The relationship means the People’s Bank of China buys U.S. debt using a different method than any other central bank in the world.

The other central banks, including the Bank of Japan, which has a large appetite for Treasuries, place orders for U.S. debt with major Wall Street banks designated by the government as primary dealers. Those dealers then bid on their behalf at Treasury auctions.

China, which holds $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, still buys some Treasuries through primary dealers, but since June 2011, that route hasn’t been necessary.

The documents viewed by Reuters show the U.S. Treasury Department has given the People’s Bank of China a direct computer link to its auction system, which the Chinese first used to buy two-year notes in late June 2011.

China can now participate in auctions without placing bids through primary dealers. If it wants to sell, however, it still has to go through the market.

The change was not announced publicly or in any message to primary dealers.

“Direct bidding is open to a wide range of investors, but as a matter of general policy we do not comment on individual bidders,” said Matt Anderson, a Treasury Department spokesman.

While there is been no prohibition on foreign government entities bidding directly, the Treasury’s accommodation of China is unique.

The Treasury’s sales of U.S. debt to China have become part of a politically charged public debate about China’s role as the largest exporter to the United States and also the country’s largest creditor. (Read More)

What could go wrong?

In a statement issued in Geneva – home to the U.N.’s human rights apparatus – the five called the financial transaction tax (FTT) a way “to offset the costs of the enduring economic, financial, fuel, climate and food crises, and to protect basic human rights.”

It would provide “a pragmatic tool for providing the means for governments to protect and fulfill the human rights of their people,” they said.

“The FTT is an opportunity for governments to move beyond rhetoric in their commitments to sustainable development, and to give flesh to their noble pronouncements of solidarity,” said one of the five, Virginia Dandan, whose title is “independent expert on human rights and international solidarity.”

The decades-old idea of levying a small charge on financial transactions – dubbed a “Robin Hood tax” since it supposedly taxes rich nations to benefit poor ones – has animated a wide range of advocacy groups, who see it as a way to help tackle everything from poverty to the cost of HIV/Aids care, to the emission of gases blamed for climate change.

If you think it’s just some kooks nobody heard of pushing this tax, think again.

High-profile proponents include Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams – and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s new socialist president, Francois Hollande, both of whom will be at the G8 event and the subsequent NATO summit in Chicago. (British Prime Minister David Cameron is skeptical.)

Read the whole thing.

According to a transcript, Greek depositors recently withdrew 700 million euros from the nation’s local banks, said President Karolos Papoulias, though the exact timing of the transfer was unclear.

I think people need to prepare for the eventual removal of Greece from the EU and investors are getting ahead of that before they’re forced to,” said Matthew McCormick, vice president and portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Investment Counsel on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “It’s a political market and an event-driven market.”

Also be sure to see the related slideshow depicting the top twenty of the world’s biggest debtor nations. We’re #20 on the list, but it only includes external debt, ie: debt we owe to other countries. It doesn’t count debt owned by US institutions or unfunded liabilities. How long will it be until we’re as bad as Greece?

Check out this side-by-side comparison:

See the full graphic at Bankrupting America. If things don’t change soon, we’ll be the next Greece, only worse.

Update: Linked by May Saubier at Baby Center – thanks!

The Obama administration and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) are beginning a new push to seek ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, known around Washington simply as the Law of the Sea Treaty.

The treaty, which came into force in 1994, established rules of the road for operating in international waters and set forth a regime for determining mineral and other rights beneath the ocean floor. Since then, 161 countries have signed on, as well as the European Union, but the U.S. Senate has not ratified it.

In fact, the treaty has never come up for a full vote, despite support from multiple administrations, Democrats, and the Navy, which views it as needed to allow the United States to fully participate in the growing multinational system that governs the open seas.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Well, there’s more to it. Investors Business Daily has the details the government doesn’t want you to know.

Even if he’s not re-elected, the president hopes to leave behind a treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and to which we’d be required to give half of our offshore oil revenue.

The Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Like the Kyoto Protocol that pretended to be an effort to save the earth from the poisoned fruit of the Industrial Revolution, LOST pretends to be an effort to protect the world’s oceans from environmental damage and remove it as a cause of potential conflicts between nations.

Like its Kyoto cousin, LOST is an attempt at the global redistribution of power and wealth, the embodiment of the progressive dream of the end of the nation state as we know it and the end of political freedom by giving veto over all of mankind’s activities to a global body — in this case something called the International Seabed Authority, located in Kingston, Jamaica.

The ISA would have the power to regulate 70% of the earth’s surface, placing seabed mining, fishing rights, deep-sea oil exploration and even the activities of the U.S. Navy under control of a global bureaucracy. It even provides for a global tax that would be paid directly to the ISA by companies seeking to develop the resources in and under the world’s oceans. (Read More)

How dreadful. No wonder the Democrats support it. They have been quietly working on this while the media talks about 45 year old bullying incidents and President Obama makes some noises about gay marriage. What else are they trying to distract us from?

You can find the phone number of your US Senators here. If you have trouble getting through, try the main switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

Anders Borg

When the economy tanked a few years ago Sweden’s Finance Minister Anders Borg did the opposite of what everyone else in the world was doing. Rather than following the Keynesians, he cut taxes. Not only did he cut taxes, he cut taxes on rich people. Now Sweden is enjoying strong economic growth and the tax cuts have paid for themselves.

When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.

Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.

All this has taken Borg from curiosity to celebrity. The Financial Times recently declared him the most effective finance minister in Europe. When we meet in his Stockholm office on a Friday afternoon (he and his aide seem to be the only two left in the building) he says he is just carrying on 20 years of reform. ‘Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.’ An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.

‘Everybody was told “stimulus, stimulus, stimulus”,’ he says — referring to the EU, IMF and the alphabet soup of agencies urging a global, debt-fuelled spending splurge. Borg, an economist, couldn’t work out how this would help. ‘It was surprising that Europe, given what we experienced in the 1970s and 80s with structural unemployment, believed that short-term Keynesianism could solve the problem.’ Non-economists, he says, ‘might have a tendency to fall for those kinds of messages’.

He continued to cut taxes and cut welfare-spending to pay for it; he even cut property taxes for the rich to lure entrepreneurs back to Sweden. The last bit was the most unpopular, but for Borg, economic recovery starts with entrepreneurs. If cutting taxes for the rich encouraged risk-taking, then it had to be done. ‘In most cases, the company would not have been created without the owner,’ he says. ‘There would be no Ikea without [Ingvar] Kamprad. We would not have Tetra-Pak without [Ruben] Rausing. They are probably the foremost entrepreneurs we have had in the last few decades, and both moved out of Sweden.’

Read the whole thing, it gets even better. This stuff isn’t rocket science.

H/T The Enterprise Blog

It is here necessary to explain that, while Americans usually employ the term “Asian” to mean East Asian — Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc. — in Britain the term generally denotes immigrants from Pakistan, India or the Middle East. Thus, among the “Asians” convicted in the  gang-rape case were Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin and Hamid Safi.

Blogmocracy call them “Muslim scum who gang raped a 13 year old,” a description that CAIR would likely disapprove, but the question remains: What happens when fear of being accused of “racism” prevents the police from effectively enforcing the law?

Be sure to read the whole thing. Don’t think this can’t happen here. Remember the uproar about the NYPD investigating Muslims from New Jersey who may be operating in New York? Wouldn’t you like to think that if the NYPD stumbled across a ring of Muslim pedophiles raping young girls that they would do something about it, even if it wasn’t tied to their terror investigations? (Not that gang rape isn’t a form of terrorism.) Yet a good number of people want to shut down those investigations. What does that tell you?

“When we took office, let me remind, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem,” the vice president said. “We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe.”

He didn’t stop there.

Biden continued, “We were neither fully respected by our friends nor feared by our opponents. Today is it starkly, starkly different.”

Yes, today, neither our friends nor our enemies respect us at all.

The Weekly Standard has video, and the response from the Romney campaign to the Obama administrations “Blame America First” policy.

***

Dick Morris Offers Sobering View of Obama’s Plan to Strip US Sovereignty in 2012

Political analyst Dick Morris appeared on Fox News, Hannity last night discussing his new book, Screwed!: How Foreign Countries Are Ripping America Off and Plundering Our Economy-and How Our Leaders Help Them Do It.
In his book, Morris details how President Obama and Secretary Clinton have crafted a series of UN Treaties, which will be presented to the US Senate for ratification between now and the end of Obama’s current term in office.

The most disturbing requirement contained in these treaties would be a requirement for the US to obtain UN approval for all acts of aggression, or wars, only with the express permission from the UN Security Council. The punishment for violating the treaty would be a trial for all persons indicted before the world court to determine the type and severity of the punishment.

Morris asserts that if these treaties are passed by a two-thirds majority vote of the senate, they have the force of a constitutional amendment and must be enforced by the US court system, and cannot be repealed.

Additional treaties would impose strict gun control measures over US citizens, give oil rights and profits to a UN committee, and prevent US missile defense systems form being deployed from space.

Watch YouTube video: “Obama Gives Away Our Sovereignty! Dick Morris TV: Lunch ALERT!”

Submitted By: Joseph Hall

President Obama’s spokesman warned the new socialist president-elect of France not to implement his campaign agenda of ending austerity measures, indicating that such a reversal could damage the world economy.

“A balanced approach . . . Both fiscal consolidation and efforts to boost the recovery is the right approach for Europe,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “That’s an approach that he thinks ensures that the recovery continues while putting our fiscal house in order.”

When I saw the headline Doug Powers posted at Michelle Malkin’s site I did a double take, thinking my eyes were deceiving me, but apparently this is for real. My first thought was that Obama doesn’t want Europe to go under and make the economy worse before November. That could be part of it. But Powers pointed to an explanation offered by Ace at Ace of Spades that also makes sense.

If France crashes, it offers America a preview of where Obama’s policies will take us, so he… doesn’t want France to implement Obama’s policies. He doesn’t want that heads up. Not before the election.

In addition, of course, a second official recession would just about wrap things up for Romney.

Well, it is an election year. I’m sure when the two meet at the White House they’ll have plenty of time to hash out all of the details. Fellow travelers and all, no doubt Hollande will do what he can to help out a comrade.

The answer is simple. They are voting for politicians who have promised to keep the gravy train rolling, consequences be damned. It’s the Cloward-Piven strategy in action – get enough people on the government dole and they will vote to keep the benefits they’ve grown used to.

But something interesting happened on Sunday in Europe: Voters in both France and Greece, two countries ruinously addicted to government entitlements, rejected the “austerity” model of debt-reduction and instead doubled down on unsustainable spending sprees. France elected Socialist Francois Hollande as president, and in his acceptance speech he promised to increase government benefits and amp up “stimulus” spending programs — the exact things that got France into a metaphorical debtors’ prison in the first place. But exactly as Cloward and Piven had surmised, once you get 50+% of the population hooked on “free” government money, there’s no turning back — they will vote for socialists every time. The election of Hollande is the culmination of Cloward-Piven; the strategy worked, but in the wrong country.

(In a similar blunder, it should be noted, Karl Marx predicted that the first socialist revolution would happen in an industrialized country like Germany or Great Britain; instead the exact opposite happened, as two backward pre-industrial nations, Russia and China, were the first to embrace communism.)

Also on Sunday, Greece held local elections and voters rewarded various “anti-austerity” parties and candidates: “Greek voters punish ruling coalition, reward far left,” reads the headline. “Voters angry over austerity delivered a blow to Greece’s ruling parties on Sunday, with neither the conservative New Democracy nor the Pasok socialists winning enough votes to form a government while far-left Syriza took second place.” Even a “neo-Nazi” anti-immigrant party won seats for the first time because they too rejected the “austerity” measures and want to maintain the entitlement state (albeit solely for Greek citizens, in their case).

The message is clear: Once enough voters are on the dole, regardless of your party’s ideology or what label it has, you will win elections if you promise to to keep the free money flowing. This was Cloward-Piven’s point, and they turned out to be frighteningly correct. (Read More)

What a disturbing turn of events. I don’t see how this can turn out well for the people of France or Greece, unless the other EU members hold their ground on spending and debt. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democrats have been working tirelessly to make it happen here – extended unemployment, rising disability claims, more people on food stamps, free cell phones, promises of free health care – the question is whether they’ve gotten enough Americans hooked to realize their goal.

Former New Hampshire Governor and Senator Judd Gregg weighed in today, and warns our fellow Americans against following this path.

The effect of this will not be apparent for a while. But the outcome is inevitable.

First, the government runs up massive debts to pay for its expenditures. When adding debt can no longer be done conveniently, it turns to a dramatically progressive tax policy. Both of these steps, when coupled with an irrational retirement system, lead to a dramatic drop in the productivity of the society and an inevitable resulting drop in the standard of living for all.

Ironically, all this is done under the banner of “fairness and equality.”

It is obvious that voting for one’s living is a great deal easier than working for it. It is easier to blame someone else who is wealthier for a reduction in the standard of living than to look in the mirror and ask hard questions about the nature and effect an expansionist government has on the quality of life in a society in general.

The driver of this process is at its most basic level envy. In a democratic system it is very simple to claim, for what seems like a long time, that if you just take more from your neighbor, you will be able to live better.

But in the end reality has a way of setting in. Countries that choose this path see that, rather than all the boats rising on the incoming tide of massive government expansion in the name of goodness and light, the boats actually start to wallow and the wealth of the society as a whole begins to erode significantly.  (Read More)

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

In related news, President Obama was among the first world leaders to contact France’s president-elect Françoise Hollande, and he invited him to the White House.

Update: Linked by the Daley Gator, who adds:

I have believed for a while now that this is the NUMBER ONE aim of the Democrats here in America. Like a crack dealer they seek to make as man[y] of us as dependent upon government as possible. They know, that once hooked, the people will be very loathe to break the cycle of dependence. Now, consider how Obama and the Democrats have increased  government jobs the last three plus years. Think of how much they have hammered the class warfare rhetoric. And it will not end in 2017 if Obama is reelected either. This is a long-term strategy to keep Liberals in power for decades.

If that last sentence doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will.

Update 2: Be sure to check out the charts Doug Ross posted.

Update 3: The Other McCain notes that media outlets are reporting that the “far-right” Neo-Nazis have gained some control in Greece. This despite the fact that the “far right” is as much against austerity measures as the far left. Gee, could that have something to do with the fact that Nazis are socialists? Good grief, the whole world needs a history lesson.

French voters elected François Hollande as president on Sunday, giving France a Socialist leader who has pledged to shift the burden of hardship onto the rich and resolve the protracted euro sovereign-debt crisis by softening the current prescription of austerity.

With his victory over conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the second and final round, Mr. Hollande won a mandate to challenge German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has imposed spending cuts as the main remedy to repair the public finances of heavily indebted European countries. Mr. Hollande, who has never held a national-government position, was planning to speak to Ms. Merkel over the phone later Sunday, an aide said, and could visit Berlin as soon as he takes office, possibly on May 15. Mr. Hollande took 51.8% of the vote, according to pollster CSA.

Mr. Hollande, the first Socialist French president in nearly two decades, has vowed to pursue efforts initiated by Mr. Sarkozy to reduce the government’s budget deficit, but has said he would ask wealthy households to contribute more.  (Read More)

Hollande has called for a whopping 75% tax on the wealthy, and lowering the retirement age. No wonder so many wealthy French citizens are looking to leave the country.

American Power has more on the French election.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe tomorrow calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.

Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s 55-story tower.

“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail. (Read More)

That’s sure to help the 99% make a living.

Update: Linked by Jim Geraghty – thanks!

American aid officials said Saturday they will restore development programs for Palestinians after President Barack Obama ended a six-month funding freeze that shut down the local Sesame Street and other projects.

An official with the U.S. Agency for International Development confirmed that $147 million, which pays for infrastructure, education, humanitarian aid and health projects, had been restored.

But the official could not say specifically whether Palestinian Sesame Street would resume.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

In October, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla, froze $192 million earmarked for assistance to Palestinians as a penalty for their United Nations membership bid in September.

We have more than $15 trillion in debt and we’re talking about paying for Palestinian Sesame Street? Good grief. (Let’s hope their rhetoric has improved in the past few years. I’d hate to think our tax dollars are still being used to fund the incitement of violence.)

The news was first reported in foreign outlets, of course.

Friday night news dump: President Obama has decided to provide $192 million to the Palestinian Authority despite Congress’s freeze on PA funding after its president, Mahmoud Abbas, attempted to declare statehood unilaterally last September, in violation of the PA’s treaty commitments.

Obama’s “waiver” of the restrictions on Congress’s Palestinian Accountability Act was first reported in the foreign press (AFP), which is where Americans generally need to go to get news about what the U.S. administration is up to. A report from the Times of Israelis here. [Hat tip, Creeping Sharia.] The New York Times, evidently too busy reporting on how much Israel sucks, did not find this story fit to print.

White House spinmeister Tommy Vietor stated that President Obama made the decision to pour American taxpayer dollars into Palestinian coffers in order to ensure “the continued viability of the moderate PA government.” He added the claim that, as the report puts it, “the PA had fulfilled all its major obligations, such as recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing violence and accepting the Road Map for Peace.” (Read More)

Moderate government, huh? Creeping Sharia notes how moderate they are.

Moderate? Does the death sentence for selling your home to a Jew sound moderate?Taxation for Islamization. Does that sound Constitutional?

Doesn’t it warm your heart knowing you work hard and pay your taxes so you can fund this  garbage?

Iran is recruiting a hacker army to target the U.S. power grid, water systems and other vital infrastructure for cyberattack in a future confrontation with the United States, security specialists will warn Congress Thursday.

“Elements of the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] have openly sought to pull hackers into the fold” of a religiously motivated cyberarmy, according to Frank J. Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University.

Lawmakers from two House Homeland Security subcommittees will hold a joint hearing Thursday about the cyberthreat posed by Iran, as tensions over Tehran’s nuclear program continue at a high level, and a possible Israeli strike looms.

The Washington Times obtained advance copes of witnesses’ prepared testimony. (Read More)

While Iran is recruiting an army of hackers to take down our infrastructure, President Obama is recruiting an army of volunteers for his reelection campaign.