Okay folks, it looks like the whole country is now playing Peter Peterson's budget ball. For those not familiar with him, Peterson is a Wall Street investment banker. He has made billions of dollars through his dealings and government subsidies, and now he is using much of this money to accomplish a lifelong quest, gutting Social Security and Medicare.
Toward this end, he has set up a fake news service (the "Fiscal Times"); he's funded scary, anti-Social Security documentaries; sponsored a set of rigged public forums (America Speaks) and even paid for the construction of a high school curriculum to indoctrinate school children. According to some accounts, he is now the largest employer in the DC area after the Pentagon.
The way Peterson's budget game works is that you get some deficit or debt target. This is against a backdrop where the baseline projections show the deficits going through the roof in 10-20 years. The reason for the exploding deficit is the projection of exploding health care costs. The US would be looking at massive budget surpluses if it had the same per person health care costs as any other wealthy country.
Under the rules of Peterson's budget ball, you are not allowed to do anything about rising health care costs. In fact, reform of the private health care system was explicitly ruled out as an option at the Peterson-funded America Speaks forums.
This means, for example, that we can't reduce prescription drug costs by adopting a more efficient mechanism for financing drug research. The Center for Medicare and Medicare Services projects that the country will spend more than $3.3 trillion on prescription drugs over the next decade. We would probably spend less than one-tenth of this amount if drugs were sold in a free market, but Peterson's budget ball doesn't let you reform the system of financing drug research. You can't even go the intermediate step of public financing of clinical trials advocated by Joe Stiglitiz, the Nobel laureate who was President Clinton's chief economist.
Peterson budget ball also doesn't let contestants take any of the other steps that could bring US health care costs more in line with costs elsewhere. This would include letting Medicare beneficiaries buy into more efficient health care systems elsewhere. This could put tens of thousands of dollars into the pockets of beneficiaries each year while saving the government trillions of dollars in the coming decades.
Nor does Peterson budget ball allow for medical tourism, which could lead to huge cost savings as people get their health care in other countries to escape our broken system. Peterson's budget ball also does not allow contestants to take down the barriers that prevent more foreigners from coming to practice medicine in the US, bringing physicians' wages here in line with the rest of the world.
Not only does Peterson's budget ball prevent contestants from fixing the health care system. He also doesn't want them to tax Wall Street speculation. This source of revenue could raise close to $1.8 trillion over the course of a decade. Virtually all of the revenue would come at the expense of the financial industry, since most investors would simply cut back their trading in response to any increase in trading fees.
And Peterson doesn't want anyone to consider the possibility that we could have the Federal Reserve Board simply hold the government bonds it is now buying, so that taxpayers are not burdened with hundreds of billions a year in additional interest payments. If the Fed held $3 trillion in bonds in 2020, offsetting the inflationary impact with higher reserve requirements, it would save the country $150 billion a year in interest.
Their argument is that we wouldn't want Congress dictating policy to the Federal Reserve Board. After all, the Fed has done such a great job. According to the claims of its chairman, Ben Bernanke, the Fed's policies brought us to the brink of a second Great Depression. With that sort of track record, how can anyone suggest making the Fed more accountable?
In short, in Peterson's budget ball, we can't make any changes that might create any serious inconvenience for the rich and powerful. We can have some small cuts in defense and modest tax increases for the rich as window dressing, but what we are left with is a massive budget deficit and nothing but Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs left to cut.
That might sound like a rigged game, but Peterson is paying for it, so he gets to set the rules. What else would we expect? The big question is whether President Obama is also playing this game. We will find out Tuesday.
"Between 2002 and early 2008, roughly $1.4 trillion worth of sub-prime loans were originated by now-fallen lenders like New Century Financial. If such loans were our only problem, the theoretical solution would have involved the government subsidizing these mortgages for the maximum cost of $1.4 trillion. However, according to Thomson Reuters, nearly $14 trillion worth of complex-securitized products were created, predominantly on top of them, precisely because leveraged funds abetted every step of their production and dispersion. Thus, at the height of federal payouts in July 2009, the government had put up $17.5 trillion to support Wall Street's pyramid Ponzi system, not $1.4 trillion." ("Shadow Banking", Nomi Prins, The American Prospect)
Shadow banking emerged so that large cash-heavy financial institutions would have a place to park their money short-term and get the best possible return. For example, let's say Intel is sitting on $25 billion in cash. It can deposit the money with a financial intermediary, such as Morgan Stanley, in exchange for collateral (aka MBS or ABS), and earn a decent return on its money. But if a problem arises and the quality of the collateral is called into question, then the banks (Morgan Stanley, in this case) are forced to take bigger and bigger haircuts which can send the system into a nosedive. That's what happened in the summer of 2007. Investors discovered that many of the subprimes were based on fraud, so billions of dollars were quickly withdrawn from money markets and commercial paper, and the Fed had to step in to keep the system from collapsing.
Regulations are put in place to see that the system runs smoothly and to protect the public from fraud. But banking without rules is more profitable, so industry leaders and lobbyists have tried to block the efforts at reform. And, they have largely succeeded. Dodd-Frank – the financial reform act -- is riddled with loopholes and doesn't really resolve the central issues of loan quality, additional capital, or risk retention. Banks are still free to issue bogus mortgages to unemployed applicants with bad credit, just as they were before the meltdown. And, they can still produce securitized debt instruments without retaining even a meager 5 per cent of the loan's value. (This issue is still being contested) Also, government agencies cannot force financial institutions to increase their capital even though a slight downturn in the market could wipe them out and cause severe damage to the rest of the system. Wall Street has prevailed on all counts and now the window for re-regulating the system has passed.
President Barack Obama understands the basic problem, but he also knows that he won't be reelected without Wall Street's help. That's why he promised to further reduce "burdensome" regulations in the Wall Street Journal just two weeks ago. His op-ed was intended to preempt the release of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's (FCIC) report, which was expected to make recommendations for strengthening existing regulations. Obama torpedoed that effort by coming down on the side of big finance. Now, it's only a matter of time before another crash.
Here's an excerpt from a special report on shadow banking by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
bench craft company
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
Okay folks, it looks like the whole country is now playing Peter Peterson's budget ball. For those not familiar with him, Peterson is a Wall Street investment banker. He has made billions of dollars through his dealings and government subsidies, and now he is using much of this money to accomplish a lifelong quest, gutting Social Security and Medicare.
Toward this end, he has set up a fake news service (the "Fiscal Times"); he's funded scary, anti-Social Security documentaries; sponsored a set of rigged public forums (America Speaks) and even paid for the construction of a high school curriculum to indoctrinate school children. According to some accounts, he is now the largest employer in the DC area after the Pentagon.
The way Peterson's budget game works is that you get some deficit or debt target. This is against a backdrop where the baseline projections show the deficits going through the roof in 10-20 years. The reason for the exploding deficit is the projection of exploding health care costs. The US would be looking at massive budget surpluses if it had the same per person health care costs as any other wealthy country.
Under the rules of Peterson's budget ball, you are not allowed to do anything about rising health care costs. In fact, reform of the private health care system was explicitly ruled out as an option at the Peterson-funded America Speaks forums.
This means, for example, that we can't reduce prescription drug costs by adopting a more efficient mechanism for financing drug research. The Center for Medicare and Medicare Services projects that the country will spend more than $3.3 trillion on prescription drugs over the next decade. We would probably spend less than one-tenth of this amount if drugs were sold in a free market, but Peterson's budget ball doesn't let you reform the system of financing drug research. You can't even go the intermediate step of public financing of clinical trials advocated by Joe Stiglitiz, the Nobel laureate who was President Clinton's chief economist.
Peterson budget ball also doesn't let contestants take any of the other steps that could bring US health care costs more in line with costs elsewhere. This would include letting Medicare beneficiaries buy into more efficient health care systems elsewhere. This could put tens of thousands of dollars into the pockets of beneficiaries each year while saving the government trillions of dollars in the coming decades.
Nor does Peterson budget ball allow for medical tourism, which could lead to huge cost savings as people get their health care in other countries to escape our broken system. Peterson's budget ball also does not allow contestants to take down the barriers that prevent more foreigners from coming to practice medicine in the US, bringing physicians' wages here in line with the rest of the world.
Not only does Peterson's budget ball prevent contestants from fixing the health care system. He also doesn't want them to tax Wall Street speculation. This source of revenue could raise close to $1.8 trillion over the course of a decade. Virtually all of the revenue would come at the expense of the financial industry, since most investors would simply cut back their trading in response to any increase in trading fees.
And Peterson doesn't want anyone to consider the possibility that we could have the Federal Reserve Board simply hold the government bonds it is now buying, so that taxpayers are not burdened with hundreds of billions a year in additional interest payments. If the Fed held $3 trillion in bonds in 2020, offsetting the inflationary impact with higher reserve requirements, it would save the country $150 billion a year in interest.
Their argument is that we wouldn't want Congress dictating policy to the Federal Reserve Board. After all, the Fed has done such a great job. According to the claims of its chairman, Ben Bernanke, the Fed's policies brought us to the brink of a second Great Depression. With that sort of track record, how can anyone suggest making the Fed more accountable?
In short, in Peterson's budget ball, we can't make any changes that might create any serious inconvenience for the rich and powerful. We can have some small cuts in defense and modest tax increases for the rich as window dressing, but what we are left with is a massive budget deficit and nothing but Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs left to cut.
That might sound like a rigged game, but Peterson is paying for it, so he gets to set the rules. What else would we expect? The big question is whether President Obama is also playing this game. We will find out Tuesday.
"Between 2002 and early 2008, roughly $1.4 trillion worth of sub-prime loans were originated by now-fallen lenders like New Century Financial. If such loans were our only problem, the theoretical solution would have involved the government subsidizing these mortgages for the maximum cost of $1.4 trillion. However, according to Thomson Reuters, nearly $14 trillion worth of complex-securitized products were created, predominantly on top of them, precisely because leveraged funds abetted every step of their production and dispersion. Thus, at the height of federal payouts in July 2009, the government had put up $17.5 trillion to support Wall Street's pyramid Ponzi system, not $1.4 trillion." ("Shadow Banking", Nomi Prins, The American Prospect)
Shadow banking emerged so that large cash-heavy financial institutions would have a place to park their money short-term and get the best possible return. For example, let's say Intel is sitting on $25 billion in cash. It can deposit the money with a financial intermediary, such as Morgan Stanley, in exchange for collateral (aka MBS or ABS), and earn a decent return on its money. But if a problem arises and the quality of the collateral is called into question, then the banks (Morgan Stanley, in this case) are forced to take bigger and bigger haircuts which can send the system into a nosedive. That's what happened in the summer of 2007. Investors discovered that many of the subprimes were based on fraud, so billions of dollars were quickly withdrawn from money markets and commercial paper, and the Fed had to step in to keep the system from collapsing.
Regulations are put in place to see that the system runs smoothly and to protect the public from fraud. But banking without rules is more profitable, so industry leaders and lobbyists have tried to block the efforts at reform. And, they have largely succeeded. Dodd-Frank – the financial reform act -- is riddled with loopholes and doesn't really resolve the central issues of loan quality, additional capital, or risk retention. Banks are still free to issue bogus mortgages to unemployed applicants with bad credit, just as they were before the meltdown. And, they can still produce securitized debt instruments without retaining even a meager 5 per cent of the loan's value. (This issue is still being contested) Also, government agencies cannot force financial institutions to increase their capital even though a slight downturn in the market could wipe them out and cause severe damage to the rest of the system. Wall Street has prevailed on all counts and now the window for re-regulating the system has passed.
President Barack Obama understands the basic problem, but he also knows that he won't be reelected without Wall Street's help. That's why he promised to further reduce "burdensome" regulations in the Wall Street Journal just two weeks ago. His op-ed was intended to preempt the release of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's (FCIC) report, which was expected to make recommendations for strengthening existing regulations. Obama torpedoed that effort by coming down on the side of big finance. Now, it's only a matter of time before another crash.
Here's an excerpt from a special report on shadow banking by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
bench craft company>
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
[reefeed]
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bench craft company
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
Okay folks, it looks like the whole country is now playing Peter Peterson's budget ball. For those not familiar with him, Peterson is a Wall Street investment banker. He has made billions of dollars through his dealings and government subsidies, and now he is using much of this money to accomplish a lifelong quest, gutting Social Security and Medicare.
Toward this end, he has set up a fake news service (the "Fiscal Times"); he's funded scary, anti-Social Security documentaries; sponsored a set of rigged public forums (America Speaks) and even paid for the construction of a high school curriculum to indoctrinate school children. According to some accounts, he is now the largest employer in the DC area after the Pentagon.
The way Peterson's budget game works is that you get some deficit or debt target. This is against a backdrop where the baseline projections show the deficits going through the roof in 10-20 years. The reason for the exploding deficit is the projection of exploding health care costs. The US would be looking at massive budget surpluses if it had the same per person health care costs as any other wealthy country.
Under the rules of Peterson's budget ball, you are not allowed to do anything about rising health care costs. In fact, reform of the private health care system was explicitly ruled out as an option at the Peterson-funded America Speaks forums.
This means, for example, that we can't reduce prescription drug costs by adopting a more efficient mechanism for financing drug research. The Center for Medicare and Medicare Services projects that the country will spend more than $3.3 trillion on prescription drugs over the next decade. We would probably spend less than one-tenth of this amount if drugs were sold in a free market, but Peterson's budget ball doesn't let you reform the system of financing drug research. You can't even go the intermediate step of public financing of clinical trials advocated by Joe Stiglitiz, the Nobel laureate who was President Clinton's chief economist.
Peterson budget ball also doesn't let contestants take any of the other steps that could bring US health care costs more in line with costs elsewhere. This would include letting Medicare beneficiaries buy into more efficient health care systems elsewhere. This could put tens of thousands of dollars into the pockets of beneficiaries each year while saving the government trillions of dollars in the coming decades.
Nor does Peterson budget ball allow for medical tourism, which could lead to huge cost savings as people get their health care in other countries to escape our broken system. Peterson's budget ball also does not allow contestants to take down the barriers that prevent more foreigners from coming to practice medicine in the US, bringing physicians' wages here in line with the rest of the world.
Not only does Peterson's budget ball prevent contestants from fixing the health care system. He also doesn't want them to tax Wall Street speculation. This source of revenue could raise close to $1.8 trillion over the course of a decade. Virtually all of the revenue would come at the expense of the financial industry, since most investors would simply cut back their trading in response to any increase in trading fees.
And Peterson doesn't want anyone to consider the possibility that we could have the Federal Reserve Board simply hold the government bonds it is now buying, so that taxpayers are not burdened with hundreds of billions a year in additional interest payments. If the Fed held $3 trillion in bonds in 2020, offsetting the inflationary impact with higher reserve requirements, it would save the country $150 billion a year in interest.
Their argument is that we wouldn't want Congress dictating policy to the Federal Reserve Board. After all, the Fed has done such a great job. According to the claims of its chairman, Ben Bernanke, the Fed's policies brought us to the brink of a second Great Depression. With that sort of track record, how can anyone suggest making the Fed more accountable?
In short, in Peterson's budget ball, we can't make any changes that might create any serious inconvenience for the rich and powerful. We can have some small cuts in defense and modest tax increases for the rich as window dressing, but what we are left with is a massive budget deficit and nothing but Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs left to cut.
That might sound like a rigged game, but Peterson is paying for it, so he gets to set the rules. What else would we expect? The big question is whether President Obama is also playing this game. We will find out Tuesday.
"Between 2002 and early 2008, roughly $1.4 trillion worth of sub-prime loans were originated by now-fallen lenders like New Century Financial. If such loans were our only problem, the theoretical solution would have involved the government subsidizing these mortgages for the maximum cost of $1.4 trillion. However, according to Thomson Reuters, nearly $14 trillion worth of complex-securitized products were created, predominantly on top of them, precisely because leveraged funds abetted every step of their production and dispersion. Thus, at the height of federal payouts in July 2009, the government had put up $17.5 trillion to support Wall Street's pyramid Ponzi system, not $1.4 trillion." ("Shadow Banking", Nomi Prins, The American Prospect)
Shadow banking emerged so that large cash-heavy financial institutions would have a place to park their money short-term and get the best possible return. For example, let's say Intel is sitting on $25 billion in cash. It can deposit the money with a financial intermediary, such as Morgan Stanley, in exchange for collateral (aka MBS or ABS), and earn a decent return on its money. But if a problem arises and the quality of the collateral is called into question, then the banks (Morgan Stanley, in this case) are forced to take bigger and bigger haircuts which can send the system into a nosedive. That's what happened in the summer of 2007. Investors discovered that many of the subprimes were based on fraud, so billions of dollars were quickly withdrawn from money markets and commercial paper, and the Fed had to step in to keep the system from collapsing.
Regulations are put in place to see that the system runs smoothly and to protect the public from fraud. But banking without rules is more profitable, so industry leaders and lobbyists have tried to block the efforts at reform. And, they have largely succeeded. Dodd-Frank – the financial reform act -- is riddled with loopholes and doesn't really resolve the central issues of loan quality, additional capital, or risk retention. Banks are still free to issue bogus mortgages to unemployed applicants with bad credit, just as they were before the meltdown. And, they can still produce securitized debt instruments without retaining even a meager 5 per cent of the loan's value. (This issue is still being contested) Also, government agencies cannot force financial institutions to increase their capital even though a slight downturn in the market could wipe them out and cause severe damage to the rest of the system. Wall Street has prevailed on all counts and now the window for re-regulating the system has passed.
President Barack Obama understands the basic problem, but he also knows that he won't be reelected without Wall Street's help. That's why he promised to further reduce "burdensome" regulations in the Wall Street Journal just two weeks ago. His op-ed was intended to preempt the release of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's (FCIC) report, which was expected to make recommendations for strengthening existing regulations. Obama torpedoed that effort by coming down on the side of big finance. Now, it's only a matter of time before another crash.
Here's an excerpt from a special report on shadow banking by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
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bench craft company
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
bench craft company
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
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bench craft company
bench craft company
Good morning Chiefs fans! A thank you to Joel and Chris for covering for me. Technology seems to hate me lately. Today's Kansas City Chiefs news covers a lot of topics: the national anthem, racial bias, Super Bowl odds, and pork. Enjoy.
CBS announced a number of changes today among the top management team for CBS News, with Jeff Fager taking over as chairman of the division, a newly created position. The company is also bringing in a new face, David Rhodes, ...
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
There is always a lot of talk about the different ways to make money online, including what tools you'd need, but what about the mental essentials? What about the mental hurdles you must overcome on a daily basis in order to earn the most money in the long run?
This article will attempt to clarify some of the essential mental roadblocks you must break down in order to successfully make money online.
¤ You need to be able to manage your time
Time-management is an essential skill for any online worker; without it, you will lose focus and begin to dip in your overall earnings. Make sure you're able to block out distractions and set times where you can work your best.
¤ You need to be ready to hustle for a sale
Making money online is just like any other business; you'll need to hustle a bit. You can't expect to sit back and have money rolling in, you'll need to get out there, make connections, ask for jobs and work your butt off to be successful.
¤ You need to be able to set goals and accomplish them
Goal setting is another mental factor when making money online because without a goal you will aimlessly do a task but not really have a purpose for doing so. Set a goal so you can stay motivated, focused and have an end in mind.
¤ You need to have passion for what you do
Trying to work an online job or business in an area that you really don't like will quickly burn you and bore you. This is the golden opportunity to earn a living from anywhere in the world; make sure you do something you're actually passionate about!
¤ You need to avoid the critics and keep working hard
Many people will try to break you down on your quest to make money online; they will tell you it's not possible or criticize your methods. Avoid the critics and just keep working; you'll be the one smiling in the end.
¤ You need to do your research
The internet isn't just a place to make money - it's the largest tool for information! Seek out information from round the web to research different ways to make money online, whether they are scams and tips to get started with each.
¤ You need to find a support system
Sometimes making money online can be a lonely profession when you're working by yourself. Try building a support system where you can pitch new ideas, gain motivation and inspiration from others within your group - it will help you keep going.
¤ Conclusion
There are, as you can see, a lot of mental essentials you must need in order to make money online. The actual work may be easy but when you have to do it on a daily basis and the only boss you have to look up to is yourself than you may lose focus over time.
Use these tips and tricks to integrate into your own mindset; be open to knowledge and advice from others and you will create a successful system to make money online.
