69ers – not an out of state football team
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) — European banks turning to their governments to raise required capital could trigger a downward spiral of declining sovereign-debt prices and further losses for the lenders.
The European banks faced with dwindling profits and unable to tap capital markets may be forced to seek government help. About 70 percent of the capital requirement falls on lenders in Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal, countries struggling to convince the world they can pay their debts.
“If governments put money in their banks, their sovereign debt will suffer, exacerbating their problems,” said Karel Lannoo, “Then the banks’ losses will rise because they hold the government debt. That’s a vicious cycle. It’s hard to know which one to stabilize first, the sovereign bonds or the banks.
It’s an incestuous sixty nine with Govts lending to their banks while the banks are lending to their Govts simultaneously. This is fine and dandy (some may say enjoyable) as long as it lasts. Party’s over when someone goes bust and the other is left to clean up the mess.
A call to arms
I think a lot of folks in this country have entirely too much trust is our policy makers. Unfortunately, the unwashed masses hold their elected (bought off) officials in such blind revelry that these polititians can nearly get away with seemingly anything they wish – as long as it is spun correctly. It is my opinion that our politicians will never make the correct decision if it is a tough decision – regardless if it is in the countries best long term interest.
I wish we were all able to discern the ideals of leadership with the actions of criminals. Regardless of what we wish, our governments rarely if ever do the right thing or fight for the common man.
The below is a little strong, but if we keep down the path were on, folks will think more and more like this guy.
Author unknown:
“bureaucracies almost inevitably deteriorate into vehicles for the perpetuation of tyranny driven by the very worst of all stewards; elitist minorities with delusions of godhood.
Government is not nor has it ever been a foregone conclusion. Government is not concrete. It is not tangible. It is not the foundation of society. Instead, government is an abstraction; a fantastic dream of collectivist paternity in the face of individual hardship. Those who fear to wander the world on their own courage, strength, and merit, seek to elevate and empower “decision makers” to provide the comfort of limited liability. Through this process, governments are created out of thin air. All governmental authority is, thus, granted to those in positions of leadership.
To put it simply, there is no power over us but that which we give away, and no freedom lost, that cannot be regained.”
Until this reality is understood, consecutive generations of human beings will be left to wonder astonished at the endless atrocities of governments they thought they could trust. The truth is, no government, no matter how seemingly noble, deserves our full faith. All governments must be treated like storehouses of aging dynamite; with extreme vigilance, care, and suspicion, because, it is in the very nature of centralized power to sink towards destabilization and disaster.”
Apathy
“If one is free to walk about the streets, keep a job, have a drink, and settle in front of his television for hours on end, then what is there to be worried about? If he is not directly affected by the ill notions of men in far off banks and capitols, then why care at all? If the pain of government criminality only strikes people from “other” cultures, or other walks of life, why be concerned? For those who actually suffer from this brand of idiocy, I can only relate the unwarranted role that our government has assumed within our society and hope that they begin to realize how extraordinarily unsafe they really are. The injustices visited upon the few are invariably visited upon the many in time, especially where a rogue government resides.
The kind of intrusion by government allowed by the American people today is utterly astounding.
The Government Is A Body Elected By The People, Therefore They Are One And The Same
The only practical explanation I can think of for someone to actually believe this argument is overmedication. Despite what we’re all taught in middle school, our government as it exists today and has for many decades does not represent the will of the people. Two dominant political parties with cosmetic differences in rhetoric but nearly identical legislative platforms and voting records is not an expression of a legitimately free republic. The system revolves around corporate ideologies of globalization, not elections. Its beneficiaries are a limited and powerful fringe of society, not the masses. It is a rigged game. A fake battle between two gladiators owned by the same Caesar. To say that the people and the government are one-in-the-same is a gross error in judgment.
Governments over time become tools for control rather than defense, its directives lean towards self preservation, not the preservation of the public. That is to say, the government and those who directly benefit from its manipulation set policies that ensure their own safety, and no one else’s.
After researching and acknowledging the course our government has taken, the question then arises; what is the ultimate end result? Barring multiple miracles of a complete economic turnaround, full third party inclusion in our political structure, the deconstruction of the Federal Reserve, the decentralization of financial influence, the reintroduction of Constitutional insulation degraded since 2001, and the complete pullback of troops involved in ongoing wars in the Middle East, there can be only one outcome: total conflict.
We did not create this division. The American people did not ask to be targeted. Though we certainly have not done enough to fend off the numerous attacks upon our general liberties, the root of the problem still lay within the core of our government, the puppet leaders who abuse it, and the corporate elitists who use it as a staging ground for personal agendas. We have become two separate groups that cannot and will not be reconciled. The government is openly admitting this through legislation like the National Defense Authorization Act. Its time we did the same.
When two forces diametrically opposed exist upon the same ground at the same time with the same force of will, war erupts. A war of philosophies, a war of dissent, and sometimes, a war of weapons. As unsettling as that might sound, we must take solace in the fact that we at least fight for what is honest. If every American must conform to the twisted path our government has chosen, or be branded an ‘enemy combatant”, then may we all become domestic threats in our own backyard.”
So easy a caveman can do it.
Print print print and print all of our problems away. Everybody wants Europe to print and buy sovereign debt (quantitative easing) – except Germany
Hows about a credible plan for growth instead of the same old tune – Capital is miss-allocated via shit loans, bank/Govt insolvency – but no default, no de-leveraging but more more printing and more bail outs…
Hussman- “What we have increasingly observed over the past decade is nothing but the gradual destruction of the ability of the financial markets to allocate capital for the benefit of future growth. By preventing the natural discipline of the markets to impose losses on poor stewards of capital, and to impose interest rates high enough to force debtors to allocate the capital usefully, the world’s policy makers are increasingly wrecking the prospects for long-term economic growth. The world’s standard of living (what we can consume for the work we do) is intimately tied to its productivity (what we can produce for the work we do). That productivity requires our scarce savings to be allocated to productive physical capital, and to productive human capital (primarily education).” Nietzsche famously said “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” The corollary is “What constantly rescues me makes me weaker.” The world will only stop looking for bailouts when policy makers stop handing them out.” No discipline. Market expectation of central banks willingness to calm waters (raise assets prices) leaves policy makers with little choice but to print print print for fear of the instability created by not doing so.
Faith in the widely held view that money can be created from nothing and used to solve all financial problems needs desperately to be proven wrong.
And what happens if inflation picks up?? Will central banks continue to print? Well, yes they will. Once you start it’s very difficult to reverse coarse. Inflation may require selling assets – i.e govt debt. Not likely – instead you will see is a change to the method of how inflation is calculated…
I think Alex sent me this article: “The “End the Fed” movement appears to have a lot going for it these days. Its adherents now include both conservatives and supporters of the Occupy movement. Perhaps its most prominent proponent, Rep. Ron Paul, has garnered respectable poll numbers in the 2012 Republican presidential race and blasts the Federal Reserve at every opportunity. Plus, the succinct slogan fits well on protest signs. Removing the institution at the helm of U.S. monetary policy since 1913 seems unrealistic, though, and opponents consider it a crazy idea, even dangerous. However, proponents keep up the call, using an array of arguments from economic theory to promoting liberty. Whatever view one takes, ending the Fed is a goal much more easily stated than accomplished. But if Fed bashers got their wish, here are a few snapshots of how the country A New Monetary Standard Many advocates of ending the Fed argue for a return to the gold standard, which President Nixon ended in 1971, due in part to growing inflation, which was itself due to the costs of the Vietnam War. In addition, Nixon was concerned that Fort Knox contained only one third of the gold needed to back the dollars in foreign hands at that time. Under this system, the dollar’s value would once again be tied to the price of gold. Another option is to tie the U.S. dollar’s value to a basket of commodities. (I back the latter) End to Constant Inflation (for better or worse) Tying the dollar’s value to a commodity could very well moderate inflation. If the country moved to a strict gold standard, for example, the money supply would be bound to the supply of gold, so printing more dollars would require acquiring more bullion to back them, a big disincentive. This notion, of course, pleases proponents of controlled government spending. Though there might be short-term bouts of inflation and deflation, in the long run, prices could easily remain stable. There are, of course, caveats. For example, the country would be forced to periodically deal with the relatively unfamiliar territory of deflation. Returning to the gold standard in particular could make these problems worse. “The gold market can have very large movements within a day,” says Randall Kroszner, an economics professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and a former governor of the Federal Reserve System. He adds that during recent times of economic uncertainty, this added volatility would likely not have been helpful. Shock to the System A change to the U.S. currency system could potentially be destabilizing to foreign economies. Kroszner says that, as many countries tie their currencies’ values to the dollar, the potential deflationary effects of being linked to a gold standard would lead to more exchange-rate volatility. But advocates say the result would be more long-term stability for the global economic system. “I think it would be extremely positive, but the initial effect would be so bold as to be alarming,” says Judy Shelton, a senior fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for free markets. A Sad Day for Keynesians (good – I want them all to die painfully) Most Keynesian economists believe that expansionary monetary policy moves can boost economic growth. The U.S. has seen this at work most notably with the latest round of quantitative easing, known as QE2. The effectiveness of quantitative easing, especially balanced with associated inflation risks, have been hotly debated in recent years. But no more Fed would simply mean no more easing programs. Saving May Be More Attractive (see Bernanke is killing my mom) Shelton argues that the Fed, with its near-zero interest rates and contributions toward dollar devaluation, “makes a sucker out of a saver.” “You save money, you’ve got zero interest for saving it, and by the time you get it back out, it’s worth less,” she says. Without the Fed pushing interest rates low in hopes of stimulating the economy, says Shelton, saving money could be much more rewarding. Ending the Business Cycle This is how Ron Paul put it in his 2009 book, End the Fed. According to Paul and the Austrian school of economics, the booms, bubbles, and busts of business cycles are the result of meddling by central banks. But Shelton moderates this slightly, saying that the Fed has worsened the cycle’s negative effects: “Instead of smoothing out that cycle, [the Fed has] tended to exacerbate it,” generally providing too much credit. Ultimately, she says, this can lead to irrational exuberance. Whether or not this would be universally true, many economists do blame former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s policies for encouraging the housing bubble that sparked the economic crisis. The Fed has been around since 1913, so it seems difficult to envision exactly how a Fed-free monetary system would look. According to Kroszner, without a central bank, the U.S. might revert to the system in place before the creation of the Fed: one of private clearinghouses that would determine short-term liquidity, altering short-term interest rates. However, Kroszner points out, longer-term rates are already largely determined by supply and demand. A Fairer Banking Industry? “Fairness” is, of course, subjective, but Fed critics argue that two of the Federal Reserve’s chief functions–selling bonds and regulating banks–are at cross purposes and make for an unfair market. “If [the Fed] goes into a community bank and says, ‘We’re very uncomfortable with your loans to entrepreneurs…but we won’t penalize you at all if you lend to the govt – buy U.S. Treasury bonds,’ that’s a huge conflict of interest. That makes me uncomfortable, that the Fed has the inside track on the financial resources of the country,”
Not all regulation is good (there I said it)
Not all regulation is good.
Deregulation is often blamed for the financial collapse (see the OTC derivatives market) but certain regulations themselves were also to blame.
Take for example the Basel banking rules which require commercial banks to hold a specified amount of capital against certain kinds of assets. Under these rules in 2007 banks and investment banks were required to hold 8% capital against corporate loans, 4% against mortgages and 1.6% against mortgage-backed securities. (Capital is primarily equity, or cash). The riskier the asset the more capital banks needed to hold to secure against losses. The result was financial institutions held substantially more holdings of mortgage-backed securities – due to the lower capital requirements. Hmm, that didn’t turn out so great as banks and other financial institutions were encouraged by the Basel rules to hold the worst possible assets which collapsed with the U.S. housing bubble.
Banks are also incentivized to own sovereign debt – and look what’s going on in Europe and you wonder why Euro banks are doomed?
Think that can’t happen here??? US treasuries won’t be risk free for long me thinks…
To create financial stability regulators should encourage asset diversification (penalize concentration) advocate fair value accounting and limit the amount of leverage in the system. I don’t like the idea of governments dictating which assets financial companies should own.
No sir, I don’t like it.
British Gas
British Gas was formed in 1996 by denationalizing the state run gas company.
Since it’s inception, the stock price has increased 1200%
In the past two years BG has raised its prices by first 7% then 17%.
Customer dissatisfaction hovers at 50%
Profits are up 800%.
BG has just signed a large deal to export US fracked gas to the UK and abroad for a large profit. (Sorry, No lowering of US gas prices, or lowering of dependence on foreign energy.)
BG seeks to purchase the formerly national Irish gas company. (Bord Gáis is being sold as part of the new Irish austerity measures to pay off national debt.)
BG is fined (a paltry £1 million) for greenwashing. (actively involved in to promoting the perception that a company’s policies and products are environmentally friendly. They are not.)
BG’s CEO’s annual compensation is $44 million.
BG announced that they are laying off another 850 workers, adding to 110 from earlier this year (10% of workforce) in order to remain competitive in the marketplace.
Margaret Thatcher came repeatedly.
What’s a few billion dollars?
Must read http://www.hussman.net/wmc/wmc111024.htm
Perspective; A billion dollars effectively represents about $3.20 for every adult and child in the U.S. A trillion dollars represents about $3,200 dollars pehe person. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds basic medical research in cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, autism, and other conditions, and where the total annual budget is about $31 billion annually (roughly $100 per American). Add in just over $7 billion in research through the National Science Foundation, and about $120 per citizen a year is spent by the government on essential medical and non-military scientific research through these agencies. These figures pale in comparison to the amounts that are increasingly demanded in order to make bondholders whole on their voluntary, bad investments.
The Federal Reserve provided an amount equal to the entire NIH budget simply to backstop the rescue of Bear Stearns, which allowed those bondholders who voluntarily lent to Bear Sterns to receive 100 cents on the dollar, plus interest.
The federal Govt provided $185 billion to bail out AIG
The most troubling revelation in this story is the astonishing weakness of the Federal Reserve and its incompetence as a faithful defender of the public interest.
“A five-member COP, chaired by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, has produced the most devastating and comprehensive account of the AIG ordeal. Unanimously adopted by its bipartisan members, it provides alarming insights that should be fodder for the larger debate many citizens long to hear—why Washington rushed to forgive the very interests that produced this mess, while innocent others were made to suffer the consequences. The Congressional panel’s critique helps explain why bankers and their Washington allies do not want Elizabeth Warren to chair the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”
Incomprehensibly large bailout figures now get tossed around unexamined in the wake of the 2008-2009 crisis (blessed, of course, by Wall Street), while funding toward NIH, NSF and other essential purposes has been increasingly squeezed. At the urging of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Europe has been encouraged to follow the “big bazooka” approach to the banking system. That global fiscal policy is forced into austere spending cuts for research, education, and social services as a result of financial recklessness, but we’ve become conditioned not to blink, much less wince, at gargantuan bailout figures to defend the bloated financial institutions that made bad investments at 20- 30- and 40-to-1 leverage, is Timothy Geithner’s triumph and humanity’s collective loss.
The most depressing display of math-illiteracy by investors last week was the excitement over a report suggesting that France and Germany had agreed to a 2 trillion euro bailout package for Europe. It was almost beyond belief that investors took that report seriously, but people have become so tolerant of unbelievably large figures that virtually any bailout number can now be tossed out without triggering the least bit of scrutiny. Notably, 2 trillion euros is more than the GDP of France, and is half the GDP of Germany and France combined.
The way that Europe can be expected to deal with this is as follows. First, European banks will not have their losses limited to the optimistic but unrealistic 21% haircut that they were hoping to sustain. In order to avoid the European Financial Stability Fund from being swallowed whole by a Greek default, leaving next-to-nothing to prevent broader contagion, the probable Greek default will be around 50%-60%. Note that Greek obligations of all maturities, including 1-year notes, are trading at prices about 40 or below, so a 50% haircut would actually be an upgrade. Given the likely time needed to sustainably narrow Greek deficits, a default of that size is also the only way that another later crisis would be prevented (at least for a decade, and hopefully much longer).
Gradually, but eventually, European leaders are beginning to recognize that you can’t solve a sovereign debt crisis by expanding the quantity of sovereign debt, when even the strongest countries are already bloated with it. You can’t get “Out” by walking through yet another door marked “In.”
Of course, Europe wouldn’t need to blow all of these public resources or impose depression on Greek citizens if bank stockholders and bondholders were required to absorb the losses that result from the mind-boggling leverage taken by European banks. It’s that leverage (born of inadequate capital requirements and regulation), not simply bad investments or even Greek default per se, that is at the core of the crisis.
Shenanigans
On the subject of bank capital, I can’t stress enough that the proper approach is for government to restrict even temporary, fully-collateralized assistance only to those institutions that are clearly solvent, and to promptly restructure the other institutions. What the global economy needs most is not bank bailouts, but to establish and enforce a legal and regulatory structure that allows the streamlined bankruptcy of insolvent institutions(Title II of Dodd-Frank addresses this with a more comprehensive policy than existed in 2008, but it doesn’t read as a “clean” solution in my view – putting too many cooks in the kitchen – particularly the Fed and the Treasury).
Again, again, again, the “failure” of a financial institution only means that the institution fails to pay off its own bondholders. Depositors typically lose nothing. For example, “saving” Bear Stearns meant primarily that Bear Stearns’ bondholders would be made whole. Saving Dexia a few weeks ago meant the same thing for Dexia’s bondholders. The key is not to prevent “failure,” but to prevent disorderly failure and piecemeal liquidation. Washington Mutual was a seamless, and therefore nearly unmemorable “failure.” Lehman was disorderly and jarring. The difference was that there was a legal and regulatory structure to quickly cut away stockholder and bondholder liabilities in the Washington Mutual instance (which was handled by the FDIC), while there was no similar way to restructure non-bank financials like Lehman in 2008.
From my perspective, weak regulation of bank leverage, inadequate capital requirements, and the need for prompt, streamlined restructuring for insolvent banks are among the most urgent problems that the global economy faces. Consider this. The Financial Times reported on Friday that in 2008, Dexia lent 1.5 billion euros of its capital to two institutional investors, who used the cash to buy newly issued shares in … wait for it … Dexia. Remember that as a bank, Dexia operated at leverage of about 50 times its tangible shareholder equity (see last week’s comment ). So Dexia’s maneuver made it possible to meet regulatory capital standards and take on a huge amount of additional leverage, without actually raising any bona-fide capital. As FT noted, “The unorthodox funding move, which roused Belgian regulators’ concern at the time, amounted to Dexia borrowing money from itself to finance a capital increase. This is illegal in most jurisdictions and is now banned in the European Union, but did not break Belgium’s existing laws.”
On a similarly outrageous note, Bloomberg reported last week that “ Bank of America , hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits… The Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by the counterparties. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC is objecting. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed.” Well, other than that it goes against Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act , but then, the Fed can make an exemption whether the FDIC likes it or not . And that’s what we’ve come to – government of the banks, by the banks, and for the banks (because banks are people too) .
The Bloomberg report continued, “B ank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA [the FDIC insured entity], according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades. That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives.”
Note that the figures are in trillions, not billions (U.S. GDP is $15 trillion). That said, the vast majority of the “notional value” of derivatives in the financial system represents multiple fully-hedged links in a long chain between final users who actually take the risk, so Bank of America’s true risk is most probably a tiny fraction of that notional amount. Unless those derivatives include unhedged short positions in credit default swaps on Greek debt (which we can’t really rule out), it’s not clear that the derivatives themselves are underwater. The real problem, in my view, is that the transfer is clearly driven by the intent to get around capital adequacy regulations, and runs precisely opposite to the right way to create a good bank and a bad bank . It saddles the good bank – the taxpayer insured one – with the questionable liabilities, while “giving relief” to the holding company. This is really preposterous.
As a final note, it’s worth observing that a number of banks reported positive “earnings surprises” last week. If you look at those results for any of the major banks, it is immediately clear that the bulk of the earnings were of two sources: further reductions in reserves against potential loan losses, and an accounting gain known as a “Credit Valuation Adjustment.” Those two items, for example, were responsible for nearly 90% of Citigroup’s reported “earnings.” The Credit Valuation Adjustment (CVA) works like this: as the bond market has become more concerned about new financial strains, the bonds of U.S. banks have sold off significantly in order to reflect higher default probabilities. The decline in the market value of their bond liabilities means that the banks could technically “buy their bonds back cheaper.” Under U.S. accounting rules, banks no longer mark their bonds to market, but happily take the accounting gain.
So the decline in the bonds, despite being due to an increase in investor concerns about bank default, actually gets reported as an addition to earnings! Surprise, surprise.
Uh-oh!
Copyright New York Magazine
New York Magazine (okay they are pretty disgusting, but anyway) polled 50 protestors at OWS about some issues theoretically relevant to the movement.
Here’s hoping those snotty New York Mag reporters purposefully picked the wrong people.
Lessons learned
When I read a headline today “Bernanke has learned his lessons from the 2008 crisis” my initial thought was “fuck that bearded ass face. He is satan himself, hell bent on destruction whom even jesus himself would punch in the neck.”
But I settled down and thunk to myself – Everybody deserves a second chance right? Michael Vick, DSK, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and even Mel Gibson. If we can overlook puppy killing, maid and adolescent raping Jew haters – we can forgive a simple monetarist, trying to save the world who lost their way… And he must be truly sorry – particularly for fucking savers and screwing the elderly 3 years running
Shattered about perpetuating moral hazard as illustrated here
And here
Somewhat down about allowing banks to screw taxpayers
Down and out about leaving the country at risk by lending vs junk collateral and tripling the size of the balance sheet, guaranteeing inflation and/or massive losses which he deems “optimal”
Remorseful about back door (and front door) bailouts
Seeking atonement for smashing capitalism
So here is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Without further ado I present the apology:
“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says a key lesson learned from the 2008 financial crisis is that central banks must have a dual goal of maintaining inflation while supporting the banking system. “
WHAT??? THIS CAN’T be right.. Oh for the love of Pete.
“Bernanke said the steps the Fed took during the crisis proved to be successful.”
Successful. Good God make it stop. Please make it stop.
“Bernanke also noted that the Fed helped calm markets by lowering short-term interest rates to record lows and expanded its portfolio of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities to push long-term rates lower. Bernanke said it’s a trend that will increase in the future.”
Lord help us..
Rome and the OWS
A random comment I deleted from Facebook in response to a post about the recent violence in Rome. Call it cowardly, but I don’t have the energy to continually be “(eye roll) that guy”.
Trying to keep this short. I agree the violence is detracting from the cause, but I also hope there is an asterisk in the media coverage that points out this was an Italian “Black Block” highjacking of a peaceful protest of thousands taken over by a hundred. Not that it’s covered much here, but Italian politics tend to be volatile, ephemeral, polarized, violent, and short lived, marginal pluralities. The anarchists are protesting Italy’s “conservative” billionaire Prime Minister Berlusconi who just survived a close no-contest vote. Berlusconi is an Italian version of Murdoch, he controls a ton of Italian media companies, so he in essence reports on himself. (Italy just passes a bunch of national internet censorship laws to boot, haha, Italy to boot.) He also has had/has 23 criminal cases against him from embezzlement, tax dodging, bribery, mafia collusion, et alia . His latest scandal which triggered the near no-confidence vote is that his preference for his oft hired prostitutes, are underaged girls. To further muddy things up; the “Black Block” anarchists in the Toronto WTO protests are widely believed to have been badly disguised policemen. The Toronto “Black Block” agitation was cited for the Pittsburgh G20 meeting’s denial of nearly all protesters and the heavy presence of riot police and the use of LRAD devices on protesters. This is getting too long. The Roman violence is detracting because instead of mentioning the crap I just typed, odds are the headlines will be something to the effect of, “The Occupy Wall Street movement turns violent”.
A. Strung
Mutterskopf
ladeerayne
debaseface
tiefighter25
