tv [untitled] June 21, 2011 3:31pm-4:01pm EDT
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another key thing they're pushing on us around the world is incurring huge university top up fees and you'll be happier well according to our study that these people are a generation ago or two generations ago the word work imply accumulating savings but now the word work means accumulating debt so what they're saying is you young people out there who are entering the workforce if you work really hard you will accumulate massive debt bet is propaganda isn't the whole orwellian war is peace type of newspeak well i think max is actually a post work environment we're no longer creating wealth we only have toxic debt derivatives to pass back and forth to each other so in this world you have to come up with a new paradigm of what makes one happy and that in the study she claims rachel to wire claims that young people saddled with huge amounts of debts also felt they
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were more in control of their lives but especially those in the lower economic classes so the results showed that those in the bottom twenty five percent in total family income got the largest boost from holding debt again it's new speak in other words are saying that if you have huge debts you have more control in your life what they meant to say was if you have huge debts we are in more of control of your life i think that's what they meant to say that's what they meaning is you lose control they're in more control well she claims the more debt they held the more debt the bottom twenty five percent holds both education and credit card debt the bigger the positive impact on their self-esteem and mastery but it again like we talk about the the sickness the mental illness of american society where these people literally. the more debt you have in reality the less control you have the
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less options you have look at those people stranded in america because they have negative equity and they can't pick up and move because they can't sell their property they can't get rid of their home mortgage and the same thing with people with huge student loans they can't take certain jobs they have to take specific jobs for the military industrial complex for example that once again language has been usurped here and they talk about self-esteem but what they meant to say was narcissism this huge debt fuels narcissism narcissism is not the same as self-esteem self-esteem comes from saving money and then consuming based out of savings narcissism is spending money don't have to consume stuff to pursue your own vainglorious narcissistic ends well let's apply this to you know societies that large because her study also conveniently finds that the richest people the richest
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ten percent of americans feel no benefit from debt low and behold because they of course have cash and wealth and resources they don't need fake self-esteem how does this study apply to for example wall street is this why there are so miserable and take so many drugs and are so destructive because these guys make a lot of money they're making tens of millions of dollars a year and yet they hold trillions in debt trillion six hundred trillion in credit derivative debts and yet look how unhappy they are they hold trillions in debt for other people opie baby other people's money on this case other people's debt o.-p. deep beso wall street lives day to day well this rachel dwyer she also does at the end of her this report on her study said that we found that the positive effects may wear off over time but they still have to pay their bills the question is whether they will. be able to there needs to be additional research to answer this
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question positive effect wearing off in this case would mean either prison or death yeah i'd say that that qualifies as having a positive effect wear off well i'm going to cut through just some footage here you can see in parliament square in greece this is research for rachel dwyer she was to know whether they will be able to pay off their debts these people and whether there or not they need to have additional research to find out what happens when they count pay off their debt this is kind of what it looks like yeah well once again language is being abused her they're saying or talking about the people and their debt it's not the people's debt those people don't have the debt the bankers gave them their debt o.-p. dig they're suffering from other people's debts it's not their debt that's why they're having a revolution it's the global insurrection against banker occupation part of the album i am a part of it i'm going there are a part of it i've got some good news if rachel dwyer is correct and that you know
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more debt will make americans happy well i have a headline that suggests it might be looking very good for their self-esteem soon china migrant workers clashed with police for third night one thousand protesters set fire to cars and damaged government buildings last weekend near the city in china's manufacturing heartland. so these are the chinese workers in china working for slave labor wages in order to feed americans who are just sleeves on a debt farm with cheap plastic goods and they don't look happy they look like they want to make some more money that might mean that americans actually have to start using more of their credit cards at wal-mart or the installer casino usually spruces up people's feelings and you know about themselves you know but the thing is the prices are going to continue to go higher so americans should be very very happy their self-esteem should be booming you know forty two percent of all new jobs in america are low wage so they're going to resort to credit cards and
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apparently that makes you happy but. now the downside of this your happiness your self-esteem is going to be denied to you by h.s.b.c. h.s.b.c. says will run down u.s. card business if buyer not found so c.e.o. of h.s.b.c. the largest bank in europe said he was upbeat in the medium term on the economy in the united states but the card business there did not make any strategic sense well lying yeah yeah well so obviously max keiser h.s.b.c. was the very first bank to pull out of the us mortgage market in two thousand and six two thousand and seven household financial and now they've been trying apparently to wind down their business first they've been trying to find a buyer for this business because they do not want exposure to the american consumer they want to expand their exposure to the asian workers striking and protesting and rioting in china right there trying to aggressively get out of the u.s. market because they know that with no jobs and no savings you eventually the credit
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card business will collapse including visa and mastercard that's correct and i would also note that h.s.b.c. is there for denying americans the right to life liberty and the pursuit of self-esteem so it's just me says pulling out all of their lending facilities in america yes and also moving the bank apparently to asia you know they're going back to their asian roots and h.s.b.c. they're what they're getting out of the entire western model they're going east you know that should be a lesson to everybody watching the show go east young man that's where the opportunities are well let's look at an example max of what happens to americans when they get cut off from this debt stream this new debt that h.s.b.c. is no longer willing to supply these people with let's move to europe remember i said let's compare american citizens to what the european countries are like ireland goes dumpster diving on sea floor looking for cash so cash strapped ireland resorts to selling sea cables for scrap its net copper is now selling eight thousand euros per ton and there are many cables that been laid down on the sea of
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a. ireland for the last hundred something years and they're going to go dig it up and try to sell it off and pay off some of the debts of the nation. they've got copper down on the seabed and the irish people the irish government are got their snorkel on and they're diving masks and they're free diving hundreds of feet down to try to get copper from the seabed to pay off credit card debts and to buy themselves a nice pint of guinness a lot of the churches of course in ireland are missing the iron ruse that have been torn off to pay for guinness and the entire country is being sold off on e bay and so finally now remember at the beginning of the show i said that the debt apparently does not make the rich happy no rich people hate money well because we know wall street has tons of debt they own tons of debt and it's not making them happy because greece's credit rating cut again on higher risk of default so
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they have now been downgraded they're continuously downgraded this time by standard support and it looks like default is coming closer and closer we got the triple hook you know the triple hook the triple hook a c c c. hoo that's a bad one well apparently. the c.d.s. contracts the this is the big problem here is the debt on the bonds which french and german banks own so they own greek sovereign debt but they have insured themselves and who has insured them who's provided that insurance but american banks and they apparently are exposed to this greek portugal and irish debt by up to about one hundred twenty nine billion which is real cash we'll have to hand over to these european banks but at the same time the the basil requirements are trying to get banks to increase their capital ratios here you have this cluster bomb debt explosions between europe and greece which could wipe out one hundred twenty seven billion on balance sheets in america and this is really an interesting showdown in the global financial war isn't because you've got insurance and bonds versus c.d.s.
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products in the u.s. we've seen this played out with the a scandal the subprime scandal and every aspect of the of the past three years of financial collapse the controlled demolition and depending on who sits where during the collapsing financial system depends on who survives and apparently the key here is not to have greece actually default because then american banks would suffer catastrophic losses as compared to european banks and this of course cannot be communicated to the american people because nobody in congress actually knows what a c.d.s. is or even what a bond is for that matter well yes and max finally i'll say on this is that you know in the first great depression you had the beggar thy neighbor policy of devaluing your currency but everything was against gold then so you could do that now with beggary my neighbor who where does the debt blow up who holds the bag
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back to the guys report imax guys are time now to go to athens and with the radio show host and blogger at covering delta dot wordpress dot com dimitri kofi anan us dmitri welcome to the kaiser report faceplates they try me on all right dimitri here on the kaiser report we recently discussed your coverage of the charges of treason lodged against george. the prime minister give us the details of this case well apparently this as you said i'm on the blogger and i have a radio show in new york and this story just kind of blew up after i heard the allegations made by a member of parliament a certain bias commenters of met him about the eye which is a opposition party in greece it's the other party them and have kind of are going to run the country over the past thirty five years and he made these ideas a shot of the floor parliament where he essentially accused the prime minister of
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acting as a foreign agent against the greek government and that he profited needed directly or indirectly as well as possibly members of the family and bust a member of his cabinet from the sale of one point three billion worth of credit default swaps from post bank a public banking arm of an arm that the greek government has about thirty three percent stake in two private books to a specific firm but he actually names on the floor of parliament and he actually he actually cites. people in the management people on the board it was a pretty deafening allegation and it was one that he was prompted to make by certain gods affairs who's a leader of another minority party in the parliament. and i should mention that after after making allegations and after i wrote my article the firm that he cites came out with a full denial but they said that not only then did they not by any credit default swap protections from hellenic postbank on greek that but that they didn't buy any
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sprit c.d.'s period that they never advised in their clients to buy any and the the m.p. actually did not provide publicly the evidence that he he claims he has the salmon it into many hands and i kid got on national television afterward and said that no one you know that's no one should try to or that he is suggesting that he's been threatened and that he won't be threatened and that this information is in many hands but we haven't seen the specific evidence for this specific firm out of the larger context of the article that i wrote about is something that you've talked about on your show before you've had good actress focus on the show and who along with george no less filed the lawsuit against the greek government speculators for their role in this larger financial kind of syndicate project using the derivatives markets on the one hand the c.d.s. market the insurance market and the naked short selling bonds on the other hand with the aid of the greek central bank which extended the settlement period for shorting government bonds from three days to ten days and that kind of all plays
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into this whole thing because it's not just about. these specific bonds that they were bought by post bank in the spring and summer of two thousand and nine and then sold in december after the new government came to power to some third party that that third party has not yet been confirmed but it's also a question of the larger question of who owns all these other third of contracts that are bets against the greek default and or any of the people in the gauche ations over the over. bailouts for greece are they owners of this do they have any any interest in this so there's these massive potential conflicts of interest and one of the things that the m.p. asked for besides everything else was that the prime minister come to parliament and he hear you provide evidence along with other people it's and that effectively everyone closure themselves or numbers and subs you know. provide evidence to say what you know do i or do i not have an interest in the collapse of the country because i'm involved in negotiations and that's
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a major potential conflict of interest ok so one point three billion in credit default swaps there was a sale and somebody took possession of these credit default swaps at some point during this period of time that you mention and afterward there was a reset forays something along the order of a twenty billion dollar profit now there is a way to confirm well first of all can we definitively say that these were sold i have evidence to support that they were sold i actually had and i don't make that claim on the in fact on the post on the article that i wrote one of the things that i made a point early on was that the numbers didn't really work out for me i wasn't really sure how whether he was talking about one point three billion notional or what because the m.p. actually says that at the time that he was making allegations that some of these contracts that were expiring were at the time worth something like twenty seven
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billion euros and that if there was a full credit that they would be worth sixty so the math didn't really work out for me i tried to talk to people that work in c.d.'s to explain that and i was unable to get any kind of clear answers so i don't know if they were if they were sold from the initial sale to the firm again after that. i don't have an answer for that question ok if the c.d.s. contracts are still held by the bank then the money that the greek government is seeking to offset their losses would have would be reduced correct what is certain is that bay sold their only umbrella before storms so would they have been better off absolutely will be better off because it was an insurance contract insuring against the fall and even if they didn't have a default those that insurance contract was rising in value so so in that sense he actually would be better off meant that would have saved them from a complete default no but but metaphorically metaphorically it's also something
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that at the time of the country was most vulnerable it was the one thing that it was directly correlated to the healthy economy into record so the more in dire straits the country was in the gauche ations of the i.m.f. and with the e.u. the more value this asset would have so it's the least thing that you would want to get rid of once you've come into the government and you've looked at the books and said ok hold cow you know our deficit is way above what we've been saying it is our national debt is way worse our economy is way worse and we have this credit protection on our books it's the one asset that we know is going to inversely correlate with the health of our economy so you would think that if you're functioning with the national interest in mind that you would never get rid of the sas it wouldn't make any sense from that from that point of view and that's actually a point that the m.p. makes and that's what it says he alleges that the minister is functioning as a foreign agent because he says only foreign agent would sell an asset that has such national value during a time of national crisis ok now the crowd to fall swaps are continuing to play
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a key role here and it has been now that american banks have written credit default swaps so if greece defaults american banks have to pony up one hundred twenty nine billion to french and german banks in other words the french or the german banks own bonds that. will take a haircut but it's the american banks who stand to take catastrophic losses because they're the ones who bought the c.d.'s if in fact there is a default so the question is were the american banks suckered into buying these c.d.s. contracts in the same way that george pump address was suckered into selling them or is there something else going on you know has a really good question i've been i've been trying to figure out what the deal is with this sovereign c.d.s. market in general for some time now because as many people have pointed out in some cases it's clearly clearly fake insurance and in the sense that there are c.d.'s
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contracts on u.s. treasury debt and in my opinion if you have a u.s. default who exactly is going to have the capital reserves to pay out the claims on an insurance contract on the on a u.s. default so in general it's to me it just it's another example of this massive counterparty risk risk that exists in the system that i think functions as a sort of massive source of anxiety for a lot of these banks so there's not just the greed factor which makes them push countries like greece further and further into debt and they don't they don't want to take a haircut but i think it's also fear that. we don't even know is going to happen if you took a twenty percent haircut because not only do we have greek debt on our books but who's on the other end of the swaps that we've part of these you have these credit default swaps this insurance protection that we've taken out as a hedge to to hedge our risk so i think i think that's the real issue with all these these credit default swaps and these. and and these sovereign debts on balance sheets it's that no one really knows who's exposed and who's not exposed
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and how much exposure is one bank able to deal with and how much is another back here but we've it's seems like we're kind of the same place they were at how many years ago with lehman and with ai g. and all the stuff that happened that with the counterparty risk right you referred to c.d.s. products as fake insurance and what came out after the ai gina lehman brothers. lapse was that c.d.s. contracts are in fact fake insurance for one thing and a typical insurance contract or some kind of reserve against the losses with a c.d.s. contract there are zero reserves so it's a purely a gambling instrument that is missed asked the size to encompass trillions and chinese of dollars or the spec of bets and so on follow up on what you just said there there is some much confusion about who owns what which is what we experienced right before lehman collapsed and the global financial collapse of two thousand and eight is the greek economic and financial collapse shaping up to be lame in part to
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loss of their sanity. and i mean are you actually did an interview recently before i came to athens because i'm based out of new york that's where my radio show i interviewed doesn't lock in who who is a former economist floor of the i.m.f. river plate division that includes argentina who was on the south side of some of those for carter during the argentine collapse and we talked about this exact situation and he made the point that the e.c.b. has roughly eighty billion in capital reserves and they greek banks oh roughly one forty odd and forty billion to be said because right now right you have the e.c.b. which is funding the greek central bank through the european system the central banks and that's allowing the greek banks to remain liquid because they're insolvent and they're able to continue to pay out in fact it was the fourth month month over month that we've seen declines and the central bank the several government restructure the biggest withdraw are rich drawing roughly i think from fourteen point one billion to eleven billion euros so it's perfectly it's perfectly feasible perfectly possible that peace could could be
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a layman in that sense because it's huge if it defaults in even if it takes a haircut and that's and again that goes back to my point which is why are these banks so obsessed with not giving even the smallest haircut when we know that the greek government can't possibly pay this back and anyone that's here in greece right now knows that the greek economy is falling off a cliff and anyone who's interested in trying to get interest payments is a. not is is is not doing what they should be doing clearly if your creditors the only thing that creditors are achieving right now is their liquidating assets the liquid in public companies whether their monopoly you know pro they're profitable not monopolies or not we recently i think sold the balance of the day which is the public telephone company for something like eight euros a share or something like that and they're also looking to take to take land and mineral resource rights we're hearing about rumors again stuff that used to be considered you know untrue or just rumors in the past about oil in the ionian natural gas the a-g. and mineral rights and the gold reserves in crete you're hearing about all this
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stuff now and i think what what you're seeing from the creditors point of view is let's try and liquidate as much as we can this leverage buyout hostile takeover of a country this model that we're going to use on priests we're not even going to worry about the interest payments because the country just fall off a cliff of economic activities fails that nothing's going to come in so i think i think that's where the focus is not so much a focus on trying to keep the money flowing from there whatever losses they get maybe they just don't try to recoup them from the c.b. and from the f.s.a. and anything like back in like we do with tarp and the federal reserve in the us and to we want to be too and maiden lane one made one too and all that stuff all right that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report dmitri thanks so much for being our guest thank you max i appreciate it and if you'd like to send me an e-mail please do so as a reported r t t v dot are you i want to thank my guests dimitri and stacy herbert until next time this is max kaiser saying bye oh no. no.
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flight recorders from the plane that crashed in northwestern russia over the loss of forty four lives and arrived in moscow for analysis bad weather conditions and human error to be to play. these fifteen more civilians are killed as nato bomb was . the aid but instead hit the birthday party of his four year old grandson. and show that in the greek parliament tonight within the hour the pm savage the austerity cuts face a no confidence vote the country on the brink of becoming the first eurozone nation to default. it's midnight here in moscow welcome if you just joined us you're watching r.t.
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international with me kevin now in our top story officials say bad weather and pilot error are the likely causes of a plane crash that killed forty four and left eight injured in northwestern russia on monday night the russet flight on route from moscow to petros of course crashed into a road just one kilometer from its destination a corresponding test for a similar reports from the seat. a commercial plane that would have landed on schedule ended up in pieces and in flames this tuple of one three four carrying fifty two people from moscow to north western russia crashed on a road around a kilometer from the runway now really missing a row of houses and killing forty four on board airport officials say the plane hit a high voltage power line that cut off lights on the runway which also knocked out the town's electricity. and around midnight the lights went off in our house we were going to check the electric transformer we heard the sound of a huge explosion we arrived at the scene of the accident seriously damage we could
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see swinging justing out of the bushes scattered all around the field lots. where here at the side with a tupolev one through four crash landed on a road and as you can see behind me there's a lifting parts of the plane the man living here was first on the scene because the plane had landed right in front of his home. three people out of the wreckage one was either a girl or a woman i could not sell but she was larger than the man who was honked to see it was dark then there was a man he also was in the heavy who was launches and me then we carried out two more people from the wreckage in the middle of the road another man reached out his hand towards me but i couldn't make it to him and everything starts is exploding i could not get any closer everything was engulfed by fire so very. among the eight survivors were a young boy his teenage sister and their mother five had been flown to moscow for.
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