An Epidemic of Disrespect for the President

No Longer Focused On Deposits Or Loans but they just love those taxpayer funded bail-outs.  This is our lead topic for today.

Bloomberg reported last month:

“Banks don’t have a need for deposits, and the demand for loans by households and firms is weak,” Niels Storm Stenbaek, chief economist at the Danish Bankers Association, said in a phone interview.

Wait … what?

Banks don’t need deposits?   They’re not giving many loans?  Isn’t that what banks do?

If they’re not collecting deposits and making loans, what are they doing?  In reality, big banks aren’t really acting like banks anymore.  Big banks do very little traditional banking, since most of their business is from financial speculation. For example, we noted in 2010 that less than 10% of Bank of America’s assets come from traditional banking deposits.

The big banks are manipulating every market.   They’re also taking over important aspects of thephysical economy, including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity.  And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each year (more hereand more).

Apart from the above-described manipulation, virtually all of the big banks’ profits come from taxpayer bailouts and subsidies  (see this, this and this).  Why don’t they need deposits? Because the taxpayers are showering them with money.   And they don’t need deposits because – as is now admitted by the mainstream – banks create money out of thin air.  In other words, banks don’t need deposits in order to make loans.   At the same time,  the big banks have sat on the money the government threw at them – with the encouragement of the Fed – instead of loaning it out to Main Street to kickstart the economy. As wenoted in 2012, small banks are much more interested in making loans to the little guy than the TBTFs:  USA Today points out:

Banks that received federal assistance during the financial crisisreduced lending more aggressively and gave bigger pay raises to employees than institutions that didn’t get aid, a USA TODAY/American University review found.

Dennis Santiago – CEO and Managing Director of Institutional Risk Analytics … notes:    The vast majority of this contraction of credit availability to American industry has been by the larger banks ….

Fortune reports that smaller banks are stepping in to fill the lending void left by the giant banks’ current hesitancy to make loans. Indeed, the article points out that the only reason that smaller banks haven’t been able to expand and thrive is that the too-big-to-fails have decreased competition ….

The issue today is respect for the office of President.  My brother told me he personally regards disrespect for the President of the United States – to be a sin, no matter who it is.  There are certain things we just accepted as normal procotol in previous times.  We used to say “Politics stops at the water’s edge”.   You don’t drag foreign nations into a domestic political conflict to somehow try and use that particular nation as a pawn to win some argument or conflict.  People today have been pointing out all of these “misspeaks” of people stepping over the line.  A spokesman for Mitt Romney (?) stated in 2012 that “President Obama’s problem is that he needs to learn how to be a real American”.   And then Mike ‘Huckelberry’ said a couple of weeks ago that President Obama was not a real Christian, and therefore somehow unqualified to be president.   Then we have just this week former New York Mayor Giuliani saying that “President Obama wasn’t raised the way you and I were raised, and he never learned to love America like you and I love it”.   And there have been other rants lately of “Any time President Obama speaks of America it’s only to run it down.  He can’t say anything good about America”.   I find all of these remarks perplexing.  It would seem even Bill Press takes exception into President Obama not referring to ISIS and the like as “Islamic terrorists”.   Clearly they are a branch of Sunni Moslems and they call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  I don’t how much more obvious about it they can be, especially when they occupy much of - - Iraq and Syria.  I guess if it were me in Obama’s shoes- - I’d have to wonder whether I would get the same criticism or since I was raised entirely in America and went to American schools - - that I would get a “pass”.  It’s a fact that can’t be repeated too often that had the President not pushed the Affordable Care act through congress, it’s hard to say how much of this political flack he would have been spared of.  Maybe the tea party movement wouldn’t have gotten going to begin with back in 2009 because back in those days- - the lion’s share of the attacks were strictly anti Obama Care.

The other big political firestorm is Bruce Rouner’s slash and burn tacticts in Illimois where everything is getting slashed in funds and the income tax is being reduced - - and now out of the 35 states that have the state Income Tax, Illinois is right about at the bottom.   The Koch Brothers have an exceedingly close relationship with Governor Scott Walker, and it’s becoming more and more apparent that Walker is the odds on favorite to be the Republican nominee for President next summer.  From a Cosmic point of view there are certain entities which the Federation will go after and others, such as Rupert Merdoch, FOX news, and the Koch Brothers, that they tread gingerly around and they have their own cosmic reasons for doing that.   But they’ll go after General Electric and NBC, and Monsanto.  Not even China will accept our genetically modified organism grains and produce.   But Monsanto is protected by law from any and every law suit.  Many corporations are now or will be protected by statute when the Trans Pacific Partnership goes through.   I won’t even THINK about regarding this President as any kind of progressive till he goes after Wall Street and changes the people he puts up for approval for cabinet posts.  I won’t accept him until he goes after Monsanto and all the other “Monsanto light” chemical companies spreading their mass form of pollution.  Returning to the Federation for the moment - - - as you know after Mal Evans left minister of communication - - -another guy came in - - the guy who was called “anti Earth interest” but he left and another guy came in and now he’s gone and the Federation is looking into candidates.   One of the applicants for the job is a Taccoman, which Mal Evans raised howls of protest over.  Mal wanted moral support so he contacted Jim Morrison on Andromeda, but Jim’s support of Mal on this point was pretty weak - - saying “There’s nothing wrong with having a foreign applicant for a high post.  This has been done a number of times” (perhaps referring to himself being hired by Mal)  But one Taccoman leader let it slip as a “known fact” the true Cosmic identity of the nation of Israel.  But others said “Outliers aren’t supposed to know that information” and since I heard the remark, I thought he might mean Me.   I considered it a profitable fact to learn.  OK this ends the “short version” of this commentary.

STRONG SCOTTISH-SOUNDING NAMES

Allester

Andrew

Angus

Arnold

Arthur

Brian

Byron

Cletus

Clyde

Collin

Daniel

Darren

Dewey

Donald

Duke

Duncan

Earl

Eugene

Garon

George

Glen

Gordon

Gregory

Grover

Herald

Henry

Hyrum

Jake

Jedediah

Jethro

Lance

Malcolm

Marcus

Martin

Montgomery

Oliver

Owen

Patrick

Peter

Ralph

Randolph

Rutherford

Scott

Stewart

Sydney

Wesley

William

Ziek