Benjamin Fulford
High level geopolitical horse trading going on around right now appears to be headed towards historical changes in how the world is managed will become visible in March. Big diplomatic moves have been seen with Japan, Russia, Europe, South America, Africa and the US during the past week, although with few public announcements. These talks are in preparation for big moves expected after a new Pope and a new Chinese government, formally take the reins of power in March.
As the horse trading continues, the following potential geopolitical chess moves have been hinted at by the various factions: the Pentagon would seize Nigeria’s oil fields, North Korea would attack Beijing and Shanghai with nukes, China would start a war with India, Japan would team up with Russia, the US and India to tame China, South America would link itself to Africa etc. etc.
What all this really amounts to is the various factions showing their strengths in preparations for replacing the Western dominated world system of governance with something more representative of the actual people of the planet.
There were also responses last week from MI5 and from the Vatican P2 about the attacks on the Queen and the papacy.
Here is the MI5 response to the accusations against the Queen made by US agency types
http://americannationalmilitia.com/arrested/
and mentioned in last week’s issue of this newsletter:
This is linked to previous reports that the Monarchy is ‘owned’ by Rome and this is also presumably behind the current thinking that the Queen will be deposed because of the paedophile scandal which will hit the Vatican. First point about the handshake…the nearest likeness is the Lion’s Paw of the Master Mason. It is however very questionable whether HMQ is a Freemason and therefore whether the handshake can be interpreted as being Masonic. The most senior Freemason in England is Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who is first cousin to the Queen and Grand Master of Freemasons in England and Wales. If HMQ were a Mason she would be lower in rank than the Prince, leave alone the Pope.
Officially the Pope is not a Freemason either, as Masonry is prohibited by the Catholic Church, as is paedophilia. However Zagami says there are four Lodges inside the Vatican which are run by the administration for Satanic rituals below ground. Where, incidentally the CIA says that the remains of Jesus are buried, unascended.
A member of the P2 Freemason Lodge said only that the Queen used to be subordinate to the Pope in matters of doctrine “long ago.” This same source, a member of the Italian nobility, said the Pope announced his resignation because he was threatened with the murder of millions of Catholics, probably in Beirut, if he did not resign.
In any case last week there was a major, and under-reported, split between the UK and the cabal that controls the US and Europe. Essentially, the UK government announced that it was becoming the first major Western nation to directly trade its currency for Chinese Renminbi. This was followed by an announcement by the totally disgraced cabal “credit rating agency” Moody’s that Britain’s credit rating had been reduced. The British withdrawal from the US dollar/Euro group and move to direct forex dealing with China is a major blow to the cabal behind the Federal Reserve Board and the European central bank. Australia has also already switched to direct dealings with the Renminbi, joining such powers as Japan, Russia and India and much of the rest of the world.
It is no coincidence this move comes a week before the new Chinese government formally takes over the reins of power in March.
Asia, as well, was the center of lots of jockeying for position last week. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in particular has been trying to show himself to be a macho man. When he went to Washington last weekend, he asked the Americans to allow him to stay in power for his full term (4 years) and promised he obey them in exchange, according to Japanese military intelligence. Abe also apologized for being “too close to China” last time he was Prime Minister.
However, the Americans were having no part of any talk of allying with Japan against China since without Chinese money, the US would have become bankrupt a long time ago. The Japanese establishment, to hedge their bets, have also been making secret proposals to Russia to join them in a move to encircle China.
The Japanese also pulled out an ace from their sleeve last week when the North Koreans, who are secret allies of Japan, told the Chinese they had nuclear missiles aimed at Beijing and Shanghai, Japanese military intelligence said.
The Chinese, for their part, have agreed with the Taiwanese and with many Japanese factions that the solution to the territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands would be to make Okinawa an independent kingdom again like it was until the cabal took over Japan in the Meiji era. In such a scenario the Chinese and Japanese would split the costs of US bases there in exchange for them becoming a neutral police force.
The Chinese war-mongering faction has now decided that if they need to start a war to strengthen internal Chinese unity that India would make a better target. The death of 100 million people would be “considered acceptable,” in such a war, according to a senior Chinese military source linked to an Asian secret society. This of course, is just a way of saying “do not under-estimate China.”
The US military industrial complex, for its part, showed off its likely strategy for dealing with imminent bankruptcy: the use of armed force. In particular, the US has begun to build up a major base in the African country of Niger, the only likely strategic aim of which would be to seize the rich oil fields of next door Nigeria. This is the pentagon’s way of saying they will do what is necessary to make sure they can keep filling their gas tanks no matter what happens in the financial world.
US Secretary of State John Kerry flew off to Europe and the Middle East last week to try to convince the Europeans, Russians and Sunni Muslims to unite behind dictator Obama.
However, the United States, a nation that has been constantly at war for most of the past 70 years, will find it now considered to be a friendless rogue nation. The momentum is with the 180 nation BRICS alliance. They wish to improve the environment and living standards of the planet. Their motto is simple: “make love, not war.”
benjaminfulford.typepad.com/
Costas Lapavitsas: From multimillion dollar losses by cities like Baltimore to pension fund losses and much more, the LIBOR interest rate scandal shows that such mechanisms must be taken out of the hands of banks and be run in public interest.
TRANSCRIPT:
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The Lapavitsas Report on Economics with Costas Lapavitsas, who now joins us from London.
Costas is a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He's a member of Research on Money and Finance, and he's a regular columnist for The Guardian newspaper.
Thanks, Costas.
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS, PROF. ECONOMICS, UNIV. OF LONDON: Pleasure to be here, Paul.
JAY: So what have you been working on this week?
LAPAVITSAS: I think one of the most interesting things to hit the news this week is the Libor manipulation case and the fine that has been imposed on the large British bank RBS for manipulating the Libor.
I think we need to talk a little bit about this so that people understand the significance of it, because it hasn't really been widely appreciated by the public.
Now, the Libor is not a real interest rate. It's a benchmark. It's a benchmark that is set privately by the banks and in secret. There's a committee of banks that does that. On the basis of the Libor, a whole host of other interest rates that are charged to people for their mortgages, to businesses, and so on are determined.
Now, the case and the fine imposed on RBS has discovered, has found that actually RBS has been colluding with brokers and others to manipulate the Libor. This is a criminal dimension. And they've been charged. The British government—.
JAY: Hang on one sec. Just for people that haven't followed this story at all, just a little more on why this matters so much.
LAPAVITSAS: This matters enormously for a number of reasons. As I said to you, as I said, this is not a real interest rate; this is a benchmark. If the banks determine the benchmark in an untruthful way, then they can influence a whole host of other prices, and they can influence the receipts they make from people to whom they've lent money and from the various transactions they make in the derivatives markets. For the banks, the ability to manipulate the Libor is a key mechanism to make extra profits, basically. And they've got this ability to do it because they set the Libor privately and in a special committee, which they run themselves.
Now, the British government is making out that this is a criminal act, which it is, of course, because collusion with the aim of making extra profits is criminal. The point is, however—and this is something that the British government wishes to keep quiet—it isn't simply criminality here. It looks as if the entire game is rigged from beginning to end. In other words, it isn't simply collusion and illegality. The game is rotten.
And it is rotten for two reasons, I would argue. First, the banks have got an incentive to present falsely low rates, because they in this way appear to be stronger than their competitors. And the banks have got an incentive to manipulate the rate sometimes up, sometimes down, because they make different payments in this way on their derivatives portfolio. The banks, then, have got clear incentives to manipulate it, and they signal their incentives to each other.
So this committee doesn't work. It doesn't work systematically in the public interest; it works in the interest of banks. This is becoming increasingly clear, and this is going to be big news, I think, in the months to come, because, of course, there are more banks that would be hit—that will be charged fines in the months ahead.
JAY: How did we get to a situation that a group of banks, most of them private, or maybe all of them privately owned, get to determine what is essentially the most influential rate in the globe? I mean, in theory, central banks are supposed to establish rates, I would have thought.
LAPAVITSAS: Central banks establish the rates at which they themselves lend to the banking system. However, there is also a private market for funds. There's the money market. And in the money market, banks interact with each other and work out the rate at which they lend to each other.
This is the most important price in the financial system. It's more important than the rate at which central banks lend to banks. It's the most important financial price. And presumably, in a neoliberal free-market system such as the one we've got today, it ought to be set through the free competition among the financial institutions. It isn't.
And that's the significance of this. This rate is actually manipulated. These banks have got a secretive committee. They work out the rate, which is the Libor. They don't transact at this rate—this is a benchmark. And they announce it on a daily basis. They manipulate it. They handle it. And by manipulate it, they affect all other actual interest rates at which people undertake [unintel.] transactions.
JAY: Now, just to make this concrete for people, a city like Baltimore claims it's lost millions of dollars that could have been spent on schools or roads or housing or whatever, and they've lost this money, they claim, because of this fraudulently set Libor rate. But how does that work? Why is Baltimore out money because of what some bankers are doing on this committee?
LAPAVITSAS: Because the prices Baltimore would have been charged on various loans it took or on derivatives transactions it engaged in—I don't really know the particulars of the Baltimore case, but the prices it would have been charged and the rates it would have been charged would have been false. They would have not have been true rates. They would have been based on the Libor, a premium would have been added to the Libor, and the Libor rate that would have been used as the base for this would have been a false, manipulated rate. And by manipulating it, the banks would have seen to it that money would have gone into their coffers, that their coffers would have gone up. It's a hidden, silent transfer of income and wealth from the public in general to the banks. It's arguably one of the biggest scams in the history of finance.
JAY: And Baltimore's leading a class action lawsuit of various cities, with Baltimore being the lead city, suing these banks to try to recover this money.
LAPAVITSAS: They're right to do so. As I said, I mean, there is obviously outright criminality in some respects, because these banks have been proven to have colluded with one another to handle—they manipulate the rate directly.
But the point I repeat is that criminality aside, it looks as if the entire game is rigged, that the banks actually can know how to handle and manipulate the rate without actually directly colluding with each other. And that's what's wrong about it, and that's what's bad about it, because it shows that the so-called free market in finance simply doesn't work.
I want to stress the importance of this. You see, neoliberalism and free markets, which is the mantra that we've been listening to and hearing for decades, pivots on the banks and the financial system. This is where it's supposed to be free. This is the markets, these are the markets, and the institutions are supposed to be as free as possible. Well, they're not. They're actually managing this rate, manipulating this rate in their own interests. And they are doing it through a private meeting.
You know, Adam Smith wrote more than two centuries ago that when you let capitalists meet in a nontransparent way on a regular basis, then they will do two things: they will defraud the public and they will raise prices. He argued that two centuries ago. Well, there you are. When you let banks meet on a daily basis, privately, without transparency, without public scrutiny, what they will do is to manipulate this key rate, the fundamental rate of the financial market, to make extra profits. That's what they've been doing.
This is one of the biggest scandals, as I said before, in the history of finance. It's about time the public realized what's happening and demanded intervention.
JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Costas.
LAPAVITSAS: Thank you.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.




