The Size of Derivatives Bubble = $190K Per Person on Planet

Tom Foremski
Silicon Valley Watcher
March 17, 2009

More must read financial analysis from DK Matai, Chairman of the ACTA Open.

The Invisible One Quadrillion Dollar Equation — Asymmetric Leverage and Systemic Risk

According to various distinguished sources including the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland — the central bankers’ bank — the amount of outstanding derivatives worldwide as of December 2007 crossed USD 1.144 Quadrillion, ie, USD 1,144 Trillion. The main categories of the USD 1.144 Quadrillion derivatives market were the following:

1. Listed credit derivatives stood at USD 548 trillion;

2. The Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives stood in notional or face value at USD 596 trillion and included:

a. Interest Rate Derivatives at about USD 393+ trillion;

b. Credit Default Swaps at about USD 58+ trillion;

c. Foreign Exchange Derivatives at about USD 56+ trillion;

d. Commodity Derivatives at about USD 9 trillion;

e. Equity Linked Derivatives at about USD 8.5 trillion; and

f. Unallocated Derivatives at about USD 71+ trillion.

Quadrillion? That is a number only super computing engineers and astronomers used to use, not economists and bankers! For example, the North star is “just” a couple of quadrillion miles away, ie, a few thousand trillion miles. The new “Roadrunner” supercomputer built by IBM for the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory has achieved a peak performance of 1.026 Peta Flop per second — becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this milestone. One Quadrillion Floating Point Operations (Flops) per second is 1 Peta Flop/s, ie, 1,000 Trillion Flops per second. It is estimated that all the data found on all the websites and stored on computers across the world totals more than One Exa byte of memory, ie, 1,000 Quadrillion bytes of data.

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China nervous about One-Trillion Dollar Investments in the US

Radio Australia News

Last Updated: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:49:00 +1100

The United States has assured China that its one-trillion US dollars worth of investment in the country is safe. 

The Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, had earlier said he was concerned about China’s assets in America in the wake of the global financial crisis. 

A White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has urged Congress to help restore the country’s financial reputation.

I think the best thing we can do to assure anybody in Washington, America or throughout the world that we’re serious at least to pass the president’s budget and put ourselves back on the path towards fiscal sustainability and fiscal responsibility.

Kucinich Calls For Congressional Investigation Into Cheney “Assassination Unit”

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, March 16, 2009 

Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has called for a formal Congressional probe into allegations by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that former Vice-President Dick Cheney had his own SS-style political assassination unit.

Kucinich made the call Friday in a letter to Chairman Edolphus Towns of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee which has been published on the Congressman’s website.

Kucinich explains in the letter that, “Mr. Hersh made the allegation before an audience at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, March 10, 2009. He stated, ‘Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving… It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. . .Congress has no oversight of it.’”

“If true, these operations violate longstanding U.S. policy regarding covert actions and illegally bypass Congressional oversight,” Kucinich adds. “Hersh is within a year or more of releasing a book that is said to include evidence of this allegation. However, we cannot wait a year or more to establish the truth.”

The claims were made by the Award-winning New Yorker writer last Tuesday when he told a University of Minnesota audience “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”

Hersh then went on to describe how the Joint Special Operations Command was an executive assassination unit that carried out political`assassinations abroad. . “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”

In our exclusive story last weekend we detailed how the assassination unit was not a creation of the Bush administration or Dick Cheney. The Joint Special Operations Command, has in fact been active for decades, has been deployed domestically in the U.S., has killed U.S. citizens, and continues as an integral part of Barack Obama’s expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Cheney “Assassination Unit” Still Active Under Obama, Including Domestically

 

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, March 14, 2009

Revelations that a political assassination unit which reported solely to Dick Cheney was in operation during the Bush administration are absent the fact that the unit in question, the Joint Special Operations Command, has been active for decades, has been deployed domestically in the U.S., has killed U.S. citizens, and is an integral part of Barack Obama’s expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell when he told a University of Minnesota audience on Tuesday that the Joint Special Operations Command is, “An executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

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There’s nothing unique about Jim Cramer

Glenn Greenwald

Friday March 13, 2009 08:09 EDT

Jon Stewart is being widely celebrated today and Jim Cramer/CNBC widely mocked — both rightfully so — for Stewart’s devastatingly adversarial interview of Cramer (who, just by the way, is a Marty Peretz creation).  If you haven’t yet seen the interview, you can and should watch it here; if you watch only one segment, watch the middle one and the beginning of the third.

Stewart focuses on the role Cramer and CNBC played in mindlessly disseminating and uncritically amplifying the false claims from the CEOs and banks which spawned the financial crisis with their blatantly untoward and often illegal practices.  Here is the crux of Stewart’s critique of Cramer/CNBC:

….

In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn’t create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it.

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Former Banker Exposes Plans for the US Economic Collapse

Guantanamo Bay Under Obama – More of the same?

Stephen Lendman
Global Research
March 9, 2009

As The New York Times reported on January 22, Barack Obama signed Executive Orders (EOs) banning torture and “directing the CIA to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantanamo detention camp within a year, government official said.”

The closure EO is titled: “Executive Order — Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities.”

Sec. 3 reads: “Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantanamo. The detention facilities at Guantanamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”

It sounds great up front, but when you delve into the details…

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A Chronolgy of Data Breaches

Every once in a while we come across an article about a data breach. Whether its a laptop stolen or a data hack, our information is everywhere and constantly at risk. Here is a handy list of the most recent data breaches and the details of each. Check if your bank or workplace is on the list.

Dow 4000 by Summer

Evans-Pritchard: Dow 4,000 by Summer

By: Gene J. Koprowski Article

Global trade and economic output are collapsing at rates that outpace the Depression of the 1930s, and “shock and awe” policies are required from the U.S. government to revive global growth, says Daily Telegraph International Business Editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

“This terrifying fall has been concentrated in the last five months. The job slaughter has barely begun,” Evans-Pritchard writes. “Social mayhem comes with a 12-month lag.”

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Outstanding Derivatives: 1.28 QUADRILLION-95% on MARGIN!

In an inflationary economy, big numbers quickly lose the shock factor.

Over the course of just a few years, a single banana becomes 10 times more expensive than what a four-bedroom home used to cost. A simple two-ply square of toilet paper sells for $417, while a full roll is priced at more than $140,000. And don’t even torture yourself by guessing how much a gallon of gas can go for under these conditions. The numbers get so big, not only do people stop trying to understand them, they begin to ignore them.

So it is alarming that the latest report from the Bank of International Settlements (bis) went largely unnoticed.

According to the bis, the number of outstanding derivative contracts in the global marketplace soared by double-digit percentages last year. Anything going up by double digits should elicit interest in and of itself, but in this case it is the sheer magnitude of the numbers involved that raises red flags.

The bis reported the total amount of outstanding derivatives has reached a practically incomprehensible $1.28 quadrillion. Yes, you read that correctly—quadrillion! And as astounding as this astronomically huge number is, the actual totals are even bigger because this number does not include derivatives related to the commodity markets (which the bis says it can’t track because values aren’t available).

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