fabijo's account talk

[Silverbird]

Awesome! Amidst this crisis, I got a 0% APR credit card offer in the mail this weekend. 0% apr on balance transfers and purchases for 15 months for a credit limit of $7,500! Woohoo! Free money for the next year!

Read the fine print on the fees for balance transfers. :notrust:

 

[fabijo]

Read the fine print on the fees for balance transfers. :notrust:

Well, that's true. It's 3% of the balance transfer. So, that is a flat rate fee. What I need to do is put the money into a high yield savings, paying only the minimum amount until the final month, where I pay it all off. I once found a blog where someone was trying to build up his wealth this way. It started off small, but over time, he was amassing a hefty sum of cash, in the thousands.

 

[fabijo]

Now here is an amazing article. Here is Henry Kissinger declaring that 2009 will be the year of a new world order, where America is not as powerful, but that we need to recast the current financial system:

An end of hubris
http://www.economist.com/theworldin...2574180&d=2009&CFID=32126291&CFTOKEN=41335084

The absence of restraint encouraged a speculation whose growing sophistication matched its mounting lack of transparency. An unparalleled period of growth followed, but also the delusion that an economic system could sustain itself via debt indefinitely. In reality, a country could live in such a profligate manner only so long as the rest of the world retained confidence in its economic prescriptions. That period has now ended.

Now that the clay feet of the economic system have been exposed, the gap between a global system for economics and the global political system based on the state must be addressed as a dominant task in 2009.

The dilatory diplomacy towards Iran must be brought to a focus. The time available to forestall an Iranian nuclear programme is shrinking and American involvement is essential in defining what we and our allies are prepared to seek and concede and, above all, the penalty to invoke if negotiations reach a stalemate. war??

America will have to learn that world order depends on a structure that participants support because they helped bring it about. If progress is made on these enterprises, 2009 will mark the beginning of a new world order.

 

[fabijo]

Now here's some fun stuff:

US officials flunk test of Amerian history, economics, civics
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20081120/tod-us-officials-flunk-test-of-amerian-h-f62056d.html

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

 

[fabijo]

In the test listed above, elected officials had this result on a question asking about the power to declare war:

Fifty-four percent do not know the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Thirty-nine percent think that power belongs to the president, and 10% think it belongs to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2008/additional_finding.html

 

[jimijr]

Civics Quiz

I missed one, got a 97%. I had trouble defining a public good, Q29, heh. It now says the average score for all takers in November is 78%.

 

[fabijo]

Re: Civics Quiz

I missed one, got a 97%. I had trouble defining a public good, Q29, heh. It now says the average score for all takers in November is 78%.

Wow! You did great! I got 84.85%

Anyone else, here is the test:
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx

 

[jimijr]

Ya gotta be up on the first Roosevelt administration to ace this test. I began studying the Great Depression in the summer '07 and have more or less exhausted my public library's resources.

 

[fabijo]

How's this for a twist? This guy is pretty nuts. I don't know if he's just trying to get attention or what.

 

[Eldritch Flatus]

They're sorry this vidio is no longer available.

Must be the wacko police!:worried::notrust:

 

[fabijo]

They're sorry this vidio is no longer available.

Must be the wacko police!:worried::notrust:

LOL. You're not missing much, but here's the direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65-ZzJi93ug

 

[fabijo]

Just a random joke of the day:

A Mafia Godfather finds out that his bookkeeper has cheated
him out of ten million bucks. His bookkeeper is deaf. That
was the reason he got the job in the first place. It was
assumed that a deaf bookkeeper would not hear anything that he
might have to testify about in court.
When the Godfather goes to confront the bookkeeper about
his missing $10 million, he brings along his attorney, who knows
sign language.
The Godfather tells the lawyer, "Ask him where the 10 million
bucks is he embezzled from me?"
The attorney, using sign language, asks the bookkeeper.
The bookkeeper signs back: "I don't know what you are talking about."
The attorney tells the Godfather: "He says he doesn't know
what you're talking about."
The Godfather pulls out a pistol, puts it to the bookkeeper's
nose and says, "Ask him again!"
The attorney signs to the bookkeeper: "He'll kill you if you
don't tell him!"
The bookkeeper signs back: "OK! You win! The money is in
a brown suitcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo's
backyard in Queens!"
The Godfather asks the attorney: "Well, what'd he say?"
The attorney replies: "He says you don't have the nerve to pull
the trigger."

 

[fabijo]

Well, here's some doomsday from Bloomberg.com:

Food Prices Will Rise, Causing Export Bans, Riots
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aC.nz4FiZpkg

Food prices will rise next year, prompting a revival of protectionism from food-growing nations and risking a renewed bout of rioting.

Man. I thought I was posting crazy stuff back on October 8th about riots. Now Bloomberg is talking about it? Only back in October, the email was saying it would be because of a fraudulent election. I guess everybody sees riots coming our way?? :blink:

The latest conspiracy news:

WMR has learned from knowledgeable Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sources that the Bush administration is putting the final touches on a plan that would see martial law declared in the United States with various scenarios anticipated as triggers. The triggers include a continuing economic collapse with massive social unrest, bank closures resulting in violence against financial institutions, and another fraudulent presidential election that would result in rioting in major cities and campuses around the country.

 

[fabijo]

Are you kidding me??? The Treasury is giving money to the Federal Reserve to back loans - Federal Reserve Loans??? The Treasury is broke! The Fed doesn't need ANY money. They never lose money. They're the ones creating money out of thin air. So, the U.S. Treasury is borrowing money from China to insure loans that the Federal Reserve is making. Ridiculous.

Treasury Provides TARP Funds to Federal Reserve
Consumer ABS Lending Facility
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/hp1292.htm

The U.S. Treasury Department today announced it will allocate $20 billion to back a lending facility for the consumer asset backed securities market established by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

 

[Silverbird]

Ok...I thought that these loans didn't qualify for TARP. I guess this is a squeeze play?

BTW, China hasn't been buying dollar denominated assets recently. Last I checked Japan ranked #1 in holdings.

 

[350zCommTech]

Are you kidding me??? The Treasury is giving money to the Federal Reserve to back loans - Federal Reserve Loans??? The Treasury is broke! The Fed doesn't need ANY money. They never lose money. They're the ones creating money out of thin air. So, the U.S. Treasury is borrowing money from China to insure loans that the Federal Reserve is making. Ridiculous.

Treasury Provides TARP Funds to Federal Reserve
Consumer ABS Lending Facility
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/hp1292.htm

LOL! Credit cards and auto loans.....These are ZERO's.

 

[fabijo]

BTW, China hasn't been buying dollar denominated assets recently. Last I checked Japan ranked #1 in holdings.

The only hard numbers I found from the Treasury are on a report dated June 30, 2007. Yes, Japan is number 1, China is number 2 in total U.S. holdings of securities and in long term Treasury debt. But in agency long term debt, China owned more than Japan.

And from 2006 to 2007, China jumped significantly in holdings and may surpass Japan for 2008.

In total holding of U.S. securities, Japan went from $1,106,000,000,000 in 2006 to $1,197,000,000,000 in 2007 - an increase of 8.2%.

China's total holdings went from $699,000,000,000 in 2006 to $922,000,000,000 in 2007 - an increase of 31.9%.

If China comes anywhere close to that rate, it will be the world's largest holder of U.S. Securities.

Source:
http://www.treas.gov/tic/fpis.shtml

 

[fabijo]

Update: I found more recent numbers. Japan is still in the lead with purchasing U.S. Securities. Also, China seriously slowed down its purchasing of our debt (Kudos to Silverbird for knowing this off the top of her head!! ). Either way, the U.S. is borrowing billions of dollars to fund all these programs.

Current monthly figures for each country can be found here:
http://www.treas.gov/tic/country-longterm.shtml

Now I'm trying to figure out what the other countries are doing. Don't they all have to borrow money for all the bailouts they've been doing? Are we all just borrowing from each other? Maybe. But the real issue in the U.S. is that the Federal Reserve is loaning money out of thin air. Not only does the money just pop up on demand and need to get paid back; it has to get paid back with interest!

 

[Silverbird]

All in a day's work, that's one of the broad issues I track. Though remember, you can blame bureaucrats like me that you don't have specific industry or special interest funds in TSP - some of us can't invest in them (conflict of interest) and it would be too much trouble for the investment police to check inside our TSP accounts to see our individual investments. We do have to report any other holdings, of course.

 

[fabijo]

So, Silverbird, are you saying you are employed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury?