Category: Wealth Tips

Be alert to the requirement to drive in the left lane unless overtaking.
https://www.stacklaw.com.au/news/criminal-law/rear-view-cameras-in-highway-patrol-vehicles-and-the-so-called-2-km-rule/

Some interesting tools and data. For instance, did you know 85% of customer interactions are expected to be handled by bots within just 3 years? (I didn’t.)
http://www.sitepronews.com/2017/06/23/4-new-tools-for-ecommerce-success/

The Big Five (Big Four plus Macquarie) banks are frantically trying to get most or all of their derivatives obligations excluded from the government’s levy on their liabilities.

The government has said the bank levy applies to derivatives, the financial bets that far exceed in size all other trades in the financial system. For instance, while Australia’s GDP is just shy of $2 trillion, the derivatives contracts held by Australia’s banks amount to around $35 trillion. Globally, official BIS figures record derivatives at around US$500 trillion (compared with US$50 trillion world GDP), but as there is so much dodgy accounting involved, others estimate them at US$1.2 quadrillion (US$1,200 trillion).

According to James Eyres in the 15 May Australian Financial Review, Westpac, ANZ and NAB have told the government that the levy should only apply to so-called “netted” derivatives positions, while CBA has said it should not apply to derivatives at all; Macquarie, true to form, is not making its submission to the government public.

These arguments betray real panic. “Netting”, for instance, is the ruse banks use to explain away the risks involved in derivatives gambling. They deduct, from what they owe on derivatives contracts, the amount that other banks owe them, to claim that the multi-trillions in contracts represent just a few billion in liabilities. While it may be legitimate to “net” transactions between two parties, it is bogus to apply it to derivatives. It can be compared to splitting a restaurant bill—easy among a few people, but what about a few thousand?

The bubble of derivatives speculation is extremely complex, involving millions of contracts interlinking banks all over the world. What a bank is owed on derivatives contracts by its counterparties is contingent on many other banks in the daisy chain being able to honour all of their obligations; if one of those banks fails, as Lehman Brothers did in 2008, the daisy chain of obligations can explode and the entire derivatives trade can melt down. And when it does, it is not the “netted” figure that banks have to pay, but the full, so-called “notional principal” liability in the derivatives contract. For this reason there have been numerous derivatives disasters in recent history which have wiped out entire banks and whole chunks of the financial system, including Barings Brothers in 1995, Long Term Capital Management in 1998, and of course Lehman Brothers in 2008.

The growth in derivatives speculation by Australian banks has been extremely rapid since the 2008 crisis, more than doubling from $14 trillion to $35 trillion. These contracts are held “off balance sheet”, and three of the Big Five—CBA, NAB and Macquarie—have stopped disclosing their full multi-trillion dollar derivatives exposure, revealing only the much smaller, tens of billions “credit equivalent” exposure instead. It is a scandal that this is allowed, especially after the 2008 crash, which proved such derivatives accounting to be fraudulent. As Financial Instruments Specialist Pauline Wallace of accounting giant PWC said in the 4 November 2008 Sydney Morning Herald, “I’ve always regarded it [derivatives accounting] as a bit of a magic trick. Magicians come to parties, and they make things seem to disappear. The risk is somewhere, but you never knew where,” she said.

The bank levy, if the government insists it apply to each contract, will force them to account for their full liability—both a massive accounting task, and potentially much more expensive for the banks than the initial calculations of what the levy will raise. This will actually test how real the banks’ profits are, which, given their heavy derivatives gambling, are suspiciously high in an Australian economy that is actually collapsing, losing productive jobs and industries left, right, and centre.

Glass-Steagall

The bank levy is an attempt by the government to repair its budget, but it will not repair the big Australian banks, which are heading for collapse from their dangerous speculation in derivatives and real estate. Only a Glass-Steagall separation of the banking system, which breaks up the Big Five banks into stand-alone commercial banks with deposits that are kept separated from investment banking, insurance, stock broking, wealth management and other financial services, will protect the Australian people from catastrophic banking collapse.

The Citizens Electoral Council has—since 1993!—relentlessly exposed the derivatives danger in the Australian and global financial system, and since the 2008 crash has fought for the Glass-Steagall solution to fix the banking system. All Australians are naturally concerned about their financial security, and that of their loved ones, but the current system has become such a casino that the only way to protect your own security is to fight for Glass-Steagall to protect the whole nation. To do so, join in and support the CEC’s Glass-Steagall campaign.

Click here for a free information package on Glass-Steagall for Australia, including the brochure “Australia sleepwalking into ‘economic Armageddon’”, and a DVD explaining derivatives and their danger to the economy.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.

Click the read more button to sign the CEC’s change.org petition: Break up the big banks now—pass Glass-Steagall!

from the Citizens Electoral Commission
Greens leader Richard di Natale has responded to the Citizens Electoral Council’s change.org petition, Break up the big banks now—pass Glass-Steagall, by reiterating his party’s intention to establish a “Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Banking and Financial Services”. To be effective, such an inquiry must be modelled on the US Senate Committee on Banking and Currency’s ten days of momentous hearings in 1933, known as the Pecora Commission.
The story of the Pecora Commission is one that everyone involved in banking oversight needs to know. It is of enormous relevance to Australia, because it shows how criminality can flourish right under the noses of authorities, until a person of unique courage and morality rips off the blindfold. Australia is getting used to the blatant criminality of banks, having experienced case after case of the big banks victimising thousands of customers, for which either nobody gets held accountable, or the blame is pinned on some “rogue” operator in middle or lower management. What we need is a crusader like Ferdinand Pecora.
In 1931, US President Herbert Hoover instigated an inquiry into short selling. The Senate Committee on Banking and Currency conducted the inquiry, which after ten months, under chairman Senator Peter Norbeck expanded into a general inquiry into the causes of the Great Depression. Until February 1933, however, the inquiry got nowhere. In January 1933, in the middle of the lame duck session of Congress between Franklin Roosevelt’s election in November 1932 and his inauguration in March 1933, Senator Norbeck was set to wind up his ineffectual inquiry, when he decided to make one final attempt and appointed fearless New York prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora as the new general counsel to run the investigation. This proved to be a fateful choice—for the banks.
Unlike all previous counsels for the Committee, Pecora was not a financial expert. He was a criminal prosecutor, with instincts honed in the courts of New York City. He looked at the same evidence as the previous counsels, but instead of seeing standard financial practices, as his predecessors had, he sniffed crimes. Pecora exposed those crimes in ten days of public hearings in February 1933, immediately before Roosevelt’s inauguration.
Up to the point that Pecora conducted public hearings, bankers were still among the most respected members of society, having largely escaped blame for the 1929 stock market crash three years earlier, and the subsequent misery and poverty of the Great Depression. That changed, dramatically, over the ten days of hearings, which were broadcast live on radio. With his chairman’s firm support, Pecora subpoenaed the titans of high finance, including the chairman of National City Bank, Charles “Sunshine Charlie” Mitchell, New York Stock Exchange President Richard Whitney, and J.P. Morgan Jr. Pecora laid bare, through fearless cross-examinations, the predatory practices of these powerful financiers and their institutions.
On the stand, Morgan admitted to effectively bribing hundreds of politicians with heavily discounted share offers. Pecora forced Mitchell to own up to dodging millions of dollars in tax, and overseeing a banking operation that sucked in depositors with $1 bank accounts and $50 loans, for the sole purpose of pushing those depositors into the clutches of Mitchell’s army of aggressive bond salesmen, to be hard-sold dangerous and often fraudulent investments; National City specialised in covering potentially bad loans it had made to failing companies and governments by selling the worthless bonds of those companies and governments to its own depositors, ruining thousands. (The way National City lured its depositors into buying its dangerous investment products that ruined them financially is strikingly similar to the numerous financial advice scandals in Australia over the past decade or more, in which Australia’s big banks pressured their retail customers into bad investments that cost many their life savings.)
The Pecora hearings electrified the whole country. Many top bankers, dubbed “banksters” by the public, lost their jobs, were indicted and jailed or fined. Incoming President Franklin Roosevelt made a last-minute adjustment to his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” inauguration speech, inserting a powerful commentary on Pecora’s hearings: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men”, FDR declared. This set the agenda for Roosevelt’s first 100 days, in which he was able to push through far-reaching financial reforms, including the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that imposed a strict separation of commercial and investment banking, to stop banks such as National City from selling risky securities to their unsuspecting depositors.
Glass-Steagall would become the most effective banking regulation in history. In the three years or so between the 1929 crash and its enactment, more than 4,000 American banks had failed; for the next 66 years, from 1933 until Glass-Steagall’s repeal in 1999, there were no systemic banking crises in the USA. Ironically, it was repealed to allow National City’s successor, Citibank, to merge with Travellers Insurance and its investment bank Salomon Smith Barney, creating Citigroup, which nine years later, in the 2008 crash, required the biggest bailout of any of the Wall Street megabanks. Following the crash, the two men who negotiated the Citigroup merger, Travellers’ Sandy Weill and Citibank’s John Reed, became some of the most vocal advocates on Wall Street for restoring Glass-Steagall.
Australia doesn’t need a banking inquiry to know that the banks are crooked, and that the retail banks should be split off from all other financial services, à la Glass-Steagall. Such inquiries are often bureaucratic cover-ups, especially royal commissions, which can be manipulated by their choice of commissioners and terms of reference. The test of whether the Greens and other advocates of a banking inquiry are genuine, is whether they are prepared to adopt Ferdinand Pecora’s fearless approach and conduct an inquiry without limits, one which has the potential to completely overhaul the Australian banking system.

Big polluters like Chevron could soon be forced to pay their fair share of tax in upcoming budget announcements — and they’re fighting tooth and nail to stop this.
This broken system gives big polluters such generous tax deductions that no new revenue will be collected for decades to come. As a result, people like you and me are losing out on billions of dollars that could fund our schools, hospitals, and roads.
The Senate is running an inquiry into this tax right now. Submissions close in just a few days on 30th March. I added my voice, can you add yours too?
https://actions.sumofus.org/a/add-your-voice-make-big-polluters-pay-their-fair-share-of-tax

http://www.wuc-news.com/2017/03/pope-francis-decrees-we-need-global.html
Tom calls rubbish!
A global central bank is the LAST thing we need!
We need a Glass-Steagall like separation of investment and savings banks and far more local, smaller banks. Read this:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4660465/glass-steagall

Ron explains it well.
Seems like he thinks an economic crisis is in the works too.
http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/trump-is-exactly-where-the-elites-want-him

Italy Joins the “Bail-In” Bunch
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-22/italy-joins-bail-bunch
As Mystery Of China’s Multi-Billionaire Default Deepens, A New “Bond Scare” Emerges
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-26/mystery-chinas-multi-billionaire-default-deepens-new-bond-scare-emerges
India’s Prime Minister Has Singlehandedly Crushed The Economy With His Reckless Cash Ban
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/indias-prime-minister-has-singlehandedly-crushed-economy-his-reckless-cash-ban
The $555 Trillion Derivatives Debt Implosion Is About to Begin
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-25/555-trillion-derivatives-debt-implosion-about-begin
Just in case you wondered if the precious metals markets are actually manipulated: they are:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-16/when-gold-goes-above-1430-we-whack-it
And to tie a few things together and put a bow on top:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/things-make-you-go-hmm-death-petrodollar-and-what-comes-after
And if the financial crisis wasn’t bas enough news, the idiot politicians are looking to create WWIII as a distraction!
Paul Craig Roberts Warns “Armageddon Approaches” After German Leak
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-24/paul-craig-roberts-warns-armageddon-approaches-after-german-leak