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06.11 How a nonprofit turned Baltimore County school storage rooms into a free general store for students in need

Ref. : Civic Events

Ref. : Arts & Education Events

Ref. : Public Service Notices

Books, Films, Arts & Education

06.14 The Trump administration is waging a quiet war on education

06.11 Underpaid Adjunct Professors Sleep in Cars and Rely on Public Aid [The disease of rapacious-capitalism infects the education system]


Ref. : Letters to the editor

Health Care & Environment

06.15 'The Changes Are Really Accelerating': Alaska at Record Warm While Greenland Sees Major Ice Melt

06.15 So much plastic is being made that "recycling has no impact" [Non-recyclable plastic must be made illegal to manufacture, use]

06.15 Climate crisis: aviation industry hears clamour for electric planes

06.15 We must transform our lives and values to save this burning planet [Increased ice melt in polar latitudes has been disguising reality in the middle latitudes. This effect will soon be replaced by record heat as ice volume and seasonal melting increasingly declines.]

06.15 This all-male council in Texas just voted to ban abortion [1:59 video; Bad assumptions foment ignorant actions...]

06.14 The Trans Mountain pipeline is a disaster – but Trudeau can make it right

06.14 The Pentagon emits more greenhouse gases than Portugal, study finds

06.14 Climate crisis: Alaska is melting and it’s likely to accelerate global heating

06.13 Chemical companies at centre of Guardian's Cancer Town series face state legal action [7:56 video]

06.12 'This is not a "what if" story': Tokyo braces for the earthquake of a century

06.12 Plant Species Have Been Disappearing 500 Times Faster Than Normal, Thanks to Humans

06.12 Atmospheric carbon levels are leaping. We can't afford more years like this

06.12 Politics as Usual and Planetary Destruction

06.12 Most 'meat' in 2040 will not come from dead animals, says report

06.11 Forest twice size of UK destroyed in decade for big consumer brands – report

06.11 Twice as many plants have gone extinct than birds, mammals, and amphibians combined

06.11 NOAA forecasts very large ‘dead zone’ for Gulf of Mexico

06.10 Conservatives should change how they think about global warming. I did [Another crisis issue conservatives won't acknowledge...]

06.10 Scottish Power to build vast battery to improve wind energy supply [Who won't understand this?]

06.10 Greenpeace activists board BP oil rig as it is towed out to sea [Fossil fuel company conduct should be illegal...]

06.09 Racism as a Public Health Crisis

06.08 GreenWay Reaches 100 EV Fast Chargers In Poland!

06.07 The Other Climate Threat is Fear & Apathy: We can Fix this by Voting in a Manhattan Project

06.07 Toyota speeds up electric vehicle schedule as demand heats up

06.07 For 'Challenging Us All to Confront the Realities of the Climate Crisis,' Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future Movement Win Amnesty's Top Human Rights Award

06.07 Purpose in Life Protects Against Cognitive Decline Among Older Adults

06.07 All New British Columbia Light-Duty Vehicles Will Be Zero Emissions By 2040

06.07 Caribbean Solar Update: Curacao Solar Saves 10% In Energy Costs; Montecristi In The DR Doubles To 116 MW

06.07 Santiago (Chile) Adding 200 Electric Buses In 2019

06.07 Single-Payer Reform—“Medicare for All”

News Media Matters

06.15 China's Expanding Media Dominance in Africa

Daily: FAIR Blog
The Daily Howler

US Politics, Policy & 'Culture'

06.15 'Eye-Popping': Analysis Shows Top 1% Gained $21 Trillion in Wealth Since 1989 While Bottom Half Lost $900 Billion [More equality or bring back the guillotines!]

06.15 Hard Times in the Imperial Valley

06.15 Ro Khanna Forces Beltway Bandit to Refund Millions From Price Gouging

06.15 White House physicist sought aid of rightwing thinktank to challenge climate science [When your President is a quack he naturally surrounds himself with sycophants]

06.14 Do Your Jobs: Sick and Dying, They Brought Themselves Down Here to Speak - To No One

06.14 The Case for Reparations [5:31 video]

06.14 Bernie Sanders just made a brilliant defense of democratic socialism

06.14 Texas Progressive Jessica Cisneros Announces Primary Challenge to Unseat "Trump's Favorite Democrat" in Congress

06.13 Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan for Everything — Except Health Care

06.13 Where do the 2020 Democratic candidates stand on the key issues?

06.13 Hidden Figures Way: Nasa renames street to honor black female mathematicians

06.13 Why are we still pretending 'trickle-down' economics work? [We aren't ‘laffing’ now! In Trump-world all the worst people are celebrated. Ref.: 3:07 Idiocracy Courtroom Scene]

06.13 What’s actually in the Green New Deal, explained with a video [7:30 video]


Justice Matters

06.14 Justice Denied, Delayed, or Done Right? Serious Concerns as Prosecutors Throw Out Charges in Flint Water Crisis Cases [A very flawed prosecution using suspiciously limited evidence has been thrown out, a stronger case will be brought using newly found, voluminous evidence.]

High Crimes

06.12 'Sea Rescues Have Been Criminalized' as German Boat Captain Faces 20 Years in Prison For Saving Refugees

06.11 Hundreds of North Korean execution sites identified, says rights group

Economics & Corrupt Capitalism

06.11 Capitalism isn't 'broken'. It's working all too well - and we're the worse for it

06.11 The problem with billionaires fighting climate change? The billionaires [Bloomberg's sanity to control greed to save the life-on-earth (and continuing profits) is unfortunately rare]

06.09 Elizabeth Warren’s economic nationalism vision shows there's a better way [As like championed by Economist Joseph Stiglitz]

International & Futurism

06.15 Africa’s Lost Kingdoms

06.15 Homophobic and transphobic hate crimes surge in England and Wales

06.15 Extinction Rebellion protesters stop rush-hour traffic in London

06.15 Hong Kong leader suspends extradition bill amid protest pressure [1:37 video]

06.15 The US must stand with the people of Hong Kong [But this attacks Xi's authoritarianism, which Trump is most envious of for himself...]

06.14 As Angus Taylor ducks, weaves and dithers, China zooms past

06.13 What does it mean to be genetically Jewish? [Doing a mental dance with archanery: could a significant number of Russians and Palestinians be intentionally included or excluded as genetically Jewish? And why would Israel do this?]

06.13 Two oil tankers struck in suspected attacks in Gulf of Oman

06.13 Theresa May’s carbon emissions plan will fail if the chancellor remains complacent

06.12 Hong Kong: police use rubber bullets as protesters vow 'no retreat' [1:34 video]

06.12 French medics warn health service is on brink of collapse

06.12 Leaked documents reveal Russian effort to exert influence in Africa

06.12 Extending the US Embargo on Cuba & Hurting the People [Doing what's cruelest]

06.12 Annexation Without Citizenship Is Apartheid


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by Ellen Hodgson Brown, J.D.
Originally posted on Ms. Brown's website on June 4th, 2010

Keeping interest rates low is considered the first line of defense for central banks bent on easing the credit crisis and getting banks to lend again. The Federal Reserve’s target for the federal funds rate -- the overnight interest rate that banks charge each other – has been kept at a rock-bottom 0% to 0.25% ever since December 2008. A growing number of economists now think it could stay there well into 2011 or even 2012, prompted by fears that a spreading debt crisis in Europe could hurt a budding U.S. recovery.

Dirk van Dijk, writing for the investor website, explains what a good deal this is for the banks:

“Keeping short-term rates low . . . is particularly helpful to the big banks like Bank of America (BAC) and JPMorgan (JPM). Their raw material is short-term money, which is effectively free right now. They can borrow at 0.25% or less, and then turn around and invest those funds in, say, a 5-year T-note at 2.50%, locking in an almost risk-free profit of 2.25%. On big enough sums of money, this can be very profitable, and will help to recapitalize the banking system (provided they don’t drain capital by paying it out in dividends or frittering it away in outrageous bonuses to their top executives).”

This can be very profitable indeed for the big Wall Street banks, but the purpose of the near-zero interest rates was supposed to be to get the banks to lend again. Instead, they are investing this virtually interest-free money in risk-free government bonds, on which we the taxpayers are paying 2.5% interest; or are using the money to engage in the same sort of unregulated speculation that nearly brought down the economy in 2008, or to buy up smaller local banks, or to pay “outrageous bonuses to their top executives.” Even when banks do deign to use their nearly-interest-free funds to support loans, they do not pass these very low rates on to borrowers. The fed funds rate was lowered by 5% between August 2007 and December 2008; yet the 30 year fixed mortgage rate dropped less than 1%, from 6.75% to only about 6%.

Why Do Banks Need to Borrow?
Because They Don’t Really Have the Money They Lend

Dirk van Dijk writes that “short-term money” -- meaning money borrowed short-term from other banks -- is the “raw material” of the big banks. Why, you may ask, do banks need to borrow from each other? Don’t they just take in money from their depositors and relend it?

The answer is no. Banks do not lend their depositors’ money or their own money. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas explains on its website:


A bank simply advances bank credit created on its books. This credit becomes a deposit in the account of the borrower, who can write checks on it. The checks then get deposited in other banks and trade in the economy as what we all know as “money.”

A bank can create as much money on its books as it can find creditworthy borrowers for, up to the limit of its capital requirement. The hitch comes when the checks drawn on these loans-turned-deposits are cleared, usually through the Federal Reserve. A bank with a 10% reserve requirement must keep 10% of its deposits either as “vault cash” or in a reserve account at the Fed, and when checks are cleared by the Fed, it is through this account. The effect is to make the bank short of reserves, which it can try to replenish by attracting back the customers of the bank where the credit was deposited. But as was explained by the Winterspeak blogging team:

“If bank A [the lending bank] fails to [attract new depositors], then it simply borrows the reserves it needs overnight from . . . bank B [the bank where the reserves wound up]. The overnight lending market is designed to do exactly this. Bank B, in this case, happens to have exactly the quantity of reserves bank A needs, and since reserves earn no interest, is happy to lend to bank A at the federal funds rate, which is the overnight interbank lending rate.”

In effect, a bank can create money on its books, lend the money at interest (today about 4.7% on a fixed rate mortgage), then clear the outgoing check by borrowing back the money it just created, at a cost to the bank of only the very low fed funds rate (now .2%). The bank creates bank credit, lends it at 4.7%, then borrows it back at .2% to clear the outgoing checks, collecting 4.5% interest as its profit. The credit the bank has lent is not an asset it has labored to earn but is simply “the full faith and credit of the United States” – the credit of the people collectively. Yet the bank is allowed to pocket a hefty interest spread on this credit-generating scheme; and that is assuming it lends at all, something that is happening less and less these days, since bankers find it safer and more lucrative to use their nearly interest-free credit lines to invest in risk-free government bonds at taxpayers’ expense, engage in speculation, or pay themselves sizeable bonuses.

Avoiding Another Lehman-style Credit Collapse

The reason banks are highly dependent on loans from each other, then, is that they need these low-cost loans to keep the credit shell game going. This is particularly true for large Wall Street banks. Small banks get their funds mainly from customer deposits, and usually have more deposits than they can find creditworthy borrowers for. Large banks, on the other hand, generally lack sufficient deposits to fund their main business -- dealing with large companies, governments, other financial institutions, and wealthy people. Most borrow the funds they need from other major lenders in the form of short term liabilities that must be continually rolled over.

That helps shed light on what really caused the credit crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The Lehman bankruptcy triggered a run on the money markets, causing interbank lending rates to soar. The London interbank lending rate (LIBOR) normally adheres closely to official interest rate expectations (meaning, in the U.S., the targeted fed funds rate); but after Lehman went bankrupt, the LIBOR rate for short-term loans shot up to around 5%. Since the cost of borrowing the money to cover their loans was too high for banks to turn a profit, lending abruptly came to a halt.

Interest rates on variable rate mortgages and big corporate deals tend to be based on LIBOR rates, which are moving up again now, although the fed funds rate has not changed. LIBOR rates are moving up due to tensions arising from the possibility that Europe’s sovereign debt crisis could turn into another global banking crisis.

This is just one of many reasons that states should consider following the model of North Dakota, the only state that currently owns its own bank. The state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND) helped North Dakota escape the credit crisis. The BND has a very large and captive deposit base, since all of the revenues of the state are deposited in the bank by law, keeping the bank solvent regardless of what is happening in the interbank lending market. North Dakota is currently the only state not struggling with a budget deficit.

Nations could follow this model as well. A recent article in The Economist noted that the strong and stable publicly-owned banks of India, China and Brazil helped those countries weather the banking crisis afflicting most of the world in the last two years.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

While the banks responsible for today’s economic crisis are enjoying unprecedented benefits, state and local governments are forced to maintain very large and wasteful rainy day funds, even as they are slashing services to balance their budgets. They have to do this because they do not have the secure, nearly-interest-free credit lines available to private banks. Owning their own banks can allow local governments to avail themselves of the very low interest rates accessible to private banks, by giving them the same authority to create “bank credit” on their books that private banks have. North Dakota, which has had its own government-owned bank for over 90 years, not only is the only state to sport a budget surplus but has the lowest unemployment rate in the U.S. It evidently has no funding problems at all. Five other states currently have bills on their books to consider forming their own banks, and several others have discussed that option in their legislatures.

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep a corrupt banking system afloat, including buying toxic assets off their books and making credit available nearly interest-free, all in the name of turning the credit spigots back on on Main Street; but the banks have not kept their end of the bargain. In fact, they are just doing what their business models require of them – making the highest possible return for their shareholders. Publicly-owned banks operate on a different model: they must serve the community. Like China, India and Brazil, U.S. states would be well served to set up publicly-owned banks that could provide credit to the local economy when the private banking scheme fails.

Ellen Brown


Ms. Brown's stories are republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.

Copyright © 2010 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved.



This story was published on June 7, 2010.

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