Truckers, shut down/General Strike
Imminent Food and Product Shortages In The US Very Soon!
In an Economic System whose every facet and nuance is subtly linked with that of every other country through the domino chain monstrosity known as "Globalism", shipping of goods and commodities is the lifeblood of our current consumer society. A massive drop in shipping activity is a prophetic indicator of near-future economic instability, or in this case, complete collapse. The "Baltic Dry Index", which tracks and records this activity, would certainly be a warning alarm to such a collapse. So why then has this index been completely ignored by the Mainstream Media? Perhaps because it is one of the few index's that is not directly associated with Stock Market trade, meaning, its information cannot be manipulated by short sellers, corporate monopolies, or speculators, the way that the Gold and Silver markets have been manipulated. If the MSM were to inform the public of the BDI's 93% drop over the past year, they would be effectively alerting the people (who still have naive hopes of some fantastical recovery) that a complete disintegration is about to take place. Such an early warning would surely risk the plans of the Media's CFR puppet masters.
Creditors are no longer willing to take lending risks on the shipping of goods that may not sell. Shippers are then unable to continue operations of their businesses, and thus, the vicious cycle of "scarcity" begins. This is how the current Food Crisis will expand one-hundred fold within a period of only a couple years, crushing what was left of the American Consumerist Illusion, although it is likely that island nations such as the UK and Japan will be effected first. Here is a very well made video explaining how the BDI works, and what it means:
See My Posted Video Here On This Site - The Baltic Dry Index - Vital, Critical Information
Crisis Hits World Shipping
Oct. 20, 2008 (EIRNS)—World shipping of key commodities is grinding to a halt as shippers cannot get banks to give them the credits they need to finance operations, according to numerous reports today. The Australian reported that the "Baltic Dry Index" has plunged 80% this year. This index is a measure of commodities-shipping costs, which reflects demand and prices for bulk carriers, which is at the lowest point since November 2002, when demand for metals was low. Australia is one of the world's biggest iron ore producers. The Baltic Dry Index was at 1,506, down from 11,893 points in May this year.
The U.S. market is contracting: In September, inbound container numbers at the Port of Long Beach in California were down 15.8% from a year earlier.
China is expecting a severe downturn in shipping. China Shipping Container Lines, China's second-largest container line, expects a 10% volume shrinkage this year. Bloomberg quoted Zhang Denghui, assistant president, saying that "Traffic will drop at least 10% for the full year. An even much larger drop is possible, as the full impact of the global economic turmoil is yet to come."
Also, the Pacific Basin Shipping Ltd., Hong Kong's biggest dry-bulk carrier, and Precious Shipping Pcl. said demand for moving coal, iron ore and other commodities will fall because banks are guaranteeing fewer loads, Taiwan's Central News agency reported today. "Letters of credit and the credit lines for trade currently are frozen," Khalid Hashim, managing director of Precious Shipping, Thailand's second-largest shipping company, said in Singapore yesterday. "Nothing is moving because the trader doesn't want to take the risk of putting cargo on the boat and finding that nobody can pay."
NOTHING IS MOVING GLOBALLY AND THE SHELVES IN THE STORES IN THE UNITED STATES WILL BE EMPTY, SOMETHING THEY ARE HIDING FROM US.
Would the US Government pre-notify 360 million consumers of an imminent food and product shortage and cause wide-spread panic buying, chaos and confusion? NO. They would bring 4,000 battle hardened American troops from Iraq and station them here and then quietly arrange to bring another 16,000 during the coming month or so. VERY QUIETLY because you haven't heard about the additional 16,000 troops, have you?
Be prepared with stored non-perishable food, water, blankets, LED flashlights, propane, medical supplies, and although I am NOT a gun person we are buying one tomorrow because it is likely people will be starving and coming to your house if it looks like you might have anything and especially if you're of small stature or look old or weak. For the very first time in my life I am scared like never before and I have been studying and blogging about the Baltic Dry Index for several months now. This is no joke. It's a secretive index and the single most valuable index used by bankers, brokers and financial people because it CAN'T be manipulated. It is what it is. It is not a commodity. It is not traded. It is not used to make money. It is used to gauge the global economy and it has dropped 94% and is NOT coming back anytime soon. Read the Wikipedia entry on it and search the internet and do your own research. If you've never seen a grocery store with empty shelves take your camera. It'll be a first. Get ready. Prepare or perish.
SOURCE: http://www.larouchepub.com/pr/2008/081020crisis_hits_shipping.html
BELOW:
The Baltic Dry Index
http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/bdi_baltic_dry_index.htm
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A Devil's Dictionary of Finance
Additional Capital: A financial lifesaver for banks and investment houses swamped by losses and the threat of bankruptcy. The additional capital raised to cover the emergency is obtained by printing and selling more stock, thus lessening the value of the stock already in existence.
Raising money under these circumstances is very expensive and sometimes involves a guarantee that the buyers of the new stock will receive some kind of dividend before anybody else gets paid--an additional sock in the nose to the current stockholders. The need to raise additional capital is not always due to the stupidity and incompetence of the people running the company. Sometimes it's for such profitable purposes as buying new machinery or expanding the factory (back in the days when we had factories).
Basil II: Not to be confused with a medieval king of Bulgaria or a Byzantine emperor. The Basil II accords are an international agreement on banking practices designed to prevent--guess what? A worldwide banking crisis. Heavy-money players such as the United States and the EU are signatories to the agreement, whose provisions nobody quite understands and which nobody has been able to put into effect, but which everybody agrees are necessary to maintain the present high level of world prosperity.
Blank Check Company: A company with a pot of money and no business. First, you start a company. Second, you flush a covey of slap-happy investors who have lost the sense they were born with. After you have their money, you go looking for some kind of business for the company to get into. Compare a blank-checker with the men and women who tart up, go to the ATM to withdraw money and then head to a pickup bar. By the end of the evening some of them are in business. Most are not.
Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO): Take a bunch of commercial loans for which there is collateral of some kind or other, smoosh them together into one big loan or bond and voilà! You have a CDO. Whether you want the CDO depends on how good the underlying loans and collateral are. It appears that many of the investment bankers selling CDOs were too busy buying houses in the Hamptons to find out.
Counterparty: The name for the other guy or institution in a deal, otherwise known as he who is left holding the bag. If you lend me $10, we are each counterparties to the loan. A committee has been formed to find out why this word is needed.
Credit Default Swap: Warren Buffett is supposed to have called credit default swaps and their kinky kindred arrangements "financial weapons of mass destruction." (Also see Liquidity Put.)
A credit default swap works this way: Company A gets a loan, usually in the form of a bond, from Company B, but Company B worries that Company A may not pay the loan when it comes due. So Company B makes a deal with Company C. In return for regular payments, Company C will make good any loses suffered by Company B in case Company A welches on the deal.
So a credit default swap is a form of insurance... but if Company B has a mind to, it can buy a dozen or more credit swaps from Company C or some other entity. In the event that Company A fails to pay back the money, Company B stands to make a huge profit. Worse yet, Companies H and M, which had nothing to do with the deal, can nevertheless do a credit default swap based on whether or not Company A lives up to its promise to repay Company B.
Credit default swap mutations, immutations, transmutations, remutations and permutations are endless and perilous. At present an estimated $4.5 trillion in credit default swaps is swirling around in financial outer space. If they land in a black hole, the business world will end with a bang. Then comes the whimper.
Doges of Wall Street and Greenwich, Connecticut: These are the 5,000-6,000 people who sit atop the nation's major financial institutions, banks, hedge funds, etc. Although small in number, the few hundred operations they run garnered more than one-quarter of all the profits made by all other American companies last year. (So lush are the pickings that lesser workers in finance make half as much as people doing the same thing in other industries.)
If the Doges of Wall Street and Greenwich, Connecticut, are not the Masters of the Universe Tom Wolfe dubbed them at about the time they led the United States into the savings and loan debacle, they have at least had the power to free themselves of almost all regulatory restraint. In the process, they have caused two more financial crises, which have brought America to a precarious, trembling balance on the edge of catastrophe.
"The economy is fundamentally sound," or "The worst is behind us," or "We've hit the bottom, and it's uphill from now on": Head for the hills.
Fair Disclosure Rule: A government rule requiring a company to make information about its prospects available to the larger investing public and Wall Street stock analysts at the same time.
The rule is part of the never-ending effort to prevent people from cashing in on exclusive information. Since successful stock-picking is impossible without secret inside information, you may be sure the cheaters are finding new forms of unfair advantage even as you read this.
Form 4506T: The IRS form to be signed by home buyers giving mortgage lenders the authority to look at the buyers' income tax returns to verify their income and make sure they can afford the mortgage. Had form 4506T been used by lenders during the housing boom, there would have been a much smaller housing bubble and therefore a smaller crash. Law enforcement agencies are investigating why lenders did not ascertain the credit-worthiness of borrowers and whether the failure to do so constitutes fraud and/or actionable negligence.
Liquidity Put: This is a promise by a firm selling a CDO (for which see above) or MBO (see below) to repurchase an item in case the buyer cannot sell it to somebody else for the original purchase price.
Originally the idea for securitizing or bundling mortgage or other debt into bonds and then selling the bonds was that if enough were sold to a broad enough spectrum of people, the risk would be spread so far and so thin that a lot of people would get nicked for a little loss, but nobody would get seriously hurt, if home buyers welched on their payments.
With liquidity puts, the risk really is not spread around--it remains with the sellers. And now the investment banks that did the selling are on the hook for billions of bucks.
Why would they do something that looks, in the light of what has happened, so dumb even a Wall Streeter should have known better? The answer probably is that they were so greedy for sales they threw in the repurchase promise confident that they had all the angles figured so perfectly that they could not get burned.
Mortgage-Backed Security (MBO): Akin to CDOs are MBOs, many of which, of late, are emitting a decidedly unpleasant odor.
Ninja Loan: This has nothing to do with black-clad fighters of fourteenth-century Japan. They were sometimes rash but never as idiotically greedy as the modern mortgage brokers who made such loans, meaning mortgages given to people with no income, no job and no assets.
Punch Bowl: A metaphor for easy money and the inflation, speculation, unemployment and hard times easy money brings in its wake.
William McChesney Martin, the Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is remembered for saying that the Fed must "take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going." He meant sucking money out of the economy when too much of it is starting to blow bubbles, à la Alan Greenspan's technology bubble of 2000 and his real estate bubble of 2003-07, a bubble so large it defied the laws of physics.
During most of Martin's time the dollar was worth 100 cents and a prosperous and growing nation was spared the roller-coaster, boom-and-bust economics that have become the norm since he left office. In the end, Martin gave in to political pressure from the White House to pay for the Vietnam War; he left office in 1970 with inflation at a ruinous 6 percent and rising by the minute.
Recession: The word may have come into use around 1929 as a euphemism for the harsher "panic," the nineteenth-century term for when the arrows on the graphs start moving south. By the 1950s it was preferred to "depression," a word that came to be so terrifying it is now used only in connection with the 1930s. The term "crash" is never, ever used in decent business circles.
Since business depends on optimism and suspension of skepticism, expressions suggesting things may be somewhat sub-hunky-dory are of great concern. Hence such cutesy locutions as "the R word," or namby-pambyisms such as "slowdown," "downturn," "pullback," "slump" and "pause."
Risk Management: The conviction that young men and women with PhDs in mathematics can write formulas for such derivatives as SIVs (see below) so that they are financially fail-safe. It was believed until late 2007 that risk could be so well managed that it would be possible to lend billions of dollars to deadbeats, would-be bankrupts, near paupers, irresponsible speculators, doddering old people, uninformed immigrants, drunks and people seeking funds for a South American vacation and still make a profit.
Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV): SIV drivers have been known to vanish when hit by one of Wall Street's IEDs (improvised explosive devices). The vehicle is inherently risky.
A financial institution buys a bunch of bonds that pay a fixed rate of interest and may take twenty years to mature. ("Mature" is finance lingo for the date when the bonds pay back the principal.) The institution buying the bonds must borrow to pay for them, and if it is to make money on this deal, it must pay less interest than it is receiving from the bonds. It has to borrow short-term loans because they generally carry lower interest rates. Though the difference between what the bonds pay the institution and what the institution must pay on the short-term loans is only .25 percent, if the money involved is in the billions, an SIV can be very profitable.
It can also blow up in your face. If the interest rates on the short-term loans suddenly jump up or there are no short-term loans to be had, the SIV swerves off Prosperity Highway and smashes into a tree, which is what happened beginning in late 2007.
Toxic Waste: A piece of financial crap. This is Wall Street slang for a security so lousy that only an older person suffering from age-related macular degeneration with second-stage Alzheimer's on Social Security could be induced to buy it.
Variable Pricing: The irksome but indispensable practice of charging more when demand is highest and less when it is lowest. Electrical utilities have been using variable pricing in one form or another for 100 years. Airlines do it and operators of toll roads are beginning to do it. Your neighborhood tavern, with its happy-hour special, is practicing an inebriated form of variable pricing.
Variable pricing is a means to achieve what is called "load balancing," by charging more to discourage everybody from using a service at peak demand time. Hence airline tickets cost less for off-hours flights and more for the convenient morning and afternoon departures. If everybody flew at the same time, airports would have to be tripled in size, airlines would have to buy four times as many planes and the cost of tickets would leap commensurately.
People who find variable pricing discriminatory, unfair and/or biased racially, religiously or by social class or sexual orientation are advised to look into the purchase of private jets, a form of transportation the pricing for which is invariable and invariably high. (Also see Zone Pricing.)
VIX: It sounds like Vicks VapoRub, the gooey substance the great grandmothers of America used to rub on the chests of children with flu. Vicks may be more useful than VIX, which is the ticker symbol for Volatility Index, another Wall Street will o' the wisp. Thanks to mathematical abracadabra, VIX is believed to predict how fast and how violently the price of stocks will gyrate up and down in the coming thirty-day period.
The theory is, the greater the ups and downs, the more dangerous the market is for investor sheep. Those are the human ovines who have talked themselves into believing that they know how to buy a share of stock when it's cheap and sell it when it is expensive.
A small class of little-known investors exist who make money regardless of the direction the stock is heading in. You are not one of them.
Zone Pricing: Equality does not exist in business unless thrust on it from the outside. All customers are not equal, so do not appeal to the "rights of man" when you learn that a drug costs more in America than it does in Canada. Zone pricing means that things have different prices in different places. It is a geographical application of charging what the traffic will bear, depending on where the traffic is. (Also see Variable Pricing.)
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