Internet Babel

This time Max Keiser and co-host Stacy Herbert talk about the walking zombies of the world’s largest economies.

A report on Bloomberg indicates that the housing and debt crisis in the U.S. is far from over, as instances of so-called ‘Buy and Bail’ are on the increase.

Buy and Bail consists of  acquiring a new house before the buyer’s credit rating is ruined by walking away an existing mortgage loan because it is “underwater” – i.e. worth less than the mortgage. It’s an attempt to escape payments on a home whose value may never recover while securing a new property, often at a lower price with a more affordable loan (and almost always with a different lender).

After falls in house values since 2006, something like 20% of home loans in the U.S. are “underwater”, meaning the house is worth less than the loan. As a result, more people are looking at ways to walk away from loans and approx. 12% of mortgage defaults are ‘strategic’ (deliberate), according to the report.

There is still a long way down yet, it would seem.

Read the full article here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-10/-buy-and-bail-homeowners-get-past-mortgage-hurdles-from-fannie-freddie.html

This is a piece of video that makes you glad that for the existence of the medium, and of the Internet.

Invaluable experience and knowledge that otherwise could have been lost forever. It will explain much about what is going on today, but the events recalled are more than sixty years past and the interview itself was conducted in 1982.

G. Edward Griffin interviews Norman Dodd, congressional Director of Research for the Reece Committee, 1953-1954. The Reece Committee’s purpose was to investigate the seemingly unconstitutional activities of tax-exempt foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller or Carnegie Endowment.

Gold, Torture, Lies, Propaganda, Junk Bonds, Fraud, the Media and the State of the Union.

An extract from the excellent “Keiser Report”.

Prior to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithners visit to Berlin at the end of May, Webster Tarpley gave this interview discussing the proposals for regulation of trading and speculation, and also covers the ‘casino’ economy, ways of addressing recession and the free market fetish.

Adrian Salbuchi is an Argentinian economist who has plenty to say about the banking system and the Global Financial Crisis. This video is a year or so old but it acts as a good introduction to his thoughts, and we’ll be covering more of his material in future.

Using his experience of the financial difficulties experienced in Argentina, Adrian explains the lead up to the Global Financial Crisis, describing the whole Global Financial System as one vast Ponzi Scheme, based on:

(1) Artificially controlling the supply of public State-issued Currency
(2) Artificially imposing Banking Money as the primary source of funding in the economy
(3) Promoting “doing everything by Debt” and
(4) Erecting complex channels that allow privatisation of profits when the model is in expansion mode and socialisation of losses when the model goes into contraction mode.