Re: SC79

Info contained in an e-mail sent to me:

......The Prime Minister of Iceland, Geir Haarde, sent shivers through the
global financial system when he asserted that Iceland can not, and will not
pay the foreign liabilities of its banking sector and that the interests of
Iceland will have first priority.

Yesterday, Haarde told a press conference: "The point is this. The total
indebtedness is such that there is no way that the Icelandic population can
take responsibility for the debt these private companies have incurred. It
happens everyday in bankruptcies, that some are burnt."

British PM Gordon Brown calls Iceland's behavior "totally unacceptable" and
warned of legal action to recover the US $ 1.74 billion loss in Iceland,
especially after the Icelandic government this week passed
emergency legislation to deal with the banking collapse. Unlike the British
or U.S. plans, this was not a bank "rescue" plan but legislation that gave
the government the authority to seize any bank or financial company, put it
through a bankruptcy or other procedure that would put the interests of the
Icelandic nation over that of the banks...........

.............The efforts of US Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson and his Plunge Protection Team are being overwhelmed, as the largest
volume of financial bets in world history crushes their bailout efforts,
which are unprecedented in scope, but are nevertheless puny in comparison to
the "tumor" they are trying to save.

Driving all of this is the global "casino" known as the derivatives markets,
a market which dwarfs the world's mortgage, bond and stock markets -
combined. While mortgages, stocks and bonds are measured in the trillions of
dollars, the derivatives market is measured in quadrillions, or thousands of
trillions of dollars. Today the Derivative Association said that the size of
the over-the-counter market is about $ 675 trillion. Putting a number to the
size of the derivatives market is virtually impossible, but putting a number
to the value of the derivatives market is easy — zero!

Derivatives were the great financial innovation of the Greenspan era, in
which casino-style bets on the price movements of currencies, bonds and
stocks replaced the ownership of those items as a way to make money. The
bets thus placed soon far outstripped the levels of the markets upon which
they were nominally based, as derivatives became the prime source of
"profit" for the financial markets. That these "profits" were entirely
fictitious, a fancy form of casino-floor betting chips (securitization), was
considered irrelevant as long as the market was growing and the "funny
money" was pouring in. Last year August, however, the global financial
system died, sealing the doom of the derivatives game.

Today, the collapse of the derivatives market is crushing the international
financial system, as the speculators fight to save the fictitious "profits"
through the largest bail-out attempt in history.

According to the most recent data for June 30, 2008 released today by the
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the three largest American bank
holding companies, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citicorp, had
current outstanding derivatives contracts totaling $179.4 trillion dollars.
The three banks combined have total assets of just under $5.6 trillion!

Now do you see why the bail-out is not working? And can not work —
there isn't enough money in the world to cover all these virtual bets, and
the efforts by the central banks to print that money, is fuelling a
hyperinflationary bomb which will wipe out not only the remnants of the
global financial system, but also the governments, national economies and
the means of existence for most of the world's population. Hyperinflation
will destroy the value of the US dollar itself, wiping out pensions, savings,
bank accounts, stock portfolios, and all other monetary values, bankrupting
households, businesses and governments, leaving all the nation-states
destroyed, and, effectively, no longer nation-states.

It is essential that the bailout of the derivatives bubble be stopped
immediately. All derivatives trades should be declared null and void, and
wiped off the books of the speculators. Any financial instrument containing
a derivative should also be declared null and void, and wiped off the books.
This unregulated, insanely leveraged casino should be shut down, and all
claims arising from derivatives bets nullified, as Iceland has done.........

...........Regulation is not the problem in US financial markets it
is criminality, fraud and ENFORCEMENT of the law. Wall Streets
'policeman' have all been paid off or worse, warned off, while the
most criminal actions are being completed. There is no
transparency or a willingness to open the books, it's all hide,
obfuscate, lie, delay. It's corrupted to the core and how will
anyone ever trust the place again?...

250,000,000,000 of taxpayer money, as announced just today, will be going to the Banksters banks to try and free them up from the finacial troubles they fraudulently got theirselves into. The mass criminality continues.