Elaine Supkis

Currency ETF Charts

1. Europe is furious that the euro is rising.
2. The Bank of Japan is using every tool they have to weaken the yen.
3. All currencies of commodity-based nations are going down across the planet.
4. England is in the same boat as the US with one gigantic difference: no one is going through hell to raise the value of the pound. They are, with the dollar, because they want to restart the US with buying imported goods from them. England is in the same boat with Iceland and Ireland and will see significant import goods inflate.

Now, currency traders have a different view from nations. They think 'going up' is good and 'going down' is bad. But this is not true in all cases. Major exporters of MANUFACTURED goods desperately want weaker currencies vis a vis the US dollar. And periodically, the US goes through bouts of trying to depress the dollar for the same reason only this always causes a global financial collapse since the dollar is the world's fiat trade currency basis.

Thank you, emsnews.wordpress.com

Switzerland's Dollar Denominated Debt and the Fed's Shrinking Balance Sheets

So, the Swiss are now 'printing dollars'? Gott im Himmel! What a business. The US lost control of its own currency in 1914 and now, UBS can yank our financial strings. So much for 'sovereignty'. Note that the US lost its sovereignty a long time ago.

Quick Clarification on 'Mortgage Slaves'

If you have 'equity' in a house, you sell it. If the market is so bad, no one can sell houses, then no one has any 'equity' in property! For equity is the value of a house when it is sold, minus any debts.

One thing people forget is this simple fact of life: a mortgage is not a bank's interest to own a property. A property is merely a thing the bank can seize if you don't pay back a loan. It is identical to a pawn shop. You can pawn goods and then get them back when you pay off the loan from the pawn shop. If you go bankrupt, the pawn shop keeps whatever you gave it as surety on a loan.

People think that mortgages are the bank becoming the landlord, so to speak. But this isn't the case. Note that banks will move heaven and earth to keep from getting stuck with these sureties for loans that aren't being paid. They don't want to be landlords.

Same with cars: a car loan is our promise to pay for a car, while using it. This is why it requires both insurance, [ditto, with houses] and will be confiscated to pay for the loan. When the car is sold, the amount left over from the loan that the sale doesn't cover, is charged to the borrower and the bank will try to collect the difference.

Lending 'dried up' because bankruptcies began to soar long before there was any economic downturn. People just took on too much debt from too many banks. Not just mortgages but car loans, credit card charges, etc. So we are seeing a collapse in all lending due to an inability to keep up with interest payments on borrowing.

WSJ Weighs in on Peter Schiff

Hello, Auto 44, you realize, my web address is next to my name.

On top of this, I have archives at three other places: emsnews.wordpress.com/
elainemeinelsupkis.typ.../
culturelifenewsii.blog.../

If you want, you can explore my site. Just look at the cartoons, they explain everything. And one other thing: people grossly underestimate the mess created by the Japanese carry trade. Many Americans who are not inside the investment banking community, probably never even heard of this thing. It is now gone and incidentally, our banking 'liquidity' vanished at the same time.

Now, the US is ZIRP and we are at zero interest rates only it doesn't work for us so hot since we are an importing economy, not a major exporting economy like Japan.

About gold: it is now going up due to desperation. When banks collapse, gold goes up. Double, triple. But it, too, can go down and do this with amazing speed. All we have to do is stop the 0% lending.

WSJ Weighs in on Peter Schiff

Generalized calling of events is easy. Calling them exactly is hard. Saying, 'There is a bubble' is easy. Explaining where the funny money comes from is hard. For example, the housing bubble was NOT local. It was NOT in America. It was GLOBAL.

Now, how was that possible? Someone was flooding the entire planet with lending! Usually, the lenders doing this have super-low interest rates. And who, pray tell, was that?

The Bank of Japan with its ZIRP loans! Duh! I predicted not only the date of the apex of the bubble correctly, I also correctly noted that it was global AND I accurately predicted that the funny money pouring out of Japan would shift towards immense take-over schemes which hedge funds and investment bankers dump epic loans on top of businesses.

I even accurately predicted the month the Japanese carry trade would end and also, that this would cause a freeze up of 'liquidity' as lending ceased to flow from Japan and the rest of the world.

I even figured out who would start the very violent unwinding of the Japanese carry trade and the rise of the yen: China. For China and Japan had a nasty spat in the middle of July, 2007. I must have been one of the few people [I read both Chinese and Japanese economic and diplomatic news] to notice that Japan told China, 'We will drive the value of the yen down to 120 to the dollar and then will flood China with this money!'

And China, fighting rising inflation, said, 'No way in hell...we are going to force the yen up to 100 to the dollar!' And they did and the carry trade unwound starting on August 15, 2007, one month after the diplomatic spat.

International trade is collapsing because too much credit was made from thin air. Schiff could see the vague outlines of what was going on but NOT the details nor the ultimate underpinnings and what to watch.

This is due to Americans and British being very ego-centric. They think they are the world's finance and economic powerhouses when they are both just leaves running in the waters going down the gutter in an Asian downpour.

The Cult of Peter Schiff - Is It Deserved?

Understanding and predicting downturns is a complicated business. First, you have to understand international central banking policies which are all tied in ribbons of red to TRADE policies. Then, you figure out how much lending these central banks will allow while playing international trade games and from that, you can figure out where markets will go, up or down.

For everything hinges on interest rates. The queer ZIRP system set up in Japan has unbalanced everything in strange and horrible ways. This created the Japanese carry trade. The unwinding of this 'carry trade' is now monumental. It began in July, 2007. Each year, as one central bank after another falls into the Japanese ZIRP system, the unwinding gets worse and worse.

Making money off of this unwinding is very difficult since it is DESTROYING WEALTH. ZIRP won't retrieve wealth. Why is this?

The Derivatives Beast: this insurance/hedging system unwittingly hooked itself into the central bank interest rate manipulation system [derivatives are openly based on this system] and since the central banks openly manipulate interest rates, this means, all the people who are 'inside' the system have utterly warped it. That is, Citigroup's people, the guys running JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, etc.

Their insider knowledge coupled with their wild attempts to always make profits even when wealth is being destroyed has so unbalanced the systems, it is all now crashing down like a house built on a solid foundation and then the residents dig out the foundation and put it on the roof! Picture that!

There is no way to stop this crash. Only after all the illicit wealth built up by previous speculation vanishes, will this crash end. Then, we must build a BALANCED TRADE system, not the grossly unbalanced one with the US sucking up nearly a trillion in trade overruns. Right now, we are far, far from fixing the fundamental problems of free trade.

This is Elaine Supkis of emsnews. Thank you.

Evidence That Big Inflation Is Coming

Oil is going to go up. By the way, who is the person who rates these comments? Not very good choices, I might suggest.

But this isn't my own site! To go back to 'deflation/inflation' we can have both at the same time! Isn't that amazing?

For an obvious example: housing was inflating rapidly from 2003 to 2007. Then, it rapidly deflated. Oil was deflating from 1994-1999. Then it began to inflate. Consumer goods dropped in price and deflated from 1994-2004. But then it began to inflate. For example, plywood from Canada was $3.50 a 4x8 sheet quarter inch and shot up to over $9 a sheet and now has fallen to $7 a sheet.

All of these things, incidentally, are part of our TRADE DEFICIT. This mostly grows and grows and grows. We take on more and more debt to service this trade deficit. Now, we can't take on more debt, the trade is falling but is STILL in a deficit.

As I keep saying, the true thing at work here isn't 'how much money is being printed' but 'what is going on in trade?' I may be the only person saying this, but this see saw of prices is very much balanced on the fulcrum of trade.

Evidence That Big Inflation Is Coming

EMS News here!

Look, inflation happens only when the working class has extra paper money to spend on whatever they spend it on. There are several different levels of 'inflation': buying things on credit, buying things one needs to survive and savings levels.

Easy credit at the BEGINNING of a bubble leads to manic bidding up the prices of various things such as fancy cars, properties, etc. The wealthy use this easy money to bid at art auctions, buy mansions, pay for ritzy prostitutes. The lower classes buy season tickets to sporting games, go to Vegas to gamble or go on vacations or get divorced [heh].

When debt builds up to the point that no one can afford to pay even Zero Interest Rates [ZIRP] we get a depression. The government, very early on tried to elevate spending artificially by giving all Americans $600. This led directly to a sudden and very destructive series of commodity bubbles that rose very rapidly from February, when the first money was mailed, to August, when the last checks were spent.

Virtually every penny of the 'free' bonus was soaked up by the sudden inflationary surge. Now, the deflation spiral is back and much nastier. The US is trying to do what Japan did when it had a huge credit bubble: keeping the zombie banks alive while trying to use government debt to float the entire economy.

Japan is now very deep in debt due to this. Debt owed nearly totally, 87%, to the Japanese. We are mired deep in debt to the Japanese and Chinese, not to ourselves. So all our government spending is turned into future tax obligations to our most dangerous trade rivals.

The simple question of 'deflation or inflation' has to be viewed from a global trade perspective to see where our real dangers lie. The US can't 'create money out of thin air' without getting totally entangled with our largest trade partners and creditors. All the fiddling we are seeing are being watched by these two dragons who will leap on us the minute we choose the 'inflate the currency' option and the dollar nosedives against the yen and yuan.

It is already diving against the yen and it 88 yen to the dollar! The Japanese prefer to have it at 120 to the dollar. Which is where it was at in July, 2007, back when the Japanese carry trade went suddenly into reverse.

Gold is neary $900 per ounce. But has barely budged in the last two months if you compare this to how many yen buys the same amount of gold! We are seeing the differential in the dollar, falling, rather than gold rising.

OPEC, being a consortium, a loose one, at that, always lags behind when it comes to cutting off the spigots when there is an economic downturn. But they will catch up with it, pretty soon. And then the one thing that can trigger global inflation will take off. For oil is the fundamental basis of all commodity and manufacturing pricing inflation. It doesn't affect property or equity values, right away. But it certainly has a very powerful effect on everything else.

High oil prices is the nightmare of world trade. It eats profits in industry and prevents customers from being able to take on more debt as they struggle to pay for food and energy.

Have We Turned All Economic Authority Over to Highly-Principled Accountants?

Geithner, the tax cheat who didn't have the wit to hire an accountant [hell's bells, I have one!] is going to save us? What sort of insane world is this???

Bailing out failed banks who failed because they played insane games with risk, trying to eliminate it so they could make reckless loans, is stupid. It is now bankrupting the entire nation. Bailing out banks that created this massive $66 trillion derivatives beast is impossible. We have to force the banks to declare bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy, incidentally, originally referred to banks. When a bank ceases to be capitalized, they cease to be a bank. A bank is where one has savings that earns profits. When this vanishes, the bank just isn't there anymore. It is not a bank but a sinkhole. How easy is this to understand?

As far as I can see, Americans do not, collectively, want a clear accounting. We want to live in a fantasy world where we are the richest nation, not one mired deep in debt. Until we face reality, we will continue to try to evade the obvious truth: America squandered all our future wealth. Our grandchildren will pay our bills. This is outrageous.

Right now, I think America needs some sober, careful accountant who will go over the Pentagon's messy books, who will audit Fort Knox and who will sit down and crunch the numbers of the derivatives market and then impose the cures we badly need. We will NOT get richer anymore, playing stupid games that wreck the industrial base and adds more debt.

Regards,
Elaine Supkis, emsnews.wordpress.com

The Economic Meltdown: Dismantling, Yes; Doom, No

MILITARY spending shot up 40% under Bush II. On top of that, the fool cut taxes. Anyone who runs a massive increase in military spending on international adventures while cutting taxes and encouraging spending to the point of even pumping what, $8 trillion this year into the markets?

This is pure insanity. It is bankrupting America. Our global empire is now doomed as we sink under this sea of red ink. We cannot afford to have a military that costs more than the entire planet's military costs! Anyone who thinks this has not looked at the statistics.

Free trade is the other deficit sinking our ship. We are running both a trade and budget deficit this last 35 years except for 2 years. This has caused a multi trillion dollar drain on the US economy.

The end is now in sight. When the world ceases to use the US dollar as the basis for international settlements, our empire will totally collapse, as a catastrophically as the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Enlightening the Gold Bugs

This is what happens when writers write with no reference to history! Gold was not considered valueless in the Great Depression: quite the opposite! The gold reserves in the US were being drawn rapidly down when FDR, after assuring everyone before hand, slammed the door shut. One entity hoarding gold via US dollars was FRANCE.

You see, France finished this huge, underground vault in Paris. They thought the Germans would never get this gold. Ahem. Herr Hitler did, incidentally.

Anyway, the manipulations of the gold markets by FDR were to protect what remained of our gold at Ft. Knox. And more importantly, at the secret Federal Reserve vaults in NYC.

Gold was so important, FDR, like Hitler and the British Crown and nearly everyone, made gold hoarding ILLEGAL. If you tried to use gold to do business, it was confiscated! And you were jailed. The $35 gold price was to flush out all the gold held by individuals and above all, businesses. They were then FORCED to use paper no matter what.

Some people protested this by using spare change to buy and sell. A thousand silver half-dollars, for example. The government squelched this, too. The harsh truth isn't 'is gold worth something' but 'how will governments grab it no matter what?'

And this is where gold bugs go off the cliff: they imagine the government will come, hat in hand, to beg for the gold and pay top price. This will not happen.

When money evolves to zero worth, governments always shift to open confiscations. I wonder why so many people never mention this? HAHAHA. Never.

Did (or Didn't) Japan Just Reintroduce Quantitative Easing?

Another matter: ruling elites are not so smart as they like to pretend. The ruling elites in Japan have this crazy hope that robots will replace the missing humans. A robot army of silent workers will be all they need or perhaps, cheap American or Chinese labor while the profits flow to Tokyo.

Japanese animators often fret about this. I see the naked fear that this sort of anti-humanistic system will dominate Japan before the mid-century. Japan was once famous for its love of children. Now, it is famous for its love of robots.

Recently, a Japanese inventor was in the news because he made this 'maid/companion' robot female that could do math and simple chores. He had a heart attack while struggling to create this helpless minion of his dreams, his Coppelia.

He sits at night at the dinner table and talks to this mechanical doll. He will produce no children, needless to say. The ZIRP system is sucking the lifeblood out of Japan. And trust me, many American ruling elites consider this an optional future for us. Humans are hard to control. Robots are easy to control. Welcome the the world of Gundum.

Did (or Didn't) Japan Just Reintroduce Quantitative Easing?

This article is totally insane!

Look, at no point has Japan's leaders in the LDP desired to see an end to the 'depression' in Japan. For several years, Japan's RULING ELITES have enjoyed vast increases in their personal fortunes, a vast increase in profits, a vast increase in global power...during the ZIRP regime!

Not only that, when real inflation was hammering Japanese workers last year, the ONLY country on EARTH that pretended there was less than 1% inflation was Japan....even after data proved that inflation was over 3%.

Far from trying to stop 'depression' which always is code for 'depressing the wages of workers', the corrupt and totally evil Bank of Japan was in collusion with Toyota and the other export giants to keep Japan in a depressionary straight jacket so they could use the weak yen as tool of aggression.

Note that Japanese corporations are buying up Western corporations or putting them totally out of business! Note that Japan is colonizing the US industrial base! Note that Japan, this week, is out buying foreign businesses, setting up shop all over the place!

The Bank of Japan LOVED the 'carry trade' they created with their ZIRP system. Jokers like poor Mr. Krugman and others couldn't figure out that the appearance of a depression [by threatening Japanese workers with the removal of their jobs to CHINA] was a tool used to further the economic ends of the ruling elites of Japan.

Even the Bank of Japan's own statistics shows clearly that it was nearly 100% the depression in worker's wages that made prices fall. Workers can't buy much of anything, anymore. One third are stuck in part time/temporary worker hell. The mainstream workers are seeing annual wage reductions.

We are now imitating that! GAH! Giving banks money won't fix SQUAT DIDDLY. Giving workers pay raises will help a great deal. China has to pass laws, forbidding their workers to have children. Japan, this month, is out, begging someone, anyone, to have babies! But the workers can't!

This means, the stupid ZIRP/no inflation due to workers starving to death system of the Japanese will end with the Chinese colonizing the islands of Japan by 2050.

Federal Commitments Now Total $5 Trillion

All governments in the top industrial nations and the US which is a semi-industrial nation [swiftly going non-industrial!] are doing the same two things:

1. ZIRP interest rates.
2. Wild government overspending.

At my own blog, I have detailed statistical information about this process. Japan's depression is now sucking in the entire planet! This is the heart of the mess. And is not being addressed by virtually any economics pundits.

The world's #2 [or #3 depending on what statistics one uses] economy has been mired in this hideous depression since the mid-1990's. I often remark on the queer nature of this depression. The ZIRP system of Japan flooded the world with faux dollars via the very notorious 'Japanese carry trade' where currency gamesters and offshore banksters all piled into the Japanese lending system.

This caused a flood of Japanese [and Chinese!] exports to flood markets of stronger currencies. The yen is now rapidly shooting up in value due to all nations trying the Japanese ZIRP systems, themselves.

Madoff: One Bad Apple Should Not Deter Investors

It turns out that the Madoff SEC investigator in the past was sleeping with his niece! HAHAHA.

Sex and money: these are all whores. And yes, all hedge funds should be as illegal as trust funds were after the Great Depression wrecked 99% of those illicit money stealing machines.