Below is a 3-part video series in which I discuss how bankers have used the concept of ideological subversion to brainwash hundreds of millions of retail investors into accepting harmful propaganda that allows them to build their bottom line at the expense of the investors while simultaneously convincing investors to ignore alternate behavior that would be beneficial to their financial welfare. Ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov explained the process of ideological subversion as a four stage process utilized by the Soviet Union to brainwash its citizens during the cold war: (1) Demoralization; (2) Destabilization; (3) Crisis; and (4) Normalization.
I have slightly modified the time frames of the four above stages explained by Bezmenov to fit the model that bankers have cleverly executed against the people over the past several decades. The process of ideological subversion ensures that billions of people are unable to change their behavior and take sensible tactics to defend the welfare of their families despite being presented with an abundance of evidence that challenges and refutes their current harmful belief system. Read more …
It is absolutely essential to own physical gold and physical silver if you want to have any chance of surviving the next decade without being financially devastated. Physical gold and physical silver, while often viewed as “investments” and through the lens of banker propaganda, as “risky investments”, are quite simply the soundest forms of money on earth today.
Today, a Sydney Morning Herald analysis of a Reserve Bank of Australia report discovered that “The big four Australian banks [ANZ, Commonwealth, NAB, and Westpac] have used the cover of the global financial crisis to charge borrowers more than the increase in their own costs, resulting in big profits for the lenders and much higher interest bills for many customers… The analysis reveals that a borrower with a three-year fixed-rate home loan of A$300,000 ($370,500) pays a personal contribution to extra bank profit of between A$75 and A$125 of the monthly mortgage bill.”Read more …
Central Bankers always seem to do the wrong things at the wrong times in manners that hurt the citizens of their country in the maximum amount possible. Not only do they commit these mistakes, but they commit the same mistakes over and over and over again with the insane belief that executing the same mistake will produce a different outcome. So I suggest that the next person US President Obama appoints to the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve should be a US Navy SEAL. In fact, he should also appoint a SEAL to his Presidential Economic Advisory Board. At a minimum, by employing SEAL culture to this financial crisis, we would not have the current crop of buffoons execute the same mistake over and over again and have them sell us their mistakes as recovery that are in reality, cover ups for the next imminent collapse. Read more …
Yesterday’s slide in the US stock markets provided further proof that the world’s financial markets are nothing more than a rigged casino where the house (Wall Street) holds by far the better odds in every game (currency markets, stock markets, derivative markets, commodity markets) it offers the mark (the retail investor). How else could the US DJIA lose 700 points in a 10-minute span and a number of blue chip stocks lose 25%, or 30% in a matter of minutes as well? The answer? Wall Street’s use of predatory algorithmic High Frequency Trading (HFT) programs that are designed to trigger cascade-like buying and selling. To believe that, as an individual investor, you have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating these Wall Street trading programs that front run your trades or block your trade executions faster than you can blink your eye is tantamount to believing that skill is involved in winning when you shimmy up to the slot machine stool at the Bellagio in Vegas. Read more …
To watch the live Goldman Sachs Congressional Testimony regarding how they used CDOs and mortgage backed securities to defraud investors, click this link here.
Yes, there is no typo in the headline of this article. Today there is still an unbelievable opportunity to invest in gold that will disappear over the next several years as this monetary crisis deepens. Despite the general widespread sentiment of Western financial advisers that they have missed the run-up in gold and now it is too late to buy, this is not true at all. In fact, to illustrate how little people understand about the reasons to buy gold, of all my friends that I urged to buy physical gold more than six years ago when gold was less than half of its current price, I only know of one that has bought any gold, and it still took five years of my prodding, four times a year, for this single person to purchase gold. This is how incredibly misunderstood an asset gold remains today despite its enormous run higher in the past 8 years. This brief anecdote aptly illustrates the bias against gold and the foolish belief that gold is a bubble that persists today due to the massive propaganda and disinformation campaigns waged by bankers against gold. It is ironic today that public mistrust of bankers can be at such a high level at the same time that the public is still enormously willing to follow all of the bankers’ propaganda about gold. This great twist of irony illustrates just how powerful the bankers’ century long misinformation campaign about money and gold has been. Few people even understand how money is created let alone why gold is a protector of people’s rights. Read more …
Last week, many analysts that were looking for some clue as to whether the CFTC will establish reasonable position limits in gold/silver futures markets and additionally not grant bullion banks (i.e. HSBC and JP Morgan) exemptions to these position limits in the near future were encouraged by the below CFTC press release.
Washington, DC – The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission today announced that it is withdrawing two no-action letters that provided relief from federal agricultural speculative positions limits set forth in CFTC regulations (17 C.F.R §150.2). “I believe that position limits should be consistently applied and vigorously enforced,” CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said. “Position limits promote market integrity by guarding against concentrated positions.” In CFTC Letter 06-09 (May 5, 2006), the agency’s Division of Market Oversight (DMO) granted no-action relief to DB Commodity Services LLC, a commodity pool operator (CPO) and commodity trading advisor (CTA), permitting the DB Commodity Index Tracking Master Fund to take positions in corn and wheat futures that exceed federal speculative position limits set forth in CFTC Regulation 150.2. Subsequently, in CFTC Letter 06-19 (September 6, 2006), DMO granted similar no-action relief to a CPO/CTA employing a proprietary commodity investment strategy that includes positions in Chicago Board of Trade corn, soybeans and wheat futures contracts. Among other things, DMO’s no-action position in both cases stated that any change in circumstances or conditions could result in a different conclusion. DMO has previously stated that the trading strategies employed by these entities would not qualify for a bona fide hedge exemption under the Commission’s regulations. DMO will work with each of these entities as they transition to positions within current federal speculative limits. The withdrawal of these no-action positions is very specific and limited and does not affect any other no-action or regulatory positions taken by the CFTC or its staff with regard to these entities or other market participants. Read more …
Often, during confusing economic times, people turn to icons in the investment world such as Warren Buffet and bond king Bill Gross for direction and blindly absorb the opinions of such men as their own without any critical analysis. To allow a handful of prominent men to guide the direction of public debate regarding our global financial and monetary crisis is an extremely dangerous and counterproductive habit, for a great many of these men possess ulterior motives that drive the vast majority of their public actions and statements. Consider if you owned hundreds of millions of shares of a single stock (Warren Buffet reportedly owns more than 300 million shares of Wells Fargo stock). Would you not be inclined to make statements that supported a rosy an outlook as possible for Wells Fargo if you were aware that your public statements held enough weight to move the stock higher? Read more …
More than 2-½ years ago when I predicted a global stock market crash on my investment blog, even foreshadowing the duration and the severity of the impending crisis by naming it the Peak Investment Crisis, many called my predictions ludicrous and far-fetched. In that article, I specifically stated that the declines in global stock market indexes could easily “dwarf the pullbacks that caused a 10% decline in the London FTSE, a 35% decline in the Indian markets, a 30% decline in the Brazilian markets, and 20% decline in the Japanese markets over a several week period in 2006” and that “it [was] a potential disaster that 99% of people [were] unaware of.” Today, I foresee another enormous disaster with far wider-reaching and more serious implications than even our current global financial crisis. Read more …
In the past three years, while banks all over the world and Wall Street were imploding, while some $40-$50 trillion of capital was being destroyed in global stock markets, one financial market kept growing. That market is the financial derivatives market. According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the global Over the Counter (OTC) derivatives market has grown almost 65% from $414.8 trillion in December, 2006 to $683.7 trillion in June of 2008. On the BIS’s own website, there are no updated figures for the notional derivatives market since June 2008, so we can likely assume, with some margin of safety, that this market has now grown to more than $700 trillion now. Comparatively speaking, the total market cap of all major global stock markets is approximately $30 trillion.
Before I discuss how financial products could grow more than 65% during a time period when financial companies were imploding all over the world, let’s review the definition of a derivative, because this will explain how this market of financial products keeps becoming more valuable at a time when the value of many capital assets are sinking like a rock in an ocean. Read more …
In the meantime, here’s a brief description of the book’s contents below:
Disenchanted with the sales oriented environment of Wall Street firms, J.S. Kim left the corporate world to launch his own companies, SmartKnowledgeU™, an investment research & education firm, and Blue Ocean Investing™, an investment consulting firm. Before leaving the corporate world, J.S.’s diverse work experiences included managing money for some of the richest people in the world at Fortune 500 companies and developing healthcare programs for some of the poorest Americans at a community healthcare corporation.
Since leaving the corporate world and no longer clouded with the deception of Wall Street firms, J.S. Kim’s proprietary investment strategies have led to amazingly accurate calls including calling for gold to hit $850 by the end of 2008 in September of 2007 (gold reached $850 an ounce on January 3rd, 2008, only three days off of J.S.’s prediction!). In October, J.S. predicted that a recession would hit the United States. Furthermore, in November of 2007, at a Crisis Investment workshop at the Pan Pacific in Asia, J.S. called for triple-digit down days in the U.S. Dow Jones Industrial Read more …
November 23, 2007 - The coming dollar crisis, like the Asian Currency Crisis in 1997, and the U.S. Great Depression of 1929, will catch the overwhelming number of investors off guard and unprepared as it destroys wealth worldwide. However, during crises, there is always great opportunity. The less than 1% of the investment population who is savvy will build great fortunes during this time.
As with previous economic crises, governments always try their best to hide any brewing crisis. This is why seemingly rosy economic outlooks can seemingly turn desperate overnight. Think of the month prior to the great depression when U.S. stock markets were at an all time high and unemployment, at less than 1%, was at an all time low. Then the bottom dropped out of the market. How could great wealth and security literally be destroyed overnight and blindside so many investors?
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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...
