“We apologize for the inconveniences, but this is a revolution.” – Subcomandate Marcos, January 1, 1994
As a history buff, I recently started to re-read a book of essays from Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos that I read more than 8 years ago. I was struck by the prescience of Subcomandante’s essays. Even when he seemed to offer no predictions for the future, more than a decade later, many of his arguments, though he offered them with Mexico in mind, remain remarkably applicable to the state of the Western financial world today. His following essay, “The Fourth World War Has Begun” originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique in September of 1997. It is a critically important essay because 12 years later, the intimate link that Marcos speaks of between globalization and the fraud of our global banking system has now in 2010, washed upon our shores. Read more …
Despite the fact that nearly all of the macroeconomic trends I have predicted since 2006 on my blog, the Underground Investor, have come true, the percent of people that disagree with my predictions for 2010 and 2011 still outnumber those that agree by a factor of ten to one. There is a rational explanation why the public still grants a great deal of validity to the opinions of people I like to call the “men who cried wolf” – Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geitner, Gordon Brown, Alan Greenspan, et al.
The explanation is that the fastest growing export of the Western banking industry is fraud. Read more …
A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service plowed his small plane into an office building housing nearly 200 federal tax employees on Thursday, officials said, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing as thick plumes of black smoke poured into the air.
The alleged suspect, Joseph Stack, left the below suicide note behind:
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Read more …
The recently announced IMF sale of 191.3 tonnes of their gold reserves, though it caused an immediate sharp knee-jerk reaction in gold futures markets, will have a negligible effect on the long-term price of gold. Here’s why.
In December, 2009 the commercial bullion banks that serve as agents for the leading Western Central Banks were net short 303,791 contracts of gold. Each COMEX gold futures contract represents 100 troy ounces, so the Commercials were net short 30,379,100 troy ounces of gold. With the average price of gold $1,134.72 per troy ounce in December 2009, this net short commercial position represented $34.47 billion worth of gold. There are 32,150.74533 troy ounces in one metric tonne. So 30,379,100 troy ounces/ 32,150.74533 troy ounces = 944.90 metric tonnes of gold. Since gold contracts are supposed to be good for physical delivery, the commercial bullion banks that were short nearly 38% of annual world production of gold this past December should have had 944.90 physical metric tonnes of gold in their vaults to back up their short position at that time. In reality, this situation never exists. Read more …
There is an inextricable link between our academic system and the failure of citizens worldwide to understand the dire negative financial consequences of the coming second phase of the global monetary crisis. To help you understand the huge gap of knowledge that is missing from all business curricula today that is necessary to foresee the coming consequences of the second phase of this crisis, I have posted a brilliant speech below by educator Sir Ken Robinson that illuminates all of the deliberate flaws of our current academic system today imposed upon us by the very financial oligarchs that founded our academic system. These flaws in the system immensely contribute to the ignorance of the masses regarding the severity of the crisis that exists today. The below video is a must watch and there is a reason why it currently has more than one million views.
At 5:50 of the video, Sir Robinson states:
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original, and by the time [children] get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened to be wrong, and we run our companies this way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”Read more …
In Hong Kong, Mohammed al-Jasser, the head of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority affirmed that the US dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency is coming to an end when he stated, “The dollar is still preeminent in its role as a reserve currency.” We should recall former US Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder’s statement, “The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth” (PBS’s Nightly Business Report, 1994) and thus be astute enough to realize that the often hollow words of Central Bankers serve as a contrary indicator of the truth. Read more …
Today, our financial system is so broken that casinos have much more integrity in their business dealings than do our banks.
Casinos Actually Have More Cash on Hand
The largest casinos in Vegas and Macau have much more cash on hand on a daily basis than most branches of the largest banks in the world. Whereas banks typically only have a minute percentage of their clients’ cash on hand and are really a digital business, casinos are a cash business. Read more …
In his first State of the Union speech in 2010, President Barack Obama carefully chose his words in calling for a new jobs bill to stimulate real organic economic growth. Historically, politicians have garnered widespread public support for bills that otherwise would have been despised through the use of deceptive labeling. For example, past US Presidents labeled bills that ultimately weakened pollution regulations as “Clean Air Acts”, and so on. In response to this newly proposed jobs bill, US Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) relayed that he, along with other colleagues, were specifically instructed not to refer to this jobs bill as a stimulus bill in the media:
“The other thing I’ll point out is we now have…we are working on a…we’re told not to call it another stimulus bill. We’re calling it a jobs bill.”
However, politicians have always been extremely deft about making speeches that present a united front with the people against corruption, while often hammering out legislation behind closed doors that ensures no real change will ever occur. To determine if the wool is being pulled over our eyes once again, let’s turn to the actual text of President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Read more …
John Maynard Keynes once stated that the markets can stay irrational longer than investors can stay solvent. While this statement has proven to be true, it is really not aboveboard. What Keynes didn’t want to disclose to the public is the fact that markets stay irrational longer than investors can stay solvent because market mechanisms are fraudulent and that there have been no free markets and no capitalism at work since Central Bankers assumed the role of setting interest rates in global economies. A more accurate statement that should replace the oft-quoted Keynesian saying is below:
“A fraudulent monetary system that engages all economic forces on the side of destruction can create an illusion of wealth and economic health for irrationally long periods of time but eventually will implode and result in the great destruction of the economic security of a nation.”Read more …
2009 was an incredibly interesting year both politically and financially, as both arenas are inextricably intertwined, though on the surface, the leaders from these respective industries often bicker and admonish one another for public show, while smiling and shaking hands behind closed doors. Uncovering this complex and hidden connection almost always requires much deeper digging than is ever executed by mass media financial journalists, who often seem more intent on fawning to banking interests rather than revealing the smallest speck of truth to the public. No doubt there were many huge stories sprinkled throughout 2009. Read more …
Ilene’s the editor at Phil’s Stock World, where she keeps readers up to pace with the latest stock market news and events from around the internet. Visit her at Phil’s Favorites site. Her background is in law and biological science, so she may stray from financial matters every so often. (For instance, she has been writing a series on swine flu. Find the latest here.)
Introduction
J.S. Kim is the founder of SmartKnowledgeU™, an independent investment research and wealth consulting firm. J.S. accurately called the recent global financial crisis, sharing his thoughts on his investment blog, to his subscribers, and in a series of YouTube videos. His articles have been reprinted online by Reuters, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the International Business Times. He recently authored the timely book, “Confessions of a Wall Street Insider, a Zen approach to making a fortune from the coming global economic crisis.” Recently, J.S. Kim and I have been speaking via Skype and email about the banking industry, the Federal Reserve, fixes for the economy, and current investment trends.
Interview
Ilene: Hi J.S., thanks for speaking with me and showing me how to use Skype; this is pretty easy. Can you tell me a little about your background and what led you into the financial field?
J.S.: I studied neurobiology at University of Pennsylvania and then earned two masters at the University of Texas, in Public Policy and Business Administration. After graduating, I began working in the Private Wealth Management division of Wells Fargo. Subsequently, I worked for several years at Smith Barney. In 2005, I launched my company, SmartKnowledgeU™. Read more …
I hate bankers and so should you. Why? Because bankers steal a little bit of Christmas cheer every year. For the past several years, bankers have
stolen a lot of Christmas cheer. Like the Grinch from Dr. Seuss’s famous children’s tale, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, bankers have hearts two sizes too small, and by means of burglary, they do their best to deprive everyone of Christmas every year. Only unlike the Grinch, despite stealing from people every year, bankers never learn and never reform, they never return to the people the vast amounts of money they stole from them, and they are cold-hearted and arrogant enough to claim that they are doing “God’s work” (as stated by Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein, when in reality, they do much more harm to society as a whole than good. And this makes the majority of bankers worse than the even the loathed Grinch himself. Read more …
All global economic problems today are rooted in the existence of Central Banks and their commitment to an application of destructive Keynesian economic theories to our global monetary system that simply has not worked for the better part of this century. Within the realm of academics, monetary policy, politics and media, there is a persistent refusal to acknowledge the primary role Central Banks undertake in artificially creating boom-bust cycles that would not occur in such severe fashion were Central Banks simply willing to step out of the way and allow free market forces to operate. Read more …
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About
J.S. Kim is the Founder & Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU™, LLC. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, and received a double master in Business Administration and Public Policy from the University of Texas at Austin. Read more...
