posted May 07, 2010 07:55 AM         

Doesn't it seem like every day when you turn on the news, something has either erupted or exploded?

The Crisis In Greece Presages The Arrival Of Uranus In Aries

The Greek riots are beyond spark at this point–they are starting to reach full tilt blaze. Of course, footage of what’s happening there and in places like Iceland are not found in great abundance in here in the US. No. we’re searching for the next big terror threat, packing SUV’s with fireworks and fertilizer. The Greek riots are significant to say the least. To understand why people are ****** , we need to look at why the Greeks are being charred like souvlaki over the naked flame of betrayal. Does the name Goldman Sachs ring a a bell?

In 2002, Goldman Sachs and Greece’s debt managers decided to pump life into the Greek economy. For those that are still living in the 19th Century, GNP and GDP are no longer what they seem to be or perhaps never were. Greece and nearly every other country in the first world cannot rely on it’s own resources and burgeoning industry (unless you happen to be Poland) to compete in the global economy. That’s where GS comes into play. To understand the murky world of currency and credit swaps, let use baseball as an analogy.

So let’s say you’re Mark McGwire and you had a good roid run with your pal Jose Canseco, but Jose is gone and your supplier is as well. Your back is betraying you and you are missing more games than you’re playing. You hook up with your juice pimping bro and start the cycle all over again. You hoist and lift. The next thing you know, you’re jacking balls just as juiced out of parks at an eye popping rate. You find yourself in a race to break Roger Maris’ seasonal home run record with Sammy Sosa (hey where did Sammy get his juice?). By the end of the season, you’re the next Babe Ruth and Sammy is your Cantinflas. The rest of the league knows what you’ve been up and knows that if they want to compete, get big contracts, save their jobs, they gotta hit that juice as well. Barry Bonds, as fine a natural hitter as the game has ever seen (and a vain Leo at that) watched McGwire steal the spotlight and said, “damn!”

Barry got hooked up with Victor Conte, former bass player of “Tower Of Power.” Tower of Power? Can you believe that? You can’t make this stuff up. Anyway he was peddling roids to guys like Niner defensive tackle, Dana Stubblefield, who parlayed his performance into a NFL defensive player of the year award and a massive contract with The Redskins and sprinter, Tim Montgomery. The next thing you know, Barry is hitting home runs into McCovey Cove and going after both Maris AND Aaron. Even little guys like Marvin Benard got into the act, yanking 20+ jacks out of the yard and scoring a big contract as well.

You see, just playing well, executing, sound fundamentals, regular weight training, all that was not enough anymore. To compete, you had to stick a needle in your ass and pump up the volume.

Goldman Sachs are the Victor Conte of the global economy. If Italy is playing with currency swaps (and they were) and scoring big cash, then why not Spain, or Portugal or Greece? Once somebody crosses the line, that line will be crossed by everyone else, because if it isn’t, a dreadful panic that you’ll get left behind sets in.

So Greece took the plunge and started swapping. Here’s how it worked:

“Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date. Such transactions are part of normal government refinancing. Europe’s governments obtain funds from investors around the world by issuing bonds in yen, dollar or Swiss francs. But they need euros to pay their daily bills. Years later the bonds are repaid in the original foreign denominations. But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.

This credit disguised as a swap didn’t show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat’s reporting rules don’t comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. “The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps,” says a German derivatives dealer. At some point Greece will have to pay up for its swap transactions, and that will impact its deficit. The bond maturities range between 10 and 15 years. Goldman Sachs charged a hefty commission for the deal and sold the swaps on to a Greek bank in 2005.” (Spiegel Online)

The deficit between the fictional credit and the actual debt/currency, plus any accrued interest is completely radioactive to Greece now. For all intents and purposes, they are bankrupt. Apparently, Spain and Portugal are not far behind due to similar leveraging and now hemorrhaging.

What we’re seeing here is not dissimilar to what happened after “The Treaty Of Versailles” where crippling sanctions and reparations were foisted upon the German people at the end of WWI, which in essence bankrupted them and created the economic and social void, which led to the rise of The Third Reich. Here, we’re seeing something similar. The sanctions and debt regulation being imposed on the people of Greece are beyond the pale. They are being forced by The IMF in coercion with their so-called leadership to to take massive salary cuts and forego most, if not all of their pensions. They are ****** and they’ve only just begun to vent their anger.

What’s fascinating about watching these protests is the fierce, thrust and parry of the protestors front lines, brandishing small, red flags in the face of the riot police, who are no doubt just as annoyed as the protestors themselves, since they are having their salaries whacked as well. You can almost see the hesitancy in the approach of the riot police at times, not wanting to hit or hurt their fellow Grecians. It’s a fascinating war dance. But unfortunately, it will only get hotter. Three bank employees have died in the protests and as always, we need to be wary of agent provocateurs in any setting such as this.

All of this is leading up to the shift of Uranus in Pisces to Uranus in Aries. During the last days of Uranus in Pisces, we witnessed the explosion at sea of the TransOcean/BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico as well as the bursting of a central water main in Boston that threatened water supplies and safety in that city over the weekend. Just prior to a planetary shift, especially one as major as this, there seems to be a denouement to the activity of that particular alignment during the last days of a planet in a sign–the intensity gets dialed up.

And now the rioting, a presage to Uranus in Aries begins to foment.

If Greece falls, either through monetary failure or internal strife and prolonged disruption, then the next domino will begin to fall, since the global economy is trip-wired like a complex explosive, where one bang triggers the next and so on in a hyper-destructive-sequence, a chain reaction.

It’s a device that’s been set to go off and we’re now witnessing the first of many explosions.

When we look at mythology and astrology, we reference the Greeks and Romans at great length. While we call Mars, “Mars” the Roman god of war and Venus, “Venus” the Roman goddess of beauty, we assign Aries to Mars. Aries of course was Mars’ correlative in Greece. Aries is the first sign and initiates the wheel into action. Aries is “Greek.” Thus, as Uranus approaches Aries, it is little more than ironic that Greece is channeling the fury of this deity within it’s own borders. My guess is that what we will see is the ritual reenactment of each great civilization and their eventual fall through the oncoming economic crisis and the arrival of Uranus in Aries.

In The West, it started with the fall of Greece, then Rome, then the dark ages, then the rise of England and it’s eventual fall to the US (the public version), and ultimately the fall of The USA itself, the culmination of the last deadly charge on the global economic domino bomb. We’ll witness the reenactment of the fall of each great epoch in real time, drawing history as we know it to a close.

Ritual theater.

Riots, anarchy, the entire collapse of the world economy are all very, very, real possibilities. Amidst the chaos a void will arise, just like it did in Germany and of course it was the bankers and their outright betrayal of the German people at Versailles that Hitler seized as his lightning rod, the dual bolts of Sowelu, The SS. All of this . . . and I mean all of it, is some form of controlled chaos and it will be allowed to foment to the point where hopelessness and fear run rampant. In the void of natural order, something and quite possibly someone will emerge to “save us.” In Uranus in Aries, we will likely witness “The Age Of The False Savior,” entering onto the world stage, bringer of light to our darkest times. Together, The Ram and The Goat will reign supreme in the heavens. If that’s not a clear sign of what’s to come, I’m not sure what is.

posted May 07, 2010 07:48 PM         

I found this:

Despite recent government reports that China's holdings of U.S. Treasury debt declined during the second half of last year, the Asian economic giant almost certainly owns far more Treasury securities than official statistics indicate.

After peaking at $801.5 billion, China's holdings of U.S. Treasury securities declined to $755.4 billion at the year's end, dropping the communist power into the position of second-largest holder of Treasury debt after Japan's $768.8 billion, official government data reveal.

But these numbers don't tell the whole story.

"The U.S. Treasury data almost certainly understate Chinese holdings of our government debt because [the U.S. figures] do not reveal the ultimate country of ownership when [debt] instruments are held through an intermediary in another jurisdiction," Simon Johnson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan forum established by Congress in 2000 to monitor the security implications of the U.S. economic relationship with China.

Mr. Johnson told the commission last week that "a great deal" of last year's $170 billion increase in Treasury holdings by the United Kingdom "may be due to China placing offshore dollars in London-based banks" and then using the funds to purchase Treasury debt.

Mr. Johnson, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, estimated that China owns about $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, or nearly half the $2.37 trillion stock of Treasury debt held by "foreign official" owners.

The amount of U.S. debt held by China is even higher than that, said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University.

Under the widely held assumption that 70 percent of China's $2.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves is invested in dollar-denominated bonds, Mr. Prasad told the commission that China probably holds about $1.7 trillion in U.S. government debt.

That would include the more than $400 billion in debt issued by U.S. government agencies, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose obligations are liabilities of the U.S. government, Mr. Prasad said.

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A Redux of The Great Depression?

Uranus, the planet of change, moves into the sign of Aries (ruled by Mars, the planet of action) from May 27, 2010-May 14, 2018, making change and evolution more rapid and unpredictable. The last time Uranus was in Aries was during the Great Depression, and before that, it was in the time of the gold rush of the mid 1800's. Both events revolved around changes in wealth. The sign of Aries represents new beginnings, catalytic events and forward movement. This could represent a new beginning in terms of our monetary system or it could be a breakdown of the old ways of doing business.