by John Truman Wolfe

The headlines of an article in yesterday’s Market Watch says, IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End.

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/112616/imf-bombshell-age-america-end-marketwatch

This article covers a report by the International Monetary Fund that predicts the end of what they call “The Age of America.” The IMF says that China will overtake the American economy in 2016.

The fact of the matter is that the data and statistics cited by the IMF are flawed. Read more »

This is the third and final segment of A Greek Tragedy.  It covers what occurred in Greece and what is truly needed to prevent a continuing Global Financial Crisis.

THE GREEK BANKRUPTCY

Meanwhile, the Athenian addiction continued.

The country finally hit the wall about a year ago, at which point there was a real potential that the nation of Pericles was going to declare bankruptcy.

What does this mean? It means that Greece had reached the point that they could no longer pay the interest on their debt – their bonds.

Markets roiled as Greece went cap in hand to their brethren in the European Union, “Buddy, can you spare a billion?”  The Eurozone countries bitched, protested and criticized, and in the end, along with help from the IMF, coughed up $146 billion.

It wasn’t altruism, mind you. No, no. This was pure self-interest. The situation in Greece had helped to drive the value of the Euro down 15% during the first six months of the year. (George Soros, the Dorian Gray of international finance, must have been orgasmic.) The bailout halted the fall.

Read more »

This is the second of a three part story on the part Goldman Sachs played in creating the European financial crisis. The first part of the story is posted earlier in the blog.

In short, Goldman converted ten billion dollars of Greek debt that had been purchased with U.S. dollars and Japanese yen into debt that could be repaid in Euros. However, in creating this “currency swap”, they used a fictitious value for the Euros which lowered the reported amount of Greek debt by billions.

The structure enabled Greece to owe billions to Goldman in a currency deal without having to report it to the European Union as a loan, which is clearly what it was. Turns out using the Alice in Wonderland value for the Euro wasn’t illegal, just deceptive as hell.

Read more »

BENNIE AND THE FEDS

Ben Bernanke has all the emotion of a fried circuit board.

His dome is buffed, his beard is fastidiously trimmed, but I’ve never seen the guy smile.

Even if he weren’t Wall Street’s android, it’s not smiling time for the B-man, because after months of fighting tooth and nail all the way to the Supreme Court to stop it, Bennie and the Feds lost their effort to keep the records of what they did during the financial crisis hidden from the American public.

As a result, last Thursday, the Fed vomited 30,000 pages of previously confidential information into the public consciousness. Read more »