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REMINDER: All investment, economics, and finance related material now appears at the new IaconoResearch.com. For the time being at least, this has become a personal blog covering a variety of mostly unrelated topics.

BofA Automated Teller Truth Machines

On January 16, 2012, in Banks, Our Culture, by Tim

The Understory reported that the Rainforest Action Network transformed about 85 Bank of America ATMs in San Francisco into Automated “Truth” Machines the other day using the overlay sticker shown below, one more sign that, though still quite popular in Washington D.C., big banks are increasingly unpopular in the rest of the country.

On a related note, according to this McClatchy report, BofA and other too-big-to-fail banks have settled on their pick for President this fall – Mitt Romney. Employees at the big banks gave the Romney campaign $600,000 through September of last year, dwarfing the $200,000 sent to the bankers’ second choice – President Barack Obama – virtually ensuring that there will be little change to the status quo, big-bank-wise, until 2017 or later.

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Look at What Central Banks Have Done

On January 10, 2012, in Asia, Banks, Europe, by Tim

I’ve been meaning to dig through the European Central Bank’s balance sheet data in order to better understand how it has grown so fast in recent months (as indicated in red below) and why the Germans aren’t up in arms about it.

Someday I surely will, though there doesn’t seem to be any real urgency since the recent spurt of money printing is not likely to end anytime soon. Between now and then, this graphic from The Economist’s Central banks: Crazy aunt on the loose will have to do.

It is fairly remarkable to stop and think how far we’ve come since the world’s central bankers saved us (and, of course, the biggest and most dangerous banks) from sure annihilation three years ago. Who would have ever imagined back in 2005 or 2006 that nearly the entire globe would have “turned Japanese” by now.

Who imagines today that the chart above left might not change for another 10 or 20 years?

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Occupy the Federal Reserve?

On December 28, 2011, in Banks, Our Culture, by Tim

According to this item at Occupy Wall Street News, the African-American faith community will join forces with Occupy Wall Street to protest economic injustice on Martin Luther King Day next month and they intend to “Occupy the Federal Reserve” in up to twelve cities across the country where regional central bank offices are located.

There’s more than a little bit of irony in the event also being referred to as “Occupy the Dream”, that is, just two years in advance of the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Fed, what, to the biggest of the banks back then was a “dream” of a monopoly over the industry at a time when smaller regional banks were rapidly gaining market share.

So far, it’s worked out pretty well for them, if not for the rest of us.

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End of the Road

On December 27, 2011, in Banks, Our Culture, by Tim

Before stumbling upon the trailer, I hadn’t heard anything about the upcoming documentary End of the Road by Tim Delmastro, but, it appears to have real potential, what with the growing realization that all the bailout efforts from a few years ago simply kicked the can down the road and that, someday, that road will come to an end.

The film is basically a compilation of interviews with eleven individuals, most of the names being familiar to readers of this blog including G Edward Griffin
, Jim Puplava, James Turk, Jim Rickards, Peter Schiff, Eric Sprott, and Bill Murphy.

My guess is that the Federal Reserve, fiat money, and gold come up quite frequently.

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Kyle Bass on CNBC

On December 15, 2011, in Banks, Europe, by Tim

In a CNBC video that, apparently, had such demand earlier in the day that it was impossible to watch (at least I couldn’t), Kyle Bass of Hayman Capital talks about the inevitability of a breakup of the European monetary union.

He’s also not very hopeful about China as he discussed with BNN (see here and here).

BTW – Is it just me, or are those CNBC sound effects when they change charts just silly?

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When Guarantees are Not Loans

On December 7, 2011, in Banks, by Tim

Since Bloomberg’s  Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress article appeared last week, apparently a lot of people (including The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart) have been going around saying that the nearly $8 trillion in loans and guarantees made by the Fed were actually loans, when anyone who’s seen a chart like the one below would know immediately that this was not the case – loans at the crisis peak were under $2 trillion.

Not that a little under $2 trillion in newly printed money to bail out the big banks is all that much better than just under $8 trillion, but, it’s important to get the facts straight. As you might conclude yourself by perusing the many items in the previous links post, the Fed did a good job by not naming Bloomberg in their letter to Congress and addressing criticism of Fed emergency lending in general so that they could lump Bloomberg’s report (which, was not in error) along with the rest of them, many of which were in error.

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