Fun Online Polls: North Korea; The French presidential election

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How would you prefer Donald Trump to deal with North Korea?

Stop ramping up the rhetoric and just ignore them - 28%
Try and persuade PR China to withdraw support - 44%
Continue with gunboat diplomacy - 6%
Drop a nuke on Pyongyang - 13%
Launch a full-on invasion - 2%
Other, please specify - 7%

Good, I voted for one of the first two (I think the second one), having read around, that does seem like the most sensible option.
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This week's Fun Online Poll, before it's superseded by events:

If you were voting in the French presidential election:

Macron - the Europhile former Rothschilds banker and Socialist minister, whose campaign was apparently funded by Goldman Sachs.

LePen - the other one..

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney's CV

Summarised by Garth Turner.

Via Nubbers at HPC.

Nice little career you've got there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.

As if to cement their hard-earned reputation as crooks of the highest order:

One recruiter warned that Smith’s bold parting shot could make it tricky for him to find a new employer.

"If Smith is looking for a new job, he’s playing a very dangerous game,” said Dave Way of Marks Sattin, "Like most of the City’s major employers, Goldman Sachs have a strong network of alumni running companies across the world who could be bosses or clients for high-level professionals changing jobs. Those that didn’t leave for the same reasons as Mr Smith may not think his words about their former colleagues were particularly well chosen."

Insurer's trade association: Your house has not burned down

From Sky News:

That smouldering wreck standing in your garden was not the result of a fire, an official trading body has ruled.

The Insurers Scams and Dissemblement Association said that towering flames and billowing smoke which neighbours report having seen emanating from the building, did not equate to a 'conflagration event' - essentially a fire. It means payments of fire insurance - an insurance mechanism to protect you in case your house burns down - totalling about £100,000 has not been triggered.

ISDA, which oversees complex forms of insurance, was asked by you to determine whether your house had burned down earlier in the week. A second question relating to the ruined contents was asked on Thursday morning, stepping up the pressure on ISDA's Determinations committee which made the ruling.

In response to both your questions, the 15 members voted unanimously that a "conflagration event" had not happened.Your house not on fire earlier in the week, source.

The news will delight other insurance companies who are desperate to avoid any mention of a fire. But ISDA noted that your garage was still smouldering and further questions relating to the presence of two fire engines in the middle of the road could be submitted. The body said that "a conflagration event could occur at a later date as further glowing embers come to light."

ISDA's review of your house followed the fire brigade's decision to hose several thousand gallons of water at it - based on their initial assessment that your house was indeed 'burning'. It was, the fire brigade said, a reaction to the sparks landing in your neighbour's garden and the pall of smoke spreading over the neighbourhood. ISDA's spokesman however suggested that most of the damage was actually caused by the fire brigade's over-application of water to the problem.

Your bank also moved to temporarily suspend the eligibility of your house as collateral for bank loans. It will start accepting it again once you have borrowed the money elsewhere to pay for it to be rebuilt, when measures to insure yourself against losses come into effect.

Goldman Sachs: a bit like a monopoly supplier of unreliable cars which owns all the car repair workshops...

I commented as follows on a post at HPC about the Greek hair cut/bail out nonsense, which is "all paid into the mouths of the very same bankers who cooked Greece's books to get them into the Eurozone. It is one fraud after another with these folk.":

Yup.

1. I see it thusly - car manufacturers and car repair workshops are, let's assume, owned and operated by two completely separate groups. Car manufacturers want to make the most reliable cars so that people buy them, and workshops like unreliable cars because that's how they make money. As long as ownership of the two branches is completely separate, and there are competing car manufacturers and repair workshops, we get reliable cars and reasonably priced repairs.

2. But if the all car manufacturers consolidated into one corporation and owned all the workshops as well, then they have an interest in making cars which break down all the time, because that way they can build unreliable cars and earn money from repairing them. (The manufacturers do this in practice by wildly overcharging for spare parts, separate issue.)

3. So Goldman Sachs is like the monopoly car manufacturer who owns the repair shops. It has cornered every end of the market
- GS stampeded the EU into this single currency nonsense (earning massive great fees for itself during the set up) which was a pure vanity project;
- GS charged Greece a load of money to cook its books so that it would qualify for entry;
- GS made a shedload more money by then speculating against the Euro-zone;
- GS then charged the EU a load more money for sorting out the bail outs, the EFSF and so on;
- GS even appointed several of its own people (Monti, Draghi, Papademos) to run things (it's even worse in the USA - Tim Geithner springs to mind);
- GS, having made a shedload by selling 'credit default swaps' or 'credit default insurance', is now hoping to add insult to injury by getting Greece and its creditors to agree a voluntary debt reduction (see original article), which, according to their small print, is not a 'credit default event' and hence GS will not have to pay out to investors who paid the big premiums and suffer the big losses.

4. So GS had every interest in the launch of an inherently unstable monopoly currency, in the same way as a monopoly car manufacturer who owns all the repair workshops would have an interest in making unreliable cars. And GS' efforts have paid off handsomely, for them at least.

Here endeth.

I'm from the European Central Bank and I'm here to help.

Another faceless bureaucrat

Government Sachs - EU edition

From The Independent:
Hat tip GC at HPC

Green, shoots and leaves

The UK press has got itself into a frenzy over one of Obama's turgid and dreary speeches* saying that the recession was nearing an end (well, he would say that, wouldn't he?), for example The Sun...

EXPERTS last night hailed more “green shoots” of global economic recovery — but warned we are still a long way from beating the recession. Mortgage lending was UP and enquiries with estate agents ROSE (1). In America, banking giant Goldman Sachs reported a 20 per cent rise in quarterly profits...(2) 

(1) From that CML press release:

"The number of house purchase loans ticked up in February, according to new data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders**. There were 24,300 house purchase loans worth £3.1 billion, compared with 23,400 loans worth £3.1 billion in January - a 4% increase. But historically activity remains very weak, running at around one-third of the average February total of 76,000 loans for house purchase between 2002 and 2007."

(2) It is true that Goldman Sachs reported profits of $1.8 billion for the quarter up 20%, but ...

Since the fall of Bear Stearns Cos. a little more than a year ago, Goldman has taken more than $20 billion in taxpayer cash through loans, payments and backstops. Goldman's latest bailout coup was a $12.5 billion paid out of AIG's $180 billion government cash infusion.

Until it was fully extricated, Goldman always characterized its exposure to AIG as "immaterial," and that its $20 billion notional exposure to AIG was hedged. Turns out that it was -- through government bailouts that didn't exist when Goldman entered the contracts. Even former New York Luv Guv Eliot Spitzer told journalist Fareed Zakaria on Sunday that he thinks something smells...

I rest my case.

* In which Obama betrays a frightening lack of understanding of fractional reserve banking (or, just as likely, he's just saying this on behalf of his chums at Goldman Sachs), at 1 min 30:

"... the truth is, that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses ..."

I could explain at length why this is bollocks of course, but just try taking this to its logical extreme - if increased consumer and business indebtedness were A Good Thing, then why not give the banks $1 trillion in 'capital'? Oh, they did that. How about $10 trillion?

** The CML make life easy for lazy journalists accustomed to cutting and pasting by referring to themselves in the third person, I shit ye not!

"Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the ropes"

More fun and games from The Evening Standard.

"Mr Mack believes his bank has become the victim of short selling."

Pots, kettles.

Interesting is the very last sentence...

"Chinese investors, unaffected by the sub-prime meltdown and awash with cash, are also said to be considering a stake in Morgan Stanley."

As I said at the end of this recent post;

"the ultimate source of all this easy credit and cheap finance is The People's Republic Of China and oil rich countries like Russia and the Middle East. So we in the West can pull a fast one, put our banks into receivership (in a controlled and orderly fashion) and tell the bond holders (the PRC and petro-states) "Oops, sorry! We can't repay the full value of those bonds, but hey, we'll issue you new bank shares to the face value of the shortfall." This would, from the banks' point of view convert a short term liability (bonds) into a long-term non-repayable liability (shareholders' capital), so our banks would be recapitalised on the sly without the need for these messy and embarrassing rights issues."