Will Banksters Kill UK Economy on 2021 Single Market Brexit?

[illeagalhunter]

The mark of how well the high street is doing , should be measured by the number of £1 shops and charity shops.

[Total Spectrum Dominance]

I tried explaining the nature of the takedown to a colleague here... short selling and the fraud. He didn't get the concepts, derivatives, deregulation etc.

This is why we're doomed, the level of ignorance is far too high. By the time this is played out and yuour average joe cottons on it's too late

[TonyGosling]

Well said. And the most important individual and organisations sowing the seeds of confusion have been the Economist magazine, BBC and Rothschild stooge Niall Ferguson's recent TV series which hypnotised audiences into a state of mental paralysis, disabling their ability to see the bankers as the culprits.

And bankers have been helping the Gaza/meltdown smokescreen in other ways too.

[acrobat74]

[acrobat74]

[Disco_Destroyer]

surely bookmakers is easier lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_selling

I guess not a Muslim practice then

[TonyGosling]

What do these bankers have over the government?
Vince Cable seems the only sane voice in Parliament but no-one is listening to him.
Or are they?
Lloyds TSB, RBS and Barclays all probably bancrupt right now and this cash will just be used by speculators to make millions on their soon to fall share price.
Here comes another fantasy wave of fictional wealth

Taxpayers poised to take on 'toxic' debts as Government throws another £200bn lifeline to High Street banks

By Simon Watkins and Simon Walters
Last updated at 11:32 PM on 17th January 2009

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1120764/Taxpayers-poised-toxic -debts-Government-throws-200bn-lifeline-High-Street-banks.html

Taxpayers will be left exposed to £200billion in potential losses under the biggest Government bailout yet for Britain’s banks – due to be announced tomorrow.

Chancellor Alistair Darling will underwrite ‘toxic’ assets built up by the banks during the credit boom which are now seen as high risk.

If companies and individuals default on these debts, the taxpayer will be left to foot the bill.
Gordon Brown

Gamble: Gordon Brown (left) and Chancellor Alastair Darling are risking taxpayer's money to bailout the banks

The latest lifeline for the City – put to bank bosses late yesterday – came as Gordon Brown vented his fury with the banks for lending vast sums to foreign investors who are now unable to pay the money back.

Treasury officials checking the books of the Royal Bank of Scotland, now controlled by the Government, were shocked to discover that £2.5billion had been loaned to Russian oligarch Leonid Blavatnik in his attempt to build a massive business empire.

The RBS has had to write off the entire debt because one of Mr Blavatnik’s foreign companies faces going bust – with British taxpayers left to pay the price.

Mr Brown believes some banks have deliberately concealed the scale of their bad assets.

He said: ‘We have to be clear that where we have got clearly bad assets, I expect them to be dealt with.’

Details of the rescue package will not include the widely expected ‘bad bank’, which would buy up toxic loans from banks.

Other elements of the bailout would include an indefinite extension of the Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS), which allows banks to swap their loans for Government bonds, guaranteeing mortgages in an effort to kick-start the housing market, and possible protection for the finance arms of leading car-makers who provide loans to customers to buy their cars.

Ministers believe this is more effective than providing a multi-billion-pound bailout for individual car firms.

Bank bosses have been asked to give the measures their consideration, but Ministers are so angry with the banks that it is thought they will have little choice but to rubber-stamp them.
rbs

The Royal Bank of Scotland lost £2.5billion that had been loaned to Russian oligarch Leonid Blavatnik

The Treasury had also prepared plans for a ‘bad bank’ to use Government money to buy the toxic assets from the banks, freeing them to increase lending to companies and homebuyers.

However, while the measure has not been ruled out for ever, the difficulties in valuing the assets to be bought and what assets could qualify mean the scheme has been put on hold.

A senior banking source involved in the new rescue package said: ‘You should look more to the American solutions seen last week.’

The comment was a reference to a huge bailout of US banks, including a massive asset guarantee plan.

The US authorities injected £14billion into Bank of America on Friday. Crucially, it also agreed to guarantee £81billion of toxic assets on its books – exactly the kind of step anticipated in the UK.

The rescue comes after UK banks were gripped by a second round of panic selling.

Shares slumped on Friday, with £6.6billion wiped from the value of top banks.

Barclays was forced to issue an emergency statement to reassure investors after its shares fell 25 per cent in the last hour of trading.

Last year, as leading banks were forced to issue new shares to raise cash, the Treasury acted as underwriter.

When existing investors shunned the shares, the Treasury was left to buy them, injecting £37billion into leading banks and ending up as a leading shareholder in the UK banking industry.
blavatnik

Cheers: Russian oligarch Leonid Blavatnik could cost British taxpayers £2.5bn

As a result of that scheme, the Government now owns 58 per cent of Royal Bank of Scotland and almost 44 per cent of Lloyds Banking Group – the new giant created by Lloyds TSB’s takeover of HBOS.

Raising these stakes has not been ruled out as another way of injecting cash into the banks.

Nationalisation is available as a last option – although, for now, is regarded as unlikely.

Mr Brown’s latest initiative follows Business Secretary Lord Mandelson’s announcement last week of a £20billion scheme to guarantee loans made by banks to small and medium-sized companies.

That was intended to reassure banks they would not face the full impact if a small company went bust, and so encourage them to lend more cash to such businesses.

The plan to guarantee existing toxic assets held by the banks is based on a similar theory, but with hundreds of billions at stake, it dwarfs the small business guarantee scheme.

The new bailout will need approval from the European Union as it is likely to be classed as state aid to industry.

The ‘bad bank’ idea was put on the back burner after Treasury officials concluded that deciding which assets could qualify to be bought by the ‘bad bank’ could take months.

It was also hampered by opposition from some banks. A crucial element would be deciding the price at which the toxic assets were to be bought.

Too high a price would amount to an over-generous bailout for the bank; too low and the deal could end up doing banks more harm than good because it would force them to put a market value on these bad loans.

Once a market value is established, accounting rules would require the value to be applied across the board, even to those toxic assets that had not been sold to the Government-run ‘bad bank’.

That could have forced banks to recognise billions more in losses in their accounts.

John Varley, chief executive of Barclays, said last week he believed a ‘bad bank’ was not the best solution to the crisis.

Fears that Barclays could face a massive write-off in value of complex financial assets known as Collateralised Debt Obligations were said by some traders to have contributed to its fall in value on Friday.

The bank issued a statement saying it knew of no reason for the fall in its shares.

It added that its profits for the past year – due to be published next month – would in fact be higher than the £5.3billion forecast by City analysts.

Others blamed the Barclays shares rout on the lifting of a ban on short-selling financial stocks which had been in place since October.

The method of gambling on share price falls was widely blamed for a series of slumps in banks’ share prices last summer and autumn, most notably at HBOS.

The City watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, had banned short-selling of financial company shares.

But that ban expired at midnight on Thursday and some believe the slide in banks shares on Friday was a sign the short-sellers were back with a vengeance.

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable lashed out at the FSA for lifting the ban. ‘If short-selling results in a wave of panic such that banks go down, then the practical consequence is that taxpayers will have to assume responsibility,’ he said.

Vicky Redwood from Capital Economics said: ‘We’re going to face a staggering amount of bank losses over the next two or three years as the full impact of the recession is felt and we see household defaults on their debt rise, unemployment rise and corporate debt defaults rise too.

‘And so, in total, banks could be facing billions of pounds of bad debts.’

[acrobat74]

[The Watcher]

[TonyGosling]

Death Agony of Thatcher Deregulated Finance Model - by F. William Engdahl - Global Research, January 22, 2009
During the end of the 1970’s into the 1980’s British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the City of London financial interests who backed her, introduced wholesale measures of privatization, state budget cuts, moves against labor and deregulation of the financial markets. She did so in parallel with similar moves in the USA initiated by advisers around President Ronald Reagan. The claim was that hard medicine was needed to curb inflation and that the bloated state bureaucracy was a central problem. For almost three decades, Anglo-American university economic faculties have turned to Thatcherite deregulation of financial markets as ‘the efficient way,’ in the process, undoing many of the hard-fought gains secured for personal social security, public health care and pension security of the population. Now the ‘poster child’ economy of the Thatcher Revolution, Great Britain, is sinking like the proverbial Titanic, a testimony to the incompetence of what is generally called Neo-liberalism or free market ideology.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11950
As the Neo-liberal revolution began in the economies of the USA and UK, it should not be not surprising that the epi-center of catastrophe in the global crisis now unfolding also lies with the economies of the USA and UK, as well as a handful of economies, including Ireland Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Iceland, all of which embraced the free market Thatcherite agenda most strongly in recent years. Notably, the man who personally implemented Thatcherite financial market reforms and deregulation during the era of Tony Blair in Britain was Gordon Brown, then Treasury Secretary.

A sample of most recent British developments is instructive. Britain's economy is about to suffer its most vicious slump since 1946, shrinking by a drastic 2.8 per cent this year, according to EU latest estimates. The UK is predicted to suffer the worst recession of any large European economy.

The consequences for the UK will include soaring unemployment, while the economy also teeters on the brink of full-blown deflation. Unemployment will rise by more than 900,000 people over the next 12 months, driving the jobless total to 2.55 million by the end of the year, or 8.2 per cent of the workforce, from 5.3 per cent at present.

In parallel, the currency, the Pound, which is not part of the Eurozone currencies, has fallen dramatically against the Euro and even the US dollar in recent weeks over growing fears of the collapsing UK economy and banking system. Sterling has fallen below $1.40 to its lowest point in seven and a half years because of concerns about the depth of Britain's banking crisis and the Government's rising debt levels. This coming year the UK Government's borrowing levels may exceed £118 billion, equal to 8 per cent of GDP.

Britain will not be able to reap much benefit from a lower pound for exports because, as part of the Thatcher Revolution, the national economy has out-sourced, de-industrialized and turned to a service economy where, as in the USA, finance and banking became the motor of economic growth the past two decades. That motor has now broken.............

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11950

[uselesseater]

It doesn't look good but I don't understand why you can't get storable freeze dryed food in the UK (as far as I have looked)...

Also, Isn't it correct that wealth is never destroyed but only consolidated? If so, who has it and by what mechanisam did they aquire it?

Surely the most important thing in the comming times is a well informed citique of the situation, instead of the blind alleys presented to us in the media?

[TonyGosling]

Let banks fail, says Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz
The Government should allow every distressed bank to go bankrupt and set up a fresh banking system under temporary state control rather than cripple the country by propping up a corrupt edifice, according to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist.............

..........Mr Stiglitz's radical proposal is a "Chapter 11" scheme for households to allow them to bring their debts under control without having to go into bankruptcy. "Families matter just as much as firms. The US government can borrow at 1pc so why can't it lend directly to poor people for mortgages at 4pc. ," he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/442441 8/Let-banks-fail-says-Nobel-economist-Joseph-Stiglitz.html

[uselesseater]

Looking at the comments on teh Stiglitz story I don't see how the bankers think they can get away with it?

[TonyGosling]

Depression - isn't that a form of mental illness one down from being a psycopath? So basket case wars and financial collapses go hand in hand

Recession worst for 100 years, says Bilderberger Balls - and boy, being culpable, he should know (shhhh, Chatham House rules you know)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/65527e16-f705-11dd-8a1f-0000779fd2ac.html
Britain is facing the “most serious global recession for over 100 years”, Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s closest ally, has warned in an admission that the financial crisis could be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The Conservatives seized on what they said was Mr Balls’ “staggering and very worrying admission” of the scale of the global downturn.
Last week, the prime minister talked about the need for global action to “take the world out of depression”, but his spokesman said his use of the “D word” was “a slip of the tongue”.........

[TonyGosling]

Russian take
Collapse like never before.
In 2009 were going to see the worst economic collapse ever, the Greatest Depression, says Gerald Celente, U.S. trend forecaster. He believes its going to be very violent in the U.S., including there being a tax revolt.

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nJ7LM3iyNg

[TonyGosling]

Oh well, just when I was thinking it might be a good idea to join the Eurozone...

Eurozone shrinks sharply as major nations all suffer
By Jan Strupczewski
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The euro zone suffered its deepest contraction on record in the last quarter of 2008 with top economies of Germany, France and Italy all faring badly, depressing the euro on expectations of more ECB rate cuts.
Gross domestic product in the 15 countries then using the euro shrank 1.5 percent from the previous quarter, worse than forecasts for a 1.3 percent drop, statistics office Eurostat said on Friday.....
http://uk.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUKTRE51C3RR20090213


Lloyds stuns City by revealing potential HBOS loss of £10bn
Shares plunge by 40% after dramatic deterioration in bank's health
The new Lloyds Banking Group stunned the City this afternoon by issuing a profits warning and admitting that the losses incurred by HBOS last year would reach £10bn, much higher than previously forecast.
Shares in Lloyds plunged 40% to just 54.9p after the group warned that HBOS's corporate division had lost even more money than thought.
Lloyds now expects to suffer £7bn of impairment charges on corporate loans made by HBOS that turned sour, an increase of £1.6bn.......
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/13/lloyds-hbos-losses

[TonyGosling]

Will You Help Me With My Next Film? ...a request from Michael Moore

February 11, 2009

Friends,

I am in the middle of shooting my next movie and I am looking for a
few brave people who work on Wall Street or in the financial industry
to come forward and share with me what they know. Based on those who
have already contacted me, I believe there are a number of you who
know "the real deal" about the abuses that have been happening. You
have information that the American people need to hear. I am humbly
asking you for a moment of courage, to be a hero and help me expose
the biggest swindle in American history.



All correspondence with me will be kept confidential. Your identity
will be protected and you will decide to what extent you wish to
participate in telling the greatest crime story ever told.

The important thing here is for you to step up as an American and do
your duty of shedding some light on this financial collapse. A few
good people have already come forward, which leads me to believe there
are many more of you out there who know what's going on. Here's your
chance to let your fellow citizens in on the truth.

If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private
email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com.

For the rest of you on my email list who don't work in the financial
industry, you're probably wondering, "What the heck is this all about?
I thought he said he was making a romantic comedy!"

Well, I just can't say much right now. I'm sure you can understand
why. One thing I can tell you is that you're gonna like this movie
when I'm done with it. Oh, yeah...

So, again, if you work for a bank, a brokerage firm or an insurance
company -- or if you have seen things or heard things that you believe
the American people have a right to know -- please contact me at
bailout@michaelmoore.com.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Yours,
Michael Moore
bailout@michaelmoore.com
MichaelMoore.com

[Disco_Destroyer]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/127252/u.s._intel_chief's_shocking_warn ing:_wall_street's_disaster_has_spawned_our_greatest_terrorist_threat/

U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning: Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted February 17, 2009.

The Director of National Intelligence argued that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists.

We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgnger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington's new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s.

It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.

The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund's prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent--the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.

And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state's strategies to crush potential civil unrest and you get a glimpse of the future. It doesn't look good.

"The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications," Blair told the Senate. "The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism."

The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College in November in a monograph [click on Policypointers' pdf link to see the report] titled "Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' in Defense Strategy Development." The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States," which could be provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse," "purposeful domestic resistance," "pervasive public health emergencies" or "loss of functioning political and legal order." The "widespread civil violence," the document said, "would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security."

"An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home," it went on.

"Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance," the document read.

In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of Defense. They are considering it. So should you.

Adm. Blair warned the Senate that "roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown." He noted that the "bulk of anti-state demonstrations" internationally have been seen in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they could not spread to the United States. He told the senators that the collapse of the global financial system is "likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year." He added that "much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international aid or credit, or other coping mechanism."

"When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we're looking for that," he said. He referred to "statistical modeling" showing that "economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period."

Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us. Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal underclass.

The committee's Republican vice chairman, Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, not quite knowing what to make of Blair's testimony, said he was concerned that Blair was making the "conditions in the country" and the global economic crisis "the primary focus of the intelligence community."

The economic collapse has exposed the stupidity of our collective faith in a free market and the absurdity of an economy based on the goals of endless growth, consumption, borrowing and expansion. The ideology of unlimited growth failed to take into account the massive depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming and climate change. The huge international flows of unregulated capital have wrecked the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which will soon deflate), wild tech, stock and housing financial bubbles, unchecked greed, the decimation of our manufacturing sector, the empowerment of an oligarchic class, the corruption of our political elite, the impoverishment of workers, a bloated military and defense budget and unrestrained credit binges have conspired to bring us down. The financial crisis will soon become a currency crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.

The corporate thieves, those who insisted they be paid tens of millions of dollars because they were the best and the brightest, have been exposed as con artists. Our elected officials, along with the press, have been exposed as corrupt and spineless corporate lackeys. Our business schools and intellectual elite have been exposed as frauds. The age of the West has ended. Look to China. Laissez-faire capitalism has destroyed itself. It is time to dust off your copies of Marx.

[Disco_Destroyer]

Possible Twitter Censorship with the above story (linked to something else, had to run a search)
see http://twitter.com/marineperez

OK story and link fixed

[Disco_Destroyer]

Why is this topic (the only one actually directly affecting our lives) not seeing much traffic?? Anyhow this gobbledegook makes alot of sense

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aIRza4.azeC4#
Russian Markets Halted as Emergency Funding Fails to Halt Rout
Email | Print | A A A

By Alex Nicholson and William Mauldin

Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Russian markets stopped trading for a second day after emergency funding measures by the government failed to halt the biggest stock rout since the country's debt default and currency devaluation a decade ago.

The ruble-denominated Micex Stock Exchange suspended trading indefinitely at 12:10 p.m. after its index erased a 7.6 percent gain and plunged as much as 10 percent within an hour. The benchmark fell 17 percent yesterday, the biggest drop since Bloomberg started tracking the gauge in May 2001. The dollar- denominated RTS halted trading after similar declines.

The government yesterday injected $20 billion into the interbank lending market via central bank and Finance Ministry auctions in a bid to contain soaring borrowing rates as credit dried up in the wake of the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy. The one-day MosPrime overnight rate, a gauge for monitoring liquidity demand, leapt 25 basis points to a record 11.08 percent today.

The Finance Ministry attempted to stop the selloff by offering 1.13 trillion rubles ($44 billion) of budget funds to the country's three biggest banks, OAO Sberbank, VTB Group and OAO Gazprombank, for at least three months. That measure came as KIT Finance, a Russian brokerage, said it's in talks to find a buyer after failing to meet some financial obligations related to repurchase agreements.

Bond Market `Closed'

``The bond market remains effectively closed and banks are reluctant to lend to one another,'' said Julian Rimmer, head of sales trading at UralSib Financial Corp. in London. ``The problems experienced by KIT Finance have heightened counterparty risk and reduced liquidity further.''

Finance Ministry Minister Alexei Kudrin said on state television that the decision to increase the amount of budget funds available to three state-controlled banks would ``smooth over the shock changes'' in the markets and enable the banks to make loans to smaller competitors.

``We must soften such shock changes connected with the market falling,'' Kudrin said. ``With foreign borrowing stopping, we must soften the impact with additional funds, then the situation will stabilize.''

Sberbank, eastern Europe's biggest bank, can borrow as much as 754 billion rubles, VTB has a limit of 268.5 billion rubles and Gazprombank can get 103.9 billion rubles. About 400 billion rubles more of unspent budget funds is available to other banks.

``These are market-making banks capable of insuring the liquidity of the banking system,'' the Finance Ministry said in a statement today. The government and central bank will take more measures to improve liquidity this week, the ministry said.

Sberbank dropped 2.1 rubles, or 6.1 percent, to 32.55 rubles. VTB sank 0.44 kopek, or 14 percent, to 2.73 rubles, a record low.

``The primary objective of these measures is to inject liquidity to calm nervousness,'' Alexander Morozov, chief economist at HSBC Bank in Moscow, said by telephone. ``Hopefully other banks will be able to get this money via the interbank market and this should prevent the rise of rates,'' he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Nicholson in Moscow at anicholson6@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 17, 2008 06:10 EDT

[TonyGosling]

Apologies to those who've heard this song Ping-Pong before but it was released in 1994.
Which can be considered ample warning of the present depression/slump/wars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox3HLlKWkyI

[redadare]

[Disco_Destroyer]

[eogz]

It is an interesting point that the current financial crisis is above anything else the one thing most likely to preclude any massive disaster in the world as we know it today.

We all know that massive financial crisis preclude war, political extremism, starvation, erosion of civil liberties, erosion of standards of living, I could go on.

Could it really be that the final gambit has been played and we are all commenting on the end of days (not biblcal), that those that wished it have already won?

I'm trying not to be too cynical here, but I have an awful feeling about all of this....

[Disco_Destroyer]

Agreed I also feel it is the prelude to something big on the depopulation front!

Last time Eugenics was openly discussed well we all know that story

[Moon-in-Taurus]

I agree that this unfolding story is one most likely to open the eyes, and I wish that I could see it explained in the form of a map that showed the other activities of those who are gaining from this.

Whenever Brown spouts forth these days about the need for a nice new global banking system
a chill taps upon my spine and, uninvited, wraps itself around the small bones of my back.

The aforementioned map of deeds and deceptions would be such a useful tool, and is sorely needed right now, don't you think?

[Disco_Destroyer]

A map to avoiding any unforseeable hardship too would be nice

[redadare]

[TonyGosling]

Well this Hollywood film might actually help.

Hollywood film about corrupt bankers - The International
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=16812
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L_-dp-s4DI

Unless, that is, it was designed just to inflame peoples' emotions ready to get them fighting in the streets.

[Disco_Destroyer]

This is spot on and maybe a taster of whats in store

From Death Row, Mumia Abu Jamal

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