMF-reform-delayed-by-US-9534/
U.S. Warns China After Renminbi Depreciation
By Robin Harding and Josh Noble
Financial Times, London
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
The U.S. has warned Beijing not to go back to manipulating its currency, following a sharp depreciation of the renminbi since the start of 2014.
“If the recent currency weakness signals a change in China’s policy away from allowing adjustment and moving toward a market-determined exchange rate, that would raise serious concerns,” said a senior Treasury official ahead of this week’s IMF, World Bank, and G20 meetings in Washington.
… For the full story: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3355dc74-bed7-11e3-a1bf-00144feabdc0.html
Rigged Casino
The U.S. wants China to widen its trading band on one and only one condition: the yuan rises vs the US dollar.
Treasury Hypocrites
U.S. hypocrites say nothing about Japan’s all-out attack on the Yen. Moreover, and more importantly, I have a simple question:
Why is massive QE in the U.S. acceptable when the sole intent is to drive the dollar lower and U.S. asset prices higher? – Michael Shedlock
Investment Advisor Representative at Sitka Pacific Capital Management LLC
RELATED:
Financial Terrorism: Rising Price of FOOD & Gas Not Included For Inflation
Is it Merely A Matter of Time Before The World’s Reserve Currency is Changed?
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Did Goldman use HFT to rig markets for the U.S. government?
By John Crudele New York Post Monday, April 7, 2014
http://nypost.com/2014/04/07/goldman-keeps-its-flash-boys-under-wraps/
Yep, the stock market is rigged.
I’ve been explaining this to you for nearly 20 years. But thanks to best-selling author ‘Michael Lewis’ intriguing book “Flash Boys,” which comes to the same conclusion, a much wider slice of America is talking about it now.
But Lewis’ book — as well-written and riveting as his best-seller “Moneyball” — touched on only one way the stock market was rigged: through high-frequency trading (HFT).
And the book deals only with how manipulation has been occurring in recent years.
I can’t do justice to the “Flash Boys” storytelling here, but Lewis explains in depth how HFT uses faster computers, better cable lines, and closer access to stock markets to jump in front of regular people’s trades.
But to me, the very first line of the introduction of “Flash Boys” is the most intriguing thing in the whole book.
Why do I think that?
Because it’s a topic I wrote about a number of times in 2009 when a guy named Sergey Aleynikov, who developed high-frequency trading programs, was arrested by the FBI for stealing computer code from his employer, Goldman Sachs.
Lewis writes: “I thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs.”
And — this is the drumroll moment — Lewis (as I did in my 2009 columns) quotes an FBI agent who said that in the wrong hands, the computer code Aleynikov allegedly stole could be used to “manipulate markets in unfair ways.”
“Goldman’s were the right hands?” Lewis asked. As Lewis points out, everything the FBI agent knew about high-frequency trading he learned from Goldman.
My question back then, as it is now, is: What was Goldman doing with this code? Why did it react so aggressively to the theft?
And why did the FBI — which has important stuff like murder and terrorism on its to-do list — jump into the Aleynikov case within 48 hours of Goldman’s complaint when the computer geek’s actions really should have been handled in civil court by Goldman’s lawyers?
And did Goldman think there was a “fair way” to manipulate markets?
Did Goldman think only it could manipulate markets?
Lewis doesn’t get into this, but I think Goldman by 2008 had been using its high-frequency trading program to rig the stock markets. And — this is the most important part — it was doing so with the blessing of Uncle Sam, hence the FBI’s attentiveness.
That’s how Goldman could have made the case that there was a fair way to manipulate the markets. And that’s probably what Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein meant when he oddly proclaimed in early November 2009 that he (or his company, he wasn’t clear) was “doing God’s work.”
What evidence do I have of this?
Back in 2009, I looked through the phone logs of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, formerly the chief executive of Goldman, and discovered many, many calls between him and Blankfein during the financial crisis.
In a Sept. 29, 2009, column I reported that Paulson spoke almost as frequently with Blankfein during the worst part of the crisis as he did with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. And he hardly spoke to any other Wall Street executives.
In the column, I wrote: “On Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008 … the stock market performed horribly. By the end of the session, the Dow Jones industrial average tumbled 449 points as investors worried about the nation’s financial system.
“The next morning, Sept. 18, Paulson placed his first call of the day at 6:55 a.m. to Lloyd Blankfein, who succeeded Paulson as CEO of Goldman. It’s unclear whether the two connected because Blankfein called Paulson minutes later.
“And then Blankfein placed another call to Paulson at 7:05 a.m. for what looks like a 10-minute conversation.
By 9 a.m., 30 minutes before the markets opened, the two had connected or tried to connect three times.
On Sept. 17 — the day the market was collapsing — there were five calls between the pair. It would have been extremely odd if Paulson and Blankfein hadn’t talked about wanting to see market strengthen during those three calls early Sept. 18 morning.
But the market didn’t open strong on Sept. 18.
Stock prices did, however, begin a miraculous recovery around 1 p.m. that day.
By then rumors were starting to spread about a government bailout of banks, and the market turned on a dime.
Market rigging? Probably, done in a number of ways — through leaked information and heavy trading through HFT. Wall Street pals who could have purposely changed the momentum of the market.
Was the computer code that Sergey Aleynikov was accused of stealing used during that day’s trading? Is that why Goldman knew the code could manipulate markets? Is that why the FBI responded so quickly? I don’t have answers, but those are all legitimate questions.
Tim Geithner, who was head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank at this time (and later became treasury secretary) was quoted later in an interview that Washington “was forced to do extraordinary things and, frankly, offensive things to help save the economy.”
Was rigging the stock market one of them?
Stay tuned.
—–
John Crudele is business columnist for the New York Post.
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SEC lawyer, retiring, says agency too timid with Wall Street misdeeds
By Robert Schmidt Bloomberg News Tuesday, April 8, 2014
A trial attorney from the Securities and Exchange Commission said his bosses were too “tentative and fearful” to bring many Wall Street leaders to heel after the 2008 credit crisis, echoing the regulator’s outside critics.
James Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986 and retired this month, offered the critique in a speech at his goodbye party. His remarks hit home with many in the crowd of SEC lawyers and alumni thanks to a part of his resume not publicly known: He had campaigned internally to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.” …
… For the full story: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-08/sec-goldman-lawyer-says-agency-too-timid-on-wall-street-misdeeds.html
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Gold market is now becoming a watchdog for the collapse
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/4/8_Collapse_Of_The_United_States_%26_A_New_Economic_World_Order.html
On the heels of continued uncertainty around the globe, today an acclaimed money manager told King World News that a “New Economic World Order” threatens to collapse U.S. supremacy and the dollar. Stephen Leeb also spoke about how this will have a powerful impact on the gold market in this fascinating interview.
Leeb: “Eric, last week we spoke about the threat being posed by Russia, China, and the various BRIC nations, against the dominance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But if you look at the history of people who have challenged oil being priced in dollars, what happened is the U.S. has militarily wiped them off the face of the Earth….
“Whether it was Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the United States intervened militarily and both of these men were ‘eliminated’ for threatening the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The problem here for the United States is that they can’t eliminate President Xi and militarily occupy China, and they can’t eliminate Putin and militarily occupy Russia. These are countries which are armed to the teeth, and this includes nuclear weapons. So these countries are threatening the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the same way that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi threatened the dollar, but the game is decidedly different now because of the military strength of both of these countries.
One of the things that’s starting to dawn on Saudi Arabia as they look and see the bodies strewn around Libya and Iraq, is that the petro-dollar is not a recipe for longevity. And it might make a lot more sense to price their valuable commodity, namely oil, in a basket of currencies which consists of economies that are there to stay such as China, Russia, Germany, and also to include gold in that basket.
So gold would be a very important part of how they would price their oil. I think the message of the demise of those former petro-dollar nations is telling Saudi Arabia that this is not going to end well for them if they don’t have a strong backing in place before they price their oil in the alternative basket of currencies and gold.
I strongly believe that Saudi Arabia has this message and they are already talking to China and Russia about how to transition away from the U.S. dollar in the smoothest possible manner. They certainly don’t want to end up in the same situation as Iraq and Libya. So this is a very delicate situation.
But everywhere you look right now, Eric, you see the Midas metal beginning to move front-and-center. Gold has been money for thousands of years and these cultures in the East know it. This will also be very big news for commodities such as silver, which I believe will be greatly revalued higher as this transition takes place.
The United States has a great challenge on its hands in terms of trying to stop these other nations from transitioning away from the dollar. Again, it was easy to wipe out the leadership in Iraq and Libya and occupy those countries, but the U.S. can’t do that with Russia and China. They are too heavily armed and they are well-equipped to deal with the United States. This New Economic World Order threatens to collapse U.S. supremacy.
What has taken place in Ukraine may have been payback for the closed-door negotiations that Russia has already been involved with in terms of trying to unseat the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The problem here is that Putin is a master at chess and this situation in Ukraine is not at all turning out the way the U.S. had intended.
So this is rapidly becoming a very serious situation, but clearly one that the United States cannot easily control or win. And when I look at the paper price of gold heading higher today, it may be signaling that the U.S. may finally be losing its grip on world dominance. If the gold market really begins to accelerate higher from current levels, we will have our confirmation. What I am saying is that the gold market is now becoming a watchdog for the collapse of U.S. and Western global dominance. So once again gold is doing what it always does — moving front-and-center at one of the most critical moments in world history.”
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Pakistan rejects IMF’s call to sell its gold reserves for FX cash
Pakistan Refuses to Sell Gold Worth $2.7 Billion, IMF Says
By Shahbaz Rana The Express Tribune
Karachi, Pakistan Saturday, March 29, 2014
http://tribune.com.pk/story/688588/turn-down-pakistan-refuses-to-sell-gold-worth-2-7b-reveals-imf-report/
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan has refused to sell gold worth $2.7 billion, citing national security reasons, as the International Monetary Fund pushes Islamabad to convert the precious metal into cash to build foreign currency reserves, the global lender’s report revealed Friday.
The report, prepared by IMF staff led by its Washington-based mission chief to Islamabad, Jeffrey Franks, also spills the beans on the “$1.5 billion gift” to Pakistan by “Saudi Arabia” — the name Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government has so far refused to officially share with parliament.
According to the report, the State Bank of Pakistan holds more than 2 million troy ounces of monetary gold, having $2.7 billion of value at the market rate. It is not counted in gross international reserves as it is not deemed to be liquid by the State Bank of Pakistan, the IMF says.
The IMF and Pakistan authorities discussed what steps would be needed to make the gold more liquid, the report adds. “However, the (Pakistani) authorities stressed that they have no plans to sell gold and preferred existing arrangements for gold holdings for national security reasons.”
The IMF is pushing Pakistan to sell gold holdings at a time when other countries are buying the commodity as a strategic reserve. The IMF had even sold its surplus gold to India a couple of years ago.
According to analysts, one reason behind the IMF’s insistence could be the country’s inability to build official foreign currency reserves despite being in the $6.7 billion IMF arrangement.
While the IMF hinted in its report that the State Bank of Pakistan was not aggressive in building foreign currency reserves, it disclosed that Pakistan’s central bank continued its efforts to build reserves by purchasing dollars from the market.
The State Bank of Pakistan purchased $575 million in the last few months till March 17, the report states. The purchases may help stabilise the foreign currency reserves but are considered one of the reasons behind depreciation of the local currency against the US dollar. The rupee started appreciating only after the $1.5 billion grant from Saudi Arabia.
While the federal government remains reluctant to officially disclose the name of the country that “gifted” Pakistan $1.5 billion, despite the persistent demand of the opposition, the IMF report identifies it as Saudi Arabia.
A “$750 million grant recently received from Saudi Arabia” will help the Pakistani government in reducing borrowings from the State Bank of Pakistan for budget financing, the IMF said.
“Reserve accumulation was also aided by an additional inflow of $750 million from Saudi Arabia,” according to Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, which is attached with the report and is jointly prepared by Pakistan and the IMF.
In a footnote to the memorandum, Pakistan told the IMF that it received an initial inflow of $750 million on February 19, indicating that it would receive more money.
The IMF confirmed its recent forecast of 3.1 per cent growth this year, which was revised up from an earlier 2.8 per cent. “The overall economic situation in Pakistan is gradually improving,” said Jeffrey Franks.
“That 3.1 per cent may still be a bit on the conservative side, so we see indicators of growth that are relatively strong considering the fiscal adjustment that has taken place,” he told reporters on a conference call.
For the 2014-15 fiscal year, the IMF expected Pakistan’s growth to accelerate to around 3.7 percent.
The IMF report said the growth was boosted by a stronger manufacturing industry thanks to an easing of Pakistan’s chronic electricity shortages, despite weaknesses in agriculture.
It also said that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government, despite its commitment to IMF-backed reforms, faced “strong” political resistance to certain structural measures.
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“The dollar is evil. It is a dirty green paper stained with blood of hundreds of thousands of civilian citizens of Japan, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Korea, and Vietnam,” one of the authors of the motion, Mikhail Degtyaryov of the conservative nationalist party LDPR, said in an interview with Izvestia daily.
Lawmakers Call on Oil and Gas Producers to Ditch ‘Dirty, Bloody Dollar’
From Russia Today, Moscow Thursday, April 3, 2014
http://rt.com/politics/russian-dollar-abandon-parliament-085/
A group of lower house members of Parliament are urging Russian oil and gas producers and traders to stop using the US dollar. They say this means sharing profits with the United States and making Russia vulnerable to Western sanctions.
“The dollar is evil. It is a dirty green paper stained with blood of hundreds of thousands of civilian citizens of Japan, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Korea, and Vietnam,” one of the authors of the motion, Mikhail Degtyaryov of the conservative nationalist party LDPR, said in an interview with Izvestia daily.
Degtyaryov also said that Russia already had a bilateral agreement with China allowing payment in national currencies and this proved that such step was possible.
“Our national industrial giants will not suffer any losses if they choose to make contracts in rubles or other alternative currencies,” the MP said. “Russia will benefit from that. We should act paradoxically when we deal with the West. We will sell rubles to consumers of our oil and gas, and later we will exchange rubles for gold. If they don’t like this, let them not do this and freeze to death. Before they adjust, and this will take them three of four years, we will collect tremendous quantities of gold. Russian companies will at last become nationally oriented and stop crediting the economy of the US that is openly hostile to Russia.”
Degtyaryov is known for drafting an official bill banning the US dollar in Russia. He told reporters that this document has been recalled from parliament and amended with a ban on the euro and promised to resubmit the new draft to the lower house in the near future.
On Wednesday the head of leading state-owned bank VTB, Andrey Kostin, also urged Russia to start transitioning to ruble payments with all its trading partners, including China and Western Europe. Kostin also said the switch should begin as soon as possible and that exporting companies should lead the way in adopting the change. According to the banker the plan could help to lower the country’s dependency on “the whims of US and EU authorities.”
However, industry experts have warned against hasty moves, saying that sometimes the transition to a different currency was simply impossible.
The head of the Trade and Industry Chamber’s committee for financial markets, Yakov Mirkin, said that at present the international practice was to calculate oil and gas prices in US dollars as the international reserve currency. “We cannot swim against the current. This is how the whole thing works. Maybe such a thing will be possible in 10 or 15 years, but not today,” Mirkin noted.
The head of the public relations department of the Russian state oil corporation Rosneft, Mikhail Leontyev, said that his company was bound by contract obligations and the fast switch to a different currency was simply impossible.
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The ONE Revelation about HFT Programs that Truly Scares Bankers (Hint: It’s About Gold & Silver)
https://www.smartknowledgeu.com/blog/2014/04/the-one-revelation-about-hft-programs-that-truly-scares-bankers-hint-its-about-gold-silver/
Last week, the big story was how bankers use HFT (High Frequency Trading) algorithmic software not only to rig markets but also to commit theft on a daily basis (Frontrunning, like Quantitative Easing, is just fancy Wall Street lingo to disguise its true meaning of theft). Though many in the public blogosphere expressed shock that stock markets are rigged and that regulators like the Securities Exchange Commission willingly allow this theft to occur, the only thing shocking about this story was how long it took this story to reach the mainstream and that people were crediting Michael Lewis with uncovering this story with his book “Flash Boys” when in reality this story had been discussed in detail on independent financial media sites for more than five years already.
For example, an accounting professor at the Yale School of Management, X. Frank Zhang, calculated that HFT trading was responsible for a minimum of 70% of all daily trading volume in US stock markets and possibly for as much as 78% of the volume in 2009. And HFT algorithmic trading was already dominating daily trading volume on US stock exchanges prior to 2009. Thus one can clearly see that the only thing “new” about HFT algorithms is that this old news has finally moved into mainstream media headlines.
…
In any event, the Holy Grail that the bankers are seeking to protect is not that they use HFT programs to rig stock market trading.
The real truth the bankers wish to conceal from the public is that they use HFT programs to suppress gold and silver prices.
If this truth made it into the mainstream news and was being discussed at the same level at which HFT programs being used to rig millions of stock trades is being currently discussed, bankers would have a heart attack. However, do not let the complete media blackout of the banking cartel’s use of HFT algos to control gold and silver prices in the paper derivatives markets lead you to falsely conclude that the use of HFT programs are not critical to gold and silver price suppression.
There have been many instances in the past several years when it has been crystal clear that bankers were using the processing speed of HFT algorithmic programs to create waterfall declines in gold and silver prices that would have been impossible to create without them. In fact nearly six years ago, in 2008, I sent then US CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton evidence of gold price slams in the New York market that would have been impossible for bankers to create without the use of HFT algorithms. Click on the following link to see the evidence I provided to Bart Chilton back then, in which gold prices literally were slammed at market open in New York in a matter of minutes by $30, $40, $60 https://www.smartknowledgeu.com/blog/2008/10/four-parallel-markets-for-gold-in-the-same-world-asia-futures-ny-futures-physical-bullion-physical-coins/
and even more, almost always at the same exact time in New York, as well as his reply.
…
In the end, it is not the speed of trading that is the problem but rather how bankers use supercomputers that process and execute information at super speeds to create artificial, fake quotes and steal from people. Thus the problem lies squarely not with out-of-control technology but with out-of-control unethical bankers that are merely crooks in $3,000 Armani suits. Furthermore, it is not the revelation that bankers are using HFT programs to rig stock markets that scares bankers, but the possibility that the current scrutiny on immoral HFT programs may reveal that bankers use HFT programs to rig the prices of gold and silver that truly puts the fear of God in them. For if this revelation goes mainstream and gold and silver prices are freed from banker executed HFT manipulation, every asset bubble that bankers have created since 2008 will come tumbling down as rapidly as their artificially-created waterfall one-minute price declines in gold and silver futures markets. However, as long as scrutiny remains high on the Western banking cartel’s use of HFT trading algorithms, their ability to use these algos to slam gold and silver prices may very well be temporarily impeded.
Hopefully, the class-action anti-trust lawsuit against the five international banks that set the London daily gold price fixings that was filed the last week of March, 2014 in the US District Court of New York by the Philadelphia law firm of Berger & Montague and the New York law firm of Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart, and Sullivan will shed some light on how big global banks have colluded with Central Banks to additionally use HFT programs to fix gold and silver prices lower.
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Coinage Money
Still Report # 231 – IMF’s Kumhof #2
Posted 5 April 2014
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“The Rise and (Possible) Fall of Central Banks: What It Means for You.”
Ex-Pimco CEO El-Erian Said to Write Book on Global Central Banks
Tuesday, 01 Apr 2014
Mohamed El-Erian, the former chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co. whose exit spurred a leadership shakeup at the fund firm, plans to write a book about the rise and potential fall of central banks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
El-Erian, 55, will focus on what individuals, companies and governments can do to navigate an uncertain economic environment, said the person, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. He will work with the Wylie Agency, which presented the outline yesterday to publishers in the U.S. and U.K., the person said.
The author’s first book “When Markets Collide,” about global capital markets, was published in 2008 and became a New York Times bestseller. El-Erian announced his resignation from Newport Beach, California-based Pimco on Jan. 21 and in an internal memo to employees said he was thinking about writing a second book.
After his resignation, reports surfaced of tension between El-Erian and Pimco’s co-founder Bill Gross.
Perceptions of central banks have evolved over the years, according to a summary of the book viewed by Bloomberg News. The institutions once seen as helping to usher in prosperity became viewed as enablers of bank malfeasance leading to the 2007-2009 financial crisis and then as agencies that used policy flexibility to avoid a global depression, according to the summary.
Read more: http://www.moneynews.com/Personal-Finance/El-Erian-Book-CentralBanking-Pimco/2014/04/01/id/563035/
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