What we know now: Coordinated global central bank market manipulations have distorted price discovery mechanisms impacting valuations in stock, bond, and property markets. Politicians are taking credit for record-high stock prices and the unprecedented 5,000-point surge in the Dow Jones industrial average. A 2017 gift that will keep giving: NY Stock Exchange — Margin debt […]

Henry Paulson. Hank. Remember him? Of the crisis in 2008, he said: “Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they’re going to make the profit from that risk, they shouldn’t have the taxpayer pay for the losses.” Quite the wisdom one expects from the 74th U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Yet, as […]

Has the out-of-control cabal of central banks inflated grotesque asset bubbles in global property, stock, and fixed-income markets? Or are we to believe traditional media’s “fake news” mantra of “it’s different this time?” Well, bad news, folks. It’s never different, not this time, not anytime, NEVER.   Capitalism is being destroyed The US Federal Reserve, […]

  It’s different this time, or is it? The US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank have become gargantuan, out-of-control, rogue hedge funds. Global central banks have magicked-up hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt and guarantees. Global stock market valuations are stratospheric—buoyed by stock buybacks, funded by record corporate […]

Mervyn King’s decade at the Bank of England was a disaster. The Bank was too slack during the long and indisciplined boom, under prepared for the crash and playing catch-up thereafter. The legacy of Lord King’s (and Gordon Brown’s) career has been an economy still limping along far below peak output, real wages caught in […]

George Osborne was to have been a new kind of chancellor for a new kind of Britain. Instead of being an economy hooked on financial services and trading, we were going to be an economy under the stern command of business investment and export markets. Instead of government profligacy, we were going to see government […]

Henry Paulson. “Hank”. Remember him? Lean, balding, the flared nostrils of a man perpetually haunted by the memory of having to clean dog’s mess from the shoes of his neighbour’s children. Of the crisis in 2008, he said, “Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they’re going to make the profit from […]

Chris Menon interviews the author of the best-selling Planet Ponzi on the housing bubble, market manipulation, gold and the subversion of democracy Monday, 16 June 2014 at 09:49 Chris Menon: In Planet Ponzi you’ve written about the huge debt bubble that was created over the past 30 years. For those who haven’t read your book, how […]

Last week, a brave police constable told a startled Parliamentary select committee that crime statistics were being artificially manipulated to keep recorded crime on its downward path. In one remarkable exchange, the committee’s chair, Bernard Jenkin, asked: “This [the police process] would finish up with trying to persuade a victim that they weren’t raped, for […]

Ed Miliband has a point. When this country toppled into crisis in 2007-08, it was widely feared that the financial collapse would lead to mass unemployment on a scale that dwarfed the recession of the early 1980s. And it hasn’t happened, or not quite. Yes, unemployment is really bad. Yes, the statistics are manipulated. And […]