Are Banks going Belly Up?

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/TheCradleMedia/s...57722906771457

https://thecradle.co/article-view/24...-bank-official

$51 billion lost by Lebanese depositors since 2019: Bank official

The Secretary-General of the Association of Lebanese Banks, Fadi Khalaf, revealed that approximately $51 billion of Lebanese depositors’ funds have been lost since late 2019, Sputnik reported on 16 May.

While speaking about Lebanon’s banking crisis and ongoing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Khalaf stated that it has been “forty-three months, during which depositors lost fifty-one billion dollars of their deposits, and the state is still discussing projects, then withdrawing some of them and reformulating others, and if some laws are approved, the IMF is dissatisfied with them.”

He said that the $51 billion of depositors’ funds were dispensed as loans granted to the private sector or to the government to fund the purchases of imported goods, including fuel.

Funds loaned to the government came from mandatory bank reserves, which are hard currency deposits parked by local lenders at the central bank. These reserves represent a percentage of customer deposits and are usually not drawn upon except in exceptional circumstances, with the correct legal permission.

The secretary-general of the Association of Banks mourned what he described as “politics” that “preferred to transform the Lebanese economy into something resembling communist economies, yet the state did not even respect the concepts of communism, so the bulk of what was squandered went to the pockets of powerful beneficiaries [in Lebanon] and abroad more than to the people.”

In March, the IMF warned that the government must stop borrowing from the central bank and that its failure to implement reforms had exacerbated the country’s economic and banking crises.

“One would have expected more in terms of implementation and approval of legislation” related to reforms, IMF mission chief Ernesto Rigo told a news conference, while noting “very slow” progress. “Lebanon is in a very dangerous situation,” he added, in what Reuters described as “unusually frank remarks.”

Lebanon signed an agreement with the IMF nearly one year ago but has not met the conditions to secure a $3 billion aid package.

Without implementing reforms, Lebanon “will be mired in a never-ending crisis,” the IMF warned in a written statement.

Since 2019, the lira has lost 98 percent of its value against the US dollar, leading to crippling inflation, mass poverty, and a wave of emigration from the small Mediterranean nation.

The crisis erupted after decades of reckless spending and corruption among Lebanon’s elite, some of whom led banks that lent heavily to the state, including billionaire and former prime minister Saad Hariri.

Losses in the financial system are estimated at more than $70 billion, the majority of which were accrued at the central bank, which borrowed dollars from private banks at unusually high-interest rates to maintain an unsustainable peg of the lira to the dollar.

“No more borrowing from the central bank,” Rigo said, while warning that Lebanon should move towards a floating exchange rate based on market forces rather than maintaining multiple rates determined by the central bank.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

https://twitter.com/TheCradleMedia/s...03490627420167

https://thecradle.co/article-view/24...ral-bank-chief

France orders arrest of Lebanon central bank chief

French prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Lebanon’s Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh, Arab News reported on 16 May.

The warrant comes after Salameh failed to attend a court hearing in Paris. Prosecutors intended to press preliminary fraud charges, court documents and two sources said.

Salameh has attempted to avoid arrest and has failed to show up for court hearings in his native Lebanon in the past.

In March, the Lebanese Ministry of Justice asked the judiciary to arrest Salameh and his assistant Marianne Majid Howayek, as well as to seize their properties and freeze their bank accounts.

The request came after Salameh was absent from a hearing held on 15 March by a local judge along with European investigators, who were tasked to investigate charges against the central bank governor, including “bribery, forgery, money laundering, illicit enrichment, and tax evasion.”

In March 2020, France, Germany, and Luxembourg seized properties and froze assets belonging to Salameh worth 120 million euros in a major operation linked to money laundering.

The accusations stem from the activities of a brokerage firm Salameh and his brother established, Forry Associates, that took some $330 million in fees for brokering the sale of Lebanese government bonds between 2002 and 2015, $200 million of which was allegedly transferred to Salameh’s personal accounts with various Lebanese banks.

The sale of these government bonds was at the heart of a banking Ponzi scheme established by Salameh that became unsustainable and finally began to collapse in October 2019.

This resulted in a financial crisis that caused the value of the Lebanese lira to crash by some 98 percent, wiping out the life savings of many and causing widespread poverty as prices of everything, including essential goods, skyrocketed. Some estimates of losses for Lebanese bank depositors have amounted to roughly $111 billion.

[halcyon026]

Here's a dataset on FDIC failed banks since 2000.

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/nidzsharma/failed-bank

[Ravenlocke]

https://twitter.com/dana916/status/1685121275881021440

[onawah]

Is the US the Next USSR? John Michael Chambers Drops Intel
7/30/23
https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/is-...s-drops-intel/

"I had a whole news show planned for Friday night but then, American Media Periscope founder, John Michael Chambers showed up and we had a conversation, instead.

I begin by talking about Dr Joseph Mercola, who was de-banked by Rockefeller-owned Chase Bank. Chase not only shut down Dr Mercola’s bank account but they also shut down the accounts of his employees AND their family members! The Rockefellers apparently want to transform the United States into North Korea.
https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/dr-...ndemic-crisis/

Mercola had already been de-banked by another institution a few years ago and he was threatened to such a degree; that he would be sued and that his web domain that he’s operated since 1997 would be seized, that he was forced to remove 26 years of content from his website. He no longer leaves posts up there for longer than 48 hours, having now moved his blog to Substack. That he’s been de-banked again – in addition to his employees and their family members – is a signal to him that the Satanic Deep State is getting ready to launch a new attack that makes COVID look like a walk in the park.

John Michael Chambers is no stranger to de-banking and de-platforming; he was de-platformed by all of the social media companies and he was de-banked by PayPal, so I wanted to get his 40,000 foot view of this second de-banking of Dr Mercola.

We’ve also all been hearing lots of rumors about the imminent collapse of the US dollar and/or the imminent collapse of the entire Western banking system and how everybody in the so-called “Free World” will soon be effectively de-banked.

The Federal Reserve System has announced that their FedNow service has gone live. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newse...r20230720a.htm
Greg Reese made a report about how the FedNow will be the transaction processing system for the Federal Reserve’s programmable Central Bank Digital Currency.
https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/the...dc-this-month/

Since John is a financial guy, I wanted to get his views on these rumors and developments and where he thinks things are headed financially, politically, geopolitically, etc over the next 24 months.

John talks about how the Federal Government of the US is about to collapse, just as the Soviet Union did but that this doesn’t
mean that the US dollar ends – same way that the Russian Ruble didn’t end. Like the Ruble, the USD will get severely pummeled for a while but it will survive."


Source: https://www.rumble.com/video/v30frr8/?pub=ijro7

[Ratszinger]

I think the citizenry of the USA is tapped out for credit so badly they simply had no choice but to open the border for an inflow of new creditors that they can loan $ to so the FED can continue to print new money.

Most Americans cannot come up with $400 dollar cash for an emergency according to new reports being read by talking heads on TV local channels lately. Earlier I saw an article saying most US citizens had two or more maxed out credit card debt with the av. balance owed of get this? $80,000 and that is not even including the mortgages, sometimes double and triple ones, and insuracnce a major bill these days. Then we have car and lease payments, school for children or college, some have adult children living at home again and have inherited some fo their bills.

Then we have utilities, groceries and dealing with inflation and by the time we get all that and water and trash paid for there is hardly any left pay check to pay check. As I've pointed out elsewhere here, when Rome was tapped out the same way for cash and credit they freed the slaves to save the empire. For a time that worked until those slaves ruined their credit and cash situations also and then the empire began crumbling. We in the US were facing that and in our usury system of money creation that cannot happen. So we didn't have slaves to free, we opened the borders.

So due to the fact that Americans have wide and far mismanaged their credti and cash situations so badly and still do so that when they can't pay anymore bills and lose their home, have their cars taken and are kicked to the streets they have new clean slates to loan money to that can pay the bills and isn't strapped in debt and a cash flow situation to move right into them and pick up where they left off. And best of all unlike Rome where there was a limit to the number of new creditors for us it's an endless stream. So when the new residents mismanage their situation the same as the first did they have new to replace them over and over and over to infinity.

As far as the Federal Reserve and your surviving banks are concerned those immigrants are more important to them than the tapped out law abiding native citizenry!

[shaberon]

Posted by Ratszinger (here)
As I've pointed out elsewhere here, when Rome was tapped out the same way for cash and credit they freed the slaves to save the empire. For a time that worked until those slaves ruined their credit and cash situations also and then the empire began crumbling. We in the US were facing that and in our usury system of money creation that cannot happen. So we didn't have slaves to free, we opened the borders.

Precisely because Rome and the U. S. refuse to participate in Debt Jubilee.

That is how Babylon and Greece managed it.

Here, we are so much not supposed to know about it, that even mentioning it, all you get is blank stares.

Otherwise, yes, all that happens is human churn with no regard for widespread misery, coupled with the fact that most of the perpetrators have easy escape routes, i. e. multiple homes around the world.

[norman]

Yet, the banks seem to feel like they have enough power, still, do the de-banking tactic.

How does that fit in ?

People need banking as a payments service now like never before. Elon Musk is probably feeling a bum rush from them to get his X service fully functional fast enough, not unlike how Q and Trump bum rushed the pandemic etc.

Net result, one way or another, we are being pushed into the arms of services that handle the parts of 'banking' that we cannot function without.

[Bill Ryan]

This fascinating interview with Alex from Reporterfly (which I was NOT well-equipped to fully understand) was aired live on The Duran yesterday. This might be the best thread for it that we have, though it's not about the banks going belly up: it's about everything going belly up — starting with the imminent implosion of the derivative market, possibly triggered by the rise in natural gas prices this winter.

The market spot price of natural gas today is $3.12. When it nears $4, Alex states, as he suspects it will do quite soon, everything will come down.

We've seen many 'sky-is-falling' warnings about the precarious state of the global financial system, but this video is so apocalyptic all the others pale in comparison. It'd be easy to dismiss, if it didn't all sound so very serious and plausible.

Derivatives and the Coming Collapse

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sAErqW7vj7Y

[onawah]

(Banks in China are going belly up already. Just a few signs of it, among many):

Over $150 Billion Flowed Out of China, with Hong Kong as a Hub for Underground Banking
China Observer
292K subscribers
37,865 views 10/17/23

"Under the banner of "common prosperity" promoted by Xi Jinping, China is witnessing a massive capital outflow. Due to its unique position, Hong Kong has become a transit hub for the wealth exodus of China's elites.
On September 29, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority announced that renminbi deposits in Hong Kong increased by 6.0% in August, reaching 962.5 billion yuan (about 134 billion US dollars) at the end of August.
On the other hand, the Hong Kong foreign exchange fund, which supports the stability of the Hong Kong dollar's exchange rate and essentially serves as the government's fiscal reserve, decreased by 35.8 billion Hong Kong dollars (approximately 4.57 billion US dollars) in August.
This indicates the undeniable capital outflow from Hong Kong, and the scale is quite significant."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fTylQ4ATjF8

***********

(Local governments in China are in deep debt. They try to compensate by taxing and ticketing the populace more. )

Shocking Truth Behind ‘Great Escape’ In Changchun; 6 Charts Reveal China's Mountain of Local Debt
China Truths
28.6K subscribers
10/17/23

"Shocking! Changchun Suddenly Stages A ‘Great Escape,’ The Truth Leaves People Completely Stunned
6 Charts Reveal China’s Local Government Debt Problems
Iphone 15 Sales In China Are Worse Than Iphone 14
Another Economic Problem For China: Commercial Real Estate Downturn

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oNoZ8yNc3T8

***********
What This $100B Ghost City Reveals About China’s Property Crisis | WSJ
The Wall Street Journal
4.76M subscribers
Sep 11, 2023

"Country Garden, once seen as one of China’s most stable property developers, is now struggling financially, leaving the future of unfinished megadevelopments like the $100 billion Forest City in doubt.

The real estate project in southern Malaysia was planned to house around 700,000 people, but only 9,000 people live there with most units left empty. So why are Chinese real estate companies like the Evergrande Group and Sunac falling into financial distress?

WSJ explains why China’s real estate developers are in the red.

0:00 Forest City
0:48 China’s real estate market
2:56 What’s next? "

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D0PxRxwTa50

(Another BIG problem not mentioned here is that typically Chinese construction is deplorably shabby and unsafe, actually falling apart soon after building. )

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
This fascinating interview with Alex from Reporterfly (which I was NOT well-equipped to fully understand) was aired live on The Duran yesterday. This might be the best thread for it that we have, though it's not about the banks going belly up: it's about everything going belly up — starting with the imminent implosion of the derivative market, possibly triggered by the rise in natural gas prices this winter.

The market spot price of natural gas today is $3.12. When it nears $4, Alex states, as he suspects it will do quite soon, everything will come down.

We've seen many 'sky-is-falling' warnings about the precarious state of the global financial system, but this video is so apocalyptic all the others pale in comparison. It'd be easy to dismiss, if it didn't all sound so very serious and plausible.

Derivatives and the Coming Collapse

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sAErqW7vj7Y

~~~

Here's the price of natural gas, as of the last week. It spiked well over $4 a couple days ago, and is now hovering steadily around that level.

If Alex's confident prediction is anywhere close (see above highlighted in red), that suggests that the collapse may quite soon now be on its way.



Edit to add:

The year-to-date chart, showing the steady increase towards $4.00:

[Michel Leclerc]

Thank you for this, Bill. It is of the utmost importance.

***

In this context, I would like to share a little anecdote.

One of my communication consulting company’s early customers used to be a local Belgian bank, which at around the millennium changeover became a local branch of one of the larger international banks.

At the end of the 90s I was entrusted with a new coachee, who had a rather mysterious job description – and, more mysteriously even, occupied a top-floor office right above the CEO’s office. We will call him Mr X. (Allow me to anonymise or “white-lie-ise” a few elements for everybody’s benefit.)

Mr X was German-speaking and I was tasked to bring his French (which was quite good) up to perfect “international” levels, using our celebrated “turbo” techniques for high-end-IQ-ers. (Playing not a language teaching, but a language learning coaching role.)

His rectangular office was at the building’s angle; two sides were inner walls, two sides glass windows. Mr X sat with his back to the wider inner wall, facing the beautiful external city landscape, and me, who sat opposite him. Behind his back, occupying almost the entire inner wall (maybe six to eight meters wide) were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. As I sat I could not help scanning the books – it is quite customary to encounter, in a top executive team member’s office, mind you: five books, or ten books, or maybe even twelve – almost all devoted to the latest management consulting mantra, waiting to be pulped as soon as the next craze floods the world of keeping “business”.

I looked at him (he was middle-aged), noticing that he had been studying me. He smiled and said, with a twinkle in his eyes (this is not me attempting to tell a story, I really noticed it at the time): “Quite a number of books, is it not, Mr Leclerc?”

Probably he had correctly guessed the approximate truth, i.e. that at our modest offices, and at my own and my partner’s homes there were similar walls, and hence even my answer:

“Well, I am familiar with such quantities of books, but not with this library’s subject matter..”

— because they were, as far as I could see, all devoted to finance and higher mathematics..

“They are indeed rather specialised,”, he said, and then presented himself for the next 10 to 15 minutes…

***

What he said amounted to the following.

He was a top-level mathematician and finance theorist, and actually worked not for our customer, but for the international bank that our customer was a branch of.

“Do you know what derivatives are?”, he asked me. I understandably did not.

And then he explained it, briefly, in a way that I could understand probably, basically saying that they were bundles of bad debts being “ensured” (he used the same term as the derivative trader does in the conference) through selling them on another, “derived”, market — as in the world of reinsurance, which I was a bit more familiar with – but with the caveat that they were not “bad debts” of final customers, as when you and I are defaulting on our mortgage payments, but gigantic bundles of bad debts at the level of middle-sized to major banks and insurance companies, trading banks etc. One might say: Tower-of-Babel like, or ziggurat-like bundles becoming a new product, which itself at its level enters into a new bundle, which then etc.

I then probably asked for a confirmation of my obvious supposition that he was involved with this “new kind of financial instrument”.

“Yes”, he said, “I developed it – with a few other specialists – from other major financial institutions – in Europe, in America.”

I knew what a Ponzi scheme was, and may have asked him something like:

“Where does it end? Is there a final level, a ceiling to this derivation?”

To which he replied that no, there was not really an end to it – “at least not of a financial nature” – we now know what that means, don’t we? – “and that is why I am here”.

Again, I do not intend to write a nice little story. It was literally what he said.

He explained (I paraphrase) that he had withdrawn from the developing team “because he felt, and was, unable to contribute to solving the issues raised by the financial instruments concerned” – and added in the best French he could muster:

“so they decided to park me here” — park was his word (garer).. –, “so that I could devote my abilities to a different kind of study and development”.

Was he being ironical? Anyhow, they had bought him off because he knew an embarrassing lot. Financially safe for the rest of his life – in exchange for his silence.

***

His silence. But then he had talked to me. Being the confessor has been the role I have quite a few times had to play in my life. However, when the coachee confesses the things that really gnaw at his/her soul, the relationship with the coach changes.

This was not different. The conversation switched to the planning of our mutual commitment – but the assignment never materialised. Requests for an agenda could not be met by his secretary :“you know Michel, Mr. X is very busy, I have not seen him for more than a month now..” I did not see him anymore, nowhere, not in the cafetaria, not in his office. From where I could have scanned the office interrior, I was unable to see whether the wall was still covered with rows and rows of specialist books.

Maybe he had only needed to tell his story once, and then could disappear. Where to, and how?

I told this story to friends. No one seemed to understand the implications.


p.s.: I added/modified a few words, to get closer to the truth of what I recall

[norman]

Posted by Michel Leclerc (here)
No one seemed to understand the implications.

The room was bugged ?

[Michel Leclerc]

...no
...?
You recall that when derivatives became a cocktail party talk topic (at least a few years later), admiration for the ingeniousness of those "financial wizards" was always in the mix – warning signs became predominant at about… what? 2006, 2007?

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/UnicusResearch/status/1874866620734341120

Text:

2. According to a latest S&P report, the banking industry's auto loan delinquency ratio rose to 3.13% from 3.05% in the previous quarter and 2.95% in the prior-year period. Delinquent auto loans totaled $16.18 billion, up from $15.81 billion at June 30 and $15.89 billion at Sept. 30, 2023.

https://x.com/UnicusResearch/status/1874866628204036413

https://x.com/UnicusResearch/status/1874866634596499678

https://x.com/UnicusResearch/status/1874866640049012904

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/NewRulesGeo/status/1879529793206800710

https://x.com/NewRulesGeo/status/1879529800936620204

https://x.com/NewRulesGeo/status/1879529808553713956

https://x.com/NewRulesGeo/status/1879529816485155016

https://x.com/NewRulesGeo/status/1879529824689287356

[shaberon]

Posted by Michel Leclerc (here)
No one seemed to understand the implications.

Perhaps along the lines of "unintended consequences"?

That's my issue with most of the brilliant schemes that are cooked up behind closed doors. They have a tendency to "win the battle. lose the war".

It's why I recommend the material from Michael Hudson. He designed Bretton Woods. It's very similar to what you just described, except it is in New York City with David Rockefeller, and goes on far longer.

It's very similar to treaties by map-makers and other types of imposed conditions.

The man who has the power today is too Stupid to make a better future.

"Derivatives" are a third- or fourth-generation by-product of "imaginary finance". Today, it's "re-hypothecated derivatives".

What is this, but the sin of profit and gain, the heart of Capitalism. It's an artificial process, opened in London, 1694, which is terrified of you breathing a word of "alternatives", such as any other economic system, like transformed China in about twenty years. We have to demonize them, or they will call out all the phony stuff.

I'm already beat to nothing, soaring energy costs will Germanize the rest of the "bloc", and yes, we believe this is the main thing that will make Americans revolt. Meaning that they will steal and destroy everything.

Germany has been stagnant since the American occupation. The only growth is immigration. The only progress is the kind posted above.

After all, it was just a milch cow to feed Israel, and since that sum was paid in about sixty years, there is no need for it.