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Part One: The Banking Houses of Morgan and Rockefeller [VIDEO] The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch. According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1] So who then are the...

Nixon was worried about trade deficits and a deteriorating balance of payments. He rejected the advice of Volcker, then treasury undersecretary, and the Fed chairman at the time, Arthur Burns. Instead, Nixon closed the gold window, meaning foreign governments could no longer exchange dollars for gold. The value of the greenback fell like a stone. So as the value of our currency declined, prices denominated in dollars sky-rocketed. We printed bad money and too much of it, and that’s the definition of inflation. Excess money in relation to demand will do it every time. Lack of value will do it...

China vs the almighty dollarBy Henry C K Liu The Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, while under Fascist imprisonment, developed the concept of cultural hegemony: control people's minds, and their hearts and hands will follow. Gramsci explained how one dominant class can establish its control over others through ideological dominance. Whereas orthodox Marxism explains social structure as shaped by economic forces, Gramsci adds the crucial cultural dimension. He showed how, once ideological authority (or "cultural hegemony") is established, the use of overt violence to impose control can become superfluous. Today, the world lives under the virtually undisputed rule of a...

Tomorrow Sunday August 15, 1971 is the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon closing the Gold Exchange Window that allowed foreign holders of US Dollars to exchange their US Dollars for gold priced at $35/ounce......an agreement that had been in place since the end of WW II.... When this decision was announced it's hard to imagine the impact after 50 years...think of Bill Clinton getting NAFTA passed, repealing the Glass/Stegall Act, think of GWB invading Iraq and Afghanistan, etc....actions by President's have monumental impact over time, when at the time it seemed to be insignificant... Not advocating one position over the...

Fifty years ago this Sunday, President Richard Nixon announced a bold economic plan, including the severing of the U.S. dollar’s ties to gold. Since then, the world’s monetary system has consisted of (mostly) freely floating currencies. The dollar nonetheless remains the primary legal tender used internationally for trade, finance, and as a store of value, which has conferred upon the U.S. enormous advantages. Whether that will continue for the next half-century is far from certain. The Bretton Woods system, in effect back then, reflected America’s economic pre-eminence after World War II. Currency exchange rates were fixed, relative to the dollar,...

Today, 75 years after Bretton Woods, we are entering the next era of money. Thanks to new technologies like the Internet and blockchain, we now have globally scalable ways of "stamping" and transferring digital assets, or tokens, with widespread, provable legitimacy—the kind that has the power to create networks of belief on which all money depends. This is Money 3.0, in which money comes from people. Money is now programmable, like software, and can be designed according to any criteria. Imagine a currency that is programmed to pay its taxes, bit by bit, with every transaction. Imagine a currency programmed...

The big political news from last week was David Brat’s upset win over Eric Cantor for Congress. Brat is an economics professor at Randolph Macon and from his research it’s clear that he has strong political views embedded in his economics. It’s perfectly fine to be a political economist, but when it leads to an obviously flawed understanding and presentation of reality then it becomes a real problem in my opinion. For instance, in his website Brat says the following: “Our national debt has skyrocketed, reaching over $17 trillion dollars. What our leaders in Washington fail to mention is...

How a Soviet mole in FDR's inner circle triggered Pearl Harbor – and its dire relevancy to our conflict today. ... On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft delivered a shocking blow .. Nearly seven years later, Harry Dexter White, a senior official in the Roosevelt Administration, appeared to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities . Numerous witnesses, including Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, had implicated White in involvement with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. ... Harry Dexter White, a Harvard PhD and Assistant Treasury Secretary, had played a major role in creating the World Bank...

Billionaire investor George Soros told the World Bank this week that the planet is on the verge of a third world war that could arise out of an economic collapse in China. “If there is conflict between China and a military ally of the United States, like Japan, then it is not an exaggeration to say that we are on the threshold of a third world war,” Soros said during a Bretton Woods conference. . . . . Soros said the only solution to the prospect was to allow China to join the IMF’s basket of global currencies so that...

"From 1947 when [the] Bretton Woods System really got operating to 1971, when the dollar was convertible into gold at a 35th of an ounce, unemployment in America averaged 4.7 percent. And then we got rid of the Bretton Woods system — we defaulted on it — we went to fiat money, and in the years from 1971 to today, unemployment has averaged significantly above 6 percent. Low unemployment: gold standard. High unemployment: fiat money. But it’s not just unemployment. The bankruptcy rate which Elizabeth Warren likes to focus on was one point something per thousand for years, and suddenly...

President Barack Obama is nominating a major fundraiser for his presidential campaign to be the next U.S. ambassador to Sweden. The White House says Azita Raji is Obama’s pick for the job. She’s a former investment banker who served as national vice-chair of finance for Obama’s 2012 campaign. She helped raise more than $500,000 for Obama’s campaign as a “bundler” in 2012. …

In early July 1944, delegates from 44 countries gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A three-week summit took place, at which a new system was agreed to regulate the international monetary and financial order after the Second World War. The US was already the world’s commercial powerhouse, having eclipsed the British Empire several decades earlier. America was also on course to be among the victors of “Europe’s conflict”, even though its economy was largely unscathed by war. As such, Bretton Woods was US-dominated and produced a settlement largely on US terms. Seventy years ago this...

The Bank of England should cut interest rates, print more money and ease the regulatory pressure on banks as part of a radical set of measures to return Britain to recovery, the International Monetary Fund has urged. In an unusually alarmist annual assessment of the UK, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said that "growth is too slow and unemployment too high, and policies to bolster demand before low growth becomes entrenched are needed" Warning that weak growth was putting the country at risk of permanently high unemployment, the Bretton Woods institution called for swift and co-ordinated action between the Bank...

Please see the articles on George Soros' Bretton Woods conference in NH this past weekend. http://www.nhteapartycoalition.org/tea/2011/04/11/video-of-soros-protest/

(Video at link) EXCERPT 0:20 It is a really open question; How much debt is too much and when should you tighten? We're in the midst of a difficult, delicate, two-speed maneuver. 1:15 If you have a growing economy, you can tolerate a high level of debt. If you have an economy in recession, and too much debt, you get into what's called a debt trap.1:50 This argument is overshadowed by political considerations. In Europe, you have debate of eurozone members and their debt. 2:25 We can issue our own currency in the U.S., and the dollar is quite strong....

While all the focus is now on the three-ring circus in Washington vis-a-vis passing the fiscal 2011 budget the Democrats failed to pass in 2010, up in New Hampshire this weekend at Bretton Woods, the Institute for New Economic Thinking is convening a very important conference, "CRISIS and RENEWAL: International Political Economy at the Crossroads." It's no accident they're meeting on the very same site as the Bretton Woods Conference -- formally United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference -- that met from July 1-22, 1944, during World War II to plan the postwar financial world after the expected defeat of...

The author of a military doctrine used by the Obama administration to justify the recent airstrikes targeting the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya recently advocated for a "global rebalancing" and "international redistribution" to create a "New World Order." snip Just last week, INET was in the news for its announcement of its annual four-day economic symposium to be held next month in the mountains of Bretton Woods, N.H. snip Reporting on last year's event, the Business Insider related, "George Soros has brought together a crack team of the world's top economists and financial thinkers." "Its aim," continued the business...

So, central bankers are beginning to wonder if the US can pull off "another Volcker." Even Paul Volcker himself, who is still alive, doubts it. Today, too many people owe too much money and too many political favors. Put up rates to 18% today? Unthinkable. Cut 10% off government spending? Impossible. But don't worry about it. Now, we're not threatened by inflation...but by depression! It's fighting the depression that makes people worry. Smart investors and shrewd central bankers are afraid the depression-fighters will go too far...that they don't really know what they're doing. Ben Bernanke is up for re-appointment. "Bernanke...

Debt can become a real liability for a superpower. Recall what happened to postwar Britain. The dollar's sharp drop over the past few weeks has led to considerable anxiety about the status of the United States as the dominant force in the global economy. Closely related to this fear is constant worry about the rise of China and the evermore complicated relationship between Beijing and Washington. Most people are now aware that China is the largest creditor to a heavily indebted U.S. government. It holds close to a trillion dollars of U.S. Treasurys and has invested hundreds of billions more...

The 1991 book "The Risk of Economic Crisis" with all-star list of contributors including Volcker, Summers, Minsky, Krugman, Samuelson, Sprague, and edited by Marty Feldstein. The following were predictions about the nature of the risk of financial and economic crises in the USA:Lawrence H Summers, Planning for the Next Financial Crisis Could the United States again experience a financial crisis like those that so frequently disrupted the real economy before World War II? ... There is cause for concern... It is probably now easier to lever assets than ever before and the combination of reduced transactions costs and new markets...