NSA To Control The Stock Market Kit Daniels Infowars.com May 7, 2014
Spy agency can easily manipulate the market through latest surveillance hub An upcoming surveillance hub monitoring all investment transactions in real-time will allow the National Security Agency unparalleled ability to manipulate the stock market. Through the use of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)’s latest database, which keeps investor data in the same centralized location, the NSA could easily capture private, financial data on targeted investors and even influence the stock market as a whole. And it appears that the dragnet database, called the Comprehensive Automated Risk Data System (CARDS), was designed with such vulnerabilities in mind. “I can’t think of any other reason that someone would invest so much time and so much effort into trying to monitor every brokerage account in the United States in real time,” Porter Stansberry, the founder of the Stansberry & Associates Investment Research Conference, said on the Alex Jones Show. “That is an enormous technical challenge.” He also added that even knowing something as simple as how many individual investors own certain securities could be very, very valuable to select interests. And other revelations in the past reveal that the NSA is more than willing to monitor and manipulate financial transactions. Last December, the White House report on the activities of the NSA suggested that the spy agency was already hacking into financial institutions and altering the amounts held in bank accounts. “Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems,” the report recommended. Trevor Timm, a former analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, asked if the recommendation implied that the NSA was already doing just that.
And a few month earlier, in September, German news outlet Der Spiegel reported that the spy agency was also tracking the global flow of money. Under the “Follow the Money” program, the NSA collects credit card and other financial transactions into its own financial databank, called “Tracfin,” which contains nearly 200 million records if not more. “Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance,” the article continued. “NSA analysts at an internal conference that year described in detail how they had apparently successfully searched through the U.S. company’s complex transaction network for tapping possibilities.” And the upcoming CARDS database, which a law professor suggested is as tempting of a target as the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, would grant the NSA almost unlimited possibilities to influence the stock market.
The “Economic Recovery” Continues: Businesses Are Being Destroyed Faster Than They Are Being Created Michael Snyder The Economic Collapse May 7, 2014
What would you say about an economy where businesses are shutting down faster than they are opening? Well, a shocking new study released by the Brookings Institution indicates that this is exactly what is happening in the United States. We are absolutely killing small businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit in this country, and as you will see below, the number of selfemployed Americans has been on a downward trend for a decade even though our population has been steadily growing. Traditionally, small businesses have been the primary engine of job growth in this nation, so the fact that study after study has found that small business creation is being crippled in the United States is a really bad sign for our economic future. Personally, I write about our long-term economic decline nearly every day, but even I had no idea that businesses were being destroyed faster than they were being created. According to the Brookings Institution, this first started happening in 2009… The American economy is less entrepreneurial now than at any point in the last three decades. That’s the conclusion of a new study out from the Brookings Institution, which looks at the rates of new business creation and destruction since 1978. Not only that, but during the most recent three years of the study — 2009, 2010 and 2011 — businesses were collapsing faster than they were being formed, a first. And this mirrors an earlier study conducted by economist Tim Kane. According to his analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data, the following is how the decline in the number of new business jobs per one thousand Americans breaks down by presidential administration… Bush Sr.: 11.3 Clinton: 11.2 Bush Jr.: 10.8 Obama: 7.8 As you can see, this is a problem that has been building for decades and that has accelerated under the Obama administration. We are strangling small business creation to death, and as a result the number of Americans that are self-employed just keeps going down. Just check out this chart…
And keep in mind that throughout this entire time the U.S. population has been growing. So the numbers in the chart above should be going up steadily as the population grows. But instead they have just kept going down. Meanwhile, the “economic recovery” is continuing in the corporate world as well. On Tuesday, we learned that Office Depot is going to be closing 400 stores. Why would that happen if the economy was actually getting better? When this was announced, shares of Office Depot rose about 20 percent. I can never understand why that happens. You would think that when a business makes an announcement that essentially says “our business is failing” that it would cause people to dump the stock. In any event, this comes on the heels of an announcement by Staples back in March that it was going to shut down 225 stores in the United States and Canada. So where will we buy our pens and paper from now on? If the economy really was “recovering”, you would think that demand for office supplies would actually be on the rise. But the only places where the economy is “recovering” is in places such as Washington D.C., New York City and San Francisco. Those at the top of the pyramid are doing well, but almost everyone else in the country is really suffering right now. When you kill off small businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit, it tends to increasingly funnel money to the very top of the food chain. And this is precisely what is happening in America at this point. In a recent article, Charles Hugh Smith included a chart that shows how average household net worth in the U.S. breaks down by quartile… Bottom 25%: $4,600 From 25% to 50%: $21,700 From 50% to 75%: $78,900 From 75% to 90%: $242,800 Top 10%: $1,606,600
As you can see, the bottom 50 percent are really not that much above zero at all. In the old days, it seemed like almost everyone was “middle class” in America, but now that is rapidly changing. We can see this increasing divide in the real estate market as well. According to Bloomberg, sales of million dollar homes are booming, but sales of homes at the low end are plunging… “Million-dollar homes in the U.S. are selling at double their historical average while middle-class property demand stumbles, showing that the housing recovery is mirroring America’s wealth divide. Purchases costing $1 million or more rose 7.8 percent in March from a year earlier, according to data released last week by the National Association of Realtors. Transactions for $250,000 or less, which represent almost two-thirds of the market, plunged 12 percent in the period” So this explains why it is almost impossible to find an affordable home in San Francisco, but the overall homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years. But even in our wealthy enclaves there are signs of deep economic trouble. For example, in New York City the number of homeless children has soared to a new all-time high… They’re just like other kids except they have a secret. They are homeless. Children are living hidden lives in plain sight. They are part a growing number of low income families who find themselves with no way out but they are working hard to find a solution. It’s a big issue. And it’s growing. More than 23,000 children sleep in homeless shelters every night, an all-time high, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. The only “recovery” being experienced in America is the one that is happening on Wall Street, in boardrooms in Silicon Valley and in the halls of power in Washington. In the rest of the country, retail stores are closing at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 20 percent of all families do not have a single member that is employed and 49 million Americans are dealing with food insecurity. There is no way that we are ever going to have a broad-based economic recovery in this nation if we continue to destroy small businesses. They are the lifeblood of any economy and they are the primary engine of job creation. Sadly, our politicians seem completely clueless about all of this. So they will continue to do the same things that they have always been doing and then wonder why the economy never seems to turn around. Insider: NSA to Rig Stock Market Investments 100% VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ9d8KtEG5s
IMF Bailout for Ukraine and a New World Currency Alex Newman thenewamerican.com May 7, 2014 While much of the world was distracted by the supposed clash over Ukraine between Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and Western politicians, the International Monetary Fund announced a bailout of the new Ukrainian regime denominated in the IMF’s increasingly influential proto-global currency known as Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs. Analysts are warning that the developments could have profound implications for the global monetary system and the economy — and especially for the United States, which is stealthily being set up for economic calamity as the U.S. dollar continues on the road to losing its prized status as the world reserve currency. The controversial planetary entity and its Western apparatchiks, along with various communist and socialist dictatorships and the United Nations, have long been agitating to ultimately dethrone the embattled U.S. dollar. Top-level American officials at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve have been helping them along. The dollar’s place as the global reserve currency would be filled by the IMF’s SDR, currently composed of a basket of currencies that includes dollars, British pounds, euros, and Japanese yen. The IMF, the UN, and multiple national governments have all openly advocated precisely such a plot in reports and statements made in recent years. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has exploited the Ukraine crisis to further empower the IMF while reducing U.S. influence. In bailing out the new Ukrainian government, the IMF announcement of its decision — taken with approval from Russian authorities despite the alleged East-West brouhaha — referred to SDRs on multiple occasions. The press release noted that the IMF board had agreed to a two-year “Stand-By Arrangement” that “amounts to SDR 10.976 billion (about US$17.01 billion, 800 percent of quota).” The approval under the Fund’s “exceptional access policy,” the statement said, “enables the immediate disbursement of SDR 2.058 billion (about US$3.19 billion), with SDR 1.29 billion (about US$2 billion) being allocated to budget support.” Read more
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