Is QE2 The Road To Zimbabwe-style Hyperinflation? Not Likely by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
December 1, 2010

Unlike Zimbabwe, the U.S. can easily get the currency it needs without being beholden to anyone. But wouldn’t that dilute the value of the currency? No.

A month ago, the bond vigilantes were screaming that the Fed’s QE2 would be the first step on the road to Zimbabwe-style hundred trillion dollar notes. Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia) is the poster example of what can go wrong when a government pays its bills by printing money. Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed in 2008, when its currency hyperinflated to the point that it was trading with the U.S. dollar at an exchange rate of 10 trillion to 1. On November 29, Cullen Roche wrote in the Pragmatic Capitalist:

Response to Gary North: QE2 IS the Populist Solution by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
November 25, 2010

Gary North, who purports to be an expert on the errors in my book “Web of Debt,” has evidently not actually read it.  In an article posted on the Market Oracle on November 23, he says that in calling QE2 a “bold precedent,” I have switched sides.  He apparently missed the chapter I wrote on this subject, first published in “Web of Debt” in 2007, saying exactly what I am saying now.

The Federal Reserve is finally using its “quantitative easing” (QE) tool to good purpose, and I’m endorsing that, not just for our central bank but for any central bank anywhere that would be so bold. 

What’s Really Behind QE2? by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
November 19, 2010

The deficit hawks are circling, hovering over QE2, calling it just another inflationary bank bailout. But unlike QE1, QE2 is not about saving the banks. It’s about funding the federal deficit without increasing the interest tab, something that may be necessary in this gridlocked political climate just to keep the government functioning.

On November 15, the Wall Street Journal published an open letter to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke from 23 noted economists, professors and fund managers, urging him to abandon his new “quantitative easing” policy called QE2. The letter said:

ForeclosureGate Could Force Bank Nationalization by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
November 5, 2010

For two years, politicians have danced around the nationalization issue, but ForeclosureGate may be the last straw. The megabanks are too big to fail, but they aren’t too big to reorganize as federal institutions serving the public interest.

In January 2009, only a week into Obama’s presidency, David Sanger reported in The New York Times that nationalizing the banks was being discussed. Privately, the Obama economic team was conceding that more taxpayer money was going to be needed to shore up the banks. When asked whether nationalization was a good idea, House speaker Nancy Pelosi replied:

China’s Creative Accounting: How It Buried Its Debt and Forged Ahead with Stimulus by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
October 29, 2010

China may be as heavily in debt as we are. It just has a different way of keeping its books — which makes a high-profile political ad sponsored by Citizens Against Government Waste, a fiscally conservative think tank, particularly ironic. Set in a lecture hall in China in 2030, the controversial ad shows a Chinese professor lecturing on the fall of empires: Greece, Rome, Great Britain, the United States . . . . [See video below.]

“They all make the same mistakes,” he says. “Turning their backs on the principles that made them great. America tried to spend and tax itself out of a great recession. Enormous so-called stimulus spending, massive changes to health care, government takeover of private industries, and crushing debt.”

Time for a New Theory of Money by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
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Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
October 29, 2010

The reason our financial system has routinely gotten into trouble, with periodic waves of depression like the one we’re battling now, may be due to a flawed perception not just of the roles of banking and credit but of the nature of money itself. In our economic adolescence, we have regarded money as a “thing”—something independent of the relationship it facilitates. But today there is no gold or silver backing our money. Instead, it’s created by banks when they make loans (that includes Federal Reserve Notes or dollar bills, which are created by the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned banking corporation, and lent into the economy). Virtually all money today originates as credit, or debt, which is simply a legal agreement to pay in the future.

Keiser Report: Episode 87: Ellen Brown on Foreclosuregate

with Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
October 19, 2010

RT

This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, look at the full scale currency war launched by the “tomb maker” and at hiring hair stylists as scabs to cross the bankers’ picket line. He also talks to Ellen Brown about Foreclosure-gate.

Time to Break Up the Too-big-to-Fail Banks? by Ellen Brown + The Daily Show: Foreclosure Crisis

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
October 15, 2010

Looming losses from the mortgage scandal dubbed “foreclosuregate” may qualify as the sort of systemic risk that, under the new financial reform bill, warrants the breakup of the too-big-to-fail banks. The Kanjorski amendment allows federal regulators to pre-emptively break up large financial institutions that—for any reason—pose a threat to U.S. financial or economic stability.

Although downplayed by most media accounts and popular financial analysts, crippling bank losses from foreclosure flaws appear to be imminent and unavoidable. The defects prompting the “RoboSigning Scandal” are not mere technicalities but are inherent to the securitization process. They cannot be cured. This deep-seated fraud is already explicitly outlined in publicly available lawsuits.

Foreclosuregate and Obama’s “Pocket Veto” by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
October 7, 2010

Amid a snowballing foreclosure fraud crisis, President Obama today blocked legislation that critics say could have made it more difficult for homeowners to challenge foreclosure proceedings against them.

The bill, titled The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2009, passed the Senate with unanimous consent and with no scrutiny by the DC media. In a maneuver known as a “pocket veto,” President Obama indirectly vetoed the legislation by declining to sign the bill passed by Congress while legislators are on recess.

Shock Therapy for Wall Street: JPMorgan Suspends 56,000 Foreclosures; GMAC and BOA Many More by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
September 24, 2010

“Maybe this is like shock therapy. Maybe this will actually get the lenders to the table and encourage them to work out deals that are to the benefit of everybody.”

–Economist Karl E. Case, quoted in the New York Times

The hits are coming fast and furiously. Major Wall Street mortgage lenders could soon be falling like dominos – and looking again for handouts.

The Credit Meltdown and the Shadow Banking System: What Basel III Missed by Dr. Ellen Brown

by Dr. Ellen Brown
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Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
September 24, 2010

While local banks are held in check by the new banking czars in Basel, Wall Street’s “shadow banking system” has hardly been curbed by regulators at all; and it is here that the 2008 credit crisis was actually precipitated. The banking system’s credit machine is systemically flawed and needs a radical overhaul.

On September 13, the Bank for International Settlements issued heightened capital requirements that will make lending even more difficult for local banks, which do most of the consumer and small business lending today. The new rules are ostensibly designed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 credit collapse, but they fail to address its real cause, which involves a “shadow” banking system that has largely escaped regulation.

Basel III: Tightening the Noose on Credit by Dr. Ellen Brown

by Dr. Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
September 17, 2010

The stock market shot up on September 13, after new banking regulations were announced called Basel III. Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief. The megabanks, propped up by generous taxpayer bailouts, would have no trouble meeting the new capital requirements, which were lower than expected and would not be fully implemented until 2019.

Only the local commercial banks, the ones already struggling to meet capital requirements, would be seriously challenged by the new rules. Unfortunately, these are the banks that make most of the loans to local businesses, which do most of the hiring and producing in the real economy. The Basel III capital requirements were ostensibly designed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 banking collapse, but the new rules fail to address its real cause.

Why Basel III Misses the Mark

Time for Helicopter Ben to Drop Some Money on Main Street by Dr. Ellen Brown

by Dr. Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
Sept. 8, 2010

The Federal Reserve is proposing another round of “quantitative easing,” although the first round failed to reverse deflation. It failed because the money went to banks, which failed to lend it on. To reverse deflation, the money needs to be funneled directly to state and local economies. The Fed may not be authorized to “monetize” state bonds, but it COULD buy bonds issued by state-owned banks.

In 2002, in a speech that earned him the nickname “Helicopter Ben,” then- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke famously said that the government could easily reverse a deflation, just by printing money and dropping it from helicopters. “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent),” he said, “that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” Later in the speech he discussed “a money-financed tax cut,” which he said was “essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.” You could cure a deflation, said Professor Friedman, simply by dropping money from helicopters.

Homeowners’ Rebellion: Could 62 Million Homes Be Foreclosure-Proof? by Dr. Ellen Brown

by Dr. Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
Aug 18, 2010

Image by respres via Flickr

Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience of the mortgage industry. A California bankruptcy court, following landmark cases in other jurisdictions, recently held that this electronic shortcut makes it impossible for banks to establish their ownership of property titles—and therefore to foreclose on mortgaged properties. The logical result could be 62 million homes that are foreclosure-proof.

Mortgages bundled into securities were a favorite investment of speculators at the height of the financial bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. The securities changed hands frequently, and the companies profiting from mortgage payments were often not the same parties that negotiated the loans. At the heart of this disconnect was the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a company that serves as the mortgagee of record for lenders, allowing properties to change hands without the necessity of recording each transfer.

Escaping the Sovereign Debt Trap: The Remarkable Model of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia by Dr. Ellen Brown

by Dr. Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
Aug 4, 2010

The current credit crisis is basically a capital crisis: at a time when banks are already short of the capital needed to back their loans, capital requirements are being raised. Nearly a century ago, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia demonstrated that banks do not actually need capital to make loans — so long as their credit is backed by the government. Denison Miller, the Bank’s first Governor, was fond of saying that the Bank did not need capital because “it is backed by the entire wealth and credit of the whole of Australia.” With nothing but this national credit power, the Commonwealth Bank funded both massive infrastructure projects and the country’s participation in World War I.