![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/images/quotes_7a.gif)
The Global Elite Are Very Clearly Telling Us That They Plan To Raid Our Bank Accounts
Don’t be surprised when the global elite confiscate money from your bank account one day. They are already very clearly telling you that they are going to do it. Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem is the president of the Eurogroup – an organization of eurozone finance ministers that was instrumental in putting together the Cyprus “deal” – and he has said publicly that what has just happened in Cyprus will serve as a blueprint for future bank bailouts. What that means is that when the chips are down, they are going to come after YOUR money. So why should anyone put a large amount of money in the bank at this point? Perhaps you can make one or two percent on your money if you shop around for a really good deal, but there is also a chance that 40 percent (or more) of your money will be confiscated if the bank fails. And considering the fact that there are vast numbers of banks all over the United States and Europe that are teetering on the verge of insolvency, why would anyone want to take such a risk? What the global elite have done is that they have messed around with the fundamental trust that people have in the banking system. In order for any financial system to work, people must have faith in the safety and security of that financial system. People put their money in the bank because they think that it will be safe there. If you take away that feeling of safety, you jeopardize the entire system.
So exactly how did the big banks in Cyprus get into so much trouble? Well, they have been doing exactly what hundreds of other large banks all over the U.S. and Europe have been doing. They have been gambling with our money. In particular, the big banks in Cyprus made huge bets on Greek sovereign debt which ended up failing.
But what happened in Cyprus is just the tip of the iceberg. All over the planet major financial institutions are being incredibly reckless with client money. They are leveraged to the hilt and they have transformed the global financial system into a gigantic casino.
If they win on their bets, they become fabulously wealthy.
If they lose on their bets, they know that the politicians won’t let the banks fail. They know that they will get bailed out one way or another.
And who pays?
We do.
Either our tax dollars are used to fund a government-sponsored bailout, or as we have just witnessed in Cyprus, money is directly confiscated from our bank accounts.
And then the game begins again.
People need to understand that the precedent that has just been set in Cyprus is a game changer.
The next time that a major bank fails in Greece or Italy or Spain (or in the United States for that matter), the precedent that has been set in Cyprus will be looked to as a “template” for how to handle the situation.
Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem has even publicly admitted that what just happened in Cyprus will serve as a model for future bank bailouts. Just check out what he said a few days ago…
“If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?’. If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders”
Dijsselbloem insists that this will cause people “to think about the risks” before they put their money somewhere…
“It will force all financial institutions, as well as investors, to think about the risks they are taking on because they will now have to realise that it may also hurt them. The risks might come towards them.”
Well, as depositors in Cyprus just found out, there is a risk that you could lose 40 percent (and that is the best case scenario) of your money if you put it in the bank.
Why would anyone want to take that risk – especially in a nation that is already experiencing very serious financial troubles such as Greece, Italy or Spain?
As if that was not enough, Dijsselbloem later went in front of the Dutch parliament and publicly defended a wealth tax like the one that was just imposed in Cyprus.
Dijsselbloem is being widely criticized, and rightfully so. But at least he is being more honest that many other politicians. His predecessor as the head of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, once said that “you have to lie” to the people in order to keep the financial markets calm…
Mr. Dijsselbloem’s style contrasts with that of his predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister, who spoke in a low mumble at news conferences and was expert at sidestepping questions. Mr. Juncker once even advocated lying as a way to prevent financial markets from panicking—as they did Monday after Mr. Dijsselbloem’s comments.
“When it becomes serious, you have to lie,” Mr. Juncker said in April 2011. “If you have pre-indicated possible decisions, you are feeding speculation in the financial markets.”
But Dijsselbloem is certainly not the only one among the global elite that is admitting what is coming next. Just check out what Joerg Kraemer, the chief economist at Commerzbank, recently told Handelsblatt about what he believes should be done in Italy…
“A tax rate of 15 percent on financial assets would probably be enough to push the Italian government debt to below the critical level of 100 percent of gross domestic product”
Yikes!
And as I wrote about the other day, the Finance Minister of New Zealand is proposing that bank account holders in his nation should be required to “take a haircut” if any banks in his nation fail.
They are telling us what they plan to do.
They are telling us that they plan to raid all of our bank accounts when the global financial system fails.
And calling it a “haircut” does not change the fact of what it really is. The truth is that when they confiscate money from our bank accounts it is outright theft. Just check out what the Daily Mail had to say about the situation in Cyprus…
People who rob old ladies in the street, or hold up security vans, are branded as thieves. Yet when Germany presides over a heist of billions of pounds from private savers’ Cyprus bank accounts, to ‘save the euro’ for the hundredth time, this is claimed as high statesmanship.
It is nothing of the sort. The deal to secure a €10?billion German bailout of the bankrupt Mediterranean island is one of the nastiest and most immoral political acts of modern times.
It has struck fear into the hearts of hundreds of millions of European citizens, because it establishes a dire precedent.
And when you cause paralysis in the banking system, a once thriving economy can freeze up almost overnight. The following is an excerpt from a report from someone that is actually living over in Cyprus…
As it stands now, nowhere in Cyprus accepts credit or debit cards anymore for fear of not being paid, it is CASH ONLY. Businesses have stopped functioning because they cannot pay employees OR pay for the stock they receive because the banks are closed. If the banks remain closed, the economy will be destroyed and STOP COMPLETELY. Looting, robberies and theft are already on the rise. If the banks open now, there will be a massive run on the bank, and the banks will FAIL loosing all of its deposits, also causing an economic crash. TONIGHT there are demonstrations at most street corners and especially at the parliament building (just 2 miles from me).
Many are thinking that the ECB and EU are allowing Cyprus to fail as a test ground for new financial standards.
Just wanted all you guys to know the real story of whats going on here. Prayers are appreciated (although this is very interesting to watch) many of my local friends have lots of money in the banks.
Would similar things happen in the United States if there was a major banking crisis someday?
That is something to think about.
In any event, the problems in the rest of Europe continue to get even worse…
-The stock market in Greece is crashing. It is down by more than 10 percent over the past two days.
-The stock markets in Italy and Spain are experiencing huge declines as well. Banking stocks are being hit particularly hard.
-The Bank of Spain says that the Spanish economy will sink even deeper into recession this year.
-The latest numbers from the Spanish government show that Spain’s debt problem is rapidly getting worse…
“The central government’s interest bill surged 15 percent last year to 26 billion euros, while tax receipts slumped 21 percent. The cost of servicing debt represented 30 percent of the taxes collected at the end of December, up from 20 percent a year earlier.”
-The euro took quite a tumble on Thursday and the euro will likely continue to decline steadily in the weeks and months to come.
For a very long time I have been warning that the next major wave of the economic collapse is going to originate in Europe.
Hopefully people are starting to see what I am talking about.
As this point, the major banks in Europe are leveraged about 26 to 1, and that is close to the kind of leverage that Lehman Brothers had when it finally collapsed. As a whole, European banks are drowning in debt, they are taking risks that are almost incomprehensible and now faith in those banks has been greatly undermined by what has happened in Cyprus.
Anyone that cannot see a crisis coming in Europe simply does not understand the financial world. A moment of reckoning is rapidly approaching for Europe. The following is from a recent article by Graham Summers…
At the end of the day, the reason Europe hasn’t been fixed is because CAPITAL SIMPLY ISN’T THERE. Europe and its alleged backstops are out of money. This includes Germany, the ECB and the mega-bailout funds such as the ESM.
Germany has already committed to bailouts that equal 5% of its GDP. The single largest transfer payment ever made by one country to another was the Marshall Plan in which the US transferred an amount equal to 5% of its GDP. Germany WILL NOT exceed this. So don’t count on more money from Germany.
The ECB is chock full of garbage debts which have been pledged as collateral for loans. If anyone of significance defaults in Europe, the ECB is insolvent. Sure it can print more money, but once the BIG collateral call hits, money printing is useless because the amount of money the ECB would have to print would implode the system.
And then of course there are the mega bailout funds such as the ESM. The only problem here is that Spain and Italy make up 30% of the ESM’s supposed “funding.” That’s right, nearly one third of the mega-bailout fund’s capital will come from countries that are bankrupt themselves.
What could go wrong?
Right now, close to half of all money that is on deposit at banks in Europe is uninsured. As people move that uninsured money out of the banks, the amount of money that will be required to “fix the banks” will go up even higher.
It would be wise to try to avoid the big banks at this point – especially those with very large exposure to derivatives. Any financial institution that uses customer money to make reckless bets is not to be trusted.
If you can find a small local bank or credit union to do business with you will probably be better off.
And don’t think that this kind of thing can never happen in the United States.
One of the key players that was pushing the idea of a “wealth tax” in Cyprus was the IMF. And everyone knows that the IMF is heavily dominated by the United States. In fact, the headquarters of the IMF is located right in the heart of Washington D.C. not too far from the White House. When I worked in D.C. I would walk by the IMF headquarters quite a bit.
So if the United States thought that confiscating money from bank accounts was a great idea in Cyprus, why wouldn’t they implement such a thing here under similar circumstances?
The global elite are telling us what they plan to do, and the game has dramatically changed.
Move your money while you still can.
Unfortunately, it is already too late for the people of Cyprus.
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Business • The Big Dogs On Wall Street Are Starting To Get Very Nervou
The Big Dogs On Wall Street Are Starting To Get Very Nervous
By Michael, on February 21st, 2013
Why are some of the biggest names in the corporate world unloading stock like there is no tomorrow, and why are some of the most prominent investors on Wall Street loudly warning about the possibility of a market crash? Should we be alarmed that the big dogs on Wall Street are starting to get very nervous? In a previous article, I got very excited about a report that indicated that corporate insiders were selling nine times more of their own shares than they were buying. Well, according to a brand new Bloomberg article, insider sales of stock have outnumbered insider purchases of stock by a ratio of twelve to one over the past three months. That is highly unusual. And right now some of the most respected investors in the financial world are ringing the alarm bells. Dennis Gartman says that it is time to "rush to the sidelines", Seth Klarman is warning about "the un-abating risks of collapse", and Doug Kass is proclaiming that "we’re headed for a sharp fall". So does all of this mean that a market crash is definitely on the way? No, but when you combine all of this with the weak economic data constantly coming out of the U.S. and Europe, it certainly does not paint a pretty picture.
According to Bloomberg, it has been two years since we have seen insider sales of stock at this level. And when insider sales of stock are this high, that usually means that the market is about to decline…
Corporate executives are taking advantage of near-record U.S. stock prices by selling shares in their companies at the fastest pace in two years.
There were about 12 stock-sale announcements over the past three months for every purchase by insiders at Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) companies, the highest ratio since January 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Pavilion Global Markets. Whenever the ratio exceeded 11 in the past, the benchmark index declined 5.9 percent on average in the next six months, according to Pavilion, a Montreal-based trading firm.
But it isn’t just the number of stock sales that is alarming. Some of these insider transactions are absolutely huge. Just check out these numbers…
Among the biggest transactions last week were a $65.2 million sale by Google Inc.’s 39-year-old Chief Executive Officer Larry Page, a $40.1 million disposal by News Corp.’s 81- year-old Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and a $34.2 million sale from American Express Co. chief Kenneth Chenault, who is 61. Nolan Archibald, the 69-year-old chairman of Stanley Black & Decker Inc. who plans to leave his post next month, unloaded $29.7 million in shares last week and Amphenol Corp. Chairman Martin Hans Loeffler, 68, sold $27.5 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, 57, announced plans to sell as many as 3.2 million shares in the operator of the world’s most-popular search engine. The planned share sales, worth about $2.5 billion, represent about 42 percent of Schmidt’s holdings.
So why are all of these very prominent executives cashing out all of a sudden?
That is a very good question.
Meanwhile, some of the most respected names on Wall Street are warning that it is time to get out of the market.
For example, investor Dennis Gartman recently wrote that the game is "changing" and that it is time to "rush to the sidelines"…
"When tectonic plates in the earth’s crust shift earthquakes happen and when the tectonic plants shift beneath our feet in the capital markets margin calls take place. The tectonic plates have shifted and attention… very careful and very substantive attention… must be paid.
"Simply put, the game has changed and where we were playing a ‘game’ fueled by the monetary authorities and fueled by the urge on the part of participants to see and believe in rising ‘animal spirits’ as Lord Keynes referred to them we played bullishly of equities and of the EUR and of ‘risk assets’. Now, with the game changing, our tools have to change and so too our perspective.
"Where we were buyers of equities previously we must disdain them henceforth. Where we were sellers of Yen and US dollars we must buy them now. Where we had been long of gold in Yen terms, we must shift that and turn bullish of gold in EUR terms. Where we might have been ‘technically’ bullish of the EUR we must now be technically and fundamentally bearish of it. The game board has been flipped over; the game has changed… change with it or perish. We cannot be more blunt than that."
That is a very ominous warning, but he is far from alone. Just the other day, I wrote about how legendary investor Seth Klarman is warning that the collapse of the financial markets could happen at literally any time…
"Investing today may well be harder than it has been at any time in our three decades of existence," writes Seth Klarman in his year-end letter. The Fed’s "relentless interventions and manipulations" have left few purchase targets for Baupost, he laments. "(The) underpinnings of our economy and financial system are so precarious that the un-abating risks of collapse dwarf all other factors."
Other big hitters on Wall Street are ringing the alarm bells as well. For example, Seabreeze Partners portfolio manager Doug Kass recently told CNBC that what he is seeing right now reminds him of the period just before the crash of 1987…
"I’m getting the ‘summer of 1987 feeling’ in the U.S. equity market," Kass told CNBC, "which means we’re headed for a sharp fall."
And of course the "perma-bears" continue to warn that the months ahead are going to be very difficult. For instance, "Dr. Doom" Marc Faber recently said that he "loves the high odds of a ‘big-time’ market crash".
Another "perma-bear", Nomura’s Bob Janjuah, is convinced that the stock market will experience one more huge spike before collapsing by up to 50%…
I continue to believe that the S&P500 can trade up towards the 1575/1550 area, where we have, so far, a grand double top. I would not be surprised to see the S&P trade marginally through the 2007 all-time nominal high (the real high was of course seen over a decade ago – so much for equities as a long-term vehicle for wealth creation!). A weekly close at a new all-time high would I think lead to the final parabolic spike up which creates the kind of positioning extreme and leverage extreme needed to create the conditions for a 25% to 50% collapse in equities over the rest of 2013 and 2014, driven by real economy reality hitting home, and by policymaker failure/loss of faith in "their system".
So are they right?
We will see.
At the same time that many of the big dogs are pulling their money out of the market, many smaller investors are rushing to put their money back in to the market. The mainstream media continues to assure them that everything is wonderful and that this rally can last forever.
But it is important to keep in mind that the last time that Wall Street was this "euphoric" was right before the market crash in 2008.
So what should we be watching for?
As I have mentioned before, it is very important to watch the financial markets in Europe right now.
If they crash, the financial markets in the U.S. will probably crash too.
And the financial markets in Europe definitely have had a rough week. Just check out what happened on Thursday. The following is from a report by CNBC’s Bob Pisani…
Italy, Germany, France, Spain, U.K., Greece, and Portugal all on track to log worst day since Feb. 4. European PMI numbers were disappointing, with all major countries except Germany reporting numbers below 50, indicating contraction.
What does this mean? It means Europe remains mired in recession: "The euro zone is on course to contract for a fourth consecutive quarter," Markit, who provides the PMI data, said. A new insight is that France is now joining the weakness shown in periphery countries.
You’re giving me agita: Italy was the worst market, down 2.5 percent. The CEO of banking company, Intesa Sanpaolo, said Italy’s recession has been so bad it could cause a fifth of Italian companies to fail, noting that topline for those bottom fifth have been shrinking 35 to 45 percent. Italian elections are this weekend.
It wasn’t any better in Asia. The Shanghai Index had its worst day in over a year, closing down nearly three percent.
And the economic numbers coming out of the U.S. also continue to be quite depressing.
On Thursday, the Department of Labor announced that there were 362,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits during the week ending February 16th. That was a sharp rise from a week earlier.
But I am not really concerned about that number yet.
When it rises above 400,000 and it stays there, then it will be time to officially become alarmed.
So what is the bottom line?
There are trouble signs on the horizon for the financial markets. Nobody should panic right now, but things certainly do not look very promising for the remainder of the year.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch … ry-nervous
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Feb 22, 2013 12:15 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
The Big Dogs On Wall Street Are Starting To Get Very Nervous
Why are some of the biggest names in the corporate world unloading stock like there is no tomorrow, and why are some of the most prominent investors on Wall Street loudly warning about the possibility of a market crash? Should we be alarmed that the big dogs on Wall Street are starting to get very nervous? In a previous article, I got very excited about a report that indicated that corporate insiders were selling nine times more of their own shares than they were buying. Well, according to a brand new Bloomberg article, insider sales of stock have outnumbered insider purchases of stock by a ratio of twelve to one over the past three months. That is highly unusual. And right now some of the most respected investors in the financial world are ringing the alarm bells. Dennis Gartman says that it is time to “rush to the sidelines”, Seth Klarman is warning about “the un-abating risks of collapse”, and Doug Kass is proclaiming that “we’re headed for a sharp fall”. So does all of this mean that a market crash is definitely on the way? No, but when you combine all of this with the weak economic data constantly coming out of the U.S. and Europe, it certainly does not paint a pretty picture.
According to Bloomberg, it has been two years since we have seen insider sales of stock at this level. And when insider sales of stock are this high, that usually means that the market is about to decline…
Corporate executives are taking advantage of near-record U.S. stock prices by selling shares in their companies at the fastest pace in two years.
There were about 12 stock-sale announcements over the past three months for every purchase by insiders at Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) companies, the highest ratio since January 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Pavilion Global Markets. Whenever the ratio exceeded 11 in the past, the benchmark index declined 5.9 percent on average in the next six months, according to Pavilion, a Montreal-based trading firm.
But it isn’t just the number of stock sales that is alarming. Some of these insider transactions are absolutely huge. Just check out these numbers…
Among the biggest transactions last week were a $65.2 million sale by Google Inc.’s 39-year-old Chief Executive Officer Larry Page, a $40.1 million disposal by News Corp.’s 81- year-old Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and a $34.2 million sale from American Express Co. chief Kenneth Chenault, who is 61. Nolan Archibald, the 69-year-old chairman of Stanley Black & Decker Inc. who plans to leave his post next month, unloaded $29.7 million in shares last week and Amphenol Corp. Chairman Martin Hans Loeffler, 68, sold $27.5 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, 57, announced plans to sell as many as 3.2 million shares in the operator of the world’s most-popular search engine. The planned share sales, worth about $2.5 billion, represent about 42 percent of Schmidt’s holdings.
So why are all of these very prominent executives cashing out all of a sudden?
That is a very good question.
Meanwhile, some of the most respected names on Wall Street are warning that it is time to get out of the market.
For example, investor Dennis Gartman recently wrote that the game is “changing” and that it is time to “rush to the sidelines”…
“When tectonic plates in the earth’s crust shift earthquakes happen and when the tectonic plants shift beneath our feet in the capital markets margin calls take place. The tectonic plates have shifted and attention… very careful and very substantive attention… must be paid.
“Simply put, the game has changed and where we were playing a ‘game’ fueled by the monetary authorities and fueled by the urge on the part of participants to see and believe in rising ‘animal spirits’ as Lord Keynes referred to them we played bullishly of equities and of the EUR and of ‘risk assets’. Now, with the game changing, our tools have to change and so too our perspective.
“Where we were buyers of equities previously we must disdain them henceforth. Where we were sellers of Yen and US dollars we must buy them now. Where we had been long of gold in Yen terms, we must shift that and turn bullish of gold in EUR terms. Where we might have been ‘technically’ bullish of the EUR we must now be technically and fundamentally bearish of it. The game board has been flipped over; the game has changed… change with it or perish. We cannot be more blunt than that.”
That is a very ominous warning, but he is far from alone. Just the other day, I wrote about how legendary investor Seth Klarman is warning that the collapse of the financial markets could happen at literally any time…
“Investing today may well be harder than it has been at any time in our three decades of existence,” writes Seth Klarman in his year-end letter. The Fed’s “relentless interventions and manipulations” have left few purchase targets for Baupost, he laments. “(The) underpinnings of our economy and financial system are so precarious that the un-abating risks of collapse dwarf all other factors.”
Other big hitters on Wall Street are ringing the alarm bells as well. For example, Seabreeze Partners portfolio manager Doug Kass recently told CNBC that what he is seeing right now reminds him of the period just before the crash of 1987…
“I’m getting the ‘summer of 1987 feeling’ in the U.S. equity market,” Kass told CNBC, “which means we’re headed for a sharp fall.”
And of course the “perma-bears” continue to warn that the months ahead are going to be very difficult. For instance, “Dr. Doom” Marc Faber recently said that he “loves the high odds of a ‘big-time’ market crash“.
Another “perma-bear”, Nomura’s Bob Janjuah, is convinced that the stock market will experience one more huge spike before collapsing by up to 50%…
I continue to believe that the S&P500 can trade up towards the 1575/1550 area, where we have, so far, a grand double top. I would not be surprised to see the S&P trade marginally through the 2007 all-time nominal high (the real high was of course seen over a decade ago – so much for equities as a long-term vehicle for wealth creation!). A weekly close at a new all-time high would I think lead to the final parabolic spike up which creates the kind of positioning extreme and leverage extreme needed to create the conditions for a 25% to 50% collapse in equities over the rest of 2013 and 2014, driven by real economy reality hitting home, and by policymaker failure/loss of faith in “their system”.
So are they right?
We will see.
At the same time that many of the big dogs are pulling their money out of the market, many smaller investors are rushing to put their money back in to the market. The mainstream media continues to assure them that everything is wonderful and that this rally can last forever.
But it is important to keep in mind that the last time that Wall Street was this “euphoric” was right before the market crash in 2008.
So what should we be watching for?
As I have mentioned before, it is very important to watch the financial markets in Europe right now.
If they crash, the financial markets in the U.S. will probably crash too.
And the financial markets in Europe definitely have had a rough week. Just check out what happened on Thursday. The following is from a report by CNBC’s Bob Pisani…
Italy, Germany, France, Spain, U.K., Greece, and Portugal all on track to log worst day since Feb. 4. European PMI numbers were disappointing, with all major countries except Germany reporting numbers below 50, indicating contraction.
What does this mean? It means Europe remains mired in recession: “The euro zone is on course to contract for a fourth consecutive quarter,” Markit, who provides the PMI data, said. A new insight is that France is now joining the weakness shown in periphery countries.
You’re giving me agita: Italy was the worst market, down 2.5 percent. The CEO of banking company, Intesa Sanpaolo, said Italy’s recession has been so bad it could cause a fifth of Italian companies to fail, noting that topline for those bottom fifth have been shrinking 35 to 45 percent. Italian elections are this weekend.
It wasn’t any better in Asia. The Shanghai Index had its worst day in over a year, closing down nearly three percent.
And the economic numbers coming out of the U.S. also continue to be quite depressing.
On Thursday, the Department of Labor announced that there were 362,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits during the week ending February 16th. That was a sharp rise from a week earlier.
But I am not really concerned about that number yet.
When it rises above 400,000 and it stays there, then it will be time to officially become alarmed.
So what is the bottom line?
There are trouble signs on the horizon for the financial markets. Nobody should panic right now, but things certainly do not look very promising for the remainder of the year.
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Do Wall Street Insiders Expect Something Really BIG To Happen Very Soon?
Why are corporate insiders dumping huge numbers of shares in their own companies right now? Why are some very large investors suddenly making gigantic bets that the stock market will crash at some point in the next 60 days? Do Wall Street insiders expect something really BIG to happen very soon? Do they know something that we do not know? What you are about to read below is startling. Every time that the market has fallen in recent years, insiders have been able to get out ahead of time. David Coleman of the Vickers Weekly Insider report recently noted that Wall Street insiders have shown “a remarkable ability of late to identify both market peaks and troughs”. That is why it is so alarming that corporate insiders are selling nine times as many shares as they are buying right now. In addition, some extraordinarily large bets have just been made that will only pay off if the financial markets in the U.S. crash by the end of April. So what does all of this mean? Well, it could mean absolutely nothing or it could mean that there are people out there that actually have insider knowledge that a market crash is coming. Evaluate the evidence below and decide for yourself…
For some reason, corporate insiders have chosen this moment to unload huge amounts of stock. According to a CNN article, corporate insiders are now selling nine times more of their own shares than they are buying…
Corporate insiders have one word for investors: sell.
Insiders were nine times more likely to sell shares of their companies than buy new ones last week, according to the Vickers Weekly Insider report by Argus Research.
What makes this so alarming is that corporate insiders have been exceedingly good at “timing the market” in recent years. The following comes from a recent CNBC article entitled “Sucker Alert? Insider Selling Surges After Dow 14,000“…
“In almost perfect coordination with an equity market that was rushing toward new all-time highs, insider sentiment has weakened sharply — falling to its lowest level since late March 2012,” wrote David Coleman of the Vickers Weekly Insider report, one of the longest researchers of executive buying and selling on Wall Street. “Insiders are waving the cautionary flag in an increasingly aggressive manner.”
There have been more than nine insider sales for every one buy over the past week among NYSE stocks, according to Vickers. The last time executives sold their company’s stock this aggressively was in early 2012, just before the S&P 500 went on to correct by 10 percent to its low for the year.
“Insiders know more than the vast majority of market participants,” said Enis Taner, global macro editor for RiskReversal.com. “And they’re usually right over a long period of time.”
There are other indications that the stock market may be headed for a significant tumble in the months ahead. For example, as a Zero Hedge article recently pointed out, the last time that the financial markets in the U.S. were as “euphoric” as they are now was right before the financial crisis of 2008.
And as I mentioned above, some people out there have recently made some absolutely jaw-dropping bets against stocks which will only pay off if there is a financial crash at some point in the next few months.
According to Business Insider, the recent purchase of 100,000 put options by a mystery investor has a lot of people on Wall Street talking…
According to Barron’s columnist Steven Sears, someone made a big bet against the financials ETF yesterday (ticker symbol XLF), and it has everybody buzzing.
The trader bought 100,000 put options on the ETF (a put option increases in value when the price of the underlying asset, in this case, the ETF, goes down).
To put that number in perspective, Sears writes, “Few investors ever trade more than 500 contracts, so a 100,000 order tends to stop traffic and prompt all sorts of speculation about what’s motivating the trade.” According to Sears, the trade “has sparked conversations across the market.”
Reportedly, those put options expire in April.
And as Art Cashin of UBS has noted, there was also another extremely large bet that was placed recently that is banking on a financial crash within the next two months…
A Very Big Bet In A Somewhat Unlikely Instrument – My friend, Jim Brown, the ever-alert consummate professional over at Option Investor pointed us to a rather unusual trade. Here’s what he wrote in last night’s edition of his valuable newsletter:
In past years I have reported on trades that were so large it appeared someone had inside knowledge of a pending event. Sometimes those were massive put positions on the S&P. A new trade just appeared that suggests there will be a market event in the near future. Last week somebody put on a call spread on the VIX using the April 20 and 25 puts. They bought 150,000 contracts for a net of $75 per contract. That is an $11,250,000 bet that the VIX will move over 20 over the next 60 days. You would have to be VERY confident in your outlook to risk $11 million on a directional position with the VIX at five year lows and the markets trying to break out to new highs.
So does all of this guarantee that the stock market is going to move a certain way?
Of course not.
But when you step back and look at the bigger picture, it does appear that Wall Street insiders are preparing for something.
Meanwhile, the government continues to assure us that happy days are here again for the U.S. economy and that we don’t have anything to worry about.
The Congressional Budget Office has just released a report that contains their outlook for the next decade. The report is entitled “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023″, and if you want a good laugh you should read it.
Here are some of the things that the CBO believes will happen…
-The CBO believes that government revenues will more than double by 2023.
-The CBO believes that government revenue as a percentage of GDP will rise from 15.8 percent today to 19.1 percent in 2023.
-The CBO believes that the unemployment rate will continually fall over the next decade.
-The CBO believes that the federal budget deficit will fall to just 2.4% of GDP in fiscal year 2015.
-The CBO believes that the federal budget deficit will only be $430 billion in 2015.
-The CBO believes that we will not have a single recession over the next decade.
-The CBO believes that inflation will stay at about 2 percent for the next decade.
-The CBO believes that U.S. GDP will grow by a total of 67 percent by 2023.
Wow, all of that sounds great until you go back and take a look at how CBO projections have fared in the past.
In fact, Bruce Krasting has gone back and looked at the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office’s Budget and Economic Outlook 2003. I think that you will find the differences between the CBO projections and what really happened to be very humorous…
Estimated 10-year budget surplus = $5.6T.
Reality = $6.6T deficit. A 200+% miss.
Estimate for 2012 Debt Held by Public = $1.2T (5% of GDP).
Reality = Debt Held by Public = $11.6T. A 1000% miss.
Estimated fiscal 2012 GDP = $17.4T.
Reality = $15.8T. A $1.6T (10%) miss.
So should we trust what the CBO is telling us now?
Of course not.
Instead, perhaps we should listen to some of the men that successfully warned us about the last financial crisis…
-”Dr. Doom” Marc Faber recently stated that he “loves the high odds of a ‘big-time’ market crash“.
-Economist Nouriel Roubini says that we should “prepare for a perfect storm“.
-Pimco’s Bill Gross says that we are heading for a “credit supernova“.
-Nomura’s Bob Janjuah believes that the financial markets will experience one more huge spike before collapsing by up to 50%…
I continue to believe that the S&P500 can trade up towards the 1575/1550 area, where we have, so far, a grand double top. I would not be surprised to see the S&P trade marginally through the 2007 all-time nominal high (the real high was of course seen over a decade ago – so much for equities as a long-term vehicle for wealth creation!). A weekly close at a new all-time high would I think lead to the final parabolic spike up which creates the kind of positioning extreme and leverage extreme needed to create the conditions for a 25% to 50% collapse in equities over the rest of 2013 and 2014, driven by real economy reality hitting home, and by policymaker failure/loss of faith in “their system”.
The truth is that no matter how much money printing the Federal Reserve does, it is only a matter of time before the financial markets catch up with economic reality.
The U.S. economy has been in decline for a very long time, and things just continue to get even worse. Here are just a few numbers…
-The percentage of the civilian labor force that is employed has fallen every single year since 2006.
-According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, truly accurate numbers would show that U.S. GDP growth has actually been continuously negative all the way back to 2005.
-U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
-One recent survey found that nearly half of all Americans are living on the edge of financial ruin.
-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 146 million Americans that are considered to be either “poor” or “low income” at this point.
For many more statistics that demonstrate that the U.S. economy has continued to decline in recent years, please see this article: “37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy“.
So where is all of this headed?
Well, after the next major financial crisis in America things are going to get very tough.
We can get a hint for how things are going to be by taking a look at what is going on over in Europe right now.
Can you imagine people trampling each other for food? That is what is happening in Greece. Just check out this excerpt from a Reuters article…
Hundreds of people jostled for free vegetables handed out by farmers in a symbolic protest earlier on Wednesday, trampling one man and prompting an outcry over the growing desperation created by economic crisis.
Images of people struggling to seize bags of tomatoes and leeks thrown from a truck dominated television, triggering a bout of soul-searching over the new depths of poverty in the debt-laden country.
The suffering that the Greeks are experiencing right now will come to this country soon enough.
So enjoy this false bubble of debt-fueled prosperity while you can. It is going to end way too soon, and after that there will be a whole lot of pain.
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Do Wall Street Insiders Expect Something Really BIG To Happen Very Soon?
Why are corporate insiders dumping huge numbers of shares in their own companies right now? Why are some very large investors suddenly making gigantic bets that the stock market will crash at some point in the next 60 days? Do Wall Street insiders expect something really BIG to happen very soon? Do they know something that we do not know? What you are about to read below is startling. Every time that the market has fallen in recent years, insiders have been able to get out ahead of time. David Coleman of the Vickers Weekly Insider report recently noted that Wall Street insiders have shown “a remarkable ability of late to identify both market peaks and troughs”. That is why it is so alarming that corporate insiders are selling nine times as many shares as they are buying right now. In addition, some extraordinarily large bets have just been made that will only pay off if the financial markets in the U.S. crash by the end of April. So what does all of this mean? Well, it could mean absolutely nothing or it could mean that there are people out there that actually have insider knowledge that a market crash is coming. Evaluate the evidence below and decide for yourself…
For some reason, corporate insiders have chosen this moment to unload huge amounts of stock. According to a CNN article, corporate insiders are now selling nine times more of their own shares than they are buying…
Corporate insiders have one word for investors: sell.
Insiders were nine times more likely to sell shares of their companies than buy new ones last week, according to the Vickers Weekly Insider report by Argus Research.
What makes this so alarming is that corporate insiders have been exceedingly good at “timing the market” in recent years. The following comes from a recent CNBC article entitled “Sucker Alert? Insider Selling Surges After Dow 14,000“…
“In almost perfect coordination with an equity market that was rushing toward new all-time highs, insider sentiment has weakened sharply — falling to its lowest level since late March 2012,” wrote David Coleman of the Vickers Weekly Insider report, one of the longest researchers of executive buying and selling on Wall Street. “Insiders are waving the cautionary flag in an increasingly aggressive manner.”
There have been more than nine insider sales for every one buy over the past week among NYSE stocks, according to Vickers. The last time executives sold their company’s stock this aggressively was in early 2012, just before the S&P 500 went on to correct by 10 percent to its low for the year.
“Insiders know more than the vast majority of market participants,” said Enis Taner, global macro editor for RiskReversal.com. “And they’re usually right over a long period of time.”
There are other indications that the stock market may be headed for a significant tumble in the months ahead. For example, as a Zero Hedge article recently pointed out, the last time that the financial markets in the U.S. were as “euphoric” as they are now was right before the financial crisis of 2008.
And as I mentioned above, some people out there have recently made some absolutely jaw-dropping bets against stocks which will only pay off if there is a financial crash at some point in the next few months.
According to Business Insider, the recent purchase of 100,000 put options by a mystery investor has a lot of people on Wall Street talking…
According to Barron’s columnist Steven Sears, someone made a big bet against the financials ETF yesterday (ticker symbol XLF), and it has everybody buzzing.
The trader bought 100,000 put options on the ETF (a put option increases in value when the price of the underlying asset, in this case, the ETF, goes down).
To put that number in perspective, Sears writes, “Few investors ever trade more than 500 contracts, so a 100,000 order tends to stop traffic and prompt all sorts of speculation about what’s motivating the trade.” According to Sears, the trade “has sparked conversations across the market.”
Reportedly, those put options expire in April.
And as Art Cashin of UBS has noted, there was also another extremely large bet that was placed recently that is banking on a financial crash within the next two months…
A Very Big Bet In A Somewhat Unlikely Instrument – My friend, Jim Brown, the ever-alert consummate professional over at Option Investor pointed us to a rather unusual trade. Here’s what he wrote in last night’s edition of his valuable newsletter:
In past years I have reported on trades that were so large it appeared someone had inside knowledge of a pending event. Sometimes those were massive put positions on the S&P. A new trade just appeared that suggests there will be a market event in the near future. Last week somebody put on a call spread on the VIX using the April 20 and 25 puts. They bought 150,000 contracts for a net of $75 per contract. That is an $11,250,000 bet that the VIX will move over 20 over the next 60 days. You would have to be VERY confident in your outlook to risk $11 million on a directional position with the VIX at five year lows and the markets trying to break out to new highs.
So does all of this guarantee that the stock market is going to move a certain way?
Of course not.
But when you step back and look at the bigger picture, it does appear that Wall Street insiders are preparing for something.
Meanwhile, the government continues to assure us that happy days are here again for the U.S. economy and that we don’t have anything to worry about.
The Congressional Budget Office has just released a report that contains their outlook for the next decade. The report is entitled “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023″, and if you want a good laugh you should read it.
Here are some of the things that the CBO believes will happen…
-The CBO believes that government revenues will more than double by 2023.
-The CBO believes that government revenue as a percentage of GDP will rise from 15.8 percent today to 19.1 percent in 2023.
-The CBO believes that the unemployment rate will continually fall over the next decade.
-The CBO believes that the federal budget deficit will fall to just 2.4% of GDP in fiscal year 2015.
-The CBO believes that the federal budget deficit will only be $430 billion in 2015.
-The CBO believes that we will not have a single recession over the next decade.
-The CBO believes that inflation will stay at about 2 percent for the next decade.
-The CBO believes that U.S. GDP will grow by a total of 67 percent by 2023.
Wow, all of that sounds great until you go back and take a look at how CBO projections have fared in the past.
In fact, Bruce Krasting has gone back and looked at the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office’s Budget and Economic Outlook 2003. I think that you will find the differences between the CBO projections and what really happened to be very humorous…
Estimated 10-year budget surplus = $5.6T.
Reality = $6.6T deficit. A 200+% miss.
Estimate for 2012 Debt Held by Public = $1.2T (5% of GDP).
Reality = Debt Held by Public = $11.6T. A 1000% miss.
Estimated fiscal 2012 GDP = $17.4T.
Reality = $15.8T. A $1.6T (10%) miss.
So should we trust what the CBO is telling us now?
Of course not.
Instead, perhaps we should listen to some of the men that successfully warned us about the last financial crisis…
-”Dr. Doom” Marc Faber recently stated that he “loves the high odds of a ‘big-time’ market crash“.
-Economist Nouriel Roubini says that we should “prepare for a perfect storm“.
-Pimco’s Bill Gross says that we are heading for a “credit supernova“.
-Nomura’s Bob Janjuah believes that the financial markets will experience one more huge spike before collapsing by up to 50%…
I continue to believe that the S&P500 can trade up towards the 1575/1550 area, where we have, so far, a grand double top. I would not be surprised to see the S&P trade marginally through the 2007 all-time nominal high (the real high was of course seen over a decade ago – so much for equities as a long-term vehicle for wealth creation!). A weekly close at a new all-time high would I think lead to the final parabolic spike up which creates the kind of positioning extreme and leverage extreme needed to create the conditions for a 25% to 50% collapse in equities over the rest of 2013 and 2014, driven by real economy reality hitting home, and by policymaker failure/loss of faith in “their system”.
The truth is that no matter how much money printing the Federal Reserve does, it is only a matter of time before the financial markets catch up with economic reality.
The U.S. economy has been in decline for a very long time, and things just continue to get even worse. Here are just a few numbers…
-The percentage of the civilian labor force that is employed has fallen every single year since 2006.
-According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, truly accurate numbers would show that U.S. GDP growth has actually been continuously negative all the way back to 2005.
-U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
-One recent survey found that nearly half of all Americans are living on the edge of financial ruin.
-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 146 million Americans that are considered to be either “poor” or “low income” at this point.
For many more statistics that demonstrate that the U.S. economy has continued to decline in recent years, please see this article: “37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy“.
So where is all of this headed?
Well, after the next major financial crisis in America things are going to get very tough.
We can get a hint for how things are going to be by taking a look at what is going on over in Europe right now.
Can you imagine people trampling each other for food? That is what is happening in Greece. Just check out this excerpt from a Reuters article…
Hundreds of people jostled for free vegetables handed out by farmers in a symbolic protest earlier on Wednesday, trampling one man and prompting an outcry over the growing desperation created by economic crisis.
Images of people struggling to seize bags of tomatoes and leeks thrown from a truck dominated television, triggering a bout of soul-searching over the new depths of poverty in the debt-laden country.
The suffering that the Greeks are experiencing right now will come to this country soon enough.
So enjoy this false bubble of debt-fueled prosperity while you can. It is going to end way too soon, and after that there will be a whole lot of pain.
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Very Good, House—Keep it Comin’
Jim Harper
Yesterday, I shared my doubts about the prospect of getting budget and organizational data from the White House. Today, I’m happy to report genuine progress on open data from Congress.
The Government Printing Office announced today that it will be making House bills available in XML format and in bulk through FDsys, GPO’s Federal Digital System. House bills now join other material on GPO’s bulk data page.
If you’re like me, following that link gives you some idea of what’s there, but clicking through any further gives you no idea how to use it any more than other copies of bills. That’s OK, because the kids with the computers do know how to use it. And they can take well structured, timely data reflecting the proposals in Congress and turn it into various information services, applications, and web sites that make all of us better aware of what’s happening.
I believe the public has an Internet-fueled expectation that they should understand what happens in Congress. It’s one explanation for rock-bottom esteem for government in opinion polls. Access to good data help produce better public understanding of what goes on in Washington and also, I believe, more felicitous policy outcomes—not only reduced demand for government, but better administered government in the areas the public wants it. (If you’re a reader of a certain partisan bent, you might appreciate the idea that the era of passing bills to find out what’s in them will end.)
Upon the release of my Cato Policy Analysis, “Grading the Government’s Data Publication Practices” I characterized President Obama as lagging House Republicans in terms of transparency. Today’s development helps solidify Republicans’ small lead. The GPO release says the initiative comes “[a]t the direction of the House Appropriations Committee, and in support of the task force on bulk data established by House report 112-511.”
The administration has plenty of capacity to retake the lead, of course, and could do so quite easily. I’ll call it like I see it, doing my best to reflect consensus among the transparency community as to the quality of data publication, when we return to grading the data produced by various organs of government in another year or so.
Did you think this praise would come without garnish? It’s like you don’t know me at all.
For now, this data is of limited use because it includes only House bills. The entire oeuvre of congressional bill-writers should be published the same way in the same place so that contrasts and comparisons can be drawn among House and Senate work. In short, why is the Senate not on board?
That I’ve been able to find, the XML is not well documented. What each of the technical codes means is understood by several people in Washington’s transparency community, but the idea is to make it available very broadly, so the documentation should be very strong. The information at xml.house.gov should be updated, tightened up, and made easily available to the people gathering bill data on FDsys.
The XML data structures put in bills are limited in terms of what they convey. There is rudimentary information about who introduced and cosponsored bills, what committees they were referred to, and other procedural information. That’s good. But the effects of bills—on agencies, existing law, programs, places—this is not available in machine-readable code. That would be great.
Watch this space. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll show how semantically rich data can automatically reveal more about what happens in the legislative process. Technical people will be able to draw insights about legislation and the legislative process that were never available before. They will translate that for us myriad ways, better equipping the public to oversee the government.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Other • The (Very) Rich Get (Much) Richer
The (Very) Rich Get (Much) Richer
Written by Jeff Nielson
Thursday, 03 January 2013 13:28
How do we define the term “obscenely wealthy”? We start with people who already have more wealth than any humans in the history of our species. We then watch these people getting much wealthier, much faster than anyone else on the planet. And then we listen to them lusting for even more wealth.
No one does a better job of illustrating obscene wealth than the lovers-of-Big-Money at Bloomberg. It’s recent headline summarizes this attitude perfectly:
Billionaires Worth $1.9 Trillion Seek Advantage in 2013
We have a handful of Oligarchs sitting on a mountain of wealth large enough to completely eliminate global poverty – with enough left over for they and their entire family clans to live lives of perpetual luxury. However this is not the truly “obscene” aspect of this paradigm. The true obscenity lies in the fact that these Oligarchs remain obsessed with getting much richer, much faster – and at the expense (literally) of everyone else.
Again, Bloomberg illustrates this for us with perfect clarity. It notes that these billionaires who were worth roughly $1.65 trillion at the beginning of 2012 are now worth $1.9 trillion at the end of 2012. That’s approximately a 15% increase in their total wealth, in one year, after paying(?) their taxes, and after all the lavish spending which characterizes the life of the average billionaire.
How many of the Working Poor got 15% wealthier last year – after paying their taxes and all their living expenses? Zero? Indeed, only the most entrepreneurial (or crooked) millionaires would have been able to increase their wealth at the obscene rate of these billionaires. Yet what do we hear out of the mouths of Billionaires like Warren Buffet? “Tax the millionaires.”
Specifically, tax the income of the millionaires (much harder). Note that the billionaires also have large incomes. However, once one acquires this obscene level of wealth, “income” becomes a trivial element of their total wealth.
Few billionaires have annual (taxable) “incomes” above $50 million/year. Yet for even a ‘bare’ billionaire this amounts to only 5% of their total wealth. So how did all of these billionaires get wealthier by an average of 15% last year alone? The untaxed appreciation of their vast assets.
Even if all the incomes of all the billionaires were taxed at 100%, these billionaires would still be getting wealthier much faster than anyone else in society. This is why I continue to regularly point out in my commentaries that it is never possible to construct a fair tax system based on income taxation. Inevitably, income taxation makes those on the bottom much poorer, while allowing the Top-1% to accumulate (and hoard) wealth at a rate which would have made the kings and queens of the Middle Ages envious.
The only possible fair form of taxation is wealth taxation, specifically a flat wealth tax. Everyone pays the same rate, and no one (including the billionaires) is able to hide the vast majority of their wealth from the Tax Man. Thus when Warren Buffet says “tax the (incomes of the) millionaires”, he doesn’t say this because he wants to start paying his “fair share” of taxes. He says this so that he (and his Oligarch buddies) can continue to avoid paying their fair share.
Note that Bloomberg makes it clear that the Oligarchs aren’t satisfied with getting only 15% wealthier in one year. In 2013 they want an “advantage” for themselves. This presents two, obvious questions for readers.
How much richer do these Oligarchs think they are entitled to become in 2013? How much richer do the Oligarchs think the Little People are entitled to become in 2013?
What makes the second question even more pertinent than the first is that the Little People (the Working Poor) didn’t get 15% wealthier in 2012. In fact (on average), they all got significantly poorer. For example, the U.S. standard of living (for the Little People) has fallen by more than 50% over the past 40 years.
Indeed, the precise reason why all of the debt-saturated economies of the West are on the verge of implosion is because these Vampire Billionaires have blood-sucked us dry. And in referring to our massive debts this brings us to the fiction in the Bloomberg article.
Bloomberg refers to its list of Oligarchs as “the richest people in the world”, yet even its own research indicates this is a farcical classification. In its sub-title, “Hidden Billionaires”, Bloomberg discloses that 54 of these Oligarchs were “discovered” in 2012 alone. They didn’t become billionaires last year, but rather their vast wealth-hoards were only identified for the first time last year.
What about the Trillionaires?
There is somewhere in the vicinity of $200 trillion in total debt floating around the global economy; comprising total sovereign, corporate, and personal debt. Who holds the IOU’s?
It’s not governments. They’re all debtors. It’s not the corporations. They’re (almost) all leveraged-to-the-hilt with debt, because in the Age of the Oligopoly all their time, energy and financial resources are going into buying up other corporations. It’s certainly not the Little People. Even in (supposedly) “wealthy” Western economies, personal debt-levels have never been higher, meaning net wealth has never been lower.
We know from Bloomberg’s own numbers that the total wealth of the (supposed) “richest people” is a mere $1.9 trillion – and that is all of their wealth combined. Who is holding the IOU’s on the other 99% of this $200 trillion in debt? The Trillionaires.
These are the people who are so wealthy that their wealth hasn’t even been “discovered” yet by the sleuths at Bloomberg – and likely never will. Even at currently artificially low interest rates, these Vampire Trillionaires blood-suck the global economy for $trillions every year in interest payments alone.
This is why (real) economic growth is now impossible for all but the most-robust (or least-indebted) economies. In a $70 trillion global economy, we have the Trillionaires skimming roughly 10% per year off the top, for themselves. What readers must understand is that this “taxation” of the entire global economy by the Trillionaires – in the form of interest payments – is essentially nothing less than the proceeds of crime.
We start with income taxation, a form of taxation which (as a matter of arithmetic) must impoverish the bottom-80% over time, turning them into debtors. Most of the rest of the top-20% prosper moderately under this extremely corrupt form of taxation, while (as we have seen) the Oligarchs get a complete ‘free ride.’
With the bottom-80% turned into impoverished debtors, this starves our consumption-based economies of revenues. This “revenue crisis”, in turn, turns our governments into massive debtors; as even modest levels of public/social services can no longer be maintained by the trickle of tax revenues flowing in.
These $trillions per year which the Trillionaires are siphoning-out of the global economy (and into their own wealth-hoards) are being extorted out of the global economy via an entirely corrupt economic system. The very, very rich are not simply getting much, much richer. They are doing so by stealing from everyone else.
http://bullionbullscanada.com/intl-comm … uch-richer
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Thu Jan 03, 2013 1:52 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
A 3.8% Tax On the Sale of (a Very Small Number) of Homes In the Obamacare Law?
If one makes over $200,000/year and if one realizes at least $250,000 in gains if single or at least $500,000 if married, on the sale of a home, one gets to pay (an additional) 3.8% to the federal government.
This little provision doesn’t apply to most of us, but how weird is it that it was inserted into the Obamacare bill?
I guess we really did need to pass it to see what was in it.
Click here for a good explaination of the tax.
The post A 3.8% Tax On the Sale of (a Very Small Number) of Homes In the Obamacare Law? appeared first on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
In World Bank’s New Tax Report Card, ‘High Effort’ Is a Very Bad Thing
By Daniel J. Mitchell
Remember when you were a kid and your parents would either be happy or angry depending on whether your report card said you were trying hard or being a slacker? No matter whether your grades were good or bad, it helped to get an “A for Effort.”
But sometimes a high level of effort isn’t a good thing.
The World Bank has a new study that measures national tax burdens. But instead of using conventional measures, such as top tax rates or tax collections as a share of GDP, the international bureaucracy has developed an index that measures “tax effort” and “tax capacity” after adjusting for variables such as per-capita GDP, corruption, and demographics.
One goal of the study is to develop an apples-to-apples way of comparing tax burdens for nations at various levels of development. Poor nations, for instance, tend to have low levels of tax revenue even though they often have high tax rates. This is partly because of Laffer Curve reasons, but perhaps even more so because of corruption and incompetence. Rich nations, by contrast, usually have much greater ability to enforce their tax codes. So if you want to compare the tax system of Paraguay with the tax system of Sweden, you need to take these factors into account.
Here’s a description of how the authors addressed this issue.
Measuring taxation performance of countries is both theoretically and practically challenging. …tax economists have attempted to deal with this problem by applying an empirical approach to estimate the determinants of tax collection and identify the impact of such variables on each country’s taxable capacity. The development of a tax effort index, relating the actual tax revenues of a country to its estimated taxable capacity, provides us with a tempting measure which considers country specific fiscal, demographic, and institutional characteristics. …Tax effort is defined as an index of the ratio between the share of the actual tax collection in GDP and the taxable capacity.
This is a worthwhile project. There sometimes are big differences between nations and those should be part of the equation when comparing tax policies. Indeed, this is why my recent post on the rising burden of the value-added tax looked at data for nations at different levels of development.
But I’m irked by the World Bank study because it’s really measuring “tax onerousness.” I’m not even sure onerousness is a word, but I sure don’t like the term “tax effort” because it implies that a higher tax burden is a good thing. After all, we learned from our report cards that it’s good to demonstrate high effort and not be a slacker.
And just so you know I’m not just imagining things, the authors explicitly embrace the notion that bigger tax burdens are desirable. They assert (without any evidence, of course) that higher levels of tax promote “development” and that more money for politicians is “desirable.”
The international development community is increasingly recognizing the centrality of effective taxation to development. …higher tax revenues are important to lower the aid dependency in low-income countries. They also encourage good governance, strengthen state building and promote government accountability. …many developing countries experience a chronic gap between the actual and desirable levels of tax revenues. Taxation reforms are needed to close this gap.
If the authors of the study looked at economic history, they would understand that they have things backwards. “Effective taxation” doesn’t lead to “development.” It’s the other way around. The western world became rich when the burden of government was very small and most nations didn’t even have income tax regimes. It was only after nations because prosperous that politicians figured out how to extract significant shares of economic output.
But let’s set that aside and see which nations have the most and least onerous tax systems. Here’s a table from the report and it seems that Papua New Guinea has the world’s worst tax system and Bahrain has the best tax system. Among developed nations, New Zealand is the worst and Japan is the best. The United States (circled in red) gets a decent score. We’re not nearly as good as Switzerland and we’re slightly worse than Canada, but our politicians expend less “effort” than their counterparts in nations such as France, Italy, and Belgium.
By the way, I’m not endorsing either the methodology or the results. I like what the authors are trying to do (at least in terms of creating an apples-to-apples measure), but some of the results seem at odds with reality. New Zealand’s tax system isn’t great, but it certainly doesn’t seem as bad as the French tax code. And I have a hard time believing that Japan’s tax code is less onerous than the Swiss system.
The World Bank study also breaks down the data so that countries can be put into a matrix based on how much money they collect and how much “effort” they expend.
Here’s where the authors let their bias show. In their descriptions of the various boxes, they reflexively assume that higher tax collections are a good thing. Here is some of what they wrote in that section of the study.
The collection of taxes in this group of countries is currently low and lies below their respective taxable capacity. These countries have potential to succeed in deepening comprehensive tax policy and administration reforms focusing on revenue enhancement. …Botswana and Chile were originally in the low-effort, low-collection group, but they made it to the high-effort, high-collection group after recent improvements in revenue performance. …Although countries in this [high collection, low effort] group have already achieved a high tax collection, fiscally they still have the potential to implement reforms to reduce distortions and reach a higher level of efficiency of tax collection, since their tax effort index is low.
Very Orwellian, wouldn’t you say? We’re supposed to conclude that it’s bad if nations are “below their respective taxable capacity” because they can “succeed in deepening comprehensive tax policy” for purposes of “revenue enhancement.” Other nations, though, got gold stars because of “improvements in revenue performance.” And others were encouraged to try harder, even if they already collected a lot of revenue, in order to “reach of a higher level of efficiency of tax collection.”
But, to be fair, the study does include some semi-sensible comments acknowledging that there are limits to the greed of the political class. For all intents and purposes, the authors warn that there will be Laffer Curve effects if “high effort” nations seek to make their tax systems even more onerous.
Given that the level of tax intake in this group of countries is already high and stays above their respective taxable capacity, a further increase in tax revenue collection may lead to unintended economic distortions. …low-income countries with a low level of tax collection but high tax effort have less opportunity to increase tax revenues without possibly creating distortions or high compliance costs.
Just in case you’re not familiar with the lingo, “distortion” refers to the economic damage caused by high tax rates. This can be because high tax rates lead to a reduction in work, saving, investment, entrepreneurship, and other productive behaviors. Or it can be because high tax rates encourage people to make economically inefficient choices solely for tax planning purposes.
So the fact that the World Bank recognizes that taxes can hurt economic performance in at least some circumstances puts them ahead of the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. That’s damning with faint praise, to be sure, but I wanted to close on an upbeat note.
P.S. If you peruse the matrix, you’ll notice that New Zealand is considered a developing country. I’m sure that will be the source of amusement to my friends in Australia.
In World Bank’s New Tax Report Card, ‘High Effort’ Is a Very Bad Thing is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty