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Is Anyone Really Surprised That The System Is On The Brink Again? Phoenix Capital ResearchZero Hedge 02/04/2014 15:07 -0500 We find it truly extraordinary that anyone is surprised the financial system is under duress again. After all, what have the Central Banks accomplished in the last five years? 1) Did they clear out the bad debts that caused the 2008 collapse? NOPE 2) Did they implement structural reforms to insure another 2008 didn’t happen? NOPE 3) Did they punish fraud or corruption in any way to insure that the system was clean? NOPE So what did they do? They cut...

Celente isn’t suggesting that a massive collapse is going to happen in the future. He says we’re already in it – and it’s taking hold right before our eyes across the entirety of the globe:

From Terry Burnham, former Harvard economics professor, author of “Mean Genes” and “Mean Markets and Lizard Brains,” provocative poster on this page and long-time critic of the Federal Reserve, argues that the Fed’s efforts to strengthen America’s banks have perversely weakened them. First posted in PBS. Is your money safe at the bank? An economist says ‘no’ and withdraws his Last week I had over $1,000,000 in a checking account at Bank of America. Next week, I will have $10,000.

Two of the largest banks in northern Europe have announced they will boycott Israeli banks because they operate in “occupied territories”, the Walla! Hebrew-language news website reported on Saturday. The two banks in question are the Swedish Nordea Bank, which is the largest bank in Scandinavia, and the Norwegian Danske Bank, which is the largest bank in Denmark. Danske Bank, which serves five ​​million customers in Denmark and Northern Europe , publishes on its website a list of companies which are boycotted for legal and ethical reasons. Two weeks ago the list was updated and, according to Walla!, for the...

People are getting increasingly agitated about being spied on by government. The snoops at the National Security Agency have gotten the most attention, and those bureaucrats are in the challenging position of trying to justify massive invasions of our privacy when they can’t show any evidence that this voyeurism has stopped a single terrorist attack. And let’s not forget that some politicians and bureaucrats want to track our driving habits with GPS devices. Their immediate goal is taxing us (gee, what a surprise), but does anyone doubt that the next step would be a database of our movements? But the...

The People’s Bank of China , the central bank, has just ordered commercial banks to halt cash transfers. ---Clip--- In short, there will be a three-day suspension of domestic renminbi transfers. There will also be a suspension, spanning nine calendar days, of conversions of renminbi to foreign currency. The specific reason given—“system maintenance” at the central bank—is preposterous. It is not credible that during the highest usage period in the year—the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday beginning January 31—the central bank would schedule an upgrade and shut down cash transfers. A better explanation is that the country’s banking system is...

HSBC is imposing restrictions on large cash withdrawals raising a number of red flags. The BBC reports that some HSBC customers have been prevented from withdrawing large amounts of cash because they could not provide evidence of why they wanted it. HSBC admitted it has not informed customers of the change in policy, which was implemented in November for their own good: “We ask our customers about the purpose of large cash withdrawals when they are unusual… the reason being we have an obligation to protect our customers, and to minimise the opportunity for financial crime.” As one customer responded:...

Jamie Dimon isn’t very impressed by bitcoin. Bitcoiners, in turn, don’t appear terribly impressed by Jamie Dimon. The virtual currency, which a year ago at this time was known only by a small band of enthusiastic libertarians, techies, and alleged drug traffickers, has gotten so much larger in the intervening time that it gets talked about at the big Capitalismpalooza called the World Economic Forum at Davos. That in itself is interesting. But J.P. Morgan'sJPM -1.35% Jamie Dimon and U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew were both asked their opinions and both talked it down, and both harped on its use...

Germany's blowback against gold manipulation is accelerating. Following yesterday's report that Bafin took a hard line against precious metals manipulation, after its president Eike Koenig said possible manipulation of precious metals "is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal", today the response has trickled down to Germany and Europe's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which announced that it would withdraw from the appropriately named gold and silver price "fixing", as European regulators investigate suspected manipulation of precious metals prices by banks. As a reminder, Deutsche is one of five banks involved in the twice-daily gold fix for global price setting and said it...

Earlier we pointed out that mortgage origination at Wells Fargo - the bank's bread and butter - is crashing at an unprecedented pace, and as per the conference call, Q1 isn't looking any better. Naturally, it stood to reason that the bank would seek alternative business and product lines to supplant the declining revenue it used to generate when it would originate some $100 billion in mortgages every quarter, now half that number. However, not even in our wildest dreams did we predict just what this "alternative" product would be. Because, as the FT reports, Wells Fargo, the largest US...

The world's two largest custody banks, BNY Mellon Corp and State Street Corp, are loading up on engineers to crunch mountains of data into juicy chunks of information that they can use to win more customers and generate more fees. The shift in hiring strategy comes as the cost of computing power, data storage and bandwidth plunges, giving the U.S. banks more opportunities to capitalize on information about customers that include the world's largest hedge, mutual and pension funds. "At State Street this year, we've hired more engineers than MBAs," said John Klinck, the bank's head of global strategy and...

the bogey man known as “systemic risk” to gain advantage over the other creditors . ... In order for the OTC casino to work, the derivatives contracts had to be given special priority in bankruptcy. Speculative derivative instruments such as credit default swaps (CDS), which caused the failure and government bailout of American International Group, could never exist in significant size were in not for the safe harbor from bankruptcy for derivatives created by Congress in the 1980s and 1990s. Members of Congress from both parties were paid very well for their treachery. ... The intellectual author of the “systemic...

Payment card data was stolen from an unknown number of Target Corp customers starting on the busy Black Friday weekend in a major breach at the U.S. retailer, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Secret Service is investigating, according to a spokesman for the agency, which safeguards the nation's payment systems. Target officials did not respond to requests for comment. Investigators believe the data was obtained via software installed on machines that customers use to swipe magnetic strips on their cards when paying for merchandise at Target stores, according to the person who was not authorized to...

<p>The too big to fail banks have a larger share of the U.S. banking industry than they have ever had before. So if having banks that were too big to fail was a "problem" back in 2008, what is it today? As you will read about below, the total number of banks in the United States has fallen to a brand new all-time record low and that means that the health of the too big to fail banks is now more critical to our economy than ever. In 1985, there were more than 18,000 banks in the United States. Today, there are only 6,891 left, and that number continues to drop every single year. That means that more than 10,000 U.S. banks have gone out of existence since 1985. Meanwhile, the too big to fail banks just keep on getting even bigger. In fact, the six largest banks in the United States (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years. If even one of those banks collapses, it would be absolutely crippling to the U.S. economy. If several of them were to collapse at the same time, it could potentially plunge us into an economic depression unlike anything that this nation has ever seen before.</p>

The bitcoin bubble appears to have burst as a stepped series of price crashes are underway with the price currently standing at 1074 down form 1240 barely a day earlier. A clue to its future direction can be discerned from the unfolding technical price patterns, that just as I wrote wrote in the run up to the peak of the Bitcoin bubble with the price converging on USD 1250 that the market was primed to crash and all it was waiting for was any even marginally negative news to act as trigger for increasing waves of market panics as GREED...

An article that recently came out in Rolling Stone, titled “Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail,” by Matt Taibbi, asserts that the government is afraid to prosecute powerful bankers, such as those running HSBC. Taibbi says that there’s “an arrestable class and an unarrestable class.” What is your view on the current state of class war in the U.S.? Well, there’s always a class war going on. The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish...

Are U.S. federal government policy makers planning for an economic meltdown? Fiscal and financial news isn’t a particularly sexy topic for broad audiences, even under normal circumstances. And over the Thanksgiving national holiday weekend, about the only news people care to consume are football scores. But as we enjoyed turkey dinners, shopping, and hopefully some quality time with friends and family – and even in the recent days leading up to the holiday weekend – some major policy ideas and changes have emerged that could keep you away from your personal finances in the face of another meltdown. Americans...

Leading US banks have warned that they could start charging companies and consumers for deposits if the US Federal Reserve cuts the interest it pays on bank reserves. Depositors already have to cope with near-zero interest rates, but paying just to leave money in the bank would be highly unusual and unwelcome for companies and households. The warning by bank executives highlights the dangers of one strategy the Fed could use to offset an eventual “tapering” of the $85bn a month in asset purchases that have fuelled global financial markets for the last year.

Banks Warn Fed They May Have To Start Charging Depositors Tyler Durden 11/24/2013 15:24 -0500 The Fed's Catch 22 just got catchier. While most attention in the recently released FOMC minutes fell on the return of the taper as a possibility even as soon as December (making the November payrolls report the most important ever, ever, until the next one at least), a less discussed issue was the Fed's comment that it would consider lowering the Interest on Excess Reserves to zero as a means to offset the implied tightening that would result from the reduction in the monthly flow...

I've been away for weeks now on a non-financial assignment (we have something unusual coming out in Rolling Stone in a few weeks) so I've fallen behind on some crazy developments on Wall Street. There are multiple scandals blowing up right now, including a whole set of ominous legal cases that could result in punishments so extreme that they might significantly alter the long-term future of the financial services sector. As one friend of mine put it, "Whatever those morons put aside for settlements, they'd better double it." Firstly, there's a huge mess involving possible manipulation of the world currency...