Free Republic

Some interesting stuff on Telegram's Intel Slava Z feed, that seems like it might be related to other deep state looting that we see going on. 🏳️‍🌈🇷🇺 Western countries cannot fulfill their own sanctions and block two-thirds of the reserves of the Russian Central Bank. Because no one knows where they are. After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the G7 countries decided to block Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserves located abroad, which were estimated at $300 billion. But in the end, less than a third of this amount was arrested, and the rest was simply not found. This...

The burn rate for this government (Ukraine...) is somewhere between five and six billion dollars a month and that is a staggering burn rate. USAID was part of president Biden's commitment in disbursing a billion dollars to the world bank trust fund. Thanks to congress and rare bipartisanship in this town we have 7.5 billion dollars more direct budget support that we wish to be providing to Ukraine. That is a lot of money and that is money that we know is not going to be enough. We know that more direct budget support is going to be needed down...

The World Bank will provide Ukraine with $4.8 billion for recovery following a roundtable talk held in Washington on April 21 along with the Ukrainian government, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has said. "Yesterday, during a ministerial roundtable talk, I turned to the World Bank. The result is $4.8 billion for the restoration of Ukraine," the head of state said on Instagram. He thanked that Ukraine "is heard and supported." "With such help, we will be able to quickly restore the country," Zelensky said. As reported, the president of Ukraine, in his speech at this roundtable talk via video link,...

With the looming threat that the financial industry may shut its doors to the gun industry, a Utah man is hoping that his cryptocurrency geared toward purchasing firearms will take off. Since Democrats took full control of the government last month, a proposed rule that would protect businesses such as the firearms industry has been scuttled, opening the possibility that companies will see their financial services cut off. Rob McNealy, a Second Amendment supporter, created the Universal Settlement Coin (TUSC), a cryptocurrency that focuses on providing the firearms industry with a tool that would allow gun stores and firearm-related manufacturers...

Seven hundred kids. That’s how many students would have lost their scholarships—and a chance at a better life—if Fifth Third Bank hadn’t come to its senses. Instead, after a week of uncertainty, the company sat down with Florida parents and pastors and decided not to listen to Florida’s cultural bullies. It’s one thing for a company to support LGBT extremism. It’s quite another, the bank agreed, to hurt needy children in the process. Most kids had already left school for the weekend when they got the good news: One of the biggest contributors to the Florida voucher program wasn’t dropping...

Last week, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bank announced they no longer would donate to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which enables more than 108,000 low-income children and children in foster care to receive scholarships to attend a safe and effective school of choice. The move comes after the Orlando Sentinel published a piece suggesting that $105 million in tax credit scholarships had been used by families to pay tuition at faith-based schools that, as The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann put it, “uphold their faiths’ historic sexual ethics.” Businesses that contribute to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations in the state can receive...

The pro-mass immigration, GOP megadonor, billionaire Koch brothers are pushing not only an amnesty for illegal aliens ahead of the midterm elections, but also continued mass legal immigration despite Republican voters vastly opposing that agenda. In an interview with Time Magazine, Daniel Garza who leads the Koch-funded LIBRE Initiative, said any cuts to current legal immigration levels are “unacceptable.” Every year, the U.S. imports more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled legal immigrants, putting downward pressure on blue-collar Americans’ wages and demographically changing the country at a rapid pace. “For us, that was unacceptable,” Garza said of an immigration plan endorsed...

Trump also criticized Democrats for opposing his proposed wall on the Southern border. “Eventually the Democrats will agree with us to build the wall and keep the damn drugs out,” he said, prompting chants of “build that wall” in the room. The president criticized sanctuary city policies for allowing illegal immigrants and drug dealers to remain in the country. He called on Congress to end funding for sanctuary cities. “If we are not going to get tough on the drug dealers who kill thousands of people and destroy so many people’s lives, we are just doing the wrong thing,” he...

The biggest extortion racket in world history has been directed from the Oval Office and managed by two Attorney Generals, Holder and Lynch. Never have such vast sums been extracted from any entities and never have such sums been applied to the construct of the massive conceit of one person.  Exceeding all parameters of reason, the current Administration  has taken advantage of the financial assault on Americans by banks and financial institutions, to build a glorifying legacy that makes Bill Clinton jealous.  For an additional measure of abuse, .  . . the billions came from taxpayers. The losses from...

... Bank of America (BAC) on Thursday announced it set aside $997 million to protect from loan losses, mainly in the bank's $22 billion energy portfolio. Wells Fargo (WFC) warned of "significant stress" and "deterioration" in the oil and gas space. The problems there forced Wells Fargo to add $200 million in loan-loss reserves, its first increase to this rainy-day fund since 2009. And JPMorgan Chase increased its provisions for credit losses by 88%, mostly due to the oil, natural gas and pipeline business. It was enough to cause JPMorgan's (JPM) first drop in profits since late 2014. ...

Yesterday we reported that the ECB has begun contemplating the death of the e500 EURO note, a fate which is now virtually assured for the one banknote which not only makes up 30% of the total European paper currency in circulation by value, but provides the best, most cost-efficient alternative (in terms of sheer bulk and storage costs) to Europe's tax on money known as NIRP [Negative Interest Rate Policy].

There has been an economic coup d'etat in America and most of the world. We are now ruled by about 200 unelected central bankers, monetary apparatchiks and their minions and megaphones on Wall Street and other financial centers. Unlike Senator Joseph McCarthy, I actually do have a list of their names. They need to be exposed, denounced, ridiculed, rebuked and removed. The first 30 includes Janet Yellen, William Dudley, the other governors of the Fed and its senior staff. The next 10 includes Jan Hatzius, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, and his counterparts at the other major Wall Street banking...

Just when you thought Wall Street’s heist of the U.S. financial system couldn’t get any crazier, along comes a regulator’s report on FDIC-insured banks exposure to derivatives. According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), one of the regulators of national banks, as of June 30 of this year, Goldman Sachs Bank USA had $78 billion in deposits, and – wait for it – $45.7 trillion in notional amount of derivatives. (Notional means face amount of derivatives.) According to the OCC report, Goldman Sachs Bank USA’s notional derivatives are an eye-popping 563 percent of its risk-based capital....

ouse Republican leaders succeeded last month in their quest to shut down a federal agency that helps U.S. companies sell their goods overseas, but a majority in Congress may soon have the last word.. A path to reviving the Export-Import Bank has emerged in Congress, and the agency, which has the strong backing of business groups, could be providing assistance again within weeks. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would allow bank advocates to include a five-year reauthorization of the agency on a highway funding bill that must pass by the end of the month. And there's enough...

NEW YORK – President Obama’s attorney-general nominee, Loretta Lynch, admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that her investigators in the money-laundering probe of HSBC were aware of evidence compiled by whistleblower John Cruz but she chose, nevertheless, not to bring criminal charges. Lynch provided written answers to questions submitted by committee chairman Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, in a document posted on the panel’s website dated Feb. 18. As WND reported, Lynch’s confirmation vote in the Senate initially was postponed after Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, opened the investigation of Lynch’s role in the HSBC...

We don’t like to concede that a primary cause of the financial crisis was a Wall Street compensation system that rewarded executives, bankers and traders for taking big risks with other people’s money without holding them the least bit accountable. And because we don’t like to discuss such things in polite company, it is certainly unsurprising that six years later, not a single fundamental aspect of how Wall Street pays its top people has changed. The incentive system that handed out millions of dollars in bonuses to bankers and traders who packaged shoddy mortgages into securities and sold them as...

The banking industry likes superfluous language. There's "quantitative finance" for example, which (given that finance isalready a quantitative subject) is a bit like saying "aerial flight" or "wet swimming". And then there's "forward guidance". What, as opposed to backward guidance? I mean, what other type of guidance is there? Last summer the Bank of England (BoE) decided it wanted to import the U.S. Federal Reserve's forward guidance policy. In short this went along the lines of "we'll link future moves in the base rate to other external market indicators, so that as these other indicators move then so will base...

In March 2011, Reuters announced a secret order signed by Barack Obama to provide covert support for Libyan rebel forces. The operation became known as Zero Footprint, but after Obama finished with it, Big Foot was identified. For about 18 months before the attacks on our Benghazi Special Mission, intelligence had successfully identified terrorist factions inside the rebel factions. Those terrorists included the Muslim Brotherhood as well as al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, Senator John McCain said the rebels were his heroes. Qadhafi made a fatal mistake, literally, by working toward one currency for Africa, which threatened the West. The idea of a...

It doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees.  Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we’re...

The important-sounding Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union has recently reiterated "its strong support for Ukraine's unity, sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity." Poor, destabilized, post-putsch Ukraine is to be congratulated for receiving something none of the 28 countries that actually belongs to the EU ever does: support for its sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. ("Unity" is a more complicated matter, given the EU's reflexive pox on separatist movements that might prefigure the breakup of the EU itself.) As the world's pre-eminent transnational entity since the breakup of the USSR, the EU is all about eradicating its members' sovereignty,...